Senator Stapleton said nothing in the Senate because he was more or less drunk, and because the thought of seeing I told you so again in Caroline’s eyes paralyzed him. History had proven her horrendously right. The South was seceding. The Mexican civil war grew more and more murderous. He stayed drunk for the next month, during which Abraham Lincoln became president and began dealing with the crisis.
Lincoln’s inaugural address was a wary mixture of vows to avoid war and veiled threats to enforce the Constitution. But for the next four weeks, he did not show a sign of enforcing anything. In the Senate, Stephen A. Douglas took charge of the remaining Democrats. Bitter about losing the White House, he was as drunk as George most of the time. But he repeatedly assured everyone that the new president wanted peace and urged Lincoln to do nothing to exacerbate the South. John Sladen attacked Douglas for his refusal to renounce the use of force to prevent secession. Douglas mumbled quotations from Andrew Jackson. Senator Stapleton stared at them both as if they were incarnations of a nightmare.
In the White House, Lincoln remained an enigma. Caroline learned from Julia Tyler that he had secretly offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if the Virginia convention called to debate secession agreed to disband. He was trying to isolate the seven seceded states, so they would crumple before the mere threat of force. John Tyler persuaded the Virginia convention to reject Lincoln’s proposal. Tyler no longer had the slightest doubt that Lincoln wanted either a war or a political victory that would leave the South demoralized. Caroline told Julia she agreed completely with the ex-president.
Both sides were playing historic poker, trying to make the other side show the first card. If Lincoln called for troops and invaded a South that had not fired a single shot at a federal soldier, he might find himself deserted by the 2 million Democrats of the North. Caroline was almost certain she could persuade George to make his neutrality speech and take charge of that formidable opposition, bringing Lincoln to a dead stop.
In the middle of the first week in April 1861, John Sladen appeared in Caroline’s parlor. It was midmorning. Rain drizzled from a gray sky. He looked as gloomy as the weather. “I’m going South,” he said. “President Lincoln’s ignored my offer to act as a mediator between the two governments. If I stay here any longer, I’ll start to look like a trimmer. People in Louisiana haven’t forgotten I’m from New York.”
In his tormented eyes, Caroline saw other words. Will you come with me? The Delilah is still steaming from St. Louis to New Orleans.
“You’ve heard something. Tell me. I thought we had no secrets.”
“The ultras, maniacs like Robert Barnwell Rhett, are telling Jefferson Davis he has to act. He has to do something to show the people that the South means business. They want him to open fire on Fort Sumter.”
“Can you stop them?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to try.”
The words he had struggled to hold back burst from his lips. “Come South with me. Give my life some meaning!”
She seized him by the arms. “John Sladen. Your life has meaning. What we’ve tried to do has meaning. If we fail, someone will tell our story someday. They’ll see the depth and breadth of it—the daring.”
He stood there, head down, the sullen defeated boy she had loved in New York. But she did not feel an iota of pity for him. Or desire. Why? Caroline realized she was not the same woman. That naive Ohio farm girl Caroline Kemble had become Caroline Kemble Stapleton. To flee South with him like an impassioned adolescent would obliterate the meaning of what they were trying to do. It would destroy all the meanings that Caroline Kemble Stapleton had created from her life.
“I can‘t—and won’t—go with you. It would destroy all hope of playing the George card. He can still be played—even if the worst happens in Charleston.”
“How? What can he say?”
She shook her head. “You’ll find out when it happens. If it happens.”
Caroline kissed John Sladen on the cheek and he trudged into the rain. She was totally alone now, face-to-face with history. Somehow she liked that idea.
A week later, Lincoln decided Fort Sumter was the perfect place to test the South’s intentions—and nerves. The site could not have been more symbolic. There it sat in the harbor of Charleston, queen city of the state that had invented secession, a piece of federal property that South Carolina insisted now belonged to her. President Lincoln sent a public message to the governor of South Carolina, announcing he intended to resupply the trapped garrison. Lincoln still insisted he did not want war. He was only trying to retain control of federal property and assist starving federal soldiers, as he was constitutionally required to do.
