An hour later, George returned with a funereal expression on his face. “Calhoun won’t go back in the presidential race and he won’t withdraw his letter. He says the letter is necessary to warn the British that we’re onto their game of trying to destroy the South’s economy to give the world market to their India cotton. He says if some senator leaks the letter, that’s his business. As secretary of state, he considered it his duty to write it.”
“What did John say?”
“Nothing. He just sat there like the cat that ate the canary. He’s got the old man mesmerized.”
In two weeks, the Democratic Convention would begin in Baltimore. “If Calhoun won’t run and Van Buren can’t, who’s going to be the nominee?” Caroline asked.
“Who knows? It could go to almost anyone.”
“Why not James K. Polk?”
George thought about it for a moment. “Why not?”
“Maybe we ought to take a trip to Tennessee to get General Jackson’s opinion.”
“I’m ready to leave right now.”
By six o’clock they were on the train to Baltimore. The whooping steam engine sent huge cinders flying through the open windows, spreading soot all over their clothes. But it was worth the mess to travel at thirty miles an hour. In Baltimore, they caught a night train west to Pittsburgh. Dozing in the seats, the car lit only by the flickering light of the furnace in the engine just ahead of them, they reached the booming Western metropolis in the dawn. A steamboat was departing for Nashville in a half hour. They slept most of the day while the boat churned down the Ohio to the Cumberland River. At noon the following day they were in Nashville—a trip that had taken them a week in 1828.
Although they were honeymooners no more, they could not avoid recollections of their first trip. They were no longer those youthful lovers. Caroline was all too aware that George disliked her imperious ways. Her divided heart had virtually extinguished her capacity for ardor. But they were far more profoundly political partners than they had been in that first fumbling exploration.
They were also still man and wife. In their cabin aboard the steamboat, George hinted that he would like to revive a particular set of memories. But the absence of a bathtub for douching made another pregnancy too risky. Caroline claimed total exhaustion as her excuse.
In another half hour they were debarking at the Hermitage’s dock, east of the city. The handsome carriage that carried them up to the mansion was the one in which ex-president Jackson had departed from Washington; it was made from the wood of the famous frigate USS Constitution.
At the Hermitage a familiar face greeted them at the door: Andrew Jackson Donelson. He was still functioning as Old Hickory’s adviser and secretary. George swiftly explained why they had come and hoped the General’s health could tolerate a serious political discussion.
“He’s very weak,” Donelson said. “But the word Texas would bring him out of his coffin. Let me tell him you’re here.”
A moment later, a shout rattled through the house. “Bring them in! Bring them in!”
They found Andrew Jackson sitting half erect on a settee, a spectral skeleton of the man they had known as president. His cheeks had sunk, his prow of a nose now presided over a skull-like face. As they walked toward him, a spasm of coughing racked his withered body. They saw blood on the handkerchief he held to his lips. But life still blazed in his eyes.
“What an unexpected pleasure for a dying man!” he said as he accepted Caroline’s kiss and George’s handshake.
He settled himself and studied the Stapletons. “Andrew tells me you haven’t traveled a thousand miles merely to say good-bye to me.”
“Our party is in crisis, General. We’ve come to you for advice,” George said. “The man you’ve chosen to lead us is betraying you on the last and greatest cause of your life.”
He drew from his pocket Martin Van Buren’s letter opposing the annexation of Texas and handed it to Jackson. He peered at it and pronounced the Globe’s type too small for him to read. George summed up the letter—and linked it to the letter Henry Clay published the same day, saying essentially the same thing. Andrew Jackson Donelson scanned the Van Buren letter while they talked and confirmed George’s reading.
“Little Van has proven himself a trimmer, once and for all,” Donelson said. There was unmistakable triumph in his voice. He was remembering the brawl over Peggy Eaton and the anguish he and his wife Emily had endured over their refusal to recognize her.
Another fit of coughing racked Old Hickory. He wiped more blood from his lips. “I can’t believe Van Buren would do such a thing without consulting me.”
