Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  “A branch broke off,” said David sadly, “under some fellow’s weight.”

  Annie was equally disappointed.

  Lincoln resumed his speech. As he came to the coda, Seward leaned forward, eager to hear what Lincoln had cut from his own speech and what of Seward’s paragraph he had used.

  “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government …” Seward frowned: this was hard, too hard. “… while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend it.’ ”

  Seward waited for the challenge “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question, ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’ ” To his great relief, Lincoln had cut this most dangerous question, and in its place came Seward’s text, ruthlessly pruned of its richer blossoms. “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords …”

  Seward, eyes shut, chanted softly his own original phrase: “The majestic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths …” Tears came to Seward’s eyes whenever he declaimed this particular passage, first tried out many years ago at Utica. But Lincoln had changed the language. With some irritability, Seward heard the trumpet-voice intone the new “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  Lincoln stopped; took off his glasses; put the speech into his pocket. As Seward applauded politely, he could not help but think how odd it was that some men have a natural gift for elevated language while others have none at all. Lincoln had made a perfect hash of Seward’s most splendid peroration. Since any one of Seward’s speeches was apt to sell nearly one million copies, he had, suddenly, the sense of being jilted—worse, of being a great beauty abandoned at the altar by a plain and unworthy man. But Seward would prevail in time. The Albany Plan may have misfired but since the principle of it was still very much in his mind, he had taken back his letter of withdrawal. He would be Secretary of State; and prime minister yet.

  Chase turned to Sumner. “What does he mean?”

  Sumner was bemused. “He will take the South back—slaves and all. Anything, to preserve the Union.”

  “Thank God, they will not come.”

  “Thank God, they will not come, without a bloody war.”

  The speech was well enough received by the crowd in the plaza. Lincoln had now recovered his color, Hay noticed. The new President stood beside the small table waiting for the ancient Chief Justice to give him the oath of office.

  At the age of eighty-three, Roger B. Taney was several years older than the Constitution, whose interpreter he had been for a quarter century, as the fifth Chief Justice of the United States. Seward was peculiarly aware of the irony of the present situation. Had the fragile, withered Chief Justice not said, in the course of a decision to return a slave to his master, that Congress had no right to ban slavery from any territory, Abraham Lincoln would not now be President. Lincoln looked down, gravely, at the little man who did not look up at him but looked only at the Bible in his right hand. In an inaudible voice, Taney administered the oath. Then Lincoln, hand on the Bible, turned from the Chief Justice to the crowd assembled and ignoring the slip of paper on which his response had been printed, declared in a voice that made even Chase’s cold blood turn warm, “I, Abraham Lincoln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and I will, to the best of my ability …”

  Lincoln turned full-face to the crowd in the windswept plaza; and the famous war-trumpet of a voice, until now muted, sounded its declaration and what was meant to be its justification for all time, “… preserve, protect and … defend the Constitution of the United States!”

  On the word “defend,” as if by prearrangement, the first battery of artillery began to fire; then the second; then all guns fired their salute to the new President, who remained at attention throughout the bombardment.

  “My God,” said Hay to Nicolay, “it is going to be war!”

  “I have known that for some time,” said Nicolay. “The real question is how will it go for us?”

  NINE

  HAY STOOD at the front door of the Executive Mansion, waiting for the President to arrive. Mary and the children and the relations were already exploring the house, and Nicolay had gone to the bedroom which he was to share with Hay, just across from the President’s office. Hay had already moved in earlier that morning. Old Edward had helped him up with his baggage, and then asked for a tip, which Hay had given him. It was the first time that the White House had appeared to him as what it really was, a run-down hostelry for politicians. But the bedroom he was to share with Nicolay had a fine view of Lafayette Square; and their double bed looked comfortable. At least, they were only two to the bed. Lincoln used to speak, not unfondly, of his early days out on circuit in Illinois when five lawyers would share the same bed and it took all of his celebrated wiliness to secure the outside corner, where, by the light of a single candle, he could read as the others snored.

  There was a crowd outside the White House gate; guards staggered the arrival of carriages. General Scott himself stood on the top step of the portico, proud of his handiwork. There was cheering as the carriage containing Buchanan and Lincoln rattled through the gate. Both men raised their top hats. As the carriage stopped, Old Edward helped down, first, Lincoln, and then his predecessor.

  As the two men, accompanied by Hay, went up the steps, Buchanan said to Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.”

  Lincoln smiled. “Well, second happiest, maybe.”

  General Scott saluted the new President. “Welcome, sir, to the Executive Mansion.”

  “Thank you, General. And my congratulations.”

  “I said we would have us a President today, no matter what. And we have. My mission, sir, is accomplished.” Then General Scott saluted; and departed, in a jingle of metal and a whispering of gold braid.

  During this, Buchanan stared, head cocked to one side, at the brick barn off to his left. When Scott had gone, he turned to Lincoln.

  “You will find, sir, that my niece has prepared some dinner for your party.”

  “I wish that you and your niece would join us.”

  “Sir,” said Buchanan, with some warmth, “I never want to set foot in that house again.”

  “Is it really so bad?”

