The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “I see your point—all too well.”

  “In my heart, I shared her disgust. There was something degrading in this fellow Eaton, Jackson’s favorite, embracing his whore in public. It seemed a sort of paradigm of the degradation that Jackson’s followers seemed determined to impose on us all. You’ve seen Sausage Smith in action. Then there’s Kendall and his hired libeler, Blair, at the Globe. And slimy, slithering Van Buren and his friends from New York. I couldn‘t—I still can’t—deny that my heart assented to her judgment. Someone needed to erect a standard and declare, ‘Thus far and no further.’ I will candidly admit that I thought Jackson would beat a retreat, considering how roughly his character and his wife’s character had been handled in the campaign. I’m a politician, my young friend. A proud badge, in my opinion. I knew your grandfather slightly in his last years in Congress. He considered it an honorable title. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve heard reports that your wife operates you, rather like Polk’s wife runs him. I hope the rumor’s not true. A woman’s judgment can be as good as a man’s and even superior on some things. But there are so many intangible matters between men that they can never grasp.”

  “The rumor’s not true, though I have great respect for Caroline’s intelligence.”

  After another hour of silence in the drooling, icy rain, Calhoun began again. “This is no local affair. I hope you realize that. The British are in this game. They own half the stock in the Bank of the United States, which gives them tremendous leverage in Congress. They’re eager to buy what they couldn’t conquer in 1776 and 1812. They’re behind the abolitionists. They’d love to abolitionize the South. If it doesn’t bring on a race war, it will at the very least double the price of our cotton. That. would leave their India cotton preeminent in the world market.”

  George groped for words. This man’s mind roved so far beyond his horizons.

  “I’ve heard your father was killed in the war of 1812. Is that true?” Calhoun asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That makes this journey doubly generous. You’re risking your health for one of the fools who started that war. Along with my asinine friend Henry Clay. The War Hawks, they called us. Do you remember any of it?”

  “Only that I thought you were wonderful. I was eleven years old. I read your speeches in the newspapers. I thought they breathed pure patriotism.”

  “They did, for an eleven-year-old. Henry Clay and I thought we could conquer Canada without shedding more than a few drops of American blood—doubling the size of the country. We thought the British were too preoccupied with fighting Napoleon to the death to stop us. It was the first—and last-time I underestimated the British. They’re a formidable people. We were lucky to escape that war as a whole country. New England almost seceded, you know. Daniel Webster conveniently forgets that in his apostrophes to the Union.”

  “My grandfather refused to attend the Hartford Convention.”

  “I know. I heard him denounce it in the Senate. Even though he knew it reduced him to a man without a party. I remember something he said at that time. Maybe you’ve heard him repeat it. ‘Better a man without a party than a party without a man.’”

  “I’ve never heard that before.”

  “It’s worth remembering. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  George was tremendously moved. His grandfather’s lost words summed up what they were doing here, talking one man to another, without anything between them but their wish to preserve the Union. The mail cart jolted on through the night, the rain replaced by a bitter northeast wind.

  In another twenty-four hours of brutal jouncing, they were in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. It was a comfortable-looking town, with tall trees lining the wide streets. The houses reminded George of Charleston; many displayed the same delicate ironwork and columns over high-arched basements. The capitol building was a handsome classical temple, with huge Doric columns. Not far away was a swarm of horses and buggies in the street outside a building of gray-painted brick, the home of South Carolina College. That was there the Nullification Convention was meeting.

  George had to help the exhausted Calhoun out of the mail cart. They were both splotched with mud and grime. But Calhoun insisted there was no time to change their clothes or rest. After a minute of leaning on George’s broad shoulder, he pronounced himself strong enough to proceed under his own power and walked slowly, painfully, into the building.

  On the rostrum at one end of the hall stood George’s Charleston acquaintance Robert Barnwell Rhett, feet spread wide, his nostrils flared in defiance. “I dare any man here to stand up and say he loves the Union,” he roared. “There is only one course for South Carolina, a course which will unite the South behind her: immediate secession!”

