Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  Proudly, Chase presented to McClellan those grandees that the general did not know. The general’s manners were exquisite. But then he was, as everyone including himself said, well-bred, the heir to a well-to-do Philadelphia family. McClellan knew the world. He also knew china. “Unusual Meissen,” he said to Kate, lifting a plate from the buffet and turning it over.

  “I take pride in it,” said Kate, pleased. “I didn’t know you were a connoisseur of china, too.”

  “I know a soupçon, Miss Chase.” The Young Napoleon gave her a quick smile. “I’d like to know more. One day …” McClellan looked sadly historical.

  Once the ceremonious insertion of the hero into the party had been accomplished, Chase proceeded to draw McClellan to one side. “I think,” he said, in a low voice, “that you should tell the President of your plan.”

  “And have him tell Tad? And have the rebels read all about it in the Herald? No thank you, sir. You, Mr. Chase, are the only member of the government I can trust with a secret, and whose counsel I value.” The short general stepped back so that he would not have to look directly up at the tall Chase. Even so, Chase still looked down at him and noticed, with unusual clarity, how white and straight the parting in the general’s sleek hair was. By squinting his right eye, Chase was able to make out clearly a set of handsome features through the now-perpetual haze. Chase also noticed that McClellan’s face was somewhat tallowy looking in the bright glare of the gas lamps and that the face looked to be strewn with diamond dust, which, upon due reflection, Chase decided must be sweat.

  “General, I am honored that you put so much confidence in me. I shall not betray it. But the President has asked you to move against Manassas …”

  “His Excellency knows nothing … nothing of strategy. He reads a few out-of-date books and then spouts them at me.” Abruptly, McClellan curbed his tongue. “His Excellency is a splendid man in many ways but he should leave fighting to us soldiers.”

  “That is what he is trying to do.” Chase was diffident.

  “It is pointless to go overland to Richmond. It is also pointless to go back to Manassas. But my plan, which involves surprise, of course, cannot fail.” The voice was now almost a whisper; fortunately, Chase’s hearing was uncommonly acute. “We go downriver. We establish ourselves at, say, Urbana, in the peninsula. Then, from the east, we move on to Richmond, and Richmond is ours.”

  “You know that I favor your plan …”

  “I know. And I shall remember that, Mr. Chase.”

  “Well, yes. Thank you. That’s good of you. Yes.” Chase was still unable to deal with McClellan’s Napoleonic style.

  But Hay was more than capable of dealing with the Young Napoleon; and was sorely tempted to do so. Later in the evening, he got his opportunity when he heard McClellan proclaim: “If the only way I could save the Union would be to become dictator and then, at the very moment of victory, die, I would do so.”

  Although a number of ladies applauded this sentiment, Senator Ben Wade looked skeptical, as befitted the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. “Well, General, so far we haven’t offered you the dictatorship.”

  McClellan mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Of course you haven’t, Senator. I was simply responding, hypothetically, to what the newspapers are writing. They have suggested it, not I.” Wade of Ohio was a cleanshaven, hard-eyed little man who spoke out of the side of his mouth, and whose usual response to any statement by anyone was smiling disbelief. Wade was the Senate’s leading Jacobin, as Nicolay and Hay always referred to the radical Republican element that found Lincoln weak and generally irresolute in the holy war against slavery anywhere and everywhere on earth. “We’ll be holding hearings soon, General,” said Wade, pursing carplike lips as best such lips can be pursed, thought Hay, currently fascinated by the logic of similes; he had begun to write poetry again. “We look forward to hearing your plans for next year now that this year is over, with no victories.”

  “No victories?” McClellan turned to the others. “Senator Wade is too modest. At Bull Run, when our highly … trained army was in retreat, Senator Wade and Senator Chandler—two civilian observers—drew their pistols and stopped the rout.”

  “I had no idea you were so brave, Mr. Wade.” As always, Sumner was without irony. As always, he was literal. He turned back to McClellan. “But, General, brave as our senators are, they could not stop the rout for long.”

  Wade smiled with anger. “We did what we could, which wasn’t much that day. The troops were not ready.”

