Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  Seward thought, somewhat wryly, of the secret overtures that he and Thurlow Weed had been making toward Governor Seymour, Lincoln’s choice as the Democratic-Unionist president. Luckily, Seymour had proved to be vain and dull, a highly resistible combination in Seward’s view. Worse, on the Fourth of July, Seymour had told a large audience at New York’s Academy of Music that the government was destroying the rights of the citizens with midnight arrests, the shutting down of newspapers, the suspension of habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury. Nicely, the governor lit the fuse; and the city went up in flames.

  Lincoln was now comparing General Meade to McClellan, the beginning of the end for Meade, thought Seward. “Meade is making the same mistakes. Like calling for a council. I warned him that no council has ever wanted to fight; and I am afraid that the one he has called is no exception.”

  Stanton entered the room. “May I see you, sir?”

  Lincoln moved into his office; and Stanton followed, shutting the door behind him. Seward looked about the table at his colleagues. “Let us have an informal council behind the President’s back. As of this morning, how many here agree with me that we should have shot or, perhaps, hanged Vallandigham?” The response was properly bloodthirsty. Even Chase was moved to denounce in harsh terms the President’s unaccountable leniency. They were exchanging items of news or gossip from New York City when Lincoln and Stanton returned.

  Usher asked Stanton if there was bad news. Stanton gasped a negative. Then Welles asked if there was any truth to the rumor that Lee had already crossed the Potomac into Virginia. Stanton said, “I know nothing of Lee’s movements.”

  “Well, I do,” said the President; and he gave Stanton a hard look. “If Lee has not got all of his men across the river by now, he soon will.” Lincoln turned back to Stanton. “I want to see Halleck. At the War Department.” Without a word, Stanton left the room.

  “About the rioting in New York City,” Seward began.

  But Lincoln cut him off. “I don’t think we’re in any mood—or at least I am not in any mood—to continue this meeting. I’ve now got two volcanoes on my hands.”

  “How do you plan,” asked Bates, “to answer Governor Seymour’s request that the draft be suspended in New York City?”

  “I don’t know,” said the President; and he left the room with Welles, who walked him part of the way across the White House lawn. Just as Welles was about to return to the Navy Department, Lincoln stopped in his tracks and took his arm. “Mr. Welles, there is something excessive strange here. There is bad faith somewhere. General Meade has been pressed and urged by us to pursue Lee and cut him off. But only one of his generals favored an immediate attack. What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Good God, what does it mean?”

  “Did you ever directly order Meade to attack?”

  “I urged. I exhorted. So did Stanton, I think. Halleck was always waiting to hear from Meade.”

  “Halleck was only four hours away by rail from Meade. Why didn’t he go to him at Gettysburg and tell him that he was to attack?”

  Lincoln did not answer. The bright sun made his face more than ever sallow; and the eye sockets were now cavernous.

  “Sir, I think that General Halleck is the problem. He is inert, at best. At worst, he is not competent.”

  Lincoln sighed. “Halleck knows better than I do. He’s a military man, has a military education. I brought him here to give me military advice. It’s true that his views and mine are widely different. Even so, it is better that I, who am not a military man, should defer to him rather than he to me.”

  Welles shook his head. “I disagree, Mr. President. Halleck has no ideas, that I ever heard of. He originates nothing. You have the overall view of the war in your head, with all its ramifications, political and military. You must never fear to give the lead to those who must be led.”

  Lincoln seemed not to have heard any of this. He spoke as if to himself. “When we got word that Vicksburg had fallen, and the Potomac was in flood, and Lee was desperately waiting for the waters to fall so that he could cross, I saw that the rebellion was at an end. But the generals voted not to attack him, and now the war goes on and on—and on.”

  Then Lincoln turned, abruptly, and set off, alone, to the War Department. Welles crossed to the Navy Department. Mrs. Lincoln’s cow moaned. One of the Bucktails asked the cow to shut up. The heat was intense. Gnats filled the summer air.

  Robert Lincoln entered Nicolay’s office as Nicolay was preparing to depart for the West. Hay had already moved into Nicolay’s office. “Well, the prince at last!” Nicolay exclaimed.