  While Rhett ranted, Calhoun moved around the hall, shaking hands with startled delegates, introducing George as a fellow senator. “This man has ridden eight days and nights in an open cart with me to let you know there are some Northern Democrats on South Carolina’s side.”

  Many reactions were barely polite. Not a few men told Calhoun they thought he had sold them out on the tariff and he might as well have stayed in Washington. “We just passed a motion to censure you for failin’ to do your duty,” snapped one young hothead in an elegant blue coat and green silk vest. Others told Calhoun they were going to nullify this new tariff and secede, no matter what he said. With a patience and endurance that made George marvel, knowing his physical condition, Calhoun heard out the protesters. Quietly, insistently, Calhoun told them they were wrong; South Carolina could not win a war with the rest of the country. The South was not united behind them.

  Calhoun told them what Senator Forsyth of Georgia had said about South Carolina abandoning the protection of the Constitution and asked George to bear witness. He advertised Senator Stapleton as a military historian who agreed that they would be starting a war they could not win.

  On the rostrum, Robert Barnwell Rhett ended his diatribe with another challenge for anyone to testify to his support for the Union. Only one man, an aged veteran of the Revolution with a missing leg, rose. But most delegates were no longer paying attention. Around the hall there was a swelling murmur over the news that Calhoun had arrived. Robert Young Hayne, recently elected governor of South Carolina, took over the rostrum and announced Calhoun’s presence.

  “Senator, would you be good enough to give us your views?” he asked.

  Calhoun wisely said no. He was in no condition to make a speech. But he said he was eager to converse with delegates singly or in small groups.

  “Governor Hayne,” George said. “Speaking as a friend as well as a fellow traveler, I think Senator Calhoun and I would make more sense if we allowed ourselves a few hours of rest in a bed. We’ve spent the previous eight days and nights in a mail cart. I’m young enough to stand it, but I fear for the senator’s health.”

  “Do I hear a motion to adjourn until these gentlemen recuperate?” Hayne asked.

  A thunderous assent. A carriage was soon at the door, and in fifteen minutes George was lying in a tub of steaming hot water on the upper floor of a nearby private home, his fetid clothes gathered for the wash by a smiling black servant. He fell asleep twice in the tub. Cleansed, he plunged into a feather bed and slept dreamlessly until a hand shook his shoulder. He gazed up at John C. Calhoun. He still looked exhausted. But he had changed into fresh clothes. The haunted determination that suffused his face summoned George to battle.

  “The committee that deals with the nullification ordinance is meeting.”

  George struggled into his clothes. His head was throbbing; his breath created a sawing sensation in his chest. A wave of chills assailed him. It began to look as if the pages of the Globe had not protected him from pleurisy after all. But he said nothing to Calhoun as they trudged into the cold March night.

  In a classroom of the South Carolina College a dozen members of the Nullification Committee hunched in student seats. The c
hairman was Calhoun’s close friend Francis Pickens, slim, with a firm precise mouth and a proud tilt to his head. Several members handled Calhoun as roughly as some of the delegates he had encountered when they first arrived. He met them with the same patient courtesy—and unswerving opposition.

  “The nullification ordinance must be repealed,” he said.

  “You mean we’re beaten?” Robert Barnwell Rhett snarled.

  “Yes. Congress has authorized the president to smash us to smithereens.”

  “Then it’s over?” asked another man. “We have to go home and face our friends, our wives and children, looking like fools?”

  “By no means. We’ll proclaim a victory. In fact we have every reason to claim one. We’ve made them reduce the tariff. But the Force Bill is a defeat for peaceful nullification. It would be foolish to deny it.”

  “It’s a damnable unconstitutional disgrace!” Robert Barnwell Rhett roared.

  “I agree with the unconstitutional part,” Calhoun said. “The framers never intended to give a president such power. But nine Southern senators voted against it. My journey to Washington was not a waste of time.”

