Lincoln (7 page)

“Yes, that’s
just
what you said.” Lincoln turned to Hay, “Word for word,” he added. With a low bow, Hay left the two statesmen to what, he suspected, was going to be a most disagreeable session. Sumner had supported Lincoln in the election; but now Sumner feared Seward’s ascendancy over the new President. Sumner wanted Lincoln to abolish slavery in the seceded states. But Lincoln was not about to do that, not with Virginia and Maryland on the verge of secession, and half a dozen border-states, including Kentucky, ready to follow. On the train from Springfield, as Hay observed the large crowds that cheered the President-elect (everywhere except in New York City, where there was a powerful pro-secessionist movement), he had come to think of Lincoln as a beleaguered fortress, with cannons firing at him from every direction; a fortress waiting to be relieved by … But Hay did not know by what. No one knew what was in Lincoln’s mind. Particularly not the boisterous young men crowded at the far end of Willard’s bar, drinking cocktails at ten cents a glass.

Hay pushed through the swinging doors of the long bar just off the main parlor of the hotel, where ladies sat beneath a gilded dome, drinking tea and casting disapproving—when not envious—looks at the men as they entered and left the bibulous good fellowship of the smoky, long bar.

Hay found the smooth-faced—the boy could but would not grow whiskers—Robert Lincoln, talking to a short, bright-eyed young man who was already beginning to go bald. Robert introduced Hay to the young man, saying, “He graduated from Harvard the same year you graduated from Brown.”

“Well, that’s a bond, I guess,” said Hay, ordering a brandy-smash.

The Harvard graduate was examining Hay curiously. “You’re one of Mr. Lincoln’s secretaries, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Everyone says Johnny’s too young.” Robert smiled shyly; but then he was shy; and a bit solemn. Two years earlier he had been uprooted by his father and sent east to enroll at Harvard. But since he had not been scholastically ready for that great university he had been obliged to spend a year in preparation at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. It was said that Mr. Lincoln wanted the best possible education for his oldest son just as he himself had had the very worst, which is to say practically none at all. After the debate with Douglas and the lost election, Lincoln decided to travel east to see how his son was getting on at Exeter. It was on this trip—coincidentally, hardly any claimed—that Mr. Lincoln
was prevailed upon to speak third in a series at New York’s Cooper Institute. He did so on February 27, 1860. The liberal editor of the New York
Evening Post
, William Cullen Bryant, chaired the meeting, while the city’s most powerful editor, Horace Greeley, sat in the audience. The next day Lincoln was known to the entire nation. With characteristic eloquence, he had accepted the slavery at the South, but he had opposed its extension elsewhere. This pleased a majority of the Republicans, while arousing great suspicion among Douglas’s Northern Democrats, not to mention the Democrats of the South. After Lincoln’s triumph at the Cooper Institute, he spoke elsewhere in the northeast, and in the course of this triumphal passage, he took the Republican nomination away from the powerful Seward as well as from that passionate anti-slavery man Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. “So if it hadn’t been for you, Bob,” Lincoln liked to say, “being up there at Exeter, I’d never have been nominated or elected.” Robert appeared to believe this. Hay did not. From the beginning of his close association with Lincoln—less than a year but it seemed like a lifetime—he had been delightedly conscious of the Tycoon’s endless cunning. There was nothing that Lincoln ever left to chance if he could help it. He was a master of guiding public opinion either directly through a set speech to a living audience or, indirectly, through an uncanny sense of how to use the press to his own ends. He was also the first politician to understand the importance and the influence of photography; no photographer was ever sent away unsatisfied. He had even grown a beard in order to soften his somewhat harsh features; and to make himself, at least in appearance, the nation’s true Father Abraham. It was thus with characteristic forethought he had sent his son to New England to school so that with no other apparent end than ordinary paternal care, he might, when the time came, go east—and seize the crown.

“Hey, Johnny! Hasheesh Johnny Hay!” Hay turned and recognized the face but not the name of a fraternity brother from Brown. They made the fraternal handclasp of Theta Delta Chi. Since the young man was drunk, Hay pulled him to one side, out of range of Robert Lincoln, who was very much enjoying his anonymity, soon to end when the newspapers got through illustrating, one by one, the entire Lincoln family. Hay also did not want anyone to learn his college nickname.

“What’re you doing in town?”

