Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  “Should they know what happened yesterday, I wonder how great the honoring will be.” There was a division within the Administration whether or not to release the full figures of the defeat that Grant had just sustained at Cold Harbor in Virginia. He had made a frontal assault on Richmond’s northern defenses; and had been thrown back by Lee. Thus far, the press had only reported that Grant had not succeeded in taking Richmond. Stanton had seen to it that the enormity of Grant’s defeat was kept from the country. In a single operation, Grant had lost fifty thousand men, more than half the fighting army that he had taken into the Wilderness. If the country were to learn of this, Seward had said, there would be no nomination of Grant for president by any party. But Lincoln had taken the view that anything which might cause the country to lose confidence in Grant would also bring down the Administration and elect McClellan. “He’s just about our last hope, Governor. Besides, I believe him when he says he isn’t a candidate.”

  “The Missouri delegation is pledged to vote for Grant on the first ballot.”

  “But all the others will be voting for me.” Lincoln seemed unconcerned by Missouri’s display of Blairish disloyalty or eccentricity. “I’m sending Nicolay to Baltimore. He’ll have a word with the Missourians.”

  “Will he spread the word about Cold Harbor?”

  Lincoln shrugged. “I hope it won’t be necessary.”

  “With some of our Grant-honoring New Yorkers, I think it will be necessary.”

  “Then he will do it,” said Lincoln, obviously prepared to go further in secret than in public. “What word from New England?”

  “Weed is busy.” In principle, Lincoln favored the renomination of the 1860 ticket of Lincoln and Hamlin; therefore, publicly, he would support no one. Privately, Lincoln was working with Seward and Weed and Cameron to deny Hamlin the renomination. “The Maine delegation will support Hamlin, as favorite son. But Massachusetts will go mostly for Dickinson, my fellow New Yorker.” Seward was more amused than alarmed at the current Byzantine strategy of the radicals to remove him from the Cabinet by electing a New Yorker to the vice-presidency on the ground that two such high offices could not be filled by natives of the same state.

  “Welles says that Connecticut will be for Andrew Johnson.” Lincoln stared out the window at the blazing green summer foliage. The year’s weather had been bizarre. At the end of March, snow had covered the city for the first time in anyone’s memory, destroying the spring flowers. Now June was equatorial in its heat. All things are out of joint, thought Seward. “Sumner is our greatest ally,” he said. “But he doesn’t know it, which is always a pleasure. He wants Hamlin to leave the Vice-Presidency so that he can then go home to Maine, where he will replace Sumner’s enemy, Fessenden, in the Senate, while Dickinson, as a New Yorker …”

  Lincoln sighed. “Sumner exhausts me. Anyway, one burning house at a time. I must have a vice-president in sympathy with my views, which Hamlin is not.”

  “To say the least.” The issue of Hamlin’s possible corruption had never been alluded to by either Lincoln or Seward. Some months earlier, the two men, each on his own, had come to the conclusion that the next vice-president must be a Democrat and a Unionist and a Southerner. Cameron had also concurred. Cameron had then approached Ben Butler, whom Chase had wanted as his running mate.

  Ben Butler had declined the honor. “At forty-six,” he told Cameron, “I’m far too young to spend four years being bored to death listening to senators make stupid speeches.”

  The second choice was Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. He had been loyal to the Union. He agreed with Lincoln’s policy of readmitting the rebel states once ten percent of the population had taken the oath. He was popular in the North. Seward knew that Lincoln had sent Dan Sickles on a tour of the South, and that Sickles had given a good report of Johnson, whose virulent hatred of the slave-owners had made Lincoln uneasy.

  “Naturally, I must not be seen to have any preference,” said Lincoln for the hundredth time.

  “What happens if things start to slide toward Dickinson?”

  “I’ve given Lamon a letter which he is to show the delegates only if it is absolutely necessary. But I think, between Weed and Cameron, we will have Johnson without much fuss.” Lincoln chuckled. “Of course we can never really count on anything, can we? I can never forget that I was nominated at a convention where two thirds of the delegates wanted the other fellow.”

  “Me.”

  “You.”

  Nicolay entered the room; and gave Seward a dispatch. Lincoln asked after Lamon, who had been thrown from a carriage two days earlier and suffered a number of broken ribs. “He just took the cars for Baltimore.”

  “He is made of iron,” said Lincoln. “When do you go?”

  “This evening, sir. With Mr. Cameron.” Nicolay left the room.

  Seward looked up from the dispatch. “Mexico,” he said, eyes glittering as always when he considered that prize-to-be. “The Emperor Maximilian is having his problems.”

  “President Polk’s version of the Monroe Doctrine is not one of them,” said Lincoln wryly.

  “You know the radicals in Baltimore are going to make Mexico an issue. First, Maximilian is a French puppet. Second, France is on the side of our rebels. Now, you know my dream—”

  “The United States as master of the entire earth. From China to Spain. From the North Pole to the South Pole. All ours!” Lincoln laughed. “Well, Governor, when it comes to territory, I am much more modest. All I want is Richmond, just sixty miles away.”

