Molly sent him to a highfalutin academy to soak up whatever learning he could. She dressed him up like a lord, in a velvet coat and kid gloves, and I wouldn’t be startled if that boy was a little ashamed of his Pa. He didn’t have a trace of my Kentucky drawl.
I had to content myself with Willie and Tad, my two wild boys. They were born after Eddie passed, but they couldn’t rep1ace him—no one could, not in her affections. So they ran wild. They tore up our little garden, and other gardens in the neighborhood. Tad wasn’t more than a couple of years out of the cradle. He never learned to talk proper. He had kind of a lisp. Willie and I were the only ones in the world who could understand his chatter. Tad remained a mystery to his own mother and our Irish maid, who would fuss over him, because Tad couldn’t solve the impediment of buttons and belts. Mary had to tie him into his clothes, but she couldn’t decipher a word he said.
“Mr. Lincoln, you’re as bad as your own boys. But I’m wild to see Bob. A woman can have a normal conversation with him.”
Bob had his sights set on Harvard, and that was Mary’s doing. Harvard was closer to Lexington, Kentucky, with all its airs, than it was to a town in Illinois.
I’d walk to the office with Tad on my shoulders and Willie clutching my waistcoat. I had a premonition that morning, as if something strange and original might happen. I didn’t dare look into the mirror, because I would have seen a shadow that wasn’t supposed to be in the glass. And I worried that harm might come to my boys. So I spat three times in the sand and held on to Tad as tight I could, but I could still feel some presence—like a lick of air with its own perfume—following me and the boys.
My law partner, Billy Herndon, wasn’t that anxious to see them. He knew how destructive the boys could be, and he was preoccupied with my political career, even if I hadn’t been elected to anything in nine years. Billy was rather petit for a man, but he liked to wear kid gloves and patent-leather shoes and douse himself in toilet water. He was in his drams a lot, and Molly couldn’t bear the sight of him. He’d rubbed her wrong a while back when she was the prettiest belle in town. Billy was rather blunt. He admired her dancing and meant to compliment her—told Molly she moved with all the suppleness of a snake. She cursed Billy for that remark and wouldn’t invite him into the house, even after Billy and I sealed our partnership with a handshake.
What some folks in Springfield didn’t know was that Billy was always hiding runaways. I could come into the office at noon and find a colored boy gnawing on a potato under my desk. Another boy might be in the closet. I’d play checkers with that boy until Billy found the means to sneak him past the slave catchers in a beer barrel. I had to bite my lip and keep quiet. Those catchers had the law of the land on their side.
Billy was always getting into scrapes. He’d crash his head through a window in a brawl, and I had to pay for the damages before the sheriff got to Billy and sent him off to jail. And so he was obliged to forgive me for my own little boys.
He’d stifle a groan whenever he saw Willie and Tad. And he’d sit like a martyr while they climbed up into the bookshelves and tossed our books like bombs. They spilled the ink out of their wells and scattered all the briefs written in my own hand, since Billy didn’t have the faintest idea how to write a brief.
And while all this merriment was going on, there was a knock on our door. The curtain was down, and I could see a figure in the glass, like some strange shadow. At first I thought it was a runaway slave hoping for some succor. But it wasn’t a runaway. Billy and the boys heard me gasp. I was trembling, because that figure looked like a ghost out of my past.
“May I come in?” the ghost asked in the rich voice of a shouter at church.
“Please,” I squealed in that damned high pitch of mine.
She was wearing a shawl and a winter bonnet. I hadn’t seen her in a century. She was a widow now—her husband had died back in ’54, and I hadn’t even sent Hannah as much as a note. Clary’s Grove had winked out together with New Salem—settlements that never had much of a chance. She had the same wrinkles she’d had when I first met her as a twenty-year-old matriarch. Lord alive, she looked younger now than she did then, as if the wrinkles had reversed themselves. Still, I could see the trouble lines on her forehead. And I knew she hadn’t come to Lincoln & Herndon on a social call. I was still trembling when I asked, “How are you, Mrs. Jack?” And while Hannah revealed the tribulations of her son, William “Duff” Armstrong, she still had a crackle in her eye for my own mischief makers.
