Now I Know (11 page)

The 2002 movie
Gangs of New York
takes place in the mid-1800s, during a period when New York City was divided over the possibilities of a civil war. Although the movie itself is fiction, many of the plot points are drawn from history. For example, in July 1863, many working-class New Yorkers rioted over the Union’s decision to institute a military draft. During the four-day clash between rioters and federal troops, more than 100 people were killed and another 2,000 were wounded. The riot was, eventually, suppressed.

This wasn’t the first time New York City’s skepticism toward the sanctity of the United States came into play. In early 1861, the city considered leaving the country and becoming its own nation.

In December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, sparking troop mobilizations and dividing the populace. Although northern states such as New York (and by extension, New York City) were, by and large, antislavery and pro-Union, this was hardly unanimous. Feeling of unity with the South and disdain for the Union was, probably, a minority opinion, but those sympathetic to the rebels had an ally in high places: the mayor’s office.

Mayor Fernando Wood, who served as the city’s chief executive for two nonconsecutive terms, was what was known as a Copperhead—a Northern Democrat who was in favor of a peaceful resolution with the Southern states, in most cases even if it meant a continuation of slavery. In 1861—a few months before the Civil War began—Wood believed that the Union was destined to crumble and, in any event, saw the national government as no friend to his city. Much of New York’s mercantile industry’s business—one of the largest industries in the city at the time—came from the cotton trade. Tariffs imposed by the federal government—plus the likelihood of trade disruptions due to secessions, if not war—put that at risk. (Wood was no abolitionist either—he had a reputation for racism and for facilitating slavery, legal and illegal alike.)

On January 6, 1861, Wood proposed that the city leave New York State, and therefore the Union. Wood’s plan was for Staten Island and Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens, which at the time were not part of New York City) to form an independent city-state called the Free City of Tri-Insula. When he proposed it, the city council’s reaction was lukewarm at best, although hardly unanimously against declaring independence. Before Wood could drum up support for his plan, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter, and by and large, the city’s leadership rallied around Abraham Lincoln. Wood failed to win re-election in 1862. His successor, George Opdyke, was an antislavery Republican whose most notable act as mayor was recruiting troops to quell the anti-draft riots of 1863.

In January of 1861, representatives from across Alabama gathered at a convention to decide whether to adopt an ordinance of secession, the formal document by which the state attempted to secede from the Union. (Each of the other seceding states issued their own such documents in various different ways.) The convention, by a sixty-one yea, thirty-nine nay vote, decided to secede and become part of the Confederate States of America, and almost all the delegates signed the ordinance once the majority established its passage. One exception to this was Charles Christopher Sheats, a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, and the lone delegate from Winston County.

Although Sheats’s decision made him an outcast if not an outright enemy of Alabama and the Confederacy as a whole, he accurately portrayed the desires of his home in Winston County. Winston, covering a generally hilly region unsuitable for typical plantation-style farms, had a relatively small population and even smaller population of slaves; per the 1860 census, fewer than 3,500 white people and 122 slaves lived there. (For comparison’s sake, the state as a whole had a population of about 520,000 free people and 435,000 slaves.) With an end to slavery being an important, if not the only, driving force behind the South’s collective decision to leave the Union, the Winston population feared that plantation owners were looking to expand their power, which would certainly come at the expense of nonplantation areas of Alabama such as their own.

Over time, Winston’s dissent from secession became increasingly tangible. As the Civil War continued, Winston’s government took a neutral stance, refusing to support either side. Citizens of the county did not enlist in the Confederate ranks and refused to take loyalty oaths pledging themselves to the Confederacy. And as Confederate actions in the area (such as attempts at forced conscription) increased, Winston’s citizenry became less and less receptive to the South’s cause, turning pro-Union. Sheats himself was jailed by Confederates for his support of the North, and at one point the county considered a resolution to, themselves, secede from Alabama—if the state could secede from the Union, they argued, the county could secede from the state. News of the resolution spread throughout the region, leading many to believe that Winston had declared itself an independent nation, separate from both North and South.

But the resolution never passed, in large part because of the still-significant number of pro-Confederate people in the county. The county became a microcosm of the country, with people on both sides seizing arms, destroying property, and taking each other’s lives. Some Winston men enlisted with the Union army when the North invaded Alabama in 1862, joining the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which later accompanied William Tecumseh Sherman in his famous march to the sea. Others joined up the Confederate Home Guard, a militia designed to track down deserters and act as last defense against a Union invasion. Those Unionists who did not join the cavalry created their own version of the home guard, adding to the violence in the region.

Today, Winston is best known as the county that seceded from the Confederacy (even though it did not), and is often referred to as “the Republic of Winston” or “the Free State of Winston,” even by the county’s residents. The myth has spread so widely that multiple novels make reference to it, including
Addie Pray
(upon which the movie
Paper Moon
is based) and
To Kill a Mockingbird
. To mark the town’s uniquely divided culture during the war, the war memorial is a statue of a young soldier, clad half in Union grays and half in Confederate garb.

