by Gore Vidal
“He did harm to McClellan; and harm to Burnside. I refuse to put myself in a position where he can put the knife in my back.” Hooker turned and faced Lincoln, vulnerable back now to the door.
“Well, General, I am not about to relieve General Halleck because of some personal animosity on your part. But I will arrange that you report directly to me from the field; and not through General Halleck. That way he cannot, as you say, put a knife in your back. Is that satisfactory to you, sir?”
“Yes, sir, that is satisfactory. I accept the command.”
“Thank you.” Lincoln got off the window-sill, and went to the pigeonhole desk and removed a letter, which he gave to Hooker. “Read this at your leisure, General. Since we are on the subject of satisfactoriness, I must tell you that there have been times when I have found you less than satisfactory. I have listed those times. I have also written out my views on a number of subjects.”
Hooker’s florid face grew dark. “I, not satisfactory? In what way, sir?”
“You talk too much,” said the President, equably. “Yes, I know that I talk too much, too, but I don’t ever say much of anything. I just tell stories, and make a noise and keep my own counsel. Now I have recorded in the letter those comments of yours that I do not like, nor want ever to hear again.”
“I am stunned! And, on my honor, I am outraged that you should think … What has been reported to you?”
“Your constant attacks on your fellow generals have not gone unremarked. Witness, General Burnside’s ill-advised attempt to remove you from the army. You were the same with McClellan. Now, you yourself are the commander and I’m afraid that your past spirit may turn upon you. You must repair your fences or, as the farmer said …”
Hooker was not ready for a Lincoln story. “I have never said behind any man’s back what I would not say to his face.”
“Then I would enjoy hearing you tell me how I should be removed, by force, from my office, and the government turned over to a military dictator, like yourself.” Lincoln smiled, benignly, as he spoke.
Hooker began to stammer. “I have said no such thing. Not like that, anyway. Not about me, certainly. Or any other general, by name, taking your place. Perhaps I said you should be more forceful, more like a dictator. But I never said …”
Lincoln raised his hand. Hooker fell silent. “Only those generals who gain success can set up as dictators. That seems to be one of the few absolute laws of history. What I now ask of you is a military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”
“Sir, you will have your military success. That is a promise. As for the dictatorship …”
“Don’t give it a second thought,” said the President, amiably; and then he sent Hooker to see Stanton. Once the general was gone, Lincoln entered the Reception Room, where Seward stood at the window, watching the hogs being slaughtered at the base of Washington’s monument.
“Well, Governor, it’s Hooker.”
“You’ve given him the Army of the Potomac?”
Lincoln nodded. “I think he is a fighting general. I don’t much like his character. He intrigued against McClellan and Burnside, and now he’s after Halleck …”
“I thought politicians were vain and treacherous,” said Seward, settling in a chair. “But we are like cherubim and seraphim compared to military men.”
“I can’t say I feel much like a cherub today, Governor.” Lincoln leaned against the door and pressed his back hard against the wood to relieve the aches and pains of age.
“Well, you look seraphically bright,” said Seward, who indeed thought Lincoln looked less than usually haggard. “You realize, of course, that you have made this appointment without consulting your Cabinet.” Seward was mischievous.
“Surely, I consulted all of you, and we took a vote, and I abided by the majority, as I always do.” Lincoln was equally mischievous.
“Well, one thing,” said Seward, “Chase won’t go to Ben Wade, complaining. Hooker is Chase’s man.”
“So I gather. So I gather.” Lincoln shut his eyes; and smiled. “I must say that the presidential ambitions of Mr. Chase are like a horsefly on the neck of a plow horse—it keeps him lively about his work.”
But although Mr. Chase’s presidential aspirations were now growing in intensity—the election was only a year and a half away—he was subject to a distraction that touched upon another of his passions. One of the Treasury clerks was William O’Connor, a literary young man whose pro-abolition novel, Harrington, had much pleased Chase. The previous day, O’Connor had asked Chase if he would consider for a clerkship a man mysteriously considered by O’Connor to be a great poet. “He comes to you, sir, with a letter of introduction and commendation from Ralph Waldo Emerson.” At the mention of this letter, Chase agreed to see the infamous Walt Whitman.
