The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “Fire Judson Diggs.” Caroline did not like the set of George’s jaw. He was not acting like a presidential candidate. He looked more like a man confronting a harsh fate.

  “Wait a moment. Maybe it might be better to give him another thousand dollars to change his story.”

  “I don’t want him to change his story. And I won’t tolerate a piece of vermin like him in my household.”

  Caroline confronted the man who had come back from Mexico confident of his moral course. For the past two and a half years, her icy enmity—and the vagaries of Washington’s politics—had slowly eroded that confidence. How could something as ridiculous as this, the recklessness of a twenty-year-old black girl, threaten the restoration of the Temple of Fame?

  The following day a triumphant General Quitman was back in Washington. He had hired a steam yacht at Alexandria, and his posse had joined him for a furious all-night dash down the Potomac. They had overtaken the slow-sailing Pilgrim in Chesapeake Bay and hauled all seventy-seven runaway slaves, the captain of the ship, and his accomplices, Tabitha Flowers and her husband, Caesar Rhodes, back to Washington. The slaves were in the traders’ pens in Lafayette Square, and Tabitha, her husband, and the captain were in the District jail, charged with grand larceny and insurrection.

  Inevitably, the National Era, the District’s abolitionist newspaper, filled its front page with the story. Other papers throughout the nation flooded the capital with reporters. The episode was irresistible. At a time when Southern politicians were confidently demanding the right to export slavery throughout the Union and arrogantly proclaiming that their slaves were happy and contented with their lot, these seventy-seven house servants—blacks who lived comfortable lives in Washington’s better homes, wore good clothes, and ate decent food—were willing to risk capture and dire punishment to flee to free soil. The “flight of the Pilgrim,” as the story was swiftly dubbed, sent a ripple of panic through the slaveholders of the South and a howl of exultance through the abolitionists of the North.

  Judson Diggs soon added a righteous veneer to his version of the story. He claimed that Tabitha had borrowed the five hundred dollars to hire the Pilgrim from him. But reporters soon found other blacks who remembered Judson’s previous version of the plot. The newsmen crowded the Stapletons’ porch, they swarmed in the corridors of the Capitol, shouting questions at George. He was forced to issue a statement admitting he had loaned Tabitha the five hundred dollars. But he denied knowing anything about the Pilgrim.

  The abolitionists grandly announced they would ransom all the fugitives and hire topflight lawyers to defend Tabitha and her husband and the ship’s captain. But it soon became apparent that they had no intention of doing any such thing. The lawyers, former governor of Ohio Salmon P. Chase and former governor of New York William Seward, after volunteering their services and winning headlines, suddenly found themselves too busy to go to Washington. All the runaways were sold by their angry masters to District slave traders, who promptly shipped them to New Orleans for sale to the cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama. The abolitionists generated another round of sensational headlines about their harsh fate. But these moralists, many of whom were wealthy, did nothing to help them.

  George was totally disgusted with the abolitionists’ performance: “These people are the biggest hypocrites that ever existed,” he said. He hired one of the best lawyers in the District to defend Tabitha and her husband and the captain of the Pilgrim. But there was little the lawyer could do. The evidence against the defendants was overwhelming. The juries were packed with Southerners. The white captain was condemned to life imprisonment. Caesar Rhodes, Tabitha’s husband, received a similar sentence.

  Tabitha was the last to be tried. On the morning of her trial, George did not join Caroline for breakfast. She went to his room, wondering if he was ill. She found him working on a speech. In spite of their estrangement, he still let her read his speeches before he gave them. “What’s this?” she said, walking over to his desk. “I thought everyone’s too busy arguing about the Pilgrim to worry about affairs of state.”

  “It’s something you won’t like,” he said, swiftly gathering the pages and shoving them into his inside pocket.

  Caroline instantly knew he was planning to testify for Tabitha. “You can’t do anything so stupid. Not now, when so much is at stake.”

  “Is it?”

