I Am Abraham (28 page)

After her mistress moved to Missouri, Yib established herself as a mantua-maker, and was able to buy her freedom in ’55. She removed to the District several years later, and was soon the most sought-after seamstress in town, working for Mrs. Jefferson Davis and Mrs. Robert Lee. The finest ladies of the District would have
devoured
Yib if she’d given them half the chance. They all wanted to keep her on consignment. Meantime her son went off to a colored college in Ohio and tried to enlist after the war commenced, but Ohio didn’t have room for black volunteers, except as mule drivers. So he joined the 1
^st
Missouri with several of his mulatto classmates, not as mule drivers, but as raw white recruits. He had some supernatural luck as the 1
^st
Missouri’s chief scout. He’d walk through a burning apple orchard like some invisible waif, the last man alive in his scouting party. He carried a crazed colonel across Rebel lines, his own tunic on fire. He’d disappear during a raid, and appear again with a cache of rifles and the Rebel flag—until he was shot to pieces at Wilson’s Creek, in a skirmish with a renegade Rebel militia.

I seized Keckly’s hand and kissed it the next time I saw her in black.

“I am so sorry for your sacrifice, Madame Elizabeth.”

For the first time I could feel in my bones that she thought a little less of me. And it was like being scalped as I looked into her eyes.

“It wasn’t a sacrifice, Mr. President. If I had been younger, I would have disguised myself as a man and joined his regiment. I wouldn’t have fallen in his place. That would have rubbed out the dignity of his death. He had the honor of fighting for his country, Mr. Lincoln, even if
that
country couldn’t recognize the worth of who he was. He wouldn’t sit out the war at some haven in Ohio. That wasn’t in my George’s nature.”

She didn’t want to be consoled. All she wanted was a classroom. So I was determined to sit in on one of her classes, not to spy on her, you see, but to get acquainted with Yib and her chalkboard. She didn’t seem startled when I entered her classroom in the basement and sat down on a tiny stool next to Willie and Tad and the servant boys. I’d just come back from the War Department and was still wearing my chapeau. It was unconscionably impolite, and I placed that stovepipe hat on my knee, like a toadstool or a writing desk. Desks were in short supply, and all her pupils had to sit around a rickety table with their tablets and black lead pencils, while Elizabeth, still in her mourner’s black gloves, scratched a word on the chalkboard with all the flair of a schoolmarm.

Turpitude

She made us all pronounce that word on our tongues with the trill of an opera star.

The boys scratched their heads. “Tur-pee-tude,” Tad muttered. “That sounds like a fine pickle, ma’am.”

“Take a stab at it, Mr. Tad.”

He was stumped, like all her other pupils, and Yib turned to me, as if I were a philosopher—or a fireman who could solve a difficult flame.

I told her what I thought. “I’d say it was a vile blister in the human heart.”

And she asked us who suffered from such a blister.

Bradley, the butler’s boy, said, “All the generals in Virginia and all the Johnny Rebs.”

His accomplices in the room punched that rickety writing table and it just about collapsed. “Hooray for Brad!”

Keckly stared them down. “What if Varina Davis—or her couturière—was teaching a similar class at the Rebel White House? Wouldn’t Varina sing that
our
generals suffered from the same vile blister?”

“Then she would be wrong,” said my Willie, with a troubled look on his blond brow. “Ain’t that so,
Paw
?”

I realized the pickle I was in. “Yes—and no. A general who believed in his cause, no matter what side he was on, wouldn’t have to suffer from rascality. But he could still have a ruinous heart . . .”

Luckily there was a knock on the door. One of my confidential secretaries said I was late for a Cabinet meeting, and that Mr. Seward might kill Mr. Chase, or vice versa, if I didn’t come upstairs immediately and end their tuffle. So I excused myself, and realized I ought not intrude upon Yib’s domain again. I didn’t know her and probably never would. I had to fight my own Pa to learn the alphabet, but I hadn’t endured what she had to endure as a child. And yet we were alike in a way—quick to wound and slow to heal. She’d risen out of nowhere, without book learning or a blab school, and was mistress of the needle and the chalkboard. Fortune had put us together somehow and made Yib a curious acquaintance of mine. She was half an ally, and Lord knows what the other half was.

