The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  The next day Caroline decided to continue ignoring the rule that pregnant ladies should “retire” until they gave birth. She went to William Henry Harrison’s inaugural. It was a cold, windy March day. Hatless and coatless, the big, gray-haired man—at sixty-eight he was the oldest elected president yet—droned through an endless speech that had obviously been written for him by Henry Clay. It announced it was time to eliminate the danger of tyranny from the federal government by making sure its power was distributed the way the Founding Fathers intended it to be—Congress should be in charge of things. As the president nattered on, bored politicians got up and stamped around the platform to restore some circulation to their freezing feet; Caroline was tempted to join them. By the time he finished, her feet, in the thin silk slippers ladies wore to dress occasions, were two blocks of ice.

  The inaugural reception at the White House was a model of decorum, making it clear that this Western general had no desire to be a man of the people. But plenty of the people were in the mansion—most of them job seekers. At least a hundred of them did not hesitate to hand the president written pleas on their own behalf. By the time George and Caroline shook Harnson’s hand, he had sheaves of paper sticking out of the pockets of his coat.

  “Ah, Senator Stapleton. I served in Congress with your grandfather,” the president said. “I greatly admired his integrity, his patriotism. I wish we were back in those good old days, when the federal government had fewer jobs to hand out than the state of Delaware. A man could govern with dignity.”

  He interrupted his lament to unleash an enormous sneeze. Two job seekers rushed forward with handkerchiefs and assured the president he could keep them, along with the petitions inside them.

  On the way home, George said, “I’m beginning to wonder why anyone would ever want to be president. It’s the most thankless job in the world.”

  “It’s also the most important job in the world,” Caroline said.

  “More important than the prime minister of England, the czar of Russia?” George said, determined to disagree with her.

  “Yes, or it will be soon, when the United States annexes Texas and California and Oregon and becomes a continental power.”

  “A continental power?”

  “Sarah Polk, thanks to her residence in Nashville, has been spending time at the Hermitage. She tells me this is General Jackson’s latest vision.”

  “A continental power. I like the sound of it.”

  To whom should she give the credit—Andrew Jackson or Sarah Polk? Who was more important, the originator of a vision or the person who sees its potency? For Caroline, that was an easy question to answer. General Jackson was an old man, out of power. Their generation was the one that would implement his vision and win places in the Temple of Fame. And a woman, or two women, would be the secret agents, the hidden creators, of this global transformation.

  “It’s a beautiful dream,” George said. “But I wonder if it will ever happen. Henry Clay told me he has no intention of touching Texas. He calls it a gigantic tar baby. Anyone who goes near it will get smeared. The North won’t tolerate it as a slave state and the South won’t swallow it as a free state. He plans on making Americans so prosperous, no one will give a damn about acquiring more territory.”

  “Henry Clay, for all his seeming shrewdness, is a fool,” Caroline said. “He’s so wrapped up in his ambition to be president, he can’t think straight. No matter how prosperous you make Americans, there’re always going to be some people who want to get even more prosperous—and what better way to do it than by laying our hands on a few million acres of unclaimed land?”

  “I’m inclined to agree with that.”

  “You should become the Senate’s most outspoken advocate for Texas. Go down there and pay Sam Houston a visit. Talk about it, make speeches about it, everywhere you go. Talk about California and Oregon too.”

  “I might end up sounding like a warmonger. Remember how many Quakers we’ve got in New Jersey.”

  “Talk about peaceful purchase. Negotiations with Mexico.”

  Back home, the Stapletons found twelve-year-old Jonathan and ten-year-old Charlie having an argument with their tutor, a stocky, bullnecked young Virginian named Randolph Cooke. “These young gentleman have gotten their hands on some abolitionist literature. They claim the right to read it. I say no one their age should be permitted to look at such trash,” Cooke said.

  Jonathan gazed at his mother with John Sladen’s rebellious eyes. “I told him Americans—even American boys—should have the right to read what they please.”

  “Yeah!” said Charlie, who clearly did not care one way or the other. He was enjoying the brawl as a happy alternative to schoolwork.

  Swarthy, dark-haired Jonathan was growing taller by the minute, so it seemed to Caroline. Studious, intense, he was always asking her questions about history and politics. By all the laws of logic, he should have been her favorite. But she found him too morose, too humorless, to win her affection. It was freckle-faced Charlie who stirred her heart with his clever pranks and total disinclination to take anything seriously, including his studies. His strong physical resemblance to her father also had something to do with her fondness for him.

  Caroline had hired Cooke as a tutor last year, when their shuttles between Washington and New Jersey became more erratic because of the presidential election. Washington’s schools were second-rate anyway. George was determined to send his sons to Columbia and was more than willing to spend money to get them ready. Cooke had graduated from the University of Virginia last year at the top of his class.

  “Let me see this stuff,” George said.

  Cooke handed him a copy of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator. The editorial called for Americans to join in a “mighty moral war” to free the South’s blacks. The stories from correspondents told of successful British efforts to suppress the slave trade in Africa, of the progress of “reform” in Jamaica and other West Indies islands, where slavery had been abolished seven years ago. Another story told of a mob attacking an abolitionist paper in Indiana and burning down the publisher’s house and destroying his printing press.

