Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  As the weekend began, I gave up my attempts at consolation, let her push me away, and turned my attentions to soothing the distress of little Bud Taft, Willie’s favorite playmate. He has put his head upon my bosom and cried his eyes out. During the vigil, when it appeared Willie might survive, I promised Bud that I would take him to see the illuminations; all the public buildings had been ordered lit to celebrate the capture of Fort Henry. Then, on Thursday, Willie was gone, and the lights were cancelled.

  All has been darkness since. This afternoon, at 2:00, I ran back across Lafayette Square, through thunder and lightning, to fetch Papa and your mother to the East Room, to join the mourners. Among them one could find much of the Congress, along with McClellan, Bob Lincoln and the President. He was so tired from watching at the bedside; his lined face looks scarcely like the one that smiled at us in Albany a year ago. He took my hand for a moment, and managed a weak smile, addressing me as “Aunt Clara,” which Willie had called me once or twice. “You must soon have some children of your own,” Mr. Lincoln said. Then they began the procession to Oak Hill. Willie will be in a mausoleum there until the day comes when the whole family return to Illinois, carrying his tiny body with them.

  What will become of young Tad, with a mother laid waste by her feelings, and a father whose every hour is consumed with the prosecution of this war? Robert will have to be as much father as brother to him; and yet Robert must soon go back at Harvard. Somehow the President manages to find moments for the child — such a strange one — who clings to him like a small, fretful animal, completely without the dignified little-manly comportment of Willie. What a contrast they made: another fairy-tale pair like you and Will, one dark and one light — and now one gone!

  Oh, Henry, I miss you so tonight. Not a candle burns in any window of the Mansion, and the rain brought by the storm has puddled into ice all over Lafayette Park. Andy Jackson stands frozen — a statue of a statue — and suddenly no one dares hope for the victory needed to end everybody’s woe. We hear rumors that at last — but too soon! — the Twelfth will be moving to Virginia. That your being nearer to me depends upon the commencement of your danger is just one more cruel method this war has devised for breaking hearts.

  Take my love and let it keep you safe. And tell us where you are —

  Your loving bride

  (for that I shall finally be),

  Clara

  Fort Monroe

  Virginia

  March 29, 1862

  Darling Clara,

  We arrived yesterday at Fort Monroe and are now in camp at Hampton. Our march down from New York ended in a few small skirmishes with the rebels. I am unscathed, but three or four others were hit.

  Being fired upon was the most extraordinary experience — personally thrilling. Each bullet, it seemed, was intended just for me. In fact, I was probably no more visible to whichever soldier was firing from behind the trees than he was to me. But, whoever he was, I wanted to dash into the brush after him, to find him and slash his throat with the blade of my bayonet. I would have done so entirely without malice, with only a strong desire to know just who he was, to gaze upon his face, as if it were another side of my own.

  This is no sort of letter to write to one’s love — and that you are, my darling Clara. But if this frightens you, I know you will indulge it, for we have never spoken to each other only as lovers; I can share with you my secrets and fears, as if we really were the sister and brother most of the family still take us for.

  My fears are not really for myself. They are of myself. I wonder what this war will unleash inside me, what it will do to my will and spirit. If my heart beats faster at a mere sprinkling of gunfire, what will it do when hurling itself at Jackson’s whole army? I am sitting on an old dry chestnut-tree log as I write this; for how many years it’s been sleeping in the sun, I don’t know. For all its apparent lifelessness, I know that, cracked open with an axe, it would release all manner of crawling insects upon its little patch of the world. This is what I fear the war may do to many of us fighting it.

  Your letter, more than a month old, the one about the Lincolns’ son, was waiting for me when we arrived at Monroe. It had ricocheted down from Fort Hamilton ahead of our slowly marching feet. It is only the first one atop a small stack from you, but I want to answer each one by itself — to do otherwise would be like giving you back a single kiss for a dozen you’ve showered on me. After five weeks, the letter’s perfume is still fresh, and I have again taken it out in the morning brightness, to smell the paper and imagine you in my arms.