“He’s done it, General. No doubt you’ll get a letter from him, trying to explain it away,” George said.
“I begin, to think you were right about him from the start,” Jackson said.
There was a long silence, broken only by Jackson’s labored breathing. He looked slowly from Donelson to George to Caroline and said, “We need another candidate. Are you here to suggest Calhoun? It might kill me but I’ll try to swallow him.”
George shook his head and drew Calhoun’s letter about Texas and slavery from his pocket. This one Old Hickory managed to read for himself. “Isn’t it amazing how an intelligent man can lack ordinary common sense?”
Jackson handed the letter to Donelson and looked into the distance. “Who shall it be?”
“You have a man only a few miles away, in Nashville. A man you trust, who shares every one of your beliefs,” Caroline said. “Above all Texas.”
“Polk?” Jackson said. “There’s no better Democrat alive. But he’s got loser stamped on him, thanks to Slim Jimmy Jones. Sarah’s persuaded me to push him for vice president.”
“He could only manage it with your backing, General,” George said. “If you’re willing to give me a letter endorsing him, I’ll undertake to manage his candidacy at the convention. But first, we’re going to need a letter from you, dismissing Van Buren.”
“Get me pen and paper. I’ll write that one now. It will be in the Nashville papers tonight.”
Andrew Jackson Donelson produced pen, ink, and a portable writing desk. For a half hour, Jackson laboriously scrawled a denunciation of the man he had backed for the last fifteen years as his heir apparent.
“Your arrival couldn’t be better timed,” Andrew Jackson Donelson said. “I’m leaving tonight for Texas. President Tyler has asked me to represent us there. The situation seems to grow more alarming every day. The British are definitely threatening to intervene. They’ve got a fleet off Cuba. Tyler’s ordered Commodore Stockton to take a squadron of our ships to Galveston.”
Jackson handed George the letter. It was a thorough repudiation of Martin Van Buren as the leader of the Democratic Party. “As for Polk, maybe we’d better think about him overnight. Why don’t you go into Nashville and get his thoughts on the matter?”
In an hour, they were riding through the streets of the Tennessee capital in Old Hickory’s carriage. The Polk house was a modest one, on the outskirts of town. He had moved to Nashville to practice law. Sarah had told Caroline he had more clients than he could handle.
The Polks’ astonishment at the appearance of the Stapletons on their doorstep was nothing less than total. Sarah almost wept when she embraced Caroline. “I’d begun to think we’d never meet again,” Sarah said. It had been five years. She was her same straight-backed dignified self. Her face showed not a wrinkle, but there were flecks of gray in her dark hair.
When the Stapletons told them why they had come, and where they had just been, both Polks were stunned. “Van Buren has finally done it!” Sarah said. “The schemer’s out-schemed himself. Who’ll be the nominee?”
“I hope I’m looking at him,” George said, smiling at James Polk.
“James—for president?”
For a moment Sarah was overwhelmed. The whole thing was so far beyond any and all her political calculations a half hour ago. James’s reaction was more unexpected. He did
not seem especially enthusiastic about the idea.
“The next president won’t enjoy his four years in the White House,” he said. “He could wind up fighting a war with Mexico and England simultaneously. If the English fly the abolition flag, they could raise hell in New England. It could be a replay of 1812, another Hartford Convention. This time, if they threaten to secede, the South will say good riddance. He could be the last president of the United States.”
“James, you have a bad habit of fearing the worst,” Sarah said.
“On the other hand,” Caroline said, “a winning war would make you the first president of a continental United States. You know what Andrew Jackson really wants—New Mexico, California, Oregon, as well as Texas.”
“A winning war in which General George Stapleton, son of a West Point hero of 1812, plays a leading role,” Sarah Polk said. “Making him the logical candidate to succeed James K. Polk.”
The two men sat there, bemused half-smiles on their faces. “Why don’t we try it?” George said. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll blame it on them—and Old Andy.”
