The Invisible Line (23 page)

A boat came to shore, carrying people and corpses pulled from the river. Randall climbed on board, looking for Hart among the survivors. Calling his name and asking for help, he was guided to a body among the dead, “wrapped up in a blanket, wholly unconscious and insensible, and in a rigid state.” The skin on Hart's hands had been burned off. His feet were bare. Randall knelt by his brother and touched his chest—frozen. If Randall's mind emptied as he felt his loss, he was jolted back by a beat under his hand. And another. Hart lived.
¹⁰

Randall told several men to start rubbing his brother's body, and they covered Hart's feet with hot water bottles. He plied Hart with an all-purpose remedy during the war, brandy and camphor. For an hour Randall knelt over his brother, working, giving orders as if he were still a general. Slowly, he would remember, Hart “came to himself.” After feeling utterly powerless, Randall had used his hands—his touch—to bring his brother back from the dead. The two men picked themselves up from the slick wet floor of the boat. They sat side by side as night turned to day.
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FROM HIS OFFICE in the business district, where the American Quarter gave way to the French, Randall Lee Gibson could feel the steady push of commerce. New Orleans was ripening into spring, puddled and perspiring, cascading with fronds, flowers, and hanging moss. It was a jungle of merchandise and money and dreams. It swarmed, in one traveler's words, with “merchants, planters, travelers, river-men, army men, (principally Rebels,) manufacturing and jobbing agents, showmen, overseers, idlers, sharpers, gamblers, foreigners, Yankees, Southern men, the well dressed and the prosperous, the rough and the seedy.” In Terrebonne Parish, Gibson's father was bemoaning the refusal of his former slaves to work for him as they once had. But in New Orleans people dreamed of inventing new machines—cotton planters and pickers and cane cutters—that would remedy the problem of free labor and bring them untold riches. Streetcars rumbled, and beautiful women promenaded up nearby Canal Street, but Gibson was too busy to take notice.
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Just weeks after the
W. R. Carter
explosion, Gibson moved to the city and opened a law office with John Austin, who had commanded a battalion of sharpshooters under Gibson during the war. He advertised his services as a “counselor at law” in the local dailies. One column over, in those same papers, shipping lines promised adventures in New York, Liverpool, Havana, and Le Havre, but Gibson's thoughts did not wander from his new home. He immersed himself in routine contract disputes and debt collection, title searches, insurance matters, and the occasional divorce. Almost immediately after hanging out his shingle, Gibson wrote that he was “overwhelmed—literally overwhelmed with business. I say overwhelmed but you can hardly imagine how little it takes to do this, so slender is my stock of knowledge either of the Law or of practical affairs.”
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Gibson soon learned that the world of practical affairs seldom fit his idea of how people should act. He had to calm clients who were ready to kill over their legal disputes. One client, describing a man who had defaulted on a debt, wrote Gibson, “I had the utmost difficulty for many days in restraining myself from publicly horse-whipping him . . . I have denounced him very liberally and selected for that purpose the ears of those who I hoped would convey my words to him. In fact [I] have asked persons to tell him that I habitually denounced him as a Thief and Swindler. Which he is.” Another client, whose title to a plantation, Gibson assured him, was “beyond dispute,” was shot point-blank by a neighbor with a rival claim.
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In postwar New Orleans very little hinged on what was right or gentlemanly. Gibson continually encountered people who, despite the politest of protestations, would “never pay a cent [they] can avoid” and thought that “any act not indictable at Law cannot be wrong or dishonorable.” Morality foundered in the murky currents of material struggle. A Nashville lawyer contacted Gibson on behalf of an Irish woman whose husband had moved to New Orleans, prospered in business, and married another woman without a divorce; the request for Gibson's services did not involve initiating bigamy charges. Rather, the lawyer explained, “we only want money out of him + don't care to interfere with him in any other way.”
