I Am Abraham (41 page)

“Elizabeth, we have to scatter, or this old jail might come crashing down on our heads.”

She mumbled something, and I had to lean down on my coattails to catch her mutterings.
“Mr. Lincoln
—
I can’t move.”

And that’s when Mother arrived, amid all the copulations and a cacophonous din. She wasn’t even bothered by the groans and farts, the frenzied maneuvers around her.

“Lizzie, get up. Goodness, you can’t sit here in all this filth. You’ll die.”

Keckly stood up like Mother’s own marionette, but she started to totter. “My legs have gone
daid
.”

“Nonsense,” Mother told her.

It took Keckly five whole minutes to collect herself. She scrutinized that endless parlor as if she had landed in a forest of privacy screens, and wiped her face with Mother’s silk handkerchief.

“I’ll never get out of here, Mr. Lincoln. I’m on the Provost’s list.”

H
IS
NAME
WAS
R
OSECRANS
, like one of my generals. But this magistrate was a colonel with the Provost’s office. He sat in his own little court on the second floor. He could have been my age, though it was hard to tell. He wasn’t deformed, or anything like that, but he did have a tiny hump on his back—a war wound, I reckon, and that’s why he was stationed at Old Capitol. He had little concern for my Presidency. But his eyes rattled in his head when I entered his courtroom with Elizabeth and Mary and two sentinels. I’d seen him once before, riding through the District with George McClellan, on one of his mad dashes from the Powder Magazine to Lafayette Park, Little Mac flying out of the dust with his retinue, while half the city was agog and still worshiped him; Rosecrans was there, in his duster, as Little Mac and his family flanked the White House and rode across the Long Bridge, into Alexandria, went from camp to camp.

“Mr. Lincoln, why did you come into my court with the prisoner?”

“Her being here is a flat mistake.”

He sat on a very tall bench, and I had to stand on my toes if I wanted to catch his eye. He rifled through a drawer and squinted at a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass.

“Isn’t she Elizabeth Keckly, who’s been aiding and abetting criminals and deserters at a so-called contraband camp? We caught her flat out. She had the cheek to sabotage our investigations, sir, to hinder us from capturing such criminals. We don’t even have to charge the lady. We’re at war, sir.”

He smiled to himself, like the petty tyrant he was. “Are you defending her as an officer of this court?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I’m licensed in Illinois.”

“Illinois don’t mean much in my court. This here’s a prison for soldiers and crimes connected to soldiering and sabotage.”

“You have no authority over her. This woman works for me. Her contraband camps are a cover.”

I’d scratched at his curiosity. “Cover for what?”

“A training ground for future black officers.”

He started to slink in his high chair. This magistrate had barked at prisoners and junior officers, at prostitutes and tramps, at bomb throwers and editors of seditious material, but not at a man who could bark right back.

“I never received any notice about such an institution,” he muttered from his high chair.

And now I prepared to break him, like some gullible alligator.

“Rosecrans, you’re a magistrate, not the Secretary of War.”

He started mumbling to himself. “And do these camps have a code name?”

“
Yes
,” I spat. “
West
Point
. These officers will command a regiment one day.”

He slipped further and further into the well of his high chair. “Black regiments, sir?”

“Some black, some white.”

I’d crushed his belief in the world. He couldn’t bear to look at Elizabeth. She’d become a sign of his unworthiness. He stamped her release form. We might never have left that maze without his signature—dead or alive. Prisoners had a habit of getting lost at Old Capitol, which had its own gallows and mortuary. We climbed down the stairs, past the Rebel officers, who trudged back and forth in a trance, and the traitor-clerks, who screamed their oaths of loyalty into the walls, past the paupers, who congregated here until they could be sent to the Poor House, past the harlots and matrons who had spied on us and sat in a corner until some
repatriation boat
carried them to Richmond, past the child murderers, who wandered about in their chains, and the sentinels, who herded prisoners from hall to hall. Keckly shuddered, as the stench grew worse and worse. The sentinels hissed at me—a President didn’t have much quarter here—but they wouldn’t question the magistrate’s stamp.

Elizabeth blinked into the bald light once we entered the yards. “Shame on you, Mr. Lincoln—bamboozling that poor magistrate.”

And she corralled me with my own lies.

“Would you like to visit
West
Point
? We can ride through one of the contraband camps . . . and you can appoint a couple of colored cadets.”

I
jest
couldn’t do it. My generals wouldn’t have tolerated a little college for colored cadets. They’d never serve with black officers. We’d have open rebellion in the ranks. I could shout until blood came leaking out my ears, and we still wouldn’t have been able to go on with the war. Richmond would have crept across the river like some land-and-sea monster, with Rebels swimming right on our porch . . .

Elizabeth fell asleep against my shoulder on the trip back to the White House—we rode past Swampdoodle, a marshland of privies and shacks, where the Irish lived; most sane men avoided that swamp; enlistment officers rarely entered the Irish enclave, looking for raw recruits. We rode past an ambulance delivering certain fine ladies to the wharves—these were Washington matrons who’d been a bit reckless in their sympathies to the South; they sang “The Bonnie Blue Flag” smack in the middle of Union country.

We are a band of brothers and native to the soil

Fighting for the property we gained in honest toil

And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far

Hurrah! For the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.

There wasn’t much of a melody in their eyes. I noticed the
bracelets
on their legs; they were lashed to that ambulance. And they weren’t raucous with Mother and me.

“We’re going to Richmond. Should we give your regards to Mr. Jeff?”

The ambulance was gone before I had the chance to utter a sound. I couldn’t stop thinking of those Belles Dames and their Bonnie Blue Flag. They must have dreaded that repatriation boat, a little. Still, they hadn’t woken Elizabeth—she was sobbing in her dreams.

