Taylor had compounded his insubordination by writing a fellow general a long letter full of vicious criticism of President Polk’s conduct of the war. He claimed the administration had given him murky and contradictory instructions, and he questioned whether there was any hope of defeating Mexico, a nation of 8 million people, with the ridiculously small number of soldiers the president had given him. His friend had leaked the letter to a New York newspaper, stirring a sensational furor. The president had replied by publishing all the administration’s correspondence with General Taylor, demonstrating his failure to request equipment and his repeated refusal to suggest a winning strategy. But few people bothered to plow through the fine print, and Polk had come off a bad second best.
“It’s so maddening,” Caroline said. “You’ve captured California and New Mexico. You’ve settled the Oregon boundary without a war. You’ve passed a tariff that satisfies the South and most of the rest of the country.”
“And what is our reward?” Sarah said bitterly. She picked up a newspaper and read, “‘The president’s latest message to Congress was perfectly characteristic of its author: weak, wheedling and sneaking.’”
“Who wrote that?”
“The Boston Atlas.” It was Boston’s biggest Whig paper. Sarah picked up another paper. “‘Polk takes his ease on sixty-eight dollars per day in the White House, while the soldiers he has driven to the field subsist on fare his very slaves would loathe.’”
“I saw that one in the New York Tribune.”
Sarah picked up another paper. “‘I am greatly deceived if we shall not ere long see facts coming to the light which will enable the Congress to charge the President with an impeachable offense for bringing on war in an underhanded and illegal manner.’”
“Daniel Webster,” Caroline said.
“Can you imagine what the Mexicans think when they see statements like that? They’ll never make peace.”
“If only that fool Taylor hadn’t let that Mexican army get away …”
Sarah nodded gloomily. Both of them knew that General Taylor was not the whole explanation, though his blunders had contributed to the malaise that was spreading through the country. The president’s decision to allow General Antonio Santa Anna to return to Mexico from his Cuban exile on the promise that he would make peace was haunting the administration. The double-talking schemer no sooner got to Mexico City than he began rallying the country to drive the hated gringos into the sea. It gave the Whigs an irresistible opportunity to sneer at the president’s judgment.
At least as important was the lack of respect his fellow Democrats had for James Knox Polk. The Van Buren men still hated him for depriving their hero of the presidency. Calhoun’s Southern followers disliked Polk because he was Andrew Jackson’s heir. Many Westerners denounced him because he had compromised on the Oregon boundary. No one rose to defend the president when the Whigs called him Jim Thumb, a cousin of P. T. Barnum’s famous midget. Nor did they protest when Senator Jeremy Biddle of New Jersey fastened on him the epithet “Polk the mendacious.”
“I don’t know who is more infuriating, Taylor or that swine David Wilmot,” Sarah Polk said.
The president had asked Congress to vote him $2 million that he could offer the Mexicans as an immediate down payment for a treaty of peace that gave the United States California and New Mexico. Congressman David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, was angry because he had risked local obloquy to vote for the lowered tariff, which the Keystone State’s manufacturers abhorred, and the president had failed to reward him with government jobs for his relatives and friends. He had attached a rider to the bill stating that slavery would be barred from any territory acquired from Mexico.
John Quincy Adams and his fellow Whigs had all but danced in the aisles with glee. They backed the rider with rhetoric that infuriated the Southern Democrats. After rancorous debate, the rider was finally excised, but a Whig filibuster killed the bill in the Senate, depriving the president of a vital tool for negotiating a quick peace. Worse, Wilmot’s so-called Proviso still hovered out there like a vulture, waiting to swoop down and devour Polk’s Mexican policy.
Emboldened by this Democratic disarray, the abolitionists in the Whig Party took the offensive. Joshua Giddings, a congressman from Ohio, declared he was in favor of seceding from a government that was conducting this pro-slavery war. “Black Tom” Corwin, a senator from Illinois, declared that he hoped American soldiers in Mexico would be welcomed to “hospitable graves.” A Boston newspaper declared the war was so grossly immoral, “if there is a heart worthy of American liberty, its impulse is to join the Mexicans.”
