by Gore Vidal
Hay was greeted at the cigar-stand by Thurlow Weed. “What news?”
“Nothing good, sir.”
“I just saw Burnside. He went up to his room without a word to anyone.”
“And without his troops?” Hay knew that he ought not to betray bitterness to the ever-devious Thurlow Weed; but he was now beyond mere discretion.
“You look a bit green,” said the great politician and newspaper editor.
“A touch of the ague, sir. It will pass.”
“Most things do.” Weed held out his hand to Senator Wade, who had just come from the President. Hay pushed through the crowd to the first dining room, which was shut—not only was this Sunday but all the best provender had been sent on to Manassas for the elegant onlookers. Hay’s friend, George Washington, the headwaiter, was nowhere in sight. Finally, Hay was obliged to go into the crowded bar; here he stuffed himself with ham and drank brandy-smashes, all the while staring into the gaunt dirty face of the boy-governor, who was emptying glass after glass of gin. Men pressed against them; and called out for drinks. The smoke of cigars was heavy. Hay wondered what time it was. He had the sense that he had, somehow, mislaid most of the night.
“I took over the artillery battery,” was Sprague’s constant refrain. “Look,” Sprague pulled at the sleeve to his dirt-smeared tunic. There were two bullet holes, one above the other, near the left elbow.
“Were you hurt?”
“I was scratched. There’s another hole …” Sprague searched in the dim light for his third martial souvenir but could not find it. “We held the line forty minutes. Just us. Just Rhode Island. I was in front. They cheered me. All twelve hundred men. Then my horse was shot from under me. I changed the saddle in front of them. We held on. But nobody came. We were ordered back. Burnside led them back. That’s when I took over the battery. That’s when Johnston’s army appeared. God knows how they got there. That’s when our soldiers—not mine, theirs—started to run. The Zouaves were the first. Yellow to the core. Then they all ran and ran and ran. There is no army now.”
Hay listened, as if in a dream; and then, still dreaming, he left Willard’s, to find that it was indeed morning; and that he had not slept all night unless, of course, he had been asleep on his feet and had dreamed that he had been talking to Sprague in the bar at Willard’s.
In the secretary’s office, Nicolay was talking to a group of journalists. When he saw Hay at the door, he excused himself. “Get to bed,” he muttered. He touched Hay’s hand. “You’re burning up.”
“I will. I will. What’s happening?” At that moment, the door to the office opened and Lincoln appeared, Cameron beside him. The President looked exhausted, thought Hay, himself now barely conscious. From what seemed the other side of the Potomac, Hay heard Lincoln say, “Mr. Cameron, send for General McDowell.”
Hay blundered through the usual crowd in the corridor to his bedroom; flung himself on the military cot; and let the fever take charge of him. But before he lost all consciousness, he realized that Lincoln had not said, “Send for General McDowell.” Lincoln had said, “Send for General McClellan.” They were now back at the beginning.
PART II
ONE
THE SUN had not yet risen on Christmas Day, 1861, when the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, entered the dining room of the now comfortable but entirely resplendent house at Sixth and E to be greeted by his daughter Kate, both comfortable and resplendent in morning robe, as she presided over a vast breakfast of buttermilk cakes and honey, of two kinds of Virginia sausage, and hominy grits with red-eye gravy, a rebel dish to which he was addicted, and Kate not.
Kate sprang from her chair; embraced him. For an instant, he was enclosed by the scent of lemon verbena that reminded him of her mother, who had worn no other scent, as perfume was distilled by Satan, while lemon verbena was a leaf from one of God’s fragrant trees. “Merry Christmas, Father!”
“Merry Christmas, dear Kate! Where’s Nettie?”
“Asleep, lazy child.” Kate drank her coffee and watched with sharp eye the way in which the mulatto manservant—a new acquisition—served.
