That sense of satisfaction soon faded. The truth was that the president-elect had outfoxed his enemies. He was still alive and unscratched.
A knock on the door interrupted these thoughts.
“Come in,” called Bennett.
Lucius entered the room with a new inkwell.
“That was quick,” said Bennett.
“We had this downstairs, sir.”
Lucius stood still for a moment. Bennett shifted his chair back behind the desk and dipped his pen in the new inkwell. It came out shimmering black. Bennett grinned as a drip of ink came off the end.
“You know, Lucius, my hair was once this color.”
“Yes, I do know,” said Lucius, who allowed himself a smile.
Bennett’s hair had started to turn gray when he shipped out to Mexico. Upon his return, it had gone almost completely white. Now he wore it in the shoulder-length style of many Southerners, and it framed his broad face. His head rested on top of a big-boned body. He was once a muscular man, and traces of his former strength were unmistakable. Even at his advanced age, sitting in a chair, Bennett exuded a sense of brute power.
“Thank you, Lucius. That will be all.”
“Yessir,” said the slave, who exited the room.
For most of his life, Bennett had looked younger than he really was. He owned a large, upcountry plantation that grew cotton and rice. He spent about half his time there. Many plantation owners were content to let their slaves and hirelings do all the work, but not Bennett. He enjoyed the physical life of the farm and participated in it whenever he could, even after the wooden leg took away much of his usefulness. He had always hired overseers, and now he relied on them more than ever before. Yet he continued to go into the fields regularly, giving orders and sweating in the sun alongside the slaves whose own toil helped make him one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina.
This habit puzzled Bennett’s peers, who did not understand why he would choose to spend so much of his time so close to slaves engaged in manual labor. They preferred a soft life of leisure. But Bennett believed the work was good for both the body and the mind. When he went off to Mexico in his late fifties, he looked and felt a good fifteen years younger. His presence in the fields also had a positive effect on the whole plantation. Bennett knew there was no such thing as the “happy slave” of legend, but he also knew there was more contentment among his slaves than there was among other slaves on neighboring farms. Just as soldiers appreciated seeing their general near the front lines, slaves appreciated seeing their master in a crop field.
Bennett himself believed strongly in the institution of slavery. He despised the Northern abolitionists who wanted to destroy it. They were radicals who had no appreciation of history, he thought. Aristotle regarded men as innately unequal and considered slavery the most natural thing in the world. It made plain sense that some would rule and others would serve.
There were some in the South who had doubts about slavery. George Washington, the Virginian, was one: he had freed his slaves upon his death. Bennett, however, considered slavery a positive good. Northerners who wanted to meddle with the South’s way of life were supreme hypocrites, he thought. The industrial labor all around them was just another kind of forced servitude. Workers were wage slaves living in urban squalor. Northern industrialists cared only for making money. Bennett provided for his slaves in ways that went far beyond compensating them for their time on the job. Some of them, such as Lucius, even felt like family.
He knew the name of almost every slave on his plantation—and there were more than two hundred of them. When one died, he often delivered a short eulogy and was able to cite a few personal characteristics. He made a special effort to keep families together too. This was not always possible, but Bennett regarded himself as generous when it came to these matters. When he did sell a few slaves, he tried to sell them as families. When he had to split up a family, he tried to sell them to a neighbor and allow visitation. When he bought slaves, he often inquired about whether close family members were also available. He could recall several times purchasing slaves he did not really need, just to keep a family in one piece. It was something no Northern industrialist would have understood.
Gazing out the window again, his eyes settled once more on Sumter. “Here is a family that won’t remain together,” he muttered. The Battery below him had been fortified some years ago, and before that it was a place for hanging pirates. He imagined Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, swinging from a tree. Then he reflected on the likely consequences. That seawall would need to be lined with cannons again.
There was no way to avoid strife between North and South now. Passions ran too high. Bennett felt betrayed by what had happened to make it so. Even after Mexico, he had done his part to hold off the sectional conflict. During the 1850s, he helped finance the filibustering expeditions of Narciso Lopez and John Quitman to Cuba as well as William Walker’s forays into Nicaragua—again with the purpose of national expansion foremost in his mind. They were total failures, but Bennett nevertheless remained committed to doing what he could to keep North and South bound together by a single constitution that permitted the South to keep its way of life.
Bennett might have maintained this optimism even now if it had not been for what had happened in Kansas—or “Bleeding Kansas,” as the press had taken to calling it. His two sons also had served in Mexico. Soon after returning, they moved to Kansas, with their father’s encouragement. The idea was to found a new Bennett plantation as soon as Kansas could be admitted to the Union as a slave state—but both young men became entangled in the violent disputes over the territory’s future. In 1856, within a few weeks of John Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, antislavery factions gunned down both Bennett boys. Neither had married, so their deaths left Bennett without an heir. He was totally alone, except for his slaves.
