Into the Long Dark Night

by Michael Phillips

  “I’m happy you like it,” I said.

  “It is perfect—just what we were after. Within a week we will have this running in as many of the papers sympathetic to our cause as we can.”

  “And the Alta?” I reminded him.

  “Of course. I’ll arrange to have it wired to San Francisco, too. Now, Miss Hollister, do you have other ideas for more such pieces?”

  “I . . . I suppose—that is, yes, I always have ideas, but I never know exactly what’s going to come out until I sit down and start writing.”

  “Well, however you do it, you get to work on some more of it! If this is what comes out when you put your hand to the paper, I would like to see, perhaps, a new article once a week—or even more often, if possible. With Sherman’s victory and your articles and the President’s campaigning, I think we may turn this election around yet. If only Grant can keep Lee from running him out of Virginia. A Lee victory now would be a devastating blow to our whole effort.”

  He rose and led me to the door.

  “So, Miss Hollister,” he said, “continue just as you have been doing. Bring me whatever you come up with. And in the meantime, I’ll also be contacting you about making some campaign appearances.”

  “You mean . . . speaking?” I said.

  “Somewhat, perhaps. But don’t be anxious. I’ve heard that you are a fine speaker.”

  “I do better with my pen.”

  “Well, we’ll see. But just be ready—I may want to call on you to accompany either the President or one of our Republican senators on a campaign swing or two—Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey . . . these are states we must not let McClellan win.”

  “I’m sure nobody would pay much attention to—”

  “Come, come, Miss Hollister. I know better than that, even if you do not. There have been reports, even from as far away as California, about some of the appearances you made on the President’s behalf four years ago. I happen to know that you are very effective on the stump as well as at a desk.”

  I could feel my face turn red. How could I convince him that I really disliked standing up in front of a crowd of people?

  “Besides,” he went on, “you won’t always have to say anything at all. Your mere presence says something too—a woman sharing the platform with the politicians, a woman whose name people recognize, a woman who has been on the front lines where the fighting is, and now who is writing and appearing on behalf of the President—not to mention that your book about California when you were younger is beginning to circulate a bit. It all speaks very well for the President.”

  “I’ll do whatever you would like me to,” I said finally.

  “Then you keep writing articles and editorials for President Lincoln, and I will be in contact with you.”

  He shook my hand, and I left.

  Chapter 46

  On the Campaign Trail

  I did as Mr. Hay wanted, and kept writing. Ideas kept coming to me, and I wrote them down. Sometimes they turned out to be an article that was printed, sometimes not, but I sat down at my writing desk every day to see what I might be able to say. I wrote about Mr. Lincoln, about how I saw the country, about some of my personal experiences both at Gettysburg and recently in Virginia, and even now and then about something relating to California, because there were voters back on the West Coast too, and they had to vote for Mr. Lincoln as well as those closer by.

  A week and a half after my return to Washington, Mr. Hay asked me to accompany several congressmen and their wives, two senators, and the vice-presidential candidate, Mr. Johnson, on a train trip to campaign in Pennsylvania and Ohio, then back through Buffalo, New York, and south to Philadelphia before returning to Washington.

  “There will be other women along,” he said. “All arrangements for lodging and the like will be taken care of. You’ll have a wonderful time, and we hope it will be a very effective opportunity to sway the vote in these crucial states.”

  “Do you want me to stop writing articles?” I asked.

  “Oh no. You should still have time to continue that work as well. You will not have to speak more than a few times. We simply want to be able to introduce you and let people see your face. But we want fresh new articles to continue to appear as well. The President himself will be joining the party in Philadelphia for two major campaign addresses.”

  I agreed, and told Mrs. Richards of my plans. Since we’d be gone three or four weeks, I told her I’d move my things to one side of the wardrobe and the bottom drawers of the dresser so that she would be able to rent out the room to other travelers or visitors to the city in my absence.

  The very morning we left, a letter arrived from Clara Barton. I waited until we were on the train north to Baltimore and then Harrisburg before reading it.

  Everyone here sends you greetings. We all miss you, though we are glad you do not have to see the suffering for a while, and we know the work you are doing for the President may help the war end sooner.

  But oh, Corrie, the suffering is so dreadful. With every new attempt at Petersburg, more men are killed and wounded. Where will it all end? The battle is a tactical one, with standoff after standoff. There have even been reports of spies in our midst, even plots against Generals Grant and Meade. Yet our work in the hospitals goes on much as it was when you were with us. We have had to continue to move with the army, making use of homes and buildings in the surrounding towns whenever we can. Yet the means we have of helping is woefully inadequate!

  I saw, crowded into one old sunken hotel, lying upon its bare, wet, bloody floors, five hundred fainting men holding up their cold, weak, dingy hands as I passed, and beg in heaven’s name for a cracker to keep them from starving (and I had none); or to give them a cup that they might have something to drink water from, if they could get it (and I had no cup and could get none). As much as comes to us daily from the faithful women of the northern states who labor making bandages and supplies, we have so much less than is needed.

