The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, because you still have it in your power.”

  They went home to New Jersey with those words throbbing in Caroline’s head. She found Bowood tomblike. The Congressman’s ghost seemed everywhere: gazing from the library wall in a new painting that his son Malcolm had commissioned, watching in the shadows from the silent parlor, presiding over the exquisite Palladian dining room. George left her there for days at a time while he toured the state, hobnobbing with local Democrats and their innumerable committees.

  Another strain on her nerves was Jeremy Biddle and his wife, Sally. Caroline was not thrilled to return to their proximity—especially when she discovered that Sally had more or less established herself as the first lady of the little industrial city of Hamilton. She and Jeremy had built a substantial house on the other side of the city, close to Principia Mills, so Jeremy could walk to work in good weather. Although Sally was six months pregnant, she decided to give a dinner party for Caroline and George.

  How could Caroline say no? As a politician’s wife, she could not risk offending anyone. Of course George was delighted to come. He and Jeremy had been corresponding about the politics of Washington and the nation, and during dinner Jeremy drew him out about his impressions of Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Martin Van Buren to fine effect. The other guests, a mixture of local businessmen and politicians, were enthralled.

  At coffee, the gentlemen stayed behind for their inevitable cigars, and the ladies withdrew to the east parlor, decorated in the cosy style people had not yet learned to call Victorian. During dinner Sally had confined herself to female topics, such as the wonderful new Lucifer matches everyone was using in their kitchens. She now gave everyone a demonstration. The matches were tipped with brimstone. All you had to do was insert the tip in the fluid at the bottom of the matchstick and you had a flame. Everyone agreed it was infinitely better than the old-fashioned flint lighters.

  With no warning, Sally put away the matches and turned the conversation to the aspect of the Washington scene Jeremy had avoided at dinner—the Peggy Eaton scandal. “All of us can scarcely wait to hear your opinion of Mrs. Eaton,” Sally said. “Have you returned her calls? Do you appear with her in public?”

  “I have a private opinion of Mrs. Eaton, and a public one,” Caroline said. “In private, I think she’s a fool. In public, I tolerate her for President Jackson’s sake.”

  “Such a dilemma,” Sally said. “You must find it especially fascinating.”

  “What do you mean?” Caroline asked.

  Sally floundered. “With your strong opinions … about women’s role.”

  Caroline’s self-control remained intact. But as she met Sally’s eyes across the parlor, she read condescension and even contempt in her cool stare—while her polite smile became more and more mocking. No one else in the room noticed anything out of the ordinary. Everyone presumed there was nothing but the warmest friendship between Caroline and her cousin-in-law. But in that scarifying moment, Caroline realized that Sally knew about John Sladen and was implicitly comparing her to Peggy Eaton.

  An incalculable rage gripped Caroline’s soul. Was Sally hinting that she could wreak similar havoc on Mrs. Stapleton whenever she chose? Probably not. She was a Stapleton, after all, and Caroline now shared the name. But the mere suggestion that Sally had such power over her made Caroline seethe. She silently vowed never to set foot in Sally’s house again. From that moment she found the whole city, including Bowood, intolerable.

  Within a week, she had George hunting for a vacation home. Hamilton was as impossibly hot as Washington, Caroline insisted. The heat was making her and little Jonathan ill. She soon had a specific house in mind. Her grandmother Kate Rawdon, with whom she still corresponded, told her that down in Monmouth County, Kemble Manor, the home of the wealthiest branch of the Kemble family before the Revolution, was for sale.

  Caroline insisted on an immediate visit. The place was a wreck, the roof leaky, the chimneys crumbling. It would cost a fortune to restore. But the view of Raritan Bay was spectacular, and the vale of the Shrewsbury River, one of the loveliest water vistas in New Jersey, was only a few miles away. George bought Kemble Manor and by August an outpouring of cash had it ready to inhabit.

  For the next two months, they enjoyed an idyll. Each day George took Caroline and Jonathan sailing in a swift sloop George picked up at a bargain price in Perth Amboy. He taught Caroline to swim in a tidal creek near the property. As a farm girl from landlocked Ohio, she had a dread of the water that was not easy to overcome.

