The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  The ex-president and the senator sat there, dazed. Finally, John Tyler said, “I begin to think those ladies who are agitating for the vote for women may have a point.”

  “I thought so the first time I heard from them,” George said.

  “It’s magnificent,” Tyler said, giving Julia a kiss. “It’s beyond anything any male politician in the entire United States and the territories could have composed.”

  He was right. Caroline sent the finished essay to the New York Herald, now the paper with the largest circulation in the United States. They printed it on the front page, and within days it was reprinted in papers across the nation. The Southern Literary Messenger, the South’s favorite magazine, ran it a month later. Letters poured into Sherwood Forest, many solicited by Caroline. Sarah Polk, Mrs. Webster, and Mrs. Calhoun were among the patrons of the Stapleton salon who joined the chorus of praise. “I verily believe Mrs. Tyler has squashed those English snobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe in one blow,” Sarah Polk wrote to Caroline, showing she had not lost any of her political acuity. She knew the real target of the reply.

  Caroline was far less optimistic. She accepted John Sladen’s congratulations for establishing herself as Julia Tyler’s favorite political confidante. But Caroline could only see darkness looming on the political horizon. The Whig Party was in its death throes. Their defeat in 1852 had shattered them so badly, they virtually ceased to function. In the wreckage a kind of political anarchy flourished. For a while, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant party called the Know-Nothings won a spate of elections. They even persuaded Andrew Jackson Donelson, Old Hickory’s nephew, to become their spokesman in Tennessee, to Sarah Polk’s dismay. But they soon split into antislavery and pro-slavery wings, like the Whigs. Only the Democrats retained a semblance of unity, by holding high the torch of the Union.

  From New Orleans came impatient calls for action by Charlie, who was growing bored with making and losing money on the Cotton Exchange. He wanted to help launch that invasion of Cuba, but the chances of persuading President Franklin Pierce to look the other way and tolerate the expedition grew dimmer with every sale of a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Complicating the president’s problems was a bill that Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois had persuaded Pierce to back, opening the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to both slave and free-soil settlers. Passed as a Democratic Party measure, it had enabled the abolitionists to whip up a frenzy of criticism against Pierce in the North.

  Senator Stapleton, remembering the stubborn resistance that Americans had encountered in Mexico, was lukewarm toward the Cuban expedition. His enthusiasm rose slightly when John Quitman became leader of the project. Quitman had demonstrated military ability in Mexico. George also grudgingly agreed that Charlie was a born soldier, and he ought to be allowed to find out for himself how good he was at it. In the Senate, John Sladen introduced a bill to suspend the neutrality laws, which barred Americans from launching such “filibustering” expeditions, as the newspapers called them. (From the Spanish word for pirate, filibustero.) The neutrality laws had never been popular, and the bill easily won the approval of the Foreign Relations Committee.

  Caroline was keeping ex-president Tyler in close touch with these developments. She had persuaded Julia Tyler that a well-timed statement from him, supporting Cuba’s annexation on the same terms that had brought Texas into the Union, would add luster to Tyler’s fame. Julia assured Caroline that the statement would be made when the moment for it came. The abolitionist uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act made the ex-president ready and eager to defend the South’s right to expand the number of slave states. As the man who had annexed Texas, he was passionately convinced that the South’s future depended on its ability to maintain political equality with the North.

  On May 25, 1854, Senator John Sladen was one of the first arrivals at Caroline’s revived salon. George was still in his room, changing his clothes. She let Sladen kiss her cheek. That was all the familiarity she had permitted him since their voyage to New Orleans. Their liaison had become purely political once more.

  “Has the Senate voted on your neutrality bill?” she asked.

  “No. Nor is it likely too. Didn’t George tell you? We spent the afternoon at the White House.”

  “I haven’t seen him. He came in while I was dressing.”

  “The President is having kittens over the bill. On top of Kansas-Nebraska, he’s afraid it will ruin his chances for a second term. Not only does he want it killed—he’s issuing a proclamation against filibustering tomorrow.”

