Lincoln

by Gore Vidal

  On the wharf there was a large crowd of Negroes, who kept asking, “Who is it?” When told that the man was President Lincoln, they could not believe it. But then when Lincoln stood up and, Tad’s hand in his, stepped ashore, they began to cheer and some of them, shyly, asked to shake his hand, while others wanted only to touch him.

  With Admiral Porter at his side, Lincoln moved up the street, guarded by twelve edgy sailors, armed with carbines.

  As they moved down the center of the trafficless street, crowds began to form; there were now whites as well as blacks. Every telegraph pole had men clinging to it, eager to glimpse the incarnation of Yankee evil, Old Abe—or Old Nick—himself. Tad’s guard, Mr. Crook, kept murmuring into Lincoln’s ear, “I don’t like the look of this crowd.” But although there was no sign of greeting, there was no notable expression of hostility. Nevertheless, at one point the nervous Admiral Porter said, “Sir, why don’t we stop here at this hotel, and wait for General Weitzel’s men.”

  “Oh, I find this more interesting, Admiral,” Lincoln pointed to a section of the main street where a public building had been so shelled that only its highly ornamental façade still stood. “We have done a lot of damage to this city,” said Lincoln, with a certain wonder.

  As they passed through the ruins, a light wind started up and, suddenly, down the street, like thousands and thousands of large square leaves, government documents swirled. “What begins in paper,” said Lincoln wryly, as his ankles were wrapped round with government records, “ends in paper.”

  Then they turned a corner and the undamaged Greek temple of the state capitol was now visible on its hill. As the Union flag went up the flagpole, the sailor-escort cheered—and Crook leapt in front of Lincoln, arms spread wide so that his entire large body could shield the President’s narrow one.

  Lincoln looked up at the window where Crook had seen danger. “There’s no one there,” he said.

  “There was, sir. A man with a gun, sir.”

  “I have my pistol,” said Tad, delighted.

  “You won’t need it today, Taddie,” said Lincoln, continuing his walk.

  Closer to the capitol, they stopped in front of the notorious Libby Prison. When someone shouted, “Tear it down,” Lincoln said, “No. We will leave it as a monument.” Then, to Admiral Porter’s relief, a cavalry escort appeared, making it possible for the President to ride the rest of the way to an austere gray stucco house with a pillared doorway.

  Here the cavalry commander stopped. “It is the Confederate Executive mansion, Mr. President. It is now yours.”

  Lincoln dismounted. For a moment, he paused to dry his face with a handkerchief; then he and Tad and Admiral Porter entered Jefferson Davis’s house.

  They were met by an elderly black man, who said, “I worked for Mr. Davis, who told me to keep the house nice for the Yankees.”

  “I am sure that you have.” Lincoln opened a door into a room with a long table surrounded by chairs. From habit, Lincoln seated himself at the head of the table.

  “That was Mr. Davis’s chair,” said the old man.

  “It is now Mr. Lincoln’s,” said Admiral Porter.

  “Could you bring me some water, please?” was Lincoln’s only request. As the old man hurried from the room, General Weitzel, sweating heavily, entered and saluted the Commander-in-Chief. “Richmond is yours, sir. I’m sorry we were not at the dock to meet you but you arrived ahead of schedule.”

  “That’s all right. What news from the front?” As Tad and Crook explored the house, Weitzel reported to Lincoln the day’s activities. Lee was still in the vicinity, and Grant was preparing for a final military confrontation.

  The old man returned with water for the President and whiskey for the general and the admiral. As they toasted victory, Weitzel reported that seven hundred buildings had been destroyed in the city; and that many whites as well as blacks had been left homeless. “What are your instructions to me, sir, on how I am to treat the local population?”

  “Well, I am not ready to give you my final views on the subject but if I were you I’d let ’em up easy.” Lincoln nodded; and repeated, “Let ’em up easy.”

