The President is very close to appointing you his chief negotiator, replacing this idiot Nicholas Trist. Are you aware that in one of the preliminary exchanges, he offered terms that left the Texas boundary on the Nueces River? He’s playing Buchanan’s game; like the old woman he is, Buck thinks the next president will have to be a peace-mongering mollycoddle. He’s wrong. The American people want a conqueror. That can be you—the man who fought his way to Mexico City and then imposed a peace that will last fifty years, a peace that will pour hundreds of millions into our pockets and make us a world power, with an army that even perfidious Albion will respect. If all goes well, the president will be sending you your instructions in a fortnight. He still has some doubts about this course, but I’m sure they will be resolved shortly. The boys send their love and admiration—as do I.
As ever,
Caroline
Stunning, staggering news. He would have to find out if Trist really did something as stupid as offer to give back a quarter of Texas. He glanced through the clippings, quickly absorbing the basic arguments. They made sense—especially if the Mexicans forced them to fight their way into Mexico City. Another long casualty list would inevitably harden almost every American heart against Mexico.
What would Maria de Vega think of such a peace? Would her admiration for the United States persist when an American viceroy ruled the nation—and the U.S. Army enforced his decrees from Monterrey to Yucatán? Somehow he doubted it. Mournfully, George realized that this letter made it impossible for him to go to her tonight. If he was to become the man who conquered Mexico, he would have to do it as Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s husband.
He scribbled a note: My dearest: General Scott has called a council of war which will probably last until midnight, at least. Perhaps it is better to say good-bye this way, without false pretenses. God willing, I’ll see you in Mexico City.
“Take this to Madame de Vega,” he said, handing it to Hannibal.
Now what did pompous old Jeremy Biddle have to say? George tore open the envelope. It too was stuffed with newspaper clippings—almost all of them the same ones Caroline had enclosed, trumpeting the importance of taking and holding all of Mexico.
Dear George,
I write this letter in an agony of trepidation. I have written a dozen versions of it and torn them up. But the love of our country—a love we both share—forces me to try again. You see in the enclosed clippings the creation of a monstrous conspiracy to make Mexico a conquered province. It is a conspiracy that is being conducted by two persons, who have become in my opinion the most malevolent spirits ever to intrude their hellish designs into American politics. The persons are your wife, Caroline, and her lover, John Sladen. Yes, lover. I have not used the word arbitrarily. But I use it with enormous regret. For the past twenty years, I have withheld from you a secret that must now be told. A month before your marriage to Caroline, I found her in flagrante delicto in the basement of Mrs. Burch’s brothel with Johnny Sladen. I pounded him into jelly, took her home, and made her vow never to see him again. I gave the scum $100 and sent him to New Orleans. I told you nothing. I did this in the name of our friendship—I swear it. I acted with a brother’s love. But an evil fate reunited them in Washington, D.G They may not have become lovers immediately. But slowly, I am convinced, Sladen gained ascendancy over her and converted her to his vile scheme to make the South a nation within the nation. Mexico has always been the centerpiece of this purple dream. That they are lovers now, as they move toward triumph, I have no doubt. A private detective I have hired to follow Sladen reports he is in your house daily, at all hours of the day and night. Through Caroline’s almost unnatural friendship with Sarah Polk, they’ve reduced the President to a pathetic puppet. You and you alone can prevent them from winning this evil victory, which will destroy our Union as certainly as the dark banner of slavery under which it operates.
Someday I hope you can forgive me for this. I know it will be impossible for many years. Perhaps forever.
Adieu old friend,
Jeremy
When Hannibal returned from Maria de Vega’s house, it was almost dark. He found George Stapleton sitting in the shadows with Jeremy’s letter in his hand.
“General,” he said, lighting an oil lamp, “don’t you need some light to read that?”
“I’ve read it.”
“Good news, I hope?”
“In a way.” George heaved himself to his feet.
“You want some supper, General?”
“No. I’m going out.”
“Where’ll you be, General? In case General Scott wants you for some last-minute ‘mergency meetin’?”
“I’ll be at Madame de Vega’s house.”
SEVEN
IN THE WHITE HOUSE’S MAIN dining room, Caroline Stapleton sat at the splendidly appointed dinner table beside General James Corcoran of Ohio. At the battle of Buena Vista, General Corcoran had been shot in the head and left for dead on the battlefield. An army doctor had operated on him, extracting the bullet and saving his life. But General Corcoran was not the same cheerful, loquacious congressman who had gone to Mexico in search of military fame. He walked with a cane and spoke in slow, halting sentences, slurring his words.
Why had Sarah Polk sat her beside Corcoran? Was she trying to warn Caroline that she too might soon find out the bitter truth about the wages of fame? A month ago, they had been told that the American army was descending into the Valley of Mexico, where they were certain to meet the Mexican army again. Across the table, Senator John Sladen of Louisiana gazed hungrily at Caroline. She had made a statement of sorts by retreating to New Jersey for the summer. Only an urgent summons from Sarah Polk had persuaded her to return to Washington for this dinner.