27.

Little Mac & the Lady President

W
E
WANTED
A
magnificent rider to lead us, not a man who couldn’t even mount a horse. So I summoned General George B. McClellan—handsome, robust, thirty-four years old—to the District that same July, a week after the disaster at Bull Run. He’d already trounced the Rebels during a skirmish in the backwaters of western Virginia. He came from a distinguished Philadelphia line, had entered West Point at fifteen, the youngest cadet in his class. I needed a feller who didn’t creak along with arthritis. I couldn’t afford another fizzle. He wouldn’t have raced home from Bull Run like a general with a bunch of nanny goats. McClellan had too much pride—and too much precision.

Our one war hero, he arrived in Washington on horseback and waited for nobody, not even a member of his new staff. Galloping across the capital, he rounded up all the deserters and stragglers he could find, tossed soldiers out of brothels and bars, and returned them to camp. He gathered this little growing army of deserters behind his black horse, some of the boys wearing corsets out of a brothel, others dressed up like bandits in red scarves, or disguised as carpenters and grocers—it didn’t matter to McClellan. He tamed them all. These very stragglers developed a deep affection for their new general and called him
Little Mac
. He’d gone into dark alleys and other hellholes to dig them out, fought river pirates and brothel keepers with a bullwhip, while his black horse—Dan Webster—waited for him, whinnying once and stamping his foot in the dust.

That horse was as vain as he was. McClellan went into the back streets in full dress, stopping to comb his reddish brown mustache. We housed him in his own mansion at the corner of Lafayette Square. The bottom floor served as his headquarters and telegraph office, and he himself lived on the second floor. “I feel that God has put a great work in my hands,” he told his fellow officers.

And he opined that there was little room for General Scott in God’s great work. McClellan ignored our General-in-Chief, who couldn’t seem to move from his divan on account of the dropsy in his feet and legs. He’d once been Scott’s loyal aide, had admired his love of battle, but ridiculed him now. He wouldn’t even meet with Old Fuss & Feathers, and locked him out of his own headquarters. “I’m the only one who can save the Union,” he proclaimed. He surrounded himself with junior officers who were loyal to him, pontificated like some preacher, gave a hundred interviews, met with Congressional committees. The Democrats adored “Little Napoleon,” as the papers dubbed him, and would have preferred a military man as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief, but I had to suffer his pompous ways or I couldn’t survive.

He humiliated Scott once too often. “Excellency,” he said to me, “must I endure that old idiot? I cannot lead an army with him rattling in my ear.” Scott wasn’t his only target. McClellan called me “the original gorilla” behind my back, but I had been called worse than that. Scott had none of McClellan’s lightning, or at least no lightning left, and when I asked Little Mac if he could head the Army of the Potomac and also become our General-in-Chief, he pulled once on his brand-new chin beard and said, “Excellency, I can do it all.”

So I had to drop Old Fuss & Feathers, allow him to resign, and put all my faith in that bantam rooster. He built a ring of forts and camps around the capital and sometimes he would survey his own army from a hot-air balloon. We’d never had another general remotely like him. Washington wives loved to watch him sail in his balloon. He’d stand in the gondola—alone—while it rocked in the wind and rose above the White House, the wives clutching their hearts at the sight of this marvel, who could have been emperor of the District in a floating sedan chair. He wasn’t interested in these elegant ladies. He loved his wife, Mary Ellen, the daughter of an army engineer who’d become his adjutant. He wrote her religiously twice a day, I hear. I’d hate to imagine what was in his letters. He must have attacked me relentlessly as a civilian nincompoop. Half of ’em were treasonable, I suppose, but there was no one else who could get us out of this scrape. And I kind of envied that gondola of McClellan’s, wished I could fly over cow pastures and Rebel terrain with his damn insouciance, but I was grounded in my own terrain, without tether cords or the ballast of a black stallion.

Mother had given him a bouquet when he first arrived. It was her way of introducing herself to that bantam in blue. He handed the bouquet to his father-in-law, turned on his heels, and nuzzled his horse—and now Mary had an unpopular opinion of him.