“Look at this,” Sarah said, handing Caroline a paper in Spanish. “It’s the official journal of the Mexican government. They’re offering the thanks of the nation to Webster for threatening the president with impeachment.”
The president knocked on the open door of Sarah’s study. A sheen of sweat was visible on his high forehead, although the temperature outside was in the forties and the White House was not appreciably warmer. He had acquired a slight stoop, as if his shoulders were having trouble bearing the burdens loaded upon them. Sarah said it was from spending too many hours at his desk. Caroline forbore from mentioning that Sarah had acquired one too. She toiled beside him far into the night, scanning reams of paperwork from the War Department and the Navy Department and the State Department, drafting letters to cabinet members and replies to his newspaper critics for anonymous publication in the administration paper, the Washington Union.
“You look like a man with some news in your hand,” Sarah said. “Or is that just more paperwork?”
“It’s bad news, I’m afraid,” the president said in .a leaden voice. “Taylor reports another victory in Mexico. With a butcher’s bill even longer than Monterrey. Our friend Abe Yell is dead at the head of his regiment. Henry Clay’s son has been killed. The list goes on and on. It’s sickening.”
“Abe Yell,” Sarah said. “His poor wife—and son. Isn’t the boy at Georgetown?”
Polk nodded. Abraham Yell had been a congressman from Arkansas. He was a boyhood friend of the president’s. In Zachary Taylor’s army, generals and colonels were expected to lead their men from the front.
“George is all right?” Caroline asked, dread seizing her throat. Surely the president would have mentioned him first if he was among the lost. But he might be wounded. Two volunteer generals had returned from Monterrey crippled by bullets.
“A letter from him was included in Taylor’s report,” the president said with a wry smile. “To my other duties, I may now add the title of postman.”
He handed Caroline the letter and began denouncing Taylor. The man had been ordered to remain on the defensive at Monterrey. Instead he had marched his army a hundred miles deeper into northern Mexico, inviting this attack. The president began reading from the New Orleans Picayune, one of the most ardently pro-Taylor papers. It described the general, sitting sidesaddle on his horse, facing three lines of charging Mexicans, snarling to an artillery captain named Bragg, “Double-shot your guns and give them hell.”
It was the sort of battlefield heroics that Americans adored. “That story could make him president,” Sarah said with bitter weariness.
“Excuse me,” Caroline said, and began reading George’s letter.
By the time you get this you may have heard about Buena Vista. It was another glorious victory for Old Zach, the luckiest general on the face of the earth. Two days before the battle, he was dismissing reports of our scouts that Santa Anna was coming after us with 20,000 men—against our 5,000. It was the most desperate fighting I’ve seen yet. At one point our entire left flank collapsed—men from Indiana and Kentucky ran for the rear. I led Colonel Jefferson Davis and his Mississippians into the gap and we stopped an all-out cavalry charge. Again, it was the West Pointers like Davis and Captain Bragg of the artillery who saved our necks. If Santa Anna had renewed his attack the next day, he would have destroyed us. We had almost 1,
000 casualties and another 1,500 had deserted. But his army had run out of food and he had to retreat. What a despicable character he is. At the climax of the battle, we had a brigade of their infantry trapped behind our lines. Santa Anna sent an officer forward with a flag of truce. Old Zach, who still fancies himself a politician, ordered us to cease fire and the brigade escaped. A half hour later their whole army came after us again. I had two horses shot out from under me but once more emerged without a scratch.
Please tell the President I don’t want to spend another hour with Zachary Taylor. He’s an insufferable stupid butcher. I’d appreciate a transfer to General Scott’s army.
Greet Jonathan, Charlie, and Paul for me and tell them how much I miss them.
As ever,
George
Caroline read the letter aloud and the president nodded grimly. It confirmed his low opinion of Zachary Taylor. “I’ll have George transferred to General Scott’s army tomorrow. I have good news from him. He’s captured Vera Cruz with scarcely the loss of a man.”