On a cold morning, as Chase stood in front of the coal fire in his office, warming his hands, the large, gray-bearded, pink-faced, blue-eyed poet, dressed somewhat theatrically in Southern planter style, was shown into the room by O’Connor, who made the introductions and then tactfully withdrew.
Chase stared at Walt Whitman; who stared at Chase. The immorality of Whitman’s very bad book of poetry had been much discussed in Columbus a few years earlier. Emerson’s endorsement of a poet whose horrifying emphasis on the sexual in man was equalled only by his absence of any talent for versification gave credence to the recurring rumor that the great Emerson was now senile. Nevertheless, thought Chase, senile or not, Emerson could still sign his name.
“Mr. Emerson has spoken of you to me with such admiration.” The poet’s voice was husky; the accent common New York.
“I gather he has written me a letter,” said Chase. “In his own hand,” Chase heard himself add, somewhat ridiculously.
“Oh, yes! He has also recommended me to Governor Seward and to Senators Sumner and King. I have seen the senators. Mr. King showed me the Capitol the other day. Not in one’s flightiest dreams has there been so much marble and china, gold and bronze, so many painted gods and goddesses …”
“I have often thought that the new decorations are somewhat too opulent and pagan for a Protestant republic.” Chase wondered if Whitman had brought Emerson’s letter with him.
Whitman nodded. “I was somewhat surprised. But then I thought, well, the republic is no longer young, and so the inside of the Capitol is now every bit as sumptuous as the interior of Taylor’s saloon in the Broadway, which you doubtless know.”
Chase felt an involuntary shudder go through him. The man was plainly a beast. “I am temperance, sir. I have never set foot in anyone’s saloon. About Mr. Emerson’s letter …”
“I seldom go to Taylor’s. Poets cannot afford the tariff. Anyway, Mr. Sumner has been most kind, and he said that he would speak to you. I have also been to the White House, and though I did not meet Mr. Lincoln, I talked to the young secretary—such a handsome manly lad—John Hay, who is a poet, too; and a charming one. He asked me to sign his copy of Leaves of Grass.”
Chase had heard tales of John Hay’s attendance at disorderly houses. He was glad that Kate only flirted idly with the young man, who was plainly debauched.
Whitman was now describing his part-time job as a copyist at the Paymaster’s office. “It’s only an hour or two a day. Then I make the rounds of the hospitals. I bring what gifts I can afford to the wounded. I write letters for them. Comfort them. My own brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg. That is why I came here, to see him. I was also robbed of all my money the first day in town, but then I ran into Mr. O’Connor, and now I live in his rooming house …”
“Is Mrs. Whitman with you?”
“No, my mother lives in Brooklyn. She is not well. So it is important I get employment. Mr. Emerson thinks that I should continue as a journalist, but hacking on the press here is not really practical …”
“In Mr. Emerson’s letter, does he mention what you might do in the government’s service?” Chase thought this approach subtle in the extreme
.
“Well, here it is,” said Whitman. He gave Chase the letter. On the envelope was written “The Honorable S. P. Chase.” Inside was a letter dated January 10, endorsing Walt Whitman highly for any sort of government post; and signed, Chase excitedly saw, with the longed-for-but-never-owned autograph “R. W. Emerson.”
“I shall give Mr. Emerson, and yourself, sir, every sort of consideration,” said Chase, putting the letter in his pocket where it seemed to him to irradiate his whole being as if it were some holy relic.
“I shall be truly grateful. As will Mr. Emerson, of course.” Chase shook Whitman’s hand at the door and let him out. Then Chase placed the letter square in the middle of his desk, and pondered what sort of frame would set it off best.
O’Connor entered during this happy reverie. “Well, Mr. Secretary …”
“What?” Chase looked up. Then he recalled the business at hand. “I must tell you, Mr. O’Connor, that it is my view that Mr. Whitman is a decidedly disreputable person, based on what he himself has written, presumably about himself.”