  “John Sladen, General Quitman, have assured me they know Tabitha hoodwinked you. You’re still their candidate.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be.”

  He rode to the District courthouse, arriving as Tabitha took the witness stand. Her bitter husband had already testified against her. His treachery was superfluous. Tabitha defiantly admitted everything. The jury’s guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion.

  As the judge prepared to sentence Tabitha, Senator Stapleton asked if he could speak. He proceeded to tell the jurist and the spellbound courtroom the story of her mother’s kidnapping, her father’s heroic death in Mexico. “Your Honor, this young woman is undoubtedly guilty of breaking our laws. But I must ask you if these laws, in her case, should be tempered with mercy. We might even ask ourselves if these laws deserve to be broken.”

  The judge was a Virginian. He was visibly shaken by Senator Stapleton’s words. But he grimly declared that there was nothing in the statute that gave him the power to alter the jury’s verdict. He sentenced Tabitha to life imprisonment. George strode from the courtroom to , the floor of the Senate and made a passionate speech, calling for the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The story made the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  The next morning, another spring rainstorm drenched Washington. Looking out the window, Caroline saw Judson Diggs on a brand-new hack pulled by a fine bay horse that he had bought with his thousand-dollar reward. He stopped in front of General Quitman’s house. The Mississippian no longer accepted rides to the Capitol from Senator Stapleton.

  “You realize what you’ve done, don’t you?” Caroline said as they sat down to dinner later that day. “You’ve thrown away the presidency. You couldn’t get a Southern vote now if you offered a thousand dollars each for them.”

  “There are some things more important than being president.”

  The soldier who had just returned from Mexico confronted Caroline again. Suddenly she understood everything. Her invisible antagonist, Maria de Vega, was still in command of George Stapleton’s soul.

  Maybe she would take that trip down the Mississippi with John Sladen after all. George’s nobility only deepened Caroline’s resolve to do anything, to risk everything, in the name of the word that burned in her throat day and night: vindication.

  THREE

  CAROLINE, SAT BENEATH HER PARASOL in the blazing July sun gazing up at the most loathsome sight her eyes had ever encountered in Washington, D.C.—President Zachary Taylor. With over two hundred pounds on his five-foot-eight frame, his torso sat like an overstuffed sack on his short, bowed legs. His jowls bulged over his collar. His belly jutted past his sweat-soaked suit coat. His long, apelike arms dangled almost to his knees. The contented stupidity of his expression completed the picture of an aboriginal imbecile who had wandered by accident into civilization.

  The president had just finished giving one of his more moronic speeches, hailing the rise of the idiotic monument to George Washington, a half-built semi-ruin that sat a few hundred yards away, surrounded by wheelbarrows and mounds of sand. It was an emblem of Taylor’s haphazard administration—and might even serve as a symbol of the state of the nation, which was on the brink of becoming a truncated monstrosity.

  Caroline’s only consolation in this baleful meditation was the knowledge that her noble husband, former presidential candidate Senator George Stapleton, had almost exactly the same opinion of President Zachary Taylor. George did not factor into his disgust Caroline’s antipathy for Taylor as the man who had destroyed James Knox Polk’s presidency. George saw him
in more immediate terms as an incubus that was about to split the Republic in half or perhaps thirds, by starting a civil war.

  For two more hours, Caroline and George and the rest of the crowd, which included most of Senate and the House of Representatives, sat in the heat listening to other gaseous orators from the Whig Party extol the virtues of patriotism. On the bare platform, Taylor, sheltered neither by an awning nor an umbrella, repeatedly mopped his streaming forehead with a red-checked handkerchief. But his ugly face retained the complacent self-satisfaction of a circus master who was forcing his trained animals to perform, knowing that at least half of them would take profound pleasure in tearing him to pieces.

