Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  “I hear that rumor all the time,” said Stanton, “and tend to disregard it. Who told you, Governor?”

  “That is for me to know, as they say. But if true, and I believe it is, as of July 27 … Anyway, it is worrisome.”

  “Yes,” said Lincoln. “It is.”

  A messenger arrived with a communication from City Point; it was almost as if Grant’s spirit—or spirited spirit, thought Seward—was aware of this conversation. The general proposed that he come to Washington by way of Monocacy Junction, where an army was currently being somewhat haphazardly assembled in order to deal with Early. Meanwhile, Grant proposed that there be, first, a united command of all forces at the capital and, second, a single overall divisional commander whose task would be the destruction of Early and the sealing off of the Shenandoah Valley. Grant had already ordered to Washington the one officer capable of accomplishing what was necessary.

  “General Meade,” said Seward, turning from the window.

  “No,” said Stanton, peering through suppurating lids at the telegram, “it is General Philip Sheridan.”

  “He is a child,” said Seward.

  “No,” said the President, “he is a boy, which may be what we’re looking for. Grant swears by him as the best cavalry officer we have.”

  “He is far too young,” said Stanton. “We must dissuade General Grant.”

  “Or let him persuade us.”

  “How old is he?” asked Seward.

  Stanton turned the pages of a notebook until he found the name. “Well, it says here, thirty-three, but—”

  “The same age as Our Lord.” Lincoln looked, piously at Seward, who crossed himself like Archbishop Hughes. “I think the problem is,” said the President, judiciously, “that he is so small. Sheridan’s a foot shorter than me, and looks like a skinny boy with a beard glued on.”

  At the Center Market, a boy—with no beard glued on (but had there been one handy he might thus have disguised himself, so nervous was he)—stood among the corpses of a regiment of pullets, listening to Mr. Henderson describe the next attempt upon the President’s life. Ever since Lincoln’s alleged near death from poisoning, David had found himself treated with a new dignity at Sullivan’s and elsewhere. The fact that the attempt had failed did not discourage his fellow patriots. After all, a man could do no more than try. Through Mr. Sullivan, David had been congratulated by the Colonel himself. Meanwhile, unsigned cryptic letters arrived for him in care of Sullivan. Several were postmarked Canada. Wilkes Booth remembered him.

  Deftly, Henderson removed the insides of a pullet. “The plan now is to shoot him first chance we get.”

  “But why bother when he’s going to lose the election anyway?” David had grown somewhat fond of the man he was now thoroughly convinced that he himself had almost poisoned.

  “He’s wily, says the Colonel. He could win yet. But dead, he won’t win for sure. We have an arrangement with McClellan, you see.”

  “I know,” said David, who knew nothing but what he heard in the saloons. When it looked as if old Jubal Early was going to take the city, David had been instructed to join a group of wild boys at Lookout Point and just as Early entered the city, they were to charge the stockade where the prisoners were being held. But Early had never got beyond Seventh Street Road; and seventeen thousand Confederate soldiers were still penned up like … chickens, thought David, listening carefully to Mr. Henderson’s low cluck while Washington’s housewives crowded about the Henderson women, and poked the chickens and complained of prices. David looked at his watch. This was his morning to make deliveries. He had to be back at Thompson’s by noon.

  “We can’t take no chances now, says the Colonel. Things are bad for us. We got almost no men left, and the Yanks won’t make any more prisoner exchanges. We was counting on that.” Mr. Henderson regarded the chicken’s liver in his hand, as if it were a purple jewel of great price.

  “So why not catch Old Abe and hold him for ransom?” David had always been intrigued by the possibility. Of all the mooted plans, this one had seemed the most sensible and to the point. The Yanks would give up a lot of Confederate soldiers to get back Old Abe.

  “The Colonel thinks that Seward won’t make no exchange for Old Abe. He thinks it’s pointless. He also says that Richmond says that the foreigners won’t like it if we do that and we need the English to keep on helping us out with boats. I don’t know. Anyway, we’re killing him real soon. What I want to know is, what are his movements now?”

