by Gore Vidal
Lincoln rose, undid his tie, yawned. “Gentlemen, I bid you good-night.” The others rose; and remained standing in place until the President was gone. Then Seward turned to Chase. “Will you stroll home with me?”
“Of course. Kate has taken our carriage …”
Seward now occupied all of the Old Club House that looked upon Lafayette Square. The nearby spire of Saint John’s Church was like a dark iron nail against the night sky. “I am able to pray,” said Seward, indicating the church, “at a moment’s notice.”
“Did you ever get the President to go to St. John’s again?”
“No, but I’m working on it. I believe that he goes now to the Presbyterian church.” As they crossed the damp, wooded park, the lights were going off in the Executive Mansion, while a single street lamp served the entire street that edged the park.
As the two men entered the house, they were greeted by Seward’s large, enthusiastic dog, Midge, heiress to many canine bloodlines. Midge led them into the downstairs study where Seward’s son, Frederick, sat by the smoldering fire; at work in his shirt-sleeves. The young man greeted Chase; and excused himself. While Chase sat in a sofa beside the fire, Seward poured himself a goblet of brandy. “I am as thirsty as the great Sahara,” he said.
“I have not the habit,” said Chase. “Nor the thirst,” he added, precisely.
Seward sat opposite Chase, twisting the goblet between his hands. “You and I disagree on Fort Sumter, but only as to means, and timing.”
“We disagree, perhaps, about the urgent need to abolish slavery,” said Chase mildly.
“You would go to war for that?”
“If it was necessary, yes.”
“Wouldn’t you rather go to war against Spain, and acquire Cuba? Against the French, and acquire Mexico?”
“I would rather acquire Charleston.”
“But we would have outflanked the cotton states.” Seward was persuasive; and elaborate. Chase listened, carefully. The concept was ingenious. The famed two birds that it was always his dream with one stone to kill might, at last, be snared.
“Let us say,” said Chase, when Seward had finished with his design for empire, “that I am open to the idea in general. But in particular …”
“There is a log in our way, Mr. Chase. Or should I say a rail?”
Chase nodded. “It is plain to me that Mr. Lincoln is a well-meaning but inadequate man.”
“And it is plain to me that you and I, together, could administer the country better than he, and if war comes, we could prosecute it better than he.”
“I agree.” Chase had never liked Seward or his morals—or lack of them. But Seward was the consummate politician of the age. Between Seward’s wiliness and his own high moral purpose, they could indeed conduct a successful administration and prosecute, if necessary, a winning war. Chase said as much. “But”—he added the obvious—“he was elected President.”
“Because he was elected, we have lost—or will lose—close to a third of our population. Seven states are gone. Others will go. The minority that elected him disunited the country. Should war come, then such a high emergency would dictate that some combination—with his agreement, of course—would be called upon to direct the government.”
“He has us, the compound Cabinet.” Chase came as close to irony as his temperament would allow.
“He has you and he has me. Do we have him?” Seward squinted through cigar smoke.
“In what sense?” Chase began to feel not unlike Cassius listening to Brutus. Or was it the other way around?
“Mr. Chase, I am going to propose to him, openly, that either you or I or both be allowed to direct the Administration. No more votes of three to three. No more funny stories. No more procrastination—”
“You will ask him to abdicate?”
“Of course not. He will continue to be what he is, the President. But the engine of this Administration will be us.” Seward was surprised at his own magnanimity in allowing Chase to share with him, as it were (each now tended to think in Roman terms), the consulate. But he knew Chase to be a formidable figure; and not easily put aside.
“I shall be curious to see what he has to say to your proposal.” Chase was always slow to take to new ideas. But once absorbed, they became a part of his very flesh. On this noncommittal note, Chase lifted his considerable flesh from the sofa, and asked that a hack be summoned. In politics, as in love, opposites attract, and the misunderstandings that ensue tend to be as bitter and, as in love, as equally terminal.
TWELVE
THOMPSON’S Drug Store shut at noon on Sunday, April 14. Ordinarily, the pharmacy would not have been open at all on a Sunday but there was so much excitement in the city that Mr. Thompson could not bear to shut up shop when, after the bar at Willard’s, Thompson’s Drug Store was one of the city’s finest rumor centers. Already that morning the doorkeeper to the Executive Mansion, Mr. McManus, had come with a prescription to be filled for Mrs. Lincoln, whose nerves craved laudanum, and an extra supply of blue mass to move yet more urgently the presidential bowels.
While David made up the prescription in the back room, Mr. Thompson and a half-dozen of the shop’s regulars questioned Mr. McManus closely.
“What will the President do, do you think, sir?” Mr. Thompson treated with deference anyone connected with the great house across the avenue.
“A stern retaliation, you may be sure. But I must not say, of course, what form it will be taking.” McManus always affected to know the inner councils of the Presidency; and Mr. Thompson thought him an oracle, though in David’s few encounters with the old Irishman he had never heard him say anything that he could not have read in a newspaper.
“What will happen to Major Anderson and the garrison?” asked a customer.
