Lincoln (6 page)

“It was at my advice, sir,” said Scott, “that you took the night-cars. I trust our people in Baltimore. They swore to me that you would never have got through alive.”

“Well, even if you were right, General, I’m still not sure that you’ve done me a good turn.”

“We could take no chances,” said Seward.

General Scott nodded. “That’s why I agreed with Mr. Seward when he said you would be safer at Willard’s Hotel than in a private house.”

“Was that
your
idea?” Lincoln looked at Seward, with some amusement. “I thought it was General Scott’s.”

Seward was amazed to find himself blushing, as he stammered about safety. Actually, the Albany Plan had dictated Lincoln’s removal from a private house to a hotel where Seward and the others would have access to him and his party. The general saluted as they departed.

The weak sun had now vanished behind what looked to be snow clouds. Lincoln and Seward walked in silence down Seventeenth Street to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, as usual crowded at this time of day. Carriages and cabs clattered by while the horse carriages rattled on their tracks, bells sounding.

“No soldiers,” said Lincoln, watching the traffic.

“No war—so far.”

“What a fix we’re in,” said the President-elect, stepping up on the brick sidewalk that led past the iron fence of the White House, where he would soon be quartered—caged, was more like it, thought Seward. For a brief moment—very brief, actually—he was glad that Lincoln and not he had been elected sixteenth president of what was left of the United States of America.

T
HE SIDEWALK
in front of Willard’s Hotel seemed to hum and throb, and John Hay felt as if he were still on the cars as he made his way through the crowd of people—mostly colored, he noticed—who were on hand to get a look at Mr. Lincoln, who was not visible; unlike Mrs. Lincoln, who was, as well as the three Lincoln sons, the six lady relations of Mrs. Lincoln’s, the two Lincoln secretaries John George Nicolay (born twenty-nine years ago in Bavaria; moved to Illinois as a child; grew up to edit a Pittsfield newspaper) and John Hay himself, aged twenty-two, a graduate of Brown who had been admitted to the Illinois bar exactly two weeks ago, thanks, in part, to the fact that his uncle was Springfield’s leading lawyer and an old associate of Lincoln; thanks, again in part, to the fact that Hay had gone to school with Nicolay, Lincoln’s secretary during the campaign for the presidency. Hay had been able to make himself so useful to Nicolay in the campaign that Nico had said to the President-elect, “Can’t we take Johnny to Washington with us?” and although Lincoln had groaned and said, “We can’t take all Illinois down with us to Washington,” John Hay had been duly employed as a presidential secretary. Small, wiry, handsome, John Hay intended to enjoy as much as possible his sudden elevation in the world.

At Brown, Hay had wanted to be a poet; in fact, he was a poet who wrote verse that got published. But that was not exactly a career or a living. For a time, the pulpit had appealed to him—except for the business about God. Although the law had no great appeal to him, for a young man named Hay there was not much choice. He worked in his uncle’s office, where he got to know his uncle’s friend, Mr. Lincoln, a man whose ups-and-downs were much talked of in Springfield, particularly the downs. Mr. Lincoln was supposed to have gone mad for two weeks just before what was to have been his wedding day, which had to be postponed. He had gone into a decline after losing his seat in Congress and despite the campaigning that he had done for the new Whig President, Zachary Taylor, he was offered no government appointment other than the secretaryship of the Oregon territory, which Mrs. Lincoln had turned down for him. Home in Springfield, Lincoln practised law with the brilliant, hard-drinking William Herndon and let himself, many said, sink into apathy, while making a good deal of money as a railroad lawyer. When the great debate on slavery began, Mr. Lincoln found his voice, and after his challenge to Stephen Douglas, he had come to personify the new
Republican Party and the new politics—whatever they were. Hay was never quite certain just where Mr. Lincoln meant to take the nation but he did know that wherever that was, he was going to go, too.

At the center of the lobby, the manager of Willard’s was greeting Mrs. Lincoln, who was tired and not, Hay could see, in the best of moods. Nicolay and Hay had their code words for the great folk. Mary Todd Lincoln was known, depending on her mood, as either Madam or the Hellcat. Mr. Lincoln was either the Ancient or, in honor of the previous year’s visit to Washington by the first ambassadors from that awesome Japanese official known as the Tycoon, the Tycoon.

