I Am Abraham (46 page)

“The Dry Tortugas, sir,” said my secretaries with great reluctance, “is not the same as a firing squad. You can either pardon a soldier or . . .”

Send him
to the Tortugas
.

The barking at Fort Stevens had stopped, and I moved on to the next dossier, with a bitterness in my heart, not against my generals and their rules, but at my own culpability as the mad king of war.

45.

An Evil Hour

I
HAD
TO
ENDURE
a summer’s worth of Mad Fridays, as a blue haze rose off the river and the canals and seemed to
stifle
the sky, while a vast army of pigs rooted along the avenues and rushed through the back door of the Willard, frightening cooks and the hotel’s clients. Marines, who were called in from their barracks, chased the pigs down to the Potomac flats with their batons and rifle butts, and lost them in the blue haze of swamp gas.

Mary and Tad got out of this swamp, and escaped to Vermont that August with a caravan of hatboxes that filled an entire baggage car. I was all alone at our summer cottage, in the worst damn summer of the war. A few drunken soldiers may have lurched here and there—shots were fired—but the Rebels sat within their ramparts at Petersburg, and we couldn’t pierce or break Lee’s line. Grant had despatched his own best general to invade Georgia and hurl the Rebels right into the sea, yet Tecumseh Sherman couldn’t be found anywhere on the map. His army had vanished into some mythical wood. We were stuck in
an evil hour
, according to my critics. Republican and Democratic papers sang the same tune. “The People are wild for Peace.” And the Locos had their
Peace
candidate, McClellan, who sat in his cottage on Orange Mountain, in New Jersey, and sulked because I wouldn’t give him another crack at a command. “The wish of my heart is to lead the Army of the Potomac in one more great campaign,” he told reporters and whatever general would listen. Meantime he connived with Copperheads—those Northern reptiles who wanted us to
surrender
the war—and other poisonous snakes. Stanton warned that any general who turned politics into
a game of blood
ran the risk of getting gored. And still McClellan intrigued, spurred on by his own battle fever. Convinced that every soldier in the land would vote for him, he conspired with the McClellan Legion of veterans’ clubs to deliver that vote. There were torchlight parades up the mountain, with Copperheads and Legionnaires, who despised each other and scuffled all along the mountain road. The Legionnaires arrived first, with broken lanterns and torn battle blouses; and while one side of the mountain lit up like a meteor, McClellan men did rally under a single banner.

Time to Swap Horses.

And then, one night, just after the convention in Chicago anointed Little Mac as the solitary soldier who could distance us from the dread
arbitrament
of war, I grew restless rambling on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, and called for the Presidential carriage, with its solid silver lamps and silvered steps that always seemed to sway. The coachman arrived, and I was alarmed. It was Tim, that recreant who had set fire to the stables and burnt our ponies alive. I could still listen to their lament sometimes, before I fell asleep.

I was startled to see his haggard face and ropey hands, his eyes like little pink buttons.

“Timothy, weren’t you arrested?”

“I was betrayed, sir. It was a false accusation. I would never harm your horses—I fed them every morning, combed their manes. I took much pride in their handsome coats. It was one of the gardeners, sir, who started that fire. He stole some cash from the Lady President. She got rid of him, and he took his revenge on the ponies.”

I searched those pink buttons, but the coachman’s eyes didn’t reveal a thing. I climbed into the carriage and told him to take me to the Willard. I didn’t want to rush over to the War Department and sit around with the cipher clerk—it would only have added to my gloom. I wanted some company, the pleasure of seeing a kind face under the soft blue hiss of the hotel’s gaslights.

We rolled down from the hills, passed one of our earthworks, with Tim clucking at the horses. The little fort lay abandoned; there were hats and old shoes lying around, and the rifle pits were all unmanned. We passed a row of privies that resembled a staggered, leaning platoon; a howitzer and a Parrott gun lay in the middle of the road on little trucks without wheels. And Tim had to steer around these
impediments
, or we might have spilled into a ravine.

I’d never traveled on such a forlorn route, where no picket challenged our right of passage, no colored farmers carried watermelons on their little trucks. I couldn’t recollect meeting one human eye, and we got to the Willard in record time. I clambered down silvered steps that stuck out like bristles and near broke my ankle.

