The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “He’s been dead a long time. I doubt if he would have an easy answer—if he were alive.”

  Caroline’s eyes drifted—or were drawn by some malevolent current—to Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s portrait. Oh, my dear girl, I fear for thy salvation, the saintly lips whispered.

  What would you know about salvation, you simpering fool? I’m thinking about America’s salvation. Yes, even the salvation of this black race that you in your Quaker goodness supposedly pitied. I’m offering them a chance to become free men and women in a Southern empire a hundred years from now. I’m trying to avoid a war that could kill a million white men. I’ve already sacrificed a son to the salvation I worship.

  Caroline gulped her bourbon, which George had cut with plenty of water. “I sometimes think we should tell Tabitha’s story,” she said. “It might shut up a few abolitionists. There’s no hope for these pathetic people in the United States of America.”

  “Somehow I can’t believe that,” George said. “Though God knows the evidence is in your favor.”

  Caroline was swept by a violent desire to flee Bowood, to escape those faces on the walls of this room, where the Congressman had persuaded her to join the Stapleton family. “I think we should go to Washington now!” Caroline said. “Today. The Republicans are going to carry New Jersey. Why stay around to make humiliating statements to reporters? Better to retain your role as a national spokesman.”

  George trudged heavily from the room, his big head drooping, massive shoulders slumped. Caroline was shaken by how old he looked. He was fifty-eight; he looked more worn, more weary, than his grandfather had looked at eighty-five. Was it her fault? A quasi answer drifted from Hannah Stapleton’s saintly lips. Oh, my dear girl, I fear for thy salvation.

  Caroline slammed the library door and went upstairs to begin packing. In twenty-four hours she and George were in Washington, D.C., where the magical telegraph soon informed them and the rest of the nation that Abraham Lincoln had won the presidency with only 39.8 percent of the popular vote. He had carried New Jersey, New York, and sixteen other Northern and Western states, enough to give him a majority in the electoral college. If New York and New Jersey had voted against him, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives.

  On December 20, 1860, as the Stapleton family gathered for Christmas in Washington, D.C., South Carolina issued an ordinance of secession and called on other Southern states to join her. The abolitionist press immediately demanded President Buchanan declare war on them, à la Andrew Jackson. But Buchanan, his cabinet dominated by Southerners, did nothing but issue a feeble remonstrance, which was all but dictated by John Sladen. The president declared secession was illegal but said that he had no constitutional authority to prevent a state from leaving the Union. As a practical matter, he said it was unthinkable for one part of the Union to make war on another part of it. He went on to denounce abolitionists’ attacks on the South as the chief reason for the crisis.

  The day after the White House released this statement, a Capitol page delivered an envelope to the Stapleton door. In it was the presidential message in Buchanan’s own handwriting, with a note from John Sladen: I am appointing you the keeper of our archives.

  Caroline’s heart pounded. He knew with uncanny skill what aroused her. She thrust the letter and the message into a dresser drawer. It was too soon to celebrate. She had to continue playing the part of loyal wife and dutiful mother. She soon discovered that she had to summon all her resolution to maintain her self-control.

  That night at dinner, Jonathan Stapleton glowered at his mother and father and asked them what they thought of South Carolina’s departure from the Union. George said he was dismayed and intended to make a peace proposal in the Senate tomorrow. South Carolina had voted to secede once before and retracted it. He thought they could be persuaded again.

  “By what? Sweet words?” Jonathan said. “As I recall the story, you said President Jackson’s threat to hang every one of them did the trick.”

  “South Carolina was isolated then,” Caroline said. “Now, thanks to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and John Brown, the South’s attitude has been transformed. That kind of threat would stampede every other Southern state to join them.”

  “I agree completely with Mother,” Paul Stapleton said. He was wearing his gray West Point uniform. Rooming with a cadet from Alabama, he had become a strong advocate of compromise. The idea of facing his classmates on the battlefield appalled him.