  The sight of George in a bathing costume, muscles rippling, the sun glistening on his bronzed skin, stirred desire in Caroline’s flesh. By now they had acquired instinctive ways to arouse each other: a kiss on the throat, a touch of a fingertip on the nape of the neck. They made love almost every night. Caroline began to think she could annihilate John Sladen and Sally Stapleton Biddle and loose-lipped Jeremy Biddle with the sheer satisfaction of being alive, of being married to this huge, amiable, passionate man.

  For George too those summer months at Kemble Manor were a profound experience. He began to call it their second honeymoon. The resentment he had felt about Caroline’s failure to console Hugh Stapleton ebbed into forgiveness.

  Jonathan thrived too, taking his first tottering steps across Kemble Manor’s parquet parlor holding his father’s hand. Caroline began to take more pleasure in the child. She promised herself she would give him even more attention when he was old enough to educate.

  Tabitha and Hannibal Flowers (he had taken her last name, not having one of his own) enjoyed Kemble Manor as much as their employers. They and Harriet, the fat, gray-haired cook, were the only servants. George cheerfully offered them swimming lessons, which Harriet declined. But Tabitha and Hannibal were soon splashing in the creek. There was no need to wonder what happened back at Kemble Manor after one of these sessions. About the same age as George and Caroline, they were at least as amorous.

  Caroline was not entirely surprised when Tabitha informed her that she was pregnant. George congratulated Hannibal and hoped it would be a boy. “I’m waiting for Caroline to give Jonathan a brother,” George said.

  As if the words were black magic, Caroline’s head whirled and she was assailed by that first signal of pregnancy, morning sickness. George was ecstatic. In an amorous daze, Caroline found herself welcoming the child, even if she did not look forward to the next seven months.

  The new baby prompted her first political thought in weeks. “It will be a perfect excuse to avoid going to parties for Peggy Eaton,” she said.

  George looked gloomy. “I won’t go alone.”

  “You most certainly will. You can imitate that widower faker Martin Van Buren.”

  Caroline quickly sent Sarah Polk the news. That astute politician congratulated her for the baby—and the exemption from Mrs. Eaton. “I don’t look forward to returning to our overheated capital,” Sarah wrote.

  As September dwindled, George left for another tour of New Jersey’s political circuit, and Caroline began packing for . another nine months in Washington. As Tabitha helped wrap dresses and shoes in paper before putting them into trunks, she said, “I wishes we could stay here forever, missus. I never been so happy anywhere. I hates the thought of goin’ back to Washington.”

  “Why?”

  “Them slave coffles, mistress. They upset me so. To see black folks treated that way. Sold and traded like they was so much cattle. It curdles my soul, mistress. It really do.”

  “I don’t think Southerners like slavery any more than we do. I heard President Jackson say he wished he could free all his people. He freed Hannibal.”

  “For five hundred of Mr. Stapleton’s dollars.”

  The conversation made Caroline uncomfortable. Her father had freed their slaves when the family migrated to Ohio, where slavery was forbidden in the state constitution. Like his idol, Thomas Jefferson, he disapproved of the idea of sl
avery in the abstract, but he did not think freed blacks could live happily with whites. He had been a founding member of the American Colonization Society, which proposed to send freed blacks to Africa. But none of Jonathan Kemble’s blacks showed the slightest interest in going back to the land of their ancestors. They headed for Philadelphia and New York.

  That Sunday, Tabitha and Hannibal went off in the buggy to a church in Middletown, where they had found a preacher they liked. He was a Baptist who gave rousing sermons about sin and damnation and salvation through Jesus. George and Caroline, , both devoid of religious belief, stayed home—although George remarked that when Jonathan grew older, they would have to select a church.

  Tabitha and Hannibal returned from church with a bundle of papers in a small cardboard box. “Our preacher, Mr. Donaldson, when he heard we was goin’ to Washington, give us this to take and hand out to the slaves there. What’s it say, Mr. George?” Hannibal asked.

