I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  We drank our tea in silence. We couldn’t talk politics any longer. One civil war wasn’t enough for Billy. He wanted a different kind of war—bloody revolution, as he called it, where the South would be reduced to rubble and the border States would have to give up every single black. Maryland, Missouri, and Kentuck had poisoned the Union in Billy’s mind, and we had to rid ourselves of all the paraphernalia of slavery. Otherwise we’d have a slave culture another hundred years. Billy wasn’t so wrong. Slavery anywhere in the Union was an affront. Yet I had to woo our slaveholders gently until we finished the war. Julia Grant still had her own slave. She was a good Missouri gal. Billy might have forgiven Julia, but he wouldn’t forgive the South. And I couldn’t save the Union by turning the South into a vast prison farm. I was no jailor, and neither was General Grant.

  Billy broke the silence with a short breath. “It wasn’t only about your wife,” he blurted out. “That Democrat said you had a harem in the White House—that you slept with all the maids and with Mary’s seamstress, a mulatto gal—that you sired a devil child, half boy, half dog—that he lives in the attic, and presides over a Miscegenation Ball. That’s when I hit him, hit him hard.”

  I didn’t know how to comfort Billy. I wanted to touch his face; but he was covered with welts and his beard was gnarled as a blackberry bush.

  “Mr. Lincoln, are you ever coming back to Illinois?”

  “I may be back sooner than you think—if the Democrats prevail.”

  “I’ve kept your chair the way it was, close up to the wall,” he said. “And your couch, with all the piles of paper. People are always coming in to have a look. I have to chase them out. ‘It’s not a shrine, for God’s sake.’ That’s what I tell them. ‘It’s where Mr. Lincoln worked, and where he’ll work again.’ ”

  I could have found a sinecure for Billy—some fat office in the Interior Department. But he would drink his way into oblivion, fight with his superiors, and I’d have to clean up the mess. I had no time for Billy.

  He finished his tea and toast, and walked out of my office. I wouldn’t have followed Mary’s mandate, and hurled him out at high noon. I’d have let him heal up in the Prince of Wales Bedroom. Perhaps he had never intended to come here, but had been waylaid by Mary’s coachmen after his drunken brawl. He gathered up his clothes, scribbled a couple of lines to my wife, and left the White House at a quarter to nine, in a hat with a tattered brim . . .

  I heard the rifles from Fort Stevens well into the morning—that strange, almost silent bark, like the sound of pathetic, tin dogs. My hands were shaking, and I had the worst blue spell in a long while when my confidential secretaries knocked and entered with a brand-new folio of court-martials from Stanton at the War Department. I noticed the hollows in their cheeks. Nicolay & Hay were as melancholy as their Titan about the fusillades at Fort Stevens.

  “Damn my Secretary of War!”

  I took that folio and tossed it against the wall—my secretaries blinked as all the dossiers flew out like paper orphans and landed on the oilcloth.

  The Titan is having a fit.

  They stooped and picked up the different dossiers and piled them on my Cabinet table. I looked upon these court-martials as little sagas. I perused the first one. It told the saga of a farmer boy from Missouri who deserted, took care of his crops, and enlisted again.

  “Why shoot that boy? Let him fight.”

  I pardoned him with a scratch of green ink. After that the tales grew more entangled and more complex. A raw recruit murdered his own captain, but there had been bad blood between him and the captain, who was brutal with all his men; then there was the deserter who signed up with the Rebels, collected his bonus, ran back across the lines, joined another regiment, and did the same maneuver five or six times; or the colonel who left the battlefield and slashed his wife to pieces on his own little holiday from the war. These sagas started to molt inside my brain, and to preserve my sanity I scribbled on the dossiers: Send to Dry Tortugas. It was where McClellan had banished all his bad soldiers—the military’s isolation camp on the Dry Tortugas, where none was ever heard from again.

  “The Dry Tortugas, sir,” said my secretaries with great reluctance, “is not the same as a firing squad. You can either pardon a soldier or . . .”

  Send him to the Tortugas.

  The barking at Fort Stevens had stopped, and I moved on to the next dossier, with a bitterness in my heart, not against my generals and their rules, but at my own culpability as the mad king of war.