  “So do I, Jonathan,” Laura Biddle Stapleton said. Caroline had discovered she had almost supernatural power over her daughter-in-law. Laura despised her mother for her fanatic abolitionism—and her contemptuous treatment of her father.

  “You mean we’re just going to sit here and let the Union break up?” Jonathan said.

  “It hasn’t come to that,” George said, visibly agitated.

  “It’s only a step away, Father,” Jonathan said.

  He was right of course. The year 1860 began with six more Southern states seceding—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Senator Stapleton’s peace proposal, which called for the creation of a $20 million dollar fund to begin the purchase of slaves and their repatriation to Africa or Caribbean islands such as Santo Domingo, went nowhere. The seceding states announced plans to form a Southern confederacy and urged other Southern and border states to join them.

  “I think it’s time for you to bring President Tyler into the picture,” Caroline told George. She and Julia Tyler had been exchanging letters almost daily on the mounting crisis. As the ex-president saw it, Virginia was the key to resolving the situation. If the Old Dominion stayed in the Union, the other border states could be persuaded to follow her lead, reducing the Southern confederacy to such a tiny minority of the states, they would almost certainly lose heart and abandon their course.

  In mid-January, George and Caroline journeyed to Sherwood Forest. She thought John Tyler looked haggard. He confessed he had been sleeping badly. “It isn’t easy to watch the collapse of the Great American Republic,” he said. He saw nothing but disaster emerging from secession. The English would immediately foment trouble between the two American nations. Already they had agents in Virginia and other state capitals assuring them of England’s support. Each year their textile factories devoured most of the South’s 200 million pounds of cotton. They would love to reduce the South to a client state, then manipulate the price of cotton, adding billions to their profits.

  Tyler said he admired George’s attempt to solve the crisis with money. But he feared many Southerners would reject the idea as a betrayal of their blacks. “I would find it very hard to sell my people and export them to some unknown fate in a foreign land. I consider them my moral responsibility.”

  For a while Tyler toyed with a novel idea. Maybe Virginia and the other border states, in which he included the Stapletons’ New Jersey, ought to join the seceding states, hold a convention in which they would adopt the U.S. Constitution, with additional safeguards against the abolition of slavery, and invite the other states to join them. “It might end up isolating New England, the seedbed of the abolitionist poison,” he said.

  George shook his head. With New Jersey and New York in Republican hands again, he thought the proposal would be dismissed with scorn. Instead, George suggested a peace conference to meet in Washington. All the states would send delegates, making it a sort of constitutional convention. Tyler doubted that the seceding states would send anyone. That meant Northerners would have a massive majority. Instead, the ex-president suggested limiting the conference to twelve border states: “That would make for a more manageable number of delegates and would involve the states that have the most to lose from a breakup of the Union.”

  George concurred, and he and Tyler went to work on drafting an open letter to the Richmond Enquirer and other newspapers. Caroline took Julia aside and urged her to suggest that the proposal should include a plea for peaceful separation, if the conference failed
. Tyler agreed and asked her and Caroline to draft the paragraph. George looked dubious, but he was in no position to object. Between them the two women produced a cry from the heart.

  If the Free and Slave states cannot live in harmony together … does not the dictate of common sense admonish to a separation in peace? Better so than a perpetual itch of irritation and ill feeling. Far better than an unnatural war between the sections. Grant that one section shall conquer the other, what reward will be reaped by the victor? Ruin and desolation will everywhere prevail. The victor’s blow will be encircled with withered and faded leaves bedewed with the blood of the child and its mother and the father and the son. The picture is too horrible to be dwelt upon.

  The letter was printed in hundreds of newspapers. Caroline carefully saved the original. It would be another important document in the archives of the Southern confederacy. She saw herself telling John Sladen the story of her secret triumph as the SS Delilah churned through the Mississippi darkness.

