I Am Abraham (20 page)

My throat was dry. I was all done. The bands had stopped playing, the crowds dispersed, and I could hear the river roil. I hadn’t helped a soul. Black men would remain in their prison house—that house of a hundred keys—separated from their own kin. And the Republic was perilously close to some cliff.

I watched Dug step into his silver carriage with Adèle, that handkerchief still around his throat. His partisans grabbed the horses’ gear and wouldn’t let the carriage move until Dug smiled at them. It was a sinister smile—Dug looked deranged, as if the canvass had killed some essential part of him, had unmasked the horror of his own lies. But it wouldn’t hurt him none. The Democrats controlled the Legislature—and the Statehouse would pick the next Senator from Illinois.

I stood around as the workmen commenced to tear up the platform and pile the planks of wood into wheelbarrows; they wore leather mittens and cotton masks to guard them from the dust and debris. They were reckless with the wheelbarrows, bumping into stanchions like wanton angels with their own mad abandon. They left deep tracks on the courthouse lawn. But they had their own miraculous rhythm; the platform vanished in front of my eyes, with all the banners and balloons. And in less than an hour there wasn’t a single sign that Dug and I had ever come down the Mississippi to have a debate in Alton—except for those rifts in the grass from all the wheelbarrows.

16.

The Giant Killer

T
HE
RAIN
POUNDED
our roof on Election Day, like pellets from Satan’s own scattergun. Our cellar flooded, and if Mother and I hadn’t found her bailing pails, we would have had our own Mississippi under Jackson Street. The fence tore right down in the wind and left a deep curl of wood. My captains had been correct—we took the popular vote, but the Democrats held on to their precincts, and the new Legislature, like the old one, would belong to Dug; come January, that Legislature would vote him in for another term as United States Senator. I told my captains, and told my wife, “I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.”

I was out on the road half the time, trying to outrun death and destruction while I paid off some of our debts. Folks would stare at me, whisper to their wives, and I couldn’t tell if I was a pariah or some little god who’d come off the plains. I was fifty years old, with layers of dust in my wild black hair and only one odd shirt in my carpetbag. The waitresses along the route were dustier than I; they wouldn’t let me alone until I signed my autograph. The inns often ran out of bread and meat, but folks kept staring, even while they were famished. “That’s Lincoln,” they said. “That’s him—Sir, can we
tech
your hand?” And I would ride off into the dust again, month after month.

Mary was chagrined that I wouldn’t come home. She’d flail me in her letters. “The boys miss their father. They cannot recollect his face. They wonder now if Mr. Lincoln is tall or short. Or maybe there are two Lincolns—first the husband and then the Far Rider, who spreads himself across the counties. We all wish the Far Rider would come home.”

The Far Rider was forlorn. Canvassing had nearly cost me my home and my practice. Lincoln & Herndon might have petered out if I hadn’t ridden through dust storms like a desert creature in search of new clients. And when I did get back to Springfield, we had another blow. Bob failed his entrance exams to Harvard—he couldn’t solve the enigma of geometry, or rhetoric, or natural history. Mary locked herself away in her room—no one could draw her out, neither Willie nor Tad.

I was stunned when Bob arrived at my office. He had never been fond of visiting Billy and me in our unruly quarters. His linen was so fine, and he had that silver pin in his cravat—a gift from his mother, an heirloom her own father had once worn. His lower lip was trembling.

“Father,” he said, “I’ve come to work.”

“I don’t understand you, Son.”

“I decided to apprentice myself to you and Billy.”

I was as suspicious as an old fox about to raid a barnyard. “Is that what you want to do—tie yourself to Lincoln & Herndon?”

“No,” he said. “But I’m a failure, and failures don’t have much choice.”

“Billy,” I said, “lock the door.” And we barred every other client from the premises. Then I sat Bob down in my own rocking chair.

“You’re no failure,” I said, in Bob’s own schoolboy English. “It’s your highfalutin academy that failed you. It didn’t learn you a thing, and I paid that tuition with my blood. Now tell your Pa straight out what it is you want.”

“To go to Harvard, sir.”

“Then Harvard it will be.”

It was Mary who had given him those Eastern airs—my wife believed in all the privileges Harvard could bestow upon a boy from the West. Springfield was a dusty barn she had to tolerate on my account. If she’d had her druthers, she’d have gone up to Harvard with Bob as its first female scholar . . .

