Schlozer will have a better idea of the chancellor's mind than I do, Schlieffen thought. Then he realized Rosecrans had just spoken, and he had no idea what the general had said. "I am sorry," he said. "You must please excuse me. I was thinking of something else."
"1 guess you were," Rosecrans said with a chuckle. "The Judgment Trump could have sounded right then, and you never would have noticed. What I said was, I'll take the notion of sending officers to Berlin over to the secretary of state to see what he thinks of it."
"That is good. I am glad to hear it," Schlieffen said.
"Damned if I know what will come of it, though." Rosecrans' good humor vanished. "Ever since Washington warned us against entangling alliances, we've held apart from 'em. Of course, in Washington 's day we didn't have nasty neighbors tangled up with foreigners themselves. But he's like the Good Book to a lot of people here, even if he was from Virginia."
That Rosecrans was himself talking with a foreigner never seemed to enter his mind. Schlieffen had seen in other Americans the same interesting inability to judge the effects of their own words. It did not offend him, not here; he would not let it offend him. "You will do what you can do, General, with the officials of your country, and I will do what I can with the officials of mine, and we will see what from this comes."
Before Rosecrans could answer, the box on the wall clanged to let him know someone wished to speak with him. He grimaced and swore fiercely under his breath. But then, like a hound summoned to the dinner bowl by the ring of a bell, he got up and went to the telephone. "Rosecrans here," he shouted into it. "Yes, Mr. President, I hear you pretty well right now. What were you saying before, Your Excellency?" A pause. "But, Mr. President…"
Schlieffen quickly realized the conversation with President Blaine was liable to go on for some time. He half rose. General Rosecrans nodded permission for him to go. He respectfully dipped his head to the American general-in-chief, then left the inner office.
"Auf wiedersehen, Hen Oberst," Captain Berryman said when he emerged; Rosecrans' adjutant had regained enough spirit to try German again. "Ich hoffe alles is mit, uh, bei Ihnen gut?"
"Yes, everything is well with me, thank you," Schlieffen answered. "How is everything with you?"
Before Berryman could answer, Rosecrans' bellow of frustrated fury did the job for him: "God damn it to hell, Mr. President, I can't give you a victory when the sons of bitches are coming at us five ways at once… Yes, well, maybe you should have thought about that more before you dragged us into this miserable war… Maybe you should think about making peace, too, while you've still got the chance." The sharp click that followed was, again, the earpiece slamming down onto its rest.
Schlieffen and Berryman looked at each other. Neither found anything to say. After a polite, sympathetic nod, Schlieffen let himself out of the antechamber.
Abraham Lincoln appreciated-indeed, savored-the irony of meeting in the Florence Hotel to do battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Here he was, doing his best to make the party remember the labourers who had helped bring it to power, and doing it in a hotel erected by the Pullman Company on part of the city within a city they owned: factories, houses, blocks of flats, all in the holy name of Pullman.
Robert had arranged it, of course. His Chicago connections were far better than his father's, these days. The room, Lincoln could not deny, was splendid: magnificent walnut paneling, table with legs even more elaborately carved than that paneling, chairs upholstered in maroon velvet and soft enough to swallow a man, gaslights overhead so ornate, they resembled a forest frozen in beaten bronze.
"I think we are all here," Lincoln said, looking around the room. Fewer were here than he had hoped. Some of his telegrams had gone unanswered; some men he had hoped would accept had declined. He wondered whether he had enough strength at hand, even if everything went as he wanted, to turn the party into the path he had in mind. The only way to find out would be the event.
Around the table, heads nodded. There sat Frederick Douglass, with his big frame and white mane and beard as solid and impressive as a snow-topped mountain. There was John Hay, a lighter presence, once Lincoln's secretary, then minister to the CSA in Blaine 's administration till war broke out. There sat Benjamin Butler, a clever mind concealed within a bald, bloated, sagging walrus of a body: before the War of Secession a Democrat who thought Jefferson Davis might make a good president of the United States, at its end a U.S. general who'd had to flee New Orleans in a Navy frigate to keep the returning Confederates from hanging him without trial.
