Riding up the Pennsylvania hillside after midnight on the first of May, he could turn his back on the glow of a small, soon-to-be-forgotten domestic tragedy—a cliche in its commonness; so goddamn horrifying and heartbreaking in its specifics. He could turn his back but not his mind. His inward vision swept beyond the past two weeks to embrace two decades.
The Hazards, ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and the Mains, rice planters of South Carolina, had formed their first ties when a son from each house met by chance on a New York City pier on a summer afternoon in 1842. George Hazard and Orry Main became acquaintances on a northbound Hudson River boat that day. As soon as they left the boat, they became new cadets at West Point.
There they survived much together, much that strengthened their natural affinity for one another. There was the skull work — easy for George, who had no great desire for a military career; hard for Orry, who wanted nothing else. They managed to endure the hazing of a deceitful, some said lunatic, upperclassman named Elkanah Bent, even conspired to get him dismissed after a series of particularly heinous acts on his part. But influence in Washington had returned Bent to the Military Academy, and he had graduated promising George and Orry a long memory and full accounting for their sins against him.
The Mains and Hazards got to know one another, as Northern and Southern families often did in those years while the long fuse of sectionalism burned down to the powder of secession. There had been visits exchanged, alliances formed — hatreds, too. Even George and Orry had seriously quarreled. George was visiting at the Main plantation, Mont Royal, when a slave ran away, was caught, then cruelly punished on orders from Orry's father. The argument of the two young men afterward was the closest they ever came to seeing their friendship destroyed by the divisiveness dripping into the country's bloodstream like a slow poison.