How Few Remain (73 page)

At the Palmer House restaurant, the maître d’ gave him a fishy stare. “I am to dine with Mr. Lincoln,” he said, and the ice began to break up. A discreetly passed silver dollar made the fellow as obsequious as any Confederate planter could have wanted in a slave.

Lincoln was already seated when Douglass came up. He unfolded to his full angular height like a carpenter’s jointed ruler. “Good to see you, Fred,” he said, and held out his big, bony hand.

Douglass took it. “It’s been too long,” he said. “But neither of us is in fashion these days, and so we both have to work harder just to make our voices heard. That leaves too little time for sociability.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” Lincoln said in the rustic accents of his youth. “Well, sit yourself down, we’ll get outside some supper, and then we’ll hash this out and see what we come up with.”

“An excellent proposal.” Douglass did sit, then examined the menu. He spoke with firm decision: “I shall have a beefsteak. If I can’t get a good one in Chicago, they have vanished off the face of the earth.”

“I had beef last night, so I believe I’ll order the roast chicken,” Lincoln said. “Considering what we shall be about over the next few days, though, I wonder whether cooked goose wouldn’t be a better choice.”

“Surely things have not come to such a pass,” Douglass said.

Lincoln looked at him. Lincoln, in fact, looked through him. The ex-president said not a word. Douglass, feeling himself flush, was glad his brown skin kept that from showing. When the waiter came round to see what the two men wanted, he reckoned the interruption not far from providential.

His beefsteak, when in due course it arrived, occasioned another interruption, a rapturous one. Across the table from him, Lincoln methodically demolished half a chicken. Both men drank whiskey with their meals.

“How you stay so lean with such an appetite is beyond me,” Douglass said, patting his own considerable girth.

Lincoln shrugged. “I eat—and I am eaten.” He had not drunk to excess, any more than Douglass had, but perhaps it was the spirits that let his frustration with the world in which he found himself come forth to a degree he did not usually permit. Or perhaps it was something else. After one of his self-deprecating chuckles, he said, “I bear up well in the presence of mine enemies; only with my friends do I let my sorrows show. Having so few friends these days, I am most often quite the jolly gentleman.”

He looked as jolly as an undertaker. He usually looked that way, regardless of how he felt. Douglass said, “Surely the state of the Republican Party cannot be so bad as you implied in your invitation to this supper.”

“Can’t it? Why not?” Lincoln asked, and Douglass had no answer. The former president went on, “This may be the last supper of the Republican Party.”

“With the way the war has gone, I fear you’re likely right,” Douglass said. “I had such hopes when we began it, and now …” His voice trailed away.

“Now we’ve both come closer than we would have liked to making the acquaintance of the hangman,” Lincoln said, and Douglass winced and nodded. Lincoln continued, “But that is not what I meant. Our party would face hard sledding, and face it soon, even had the war gone as we should have liked.”

“You are, I believe, too much the pessimist,” Douglass said. “Had we succeeded in forcing the Confederate States to disgorge Chihuahua and Sonora, Republican strength would have been assured for years to come.”

But Lincoln shook his head. “Try as I will, I cannot make myself believe it, for we have abandoned the principles upon which we—you and I and others—founded the party in the first place. When was the last time you heard a Republican speak up for a fair shake for the working man or for justice and equality for all men? Those are the ideals we espoused when we were young. Have they changed from boons to evils as we grew old?”

Douglass frowned and looked down into his glass of whiskey. In those charged, heady days before the War of Secession, everything had seemed possible. He spoke carefully: “Since the war,
we may perhaps have grown too concerned with giving the country back its spine and allowing it to stand tall in the world, and—”

“What about caring what it stands for when it stands tall?” Lincoln broke in. “We have forgotten the working man as the capitalist ground him into the dirt. We have looked outward too
much
, and at ourselves too
little
, and so a pit yawns beneath the party. Unless the mass of men believe we represent them and can better their lot, they will cast their ballots elsewhere, and I for one shall not blame them. In their shoes—when they have shoes—I should cast my vote elsewhere, too.”

“I look outward,” Douglass said. “I look south, to my brethren yet in bondage.”