Chase tried not to gobble his food; and gobbled. He was already too large for his frock coat, or “toga,” as Kate called it. The cakes were perfectly cooked, neither too light nor too dark. Kate spent hours each week with the cook patiently trying out new recipes and improving old ones. She was like a general in the house. Chase had often wondered what she might have done had she been a boy. She seemed to him to combine, in the most natural way, the best qualities of the two sexes. The previous evening had been typical. As they celebrated Christmas Eve alone together, the next day’s elaborate menu already seen to, Kate had beaten him four times in a row at chess, a man’s game that he fancied himself a fair master of.
“Why is Mr. Lincoln so irreligious? It’s bad enough the way he holds Cabinet meetings on Sundays. But now there’s one on Christmas Day!” Kate was teasing him, of course; he knew that she lacked his own deep religious faith. But if she lacked it, that had been his fault for having her so thoroughly not to mention expensively “finished” at a distinguished New York school. Nevertheless, he was certain that she would one day come, willingly and joyfully, to her Savior.
“Sunday is one of the few days the White House is not filled with office-seekers. Except for the ones that actually spend the night in the corridor, so that they can get to the President first in the morning.”
“I’d throw them out.” Kate accepted from the butler a single soft-boiled egg in a porcelain cup, her one excess at the day’s first meal.
“So would I, all in all.” Chase began on the fried sausage patty into which a great deal of red and black pepper had been kneaded. “But Mr. Lincoln cannot say no …”
“Except when he does.” Kate was sharp.
“Well, yes. He is often weakly firm—or firmly weak.”
“Will he say no to the English?”
“I’m not certain.”
“What would—what will you advise?”
“To give the prisoners up, as painful and embarrassing as it will be for us.” Ever since early November when an American ship, the San Jacinto, had stopped the Trent, a British mail packetboat, off the coast of Cuba and seized two Confederate officials en route, as commissioners, to England, public opinion had been duly inflamed in both countries. Elements in both Britain and the United States were eager for war.
At the moment, there was an impasse; and Seward was very much in his element. “We shall wrap the world in flames!” he had recently shouted, full of brandy, in the presence of Mr. Russell of the London Times. Everyone had been horrified, except Chase, who was now used to Seward’s style. The more bloodthirsty he sounded at a time of crisis, the more energetic he tended to be to find a safe way out. As far as Chase could tell, Seward had long since given up his master plan to start a worldwide war in order to restore the Union whilst acquiring new exotic territories for the greater American republic.
Characteristically, the President had been of no particular use in the crisis. He allowed Seward to deal as he saw fit with Lord Lyons, who tended to be surprisingly pacific in this matter. No doubt, Lyons was vividly aware of something that the British ministry at London was not: the United States was now the largest military power on earth. In and around Washington alone, there were close to two hundred thousand well-trained troops—three-year not three-month volunteers, a tribute to the organizing genius of their youthful commander General McClellan. Although the Union navy was as yet of no great consequence, it would grow—and grow—and grow. As Chase started, inadvertently, to think of the expense of this unprecedented military establishment, he inhaled a bit of red pepper, which lodged in his throat, and burned; he coughed, tears came to his eyes. Kate patted his back.
“What’s wrong?”
For a moment, the fierce pepper took away his voice; then tea restored it. “I was thinking of money.”
“Oh, poor Father!” Kate went back to her
egg. “Our bills …”
“Not ours. The government’s. The war is costing us one-and-one-half million dollars a day. The bankers … The bankers!” Chase paused, as if frozen. The financing of the war was a nightmare to which he could see no end. In August he had borrowed from the banks one hundred fifty million dollars in gold and silver coins to be paid in three installments against three-year Treasury notes, paying 7.30 percent. After the first installment, the bankers began to complain; Chase had then asked Congress to set up a national banking system so that the government might issue its own paper currency, a proposal which made him almost as nervous as it did the banking establishments. Now the bankers were threatening not to pay the current installment. Jay Cooke was his only comfort in all of this. “Fight the sons of bitches!” he had said, and Chase had excused the profanity as it so closely, if crudely, approximated his own view of the moneychangers in the Temple.