  He turned to George Stapleton. “Here’s another man who refused to vote for the Force Bill. Senator Stapleton is also a harbinger of hope in matters not purely political. He wishes to extend more than a hand of friendship to the South. His family owns the most successful railroad in America. He’s eager to loan us the money that will help us build one in South Carolina. A railroad that will bring prosperity to our state, from the up-country to the sea—and help us bind the West in a coalition that will break the Yankee stranglehold on our throats.”

  The committee was gazing at George with a confusing mixture of respect and suspicion. “What does he want for all this benevolence?” Robert Barnwell Rhett said. “Mortgages on everything we own?”

  “He expects a fair return on his investment, of course. But he also wants the satisfaction of knitting together our fractured Union. He’s a Union man to the bottom of his soul. As I am.”

  The committee gazed at George as if he were some strange species of animal from the Russian tundra or the jungles of Africa. “Is this a fair exposition of your views, Senator Stapleton?” Francis Pickens asked.

  “Eminently,” George heard himself say.

  The throbbing in his head had reached steam-engine proportions. A bayonet of pain drove through his chest with every breath. His flesh felt on fire. It was not simply the onset of pleurisy. It was also the sense of uneasiness that pervaded his being as he listened to Calhoun and Francis Pickens and Robert Barnwell Rhett. He wanted to take Rhett by the back of the neck and bang his head through the wall. He wanted to seize Calhoun and Pickens and shake them the way a parent shakes a child out of a nightmare. The Union was at risk in this room, in this city, and nothing George had heard from any of these men, including John C. Calhoun, allayed that sense of oncoming disaster.

  “I for one am convinced,” Francis Pickens said. “Shall we take a vote on Senator Calhoun’s motion to repeal the Ordinance of Nullification?”

  The vote was eleven to one. Robert Barnwell Rhett was the sole holdout. The next day George was too sick to get out of bed. Calhoun reported to him that after several hours of oratory, the convention had agreed to repeal the ordinance. Peace was now guaranteed. In a final gesture of defiance, they recommended that the legislature nullify President Jackson’s Force Bill. Calhoun called that ridiculous gesture “a bit of salve” for the unreconcilables like Robert Barnwell Rhett.

  “I wish you were on hand to hear how many gentlemen credit you for changing their minds,” Calhoun said.

  George nodded. He could no longer talk above a croak. A doctor had bled him and administered blisters to his aching chest. He was under orders to take cold baths to bring his fever down. None of these medical remedies worked very well. For the next several days, he drifted in and out of delirium. A haze of smoke or fog filled the room. Through this murk he saw Tabitha sitting beside his bed, weeping and wringing her hands. Suddenly she changed into John C. Cal- houn, who changed into Hugh Stapleton, wearing a cocked hat and wielding a telescope through which he peered into the distance. The Congressman seemed to be trying to tell him something important. But a hand was over his mouth. Only muffled words emerged: “trairous.” Was that traitorous? George’s eyes traveled from the hand up its attached arm to discover it belonged to Caroline Kemble Stapleton. She had a smug smile on her face. “What the hell are you doing?” he roared.

  “George, I’m here to help you,” Caroline said. “Take some of this broth.”

  The haze that filled the room slowly cleared. Caroline was sitting beside his bed, wearing a green dress with a white lace bow at her throat. Her lovely face was the opposite of smug; it was full of loving concern. She had a bowl of steaming soup in her hand. “Where am I?” George asked.

  “In Columbia. President Jackson sent me down here on a navy frigate to nurse you. It was Senator Calhoun’s idea. I’ve been feeding you this old Indian herbal remedy that Sarah Polk gave me. It seems to work.”

  George swallowed some of the soup. It tasted like rusty iron filings had been boiled in it. “I’ll either get better or die to stop drinking that stuff.”

  “Your fever is almost gone. The Calhouns have invited us to Fort Hill where you can recuperate for the rest of the summer if need be.”

  Senator Calhoun poked his distinguished head in the door. “How is he this morning?”

  “He knows where he is, and who he is,” Caroline said.

  “Good. We’ll leave for Fort Hill tomorrow.”