  “Well, he still takes blue mass,” said David, making a joke that Mr. Henderson affected not to hear. “He’s out at the Soldiers’ Home most nights. Mrs. Lincoln and the two boys and the nigger woman are all out of town and so is Johnny Hay. Old Abe’s pretty much alone most of the time. He rides or drives in from the Soldiers’ Home about sun-up and goes back when it’s dark. But there’s always troops with him now—the Bucktails, they call them.”

  “Marshal Lamon?”

  “Most times he’s with him. But sometimes he’s not.” Since Lamon was U. S. Marshal of Washington, Mr. Henderson regarded him with more fear and respect than any president.

  “Lately, when Old Abe’s been at the War Department at night, he’ll go back to the Soldiers’ Home without Lamon. He’s sure a big man, isn’t he? Lamon—with all those guns.”

  Mr. Henderson nodded. He wiped his hands with a bloody cloth. “You keep an eye out during the next week or so. If you think Old Abe is going to be late one night, or if you hear Marshal Lamon won’t be with him or anything useful, tell it to Sullivan and he’ll pass us the word.”

  David saw that his evenings would be ruined. Recently he had got to know a girl who made up packages in Shillington’s Book Store. Since she was an orphan living with an aunt, she was free as air; and as fickle. Lately, she had allowed him to take her to respectable places to eat, where she ate a great deal and spoke disapprovingly of girls who got involved with Yankee soldiers or frequented places where drunks and druggies were to be found. David had expected to unite himself with her in the ham-lady’s back room where he currently slept, paying for the privilege in cash not person. Now David would be obliged, night after night, to lurk about the Mansion and the War Department until Old Abe decided to go to bed, which, sometimes, he didn’t do at all. When there was a battle on, he was apt to spend the whole night at the War Department.

  As if Mr. Henderson understood his problem and took pity on him, he said, “There’s a groom called Walter in the White House stables. He’s the one who gave Mrs. Lincoln that bad fall, by mistake. You say you know me. You tell him you’d like to know, when he knows, if the carriage—or better yet a horse—is to be got ready late. That will give us some warning.”

  This was better. “I reckon I can keep track of Lamon from Thompson’s, where you can see everybody who comes and goes to the Mansion. But why worry so much about him? Bullet’s going to kill him, too, ain’t it?”

  Mr. Sullivan strangled the neck of an old hen so deftly that the hen never experienced so much as an instant of premonitory despair. “Lamon’s not careless. Old Abe is. Lamon always sees to it that Old Abe’s got a wall of troops around him, which makes him hard to hit. Left to himself, Old Abe just moseys along.”

  David agreed that this was the case. Once the President had actually wandered all alone into Thompson’s. Mr. Thompson had been profoundly excited. What might he do for His Excellency? But Old Abe had just smiled and said, “Nothing at all, Mr. Thompson. I just came in because I like the smell.”

  Mr. Henderson was now plucking the hen so rapidly that a cloud of feathers hid both hen and hands. “We tried to take care of General Grant when he was here last week. But we never got close enough.”

  “I saw him,” said David. “He looked like he had been on a real drunk. He came riding hell-for-leather up the avenue with this little fellow Sheridan aside him.” David had been impressed by Sheridan’s youth. But young and dashing as he was, Sheridan would be no match for old Jubal Early, the
first Confederate hero since “Stonewall” Jackson’s death.

  “We went and put a bomb inside Grant’s headquarters at City Point. It went off the very day he got back from here.” Almost tenderly, Henderson laid out the now nude hen on the white marble butcher’s slab. “Had he gone into his headquarters just five minutes earlier …” Mr. Henderson shook his head. Anyone observing them, thought David, would have thought that Mr. Henderson was saying a prayer for the hen’s departed soul.

  At Sullivan’s, David was greeted by a number of midmorning drinkers. David wanted to discuss with Mr. Sullivan how best to get information to him, but the Irishman was not to be found and the bartender had no idea when he would be back.

  David stood side by side with a night-rider at the bar, each with a foot on the low brass rail. The night-rider gave David a plug of tobacco to chew on, and David duly chewed. Once his mouth had filled up with nicotine-induced saliva, he spat at the nearest spittoon more than a yard away, and made a perfect bull’s-eye; he gave back the plug.