It was, Caroline admitted, an absolutely masterful move. She had been wrong about this elongated prairie lawyer. He had somehow acquired remarkable capacity since he had repeatedly made a fool of himself as a Whig congressman. Lincoln was playing a card that enabled him to say, Heads I win, tails you lose. If Confederate president Jefferson Davis permitted Lincoln to assert federal authority this way, Davis would soon find his government looking as isolated and powerless as Andrew Jackson had made the South Carolina nullifiers of 1833.
On the morning of April 12, 1861, Davis ordered Southern guns to bombard Fort Sumter before Lincoln’s relief expedition arrived. Instantly, every Republican newspaper in the nation screamed that the South had fired on the flag and attacked defenseless federal soldiers. A wave of war fever swept the North. President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to suppress an armed rebellion. Within days, Virginia voted to secede.
“Now is the time to declare your neutrality,” Caroline told George.
“What are you talking about?” George was still drinking a quart of bourbon a day. She had let him stay drunk, once she saw Lincoln’s game. There was no point in a declaration of neutrality until the war began. Then would be the perfect moment for a prominent Northern Democrat to decry the rush to bloodshed and call on his fellow Democrats in the border states around the South to declare a similar neutrality. If it worked, it could prevent Northern armies from marching across Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, to attack the South. It would predispose them to secede the moment a Northern army invaded their neutral soil. If they all seceded, the South would be too strong to conquer.
A passive George allowed Caroline to summon the leaders of New Jersey’s legislature to Bowood. Their salaries, and a good deal more than their salaries, were still being paid by the taxes and other emoluments the Camden & Amboy Railroad forwarded to Trenton each year. Thanks to Jeremy Biddle’s talent for corruption, few politicians in America could match Senator Stapleton’s ability to get the attention of his state’s lawmakers. Caroline also invited a dozen reporters from the leading newspapers of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The senator and his wife traveled from Washington, D.C., in the special sleeping car that their son Jonathan had given them for a thirtieth wedding-anniversary present in 1858. George struggled for sobriety while Caroline worked on the speech until she was satisfied with it. They arrived at Bowood at 10 A.M., and Caroline issued orders for the reception. George showed not the slightest sign of hesitation or doubt. She told him he was speaking for Jonathan’s sake, for Paul’s sake. For millions of parents with sons who would die in this holocaust. He nodded numbly. He had surrendered totally to her judgment.
An hour before the legislative leaders were scheduled to arrive, Jonathan Stapleton strode into Bowood. He was wearing the blue uniform of a U.S. Army colonel. He stared at the servants in their best livery, the trays of sweetmeats, the rows of champagne glasses, and said, “It looks as if there’s going to be a party. Am I invited?”
“Of course,” Caroline said. “What are you doing in that extraordinary outfit?”
“I’m raising a regiment to support the president’s call for volunteers. I’m hoping Father will issue a statement to help my recruiting.”
“Your father is planning to issue a statement. But it
won’t help your recruiting.”
“Why not?”
“He’s going to declare New Jersey neutral.”
Thunder congealed on Jonathan’s brow. “Where is he?”
“In the library, reading over his speech. Don’t bother him—”
Jonathan was striding down the hall to the library, ignoring her. “Jonathan!” Caroline cried, rushing after him.
In the library, she found her oldest son confronting George at his paper-strewn desk. “Is it true, Father? I can’t believe it!” Jonathan roared. “You’re going to let these slaveholders break up the Union?”
“Jonathan—it’s none of your business!” Caroline said.
Jonathan gazed coldly at her. “None of my business? I’m thirty-two years old, Mother. I have a son. I hope to have more children. Haven’t I got a right to think about the future of my country? For my own sake? For my children’s sake?”
