The Accursed (5 page)

“Woodrow, please! This isn’t worthy of you. I think that you and Dean West must meet face to face, and stop this absurd plotting. I would guess that Andrew goes about Princeton complaining of
you,
and declaring that
you
should drive
him
to an early grave, if you had your way.”

Woodrow stiffened at this remark. For indeed, it had frequently come to him, even when he knelt in prayer at Sunday church services, feeling himself an empty vessel to be filled with the grace of God, that, if
something would happen
to his enemy Andrew Fleming West: how easy then, his life would become!

“All opposition to my ideas would evaporate at once, like harmless smoke.
All opposition
.”

“Woodrow, what do you mean? What have you said?”

Had Woodrow spoken aloud? He was sure he had not.

Winslow Slade said, quietly, yet with feeling, “Sometimes I think you scarcely know me, Tommy. Or, indeed—anyone. You so surround yourself with fantasies of your own creation! For instance, you claim that I seem not to have known an enemy in my career, and that God has ‘blessed’ my efforts; but you must know, this was hardly the case. There was a very vocal opposition at the university, when I pushed forward my ‘reform’ of the curriculum, and insisted upon higher admissions standards; very nearly, a revolt among the trustees. And then, when I was governor of this contentious, politician-ridden state, there were days when I felt like a battered war veteran, and only the solace of my religion, and my church, kept me from despair. Yet, I tried not to complain, even to my dear Oriana; I tried never to make careless public remarks, or denunciations. This is not in keeping with our dignity. Remember the doomed Socrates of
The Crito
—a public man in his seventies condemned to death by the state: it was Socrates’ position that one abides by the laws of his time and place, and that death is preferable to banishment from society. So I’ve long kept my own counsel, and not even those closest to me have known of my secret struggles. So it is, dear Tommy, in the waning years of my life, I can’t allow myself to be drawn into ‘politics’ yet again. I know that your office is a sacred trust in your eyes, very like that of the pulpit; you are your father’s son, in many ways; and you have been driving yourself these past months with a superhuman energy. But it must be remembered, Woodrow, the university is not the church; and your inauguration, however splendid, should not be interpreted as an
ordination
.” Winslow paused, to allow his words to sink in. It was a misunderstanding of the elder Slade, that he was without sarcasm or irony, as he was without guile; that, being by nature good-hearted and generous, he was one to suffer fools gladly. “So, my counsel to you is
compromise,
President Wilson—
compromise
.”

Woodrow reacted like a child who has been slapped. Slowly, dazedly, he sank into his chair by the fireplace, facing his host. Waning firelight played on his tight, taut features; his stricken eyes were hidden behind the wink of his eyeglasses. In a hoarse voice he said: “
Compromise
!—what a thing to suggest! What—
weakness, cowardice!
Did our Savior
compromise
? Did He
make a deal
with his enemies? My father instructed me, either one is right, and compelled to act upon it; or one is in error, and should surrender the chalice to another man. Jesus declared, ‘I bring not peace but a sword.’ Does not our Lord declare everywhere in His holy writ, that one must be either for Him or against Him? I have reason to believe that all evil begins in compromise, Dr. Slade. Our great President Lincoln did not compromise with the slavers, as our Puritan ancestors did not compromise with the native Indians whom they discovered in the New World, pagan creatures who were not to be trusted—‘drasty Sauvages’ they were called. You might not know, Winslow, but our Wilson family motto—from the time of the Campbells of Argyll until now—
God save us from compromise.
”

When Winslow didn’t reply, only just shook his head, with an inscrutable expression, Woodrow said, a little sharply: “Ours is a proud heritage! And it would go hard against my father, as against my own conscience, if I weakened in this struggle.”

Winslow said, gently, “But after all, Tommy, you
are not
your father, however much you love and honor his memory. And you must bear in mind that he is no longer living; he has been dead this past year, and more.”

At these words the younger man stared into a corner of the room as if he had been taken by surprise:
was
his father dead?

