Sarah sighed. “James’s infatuation with that man has made me …” She let her bitter conclusion go unspoken.
“This will become very ugly before it’s over,” Caroline said. “There’s another woman involved.”
She told her about George’s affair with Maria Pena de Vega. “John Sladen will use it to vilify George in the newspapers. You may want to use it yourself. A lack of invitations to the White House would say a great deal to insiders.”
“I’m not sure I could go even that far.”
“You must be prepared to do the worst. Don’t allow sympathy for me to influence you. I’m prepared to be despised if George sees fit to defend himself with this abominable letter.”
She picked up Jeremy Biddle’s letter and stuffed it into her purse. She would have to return it to George eventually.
“He won’t do that. I’m sure of it,” Sarah said.
“I fear that will depend on how the debate on the treaty goes.”
“I’ve never been more certain of our course. Everything I read in the mail and in the newspapers from the South convinces me that All Mexico is the only alternative to the collapse of the Union. The abolitionists have unhinged every politician south of Virginia. Especially since they’ve opened a newspaper here in Washington.”
“George seems to think he can find a middle ground where Democrats can rally. I told him he’s dreaming.”
“In five years every Whig in the country will be an abolitionist or the first cousin to one. In New York, our old enemy Martin Van Buren is talking of a Democratic version of their creed. That would split the party irrevocably.”
They were like priestesses in a secret religion, chanting exhortations to each other. For a soaring moment Caroline felt a thrill of pride, even of exultation. They were no longer mere acolytes in the Temple of Fame. They were mistresses of the establishment. Only their vision could rescue America from dismemberment and collapse.
“I’ll go see Sladen now,” Caroline said.
“The treaty will go to the Senate as soon as you tell us Sladen and his cohorts are ready. Meanwhile, we’ll do what we can to line up support from here.”
Out on Pennsylvania Avenue, the bitter wind pummeled Caroline’s face. The streets were still glazed with ice. Tree limbs were down everywhere. Negroes, many of them wearing nothing but thin cotton shirts, were hauling the debris to the curbs. Slave traders with rifles and the inevitable whips in their belts shouted orders at them. The District government must have hired some Africans from the Lafayette Square slave market to do this badly needed chore.
Soon she was knocking on the front door of John Sladen’s rooming house. It opened to emit a red-haired woman who had slattern written all over her. She even wore a scarlet dress, no doubt left over from last night’s party. She shivered in the icy blast whirling down the street and clutched a shawl around her.
“Seen any hacks?”
“No,” Caroline said, inhaling the woman’s stale perfume as she pushed past her.
Inside, a fat Negress said Senator Sladen had not come down to breakfast. He was probably still in his room. Caroline climbed a stairway that reeked of whiskey and cigars. These bachelor boardinghouses all smelled the same. She knocked on the senator’s door. He hastily admitted her, pulling a soiled red bathrobe around his spare frame.
A whiskey bottle was open on the bureau. Coals glowed in the vents of a potbellied stove. The redhead’s stale perfume lingered in the warm air. “I’m here on a political errand,” Caroline said. “Having seen George arrive last night, you may not be completely surprised by it.”
She told him about the Trist treaty and George’s support of it—in spite of the president’s opposition. She described Jeremy Biddle’s letter, but she did not show it to him. Her voice was as matter-of-fact and empty as her heart.
“I’m going to challenge that son of a bitch!” John raged.
“Stop acting like a Southern idiot and start thinking like the intelligent man I hope you still are. You’ve got the president’s backing to destroy this treaty. That will leave us with All Mexico as the only alternative. With proper handling, it will revive the party and guarantee that the next president will be a Democrat.”
“But that Democrat won’t be George?”
“No.”
“Who will it be?”
“I don’t think it matters. The crucial thing is to keep the Whigs and their friends the abolitionists out of the White House.”
“George is formidable. A war hero.”
“But you have information that can destroy him. Use it. Put your reporter friends to work telling about his Mexican romance.”
“Will you continue to live with him?”
“I suppose so. Our house is big enough to avoid each other most of the time.”
“What if I became the Democratic candidate for president?”
“I’d vote for you.”
“Is that all you’d do?”
She gazed at Senator Sladen’s unshaven face. The man’s soul had been shrinking before her eyes all these years, but she had never realized it so graphically until this moment. Was this what unrequited love did to a man? Or was there some other destructive process at work in his spirit?
“That is all I’d do, John. Once and for all, understand that.”
“I may still try for it.”
“The presidency?”
“Yes.”
“Good luck. Let me know how soon you’ll be ready to move. The president will wait for word from you before sending in the treaty.”
“I understand.”
“Rise to the occasion, John. Restrain your impulse to be snide. Speak like a statesman, an American statesman.”
“You don’t really think I’m one, do you.”
You can take the boy out of the gutter, but you can’t take the gutter out of the boy. She almost said those appalling words. She drove them from her tongue by an act of the will. “I want you to be one—perhaps for my sake. I’ll love that part of you.”
“It will be your creation. Like all the rest of me.”
He lunged toward her in a blundering attempt at a kiss. She blocked him with her forearm and sent him stumbling back. “No, John. Not.”