He held out his hand to James K. Polk, as he had once extended it to Andrew Jackson. Polk shook it, but there was no enthusiasm in his grasp. Had those two defeats by Slim Jimmy Jones shaken his confidence? Or had he decided that he preferred the tranquil life of a Tennessee lawyer to the raging passions of Washington, D.C.? Did he fear there was a limit to his physical as well as his spiritual strength—a limit that an ordeal in the White House might brutally exceed? If so, why didn’t Sarah say something?
Caroline understood as their eyes met. The Temple of Fame. Nothing else mattered.
TEN
TWO WEEKS LATER, CAROLINE PACED her room at Baltimore’s branch of Gadsby’s Hotel, waiting for George to return from a foray to the rooms of the New York State delegation to the 1844 Democratic National Convention. She had insisted on coming to this gathering of the party faithful. The thought of sitting home waiting for the latest terse report to reach Washington over Mr. Morse’s magical telegraph was intolerable. She wanted to witness, to savor, the details of Martin Van Buren’s humiliation—and the transformation of James Knox Polk from forgotten man to presidential candidate.
So far, everything had gone according to plan. Around the corner from Odd Fellows Hall on Gay Street, where the Democrats convened, President John Tyler had staged his own convention of federal officeholders. Every single one of them had been appointed by him or could be dismissed by him with a stroke of his pen. Dispensing generous quantities of rum, gin, and bourbon, surreptitiously paid for by Senator Robert Walker, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the president had gotten himself nominated by acclamation on the platform of “Tyler and Texas.”
This put unbearable pressure on the Northern Democrats who backed Martin Van Buren. Southerners, notable among them followers of John C. Calhoun, had rammed through a reaffirmation of the two-thirds rule as the convention’s first order of business. Who could say no, when such a major issue was dividing them and the nation? From that moment, Martin Van Buren was a dying candidate. His supporters were a clear majority on the first ballot but far from the magical two-thirds.
Over seven more ballots, the Little Magician’s totals sank as various states switched to favorite sons and Van Buren supporters and opponents shouted and cursed and groaned around Caroline in the balcony. Ex—vice president Richard Mentor Johnson’s Kentucky followers waved Tecumseh’s red vest and whooped it up for five minutes. An enormous silence greeted their efforts. James Buchanan of Pennsylvania fluttered aloft, but he too fell back to earth with a thud. Westerners shifted to Lewis Cass, a phlegmatic ex-soldier from Michigan who had served as secretary of war in one of Jackson’s later cabinets. He accumulated enough support to alarm George Stapleton. He signaled the chairman of the convention, a firm Jackson-Polk man, to gavel them into recess. Back everyone streamed to the hotels, where a night of furious politicking began. George and a cadre of Tennesseans began visiting state delegations to remind them Jackson was backing Polk.
A knock on the door. “It’s your man from Louisiana,” John Sladen said.
He was a partner in the intrigue. George had given him a copy of Jackson’s letter to show to Southern delegations. At the right moment he had promised to throw Louisiana to Polk when the convention returned to Odd Fellows Hall tomorrow.
“Things are moving along nicely,” John said, dropping into a wing chair. “Jackson’s letter works like an electric shock, even on the most fervent Van Burenites. They’re beginning to see the necessity of giving him up. But they want to make sure they’ll get their share of the spoils.”
“They will,” Caroline said.
“You’re delegated to speak for the Polks?”
“Yes.”
“We Southerners want to know if we’re getting a man we can depend on in other ways.”
“You are.”
“You’re sure he can be managed?”
“Absolutely.”
“How much have you told Sarah?”
“Very little so far.”
“Then how can you be sure?”
“Because I’m sure of her.”
“You mean you’re sure you can manage her?”
Caroline was amazed by how much this question disturbed her. Suddenly they were in the basement room again, yielding to incomprehensible needs and desires. She was almost horrified when she said, “Yes.”
George burst into the room, a huge smile on his face. “New York’s surrendered Little Van! That decides it. They’ll announce they’re backing Polk before the first ballot tomorrow morning.”