That was the moment when his mind turned on the question of union. Like virtually every other member of Charleston’s elite society, Bennett now believed the time had come for his state to part ways with the rest of the country. First he gave his leg, then he gave his money, and finally he gave his sons—all for the sake of preserving a country that seemed to show no appreciation for these sacrifices. Children should expect one day to lose their parents, but parents should not have to lose their children after they have weathered the vulnerabilities of youth and grown into healthy adults.
And still this was not enough for the Northern radicals, who had just elected this foul man to the presidency. Lincoln’s name had not even appeared on Southern ballots. The unionists say they are for Union, thought Bennett, and yet they elevate a man whom thousands of citizens did not even have the privilege of voting against. How could any democracy worth its name permit that to happen? It was an insult to half the country. More than half of it, really—a few weeks earlier, Bennett had added up the popular vote totals cast for Lincoln and his three opponents. The president-elect had won less than forty percent of all the votes cast. Now he would rule over more than thirty million Americans. He was a false president. Life in the South would change in fundamental ways. Bennett imagined that even the local postmasters, named to their patronage jobs by this thieving politician in Washington, would stop censoring the abolitionist screeds from the mail.
Bennett finally rose from his chair and walked to a globe resting on a pedestal nearby. The curving coastline of West Africa pointed up at him. He gently rotated the globe to his right, his eye following a line across the Atlantic Ocean until it reached the shore of South Carolina. The map marked the borders of each state. Presented this way, he thought, they looked like separate nations. As well they might be. South Carolina had formally seceded from the United States at the end of December. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana had followed in January, and Texas had quit the Union on the first day of February. Just a week ago, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama. Several other slaveholding states re
mained in the Union, but Bennett suspected that they would leave as well. If they did, the Confederacy would span from Maryland to Texas. It would be geographically larger than what remained of the so-called United States.
Now Bennett’s eye wandered farther south on the globe, to a long and narrow island in the Caribbean. Florida seemed to point like a finger at Cuba. Had things gone differently these past few years, perhaps it too would have been in the Confederacy. Or perhaps Cuba would be an actual state, with its admission to the Union delaying the conflict that was now erupting. President Buchanan had wanted to buy the island from Spain, but abolitionists in Congress stopped the purchase.
The island remained outside the American sphere of influence, and yet it was strangely close. Bennett, in fact, once had spent an entire winter there. He had even considered buying a sugar plantation but decided it was impractical to run from South Carolina. Even after that, he continued to correspond with some of the leading figures in Havana. He was able to do this in Spanish, having picked up the language during his time in Mexico. Bennett once had rated the Cuban episode of his life a grand waste of time, or at most a missed opportunity. Yet his letters to and from Cuba had increased tenfold since last fall. Now the time had come to send one more, which he believed would change the course of everything.
Bennett dipped his pen in the inkwell again and scrawled the date on the paper. He paused for a minute, trying to decide which words to use. Then he began: “Estamado Señor, le solicito su ayada en un tema urgente.” As Bennett formed these words on the page, he mumbled a translation to himself: “Dear Sir, I seek your service in an urgent matter…”
THREE
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 1861
The two men looked like hostages as they bumped down the street in an open carriage. Armed soldiers surrounded them on horseback. Troops marched in front and behind. Hundreds of spectators lined their path. Many of their faces were sullen, as if they were watching a foreign army seize control of the city. Shutters up and down Pennsylvania Avenue—or “the Avenue,” as the locals called it—were closed tight. Most of the onlookers were at least polite. A few even cheered. Yet this was not what Washington, D.C., had seen in years past. The procession seemed more like a military exercise than an inaugural parade.
The carriage riders exchanged few words along the way. Their silence would have felt awkward were it not invaded by shouts from the crowd and the clattering hooves of horses. The men had met only once before, and they had had little to say to each other then. Now there was practically nothing at all. Both welcomed the steady stream of noise that filled the space between them. It provided a convenient excuse for avoiding conversation.
The pudgy, older man was James Buchanan, the outgoing president. A shock of his white hair bounced whenever the carriage hit a hole in the street, which it did every few feet. The jolts also made him grimace, but he looked more pitiful than menacing. He could barely see out of one of his eyes, a debility that forced him to squint constantly. In fact, he appeared a bit disoriented, as if he did not understand why he and the fellow seated beside him were the center of so much attention. Some of his critics would have considered this a fitting summary of his whole dithering presidency. Buchanan himself mostly felt relief. In recent weeks he had wanted nothing as badly as this day to come, and with it the lifting of a burden he believed he could no longer bear. He wanted to be done with the responsibility of the presidency. His thoughts now were focused on Wheatland, his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He would plant flowers soon.