  “Of course not, Senator. That’s why I was called in. To make them ready.” Hay admired McClellan’s coolness at a moment when the Young Napoleon was, literally, sweating. Either he was suffering unduly from nerves, not very likely in the familiar arena of his greatest triumphs thus far—the Washington salon—or he had a touch of Potomac fever. McClellan turned away from Wade, only to find himself face-to-face with Hay, who gave Little Mac his very special backwoods grin. “Good evening, General.”

  “Mr.… uh, Hay.” McClellan looked about for reinforcements but there were none at hand.

  “We were sorry about the other night, when you were indisposed.”

  “The other night?” McClellan affected not to know what Hay was talking about. “Indisposed?”

  “Don’t you remember? The President and Mr. Seward and I came to your house in H street, and the porter said you had gone to a wedding. So we waited in your parlor for an hour. Then you came home and went upstairs, passing right by the President. So we waited another half hour, and then the President sent the porter to you to say he was still waiting and you sent down word to us to say that you’d gone to bed.” Hay was delighted at his own courage. Although Lincoln had been amiable about the whole affair, Hay had been furious at the insult to the President.

  “There was some misunderstanding, I believe.” The Young Napoleon glared at Hay. “I had not realized that it was His Excellency. He comes to me so often, without warning.” McClellan again mopped his now nacreous face.

  “I don’t think that he will do so again.” Hay bowed as he had seen Lord Lyons bow to the President, endlessly courteous and entirely superior. But the effect was somewhat spoiled by the arrival of the French princes, who came between him and McClellan. Aware that he was now bowing to the ample backside of the Count of Paris, Hay straightened up and turned away. Chase gave him a hesitant vague smile. Since Hay knew that Chase saw less than he pretended, he always identified himself, politely, to what he and Nicolay regarded as the President’s only real rival.

  “Of course I saw you, Mr. Hay.” Chase drew Hay toward him in order to present him to Thaddeus Stevens, whose hard Roman face cracked slightly in order to produce a smile. “I’m sorry that the President and Mrs. Lincoln could not come.”

  “The President has gone to bed, and Mrs. Lincoln has her relations at the Mansion,” said Hay, studying, as always, Stevens’s wig, so much more serious in its classical pretensions than Gideon Welles’s somewhat too romantic seascape of false hair.

  “I suspect,” said Chase, “that I made a mistake in renting a house so far from the Mansion. Mr. Lincoln never drops in.” Chase was as droll as Chase could be, which was not much. “On the other hand, Messrs. Blair and Welles and Stanton are right across the street …”

  “General McClellan, too,” added Stevens, hard eyes taking in the prizefighter figure of the general, posed now beneath a chandelier at the room’s center, right hand in his blouse like Napoleon, face streaked with sweat.

  “Yes, the general, too.”

  At that moment, the pale Cameron was upon them. “Oh, Mr. Stevens,” said Cameron, softly to his perennial enemy.

  “Oh, Mr. Cameron,” repeated Stevens, in exactly the same whispery tone of voice. Hay thought of the red-hot stove story; and wondered, as always, at how much abuse politicians could so easily take from one another.

  “Things are really moving now, aren’t they?” Cameron said to Chase, ignoring Hay.


  “Some things, yes,” said Chase, vaguely.

  “Which things?” Stevens affected innocence.

  “Oh, the war.” Cameron looked at Stevens with what Hay took to be calculated neutrality.

  “Then you must come before our committee and tell us all about it. You see, because we are so remote from the grand strategy, we never know anything at all, and because we are so patriotic, we’d never think of prying.” Stevens’s intellectual elegance appealed to Hay, even though the man was so radical that he would gladly destroy the Union to free the slaves. Hay took it as an ominous sign that now two members of the Conduct of the War Committee seemed to be proposing immediate hearings.

  Chase also picked up on this. “You must wait, Mr. Stevens, until the grand design has taken shape.”

  “I am not a young man, Mr. Chase. But I would like to live long enough to see the Negro freed.”

  “Oh, you’re too hard on us, Mr. Stevens.” Cameron affected comity. “Mr. Chase and I are exactly the same. You read my report to Congress, on the necessity of freeing and arming the niggers? Slaves, that is.”