“They’re fine boys, Abraham.”
She told me about Duff’s incident with a certain James Metzker. They’d been attending a two-week revival meeting at Virgin’s Grove near the old abandoned site of New Salem. And at a makeshift bar near the revival camp, Duff and a friend of his got into a drunken brawl with Metzker. Hannah’s boy was twenty-four—he whacked James Metzker in the eye with his slung shot, the favorite weapon of the Clary’s Grove Boys. The slung shot was peculiar to Clary’s Grove; it was an eggshell filled with melted zinc, covered over with calfskin, and tied to Duff’s wrist with a piece of powerful string. Metzker didn’t survive that blow. Duff might not have been indicted, but a house painter who was also at the meeting—Charles Allen of Petersburg—swore to a coroner’s jury that he had seen Duff strike Metzker in the full light of the moon and hurl that bloody slung shot into the grass; Allen himself had collected it.
“My boy will rot in jail,” Hannah said, clutching her shawl. “He was caught in the moonlight by another man.”
“Means nothing,” Billy said. “We have the best cross-examiner in the county.”
“Now don’t you give her false hopes,” I muttered, pretending to scold my junior partner. “But every witness has a weak point, and I’ll find it if I can.”
THE TRIAL WAS HELD in Beardstown a month or so later, at the Cass County court. The prosecutor there thought he had a pretty case. Duff was a wild boy like his own dead Pa. He even wore that polka-dot bandanna of Clary’s Grove—a sure sign of his guilt. But the prosecutor, who was called Big Hank and had a way of breathing fire at a jury, hadn’t bothered to uncover my own brotherhood with Clary’s Grove.
He moved among the jurors with all his grandeur and built up his case against Duff and Duff’s dead Pa. I didn’t much care for how he dirtied Jack’s name. But Beardstown was his bailiwick, and a lawyer like me had to bite his own lip.
Big Hank produced the house painter, and that man swore up and down that he had seen Duff strike Metzker.
“How can you be so certain?” Big Hank asked with a growl, pretending to attack his own witness. It was an old trick, and it always worked on a jury.
“The moon was in my eye,” said the house painter.
Big Hank turned on his heels and said, “Your witness, Congressman Lincoln.”
He was clever as a snake, since everybody in the courthouse knew how lamentable I’d been as a Congressman. But Big Hank couldn’t rile me. I kept that house painter in the chair. And I walked among the jurors—I was familiar with most of their kin. I took out my knife and examined the slung shot that the house painter swore he had found after Duff delivered that fatal blow—it couldn’t have stunned a rabbit. It was a mockery of a slung shot, sewn with pathetic string.
I asked the house painter to twirl that weapon for me. He did, and it fell apart in his own fist.
“Mr. Charles Allen,” I asked the witness in his chair, “is this Duff Armstrong’s slung shot, or is it your own?”
“Duff’s,” he said, with a squint in his eye. “Swear to Gawd.”
Then I asked the court attendant to bring me an almanac. I flipped through it and stopped at the day Metzker died.
“Mr. Charles Allen, will you repeat the time you supposedly saw the accused strike Mr. Metzker in the eye?”
“Gawd, it was on the near side of midnight by at least an hour.”
“And the moon was still on the rise?”
“It was like staring at a big fat cat in the sky,”
the house painter drawled.
I let him poison himself with his own words. And then I pounced.
“That’s awful peculiar, sir, since the almanac remarks that the moon had set long before the fracas at Virgin’s Grove—that big fat cat of yours had dropped right out of the sky. You couldn’t have seen Duff Armstrong or anybody else in the light of the moon.”