“There is talk of the rebels holding them for ransom like common bandits.” David doubted this; whatever the faults of his countrymen, and so he regarded the South Carolinans, they were not bandits but men of honor.
“It was heroic,” said Mr. Thompson, arranging the patent medicines on their special shelf, each according to size. He was devoted to symmetry. “Thirty-four hours of bombardment from the rebels. The flag in flames. The fort in flames …”
“It would’ve been a whole lot more heroic if they’d fought to the death,” said a distinctly Southern voice.
“To what point?” asked McManus. “General Beauregard has thousands of men in Charleston Harbor. Why, I’ve seen the map in the President’s office. He keeps it on an easel, like it was a picture.”
“Why,” asked Thompson, a copy of the Star in front of him, “didn’t the ships arrive in time to provision the garrison?”
“They did arrive, Mr. Thompson, they got there just when the bombardment started.”
“So why didn’t they go and fire back at the … rebels?” said the mocking Southern voice.
David entered the front part of the store, two packages in hand. McManus was getting more red in the face than usual. “Because they was stopped by the tide. There is this sandbar at the harbor entrance. Until the tide comes in, you can’t enter the port.” This was not in any of the papers that David had read. Perhaps McManus did know something after all, and if he did … David gave Mr. McManus the packages. “Thank you. Good-day, Mr. Thompson, gentlemen.”
Mr. McManus left the shop. “I’ve never seen so many people at the White House, on a Sunday,” said one of the regular customers. “Every big frog in the town has come to call.”
“I reckon there’s a lot of croaking going on across the street,” said the Southerner, with quiet malice. Mr. Thompson made a soothing noise. He made it a point never to take sides politically; he sold his pills and powders and tonics to all.
As Mr. Thompson and David proceeded to shut up shop, David received the unpleasant news that he was to go across the river to Alexandria that afternoon. “I got this urgent message from old Mrs. Alexander herself; the town’s named for their family, you know, and I’m the only one
who can make up the exact prescription she needs so as to lose the water she must lose for the dropsy. It’s right here.” Mr. Thompson indicated a package next to the porcelain jar that contained essence of pure mint. “The address is written on it.”
“But this is Sunday, Mr. Thompson …” David began; and shortly thereafter ended. He was to go by foot to Alexandria, across the Long Bridge. No, he could not have the money for a hack. He was young; while the exercise was worth all Mr. Thompson’s wares rolled into one vast pill, said the proprietor, whose hatred of walking was so great that he had been known to wait an hour for the horsecars to take him from Tenth to Fifteenth streets.
The day was mild; the air warm. The first white lilacs had opened in the President’s Park. David paused in front of the White House gate. Open and closed carriages were depositing stout, solemn figures at the portico, where Mr. McManus stood, bowing them inside. The war had started at last. Although David knew which side he would be on, the notion of serving in an army, anyone’s army, did not delight him. Nor did he want to join the wild boys, who had so signally failed to assassinate Mr. Lincoln on March 4: “There was these guards at the Long Bridge, and they wouldn’t let us back in the city till it was too late,” one of them had whined. In any case, most of the wild boys had already gone South to join the new Confederate army. Perhaps he could be some sort of spy. He was well placed at Thompson’s Drug Store. When Annie got back from Surrattsville, he would ask her advice. He knew that Isaac had vanished—into Virginia, people said. But neither Mrs. Surratt nor Annie ever mentioned Isaac. They were a close-mouthed family, unlike his own. David groaned aloud at the thought of the house of women—nice women—to which he had been, by fate and his father’s thoughtless death, consigned and condemned.
As the carriage containing a small, thick-chested, large-headed man clattered past David and through the gate, he turned and made his way, slowly, toward the Long Bridge.
Mr. McManus bowed very low to the short man. “Senator Douglas, the President is waiting for you, sir. In the Red Room.”
“Good to see you, Old Edward.” The resonant bass voice was as firm as ever but the face was colorless. And the hand that its owner gave Lincoln to shake was cold and weak. “Well, Mr. President,” he said, “here you are.”
“Here we are, Judge,” said Lincoln, leading Douglas to a chair beneath Washington’s portrait. “Just the two of us, like old times.”
“All in all, Mr. Lincoln, I’m sort of glad that it’s me calling on you and not the other way around.”
Lincoln smiled a weary smile. “You know, Judge, I have a peculiar hunch that you might mean exactly what you say.”
“What can I do?” Douglas sat very straight in his chair, and looked taller than he was.
“I want you to listen to something. Then we’ll talk.” Lincoln removed a document from his pocket. “It’s a proclamation. I’ll read you the salient points. I start by condemning those elements in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana for obstructing the execution of the law …”
Ever the sharp lawyer, Douglas picked up on the word “execution.” “You are deliberately invoking your oath, to execute the laws. Am I right?”