“Father,” Mary said, “you must shut down that rotten sink, or I will shut it myself.”

“And where should I put all the prisoners? Stanton will store them in your flower garden.”

“Mr. Lincoln, those were a poor excuse for prisoners. Strumpets parading with Senators. Soldiers who should be in an infirmary, or a mental ward. Half-blind saboteurs who kept bumping into walls.”

And might have murdered Taddie in his bed.

Mother wasn’t wrong. Old Capitol was a rotten sink and a circus for profiteers. I doubted Stanton collected a penny for himself. He must have realized that a penal house had to be run like any other business—with canteen cards and privacy screens. I couldn’t afford to shut it down, else we’d have to jump onto the repatriation boat with the Belles Dames and flee from all the chaos.

Mary pouted for a while and then broke her silence with a smile.

“Father,” she said, with a playful twist in her eyes, “do you think a black officer will ever command a white regiment?”

“I doubt it.”

“Not even in Taddie’s lifetime?”

“No. Not ever.”

We rode along Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Willard, where every room was lit, and entered the reptilian darkness of the President’s grounds—the front porch had a single, sputtering flare; the stables looked like catacombs. I wouldn’t let the coachman handle Elizabeth. I carried her through the gate. Mother didn’t want her sleeping all alone in the attic, so I set her down on a divan in Mary’s headquarters and covered her with a blanket. I watched her breath for a little while, watched the flutter of her hands. The Locofocos liked to harp about the Miscegenation Balls we had at the White House, how the Lincolns lived
incestuous
lives. But their evil gossip couldn’t corral the feelings I had for Elizabeth; she was like an irascible sister you loved in spite of the quarrels you had, an angel in the attic, even without her bombazine.

40.

Gettysburg

M
Y
S
ECRETARY
OF
W
AR
had requisitioned a special four-car train that November, with sharpshooters and a tiny cannon, put there for ceremonial sake. I traveled with my confidential secretaries, my valet, and Mr. Seward. Much as I tried, I couldn’t seem to finish my remarks for the dedication—how could one lone man in the White House, who sent boys off to their doom, find the will to
represent
these fallen boys? I scribbled on scraps of paper, using my stovepipe hat as a desk, but I couldn’t find the words to capture the living or the dead. It was as if I’d suddenly gone
deef
and dumb to the constant tattoo inside my skull.

I sat in the personal car of the B&O president, like some ceremonial king, with my own bedroom and private privy, with lamps that lit up the second we approached a tunnel, with Venetian blinds, and carpets soft as quilt, but all that luxury couldn’t inspire me none, or dress over my remarks. I was approaching a battleground where the Commander-in-Chief hadn’t played the littlest part, where row after row of hospital tents had straddled every orchard, where the sting of excrement and rotting carcasses had remained for months, where one sleepy village and all its farmland had turned into a vast slaughter yard.

I didn’t want it to feel like a circus, but it did. Medicine men hovered around the tracks with every sort of moonshine; children hawked balloons; and counterfeit soldiers in motley uniforms cradled war souvenirs in their arms, but not everyone belonged to the same menagerie. I saw nurses with that genuine remorse in their eyes of women who must have lived for weeks around wounded men. And others, like myself, recalled the battlefields as best we could, and were confused and uncertain and more than a little shy the nearer we got to Gettysburg.

I arrived at the tall depot on Carlisle Street as the sun was going down—it burnt the walls of the car a soft and luscious red. But I couldn’t relish that color very long. The platform of the depot was lined with row after relentless row of coffins—the very last interments before the dedication, I suspect. Diggers would probably work half the night on Cemetery Hill . . .

We gathered next morning at the
Diamond
, as citizens of the town called their central square, with hundreds of souls packed into that space, perhaps a lot more—I hadn’t come here to count. I was vertiginous after a while, as people moved in great numbers and shouted, “Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.” A soldier had to help me onto my horse, or I might have been landlocked somewhere and missed the ceremonial.

I towered above half the world and rode to the cemetery that morning in the midst of a procession that included firemen, reporters, soldiers, and politicians. People kept trying to clutch my hand. Up Baltimore Street I went on my bay horse, my shoes slipping out of the stirrups, my meager remarks in my pocket. I wore a black band on my hat to remember my dead boy—and the dead boys of Gettysburg, some of whose bones were still scattered in the fields, with the carcasses of horses and cows. I didn’t see any broken buildings on Baltimore Street, or collapsed roofs, but several of the walls along our route were riddled with bullet holes. I’d heard tales of the Rebel yell being much more reckless than a cannonball and halting a courier’s horse in its tracks. And of Lee’s
foragers
hunting for Gettysburg blacks—mainly women and children—in the midst of battle, forcing them out of their homes like the worst kind of kidnappers and thieves, and hauling them back to headquarters as their own little
battery
of slaves . . .

I was pulled right out of my reverie by the folks who were selling souvenirs—little relics of war that included bullet pouches and broken cannonballs. They lurched out at us with their plunder; one of them had a Rebel captain’s uniform on a stick, and brandished it like a scarecrow, with painted eyes and whiskers.

“Five dollars,” he said, running beside me with that wicked semaphore, as if he were signaling to his own army of ghouls. “Mr. Lincoln, four dollars—you can give the uniform to Tad. I pressed it clean.”

I had to knock that stick out of his hand, or he would have followed me past the ragged line of houses, to the Baltimore Pike, and the top of Cemetery Hill, where every grave, every marker, could be seen from my saddle. We had to cross a
pinched
piece of battleground, and I was bewildered by what I saw—belt buckles, bits of cracked glass, torn insignias, a tattered shirt, an officer’s whip, the rusty barrel of a gun, all strewn about, as if some madman were leaving vestiges of his mayhem, or a tornado had struck without warning, desiccated the land, and went on to destroy another hill.