  “What became of you?” asked Hay.

  “I was caught in the rioting. The beginning of it, anyway. Luckily, I had a friend at the Fifth Avenue Hotel who had his own carriage. He got me across the city to the ferry before they stopped the service. I was on the last cars for Baltimore.” Robert looked thirty years old, thought Hay, somewhat enviously; and he sounded like a Boston Brahmin. “Where are they?”

  “Your father’s at the War Department, as always,” said Nicolay, giving Hay a small key. “To the strongbox. Don’t lose it.” Nicolay turned to Robert. “And your mother’s now out at the Soldiers’ Home. She’s better, they say. The infection’s clearing up.”

  “Everything’s happening at once down here.”

  “We try never to have an idle day,” said Hay, blithely.

  “Isn’t the town awfully crowded for summer?” Robert studied the stack of newspapers. They were from everywhere in the Union; and Richmond, too.

  “Vicksburg,” said Nicolay, with some satisfaction. “All the faint-hearts have come to town to rally round the victorious president.”

  Robert inquired after mutual acquaintances but Hay knew that he was interested in only one, the daughter of the hardware magnate; and so Hay took a deep breath and said, “Miss Hooper is to be married this month.”

  Robert swallowed hard; inquired if Mr. Watt was to be found; was told that Mr. Watt had gone to the army.

  “What started the rioting?” asked Hay.

  “Who knows?” Robert was vague; his mind elsewhere, in Georgetown. “At first, it looked to be organized. The Irish were all set to kill every Negro in the city. Oh, they are animals!”

  “The Negroes?” asked Hay, mischievously.

  “No, the Irish. Damned drunken papists!” Robert was very much the Boston Brahmin. “They are calling this a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

  “They are not so far wrong,” said Nicolay. “It’s certainly not fair to let a man stay out of the war because he’s got three hundred dollars to pay for someone else to go. There’s bound to be trouble.”

  “There is trouble,” said Robert. “It’s like the French Revolution, what’s going on up there, with people being hanged from lampposts.” Edward announced that the carriage was ready to take Robert to his father. “Well, I’d give three hundred dollars to be allowed to fight.”

  “Give it to your mother,” said Hay. “She’ll let you join up in a flash.” Hay was icily aware that he had gone too far. But Robert only laughed; and left.

  “That was hardly tactful.” Nicolay frowned.

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Anyway, I don’t think he knows about Madam’s mysterious ways of raising money. Curious, how little like either of them he is.”

  Nicolay took down the map of Pennsylvania from which all pins had been removed. “I think he’s very much a Todd.”

  Hay suddenly recollected a conversation that he had had with Herndon on his last trip to Springfield. “Old Herndon says that he believes that all the rumors about the Ancient being illegitimate aren’t true but that the Ancient himself told Herndon that his mother—someone called Hanks—was illegitimate, and the daughter of a Virginia grandee.”

  “Mr. Herndon is very good at quashing rumors that no one else has heard.” Nicolay did not take a friendly view of the President’s law partner.

  Hay was thoughtful. “I don’t think he eve
r lies. But he does like to speculate. He thinks that the Ancient knows who his real grandfather is, but he would never tell Herndon.”

  “The Ancient is nothing if not wise.”

  “So Herndon is now of the opinion that the shadowy grandfather is none other than that great advocate of slavery, the aristocratic John C. Calhoun.”

  “God help us!” Nicolay was appalled.

  “ ‘They even,’ said Herndon happily, ‘look alike.’ Is that for your book or mine?”

  Hay and Nicolay had each had, on his own, the idea of writing a biography of Lincoln. Lately, they had been discussing such a book as a joint effort.

  Nicolay shut his desk. “Upon the two of us, John, must fall the noble task of telling the world who Abraham Lincoln really was. This means that we are obliged to leave Billy Herndon out.”

  “But, Nico, do we know who he really was—or is?”

  “We know what we know, which is a good deal, I think.”

  “I wonder,” said Hay. “The Tycoon is a mysterious man; and highly secret.”