  “Where did you get this?” George asked Jonathan.

  “Laura Biddle mailed it to me.”

  Laura was Sally and Jeremy Biddle’s daughter. She was eleven. “Where did she get it?” George asked.

  “Her father and mother subscribe to it,” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with you reading it,” George said. “As long as you don’t believe everything these fanatics say.”

  “Their intentions are so dishonorable, Senator, I can’t believe you will even tolerate such a piece of offal in your house!” Cooke said.

  George grew testy. “Mr. Cooke. I’ll decide what I can and cannot tolerate in my house. I think it’s better in the long run to read the nonsense these people purvey. Banning them only makes their vaporings more attractive to twelve- and ten-year-old boys.”

  “If you insist on that stance, sir, I must consider my authority with these young men at an end and respectfully request your permission to resign my contract.”

  Caroline was appalled by the way the argument was going. Cooke’s brother worked as a reporter for the Washington Telegraph, a strongly pro-Southern paper. She could see a story appearing in its pages in the next day or two, reporting how a principled young Southern gentleman tutor had resigned his position at Senator Stapleton’s home rather than tolerate abolitionist literature in the parlor.

  “Mr. Cooke, calm down,” Caroline said. “I’ll see to it that this paper never appears in our house again. While I agree with their father that it does Jonathan and Charles no great harm to read it, I won’t tolerate such an offensive publication in my home, where Southern visitors like yourself would be justly offended by it.”

  “I certainly have no intention of subscribing to this rag,” George said.

  “Then I take it we may cast it out with the trash?” C
ooke said, glaring triumphantly at Jonathan.

  “Of course,” George said.

  Upstairs in their bedroom, Caroline lost her temper. “Really, George. Must I do all our thinking? Don’t you see what might get into the Telegraph if you let that fellow quit over that damn paper?”

  “It would be nothing that I couldn’t correct with a letter to the editor.”

  “The Telegraph’s not a Jackson paper anymore. They’re totally devoted to Calhoun and Southern rights. I don’t think your friendship with the senator would stand the test of letting your son read The Liberator. I hope you’ll write a very stiff letter to Jeremy Biddle and tell him how little use we have for further correspondence between his daughter and Jonathan.”

  “I’ll tell him in a less offensive way that we’d appreciate no more copies of The Liberator.”

  “George, you don’t seem to realize how serious this could be. How a seeming trifle like this could destroy your chance to be president.”

  “Didn’t I just finish telling you I didn’t particularly want to be president?”

  “I didn’t take you seriously. I don’t take you seriously now.”

  For a moment George looked as if he were going to say something extremely unpleasant. He let the impulse pass. But Caroline reacted with profound alarm. What a paradox marriage was. The baby swelling in her body was a product of their passionate partnership, but its presence deprived her of a primary sense of control, possession, that was becoming almost as necessary to her as breathing.

  Later in the day, Caroline summoned Jonathan to the library and gave him a lecture on his responsibility as his father’s older son. “We expect you to set an example to Charlie. Yes, even to represent the family, to a certain degree, before strangers and servants. We’re on display here, under scrutiny at all times, even in our homes. That’s what it means to be a public man. There’s a chance, a very good chance, that someday your father might be called to the highest office in this country. Would you want to be responsible for ruining that chance?”

  Jonathan scuffed his toe on the carpet and muttered, “I only did it to get even with Mr. Cooke for his perpetual sermons about the South’s superiority to the North.”

  “You must learn to be more tolerant, more understanding. The South is being attacked with no provocation on their part. They’ve begun to adopt a defensive mentality. It’s important for some of us in the North to assure them that we’re still their friends.”

  “Why can’t they free their slaves like the British did?”

  “The answer to that is much too complicated for you to understand.”

  Jonathan stalked out, head down, like a victim of an unjust punishment. For a moment Caroline almost screamed at him. What else could go wrong? An enemy in the White House, enemies in control of Congress, the country careening toward a future in which Senator Stapleton was irrelevant. Was George beginning to think that his domineering wife had given him fatally wrong advice, pushing him into the Democratic Party? Was she herself beginning to wonder if the Democrats had a future? A number of conservative Democrats had switched to the Whigs in the last few years, mostly out of disgust with Martin Van Buren.

  Caroline lay down on the bed, the first jagged thrusts of a migraine pulsing through her forehead. For the next week she was miserable. Her pain had one side benefit. George felt so sorry for her, all their arguments, large and small, vanished. John Sladen brought her a bottle of eau-de-vie and sat in the darkened parlor with her (bright light ignited flashes of pain in her eyes), trying to cheer her up. But he was as miserable as she was.

  He agreed with her that George should become Texas’s spokesman and might well visit the giant republic. But there was an undertone of futility in the discussion. He dropped the subject and tried to amuse her with a word portrait of the hundreds of Whig job seekers swarming through the first floor of the White House, all but marooning the president on the second floor. Mrs. Harrison was wisely staying in Ohio until the jobs were handed out and the administration settled down. Daniel Webster had accepted Harrison’s offer to become secretary of state, which should provide Caroline’s salon with a steady supply of gossip.