  George’s eyes widened as he read the papers. The Reverend Mr. Donaldson was apparently a recent convert to the idea that slavery should be abolished. in the South—and in the meantime there was nothing wrong with encouraging slaves to run away from their masters. “I wouldn’t bring this anywhere near Washington,” George said. “It could get you in a lot of trouble.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Tabitha said. She had been learning to read with Caroline’s help. “I could make out some words. Things like ‘against the law’ and this—about burnin’.” She pointed to a line in which slaves were exhorted to burn their masters’ houses and barns in retaliation for their bondage.

  “What should we do with it, Mr. George?” Hannibal said. “We promised Pastor Donaldson to bring it with us.”

  “I’ll go see Mr. Donaldson and get you out of that promise.”

  That afternoon, George rode over to Middletown and spent an hour with the Reverend Mr. Donaldson. He was a small, spare man whose eyes glowed with an otherworldly light. He was unimpressed when George rebuked him for sending abolitionist literature into Washington, D.C. Did he want to burn down the capital of the country?

  “In this cause, many will have to suffer. We’re declaring war against the slave power, Congressman Stapleton. Since you’re leagued with them in the infernal Democratic Party, we’re declaring war against you too.”

  “I’ll remember that the next time you ask me for a donation to your church school,” George said.

  “I’ve seen a new light. I wouldn’t take your money now.”

  It was George’s first encounter with abolition—a movement that would make his life hell on earth in coming years. For the time being, he dismissed Donaldson and his kind as a tiny minority of extremists who could and should be ignored. Back at Kemble Manor, he told Hannibal to put the abolitionist literature in the fireplace and burn it.

  “He’s a powerful preacher, Mr. George,” Hannibal said, as he piled the pamphlets in the fireplace. “He say all America someday gonna believe in the light he’s been sent—that all black people should be free.”

  “I wish they were all free right now, Hannibal. But it would take more money than I’ve got, or the whole country’s got.”

  George told Hannibal there were almost two million black slaves in the South. If each one was redeemed by paying his master five hundred dollars the way George had freed Hannibal from Andrew Jackson, that meant it would cost a half billion dollars to free them all. That was a lot more money that the U.S. government had at its disposal. If the slaves were freed, how could they live? Their masters could not afford to pay them wages. It might start a war in which one or the other race would be exterminated.

  Hannibal listened, his brow furrowed. He adored George Stapleton, the man who had given him his freedom. But he visibly resisted the logic of George’s argument. The coachman ruefully shook his big black head as he ignited one of the new Lucifer matches and set the papers ablaze. “Maybe only God can do it,” he said.

  BOOK FOUR

  ONE

  A WEEK LATER, THE STAPLETONS left for Washington, D.C., by steamboat from Perth Amboy. Pregnancy made Caroline and Tabitha both feel queasy on the water; they had a difficult trip. But their spirits improved when they reached the house on Pennsylvania Avenue and found everything spotless and shining. Sarah Polk had hired two free black women; Josephine and Nancy Parks, to give the place a thorough cleaning. Caroline promptly hired the sisters as maids.

  A reunion with the Polks at Gadsby’s Hotel that night provided a feast of gossip. Mrs. Eaton still reigned at the White House, but Sarah Polk thought her loose tongue and headstrong style were undercutting her support elsewhere. Far more important, President Jackson had turned totally against Vice President John C. Calhoun. He now regarded him as an enemy.

  Mrs. Eaton was not the only reason. While everyone else was vacationing, Secretary of State Van Buren had sent James Hamilton on a Machiavellian summer journey to Georgia, where he met with William B. Crawford, who had once rivaled Calhoun as the leader of the South. Now laid low by bad health and political misfortune, Crawford had given Hamilton a letter that the secretary of state had arranged to reach the president by another hand.

  Since 1818, Andrew Jackson had believed that John C. Calhoun was the only man who had defended his invasion and conquest of Florida that year—the military adventure that Henry Clay had tried to use to destroy Jackson as a political rival. Now Crawford, who had been in President Monroe’s cabinet with Calhoun, swore in writing that the South Carolinian had wanted to have Jackson court-martialed and disgraced.