He whirled on George. “Father, can’t you see what this means? If you let these Southern bastards go in peace, they’ll be invading Cuba and Mexico in the next five years. They’re all drunk on their purple dream of a slave empire. Charlie told me all about it. Eventually they’ll attack us. We’ve got to fight them now—or never.”
Senator Stapleton stared numbly at his son. His desperate eyes roved from Jonathan’s inflamed face to Caroline’s sculpted ferocity. Jonathan flung up his arm and pointed to the portrait of the Congressman on the wall. “What would he think? Your grandfather? Didn’t you tell me how he worshiped the Union?”
George Stapleton’s breath began coming in ratchety gasps. “He did, he told me that a hundred times. How much Washington, Hamiliton, valued it.”
“I know you and Mother consider me an opinionated loudmouth. If not in my name, then in his name you can’t do this, Father. You can’t turn your back on your family, your country, this way.”
Supreme irony. Here was John Sladen’s son, oblivious to his bloodline, lecturing his nonfather about his obligations as a Stapleton. Destroying the dream of fame his real father had nurtured with murderous fervor for two decades. Caroline realized she could silence Jonathan, annihilate this whole heartrending scene by revealing the truth of his origin. She let her eyes stray to Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s portrait. Why not perform this ultimate act before those saintly eyes? Become a woman who destroyed her own son—and her husband—in pursuit of fame.
But George spoke first. “You’re right.” Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Oh, Son, you’re right. In my heart I know you’re right. But once you’ve seen a war, you’re ready to do almost anything to avoid another one.”
“Let us younger men worry about the fighting. I have no doubt whatsoever that seventy-five thousand determined Northern men can march from Washington to Charleston in two weeks. Slavery’s made the Southerners soft. They have no stomach for a serious contest.”
Jonathan was mouthing standard abolitionist propaganda. “You’re an ignorant, arrogant fool,” Caroline said.
“He’s still right.” George picked up the neutrality speech and lumbered across the room to the fireplace. “A match,” he mumbled. “Where’s a match?”
Jonathan handed him a box from the desk. The first one failed to strike. All Caroline had to do was cry stop! and begin telling the truth about Jonathan’s paternity. But she did not speak. Behind her she felt Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s eyes boring into her skull, telling her she was a Stapleton, just as much as these men. Jonathan was one in spite of having scarcely a single drop of Stapleton blood in his veins.
The Stapletons were more than a bloodline. They were a spiritual enterprise, and they had made Caroline Kemble part of it just as they had made Hannah Cosway part of it. The hint of pain Caroline saw in Hannah’s saintly eyes was an echo of the same pain she felt now, facing woman’s fate, to be forever torn between visions of an independent self and loyalty to primary bonds, those wordless ties of heart and mind and memory that created a family.
There was something else, something deeper, darker, at work here: evil. She was being asked to embrace or repudiate it one more time. Where, why, had she welcomed it into her soul? Was it that primary act thirty-three years ago in that New York cellar? Or was it her refusal to repudiate that act, her reembrace of it in her long collusion with John Sladen? She saw her descent into evil’s underground flow, its rush toward ever darker acts and visions, the war with Mexico, the murder of a president, the voyage on the Delilah, the black anaconda in America’s heart. For a moment Caroline poised on the shore of the sunless sea, finally understanding that tormented poem. One more step and she would vanish into that somber icy immensity. One more word.
But she could not say it, she could not speak, she could not destroy her woman’s soul for the sake of this god of hate and horror that slithered and heaved in her flesh. She could not deny that in spite of bitter disappointments and almost intolerable losses she was glad she had chosen to become Caroline Kemble Stapleton, glad—and proud.
In a moment the neutrality speech was a blazing pyre. Caroline could only watch in amazed dismay. A half hour later, when the legislators and reporters gathered, Senator Stapleton was almost sober. He began the festivities with a toast to the Union. Then he asked Jonathan to stand beside him before the mantel in Bowood’s spacious drawing room.