They gazed at each other. Could he really desire this husk of a woman? This inert collection of atoms, drifting in time? Down the fetid stairs to the freezing street Caroline went. She welcomed the savage cold. It could not begin to match the winter in her heart. But it was a tolerable companion. Summer would be the really difficult time. What would she do when the earth opened its warm mouth to the winds of June?
She would worry about that in June. Now, in the midst of winter, she had a country to save. The future of Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s soul was irrelevant.
THIRTEEN
“GENTLEMAN, THE PRESIDENT’S ATTITUDE TOWARD this treaty speaks for itself. He has sent it to us, along with the sixty-page screed of the fool who negotiated it, simply to protect himself and the Democratic Party from the accusation that we are unnecessarily prolonging the war. Two years ago, we might have welcomed it. Today, with another ten thousand Americans in nameless graves in Mexico, and the government of that so-called country in a state of total disintegration, it is a joke, a joke in bad taste, an insult to the intelligence of every man in this Senate, to suggest we should approve it. Anyone who makes this argument can be identified as a man with an ulterior. motive—of party, of ambition, or some even more unsavory stimulus.”
Senator George Stapleton hunched forward at his desk, his big body involuntarily coiled to lunge at Senator John Sladen of Louisiana, who was speaking at his desk, only a few feet away from him. George somehow restrained himself. It was better to pretend that none of those sneering words applied to him. In spite of the column that had appeared in the New York Morning News yesterday, describing the way a certain senator who had gone to Mexico as a hero had come home as a fancy man. The senator, the reporter declared, was the love slave of a Mexican woman whose
family stood to gain a hefty slice of the $15 million Mr. Trist had agreed to pay Mexico for California and New Mexico—territory we already possessed by right of conquest. The column had been reprinted today in the Washington Union, the official newspaper of the Democratic Party. The implied message was unmistakable: the president himself was confirming the story.
George gazed around the Senate chamber, remembering other days when history had loomed large here. Daniel Webster annihilating Robert Young Hayne’s attempt to argue a state’s right to secede; John C. Calhoun denouncing Andrew Jackson’s plans to invade South Carolina. Henry Clay lashing Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States. Now Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were spent men: Webster drunk most of the time, mourning the death of his son Fletcher from typhoid in Mexico; Clay back in Kentucky in the same condition, mourning the death of his son at Buena Vista; Calhoun politically isolated by his refusal to support the war in Mexico. Ultimately, all three of these giants were silenced by the history that had stormed through their days, wreaking havoc on their personal lives and their political ambitions.
How had his grandfather Hugh Stapleton achieved his marvelous serenity? George thought he knew the answer. In the Congressman’s marriage, he had found a happiness that transcended the vicissitudes of politics and history. George would never have that consolation. In the lottery of life he had drawn a woman who set preconditions on her love, who only yielded it when a man submitted to her ideas. There she sat, two dozen feet away on one of the couches reserved for special guests, dressed in funereal black, her beautiful face hidden by a veil. The clothes, the veil, were deliberate; she was advertising her grief for the death of her marriage in Mexico. She might as well have dictated that story in the New York Morning News.
Rage gathered in George’s throat. He might never achieve Hugh Stapleton’s serenity. But he would not go to his grave as Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s yes-man. George Dallas, the vice president, recognized him as the next speaker.
“Mr. President, the senator from Louisiana and his friends seem to me, in the words of the Bard of Avon, to protest too much. They seem desperately eager to impute to those who recognize this treaty as a more than just compensation for our struggles in Mexico the worst imaginable motives. I will go even further than that: with the help of their hired reporters, they have been willing to spread the lowest slanders against me and other senators who support it. My wife, whom all of you know and esteem, is not sitting in this chamber, veiled and in funereal black, by accident. On the contrary, she is making a silent statement of reproach to men who would stoop so low. Their tactics force me to question their motives, to wonder if greed has not twisted their judgment, their sense of honor, their commitment to the honor of the United States, which should be the driving force in the heart of every man in this sacred chamber.”
George sat down, amused by the fury on Sladen’s face. Caroline’s expression was withheld from him, but he found a bitter pleasure in imagining it was a fair copy of Sladen’s. Before George could savor this small triumph, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was on his feet. As one of the heroes of Monterrey and Buena Vista, he more than equaled George’s military aura. He began talking about the thousands of men he had seen die in northern Mexico. Now, after a year of American occupation, with banditry suppressed and local elections for mayor and other offices conducted democratically, without fear of reprisal from some thug like General Santa Anna, these provinces were clamoring to become part of the United States. “How can we refuse them?” Davis asked. “How can I go back to Mississippi and face the parents, brothers, sisters, wives, of the men who died at Monterrey and Buena Vista and tell them that their loved ones’ sacrifices have been ignored? This Trist treaty is a betrayal of American blood!”
Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio launched a ferocious assault on the treaty from the abolitionist point of view. The war was a James Knox Polk lie, from start to finish, Corwin ranted. “Trist’s paper,” as he called it, was one more lie. Corwin wanted to see California, New Mexico, even the disputed parts of Texas, returned to Mexico to prove to the world that America had not fought for conquest. He called for an apology from the Senate of the United States to the people of Mexico.
