“To the people’s president!” he shouted
“The people’s president!” returned the twelve hundred members of the elite, relieved of the necessity of associating with a single one of the people in their sweaty, tobacco-spitting reality. On that note of Democratic solidarity ended Andrew Jackson’s inauguration day.
Back in their house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Caroline told George what Sarah Polk had shared with her about Samuel Swartout. “I’d keep him at arm’s length for a while,” she said. “Let’s see what Mr. Van Buren offers you before you sign any pacts with one of his enemies.”
“You’re a wonder,” George said, cradling little Jonathan in his arms. He was far more affectionate with the child than Caroline was. She told herself it was Tabitha’s job to pick him up and console him when he cried. She was already counting the days when she could stop breast-feeding him. Most doctors agreed a baby could be shifted to whole milk at the age of five or six months, depending on size and appetite.
She left George in the nursery with the baby and undressed with Tabitha’s help. Tabitha was full of praise for Andrew Jackson. “Hannibal told me about him. Never lets a black man or woman be whipped on his farm. Gives them six or seven holidays a year and every Sunday off. Feeds them strong meat and fresh vegetables every day. He’ll be a good president, don’t you think?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Maybe he’ll use his power to free black people everywhere.”
“Maybe.” Caroline was too sleepy to take what Tabitha was saying seriously.
“I hates it when I see them slave coffles in front of the president’s house. They don’t belong there. Ought to be hidden someplace in a piece of woods.”
“You’re right.”
“Why don’t you tell President Jackson that when you see him?”
“I’ll try to remember.”
The girl’s ideas were so fantastic, Caroline stopped listening. Her mind drifted to the events of the day. John Sladen leaning over Clothilde Legrand in the White House. Dancing with her at Carusi’s in such a close embrace. Suddenly Caroline was sitting on the bed beside John in that New York basement. The image of the underground river wound through her mind.
“George?” she called. “George?”
A faint response from the nursery.
“Are you ever coming to bed? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Jonathan’s still fussing.”
“Tabitha will take care of him.”
“Maybe you should feed him, ma’am,” Tabitha said. “He don’t take the milk well. Spit up a lot of it.”
“Give him another bottle. Warm it this time.”
“I warmed it the last time.”
Caroline sighed. She would have to hire a wet nurse. She could not rush home from balls and teas and receptions to breast-feed the child every four hours.
For the moment, there was a more immediate concern. “George! I’m turning out the light.”
He ambled in, shedding his evening clothes. When he lay down beside her, she turned on her side and whispered, “I thought New Jersey’s conqueror would be in a mood to celebrate.”
“I’m always in a mood to do that with you.”
“There are times when I need you—as much or more than you imagine you need me.”
“I don’t imagine that. I know it.”
His big hands roved her body. Gradually, the memory of John Sladen’s spectral face on the bed in the New York basement began to dissolve in a rush of desire for the man beside her. He did not threaten her with shame or disgrace; he believed that he alone possessed her heart as totally as he began to possess her body.
For this celebratory moment, Caroline wanted that to be true. No, she wanted it to be true forever. She welcomed the long, slow thrusts that swept her toward a surrender that was also a kind of possession, fulfillment, promise, hope, forgiveness. The white words cascaded through Caroline’s troubled soul as she drew George down the sacred river’s dark current into the haunted caverns of tomorrow and yesterday, where time no longer mattered and love was a word that winged through the gloom like a creature of the night.
THREE
“ISN’T IT AS CLEAR AS high noon to anyone with an unprejudiced mind?” President Andrew Jackson said. “Clay and Adams and their minions are doing the same thing to Peggy Eaton that they did to my darling Rachel. Despicable scum that they are, they don’t have the courage to meet me man to man. They prefer to war on defenseless women!”