  “A late conversion is better than none at all. Isn’t it, Mr. Chase? Or as the Bible says, ‘He who believeth in me …’ ”

  Cameron was not amused by Stevens’s mocking tone. “I did not know you had been converted to Christianity, Mr. Stevens. Is this the work of Mrs. Stevens?”

  Chase cleared his throat nervously. Everyone knew that Stevens was a free-thinker, while, behind his back, everyone referred to the mulatto woman with whom he had lived for twenty years as “Mrs. Stevens.” Chase was about to change the subject, when Stevens’s cool response came: “Since my late mother, to whom you allude, Mr. Cameron, was a dedicated Baptist, and since all that I am or ever hope to be is thanks to her example and to her sacrifice on my behalf, I have read all the Holy Books, and subscribe wholeheartedly to the Ten Commandments, which must make me an oddity, particularly to those who regard as not binding the Eighth Commandment.”

  Cameron affected not to hear any of this. “General McDowell is signalling to me,” he said; and moved away.

  “You must be kinder to our latest recruit.” Chase had been both alarmed and delighted by Stevens’s ornate insult.

  “Oh, kindness …!” Stevens turned to Hay. “Are you kind, sir?”

  “No, sir,” said Hay. “I don’t think I am.”

  “But surely,” said Chase, the only believing Christian of the three, “you try to be.”

  “Well, no, sir, I don’t think I do. At least not very hard.” Hay was caught up in the Thaddeus Stevens style, which he admired quite as much as he feared, on political grounds, its possessor.

  “You see, Mr. Chase? There is a candid young man. He is like me. What kindness we possess is of a general nature. You will be a statesman one day, Mr. Hay. No doubt of that. Meanwhile, be candid, and tell us, who is the spy in the White House?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that there is one.” Hay was not prepared for this brutal assault.

  “If the New York Herald can steal state papers, just think what a good Confederate spy like the delicious Mrs. Greenhow might get her hands on.”

  “Mrs. Greenhow has never set foot in Mrs. Lincoln’s White House.” Hay rallied. “But it’s true that thousands of people come through every day, and who can stop them?”

  “I would,” said Chase, “if I were in Mr. Lincoln’s place. He sees far too many people. He wastes his time. He tires himself out.”

  “That,” said Stevens, “is what we have a president for. Even so, you should have a strongbox, Mr. Hay. With a padlock and a key.

  “We do, sir. But somehow …”

  “Somehow things vanish. Well, we shall be getting around to all that in due course. Meanwhile, in my capacity as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, I must warn you that Mrs. Lincoln has gone over her budget for the renovation of the house.”

  “Oh, has she?” Hay feigned innocence.

  “Oh, has she?” Stevens mocked Hay’s tone. “Yes, she has. We will have to look into that, too.”

  All in all, a dark winter, thought Hay, as Chase went to bid farewell to the McClellans and the French princes, and Stevens joined Wade in a corner, where Hay could see them grinning like a pair of alligators. Hay looked at his watch. He was due to meet Robert Lincoln at Harvey’s Oyster Bar; then they would drop in on the Eameses; then there was a dance at the house of the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, where he would abandon the virginal son of the President for the delights of Marble Alley. He might not be the poet that Poe was, but he could at least live to the full the poet’s life of the senses. Could he marry Kate? he wondered, as he said good-night to her. He decided that he probably could; but should he? There was so much he had not done yet. She would have to wait, poor girl. From now until New Year’s Day, he could give himself up to pleasure. The President was in a lenient mood, and the current crisis passed.

  ON THE other hand, Mr. Thompson was never lenient with employees. He would not allow David to take so much as an hour off until the beginning of the official holiday, which was the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, and all of New Year’s Day. “Though if ever there was a time for us to be open, it is on the afternoon of the first day of the New Year, when we can supply the one thing that most men will most desperately need.”

  “Women, too,” said David, who had more than once noticed elegant ladies getting in and out of their carriages in a drunken state. The city was turning into one continuous party, which David quite enjoyed, even though no one had thought to ask him to it.