“Oh, sir, he is a splendid original man—and a great poet.”
“I defer, Mr. O’Connor, to your personal knowledge of him. But what might the press do to us here if it were known that I was harboring the author of pages—or leaves, as he would term them—that one could not allow a lady to read or even a young man of—susceptible nature? Far better a single page of your Harrington than all Whitman’s leaves of, so appropriately named, grass. Anyway, until now I have nothing of Emerson’s in his handwriting, and I shall be glad to keep this.”
The first secretary then ushered Jay Cooke into the office. “Thank you, Mr. O’Connor,” said Chase. “I am sure that Mr. Seward can find a place for his one-time constituent.”
As the door closed behind O’Connor, Jay Cooke said, “Mr. President!”
“Oh, don’t tempt the gods! It is too soon to do more than hope.”
ELEVEN
IT WAS Mary Todd Lincoln’s second visit to Corporal Stone of Lexington, Kentucky, late of the rebel army. She had known him as a boy. He was an exact contemporary of Little Aleck. Mary sat in a straight chair beside his cot, which was at the end of one aisle in the main display room of the Patent Office. Next to the cot a glass-enclosed piece of complex machinery, patented in an earlier time, somewhat screened them from the view of the curious.
Corporal Stone was red-haired and soft-spoken; he had lost both legs at Chancellorsville in Virginia, where the Union army, under “Fighting Joe” Hooker, had been outfought by General Lee and driven back across the Rappahannock.
“But it will be hard for us, losing Stonewall Jackson like that.” General Jackson had been accidentally killed by one of his own snipers.
“Did you know General Jackson?” Mary arranged the small bouquet of hothouse roses in a mug on the table beside his cot. She tried to inhale only the odor of the roses and not that of the chamber pots that seemed never to be emptied.
“Oh, I saw him. But I never spoke to him. He was a strange sort of man, very religious.” Corporal Stone smiled, reminding her of Aleck. She smiled back; and tried not to weep. “One of the boys here was with him, and he said that when God sent down one of the archangels to take “Stonewall” up to Heaven, they couldn’t find him anywhere. So they went back to Heaven, and there he was, already. He had outflanked them.”
“Our men fight well, don’t they?” said Mary absently.
“You mean us Confederates, ma’am?” Corporal Stone looked at her with some amazement.
“I meant … us Kentuckians,” said Mary. “That is all that I meant. But I ought not to have said it, for I am loyal to the Union.”
“Back home, they say you are really with us, secretly.”
“No, I am not. But what has happened to us all grieves my heart. I have lost two brothers. I may lose more.”
“I have lost two brothers and two uncles and now—two legs.”
“It is tragic.”
“Well, I knew what I was doing, and how it might end. I was at the Phoenix Hotel …”
“Where Mr. Breckinridge always boarded.” Mary wondered where Cousin John was. He had been at Shiloh; he was now a general. Little Emilie’s husband, Ben Helm, was serving under him. Lately, there had been no news of either of them.
“… I remember it was a Thursday evening, September 19, 1861. The first Yankee soldiers arrived in Lexington. Well, when they marched past the hotel, one of our hotheads fired on them from a window. No, it wasn’t me, Mrs. Lincoln. But that was when I went and joined up with John Hunt Morgan …”
“… the Lexington Rifles, I remember. He is kin to us, too, I think.”
“We are all kin, which is maybe the problem. Anyway, fifty of us Lexington boys, under Captain Morgan, headed down the Versailles Pike to the Green River, and we’ve been fighting ever since, and Lexington has been under Yankee military law ever since, and even your stepmother don’t dare speak out against the Yankees.”
“I doubt that,” said Mary, a trifle grimly; she had no liking for her father’s second wife, a woman of great determination, to say the least. “I was told that after her son Sam—my half-brother—was killed at Shiloh, some Yankee-sympathizer was blaming John Morgan for getting you Lexington boys to go join the rebels, and Mrs. Todd said to a large gathering, ‘I wish there were ten thousand John Morgans.’ ”
“Well, she is a Todd,” said Corporal Stone; and laughed.