The Stapletons were in the White House dining room with a half dozen other couples, enjoying President Jackson’s hospitality. The Polks sat on the opposite side of the oval table. Emily Donelson and her husband flanked Caroline and George. On either side of the Polks sat John Sladen and Clothilde Legrand, her father, portly Senator Simon Legrand, and his stocky, handsome son, Victor, who was about George’s age. At the bottom of the table, opposite the widower president, sat another widower, Secretary of State Martin Van Buren.
The leader of the New York Democrats was a plump, avuncular man with shrewd, shining eyes and an amiable mouth. His fair skin and blond hair inclined him to favor creamy white vests and tan suits. He looked, someone said, as if he were always about to depart on a summer holiday. This touch of the theatrical in his tailoring made more plausible his political nickname, the Little Magician.
“What I don’t understand,” Van Buren said with apparently honest puzzlement, “is Mrs. Calhoun’s refusal to return Mrs. Eaton’s call.”
“I asked Calhoun for an explanation,” Jackson said. “He said there was nothing he could do. She had made up her own mind without consulting him. The next day I called on Mrs. Calhoun personally. I explained my wishes in this matter and gave her a positive order to return Mrs. Eaton’s call. She rang for her butler and said, ‘Show this gentleman to the door.’”
Eyes widened, brains reeled. The warfare over Mrs. Eaton had come to this: the wife of the vice president had thrown the president of the United States out of her house!
A South Carolinian by birth, Old Hickory claimed to be unsurprised by his ejection. “She’s a Bonneau from Charleston,” he said. “They don’t come much prouder than that tribe of aristocrats. She doesn’t give ten pins for my current office. As far as she’s concerned, I’m still Andrew Jackson from the Waxhaws—the wrong end of the state.”
Mrs. Eaton’s respectability, or lack of it, was convulsing official Washington. Senator Henry Clay had been inspired to one of his naughtier witticisms: “Time cannot stale nor custom wither her infinite virginity.” The wives of the three cabinet ministers allied with Mr. Calhoun had also refused to receive Mrs. Eaton in their homes or return her calls. The president had lectured the husbands furiously with no visible result. He had sent investigators to New York to refute a rumor that Peggy and her new husband had registered as man and wife in a hotel there several years ago.
Old Hickory had engaged in a shouting match with a clergyman who came to the White House with a story that Peggy had suffered a miscarriage at a time when her husband had been at sea for the previous twelve months. The Navy Department was ordered to scour its records to prove that the late purser Timberlake had been at home at least once in that previous year.
By this time the imbroglio had gotten into the newspapers. There were sly references to “Bellona”—the Roman goddess of war—who was determined to triumph over her enemies, even if she wrecked the administration. In Italian, la bellona had an even less complimentary meaning—a vulgar, well-endowed woman with no morals worth mentioning. Sarah Polk whispered to Caroline that one of Peggy’s severest critics, Mrs. Samuel Ingham, the wife of the secretary of the treasury, had a few secrets in her past to hide. But she was born a lady. Caroline wondered if the ostracism was aimed at excluding the daughter of a tavern keeper, whether or not she was, as President Jackson claimed, “as chaste as a virgin.”
In spite of repeated lectures from the president, Emily Donelson remained adamantly determined not to call on M
rs. Eaton. Emily stayed in her room at the White House when Jackson and her husband called on the Eatons in the mansion they had rented on Pennsylvania Avenue. From the icy expression on Emily’s face, the current discussion was not likely to change her mind.
Caroline remained uncommitted in this swirling political brawl. She was following Sarah Polk’s lead. As congressmen’s wives, they were not immediate targets of Mrs. Eaton’s aggressive style. Thus far, Peggy seemed to be leaving her calling cards at the doors of the vice president, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and similar potentates. But so few women accompanied their husbands to Congress in 1829, she would soon descend to congressional wives. For the time being, Caroline was grateful that the Stapletons’ Pennsylvania Avenue house was a good half mile from the Eatons’ mansion.
For obvious reasons, Peggy Eaton was a subject that inevitably tensed Caroline’s nerves. Gazing across the table, she wondered if she saw sarcasm, mockery, in John Sladen’s eyes—and in the eyes of his friends the Legrands. Had he revealed to them his conquest of the wife of the conqueror of New Jersey? She could not believe it, but there was no way to reassure herself without revealing her vulnerability.
