The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  On the morning of January 12, 1859, Caroline remained in her room, waiting for George to depart to make a speech in Trenton. Someone rang the front doorbell. She heard Mercy Flowers answer it. Up the stairs Mercy trudged.

  Caroline virtually sprang from her bedroom. “Was that a telegram?”

  “Yes. For Senator Stapleton,” Mercy said. “From New Orleans.”

  “Give it to me,” Caroline said, snatching it off the tray.

  Her hands trembled as she ripped open the yellow envelope. Standing in the dim hall, she read the words:

  TERRIBLE NEWS FROM CUBA STOP SPANISH GUNBOATS SANK ONE OF ARMED VESSELS STOP SECOND RAN ASHORE STOP SPANISH TROOPS IN LARGE NUMBERS WAITED FOR THEM STOP SOMEONE HAD BETRAYED THE PLAN STOP EXPEDITION WIPED OUT TO LAST MAN STOP SPANISH EXECUTED WOUNDED AND PRISONERS STOP MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY TO YOU AND CAROLINE STOP SLADEN

  “Give that to Senator Stapleton,” Caroline said.

  She stumbled back into her room, trying to comprehend it. But history was not comprehensible. History was like a huge steamboat lunging through the night, indifferent to human hopes and fears. Things simply happened or failed to happen. Presidents died—or were murdered. Armies won battles—or lost them.

  “No!” She heard George’s cry as he read the telegram. “Oh, God, no!”

  Heavy footsteps in the hall. George swayed in the doorway in his undershirt, tears streaming down his cheeks. “You read it?”

  “I read it.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Caroline. We’ve murdered our son. As surely as if we put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. We murdered that poor kid.”

  “He wasn’t a poor kid. He was a brave man—fighting for his country.”

  “His country? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “His country,” she hissed. “Don’t you remember why we did this? For the sake of the Union? To give the South a reason for staying in it?”

  She was amazed to discover that she could continue to lie. In her mangled heart, fame still struggled for life. The dream was not dead. Only Charlie had died. Perhaps his death was part of the evil god’s plan. Perhaps he extracted such pain from his servants. Perhaps it was his way of preparing them for their own deaths. She would pay that price too. She would not waver, she would not retreat; no matter how terrible this god became.

  For a week, Caroline’s migraine tormented her with unparalleled frenzy. George hovered beside her bed. He summoned the doctor at all hours of the day and night. The man could do nothing but increase her dosage of laudanum. She remembered her long-ago conversations with John Sladen about the way suicides used the drug to elude their despair. Was she ready for this final surrender?

  Gazing up at George’s sorrowful face, Caroline rejected this grim alternative. She clung to this big grieving man and wept and wept and wept. She let herself be a helpless woman, supported by his wounded love. For a little while they were husband and wife again in ways more endearing and intricate than their youthful passion for each other.

  President Buchanan issued a pious denunciation of filibustering. The blatant hypocrisy tormented George. But Caroline found it bracing. She credited it with banishing her migraine. With such a fool in the White House, she sensed the redemption of her dark hopes was not only still possible, but probable.

  Caroline found additional comfort in the sympathy the Tylers extended to her. The ex-president wrote her a sorrowful note, telling her how he had lost three daughters in childbirth. The death of a child is like a blow in the face to a parent. But we must soldier on for the sake of the living. Your son died in a noble cause. Let that be your consolation. Aside from the touching sentiment, it was reassuring proof of how close the two families had become. The ex-president still remained a central figure in the scenario of peaceful secession.

  Caroline showed the letter to George. He crumpled it in his big fist and wondered gloomily if they were losing their other two sons. Jonathan was using Charlie’s death as proof that anything connected to the South and slavery was odious. Their youngest son, Paul, announced he was applying for West Point. More and more dismayed by the family’s divisions, he was reaching back to mythical memories of his heroic grandfather. He told Caroline he wanted a career that had nothing to do with politics. Caroline soothed George by reminding him how often Americans elected soldiers as senators and presidents.