At the head of the table sat President James Polk, looking, if possible, more ghastly than the last time Caroline had seen him. His skin had acquired a permanent shade of brown. His tongue darted ceaselessly around his cracked, bloodless lips. His hand trembled as he raised a water glass to his mouth. His wary eyes roved the oval table, as if he did not really believe in the friendship of his guests, all of whom were in the inner circle of his administration.
The attacks on him in the newspapers and in Congress had reached a new level of ferocity. Ironically, the rhetoric played into the hands of Senator Sladen and his All Mexico campaign. The infuriated Democrats had begun to rally around the president, giving him a semblance of authority. As Senator Thomas Hart Benton said to Caroline at her last salon of the season, “Polk may be a poor thing. But he’s our own.”
The president was on his feet, a water glass in his hand. “I would like to propose a toast to a hero in our midst. To General James Corcoran, who went to Mexico as a volunteer, not in search of glory, but from a desire to serve-our beloved country. This morning, I promoted him to major general. With such men as him, we shall soon conquer a true peace in Mexico.”
That was the latest administration slogan, coined by Polk’s burly, beetle-browed secretary of war, William Marcy. The United States was in Mexico to conquer a peace. It bespoke the spread of the grim opinion that winning battles was not the answer to peace with Mexico. The Americans had defeated the Mexican army four times and still they refused to negotiate. Santa Anna, with his peg leg and sonorous duplicities, was still in command of the army and the nation.
General Corcoran bowed his head as they drank the president’s toast to his heroism. He struggled to his feet with the aid of his cane and responded, wrenching the words from his throat in a series of painful spasms. “Let me respond … with a toast to an absent hero … the man who saved my life … at Buena Vista … my friend … General George Stapleton. On the chance … that I might be … alive … he risked a thousand Mexican bullets … to drag me to safety. It is … a privilege to … be seated … beside … his beautiful … wife.”
“To General Stapleton.” The rest of the table saluted George.
“We may soon have more important responsibilities for Gener
al Stapleton,” growled Secretary of War Marcy, who was sitting on the president’s left. “I’ve urged the president to replace our lamentable chief diplomat, Mr. Trist, with a man who can put some steel in our peace terms.”
“I … can’t think … of a better man,” General Corcoran said.
Caroline’s eyes sought Sarah Polk’s. She was sitting at the bottom of the table. They exchanged the silent understanding that had become more and more profound since the ordeal in the White House began. It was tinged with darkness now, but they still clasped hands in the shadows. For a moment, Caroline had to struggle against an impulse to weep.
Secretary of War Marcy began talking about the army’s problems with Mexican guerrillas. They were shooting up American supply trains moving up from Vera Cruz and across the deserts from the Rio Grande to the army in northern Mexico. “I’ve given orders to take none of them prisoners. Any town that harbors them will be put to the torch. We’ve levied fines on the state of Neuvo León for the cost of every lost or stolen item.”
“Mexico seems to be breaking up,” the president said. “Yesterday we received a letter from the former mayors of Saltillo and Monterrey. They claim to be part of a movement to set up a separate nation in northern Mexico. They want us to make them a protectorate, to guarantee their independence. It wouldn’t be difficult to do. We’ll have to maintain an army on the Rio Grande at any event.”
“Wouldn’t it be far simpler, Mr. President, to make the whole benighted country a protectorate?” Senator Sladen said. “That seems to me the only way we can truly conquer a peace.”
“You may have a point, Senator,” the president said. “My wife has kept me in close touch with the newspaper campaign for this solution. But I’m not sure it has the approval of the American people.”
“Speaking for the South,” Sladen said, “I can produce ten thousand letters for you at the touch of a telegraph key. Every man of influence and position I know from Virginia to New Orleans favors it.”
“Except John C. Calhoun,” the president said.
“Except Mr. Calhoun,” Senator Sladen said. “But he has become a party of one, Mr. President.”
“I must confess I was a skeptic at first,” Secretary of War Marcy said. “But my conversion seems to be approaching. My new faith veritably leaped in my soul when I learned that a certain former great man in New York violently opposes All Mexico. Since his ideas have invariably tended to the ruin of the Democratic Party, I think the law of opposites may prevail here and prove Senator Sladen’s case.”
Marcy was talking about Martin Van Buren, who was his bitterest political enemy in New York. With Marcy a convert, All Mexico stood a better than even chance to win the backing of the Empire State—especially when Marcy could dangle the thousands of jobs a Mexican protectorate would require. The man at the top of this unparalleled pyramid of patronage would be the American viceroy, General George Stapleton.
Caroline sipped her wine. It was coming together, the whole incredible fabric of empire, Aaron Burr’s forfeited dream. Suddenly she was back twenty years in the shabby office off Broadway, sitting beside John Sladen listening to that small elegiac man explain the true meaning of fame. Father whispered in her deepest mind, prying open the old grave of grief. This had been his dream too—a dream of empire infinitely beyond the life of a hardscrabble farmer in Twin Forks, Ohio.
But where was the joy? Only irony, a gloating sardonic irony, glittered in Senator Sladen’s red-veined eyes. In Sarah Polk’s haunted eyes Caroline saw only the slow death of love, expiring day by toilsome day as James Knox Polk bent over his desk and wrote and read and read and wrote from dawn until midnight and beyond, wordlessly asking, Is this enough? Will only my death prove I loved you?
