by Gore Vidal
Mary swung away from the window; the Potomac shone silver in the distance. “They were neighbors. Mrs. Turner came from Boston. She was a large, showy, violent woman. She beat to death seven slaves that we know of. She threw out the window a six-year-old boy, and broke his back. My father was furious—he was a considerable political force in Kentucky. So he was able to insist that a jury inquire into Mrs. Turner’s sanity. But while the jury was being impanelled, Judge Turner sent his wife to the lunatic asylum. So by the time the jury was ready to act, the asylum had let her go, saying she was perfectly sane. Which, no doubt, she was, as monsters so often are. When Judge Turner died, he left his slaves to his children. But he put it in his will that none should go to his wife—Caroline her name was—because if they did, she would torture them to death. But she overturned the will and got the slaves, including a handsome, bright-yellow boy, brighter than you, named Richard, who was her coachman. Richard could read and write and would, no doubt, be free by now. This was seventeen years ago. But one morning she chained him up and started to beat him—to beat him to death. He was in such pain that he pulled out of the wall the hook to which his chains were attached, and then he seized the monster by the throat, and choked her to death, then and there.”
“A happy ending,” said Keckley, grimly.
“A righteous ending for her but not for Richard. He was arrested by the sheriff, one of Mr. Lincoln’s cousins, curiously enough, and tried for murder, and hanged.”
“There is no justice on earth.”
“There will be some, when Mr. Lincoln is finished with his work on earth.”
Keckley smiled, “You make him sound like the Lord.”
“Do I?” Mary laughed. “Well, if he is the Lord, he is not a Christian one. When Mr. Lincoln was elected to Congress, his opponent was a Methodist preacher who kept accusing Mr. Lincoln of being an infidel. One night during the campaign the preacher was giving one of his hellfire sermons in a church when Mr. Lincoln walked in, and sat in the back. The preacher decided to trap Mr. Lincoln. So he shouted, ‘Those of you who expect to go to Heaven, rise!’ Well, Mr. Lincoln did not stir. The preacher then pointed his finger at Mr. Lincoln so that everybody would know that he was there. ‘Those of you who expect to go to hell, rise!’ Mr. Lincoln did not stir. So the preacher said to the congregation, ‘All those who think they are going to Heaven and all those who think they are going to hell have risen to their feet but Mr. Lincoln has not moved. So where, Mr. Lincoln, do you think that you are going?’ At that, Mr. Lincoln got up and said, ‘Well, I expect to go to Congress,’ and left the church.”
The two women laughed together. Then Mary said, “Ask the housekeeper for the material. And remember, no matter what you hear, that I am the one who wants slavery destroyed once and for all, and it is Mr. Lincoln who thinks it’s a bad thing but nothing to make any fuss about if a fuss can be avoided.”
“They do not depict you as you are,” said Keckley with a certain wonder.
“When do they ever? But this earth is only a passing show, Mrs. Keckley.”
“Call me Lizzie, ma’am.”
“Lizzie.”
ELEVEN
THE SECRETARY of the Treasury stood in front of the fireplace in his front parlor, and stared raptly at the smouldering coals while in a soft but displeasing voice, he urged Jesus to carry him home. Just as the sotto voce was about to become voce itself, two arms reached around him. “You’re ready at last!” he said.
“At last!” said Kate. Proud father turned, and was prouder yet when he beheld her in a dress of white and gold. “Well?” She spun around.
“Superb, you look like …”
“The Empress Eugénie. I heard you admiring that painting of her, and I was so jealous that I had this made, to outdo her.”
“She is outdone!”
The manservant opened the front door for them and the groom opened the door of a roomy, new, closed carriage from Brewster’s in New York. Reluctantly, Jay Cooke had told him that the carriage had cost $900. Sternly, Chase had insisted that it be duly noted as a loan. For an instant he had been tempted to accept the carriage as a gift, but probity never deserted him for very long, not to mention an unrelenting awareness of the importance of the appearance of things.
“La belle des belles,” intoned Chase in his bad French, quoting what Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper had written of Kate’s first appearance at the White House in February, when, on meeting Mrs. Lincoln for the first time, Kate had responded to the older woman’s polite, “Pray call upon us whenever you like, Miss Chase,” with “You may call upon me any time, Mrs. Lincoln.” Kate had sworn to her father that no offense to Mrs. Lincoln had been intended; nevertheless, the First Lady never tired of repeating the story of Kate’s rudeness.
“Why is the meeting so secret?” Kate looked at Chase, who stared out the window at the ugly but imposing marble façade of Brown’s Hotel, all lights ablaze at this hour.
“I’ll know after it’s over.” Chase had told Kate that after tonight’s dinner for the Cabinet, the Cabinet would go into secret session. He ought not to have told her but he knew that she was the very soul of discretion, unlike her father.
“I suppose it is to do with Fort Sumter.”
“Or Virginia. They keep making new demands. And Lincoln keeps giving in to them.”
“I’d drive them out of the Union,” said Kate, fiercely.
“You may not be obliged to,” said Chase, as the carriage drove up to the portico of the White House, where Old Edward stood, waiting at the door.
