Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  Lincoln nodded. “When can we take her home?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  The presence of Lincoln in the ward was causing a considerable furor, and Seward thought that the sooner they left, the better. But Lincoln told Keckley to go take some air and rest while, “I hold the fort.”

  So Seward sat on one side of the bed and Lincoln sat on the other, and soldiers on crutches would come stumping by, trying to get a glimpse of the President through a crack in the sheets. Lincoln and Seward spoke in low voices across Mary’s unconscious form. “Meade is now waiting for Lee to attack,” said Lincoln, grimly. “Our generals always wait to be attacked. It is not their nature to attack first.”

  “There is Grant.” Seward wished that he had not, on doctor’s orders, been obliged to give up snuff: the air in the hot stuffy ward was beginning to make him ill.

  “He does not move for now. He is stopped at Vicksburg. You know, back in April, I sent Washburne out to see him. Apparently the rumors are true. He does get drunk now and again but he has an adjutant who gives him all hell when he does; and if things look too bad, they send for Mrs. Grant. Washburne stays in close touch with the adjutant. So all is well.” Lincoln fiddled with his glasses. “I like Grant. He doesn’t worry and bother me. He isn’t shrieking for reinforcements all the time. He takes what troops we can safely give him, and does the best he can with what he has got. If he takes Vicksburg …”

  There was a scratching sound on the sheet. Then a colonel from the War Department tiptoed into the makeshift tent. Not certain how to comport himself, he gave the President the dispatches and tiptoed away. Lincoln read quickly. “Lee is attacking. Meade will stay where he is. He does not know whether his own operations will be defensive or offensive.” Lincoln sighed. “Surely, they are both.”

  “Or neither. You should get some rest, Mr. President.”

  “No. I’ll stay here until Mrs. Pomroy takes over. But you go on home, Governor. After all, this is the hour of the day when you expect your reinforcements.”

  Seward chuckled. “It is a pity you are not more like General Grant and me.”

  “The thought sometimes occurs to me that I am, in this case anyway, truly pitiful.”

  As Seward departed, a youthful military doctor hurried into the tent. “I’m the doctor, Your Excellency. Captain Rewalt. From Pennsylvania. I dressed her wounds. There is some danger of infection …”

  As Seward made his way out of the ward, he was smartly saluted by the colonel from the War Department. “Sir, should I wait for the President? Or go back to Mr. Stanton’s office?”

  “I suggest you wait for him. I’ll borrow Mr. Lincoln’s carriage; then send it straight back. What actually happened to Mrs. Lincoln?”

  “The coachman—he broke an arm but he’s all right otherwise—says that someone took all the screws out from the driver’s seat and then glued the seat back on, knowing that after a certain amount of jiggling, the thing would fall off.”

  Almost every day Pinkerton brought Seward rumors of plans to assassinate the President. Most were straightforward threats to shoot him. This attempt was unusually ingenious, planned from within the White House. “The seat was … altered today?”

  The colonel nodded. “Between the morning when Mrs. Lincoln drove into town from the Soldiers’ Home to the Mansion and when she drove back.”

  Seward thanked the colonel and got into the carriage. Obviously, whoever had arranged for the accident had access to the White House stables.

  The next day, Mary was conscious. She was moved back to the White House, while the President, in effect, moved into the Telegraph Room of the War Department. Here he followed the battle in Pennsylvania. Although reports were conflicting, the enormity of the losses on both sides was soon apparent. Plainly, this was no ordinary battle.

  Hay was constantly on the move between Mansion and War Department. Nicolay was now president de facto while the president de jure tried to direct a three-day battle from the Telegraph Room, whose floor was now covered with flimsies, the yellow copy-sheets of incoming telegrams. Stanton and Halleck would occasionally join the President. Hay was impressed with how entirely directionless the two men were. To the messages from the clattering machine they simply responded with cries and expletives, with moans and sighs.

