The Black Lion Inn

by Alfred Henry Lewis

No; I neither regret nor repent the rebellion; nor do I grieve for rebellion’s failure. All’s well that well ends, and that carnage left us the better for it. For myself, I came honestly by my sentiments of the South. I was born in Virginia, of Virginians. One of my youthful recollections is how John Brown struck his blow at Harper’s Ferry; how Governor Wise called out that company of militia of which I was a member; and how, as we stood in the lamp-lighted Richmond streets that night, waiting to take the road for Harper’s Ferry, an old grotesque farmerish figure rushed excitedly into our midst. How we laughed at the belligerent agriculturist! No, he was no farmer; he was Wilkes Booth who, with the first whisper of the news, had come hot foot from the stage of Ford’s Theater in his costume of that night to have his part with us. But all these be other stories, and I started to tell, not of the war nor of days to precede it, but about that small crash in tobacco wherein I had disastrous part.

When I arrived in New York my hopes were high, as youth’s hopes commonly are. But, however high my hope, my pocket was light and my prospects nothing. Never will I forget how the mere sensation of the great city acted on me like a stimulant. The crowd and the breezy rush of things were as wine. Then again, to transplant a man means ever a multiplication of spirit. It was so with me; the world and the hour and I were all new together, and never have I felt more fervor of enterprise than came to me those earliest New York days. But still, I must plan and do some practical thing, for my dollars, like the hairs of my head, were numbered.

It was my seventh New York morning. As I sat in the café of the Astor House, my eye was caught by a news paragraph. The Internal Revenue law, with its tax of forty cents a pound on tobacco, had gained a construction, and the department’s reading of the law at once claimed my hungriest interest. No tobacco grown prior to the crop of ’66 was to be affected by the tax; that was the decision.

Aside from my saber-trade as a cavalryman, tobacco was that thing whereof I exhaustively knew. I was a tobacco adept from the hour when the seed went into the ground, down to the perfumed moment when the perfect leaf exhaled in smoke. Moreover, I was aware of a trade matter in the nature of a trade secret, which might be made of richest import.

During those five red years of war, throughout the tobacco regions of the south, planting and harvesting, though crippled, had still gone forward. The fires of battle and the moving lines of troops had only streaked those regions; they never wholly covered or consumed them. And wherever peace prevailed, the growing of tobacco went on. The harvests had been stored; there was no market—no method of getting the tobacco out. To be brief, as I read the internal revenue decision above quoted, on that Astor House morning, I knew that scattered up and down Virginia and throughout the rest of the kindom of tobacco, the crops of full five years were lying housed, mouldy and mildewed, for the most part, and therefore cheap to whoever came with money in his hands. For an hour I sat over my coffee and made a plan.

There was a gentleman, an old college friend of my father. He was rich, avoided business and cared only for books. I had made myself known to him on the day of my arrival; he had asked me, over a glass of wine, to let him hear from me as time and my destinies took unto themselves direction. For my tobacco plan I must have money; and I could think of no one save my father’s friend of the books.

When I was shown into the old gentleman’s library, I found him deeply held with Moore’s Life of Byron. As he greeted me, he kept the volume in his left hand with finger shut in the page. Evidently he trusted that I would not remain long and that he might soon return to his reading.

The situation chilled me; I began my story with slight belief that its end would be fortunate. I exposed my tobacco knowledge, laid bare my scheme of trade, and craved the loan of five thousand dollars on the personal security—not at all commercial—of an optimist of twenty-one, whose only employment had been certain boot-and-saddle efforts to overthrow the nation. I say, I had scant hope of obtaining the aid I quested. I suffered disappointment. I was dealing with a gentleman who, however much he might grudge me a few moments taken from Byron, was willing enough to help me with money. In truth, he seemed relieved when he had heard me through; and he at once signed a check with a fine flourish, and I came from his benevolent presence equipped for those tobacco experiments I contemplated.

It is not required that I go with filmy detail into a re-count of my enterprise. I began safely and quietly; with my profits I extended myself; and at the end of eighteen months, I had so pushed affairs that I was on the highway to wealth and the firm station of a millionaire.

I had personally and through my agents bought up those five entire war-crops of tobacco. Most of it was still in Virginia and the south, due to my order; much of it had been already brought to New York. By the simple process of steaming and vaporizing, I removed each trace of mould and mildew, and under my skillful methods that war tobacco emerged upon the market almost as sweet and hale as the best of our domestic stock; and what was vastly in its favor, its flavor was, if anything, a trifle mild.