How Few Remain (4 page)

Lincoln put his speech in a leather valise, got up, grabbed his bulky carpetbag, and made his way out of the Pullman car. After a couple of days on the train, solid ground felt shaky under his feet, as it was said to do for sailors just off their ships. He set his stovepipe firmly on his head and looked around.

Amid the usual scenes on a railway-station platform—families greeting loved ones with cries of joy, bankers greeting capitalists with louder (if perhaps less sincere) cries of joy—Lincoln spotted a couple of rugged fellows who had the look of miners dressed up in their best, and probably only, suits. Even before they started moving purposefully through the crowd toward him, he had them pegged for the men he was to meet.

“Mr. McMahan and Mr. Cavanaugh, I presume?” he said, setting down the carpetbag so he could extend his right hand.

“That’s right, Mr. Lincoln,” said one of them, who wore a ginger-colored mustache. “I’m Joe McMahan; you can call Cavanaugh here Fred.” His grip was hard and firm.

“Long as you don’t call me late to supper,” Cavanaugh said agreeably. He was a couple of inches taller than McMahan, with a scar on his chin that looked as if it had come from a knife fight. Both men were altogether unselfconscious about the revolvers on their right hips. Lincoln had been in the West a good many times, and was used to that.

“Come on, sir,” McMahan said. “Here, let me take that.” He picked up the carpetbag. “We’ll get you to the hotel, let you
freshen up some and get yourself a tad more shut-eye, too, if that’s what you want. These here trains, they’re all very fine, but a body can’t hardly sleep on ’em.”

“They’re better than they used to be,” Lincoln said. “I was thinking that last night, when the porter made up my berth. But you’re right—they’re not all they might be.”

“Come on, then,” McMahan repeated. “Amos has the buggy waiting for us.”

As they walked out of the station, they passed a beggar, a middle-aged fellow with a gray-streaked beard who had both legs gone above the knee. Lincoln fumbled in his pockets till he found a quarter, which he tossed into the tin cup on the floor beside the man.

“I thank you for your kind—” the beggar began in a singsong way. Then his eyes—eyes that had seen a lot of pain, and, by the rheumy look in them, a lot of whiskey, too—widened as he recognized his benefactor. He reached into the cup, took out the quarter, and threw it at Lincoln. It hit him in the chest and fell to the ground with a clink. “God damn you, you son of a bitch, I don’t want any charity from
you,”
the legless man snarled. “Wasn’t for you, I’d be up and walking, not living out my days like this.”

Fred Cavanaugh took Lincoln by the arm and hurried him along. “Don’t take no notice of Teddy there,” he said, the beggar’s curses following them. “He gets some popskull in him, he don’t know what the hell he’s talkin’ about.”

“Oh, he knows well enough.” Lincoln’s mouth was a tight, hard line. “I’ve heard that tune before, many times. The men who suffered so much in the War of Secession blame me for it. They have the right, I think. I blame myself, too, though that’s little enough consolation for them.”

Amos, the buggy driver, was cut from the same mold as Cavanaugh and McMahan. The horses clopped up the street. Mud kicked up from their hooves and the wheels of the buggy. For all the wealth that had come out of the mines nearby, Denver boasted not a single paved road. Streams of water ran in the gutters. Trees shaded the residential blocks. Most of the houses—and the public buildings, too—were of either bright red brick or the local yellow stone, which gave the town a pleasingly colorful look.

Miners in collarless shirts and blue-dyed dungarees mingled
on the streets with businessmen who would not have been out of place in Chicago or New York. No, after a moment, Lincoln revised that opinion: some of the businessmen went armed, too.

When he remarked on that, Joe McMahan’s mouth twisted in bitterness. “A man has more’n what he deserves and don’t see fit to share it with his pals who ain’t got so much, Mr. Lincoln, he’s a fool if he don’t reckon they’re liable to try and equalize the wealth whether he likes it or not.”

“True enough,” Lincoln said. “So true, it may tear our country apart again one day. Slave labor comes in more forms than that which still persists in the Confederate States.”

Amos shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek, spat, and said, “Damn straight it does. That’s why we brung you out here—to talk about that.”