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Despite the unseemly reality of practical affairs, Gibson found the law to be a “very pleasant occupation.” It gave him a living, albeit “not one that holds out very large pecuniary rewards,” and after months of depressed isolation, it provided him with colleagues and a community. But more than anything, it offered him a measure of control over the chaos of modern life. The steamboat fire that had nearly killed him and his brother had been the fourth boiler explosion along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in a single week. Back in sugar country, his father, Tobias, was in “exceedingly low spirits,” watching his fields go to ruin and convinced that “history proves that the labor of free negroes can not be made profitable.” Gibson knew from hard experience that in the scramble of each day, no one could be certain if he would find life or death, fortune or want.
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Beset by disaster and uncertainty, people outside the profession looked to the law for guidance and answers. The legislature, composed largely of former rebels including Tobias Gibson, enacted a series of measures that forced blacks into labor contracts and restricted their ability to quit their jobs. In a society without slavery, the law would be the master. Its new assertive place in people's lives extended to accidents. “Would it not be well to enact a law . . . compelling that the strength and thickness of the boilers be increased, or the maximum pressure of steam reduced?” asked one newspaper after the
W. R. Carter
sank. “Let Congress prescribe safeguards for the future.”
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Attorneys and judges, by contrast, took comfort in the elaborate internal logic of the law, even when it offered little relief to accident victims, debtors, and others suffering in a calamitous new world. Legal reasoning tethered the ambiguities of the present to the confident wisdom of the past. It could reduce a gory steamboat catastrophe to a technical question about what risks the victims had assumed by buying tickets for the voyage or to a tidy argument about the meaning of a certain clause in an insurance policy. The fact that damages were unavailable to many accident victims somehow became less distressing when given the Latin label
damnum absque injuria
, a wrong without a remedy, a category of cases that treatises assured their readers had always existed, and for good reason. Gibson relished the “solemnity of the Law” and the role of lawyers in filtering the violence of modern life and business through elaborate procedures and forms of argument, notaries and judges and juries. It was an alchemy that turned pain into pleadings, rage into writs, transforming what he called the “rubbish of facts” into something cleaner, morally neutral, guided by principle, natural and right. “I had no idea I should like the profession so much,” he wrote a cousin. “I become as much interested in the application of a principle of law—the tracing out [of] some single point . . . across other + apparently conflicting principles—until I find safe ground to base it on.”
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Gibson soon landed large insurance companies as steady clients. Although all the Gibson plantations were heavily mortgaged and debt was smothering his family—and although he had lived through the devastation of an industrial accident—he was making his living foreclosing on mortgaged properties and defending the denials of insurance claims arising from fires. The neat formality of the law, its position of safe, abstract remove from the real world, not only enabled Gibson to represent his clients well; it also gave him deep satisfaction. “I am charmed with the profession,” he wrote.
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What Gibson called the “arduous and responsible labors of the Bar”—poring over treatises and Louisiana Civil Code provisions, composing stern letters and meeting face-to-face with opposing counsel, drafting pleadings and arguing in court—took the novice lawyer back to better days. “I enjoy this really more than anything I ever experienced since the days of debating societies,” he wrote. When he was giving orations at Yale, Gibson had been part of a national aristocracy. Although a newspaper punned that as a lawyer he “now begins life
de novo
,” no longer a gentleman of leisure with a “princely estate,” practicing law opened Gibson's eyes to the fact that the fall of the Confederacy had not cost him his status. When he started advertising his services, the dailies announced that Gibson was “an able member of the profession, well versed in the principles of law, and assiduous in his devotion to the interests of his clients.” “There is no Louisianian who served in the army of the West but will mention his name with pride and respect,” trumpeted the
Daily Crescent
. “We have no doubt [he] will soon rank among the first members of the Louisiana bar.” To friend and foe alike, he was “General Gibson.”
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The continued respect that Gibson commanded was not merely symbolic. Tens of thousands of rebel veterans had flocked to New Orleans and, Gibson wrote, “have from the highest to the lowest, cast their fortunes for better or worse, with the City.” That world still organized itself by its wartime memories and allegiances and even by unit. On occasion they rearmed for what were essentially military operations. When Louisiana's governor broke with the legislature and attempted to convene a constitutional convention in July 1866 to disenfranchise former Confederates, armed veterans wearing white handkerchiefs around their necks rampaged through the streets of New Orleans for hours, breaking up the convention and murdering hundreds of blacks.