  “That’s because he’s smarter than anybody else. Nothing mysterious about that. Where’s the key?”

  “Here in my watch pocket.”

  “Guard it well; and the Republic, too.”

  “To the death, Nico.”

  Hay sat with the Tycoon in the President’s Office, waiting for Seward to usher in the latest delegation from New York. Lincoln sat on the window-sill, gold glasses on the end of his nose; and read from Artemus Ward: “ ‘Any gentleman living in Ireland who was never in this country, is not liable to the draft, nor are our forefathers.’ ” Lincoln chuckled, and looked at Hay over his glasses. “That has the statesman’s ring to it.” Then he read on. “ ‘The term of enlistment is for three years, but any man who may have been drafted in two places has a right to go for six years. The only sons of a poor widow, whose husband is in California, are not exempt, but a man who owns stock in the Vermont Central Railway is.’ ” Lincoln threw back his head, and roared with laughter. Hay marvelled at the Tycoon’s power of recovery. Whatever fire that kept this extraordinary engine going was plainly unquenchable if fuelled by laughter. “ ‘So also are incessant lunatics, habitual lecturers, persons born with wooden legs and false teeth, blind men, and people who deliberately voted for John Tyler.’ ” Hay and Lincoln were now both laughing, uncontrollably, as Edward opened the door and announced, solemnly, “The Secretary of State, Senator Morgan and Mr. Samuel J. Tilden of New York.”

  Seward had heard the laughter; saw the copy of Artemus Ward. “I shall want that next,” he said to the President.

  “It is a tonic, let me tell you. President Tyler died, didn’t he?”

  “A year ago January, in Richmond. He’d just been elected to the rebel congress. Mr. President, allow me to present Senator Morgan, whom you know, and Mr. Tilden, whom you don’t.”

  Lincoln shook hands with each man; and to Tilden, a small, spare, cleanshaven man of about fifty, he said, “You were an associate of Martin Van Buren …”

  “He died a year ago this month,” interjected Seward, settling into his usual place at table.

  “I know that, Governor.” Lincoln turned to Tilden. “You worked with Mr. Van Buren?”

  “I helped him as best I could during his presidency. I wrote many briefs for him.” Tilden stifled a belch. Senator Morgan had assured Seward that although Mr. Tilden’s acute and chronic dyspepsia had ruled him out as a candidate for office it did not prevent him from being an adroit manipulator behind the scenes.

  “Well, I did not support Van Buren in ’forty-eight but he was plainly the best of the lot, as it turned out. And once upon a time he had favored Negro suffrage, too.” Lincoln chuckled. “When I read that out to Judge Douglas, a Van Buren man through and through, I thought he’d have a fit. ‘Where did he say that?’ he asked in front of this huge crowd. So I gave him the book, open to the passage, and the Judge said, ‘I want nothing to do with that damned book,’ and threw it on the ground.”

  Seward allowed Lincoln a few more reminiscences; then he brought up the subject of the meeting. “We were able, Archbishop Hughes and I, to turn off the mob on the third day.” Seward felt that he deserved full credit for having so bombarded the archbishop with telegrams that His Eminence had been obliged to summon the faithful to his house on Madison Avenue, where he had scolded and soothed a crowd of some five thousand men, mostly Irish. As a result, the city was tranquil—for the present.

  “The danger now, Mr. President,” said Senator Morgan, “is the reopening of the draft offices. Governor Seymour has done what he could to placate the immigrants, but they are in a devilish mood. He would like a clear statement from you that the draft will at least be postponed in the city.”

  “He will never get that, Senator. If you postpone the draft in one state, you will give other states the notion that they, too, can have postponements.”

  “But you do realize, sir, that the city will explode again if you try to impose conscription.” Tilden watched Lincoln’s face intently: one lawyer testing another.

  “I do not impose conscription, Mr. Tilden. Congress does. The Conscription Act was much debated and thought out. It is not perfect. The Constitution is not perfect either. But at least the Conscription Act was passed almost unanimously. It is the law; and I must execute it.” Seward thought that Lincoln must, presently and characteristically, soften his line. But, to Seward’s surprise, Lincoln grew even more hard and legalistic. “To that end, ten thousand infantrymen are on their way to the city. Also, several artillery batteries.”

