Lincoln (89 page)

“Oh, I’ll keep my sights on Chase. Don’t worry.”

“Unfortunately, I am employed by the people to worry about everything. But I think Mr. Chase has made your task—and my embarrassment—a good deal easier with this circular. By allowing himself to be put forward in such a furtive way, he has distanced himself from me …”

“Distanced? He’s gone and stabbed you under the fifth rib!”

“Yes.” Lincoln turned and gazed thoughtfully at Blair.

“I understand you, Mr. President,” said Blair at last.

“Yes,” said Lincoln,” I think you do, Frank.”

Blair suddenly grinned. “Monty says the reason why you wanted me to come back to Congress was to destroy Chase.”

“It is curious how you Blairs see only the darkest motives in men, while I try only to dwell upon the true and the good.” The left eyebrow now suddenly dropped, obliging the left lid to cover, for an instant, the eye. The effect could not have been more like a deliberate wink.

AT THE
State Department, both of Seward’s eyes had shut in a most uncharacteristic blink of amazement. Dan Sickles was stretched out on the sofa, his stump arranged rather unattractively on the bolster that Seward often used as a pillow for his frequent naps. “What,” said Seward, opening his eyes again, “do the letters say?”

“I haven’t seen them. But Isaac Newton tells me that there are three of them, and that in all three Mrs. Lincoln makes it clear that she has received or expects to receive money for political services rendered.”

“Dear God in Heaven,” whispered Seward to a deity who, plainly, was capable of anything.

“They are clever,” said Sickles. “They wait until four months before the Nomination Convention, and then they ask for money, knowing there is no time for the President to maneuver in.”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t think so. The infamous Watt knows Mr. Newton, as one farmer knows another. Since Mr. Newton is now head of the Agricultural Bureau with access to the President, Watt approached him. Newton then asked me what to do. As Watt now lives in New York, I said I’d speak to you.”

Seward nodded. “You did the right thing. We must keep the President out of this.”

“If we can. He’s the one who’ll have to pay, after all.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand dollars for the three letters,” said Sickles. “Otherwise they will be published before the Convention, and Mr. Chase will then be nominated.”

Seward began to whistle to himself, a most imprecise sort of whistle as his pendulous lower lip did not precisely meet the upper. Then he asked, “Does Mrs. Lincoln know?”

“No.”

“That’s a blessing. Dan, I want you to go to New York. I want you to have a chat with Mr. Watt. Isn’t he supposed to be in the army?”

“He was. But now he isn’t. He’s operating a greenhouse. He feels that he was ill-treated over the Wikoff business.”

“He is apt to be worse treated in this matter.” Seward was prepared to take a considerable gamble. If it failed, the Administration might well be at an end. “When you get to New York, I want you to call on my friend Simeon Draper. You know him?”

Sickles nodded. “He’s the Seward-Weed man for the city.”

“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. He’s generally known as the Collector of the Port of New York. But I do use him for delicate matters. For instance, when I am obliged, as Secretary of State, to order the arrest and detainment at Fort Lafayette of anyone suspected of treason, Mr. Draper arranges the matter quietly with the Superintendent of Police, and the traitor vanishes until such time as I choose to release him—after the election, in this case.”

Sickles swung his stump to the floor. He smiled, and twirled his moustaches like an actor. “I trust that I will have in my pocket an order for the arrest of one John Watt, who, while at the White House, purloined state papers, and gave them to the enemy?”

“You will have it as soon as the ink is dry,” said Seward, writing rapidly on his official stationery.

“What if Mr. Watt has given copies of the letters to others?”

“They are simply copies—of forgeries. They prove nothing. It is the originals that concern us.” Seward signed his name with a flourish. “The originals you must get from Mr. Watt.”

“What if he refuses to give them up?”

“Dan, have you ever been inside Fort Lafayette?”

“No, Governor, I am happy to say that I’ve only been detained for murder in Washington’s highly civilized if verminous cells.”

“Well, it’s a fearsome place, the Fort. Ask Mr. Draper to describe it to Mr. Watt in great detail. Also”—Seward rolled a cigar between the palms of his hands—“a man can simply die of the fever in no time at all in one of those dark, damp, hideous, hopeless dungeons. It is truly amazing how a man can suddenly take ill and just … die, while he’s there in the spidery slithery dark.”