Next to Butler, rotund Hannibal Hamlin fiddled with his spectacles. He had been Lincoln 's vice president, and had gone down to defeat with him in 1864. But he was a Maine man, and secretary of state to boot, and as such more likely than others to gain the ear of President Blaine. Senator James Garfield of Ohio sat farthest from Lincoln. An officer during the War of Secession, he had risen to prominence as a member of the military courts that purged the Army of defeatists after the fighting ended. But for Hay, he was the youngest man in the room.
"I think two questions stand before the house today," Lincoln said, as if he were addressing the Illinois Assembly. "The first is, where does our party stand now? The second, and more urgent, is, where do we go from here?"
"Where we are, is in trouble," Ben Butler declared in his flat Massachusetts accent. "How do we get out of it?" He shook his big, round head; the gray hair that fringed his bald pate flew this way and that. "Damned if I know. Hanging Blaine from the Washington Monument might be one place to start."
"He did what he was elected to do." Hannibal Hamlin spoke up in defense of the president.
"So he did, and did it damned badly, too," Butler sneered.
"Fighting the Confederate States, opposing their tyranny, is not and cannot be a sin," Frederick Douglass declared.
But Butler had an answer for him, too: "Fighting them and losing is."
"As you will know from the invitations I sent you, I was speaking in more general terms," Lincoln said. "The question I wish to address is, assuming the war lost, as it seems to be, how is the Republican Party once more to recover its status with the American people?"
"By doing as it was meant to do from the outset: by championing freedom over all this continent," Douglass said.
"In aid of that," John Hay said, his voice light and thin after the Negro's, "I have heard that Longstreet will formally free the Negroes in the CSA once this war ends. His allies are said to have extracted such a promise from him as the price of their aid against us."
"One more reason for Blaine to come to terms, then," Douglass exclaimed, his leonine features lighting with hope. A moment later, though, he spoke more cautiously: "If it be true, of course. You, John, will be the best judge of us all as to that."
"With my few months in Richmond before the fighting started?" Hay said with a laugh full of self-mockery. "I believe it to be true, having heard it from sources I reckon trustworthy, but I can offer no guarantee. Nor, even if it is true, can I guess how much de facto, as opposed to de jure, freedom the Negroes in the Confederate States are to have."
"Giving them any at all goes dead against the Confederate Constitution," Garfield pointed out.
"That doesn't always stop us," Butler said. "I don't see any reason the Rebs will lose a whole lot of sleep over it."
"Your cynicism, Mr. Butler, has truly astonishing breadth and scope," John Hay murmured. Butler gave him an oleaginous smile, as at a compliment. Maybe he thought it was one.
Lincoln said, "When a man has no freedom, any increase looms large, f hope you are indeed correct, John. The Negro unchained will grow in ways the men now his masters do not expect." Frederick Douglass nodded vigorous agreement to that. Lincoln continued, "Even as the chains may fall from the limbs of the slave in the Confederate States, so they are being fitted to those of the labourer in the United States. Standing firm against this, we can and shall become the party of the majority once more, after the misfortune
of the war sinks below the surface of public recollection."
James Garfield frowned. "I don't see how sounding like radicals will take us anywhere we want to go."
"Justice for the working man is not a radical notion," Lincoln said, "or, if it is, that stands as a judgment against the United States."
"But what do you mean by justice, Lincoln?" Garfield demanded. "If you call raising a Red rebellion, the way you tried to do in Montana Territory — if you call that justice, I want no part of it."
"I make two points in response to that, sir," Lincoln said. "The first is that I raised no rebellion, Red or otherwise. 1 made a speech, similar to many other speeches I have made over the years. If the miners in Helena were forcefully of the opinion that it fit the circumstances under which they lived, I cannot help it. Second and more basic is the fact that the people do retain the right of revolution against a government they find tyrannical."