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Although Gibson did not participate in the massacre, many of the rioters had been his men, and his fortunes were intertwined with theirs. He described the former Confederates as “an element of strength to the City,” and they made him a public man, revered for his past and respected in the present. As a lawyer, he represented the creditors who cast a continuous pall over the efforts of Southern whites to rebuild their lives. Yet the onetime rebels looked to Gibson to protect their position in the world and lead them back to a better place. A few months after opening his law practice, he was elected president of the Benevolent Association of Gibson's Brigade, charged with “relieving the wants of our needy and destitute, and to preserve sacred and inviolate the last resting places of those who fell, as only brave men die, with the flag of their country floating over them, with their faces to the foe, and paid the price of their devotion with their lives.” As their former general, Gibson embodied a time that had promised security, prosperity, and control. He might still lead his people to safety, as he had done at Spanish Fort.
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Settling into life in New Orleans meant regularly memorializing the South's glory days, but Gibson's thoughts began to radiate outward, beyond the South, to places and people he had not seen since his youth. After years of convincing himself that he disliked the North and its people, he discovered that not even four years of bloody fighting could come between old friends. “I have watched you through the War, so far as I could through the newspapers,” wrote one college classmate in New York, “with anxious good wishes, +, personally, unabashed friendship, though differing totally from you—of course—in political matters.” In Gibson's abandonment of the plantation to pursue his new career, his Yankee friends saw a frank acknowledgment of defeat and an earnest attempt to rejoin their world, all on terms that they could understand. “I trust you will be greatly successful in your new path,” his classmate wrote, “+ that the rewards of a noble professional career will be in the end an ample compensation for all you have lost by the war.”
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I
N THE BEST OF times New York was crowded, but at the start of July 1868 the city was bursting. The streets—the entire city, even—were, in one newspaper's words, a “living mass of seething and sweltering humanity.” To join the plodding mob of straw hats and bonnets, waistcoats and full skirts, was to experience immersion, even drowning. It was almost impossible to walk. Going a few blocks uptown on Broadway was more like drifting in a current.
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Along with ten thousand weekly arrivals from Europe, New York was packed with country folk there to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, as well as fifty thousand visitors, “refreshed with mighty rivers of lager-beer,” attending a German cultural celebration and shooting match, the Schützenfest. On top of everything was a gathering taking place just east of Union Square. At Fourteenth Street the crowd encountered a coterie of police, “as plenty as blackberries.” Spanning the street behind them was a fifty-foot archway made of pine branches. It was anchored with American flag bunting to a grand building on the north side of Fourteenth, the tallest on the block, its heavy Italianate cornice crowned with a statue of a proud Indian sachem and the words “Tammany Society.”
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While the headquarters of New York's fabled Democratic political machine would later appear as if it “lurked, menacing, in dingy red brick,” the building gleamed in July 1868. Thousands of people were gathered around, some pausing to admire it, others thinking only of the business taking place inside. The new Tammany Hall—the “Wigwam,” as it was known to the party faithful—had opened just in time to host the National Convention of the Democratic Party.
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The cavernous hall inside was a riotous drape of red, white, and blue. Behind the stage was a large bust of George Washington and a banner proclaiming “Pro Patria.” The wall around it was decked with oil paintings of the seals of the thirty-seven states. The seal of Utah Territory was also included by mistake, prompting one newspaper to write that the Democrats had been “so long exiled from control of the National Government that they have forgotten exactly what communities constitute the several States of the Union.” Enormous bronze statues flanked the stage, Roman gods holding gaslit candelabras, an unwitting symbol of old ideas in a new era. “Will the new edifice be the symbol of a wholly reconstructed Democracy,” asked
Harper's Weekly
, “or will the old Tammany organization and the old Democratic party there die together?”
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