“Yes, Governor.” Sickles, well pleased, took the warrant and put it in his tunic.

Five days after the publication of the Pomeroy circular, Frank Blair rose in the House of Representatives and began an attack on what he called the Jacobins in his native Missouri. But as Blair spoke, the powerful voice ringing throughout the chamber, the attack went beyond those Missouri abolitionists who sought to undermine the Administration. “I say here in my place and upon my responsibility as a Representative that a more profligate administration of the Treasury Department never existed under any government, that the whole Mississippi Valley is rank and fetid with the frauds and corruptions of its agents; that ‘permits’ to buy cotton are just as much a marketable commodity as the cotton itself; that these permits to buy cotton are brought to St. Louis and other western cities by politicians and favorites from all over the country and sold on ‘change’ to the highest bidder, whether he is a secessionist or not, and that, too, at a time when the best Union men in these cities are denied permits.”

Washburne, from his front-row seat, saw that a number of Senators had come over from their side of the Capitol to hear the voice of the Blairs raised against Chase. One was Sprague, who stood at the main door, listening carefully.

Blair was now attacking the so-called trade stores, which Chase had established in those sections of the seceded states that had been occupied by Federal troops. “These trade stores are given to political partisans and favorites, who share the profits with other men who furnish the capital, Mr. Chase furnishing capital to his friends and partisans in the shape of permits and privilege to monopolize the trade of a certain district.”

Chase sat at his desk, reading Blair’s speech with a sense that he might, suddenly, burst. “ ‘Some of them, I suppose, employ themselves in distributing that “strictly private” circular which came to life the other day which informs us that the friends of Mr. Chase have been secretly forming an organization in his favor all over the country and which charges the Administration of Mr. Lincoln with corruption. None knew better than the friends of Mr. Chase at whose door does that corruption lie as their efforts to stifle investigation here so plainly prove.’

“It is monstrous,” Chase said to Jay Cooke, who was staring through
the light rain that fell now between the Treasury and his bank. “There are no specific charges of any kind. Just …” Chase could not finish; his heart was pounding; he had just become fifty-six years of age, and he had the sense that at any moment life could take wing from his aging body.

“Well, Pomeroy’s circular hasn’t helped us,” said Cooke. “That’s for sure. But we’ll be hanging Mr. Blair in due course, and in the same place.”

“But the damage that this does me! True or false don’t matter when this speech is spread all around the country. I must resign.”

“Don’t you think that you should wait to hear what the President has to say?” Chase knew that Jay Cooke did not believe in anticipating trouble. But then Cooke did not understand how politicians communicate with one another.

“Mr. Cooke,” said Chase, lowering himself into his teakwood throne, to be abdicated more soon now than late, “we have already heard from Mr. Lincoln.”

“He’s written you?”

“No, he has not written me. He has sent me his message through Frank Blair.”

Jay Cooke shook his head with disbelief. “He controls Frank Blair?”

“Mr. Lincoln, in his strange, shifting, weak way, controls almost everyone. You see why I cannot stay.”

“Wait for his letter, Mr. Chase.”

The President had finished the letter in question and was rereading it when Robert, home from Harvard, came into the office. Lincoln handed him the letter and said, “How does this sound to you? It is to Mr. Chase, who thinks he should resign over the Pomeroy circular.”

“He should. Don’t you agree?”

“Read.”

Robert read; then asked, with some wonder, “You’ve
never
read the circular?”

“No. There are some things it is often better not to know.”

“Just curiosity would drive me to look at it.”

“I think I lack that bump,” said his father.

Robert finished the letter. “You’re keeping him in the Cabinet?”

Lincoln nodded. “In a sort of casual way. I think Frank Blair has pretty much taken the wind out of Mr. Chase’s sails. He can never win the nomination now. Find a messenger and send this over to the Treasury.” Robert took the letter and left the office. Seward entered from the Cabinet Room.

“Well, Governor, I’ve just gone and patched things up with Mr. Chase.”

“After ordering his execution on the floor of Congress.”

“Well, you know the Blairs.” Lincoln stared vaguely out the window at the truncated monument to the first President, dirty white against the dark wintry sky.