  I am sorry for your distress, but I must tell you, darling, how paltry a thing Willie Lincoln’s death looks from here. I do not underestimate the Pres.’s woe, but the national fuss: is it seemly? It is as if a dauphin had died. Mother sends me a cutting from the Star: Lying in state in the Green Room? Before a funeral in the East one? Children die each day in the normal order of things: think of the ones my mother lost, Charles and Anna, infants, more than twenty years ago. The President’s grief for his son is ill-proportioned to the merely abstract sorrow he can feel at reports of grown men dying in quantity, just across the river from Washington. Madame President should come downstairs and get out to the hospitals, so that she can see all the boys, older than her Willie, but still boys for all that, dying far from their own mothers’ comforting arms.

  I sit only yards from one of the fellows hit by a rebel bullet the day before yesterday. He moans persistently, and every once in a while gives out with a sharp cry. Last night I saw the doctor change his dressing. I looked into the wound itself, a deep depression in the muscle of the boy’s right chest. Red blood bubbled to life amidst the discoloration, like a strange flower from a latitude we have never seen. I was repelled — but conscious, too, of my fascination. I longed to see deeper inside the boy, to glimpse whatever secret lay inside his being, the way I wish I could open myself up for a look inside. The boy’s blood, pulsing almost imperceptibly to the beating of his heart, was wonderful to see, until one remembered that it was shedding itself for nothing. The passions of the individual are a glorious mystery, before which we should tremble with respect; to see them squandered, spilt, for the dry creeds of the old men who insist upon this war, far away from where it is actually fought, is to feel one’s spirit crushed.

  But mine will soon revive and soar, so don’t you worry. Once we march into battle, I shall be bellowing with delight, out for blood and greedy for glory.

  You are love of the deepest kind; our connection is absolute, full, unbreakable. We could not be closer if we did share the same blood. As it is, we shall share each other’s blood, in the beautiful children we create together. I shall give you boys of your own, Clara, great strong boys who will grow healthy into manhood and not be wasted on war such as this.

  Your own,

  Henry

  He put the brown paper into its rough envelope and sealed it up, wondering if he should have been quite so firm on the subject of the Lincoln boy. Yes, he decided, Clara needed to read what he had written. In her own letter she didn’t sound herself. She was morbidly sentimental, filled with the sighs and tears of a maiden aunt. (“Aunt Clara” indeed!) Her own deepest feelings were being pressed into service by the Abraham Lincolns, distracted toward an object unnatural to them. Everyone’s nature was being snatched from itself, displaced, by the man directing this war.

  Clara’s grief, thought Henry, however false its object, was at least better than the crocodile tears of the men who’d gone to the East Room to make a proper display of lamentation before the boss. And as for Madame! He had no doubt she would be back in her white dress within weeks, just as Miss Donnelly’s poem, clipped from the newspaper and tucked into Pauline’s letter, made so bitterly clear:

  What matter that I, poor private,

  Lie here on my narrow bed,

  With the fever gripping my vitals,

  And dazing my hapless head!

  What matter that nurses are callous,

&nb
sp; And rations meagre and small,

  So long as the beau monde revel

  At the Lady-President’s Ball!

  He read the verse again before inclining his ear to the hospital tent.

  Our loss was 1 killed and 3 wounded … The following officers were present guarding the bridge, and afterward on skirmish duty or supporting Tidball’s battery: Capt. M. M. Blunt, commanding battalion; Capt. H. R. Rathbone, acting field officer, commanding Company C …