The slender Nicolay was at the Hellcat’s side, smiling grimly through his long, pointed, youthful beard. Although Hay could not hear what the Hellcat was saying, he suspected that a complaint was being duly registered. Suddenly, Hay found himself next to the oldest Lincoln son, Robert, a seventeen-year-old Harvard freshman who said, with pleasure, “Johnny!” as if they had not spent the last twelve days and nights cooped up together on the cars from Springfield, playing cards in the baggage car and, occasionally, taking a swig from a bottle that Lamon always carried, “just in case,” he’d say, shoving it into the great side pocket that contained a slingshot, a pair of brass knuckles, a hunting knife and a derringer.

“I think Nicolay needs some help,” said Hay, maneuvering himself through the crowd to Mrs. Lincoln’s side just as her normal high color was beginning to take on that dusky glow which was the first sign of a Hellcat storm.

“Mrs. Lincoln!” Hay beamed, boyishly; but then with his youthful face he had no other way of looking, to his chagrin. Strange men often addressed him as Sonny; his cheek was often patted; he knew that he must, very soon, grow a moustache, if he could. “Your trunks are already in your rooms.” This was a lie. But he knew Mrs. Lincoln’s passionate attachment to her baggage and its integrity.

“Oh, Johnny! You do relieve my mind!” Mary Todd Lincoln’s smile was, suddenly, winning and so Hay was won; she took his arm and they swept through the hotel lobby to the main staircase, as the manager and his outriders cleared a path for their considerable party.

Outside, the crowd dispersed. David and Annie were disappointed not to have seen the archfiend himself. “They say he’s got whiskers now, so as no one will know him,” said David, as they walked up Thirteenth Street.

“But once people get used to the whiskers, they’ll know him after a while.” Annie stopped in front of a raw-wood picket fence. Through the
gap between two slats they could see a vacant lot where a number of young men were drilling with old rifles.

“Who are they?” asked David.

“The National Volunteers,” Annie whispered, her breath white between them. “One of them is a friend of Brother Isaac.”

“What are they drilling for?”

“Inauguration Day. Come on. Let’s go. I don’t want them to see me.”

David and Annie hurried down the street. “They’re crazy,” he said, “to take on the whole U. S. Army.”

In Parlor Suite Six at Willard’s Hotel, it was agreed that the National Volunteers were indeed crazy but, potentially, dangerous: such was the intelligence already received by the suite’s principal resident, the bewhiskered Abraham Lincoln, who now sat in a huge armchair in the parlor as his two youngest sons, Willie and Tad, climbed over him, and Hay smiled sweetly at this domestic scene. He had never hated two children more than these. Tad, at seven, could not be understood due to some sort of malformation of his palate, while the ruthlessly eloquent and intelligent Willie, at ten, could be understood all too well. Willie was a tendentious explainer, who regarded Johnny Hay as a somewhat dull-witted playmate.

While the children shouted and pummelled their father, Seward and Lamon discussed with Lincoln, as best they could, arrangements for his security. Mary had withdrawn to the bedroom to greet her—Hay prayed—not-mythical luggage.

Nicolay was at the door to the parlor, looking somewhat alarmed. Then Hay saw why. Behind Nicolay towered the unmistakable figure of Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, heir to Daniel Webster, greatest of the Senate’s scholars, an orator of such power that audiences had been known, after three hours of his burning-bush language, to beg for more of that incandescent flame, fuelled by a single passion—the conviction that there was no greater task on earth than to liberate the slaves, and punish their masters.

Lincoln positively jackknifed to his feet at the sight of Sumner, scattering his sons upon the flowered carpet. As the boys started to yell with indignation, Lincoln said, “John, you deliver the boys to their mother.”

Hay grabbed Tad’s hand and pulled him, squeaking, to his feet, while Willie ran into his mother’s bedroom, shouting, “Mamma!”

Gracefully, Seward introduced Senator Sumner to the President-elect. Charles Sumner was not only remarkably handsome but, unlike most modern statesmen, he was cleanshaven. Hay had already sent out a curiously uninteresting story on the wire-service to the effect that Lincoln would be the first bearded president in American history. Face-hair was
now respectable or
de rigueur
, as Hay’s French-speaking Providence, Rhode Island muse, Mrs. Sarah Helen Witman, would say. Since a brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe, Mrs. Whitman had worn only white, like a shroud; she had also sprinkled herself with ether in order to suggest a terminal illness of the sort that had once ravished Poe; and entirely overwhelmed poetry-loving Brown undergraduates.

