by John Jakes
Thinking of Brett—her face, her hands, her ardor in the privacy of their bed—he felt the physical need of her. He closed his eyes a moment. When he was again in control, he scribbled on.
The city is already heavily fortified, which I would take as a sign of a long war were there not such a pervasive general opinion that it will be short. A short war is greatly to be desired for many reasons—not the least of which is the most obvious, viz., my desire for us to live together as husband and wife wherever duty takes me in time of peace. Speaking not of personal matters but political ones, however, a war of short duration will make it easier to restore things as they were. Today on a public thoroughfare I encountered a negro—either a freedman or a contraband, General Butler’s term for a Southern runaway. The black man would not vacate the sidewalk to permit me to pass. Memory of the incident has unsettled me all day. I am as fervent as any citizen about ending the disgrace of slavery, but the black man’s liberty is not license. Although I know my long-lost sister would contradict me, I do not consider myself unjust or immoral for holding that belief. To the contrary—I feel I reflect a majority view. Speaking only of the army, I know that to be absolutely true. It is said that even our President still speaks of the urgent need to resettle freed blacks to Liberia. Hence my fear of a protracted war, which could well bring the havoc of too many rapid changes in the social order.
He stopped, pencil poised on the same level as the steady flame. How wet, how weighty the air felt; drawing deep breaths took great effort.
What he had just written produced unexpected flickerings of guilt. He was already coming to loathe the war’s ideological confusion. Perhaps by the time he and Brett were together again and she read all of the journal, including passages yet unwritten, answers, including his own, would be clearer than they were this evening.
Do forgive the strange philosophizing. The atmosphere of this place produces curious doubts and reactions, and I have no one with whom to share them save the one with whom I share all—you, my dearest wife. Good night and God keep you——
Closing the passage with a long dash, he shut the copybook. Soon after, he undressed and blew out the lamp. Sleep wouldn’t come. The bed was hard, and his need of her, his lonesome longing, kept him tossing a long time, while hooligans broke glass and fired pistols in nearby streets.
“Lije Farmer? Right there, chum.”
The corporal pointed out a Sibley tent, white and conical, one of many. He gave Billy’s back a cheery slap and went away whistling. Such breaches of discipline among the volunteers were so common Billy paid no attention. At the entrance to the tent he cleared his throat. He folded his gauntlets over his sash and, orders in his left hand, walked in.
“Lieutenant Hazard reporting, Captain—Farmer—”
Astonishment prolonged and hushed the last word. The man was fifty or better. Pure white hair; a patriarchal look. He stood in his singlet, with his galluses down over his hips and a Testament held in his right hand. On a flimsy table Billy saw a couple of Mahan’s engineering texts. He was too stunned to notice anything else.
“A hearty welcome, Lieutenant. I have been anticipating your arrival with great eagerness—nay, excitement. You discover me about to render thanks and honor to the Almighty in morning prayer. Will you not join me, sir?”
He dropped to his knees. Dismay replaced astonishment when Billy realized that Captain Farmer’s question was an order.
4
WHILE BILLY REPORTED FOR duty in Alexandria, another of the government’s continual round of meetings took place in the War Department building at the west side of President’s Park. Simon Cameron, former boss of Pennsylvania politics, presided at his unspeakably littered desk, though it wasn’t the secretary who had called the meeting but the elderly and egotistical human balloon who purported to command the army. From a chair in a corner where Cameron had ordered two assistants to sit as observers, Stanley Hazard watched General Winfield Scott with a contempt he had to work to hide.
Stanley, approaching forty, was a pale fellow. Paunchy, yes, but a positive sylph compared to the general long ago nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.” Seventy-five, with a torso resembling a swollen lump of bread dough, Winfield Scott hid most of the upper part of the largest chair that could be found in the building. Braid crusted his uniform.