“Wonderful!” Caroline and Sarah said in unison. In the momentary silence their eyes exchanged their secret understanding. Not for the first time, Caroline wondered how much longer they could sustain it.
“General Santa Anna will soon be dancing to my tune,” the president said.
General Winfield Scott represented the Polks’ response to Zachary Taylor’s glorification—and General Antonio Santa Anna’s double-crossing diplomacy. The president had given Scott all of Taylor’s regular army regiments and added ten thousand volunteers. Scott had orders to capture Vera Cruz and march to Mexico City, where the Americans would dictate peace at the point of a gun.
Back at her house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Caroline found John Sladen and John L. O’Sullivan waiting for her. She gave them both warm smiles. Sladen had stopped drinking. He was looking more like the shrewd, cocky man she had loved and abandoned in New York. In the fall of 1846, John had become Louisiana’s junior senator. It had been one of the most corrupt elections in recent history. He had spent a fortune buying votes in New Orleans. Victory had buoyed his spirits and vastly increased his self-confidence. “What’s the latest news from Mr. Polk’s war?” he asked.
She told them about Taylor’s victory at Buena Vista. They groaned and all but tore their hair. She let them writhe in anguish for a while and then announced Scott’s victory at Vera Cruz. Their excitement was unbounded. This Was the news they had been hoping to hear.
“Is it time for me to unmask my batteries?” O’Sullivan asked.
“I think so,” Caroline said.
“What’s the president’s mood these days?” John asked.
“You might call it barely controlled rage. At General Taylor and at General Santa Anna.”
“The latter is what I want to hear,” John said. “We can take care of Taylor.”
She gave George’s letter to O‘Sullivan. He had been extolling General Stapleton in the New York Morning News with a flamboyance that New Jersey papers were quick to imitate. “I wish he wasn’t so modest,” O’Sullivan said, glancing at the text. “He never gives us any vivid details to work with.”
“That’s where your wonderful imagination comes in,” Caroline said.
“I see he’s transferring to Scott. We’ll use that for a blast at Taylor. Can we quote this stupid old butcher line?”
“You can quote the whole thing.”
“It ought to raise a fuss,” O’Sullivan said.
“We want more than a fuss. We want a campaign,” Senator Sladen said.
“For ‘All Mexico’? Don’t worry. You’ll get it,” O’Sullivan said. “We’ve got the Public Ledger in Philadelphia, the Sun in Baltimore, the Crescent City News in New Orleans, and a dozen other papers lined up to follow our lead.”
It was uncanny the way the war was unfolding like a vast drama guided by an unseen hand. So many ifs might have changed the script and rendered this awesome possibility—the conquest of all Mexico and its conversion into an imperial province of the United States, the equivalent of England’s India—null and void. If Zachary Taylor had been a better general and destroyed the Mexican armies he had fought, instead of letting them retreat. If General Santa Anna had kept his word and negotiated peace. If General Taylor had not developed White House fever.
Instead, everything was moving relentlessly toward a Caribbean empire—the ultimate expansion of Aaron Burr’s dream. But this new domain would not be the febrile creation of a single ambitious man. It would be a major turning point in world history. The more Caroline thought about it, the more convinced she became that it was not only the solution to the South’s dilemma, but it would mark the United States’ emergence as a world power. The conquest and pacification of Mexico would make them England’s political and economic equal.
Sarah saw this too, Caroline was convinced to it. But Sarah was too absorbed in the day-to-day business of the war and the president’s relationship with Congress to think about it. More and more, she depended on Caroline to envision the lustrous future that lay beyond the anxious exhausting present.
O’Sullivan departed to catch a train to New York. John Sladen lingered. “It’s happening,” he said. “I can feel the whole incredible thing heaving, stretching, thrashing—giving birth. It’s like watching some mythic giant emerging from the primal mists.”