The jurors themselves started to gasp. I dismissed the house painter, but I wasn’t really done with him and the prosecutor. And so, during the summary, I looked into the jurors’ eyes and said, “The prosecutor likes to call me Congressman, but I was once dirt poor, and without a home. Duff’s Pa took me in, fed me, sheltered me, and fixed me up with clothes.” And my own knees started to buckle at the mention of Jack—and Mrs. Jack. I’d stunned myself, and I started to cry in front of jury and judge.
“I first met the accused when he was a babe—I rocked him in my arms, sang him to sleep. His Pa was the prince of fellows. Jack Armstrong may have caroused a little, but he helped the poor. And there wasn’t a widow in the county who lost her home while Jack Armstrong was around.”
It didn’t matter what Big Hank did or said after that. The jurors were sobbing as hard as I was. They didn’t have to deliberate more than half an hour. The charge of manslaughter—and every other charge—was dropped against my client. I hugged Mrs. Jack, smiled at Duff in his polka-dot bandanna, and lit out of there. I couldn’t run fast enough from the residue of Clary’s Grove and New Salem. However far I went, or where I landed, seems I was always a second away from drowning in the Sangamon River. I didn’t have that raw power to settle in. I was like a man with a price on his head. No one has to chase you hard when you’re so busy at chasing yourself.
14.
Long Lincoln & the Senatorial Ball
IT WAS MARY’S fault. She kept muttering to herself like a musical refrain, “President Lincoln, President Lincoln.” It was at such moments that she stopped talking about Eddie, our little Angel Boy, and planned to revive my defunct career like some master carpenter with a plumb line and an awl. She swept away all the sad accumulations of dust on my clothes. “Mr. Lincoln, you are the most unparlorable man I have ever met. But I will teach you manners, sir. You will require some at the White House. And don’t you spoil my chances, hear? Or I might not feed you again.”
It was good to see her laugh, to catch Molly’s old crinkles. She was a pure strategist. My path to the White House, she surmised, was through her old suitor, Senator Douglas. Dug was a wreck of a man after his first wife died; he went across the capital in tattered cuffs, drunk as a despot, stumbled around the Senate chambers, moved to the shoddiest boardinghouse. And then that slumbering shadow met and married Adèle Cutts, the grandniece of Dolley Madison. Adèle was half Dug’s age. Some people called her a divine beauty, but her neck was overlong in my estimation. Yet I wasn’t allowed to criticize her. Dolley Madison was the one woman in all of Washington who was kind to Mrs. Lincoln when I was a Congressman. Her first husband had been a Todd, and belonged to Mary’s own kin.
Even so, I did have a legitimate gripe against Dug, who had changed his politics overnight, in 1854. He pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, shoved it down the throats of Northern Whigs. He offered the miracle of popular sovereignty, which wasn’t much more than a smoke cloud. It was the Little Giant’s way of extending slavery into the Territories—Kansans could vote on slavery and bleed to death over it. The Whigs couldn’t fight Senator Douglas. So I unwhigged myself and joined the Abolitionists—and their new Republican Party.
Dug was up for reelection in ’58, and Molly insisted I grab his Senate seat. “Win or lose, you have aspirations. You’ll ride Dug’s coattails right to the District.”
That damn District! It had one cobbled street—Pennsylvania Avenue, with the glow of some eerie stars, because no other street in the capital was lit up by oil lamps, and the lamps sputtered and stayed dead whenever Congress wasn’t in session. I didn’t want to live at a boardinghouse on East Fourth Street again, where the slave catchers would descend upon us in the middle of a meal and shackle some negro waiter in front of my eyes. The biggest slave market in the land was five or six blocks from the White House. But Molly said I had a certain prominence now as a Republican. That’s because all the nabobs were either from the East or in the Democratic Party. I gave speeches up and down Illinois for every other candidate—except myself. I’d stand with my back slumped against a wall, give myself a good long scratch, and then slowly rise up and stare into the audience’s eyes. A woman fainted once, in Alton. They had to carry her out in an ambulance. Other folks pawed at me, said I could tantalize a whole population.