“I know.” Lincoln went back to watching the street scenes. Miner, merchant, banker—you could tell so much about a man’s class and wealth by how he dressed. Women were sometimes harder to gauge. Who was poor and who was not gave him no trouble. But if a woman dressed as if she’d come from the pages of
Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly
but painted her face like a strumpet, was she a strumpet or the wife of some newly rich mining nabob? In Denver, that was less obvious than it would have been farther east, where cosmetics were
prima facie
evidence a woman was fast. The rules were different here, and no wonder, for a woman could go—and several had gone—straight from strumpet to nabob’s wife.

In its ornate pretentiousness, the Hôtel Métropole matched anything anywhere in the country. “Here you go, Mr. Lincoln,” Fred Cavanaugh said. “You’ll be right comfortable here, get yourself all good and ready for your speech tonight. You’d best believe a lot of folks want to hear what you’ve got to say about labor nowadays.”

“Hear me they shall,” Lincoln said. “What they do if they hear where I’m staying, though, may be something else again. Are they not liable to take me for one of the exploiters over whom they are concerned?”

“Mr. Lincoln, you won’t find anybody in Colorado got a thing to say against living soft,” Cavanaugh answered. “What riles folks is grinding other men’s noses in the dirt to let a few live soft.”

“I understand the distinction,” Lincoln said. “As you remind
me, the essential point is that so many in the United States, like virtually all the whites in the Confederacy, do not.”

The Hotel Métropole met every reasonable standard for soft living, and most of the unreasonable ones as well. After a hot bath in a galvanized tub at the end of the hall, after a couple of fried pork chops for lunch, Lincoln would have been happy enough to stretch out on the bed for a couple of hours, even if he would have had to sleep diagonally to keep from kicking the footboard. But the speech came first.

He was still polishing it, having altogether forgotten about supper, when Joe McMahan knocked on the door. “Come on, Mr. Lincoln,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a full house for you tonight.”

The hall was not so elegant as the opera house near the Hotel Métropole. It was, in fact, a dance hall with a podium hastily plunked by one wall. But, as McMahan had said, it was packed. From long practice guessing crowds, Lincoln figured more than a thousand men—miners and refinery workers, most of them, and farmers, with here and there a shopkeeper to leaven the mix—stood shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, to hear what he had to say.

They cheered loud and long when McMahan introduced him. Most of them were young. Young men thought of him as labor’s friend in a land where capital was king. Older men, like the beggar in the railway depot, still damned him for fighting, and most of all for losing, the War of Secession.
I
‘d have been a hero if
I
won, he thought. And I’d have been a housewife, or more likely a homely old maid, if I’d been born a woman. So what?

He put on his spectacles and glanced down at the notes he’d written on the train and in the hotel. “A generation ago,” he began, “I said a house divided against itself, half slave and half free, could not stand. And it did not stand, though its breaking was not in the manner I should have desired.” He never made any bones about the past. It was there. Everyone knew it.

“The Confederate States continue all slave to this day,” he said. “How the financiers in London and Paris smile on their plantations, their railroads, their ironworks! How capital floods into their land! And how much of it, my friends, how much drips down from the eaves of the rich men’s mansions to water the shacks where the Negroes live, scarcely better off than the brute
beasts beside which they labor in the fields? You know the answer as well as I.”

“To hell with the damn niggers,” somebody called from the audience. ‘Talk about the white man!” Cries of agreement rose.

Lincoln held up a hand. “I am talking about the white man,” he said. “You cannot part nor separate the two, not in the Southern Confederacy. For if the white laborer there dare go to his boss and speak the truth, which is that he has not got enough to live on, the boss will tell him, ‘Live on it and like it, or I’ll put a Negro in your place and you can learn to live on nothing.’

“And what of our United States, which were, if nothing else, left all free when the Rebels departed from the Union?” Lincoln went on. “Are we—are you—all free now? Do we—do you—enjoy the great and glorious blessings of liberty the Founding Fathers fondly imagined would be the birthright of every citizen of our Republic?

“Or are we returning to the unhappy condition in which we found ourselves in the years before the War of Secession? Do not our capitalists in New York, in Chicago, yes, and in Denver, look longingly at their Confederate brethren in Richmond, in Atlanta, in new and brawling Birmingham, and wish they could do as do those brethren?