Seward took a deep breath; and then he told Lincoln of John Watt and the three letters. He was now happy to report that Sickles had been successful. Threatened with Fort Lafayette, the price had dropped from twenty thousand to fifteen hundred dollars, which Sickles had paid. Seward had the letters. As long as the war was on and
habeas corpus
suspended, Watt could never speak out. Once the war was done, it made no difference.

As Seward spoke, Lincoln leaned against the window frame; his face did not change expression, but since the face in repose was always deeply melancholy, he seemed now, to Seward’s eye, a graven image of sorrow. He showed no surprise at any part of the story. When Seward was finished, Lincoln said, “Have you the letters?”

Seward gave the three letters to Lincoln, who promptly put them, unread, in the fireplace, where they swiftly turned to ash. Then Lincoln went to his writing desk and wrote out a personal check in the amount of fifteen hundred dollars and gave it to Seward. “Repay Sickles or whoever provided the actual money.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a long silence as Lincoln stared into the fire and Seward examined, yet again, the furious face of old Andrew Jackson, so very like, in expression, that of Mr. Blair, Senior. Finally, Lincoln said, “You know, Governor, that I do not ever discuss personal matters with anyone, as they tend to be painful for me and I see no need to share the pain. But as you have become so intimately involved with my family, I think I should give you my view of all this, and that is that the … caprices of Mrs. Lincoln, I am satisfied, are the result”—Lincoln rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, as if not to
see
what he was about to say—“of partial insanity.”

Since nothing that Seward could say on the subject would be of any use, he simply replied, “I am glad we could be helpful. The episode is over.”

“Well,
this
episode is over.”

In the front parlor of Sixth and E the political managers of Salmon Portland Chase had just accepted, somberly, the end of a crucial episode. All pretense that Kate did not involve herself in politics had been dropped. It was she who stood before the fireplace like the conductor of an orchestra, while Chase slumped passively in his usual chair and the brothers Cooke sat side by side on a loveseat. Sprague poured himself brandy from
a decanter. In the five months that he had been married, he had several times given up drink for good. Senator Pomeroy folded and refolded a handkerchief, as if it were the Union’s own sacred flag.

“I cannot believe that Ohio has deserted us.” Kate was white with anger.

“Well, they have,” said Henry D. “I always said one of us should have gone back last month and rallied the legislators …”

“But Father was there himself in October. I’ve never seen such crowds, and now they have all turned against us.”

“I’ve written my friend Mr. Hall of Toledo a letter saying that I wish no further consideration of my name.” Chase himself did not find it hard to believe that his old friends and allies had turned from him to Lincoln. That was the nature of politics. Lincoln was the president; and the president controls the party apparatus. Six months earlier, when the military news was bad, Chase might have prevailed. But since the war was now going well, the Republicans were not about to switch horses in the midst of history’s stream. On the other hand, there was an excellent chance that the people of the country might be inclined to elect a Democrat in November. Already Chase had received a hint or two from leading Democrats displeased with McClellan. But Chase knew that it would take a political miracle for him to gain the Democratic nomination; and miracles were in peculiarly short supply at Sixth and E.

“We did our best, Mr. Chase.” Pomeroy folded his handkerchief yet again. “We are nowhere near finished, of course. I have talked to many Republican leaders, and they believe that our strategy should be to lie low for the time being, while working with the Frémont faction in the party. Then, at the convention itself, we should be able to stop Lincoln. Once he is eliminated, who else is there but Mr. Chase?”

“That seems sound,” said Jay Cooke; he turned to Chase. “What was the President’s response to your letter about the circular?”

“He waited until
after
Frank Blair’s attack on me, then he wrote to say that he agreed with me that neither of us could control his friends and that I should remain at the Treasury.” Chase had wanted to tear up the letter; but dared not. He knew now that he would have to remain where he was and endure in the most public way the humiliation of one who had tried and failed to supplant a rival who had, in the most public way, outwitted him. Within three days of the publication of the circular, Lincoln had arranged for the Republicans in the Ohio legislature to reject their native son, Chase, and unanimously support the President. Within five days of the circular’s publication, Lincoln had inspired Frank Blair to accuse his own Secretary of the Treasury of corruption. Then, two days later, Lincoln
wrote Chase his friendly but, to Chase, highly condescending letter—of victory.