by Gore Vidal
“What you said to Mr. Forney.”
“Oh?” Lincoln glanced at Hay; like someone just awakened from sleep. “What did I say to him?”
“You said you felt like the boy who stubbed his toe …”
“Too old to cry, too hurt to laugh,” Lincoln finished. Then he smiled. “Sometimes I say those things and don’t even know I’ve said them. When there is so much you cannot say, it’s always a good idea to have a story ready. I do it now from habit.” Lincoln sighed. “In my predicament, it is a good thing to know all sorts of stories because the truth of the whole matter is now almost unsayable; and so cruel.”
NINE
THERE WAS in the capital no drawing room more entirely agreeable and stimulating to Seward than that of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Eames. Mr. Eames had been, in earlier years, a publisher of the Washington Union, a Democratic newspaper long since vanished. The Eameses themselves had vanished for four years, during which time he was American minister to Venezuela. They returned to Washington in the last golden secesh days of the Buchanan Administration; and thanks to Mr. Eames’s charm and to Mrs. Eames’s New York wit they conducted what was, in effect, Washington’s only salon in the European sense. To be at home with the Chases was a far grander experience; but the house of the Chases was, simply, the elegant command headquarters of the next president, and the guest lists at Sixth and E were altogether too calculated, in Seward’s amused view, to amuse him. But one was invited to the Eameses only if one were amusing or wise or, like William Seward himself, both.
When Seward stepped into the drawing room, Mrs. Eames gave him a delighted smile and a small curtsey. “Monsieur le Premier,” she murmured reverently.
“Do rise, my dear. I know how exciting it is for you to see me like this, power radiating from my fingertips. But do battle with your natural awe.” Seward took her arm comfortably, and surveyed the room. Of the twenty or so guests already arrived, Seward remarked, contentedly, “There is not one uniform. That is a relief, let me tell you.”
“The only military men we know, Governor, live only to fight. They are either in the field—or safely, heroically, under it.”
“Do you actually know any men of this sort?”
“Yes. And they are all Democratic politicians. And here is their queen.”
They were joined by Mrs. Stephen Douglas, widow of the last leader of the entire Democratic Party. Seward was much taken with Mrs. Douglas’s charm, Southern though it might be. As there had been much speculation in recent months that should Kate Chase marry Governor Sprague, Chase himself would marry the widow Douglas, Seward felt free to inquire if this would be the case.
“Oh, I don’t think so!” Mrs. Douglas turned slightly away so that Seward might better view her famous profile, whose high, curved forehead and straight, perfect nose had inspired legions of newspaper writers to classical allusions—usually mistaken, Seward would duly note. Mrs. Eames went to greet the Baron and Baroness Gerolt and their large but handsome daughter Carlota.
“I think you’d make a splendid couple,” said Seward, enjoying the profile, as it began, delicately, to flush.
“I esteem Mr. Chase highly,” she said.
“And is not Miss Kate—your prospective stepdaughter—glorious?” Seward liked nothing better than to make lighthearted mischief.
“Oh, is that the word?” Mrs. Douglas gave him her full face; and full smile. He noted that the teeth were not as regular as those of a Greek goddess. But then she need not eat marble. “Glorious,” she repeated in her soft voice. “Well, yes, she wants glory.”
“Meaning she desires it, or lacks it? Our old verbs have so many meanings.”
“And you know them all.” But Mrs. Douglas was not about to be drawn out on the dangerous subject of Kate. “Mr. Chase did pay me a call one day when I was out. So he left me, as his card, half a one-dollar bill, with his picture on it.”
