by Gore Vidal
In the crowded first parlor, Chase was also concerned with the soundness of the press. “I can’t think where these rumors come from,” he said to Ben Wade. “I have in no way encouraged any one to put me forward as president. Yet they keep printing these stories like … like …”
“Like greenbacks,” said Wade, his usual sneer now an amiable snarl, in honor of the nuptials. Chase had always counted on Wade as an ally. But, lately, he had sensed a certain reluctance on Wade’s part to commit himself. Certainly, each was a radical in regard to abolition and to the reconstruction of the once-conquered Southern states. Each was from Ohio. Each despised Lincoln. But Wade’s manner to Chase had subtly altered since that confrontation between Cabinet and Senate which had not been, Chase knew, his finest hour. Lately, Senator Pomeroy had been sounding out Wade and the other powerful radicals in Congress. All preferred Chase to Lincoln and yet …
“I see you in one place and one place only, Mr. Chase,” said Wade, abruptly.
“Naturally,” Chase began his usual demur, “I do not put myself forward …”
“Naturally,” said Wade, bluntly. “Because you can’t. I see you as Chief Justice of the United States.”
“Oh.” Chase was entirely defeated. In dark moments, he had also seen himself in that high isolated place, out of the swift currents of history. But he could not believe that Wade was saying this to him at a moment when their faction of the party had no other alternative to Lincoln, who could not, in any case, win reelection. “There exists,” said Chase, rather weakly, “a Chief Justice.”
“But he is eighty-six. He has been fading rapidly for more than a decade. You know, all through Buchanan’s Administration I prayed most earnestly for the life of Chief Justice Taney to be spared and, by God, I’m a little afraid I overdid the matter.”
Chase laughed politely at Wade’s favorite joke. None of their party had wanted Buchanan to appoint another pro-slavery, pro-states-rights Chief Justice. Fortunately, the old man had survived Buchanan’s presidency; now, if he were to die within the next year, Lincoln would appoint his successor. Should Taney live more than a year, Chase, as president, would make the appointment. Chase was direct. “Frankly, Mr. Wade, I had always thought that if the appointment were mine to give, you would be my choice.”
Wade looked as surprised as Wade could ever look. Then he said, “I am very moved, Mr. Chase.” He had recovered his usual coolness of manner. “Am I to take this as the beginning of a trade?”
“Oh, no, no!” But Chase was pleased with the turn of the conversation. “I do not trade, of course. I merely expressed a personal sentiment that is also general.”
The President was now leaving. “I seemed to have stayed two hours,” he said to Chase, as Wade smiled up at him. “But then I wanted to take the cuss off the meagerness of my party of one.”
“I hope Mrs. Lincoln is well.” Chase was polite.
“She has her ups and downs. That bang on the head last summer still bothers her.”
Ben Wade said, “Sir, I was just telling Mr. Chase what a splendid Chief Justice he would make.”
Chase felt as if deep in the cellar beneath his feet a charge of dynamite had been set off. As he swayed, he wondered why others did not respond to the vibrating floor. Weakly, he said, “I told Senator Wade that he was my own private choice.”
“Well, Mr. Wade,” said Lincoln, a half smile on his lips, “you would both look mighty nice up there on that dais in the Capitol. While Mr. Chase here”—Lincoln looked down at Chase, who looked up at him, blindly, like a child expecting a kiss—“would adorn any office in the land, including the one which I, temporarily, hold so”—Lincoln’s head now turned from Chase’s uplifted face to that of Ben Wade’s—“unworthily.”
“Hardly, sir!” Chase heard himself strike the sycophantish note. “You inspire us all.”
“Then come with me next week to Pennsylvania, where I’m going to need all the help that I can get, helping our greatest orator, Edward Everett, inspire the nation.”
“What is happening in Pennsylvania?” asked Wade.
A servant was now helping the President into his topcoat. “We are dedicating a cemetery at Gettysburg, right on the battlefield. Governor Seward and Mr. Stanton are coming with me.”
“If only I could,” said Chase. As he started to describe the next week’s business, the President took his hat and stick. “I have said farewell to the young married couple. Now I say it to you, Mr. Chase. Mr. Wade.”
“I wish I could go with you, sir,” said Chase to the President’s back.
“Let the politically dead,” said Wade in a voice that Chase knew that Lincoln could hear, “bury the dead.”
Shocked, Chase hurried to lead the President out the front door and into the street where, late as it was, hundreds of people still watched as the carriages came and went.
When they saw the President, silhouetted, unmistakably, in the door, there was a cheer. He raised his hat. “It is for the living, Mr. Chase,” he said serenely, “that we honor the dead. They are well out of it, as we shall be, in due course.” He looked at Chase; and smiled. “Politically—or otherwise.” Then Lincoln got into the presidential carriage; and drove off.
TWO
AT THE last moment, Madam decided that she could not leave Tad, who was still sick, while Stanton said that he must stay at the War Department in order to follow Grant’s attack on Chattanooga. So, in the end, Seward and Blair and Usher were the only members of the Cabinet to accompany the President. The ubiquitous Lamon was, as always, at Lincoln’s side, while, for once, Nicolay decided that he, too, would like an outing; so both secretaries attended the President at Gettysburg.