Air travel comes with a risk that, although mathematically rare, seems all too common: lost luggage. According to
Conde Nast Traveler
, U.S. carriers handle 400 million checked bags a year, and as many as 2 million bags are lost each year from domestic U.S. flights alone. That’s a small percentage—about half a percent—and most misplaced bags are reunited with their owners within forty-eight hours. Within five days, 95 percent of those 2 million bags will find themselves back home. But a small percentage—and we’re talking 50,000 to 100,000—sit idly, never to find their way back home.

What happens to these bags? They go to Alabama.

Scottsboro, Alabama, is a small city of just under 15,000 people, tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, thirty miles or so from the Georgia and Tennessee borders. Every year, about a million visitors come to this tiny city, the vast majority of whom come to visit the Unclaimed Baggage Center. This 50,000-square-foot store sells the things that flyers lost and were unable to recover.

When an airline loses your bags, federal law requires them to try to find them for you. Typically, the airlines are successful at doing so. But not always. After the lost bag has sat for ninety days unclaimed (or its owner has not been located), federal law imposes a different obligation on the airlines: They have to pay the flyer a settlement amount. In doing so, the airline effectively purchases the luggage, becoming the legal owner of everything inside the bags. But airlines aren’t in the business of selling random items like half-used bottles of sunscreen, underwear of every size, evening gowns, jewelry, and a cornucopia of other goods. Besides, it would be bad for business if the airlines—after scanning baggage and at times, manually inspecting the contents—started putting the high-priced items you formerly owned on some e-commerce site. (Imagine the conspiracy theories!) This leaves the airlines with a problem: Tens of thousands of bags become theirs each year, and they can’t sell the stuff inside.

The Unclaimed Baggage Center is the largest and most well known of a handful of intermediaries that help solve this problem. The UBC, as Scottsboro locals call it, buys unclaimed baggage by the pound, sight unseen, from the airlines. (This works well for the airlines because they’re better off having no knowledge of the contents of the unclaimed bags.) The UBC trucks the items from various airlines’ unclaimed baggage depots across the country to the Scottsboro HQ. Workers sort through the contents, and about a third of the items make it onto the shelves in the colossal store. Another third are donated to charity, and the final third is deemed unfit for sale. (The criteria for being unfit for sale is unknown, but shoppers have noted that partially consumed bottles of lotion are often on the store shelves whereas sex toys rarely, if ever, are.) Most items are for sale at a sizeable discount, and on occasion, a shopper may find a diamond in the rough—literally. The UBC has sold a handful of lost diamond jewelry in its forty-plus-year history.

The RMS
Titanic
set sail from Southampton on its way to New York City on April 10, 1912. As we all know, it did not reach its destination. On April 14, the ship struck an iceberg and within hours snapped in two and sank to the Atlantic floor. The wreckage was lost at sea until September 1, 1985, when underwater archeologist Robert Ballard discovered the ship’s boiler and hull while aboard the
Knorr
, a research vessel owned by the U.S. Navy.

But the
Knorr
was not out there searching for the
Titanic
. It was on a secret Cold War mission at the behest of the Navy itself.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Ballard created Argo, an unmanned undersea video camera outfitted with various lighting designed to illuminate the ocean at depths approaching 20,000 feet. The site of the
Titanic
disaster, in the seabed roughly 370 miles south-southeast of Newfoundland, put the wreckage at about 12,500 feet, well within Argo’s range. But getting the camera—which out of the water weighed 4,000 pounds—to the site required a ship, crew, and a sizeable budget.

In 1982, Ballard asked the Navy to request funding for his search for the
Titanic
, but the Navy wasn’t interested. It was, however, interested in Argo more generally. In the 1960s, a pair of nuclear submarines—the USS
Thresher
and USS
Scorpion
—sank. The Navy didn’t know what caused the disasters, and was particularly concerned about the
Scorpion
’s fate—it may have been sunk by the Soviets. Further, the military wanted to know what happened to the nuclear reactors on those ships and the impact they had on the ocean environment. So the Navy struck a deal with Ballard: help answer these questions and, if time and budget permit, you can search for the
Titanic
while you’re out there, too.

Ballard managed to find both the
Thresher
and
Scorpion
with time to spare. (The
Thresher
sank due to a piping error, he concluded, according to
National Geographic
; he couldn’t determine if the
Scorpion
fell prey to an attack. Neither nuclear reactor had an adverse effect on the ecology of the ocean.) With the Navy’s blessing, he went toward where he believed the
Titanic
came to rest, and, correctly speculating that the ship had broken into two parts, was able to discover its location. Fanfare and major press attention ensued.