  A COPY OF Captain Matthew Blunt’s report on the Twelfth Infantry’s performance at Antietam Creek had lain on Clara Harris’s night table for three days, just one less than the original had been in Secretary Stanton’s office. In the week after September 17, 1862 — a day on which the Northern and Southern armies inconclusively killed 5,000 of one another’s men — the hunger for news was like a great, persistent moan in Lafayette Square. Every house with a soldier in the battle contributed to it. Knowing that Henry had been fighting in those bleeding Maryland cornfields, Clara urged her father, each morning, to see if a report from the Twelfth had arrived at the War Department. Senator Harris disliked Mr. Stanton’s perfumed whiskers as much as the secretary disliked Harris’s frequent favor-seeking, but every morning the senator had gone around to check. When he at last secured Captain Blunt’s report — technical, confusing, but absolutely affirming Henry’s safety — Clara wept with joy. Neither General Lee nor General McClellan had gotten what he wanted from the apocalypse, but she had, and she kept the paper on her table so that she might prove the fact, over and over, to her own satisfaction.

  Since the Twelfth had joined the Army of the Potomac in May, it had seen some fighting at Mechanicsville and Bull Run, but Henry’s letters had been more about building corduroy roads than battling Stonewall Jackson, and throughout the heat of this second summer in Washington — or at least those weeks of it she hadn’t escaped with Pauline and her sisters to Newport — Clara found it hard to believe that Henry was any more likely to die of the malaria he mentioned than she was to perish from the germs and stink suffocating the capital. But when news of the battle near Sharpsburg started coming, there was a terrible change in her feelings. What took place was on a scale so titanic that it seemed impossible for anyone near it to have survived. Imagine, said her father, someone obliterating the whole center of Albany with wagon loads of gunpowder: that might give you 5,000 killed and 20,000 wounded. Surely, Clara thought, the word “Antietam” would replace some older one in the language — Leviathan, perhaps — becoming forevermore the synonym for pitiless devouring. She so wanted to shut her eyes and ears to the thought of it, and to all the excited, horrified chatter that filled the square and the Executive Mansion, that she had actually been averse to opening what at last arrived today, Tuesday the thirtieth, a letter from Henry himself:

  Near Sharpsburg

  Sept. 22

  Darling Clara,

  Am completely safe.

  We spent 19 hours guarding one of the two small bridges. We were well to the rear of everything, with McClellan further back still, using his field glasses to watch us watch. In the distance was the slaughter in the cornfield, men hacking at each other, and at stalks as tall as themselves, until they couldn’t tell the difference. A New York fellow told me today it was like swinging a hammer in a forest of mirrors. The firing was so constant that the brief moments of quiet rang in our ears like explosions. The world had gone mad: thousands upon thousands killing themselves for a small white church and a tiny patch of land. We were not at all eager to get into it, but then at noon came the order to cross the bridge. The cavalry and guns galloped into heavy fire, but our skirmishers drove back what was opposing us. Our losses were small, our part in the whole thing minuscule. Still, everything changed for me, completely, at that moment, as if I had come up through water and taken in a great gulp of air. It was over quickly, but not before I’d seen a fat boy from Newburgh, in the middle distance, exploding like a flour sack.

  I shot a man of theirs I was close enough to see, in the arm, and I heard him scream, more in annoyance, I thought, than pain.

  Today we worked, shirtless, picking up bodies, some of them with their mouths still open from when they tried to catch last night’s rain. What they are calling Bloody Lane was once a sunken path, worn from being trod; but this morning the corpses were thick enough to make it level, like a ditch that had been filled with human water. Everywhere the green leaves are so dappled with blood that I imagine myself walking past a long Christmas table covered with holly.

  Now, when all is bloated bodies, tallies, and terrible pictures, I should feel foolish at the smallness of our part — the bridge we set such store by crossed a creek no one had bothered to try fording; had they troubled themselves, they would have discovered that every man could have waded across it without wetting his belt. But I do not feel foolish. I remember myself instead at the moment we crossed — screaming, alive, complete — which is how I remained until we pulled back east.

  We are safely camped and you are not to worry.

