The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  Sarah Polk was livid. Caroline told George if he made an enthusiastic speech in favor of Van Buren in New Jersey, she would consider divorcing him. Fortunately George needed no encouragement toward tepidity. His efforts on behalf of the incumbent (privately George preferred the word recumbent) president were minimal. He concentrated on electing Democrats to state offices and to Congress. Governor Polk went through similar halfhearted motions on the Little Magician’s behalf in Tennessee, and John Sladen persuaded his powerful Legrand in-laws to do even less in Louisiana. Their unenthusiasm was widely imitated in other states.

  The Whigs nominated the respected former senator from Virginia, John Tyler, for vice president. They had learned from the Democrats how to organize a party, and now they paid them the compliment of imitating their campaigning style. Instead of hickory poles, the Whigs paraded liberty poles through the streets of a thousand towns and cities to an open field, where vast quantities of beer and liquor were consumed and tons of hot air were expelled by speakers’ on the virtues of “Old Tippecanoe,” as General Harrison was called, after the Indiana creek near which he had defeated Tecumseh and 650 Shawnees in 1811.

  Everyone then joined in a rousing song:

  What has caused this great commotion, motion, motion

  Our country through?

  It is the ball a-rolling on, on

  For Tippecanoe and Tyler too—Tippecanoe and Tyler too

  And with them we’ll beat little Van Van Van

  Van is a used-up man.

  Compounding the Democrats’ troubles was a remark by the Washington correspondent of a Baltimore newspaper, who sneered that Harrison lacked both the brains and the inclination to be president. He would be perfectly satisfied with a pension of $2,000 a year, leaving him free to spend his days drinking hard cider in his log cabin on the banks of the Ohio.

  The Whigs seized on this insult and converted it into another asset. A congressman named Ogle rose to denounce Van Buren for living in luxury in the White House off gold and silver plates, reclining on soft Turkish divans, and walking on Brussels and Wilton carpets deep enough for an honest American to bury his foot in. Little Van’s rotund frame, his fondness for flashy clothes, seemed to prove this slander, and the Whigs were soon singing another song:

  In the cabin made of logs

  By the river side

  There the honest farmer lives

  Free from sloth and pride

  To the gorgeous palace turn

  There his rival see

  In his robes of regal state

  Tinseled finery.

  The Whigs roared this ditty while parading log cabins through the streets along with their liberty poles. The drink of choice at all their rallies became hard cider, which did nothing to diminish voters’ enthusiasm for Old Tippecanoe and Tyler too. The fact that “Old Tip” was born in a Virginia mansion and lived in an Ohio house that was no more a log cabin than Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage swiftly became irrelevant.

  At Bowood on election day, George and Caroline held an open house. On previous election days, the event had been called a victory party. Today, the invitations simply called it “a reception for friends, personal and political.” The old house was crowded with visitors, among them Sally and Jeremy Biddle. Sally had become almost as fat as her aunt Henrietta Van Rensselaer. Jeremy, on the other hand, was growing lean. Caroline had privately nicknamed them “the Sprats” after the couple in the nursery rhyme. Jeremy apparently ate no fat and Sally certainly ate no lean.

  Twelve years in Washington had largely dissipated Caroline’s fear of Sally’s moral disapproval. The deeper one traveled into the world of politics, the less meaning the word moral seemed to have. Peggy O’Neale Eaton was back in Tennessee, watching her ruined husband drink himself to death. Once svelte Sally Stapleton Biddle, growing fatter and more provincial by the hour, was unhappily, married to a plodding businessman. The other women of the Golden Horde were going through the motions of vapid gentility in upper-class New York.

  Sally still had pretensions, thanks to her image of herself as first lady of Hamilton. She assumed that Caroline was desperately anxious to see Martin Van Buren reelected and spoke to her with oozing condescension about his chances.

  “I think you’re going to find Little Van is a used-up man before long.”

  “I hope so,” Caroline said. “Between us, no one despises him more wholeheartedly than I do.”

  Sally was astonished and confused. “Why do you say that?”

  “I could tell you things about that man, but delicacy prevents me from going into detail.”

  Sally was reduced to humble murmurs. It was more than adequate revenge for that moment in her drawing room, when she impaled Caroline with that mocking stare ten years ago.

  But Sally was not without resources. “How is John Sladen? Do you see much of him when Congress is in session?”

  Caroline decided to be bold. “He’s in and out of our house constantly. The poor man can’t entice his wife to Washington. He and George have become close friends and political confederates. I take some credit for that.”

  “I’m sure you do. But I begin to wonder how long any moral person can remain a Democrat. I didn’t have to change Jeremy. He’s a born Whig. But George …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your alliance with the slave owners. The more I think about it, the more the whole South becomes a blot on our national honor.”

  “You sound like an abolitionist.”

  “Oh, no! I have no use for those dreadful people. Yankees, almost every one of them. But I wonder how you tolerate the sight of slavery, of people in chains, right outside your house. I presume you see them every day?”

  “I see them often enough.”

  “And what happened to poor Tabitha …”

  “Yes. It was terrible. Excuse me. I must attend to my other guests.”