  Suddenly, Lincoln looked about the room, as if aware for the first time of the magnitude of what had happened. “It is so much like a dream,” he said at last, “but then I dream so much these days that it is hard for me to tell sometimes what is real and what is not.”

  “This is real, sir,” said Admiral Porter. “You are seated in the chair of Jefferson Davis, and he is all but a fugitive from your justice.”

  Lincoln smiled. “If that is all he has to fear, he would be safe enough. I have no justice, or anything else now. It is fate that guides us all—and necessity. You see, I must be here, just as he must be in flight; just as the war must end.” Lincoln ran one hand across the smooth table top. “And the Union be so restored that no one will ever be able to see the slightest scar from all this great trouble, that will pass now the way a dream does when you wake at last, from a long night’s sleep.”

  ELEVEN

  ELIHU B. WASHBURNE had never seen the President so curiously passive. He lolled on the lounge in his office, tie loosened and collar open. He had lost, Washburne reckoned, thirty to forty pounds. The Indian-black hair of beard and head were now marked with gray, while the face had been burned to a coppery Indian shade by the Virginia sun. For once, Lincoln complained of his health: “My hands and feet feel like they’ve been kept in the icehouse all summer long.”

  “You’re not ill, are you?”

  “I don’t think so. But if I am, I am a happy sick man.” Lincoln smiled, absently.

  “Speaking of sick men, will Seward resign?” Some days earlier the Secretary of State had been thrown from his carriage. He had dislocated a shoulder; broken both jaws and both arms; lay now in a metal brace, delirious and incoherent much of the time.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. I hope not. Broken bones mend, after all. To think he and Welles are all that’s left of my famous—and infamous—Combination Cabinet.” Lincoln chuckled. “That seems such a long time ago. Now we have a whole new set of problems.”

  Washburne nodded. “The Jacobins are getting set to punish the rebels.”

  “Well, we shall have to crack the whip a bit over Mr. Wade and his friends …” Lincoln paused; then he did something that he had not done for a long time. He simply drifted away in midsentence from the immediate subject. “What is the debt of the state of Illinois now?”

  Startled, Washburne shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. I do know that it is considerable, thanks to your Internal Improvements Act.”

  “Now that was more Judge Douglas’s invention than mine.”

  “If we are to believe your campaign biography.” In 1860, Washburne had been astonished at Lincoln’s refusal to take public responsibility for any of their state’s debt. Yet, as a leader in the legislature, Lincoln had voted for roads and bridges and canals with such a wild abandon that the state soon had a debt of fifteen million dollars, while the state’s bonds were selling for fifteen cents to the dollar. Interest on the bonds regularly exceeded by far the state’s total revenues.

  “I note,” said Lincoln, slyly, picking up a Springfield newspaper, “that the state is now beginning to pay interest on those bonds and that by 1882 they will all be paid off. Meanwhile, we were able to internally improve Illinois in the most spectacular way.”

  Washburne grunted. “Bridges without rivers under them, roads that go nowhere …”

  “Mere details.” Lincoln sat back in his chair. “I am looking ahead again.”

  “More realistically than before, I hope. Our state was damn near wrecked by what you legislators did.”

  “I know. That’s why I’ve been studying the matter. None of us who favored such expenditures can take much pride in what happened. Only we may have to do something like it once again. You see, if I am to reimburse the slave-owners—”

  “You still want to do that?” Washburne
was amazed. Since the rebels had held on to the very end, he saw no reason to do anything at all for them.

  “Yes. I think it only just. It will also be a quick way of getting money into the South for reconstruction.” Lincoln sighed. “Then we’ll need money to colonize as many Negroes as we can in Central America.”

  Washburne shook his head with wonder. “When you get hold of an idea you don’t ever let it go, do you?”

  “Not until I find a better one. Can you imagine what life in the South will be like if the Negroes stay?”

  “It will be hard,” said Washburne. “But most of the Negroes don’t seem to want to go. But if they do go, where will you find four million white people in the South who can do the work that the slaves did?”