“Such elegance!” Seward was delighted at the thought of the ponderous, Bible-quoting, hymn-singing, monomaniacal (on the subject of himself and the presidency) Chase tearing up dollar bills and leaving them as calling cards on beautiful ladies. He would have to tell the President, who had not had much to laugh at since the beginning of the third and last session of the Thirty-seventh Congress of the United States on December 1, 1862. In the last ten days, the full weight of the Republican Party’s loss at the election had been felt. As a result, the radicals were now crying out for Seward’s head; and Chase was not so secretly inciting them. Once Seward ceased to be premier, Chase would take his place, with the blessing of Congress and the acquiescence of the weak and now weakened Lincoln. Seward’s thoughts, always mercurial, were turning dark indeed, even as he smiled at Adéle Douglas; but she lightened his mood with her response to Chase. “I sent him back his unusual calling card, with a note saying that I did not accept money from gentlemen.”
Seward laughed wholeheartedly. Mrs. Douglas, pleased to have made him laugh, said, “As the eyes and ears—not to mention gaoler—of the government, what has become of my poor aunt, Mrs. Greenhow?”
“We exchanged her and a number of other lady spies some time ago …”
“I know. I was so grateful. But I thought it better not to put anything in writing to you. Yes, I know you sent her to Richmond. But then what happened to her?”
“You don’t know?” Seward wondered if Mrs. Douglas might not be lying. There were times when he felt that, except for a few hundred outlander politicians like himself, Washington was the actual capital of the rebellion.
“If I knew, Mr. Seward, I would not ask.” This was dignified.
“According to my spies—and they are, literally, spies—Mrs. Greenhow is now living in Paris, paying court to the empress, and intriguing to get the French to recognize the Confederacy or, failing that, to annex all of Mexico, a bone of contention between Mr. Mercier, over there, and me.”
“My aunt is so—vehement.” Mrs. Douglas shook her head. Then she embraced the Baroness Gerolt while the Baron greeted his crony Seward.
“Well, Governor,” said Gerolt in his heavily accented English, “I have written my government today that the war will be finished one way or the other before the first of the year.”
“One way, Baron, yes; but why the other?” Seward took the teacup that a maid brought him.
“Berlin requires me to sound neutral.”
“I wish London required the same of Lord Lyons. I tell you the British legation should be called the rebel legation. I think you may be right,” Seward added, in a low voice. “We seem to be preparing for the final confrontation in Virginia. Lee and all his army are at Fredericksburg, or so I read in the newspapers.”
Gerolt laughed. “I am told, through our newspapers, that our new chief of Cabinet very much admires the way that you arrest editors but he dares not do the same in Prussia because he says that, unlike you, he is devoted to freedom of speech.”
“Mr. Bismarck has a nice wit.”
“We think so, privately. Also, privately, he is fascinated by this war of yours.”
“He can come and take it away with him any day of the week, my dear Baron. It is all his.”
“I shall transmit your proposal. Meanwhile, I have sent him your latest book.”
Seward had just published a volume of his speeches and correspondence as Secretary of State. He had been heavily criticized for doing such a thing while in office; and in wartime. He had even been accused by Sumner of levity and cynicism and indifference to the abolitionist cause.
John Hay bowed low to Seward. “Premier,” he said.
“Young man.” Seward acknowledged the obeisance with a wave of his long pale hand.
“Baron.” Hay shook hands with the Prussian, who smiled benignly. “Miss Carlota has done me the honor of saying that she will come to the theater with me, if I have your consent.”
“I will telegraph Berlin.”
As Hay and Gerolt chatted amiably, Hay watched Seward, who was surveying the room with his usual quizzi
cal air. Hay wondered how much Seward knew of the plot to remove him. Resourceful and clever as the little man was, he had grown more and more estranged from his one-time colleagues in the Senate, where the chiefs of the anti-Seward cabal were located.
Shortly after McClellan’s removal, Senators Wade, Hale and Fessenden had called on the President to congratulate him. The meeting had been pleasant enough; but there had been a number of pointed references to Seward’s lack of zeal in the matter of abolition. Lincoln had chosen to ignore, through deflection, these comments. Now something was stirring at the Capitol. Ben Wade had been quoted as saying that the war could never be won until Seward was sent away and a lieutenant-general—a true Republican—placed in command of the entire nation, as dictator. Who this potentate should be, Wade did not say. But Chase was always a magical figure for the senatorial members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.