  “That’s fine shooting,” said a soft Southern voice with a touch of Irish brogue. David turned and saw a ragged youth of the sort the town was full of now. A piece of rope held up faded trousers that were unmistakably butternut gray. “You take the oath?” asked David, the usual polite introduction this season at Sullivan’s.

  “Well, I got caught by the Yanks who went and locked me up until I said to myself, well, I’m Irish anyways, so I took the oath. Mr. Sullivan’s been real nice to me.”

  Although the night-rider was not about to be nice to a Confederate soldier who had renounced the sacred cause, David couldn’t help but think that had it not been for the accident of his job at Thompson’s, he might be this boy, living on handouts and looking for work. He bought the young man, Pete Doyle his name was, a beer. They talked a while of the war but David could see that Pete had lost what little interest he might have had in it. “I’m looking for work,” he said. “I’ve been to the horsecars. They say there might be something someday soon. But I don’t know. There’s so many like me in the town.” He pushed back his thatch of gingery hair. If he hadn’t been so smelly, David might have taken him off to the ham-lady.

  But at that moment, a tall, stooped figure appeared in the bar. He was well known to the patrons of Sullivan’s, who had first taken him to be one of Pinkerton’s spies until Sullivan said, no, that despite the creature’s Yankee accent and eccentric ways, he was William de la Touche Clancey, the editor of a small pro-Confederate magazine in New York City, currently on the run from military prosecution. David had seen him a number of times at the bar. Although Sullivan personally tolerated Clancey, he had warned David and the other young men to steer clear of him because “He’ll leap at you like you was a glorious young colleen fresh from Cork.” As it was, a number of penniless youths had indeed been leapt at—successfully. Currently, one of them was using copavia and blaming his disease on Clancey. Sullivan was not sympathetic. Since the young man had been fairly warned, the fault was his.

  “There you are, my Davie!” hissed Clancey, who had learned all the names of the regulars.

  “Be careful, Pete,” whispered David.

  But Pete just grinned happily as Clancey put a long skeletal arm about his shoulders and ordered beer for his new friend Pete. The night-rider left in disgust. “How marvelous to encounter one who has come through the fires of a righteous war unscathed!” Clancey, who had long since given up on David, peered into Pete’s innocent face, on whose cheeks proper whiskers had yet to grow.

  “Well, I didn’t see all that much fire before I went and got captured and took the oath.”

  “Oh, you are modest! The one quality that I love above all others, save love of country!” The beer arrived. “Let us drink,” said Clancey, eyes popping as he contemplated his tender quarry, “to the death of Lincoln, and the inevitable victory!” David also drank to that. Then, as it was past noon, he left the bar. Mr. Thompson did not like to be kept waiting.

  Senator Sumner did not like to wait either. He had sent Nicolay a message: Could he see the President as soon as possible? Sumner would meet Lincoln anywhere except at the White House, where journalists might see them together. With a degree of mischief, Lincoln had suggested that the most convenient place would be at Governor Seward’s Old Club House. The Senator had agreed; but the meeting must be private, he said. When Lincoln asked Seward if he might use his house, Seward had been much amused. “I shall stay at my desk, fighting the Emperor Maximilian and all his works, while the two of you plot in my study, with only Pericles as witness.”

  Lincoln nodded, and picked at the single boiled egg that dominated the great crested plate on his desk. This was the lunch that he himself had ordered. Seward suspected that the President might stop eating altogether were it not for Mrs. Lincoln. Certainly, when she was away, as now, he made no pretense of any interest in food. The President’s one indulgence was water. During the day, he made numerous visits to the water-cooler in the corridor; and there he would drink cup after cup of water as if it were the finest hock. “Mr. Sumner will probably try to compete with Pericles,” said Lincoln, finishing, with an effort, the egg.

  “Do you think he will mention the well-known secret meeting in New York?”

