Tuesday, January 29, 1861
Henry Gambler knew to be skeptical of the Baltimore newspapers.
During his Plug Uglies days, when he’d ran the most famous gang in Baltimore, he’d learned papers were lies; truth meant nothing in the political battle to control America.
But the papers still had their uses.
Now he sat up in the whorehouse bed, his fingers tracing the Baltimore Sun, pausing at the longer words and repeating them silently. Once he had the gist of the story, he knew what to look for and finished the article with ease, following Abraham Lincoln’s proposed journey through the North before heading to Washington for the inauguration, his finger stopping at the final date: February 23, the day Lincoln would arrive in Baltimore.
Less’n a month to go.
Freshly bathed, Henry stretched his arms, luxuriating in the soft sheets after a spell in a ramshackle cottage hidden in bleak woodlands where he’d been ordered to by James Gilmor. Ignoring what he’d done there, he instead thought of the future to come. He knew the Texas secessionist convention was meeting soon. The country was barreling towards war. But that dint matter to him. For only one thing did. His justice.
Not these headlines screaming justice or injustice ‘cause some law said this or some man got elected? Those weren’t justice. He thought of Pulson ranting for justice and the little girl he’d spied through the window. Sickened? He weren’t. He no longer cared. He’d seen too much, done too much.
But one injustice still so disgusted him that his stomach filled with burning hatred. Not the dingy house Pulson went to near the tracks southwest of the city, but up north, in the fancy squares of Mount Vernon.
Henry could walk through Baltimore blindfolded and know where he was from the sounds: the catcalls of the wharves, with sailors shouting in a dozen languages as they pulled down the riggings and hopped from boat to boat clear across the harbor; the laughing dialects of the coloreds in their alleys or the accents of the Germans in Fells’ Point and Jonestown, or the twangs of the working whites who lived east or west of the commercial districts and shopped along Gay Street in Oldtown. He dint even need to hear the nervous clattering of cattle hooves on cobblestones or the cries of farm boys in herding the animals down Pennsylvania Avenue to the stockyards, for the acrid smells alone told him where he was.
Only in Mount Vernon were silence. Prim, law-abiding silence.
Still wearing his imaginary blindfold, Henry’s feet appreciatively used the loose cobblestones in commercial districts, worn into groves by wagon wheels, to guide him to his favorite taverns. And he could judge how far he was from the docks just by sniffing. But only in the fastidious, perpetual Sundays of Mount Vernon did he feel lost.
In the old days he’d loved the jostling crowds, flirting with girls and slapping men’s backs. Their tiny houses be too small, so people spent so much time on the streets, and in a way, the whole city be his own house. He might have called home a narrow rowhouse off Pennsylvania Avenue, sharing with seven brothers and sisters and his parents. But his parlor, where he’d received visitors and held court among friends, were Monument Square or Exchange Place. His dining room be the taverns with the street peddlers selling fried fish and oysters his cooks and the little colored boys who ferried the freshly fried food his servants. The three-men German bands on the corners, afore being chased off by the police, be his entertainment, while the street fakers, tricksters for the gullible, his amusement. The fire stations were his library, where he traced the newspaper headlines and plotted with his mates and took orders from their political bosses. And more often than not his bedroom be the whorehouses along Davis Street.
He’d been unabashedly a rough, a rowdie, a yob, content to pick up temporary work here and there and drink and give away most of his earnings, never having more than a dollar or two at a time. But it ain’t matter, for every day was a holiday, not just the 4th o’ July with its swags of buntings carpeting the city and joyous drunken brawls, or New Year’s Day where he and all the boys ran through the whole o’ Baltimore blowing their horns all day long. Baltimore was his, and he’d felt as if he owned the city.
But not in Mount Vernon.
The place he avoided. These tall rowhouses seemed built in aloofness, reminding all that the higher the house, the higher the hill, the higher the fine airs and the richer the owner. These proud folks of Mount Vernon disdained hustle and bustle and Henry sensed their contempt for rambunctious working men. Dirty. Unkempt. Untrustworthy. Unvirtuous. Immoral. Even worse were the matrons’ sneers, venturing from Mount Vernon in carriages to select shops along Baltimore Street. And he hated their uppity servants, the dark men and women who thought themselves better than most white men.
Henry could live with snobbery. He could live with that peculiar ignorance of the rich. He had no interest in their fussy daughters.
But he never forgot that these fine men of Mount Vernon did not believe in justice. Not these great men whose factories and ships and warehouses and banks and railroads and courtrooms controlled the livelihood of so many thousands of people. The casual exchanges of bits of paper or handshakes over glasses of golden madeira could ruin a hundred families. And they knew it. Every step these fine men of Mount Vernon took proclaimed this to the world. They walked proud in the knowledge that they were masters of all they saw.