  Caroline walked swiftly away, looking neither right nor left, until she reached the table where Bowood’s black servants were pouring champagne. She picked up a glass and emptied it in one continuous swallow. Very unladylike.

  Looking across the room, she saw Sally was watching her. On her face was a sheen of unmistakable malice. Damn you, Caroline thought. Goddamn you. She downed another glass, but it did not raise her spirits an iota. Wandering through the lofty rooms, pausing now and then to exchange empty phrases with semistrangers, she found herself in the library. There was the Congressman, gazing down at her from the wall above the fireplace. To the left, lower down, was the painting of the battles of Lundy’s Lane and the Thames, with her father and George’s father in opposite corners.

  A small smile was on the Congressman’s face, as if he were saying, I prevailed. Only she knew that at the very end, he had not prevailed. The world had slipped beyond his control. So much of life was fate, beyond the reach of the individual will. Would she have been wiser to trust that first primary plunge into the underground river? It would have carried her to another destination in John Sladen’s arms. She would be living in Louisiana now, struggling unambiguously in the South’s cause instead of living this way, with a divided soul. More and more that river had become synonymous with fate, with all the parts of life that a woman, or a man, inherits. She began to wonder if anyone could resist its remorseless current.

  Who could rescue her? Sarah. The word whispered in her soul. Yes, yes, yes. Sarah’s love, beyond the pull and spin of passion, beyond pleasure and desire, that was her only hope. But Sarah was beyond her reach too, perhaps forever. They had both sensed vibrations of possible pain and disappointment in her withdrawal to Tennessee.

  Caroline sank into a chair, filled with intimations of gloom infinitely darker than the political defeat she was anticipating. The next thing she knew was George’s kiss on her cheek. The room was deep in shadow. “All sorts of people have been looking for you,” he said. “They wanted to say good-bye.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked up at Hugh Stapleton
’s portrait. “I came in here the other night and sat in that chair. I almost said a prayer, asking him for guidance. Was that what you were doing?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Should she tell him what Sally had said about the Democrats and slavery? No. She would not be responsible for planting doubts in his soul. George was not a man who knew how to deal with doubt. Besides, she had pledged her political love to another troubled man. She could not undertake to comfort two lovers. Instead, she would let this lover comfort her.

  “Has everyone gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t we do something romantic? Let the boys eat supper in the kitchen while we have a cold collation—with champagne—in our room?”

  “I’ve already sent the boys off with Jeremy and Sally.”

  “You schemer—you … you politician.”

  He lifted her out of the chair as if she were a piece of gossamer and kissed her gently on the mouth. Upstairs, she discovered the cold collation, the bottle of champagne, were already waiting. Was George acquiring an ability to read her mind? A disconcerting thought.

  They drank the champagne and nibbled on the food and speculated idly on what Washington would be like without President Van Buren. An hour later, as she lay in the bathtub’s warm, fragrant water, Caroline realized what George was doing. He was reaffirming their partnership on the edge of the unknown. She was enormously, almost frighteningly touched.

  When she slipped into bed beside him, Caroline was closer to the swimmer in the underground river than the married woman balancing choices in her perpetually calculating head. In a haze of champagne and sympathy, she and George exchanged a new sense of partnership. Only when it was over and she sighed in his arms did she realize how little the gift had altered those other pledges—to John Sladen and Sarah Childress Polk.

  Somehow this reinforced the ferocity of her final kiss. “Let’s never forget this—how much we loved each other tonight.”

  “How could I?” George said with his incurable blend of romance and optimism.

  Caroline could think of a dozen, a hundred things that might make him forget it. But she declined to mar the moment with her doubts. She let Young America’s faith in the future rest unquestioning in the arms of La Belle Dame sans Merci. Knowing and not knowing, admitting and denying this stark blend of truth and poetry, Caroline hoped against hope that somehow George’s faith would prevail.

  FIVE

  “WHAT A JOY IT IS, Mrs. Stapleton, to find the Adamses now have company in the history books! My father and I, the only presidents to be turned out after a single term, have now been joined by a Democrat—a disciple of Andrew Jackson, no less. Doesn’t it reinforce your faith in a just God?”

  Old John Quincy Adams blinked cheerfully at Caroline Stapleton over the top of his eyeglasses. The former president was chortling over Martin Van Buren’s rout at the polls. Little Van had carried only seven states to William Henry Harrison’s twenty. Van had even lost his home state of New York, as well as Tennessee, New Jersey, and Louisiana.

  As an avowed Democrat, Caroline could not join the gleeful old Yankee in public jubilation. She turned to gray-haired Dolley Madison, sitting in a nearby chair, her cheeks rouged a merry red. “Mrs. Madison, rescue us, please, from this man’s partisan theology.”

  “Johnny Adams, thee art a blasphemer or worse,” Dolley said, the good cheer in her blue eyes making it clear that she was joking. “God has nothing to do with Democrats or Whigs or Federalists or Republicans!”