Kate created a diversion. She knew that he would never be able to get his breakfast down if he were to think, even for a moment, of the country’s finances, much less his own. Kate spoke of the latest gossip. Although the President’s annual message had not gone to Congress until December 3, some days earlier the newspapers had printed sections of it. This had been particularly upsetting to Lincoln and to the Administration because the press was able to report something that no one was supposed to know until the actual day. Lincoln would make no mention of the Trent Affair. This was to have been a signal to the British ministry that, despite the war spirit abroad in the land, particularly in the pages of the New York Herald, the Administration did not want matters to get out of hand.
“Everyone is now saying that it was Mrs. Lincoln who gave a copy of the speech to the Herald.”
“Who is everyone?” Chase had not heard this particular rumor.
“Everyone I talk to. The town, that is. After all, isn’t she really a secessionist? With all those brothers of hers in the Confederate Army.”
Chase did not like Mrs. Lincoln any better than he did her husband. But he was, by nature, judicious. He also recalled her conversation about the famous abolitionist purchase of Eliza in Lexington. One must be fair in these matters. “It is my impression,” he said, “that of the two, she is the one most opposed to the South.”
“But surely that is what she would want everyone to believe.”
“Then she is an excellent actress.”
“Most women are, Father.”
“I would not know that, Kate.” Chase noticed, as he often did, how like a boy Kate looked whenever she raised her chin slightly and half smiled. She was son; she was daughter; and he was happy sire to both.
Then Kate was again a pretty girl, laughing at her father. “Married three times and never once did you notice what actresses women are—and all the time!”
“Perhaps my wives were unusual.” Chase blinked his eyes. If he looked straight at her left ear, he could not see the left ear, which was to him no more than a pink blur, but he could see the eyes, nose and mouth. He shuddered involuntarily. He feared blindness more than anything; and he was reasonably certain that he was going, gradually, blind.
Kate detected the shudder. “Are you cold? Is there a draught?”
“No. No. But speaking of my wives long since departed, what news of Governor Sprague?”
“Equally departed—from Washington if not this earth. I had a note from him last week. He is still trying to become a general. I must say I admire his persistence. And his bravery. I can’t think why his conduct at the battle of Bolivar Heights was overlooked, but it was.”
“We lost the battle,” said Chase, bleakly. “That’s why it is overlooked. We seem always to lose.”
“That is whenever we do anything at all. Will General McClellan be at the meeting?”
“I don’t know. I still have faith in him. Of course, he is not McDowell. But he has done wonders with the army. They are superbly trained now; and they are devoted to him.”
“If not to the Union.” Kate finished her egg; had crumbled but did not eat a fragment of cornbread. Almost alone among Washington’s ladies, Kate had a horror of growing fat. She was thought eccentric by all but the slender company of the thin.
“I believe that that is a commander’s first task, to make an army loyal to him and then …”
“Not use it! He has done nothing for six months.”
“He has a plan. A superb plan, I think. He’s confided it to me, and to no one else.” Chase had rather wondered at McClellan’s wisdom in singling out the Secretary of the Treasury as his sole confidant in the Administration. But then who else was there? The President was notoriously indiscreet. Seward was reckless. Cameron hopeless.
“Even so, I still wish General McDowell had been kept on.”
“The McDowells are coming to us New Year’s Day. With Captain Sanford.” Chase smiled; and looked directly at Kate’s nose and saw in all its perfect shell-like detail her ear. He must really go back to Franklin’s and keep trying on new lenses until he found what he needed. Otherwise, he would be like Oedipus at Colonus, old and blind, with only a loyal daughter to look after him. Although William Sanford was not the most prepossessing of young men, he was enamored of Kate, while his father, a rough-hewn type from Lowell, Massachusetts, was almost as rich as the Spragues.
“Oh, Captain Sanford!” Kate laughed. “Whatever a mooncalf is, that’s what he is. He hates business. He hates his father. He loves music and when the war is over, he wants to go to Paris and wear a red velvet jacket and compose music.”
“Paris? Music? Red velvet?” Chase could not decide which of the three he liked the least—for a young American. But then Nettie ran into the room and threw her arms around him and wished him a Merry Christmas. She did the same to Kate; and asked if she could open her presents.