  By the time they reached the white-pillared house in the up-country, it was the last week in March. Spring had finally conquered winter. Trees were budding, the grass was green. Floride Calhoun and her petite pretty daughter, Anna Maria, greeted Caroline and the two senators at the portico. Calhoun had warned them that George was a hospital case, and solicitude breathed in their caressing Southern voices. He was hustled upstairs to a big double bed overlooking the front lawn.

  The next day George was well enough to join Caroline for a tour of the plantation. Calhoun led them down to the slave quarters, where “master” was greeted with extravagant expressions of joy by men, women, and children. At the head of the group was Old Sawney, son of the first slave whom Calhoun’s father had purchased and brought from the coastal lowlands to help him grow cotton in the high hills.

  “Sawney is as close as I’ve come to a brother,” Calhoun said. “We hunted and played together as boys. There’s many a coon we caught together, right, Sawney?”

  “Many a one, master, many a one.” Sawney was a short, burly man, coal black, with thick white hair.

  “How do you do?” George said, holding out his hand.

  Sawney looked surprised. He was not used to people shaking hands with him. He finally let George take his hand, but he made no attempt to squeeze George’s hand in return.

  The Africans, about fifty in number, lived in a big stone house about an eighth of a mile from the main house. Children peered from a dozen windows. In front of it was a shed in which a huge pot of stew bubbled, tended by an aging black woman. Calhoun explained that each family raised its own vegetables and received a ration of salt meat and cornmeal from the storehouse each week.

  A tall middle-aged black woman approached Calhoun. “Master, I don’ want to go to Alabam. I don’ care if you send all my chilluns. I don’ want to go.”

  “All right, Betsy,” Calhoun said. “You can stay here. Don’t you want to keep your youngest boy, Peter, here too?”

  “I’d like it, but you gon’ to let him?”

  “Of course I’ll let him.”

  “Oh, thank you, master!” Betsy said.

  Walking back to the main house, Calhoun explained that his son Andrew ran a large cotton plantation in the hot Alabama bottomlands. “It’s very hard work, so we rotate our slaves. I send him twenty-five for six months, and he returns twenty-five here to recuper
ate in this healthy climate.”

  As they reached the portico, Floride rushed out. “Jimmy has cut his foot badly with a hoe. I’ve sent for Dr. Parks. I’ll see to him in the meantime. Tell him we’re in the south forty.”

  She vanished down the path that led to the cotton fields. Calhoun sighed. “I always feel guilty when I come home and see how much work Floride does, day in, day out. At all hours of the night she’s down at the quarters giving them medicine. Or tending emergencies in the fields, like that one. Or settling quarrels about who works with whom.”

  “Is Sawney a foreman of sorts?” Caroline asked.

  “No, he hasn’t much inclination in that direction. He does as little work as possible. I fear I’ve spoiled him a good deal. We have a white overseer who bosses the field hands.”

  A tall stooped slave passed them on the. path. Calhoun caught his arm. “How are you, Andrew?”

  “Just fine, master.”

  “Andrew is a very good shoemaker. He earned so much money selling shoes he made after hours to nearby planters, he bought his freedom from me. He went to Philadelphia with his wife. He came back last year, half-starved. The white shoemakers smashed up his shop three times and finally drove him out of business. We’re hoping we can set him up in business in Charleston.”

  Calhoun left George and Caroline on the portico with his daughter, Anna Maria. Caroline was surprised to discover the young woman was intimately aware of what was happening in Washington. “Father sends me all the newspapers. He’s told me about your generous attitude toward the South. It’s the first hopeful thing I’ve heard in months.”

  George murmured something about preserving the Union.

  “In Boston they’re holding monthly meetings calling for immediate freedom for the slaves. Are people saying similar things in New Jersey?”

  “A few. Very few.”

  “It makes one so fearful of the future. I almost hesitate to marry and bear children. At times I feel I’d be happiest working with Father, defending the South. I’ve helped him prepare some of his speeches—researching quotations and precedents, that sort of thing.”