“He is humbug,” Mary said.

“What makes you think so, Mother?”

“Because he talks so much and does so little.”

I couldn’t blame him for that. He could conjure up an army with the force of his personality and a few words. Six months ago we were a phantom village, with our telegraph wires cut, and not one car that could connect us with Baltimore, and now we had a hundred thousand men in a maze of forts that was like a dark, impenetrable illusion. Little Mac would ride from fort to fort, without a single guard, as if he were challenging the Rebels to
trouble
him.

Problem was he had a damn big mouth. “We have to dodge the nigger question,” he said. Fugitive slaves had little chance with Little Mac as General-in-Chief. It did not matter who was hiding them, or where they were hid. Little Mac rooted them out, riding his black horse, and had his commanders return them to their masters. “Excellency,” he said, “I’d rather not poison the waters.”

I didn’t quarrel with him. He was the master engineer. I think he meant to scare the Rebels out of the war with the might of his army. I visited his troops riding on a borrowed horse, with my feet scraping the ground. He kept stroking his mustache and palavering about the one
epic
attack that would break the Rebels all at once. He was gallant in his uniform, with a silk scarf around his throat. His boys never even looked at me—I was the scarecrow in a stovepipe hat who happened to be President, and he was a god who strode among them and wasn’t even as tall as other generals; he might ask a boy about his sick mother, or contribute to the funeral of a soldier’s
Paw
. They stood in the snow for him, in wind and rain, dazzled if they could touch Dan Webster’s silky flank.

I’d see him every morning from my windows, magnificent on his black stallion, hooves trampling the dust on Pennsylvania Avenue, while he strode across the District like some grand marshal of war—only Little Mac wasn’t making war; he was collecting blankets and ammunition dumps. So one night in the middle of November—1861—I went to see him with Mr. Seward and my confidential secretaries, Nicolay & Hay. We strolled across Lafayette Park with the wind in our mouths, the trees bending like live bullets with branches and chipped bark, the ground swelling under our feet as we stopped in front of the little general’s palatial home and headquarters with its clique of armed guards.

We were shown into the parlor. Little Mac was at a wedding and wouldn’t be back for a while. We decided to wait. Nicolay & Hay commenced to burn while my Secretary of State smoked one of his Havana cigars. An hour passed. I could feel the
unholies
coming on. Someone should have run to that wedding and notified Little Mac—I began to wonder if I was his general, or he was mine. McClellan appeared in his military cape, shuffled right past us without a smile or the briefest hello, and bounded up the stairs to his living quarters. We waited another hour, with the
unholies
riding through my blood—I wanted to drag him through the sawdust by his chin beard. I sent word up to Little Mac.

His aide climbed back down and shrugged his shoulders with some of McClellan’s own arrogance.

“I’m awful sorry, Mr. Lincoln, but the General is indisposed.”

“Then you might
dispose
him,” I said.

“I can’t, sir. He’s retired for the night.”

So we left that armed palace, Nicolay & Hay twitching with anger.

“That’s the insolence of epaulettes. Soon he’ll ask you to water his horse.”

My lips were trembling. “I’d water his horse and hoist him into his saddle if that could produce some victories.”

I returned to the White House, leaving Mr. Seward at his doorstep.

Little Mac’s allies in the Senate kept reminding him that he ought to be Dictator, while I could remain in town as his puppet President. I didn’t want to
wrassle
with him right now. I could have lopped Little Mac off at the knees with a stroke of the pen and tossed him into the Dakota Territories, but it soothed folks to have
their
general ride through the District on a black horse. And the Rebel chiefs in Richmond must have shuddered a bit when their spies whispered to them how Little Mac rode from one camp to the next—the lord of his domain—while the Union Army swelled up like a beast.

I could hear the rattle of dishes in the Crimson Room. Mary was having one of her soirees—the laughter rang like a rifle shot. I was glad she hadn’t called me down to greet her guests. The winter season had started in Washington in spite of the war—no, even the war was now
delusional
, thanks to McClellan and Mr. Dan Webster. Folks felt safe in their beds, surrounded as they were by so many bayonets, but somehow I’d have to get that pretty little man to fight.