Father and daughter were shown into the Red Room, where the dinner guests were gathered. Chase was delighted at the effect Kate made. The men hurried to greet her; the ladies stared hard at the new dress, and murmured behind their fans. Brand-new gas lamps, improperly installed, hissed in much the same way that the ladies did as they discussed Kate’s appearance.
Chase stationed himself beneath the painting of Washington that dominated the room, and talked to Mrs. Grimsley, the agreeable cousin of Mrs. Lincoln, who told him, “The other ladies have gone home. I think we all of us stayed much too long. I know Cousin Lincoln was looking more and more grim every morning when he’d get up to find all seven of us in our wrappers, taking up every chair in the upstairs sitting room.”
“I’ve never seen the living quarters,” said Chase, his eye on Kate, who was now enchanting all three Blairs. The fierce Old Gentleman was either grimacing with agony or smiling; the latter an expression so rare that no one could positively identify it. The Postmaster-General, Montgomery Blair, was beaming as he told Kate a story in Negro dialect, while his brother, Representative Francis Blair, Junior, snapped his fingers. Kate gave every appearance of being enchanted by the three lean, wiry, ambitious men, who were plainly enchanted by her.
One who had not yielded to Kate’s enchantment now stood in front of a pier glass in the southwest bedroom, and adjusted Lizzie’s handiwork so that slightly more of her dimpled shoulders would be revealed. As she did, Lincoln crept up behind her and pulled the dress up: “Father!” she slapped his hand, not entirely playfully. “What do you know of fashion?”
“You look like a fancy woman, Molly.”
“A beautiful fancy woman?” Lincoln kissed the top of her head for answer.
“It is curious,” said Mary, studying her features in the glass, “that when I was young I had no vanity at all, and now I can think of nothing but my appearance, and wish so much that I looked young.”
“You do to me. You don’t change.”
“But you never look at me. So how would you know?” She turned; stood on tiptoe and straightened her husband’s tie.
“Who am I to sit next to?” he asked.
“Well, not that dreadful Miss Chase. I suppose you think she’s pretty.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever noticed.” Lincoln grinned, and started to ruffle his hair; then thought better of it.
“Nor Mrs. Douglas, who is far too handsome. Nor any of
the Blair ladies. Nor …”
“I’ll have to sit next to somebody.”
“There’s always Cousin Lizzie,” said Mary, with a sweet smile; and took his arm. Together, they paraded down the corridor, hissing with the blue-white gaslight flames. Together, they descended the staircase, he with mock hauteur and she as erect as Queen Victoria, with whom she had recently been, flatteringly, compared in the New York Herald. As they got to the bottom of the staircase, Old Edward preceded them to the door to the Red Room and shouted, “The President and Mrs. Lincoln!”
Women as well as men rose as they made their entrance. Mary was now quite used to this phenomenon. Lincoln affected to find it embarrassing, even though he had always taken it for granted that whether or not anyone rose at his approach, he would be the center of attention.
At table, protocol required that Kate, as the highest-ranking lady present, sit on the President’s right, and Mrs. Douglas on his left. Senator Douglas was at home, ill. Mary was flanked by Seward and Chase, her two least-favorite politicians. Although she favored the abolition of slavery, she was not an abolitionist, a distinction that her husband claimed to find more mysterious than the Trinity. But Mary had long since determined to her own satisfaction exactly what should be done. Had she not grown up a neighbor of Henry Clay, the idol of the Whigs and the only politician that she had ever heard her husband, with any sincerity, praise both as a speaker and as a moralist? All those who were now slaves would remain slaves but their children, when of age, would be free. In a single generation, the terrible institution would be at an end, and the slave-holders could hardly complain that they were being robbed of their property.
As the waiter served Chase terrapin, Mary saw a look of true greed cross his face. “That is something, sir, that we never had in our part of the world,” she said.
“No, nor in Ohio. But surely there is terrapin in Lexington, Kentucky?”
“I was thinking of Springfield. Oh, yes. We had all sorts of game, too. Do you know the town, sir?”
Chase nodded. “In fact, I met your father once, years ago. That was in my abolitionist phase.”
“Surely not yet at an end?”
Chase was serene. “The Cabinet is as one behind the President, in every way.” What, he wondered, would the votes be tonight? “I was involved in the so-called Fairbank Scandal, which nearly started a civil war in Lexington. That was close to twenty years ago.”
Mary was suddenly alert. “Calvin Fairbank, sir? the minister?”
“That’s right. A group of us in Ohio would raise money so that we could buy slaves and then free them. Mr. Fairbank was a sort of agent of ours.”
“Eliza!” Mary exclaimed. “I was there that day, at the slave auction, in the courthouse square.”
“I am told that no one who was there has ever forgotten what happened.”
“So you, sir, were behind Mr. Fairbank?”
“I was indeed. When I heard of Eliza’s case, I gave him the money to buy her.”