  “I think he will speak of nothing else.” Lincoln poured himself yet another glass of water from the brilliant Waterford glass carafe. Seward wondered if the President had any idea of just how much money his wife was spending of public as well as of private money. Certainly, the newspapers were keeping careful track of her visits to the stores in New York and Philadelphia. But those were not the sort of stories that Lincoln would ever look at. Currently, the press was making much of the fact that while viewing the dead on a battlefield, Lincoln had asked Lamon to sing him some ribald songs. The story was curiously repellent; and so believed by many. But Lincoln would not read any version of the story, much less answer it. “In politics,” he had said to Seward, when the subject came up, “every man must skin his own skunk. These fellows are welcome to the hide of this one. Either I have established the sort of character that gives the lie to this sort of thing, or I haven’t. If I haven’t, that is the end.”

  The end seemed now to be approaching, thought Seward, as he watched Lincoln dry his lips with a napkin. For the first time in some months—well, hours—Seward wondered what might have happened had he and not Lincoln been elected in 1860. The war would certainly be over by now, due, if nothing else, to Seward’s superior guile. He would have seduced the South back into a more voluptuous, if not perfect, Union. But at what cost, he could not hazard. Certainly, if he had had to bear what Lincoln now bore, he might have resigned and gone home to Auburn. There were times when Lincoln seemed to him like some bright, swift-burning substance that, once ignited, could not be extinguished until it had burned itself entirely out, according to its own peculiar and circumscribed by time, nature.

  “Will Horace Greeley publish your correspondence with him?”

  Lincoln shook his head. “I insisted that certain passages must be deleted. I felt that he would only aid the rebels by giving too gloomy an aspect of our case—not to mention the Democrats. He has backed down. I don’t think he wants them published, anyway. They make him look more than ever a fool. Hay writes me that the Niagara meeting was a comedy of errors. The so-called commissioners had no authority, and Mr. Davis is not about to agree to any terms. As usual, Greeley wasted everyone’s time; and nothing came of it.”

  “He was at the secret meeting last week.”

  Lincoln suddenly smiled. “You know, when Johnny Hay was leaving Greeley’s office at the Tribune, guess who was coming in the door?”

  “Mr. Chase?”

  “You have second sight, Governor. But I attach no importance to that, as long as Mr. Taney lies on his deathbed—interminably breathing, to be sure!”

  “Well, I don’t want to cry out like Cassandra—how Mr. Blair brings out the classicist in me!—but, if you’ll forgive me
, I think you’ve fallen into a trap. I don’t think Greeley had the slightest interest in those two rebels at Niagara. I think he was trying to smoke you out as an abolitionist, and I think he succeeded. He got you to state, more plainly than ever, that if the South does not absolutely abandon slavery as a pre-condition of peace, the war will go on. As a result, there’s been all hell to pay in New York. Archbishop Hughes is tearing his hair—or, I guess, to be more precise, his miter—to bits, and my good Irish supporters are now saying that they will never fight for any nigger’s freedom.”

  “They do precious little fighting as it is.” Lincoln’s face set. “They are the least disciplined and most cowardly of our troops. They are welcome to support McClellan, and an instant bad peace.” Lincoln pushed back his buckthorn chair from the table. “You are right, I suppose, about Greeley smoking me out. But I was already out after the Reconstruction proclamation, and the last message to Congress, and the reply to Wade.”

  “You have never before said that if the South were to come to you and say ‘we will lay down our arms and rejoin the Union,’ that they could not do so until they set free their slaves.”

  “If they rejoin the Union, those slaves are free—freed by me.”

  “As a military necessity. Well, that necessity will have gone.”

  “Naturally, we would hold a convention of some kind if they were to return, as you suggest. I have always been for reimbursing the slave-owners. Everyone knows that.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. But will the archbishop’s parishioners understand? Greeley has lined you up with the abolitionists, and there will be hell to pay.”

  Lincoln smiled wanly. “I am very much used to that foul currency, Governor.” Lincoln pushed the plate away from him. “I have always admired Greeley. He helped put me here—perhaps not a cause for general rejoicing or, for that matter, even personal. Now he is like an old shoe—good for nothing. When I was young out west, we had no good shoemakers, so once a shoe got old the leather would rot and the stitches wouldn’t hold and that was the end of it. Well, Greeley is so rotten now that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out.”