  45.

  An Evil Hour

  I HAD TO ENDURE a summer’s worth of Mad Fridays, as a blue haze rose off the river and the canals and seemed to stifle the sky, while a vast army of pigs rooted along the avenues and rushed through the back door of the Willard, frightening cooks and the hotel’s clients. Marines, who were called in from their barracks, chased the pigs down to the Potomac flats with their batons and rifle butts, and lost them in the blue haze of swamp gas.

  Mary and Tad got out of this swamp, and escaped to Vermont that August with a caravan of hatboxes that filled an entire baggage car. I was all alone at our summer cottage, in the worst damn summer of the war. A few drunken soldiers may have lurched here and there—shots were fired—but the Rebels sat within their ramparts at Petersburg, and we couldn’t pierce or break Lee’s line. Grant had despatched his own best general to invade Georgia and hurl the Rebels right into the sea, yet Tecumseh Sherman couldn’t be found anywhere on the map. His army had vanished into some mythical wood. We were stuck in an evil hour, according to my critics. Republican and Democratic papers sang the same tune. “The People are wild for Peace.” And the Locos had their Peace candidate, McClellan, who sat in his cottage on Orange Mountain, in New Jersey, and sulked because I wouldn’t give him another crack at a command. “The wish of my heart is to lead the Army of the Potomac in one more great campaign,” he told reporters and whatever general would listen. Meantime he connived with Copperheads—those Northern reptiles who wanted us to surrender the war—and other poisonous snakes. Stanton warned that any general who turned politics into a game of blood ran the risk of getting gored. And still McClellan intrigued, spurred on by his own battle fever. Convinced that every soldier in the land would vote for him, he conspired with the McClellan Legion of veterans’ clubs to deliver that vote. There were torchlight parades up the mountain, with Copperheads and Legionnaires, who despised each other and scuffled all along the mountain road. The Legionnaires arrived first, with broken lanterns and torn battle blouses; and while one side of the mountain lit up like a meteor, McClellan men did rally under a single banner.

  Time to Swap Horses.

  And then, one night, just after the convention in Chicago anointed Little Mac as the solitary soldier who could distance us from the dread arbitrament of war, I grew restless rambling on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, and called for the Presidential carriage, with its solid silver lamps and silvered steps that always seemed to sway. The coachman arrived, and I was alarmed. It was Tim, that recreant who had set fire to the stables and burnt our ponies alive. I could still listen to their lament sometimes, before I fell asleep.

  I was startled to see his haggard face and ropey hands, his eyes like little pink buttons.

  “Timothy, weren’t you arrested?”

  “I was betrayed, sir. It was a false accusation. I would never harm your horses—I fed them every morning, combed their manes. I took much pride in their handsome coats. It was one of the gardeners, sir, who started that fire. He stole some cash from the Lady President. She got rid of him, and he took his revenge on the ponies.”

  I searched those pink buttons, but the coachman’s eyes didn’t reveal a thing. I climbed into the carriage and told him to take me to the Willard. I didn’t want to rush over to the War Department and sit around with the cipher clerk—it would only have added to my gloom. I wanted some company, the pleasure of seeing a kind face under the soft blue hiss of the hotel’s gaslights.

  We roll
ed down from the hills, passed one of our earthworks, with Tim clucking at the horses. The little fort lay abandoned; there were hats and old shoes lying around, and the rifle pits were all unmanned. We passed a row of privies that resembled a staggered, leaning platoon; a howitzer and a Parrott gun lay in the middle of the road on little trucks without wheels. And Tim had to steer around these impediments, or we might have spilled into a ravine.

  I’d never traveled on such a forlorn route, where no picket challenged our right of passage, no colored farmers carried watermelons on their little trucks. I couldn’t recollect meeting one human eye, and we got to the Willard in record time. I clambered down silvered steps that stuck out like bristles and near broke my ankle.

  “Shall I wait for you, sir?” he asked from his kingly chair.

  “Go about your business, Tim. I’ll sleep at the Willard tonight.”