  “I knew that man was a fool from the moment I saw him,” Caroline said. “Didn’t George try to stop him?”

  As a Northern Democrat and a fellow veteran of Mexico, George had considerable influence with the president. “He didn’t say a word,” John growled.

  Later that night, after the guests had departed, Caroline said several thousand words to George. She told him that he should have challenged the president. By saying nothing, he had tacitly admitted he was as frightened by the abolitionists as the rest of the Northern Democrats. Moreover, he had embarrassed Charlie in New Orleans. Victor Conte Legrand had invested over fifty thousand dollars in the Cuban expedition. Now the guns and ammunition and provisions General Quitman had purchased would have to be sold at a forced auction for next to nothing. Charlie’s chances of marrying Cynthia Legrand and forming an alliance with one of the wealthiest families in the South had become less than promising.

  “That doesn’t worry me,” George said. “I’m glad to see the Cuban thing junked. It wasn’t a guaranteed success by a long shot. The Spaniards have ten or fifteen thousand troops in Cuba. They could put up a hell of a fight. Quitman only raised about three thousand men. If the Cubans didn’t support him, they could have been wiped out.”

  Caroline declared herself dismayed by George’s timidity. When Pierce issued his proclamation, denouncing filibustering as “derogatory to the character” of the nation, she persuaded George to publicly disagree with the president. At her behest, he joined Congressman John Quitman and a half dozen other Southerners who reminded Pierce that the United States could not have won their revolution against England without the aid of filibustering foreign soldiers such as Lafayette.

  At Caroline’s next salon, exiled Cuban patriots portrayed their countrymen as on fire with a desire for liberty and union with the United States. She produced morose letters from Charlie reporting reproachful remarks from Victor Legrand. Finally George went to see the wavering president and extracted a promise that the government would look the other way if the expedition kept a low profile.

  But Pierce could not retract his proclamation, which caused many of the expedition’s volunteers to defect. A dismayed Quitman withdrew as the leader and denounced Pierce as an enemy of the South. The president tried to mollify Southerners by offering to buy Cuba from Spain. His diplomacy ran into a stone wall of Spanish intransigence. No Madrid politician could part with this relic of Spain’s imperial glory without writing his own death sentence.

  While Pierce floundered, another political earthquake shook the country, confirming Caroline’s intuition about the power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ex-Whigs, Know-Nothings, abolitionists, and disgruntled free-soil Democrats coalesced into a new political party, who called themselves Republicans. They proclaimed themselves undying foes of slavery—which meant they did not have a single adherent south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But in the congressional elections of 1854, they swept the North and won a majority in the House of Representatives.

  The Democrats retained control of the Senate. That meant the government virtually ground to a dead stop, since the two branches agreed on nothing. When Pierce sent federal troops into Kansas to keep order between pro-slavery and antislavery guerrillas, the Republicans amended an army appropriation bill to deny the president the authority to use the troops to enforce laws passed by the pro-slavery Kansas legislature. The Senate refused to approve the bill, leading to weeks of legislative deadlock and the t
hreat of the U.S. Army’s dissolution.

  Caroline did not have to say I told you so. George said it for her, slumped at the dinner table, worn-out by the endless wrangling between the two sections of the country. He was especially dismayed by reports of Americans killing fellow Americans in Kansas. “It’s a civil war out there. Madmen are on the loose. Last week a fellow named John Brown rode into a Southern settlement on Osawatomie Creek and butcherd five men with machetes.”

  He looked so sad, so discouraged, for a moment Caroline felt an almost irresistible impulse to console him. She was witnessing the pain, the bafflement, of a patriot. Only she knew the fame this man had surrendered in the name of honesty and love of country. Only she understood, thanks to Aaron Burr, the impossibility of his desire to be both powerful and good. She found herself almost wishing she had never met Burr, never heard his bitter wisdom. But that escape into illusion would have required a different father, a different fate.

