Lincoln (68 page)

Seward laughed wholeheartedly. Mrs. Douglas, pleased to have made him laugh, said, “As the eyes and ears—not to mention gaoler—of the government, what has become of my poor aunt, Mrs. Greenhow?”

“We exchanged her and a number of other lady spies some time ago …”

“I know. I was so grateful. But I thought it better not to put anything in writing to you. Yes, I know you sent her to Richmond. But then what happened to her?”

“
You
don’t know?” Seward wondered if Mrs. Douglas might not be lying. There were times when he felt that, except for a few hundred outlander politicians like himself, Washington was the actual capital of the rebellion.

“If I knew, Mr. Seward, I would not ask.” This was dignified.

“According to my spies—and they are, literally, spies—Mrs. Greenhow is now living in Paris, paying court to the empress, and intriguing to get the French to recognize the Confederacy or, failing that, to annex all of Mexico, a bone of contention between Mr. Mercier, over there, and me.”

“My aunt is so—vehement.” Mrs. Douglas shook her head. Then she embraced the Baroness Gerolt while the Baron greeted his crony Seward.

“Well, Governor,” said Gerolt in his heavily accented English, “I have written my government today that the war will be finished one way or the other before the first of the year.”

“One way, Baron, yes; but why the other?” Seward took the teacup that a maid brought him.

“Berlin requires me to sound neutral.”

“I wish London required the same of Lord Lyons. I tell you the British legation should be called the rebel legation. I think you may be right,” Seward added, in a low voice. “We seem to be preparing for the final confrontation in Virginia. Lee and all his army are at Fredericksburg, or so I read in the newspapers.”

Gerolt laughed. “I am told, through
our
newspapers, that our new chief of Cabinet very much admires the way that you arrest editors but he dares not do the same in Prussia because he says that, unlike you, he is devoted to freedom of speech.”

“Mr. Bismarck has a nice wit.”

“We think so, privately. Also, privately, he is fascinated by this war of yours.”

“He can come and take it away with him any day of the week, my dear Baron. It is all his.”

“I shall transmit your proposal. Meanwhile, I have sent him your latest book.”

Seward had just published a volume of his speeches and correspondence as Secretary of State. He had been heavily criticized for doing such a thing while in office; and in wartime. He had even been accused by Sumner of levity and cynicism and indifference to the abolitionist cause.

John Hay bowed low to Seward. “Premier,” he said.

“Young man.” Seward acknowledged the obeisance with a wave of his long pale hand.

“Baron.” Hay shook hands with the Prussian, who smiled benignly. “Miss Carlota has done me the honor of saying that she will come to the theater with me, if I have your consent.”

“I will telegraph Berlin.”

As Hay and Gerolt chatted amiably, Hay watched Seward, who was surveying the room with his usual quizzical air. Hay wondered how much Seward knew of the plot to remove him. Resourceful and clever as the little man was, he had grown more and more estranged from his one-time colleagues in the Senate, where the chiefs of the anti-Seward cabal were located.

Shortly after McClellan’s removal, Senators Wade, Hale and Fessenden had called on the President to congratulate him. The meeting had been pleasant enough; but there had been a number of pointed references to Seward’s lack of zeal in the matter of abolition. Lincoln had chosen to ignore, through deflection, these comments. Now something was stirring at the Capitol. Ben Wade had been quoted as saying that the war could never be won until Seward was sent away and a lieutenant-general—a true
Republican—placed in command of the entire nation, as dictator. Who this potentate should be, Wade did not say. But Chase was always a magical figure for the senatorial members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Mrs. Eames led the Prussian minister away. Seward turned to Hay. “I sometimes wonder what is the use of growing old. You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.” Seward sighed, theatrically. He had used almost the exact same words to Hay in the autumn as preface to the latest human folly that had allegedly come his way—military jealousy. He had been appalled that McClellan, envious of Pope, had let Pope go down in flames at Bull Run. Now Seward was on another not-too-dissimilar tack. “I have only just begun to understand what ambition will do to a man.”