“I never knew that, sir.” For the first time, Mary looked at Chase with something close to admiration. The girl Eliza had belonged to a well-to-do family; she had been gently treated and well educated. When the family died out, she was put up for sale by their distant heirs. Ordinarily, this would have been a familiar if depressing story, but the case of Eliza was much discussed in the press because she was a lovely white girl of eighteen who happened to be one sixty-fourth Negro. At the auction, the Reverend Fairbank had bid against a Frenchman from New Orleans who, it was rumored, kept a brothel. The courthouse square was crowded. People had come from miles around. Abolitionists had threatened violence. With some horror, Mary had watched the bidding. She herself was only a few years older than the girl who stood, shuddering, on the block, the tall auctioneer beside her. When the Frenchman’s bids began to flag—the price had gone to a thousand dollars—the auctioneer had shouted, “Come on, you mean-hearted gentlemen! Look at what I’ve got!” With that he pulled down the girl’s blouse. Mary could still remember the horrified gasp from the crowd. Many ladies hurried away. Yet when a black woman was stripped, no one had ever noticed. The bidding resumed; then flagged again. This time the auctioneer pulled up the girl’s skirt to show her naked thighs. There were now shouts of anger from a part of the crowd; and raucous shouts and whistles from the other. Finally, the girl was sold to the Reverend Fairbank for one thousand four hundred eighty-five dollars—Mary could still hear the auctioneer’s voice intone, “Fourteen eight-five, going, going, gone! And sold damned cheap.”
When Fairbank came to take the weeping girl down from the block, a loud voice shouted, “What’re you gonna do with her now?”
“I’m going to set her free!” shouted Fairbank. There was almost, as Chase had noted, a civil war right there and then in Lexington’s courthouse square.
When it came Mary’s turn to speak to Seward at table, she smiled the slight smile that she had been practising ever since Cousin Lizzie had told her that if she objected to being depicted as a moon-faced little old woman, she must diminish her smile, which tended to make round her cheeks, “Just like a chipmunk’s, Cousin Mary.”
“What news, sir, of your wife?”
“She still enjoys to the full her ill-health, Mrs. Lincoln. She is home at Auburn, New York.”
“I do wish she were here, to help me.” Inadvertently, Mary looked at Kate, who had somehow got the President to laugh out loud, something women, by and large, seldom did, either because he was in awe of them or because he never took them as seriously as he did his lifelong audience, men.
“You do quite well enough, Mrs. Lincoln. I like the new gas lamps.”
“They still make that awful noise.” Mary frowned. “You don’t think they could be leaking, do you?”
“How long since they were installed?”
“Ten days.”
“If they had been leaking, Mr. and Mrs. Hannibal Hamlin would now be at the head of this table.”
“Really, Mr. Seward!” Mary disliked Seward’s total lack of gravity. “Sir, are you still opposed to the provisioning of Fort Sumter?”
Seward gave a sidelong glance over the canvasback duck. Did she know about tonight’s Cabinet meeting? One of the new President’s numerous faults was an inability to keep a secret, unlike Seward, whose capacity to maintain his own counsel had won him the title, in his gubernatorial days, the Sphinx of Albany.
It was the Sphinx who now answered. “Well, at our first Cabinet meeting, three weeks ago, the President asked each of us to write a memorandum on whether or not we should provision the garrison at Fort Sumter, and it was my advice, as you know, not to do anything of a provocative nature.”
“Do you feel the same now?” Mary did know that there was to be a secret meeting of the Cabinet after dinner; but since Lincoln had told her no more than that, she had asked no questions. She knew that he had been greatly disturbed by whatever it was that Lamon had told him that morning: Lamon had only just returned from Charleston, where Lincoln had sent him on a private mission to South Carolina’s governor. Plainly, tonight’s meeting would have to do with Fort Sumter, the last Federally controlled property in the state, and its garrison.
“Well, it depends on the circumstances, I suppose.” Seward was vague. “Actually, the entire Cabinet, except for Mr. Blair, voted for giving up Fort Sumter.”
“I believe Mr. Chase was in favor of giving it up if it meant peace, and against if it meant war.”
“You do follow these matters, don’t you, Mrs. Lincoln.” Seward was now confident that she knew about tonight’s meeting. “I suppose Mr. Lamon’s report will be interesting.” He tried to draw her out. All day he had been trying to discover what Lamon had told the President, but if anyone knew, they would not tell him; even young Johnny Hay had been evasive.
“I’ve not talked to Mr. Lamon. And the President tells me nothing.” With that, Mary changed the subject.
When the last course was taken away, Mary rose to her feet, as
did Lincoln. Neither had taken to the European custom of allowing the ladies to withdraw while the gentlemen remained at table. “For a man who doesn’t drink, it’s perfect torture,” Lincoln had remarked after a recent dinner at the British legation. But Lincoln did enjoy a story the minister, Lord Lyons, had told of the exotic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, who also hated to sit with the gentlemen after dinner and, whenever he could, he would insist that everyone depart with the hostess. After one particularly inedible dinner, Disraeli, thinking that the hostess had made a move to rise, leapt to his feet, only to hear her say, “Not yet, Chancellor. There is champagne.”