Mother, Rosalie, and Asia remain in Philadelphia. Asia’s had a little boy and, at Sleeper’s insistence, as an olive branch, named him Edwin. She has two children now under the age of two. She calls them her trotters. Between the nursing and the feeding and the diapers and the need to sleep whenever any brief window presents itself, she doesn’t have time for the war.
The sons of Philadelphia are leaving in great numbers for the battlefields. None of the Booth men enlist on either side. The women of Philadelphia are organizing donation drives and working with the wounded at the Satterlee or Mower hospitals. None of the Booth women participate. Rosalie or Mother could do so—they have the time—but they don’t know how they’d explain it to John.
John’s transforming into a secessionist. He spends days, weeks—writing comes so hard to him—working on a speech for a Northern audience. He has no venue nor occasion for this speech. He will never finish nor give it, but in it he lays out his thoughts concerning the wrongs being done by the North to the South. He quotes Shakespeare. The North is robbing the South of her good name. And for what? he asks his imaginary audience.
“Why, nothing but the slavery question!”
Slavery is not a sin, he insists. And if it is a sin, it is not your sin, so why do you care?
“You know it is not a sin. and if it was. the Constitution forbids you to interfere with it.” That strange stutter of periods. It’s not a sin, but if it’s a sin, it’s not a sin, but if it is . . .
He is working his way towards his climax, which is, once again, the Gorsuch story. How the father of his dearest childhood friend, Thomas Gorsuch (whose name he seems to have forgotten since it appears in the speech as Thomas Gorruge), was killed retrieving his runaway slaves in Christiana.
He writes, “I begin to hate my Northern brothers.” He writes, “If abolitionists held the whip, slaves would be beaten double.”
These opinions put him at odds with the rest of the family. But, given his promise to Mother not to fight, no one is much perturbed. Let him say whatever he likes. What’s the harm? Mother, who once angrily told Aunty Rogers that in her house the natural dignity of every person God made was to be respected, makes no such objection when the sentiments come from her favorite son.
Besides, John tells his family, the war will be over soon enough. Recollect how Lincoln slunk into Washington. Lincoln doesn’t have the guts for a protracted campaign.
* * *
—
Edwin also believes the war will be short. Edwin’s faith is in the great general Winfield Scott, who will surely wipe out secession in a single battle. In fact, Scott is already retiring and George B. McClellan taking his place. McClellan, who will conduct the war so disastrously, some will suspect him of secretly working for the South.
Edwin and Mary are still in New York, but he’s been invited to star in the fall season at London’s Haymarket Theatre, so they’re making plans to sail for England. Meanwhile one friend after another goes to war. Richard Cary, to whom Edwin is particularly close, enlisted immediately and is already encamped outside the capital.
Another intimate is Julia Ward Howe, whose husband, although he escaped prosecution, is widely understood to have supplied John Brown with guns and money. Julia is unhappily married and a little in love with Edwin. A few years back she published an ode to his Hamlet, celebrating his beauty and genius.
And thou, young hero of this mimic scene,
In whose high breast
A genius greater than thy life hath been
Strangely comprest!
Now she is writing new lyrics to “John Brown’s Body,” lyrics that will become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She travels from Boston to Washington with her husband and other abolitionists in the hopes of persuading Lincoln into emancipation.
Adam Badeau is off in Louisiana, serving with Brigadier General Thomas Sherman. Edwin writes to Adam, and a bit defensively—“Cold steel & my warm blood don’t mingle well,” he says. He makes a joke of being too cowardly to be a soldier. In fact, the only thing on his mind is how a successful London season will accelerate his stardom.
Joe is in South Carolina at medical school when the first shots are fired at Fort Sumter. He manages to attach himself to one of the Confederate medical staffs working there and is wildly excited about it. When the battle ends, he deserts and travels to Baltimore.
He takes a room at the Barnum Hotel. Meeting the actor William Howell on the street, he invites him back, shows him a large, locked trunk. With an air of secrecy, he opens it. Inside are a great many grisly souvenirs from medical school and from Fort Sumter. Exploded shells, split rifle stocks, bits of skull and bone.
Howell will shortly be sharing a Baltimore room with John, the brother he far prefers.
* * *
—
John has friends among the Baltimore rioters and is outraged by the federal reaction. He and Howell fantasize about enlisting and rising to prominence within the Confederate ranks, but neither does anything of the sort.
John tells Howell that a victory gained simply through larger numbers and greater resources would be hollow, would be no victory at all. Such an outcome seems to him unsporting, insupportable, and therefore impossible.
If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more
is pretty much what John thinks.
Edwin
i
By the time Edwin and Mary leave for England, Mary is expecting. The sea journey is a trial. It hurts Edwin’s heart to see her rosy face gaunt, her appetite gone. He makes continual efforts to tempt her with one food after another, and she says that she likes being fussed over, but if he doesn’t stop right now, the contents of her stomach will soon be on the deck. Nevertheless, she writes her friends on arrival, assuring them that the ten-day journey was delightful.
In London, he finds rooms on the fashionable Bloomsbury Square, an area with trees and grasses, the street where the prominent politician Benjamin Disraeli had lived as a child. Still, the air is an oppressive mixture of smoke and fog. Edwin feels it in his throat; it makes him worry for his voice. An organ grinder chooses their corner for a daily butchering of some lovely tune. Carriages clatter up and down the street. It’s never quiet.
Edwin walks to the Haymarket Theatre, imagining his father a young man on these same streets, passing many of these same buildings. He enters through the columns edging the portico, goes up the stairs and onto the dark stage. The green curtain falls in folds before him. Everything he sees feels heavy with history.