"Now you do sound like a Red," Ben Butler rumbled. His jowls shook with the weight of his disapproval.
"Without the right of revolution, we should to this day be British subjects, revering Queen Victoria," Lincoln said. "We might make discontented British subjects, but British subjects we should be. If we were still British colonies, we would retain the right of revolution against the Crown. How can we not retain it, then, against the government in Washington?"
"In Philadelphia, you mean," Butler said. "On this theory, you should have let the Confederate States go without firing a shot."
"By no means," Lincoln said. "They sought to break, and, sadly, succeeded in breaking, a union; they did not aim to establish a more perfect one for the nation as a whole."
"A subtle distinction," said Butler, an admirer of subtle distinctions.
"My view," Frederick Douglass said, "is that, while Mr. Lincoln exaggerates the likenesses between the position of the Confederate slave and that of the U.S. labourer, we may, if we so desire, use such exaggerations to good effect on the stump."
"That is what I meant to say, yes," Lincoln said, "save that I purpose making this principle the rock on which our platform stands, not just a net with which to sweep up votes when the next election comes."
Hannibal Hamlin said, "If we take this line, the Democrats will call us a pack of Communards, and that alongside all the other low things they are in the habit of calling us."
"The Democrats lined up in support of property when that included property in Negro slaves. They have not changed since." Lincoln did not try to hide his scorn. "If they start flinging brickbats, they'll have to duck a good many, too."
"How much good will any of this do, gentlemen, when we are tarred with the brush of two losing wars in the space of twenty years?" John Hay asked.
"Exactly my point," Lincoln said. "If we go on as we have been, we are surely ruined. If, on the other hand, we make the changes in our course I have suggested, we offer the entire nation a new birth of liberty. Otherwise, I fear, government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall perish from this earth, replaced by government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. The free men who made the United States a beacon to the nations of the world shall be reduced to gearing in the vast capitalist engine of profit."
"I just don't see it," Senator Garfield said. "I wish I did, but I don't. No room for compromise in any of this. Without compromise, you can't have politics. The brickbats will be flying, all right, but they'll be real brickbats with real bricks. That's the direction whence class warfare comes."
"Yes, it is," Lincoln said softly. "Do you think we can avoid it by pretending the seeds from which it springs are not already planted and growing?"
"Whether we can avoid it is one question," Hay said. "Whether we should embrace it is another question altogether."
"You mean that, John." Lincoln 's voice was full of wonder, full of grief. Hay was his protege. Hay was nearly as much his son as was Robert. As far as Lincoln could see, his own course of thought had followed over the years a perfectly logical, perfectly inevitable path. And yet, the handsome young man who was now an even more handsome middle-aged man had not gone in the same direction. For that matter, neither had Robert Lincoln.
Hay said, "I think everyone here, with the possible exception of Mr. Douglass, feels the same as I do." He sounded sad, too, the way a doctor sounded sad when he had to tell a family the situation for a sick man was hopeless, and that he would soon die.
Lincoln looked around the table, silently polling the men he had asked to join him in Chicago. With him, they could have swung many in the Republican Party to his views. If they were against him, reform along the lines he desired would not come, not through the Republicans. "Gentlemen, think again, please," he said. "Can you not see that this country needs a new birth of freedom if it is to go on being the wonder and the envy of the world?" He knew he was pleading. The last man with whom he'd pleaded was Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States during the War of Secession.
He'd failed then. After Lee's victories in Pennsylvania, the British government had recognized the Confederate States as a nation among nations and, with France, had forced the USA to do likewise. He was failing now, too. He saw that by the way his comrades would not meet his eyes.
Garfield said, " Lincoln, if we Republicans tried to go down your road, I think you would split the party not in two but in three. Some would go with you, and I expect you would gain a few among the Socialists and others who believe in notions even more radical than yours."
"Thank you so much," Lincoln murmured.