  Evil, Caroline thought. It was seeping across the continent, exactly as she had foreseen it. Had her silence—a kind of complicity—about Zachary Taylor’s death made her responsible for it? She pleaded not guilty to that accusation. She did not want to see herself as the cause of George Stapleton’s pain. At times, as she watched him trudge off to another day of hate-filled rhetoric in the Senate, she imagined a scenario in which they fled the country to a benevolent exile in Italy or the Greek islands. But she realized she could never persuade him to go, nor could she really persuade herself.

  Another night, George came home fuming over a speech by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. He had accused the South of “the rape” of the “virgin territory” of Kansas—and then turned his invective on individual senators, violating a sacred Senate code of behavior. He had suggested that Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina had made obscene vows to “the harlot, slavery”—implying he had sex with his female slaves—and added injury to insult by ridiculing the senator’s speech impediment. “It was absolutely the most vicious speech I’ve heard in my twenty-five years in the Senate,” George said. “I denounced the self-righteous son of a bitch to his face. He spit at me. Honest to God. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Charles Sumner spit at me.”

  Again, there was no need for Caroline to say I told you so. She listened while George morosely described another tormenting problem. After President Millard Fillmore had pardoned Tabitha Flowers and her husband, George sent them to New York with enough money to buy a hack and go into the taxi business. Irish hack drivers had beaten up the husband, wrecked his hack, and cut his horse’s throat. The Irish were the underclass of the North, and they were determined not to let blacks take jobs away from them.

  That night, although Caroline told herself she was not renouncing her evil heart, she opened her arms to her melancholy husband. “It’s not your fault, George. None of it is your fault,” she said. He was so grateful, so touched by her sympathy, she grew alarmed. He was seducing her into loving him again!

  The next morning John Sladen rescued her with a note: Don’t fail to visit the Senate this afternoon. You’ll see something that will thrill you. That afternoon, Caroline strolled to one of the reserved couches on the Senate floor as the senators wrangled over Sumner’s insulting speech. George urged the Yankee, whose skull-like face made him look like a veritable harbinger of evil, to apologize to Butler. John Sladen proposed Sumner’s expulsion from the Senate. The vote fell far short of the two-thirds required for such a drastic measure. After some feckless debate on Kansas, the world’s greatest deliberative body adjourned. Most departed for the infamous Hole in the Wall or more genteel watering places. A few lingered, chatting to friends. Senator Sumner stayed at his desk, answering mail. Like many senators, he used his desk as an office.

  George strolled over to Caroline’s couch. “What brings you down this way?” It was her first visit in more than two years. He thought it had something to do with her unexpected sympathy last night.

  “I was told something extraordinary was going to happen. But I fear my informant was wrong.”

  As they spoke, with George’s back turned to the rows of desks, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate chamber clutching a thick gutta-percha cane. He strode past them with a grim expression on his handsome face. A moment later there was a thud and a cry. George whirled, Caroline stared aghast. Brooks was smashing Senator Sumner over the head with the cane. A few feet away, Senator John Sladen watched with a sardonic smile.

  George rushed to Brooks and tore the splintered cane out of his hand. Sumner toppled to the floor, blood gushing from his head. Butler turned to the handful of senators still on the floor and shouted, “Let the Yankees be warned. The South will not be insulted without retaliation!”

  Evil. Caroline’s eyes found the resolute face of her fellow conspirator. Thank you, she said as the sergeant at arms, the doorkeeper, and Senate pages carried the bleeding Sumner away. Thank you for giving me another chance to see how serious we are.

  A shaken George took Caroline home in the Stapleton carriage. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe what I just saw.”

  Caroline said nothing. But her eyes spoke: I told you so. Maria de Vega, Mexico, were vanishing in this political maelstrom. Caroline sensed her growing power. “The South has to be given something to soothe their anger,” she said. “It can’t be Mexico. That would require an army, a war. It will have to be Cuba.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” George said.