“I know you do, old friend,” Lincoln said. “Nor do I presume to condemn you, for there your heart lies. But do you not see that the factory owners in the United States abuse the working classes in much the same way as the slaveowners in the Confederate States abuse the Negro?”

“It might seem so, to a white man,” Douglass snapped. But then he softened: “We have disagreed here for years, you and I. I ask you, Abraham: where is the factory owner who, when a pretty woman in his employ strikes his fancy, can abuse her chastity as he wishes?” His mouth tightened. The color of his skin, the shape of his features, testified that he was the product of such a union.

Lincoln replied, “Where is the slaveowner who, when times are slack or when a hand grows old, can turn him out to starve without a backwards glance, as if he were discarding a torn glove? The evils are not identical, but both spring from superiors enjoying untrammeled power over those they call inferiors, which is, as I have long maintained, destructive of democracy.”

“The plight of the Negro is worse, and more deserving of attention,” Douglass insisted.

“The plight of the Negro in the United States is not far different from the plight of other proletarians in the United States, and grows less different day by day,” Lincoln said. “In looking toward the Negro in the Confederate States, for whom we can do little, you ignore both the Negro and the white man in the United States, for whom we can do a great deal.”

“I look to amend the worst evil I see,” Douglass said stiffly.

“Which is also the one least susceptible to amendment.” Then
Lincoln laughed, which irked the Negro orator and journalist, who found nothing amusing in the discussion. Seeing his expression, the ex-president explained: “I went through what they call the Lincoln-Douglas debates more than twenty years ago, and now I find myself in the midst of the Lincoln-Douglass debate.”

“After some of the things the Little Giant said about the colored man, I’ll thank you not to compare me to him,” Douglass said, but he was smiling now, too. “You lost that election, but those debates made you a force to be reckoned with.”

“And all that reckoning with me got the country was a lost war and a new, unfriendly neighbor on our southern border,” Lincoln answered. “All that electing me got the party was the assurance it would not elect another Republican president for the next generation.”

Yes, Douglass thought, Lincoln was letting his bitterness show tonight, more than he normally did. The Negro said, “Cheer up, old friend. You yourself spoke of the king who charged his wise men to come up with a saying that would be true and fitting in all times and situations. They gave him the words, ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ “

“Yes, and do you know what those wise men were talking about?” Lincoln asked. Douglass shook his head. “The Republican Party,” Abraham Lincoln said.

Captain Saul Berryman looked neither so bright nor so young as he had before the war against the many foes of the United States. “Good morning, Colonel Schlieffen,” he said wearily. He did not bother speaking German, as he had before, but waved Schlieffen to a seat in the outer office. “General Rosecrans will be with you shortly.”

“Thank you,” Alfred von Schlieffen told Rosecrans’ adjutant. Captain Berryman only grunted by way of reply. He had already immersed himself once more in the paperwork that had engrossed him when Schlieffen walked into the office.

The closed door to Rosecrans’ inner sanctum did little to muffle the phrases he was, presumably, bellowing into the telephone: “Yes, Mr. President … No, Mr. President … No, no, no … I’m sorry, Your Excellency, but I don’t think we can manage that… . What? What? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.” That last was followed a moment later by a sharp little crash, as of
the newfangled machine’s earpiece being slammed back into the bracket on which it rested when not in use.

Major General William Rosecrans opened the door to the inner office and peered out, a hunted look in his deep-set eyes. “Ah, Schlieffen,” the general-in-chief of the United States said, suddenly genial. “I’d sure as hell sooner talk with you than with James G.”—his beard swallowed a word or two—”Blaine.”

“Thank you, General,” Schlieffen said, rising and going into Rosecrans’ office. What he thought of an officer who would curse his commander-in-chief he kept to himself. Instead, pointing to the box on the wall, he said, “I am sorry it did not let you hear well.”

“What?” Rosecrans stared. Then he laughed. “I could hear just fine, Colonel. What happened was, I got sick of listening. Any time a man asks you to do what isn’t possible, you’re a damned sight better off pretending you can’t make him out.”

Schlieffen thought of the British admiral, Nelson, deliberately raising a telescope to his blind eye so he could keep from officially seeing an order he did not like. With as much sympathy as he could put in his voice, the German military attaché asked, “What does the president ask of you that you cannot do?”