  All these political gentlemen were sweltering in the capital’s atrocious heat and humidity thanks to President Taylor. With any other man in the White House, they would have long since departed to their plantations and villas. Caroline wondered if there was anyone else in the crowd who actually preferred the brutal weather of Washington. She had no desire to go near Kemble Manor, because she stubbornly, ferociously refused to succumb to the faintest possibility of forgiving Senator George Stapleton for his multiple betrayals of her dream of fame.

  Finally, the patriotic dithering ended and people milled listlessly in the soupy almost viscous air, exchanging glum smiles and halfhearted hellos. Caroline and George found themselves walking in tandem with the president’s daughter, pretty Elizabeth Taylor Bliss and her arrogant husband, William Wallace Bliss, who had been Taylor’s chief of staff during the war.

  “Oh, Mrs. Stapleton,” Mrs. Bliss cooed in her best Southern manner. “I’m so glad to see your health is improving. Perhaps we can lure you to the White House for dinner soon.”

  “Perhaps.” Caroline had turned down a dozen invitations. When would this idiot realize Mrs. Stapleton had no intention of going into that house while it was inhabited by her repulsive father?

  “Could we tempt you to the reception we’re giving today?” Colonel Bliss asked.

  “Thank you, no.”

  Another ten paces and a more welcome voice spoke in Caroline’s ear. “What do you think of the chances of Zach succumbing to sunstroke?” Senator John Sladen said.

  “I found myself wondering the same thing,” Senator Stapleton said. He peered into the distance. “I’ll go get our carriage. The police seem to have ordered them to move a good mile away for some stupid reason.”

  He left Caroline and John Sladen together on the grass. “Do you think a civil war is possible?” she asked.

  “Possible? I would say the word is probable. It could start in two weeks.”

  “Does that vile old man mean what he says? He’ll march an army into the South? When he only got forty-three percent of the vote?”

  “He thinks it will convert him into Andrew Jackson overnight,” Senator Sladen said.

  The political tension in Washington and the nation was approaching the volcanic level. Congress had been in session for a record 250 days, roaring, snarling, cursing, over slavery in the territories and the other components of Henry Clay’s omnibus compromise. The great obstacle to settling the murderous quarrel was President Zachary Taylor. Although he owned more than a hundred slaves, he persisted in declaring he would veto any bill that allowed slavery in the territories. Senator John C. Calhoun had responded that without access to the territories, the South should secede. Old Zach said he would march the U.S. Army into South Carolina and any other state that tried it and blast them back into the Union.

  Hotheads such as General Quitman were inclined to call Taylor’s bluff. They pointed out that two-thirds of the army that had fought in Mexico had been Southerners. Now they were being told they had no share in the five-hundred thousand square miles they had conquered. The situation looked more and more like the scenario that John Sladen and cooler heads feared most—a civil war that would desolate the South. Henry Clay’s bundle of compromises had enough votes to pass both houses of Congress but not enough to override a presidential veto.

  “What is to be done?” Caroline asked.

  “I keep asking myself what Aaron Burr would do. Do you think that’s impossibly old-fashioned?” John said.

  Caroline felt a dark, delicious thrill. It was amazing, the power of that name, forgotten by almost everyone else in American politics. “You’re going to challenge Zach to a duel?”

  “Hardly. There are other alternatives.”

  George was calling in the distance. Their carriage was lumbering over the lawn toward them. “You give me hope,” Caroline said.

  She slipped her arm through John’s to keep her balance on the uneven grass. Would George take it amiss? She did not care. They rode home in sodden silence. Dinner was almost as silent. Senator and Mrs. Stapleton did not have much to say to each other these days.

  As Mercy Flowers served mounds of vanilla ice cream for dessert, she murmured, “Just heard from that friend who works at the White House. The president’s mighty sick.”

  For a moment, Caroline found it difficult to breathe. The dark thrill was dancing in her flesh again.

  “What happened to him?” George asked.

  “He come home from that celebration and eat a dish of cherries and drunk four, five glasses of iced milk. Suddenly he was sick. Couldn’t even sit up. He in bed now with three doctors around him.”

  “Indigestion,” George said. “He’ll get over it.”