  “All the more reason,” said Lincoln, reasonably, “to reimburse the slave-owners.”

  Hay appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Stanton is here, sir. He has a message for you.”

  Lincoln pulled himself into a sitting position. Washburne noticed the languor of his movements; he was like a man to whom the air itself has become resistant. “It is unusual for Mars to bring me a message when Major Eckert is our official Mercury.”

  Stanton was now in the room. He did not greet either man. Instead he held a yellow flimsy close to his red eyes, and said, “At four-thirty P.M., this arrived. From General Grant. I shall now read. ‘General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.’ ” Stanton gave Lincoln the telegram. For a moment they were all silent. Then Lincoln got to his feet, and said, with what sounded to Washburne like wonder, “Our work is done.”

  “You have seen us through,” said Stanton; and he shook the President’s hand. Much moved, Washburne did the same. It was as if his old friend had ceased entirely to exist as a human being and in his place there was now, suddenly incarnate, an entire and undivided nation.

  All through the day and early evening, crowds filled the White House grounds and the avenue beyond. Every public building had been illuminated, and the misty night glowed with huge transparencies. Some proclaimed: “U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Grant”. The post office displayed a young express rider with the legend “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,” while Jay Cooke and Company, in an excess of self-congratulation, announced, in colored lights: “The busy bees—Bullets, Balls, Bonds,” as well as “Glory to God, who hath us Grant’d the Victory.”

  As the crowd waited for the appearance of the President, Tad kept them amused by waving a captured Confederate flag. But then he, too, was captured by Mr. Crook, who lifted him out of the window by the seat of his pants.

  In an upstairs bedroom, Lincoln stood with Hay and Noah Brooks, reading over his speech. He had been working on it all day. The text had given him a great deal of trouble. He wanted to strike the expected note of triumph but, more important, he wanted to spell out the way that the Union was now to be reconstructed. He also wanted to outmaneuver as rapidly as possible the vindictive Jacobins of the Congress. Although Noah Brooks still wrote for a Sacramento newspaper, it was more or less common knowledge that he would take the place of Nicolay, who was to go to Paris as consul-general as soon as the transfer from one secretary to the other had been made. Hay had almost decided to go home to Warsaw, Illinois, when Seward had sent for him and said, “I believe that every young man should live for as long as possible in Paris, in order to perfect his French and strengthen his morals, which is more easily done in a capital where vice is not only everywhere but so repellent that no temptation is possible. Therefore, I have elevated Mr. Bigelow to be our minister—James Gordon Bennett having refused the honor—and I have given you Mr. Bigelow’s one-time post as secretary to the Legation. I also did not think it fair to separate you from Nicolay.”

  Hay had accepted the post with delight. The thought of Paris made the coming separation from the Tycoon more bearable. After all, most of his grown-up life had been spent with Lincoln. Hay had arrived at the White House a green twenty-two-year old; now he was twenty-six and there was nothing of the American political world that he did not know. Although he would miss the Tycoon, he would not in the least miss the miasmic mansion, as he had taken to calling the hideous ramshackle old house, infested with rats and termites over which gold leaf and damask had been spread in an attempt to disguise the progressive rot. Also, neither Hay nor Nicolay thought much of Noah Brooks and the new young men who would soon replace them. At one point, Hay had considered staying on as Brooks’s aide. After all, Brooks was ten years his senior and an old Illinois friend of Lincoln’s. But then the thought of four more years in the same house as the Hellcat caused him to say no. Life had become intolerable in the miasmic mansion; and it was time to move on. Hay pitied the Ancient, trapped in a haunted house with a wife gone mad; and no one save the sycophantish Noah Brooks to talk to.

  Brooks looked out the window at the crowd. “I think it’s time,” he said.