So I tossed my hat in as a challenger to Dug, even though Republicans outside Illinois favored his reelection, figurin’ he couldn’t be beat. Meantime, I geared up for our State Convention in Springfield that June. I worked for a month on my convention speech. I delivered it in my parlor again and again, while Mary clung to every word. She’d shut her eyes and say, “I want that speech to end in a perfect rapture.”
The evening before the convention, I gathered all my generals—barely a dozen—and read my speech aloud. Most of my generals weren’t pleased. My speech was too far in advance, they said, and would ruin Republicans in Illinois. But these were ruinous times. That vile skunk and piss-pot, Chief Justice Taney, had dynamited us all with the Dred Scott Decision—negroes weren’t included in the Constitution, he declared. Scott couldn’t fight for his freedom in federal court. It didn’t matter if he talked like a duke and read the Bible better than white folks. He wasn’t a human being. I couldn’t pirouette around Dred Scott and palaver about the virtues of the Republican Party. I couldn’t pussyfoot. Or we’d all be pissing in the wind. I had to declare war on Douglas and the Democrats. And declare war I did.
Delegates stared at me with a kind of timid wonder in their eyes. I was the savior of the Republican Party. Seems we had no other candidate to run against Dug. The Chicago delegation carried a banner, held aloft by fifteen men. Cook County is for Abraham Lincoln. Yet I heard an undertow of fear that the Little Giant would crush us all and prance away from Illinois with my own head on a plate.
And that evening I delivered my speech in front of all the Republican delegates. Long Lincoln stood there on the platform—all alone. My knees were knocking behind the lectern, but luckily, no one saw. I hadn’t come to rally us—I’d come to warn.
“We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”
I talked of Dug and how the nation had breathed hot air on him and puffed him up into a tremendous man, while the rest of us were small. But Dug couldn’t lead us now, not during this strife.
I quoted from the Book. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.
“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
“It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
There was silence for a second—stone silence. And I figured I had made a failure. Then the whooping started up. Hats were tossed into the air. Delegates stamped their feet. The Cook County boys paraded their banner across the hall. And I was apostrophized like some damn little god—or lunatic—who would run against the Little Giant . . .
Mother sold a piece of land her father had given her, and she raised up our house on Eighth and Jackson a notch or two. She hired workmen to rip into our attic and add another storey to the rear of the house. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I just enlarged our borders a little.” Our humble cottage now had a Greek Revival look, like her Pa’s old Kentucky mansion on Small Street. The outer walls were painted a light brown, and we had dark green shutters to match the brown. There was a whole infection of bedrooms wit
h false fireplaces and Franklin stoves. You were swept right into the mansion through a wide stair hall. I had my own library. And Mary’s front parlor and family room could have accommodated a hundred generals, at least. It was in here, with its floral carpeting and refined furniture, that Mary meant to have her Senatorial ball—it wasn’t a proper ball, with musicians and dancing partners, but a victory soiree with all the Republican grandees my wife could round up. I hadn’t even run against Dug yet, but I was still Senator Lincoln in her eyes. I couldn’t stop Mary’s mania, her deep desire that welled through her like some black tornado that could knock down fences and kill a cow. And we had a singular celebration, since half the politicians in Illinois were suspicious of my nomination speech. But that would never have perturbed Mrs. Lincoln.
“I’m blind with pleasure,” Mary sang, as the guests arrived. She wore a taffeta gown with a plunging neckline; she had three flowers in her hair, just like Lola Montez, the danseuse who’d come from London to give a lecture on the latest women’s Fashion. My wife sipped champagne with every kingmaker she could find. She never mentioned Dug or the Abolitionists. It was as if my little victory was outside the murmur of politics.
She hired an extra Irish maid for the shindig. Our big table was heaped with condiments and wild strawberries, prairie chicken and quail, piled with peaches and cream. Mary flirted with all the rascals, even with me. And now, with the roar of voices around us, she put her arm in mine, and said with an exaggerated sigh, “Mr. Lincoln, I’m determined that my next husband shall be rich. You know how much I long to go to Europe. But poverty is our portion.”
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