“By now, yes, I suppose she is. We all knew John Morgan, all his life.”
Keckley came toward them. Mary rose. “When you are well, I shall try to get you sent home.”
“Bless you, Mrs. Lincoln.”
Mary and Keckley were then joined by a hospital matron from the Sanitary Commission. She guided them through the various halls of the Patent Office, which was now one vast incongruous hospital. Unmovable inventions still remained where they had always been on permanent exhibition, surrounded now by the highly impermanent ever-mutable flesh of wounded men. Mary delivered flowers and fruit; and spoke to this one and that one.
The matron was filled with complaints. The hospital had been overwhelmed after the defeat at Chancellorsville. “I thought Fredericksburg in December would destroy our whole system. But this is worse. They keep coming and coming, the wounded.” She was a stout woman from New England. “We have no more room here. We are trying to take over a floor or two of each hotel, but the politicians fight us.”
“Would that they were here,” said Mary, bitterly. “And these boys at home and well.”
“My sentiments, Mrs. President. But I do wish—if you will forgive me—the President ends this war before we lose all the young men in the country.”
“We may well lose them all at the South,” said Mary. They had stopped in front of a huge iron plow, invented, if that was the word, by General Washington. “There are fewer boys there than at the North.”
“We’ve mixed them, as you’ve seen. We are supposed to keep the prisoners separate. But we can’t. There are too many now. I wonder how much longer this will go on, our being defeated all the time.”
“My husband must find a general first. Unfortunately, the best ones are all on the other side.” Mary smiled. “I ought not to say that. I dare say I shall read in the New York World that I was speaking treason, but I have lost interest in the vampire press.”
“Would that they would lose interest in you, ma’am,” said Keckley, guiding Mary to the door.
The search for a general was about to begin again. While Mary was at the Patent Office, General Hooker was at the White House with the President. Once again Lincoln perched on the window-sill and once again “Fighting Joe” marched up and down the room. But the nature of the march had entirely changed from their earlier meeting. Hooker was now defensive and ill-at-ease, while Lincoln seemed worn out.
“I am certain,” began Hooker, with no great display of certainty in his manner—he had been knocked unconscious when a Confederate shell hit a pilla
r of the porch on which he was standing, and the pillar had fallen on him, and he had been unconscious for hours. Once recovered, he had given up drink and without drink there was, everyone said, no longer a “Fighting Joe” Hooker but simply another incompetent Union general named Hooker, whose headquarters, according to the military son of the American minister to London, was like a brothel-casino. In fact, so addicted was Hooker and his immediate staff to the flesh that Washington’s army of prostitutes was now known as Hooker’s girls or, for short, Hookers.
“I am certain,” said Hooker, “that I can once again cross the Rappahannock, and while Lee is still regrouping, I can strike at Richmond.”
“I will follow you in this, of course,” said Lincoln. “But, for the moment, I’d be happier if you were simply to stay where you are and hold off the enemy until we have worked out some large design. Meanwhile, I have now been twice to see you in the field. I have talked to the various commanders, and what I feared might happen has begun to happen. As Burnside lost the support of his commanders—of which you were one—so now you are losing their support.”
Hooker stopped his pacing. The pale eyes stared at the President, more like those of a frightened rabbit than of a predatory fighting animal. “Who has spoken to you against me?”
“I cannot tell you. But it is now quite general.”
“Do you wish to replace me?”
Lincoln shook his head; and slid off the window-sill. “I’m not in the habit of throwing away a gun just because it has misfired once. But, for the moment, I am content not to go firing at just any target.”
“I think, sir, you should consult all the ranking generals of the army and not just my rivals within the Army of the Potomac.” Hooker was once more his fighting self. “You will find me held in the highest esteem.”
“As you are still in command, it is plain that I, too, hold you in the highest esteem.” Lincoln rang the bell. “We shall be in communication, General.”