  Julia Tyler invited Caroline to Sherwood Forest for weeks at a time. She too was in mourning. Her older sister, Margaret, had died unexpectedly during a visit to the plantation in the spring of 1858. Margaret, who had rejected scores of Washington, D.C., suitors and insisted on marrying only for love, had selected a tall impecunious young New York aristocrat for a husband. He had gone to California during the gold rush of 1849 and was killed when his shotgun accidentally discharged. It took nine tear-drenched years for Margaret’s broken heart to kill her.

  Wordlessly, Caroline shared her grief for Charlie with Julia, and Julia shared her grief for Margaret with Caroline, affirming at a profound level of silence what they both knew about each other now—they were not like other women. They loved something more elusive and more demanding than other women. Did Julia know it was fame? At times Caroline was tempted to tell her about the vision she had shared with Sarah Polk. But she decided that memory should remain a sacred secret between the two of them.

  Caroline was at Sherwood Forest with George in October of 1859 when incredible news from western Virginia swept through the state. Abolitionists had seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and were calling on the state’s Africans to form a black revolutionary army equipped with the thousands of government guns they now controlled. As the telegraph flashed the story throughout the South, the audacity of the raid, the mental picture of a race war it generated, sent shock waves of panic from Richmond to New Orleans.

  George rushed back to Washington, D.C., to make sure President Buchanan acted decisively. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Senator Stapleton knew exactly how many troops were at the president’s disposal, and who was the best man to take command in the crisis. George virtually insisted on Buchanan’s choosing Colonel Robert E. Lee, who was on leave at his home, just across the river in Arlington, Virginia. Lee’s brilliant performance in Mexico had convinced George that he was the outstanding soldier in the American army.

  Backed by a presidential proclamation, Lee rushed to Harpers Ferry with a company of U.S. Marines. Four companies of U.S. Army troops were also dispatched from Virginia’s Fortress Monroe to support him. Rumors swept Virginia that the insurgents numbered five hundred men. They had seized thirteen prominent Virginians as hostages, among them a grandnephew of George Washington.

  Henry Wise, the governor of the state and an old Tyler friend, called out Virginia’s militia. Caroline found herself wondering what the slaves thought of it all. The Tylers assured her that Sherwood Forest’s Africans posed no danger. But she noticed the ex-president thoroughly approved a decision by a neighbor to organize a cavalry troop of older men to patrol the roads at night, should the younger members of the county’s militia be ordered to western Virginia.

  Within twenty-four hours the threat of a slave insurrection evaporated. Colonel Lee’s marines stormed the Harpers Ferry arsenal and subdued the seven abolitionists who had perpetrated the raid, under the leadership of the Kansas fanatic “Osawatomie” John Brown. The thirteen hostages were freed unharmed. George went to Harpers Ferry with Virginia’s Senator James Mason to interrogate Brown. George sent a lengthy letter to John Tyler, reporting his conclusions. Brown was clearly insane. He raved hatred of Southerners and slavery, quoted the Book of Revelation, and saw himself as a latter-day savior. His confederates were a collection of drifters and dimwits, sucked into the vortex of his apocalyptic rhetoric.

  I’m telling you this to reassure you that this man and his followers are not typical of the responsible people of the North. They disdain and despise Brown’s mad solution to our national dilemma as much as I do, George wrote.
He enclosed newspaper clippings reporting that everyone from former Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln, who was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, to Catholic and Protestant clergymen to all the leaders of the Northern Democratic Party condemned Brown.

  Caroline feared few would listen to these reasonable voices. The millions of Northern readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin endorsed biblical John Brown in their hearts, even though they flinched from his brutal acts. The abolitionist press became more and more frenzied as Brown was tried for sedition and murder—one of the marines had been killed storming the Harpers Ferry arsenal—and condemned to death. As the day of Brown’s execution approached, rumors predicted an abolitionist army would descend on Virginia to rescue him. Governor Wise issued fifty thousand muskets, putting the state on a war footing.