  “There is a way to end this war gloriously.” Seward could not resist sharing his latest dream with Lincoln. “We will buy the slaves, as you’ve suggested, and we’ll colonize them, as you’ve suggested, in Central America. I am certain that the South will agree to those terms at this point if we then unite, as one entire nation again, and our combined armies under Grant and Lee sweep across the Rio Grande into Mexico, driving the French from this hemisphere, and then we move into Central and South America, driving out the Spanish and the Portuguese. Oh, I see such a glorious logical American solution to all our problems!”

  Lincoln shook his head in mock dismay. “How do I persuade Sumner and Ben Wade and Zach. Chandler to go along?”

  “Shoot them!” said Seward, exuberantly.

  “Well, if you sign the order, Governor, and I can prove that I was totally incapacitated at the time …”

  Hay appeared in the doorway. “Sir, something that says it’s the delegation from South Carolina wants to see you. I think they are a swindle, sir.”

  “Send them in, John. They won’t swindle me.”

  As the delegation, which included several Negroes, entered the room, Seward departed through the Cabinet Room. He had been entirely serious about his solution to the war. He had also sent a message through to Richmond, and he knew that his idea was now being seriously discussed in the highest Confederate circles. Grant and Lee; and then the world.

  Major John Hay enjoyed wearing his uniform at the Eameses. “It is not that I exactly fight in it,” he said, “but I feel that I could fight in it.” He and Mr. Eames were in an alcove of the drawing room where a crude painting of Simon Bolivar hung, a souvenir of Venezuela. “You should leave the fighting to others,” said Mr. Eames. “The real war is here in Washington.”

  “Certainly it is a war of its sort,” agreed Hay, aware that the once and perhaps future warrior Chase had just entered the room.

  “The President must be pleased with what happened at Baltimore.” Eames seldom couched questions as questions, diplomatically allowing the other person not to answer if he chose.

  “Oh, yes. He seems well pleased with Governor Johnson as a running mate. He’s not entirely happy with all the platform, but then no one ever bothers much with platforms.” Nicolay had come back, tired and bored, from the convention. He had reported to Hay that no one had recognized the President’s hand in the choice of Johnson. Cameron had arranged matters with his usual skill. Miss
ouri had cast its votes for Grant; then switched to Lincoln, who was chosen unanimously. The speeches had been tedious but, mercifully, short; there was less drinking than usual. Last-minute details of Grant’s defeat at Cold Harbor had chilled, said Nicolay with a smile, the ardor of his admirers. Lately, the Tycoon had been so much serenaded at the White House that he had come to the conclusion that the only entirely painful form of speech-making was responding, vapidly, to a serenade.

  “What news of General Grant?” Mr. Eames did pose this as a direct question.

  Hay responded with equal directness. “He has moved south and west of Richmond. He hopes to take Petersburg. If he does, he will be able to cut off Richmond from the rest of the South.”

  “But he has been stopped.”

  Hay nodded. The Tycoon had taken the news well enough. But Hay could see that he was, each day, more and more reminded of McClellan, who had got himself bogged down in much the same place. Fortunately, Grant had not made his headquarters at Harrison’s Landing. Instead he had picked City Point, a minuscule port on the south bank of the James River, some ten miles from besieged Petersburg. “As long as Grant stays where he is, Lee must stay there, too, or give up Richmond. Meanwhile, our Western generals are moving east.” As Hay spoke, he watched Chase approach Julia Ward Howe, the celebrated poetess who had been in the city for some time, giving elevated lectures on “Moral Trigonometry” and other complex issues. The town was making much of her. But then she had become nationally famous by putting new words to that old drinking-song to which the words of “John Brown’s Body” had been, briefly, attached. Now, once again, John Brown had been detached, as it were, from the living music and Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had replaced him with a poetic exuberance that had caused some laughter in Washington’s literary circles where the phrase “the evening’s dews and damps” gave much pleasure. Hay far preferred the works of the scandalous old Walt Whitman, who was still skulking about the city’s hospitals, looking after wounded boys and writing occasional puff-pieces for the press in which the good gray poet, Walt Whitman, was ecstatically praised by the author, Whitman himself. When Hay got the chance, he often enjoyed evenings with such Washington litterateurs as John Burroughs and William O’Connor, both Treasury clerks and friends of the unemployable-by-Chase Whitman.

  At the moment, however, Chase was in his element with a poet he could entirely admire. “Knowing, Mrs. Howe,” he said to the small plump-faced woman with her braids of hair like coronets of reddish mouse fur, “that I would have the honor of seeing you tonight, I took the liberty of bringing with me your very first volume of verse in the hope that you would give me a dedicace.”

  “With pleasure, dear Mr. Chase.” Julia Ward Howe took the thin volume that Chase offered her, and together they withdrew to a writing desk where she inscribed his name and her name on the title page of Passion Flowers. “It is curious the affection that one so often, even misguidedly, feels for a first effort,” Mrs. Howe observed, blotting the two names firmly and returning the book to Chase, who felt the collector’s peculiar joy at having acquired something so deeply longed for.

  “You need never feel that your affection for these verses is misguided. My daughter Katie used to read them aloud to our literary group in Columbus.”