“You mean Mr. Chase, sir?”

“Johnny!” Seward feigned shock. “I never speak ill of a colleague; or of anyone. It is my custom to speak only in wise generalities, occasionally decorated by the odd aphorism or insight so annoying to Senator Sumner. But I do believe Mr. Chase is altogether too frequent a visitor to the Capitol. Mind you, during the redecoration—so tastefully if expensively done—I can see his eagerness to observe how the Treasury’s money is spent. Now that it looks as if they may actually put a permanent dome over the rotunda, I realize that he has a proprietary feeling—even one of kinship, since the dome is bound to resemble his own noble head, and yet why does he forgather with the Jacobins, who detest this Administration? And why was he observed yesterday in the Speaker’s chamber, staring at himself in a gold-framed mirror and—thinking himself alone—saying to his reflection, with solemn unction, ‘Mr. President Chase’?”

Hay roared with laughter at the image. Seward grinned mischievously. He had said all that he had intended to say on the subject but he had sent Hay a signal. Seward was one of the few people who knew that Hay often wrote Washington stories, anonymously, for the New York newspapers. Hay’s speciality was inside information about the Administration, which seemed, at first, to be scandalous but then proved to be subtly favorable to the President. He often published in the
World
, a newspaper noted for its virulent hatred of Lincoln. It gave Hay a good deal of pleasure to know that the editor never suspected that he was being manipulated by the President’s own secretary. Meanwhile, Hay and Nicolay had seen to it that journalists of every sort had been given military and civilian posts in different parts of the country so that they could then write stories favorable to the Administration for their old newspapers.

During Hay’s first year in the White House, he had thought it a good
idea to keep his own stories secret from the Ancient. But since Thurlow Weed and Seward both knew—it was Weed who had made the arrangements with the
World
and the
Journal
—Weed had promptly blabbed to the President, who had been troubled. “Is it proper?” he had asked Hay.

“Is it proper, sir,” Hay had answered, “that we are never allowed to answer our critics in those papers?”

Lincoln had let the matter drop; and Hay continued his secret journalistic career. He had been amused to learn from Seward that the son of the American minister to the Court of St. James, Henry Adams, was doing exactly the same thing; and only Seward knew about both young men. But then only Seward probably knew everything worth knowing on earth, thought Hay, who said, “I wonder if the readers of the
World
might be interested. I’m sure the editor, Mr. Marble …”

“What a terrible man is Manton Marble!” With that, Seward, inscrutable as Ignatius Loyola himself, crossed the room in order to torment M. Mercier about Mexico. Hay had received his instruction. He was to expose the Chase cabal against Seward and, ultimately, the President.

Mr. Eames joined Hay at the fireplace. Coal burned and hissed in the grate. The parlor was warm; but Hay was always chilly now. He stood with his back to the fire as his host complimented him on the President’s message to Congress, which Nicolay had allowed Hay to deliver, in person.

“I thought some of it even poetic,” said Eames. “Highly poetic.”

“Even Shakespearean?”

Eames smiled. “That is a little lofty, perhaps. But the last lines had their echoes.” The Tycoon had labored for weeks on the message, the first since his party’s electoral set-back in November. The ending had been beautiful. “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

But there had been many objections made to the principal theme of the message, the buying of the slaves by the government; and then their colonization elsewhere. Hay thought Lincoln somewhat obsessed on the subject of colonization, while Mr. Eames thought that Lincoln was under some sort of hallucination about the nature of the war itself. “Mind you, I’m an old Democratic editor, and so I see things with a half-Southern eye. But when the President thinks that the rebellion will end if we compensate the slave-owners with money, he totally mistakes what the war is about.”

“What, then, is it about?” Hay had often wondered. No explanation
had ever seemed to him entirely plausible. It was like the fever; it came for no reason and left for no reason.

“I thought Mr. Lincoln understood that better than any man, at the beginning. It was the principle that the Union cannot be dissolved, ever.”

“But it had been dissolved before he was inaugurated.”