  Almost instantly, a migraine ravaged her composure. In a day and a night of agony, she began to realize that this image was at the root of her desolating guilt. As George hovered beside her bed, she saw it would be impossible to desert him. The Delilah would have to sail without her. She would let John Sladen worship her statue in his secret Temple of Fame. But the real woman would not inflict this ultimate betrayal on her husband.

  The Virginia legislature acted swiftly on the proposal for a peace conference. But instead of limiting the conclave to the border states, they called for a meeting of delegates from every state still in the Union. John Tyler gloomily predicted this was a recipe for disaster. Nevertheless he agreed to serve as one of Virginia’s five delegates to this “peace convention.”

  A few days later, the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Ohio passed resolutions offering the federal government troops to suppress “the rebellion” of the seceded Southern states. That filled the ex-president and Senator Stapleton with foreboding. These were two of the border states that Tyler had hoped would be inclined to a peaceful settlement.

  In Washington, D.C., Caroline urged the Tylers to stay at the Stapleton house. But Julia felt they should assume a posture of complete neutrality and stay at Brown’s Hotel, one of the capital’s more elegant hostelries. Virginia had not only appointed Tyler a delegate to the peace convention—he was also a special commissioner to President Buchanan.

  Julia clung desperately to her image of the ex-president as a conciliator: The seceding states, on hearing that he is conferring with Mr. Buchanan, will stay their proceedings out of respect for him. If the Northern states will only follow up this measure in a conceding spirit, peace will be assured.

  Caroline sent this sad naive letter to John Sladen with the comment They’re ready, I think. For a moment she felt wistful, remembering the exaltation of her pursuit of fame as Sarah Polk’s partner. She felt no such mystical union with Julia Gardiner Tyler. For another moment Caroline yearned to share everything with Sarah, even her pact with her evil god. But Sarah would never approve, even though she agreed wholeheartedly that the South should be permitted to secede in peace. Sarah refused to face the evil at the heart of the great republic—and would never admit evil must be used to eviscerate it.

  On January 24, ex-president Tyler and Julia came to the Stapleton house for dinner. Tyler had conferred with President Buchanan that afternoon. He was not encouraged by what he saw. “The man is in a daze,” he said. “All he did was whine at me because some of the seceded states had seized federal forts and arsenals. I tried to make him understand that these were no more than minor irritants, the necessary result of popular excitement.”

  “He’s the worst possible man to have in the White House at a time like this,” George said. “He doesn’t have the backbone of a jellyfish.”

  “That may be all to the good, George,” Caroline said, “if our goal is peace.”

  “Our goal is to save the Union,” George said.

  “That can’t be done without peace,” Caroline said.

  “Precisely my view, Mrs. Stapleton.” Tyler joined her in agreeing that Buchanan’s spinelessness made it easy to put conciliatory words in his mouth. “The president came around to my opinion on the forts and arsenals. He reassured me that he did not plan to undertake any hostile action to prevent other forts, such as the one in Charleston Harbor, from surrendering to their new masters.”

  Caroline rushed a report of this conversation to John Sladen. Although Louisiana had seceded, he remained in Washington at President Buchanan’s request, prepared to conduct negotiations with the peace convention and with the new president, Abraham Lincoln. That gentleman was wending his way to Washington from Illinois, pausing to speak in New York, New Jersey, and other states, each time sounding more and more shaken by the crisis confronting him.

  Three days later, when the 132 delegates to the peace convention gathered in the grand hall of the Willard Hotel, they unanimously elected John Tyler their presiding officer. Caroline invited him and Julia and two dozen of the convention’s leading figures to her salon the following night. On paper, the peace delegates were impressive. Their numbers included former governors, senators, and congressmen. Six had served in presidential cabinets. But almost all were now old men, no longer active in politics. They limped on canes and complained of rheumatism and bad stomachs. A delegate from Missouri, speaking in a voice choked with phlegm, told Caroline his lungs were so inflamed he was afraid to go outdoors when it rained. None of them seemed to have much hope of rescuing the situation—although all of them deplored the idea of a civil war.