  “Oh, the house is all right. It needs some repairs, of course. No, sir. My objection is to the office itself that I filled and that you must now fill. Mr. Lincoln”—Buchanan’s voice dropped to a whisper—“the office of President of the United States is not fit for a gentleman to hold.”

  “Well, that’s lucky for me, I guess.” Lincoln tried to make a joke; but the old man was serious.

  “You will see what I mean, sir. And now, farewell; and may God bless you and yours.” As the fifteenth President got into his carriage and drove away, the sixteenth waved to him until he was gone. Then Lincoln went into the house.

  Dinner was a haphazard affair. Seventeen sat down for dinner in the so-called family dining room on the ground floor. Miss Lane’s taste was for plain cooking, which suited Lincoln but not Mary or the ladies, who had dreamed of lobsters and canvasback duck and soft-shelled crabs and Potomac shad with roe instead of sturdy roast beef.

  Mary held forth on the horrors of the mansion. “The upstairs is abominable. It’s like the worst boardinghouse you ever saw.”

  “Now, that’s plain impossible, Mother,” said Lincoln mildly, helping himself to a single boiled potato. “Why, the boardinghouses that I’ve seen …”
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  “You know what I mean, Father.”

  “Oh, it’s true, Cousin Lincoln!” Cousin Lizzie always came to Mary’s rescue. “There’s only one good piece of furniture in the President’s bedroom and that’s a mahogany French bedstead, only the headboard’s split right in half.”

  “Just the thing for me to sleep in,” said Lincoln; but only Hay got the allusion. The ladies were too busy with their account of what they had found and not found in the course of their tour.

  “There’s no proper gaslight, either!” Mary spoke now with a sense of drama. “None! Only candles for now! And though the water taps turn, mud and rust come out.”

  “How’s your room?” asked Lincoln of Hay.

  “Like Versailles, sir.”

  “Which you’ve never seen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor I. Well, since we’ve never seen it, we can always say we live in royal splendor.”

  Mary rose to her feet before the last plates were taken away. “We must dress for the ball, everyone. There’s not much time.” As the ladies hurried from the room, their great hoops struck one against another like ships in a narrow slip, thought Hay, who had taken enormously to boats when he was at Providence.

  Lincoln motioned for Hay and Nicolay to come with him. “Let’s take a look at Mr. Buchanan’s hell,” he said, leading the way upstairs.

  The three men walked down the long gloomy hall to the balustrade that marked the beginning of the presidential offices. There was no one in sight, not even the Negro Edward, whose task it was to keep an eye on those visitors who had been passed upstairs by Old Edward at the main door. On the first clerk’s desk, a kerosene lamp cast long shadows. The waiting room beyond was dark and forbidding.

  Lincoln entered the reception room, where Buchanan’s Cabinet had met. In the center of the table, a single lamp made ghostly the room in which, Hay thought, dramatically, so many administrations had made so many wrong decisions in recent years. He wondered where Jefferson had worked; but then remembered that since the British had burnt down the house in 1814, Jefferson’s ghost had probably burned up, too.

  Lincoln picked up the lamp from the table, then he opened the connecting door into the President’s office. The first thing that they saw clearly in the gloom was a painting of Andrew Jackson over the white marble fireplace. “Well,” said Lincoln, neutrally, “I guess we’ll leave old Andy where he is.”

  “What about a painting of Jefferson?” asked Nicolay.

  “If Virginia stays in the Union, I will have only portraits of Virginians in this place. Madison, Monroe, Mason, every last one of them. Otherwise …” Lincoln had seated himself in the President’s chair, a battered armchair of maplewood. The President’s desk proved to be a tall affair with numerous pigeonholes, and a fine view from one of the room’s two windows of the Potomac, and the blue hills of Virginia beyond, now fading as the sun set.

  “What about a painting of General Washington, sir?” Hay ran his finger round the frame of Jackson’s picture, and collected an inch of dust. “Or is he too Virginian?”

  “No, the father of our country is just right. Only I might look too ambitious, moving him there.” Unconsciously, Lincoln ruffled the hair that Mrs. Lincoln and the barber had so carefully arranged for the day; then he leaned back in the chair and put his feet up on the desk and stretched his arms. “This is not the worst of rooms,” he said, judiciously.

  In the glare of the kerosene lamp, Hay noticed how tired Lincoln looked; and he had been President for only a few hours. Nicolay must have noticed the same thing because he said, “Don’t you think you should rest, sir? Before the ball?”

  “Well, there’s no business left to transact, that I can see.” Lincoln was now going through the drawers and cubbyholes of the desk. “Mr. Buchanan has cleared up nicely.”

  “He was at the Capitol till noon today,” said Nicolay, “making lastminute appointments.”

  “I suppose that comes of being a gentleman.” Lincoln grinned suddenly at Hay, who noticed, as he always did, that in a world of men who smoked or chewed tobacco, Lincoln, who did neither, had white teeth, unlike Madam, whose smile was always slightly compressed in order not to reveal the dinginess of her own teeth.

  Lincoln rose and went to the door that led to the narrow waiting room. Then he crossed the waiting room to the secretaries’ bedroom. “You’ve got almost as much space as I do,” he said to Nicolay.