“Shall I wait for you, sir?” he asked from his kingly chair.

“Go about your business, Tim. I’ll sleep at the Willard tonight.”

The Willard was as somber as that earthwork on the hill. I’d watched it flicker like a burning barn on most other nights. The doorman wasn’t even there to greet me in his high hat. I went into the lobby and fell into a blaze of light. The divans shone under the chandeliers, bristled like peacock tails. I was surrounded by an assembly of clerks.

“Mr. Lincoln, what a pleasant surprise!”

Bellboys hovered around, volunteering to be my runners—they would have delivered messages to Richmond, or to General Grant, would have scoured the whole of Dixie Land for a trace of Tecumseh, my missing general, and his missing men.

“Boys,” I said, “no traffic tonight. Not even to the telegraph office. I’m on a little holiday—at the Willard.”

I was served Maryland oysters and a drop of wine at my own little table in one of the Willard’s private parlors, though it wasn’t so private, and I wasn’t all alone. A voice shot out at me, like an electric bolt.

“Enjoying your midnight supper, Excellency?”

I peered into the shadows; an officer was sitting on a divan, his chin resting on the pommel of his sword. I recognized his silky mustache, and the military cape he was wearing in this infernal heat. Why wasn’t he on his mountain, where he belonged?

“General, what are ye doin’ at the Willard?”

“Oh, I’m having a little respite—from Stanton’s damn detectives. They’ve been following me everywhere.”

And you shouldn’t have been fooling around with Copperheads.

He sat humped in the shadows, with his chin on that sword; couldn’t see much more than a hint of his eyes. He’d always been a man of shadows, contemptuous of everyone who wasn’t part of his military family—and that included other generals.

“Excellency,” he whispered from his divan. “You can’t fool me with your killer in the long hat.
Unconditional Surrender Grant
. Well, I believe in terms—good terms, fair terms, not unconditional carnage. But Sherman is lost in the woods, and Grant’s beard will turn silver in the middle of his siege. I’ll sack them both first chance I get, send them to fight the Sioux.”

“And what fate have you prepared for me?”

I heard him titter in the dark. “You can become the President of a colored college—I’ll collect some cash, give you the first hundred dollars.”

“And I suppose you’ll send a peace commission to meet with Jeff Davis.”

The hate in him was palpable—I could feel it flutter around, a half-mad missile. Little Mac was like a secular bishop certain of his own divine sense, and I was the gadfly who got in his way.

“Excellency, you should have given me back my old command, and then you wouldn’t be in this pickle, staring at the man who’s going to steal your chair and send you flying back to Illinois.”

He brushed his mustache and chin beard with a little amber comb, as if he were posing for some invisible camera in the room. Little Mac was the
prettiest
general we ever had, and he would have been the first to acknowledge that. But there was a lilt in his left eye, a wayward slant, that left him with a deeply troubled look.

“I should silence Stanton, shut him up, before he slanders me again. You believe his canard that I met Bobbie Lee on the battlefield . . .”

Stanton loved to flesh out the old fable—that the two generals got together at Antietam, talked of peace while sitting on their mounts, that McClellan’s boys helped Lee skedaddle with his war wagons, let him race back across the river. But that fable didn’t wash. Lee took a spill from his horse and had to wear splints on both his arms. He was carted around in an ambulance during the whole battle. Even if he’d had the time or the inclination to meet with Little Mac, Lee wouldn’t have wanted a Union general to catch him lying flat, in an ambulance.

McClellan continued to swagger. “Excellency, I don’t care a tit what you think. West Pointers will have to decide our fate, not your conniving Secretary of War. I’ll break that man once I get to the White House.”

I had to skin him a little, disturb his silk mustache.

“And what if I delay the elections, and you can’t get in?”

He was silent for a moment, like some befuddled bear in a yellow sash. Then he broke from the shadows with a violent thrust. His chin beard twitched with rage. He’d never forgive me for having removed him from headquarters—with his horse no less.

“You wouldn’t have the brass. You’re good for emancipating colored people and telling vulgar jokes. You can’t even read the terrain on a map. You don’t have the stomach to stall the elections.”