“Are we not once more becoming a nation half slave, half free, my friends? Does not the capitalist eat bread gained by the sweat of
your
brows, as the slavemaster does by virtue—and there’s a word turned on its ear!—of the labor of his Negroes?” Lincoln had to stop then, for the shouts that rose up were fierce and angry.

“You know your state, your condition,” he continued when he could. “You know I tell you nothing but the truth. Time was in this country when a man would be hired labor one year, his own man the next, and hiring laborers to work for him the year after that. Such days, I fear, are over and done. On the railroads, in the mines, in the factories, one man’s a magnate, and the rest toil for him. If you go to your boss and tell him you have not got enough to live on, the boss will tell you, ‘Live on it and like it, or I’ll put a Chinaman or an Italian or a Jew in your place and you can learn to live on nothing.’ “

A low murmur came from his audience, more frightening in its way than the fury they had shown before. Fury didn’t last. Now Lincoln was making them think. Thought was slower than anger
to flower into action, but it was a hardy perennial. It did not bloom and die.

“What do we do about it, Abe?” shouted a miner still grimy from his long day of labor far below ground.

“What do we do?” Lincoln repeated. “The Democrats had their day, and a long day it was, from my time up until President Blaine’s inauguration last month. Did they do a thing, a single solitary thing, to help the lot of the working man?” He smiled at the cries of
No!
before going on, “And Blaine, too, though the good Lord knows I wish him well, has railroad money in his pockets. How much labor can hope for from him, I do not know.

“But I know this, my friends: when the United States were a house divided before, they were divided, and did divide, along lines of geography. No such choice avails us now. The capitalists cannot secede as the slavemasters did. If we are not satisfied with our government and the way it treats its citizens, we have the revolutionary right and duty to overthrow it and substitute one that suits us better, as our forefathers did in the days of George III.”

That brought a storm of applause. Men stomped on the floor, so that it shook under Lincoln’s feet. Someone fired a pistol in the air, deafeningly loud in the closed hall. Lincoln held up both hands. Slowly, slowly, quiet crawled back. Into it, he said, “I do not advocate revolution. I pray it shall not be necessary. But if the old order will not yield to justice, it shall be swept aside. I do not threaten, any more than a man who says he sees a tornado coming. Folks can take shelter from it, or they can run out and play in it. That is up to them. You, friends, you are a tornado. What happens next is up to the capitalists.” He stepped away from the podium.

Joe McMahan pumped his hand. “That was powerful stuff, Mr. Lincoln,” he said. “Powerful stuff, yes indeed.”

“For which I thank you,” Lincoln said, raising his voice to be heard through the storm of noise that went on and on.

“Ask you something, Mr. Lincoln?” McMahan said. Lincoln nodded. McMahan leaned closer, so only the former president would hear. “You ever come across the writings of a fellow named Marx, Mr. Lincoln? Karl Marx?”

Lincoln smiled. “As a matter of fact, I have.”

    “Sam!” Clay Herndon spoke sharply. “Sam, you’re woolgathering again.”

“The devil I am,” Samuel Clemens replied, though his friend’s comment did return his attention to the cramped office of the
San Francisco Morning Call
. “I was trying to come up with something for tomorrow’s editorial, and I’m dry as the desert between the Great Salt Lake and Virginia City. I hate writing editorials, do you know that?”

“You have mentioned it a time or two.” Now Herndon’s voice was sly. That suited the reporter’s face: he looked as if he had a fox for his maternal grandmother. His features were sharp and clever, his green eyes studied everything and respected nothing, and his rusty hair only added to the impression. Grinning, he sank his barb: “Or a hundred times or two.”

“Still true,” Clemens snapped, running a hand through his own unruly mop of red-brown hair. “Do you have any notion of the strain on a man’s constitution, having to come up with so many column inches every day on demand?—and always something new, regardless of whether there’s anything new to write about. If I had my Tennessee lands—”

Herndon rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, Sam, give me the lecture on editorials if you must, but spare me the Tennessee lands. They’re stale as salt beef shipped round the Horn.”

“You’re a scoffer, that’s what you are—nothing but a scoffer,” Clemens said, half amused but still half annoyed, too. “Forty thousand acres of fine land, with God only knows how much timber and coal and iron, and maybe gold and silver, too, and all of it in my family.”