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Cowperwood & Co. Vaguely but surely he began to see looming before him, like a fleecy tinted
cloud on the horizon, his future fortune. He was to be rich, very, very rich.
Chapter XIII
During all the time that Cowperwood had been building himself up thus steadily the great war of
the rebellion had been fought almost to its close. It was now October, 1864. The capture of
Mobile and the Battle of the Wilderness were fresh memories. Grant was now before
Petersburg, and the great general of the South, Lee, was making that last brilliant and hopeless
display of his ability as a strategist and a soldier. There had been times--as, for instance, during
the long, dreary period in which the country was waiting for Vicksburg to fall, for the Army of the
Potomac to prove victorious, when Pennsylvania was invaded by Lee--when stocks fell and
commercial conditions were very bad generally. In times like these Cowperwood's own
manipulative ability was taxed to the utmost, and he had to watch every hour to see that his
fortune was not destroyed by some unexpected and destructive piece of news.
His personal attitude toward the war, however, and aside from his patriotic feeling that the Union
ought to be maintained, was that it was destructive and wasteful. He was by no means so
wanting in patriotic emotion and sentiment but that he could feel that the Union, as it had now
come to be, spreading its great length from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the snows of
Canada to the Gulf, was worth while. Since his birth in 1837 he had seen the nation reach that
physical growth--barring Alaska-- which it now possesses. Not so much earlier than his youth
Florida had been added to the Union by purchase from Spain; Mexico, after the unjust war of
1848, had ceded Texas and the territory to the West. The boundary disputes between England
and the United States in the far Northwest had been finally adjusted. To a man with great social
and financial imagination, these facts could not help but be significant; and if they did nothing
more, they gave him a sense of the boundless commercial possibilities which existed potentially
in so vast a realm. His was not the order of speculative financial enthusiasm which, in the type
known as the "promoter," sees endless possibilities for gain in every unexplored rivulet and
prairie reach; but the very vastness of the country suggested possibilities which he hoped might
remain undisturbed. A territory covering the length of a whole zone and between two seas,
seemed to him to possess potentialities which it could not retain if the States of the South were
lost.
At the same time, the freedom of the negro was not a significant point with him. He had
observed that race from his boyhood with considerable interest, and had been struck with
virtues and defects which seemed inherent and which plainly, to him, conditioned their
experiences.
He was not at all sure, for instance, that the negroes could be made into anything much more
significant than they were. At any rate, it was a long uphill struggle for them, of which many
future generations would not witness the conclusion. He had no particular quarrel with the
theory that they should be free; he saw no particular reason why the South should not protest
vigorously against the destruction of their property and their system. It was too bad that the
negroes as slaves should be abused in some instances. He felt sure that that ought to be
adjusted in some way; but beyond that he could not see that there was any great ethical basis
for the contentions of their sponsors. The vast majority of men and women, as he could see,
were not essentially above slavery, even when they had all the guarantees of a constitution
formulated to prevent it. There was mental slavery, the slavery of the weak mind and the weak
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