  But David had been asked to have supper with the Surratts on New Year’s Eve when, at midnight, Annie would celebrate her nineteenth birthday and become, for the next six months, the same age as David. He had seen little of her since summer. When she was not at Surrattsville, she was giving music lessons. Also, as the old Surratt weakened, David had less reason to go to their house. He had no reason at all to go to his own house except to sleep. Thanks to the war, those of his several sisters who were unmarried—the majority—were in constant turmoil, like a half-dozen hens surrounded by two hundred thousand roosters. Mrs. Herold was now in a state bordering on madness. She could think of nothing but the endangered virginity of her daughters; even the ones who were neither entirely youthful nor well-favored caused her loudly to despair. The house in the Navy Yard was now like a military encampment. “Who goes there?” was the shrill greeting from upstairs whenever a daughter or the single family rooster came home late, to the sound of warped floorboards groaning.

  In the daytime, officers were encouraged to pay calls. Private soldiers were discouraged at all times. The Herold daughters were repeatedly lectured on dangers that they understood far better than their worthy mother, who favored, one day, marriages to men who might soon be killed; then, next day, wept at the thought of young widows left with babies in a harsh world. Just to be out of the house, David had lived for two months with the ham-lady of the Navy Yard. Since she was a successful grocer who let rooms, she was not suspected by Mrs. Herold of powerful appetites; in fact, the deeply innocent Mrs. Herold thought that the ham-lady, whom she knew slightly, might be a good influence on David. But when he finally tired of ham, and returned to what he now thought of as the hive of the queen bees, Mrs. Herold was glad to have a man about the house again, and straight away cooked him a splendid dinner, featuring, to his distress, ham and red-eye gravy.

  David wished Mr. Thompson a Happy New Year. Then he set out for the Surratt’s house by way of Scipio’s bar. The streets were full of soldiers, many already drunk. Nowadays, David seldom saw any of his old cronies, the true Washingtonians. It was not that they had all left the city. Rather, the city had so filled up that the natives were lost amongst the tens of thousands of strangers, not to mention the altogether-too-sturdy-for-David’s-taste boys in faded blue uniforms.

  As usual, Scipio’s was crowded. But then every bar in town was crowded. Attempts to keep soldiers out of the bars
and in the camps had, so far, failed.

  David found himself a place near the cash register, jammed between two Union corporals who talked across him and spat tobacco juice on the sawdust-covered floor.

  “Happy New Year, Davie.” Scipio served David a beer. “Like you see, it never lets up now. I get no time to play violin anymore.”

  David looked sorrowfully about the bar. As recently as a year ago, he would have had half-a-dozen wild boys to talk to, not to mention actors from the theaters and, best of all, actresses. But now the soldiers had crowded everyone else out of the barroom, just as the two corporals now crowded David away from the bar, obliging him to shove his way through the crowd, narrowly avoiding, en route, a sudden jet of vomit from a beardless youth. David looked into the dining room. Here, at least, there were no soldiers. Washington theatergoers were still in the majority at the round marble tables; and there were actors, too. David recognized the famous ingenue, Emily Glendenning. She was eating lobster at a corner table. On stage, she looked no older than he. But like so many actresses, she looked a good deal older up close. At the moment, she was cracking a lobster’s claw, and pretending to listen with interest to John T. Ford, the proprietor of the theater next door, a pleasant man of thirty who not only knew David by name but gave him jobs whenever he could.

  As David waved good-night to Skippy, who did not see him, he felt like a stranger in his own city. Perhaps he should go south to Richmond, after all, and join the army.

  But Mr. Surratt said no. Propped up in his bed, the old man was skeletal; the cords in his neck were like hangman’s rope, thought David, always sensible of the fate that could befall anyone the Yanks decided was a traitor.

  David sat in the chair beside Mr. Surratt’s bed and tried not to breathe too deeply the air in the room, which smelled partly of coal-smoke from the front parlor and partly of dying. In David’s professional capacity as Thompson’s courier, there was little that he did not know about the ways and the smells and the sounds of the dying. In the front parlor, Annie was playing a very sad Scottish ballad on the piano, while singing voices joined in from time to time, some taking the high road, others the low.