(Saturday, January 19, 1861)
Jude Royer lodged with a Mrs. Daniel Melville, a middle-aged widow consumed by respectable faith and pious propriety and who took in several boarders in her rowhouse on Hollins Street, just off Union Square in the West End, a growing new neighborhood a mile and half from the harbor.
Although the Baltimore Street horsecar tracks extended nearly this far west, Jude preferred to walk. A penny saved was a penny earned.
Across from Mrs. Melville’s stood the large rowhouse of Sarah Gratz, one of his clients. A wealthy widow of the Hebrew faith, she owned multiple warehouses and used Jude’s legal services. He was glad for the work but leaving a meeting with Mrs. Gratz felt like escaping an inquisition and he knew she was one of the rare people who read every word in a legal document.
A lamp flickered to life in her upper windows, reminding Jude it was her disposition brief he’d failed to deliver.
He shuddered at the inevitability of informing her.
Yellow glow emanated from the dining room just past the narrow staircase, where Mrs. Melville held her nightly court with the boarders. Infamous for her ability to make the Sunday roast stretch till Saturday, Jude found Mrs. Melville somewhat silly, too obvious in her careful resemblance to the English queen, but she served hot bread and endless bowls of steaming potatoes at every meal and kept a clean house. Tonight, eager to avoid Ernst and to face the chore of reading the letter from home, he hurried upstairs to his room.
The gaslight didn’t extend to the third floor, so Jude didn’t see the hand restrain him. “You are all right?” Ernst asked, coming out of his room. Despite his excellent English, he retained a slight German accent, as he once told Jude, so no one would mistake him for a slaveholder. His crisper accent sounded more pronounced than the guttural German still heard among the older generations in Frederick County, children and grandchildren of settlers who’d come to America when King George ruled the colonies and Indians and wolves haunted the endless wilderness of central Maryland.
Jude claimed to be well. He opened the door of his room and in the moonlight saw Ernst’s unconvinced expression.
“The wound on your head, Jude! Were you caught in the riot? I am sorry to have missed it when I was so close by. But I will tell you about the patient I saw, a man with a most strange set of wounds, three pellets in a row so perfect like the bites of a bedbug, only much larger! One would think they had not been fired by a human hand and…”
“Thank you,” Jude interrupted, already feeling queasy.
After an awkward minute when Ernst peered over the wound and made clucking noises, Jude gave in and confessed: “I was never so scared in my life. I thought I was to die.” He told of the riot, the not-so-Good Samaritan, the lady in the carriage, Matthew’s arrest, the stolen watch, the discovery of the letter and even the colored woman at the beginning of it all.
Ernst lit the candle on the desk and glanced through the Palmetto letter. “Damning,” he conceded. “You are not convinced of Mr. Swann’s guilt?”
“Of course not! You know Matthew as I do. Which is to say not very well, but enough to know he doesn’t have the right…. “ Jude struggled for something to succinctly describe the unfortunate man without insulting him. “Temperament,” he finally said.
“It is likely a mistake,” Ernst agreed. “I cannot see Mr. Swann behind this modus operandi for an assault on Mr. Lincoln. Perhaps there is another Matthew Swann in Baltimore and the constables arrested the wrong man? An irony of America is how she relies upon those with the least abilities to guard her most sacred liberties. In the German states the police would never make such a mistake.”
He thought for a moment. “Unless it was deliberate.”
Ernst’s theory didn’t explain the visit of the colored woman, but Jude liked the idea of going to bed with hope rather than despair. “Maybe I assumed the worst too quickly,” he conceded. “It is horrible to think how easily people can lose control over their lives.”
“It happens far more often than one would like to believe,” Ernst pointed out. “We only pretend it doesn’t. Men have a remarkable ability for ignoring the pains and troubles of others. What is the colloquium you Americans employ? ‘Out of sight, out of mind?’”
Jude grunted.
“And I am also fascinated by la bella donna,” Ernst added.
“Why?”
“An enclosed landau? A very expensive carriage, even for a judge. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out who she is.”
“I am engaged,” Jude primly reminded Ernst.
Ernst nudged him. “To the lovely Miss Eliza Angell. How fortunate you are to already have encountered two angels and you are not even dead.”
Jude was annoyed. “Why must you sound unserious about everything?”
Ernst laughed. “People fascinate me, perhaps too much. I think of the thousands of minds around me as I stroll down the street, and why for every mind, there are differing opinions, beliefs and prejudices on the very same subject. Isn’t it remarkable, Jude? And it’s not even the most remarkable aspect of it! But ignore my peculiar curiosity. You have had an awful day. I do hope you can find solace in your own gods tonight. I am off to do my evening homage to the gods of philosophy for I have Engel’s latest book just in from London, which is why I begged Frau Melville to accept my absence from the table tonight.”
Ernst was not even forty and his tales of exploits around the world awed Jude, who’d once considered himself well-travelled for having seen New York. He was flattered that Ernst spoke freely with him, but the German too often quoted a strange philosopher named Kant who said while no one could ever know if God existed, belief was justified for the sake of morality. He also hadn’t forgotten Ernst once saying women grew into the roles ordained for them by their men. He had never met anyone like Ernst, who approached everything with probing observations and awkward questions, forcing people to acknowledge things they didn’t want to see.