“Yes, Judge. That oath is my bulwark and my shield and my … sword.” Lincoln pronounced the “w” in sword; and smiled. “Remember how that was the way we always pronounced the word as boys? Because we’d only seen the word in books …” Lincoln looked down at the text. “Therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States …”
Douglas blinked his eyes rapidly, as if he had just awakened from a dream, to find that his rival was in his place; and that he was now nowhere. “… in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws …”
“The oath,” murmured Douglas, nodding. He was beginning now to understand what Lincoln was doing; he also understood the perils implicit in such a high royal progress to an end that no one on this earth could anticipate or even imagine.
“… have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to repress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed.” Lincoln looked up. “Well?”
“Executed again.” Douglas nodded; and in the round sick face he managed a smile. “But it’s like Hotspur, isn’t it? You may summon all you like. But will they come?”
“They have no choice when I call upon them to preserve, protect and defend the Union.” Lincoln spelled it out, as if he were carving his own epitaph in marble.
“Yes, they will come.” Douglas nodded. “But it won’t be easy. I think seventy-five thousand is too few. Ask for two hundred thousand men.”
“I must demonstrate the need first.” Lincoln glanced at the paper. “I go on to say that these troops will be needed to repossess our forts and so on, peacefully, of course.” Lincoln sighed. “And then I address the so-called governments of the rebellion and I say, ‘I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date,’ which is as of tomorrow April 15, 1861. I then call Congress into session on the Fourth of July. Well?”
“Well, you’ve given yourself until July 4 to play the dictator, and I suggest that you do all that you think must be done to crush the rebellion before Congress comes back.”
“I had not thought of it in quite those terms, Judge.” Lincoln smiled; and began to tug his hair into wild and characteristic disarray. “It’s true that I don’t want Congress here until I know who’s going to be in it and I won’t know that until I see what other states decide to leave the Union. I reckon by the Fourth of July we’ll know the worst.”
Douglas nodded. “Certainly, Virginia will go. Maryland?”
“I am prepared to hold Maryland by force.”
“Can you?”
“If I don’t, we lose this city. The governor of Maryland is with us, unlike the governor of Kentucky, who is working for secession. Fortunately, our friend old Doctor Breckinridge—you know, John C.’s uncle—is holding fast to the Union, and he carries great weight. It is also helpful that our first—and only—hero so far, Major Anderson, is a Kentuckian.”
“What did happen yesterday? Was he captured?”
“No. That was just our friends in the press. The major turned the fort over to Mister Beauregard, formerly of the United States Army, who then put him and his men aboard one of our ships. He’s on his way here now.”
“Why did Mister Beauregard fire on Fort Sumter when all you were going to do was provision it?”
“You will have to find some way to enter the mind of Mr. Jefferson Davis, who gave the order to Mr. Beauregard. A week ago, I sent a clerk from the War Department down to Charleston to read to Governor Pickens a note from me to the effect that if they did not try to stop us from provisioning our fort, we would in no way add to its manpower or fire power. The clerk left my note with the governor, who sent it on to Mr. Davis, who then gave orders for Anderson to evacuate the fort, which he refused to do. I have always been told that Mr. Davis, when you really get to know him, is one of the damnedest fools that ever lived, and now I believe it.” Lincoln folded the proclamation; and put it in his pocket.
“Well, you said that you would never be the aggressor, and I guess you’re not.” There was a faint smile on Douglas’s lips.
“What does that smile mean, Judge?” With left eyebrow raised, Lincoln gave Douglas a look of comical suspicion.
“After that deep grave you dug for me at Freeport—and unlike Mr. Davis I am no damned fool—I suspect you of … maneuvering.”
“Oh, not like that, Judge. Not like that.” Lincoln was on his feet, pacing the room, pulling at his hair. “It is true that I could have let the thing go. What difference does it make who holds a fort that is worthless to us and probably not much use to them if war comes?”
“War has com
e, Mr. President.”
Lincoln stopped at the window; turned back into the room. “Yes, it has come.”
“So now you have your chance to re-create the republic.”
Lincoln was startled. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, when I was getting ready for our last set of debates, I rummaged around and found a copy of an old speech you gave to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield.”
“My God, Judge, I was a boy when I gave that talk.”
“You were twenty-eight, at which age Alexander the Great had been remarkably active. You mentioned him, too. And Julius Caesar. And Napoleon, I believe.”
“As tyrants, yes, but …”
“As tyrants, yes.” Douglas was inexorable. In a sense, this was his revenge on the man who had put him forever to one side. “You said that the founders of the republic had got all the glory that there was and that those who come after can never be anything except mere holders of office, and that this was not enough to satisfy ‘the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.’ ”
Lincoln stared down at Douglas. There was no expression in his face; he had frozen in an attitude of attention; and nothing more.
“Your lion and your eagle cannot endure the notion of following in the footsteps of any predecessor, or of any one at all. Your great man ‘thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, he will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving free men.’ I learned a lot of that speech, just in case.”
Lincoln continued to stare down at Douglas, who gave a half salute to the figure between him and the room’s far window. “Well, you are the eagle, you are the lion. You have it in your power, thanks to that marvelous oath the Constitution unwittingly gave you, to free the slaves or to enslave us all. Which will it be?”