  Lincoln, at least, had an objective. Lee’s army must now be destroyed once and for all. Lee was far from home, and he was, in Lincoln’s view, outnumbered. Best of all, he was giving ground to Meade. Strange new names were coming off the wire. Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Hill were often reversed: charges were made up Cemetery Ridge and down Seminary Hill; then there was Culp’s Hill and Round Top Mountain. During the long sultry day, Hay tried to visualize these places; but failed. Of those who visited the Telegraph Room, only Stanton had ever been to Gettysburg; and he remembered nothing but the courthouse, where he had defended an embezzler.

  By nightfall, Lee had been driven off. “Now we have got him!” Lincoln’s eyes glowed. He turned to Halleck, who was in the room. “Send Meade word that he is to pursue the enemy, and cut him off before he reaches the Potomac.”

  Halleck scratched his arm; and rolled his watery eyes. “I don’t think, sir, that at this hour of the night, after many thousands of casualties, and many hours of hard fighting, any general could begin a pursuit …”

  The telegrapher gave a start. “Mr. Lincoln, a message from General Meade. He is congratulating the Army of the Potomac for having defeated, I quote him, sir, ‘an enemy superior in numbers and flushed with pride of a successful invasion, that had attempted to overcome and destroy this army.’ ”

  “What a strange tone!” Lincoln frowned. “I suppose it is always good to say the enemy is superior in number even when he is not, but why speak of a successful invasion, when it is now not? Why say that the enemy has attempted to overcome and destroy us when that is what we must do to him? Go on.”

  The telegrapher continued. “ ‘The commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.’ ”

  Lincoln leapt from his chair. “Drive the invader from our soil! My God! Is that all?”

  “It is a very great deal, sir,” said Halleck.

  Lincoln rounded on Halleck; and for a moment, Hay caught a glint of true violence in the Tycoon’s eyes; but then the usual iron control returned. “You will, General, in due course—by tomorrow morning, that is—tell General Meade that he is to pursue Lee. We have the rebels within our grasp. We have only to stretch forth our hands and they are ours. The war, General Halleck, must now come swiftly to an end.” Lincoln then dictated a congratulatory message to the Army of the Potomac. When this message had gone out on the wire, Lincoln turned to Hay and said, “Well, I can now go to bed. But, first, Mr. Chandler,” he gestured to the telegrapher, “send a message to my son. Three words, ‘Come to Washington.’ Sign it with my name; and charge the message to me, personally. Good-night.”

  As they crossed the avenue, the Tycoon was both tired and febrile. He could not let go the phrase “our soil.” “Of course, Pennsylvania is our soil. But so is Virginia. So are the Carolinas. So is Texas. They are forever our soil. That is what the war is about and these damned fools cannot grasp it; or will not grasp it. The whole country is our soil. I cannot fathom such men.”

  Hay could not help but think that few men could fathom Lincoln’s passion for the Union, which had become, for him, the ultimate emblem of all earthly if not heavenly divinity.

  The next day—propitiously, the Fourth of July, an Independence Day which the capital had already decided to celebrate to the fullest—Stanton announced that Lee’s army had been turned back at Gettysburg; and was now retreating south to the Potomac River and Virginia.

  The President waved to the crowds that had assembled in front of the White House; and watched the fireworks; and kept Mrs. Lincoln company. He was highly annoyed that he had not yet heard from Robert.

  “There is bad b
lood,” said Nicolay to Hay, “between the Hellcat and the Prince of Rails.” Side by side, they were preparing answers to the various congratulatory telegrams that had begun to arrive at the White House.

  “Is the cause of this blood gone bad the beautiful Miss Hooper, daughter of the dry-goods magnate of Georgetown, whose flashing eyes ensnared our Robert at the last Yuletide season, specifically, in the parlor of Mrs. Eames, when he confessed to me, sotto voce, that he would like to see her elevated to Princess of Rails?”

  “God forbid! That really would kill Madam, if she knew. No, it was over those two midgets that Mr. Barnum brought to the White House.”

  “Tom Thumb and his bride, who looked not unlike a miniature Madam. That is, Tom Thumb looked like Madam, not his beauteous consort.”

  “Well, before the reception for the two Thumbs,” said Nicolay, “Robert told his mother that he would not be joining them. When she asked him why not, he said, ‘My notions of duty, perhaps, are somewhat different from yours.’ ”

  Hay whistled softly. “That’s what Harvard does to you, Nico. They should’ve sent him to Brown. He will become more and more intolerable.”