  “You will place the city under martial law?” Tilden probed.

  “In effect, Mr. Tilden, the whole Union is under a kind of martial law; as it is wartime. Now I know that you and Governor Seymour and a number of other Democrats think that we have torn up the Constitution down here. But we are simply trying to salvage it, and the nation.” To Seward’s relief, Lincoln finally struck the conciliatory note. “Tell the governor that the principle to which I propose adhering is to proceed with the draft while, at the same time, applying”—Lincoln paused for a strong word; found one that Seward thought too strong—“infallible means to avoid any great wrongs.”

  “This,” said Tilden, eyeing the bait, “is to be interpreted as giving a certain leeway to New York’s conduct of the draft?”

  “I did not say that. But I cannot control every interpretation put on my words.”

  “Yes,” said Tilden, nodding. Seward was pleased. The two distinguished lawyers had understood each other.

  But Senator Morgan had not got the point. “What do we say when demagogues cry out against the three-hundred-dollar exemption? ‘Rich man’s money against the poor man’s blood,’ they say. You know there is a lot of communist sentiment in the city; and all this just heats it up.”

  “To have an army, you must first have men.” Lincoln was reasonable. “Ideally, they should be volunteers. Otherwise, we must have conscription. After all, other countries—republics as well as monarchies—have it. The exemption seems to me a fair enough thing. At least it brings money to the Treasury, which helps the war.”

  Senator Morgan was not pleased. “Why can’t you wait until the Supreme Court has determined whether or not the Conscription Act is Constitutional?”

  “Because I don’t have the time, Senator. The war grows bloodier with each day. The rebels are conscripting every male who can walk; and they send them off to be slaughtered like cattle. Are we so degenerate that we cannot, with our greater numbers, raise an adequate army through a lawful draft?”

  “Then you refuse, sir, to wait for the Supreme Court to rule?” Morgan was now very tense.

  Seward looked at Lincoln, who, for no perceptible reason, was smiling. “Sir, I will not wait upon anyone. The time for argument is past. If this is not agreeable to you, then we shall just have to see who is the stronger.”

  Seward felt an involuntary shudder in his limbs. He was also ravished by the irony of the m
oment. For nearly three years, a thousand voices, including his own, had called for a Cromwell, a dictator, a despot; and in all that time, no one had suspected that there had been, from the beginning, a single-minded dictator in the White House, a Lord Protector of the Union by whose will alone the war had been prosecuted. For the first time, Seward understood the nature of Lincoln’s political genius. He had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer, given to fits of humility in the presence of all the strutting military and political peacocks that flocked about him.

  The two New Yorkers also appeared to have some inkling of who the man was that they were dealing with; or being dealt by. Senator Morgan fell silent, while Mr. Tilden belched softly. The President then read a page or two from Artemus Ward, lightening the mood.

  As the meeting ended Tilden looked up at Lincoln and said, “Mr. Van Buren had the greatest respect for your tenacity and your general judgment in this war.”

  Lincoln could not resist the obvious joke. “My ‘general’ judgment has been on the whole pretty bad. But I am tenacious all right. I am glad he appreciated that.”

  “He was also much amused,” said Tilden, ignoring the joke, “when he recollected an adjective you once used to describe his presidency.”

  Lincoln frowned. “What was that?”

  “ ‘Monarchial,’ Mr. President. He was much tickled by the word, as coming from you. In fact, at the end, Mr. Van Buren felt that you were bent on outdoing him.”

  Lincoln laughed, showing all his white teeth. “Well, if I am monarchial, it is the times that shoved the crown on my head. Anyway, when the war is won, I’ll lose my crown fast enough, and probably my head, too. And, frankly, between us, I am heartily sick of both.”

  How does such a sovereign lay down his scepter? Seward wondered, as he walked down the main stairs of the Mansion, Senator Morgan to his left and Mr. Tilden to his right.