“What did you have to promise them?”
“At least two seats in the cabinet. Preferably three.”
“That’s more than they deserve,” Caroline said.
“I know. Polk can keep the promise or not, as far as I’m concerned.” George turned to John Sladen. “What’s the word from the Land of Cotton?”
“Why, Massa George, we’s done committed everything but the honuh of our women to yo cause,” John said in a good imitation of a blackface comedian.
“How many states?” George said.
“Every one but South Carolina, which has chosen not to attend our historic convention—except for Congressman Pickens.”
“Maybe I can persuade him to come forward tomorrow and announce his state is for Polk,” Caroline said. “I’ll tell him it would please Julia Gardiner to know he played a part in burying the Little Magician.”
“A very good idea,” George said. “A lot of people will think he’s speaking for Calhoun.”
“He will be,” John Sladen said.
“Let’s all get some sleep,” George said, stifling a gigantic yawn. “It’s three A.M.”
John Sladen departed. Caroline sat down on the edge of the bed. In the bureau mirror, she saw herself, her combed-out dark hair gleaming on her shoulders in the yellow lamplight. She was wearing a sky blue negligee over her nightdress. A woman. A woman surrounded by these power gods, these strutting politicians who imagined they were deciding the nation’s destiny. If they ever knew they were performing to a script she had written. They were her puppets. Hers—and Sarah’s.
The loose hair added a touch of youth. George was looking at her in that admiring, desiring way that multiplied her elation. Yes, it was the same woman who had sat in Bowood’s dining room and realized that her future happiness was entwined with history and power. But the political tyro who had let George put Hannah Stapleton’s ring on her finger never really believed she would create a president of the United States.
The ring still gleamed on her finger. But she had triumphed over it. She had become a woman infinitely superior to that beatific Quakeress on Bowood’s library wall.
Caroline turned to George. “Are you as happy as I am?”
The question seemed to take him by surprise. “I suppose so,” he said, sitting down beside her.
“You don’t sound it.”
“I’m just tired—it’s been a lot of work.”
“You won’t regret it. Sarah meant it when she said George Stapleton would succeed James Polk. She’ll do everything in her power to make that promise come true.”
“I wish a war wasn’t in the plan. I keep remembering something John Calhoun said to me on our trip to South Carolina in 1833. How much he regretted starting the war that killed my father—and your father.”
“The Mexicans are going to start the war. Or the British. You won’t die in it. You’ve got a charmed life, like your great-grandfather. Didn’t the explosion on the Princeton prove that?”
“I’m not just thinking of my own neck. I’m thinking of a lot of kids who’ll feel like I felt when I heard my father wasn’t coming home.”
“I hope you’re not saying these things to anyone else.”
“Of course not.”
“History is full of hard choices, George. There’s no room in it for sentiment. Did Andrew Jackson ever stop to think about the men who died under his command?”
“I’m not Andrew Jackson. I’m George Stapleton.”
“President George Stapleton. Doesn’t that stir you? It stirs me—it arouses me, George. I’ll love that man with a passion, a devotion beyond imagination. I want to help that man lead this nation into a glorious future.”
“What if the future turns out to be inglorious? This argument over slavery gets nastier every day. You should hear what some of those New York Democrats are saying about the South. They sound like abolitionists. They sneer at Polk because he owns slaves. If it gets much worse, this country could become ungovernable.”
For a moment Caroline almost told him the secret plan, the annexation of Texas and the conquest of California and Oregon—and Mexico. It sat there in her soul like a two-faced god in the Temple of Fame, transcending old-fashioned words such as union, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Could she persuade him to accept it, now? No, George Stapleton would have to be led step by step to its brutal necessity. What he had just told her revealed that the fundamental division in the Stapleton soul was afflicting him, just as she had long ago feared it might. Like too many Americans, the Stapletons wanted to be powerful—and good. More and more, Caroline had concluded Aaron Burr was right—it was impossible.
The Wages of Fame Page 41