And something else, someone else, another tormenting voice, had been beating at his thoughts, like buffeting waves—
You can speak out against these atrocities. Christians like yourself
.

Clumsily Woodrow removed his eyeglasses. His vision had never been strong; as a child, letters and numerals had “danced” in his head, making it very difficult for him to read and do arithmetic; yet, he had persevered, and had made of himself an outstanding student, as he was, in his youth, invariably the outstanding member of any class, any school, any group in which he found himself.
Destined for greatness. But you must practice humility, not pride.

Woodrow wiped at his eyes with his shirt cuff, in manner and in expression very like a child. It seemed to be so, he did not recall that Joseph Ruggles Wilson, his father, had passed away; into the mysterious other world, into which his mother had passed away when Woodrow had been thirty-two, and his first daughter Margaret had been recently born. “You are right, Winslow—of course. Father has been dead more than two years. He has been gathered into the ‘Great Dark’—abiding now with his Creator, as we are told. Do you think that it is a realm of being contiguous with our own, if inaccessible? Or—
is it accessible
? I am intrigued by these ‘spiritualists’—I’ve been reading of their exploits, in London and Boston . . . Often I think, though Father is said to be deceased, is he entirely departed?
Requiescat in pace
. But—is he in peace? Are any of the dead departed—or in peace? Or do we only wish them so, that we can imagine ourselves free of their dominion?”

To which query Winslow Slade, staring into the now-waning fire, as shadows rippled across his face, seemed to have no ready reply.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE
is the simple legend chiseled beneath the name winslow elias slade and the dates 14 december 1831–1 june 1906 on the Slade family mausoleum in the older part of the Princeton Cemetery, near the very heart of Princeton. It was said that the distressed gentleman, shortly before his death, left instructions with his family that he wished the somber inscription
Pain Was My Portion
would be engraved on his tomb; but that his son Augustus forbade it.

“We have had enough of
pain,
we Slades,” Augustus allegedly declared, “and now we are prepared for
peace
.”

This was at a time when the Crosswicks Curse, or, as it is sometimes called, the Crosswicks Horror, had at last lifted from Princeton, and peace of a kind had been restored.

I realize, the reader may be wondering: how could Reverend Winslow Slade, so beloved and revered a Princeton citizen, the only man from whom Woodrow Wilson sought advice and solace, have come to so despairing an end?
How is this possible?

All I have are the myriad facts I have been able to unearth and assemble, that point to a plausible explanation: the reader will have to draw his or her own conclusions, perhaps.

At the time of our present narrative in March 1905, when Woodrow Wilson sought him out surreptitiously, Winslow Slade retained much of his commanding presence—that blend of authority, manly dignity, compassion, and Christian forbearance noted by his many admirers. No doubt these qualities were inherited with his blood: for Winslow’s ancestry may be traced on his father’s side to those religiously persecuted and religiously driven Puritans who sought freedom from the tyranny of the Church of England in the late 1600s; and on his mother’s side, to Scots-English immigrants in the early 1700s to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who soon acquired a measure of affluence through trade with England. Within two generations, a number of Slades had migrated from New England to the Philadelphia / Trenton area, as, in religious terms, they had migrated from the rigidity of belief of old-style Puritanism to the somewhat more liberal Presbyterianism of the day, tinged with Calvinist determinism as it was; these were compassionate Christians who sided with those who opposed the execution of Quakers as heretics, a Puritan obsession. Sometime later, in the Battle of Princeton of 1777, General Elias Slade famously distinguished himself, alongside his compatriot Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr, Jr. (Elias Slade, only thirty-two at the time of his death, had boldly surrendered his powerful positions in both the Royal Governor’s Council and the Supreme Court of the Crown Colony in order to support George Washington in the revolutionary movement—a rebellion by no means so clear-cut in the 1770s nor so seemingly inevitable as it appears to us today in our history textbooks. And what an irony it is that Aaron Burr, Jr., a hero in some quarters in his own time, has been relegated to a disreputable position scarcely more elevated than that of his former compatriot Benedict Arnold!)

