My Name Is Mary Sutter (35 page)

Chapter Forty-six

That evening, Saturday the sixth of September, Abraham Lincoln climbed toward the roof on the spiral iron stairway he had discovered behind a door in an attic room. Through unfinished walls shrouded with spider webs, he could hear the occasional crash of china drifting up from the East Room. After the week’s terrible news, it astounded him that people still attended the regular Saturday night levee, though in the crush the guests’ uncertain gaze had followed him more closely than usual on his round of handshaking and salutations. He usually enjoyed these public opinion baths, but tonight he had not wanted to hear the shouted questions, proffered opinions, and clinging entreaties about Lee’s whereabouts.

With each ascending stair, Lincoln’s heart thundered against his chest wall. He had learned not to panic when his heart betrayed him like this. It calmed usually, over time, though his wife always took fright when he had to pause to catch his breath.

Sometimes he thought his heart might burst, it beat so hard.

Two more steps and he was out the door, taking great, gulping breaths of the muggy stench of Washington. Bent over, his hands to his knees, he willed his racing heart to slow, imagining that if it did not, he might die up here and no one would find him for days. Unlike the divided country, or George McClellan even, his heart began finally to obey, and as a faint northerly breeze began to bestow tepid relief, Lincoln straightened, removed his coat, his tie, and loosened the buttons of his shirt.

No doubt Hay would soon be searching the East Room for him. Or Mary, or Tad, racing between the silk ball gowns and worsted pants legs of the guests to impart him some welcome piece of distraction from the social hoohah.

The problem with being president, Lincoln decided, was that he was rarely ever alone when he needed to be, except in the deep hours of the night, and even then the house echoed with the ghost of Willie. Even up here, he couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t once again imagine that Willie was beside him. Lately he had found himself talking to his dead son. The other day, when his pants leg had grazed the arm of a chair, he’d even turned to snatch Willie up in his arms the way he used to.

Before.

Lincoln leaned now against the parapet and gazed westward toward the half-built Washington Monument barely visible against the Arlington Heights, the fort campfires flickering like yellow stars above the moat of the Potomac. Perhaps Mary was right, perhaps the dead did try to communicate from the grave. Her cadre of spiritualists had certainly convinced her, and she derived comfort from their tales, poor woman, though he simply could not tolerate the sitting around of tables and the holding of hands in the dark. What his money sometimes went to. But still, perhaps. Above the clatter of carriage traffic, he strained now to see if he could hear Willie’s high prattle, but it was just the lowing of the army cattle grazing on the mall, the raucous banging of a tavern piano from nearby Murder Bay, and the party noises floating up from the East Room.

Ghosts. Or not.

Lincoln peered through the dying evening light at the vulnerable city in his care. Why shouldn’t his family share in the general grief? Willie, in Mary’s mind, had been more than enough to pay. And if he commanded his grown son Robert to leave Harvard and enter the army, he was certain Mary would imprison the boy in his room to prevent his going. Somewhere out there in the gloaming was a Rebel army intent upon conquering Washington. There had been skirmishes at Fairfax and Falls Church. Closer even than Manassas. For a moment, Lincoln allowed himself to imagine the worst: a surrender, the handing over of the Mansion’s keys, the Union irretrievably sundered. It was this that had sent him wheezing up the stairway away from the spying eyes of the nervous party guests.

This, and the need to entertain a single, unadulterated moment of despair: What if he failed?

Almost a year and a half had passed since the war had started. Since this most recent debacle at Bull Run, Lee was marching north, primed either to circle back and attack Washington or to press even farther northward, perhaps even to seize Philadelphia or New York. The maneuver would destroy the country forever, a country built on principle and purpose. It was bruising to think that he might preside over the country’s bloody cessation, and then immediately he was conscious of the vanity. The personal vainglory of worrying about how he might be perceived. What history would be written of the destroyed democratic experiment of a young, unsustainable country would be brief in the annals of time, his part a mere whisper. The failure not his alone. But still, what Lee and Jefferson Davis didn’t understand was that to destroy a union founded on freedom was to declare all of humanity’s endeavors foolhardy.

To fail at this would be to fail at God’s work.

Lincoln began to march back and forth along the parapet, the city noises turning hushed and expectant, as if at any moment Lee was going to charge down Pennsylvania Avenue and claim the Mansion for the Confederacy.

Mary’s comfort had been that God was taking care of Willie, that it was only their own inability to perceive Willie’s attempts to reach them that kept him from them. Some days, Lincoln thought her view insane, and other days felt himself insane for his inability to see God’s hand in all of this, and even to believe that God existed.

What would it mean, then, to fail at the work of a being whose existence you doubted?

Lincoln supposed that his failure would mean that he, too, would no longer exist.

He would love to see Willie again.

Enough.

He turned violently and toppled against the parapet, catching himself with his free hand, then righting himself, tugging at his clothes, fighting for breath as his heart once again galloped out of control.

If he allowed himself to lose his mind, as he already feared Mary had lost hers, then he would be of no use to anyone.

God’s work, then, and whether God existed or not, he would act as if He did, on faith, for he could deduce no other reason in the end for man’s existence. He would die one day. Sooner rather than later, a failure or maybe a hero, perhaps a victim of his own quavering heart, perhaps a result of his insistence that men see their hypocrisy for what it was. Something, then, to warrant the last year and a half of misery. Something good to come of all of this, the very least of which, if he were successful, would be an unsundered union.