He wondered if Rosecrans would answer him. He wouldn’t have answered a question like that from a foreign attaché, were he back in Berlin. But the American soldier did not hesitate. “What does he ask?” Rosecrans echoed. “What does he ask? He asks me to win the goddamn war for him, that’s what. Not so much at this stage of things, is it?”

His breath stank of whiskey. Even a sober man, though, would have been hard pressed to be optimistic at the moment. “How does he want you do do this?” Schlieffen inquired.

“How?” Rosecrans howled, stretching the word out into a cry of pain. “He hasn’t the faintest idea how. I’m the soldier, so that’s supposed to be my affair. Have you got a won war concealed anywhere about your person, Colonel Schlieffen? I haven’t, sure as the devil.”

“If President Blaine still wants you this war to win, I do not know how to tell you to do this,” Schlieffen said. “The only question I have is why he does not take the peace the Confederates say they will give him and thank God for it. When we France beat, we from them took two provinces and made them pay five milliards of francs.”

“What’s a milliard?” Rosecrans asked. Schlieffen took a pen from its inkwell and wrote the number on a scrap of paper: 5,000,000,000. Rosecrans looked at it. “Oh. Five billion francs, you mean.” He whistled softly. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Ja,”
Schlieffen answered laconically.

“That’s a hell of a lot of money,” Rosecrans said, as if the German had not spoken.

“Ja,”
Schlieffen said again, and then, “and Longstreet wants to take no provinces—no, no states, you would say—from the United States. He wants to take no money from the United States. He wants to take only the two provinces he bought from the Empire of Mexico, and to have the United States say they are his. With what he could do, these are good terms,
nicht wahr?”

“Oh, they’re good terms, all right,” Rosecrans said. “You ask me, they’re
too
damn good. It’s as though Longstreet is saying, ‘We can lick you any old time we please, and we don’t have to take anything away from you to make that so.’ It’s—humiliating, that’s what it is.”

Schlieffen essayed a rare joke: “If President Blaine does not for these terms care, President Longstreet will them harder make. Of this I am sure. Do you not think that I … am right?” He nodded to himself, pleased he’d again remembered the English idiom.

“In a red-hot minute,” Rosecrans said, which the German military attaché, judging by the tone, took for agreement. Sighing, scowling, Rosecrans went on, “But he can’t do that now, because that would be humiliating, too. Do you understand what I’m saying, Colonel?”

“Oh, yes, I understand,” Schlieffen said. “But in war, the way not to be humiliated is to win. If you lose a war, how can you keep this from happening to you? The enemy to be stronger himself has shown.”

“Hasn’t he, though?” But then Rosecrans violently shook his head. “No, Goddamn it, the Confederates haven’t shown that they’re stronger than we are. As strong as we are, maybe, but not stronger. It’s only after England and France jumped on our back that everything went into the privy.”

“But we of this spoke down in Washington before the war began,” Schlieffen said. “Britain and France have been friends to the Confederate States since before the War of Secession. The
United States should have had ready a plan to fight at the same time all three countries.”

“I remember you saying that,” Rosecrans replied. “I have to tell you, I didn’t take it seriously then. Do you really mean to tell me that back in Berlin you’ve got a plan for war against France and one for war against France and England and one for war against France and England and Russia and one for—”

“Aber natürlich,”
Schlieffen broke in. “And we think of also Austria-Hungary and Italy, though they are now our friend. And we remember Holland and Belgium and Denmark and Sweden and Turkey and—”

The general-in-chief of the United States stared at him. “Jesus Christ, you do mean it,” Rosecrans said slowly. “What do they do in that General Staff of yours, Colonel, sit around all day studying maps and timetables and lists of regiments and I don’t know what all else?”

“Yes,” Schlieffen answered, surprised yet again that Rosecrans should be surprised at the idea of military planning. “We believe that, if war comes, we should as little to chance leave as we can.”

“A lot of chance in war,” Rosecrans insisted. “Can’t help it.” Yes, he was an American, looking for nothing more than the chance to go out in the field of uncertainty and snatch what he could from it.