The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  Anna Maria’s sadness stirred George’s sympathy. “I can’t believe reasonable men, with the same heritage, won’t sit down in Congress and solve these problems.”

  “I’m sure George is right,” Caroline said.

  “Fire!”

  The cry abolished politics. Senator Calhoun rushed out on the porch. One of the house servants dashed up to them. “The barn, master!”

  Calhoun and George raced to the big wooden structure. Flames were poking livid snouts against an upper window. “Get buckets!” Calhoun shouted to several slaves.

  George charged into the barn. The fire was in the loft. He climbed up and saw it crackling beneath a bale of hay that someone had set against the window. The bale reeked of some sort of pungent liquid.

  “Stand back!” he shouted, and flung the bale from the loft into the center of the barn. By that time a half dozen slaves with buckets had arrived, and they hurled water on it. George stamped out sparks in the hay around the window and recommended a thorough dousing. The slaves climbed up with buckets and finished the job.

  “How could a fire start up there?” Calhoun said as they returned to the house.

  “It was set!” Floride was waiting for them on the portico, as angry as she was distraught. “It was set by one of Sawney’s tribe!”

  “Oh, tut tut, Floride,” Calhoun said.

  “I’ve told you a dozen times that fellow has never been the same since you took him to Washington ten years ago and he talked to free Negroes. He and his sons and daughters and nieces and nephews are going to kill us all.”

  “My dear, you’re exaggerating, I’m sure of it.”

  “Get someone to find who started that fire. I insist on it.”

  “It could have been an accident.”

  “Get someone!”

  George and Caroline discovered this meant summoning one of the older Africans and promising him fifty cents if he found out who set the fire. In an hour the fellow was back with the information. “Henry done it.”

  “What did I tell you?” Floride said. “He’s Sawney’s favorite nephew.”

  Calhoun summoned Henry to judgment. “Why did you set the fire?” he thundered.

  Henry trembled and looked as if he was about to sink to his knees on the brick path that led to the porch. He was about eighteen, chunky, with Sawney’s square jaw. “Was n’accident.”

  He looked past Calhoun at George and Caroline as he said this. Caroline suddenly wondered if their visit was the reason for the fire. Sawney stood in the circle of blacks watching the interrogation. His eyes too were on the Stapletons. Were the Africans trying to tell these Northern visitors something they regarded as important? Something to do with their readiness to imitate Nat Turner if they got a chance?

  “I’m going to have to whip you, Henry,” Calhoun said. “You know I hate to whip anyone. But this was a very bad thing to do. Is it because you don’t want to go to Alabama?”

  “I dunno, master. Maybe.”

  “You all have to work part of the year in Alabama because we need the money to buy clothes and food for everyone. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, master,” murmured the crowd. Caroline noticed Sawney said nothing.

  Henry was locked in the smokehouse until Fort Hill’s overseer finished supper. He sauntered over from his house on the edge of the cotton fields with his whip in hand. He was a small, hard-faced man, with buck teeth. “Give Henry twenty-five strokes,” Calhoun said. “He’s in the smokehouse.”

  They sat on the portico sipping lemonade until the crack of the whip filled the warm spring night. Twenty-five times it cracked and each time Henry screamed with pain.

  “Now will you believe me?” Floride said.

  “He was just trying to say he didn’t want to go to Alabama,” Calhoun said.

  “You should have given him fifty,” Floride said

  George and Caroline were grateful for the darkness, which concealed any wayward expressions that might be forming on their faces. I told you so reverberated in George’s ears with a special irony. Was he here because the woman sitting beside him had used that expression with passionate savagery? Or was it because he genuinely wanted to save the Union? Or both?

  “You should sell Sawney. If you truly cared about the safety of your wife and daughter, you would,” Floride said.

  “I’m sorry, Floride. I couldn’t possibly sell him.”

  “Senator Stapleton, Father tells me you hope to write a history of our War for Independence,” Anna Maria Calhoun said.