Jude could end the conversation then and there. But he wouldn’t be able to sleep without asking, even though what Ernst would say would likely still deliver a sleepless night.
“Earlier this afternoon, you said there are a thousand and one definitions of justice,” he slowly said. “What did you mean?”
Ernst’s eyebrows rose. “Justice, like other ethics, is a many-sided concept involving competing values. The meaning of justice has evolved throughout history as people struggle with how to define, and even justify, its existence, using politics, religion, philosophy and economics to aid them. It cannot be summarized succinctly. Or can it? That is the challenge, Jude! But what prompts such a question?”
Jude fell silent.
“What does being just mean to you, Jude Royer?” Ernst asked.
Jude shook his head. “A vague idea of doing the right thing, I suppose. Whatever that might be.”
“Do you do the right thing?”
“I obey the laws and go to church and pay due respects where it’s needed,” he mumbled, knowing how feeble the answer sounded after Ernst’s ruthless exposure of America’s failures.
Ernst gave him an unnerving look. “Your answer does not surprise me, Jude. It is what most people would say. You are unremarkable.”
Jude glanced at his friend, a mystifying shadow against the darker outlines of the door. He grumbled, feeling the headache stirring again. “Why do we even want justice to begin with?” he snapped.
“Perhaps I have travelled too much,” Ernst surmised. “Far more places than any sensible man needs to go, for the more of the world I see, the more confusing it becomes. Still, I have found there is one constant presence in every civilization and culture, from the kingdoms of Europe to the mosques of Arabia and the courts of the Occident and even the tribes on the American Plains, and it is the need for justice, which is as real and heartfelt as anything can be.”
“These are all very different peoples, and won’t they have different understandings of justice? Doesn’t it cast doubt on whether there is such a thing as true justice?” Jude said, remembering what the lady in the carriage had asked. By god, she’d been intelligent!
“True justice? You are asking if there’s a universal truth to justice? That there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when it comes to justice?”
“Yes!”
“What is right? Or wrong? Oh, I can see you are unhappy for I do not answer and only pose more questions. But let me risk your wrath and ask yet another question, Jude. Would you say we want to see no one better than ourselves? Does a desire exist in every man for no one to have the advantage over him? For a degree of equality among us all? But how can this be when all men are different. Men are stronger, weaker, handsomer, uglier, smarter, stupider, richer, and poorer. The list of differentiators is endless, and it tells us one thing: man is not equal.”
“Are you saying justice cannot exist if we are unequal?”
“Isn’t that the great test of mankind? Reconciling the existence of humanity with inequality among men?” Ernst wondered. “Would it not be more sensible to define ourselves by the physical and intellectual inequality we see among ourselves? Deferring to inequality makes sense as it’s more evidently real. We defer to kings and great generals. We defer to the wealthy man and give more weight to his wisdom and capabilities, even if they are sorely misplaced. We are certainly aware of the power of charisma and beauty and respond to it in logic-defying ways.”
“Even in a democracy like America?”
“Of course! Americans may proclaim all men are created equal, but I have observed how great disparities of wealth are tolerated, even praised, in this country. Your middle-class Americans proudly boast of their equality and hard work but are also quick to disdain poor Americans and call them white trash. Then observe how these poor whites treat the Negroes; they tolerate their poverty and lack of status through the assurance that no matter how bad things are, at least they are not Negroes. And even among the Negroes a similar pattern also emerges, with house servants sneering at the field hands. Americans champion democracy and the equality of man, but the simple truth is we see no evidence of equality in our everyday lives in these United States.”
“You are saying justice cannot exist,” Jude argued. “If you argue justice can be tied to accepting inequality, won’t it imply we must accept slavery because the coloreds are inferior to white people?”
“Are they really, Jude?”
An awkward silence descended on the room.
Then Ernst laughed. “I can see you are getting angry, Jude. You demanded me to give you the universal truth to justice. In return I wanted you to understand while the world is a starkly unequal place, an instinct in man still yearns for some sentiment of equality. Justice is an essence that all men feel and need. This yearning for justice is perhaps the one thing all men hold in common, and perhaps forms the basis of this desire for equality too. Is this, perhaps, the origin for belief in a true justice?”
Then Ernst frowned. “But unfortunately, the only indisputable universal truths readily evident in mankind are that we are all the same species, and we are also completely, utterly, unequal. Those are, as you Americans would say, the bottom facts.”
“We are equal yet we are unequal,” Jude murmured.
Ernst nodded. “An extraordinary paradox. Justice, as well as the entirety of the history of mankind, must rest upon those two facts. Even the very concept of liberty is divided by those two facts, for some liberty must promote equality whereas for others liberty must accept inequality. Any truth to justice now has two possible options: the acceptance of inequality among men, or achieving equality. You will find that man has historically elected to follow one or the other in defining justice.”