His companion kept a somber look, occasionally broken by a quick smirk or a slight wave. His crumpled face was not handsome, but it was distinctive. One glimpse and it was hard to forget, with deep-set eyes, a high forehead, and a big nose. The beard was new. He had only recently grown it. People accustomed to his face from pictures were not used to the new look. It made him appear older and more serious. Perhaps that was the point. All of this was set atop a tall and spindly frame. Many of his features seemed out of proportion, and a black stovepipe hat exaggerated his considerable height even further. It might be said that a good caricature resembles its subject. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was a subject who resembled a caricature.
Colonel Charles P. Rook rode on a horse alongside the carriage, dressed in his blue uniform. His thoughts kept returning to a single question, which he could not chase from his head: would he take a bullet for Lincoln? Rook was riding with the president-elect for the specific purpose of protecting him. The other horsemen surrounding Lincoln were under his command, and he had planned all the security arrangements along the inaugural route, as well as at the Capitol, where Lincoln would give a speech and be sworn in. At Eleventh Street, Rook looked up and saw sharpshooters peering down from the rooftops of buildings facing the Avenue. They held Sharps rifles and had orders to use them if necessary. When he passed Tenth Street, he checked for the mounted soldiers who were there, just up from the intersection and ready to charge should the need arise. And in the crowd, mixed among the parade watchers, he sometimes spotted a familiar face—an undercover agent, keeping tabs on the people around him. Rook had planned it all.
The only thing he had not planned was the weather. It had rained lightly at sunrise, but unfortunately not enough to dampen the dust on the Avenue. At least the air was crisp and cool, a welcome change from the unusual warmth of the last several days. Rook figured this would keep his men more alert, rather than tempt them into sluggishness. He worried that a loss of concentration for even a moment, somewhere along this path, would give an assassin the small opening he needed. If a gunman were to pop his head from a second-story window on the south side of the Avenue, it was possible that only Rook’s flesh would prevent Lincoln’s death.
Rumors of conspiracy had run around the capital ever since Lincoln’s election sparked the secession crisis. Opinion in Washington was split between those who supported Lincoln and thought the South was in the midst of a grand bluff, and those who truly hated the president-elect. There was no middle ground.
Rook was from Kentucky, and soldiering came naturally to him. His ancestors had fought in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He had graduated from West Point in 1845, and within two years found himself fighting for his country in Mexico. He landed with the invasion force at Veracruz in 1847. On the march to Mexico City, Rook won brevets at the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec. His military career was off to a brilliant start.
Then he quit. He discovered that when there was no war to fight, life in the military was unrewarding and the pay too low. He tried banking, but that failed when his treasurer ran off with most of their money. Then he went into surveying. The never-ending travel had prevented Rook from finding a wife. Most men of his age had a family. Rook, some said, was married to whatever job he held at the time.
He happened to be in Washington a few days after South Carolina seceded, when Lieutenant General Winfield Scott learned of his presence. The two men knew each other from Mexico. They discussed the national crisis and the particular threat to the District of Columbia, nestled between two slave states. They also considered the safety of the incoming president. After a time, the old general announced that he had a meeting with President Buchanan. Rook walked him down to his carriage. At the door, Scott paused.
“Our most immediate problem is that many of the citizens of the District of Columbia would like to defend the government and their next president—but they have no rallying point. There is nothing to bring them together.”
“What may be done?” asked Rook.
“Make yourself that rallying point,” Scott replied, stepping outside the door and into his carriage. From the vehicle, Rook heard him repeat his words: “Make yourself that rallying point!”
Three days later, Rook was mustered back into military service with the job of organizing the District’s security and protecting the president-elect. It felt good to be back in uniform. Unlike some military men, Rook was far from vain about his appearance.
He took a small measure of pride in a neatly trimmed beard that came to a sharp point below his chin, as if it had been chiseled into shape. Overall, however, he displayed the slightly rumpled appearance of a man who felt most at home in a field camp.
For the past two months, Rook had worked tirelessly to ensure that Abraham Lincoln would survive until this day. Yet Rook did not care much for Lincoln. His candidate in the election had been Stephen Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois. Douglas actually had defeated Lincoln in a Senate race just two years earlier, in a contest that the whole nation had watched. Rook did not believe Lincoln was the best choice to lead the country—and he was not sure that Lincoln was even a good choice. He worried that the abolitionists behind his rapid ascent did not have the interests of the Union in mind. They were blind advocates of a radical cause, no better than the fire-eaters of the South who now committed treason. Had their positions been reversed and the South pressed its views on the North, Rook believed it was the abolitionists who would be seceding. He wished both sides would keep the nation’s interests in mind rather than flirt with a deadly conflict.
Rook had suggested holding the inauguration indoors. Lincoln, however, rejected the proposal. The open-air inauguration had become a habit ever since the British had burned the Capitol in the War of 1812 and forced the ceremony outside. The president-elect also turned down Rook’s recommendation that he stay in a private house rather than a public hotel like Willard’s. His experience in Baltimore probably explained it. Lincoln wanted to avoid another embarrassment.
The First Assassin Page 2