But it was not just this that drove him. There was a certain decency that had to be imposed. A righting of wrongs. Yes, just as he had shut down the Maryland legislature, so would he shut down slavery.

The language had already come to him. His other idea—forming a colony in Africa or the Indies to which any freed American slave or black man could migrate—had proved unacceptable to the abolitionists who were demanding political equality for the black man. It had not been his intention to liberate, but now? Now it was. The tone of the final document would have to be firm, the intent indisputable. Already he had read one draft to a portion of his cabinet, but now he had decided that nothing less than complete authority would do. After all, this was armed rebellion. Not even the innumerable dead had quelled the Rebels’ intransigence. And now they were marching nearby, perhaps even approaching the city’s ring of forts. At any moment, Rebel muskets might flash in the night and the last battle might begin, leaving a proclamation he might never get to make unfinished on his desk.

Oh, to fail as grandly as that.

His heart beat more slowly now, though Lincoln could not understand why. A country’s imminent failure should rouse even the stars to fainting.

To emancipate. He shut his eyes and lifted his face to the night. To effect such a change. To enact with impunity. He supposed Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee wanted the same, believed the insistence that they remain in a union in which they were unhappy an encroachment upon their own personal freedom.

Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility. Irony lost in the blind pursuit of cacophonous righteousness. I wish to be free, but
you
may not be free. What he hated most was that they could not see the inherent cruelty in their economy. Their slaves’ skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.

Contradiction the rule of the land. Right and wrong were as interchangeable these days, it seemed, as the winds, and yet here was one concrete thing he could achieve, would achieve before the end, whenever that came.

What purpose death? What purpose any of it?

Lincoln allowed himself this last moment of melancholy before banishing the remnants of the despair he had indulged, and then he slowly descended through the torrid heat of the attic rooms, entering once again the unnumbered circle of hell reserved for the doggedly hopeful.

On Monday, September the eighth, Lincoln turned to his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, and said, “Exactly where do you think the Rebels might go after Frederick?”

North of the city, the guns at Fort Stevens were pounding away, practicing in case the Rebels, who had crossed the Potomac at Leesburg, Virginia, on Thursday and were heading north toward Frederick, Maryland, and its stores of Federal ammunition, were to instead turn back to take Washington.

Stanton cleared his throat and tried to compose himself. He was furious. He thought he had sealed McClellan’s dismissal, had in fact come today hoping to hear from Lincoln that the indictment he had written with the attorney general had once and for all rid the nation of that timorous little man, but instead the decision that Lincoln had made on September second was holding. George McClellan was again in charge, and in fact had been given leave under General Halleck to do all that was necessary to defend Washington. They were right back where they had been in March, with McClellan all but running the Army of the Potomac—though in the last month he had defied Halleck’s orders again and again. In truth, after Pope’s abominable performance at Bull Run, it was hard to imagine any Union general less trustworthy than Pope. Next to him, McClellan appeared to be as fearless an invader as Genghis Khan. But McClellan? With Stonewall Jackson and Lee running unfettered through Maryland? Stanton wished the war was still on established Southern ground, not the shifting sands of the state of Maryland, whose legislature Lincoln had recently reduced by half when it was discovered that a good portion of its number were traitorous. Those members were now in prison. If there was one thing Stanton admired about Lincoln, it was his willingness to hatchet any rebellion in the ambivalent state just to the north. These were instincts to trust, but McClellan was nothing but trouble.

“It’s difficult to say where they’ll go,” Stanton said, staunching his wish to rail against McClellan. “If the Rebels do take Frederick, then perhaps they’ll head northward. The governor of Pennsylvania has called for militia. They are arming themselves.”

Lincoln was pacing. Stanton doubted that the president had slept since the news of the defeat at Bull Run had come through. He’d been a whirl-wind of activity, taking charge of the collapsing army, even calling his friend Pope into his office yesterday to have him read directly to him his account of the failure at Bull Run. It had been clear that Pope lacked insight into what had happened. He had blamed everyone but himself. Where, Stanton thought now, was a Union general who did not blame someone other than himself for his own failures?

Lincoln said, “Tell Halleck to have McClellan gather every man, gun, wagon, and mule within his reach and get them back out there.”

Lincoln knew the state of the men, knew how exhausted and demoralized they were, because he had visited the hospitals and seen the havoc that had ripped through the troops.

“I’ve already issued a directive,” Stanton said.

“Will McClellan move? It is imperative.”

“I believe so.” Stanton didn’t believe so, but Lincoln was in a mood.

Lincoln exhaled and gazed up distractedly. “Do you know, if we pursue them now, this could be it: we could annihilate the entire Rebel army in the next few days. Surround them, cut them off.”

“Or they could take Philadelphia.”

For a moment, equal visions of victory and defeat competed, each one as real a possibility as the other.

Stanton heaved himself to his feet. A quagmire, with the best general stuck in a mansion, and the Union’s hopes pinned on a man whose record terrified him.

Amelia Sutter laid aside the Albany
Argus
with its news of the Rebel incursion northward and reached for little Elizabeth lying on a blanket at her feet. In the parlor, the evening air still carried the pungent whiff of the last of Albany’s summer heat, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice the noxious smell. Eight months old and thriving, she gurgled and stuffed her little fists into her mouth against the teething pain she didn’t seem to mind, either. The darling child was Amelia’s only evidence that she had ever had daughters.

Do as you like.

And what would she say to Mary now, months later? It was impossible to govern her grief. She’d not had a single letter since Mary had left last February. Now she feared she would never know whether or not Mary was even still alive.