  Anna Maria had read a dozen books on the subject, including John Marshall’s Life of George Washington. They began a discussion that lasted through dinner, with Senator Calhoun a lively participant. He had made a close study of the politics of the Continental Congress. Even then, the Southern states tended to vote as a bloc and their chief opposition was New England. Both sides tried to build coalitions with the Middle States.

  Anna Maria gazed at her father with rapt adoration. “So it was this way from the start.”

  “I fear so,” Calhoun said.

  Floride did not say a word. The American Revolution bored her. She abruptly changed the subject over coffee. “Texas, Senator Stapleton. What do you hear of it in New Jersey? All our young men talk about it day and night. A number have already gone there.”

  “I only hear about it when I go to the White House,” George said. “It’s often on the president’s mind. He says we must have it, sooner or later. He prefers sooner.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Floride said. “I hate to think I might agree with anything Andrew Jackson says.”

  I told you so resounded in George’s head long after he finished dinner and went to bed. It coiled around his brain like the crack of the overseer’s whip. Beside him, Caroline whispered, “I’m almost glad you got sick and brought me down here. You have to see their situation before you realize why they think the way they do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The blacks. The women are terrified of them. Mrs. Calhoun told me they outnumber the whites three to one in this county. Around Charleston it’s more like five to one.”

  George stared into the silky spring darkness of South Carolina, wondering where love and history were taking him.

  BOOK FIVE

  ONE

  CAROLINE KEMBLE STAPLETON LOOKED AROUND the large, opulently furnished parlor of her home at 3600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In one corner, Margaret Bayard Smith, a gray-haired grande dame of Washington society, was telling Congressman John Sladen of Louisiana the story of her recent visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s old home. She had found the mansion a pathetic wreck. “Rotting terraces, the lawn plowed up and cattle wandering among the Italian vases, the stone that marks Mr. Jefferson’s resting place defaced and broken, and not even a slab or piece of wood to mark the grave of his beloved daughter. I asked myself, ‘What is human greatness!’”

  In another corner, Sarah Childress Polk and her husband, Speaker of the House of Representatives James Polk, were talking politics with austere Senator Silas Wright of New York. Tomorrow, March 4, 1837, Martin Van Buren would be inaugurated as president of the United States, and Senator Wright would become the most important man in the Senate, the White House’s spokesman. In the House, James Polk would bear this unenviable burden. Listening closely to their muted council of war was beefy, red-faced Reuben Whitney, the most important lobbyist in Washington. He represented the state banks into which the government now deposited its rivers of cash, since Andrew Jackson abolished the Bank of the United States.

  On the other side of the room, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, his beetling black brows adding dark majesty to his broad forehead and massive chest, was telling one of his comic stories to a group that included Senator John C. Calhoun and his chief spokesman in the House of Representatives, stumpy George McDuffie. “Recently one of my constituents accused me of being no different from a Southern politician. I told him he was absolutely right. Have I e
ver been known to leave a glass of brandy undrained? Have I ever stayed in town five minutes after someone challenged me to a duel? Have I ever paid a debt if I could avoid it?”

  Calhoun and McDuffie laughed as heartily as everyone else. Good humor was the rule in Mrs. Stapleton’s salon. Her skill at mixing the prominent from all parties and all parts of Washington society was by now an established fact. One attraction was the cuisine, prepared by Henry Orr, a free black who had become Washington’s premier caterer. Side tables abounded with castles of quartered oranges glazed with yellow sugar, ice cream molded into the shape of doves, a dozen different cakes and tarts, all served with warm apple toddy or the best French wines. But the palate took second place to politics. People said things—and heard things—in Mrs. Stapleton’s parlor that made it a Washington institution, only slightly less important than the House and Senate.

  Her invitations were a compliment—and a summons that few dared to ignore. As if to prove the point, through the door came Henry Clay of Kentucky. He had just suffered a horrendous blow—the death of yet another daughter, this one the senator’s favorite.

  “Senator,” Caroline said. “I am so pleased, and so flattered, that you felt well enough to come. What can I say beyond how much the sad news has wrenched all our hearts.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Clay said, his angular face haggard with grief.