  I saw two hundred six-mule army wagons in a line, stretching down the street to headquarters, and reaching so far out on the Wilderness Road that I never found the end of it; every wagon crowded with wounded men, stopped, standing in the rain and mud, wrenched back and forth by the restless, hungry animals all night. Dark spots in the mud under many a wagon told all too plainly where some poor fellow’s life had dripped out in those dreadful hours.

  A man came through the camp just last night, following the battle with his wagon, an itinerant embalmer. Oh, just to read the words of his dreadful flyer made my flesh crawl: “Persons at a distance, desiring to have the bodies of their deceased friends disinterred, embalmed, disinfected, or prepared and sent home, and have it promptly attended to, apply to the office of Simon Garland, 35 South 13th Street, Philadelphia. No zinc, arsenic or alcohol is used. Perfect satisfaction guaranteed.”

  To think of human death being reduced to such a grisly business! He was prowling about the hospital looking for the bodies of those he had been hired to fix. It was all too terrible to think about!

  Do whatever you can, dear Corrie. Tell our President, tell the people of the country, how awful it truly is. This cannot go on . . . it must end! The killing and destruction must be put to a stop. Tell them, Corrie—from all of us!

  I was wiping away tears even before finishing her words. I determined then and there to somehow find a way to include some of what Clara had said in my very next article. In fact, within ten minutes I had pulled out my pen and paper and began right there on the train, as best I could without spilling the ink.

  The trip was long and tiring, yet exhilarating too. I met many new people and saw places I’d never seen before. Our first major stop was in Pittsburgh, then on to Columbus, then north to Akron, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and Rochester before heading south. When I stood up to speak for the first time, I tried to remember what I’d said the first time I was on the platform in Sacramento four years earlier. Afterward, people came up to talk to me, especially wom
en, and a lot of them had read either my book or some of the articles, and they were all so nice and kind with their words. After that it began to get easier, just as it had when I’d traveled with Mr. King, although I still preferred when the congressmen and Mr. Johnson did the speechmaking and only introduced me or said something about my articles.

  I did manage to find time to keep writing, although it wasn’t quite as easy as if I’d been back at Mrs. Richards’. During the campaign trip, I sent four articles back to Mr. Hay. One of them appeared in the Buffalo paper the day we arrived. One of the senator’s wives came excitedly into my room of the hotel where we were staying, carrying it in her hand.

  “Corrie, look,” she said, “here’s the article you sent back to John Hay when we were in Pittsburgh. I’ve brought you a copy of the paper.”

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  I glanced at it, but was embarrassed to read any of it just then.

  Later that night, after I was alone and ready for bed, I opened the paper up to the second page and read what I’d written on the train as we’d traveled across Pennsylvania. As we’d gone through Harrisburg and Gettysburg, so many things were in my mind. I thought a great deal about Sister Janette and all she’d told me about Pennsylvania and William Penn and others of the early leaders of the country. Then I began thinking of the founding of our nation as a whole and of the men who had written the Constitution and organized our government. And I thought about slavery and what part it had played in our country right from the beginning.

  When the fathers of our country wrote the Declaration of Independence, they said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When they later wrote the Constitution, by which we’ve been governed ever since, they again spoke of “the blessings of liberty” as the reason why the Constitution had to be written.

  These documents have been the very foundations of this nation ever since. Yet what was the liberty they spoke of? What did they mean when they wrote all men are created equal? Who were the all men they spoke of?

  Many of the very men themselves who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution owned slaves. Five of the original thirteen states were from what is today the Confederacy. Four of our first five presidents were from Virginia, what we call today a “slave state.”

  These men, our very founding fathers whom we revere, obviously didn’t think there was anything wrong with slavery. So what are we to make of their words liberty for all men and created equal?

  As I read, I could not help but be reminded of Miss Stansberry, now Mrs. Rutledge, and how she had drilled us from our history books, making us memorize the first part of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, as well as the names of all the Presidents. Zack had hated it, but I was glad now for all the hard study she’d made us do.

  If our nation truly was founded on “liberty” and “equality” for “all men,” why are we now engaged in this terrible war?

  Perhaps something was wrong from the very beginning, something that the founding fathers didn’t know was wrong, but something that was eventually going to have to be fixed. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln is the man who has taken upon himself the task of completing what the founding fathers only began.

  This great nation was founded and built upon principles known to few other nations on earth—principles of liberty and freedom and justice. And yet perhaps there has been a crack in that foundation, a crack barely visible, and indeed invisible to many, a crack which has from the very beginning of our nationhood weakened the structure of the nation we have been trying to build. That crack is the existence of slavery.

  Why has there been a crack? Why has the foundation been weak?