“So he started the war in order to put the Union back together again. That is what the fighting is all about. But now he seems to have shifted over to the slavery side, and there he is wrong—in my humble view. He tells us that in the thirty-eight years between now and 1900, the government can sell bonds and pay off the slave-owners. Well, perhaps, it can. But what makes him think that any Southerner will put down his arms because the government is willing to pay him for his slaves? The South is not fighting for slavery, Mr. Hay. The South is fighting for independence. You can buy all their slaves, and they’ll take the money. But they will not come back into the Union except by force.”

“You think it has gone so far?” Hay had not heard a supporter of the Union present so confidently—and plausibly—the Southern case.

“Oh, Mr. Hay, the cost! Think of all the blood that has been shed; and think of all that will be shed; and then ask yourself, will any man say that he has fought in so terrible a war just for the right to keep slaves? No, he will say that he fought to keep his country free; and he will mean it.”

CERTAINLY
, John Surratt meant it, as he and David crossed Pennsylvania Avenue, the wet snow swirling all about them. John described what had happened the day before on the Rappahannock. “I was supposed to come straight here. But then all hell broke loose, starting Saturday in this terrible fog, and going on till yesterday when the Yanks retreated back across the river. They lost three times the men we did. I know. I saw a lot of the fighting from near Marye’s Hill, where our artillery was. We made a trap for Burnside; and he fell into it.”

The two young men entered Sullivan’s Saloon, just off the avenue, now filled with ambulance carriages. Although the saloon’s owner had been born in Ireland, he was entirely dedicated to the Confederacy. But since practically everything that Sullivan said was posed as a joke, Pinkerton’s men had given him no real trouble, while he, in return, had made all sorts of trouble for the secret service, passing on false information, usually having to do with the vast size of the Confederate armies.

David and John sat at the back of the bar, near the Franklin stove. The floor was strewn with sawdust turned to mud as a result of wet boots, spilled beer and the spittle of tobacco-chewers. Though it was noon,
gaslights hissed cozily from the low ceiling and the free lunch was now being set out by a mulatto waiter, as loyal to the Confederacy as his employer. David helped himself to a boiled egg while Sullivan himself brought them mugs of beer. The front of the bar was crowded with what looked to be countryfolk of the sort who brought their produce to the Center Market, which was what many of them did. But there were also a pair of night-riders, drinking whiskey and talking to each other in low voices.

Sullivan sat with John and David; he listened with fascination to John’s account of the Union army’s defeat at Fredericksburg. “What happens now?” Sullivan asked, when John paused for a moment in his delighted if somewhat awed account.

John shrugged. “I guess General Burnside will stick there in the mud till spring. Or he’ll retreat to here.” John shook his head. “A year ago they were almost in Richmond and now they can’t even cross the Rappahannock, sixty miles away.”

“They can’t fight, which is lucky for us,” said David, repeating what his friends were always saying.

“Oh, they can fight,” said John. “You never saw anything like how wave after wave of them went up that hill only to get blown to bits by the cannon in the breastworks. They don’t have one good general, that’s what is lucky for us. They also don’t have us night-riders,” he added in a whisper. “We’ve got Pinkerton so full of misinformation now that he truly thinks General Lee has a million men under arms, and that we’re fixing to kidnap Lincoln.”

“Why don’t we?” asked David.

“There’s no point. We’re winning. Lee’s going to be in Philadelphia by summer. When that happens, the war ends.”

Sullivan nodded. Absently, he cleaned the rough wood of the table with a rag. “One of the wild boys took a shot at Old Abe last August on Seventh Street road, and when the Colonel heard what he had done he was mad as could be.” The nameless Colonel was someone whom David had yet to see, that he knew of. He was the link between Richmond and the Confederate agents in Washington. Sometimes David thought that Sullivan himself might be the Colonel; certainly, he quoted him often; and seemed to know him.

“Why was he mad?” asked John. “It would be a righteous thing to shoot the man who thinks he’s going to free our niggers.”

“It may be righteous, but the Colonel said that with President Lincoln in charge of this war, it is as good as won for us.”