  Lincoln nodded. Then, candle in his left hand, speech in his right hand, glasses on his nose, Lincoln stepped out onto the ledge. The crowd cheered. As the tall, thin figure stood silhouetted against the glow of the transparencies across the park, Hay suddenly saw Lincoln as a sort of human lightning conductor, absorbing all the fire from Heaven for all of them.

  To Hay’s amazement, the cheering did not die down, as it usually did before a speech. Instead it became more and more intense, even violent. Hay had another image. This was not so much a crowd as a stormy sea, whose huge waves were crashing over the house. Tad, seated at his father’s feet, clapped his hands over his ears. During all this, the Tycoon remained very still in the open window, unsmiling face illuminated from beneath by the candle in his hand.

  At last, as suddenly as a storm stops, the cheering stopped; and Lincoln began to speak. Hay knew that this was the wrong speech for such an exuberant gathering. But Lincoln had insisted that he must declare himself as soon as possible on the issue of the returned states.

  Lincoln read the first page, which was filled with all the expected references to victory. Then he had difficulty with the candle; and Brooks stepped forward and held the candle for him. As Lincoln finished the first page, he dropped it. Tad caught it, and said, “Gimme another.”

  The President proceeded to lay before the crowd—and the country beyond—his own case for acceptance of Louisiana into the Union, even though there might be objections to this or that aspect of the way in which the state’s government was being organized. “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than smashing it.” Thus he answered the radicals in Congress. He also emphasized that Louisiana would vote in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. On the vexing question of giving the Negro the vote, Lincoln conceded, “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent and those who serve our cause as soldiers.”

  John Wilkes Booth and Lewis Payne were standing beneath a street lamp at the edge of the Presidential Park. “My God! He will let the niggers vote!” Booth was horrified. Then he whispered in Payne’s ear. “Shoot him now.”

  Payne shook his head. “Not now, Captain. It’s too risky. And he’s too far away. Later …”

  The President finished his speech. There was less applause than at the beginning. The band played, until rain started to fall, and the crowd dispersed.

  “Well,” said Booth, as he and Payne hurried down Pennsylvania Avenue to Sullivan’s Saloon, “that is the last speech that he will ever give. Because now I shall put him through.”

  Over the Capitol, in fiery letters, was the legend “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” When Booth read these words aloud, he laughed. “The Lord has more marvels yet to work, and other instruments as yet undreamed of.”

&nbs
p; At the very back of Sullivan’s Bar, David Herold and Atzerodt were waiting. David had never before seen Wilkes quite so worked up, as he related to them the President’s speech. “It is what we all feared from the beginning, that the nigger would be put over us.”

  “Where is John Surratt?” asked Atzerodt.

  “He’s gone to Canada,” said David. “He’s run out on us.”

  “We don’t need him,” said Booth. “We are enough—just us—to redeem our cause.”

  As the various attempts to kidnap Lincoln failed, Surratt had grown more critical of Booth. Finally, when Richmond fell, he told David that he now saw no point to a kidnapping. When Booth began to speak of murder, Surratt said that he saw no point to that at all and so, to avoid any further involvement with the conspiracy, he had left for Canada. This at least was the story that John had wanted David to believe. Wilkes himself was silent on the subject.

  As Booth drank brandy and the others drank Sullivan’s best beer—Sullivan himself had gone to Richmond to see old friends—the last battle of the Confederacy was designed at the low pinewood table in the back of the smoky saloon.

  Booth had two playbills. One for Ford’s Theater; the other for Grover’s. “The secret service is expecting the President and General Grant to go to the theater together at the end of this week. I assume if they go Friday, it will be either to Grover’s patriotic rally or to Ford’s Laura Keene comedy. Whichever it is, we shall be ready.” Booth fixed David with his dark honey-colored eyes. “I will take care of the President and General Grant. Lewis will kill, at exactly the same time, Mr. Seward, while Atzerodt will kill the Vice-President at the Kirkwood House Hotel. With one swift stroke, we shall behead the government. Then we make our way to North Carolina and join up with Johnston’s men, who are still fighting in the hills.”