Mrs. Eames led the Prussian minister away. Seward turned to Hay. “I sometimes wonder what is the use of growing old. You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.” Seward sighed, theatrically. He had used almost the exact same words to Hay in the autumn as preface to the latest human folly that had allegedly come his way—military jealousy. He had been appalled that McClellan, envious of Pope, had let Pope go down in flames at Bull Run. Now Seward was on another not-too-dissimilar tack. “I have only just begun to understand what ambition will do to a man.”
“You mean Mr. Chase, sir?”
“Johnny!” Seward feigned shock. “I never speak ill of a colleague; or of anyone. It is my custom to speak only in wise generalities, occasionally decorated by the odd aphorism or insight so annoying to Senator Sumner. But I do believe Mr. Chase is altogether too frequent a visitor to the Capitol. Mind you, during the redecoration—so tastefully if expensively done—I can see his eagerness to observe how the Treasury’s money is spent. Now that it looks as if they may actually put a permanent dome over the rotunda, I realize that he has a proprietary feeling—even one of kinship, since the dome is bound to resemble his own noble head, and yet why does he forgather with the Jacobins, who detest this Administration? And why was he observed yesterday in the Speaker’s chamber, staring at himself in a gold-framed mirror and—thinking himself alone—saying to his reflection, with solemn unction, ‘Mr. President Chase’?”
Hay roared with laughter at the image. Seward grinned mischievously. He had said all that he had intended to say on the subject but he had sent Hay a signal. Seward was one of the few people who knew that Hay often wrote Washington stories, anonymously, for the New York newspapers. Hay’s speciality was inside information about the Administration, which seemed, at first, to be scandalous but then proved to be subtly favorable to the President. He often published in the World, a newspaper noted for its virulent hatred of Lincoln. It gave Hay a good deal of pleasure to know that the editor never suspected that he was being manipulated by the President’s own secretary. Meanwhile, Hay and Nicolay had seen to it that journalists of every sort had been given military and civilian posts in different parts of the country so that they could then write stories favorable to the Administration for their old newspapers.
During Hay’s first year in the White House, he had thought it a good idea to keep his own stories secret from the Ancient. But since Thurlow Weed and Seward both knew—it was Weed who had made the arrangements with the World and the Journal—Weed had promptly blabbed to the President, who had been troubled. “Is it proper?” he had asked Hay.
“Is it proper, sir,” Hay had answered, “that we are never allowed to answer our critics in those papers?”
Lincoln had let the matter drop; and Hay continued his secret journalistic career. He had been amused to learn from Seward that the son of the American minister to the Court of St. James, Henry Adams, was doing exactly the same thing; and only Seward knew about both young men. But then only Seward probably knew everything worth knowing on earth, thought Hay, who said, “I wonder if the readers of the World might be interested. I’m sure the editor, Mr. Marble …”
“What a terrible man is Manton Marble!” With that, Seward, inscrutable as Ignatius Loyola himself, crossed the room in order to torment M. Mercier about Mexico. Hay had received his instruction. He was to expose the Chase cabal against Seward and, ultimately, the President.
Mr. Eames joined Hay at the fireplace. Coal burned and hissed in the grate. The parlor was warm; but Hay was always chilly now. He stood with his back to the fire as his host complimented him on the President’s message to Congress, which Nicolay had allowed Hay to deliver, in person.
“I thought some of it even poetic,” said Eames. “Highly poetic.”
“Even Shakespearean?”
Eames smiled. “That is a little lofty, perhaps. But the last lines had their echoes.” The Tycoon had labored for weeks on the message, the first since his party’s electoral set-back in November. The ending had been beautiful. “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
But there had been many objections made to the principal theme of the message, the buying of the slaves by the government; and then their colonization elsewhere. Hay thought Lincoln somewhat obsessed on the subject of colonization, while Mr. Eames thought that Lincoln was under some sort of hallucination about the nature of the war itself. “Mind you, I’m an old Democratic editor, and so I see things with a half-Southern eye. But when the President thinks that the rebellion will end if we compensate the slave-owners with money, he totally mistakes what the war is about.”