Hay recalled that the brother was Southern; was glad that the brother did not know of his appointment. “Oh, I’m just here for the inaugural.” Hay was casual.

“If there is one!” The drunken youth scowled as darkly as such a foolish
face could. “Me, I’m going home to Charleston to fight, if we have to. I guess you’re for the Yankees, aren’t you?”

“I guess so,” said Hay.

“Well …” Words did not come easily to the soon-to-be-rebel. But a sheet of paper did materialize in his hand. “I take the boat in the morning. But as we’re brothers, I leave you this. My richest legacy.”

Hay looked at a neatly printed list of names and addresses; some were curiously cryptic, like The Haystack—his eye caught that at once—or The Blue Goose, The Devil’s Own … After each name or title there was a number. “They’ve been numbered from one—which is the best—to five, which is pretty bad. Three of the brothers put this list together. Took more than a month to do. Now they’ve all gone South. Anyway, you can give copies of it to anybody you like, I guess. But they did say they’d prefer that only the Delts got the real good of it. ’Bye, Johnny.”

It took Hay several days to figure out that he had been given what turned out to be a meticulously graded list of Washington’s whorehouses. He was eternally grateful to the brother: at twenty-two, there was no finer gift one Theta Delt could have given another. A similar list had existed in the fraternity house at Providence and Hay had used it, from time to time, to while away what he liked to call “idle hours.” One of the fraternity’s most legendary idle hours occurred when Hay decided to imitate his idol Edgar Allan Poe. Although he could find no opium to eat, he did come across some hasheesh, which he and the brothers had smoked, with results still recalled in Providence as an idle hour that had expanded to what seemed to the smokers to be an idle eternity. Ever after, he was Hasheesh Johnny Hay.

Hay rejoined Robert and the bald young man, who turned out to be Henry, the son of Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, a Lincoln supporter. “I saw our senator on his way upstairs,” said Henry. “I assumed he was on his way to Mr. Lincoln.”

Hay nodded. “I left them together. I think Mr. Sumner was about to make a speech.”

Henry sighed. “He is like a madman nowadays …”

“Well, he was knocked on the head with a stick, wasn’t he? By that crazy Southerner?” Robert started to order another drink but Hay made a warning gesture; and Robert desisted. There were times when Hay had the sense that he had been hired not as a secretary to the President but as an elder brother to the boys.

“Oh, Mr. Sumner’s recovered. Pretty much, anyway. But he seems to have conversed with God altogether too much during those three years
that he was an invalid. When he came back to the Senate, he announced, ‘I am in morals, not politics.’ ”

“That
is
chilling,” said Hay.

“Much my own view,” said Henry; and smiled for the first time. “I should think that the two are probably antithetical. My father disagrees, of course. I’m
his
secretary, by the way. He’s in the Congress, you know.”

“I know. I know. Mr. Lincoln thinks very highly of Mr. Adams.”

“That’s right,” said Robert. “Fact, he said, maybe he was going to—”

“Robert!” Hay spoke warningly.

“All right, Johnny.”

“Mr. Robert Lincoln …” Hay began.

“The Prince of Rails, as the press calls him. Oh, they’ll enjoy
that
at Harvard,” said Henry, whose smile, at best, was thin indeed.

“I’ll never hear the end of it.” Robert was glum. “At least they couldn’t get me to make a speech on the back of the cars. I don’t know how Father does it.”

Henry turned to Robert. “I know my father’s being considered for minister to England. Personally, I’d rather he stayed here.”

“And miss out on London?” Hay betrayed his own youthful interest. For Hay, London was literature—Dickens, Thackeray and whoever wrote
Adam Bede
, and history. Washington was just old-shoe politics.

“I’d rather miss out on London than on Lincoln,” said Henry.

“Why?” Hay was truly curious.

“Well, if he should fail, there will no longer be a country. And since my family believes that we invented the whole thing, I’d certainly like to see what becomes of the remains.”

“I don’t think he’ll fail,” said Hay, who thought that he would; as much as he prayed that somehow Lincoln might yet hold together what was now falling apart with such awful speed.

“In that case, if he succeeds, it will be even more interesting.”

“How? It will be just as it was before.”

“No, it won’t. It can’t be.”

“What
will
it be?”

“No one knows. That’s the excitement.”