Billy caught me shivering, and it was the worst case of trembles he had ever seen. I wasn’t much of a magic maker. I neither had the money nor the prestige to get my boy into Harvard. And while we pondered, there was a knock on the door. Billy had pulled the curtain down and we couldn’t see through the glass. And then I heard that delicious hauteur of Mary’s voice.

“Mr. Lincoln, I don’t want to repeat myself. Open that damnable door.”

Billy opened up, and Mother came marching in. She had a cape covering her nightdress. And she’d ventured downtown in her slippers. But Mother didn’t storm at Billy and me. She smiled like a half-crazed mountain cat.

“Mr. Lincoln, did you really promise to get your son into Harvard?”

Before we could utter a word, Mother informed us that we had to send Bob to Phillips Exeter Academy to polish up for his entrance exams. And then she was gone. That damn academy was where all the little Eastern dukes went once they had their hearts and minds set on Harvard . . .

Billy went off to run an errand, and I sat alone in the dark. Suddenly there was a noise coming from the street—like the whisper of a huge animal. I peeked through the blinds. A bunch of citizens had collected outside to serenade me. I was
Long Lincoln, the Giant Killer.

Strangers continued to come by and gawk at the house. Dug had returned to the Senate, but
I
was the Giant Killer. Who could have imagined that seven debates—in wind and rain—had become a slice of Illinois? It didn’t seem to matter who had won. I had to ride the rails; folks wanted me to relive my particular
calvary
with Senator Douglas—the clatter in the cars, the dust storms, the effigies, the bonfires that blazed in my eyes, the dead squirrel that near ruined our sixth debate.

Then a letter arrived at my office. I had to stare twice at the envelope. It was from Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn—that Church was practically a shrine. Senators and governors communed there with Ward Beecher, and now the Church was inviting the Hon. A. Lincoln to speak there on any topic and was willing to pay two hundred dollars—I was stupefied. How could I hope to palaver in Mr. Beecher’s pulpit? I’d heard about his wild hair and even wilder Abolition ways. Women swooned in the aisles after one of his sermons.

I waved the letter in front of Billy. “I can’t lecture there. They’ll laugh at such a yokel. I don’t have Beecher’s gifts.”

“Mr. Lincoln, you’ve been offered two hundred dollars. That’s more than most mechanics make in a year.”

Plymouth Church wanted me in November—but I decided on next February. Meantime, Molly scoffed at my campaign clothes.

“Father, you can’t walk into Plymouth Church with prairie dust. It’s the pinnacle of culture. We’ll have to find a tailor for you.”

I couldn’t argue once Mary looked at me with her sharpshooter’s eyes. I went to Woods & Heckle, the tailor on the square. It took Mr. Woods ten days to measure me up for a suit. I groaned at the bill. Suddenly Plymouth Church might become a losing proposition. I’d come back with ten more bills to pay.

I had the trembles for three whole months. I was frightened of Ward Beecher and his Church—scarified of that man with the wild hair who had sent rifles to John Brown and wrote sermons about him and his bloody border raids. Brown was a lunatic with a long beard, and Beecher had called him a prophet in the wilderness. He startled the whole congregation at Plymouth Church when he produced the very chains that had bound the
prophet
at Harper’s Ferry, and he stomped on them like a rattlesnake. I kept having nightmares, and in all of them I was waylaid by strangers in clerical collars and couldn’t find the right road to Plymouth Church. Mary found me in the parlor, pale as a ghost in my nightshirt. She must have heard my nocturnal screams. We had our own bedrooms with a door in the middle after Mary had the house remodeled in one of her mad schemes. It was the latest fashion—the lord and mistress of the manor with connecting rooms, only I wasn’t much of a lord, and we didn’t live in a manor. Yet I’d crawl into her room in the middle of the night, and at other times I’d wake with Mary in my arms, scented flowers in her hair or between her bosoms, like Lola Montez.

But I could have sworn I’d been seared by lightning. I hopped like a wild Injun—had to clear my head—and strode outside in my slippers. And that’s when I saw them under a dark moon, men and boys doffed in apparel as ill fitting as my own. None of them had been measured by Woods & Heckle, I’d imagine. Their shins poked freely from their pantaloons, and their ragged cuffs didn’t reach much past their elbows; they outgrew whatever they wore, the way I had done. They’d walked fifty miles from Beardstown, with nothing but sips of well water and a few crusts that some farmer must have left for the crows.

“Are you Abe the Giant Killer?” their spokesman asked, a boy with a baritone as deep as Dug’s.