It was a general characteristic of the Philadelphia / Trenton branch of the Slade family, judging by their portraits, that the men possessed unusually intense eyes, though deep-set in their sculpted-looking faces; the Slade nose tended to be long, narrow, Roman and somewhat pinched at the tip. In his youth and well into old age, Winslow Slade was considered a handsome man: above average in height, with a head of prematurely silver hair, and straight dark brows, and a studied and somber manner enlivened by a ready and sympathetic smile—in the eyes of some detractors, a
too-ready
and
too-sympathetic
smile.

For it was Winslow Slade’s eccentric notion, he would try to embody Christian behavior in his daily—hourly!—life. In this, he often tried the patience of those close to him, still more, those who were associated with him professionally.

“It’s my considered belief that the present age will compose, through Winslow Slade, its
spiritual autobiography
”—so the famed Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared on the occasion of Winslow Slade’s inauguration as president of Princeton University in 1877.

As a popular Presbyterian minister, who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Winslow Slade had long perfected the art of pleasing—indeed, mesmerizing large audiences.

Though, in contrast to such preachers as Reverend Beecher, Winslow Slade never stooped to rhetorical tricks or empty oratorical flourishes. His Biblical texts were usually familiar ones, though not simple; he chose not to astonish, or perplex, or amuse, or, like some men of the cloth, including his formidable relative Jonathan Edwards, to terrify his congregation. His quiet message of the uniqueness of the Christian faith—as it is a “necessary outgrowth and advancement of the Jewish faith”—is that the Christian must think of himself as choosing Jesus Christ over Satan
at every moment;
an inheritance from his Puritan ancestors, but rendered in such a way as not to alarm or affright his sensitive followers.

It is no surprise that Reverend Slade’s grandchildren, when very young, imagined that he was God Himself—delivering his sermons in the chaste white interior of the First Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street. These were Josiah, Annabel, and Todd; and, in time, little Oriana; when these children shut their eyes in prayer, it was Grandfather Winslow’s face they saw, and Grandfather Slade to whom they appealed.

As
The Accursed
is a chronicle of, mostly, the Slade grandchildren, it seems fitting for the historian to note that Winslow Slade loved these children fiercely, rather more, it seems, than he had loved his own children, who had been born when Winslow was deeply engaged in his career, and not so deeply engaged with family life, like many another successful public man. While recovering from a bout of influenza in his early sixties, watching Josiah and Annabel frolic together for hours in the garden at Crosswicks Manse, he had declared to his doctor that it was these children, and no other remedy, that had brought him back to health.

“The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them.
That
is the secret of family life.”

“AND HOW IS
your daughter Jessie?”

“Jessie? Why—Jessie is well, I think.”

Woodrow’s eighteen-year-old daughter, the prettiest of the Wilson daughters, was to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of Winslow Slade’s granddaughter Annabel and a young U.S. Army lieutenant named Dabney Bayard, of the Hodge Road Bayards.

Winslow had thought to divert his young friend from the thoughts that so agitated him, that seemed, to Winslow, but trivial and transient; but this new subject, unexpectedly, caused Woodrow to fret and frown; and to say, in a very careful voice, “It is always a—a surprise—to me—that my girls are growing into—women. For it seems only yesterday, they were the most delightful little girls.”

Woodrow spoke gravely, with a just perceptible
frisson
of dread.

For the intimate lives of
females
was a painful subject for a man of his sensitivity to consider, even at a little distance.

Winslow smiled, however, with grandfatherly affection. For it was the more remarkable to him, his “fairy child” Annabel was now nineteen years old, and about to take her place in society as Mrs. Dabney Bayard.

“Ah, Lieutenant Bayard!—I think I’ve glimpsed the young man once or twice,” Woodrow said, without the slightest edge of reproach in that, perhaps, his wife and he had been excluded from recent social occasions at Crosswicks Manse, “and he seems to me an upstanding Christian youth, and a patriot as well: the grandson, isn’t he, of John Wilmington Bayard?—hearty Presbyterian stock, and most reliable.”