Others at the gathering were the handsome and pompous Treasury secretary, Mr. Salmon Chase, and a man in a plainly cut gray suit who sat in the corner opposite Stanley’s. The man had barely spoken since the start of the meeting. With a polite, attentive air, he listened to Scott hold forth. When Stanley had first met the President at a reception, he had decided there was but one word to describe him: repulsive. It was a matter of personal style as well as appearance, though the latter was certainly bad enough. By now, however, Stanley had assembled a list of other, equally apt, descriptions. It included clownish, oafish, and animal.
If pressed, Stanley would have admitted that he didn’t care for any of those present at the meeting, with the possible exception of his superior. Of course his job demanded that he admire Cameron, who had brought him to Washington to reward him for a long record of lavish contributions to Cameron’s political campaigns.
Though a departmental loyalist, Stanley had quickly discovered the secretary’s worst faults. He saw evidence of one in the towers of files and the stacks of Richmond and Charleston newspapers—important sources of war information—rising high from every free section of desk or cabinet top. Similar collections covered the carpet like pillars erected too close together. The god who ruled Simon Cameron’s War Department was Chaos.
Behind the large desk sat the master of it all, his mouth tight as a closed purse, his gray hair long, his gray eyes a pair of riddles. In Pennsylvania he’d carried the nickname “Boss,” but no one used it any longer; not in his presence, at least. His fingers were constantly busy with his chief tools of office, a dirty scrap of paper and a pencil stub.
“—too few guns, Mr. Secretary,” Scott was wheezing. “That is all I hear from our camps of instruction. We lack the materiel to train and equip thousands of men who have bravely responded to the President’s call.”
Chase leaned toward the desk. “And the cry for going forward, forward to Richmond, grows more strident by the hour. Surely you understand why.”
From Cameron, dryly, but with hinted reproof: “The Confederate Congress convenes there soon.” He consulted another tiny scrap, discovered inside his coat. “To be exact—on the twentieth of July. The same month in which most of our ninety-day enlistments will expire.”
“So McDowell must move,” snapped Chase. “He, too, is inadequately equipped.”
Discreetly, Stanley wrote a short message on a small tablet. Real problem is vols. He rose and passed the note across the desk. Cameron snatched it, read it, crushed it, and gave a slight nod in Stanley’s direction. He understood McDowell’s chief concern, which was not equipment but the need to rely on volunteer soldiers whose performance he couldn’t predict and whose courage he couldn’t trust. It was the same snide pose common to most regular officers from West Point—those, that is, who hadn’t deserted after being given a fine education, free, at that school for traitors.
Cameron chose not to raise the point, however. He replied to the commanding general with an oozy deference. “General, I continue to believe the chief problem is not too few guns but too many men. We already have three hundred thousand under arms. Far more than we need for the present crisis.”
“Well, I hope you’re right about that,” the President said from his corner. No one paid attention. As usual, Lincoln’s voice tended to the high side, a source of many jokes behind his back.
What a congress of buffoons, Stanley thought as he wriggled his plump derrière on the hard chair bottom. Scott—whom the stupid Southrons called a free-state pimp but who actually needed to be closely watched; he was a Virginian, wasn’t he? And he’d promoted scores of Virginians in the prewar army at the expense
of equally qualified men from the North. Chase loved the niggers, and the President was a gauche farmer. For all Cameron’s twisty qualities, he was at least a man of some sophistication in the craft of government.
Chase chose not to answer but to orate. “We must do more than hope, Mr. President. We need to purchase more aggressively in Europe. We have too few ordnance works in the North now that we have lost Harpers Fer—”
“European purchasing is under investigation,” Cameron said. “But, in my opinion, such a course is unnecessarily extravagant.”
Scott stamped on the floor. “Damn it, Cameron, you talk extravagance in the face of rebellion by traitorous combinations?”
“Keep in mind the twentieth of next month,” added Chase.
“Mr. Greeley and certain others seldom let me forget it.”
But the waspy words went unheard as Chase roared ahead: “We must crush Davis and his crowd before they assert their legitimacy to France and Great Britain. We must crush them utterly. I agree with Congressman Stevens, from your own state. If the rebels won’t give up and return to the fold—”
“They won’t.” Scott handed down the word from on high. “I know Virginians. I know Southerners.”