“What, then, is it about?” Hay had often wondered. No explanation had ever seemed to him entirely plausible. It was like the fever; it came for no reason and left for no reason.
“I thought Mr. Lincoln understood that better than any man, at the beginning. It was the principle that the Union cannot be dissolved, ever.”
“But it had been dissolved before he was inaugurated.”
“So he started the war in order to put the Union back together again. That is what the fighting is all about. But now he seems to have shifted over to the slavery side, and there he is wrong—in my humble view. He tells us that in the thirty-eight years between now and 1900, the government can sell bonds and pay off the slave-owners. Well, perhaps, it can. But what makes him think that any Southerner will put down his arms because the government is willing to pay him for his slaves? The South is not fighting for slavery, Mr. Hay. The South is fighting for independence. You can buy all their slaves, and they’ll take the money. But they will not come back into the Union except by force.”
“You think it has gone so far?” Hay had not heard a supporter of the Union present so confidently—and plausibly—the Southern case.
“Oh, Mr. Hay, the cost! Think of all the blood that has been shed; and think of all that will be shed; and then ask yourself, will any man say that he has fought in so terrible a war just for the right to keep slaves? No, he will say that he fought to keep his country free; and he will mean it.”
CERTAINLY, John Surratt meant it, as he and David crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, the wet snow swirling all about them. John described what had happened the day before on the Rappahannock. “I was supposed to come straight here. But then all hell broke loose, starting Saturday in this terrible fog, and going on till yesterday when the Yanks retreated back across the river. They lost three times the men we did. I know. I saw a lot of the fighting from near Marye’s Hill, where our artillery was. We made a trap for Burnside; and he fell into it.”
The two young men entered Sullivan’s Saloon, just off the avenue, now filled with ambulance carriages. Although the saloon’s owner had been born in Ireland, he was entirely dedicated to the Confederacy. But since practically everything that Sullivan said was posed as a joke, Pink
erton’s men had given him no real trouble, while he, in return, had made all sorts of trouble for the secret service, passing on false information, usually having to do with the vast size of the Confederate armies.
David and John sat at the back of the bar, near the Franklin stove. The floor was strewn with sawdust turned to mud as a result of wet boots, spilled beer and the spittle of tobacco-chewers. Though it was noon, gaslights hissed cozily from the low ceiling and the free lunch was now being set out by a mulatto waiter, as loyal to the Confederacy as his employer. David helped himself to a boiled egg while Sullivan himself brought them mugs of beer. The front of the bar was crowded with what looked to be countryfolk of the sort who brought their produce to the Center Market, which was what many of them did. But there were also a pair of night-riders, drinking whiskey and talking to each other in low voices.
Sullivan sat with John and David; he listened with fascination to John’s account of the Union army’s defeat at Fredericksburg. “What happens now?” Sullivan asked, when John paused for a moment in his delighted if somewhat awed account.
John shrugged. “I guess General Burnside will stick there in the mud till spring. Or he’ll retreat to here.” John shook his head. “A year ago they were almost in Richmond and now they can’t even cross the Rappahannock, sixty miles away.”
“They can’t fight, which is lucky for us,” said David, repeating what his friends were always saying.
“Oh, they can fight,” said John. “You never saw anything like how wave after wave of them went up that hill only to get blown to bits by the cannon in the breastworks. They don’t have one good general, that’s what is lucky for us. They also don’t have us night-riders,” he added in a whisper. “We’ve got Pinkerton so full of misinformation now that he truly thinks General Lee has a million men under arms, and that we’re fixing to kidnap Lincoln.”
“Why don’t we?” asked David.
“There’s no point. We’re winning. Lee’s going to be in Philadelphia by summer. When that happens, the war ends.”