“I asked my son to join me here in his uniform to add substance to a statement I want to make. Bitter though it will be to fight a war against our blood brothers, I have reluctantly concluded that it must be done to preserve a gift handed down to us by our fathers, a gift that is more precious than life itself—our Union. I ask all of New Jersey’s Democrats to support the president in his attempt to prevent the secession of the Southern states from this great nation.”
The politicians and reporters burst into applause. Caroline turned her back on this collection of fools and walked down the darkened central corridor to the library. She sat down in front of Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s portrait and whispered, “You’ve won.”
Why was she able to make this surrender? She could not understand it. History would prove she was right about slavery and letting the South go in peace. If the North won the war—and that was by no means a certainty—the South would be a ruin and 4 million Africans would be free—without a clue on either side about what to do with them. The abolitionists’ hate-filled dreams of seeing the blacks become masters of the South would never come true. The people of the North would soon lose what little interest they had in these unfortunate victims of history.
If Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s God existed, Caroline was repelled by His crude justice. But she was too intelligent to deny that some sort of supernatural hand seemed to be in this afflicted business. What else explained John Quincy Adams’s calamitous death when the treaty of peace with Mexico was about to be rejected? Tabitha’s involvement with the Pilgrim, destroying George’s chance to become president? The failure of Charlie’s expedition to Cuba? Some mysterious power seemed to have mocked her struggle for fame. In her woman’s soul, she would continue to defy this being, even though she recognized its incomprehensible presence.
Three months later, North and South fought the first battle of the war at Bull Run in northern Virginia. To the amazement of everyone in the North, the Southerners routed the supposedly well-trained Union Army, sending it fleeing back to Washington a disorganized mob. At Bowood, Caroline read the gory details in the newspapers, wondering if Colonel Jonathan Stapleton was among the casualties. She did not wish her son ill. But she did not wish him well, either. There was no mention of him or his regiment.
Grimly, Caroline mounted the stairs to bring the newspapers to George. Still drinking heavily, he had taken to skipping breakfast. Pushing open the bedroom door, she called, “Are you awake? There’s all sorts of blood and thunder in the papers today.”
No answer. She walked to the bed. It was empty. Then she saw George’s body on the floor beside it, his face purple with apoplexy. He had died like his grandfather, silently, without a
struggle. Caroline knelt beside him and touched his discolored cheek. “Oh, George.”
She realized that she was not surprised. Once he had become a mere bystander in fame’s antechamber, George had grown more and more ghostly, more severed from life and events. She suspected this summons was not unwelcome.
Telegrams called Jonathan from Washington and Paul from West Point. Senator Stapleton lay in state in Bowood’s drawing room, and newspapers filled columns with eulogies of his heroism in the Mexican War and his patriotic support of the cataclysm that was raging.
At one point Caroline asked Jonathan if he still thought seventy-five thousand Northern men could march to Charleston in two weeks. “We’re changing our minds about a lot of things,” he said, avoiding her eyes. Paul, still at West Point, talked morosely about how little meaning the war had for him. Everyone at the Military Academy except a few fanatic abolitionists loathed it.
Caroline offered them neither consolation nor advice. She had lost interest in changing the course of history. All that mattered now was purifying her woman’s soul. On the night before George’s funeral, she lay awake until the hall clock struck 3 A.M. Flinging on a robe, she went downstairs through the silent house to the drawing room and knelt beside George’s open coffin. His big face was peaceful—but empty.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
She paused, although she had no expectation of an answer.
“I loved you,” she whispered. “I truly loved you for that little while—before you came home from Mexico.”
Candle in hand, she went down the corridor to the library and lit a lamp before Hannah Cosway Stapleton’s portrait. She wanted to hear her say those reproachful words again. This time she would not flinch. But Hannah’s saintly lips were silent. Could she possibly no longer fear for Caroline Kemble Stapleton’s salvation?
The history of every country begins in the heart of every man or woman.
The Wages of Fame Page 70