A
T EXACTLY
nine o’clock that same evening, Salmon P. Chase, late governor of Ohio and senator-elect, stood outside Parlor Suite Six with the delegation from the Peace Conference. Chase had not seen Lincoln since shortly after the election, when the President-elect summoned him to Springfield. Lincoln then beat a number of times about the bush before he offered Chase—or, perhaps did
not
offer Chase—a post in the Cabinet.

They were walking down the street that passed in front of Lincoln’s comfortable mansion—so unlike, thought Chase sourly, the legendary log cabin of Lincoln’s birth, which had been advertised from one end of the union to the other. Lincoln was courteous but tentative; and Chase, who had never thought him strong, came away convinced that the President-to-be was dangerously weak. “I look for a balanced Cabinet, naturally,” he said, automatically raising his tall hat to a passing lady. It was then that Chase noticed that Lincoln kept an elaborate file of papers
inside
the hat. At least the man was every bit as common as he presented himself; the mediocrity was honest. On the other hand, Chase was less certain about Lincoln’s views. Essentially, he had thought him an opportunist. Yet it was Lincoln who had prevailed at the convention and it was the governor of Ohio who was meekly following the tall man down the street. “Mr. Seward, who got the second most votes at the convention, is plainly the party’s own choice for Secretary of State.”

“Has he accepted?”

“Yes.” Lincoln did not elaborate. “You, sir, got the third most votes.”

Chase had stopped breathing with excitement: the offer of the Treasury was near at hand. But Lincoln veered off. “Then there was Bates of Missouri and Cameron of Pennsylvania.”

“Sir, Mr. Simon Cameron is corrupt.”

“I have been told that.” Lincoln sounded grim.

“Of course, he controls Pennsylvania.” Chase had needled Lincoln.

“But
I
am Honest Abe,” Lincoln replied, with what Chase took to be a weak smile. Then he changed the subject. “I want a Southerner in the Cabinet. A real Southerner. Preferably a Virginian. Seward is canvassing for me now.”

“Any luck?”

Lincoln stopped then. He had looked down at Chase—a stout, cleanshaven man with a nearly bald Roman bust of a head. “Sir, let me make
you a curious proposal. I would like you to be Secretary of the Treasury but I cannot offer you the post just yet.”

Chase contained his indignation. He had had, thus far, a splendid career and had he been more expedient and less moral, he, not Lincoln, would have been the Republican candidate. But if you cannot get cream, settle for milk, had always been his practical wisdom. But now Lincoln was suggesting that even the despised saucer of milk might not come his way. Since Chase did not betray his chagrin, the two men had parted on friendly terms. Fortunately, the complaisant Ohio legislature was more than willing to appoint Salmon P. Chase to the United States Senate, so at least he would hold some office in this disintegrating republic.

Now Chase stood at Lincoln’s door as the delegates from the Peace Conference fell into place behind him. The Southerners were particularly keen to see the demon. As the clock in the lobby below struck nine, Nicolay opened the door, bowed to Chase, and motioned for the delegation to file into the parlor where Lincoln, quite alone, stood in front of the fireplace.

“Mr. Chase!” Lincoln’s handclasp was warmer than his voice, thought Chase, unable to interpret the auguries in question. He had already heard that Cameron was to have not the Treasury but the War Department; and Lincoln was supposed to be having second thoughts about that. The Treasury—after the presidency—was what Chase most wanted. Bates of Missouri was not suitable; and no Southerner would serve. The Maryland Blairs, mad father and two mad sons, were also at work trying to capture Lincoln, but though Chase was convinced that Lincoln was weak, he was equally convinced that he was extremely wily. Chase had not yet heard any particulars of the Albany Plan. If he had, he would have been in despair. Chase truly feared Seward and his mentor Thurlow Weed.

Chase handed Lincoln a letter from the head of the Peace Conference, former President Tyler. “He sends his compliments, sir. He hopes to call on you at another time.”

“I shall call on
him
, of course.” Lincoln’s courtesy was perfunctory. He turned to the semicircle of delegates, who stared at him as if he were some sort of rare beast. “Gentlemen, I know some of you personally from the past. I know all of you by name and repute. I am glad that this conference continues, and I will do what I can to give assurance and reassurance to the Southern states that we mean them no harm. It is true that I was elected to prevent the extension of slavery to the new territories of the Union. But what is now the status quo in the Southern states is beyond my power—or desire—ever to alter.”