And they were.
Because they were the law!
Henry angrily fingered his scars.
These fine men of Mount Vernon called themselves Americans. They boasted no place was better than the glorious United States of America! They praised their Constitution making them the freest men in the world and spoke of laws that protected natural rights o’ mankind. They claimed God Himself had even descended from the heavens to beatify the most bountiful land on the planet. They boasted of a Manifest Destiny as they massacred the Indians and drove off the Spanish. They championed liberty and equality while forming exclusive clubs and breaking attempts among workers to join forces for higher wages and better working conditions. Henry had no great love for the coloreds, but he’d grown up with them and they were just as hard working as he, and yet these fine men of Mount Vernon held no qualms in owning and trading the coloreds to one another.
And these fine men of Mount Vernon boasted of connections to presidents and senators and governors, and of loans to build railroads and to dig canals. This country was theirs, and theirs alone. The president was theirs. Not his. The governors served them, not him. The railroads and canals made them richer, not him. The law was theirs, and theirs alone.
Had any of these fine men of Mount Vernon ever worked through a cold winter? With knuckles raw from tearing apart rope fiber just for a few pennies to feed a family? Where were the laws? Had these fine men of Mount Vernon ever worked sixteen hours a day unloading ships in the summer’s heat, carrying crates on their backs, only to end in an early grave? Where were the laws? Had these fine men of Mount Vernon ever watched a beloved child wane from malnutrition during the hard times? Experience the shame in having to beg for a spare penny to buy food? Wear rags in the snow ‘cause there weren’t money for shoes? Feel the rain seep into broken boots, chilling your toes and dragging you into the depths into an illness before the day was over? And when you died, your wife and children tossed onto the streets by bailiffs, acting upon the orders of these fine men of Mount Vernon? Where were the laws!
These fine men called themselves city fathers and sat in churches and led the society balls. They surrounded themselves with invented rules about honor and virtues. They cared about peace and order far more than the starvation and poverty just blocks away. Then these fine men of Mount Vernon demanded respect from the men they legislated against! They used laws to justify their privilege. They despised the poor, mocked the poor, and attacked the poor. But where were the laws against poverty and want and ignorance? Against snobbery or greed or vanity? Or prejudice or bias? Or hatred or contempt?
So how could these fine men of Mount Vernon believe in justice?
And Henry knew you couldn’t believe in justice when you were a rich man. You couldn’t make a fortune without robbing someone. You took the fruits of a working man’s labor, a farmer’s harvest, the Indian’s lands, and hacked apart mountains and chopped down vast forests just for a few more gold dollars. Men called it profit, but Henry knew it were swindling. The whole of the U S A and all her laws were the biggest swindle ever!
But that weren’t all.
Henry narrowed his eyes and the hatred in his stomach erupted once more.
These fine men of Mount Vernon didn’t care about him when he’d been tried in their courthouses. They’d said good riddance and exclaimed that their wives and daughters were safer. They called for his hanging. The truth ain’t matter. His justice ain’t matter. Not to these goddamn men who screamed for justice every single damned day in their newspapers and clubs, in their government assemblies and courtrooms, while turning a blind eye to all the injustice committed by their own laws!
And Henry knew of one man in Mount Vernon. The finest man in Mount Vernon. The most virtuous man in Mount Vernon. The greatest man in Mount Vernon. A man who dished out justice to the poor as if doing them a favor, crumbs from his rich tables. He pictured a gilded dining room and that table laden with roast beef and turkeys and oysters and cakes and endless bottles of wines, and he pictured the rich men in their ruffled shirts, toasting each other’s wealth while poor widows and crippled laborers, doll sized on the floor, tried to jump up to get their attention. And the great man himself coolly flicking a breadcrumb to the starving masses, saying, ‘There you go. Don’t say I’m not a fair man.’”
“Hypocrite,” Henry whispered, his face cold but his body aflame.
When the sentencing was passed down, the sonorous voice condemning him to death by hanging, he’d stood in shock. He’d held on to hope that the truth would out eventually. He’d lingered in the cells, his mind devoured by terror, not by the hangman’s noose, but increasingly by a world that no longer cared. A world with no justice for Henry Gambler. A world whose indifference had stolen his soul and destroyed it into a thousand pieces.
For he now keenly understood what the millions of words written in ink in laws across America were really for.
But in swallowing his hatred for now, Henry grudgingly conceded he had learned something else from these fine men of Mount Vernon: justice were nothing more than might.
Justice belonged to those who took it for themselves. It were every man against the whole world.
Oh, yes. He’d learned that from them. And now the fiery passion for justice drove every step he took and formed every thought in his mind, and it was only a matter of time till he’d have the final laugh over them all.
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