  The next day, the news raced through Washington. The president was not getting over it. The doctors hovered by his bed night and day, administering huge doses of calomel and other medicines. But nothing stopped the raging diarrhea and vomiting. On July 9, 1850, at 10:35 P.M., Zachary Taylor died. For the previous four days, Caroline had barely slept. Again and again, the dark thrill raced through her body.

  A week later, with Taylor’s body barely interred in the Congressional Cemetery, his vice president, Millard Fillmore of New York, announced he would sign Henry Clay’s compromises if Clay’s name was divested from the bill and other sponsors found for its separate proposals. With lightning speed, the legislation was split into four parts and each was voted and signed into law, permitting Congress to adjourn after 302 wearisome days, still the lawmakers of a united nation.

  Among the many who pronounced themselves satisfied was Senator George Stapleton, who had cosponsored the bill to abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia. In return, he extracted from President Fillmore a promise that he would pardon Tabitha and her husband and the captain of the Pilgrim before he left the White House.

  “I can hardly wait to get to Kemble Manor,” George said to Caroline on the day Congress adjourned.

  “You and Paul and Jonathan will have to make a bachelors’ hall,” Caroline said. “I’m going to New Orleans to visit Charlie.”

  It was all so innocent, so maternal, how could George object? “I wish I could go with you. But without Jeremy running the business I’ve got a lot of work to do in New Jersey.”

  “Poor dear.”

  A week later, Caroline boarded the SS Delilah in St. Louis, Missouri. It was one of the newest steamboats on the river, an immense floating palace driven by two huge paddle wheels. Everything inside gleamed, from the cushions in the salons to the brass fittings on the network of pipes that brought heat from its immense boilers to the luxurious staterooms.

  For Caroline it was more than a steamboat. Events in distant Washington, D.C., had transformed it, had transformed everything—the clanking, sooty trains she had ridden to St. Louis, the looming factories of Pittsburgh, the thousands of immigrants swarming across the Mississippi River, the immense river itself—into sinister portents of evil. America had become something different, something darker and more ominous, an almost alien land in which she was a stranger. But not for long, she told herself fiercely. Not for long.

  Caroline was leaning on the rail on the top deck, watching African roustabouts loading bales of cotton onto Delilah’s cavernous bottom deck when Senator John Sladen said, “I like the name of
your boat. Did you choose it deliberately?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Caroline said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Nathan Archibald’s the name, cotton is my game.”

  “I’m Amelia Peterson. From Philadelphia.”

  They descended to the bar, a cool oasis, with broad-bladed fans slowly turning on the dim ceiling, like the wings of enslaved angels. John ordered champagne. Caroline leaned back in her chair, sipped some of the bubbling wine, and said, “Did you kill the president?”

  John grimaced, as if he had expected the question and wished she had not asked it. “There are some things I refuse to discuss, even with you.”

  “You knew I was going to ask you. I was afraid to do it in Washington. I was afraid of how I’d react.”

  “There are some things it’s better not to know.”

  “Then it’s true.”

  “I prefer to attribute Old Zach’s departure to heavenly intervention. It’s another sign that the South will achieve her destiny.”

  “I want to know.” It was dismaying to realize how much this ultimate inside knowledge meant to her. Those four years she had spent at Sarah Polk’s side in the White House had sharpened her appetite for the perquisites of fame. With George Stapleton relegated to the anterooms of the temple, this man was her only hope.

  John Sladen clearly enjoyed the power he had over her. “I wish it were true. I wish I could be as daring, as clandestine, as evil, as you want me to be. But I’m afraid it was nothing but a lucky accident.”

  She studied his crafty face, his mocking eyes. With sudden crushing finality, she realized she no longer loved him and he no longer loved her, no matter what he said. There was not an iota of passion in this voyage south. On a personal level, they were settling scores against George Stapleton. On a political level, they were seeking a redesigned alliance, in which she could resume the role of fame’s priestess, without George.