  “But then,” said Nico, lapsing into his original language, “Robert ist unser Prinz.”

  The Tuesday Cabinet meeting had been a most gloomy affair, thought Chase. The President had described at length his efforts to get Meade to pursue Lee. But Meade still remained at Gettysburg. “He could have been in Hagerstown by now. Lee’s army is still north of the Potomac, which is in flood. So there is the bulk of the enemy army, trapped between us and the river.”

  “What does General Halleck say?” For some time, Welles had been urging the President to send Old Brains off to retirement. On this one point, Chase and Welles were in perfect accord.

  “General Halleck is very short with me,” said the President, sadly. “The troops are not yet ready, I am told. And the general in the field always knows best. So I drop the subject.”

  The new Secretary of the Interior, Mr. John P. Usher, plump and fair, an Indiana lawyer who had been assistant secretary to the departed and unmourned Caleb Smith, was interested in the progress of the enrollment of conscriptable men. Stanton was rather short with him, thought Chase. “We’ve got no full reports yet. They are still in the field, as our generals say. But we have millions of able men to draw on; and the rebels don’t.”

  “But will they let us draw on them?” asked Usher.

  “They—whoever they are—have no choice,” said Stanton.

  Seward got up from the lounge where he had been stretched out full-length during the entire Cabinet meeting; a perfect symbol, in Chase’s view, of the general slovenliness of the Administration. He wished Ben Wade could be somehow present but invisible. “Has anyone any idea what our losses have been?” asked Seward.

  “At Gettysburg, they were—” Stanton began.

  But Seward interrupted him. “No, I mean for this last year. We have been fighting pretty steadily since the Peninsula, and we’ve been sustaining great losses. There’s been Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Antietam and now Gettysburg. We’ve been taking quite a pounding …”

  “So have the rebels; and they don’t have the men we do.” Stanton tugged at his wiry beard and blinked his red-glazed eyes. “We calculate our losses to be about the same as theirs, which is desperate for them, but not for us.”

  “Even so,” said Usher, “won’t these losses of ours somewhat chill our drive to conscript more men?”

  Chase looked at Lincoln, who was now present only in the flesh. The President’s eyes were those of someone lost in a waking dream.

  Stanton coughed and wheezed with irritability. “To conscript is to conscript, Mr. Usher. It makes no difference whether or not the man conscripted is chilled by our losses.”

  Bates, with a gentle smile, said, “Mr. Stanton is trying to say that if anybody resists the draft, he’ll be hanged, and I, as Attorney-General, will have to justify these hangings under the Conscription Act.”

  Seward sat on the lounge combing his hair, a habit which greatly annoyed Chase; and not simply because he himself was now almost entirely bald. “I revert to my original question, Mr. Stanton. What have been our casualties during this last year?”

  “One hundred ten thousand men killed, missing or wounded,” said Stanton. “Naturally, I don’t have all the figures from the West.”

  Lincoln got to his feet; and bade them farewell. Chase asked if he might remain and discuss the new bond issues. Together the two men went into the President’s office. Chase found Lincoln as vague and tentative as ever when it came to financial matters. Fortunately, he had always given Chase a free hand. But there had been problems lately, and the price of gold had been rising. Chase was concerned that Gettysburg might not in itself be a large enough victory to encourage the financial markets, not to mention the speculations in gold. Suddenly, Gideon Welles flung open the office door. Wig askew, Welles stared at them, red in the face and out of breath.

  “Well, Neptune, you seem to have got a look at some sort of terrible sea monster,” said Lincoln. “Sit down. Here, take some water.”

  Welles drank the water that Lincoln poured out for him. Then he announced, in gasps, “Message. From Admiral Porter. In the West. Vicksburg has fallen.”

  “Which way?” asked Lincoln, as if unable to believe that there could be good news of such magnitude.

  “Our way. On July the Fourth, after a siege of eighty days. Grant allowed the Confederate garrison, some thirty thousand men, to go home—on parole, as he put it. Then he occupied the city. The Mississippi River is ours.”

  “I cannot comprehend it!” Lincoln shook his head with wonder.