  “Your daughter is a Renaissance lady, Mr. Chase. One sees in her something of Queen Elizabeth. Yes, of Gloriana herself. She has all the gifts—and she has the will! It is the implacable will that makes all the difference, as I demonstrate in my essay ‘Equalities’ …”

  They were joined by the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Maunsell B. Field, an invaluable aid to Chase. Field was something of an exquisite, who parted his hair in the middle, which Chase did not approve of. But Field’s devotion to his master was absolute. Field was also very much at home in the world of the fine arts: it was he who had redecorated Chase’s office, designed the much-envied marble bathroom, and chose the pattern for the Axminster rugs. When Chase was in New York City, Field saw to it that the Secretary met the highest society. Field had known every important visitor to the United States from Baron Renfrew—alias the Prince of Wales—to Jenny Lind. Needless to say, he was on the best of terms with Julia Ward Howe, and this formidable lady now included him in her general remarks on the nature of the will.

  As Mrs. Howe spoke, Chase, too, pondered the nature of the will. The Assistant Treasurer at New York, the able John J. Cisco, had just resigned. Chase wished the appointment to go to Field, who longed to spread, as it were, his wings in the more glittering atmosphere of the notorious great metropolis. Chase would have preferred to keep Field at Washington, but to have a man of such loyalty in New York was no bad thing since Hiram Barney’s defection to Lincoln, who, most ungratefully, wanted Barney to resign in order to appease the state’s moderate element.

  At first, the President had made no particular objection to Field’s appointment, but he insisted that the two New York senators must concur in an appointment so important to their state. Senator Morgan and Chase had had several meetings. Chase had been the soul of graciousness and conciliation. He had agreed to appoint Senator Morgan’s first choice; but the gentleman in question had declined the honor. Chase had agreed to Morgan’s second proposal; but again the honor was declined. Chase had then written the President, proposing Field. Lincoln had said that he could not make the appointment without “much embarrassment” because Senator Morgan was firmly opposed to it. Since three additional names had been proposed by the New Yorkers, surely Chase could select one. As of that morning, Chase had neatly, if temporarily, resolved the matter by persuading Cisco to remain in office for three more months. Simultaneously, he had received a disturbing letter from Lincoln, refusing Chase’s suggestion that they discuss the matter face-to-face. Lincoln wrote that he saw no point to a discussion on the mysterious ground “that no man knows so well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it.” Am I, Chase wondered, the shoe that pinches? Or is it the New York element that Lincoln wishes to appease?

  Chase liked the tone of the letter not at all. Lincoln had said, right out, that Mr. Field was not the proper man for an office that Senator Morgan wanted to make a political machine of; worse, the President had refused even to discuss such an important matter with the Cabinet officer directly involved. Chase had responded with quiet firmness. He was sorry if he was a source of embarrassment—he had seized on the operative word—to the President. Because if this were the case, and Chase’s position should prove to be disagreeable to the President, he would resign that position with real relief. Actually, if he were to leave office, now was the time. The national finances were more than ever unsatisfactory. The price of gold was sky-high. The costs of the war could only be met through taxation; and Congress was not about to impose the necessary taxes in an election year.

  Julia Ward Howe was now explaining the French Revolution to Mr. Field, who was enraptured. Chase pretended to listen but his mind was on other matters, of which not the least was the variety and quality of the leather with which he would bind Passion Flowers.

  Across the room, Mr. Eames told Hay that he had read his poems and that he was a real poet. “When your present work is over, you must apply yourself to poetry. Anyone can be a man of action. But hardly anyone can write a line that will live down the ages.”

  “I am not that gifted,” said Hay, almost meaning it. He knew that his recent poems were good; he also knew that his talent was for comic verse; and no comic line had ever managed to get from one generation to the next, much less make its way through the ages.

  “You will never know who you are until you are on your own and, of course, married. Yes, you must marry.” Since Mr. Eames had made a happy marriage, he inclined to fervor on the subject, particularly when dealing with contented young bachelors. “In fact, the earlier a man gets used to marriage, the better it is for him. Delay too long …” Mr. Eames shook his head at the horror that might lie in store for one who had married too late to get the kn
ack of it—like the Ancient, Hay suddenly, perhaps disloyally, thought.

  The next morning disloyalty was the theme at the White House. At nine, the Tycoon sent for Hay; he was at his writing desk, rereading a letter that he had just written. “What time does the Senate meet today?” he asked, without looking up.

  “Eleven, sir.”

  “I want you to be there when they open shop.” Lincoln looked up; and smiled. “It is a big fish this time. A salmon, in fact. Mr. Chase has resigned for the third or fourth time—I’ve lost count—and I have accepted his resignation. I could not take much more of him.”

  Hay was stunned. Chase had seemed so entirely part of their Washington landscape that it was inconceivable that he could, with a stroke of the Tycoon’s pen, cease to exist. It would be like the view from the window, without Washington’s unfinished monument. “Is it about the Field matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who will succeed Mr. Chase?”

  “Dave Tod. He’s my friend, with a big head full of brains. He’s also a Douglas Democrat.”