Suddenly that familiar, maddening whisper wound through Caroline’s head: Oh, my dear girl, I fear for thy salvation. It was Hannah Cosway Stapleton speaking to her across the miles from Bowood’s library. How had this dead Quaker saint gained access to her soul? It infuriated her every time she thought of it. How could words from a casual conversation almost a hundred years ago, words that had no reference to Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s soul, acquire this outrageous meaning?
There were more toasts—to the army, to the navy, to General Winfield Scott, to the president’s friend General Pillow, who had been wounded at Cerro Gordo. Defiantly, in a private drama that no one except she understood, Caroline stood up and raised her water glass. “I know women are not supposed to propose toasts. But I have never been a strong observer of all the rules of etiquette. I would like to propose a toast to the man whom history will credit with the conquest of Mexico and New Mexico and California—the man who has already won a harvest of fame worthy of comparison with Andrew Jackson and George Washington—President James Knox Polk.”
“I’ll second that motion,” said Secretary of War Marcy.
“It’s unanimous,” Senator Sladen said.
A ghost of a smile played across the president’s desiccated face. “How nice it is to dine with friends.” Tears were on his brown cheeks. He wiped them away. “It will end well—I’ve always felt it will end well. We’re all instruments in a divine plan—for this great country. I didn’t seek this task. It sought me. In this house, you see the mysterious workings of destiny. So much becomes clear to you.”
How right, how awesomely right he was, Caroline thought, her mind roving back across the last twenty years. So much that seemed pure chance had brought her to this moment in this history-laden house. Her original meeting with Sarah Polk, the visit to Andrew Jackson, the intricate skein of politics and passions, from headstrong Peggy Eaton and slimy slithering Martin Van Buren to John C. Calhoun’s lethal mixture of rage and ambition to the death of President William Henry Harrison to the explosion that had catapulted Julia Gardiner into President Tyler’s arms to Martin Van Buren’s act of self-destruction over Texas—who would attempt to find method, mind, in such a maze? Yet she had guided George Stapleton through it to the doors of the Temple of Fame.
The dinner party was breaking up. General Corcoran was mumbling a final tortured compliment. Sarah walked beside Caroline to the South Portico. “Thank you for that lovely toast,” Sarah said. “It will be a shield against tomorrow’s newspapers.”
“Will Trist be removed soon?”
“Very soon. Do you think George will undertake the task of negotiating a conquered peace?”
“I can guarantee it.”
“It won’t be a simple task—if things unfold as we suspect they will. George will have to operate without portfolio, so to speak. We’re simply going to tell Trist to pack up and come home—and inform the Mexicans that any offers of peace will henceforth have to come from them and should be forwarded to General Scott. We’ll instruct Scott to confer with George if, by some miracle, an offer materializes. Far more likely, the Mexican federal government will collapse and disappear. We’ll occupy the whole country as our only alternative. Then George will resign from the army and we’ll appoint him viceroy.”
“I understand. I’ll make sure he understands.”
They were out on the portico now. The sultry air of Washington in late August engulfed them. The White House’s thick walls had kept it at bay. Senator Sladen strolled over to them. “You two ladies look as if you’re deciding the fate of the world.”
“We are,” Caroline said. “Which stirs your male disapproval, I’m sure.”
“I’ve learned to conceal that emotion. The longer an American man lives, the more awe of American women undermines his soul.”
He said this in such a weary voice, Caroline felt that old subverter, pity, stir in her blood. But she sternly barred it from her soul. “May I offer you a ride to your hotel, Senator?”
“On such a warm night, I would appreciate that greatly.”
The Stapletons’ vermilion coach, manned by Judson Diggs, who got fatter every time Caroline looked at him, rumbled to the portico. Caroline kissed Sarah and the president and allowed Senator Sladen
to help her into the dark interior.
“So!” he said as they rolled through the gate.
“So,” Caroline said.
“Is that all you have to say? Not a murmur of exultation? Not a word of praise?”
“Don’t you have any feelings? Can’t you see what this is doing to the president—and Sarah?”
“They’re paying the price we all have to pay for large ambitions.”
“How can you be so complacent?”
“Because I’ve paid my price. I’ve passed through my dark night of the soul—a hundred dark nights. Without giving up hope of my reward.”
She knew what he was hoping she would say. The house on Pennsylvania Avenue was virtually empty. She had brought only Mercy and Tabitha Flowers with her. They would be sleeping soundly by now. She had left Paul in New Jersey to enjoy the last weeks of summer. Her son Jonathan was in New York arguing about negritude with his abolitionist friend Ben Dall. Charlie was in North Carolina chasing foxes and God knows what else with Southern friends.
But something remarkable and strange was occurring in Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s soul. She was discovering the aberrant voice that might or might not belong to Hannah Cosway Stapleton had some meaning after all. She was learning that gratitude and admiration were ingredients in which love could slowly, painfully flower. All the stories she had read and heard about George’s courage and competence in Mexico were working a transformation in her soul.
The Wages of Fame Page 52