"I mean no offense. I speak the truth as I see it, as you do." Garfield was earnest, sensible, in the middle of the road. He proved as much, continuing, "Some would probably try to hold the party on the course it has now. I lean that way myself, truth to tell. And some would bolt to the Democrats."
"And," Hannibal Hamlin added, "the devil would come down with chilblains before we won another election."
Benjamin Butler said, "It occurs to me that what we may need is not more freedom but a little less. Compared to any European country, this is a land full of bomb-flinging anarchists. We're so damned free, we've thrown two wars away because we did not properly prepare for either of them. Take Germany, now-nothing in Germany but coal and potatoes, far as the eye can see. But they've got discipline there, by God, and they're the strongest power on the continent."
"I wouldn't go so far as Mr. Butler," Hay said, "but I am compelled to believe there is some truth in what he says." Hamlin nodded. So did Garheld.
Lincoln discovered he'd only thought he knew despair. He turned to Frederick Douglass. "What of you, Fred?" he asked.
Douglass had less political clout than any of the others, but more moral authority. After staring for a while at something only he could see, he answered, "My own people, both in the Confederate States and in the United States, need more freedom, not less. I must believe the same also holds true for white men." Had he stopped there, he would have aided Lincoln. But he went on, "Neither am I convinced that taking the Republican Party into the streets, so to speak, is the way to gain a majority for it."
"Let me ask the question another way," Lincoln said: "Other than taking the Republican Party into the streets, how is it to gain a majority? Only sixteen years of accumulated disgust at Democratic feckless-ness let us win this latest election. Things being as they are now, when do you gentlemen foresee our winning another one, and by what means?"
For close to two minutes, no one answered. Then James Garfield said, "Whatever the means may be, they shall not include riots and rebellion, which would only raise enmity against us."
"Like pressure from steam in an engine, pressure for change will rise in the United States," Lincoln said. "Whether it rises through the Republican Party or outside the party remains to be seen. I would sooner see it rise through the party, that we may channel it for the nation's good and for our own."
He looked around the table again. Not even Douglass looked as if he agreed with him. Ben Butle
r said, "If workers go into the streets, soldiers go into the streets, too. Soldiers carry more rifles. They always have. They always will."
"Unless and until they turn those rifles against the men who give them orders they cannot in good conscience obey," Lincoln said, which produced another long silence. Into it, he continued, "Gentlemen, I say this with a heavy heart, but I say it nonetheless: if, as this meeting makes it appear likely, the Republican Party cannot find room to encourage change, I shall work outside the confines of the party to encourage it. For change, sure as I live and breathe, is coming. And, though they may not be here today, there are those calling themselves Republicans who will follow me."
"You would deliberately split the party?" It was half a gasp from Hannibal Hamlin, half a wheeze.
"No, I would not," Lincoln answered. "But I will."
"If you try, we shall read you out and pretend you were never in," Butler said. "The way the Democrats have campaigned against you ever since the War of Secession, we might be better off reading you out."
"An ostrich may bury its head in the sand and pretend the lion is not there," Lincoln said. "Will that keep the lion from enjoying a supper of ostrich?"
Butler got to his feet. Since he was short and squat, drawing himself up to his full height was less impressive than it might have been otherwise, but he did his best. "I think we have heard enough," he said. "Thank you for inviting us here, Mr. Lincoln. I expect each of us can find his own way out, his own way back to his hotel, and his own way home."
One by one, the Republican leaders filed past Lincoln and toward the door. As John Hay went by, the ex-president softly asked, "Et tu, John?"
"Et ego, Mr. Lincoln." Hay's voice was sad, but it was firm. Like the others, even Frederick Douglass, he left without a backwards glance.
Lincoln stood all alone in the room poor men had built so rich men might confer in it. "Labour first," he said, as he had so many times. "Labour first, then capital. If they cannot remember that on their own, I shall make certain they are reminded of it." And he left, too, his back straight, his stride determined. He had been a Whig. He was-no, he had been-a Republican. Now…
How Few Remain (great war) Page 55