“I would’ve known you anywhere,” said Lincoln. “From your pictures.”

“I might
not
have known you, sir, with the beard of Abraham, you might say, so newly acquired.” To Hay’s ear Sumner sounded like so many of his fellow Boston Brahmins, more English than American. Even so, the voice was singularly beautiful in its way, thought Hay, the Westerner, as he slipped into the bedroom, where, to his delight, he found Madam and a colored maid opening a row of trunks. As Willie entered the adjoining bedroom, she said, “Take Tad with you.”

“No,” said Tad.

“Yes!” said the Hellcat with a sudden change of expression that everyone, including the remarkably spoiled Tad, understood and feared. Whimpering with self-pity, the child obeyed. “Oh, God, will this never end?” Madam appealed to Hay. “I feel seasick from the cars. I hate these trunks.”

“Well, you’ll soon be settled in the White House. Can I help?”

Madam was holding up a dress of blue velvet; she examined it carefully for signs of damage. “I am a martyr to moths,” she said to herself, but spoke aloud, a curious habit to which Hay had got used during their days of confinement aboard the cars. When Mrs. Lincoln wanted to—or was able to (he could never tell whether her erratic behavior was calculated or simply uncontrolled)—she could charm anyone on earth, as she must have charmed the most ambitious young lawyer in Springfield, not that Lincoln would have needed much charming, for she was a Todd and lived with her sister whose house on the hill was the center of the town’s social life and it was there that she had been courted by all the other ambitious lawyers, not to mention Judge Stephen Douglas; as a child in Lexington, Kentucky, she had known Henry Clay, the only American statesman, except for Parson Weems’s Washington, that Lincoln had ever openly praised.

Madam gave the dress to the maid to hang up; turned to Hay with a sudden, almost girlish smile. “Between you and me, Mr. Hay, there is more to jest about in all of this than I might have suspected, for all the weariness as well.”

“I’ve noticed that, too, Mrs. Lincoln.”

But then the smile was gone. She had heard the sonorous voice in the next room. “Who is that with Mr. Lincoln?”

“Senator Sumner.”

“Oh.” Hay could see that she was torn between timidity and curiosity, which she resolved by going to the half-open door and looking into the parlor. “He’s every bit as handsome as they say,” she said in a low voice; this time to Hay and not to herself.

“He hasn’t stopped talking since he arrived.”

“At least he seems to have driven away Mr. Seward, that abolitionist sneak.” Mary turned back into the room.

“Surely, Mr. Seward’s no sneak—”

“Well, he was a rabid abolitionist once upon a time. Now, of course, he’s gone and changed a few of his spots, but right or wrong, Mr. Sumner never changes. I do hope all these abolitionists never forget that Mr. Lincoln is
not
in favor of abolishing slavery. He simply does not want to extend it to the new territories. That is all; all!” In the last twelve days Hay had heard her say this so many times that he had ceased to hear the words. But then Mrs. Lincoln was in a difficult position. The Todds were a great slave-holding Kentucky family; worse, they were, many of them, secessionists, a source of much embarrassment to her, not to mention to the new president. “Find me Mrs. Ann Spriggs.” This was unexpected.

“Who is that, Mrs. Lincoln?”

“She is a widow who has—or had—a boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. That’s where we lived when Mr. Lincoln was in Congress. She’s still alive, they say, and I’d dearly love to see her again and”—the girlish smile returned—“
and show off
!”

“For that,” said Hay, again charmed by Madam, who had just taken over from the Hellcat, “I’ll find her, Mrs. Lincoln.”

With a wave, Madam dismissed him. She is going to be a very royal First Lady, he thought, as he returned to the parlor, hoping to escape the senatorial presence unremarked. But Hay’s appearance stopped Sumner in midsentence. “Sir?”

“This is my secretary’s secretary, Mr. Sumner. John Hay.”

“Oh, yes.” They shook hands. Hay felt a certain awe, seeing so famous a man up close. “I heard you speak, sir,” he said. “Two years ago. In Providence. I was at Brown.”

“I remember the speech.” Sumner had lost interest. Hay looked at Lincoln: should he stay? The Tycoon raised his chin, which meant, no. “I’m curious to see which is taller, Mr. Sumner or myself, but when I suggested that we measure backs …”

“I said”—Sumner was not about to allow anyone to say his lines for him—“the
time has come to unite our fronts and not our backs before the enemies of our country.”