“Yes.”
“Who do you love more, now—George … or Sarah … or me?”
“I love all three of you. I’ve told you that.”
“I asked a quantitative question.”
Desire stirred in Caroline’s flesh. It had been ten months since George left for Mexico. She had never realized how much he satisfied that subterranean side of her self. Women were not supposed to need sex the way a man needed it. But she was too realistic about herself to believe that myth. Her unblinking intellect—what John erroneously called her man’s mind—saw so much.
“As long as George is in Mexico risking his life, I can never be unfaithful to him.”
“When he returns, loaded with glory courtesy of O’Sullivan’s Irish verbiage, what chance will I have?”
“I don’t know. If you’re in Mexico, administering a conquered province, will you have time for me?”
“I’ll always have time for you.”
“John, be realistic. It’s impossible. If everything goes as planned, George Stapleton will succeed James Polk as president. Are you suggesting infidelity in the. White House? Or in Mexico City, full of leering American reporters? Maybe it’s better to face it now. We can only be lovers in our dreams—as long as we both love something else more than any of the other people in our lives.”
“What’s that?” he said, his voice harsh with pain.
“Fame—as your father and my father and Aaron Burr understood it. Not the cheap version any fool can buy in the newspapers. But the deep ancient kind—the fame of those who change the course of history. That’s what we were born to do, to become. Whether we love each other in the routine way is irrelevant.”
“You’ll never be irrelevant to me!”
“Then I must consider myself your weakness. Perhaps your fatal flaw. I don’t love weakness. It’s inconsistent with fame.”
He snatched up his coat and hat and departed without another word. For the next week, the newspapers boiled with the news of Buena Vista and Vera Cruz. John L. O’Sullivan published George’s letter, assailing Zachary Taylor’s latest butcher’s bill, in the Morning News. Whigs dismissed it as Democratic propaganda, and disgusting propaganda at that. Jeremy Biddle made a speech in the Senate, denouncing the very idea of slandering a man who had risked his life for his country. Senator Sladen replied, pointing out that George had risked his life too—and all the risked lives and the lost lives were Taylor’s fault.
But there was no mention of All Mexico in the Morning News or any other paper. Sarah Polk received at least a hundred newspapers from around the nation, and Caroline spent several hours each day helping her
scour them for stories that the president should read. Returning from one of these chores, she was startled to find a copy of the Morning News on the side table in her hall. In the right-hand column, beneath a blazing headline, was the story she had been waiting for: “All Mexico Must Be Ours!”
“Hello, Mother,” said a familiar voice.
Out of the parlor emerged her son Jonathan, down from Columbia College for spring vacation. At eighteen, he had become a giant almost as tall as his father. But he lacked George’s fleshy fame. He was closer to an elongated skeleton. His jet-black hair, the argumentative gray eyes in the gaunt, morose face, sometimes made her feel she was looking at a stretched version of the young John Sladen. But this was a Sladen who thought he was a Stapleton.
“Hello,” she said, allowing him to kiss her on the cheek.
“Madam! You’re my prisoner!”
Charlie Stapleton seized her from behind, whirled her around, and kissed her on the lips. “Stop it, you silly thing,” she said, pushing him away.
“Isn’t she incredible?” Charlie said to Jonathan. “She still doesn’t look a day over thirty. You’d never think she was sixty-five years old.”
Caroline giggled almost girlishly. Charlie was incorrigible. When he was home, the house was always in an uproar. Friends of all ages and social classes thronged the parlor. Raging arguments regularly erupted between him and Jonathan. They agreed on nothing. Charlie’s Southern education no doubt had something to do with it. He was now a freshman at the University of North Carolina. But the root of the difference was temperamental.
“I’ve invited my roommate Ben Dall to join me. I hope you don’t mind,” Jonathan said. “He’s never been to Washington.”
“I’m delighted. But you’ll have to entertain yourselves. I spend a good deal of time at the White House each day, as I think you know.”
The Wages of Fame Page 48