  Senator Calhoun slipped away from the Webster group and joined them. “Mr. Clay, may I speak from the heart and tell you, having a beloved daughter that God has thus far spared me, how much I have felt for you since I heard the news yesterday.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Calhoun, thank you.”

  Webster joined them to speak similar words. He flung his arm around Clay’s stooped shoulders and led him off to the corner where he had set up a kind of kingdom, as was his style. In a few minutes, he had Clay smiling and even laughing at another of his stories—and telling a few of his own in his best Kentucky style.

  Caroline turned to see if any more guests were coming down the hall. On the stairs she spied her angular eight-year-old son, Jonathan, and his chunky six-year-old brother, Charlie, peering through the rails at the famous and important in the parlor. The two were so different looking, she felt a spasm of embarrassment that all but ruined her good humor.

  “Get to bed, you two, or there’ll be no dessert for a week!” she said.

  John Sladen strolled to the door to wag his finger at the boys. “You heard what the wicked witch said! Get going or she’ll change you into frogs who won’t be able to do anything but croak, ‘Y-e-s, M-o-th-er.’”

  He croaked the last words with a skill he told them he had acquired from listening to the thousands of frogs that haunted his Louisiana bayou.

  “Do you have a gumdropth?” asked Charlie with his endearing lisp.

  John carried in his pocket a special brand of soft sweet candy from a New Orleans confectionery shop. It had made him the house’s favorite visitor as far as Jonathan and Charlie were concerned.

  “Can I?” Charlie asked Caroline.

  “Oh, I suppose so!” Caroline said.

  “I’ll take some too,” Jonathan said, elbowing Charlie aside.

  They snatched the candy and fled upstairs. “A wonderful party,” John said, gazing into the crowded parlor. “But you never give any other kind.”

  “I wondered about inviting Mr. Calhoun, after his attack on the president today.”

  “Everyone leaves their politics at the door here, thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to you as well.”

  The last four years had seen politics of almost insane virulence raging in the Senate and the House. John Sladen had been among the most violent participants in the seething quarrels over President Jackson’s decision to destroy the Bank of the United States by removing its federal deposits, a move that threw the nation’s monetary system into turmoil. One day John had pulled open his coat to show Caroline the small pistol he was carrying to the House of Representatives. A congressman from Georgia had threatened to stab him if he repeated a charge that the man was a paid toady of the BUS.

  That was when Caroline sat John Sladen down and took charge of his political destiny. She told him that his style must change. From an abrasive, screaming, snarling attack dog, he must espouse the ways and wiles of the feline species. He must imitate George’s good nature, even if he did not possess it—adding to it a silky, smiling dimension of subtle flattery and cheerful cajolery. Unless he made this change, Caroline vowed she would bar him from her salon and write him off as hopeless.

  It had been a turning point in their relationship. From the advice-giver he had become the advice-seeker. Whatever else remained between them beneath the surface of their political lives continued to ferment. But this new balance of power became the preeminent fact of their existence.

  “Mr. President!” Caroline said.

  In the doorway was the evening’s ultimate test of Mrs. Stapleton’s salon: ex-president John Quincy Adams, now mere Congressman Adams. Caroline had learned how much he liked to be called Mr. President in private. Stumping on his cane, the short, thick-bodied old man seemed to glare at Caroline at first. But he was simply nearsighted.

  “Ah, Mrs. Stapleton,” he said. “I’ve brought two uninvited guests. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not.”

  Through the front door strode the famous British actor Richard Kemble and his beautiful daughter, Fanny. Her perfect complexion, the dark hair in strategic ringlets framing her small almost childishly innocent face, made Caroline feel alarmingly old. But she was too good a hostess not to recognize a coup when she saw one.

  “Mr. Kemble and Miss Kemble. What an honor! I saw you only last night in Romeo and Juliet. It was an unforgettable performance.”