Breakfast at the Sewards’ was a more masculine and less festive affair. Seward sat at one end of the dining-room table while the Assistant Secretary of State, his son, Frederick, sat at the other. Seward’s head throbbed only mildly. The previous evening had been spent most merrily at his own hearthside, where he had given dinner to eminences who were, due to choice, geography or death, bachelors, among them the sixty-nine-year-old, lifelong Pennsylvania bachelor Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives as well as a member of the new and potentially dangerous Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War. Stevens was easily the wittiest man in Washington; he was also one of the most learned; he was also a dedicated abolitionist, as was most of the committee, which was chaired by the harshly disagreeable Ben Wade, and included such hard men as Zach. Chandler and Lyman Trumbull.
As Seward sipped his morning coffee, he tried to recall exactly how the previous evening had ended. Stevens, of course, was sober; he had given up alcohol years ago, after the death of a drinking crony. But unlike so many who come late to temperance, Stevens was neither disapproving of others nor, ever, the common flaw of the professionally sober, dull.
Seward reviewed the events of Christmas Eve. As the club-footed Stevens limped into Seward’s drawing room, he stumbled on a loose rug. When Seward caught his arm, Stevens had thanked him demurely, “I have always so much admired your tact,” he murmured, “in never making the slightest allusion to my admittedly eerie resemblance to the late Lord Byron.” This so delighted the company that the early part of the evening was spent telling Thaddeus Stevens stories, while the eponymous source smiled his thin-lipped smile, occasionally adding, in a soft voice, some devastating gloss. Stevens had even laughed when someone described how, at the beginning of the session, a woman enthusiast had cornered him in his office at the Capitol and begged for a lock of his hair. With a courtly gesture, he had removed his enormous chestnut wig and said, “Pray, Madam, select any curl that strikes your fancy.”
Despite himself, Seward smiled through the mild but persistent pain, located just back of the eyes. “What’s that, Father?” Frederick was not only son and assistant but
surrogate for his ailing mother back in Auburn, New York. Fortunately, for Frederick, Seward had no need of a daughter, unlike his colleague who was now breaking his fast at Sixth and E.
“I was thinking of Stevens last night. Wondrously droll, he was.”
Frederick smiled. “I was in the House last summer when one of the New York congressmen kept walking up and down the aisles as he was declaiming, until Mr. Stevens finally said, ‘Do you expect to collect mileage for this speech?’ ”
Seward laughed; and felt somewhat better. He lit his first cigar to go with the last of the morning’s coffee. The best part of the day had now begun. He chose to reminisce. “You know, Horace Greeley once caught Honest Abe cheating on the mileage that congressmen are paid when they go home from Washington.”
“Cheating?” Although Seward knew that his son was very much a Seward partisan, he also knew that the young man was also under the spell of Lincoln’s pervasive myth. Even Seward had difficulty separating the practical if evasive and timorous politician from the national icon that Lincoln and his friends had so carefully constructed before and during the convention at Chicago: Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter, born in a manger—or, rather, log cabin … Thanks to the telegraph and the modernization of the daguerreotype, Lincoln’s managers had been able to impress an indelible image on the country’s consciousness. Even the famous beard that Lincoln had grown on the train from Springfield to Washington had been a deliberate calculation and not, as Lincoln had said so sweetly if disingenuously at the time, the result of a letter from a little girl who liked whiskers. Actually, the letter had come from a number of influential New York Republicans who thought that a beard might give him dignity, something that they had found dangerously wanting in the quaint western teller of funny and not-so-funny stories. So Lincoln had grown the beard.
Seward caressed his own cleanshaven cheeks. He would never change; but then he had never lacked dignity. He told his son of Greeley’s famous charge. “In ’forty-eight, Greeley was appointed for a few months to the House of Representatives. Naturally, being Greeley, he came there looking for trouble, and the first thing that he found was that most of the congressmen were kiting their travel allowances. So the apostle of virtue then did some investigation, and he published all the particulars of who had been charging how much for travel, and there was Representative Lincoln, charging the government nearly double what he was owed.”