The morning of November 19, 1863, was warm and still. Indian summer had set in. The celebrated old orator Edward Everett had already sent the President a printed copy of his speech. “My God, John!” Lincoln had said, as he sat in the special railroad car. “He will speak for two hours.” Lincoln had handed the thick pamphlet to Hay; and taken off his glasses.
“I suppose that is what he’s always expected to do.” Hay had decided not to read what he would be obliged to hear.
“A splendid old man.” Lincoln had held in one hand a single sheet of White House notepaper on which he had written half of what would be, he said, “a short, short, short speech,” dedicating the cemetery. “You know, I have heard of Everett all my life, and he has always been famous, and yet I never could find out why.”
“Our greatest orator?”
“Greater than Clay or Webster?” Lincoln had smiled. “No, he is just famous, that’s all. There are people like that in public life. They are there, and no one ever really knows why.”
They were all there the next morning on Cemetery Hill. There were seven governors, among them Seymour and Curtin; many diplomats and members of Congress. A platform had been erected, with a tall flagpole next to it. In the warm stillness, the flag hung listlessly. A military band played. A crowd of some thirty thousand people had already gathered when, finally, at ten o’clock, the presidential procession came into view, and the military band struck up “Hail to the Chief.”
Lincoln rode at the head of the ragged column of notables. He sat very straight on a sorrel horse too small for him. He was like some huge effigy, thought Hay, who rode with Nico behind him. It was odd that the biggest man in the country should also be among the very biggest—or at least tallest—of men. Seward looked sublimely sloppy at the Tycoon’s side. Trousers pulled up to reveal thick, wrinkled gray stockings, the premier was blithely indifferent to how he or anyone else looked.
Earlier that morning, Nico had gone to the house where the President had spent the night; and he had stayed alone with the Tycoon for an hour. “What news?” asked Hay. The procession was now stopped by crowds singing, “We are coming, Father Abraham.” Hay could see Lamon furiously shouting orders; but no one listened. The people wanted to see and touch the President.
“Tad is improved,” said Nico.
“A battle has begun at Chattanooga. Grant is attacking. Burnside is safe at Knoxville; he does not attack.”
“How is the Tycoon?”
“He just finished rewording the speech an hour ago. He complains of dizziness.”
Alarmed, Hay turned to Nico. “Oh, God! You know, in the train, he told me that he felt weak.”
Nico nodded. “There’s something wrong. I don’t know what.”
But if there was something wrong with the Ancient, there was nothing wrong with the Tycoon, who sat dutifully through Edward Everett’s extended version of Pericles’s commemoration of the Athenian dead. But where Pericles had been very much to the Attic point, Everett was to a myriad of New England points.
As the beautiful voice of Everett went on and on, Hay looked out over the battlefield. Trees had been smashed into matchwood by crossfire, while artillery shells had plowed up the muddy ground. Here and there, dead horses lay unburied; as they were not yet turned to neat bone, the smell of decomposing flesh intermingled with the odor of the crowd was mildly sickening. Now, in the noonday sun of an airless sort of day, Hay began to sweat.
When Everett sat down, Lincoln pulled out his sheet of paper; and put on his glasses. But there was a musical interval to be endured; and so he put away the paper. The Baltimore Glee Club intoned a hymn especially written for the occasion. A warm breeze started up, and the American flag began to snap like a whip cracking. Opposite the speaker’s platform, a photographer had built a small platform so that his camera would be trained straight on the President when he spoke. He was constantly fiddling with his paraphernalia; raising and lowering the cloth hood at the back, and dusting his glass plates.
Finally, there was silence. Then Lamon stood up and bellowed, “The President of the United States!”
Lincoln rose, paper in hand; glasses perched on his nose. He was, Hay noted, a ghastly color, but the hand that held the paper did not tremble, always the orator’s fear. There was a moment of warm—if slightly exhausted by Everett—applause.
Then the trumpet-voice sounded across the field of Gettysburg, and thirty thousand people fell silent. While Everett’s voice had been like some deep rich cello, Lincoln’s voice was like the sound that accompanies a sudden crack of summer lightning. “Fourscore and seven years ago,” he plunged straight into his subject, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
That will please the radicals, thought Hay. Then he noticed two odd things. First, the Tycoon did not consult the paper in his hand. He seemed, impossibly, to have memorized the text that had been put into final form only an hour or so earlier. Second, the Tycoon was speaking with unusual slowness. He seemed to be firing each word across the battlefield—a rifle salute to the dead?
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation—or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated—can long endure.”
Seated just to the right of Lincoln, Seward began actually to listen. He had heard so many thousands of speeches in his life and he had himself given so many thousands that he could seldom actually listen to any speech, including his own. He, too, noted Lincoln’s unusual deliberateness. It was as if the President was now trying to justify to the nation and to history and, thought Seward, to God, what he had done.
“We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live.” Seward nodded, inadvertently. Yes, that was the issue, the only issue. The preservation of this unique nation of states. Meanwhile, the photographer was trying to get the President in cameraframe.