  “But no view of Lafayette Square …”

  “Or that peculiar statue of Mr. Jefferson.” Lincoln was now in the small room just off the bedroom. “Miss Lane has taken her linen home, Johnny, so you’ll have a place to work.” Hay had already commandeered a desk from the basement, where quantities of shabby furniture were stored, as though for some bankrupt’s terminal auction. Lincoln turned, suddenly, to Nicolay. “I want you, first thing tomorrow morning, to send Mr. Chase’s name down to the Senate, for confirmation as Secretary of the Treasury.”

  “Have you told him, sir?” Nicolay was surprised.

  “Well, no, not exactly. I’ve hinted, of course. But I had to wait until I got the Cameron business sorted out—and then there was the New England mess … Now, with Mr. Chase, I’ve got just about one of everything. He’ll be my radical abolitionist while Mr. Seward is my radical trimmer …”

  “Suppose Mr. Chase refuses?” Nicolay was concerned. “He’s most outraged, he tells everyone.”

  “Oh, he won’t refuse. But”—Lincoln turned to Hay—“you go pay him a call tomorrow, in my name, and soothe the terrible beast of ambition that resides in that Roman bust—or breast, I suppose, it’s called. Do you know why God gave men teats?”

  This was a new one to Hay; also to Nicolay. They said the ritual “no’s” that must always precede a Lincoln story. “Well, there’s nothing more pointless, of course, than a man’s teats, but a preacher, when challenged as to the point, said that it was possible, in God’s good time and mysterious way, that a man might one day give birth to a baby and if he did, why, he’d be all set up to feed it.” On that note, the sixteenth President led the way back to the private apartments, where the noise of the Springfield ladies sounded to Hay just like an afternoon of the Coterie at the Edwards mansion.

  Hay arrived alone at the Union Ball because he intended to leave alone. Tonight he would indulge the flesh, exactly like Mr. Poe, he thought in justification. Poets were intended to live to the full the life of the senses. In his pocket was the list of names that his fraternity brother had given him.

  The ball was being held in a temporary structure of wood and white muslin that had been built back of the unprepossessing City Hall. Troops stood guard at every entrance, as well as in the City Hall itself, where the men’s coats, cloaks and hats were piled up in the courtroom while the extra garments of the ladies were stacked in the council chamber.

  Hay pushed his way through a crowd of well-dressed Northerners and Westerners. Hay’s ear was always sensitive to accents; he duly noted that there were none from the South. As predicted, old Washington was boycotting the ball, while most of the Southern congressionals had either gone home to their seceded states or declined to attend the Inaugural Ball as they had declined to attend the inauguration itself. The newspaper-dubbed Palace of Aladdin was ablaze with gaslit chandeliers. In the first room there was a monster buffet, courtesy of the ubiquitous Gautier; every sort of delicacy had been arranged on long trestle tables at whose center was a confection dedicated to the Goddess of Peace, depicted half life-size and all marzipan, with a cloak of spun sugar. But before the grandees could descend, locustlike, upon the food, they were obliged to file past the President and Mrs. Lincoln, who stood at the pavilion’s center.

  Hay noticed that Lincoln still wore the white kid gloves that he had arrived in, while Madam was splendid in a blue gown with a blue feather in her elaborately arranged hair; she also wore pearls, gold. Back of Madam stood the relatives, the heart of the Springfield Coterie, consisting of one sister, two nieces, co
usin Lizzie and two half-sisters from Kentucky, of whom one was said to be a secessionist.

  “He had better take those gloves off.”

  Hay turned to find Henry Adams at his side. “He hates gloves,” said Hay, “but the State Department insists he wear them.”

  “But he must take them off when he shakes hands. That is our Republican way.”

  Lincoln, as if he had heard this most Adams-like criticism, stopped his handshaking and pulled off the right glove, which he let, absently, drop to the floor.

  Lincoln was now shaking hands rather as if he was pumping water from a well. Hay noticed that the Tycoon’s eyes seldom looked at the men and women passing in front of him. This was most unlike him. Usually, he tried to say something of a personal nature to each citizen; but not tonight.

  Madam had solved the business of handshaking by holding, firmly, in both hands, a large bouquet of flowers. Whenever anyone was presented to her, she nodded and smiled graciously; and that was that. Hay had to admit that, side by side, the Lincolns were a somewhat comical couple—he so tall; she so short. For this reason, she had never allowed a photograph to be taken of the two of them standing side by side. “Because we are,” Lincoln would say in explanation, “the Long and the Short of it.”

  “This morning at Willard’s,” said Hay, “the State Department read us five pages of do’s and don’ts. There is a lot of protocol, isn’t there?”

  “Democracy requires a good deal of ceremonial. Will he learn it, do you think?”

  “Plainly, you don’t think so.” Hay had got Adams’s somewhat saturnine drift.

  “For someone from outside, all this …” Adams gestured at the crowded room, filled now to overflowing with General Scott in full golden uniform.

  “He’s not that far outside. Anyway, he’s quick to learn; and never forgets. He also does what he says he will do if you can get him to say what he means to do.”