  “Your Quaker faith, my dear Mrs. Madison, prays to an altogether unsatisfying God,” Adams said. “He’s far too kind for my taste. I prefer New England’s deity. A being who cries, ‘Vengeance is mine!’”

  “God,” Mrs. Madison insisted, “is not a politician. Didn’t Jesus say He had nothing to do with Caesar?”

  “I make a motion in favor of Mrs. Madison’s theology,” rumbled Daniel Webster, scooping a wing off an ice cream angel and downing it in a single oratorical gulp.

  “A new caesar is about to arrive from the West,” John Sladen said. “I’ll predict this much: he won’t be another Andrew Jackson.”

  “I’ll thank any and every god for that,” John Quincy Adams said.

  “Have you heard from General Jackson, Senator Stapleton?” Senator Henry Clay asked. He was fairly bubbling with ebullience. As he saw it, William Henry Harrison was too old to serve more than one term. That meant the Whig nomination would be his for the asking in 1844.

  George nodded cheerfully. “He says the Democrats have been beaten, but not conquered.”

  That’s much better, George, Caroline silently-said, keeping her smile intact. Only a severe lecture had persuaded George to pretend to be cheerful for public consumption. The letter from Old Hickory had put Senator Stapleton into a funk. He had beat his breast and wondered if they had done the right thing, letting Van Buren go down to such a crushing defeat. The Whigs had won solid majorities in both houses of Congress. They had done almost as well in the South as in the North.

  “Out of respect for his advanced age, I think you should warn the General he may have to alter that tune once Congress assembles,” Henry Clay said.

  “I’ll let you tell him, Senator,” George said. “I would advise you to do it by U.S. mail—lest you become one of those messengers who get it in the neck.”

  Everyone chuckled, but Clay was only half joking. The Kentuckian made no secret of his plans to dismantle Jacksonian-style government. The president was to become the obedient servant of Congress, and Congress was going to vote a new Bank of the United States, a new tariff, and a new internal-improvements program that would pump federal money into roads, canals and railroads.

  “I wonder how Tip will deal with the legions of job seekers that are certain to descend on him,” John Quincy Adams said. “He was the greatest beggar in my administration. I made him ambassador to Colombia, but he never ceased bombarding me with petitions for better employment.”

  “Senator Calhoun served with him in Congress,” John Sladen said. “He assures me General Harrison is as unconscious as a child of the difficulties the country faces. The man sees his election as a mere affair, of personal vanity.”

  “General Jackson declares him a complete and total imbecile,” George Stapleton said.

  “Jealousy, patent jealousy,” Henry Clay chortled. “General Harrison knows at least as much about government as General Jackson, which is another way of saying nothing whatsoever.”

  “I had a letter from my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson the other day,” Daniel Webster said. “He calls General Harrison ‘the Indignation President.’ I begin to think even I could have overcome the national loathing for New England men and beaten Little Van.”

  “A four-year-old child could have beaten Van,” John Quincy Adams said. “Which, in terms of the new president’s mental capacity, seems to be what has happened.”

  So went the conversation in Mrs. Stapleton’s parlor on March 3, 1841, the eve of President William Henry Harrison’s inauguration. Caroline had discovered from the newspapers that Mrs. Harrison had been born in New Jersey. That gave her some faint hope of a favorable reception at the White House. But its very faintness underscored the dreary prospect of four years in the political wilderness.

  Complicating Caroline’s pessimism was her fifth pregnancy. Her evening with Young America in Bowood had proven more fruitful than she had intended it to be. She hoped for a girl, but not too violently; she sensed fate seemed determined to frustrate her on that score. Perhaps it was just as well. A rebellious daughter—and she was certain a daughter would be a replica of her—would be far more difficult to deal with than a son. Caroline remained supremely confident of her ability to manipulate men.

  Her consolation these days was her letters from Sarah Polk. Not that those pages of precise prose cheered her politically. With her usual unblinking honesty, Sarah saw the future in stark terms. If the Whigs succeeded in Washington, the Democrats could become a minority
party for a long time. Her only glimmer of hope were the divisions inside the Whig Party. They had more than a few outspoken critics of slavery in their ranks. They could easily be called abolitionists, which spelled political death at the hands of most voters, South and North. The abolitionists had run a candidate on their Liberty Party ticket. He had garnered a pathetic 7,040 votes.

  In Tennessee, Texas was the hottest issue. If the Whigs brought that vast expanse of territory into the Union, they would own the state—and the entire South, plus Kentucky and Indiana—for all time. But Sarah was betting the Whigs would be too divided, and “too stupid,” to see how important it was. They would concentrate on restoring Henry Clay’s American System and let Texas sit there, waiting for the next Democratic candidate to make it the centerpiece of his platform.

  In fact, talking with General Jackson, I begin to think we can make Texas the basis of a grand movement south and west that will establish us in California and the Texas borderlands. We already have a strong claim to the Oregon territory. The General sees our manifest destiny as continental—a term I rather like, don’t you? Think of what a claim on the popular mind that achievement will be, if it is done under a Democratic administration. It will guarantee a succession of Democratic presidents to the end of this century.