To Caroline’s immense relief, James Polk managed to get the president to change the subject by mentioning a magic word, Texas. More and more Americans were settling in this huge northern province of Mexico. Did he think it was possible or probable that they could purchase it from the Mexicans the way they had bought Florida from Spain?
“An American Texas is more than either of those iffy words, Mr. Polk,” Jackson said. “It’s a necessity. Take a look at the map of North America. You’ll see whoever owns Texas outflanks New Orleans. The nation that conquers New Orleans and holds it will destroy the United States, as surely as a murderer kills a man by strangulating his windpipe. All the commerce of the West goes down the Mississippi to that port. Without it, the West would be roiled in bankruptcy and anarchy in six months.” .
“I agree, Mr. President. Totally!” Senator Simon Legrand said. “You saved us from such a fate in 1815. Your wise policy will save us again. I can assure you of Louisiana’s loyalty in such an enterprise. We’ll put thirty thousand men in the field in a fortnight of your call to arms!”
Old Hickory beamed. Legrand had served under him against the British in the 1815 triumph at New Orleans. “I hope you’ll write the secretary of state a letter to that effect, Senator Legrand.”
“Consider it done.”
Secretary of State Martin Van Buren said he was inclined to agree with the General about Texas. He hoped to begin exploring the subject of a sale with the Mexican ambassador soon.
“Explore?” Jackson said. “I hope you’ll begin by pointing out that if they decline to sell it, we’re perfectly capable of taking it from them. Negotiation with a Spaniard has never gotten us anywhere unless we laid a gun and sword on the table first, along with a pen. That’s how we won Florida.”
“With you as the resident of this house, General,” Van Buren said, “a show of weapons by someone as unwarlike as I would be superfluous—and possibly ludicrous.”
Well said, Caroline thought. She was learning so much from almost every moment in Washington. The art of flattering without seeming to flatter, the art of dissembling while seeming to speak the truth, the art of agreeing while reserving one’s judgment.
Old Hickory did not conceal his pleasure at the secretary of state’s compliment. “We all can’t be fools who spend their lives accumulating lead in their carcasses,” he said. “Let’s drink a toast to Texas! May she soon be a state of this glorious Union!”
They drank the excellent claret that the president dispensed at his table. All of Washington was awed by the way this supposedly uncouth frontiersman was serving wine and food that compared favorably with the menus of Thomas Jefferson. Old Hickory had also demanded and gotten from Congress forty-five thousand dollars to finish the interior and exterior of the White House—something Jefferson and his successors had never gotten around to doing. A portico was rising on the north side of the mansion and the East Room was a wilderness of ladders as artisans created splendor where barren space had heretofore reigned.
As the dinner broke up, the president escorted Caroline from the dining room to the south entrance. “I hope you’ll see it in your heart to be kind to Mrs. Eaton,” he said. “These people think they can drive me to a shameful capitulation that will leave me looking like a weak old fool before Congress and the nation. We mustn’t let that happen—not for my sake, but for the people’s sake.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mr. President,” Caroline said.
She was trapped in a web of conflicting emotions about Peggy Eaton. Should she openly sympathize with her—risking the possibility that she too would end among the ostracized? What if Jeremy Biddle had been indiscreet and a coterie of people in New York and New Jersey knew the truth about her and John Sladen?
Beneath the politics, there was a deeper and more dangerous current tugging at Caroline’s emotions: her sympathy for Peggy as a woman who was trying to move boldly from hotel keeper’s daughter to the world of the rich and powerful. Eaton was one of the wealthiest men in Tennessee. He was as logical a successor to Old Hickory as John C. Calhoun or Martin Van Buren. Yet everything Caroline saw and heard about Peggy stirred wary doubts in her mind.
