I Am Abraham (22 page)

They didn’t build that monstrosity—the
Wigwam
—we did! It was a huge wooden barn at the corner of Lake and Market meant to look like an Indian lodge. It was put there to keep all the delegates far apart. New York had to navigate the entire floor to get near Pennsylvania. And those two were our biggest rivals.

I was still a failed Congressman with bony kneecaps. Photographers arrived from everywhere to make me over with a new kind of dazzle—they went at me like voracious warriors. They plucked the hairs from my nostrils, covered my moles with facial powder, but I was the same sad sort in the mirror. Mary sent the photographers flying with her broom, called them mountebanks. I still had no dazzle. So reporters on the Republican payroll plunged into my past, and while I told a couple of whoppers about chasing a bear with an axe, they invented a tall tale of their own. Suddenly I was
reborn
as the Rail Splitter, Old Honest Abe. It hypnotized my own generals as they pictured me in a coonskin cap. I wouldn’t pose with an axe in my hand, but my generals prevailed. Our Republican journals screamed that the prairies were all on fire for the Rail Splitter. And it sure felt that way, as pilgrims rose out of some dusty high-plains fire and descended upon Springfield like a horde that was here to stay.

I couldn’t even ride to the convention site in Chicago on my own tail; my generals didn’t want me near the Wigwam.
Keep cool,
they wired. So I played
fives
—Canadian handball—in a vacant lot behind the
Illinois
State Journal
, which had a wondrous rear wall. There was meanness in me, a kind of malice—that fury on the plains was inside my skull. My damn future was beyond my control, like a brushfire that crackled in the dry heat and went out into the wind. I destroyed my opponents with the help of that dry wind, won every point, slapping at the leather ball until my hand was raw, while Mary ran to the telegraph office and returned with chits of paper that could have been written in Chinese. And then she returned without the chits and a smile on her face, and we didn’t need another word from the Wigwam that eighteenth of May. We’d grabbed the Republican nomination right out of Seward’s fist
after
the second ballot.

“Father, we’ve won the nomination.”

It didn’t
taste
like victory—without all the sweat and stink of the Wigwam—though our little cannon boomed from behind the courthouse in Springfield, and the fire bombs shot into the sky with a whistle that havocked my ears for half a day.

No one but Billy understood my mood. I was bored—
badly
bored. A Presidential candidate had about as much bustle and wit as a totem pole. I couldn’t criticize the President and his pusillanimous overtures to the South—he was walking into a maelstrom, while our Southern Sisters sang sweet songs into his ears and fanned his fat behind with palmettos.

It felt to me as if the prairies were on fire—not for Lincoln, as the newspapers said—but from sadness and futility. There’s the rub. The nation was heading toward ruin. The peacemakers in our own Party asked me to deliver a statement that would reassure the South. There was nothing I could deliver. The South was holding a pistol to my ear, as I had informed the folks at the Cooper Institute, and I didn’t intend to pay any tribute to some highwayman.

Suddenly that new appellation of mine seemed fit, since the Rail Splitter had hacked the Republic in two. I couldn’t have wandered into the Deep South in my stovepipe hat and walked out alive. There were rallies against the Rail Splitter in Richmond and Mobile, and Manhattan endured the same unrest, as Mayor Fernando Wood, I’m told, talked about marrying up New Yorkers with King Cotton.

The Democrats didn’t need a Rail Splitter—they chose suicide, split up into two warring wings, but I longed for an election, not an
embalmment
, and not a wake, where half the country wouldn’t have minded to see me dead.

Billy tried to pull me out of my own mordant humor. He knew I would have the
hypo
if I had to remain locked up in Springfield like a convict, with two whole months before Election Day, and he lassoed my generals into agreeing to a little public tour of the hinterland that September—I could be seen in public at the fairgrounds—at the very edge of Springfield. I thought I would smile a bit, shake a couple of hands, and juggle my hat. But no one could have appraised the crowd; folks had come from everywhere to meet the reclusive candidate. Billy and I rode to the grounds in my carriage; we couldn’t find a bit of breathing space in that thicket of people. My faithful old mare shied and snorted and stamped her feet. “Whoa, Cricket,” I muttered, “whoa.”

We must have had enough voters at the fair to fill five counties. A razzle of young Republican
Wide-Awakes
, looking like phantoms in their black oilcloth caps and capes, ran through the grounds with rails topped with torches of burning rags to celebrate the Rail Splitter—they almost set a little girl’s hair on fire. The sheriff might have locked them up as public nuisances if Billy hadn’t intervened and got some of the Wide-Awakes to give up their burning rags. Their friends and accomplices shouted, “We want the Rail Splitter—speech, speech, speech.”

I wouldn’t roil these folks at the fair, wouldn’t alarm them with any talk of a dire future. I climbed onto the footboard and screamed as loud I could, “I’m sworn to silence. It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my present position, to make no speeches.”

“Aw, Abe,” someone shouted, “you can make an exception for us.”

And others picked up that refrain.
Exception
—
exception
—
exception!

A woman with burning red eyes under her bonnet asked, “What are we gonna do about those boogers in Alabam?”

And that refrain was picked up.
Boogers
—
boogers
—
boogers!

I tried to calm that crowd. “Alabama’s still in the Union, last time I heard.”

Another woman cried, “We love ye, Abe, we really do.”

Folks shoved closer and closer to the carriage. I watched men and women whip their heads from side to side like religious penitents. Several Wide-Awakes climbed onto the footboard; the carriage rocked. Cricket reared and bucked at the men and women behind her. Some of these same Republicans slashed the carriage roof with their pocketknives and near took out Billy’s eyes. They hadn’t lost their presentiment or their vigor.