  “That means you shouldn’t support Franklin Pierce for reelection. He can’t retract his idiotic proclamation against filibustering. Not that he deserves your support, anyway. He’s done nothing for you or any of our friends. President Tyler wrote to him a half dozen times on behalf of some of his relations and old supporters. He didn’t even get the courtesy of a reply.”

  “Who will it be—the Little Giant?”

  He was talking about Senator Stephen Douglas. Caroline shook her head. “A president should be at least five feet eight. I have a personal preference for men over six feet. But that’s no longer relevant.”

  She was talking about their lost presidential hopes. With a sigh she said, “It will have to be Buchanan.”

  “Old Buck? That decrepit Nancy? I can’t believe you’re serious. I thought we got rid of him once and for all when we sent him to London to play whist with the Limeys.”

  Pierce had made James Buchanan ambassador to Great Britain. Everyone thought it was a shrewd move at the time—getting a major rival out of the country. Many people wondered why Buchanan accepted the job. Caroline soon understood why, as Pierce’s presidency crumbled around him.

  “Buchanan’s the only Democrat who can win. Pierce has let Kansas become a tar baby. Douglas is the man who fathered the baby. They’re both covered with the stuff—white Old Buck has been prancing around Buckingham Palace, spotless. He can run without a speck of tar on him.”

  “You may be right about that. But what kind of a president will he make?”

  For a moment, Caroline almost said what she was thinking: A weak one. The weakest imaginable president. But she retained her self-control and replied, “One that will let you finance an expedition to Cuba.”

  George said nothing. His silence was enough. He agreed with her. It was an enormously important moment. Their partnership was being resurrected without Caroline speaking the words of forgiveness that George had once insisted on hearing. She was free to manipulate him with unrenounced evil in her heart.

  Or was she? Was pity, the emotion that had lured her into John Sladen’s arms, drawing her into a new relationship with her troubled husband? Caroline vowed she would not make the same mistake twice. But she was vulnerable to George in ways that infinitely transcended the adolescent emotion that had drawn her to John Sladen. A thousand memories challenged her to be a wife again.

  Two nights later, Caroline welcomed Senator Sladen to her salon. “What is the latest news about Congressman Brooks?” she
asked. “Will he be arrested for his atrocious assault on Senator Sumner?”

  She said this in a voice just loud enough to be overheard by several other guests. “I’m afraid not,” John said. “The Senate decided today that it had no power to arrest a congressman. The abolitionists voted to expel Mr. Brooks from the House, but they couldn’t muster a two-thirds majority.”

  Congressman Quitman joined them, his prophetic white beard bristling. “I’m planning to buy Mr. Brooks a new cane.”

  “Please, General,” Caroline said, pretending dismay. “I saw the assault.”

  “Excuse me, but the fellow deserved it.”

  “My husband agrees entirely,” Caroline said.

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard about the whole affair,” Quitman said.

  Quitman strode across the room to interrupt George’s conversation with ex-president Tyler. All three were soon in grim agreement on Sumner’s fate. “Who are you going to support for the Democratic nomination?” Caroline asked John Sladen in a much lower voice.

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “It has to be Buchanan. You should write to him now, making yourself an early backer. That will endear you to him to the point of utter pusillanimity. Make him president and what we want to achieve will be infinitely more simple.”

  John seized a flute of champagne from a passing tray. “I’m beginning to wonder if we can pull it off. There are so many madmen on both sides.”

  Evil. Why couldn’t he understand what they were confronting? “When did you start drinking again?” she said.

  “It’s one of the few consolations of celibacy.”

  “No one regrets that more than I do.” The words were a lie but her evil heart assured her the truth was no longer relevant. “Some sacrifices are essential.”

  He knew what she meant. They had agreed an affair between two well-known people was impossible in Washington, D.C. She did not tell him that her new sympathy for George made the very idea unpalatable. Even her evil heart recoiled from the idea of adding an unfaithful wife to his woes. But that same malevolent heart was equally determined to keep John Sladen under control.