Chase went right on: “—we should follow Thad Stevens’s advice to the letter. Reduce the South to a mudhole.”
At that, the Chief Executive cleared his throat.
It was a modest sound, but it happened to fall during a pause, and no one could ignore it without being rude. Lincoln rose, thrusting hands in his side pockets, which merely emphasized how gangly he looked. Gangly and exhausted. Yet he was only in his early fifties. From Ward Lamon, a presidential crony, Stanley had heard that Lincoln believed he would never return to Springfield. Anonymous letters threatening his murder came to his office every day.
“Well—” Lincoln said. Then he spoke quickly; not with volume but with definite authority. “I wouldn’t say I agree with the Stevens response to the insurrection. I have been anxious and careful that the policy of this government doesn’t degenerate into some violent, remorseless struggle. Some social revolution which would leave the Union permanently torn. I want it back together, and for that reason, none other, I would hope for a quick capitulation by the temporary government in Richmond. Not,” he emphasized, “to satisfy Mr. Greeley, mind. To get this over with and find some accommodation to end slavery.”
Except in the border states, Stanley thought with cynicism. There, the President left the institution untouched, fearing those states would defect to the South.
To Cameron, he said, “I leave purchasing methods in your hands, Mr. Secretary. But I want there to be sufficient arms to equip General McDowell’s army and the camps of instruction and the forces protecting our borders.”
They all understood the last reference: Kentucky and the West. Lincoln refused to risk a chance misunderstanding. “Look into European purchasing a little more aggressively. Let Mr. Chase mind the dollars.”
Spots of color rose in Cameron’s shriveled cheeks. “Very well, Mr. President.” He wrote several words on the grimy paper and stuffed the scrap in a side pocket. God knew whether he’d ever retrieve it again.
The meeting ended with Cameron promising to assign an assistant secretary to contact agents of foreign arms makers immediately.
“And confer when appropriate with Colonel Ripley,” the President said as he left. He referred to the chief of the Army Ordnance Department headquartered in the Winder Building; like Scott, Ripley was an antique left over from the 1812 war.
Chase and Scott left, each in a better mood because of Cameron’s pretense of pliability. Also, the news from western Virginia was good lately. George McClellan had whipped Robert Lee out there early in June.
The men who had convened today represented two different theories of victory. Scott, who could be seen wincing and growling from the pain of gout induced by his gluttony, some weeks ago had proposed a grand scheme to blockade the entire Confederate coastline, then send gunboats and a large army straight down the Mississippi to capture New Orleans and control the gulf. It was Scott’s intention to isolate the South from the rest of the world. Cut off its supply of essential goods that it couldn’t produce for itself. Surrender would follow quickly and inevitably. Scott capped his argument by promising that his strategy would assure victory with minimum bloodshed.
Lincoln had liked some sections of the design; the blockade had become a reality in April. But the complete plan, which the press had somehow learned about and christened “Scott’s Anaconda,” drew sharp fire from radicals like Chase—they were numerous in the Republican party—who favored a swift, single-stroke triumph. The kind summed up in “Forward to Richmond!”—the slogan heard everywhere, from church pulpits to brothels, or so Stanley was told. Although he constantly craved sex and his wife seldom granted it to him, he was too timid to visit brothels.
Would the Union press on to the Confederate capital? Stanley had little time to speculate because Cameron returned quickly after seeing his visitors out. He gathered Stanley and four other assistants around him and began pulling oddly shaped little papers out of every pocket and rattling off orders. The scrap on which the secretary had jotted the President’s firm command fluttered to the floor unseen.
“And you, Stanley—” Cameron fixed him with those eyes gray as the winter hills his Scottish forebears trod—“we have that meeting late today. The one in regard to uniforms.”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary.”
“We’re to meet that fellow at—let’s see—” He patted his hopsack jacket, hunting another informative scrap.