  Because something was established as a truth in the foundation of the country which wasn’t a truth in the way things actually were. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence spoke of equality and liberty, and yet the laws of the land permitted slavery and inequality. Two opposite and contradictory things have been allowed to exist in this country all this time. Yet we still talk about this nation as the land of the free. But it has never been truly and completely a land of freedom.

  Four years ago, our brave President said, “It is time to fix this crack of inconsistency . . . it is time that we at last make what have been truths in principle truths in fact . . . it is time we make all people in this land we call a land of freedom—it is time we make all people free at last.”

  Now we are fighting a dreadful and awful war over whether this crack is worth fixing. We must find out what kind of a nation we really are, and what kind of a people we really are. Do freedom, and justice, and equality really matter, or will this nation be satisfied to say that our government is founded upon such principles but in fact deny those very rights to a large number of people because of the color of their skin? Do we really believe that “all men are created equal”?

  I think we do believe that. I know I do, and I think most northerners, and probably a lot of southerners do, too. Therefore, we must continue to support President Lincoln. The crack is nearly healed. If we do not return him to the presidency now, it will be to give up when we are so close to making our land truly a land of freedom to all, when we have paid such a great price and fought such a great battle to do so.

  We must now complete building what the founding fathers only began. And to insure that the foundation is strongly built and that its cracks are completely healed, we must reelect President Lincoln to another term of office.

  Chapter 47

  A Fateful Night

  For the rest of the campaign trip, everyone seemed to treat me just a little differently. Something about the article made them look at me almost with a look of astonishment. The women complimented me on what I’d written and said they’d never read anything like that before from me. They asked how I knew all those things to say and how I’d thought of it and how I knew so much history. But the men seemed to wonder to themselves if I was really the person writing those articles. In person I probably seemed shy and didn’t say too much. And then when they read what I’d written, it didn’t sound at all like the same person.

  I suppose I had changed some. Being around Washington and important people, and listening and talking to them, I suppose I didn’t sound quite so much like a little girl from the backwoods, as I once had. My writing was getting a little better too, at least people told me so. I wondered sometimes what Mr. Kemble and Mr. Macpherson—who always said he liked my “homespun” style!—thought of it now. Maybe they didn’t like it as much as before!

  Afterward it seemed that this article, more than any other, was one people remembered reading. In Philadelphia, they introduced me as the young woman who wrote “so eloquently about the crack in our nation’s foundation.” Everyone had been nice until then. But after Buffalo, people treated me with greater courtesy and respect. Maybe for the first time some of them realized what Mr. Hay had been saying to me all along, that the written word was just as able to influence people as speechmaking.

  Our itinerary had been somewhat uncertain. President Lincoln joined us in Philadelphia for two speeches; then he and Mr. Johnson and two of the senators went on to New York, while the rest of us returned to Washington. I hadn’t been able to let Mrs. Richards know when I would be returning, and as a result, my room was occupied on the evening when I arrived back in the Capital. She offered to find me a place for the night in her own part of the house, but after thinking about it briefly, I realized that this might be an opportunity sent by the Lord for some purpose. So I told her not to worry about me and that I’d see her the following afternoon.

  Thus I found myself again knocking on the door of Marge Surratt’s boardinghouse.

  After everything I’d been through down in Virginia, and now after three weeks on trains and at meetings and in hotels, I was almos
t eager to see her. Hers wasn’t exactly a friendly face, but there is something unique and special about laying eyes on someone you’ve been praying for. The moment I saw her, the most remarkable little stab of genuine feeling for the lady sprang up within my heart. I suppose praying for her had worked changes within me. But I thought I saw the beginnings of a smile as she saw me standing there in front of her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Surratt,” I said. “I need a room for tonight. Do you have anything available?”

  “Turned you out, did they?”

  “No, I just got back earlier than I anticipated.”

  “Well, you might as well come in, now that you’re here. You can go to the same room as before. Supper’s still at six.”

  “I remember,” I replied with a smile. “Six sharp.”

  She almost smiled. I took my bag and went up to the room. Even its drab colors and ugly curtains didn’t look half so bad this time.

  Supper was uneventful. The men around the table were all faces I’d never seen before, and no more talkative than the others had been earlier. I helped her clean up afterward and tried to talk. But it wasn’t much use. She seemed distracted and fidgety, looking toward the door and out the window as if she were expecting someone. Eventually I excused myself and went back to my room. If I was going to get anywhere with her, it would have to wait still longer.

  I was tired and went to bed immediately. It was probably no later than eight o’clock when I lay down, and I think I was asleep within five minutes.

  Dreams intruded into my consciousness. There were faces I didn’t recognize, although they were familiar and I knew I should know them. A feeling of oppression came over me, but the dreams were fuzzy and undefined. There was more feeling to them than sights and activity—feelings of dread, of danger, and around and behind it a feeling of hurt and pain. I wanted to cry, but no tears would come. I had been hurt. I could feel it, but I didn’t know why. And with it came the feeling that more hurt was coming, that danger was somewhere close at hand.