  “The president showed me the letter,” James Polk said. “I urged him to forget it. The whole thing is the product of hate and intrigue. But this Eaton affair has poisoned his mind against Calhoun. He’s written to the vice president, asking for an explanation.”

  “Mr. Calhoun is said to be close to sending Mr. Van Buren a challenge,” Sarah Polk said. “Meanwhile, the Southerners are in a rage. They’re threatening to do unto Jackson what the party did to Adams. They’re setting up newspapers in every state. At a signal from Mr. Calhoun, they’ll open fire and undermine the administration.”

  “For the moment, Calhoun insists he’s still loyal to the president,” James Polk said.

  “Can anyone stop Van Buren?” George asked. He described the petty humiliations the New Yorker had inflicted on him.

  Polk glumly shook his head. “He’s mesmerized the President. I begin to see why they call him the Little Magician.”

  “Some people think it’s vital for the South, for the Union, for Mr. Calhoun to become president.” Caroline was echoing John Sladen, but George did not seem to mind. Wasn’t it true?

  Sarah Polk did not seem to think so: “The South’s self-pity begins to trouble me.”

  “I’m more concerned about the president’s health,” James Polk said. “Andrew Jackson Donelson told me this Eaton mess is taking more out of the old man than four years of running the country. He isn’t sleeping, he’s spitting blood, he gets violent headaches.”

  Back in their own house, George wondered what they could do to rescue Andrew Jackson from this nightmare. “Nothing,” Caroline said in her hard way. “It would be better to think of what we can do to help Vice President Calhoun.”

  “I like him, but I think some of his ideas are dangerous.”

  “A good reason to become his friend and try to change some of those ideas.”

  Caroline told herself that she was not following John Sladen’s lead here. She was reacting against her growing detestation of Mrs. Eaton. Here was a woman who found herself with immense power in her hands, and she was throwing it away with petty resentments and boorish behavior. It was not a reassuring spectacle to someone who believed in women’s equality. In fact, almost all the female actors in this drama were performing far below Caroline’s expectations—or better, her hopes. Floride Calhoun seemed to delight in plunging her husband into this maelstrom of animosity.

  “I think you’re expecting too much—to imagine that a
man of Calhoun’s age and stature is going to listen seriously to a first-term congressman,” George said.

  “You’re a first-term congressman from a crucial state. The stands you take can influence people in New York and Pennsylvania. Don’t rate yourself so low, George. Humility gets you nowhere in Washington, D.C.”

  The next day, Caroline received an invitation to tea from Floride Calhoun. She found Sarah Polk and the wives of a half dozen other senators and congressmen in Mrs. Calhoun’s parlor. Floride announced her determination to continue her opposition to Mrs. Eaton. She descanted on her fixed opinion that Andrew Jackson was in his dotage. That meant someone had to take charge of the Democratic Partly.

  “I’ve urged my husband not to sit passively and let that someone be Martin Van Buren,” Floride said.

  She urged her guests to be on the alert for a major speech by Senator Robert Young Hayne in the Senate. It would settle, once and for all, the question of the South’s place in the nation. He had been preparing it for months, with Mr. Calhoun’s help. “The more ladies we have in the gallery to applaud him, the better,” she said.

  Everyone promised to join Mrs. Calhoun’s petticoat army. Caroline almost forgot about it in the excitement of watching Congress convene and George take his oath to faithfully support the Constitution. The House was bedecked with flags for the occasion. Not a few members brought champagne and other liquors to their seats to share with friends. Several Southern members brought their hunting dogs to enjoy the excitement and slaves to serve their refreshments. For a while a carnival atmosphere engulfed the stately chamber.

  “What happens now?” Caroline asked Sarah Polk, who had joined her in the gallery of the House.

  “The jockeying begins.”

  Sarah meant the competition for seats on the more important committees. George had help from his friend Polk but opposition from Churchill C. Cambreleng, who had gone over to the Martin Van Buren faction. George asked for a seat on the Military Affairs Committee; Cambreleng, the chairman, ignored him. Polk got him aboard the Commerce Committee, another natural place for him, and the influential Ways and Means Committee. Against his will, George was shoved onto the committee that governed the District of Columbia, a job all congressmen tried to avoid.