“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Lincoln was now staring out over the heads of the crowd to a hill on which a row of wooden crosses had been newly set. For an instant, the hand that held the speech had dropped to his side. Then he recalled himself, and glanced at the text. “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract.” Lincoln paused. There was a patter of applause; and then, to Seward’s amazement, a shushing sound. The audience did not want to break into the music until it was done.
Seward studied the President with new—if entirely technical—interest. How had he accomplished this bit of magic with his singularly unmellifluous voice and harsh midwestern accent?
Lincoln was now staring off again, dreamily; this time at the sky. The photographer was under his hood, ready to take the picture.
“The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.” The hand with the text again fell to his side. Hay knew that the Tycoon’s eyes had turned inward. He was reading now from that marble tablet in his head; and he was reading a text written in nothing less than blood. “It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated, here, to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave …” Hay was aware that the trumpet-voice had choked; and the gray eyes were suddenly aswim with uncharacteristic tears. But the Tycoon quickly recovered himself. “… the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve,” the voice was now that of a cavalry bugle calling for a charge, “that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall,” he paused a moment then said, “under God …” Seward nodded—his advice had been taken.
Nico whispered to Hay, “He just added that. It’s not in the text.”
“… have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln stood a moment, looking thoughtfully at the crowd, which stared back at him. Then he sat down. There was some applause. There was also laughter at the photographer, who was loudly cursing: he had failed to get any picture at all.
Lincoln turned to Seward and murmured, “Well, that fell on them like a wet blanket.”
In the last of the presidential cars, Lincoln stood on the rear platform. He waved to the assembled crowd with his right hand while his left hand clutched Lamon’s arm. Nicolay and Hay stood just back of the President. In the elaborately appointed car there were red-and-green plush armchairs with lace antimacassars, a long horsehair lounge and, everywhere, much inlaid wood and crystal and brass. A green Brussels carpet covered the floor, while the rows of brass spittoons shone like gold.
Politicians crowded the car, each eager to get the President’s attention. Like a man in a dream, Lincoln had gone through a lunch with Governor Curtin, followed by a reception, followed by a sermon at the Presbyterian church. Then he had boarded the six-thirty evening cars to Washington. Now, as the train pulled out of the Gettysburg depot, Lincoln and Lamon stepped into the car. Sweat was streaming down Lincoln’s pale yellow face; the eyes were out of focus; the wide mouth trembled. Lamon looked almost as ill, from fear. “Boys,” he whispered to the secretaries, “get these people out of here. Don’t let them near the President.”
Lincoln said nothing. Propped up by Lamon, he stood swaying with the movement of the train. Nicolay led the disappointed Simon Cameron from the car while Hay asked Seward if he could persuade the others to go. The President had work to do, said Hay. There was news from Stanton. Seward got the point; had seen Lincoln’s face. Exuberantly, he proposed to his fellow-politicians a banquet in the restaurant-car.
When the car was cleared, Lamon picked up Lincoln, who must have weighed no more than a farmer’s scarecrow to such a powerful man, and carried the half-conscious President to the lounge, where he stretched him out. Nicolay found a blanket and placed it over the shuddering form.
“What is it?�
� asked Nicolay.
Lamon shook his head. “I don’t know. The fever, I think. Malaria?”
“But he has never had it,” said Hay, a lifelong victim of that recurrent disease.
“Well, he can always catch it, I reckon,” said Lamon.
Lincoln’s eyes were now shut. Lamon found a towel, which he wetted from a water carafe; then he placed the towel on the Ancient’s face. Suddenly, Lincoln said, in a clear voice, “Something has gone wrong.” He took a deep breath and slept; or fainted.
AS AGREED, David met Booth in front of the bulletin board in the National Hotel lobby. Here, as at Willard’s, wire-service dispatches were posted up at regular intervals, and there was never a moment when a crowd was not gathered to read the latest news from the front or from Congress or, now, from the White House, where the President had been ill for some days with scarlatina. No one was allowed to see him outside of the immediate family. There were rumors that he was dying.
David had not seen Booth since their first meeting. It was Miss Ella Turner who had appeared at Thompson’s. As she ordered throat lozenges from David, she whispered, “Our friend says to meet him in the lobby of the National at noon.” Then she was gone.
Booth was at the bulletin board. A place called Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga Valley had just fallen to “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Apparently, under Grant, “Fighting Joe” had finally learned to fight. The rebel army was now in retreat. Booth turned on David with a scowl. But then when he recognized him, scowl was replaced by brilliant smile. “Davie, I’m glad to see you! I’m leaving today.” Booth led David to one of the lobby’s full windows, where two leather armchairs, side by side, commanded a view of a rank of hacks in Pennsylvania Avenue. A light, curiously feathery snow was falling. Since Congress was at that moment in session, the lobby was deserted save for palm trees in ceramic cachepots. Through a nearby door, barbers and shoeshine boys could be seen practising their necessary arts.
“My God, Davie, you are a great man in Richmond!” Booth’s voice was low; but his face was ablaze with excitement.