  By that time, Caroline was back in Washington, D.C., conferring with Senator John Sladen. She brought with her a statement from ex-president John Tyler: But one sentiment pervades the South. Security in the Union, or separation. I hope there is conservatism enough in the country to speak peace, and that after all,, good may come out of evil.

  Caroline saw it as a call for immediate secession. She wanted to release it to the newspapers. Sladen demurred. “We must save him for the right moment,” John insisted. “Give it to George instead. Let him use it as a battle cry to rally unionist sentiment. We’ll need them both when the moment comes.”

  Armed with Tyler’s statement, George organized unionist rallies in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. He spoke at all of them, virtually wearing out his voice. He emerged from this campaign in the spring of 1860 as a major spokesman of moderation in the North. His fervent speeches against the tragedy of a civil war were quoted in hundreds of newspapers. Caroline found herself admiring the senator’s growing moral grandeur. For him, the threat to the Union was a personal agony, as acutely painful as the rending of his own flesh. It was fascinating—and terrible—the way her evil god used good men and their noble intentions to achieve her dark purpose.

  Julia Tyler. sent Caroline an emotional view of the crisis from Virginia. The Democratic Party is our country’s only hope. Everything depends on finding the right candidate. He must be able to win Northern and Southern votes. If a Republican becomes president, the South will secede. They will never let the executive power fall into the hands of men sworn to destroy them.

  Unfortunately, the 1860 Democratic Convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of Southern secession fever. Senator Stapleton was proposed as a candidate, but in the frenzied atmosphere of the Palmetto State, he did not have any hope of winning two-thirds of the delegates. To Robert Barnwell Rhett and other Southern ultras, he was the man who had banished the slave trade from the capital—proof of his hidden animosity to the South. With Northern candidates subjected to this kind of fanatic scrutiny, it soon became apparent that no one was going to win the nomination. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was dismissed because he had failed to defend Southerners in Kansas. In his ratchety voice, George took the floor to plead for unity. He was drowned in catcalls.

  I told you so, Caroline’s eyes said. But her voice spoke sympathy. She listened to George wonder if God was sending him some sort of message. It redoubled his torment, to see the party of Andrew Jackson disintegrate here, where George had struggled beside John C. Calhoun to keep the state in the Union in 1833. Were they wrong, trying to hold the Union together? Should they let these people secede and leave the problem of slavery to them and their descendants? Was that the lesson of Tabitha’s bitter fate?

  Caroline’s eyes said, I told you so. But sympathy continued to flow from her lips. Sympathy and evil wisdom. “I think we should go home, make sure we control New Jersey, and see what happens in the election.”

  He kissed her and thanked her for listening to him. “Everything you’ve said and done since Charlie’s death has made me ashamed of the way I condemned you for that moment of weakness so long ago. I think I love you more now than I did before I went to Mexico.”

  “I love you infinitely more.”

  To her amazement, Caroline was able to say this because it was true—and simultaneously false. She loved the heroic, tragic, wounded figure her husband had become. But that love did not come close to matching her evil heart’s passion for fame. She saw the SS Delilah, painted black, churning down the Mississippi, that silted artery of America’s heartland. She and John Sladen drank the night wind on the hurricane deck. A great fleet awaited them at the mouth of the river, the decks thick with an army of conquest. From a mournful distance, George Stapleton and their sons watched her, calamity on their baffled faces. She would bear their pain and her own pain, she would bear the pain of the whole wounded nation because it was necessary. Only those who understood the remorseless exactions of fame would forgive her. It might take a hundred, perhaps a thousand years. Nevertheless, Caroline Kemble Sta- pleton told herself she was content.

  SEVEN

  THE SCREAM CUT THROUGH THE dark silent house like a flash of lightning. It caught Caroline prowling her room, sleepless as usual. Tabitha Flowers was having another nightmare. George had hired her as a house servant at Bowood. Her husband had disappeared. He blamed her for the Pilgrim fiasco. Only after Tabitha arrived did they discover she was a mental mess. During her two years in the District of Columbia’s prison after her conviction in the Pilgrim affair, she had repeatedly been raped by her white jailers. She often awoke the whole house with her nightmares.