  These days Pauline received her own letters from Henry and no longer asked for Clara’s, and the other girls in the house knew that no amount of wheedling could induce their sister to show them any more of Henry’s correspondence than she wished. If her father had not just asked her to bring this letter to him in his study, Clara would have kept it from him as well. It was not any intimacy in it that made her shy of sharing the letter; it was the lack of intimacy, except perhaps that between Henry and himself, a thing that would distress Senator Harris, whose hair, after a year and a half of war, was going from gray to white, and whose impatience with General McClellan now exceeded President Lincoln’s. The senator knew every opportunity had been squandered, and that the slaughter at Antietam was nobody’s triumph. But he had marveled these past few nights at supper over the way the President was bent on treating it as one. “Stalemate surpasses defeat,” Mr. Lincoln had told him, “and since losing is what we’re used to, I see no reason not to call this victory.” So that’s just what the President had been doing, to the extent of proclaiming the emancipation of the slaves the other morning at a Cabinet meeting.

  “Sit down, my darling,” the senator said to Clara, “and tell me what Henry has to say.” She handed him the letter and took up the Evening Star, avoiding his expression as he read.

  “It is good that he is well” was all he said when finished. “Now I have something to share with you,” he added, smiling for the first time. “A letter from your friend Mary.”

  “A letter from Mary Hall to you?”

  “Read it,” he said, and as soon as she began, she laughed. “Of course. The proclamation.” The long letter, which Clara skimmed, was a fountain of joy and gratitude. “ ‘To think,’ ” Clara quoted, “ ‘that only twenty-five miles from Harper’s Ferry lay the spot where the slaves would see their freedom won! What a day the first day of 1863 will be!’ ”

  “You see?” said Ira Harris. “This is just what the President wanted. He’s got everyone from Horace Greeley to your friend Mary thinking we’ve won a splendid victory. She now puts me in her personal pantheon, along with Sumner and Beecher and the rest of them.”

  Clara laughed. “Poor Papa. Everyone’s a radical now.”

  “That’s the trouble,” the senator replied. “This is beyond what was intended. Officers are already grumbling that they didn’t go to this war to ‘free the niggers,’ certainly not before they’d subdued the South. You may even be hearing such sentiments from Henry, if he can come down from whatever private exaltation he’s feeling.”

  “Papa,” said Clara, “Henry is doing only what Mr. Lincoln is. He’s trying to turn a calamity into a victory, just a small personal one in his case. Would you rather, at the moment of truth, that he’d found himself cowardly?”

  “Well, it’s a strange sort of alchemy, if you ask me. By him and the President.”

  Clara did not want to argue. The truth was, she thought Mr. Lincoln wholly differe
nt from any of them. There he was, calmly unshackling slaves in the South and suspending habeas corpus in the North — feeling transcendent if not serene. He was remade, never again to be the man he had been eighteen months ago. It was the rest of them who were somehow unchanged, incapable of being anything but what they were. Mrs. Lincoln might be mad with grief over Willie, dead for seven months now, but not so distracted that she couldn’t each day find new slights to rail at. The war’s enormities weighed Papa down with sorrow, but his vision could not encompass any meaning it might finally hold. In the Senate his greatest energy and clarity came when arguing small matters of right and wrong, whether Mr. Stark had the credentials to be seated or Senator Bright the guilt requiring expulsion.

  Now he broke the silence. “I’m afraid I have one piece of bad news, my darling, and I must tell it to you, since it isn’t likely to come by any other means. It concerns another of your old friends, Miss Bashford. Her husband, a lieutenant, died at Sharpsburg last week. Mr. Stanton manages to get some of the rebel newspapers, and while I waited in his office trying to get word of the Twelfth, I scanned one from Charleston. Quite by chance I noticed the name Edmund Lodge Baxter on their casualty list. I’m sure it is he. I haven’t known whether to tell you.”

  “It’s good that you did, Papa.” Clara tucked Mary Hall’s letter into its envelope. “Poor Sybil,” she said, shaking her head. “Losing her husband and her slaves, all in the same week.” The joke was more in Henry’s line than her father’s, but from behind his desk Ira Harris managed a smile.