“Willard’s, sir. The saloon bar. Six P.M. is the time you set.”
“Yes, six. I don’t have the head for so many details.” His vinegar smile said he wasn’t excessively concerned.
Shortly before six, Stanley and the secretary left the War Department and crossed to the better side of the avenue. Yesterday’s rain had changed the street to a mud pit again. Though he tried to walk carefully, Stanley still got a few spatters on his fawn trousers, which displeased him. In Washington, appearances counted for more than the reality beneath. His wife had taught him that, just as she’d propounded so many other valuable lessons during their married life. Without Isabel, Stanley well knew, he’d be nothing but a mat for his younger brother George to step on whenever he pleased.
The secretary swung his walking stick in a jaunty circle. In the amber of the late afternoon, the shadows of the strollers stretched out ahead. Three boisterous Zouaves, each in scarlet fez and baggy trousers, passed them, trailing beer fumes. One of the Zouaves was a mere boy, who reminded Stanley of his twin sons, Laban and Levi. Fourteen now, they were more than he could handle. Thank God for Isabel.
“—dictated a telegraph message after our meeting this morning,” he heard Cameron say.
“Oh, is that right, sir? To whom?”
“Your brother George. We could use a man of his background in the Ordnance Department. If he will, I’d like him to come to Washington.”
5
STANLEY FELT AS THOUGH he’d been kicked. “You telegraphed—? You want—? My brother George—?”
“To work for the War Department,” the secretary said with a trace of a smirk. “Been mulling the notion for weeks. That drubbing I took this morning settled it. Your brother is one of the big dogs in our state, Stanley. Top of his field—I know the iron and steel trade, don’t forget. Your brother makes things happen. Likes new ideas. He’s the kind who can pump some fresh air into Ordnance. Ripley can’t; he’s a mummy. And his assistant, that other officer—”
“Maynadier,” Stanley whispered with immense effort.
“Yes—well, thanks to them, the President’s handing me poor marks. Those two say no to everything. Lincoln’s interested in rifled shoulder weapons, but Ripley says they’re no good. You know why? Because he’s got nothing stored in his warehouses except a lot of smoothbores.”
Though Cameron often resisted new ideas as
strongly as Colonel Ripley did, Stanley was accustomed to his mentor artfully shifting blame. Pennsylvania politics had made him a master at it. Stanley quickly screwed up his nerve to challenge Cameron from another direction. “Mr. Secretary, I admit there’s a need to bring in new people. But why did you telegraph—? That is, we never discussed—”
A sharp glance stopped him. “Come on, my boy. I don’t need your permission to do anything. And I already knew what your reaction would be. Your brother grabbed control of Hazard Iron—took it clean away from you—and it’s galled you ever since.”
Yes, by God, that’s right. I’ve lived in George’s shadow since we were little. Now I’m standing on my own feet at last, and here he comes again. I won’t have it.
Stanley never said any of that. A few more steps and the men turned into the main entrance of Willard’s. Cameron looked merry, Stanley miserable.
The hotel lobby and adjoining public rooms were packed with people, as they were at most hours of the day. Near a roped-off section of wall, one of the Vermont-born Willard brothers argued with a sullen painter. The place smelled of redecorating—paint, plaster—and heavy perfumes. Under the chandeliers, men and women with eyes like glass and faces as stiff as party masks talked soberly, laughed loudly, bent heads so close together that many a pair of foreheads almost touched. Washington in miniature.
Stanley recovered enough to say, “Of course it’s your decision, sir—”
“Yep. Sure is.”
“But I remind you that my brother is not one of your strongest partisans.”
“He’s a Republican, like me.”
“I’m sure he remembers the days when you stood with the Democrats.” Stanley knew George had been particularly infuriated by events at the Chicago convention that had nominated the President. Lincoln’s managers had needed the votes Cameron controlled. The Boss would only trade them for a cabinet post. So it was with certainty that Stanley said, “He’s liable to work against you.”