  John Sladen arrived as the parlor reached flood tide. Caroline led him to Julia Tyler, who was receiving compliments in Dolley Madison’s old corner. She was wearing a pink tulle Worth gown that her husband said with wry bemusement represented half the profits of Sherwood Forest’s wheat crop.

  John kissed her hand and played the gallant Southern gentleman. “If only more Northern women had married Southern husbands, the two sections would be conducting a love feast, instead of a hate fest. Where is the president? I want to tell him how much I admire his courage, to take on such a responsibility.”

  “Between the two of us, he has very little hope of success,” Julia said.

  “Nevertheless, he can be a powerful voice for peace,” John said.

  “Exactly what I’ve been telling Julia,” Caroline said.

  For a moment some negative thought—was it suspicion?—flashed across Julia’s lovely face. Had she heard rumors about Mrs. Stapleton and Senator Sladen? “I hate to see him tarred with failure at this point in his life,” Julia said.

  “Failure to one set of eyes can be success to another onlooker. Perhaps he should aim his policy in a more southerly direction,” John said. “Why not shape the convention’s proposals to draw Virginia and the border states into the new confederacy? If we could persuade Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Delaware, Pennsylvania—and New Jersey to join us—the North would never dare to start a war. The odds would be too close to even. The abolitionists, like all bullies, would lose their nerve.”

  “A very pregnant thought, Senator,” Julia said. “I’ll discuss it with the president.”

  Julia gazed up at Caroline, her expression impenetrable. “Do you really think New Jersey could be persuaded?”

  “If George can be persuaded, yes. If I have any influence—” Caroline let her voice break. For a moment her emotion was genuine. “I’d consider it a memorial to Charlie.”

  Julia nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Several Virginia congressmen arrived to pay court to Julia. Caroline led John Sladen to the other side of the room, where George was talking to another delegate to the peace convention—Judge Jeremy Biddle. Pennsylvania had selected him, apparently on the assumption that the convention would have to grapple with constitutional issues. A dozen other judges were among the delegates. Caroline had invited Jeremy to the salon to demonstrate how totally she forgave hi
m and George for the betrayal of All Mexico.

  “I thought the brothers three might profit by a reunion,” she said.

  “I’m not sure how,” John Sladen said. “But I’m willing to shake hands.”

  He extended his hand to Jeremy, who met it with obvious reluctance. “Jeremy’s been telling me about this fellow Lincoln,” George said. “He met him several times at the Republican Convention. He says he’s no abolitionist.”

  “He’ll have to eat quite a few of his public statements to convince me of that,” Caroline said.

  “He thinks he might be willing to make a public promise not to interfere with slavery wherever it exists.”

  “I’m quite sure of that,” Jeremy said.

  Caroline struggled for self-control. Where did this detestable creature get his capacity to frustrate her deepest desires? “I’m quite certain when his abolitionist friends in Congress get through with him, he’ll do no such thing,” she said.

  John Tyler joined them, a glass of bourbon in his hand. George congratulated him for his opening remarks at the peace convention, in which he called for a triumph over party politics in the name of peace and union. George introduced him to Jeremy and recounted his prediction that Lincoln would be willing to compromise.

  “I’m afraid the South wants more than a promise of noninterference,” the ex-president said. “Speaking as a Virginian, I’m certain we, and the rest of the South, will never consent to have our blacks cribbed and confined within proscribed and specified limits—and thus be involved in all the consequences of a war of the races in some twenty or thirty years. We must have expansion, and if we cannot obtain that expansion in the Union, we may sooner or later look to Mexico, the West India islands, and Central America as the ultimate reservations of the American branch of the African race.”

  For a moment Caroline was dazed. She could only gaze into John Sladen’s hooded eyes and renew her faith in her evil god. Who else could have put those words on this ex-president’s lips? There it was, their entire scenario, endorsed, approved, blessed, by the South’s premier living politician.