At the south portico, Caroline found Secretary of State Van Buren offering George transportation back to their house in his carriage. They said good-night to the president and rumbled into the darkness. “I don’t know about you, Congressman,” Van Buren said to George, “but I feel compelled to do all I can to rescue the General from this social quagmire. I plan to give a dinner party for Mrs. Eaton as soon as possible. I hope you and Mrs. Stapleton will come.”
“Of course we will,” George said. “Don’t you agree, dear?”
“After the personal appeal the General just made to me, how can I say no?” Caroline said.
“Good. Now to another even stickier problem, in some ways. I hear you’ve been talking to Sam Swartout, the new collector of the port of New York.”
“We’ve had drinks at Gadsby’s,” George said.
“I think you’ll regret any arrangements you make with him,” Van Buren said. “He has delusions of taking over the Democratic Party in New York. It simply won’t happen. Instead, I predict he’ll be an ex-collector within the next two years.”
“Why?” George said.
“He’s got the morals of a pirate,” Van Buren said. “He thinks he’s gotten a license to plunder. I intend to revoke that license as soon as possible.”
“How will you do that?”
“I have men watching him very closely.”
Caroline sensed disapproval in George’s silence. The use of spies and informants would never sit well with him. If the secretary of state noticed this, he remained unruffled.
“New York and New Jersey are natural political allies,” Van Buren said. “We share the Hudson River, the wealth of New York City.”
“To be blunt, Mr. Secretary, New Jersey often feels in danger of being overwhelmed by New York’s size and self-importance,” George said.
“No doubt, no doubt. But you’ll find New York’s Democrats easy to get along with. The party’s center of gravity is upstate, among the small farmers and businessmen, not among the capitalists of Wall Street—or the dregs of society lurking in the city’s slums. Our roots are still in Jefferson’s ideals of simplicity in manners, appetites, and ambitions.”
“That’s good to hear,” George said.
“We can’t offer you any patronage from the port of New York for the moment. But we can certainly do business on jobs in other ports—Perth Amboy, Camden, Cape May. Judgeships, of course, as vacancies occur. Federal attorneys, marshals …”
“Of course,” George murmured, again barely concealing his distaste.
“You’re young. Let an aging politician give you some advice. Politics is always an exchange of favors, a me
eting of minds—and interests.”
Caroline found herself liking this man’s candor. She was also inclined to agree with his estimate of Samuel Swartout. Where did that leave John Sladen and his friends the Legrands? They were still trying to round up Southern backing for Swartout as the spokesman of the New York Democratic Party. Vice President Calhoun had shown more than a little interest in the idea. He saw that Martin Van Buren was likely to be his chief opponent for the presidential nomination in 1832, and a crippling quarrel in his home state would do a lot to ruin his chances. But Democrats from other states, notably Virginia, remained cool to the idea, preferring Van Buren and his well-oiled Albany machine to Swartout’s personal politics.
“At the risk of sounding like a sententious old bore, let me suggest another adage for the young politician,” Van Buren said. “Don’t try to rush things. An ability to wait for the right moment is crucial. I fear Swartout is like his old master, Aaron Burr—he’s not the waiting sort—one reason being a swarm of creditors hot on his trail.”
The Stapletons and the secretary of state parted with protestations of warm friendship. The next morning, before they finished breakfast, John Sladen was at their door with a worried expression on his face. George invited him to have coffee with them.
“What did the Little Magician have to say to you last night?” Sladen asked before Harriet could fill his cup.
“He told us to keep your friend Swartout at arm’s length,” George said.
“Are you going to take his advice?”
“I’m going to think about it.”
“It’s time to take sides, George. Sam Swartout is a man you can trust.”
“Why?”
“He’s got Andrew Jackson’s confidence. The Little Magician tried every trick in his repertoire to talk Jackson out of appointing him collector of the port of New York. But Jackson believes in loyalty. Sam Swartout was supporting him back in 1824, when Martin Van Buren was in bed with John Quincy Adams.”
The Wages of Fame Page 16