  “Mrs. Stapleton, you’re too kind,” Fanny said in a liquid voice that seemed to echo a thousand Wordsworthian brooks. “Father and I were dining with President Adams here, whom we had the pleasure of meeting in Boston. He suggested you wouldn’t mind if we imposed on you for coffee and a chance to see your marvelous coterie.”

  “Come into the parlor and meet some of our guests. This is Congressman John Sladen of Louisiana.”

  “Ohhhh,” Fanny said with a sibilant breath that virtually melted John down to his shoes. “We’ll be in New Orleans in a month’s time.”

  “I’ll be there without fail to take you to dinner,” John said.

  Caroline managed a smile. This was a recent development—his openly flirting with pretty women before her eyes. But how could she object?

  Into the parlor Caroline led John Quincy Adams and the Kembles, thinking how glad she was that the congressman/ex-president had brought them. Without these exotic creatures, she wondered if even her dedication to political harmony could have avoided an explosion of rancor at the sight of the old Yankee. For the past two years, he had been throwing the House of Representatives into chaos by presenting dozens of petitions a week from abolitionists demanding that slavery be banned in the District of Columbia—and in the entire South. Invariably he ignited furious shouting matches with Southerners who insisted that the petitions be either ignored or totally barred.

  Now, in their rush to greet the Kembles, people barely noticed old John Querulous Adams, as Sarah Polk still called him. At the head of the pack was Henry Clay, who had been romantically linked with Fanny a year or two ago in Philadelphia. She greeted the senator from Kentucky as “my dear Henry,” which sent not a few eyes revolving toward the ceiling. In a scene worthy of the stage, she kissed him tenderly on the cheek and extended her sympathy for the loss of his daughter.

  Watching, Caroline admired the way Fanny Kemble had mastered the art of charming and tantalizing men. She seemed utterly satisfied with the exercise of this skill. Did she have any personal feelings? Caroline wondered. Was there a man or men anywhere to whom she had succumbed? Caroline suspected not; a mastery of the art of dissembling or acting (was there any real difference?) tended to d
iminish the capacity for personal emotion. Caroline was discovering that was one of the principal sacrifices required of the women of the Temple of Fame.

  Fanny began holding a kind of court in the middle of the parlor. “Mr. Adams and I had the most fascinating conversation about Shakespeare during dinner. He maintained that the man was immoral. Glorifying courtesans like Cleopatra. He even insisted that Romeo and Juliet taught nothing but sympathy for fornication!”

  “I did, I did,” Adams said. “I will debate the matter with anyone here.”

  “We’ve learned, Mr. Adams, the folly of debating you,” James Polk said. As Speaker of the House, he was the frequent target of Adams’s vitriol whenever Polk tried to dispose of his endless abolitionist petitions.

  Adams grinned almost fiendishly at Polk.

  “What other plays of Shakespeare have fallen under your ban, Mr. Adams?” Sarah Polk said.

  Sarah despised the old man. She maintained he was a hypocrite who did not care an iota about the enslaved blacks. His only interest was in embarrassing Andrew Jackson and the other Democrats who had kicked him out of the White House.

  “Why, Mrs. Polk, surely you can’t favor Othello,” Adams said in his supremely self-righteous way. “As a play it just doesn’t scan. Though I’ll say this for old Shakespeare: he gave Desdemona exactly what she deserved for marrying a nigger.”

  At that moment Henry Orr offered Adams a fragrant glass of mulled wine, the ex-president’s favorite drink. Adams gazed into Orr’s impassive black face without a flicker of emotion. So much for abolitionism, Caroline thought.

  Fanny gazed at Adams in her seemingly innocent way. “I sometimes think, Mr. President, that you’re a very good man and a very wicked man all in one remarkable package.”

  Adams gazed defiantly from Webster to Calhoun to Clay, eventually including almost everyone in the room in his cold gaze. “Aren’t we all?”

  “There’s one man I would exempt from that charge, sir,” John Sladen said. “The husband of our hostess, Senator George Stapleton. If there’s a piece of malice in his large frame, I haven’t found it. I dare say no one here has, or ever will.”