  The Willard was as somber as that earthwork on the hill. I’d watched it flicker like a burning barn on most other nights. The doorman wasn’t even there to greet me in his high hat. I went into the lobby and fell into a blaze of light. The divans shone under the chandeliers, bristled like peacock tails. I was surrounded by an assembly of clerks.

  “Mr. Lincoln, what a pleasant surprise!”

  Bellboys hovered around, volunteering to be my runners—they would have delivered messages to Richmond, or to General Grant, would have scoured the whole of Dixie Land for a trace of Tecumseh, my missing general, and his missing men.

  “Boys,” I said, “no traffic tonight. Not even to the telegraph office. I’m on a little holiday—at the Willard.”

  I was served Maryland oysters and a drop of wine at my own little table in one of the Willard’s private parlors, though it wasn’t so private, and I wasn’t all alone. A voice shot out at me, like an electric bolt.

  “Enjoying your midnight supper, Excellency?”

  I peered into the shadows; an officer was sitting on a divan, his chin resting on the pommel of his sword. I recognized his silky mustache, and the military cape he was wearing in this infernal heat. Why wasn’t he on his mountain, where he belonged?

  “General, what are ye doin’ at the Willard?”

  “Oh, I’m having a little respite—from Stanton’s damn detectives. They’ve been following me everywhere.”

  And you shouldn’t have been fooling around with Copperheads.

  He sat humped in the shadows, with his chin on that sword; couldn’t see much more than a hint of his eyes. He’d always been a man of shadows, contemptuous of everyone who wasn’t part of his military family—and that included other generals.

  “Excellency,” he whispered from his divan. “You can’t fool me with your killer in the long hat. Unconditional Surrender Grant. Well, I believe in terms—good terms, fair terms, not unconditional carnage. But Sherman is lost in the woods, and Grant’s beard will turn silver in the middle of his siege. I’ll sack them both first chance I get, send them to fight the Sioux.”

  “And what fate have you prepared for me?”

  I heard him titter in the dark. “You can become the President of a colored college—I’ll collect some cash, give you the first hundred dollars.”

  “And I suppose you’ll send a peace commission to meet with Jeff Davis.”

  The hate in him was palpable—I could feel it flutter around, a half-mad missile. Little Mac was like a secular bishop certain of his own divine sense, and I was the gadfly who got in his way.

  “Excellency, you should have given me back my old command, and then you wouldn’t be in this pickle, staring at the man who’s going to steal your chair and send you flying back to Illinois.”

  He brushed his mustache and chin beard with a little amber comb, as if he were posing for some invisible camera in the room. Little Mac was the prettiest general we ever had, and he would have been the first to acknowledge that. But there was a lilt in his left eye, a wayward slant, that left him with a deeply troubled look.

  “I should silence Stanton, shut him up, before he slanders me again. You believe his canard that I met Bobbie Lee on the battlefield . . .”

  Stanton loved to flesh out the old fable—that the two generals got together at Antietam, talked of peace while sitting on their mounts, that McClellan’s boys helped Lee skedaddle with his war wagons, let him race back across the river. But that fable didn’t wash. Lee took a spill from his horse and had to wear splints on both his arms. He was carted around in an ambulance during the whole battle. Even if he’d had the time or the inclination to meet with Little Mac, Lee wouldn’t have wanted a Union general to catch him lying flat, in an ambulance.

  McClellan continued to swagger. “Excellency, I don’t care a tit what you think. West Pointers will have to decide our fate, not your conniving Secretary of War. I’ll break that man once I get to the White House.”

  I had to skin him a little, disturb his silk mustache.

  “And what if I delay the elections, and you can’t get in?”

  He was silent for a moment, like some befuddled bear in a yellow sash. Then he broke from the shadows with a violent thrust. His chin beard twitched with rage. He’d never forgive me for having removed him from headquarters—with his horse no less.

  “You wouldn’t have the brass. You’re good for emancipating colored people and telling vulgar jokes. You can’t even read the terrain on a map. You don’t have the stomach to stall the elections.”

  Either I had to tamp his feathers down or spit some oyster juice into his wayward eye.