  “What about you, John? How do you see your future?”

  “I didn’t realize you were interested in such minor matters.”

  “Surely you know how wrong, how cruel, that is.”

  Dolley Madison, who had grown fond of John, had confided to Caroline rumors about his heavy drinking and his appearance at local taverns and cockpits with women whose reputations were less than sterling. It was not unusual for congressmen to wander in this fashion. There was little diversion in the boardinghouses in which they lived, six, eight, or ten to a “mess,” talking politics day and night. But Caroline found John’s dissipation poignant. In a sense it was her fault.

  A week later, at the first Stapleton salon under the new regime, there was an undercurrent of uneasiness among some of the leading Whigs. Henry Wise, the rambunctious Virginia congressman who usually enlivened every party with outrageous jokes and remarks, was subdued. The president was acting odd; he was declining to fire Democrats from crucial patronage jobs. He had grown testy when Henry Clay started selecting his cabinet, at one point exploding, “Mr. Clay, you forget that I am president!”

  Clay was equally exasperated. Wise told of finding him in his hotel room, storming up and down. “I have not influence enough to procure the appointment of a friend to the most humble position!” he had all but shouted. In fact, he was fuming because Harrison had declined to appoint his man to that perennial gold mine, collector of the port of New York. Dolley Madison listened to these intimations of Whig disarray and announced a much more disquieting rumor: the new president was ill. He had gone for a walk to escape the job seekers crowding the White House and had been caught in a sudden rain shower. He was coughing and wheezing like a steam engine and had canceled all his appointments.

  A week later, the conversation at the salon had only one topic: the president’s illness. Harrison was confined to his bed, surrounded by a dozen doctors. An express messenger had been sent to Ohio to summon Mrs. Harrison. For the first time, people began to think the hitherto unthinkable: what if the president died? Somehow, Andrew Jackson’s numerous illnesses and semimiraculous recoveries had lulled everyone into believing God kept a special eye on the resident of the White House.

  Dolley Madison confirmed this assumption. She recalled the time when George Washington’s life was almost given up by his doctors; a cyst and abscess on his thigh defied healing. But expert nursing by Martha had him on his feet in a matter of weeks. Dolley remembered the way John Adams had brooded for four and five months at a time on his farm in Massachusetts, leading many people to think he was a drunkard or a madman. Mr. Jefferson had regularly been prostrated by his migraines. But death seemed barred from the White House. The very idea somehow contradicted the vitality inherent in the office of president—the summit of national power.

  John Sladen noted that General Harrison had called a special session of Congress in May and would not dare be so disrespectful to Henry Clay as to inconvenience him by dying. This got a brief laugh, but Dolley Madison rebuked him for his lack of Christian charity. Caroline reported from “a certain source” that the president’s condition was grave. Her secret informant was Hannibal, who attended the same Methodist church as many black members of the White House staff. They talked freely about the chief executive’s illness.

  Thus it was not a complete shock to the Stapleton circle when the news raced through Washington, D.C., and beyond it to the stunned nation: exactly one month after his inauguration, William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States, was dead. While the country mourned, Washington was racked by a question no one had ever expected to ask. What did John Tyler, the new president, or, as some people insisted on calling him, “the vice president acting as president,” stand for? His relationship to the Whig Party was suggested by the casual way he had been added to the ticket: �
�And Tyler too.”

  In one part of Tennessee there was precious little mourning for Harrison. The new president’s funeral was barely over when a letter arrived from the Hermitage, addressed to Senator and Mrs. Stapleton. A kind and overruling Providence has interfered to prolong our glorious Union. Tyler will stay the corruption of that clique who have got into power by deluding the people with the grossest slanders and hard cider.

  Most important, wrote Old Hickory, Tyler will have an open mind on the matter that overrules all others: Texas.

  Caroline smiled triumphantly at George. It was no longer necessary to say I told you so. They were of one mind, if not completely of one heart, now.

  SIX

  Dearest Friend,

  By now I hope you have received the news from George that I am a mother again—another boy, blasting once and for all, I suspect, my hopes (and I think, yours) for a girl. We have named him Paul, after George’s great-uncle, who died heroically in the American Revolution. He’s a rather frail child, caused, I fear, by the awful humidity of our capital in which I all but expired during the two months prior to his birth. I tended at times to curse Mr. Clay and our late president for calling a special session of Congress on May 31. Of course, Sir Harry of the West thought it would only take a week or two at the most to ram through his bank and tariff and improvement bills and then we could all flee to cooler climes. Instead, the statesmen have been sweating for two months now in the fiery furnace created by Beelzebub Tyler. Believe me that is one of the kinder names the Whigs have invented for our accidental president. By vetoing one Clay bill after another, he has created consternation and the most delicious chaos in their ranks. Never have I seen such fury expressed against a president. Not even the most intemperate Nullifiers and Secessionists of 1833 breathed oaths as ferocious on Andrew Jackson.