Senator Sam Houston of Texas rose to thunder denunciations against President Polk’s “pusillanimity.” He could not believe the man Andrew Jackson had chosen to lead the Democratic Party and the nation approved this treaty. Would Jackson accept it? Absolutely not! Houston roared. He would treat Mexican treachery exactly the way he had treated Spanish treachery in Florida. He would exact the full measure of justice that conquest entitled him to demand. He would do so not only to punish Mexico, but to guarantee the safety of Texas. “I ask every Democrat in this chamber to reject this treaty, in the name of the man who stands next to Washington as the father of this country!” Houston shouted.
George looked around him, desperately counting heads. He did not see more than a dozen votes in favor of the treaty. Everyone was allowing personal and particular objections to swell into a chorus of faultfinding. The Whigs were united to a man in favor of rejection. The fools thought it would be President Polk’s ultimate humiliation. They were gorging themselves on the bait of party antagonism. They had no intimation of the bombshell the White House was prepared to drop in their laps.
In the House of Representatives, Democrats were orating about the danger of England or France seizing prostrate Mexico, if the United States cut it adrift. Annexation had enormous appeal to the younger members of the party. Bankers and manufacturers backed the idea as a stimulus to business. The army and navy supported it to a man, seeing endless expansion and promotions in a semipermanent state of war. Even some opponents of slavery echoed Caroline’s argument that an annexed Mexico would draw off slaves from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, where the system had become unprofitable, and turn them into free states.
One Whig senator remained silent: Jeremy Biddle. Last week, George had gone to New Jersey with Jeremy’s letter. George had thrust it in his face and told him he wanted him out of Principia Industries by the end of the year. George would borrow the money from New York bankers to buy Sally Stapleton Biddle’s 50 percent share of the business. Jeremy had wept and begged him to forgive him for the letter. It had been Sally’s idea. He had succumbed to it in a moment of weakness. George had slammed him against the wall and told him his moment of weakness began the day he was born.
With the country enjoying an economic boom as a result of the war, the price of Sally Stapleton’s shares in Principia Industries would be at least $10 million. Caroline had been appalled. George was risking the loss of the company. The interest on the loan would be five hundred thousand dollars a year. He was bequeathing his children a heritage of debt. George ignored her. He knew it was a bad decision. But he was determined to cleanse his life of everything that had befouled his happiness.
In the Senate doorway stood the stooped withered figure of Congressman John Quincy Adams. George turned his back on Houston’s fulminations and took the ex-president by the arm. “Age before beauty, Mr. President,” he said. “You must sit at my desk and listen to this nonsense in comfort, at least.”
More than a few eyes on the Whig side of the aisle followed Adams as he stumped on his cane to George’s desk. Not many Democrats made public appearances with the old man. Every Southern politician hated him for his relentless attacks on slavery.
“I don’t much like what I’m hearing,” Adams said.
“At the moment, I would say the treaty will be lucky to get twenty votes,” George said.
“I have a speech planned for tomorrow. No doubt it will be to an empty House. Every mother’s son of them will be over here watching this … this obscenity.”
“I wish I could offer you some hope, Mr. President.”
“What is Polk doing? A president can apply pressure on a few senators, no matter how unpopular he is.”
“I fear he’s a very sick man. Sick and discouraged and ready to l
et fate take charge of things.”
“Men take charge of things, Senator Stapleton. Fate does very little. When I was president, I drifted into a similar lassitude. I let supposedly more worldly men take charge of my campaign against Jackson in 1828. I found myself forever tarred by those slanders they wrote against Mrs. Jackson. You know Polk. Tell him his days and nights will be haunted by regret if he lets Southern extremists like Sladen take charge of our nation. New England and the Midwest will secede rather than surrender to such an unsavory crew.”
“Put that in your speech tomorrow, Mr. President. I promise to be one of the listeners.”
The next day, as the Senate began another round of oratory, George went over to the House to hear John Quincy Adams’s speech. The old man tottered to his desk looking too feeble for oratory. As he predicted, the House was virtually empty. The members were all following the treaty debate in the Senate. The Speaker of the House recognized the member from Massachusetts. Adams struggled to rise, fell back in his seat, and tried again. A choking sound came from his throat and he toppled sideways onto the floor.
George and several congressmen rushed to his side. They carried him into the Speaker’s office and lowered him onto a couch. Pages were sent scurrying to find a doctor. Two or three congressmen had medical degrees. The old man clasped George’s hand. “This is the last of earth,” he murmured. “Take the notes for my speech—do what you can with them.”
A convulsion shook his bulky frame. He lapsed into unconsciousness. For two more days he lingered between life and death and finally slipped into the shadows. The passing of an ex-president, however unpopular he might be to the party in power, was not something official Washington could ignore. The Senate and the House suspended sessions. Adams’s body lay in state in the rotunda, and solemn oratory recalled his long service to the nation. Throughout the three days of mourning, George circulated among his fellow senators, telling them what the old man had intended to say in his undelivered speech, and distributing selected quotations from Adams’s notes to reinforce his case.
The Wages of Fame Page 58