  “I must say that I always believed that we would, sooner or later, take Vicksburg,” said Chase, serenely elated. “And win the war.”

  “No, no, Mr. Chase. You misunderstand me. What I cannot comprehend is that the winner of the war’s greatest victory has not reported it to me and to the nation. Usually, my generals tell the press about their victories while the fighting is still going on.” Lincoln was on his feet. “Come on, Neptune, we must send the word to General Meade. I shall try to inspire him, as Grant inspires me.”

  As the President and Welles appeared in the waiting room, Hay and Nicolay applauded the Commander-in-Chief, who gave mock-solemn bows to left and right. Then the Tycoon and Welles hurried off to the War Department, leaving behind them Chase, who observed to no one in particular, “This is proof of the justice of our cause.”

  As Chase moved like some great ship down the hall, Hay turned to Nicolay and said, “Did you hear what Ben Wade said about Chase? ‘He’s a good man, but his theology is unsound: He thinks there is a fourth person in the Trinity.’ ”

  FROM ONE END of the Union to the other, church bells rang and orators spoke and newspapers praised the victor of Vicksburg. To Hay’s amusement, there was a mass return of all those grand politicos who had fled the city with the adjournment of Congress, many of them in the conviction that the city would be in rebel hands before Congress was due to meet again. Sumner and Fessenden and Chandler were again visitors to the Mansion. General Sickles, less one leg, was at a friend’s house in F Street. When General Hooker arrived to comfort Sickles, he was promptly arrested under a War Department order forbidding general officers to come to the capital without special permission. It was said that Old Brains himself had arranged the arrest of his enemy.

  At sundown, the President was serenaded in front of the White House. The Ancient then proceeded to make what Hay thought was easily the worst speech that he had ever heard him make, full of cracker-barrel phrases, as well as the odd comment that three presidents had died on the Fourth of July, a matter of some irrelevance to the fall of Vicksburg. “He is worn out,” said Hay to Nicolay, as they made their way through the crowd to Willard’s and supper.

  “So am I,” said Nicolay. “But I shall soon be in the Rocky Mountains, breathing proper air, while you are strangli
ng here in the heat.”

  “I wonder if Robert will come or not.” There had been no response to the first telegram. The Tycoon had sent off a second one; presumably, Robert was now en route. Madam was feverish: the infection had spread.

  When the Cabinet met next on Tuesday, July 14, the euphoria of Vicksburg had begun to evaporate. Lincoln was cold and deliberate. “General Meade, on Sunday night, against my advice, held a council of war to ask his commanders what he should do next.”

  Seward sat in the President’s usual chair, his knees under his chin. Seward had other things on his mind. Unlike the President, he had already written off Meade. Union generals assigned to the Army of the Potomac invariably became cowardly or worse.

  Seward saw a much greater danger at hand. The day before, in New York City, a well-organized mob had wrecked the house of the Republican mayor; burned a dozen buildings, including the draft office; murdered dozens of Negroes; hanged a captain of the state guard and severely wounded the Superintendent of Police. They then assembled barricades in First Avenue between Eleventh and Fourteenth Streets, as well as in Ninth Avenue. All to show their fury at the Conscription Act. Since dawn, Seward had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get word to his friend Archbishop Hughes, the only man who could control the almost-entirely Irish mob. Even though many of the Irish were just arrived in the United States, to a man they hated both Negroes and the Republican Administration. Ordinarily archbishop and governor kept them in line. But someone very shrewd indeed had been at work. Shortly after the available New York militia had left the state for Gettysburg, the mob had struck. The city’s fifteen hundred policemen were soon routed; telegraph offices were seized and the wires cut, while railroad and streetcar lines were disrupted. Carefully, the city was isolated from the rest of the state and country.

  Seward could not, for the life of him, figure out who was behind this remarkably well-executed revolution. There was a rumor that Vallandigham was in the city; but Seward doubted if that Copperhead demagogue had the skill to overthrow so vast a city. But who had? Or was it simply a spontaneous uprising on the part of a citizenry enflamed by such newspapers as the Daily News and the World, which day after day, denounced the government, the draft and the Negroes.