“I’m Abraham Lincoln,” I said, reveling in the aroma of rich earth on the boy’s shoes.

“Well, we couldn’t visit with ye in Alton or Jonesboro, sir. But none of us care for Douglas. He’s with the railroad. And they stole property from Pa, threw us off our own land. We hear the conductors on the Illinois Central wouldn’t even unlock their empty saloon cars, so you could have a little rest during the canvass—that’s how much the railroad line was for Douglas.”

That boy wasn’t wrong. Billy had tried to negotiate with the railroad, but the damn conductors were all Douglas men, and wouldn’t give me a lick of water, let alone a private berth in one of their cars.

Mother appeared out of the shadows, not in her nightdress, but in the same taffeta gown she’d put on at the Senatorial ball, with the plunging neckline and all—and those Beardstown boys were
galvanized
. Their eyes didn’t stray very far from that swelling under her throat. They were like children clutching a kite string that held them in its sway.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said with that Southern lilt of hers, “are you going to entertain our guests in the light of the moon?”

She must have pitied the grime on their faces, pitied their long pilgrimage, and perhaps she saw them—man and boy—as potential voters. Motives don’t matter much. What matters is she accompanied them all into the house, fed them from her pantry—marmalade and butter, water and milk and wedges of Jack cheese, and country bread as rich and fine as a silver lode. She sat with the boys, didn’t say a word about politics to the men, didn’t denigrate Douglas; and as that melody of Molly’s floated through the house, all the phantom creatures flew out of my head, and I sat there, with the fire crackling, and watched these men and boys from Beardstown with their mustaches of milk and honey, and I didn’t mourn the end of my political career.

17.

Manhattan Melancholia

I
STEPPED
OFF
THE
train at Jersey City with enough dust on my clothes to fill a prairie schooner. I had to wend my way through a crush of people to the pier at Exchange Street, where the men wore pugnacious little hats and the women had hair piled up like coiling snakes. I strode onto the Paulus Street ferry with my trunk and umbrella—and was stunned as we rocked across the Hudson River that February of 1860. It was like being pulled into a mirage of the Manhattan shore with every splash of wind on our faces; the buildings near the dock looked like a panorama of raw red teeth. And the buildings behind the dock could have been a labyrinth of even redder teeth. There seemed no end to it; the metropolis could have stretched to some eternity of its own. But all that luster was gone as we drew close to the ferry slip; I saw a rotting warehouse, where men with crooked backs toiled in the sun,
tinkered
in ragged undershirts, hammering heaps of snarled metal into more and more macabre shapes . . .

I was delivered to a palace, six stories high and loaded with pale granite squares that covered up the corners of a city block. The glass rotunda at Astor House climbed to a height that dizzied the mind—it was like standing under the cast-iron roof of the world with an endless vertigo.

My apartment was as grandiose as a church vault, with gas lamps that glowed from within recesses in every wall. The windows had enormous swaths of glass that looked down upon a square as broad as a battlefield, where pedestrians dodged a deluge of horsecars. The golden spigots near my bed pumped fresh water—hot and cold—and the hand towels were heated. But I wasn’t allowed to rest. The Young Republicans seized hold of me. I wouldn’t be delivering my talk at Plymouth Church; they had calculated that such a temple couldn’t seat enough Quality folks. The venue had been changed to the Great Hall at Manhattan’s Cooper Institute, which could hold a little army of grandees and their wives, and that only made me more and more blue.

Meanwhile I was ferried out to Brooklyn on Sunday morning to hear Henry Ward Beecher at Plymouth Church, a big brown barn on a quiet street. I couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about until I stepped inside the chapel, with its circular benches and a pulpit that floated above us like the cupola of a balloon held in place by pillars that resembled silver strings; my head swam at the sight of that contraption, and I was fearful that the pulpit would fall flat out. But it didn’t fall. And Ward Beecher landed in the pulpit with his searing blue eyes, a melodious voice, and crop of thick blond hair that fell to his shoulders. I was glad my own squeals wouldn’t have to compete with his
soft
timbre. The ladies all flocked to him, no matter what the subject of his sermon was. He stared at us from his cupola and talked of John Brown. He was shrewd as a backwoodsman, praising Brown and damning him in the same breath. “I disapprove of his mad and feeble schemes. . . . His soul was noble; his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that.” He hesitated for a second, gripped the rails of his cupola, and sang to us in a deep whisper: “Brown went to his death as men go to a banquet, and as he was led forth to the sacrifice he kissed a little child.”