“We love ye, Abe, we really do.”

It was like swimming around in a pond of people. I couldn’t breathe, but Billy kept his cool. He grabbed one of the pocketknives, sliced through Cricket’s reins, and while people pawed at me, their thumbs perilously close to my eyes, he shoved me through the carriage’s metal bars, and right over Cricket’s rump, held me until I could clutch her mane, launched me with a light kick, and leapt off the carriage.

“Lincoln,” he said. “Run for it—I’ll manage.”

I saw him stumble, and I scooped him up onto Cricket’s back, and we rode like Injuns through that crowd, with people getting more excited as we passed—
the Rail Splitter, the Rail Splitter
—until I lost count where we were riding and who I was and what I wanted to be. I could feel the heat of burning rags, notice the top of a tent, as I rumbled in and out of lucidity. I was a pale rider rather than some Presidential candidate, and I had to calm Cricket or she might have crushed a child. We rode like that, through time and eternity, on a fairground that would never end.

19.

Victory Ride

I
T
WAS
ARCTIC
weather when we climbed aboard the train, with a freezing wind that could knock off a man’s hat and send it sailing across streets and alleys covered in black mud. The depot was as dark and hangdog as some ancient world with blood on the moon, yet half of Springfield had crowded onto the boards to bid farewell to the Rail Splitter. They could have been spectral creatures in that dark wind—the depot rocked as if a devil lived right under the boards, and the trees swayed with a somber music, and I had to wonder if we were riding into a whirlwind.

These folks hadn’t come to harm the Lincolns. They carried signs and sang to us, banged their drums and blew on their cornets, and I had to hush them up a little.

“My friends—here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return . . .”

“Abe,” said one old man, “you’ll be back in no time. We won’t let that damn District keep ye too long.”

The cornets started up again, with their bleat crashing into the roof of the depot till it sounded like a series of wails. Mother shivered. I couldn’t find much happiness on her face, and that mystified me. Ever since she was a child in Lexington, she had dreamt of becoming Mrs. President, but somehow she was reluctant to leave Illinois, where half the country had courted the Lady Elect. She worried about Bob, who’d come down from Harvard to be on board with us, worried about Willie and Tad, who were dressed up like little field marshals and might lose their hides in the District. Atlanta’s own newspaper,
Confederacy
, could see the Potomac “crimsoned in human gore,” and Pennsylvania Avenue “paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies,” if I or any other Republican baboon was sworn in.

The Presidential train belched a bit of smoke and then churned out of Springfield on that morning of black mud, banners flying in the wind. Folks were lined up all along the tracks, looking like some serpent in Sunday clothes that went on for miles. We had our own private car, replete with crimson curtains and a carpet as complicated as Ali Baba’s den. My lips were trembling. My mind was playing tricks. I could see myself, a live man sitting in a bier that could have been a rowboat on wheels, while men in white war paint surrounded my strange ambulance and let out a deafening huzzah.

There had been rumors that the Rebels would seize Washington and the White House before I had the chance to arrive—and my own inauguration would rocket out into the wind. I felt like a wild man communing with his own wild fate, the President Elect of a nation about to evaporate into smoke. Union commanders wanted Mary and our boys to travel on a separate train—the five of us were too much of a target, they declared—but Mary refused. She would stay in the
line
of danger, with me. I was caught in the middle of this tug, but finally these commanders were overruled by Winfield Scott, the Union’s General-in-Chief. Old Fuss & Feathers wired from the District that Mary and the boys would be a perfect camouflage. It was much safer, he insisted, if I was surrounded by my family. That didn’t prevent him from hiding sharpshooters along the Presidential route—the riflemen sat in their own invisible aeries, but they couldn’t hide the rifles, with that incessant gleam of their long silver snouts; it seemed much more sinister than anything the Rebels could produce.

Willie and Tad had a walloping time with every soldier and civilian on board. They couldn’t stop exploring the cars. Our college boy was more reserved. The ride and all its fanfare was a damn intrusion. His classmates at Harvard had poked fun of him as the Prince of Rails, and he couldn’t have had much tranquility under the Presidential glare. I’d never met a boy as secretive as Bob. He stood in the corner and whispered to his Mama a whole lot. He could have been conspiring against the Union, and I would have been the last to know. He must have been born in some sweet-water well that didn’t have much truck with politicians and reporters.

I couldn’t coax Mary into coming out onto the rear platform of our car at all the little stops, but folks kept insisting. “We want all the Lincolns!”

So she appeared on the platform with our three boys and waved one of her little hands, while I hopped around like a jackass. Mary was frightened of this fuss—local dignitaries crowding into the Presidential car, stroking the curtains and stomping up a storm. The constant banter terrified her. She saw Rebels lurking everywhere. Mother had pictured the Lady Elect as a new kind of Republican queen, but the politicians on the train weren’t partial to queens.

Mary was much more at ease when we stopped at some governor’s mansion, and she could wear one of her new dresses at the governor’s ball . . . and dance with Bob, the Prince of Rails, who was photographed as much as his Pa. His secretiveness was suddenly gone. He chatted with reporters, flirted with the prettiest gals. He wore the finest clothes, and he didn’t scoff at my own irregular rigging.

So I trusted Bob, let him guard the Presidential satchel, the oilcloth bag that contained the first and last copies of my inaugural address. But Bob had flirted too much, had had too much to drink. He came to me one morning with bloodshot eyes.

“Father, I lost your satchel.”

I couldn’t believe there was malice in him, that he’d lost the satchel on purpose to vex his own Pa, poke at my innards with a stick. He hid behind his Harvard shellac—that’s what bothered me the most. “Father, you mustn’t worry. I’ll buy you another satchel.”