Either I had to tamp his feathers down or spit some oyster juice into his wayward eye.

“General, did I ever tell you about my Harvard boy? Bob was of a scientific turn as a child. I bought him a microscope. Bob went around experimenting with his glass on everything. And one day, at the dinner table, I took up a piece of cheese. ‘Don’t eat that, Pa,’ said Bob. ‘It’s full of
wrigglers
.’ But I took a huge bite and said, ‘Son, let ’em
wriggle
. I can stand it if they can.’ ”

He wouldn’t stop perusing me from the heights of his chair.

“Are you demented, sir? What do your damn wrigglers have to do with me?”

“Nothing, General. I was
jest
in dire need of a joke.”

He gripped his sword, and he had such a demented look that I was fairly certain he was about to present me with my own ticket to hell. That’s how much bitterness and contempt he had with his sword held high. What would it have taken him to cleave me in two? I just sat there and sipped my wine. That enraged—and unraveled—him even more. He must have
imagined
my own blood as he slashed at the pillows and the curtains beside me, until the parlor was filled with feather dust, and his entire face had a fierce glint. Then he sat down again with a tiny mark of satisfaction, and a macabre grin.

“I could have gotten rid of you,” he said. “I had a million chances. My officers begged me to do it. Even now they beg me, even now. And people would stop me at the side of the road—good people, plain people, not politicians. They idolized Dan Webster, loved the black silk of his coat, said we were the lords of Pennsylvania Avenue, Dan and I, and you didn’t have one token of legitimacy. I should have marched on Washington and had you clamped in irons with your mad wife. Who would have stopped me?”

“No one,” I said.

And now he started to smile, with all the menace and the
meat
of it. “I wouldn’t have bothered your little boy with the lisp—I kinda like him. He could have served me wine at my headquarters, in that uniform the War Department allows him to wear—3
^rd
Lieutenant Tad.”

Exiled in New Jersey, stripped of his colors, and without men and boys to lead, he must have had an
infinity
of battle plans inside his head that maddened him beyond repair.

“Excellency, you ought to kiss my boots.
I
gave you Gettysburg. Your own officers said that ‘McClellan’s ghost’ won the battle, because the boys wouldn’t have fought with the same valor if they hadn’t assumed I was still in command. But you don’t have that
ghost
any more in your arsenal. All you have now are your nigger troops. And you dance with them while the nation leaks treasure and blood.”

He rose up on the pommel of his sword and left with all the clatter of a general; I could hear his spurs jangle across the parlors, their echo like a nightmare of splintered glass. I wondered where he would show up next. Would I encounter that splintered glass while I was on the privy, or when I carried Tad across the White House on my back? McClellan’s
madness
would always have a hold on me.

I walked through the Willard, my tall hat nearly bumping into the chandeliers. I couldn’t find much company—there wasn’t a soul to be seen in the women’s parlor. The rugs were cluttered with scraps of paper, cigar stumps, and spilled spittoons. I went out into the night, with that strange rattle of McClellan’s spurs still ringing in my ears.

46.

Mother’s Mission

I
T
WAS
DESOLATE
at dawn, with its clock tower tolling in the wind, its ticket office half shuttered, its ladies’ saloon in disrepair, full of debris. The stationmaster fumbled about with a big brass key in his fist, while troopers stood on guard in rubber raincoats. No one could get onto and off the cars without a government ticket or a special pass from the B&O. We crossed the depot, Keckly and I, and strode onto the platform of the main car shed, with its crumbling granite pillars and porous tin roof, and there she was in her pale gown, without the sign of a slipper or shoe, as if she’d strolled out her bedroom, and hadn’t traveled in her bare feet with a hatbox and a footstool to a stucco railroad station, north of the Capitol.

It was but a week after I’d met Little Mac at the Willard, and Mother had just returned from Maine. The wind yapped like a mad dog in that long tin tunnel, but she didn’t panic. She had a look of absolute bliss, like an eager child who had just made some startling discovery. Her reddish hair glowed in the tinny light. And for a moment she wasn’t even my wife, but Miss Mary Todd, a Lexington belle with a willful streak, and then I noticed the hatbox with its bruised cover, and her footstool, crouching like a gigantic mushroom, or a mottled toad.