  Caroline flung on a robe and hurried to Tabitha’s third-floor room. As mistress of Bowood, she considered the troubled woman her responsibility. She was also proving to herself, and to George, that she had genuine compassion for Africans.

  As usual, Caroline found Mercy Flowers holding Tabitha in her arms. “You just got to give your pain to Jesus, sweetheart,” Mercy said. “Think of what He suffered for our sake. He wants to soothe your misery. Just open your heart to Him. Ain’t I right, Mrs. Stapleton?”

  “Of course,” Caroline said. “But I think some warm whiskey and milk would help too.”

  Mercy hurried off to get the drink: “I’m so sorry, mistress,” Tabitha sobbed. “I can’t help it. I see them jail guards comin’ toward me like they was real. Here in this very room!”

  “My heart breaks for you.” With a modest discount for hyperbole, Caroline meant these words. She saw no hope for the blacks in America. In the North they were second-class citizens, forbidden the right to vote in most states, condemned to the lowliest jobs.

  Downstairs, Caroline met George in the hall. “Did she wake you?” she asked.

  “I was awake. Join me in the library for a drink?”

  His voice was a croak. He had been stumping the state trying to make Stephen A. Douglas president. Douglas had been nominated by a rump Democratic convention in Baltimore. Earlier in the night George had addressed a huge torchlight rally that had marched to Bowood’s steps. He had called for peace and union.

  Caroline followed George downstairs reluctantly. She had been avoiding the library. She found it more and more difficult to confront Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s beatific gaze. Caroline could not understand it. Her heart remained resolute, and history was lumbering relentlessly toward her rendezvous with fame. The only explanation was the guilt she felt whenever she gazed into George Stapleton’s haunted eyes.

  The Democratic Party had come apart. No less than three different candidates were running in its ruins. Meanwhile, the elongated former congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, had won the Republican nomination. Caroline could not have chosen a better candidate if she had been given divine permission by her evil god. She had seen Abe in action in Washington, and he had impressed her as an egregious ass. At her suggestion, the local Democratic paper had christened him “the brainless bobolink of the prairies.” Born in Kentucky, he had an accent so thick, it made Easterners wince—or, if they were Democrats, laugh. He had declared the Union could not continue to exist half-slave a
nd half-free—and when he was in Congress had introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the capital. His election would be an undebatable reason for the South to secede.

  George poured himself a half tumbler of bourbon. He had begun drinking hard as the election slid toward disaster. Unless a miracle occurred in the next few days, Lincoln was going to win the presidency. For a while, George and other Democrats, such as ex-president Tyler, had hoped no one would win a majority of the electoral vote. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where a compromise president could be chosen, perhaps from one of the border states, and the South would stay in the Union.

  “What should we do if Lincoln wins?” George said.

  “Go to Washington immediately and do our utmost to prevent the South from seceding.”

  George shook his head. “They won’t listen to me.”

  “But they’ll listen to John Tyler—and he’ll listen to you. So will John Sladen, if you give him a chance.”

  George shook his big head almost truculently. “The last time I talked to John, he wanted me to join him in a call to invade Mexico again to restore law and order.”

  “He wasn’t the only man who suggested it. President Buchanan was half inclined to it. At least a hundred Americans have been killed, millions of dollars’ worth of American-owned property destroyed. The French or the British may take over the country if we continue to do nothing.”

  The Mexican civil war was still raging with incredible fury. The Americans were too involved with their own looming crisis to do anything about it. But Caroline found it worth discussing with George because it was another chance to edge Maria de Vega to the margins of Senator Stapleton’s life.

  George’s eyes drifted to the portrait of his grandfather the Congressman above the fireplace. “I keep asking myself what he would want me to do.”