  “General, did I ever tell you about my Harvard boy? Bob was of a scientific turn as a child. I bought him a microscope. Bob went around experimenting with his glass on everything. And one day, at the dinner table, I took up a piece of cheese. ‘Don’t eat that, Pa,’ said Bob. ‘It’s full of wrigglers.’ But I took a huge bite and said, ‘Son, let ’em wriggle. I can stand it if they can.’ ”

  He wouldn’t stop perusing me from the heights of his chair.

  “Are you demented, sir? What do your damn wrigglers have to do with me?”

  “Nothing, General. I was jest in dire need of a joke.”

  He gripped his sword, and he had such a demented look that I was fairly certain he was about to present me with my own ticket to hell. That’s how much bitterness and contempt he had with his sword held high. What would it have taken him to cleave me in two? I just sat there and sipped my wine. That enraged—and unraveled—him even more. He must have imagined my own blood as he slashed at the pillows and the curtains beside me, until the parlor was filled with feather dust, and his entire face had a fierce glint. Then he sat down again with a tiny mark of satisfaction, and a macabre grin.

  “I could have gotten rid of you,” he said. “I had a million chances. My officers begged me to do it. Even now they beg me, even now. And people would stop me at the side of the road—good people, plain people, not politicians. They idolized Dan Webster, loved the black silk of his coat, said we were the lords of Pennsylvania Avenue, Dan and I, and you didn’t have one token of legitimacy. I should have marched on Washington and had you clamped in irons with your mad wife. Who would have stopped me?”

  “No one,” I said.

  And now he started to smile, with all the menace and the meat of it. “I wouldn’t have bothered your little boy with the lisp—I kinda like him. He could have served me wine at my headquarters, in that uniform the War Department allows him to wear—3rd Lieutenant Tad.”

  Exiled in New Jersey, stripped of his colors, and without men and boys to lead, he must have had an infinity of battle plans inside his head that maddened him beyond repair.

  “Excellency, you ought to kiss my boots. I gave you Gettysburg. Your own officers said that ‘McClellan’s ghost’ won the battle, because the boys wouldn’t have fought with the same valor if they hadn’t assumed I was still in command. But you don’t have that ghost any more in your arsenal. All you have now are your nigger troops. And you dance with them while the nation leaks treasure and blood.”
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  He rose up on the pommel of his sword and left with all the clatter of a general; I could hear his spurs jangle across the parlors, their echo like a nightmare of splintered glass. I wondered where he would show up next. Would I encounter that splintered glass while I was on the privy, or when I carried Tad across the White House on my back? McClellan’s madness would always have a hold on me.

  I walked through the Willard, my tall hat nearly bumping into the chandeliers. I couldn’t find much company—there wasn’t a soul to be seen in the women’s parlor. The rugs were cluttered with scraps of paper, cigar stumps, and spilled spittoons. I went out into the night, with that strange rattle of McClellan’s spurs still ringing in my ears.

  46.

  Mother’s Mission

  IT WAS DESOLATE at dawn, with its clock tower tolling in the wind, its ticket office half shuttered, its ladies’ saloon in disrepair, full of debris. The stationmaster fumbled about with a big brass key in his fist, while troopers stood on guard in rubber raincoats. No one could get onto and off the cars without a government ticket or a special pass from the B&O. We crossed the depot, Keckly and I, and strode onto the platform of the main car shed, with its crumbling granite pillars and porous tin roof, and there she was in her pale gown, without the sign of a slipper or shoe, as if she’d strolled out her bedroom, and hadn’t traveled in her bare feet with a hatbox and a footstool to a stucco railroad station, north of the Capitol.

  It was but a week after I’d met Little Mac at the Willard, and Mother had just returned from Maine. The wind yapped like a mad dog in that long tin tunnel, but she didn’t panic. She had a look of absolute bliss, like an eager child who had just made some startling discovery. Her reddish hair glowed in the tinny light. And for a moment she wasn’t even my wife, but Miss Mary Todd, a Lexington belle with a willful streak, and then I noticed the hatbox with its bruised cover, and her footstool, crouching like a gigantic mushroom, or a mottled toad.