Walt Whitman's Secret (23 page)

Maryland. What a place. The Baltimore oriole is the state bird, the white oak is the state tree, and Wilkes's distemper is the state personality. It is a place that takes politics personally. In one obviously Democratic county, the only known Republican has been lynched. Curiously, this does not deter Republicans from multiplying exponentially. In the southern reaches of the state, rivers are outlined by swamps and low-hanging vegetation. Virginia is just a spit away. A paradise for smugglers, political as well as commercial, despite the efforts of one Lafayette Baker, a self-inflated runner of spies who has slowly taken control of the Union secret service from Allan Pinkerton and is vowing to root out the evil-doers from whatever swamps they have hidden in.

Pretending to be interested in investing in local real estate, the perfect cover for all otherwise unacceptable forms of curiosity, Wilkes goes down to the riverine boundary with Virginia, then to Philadelphia once again, where he entrusts Asia with a sealed packet of documents, watching her as she locks it in her husband's iron safe. Wilkes is not fond of his brother-in-law, largely for the same reason
he is also not fond of Edwin: they are Union men. Another brother, Joseph, is of the opposite inclination. As for Junius, the eldest, named after their late and sainted father the famous tragedian, no one is sure, not even Junius himself. Their mother is frightened of the discord, which is making her ill. The children and in-laws must avoid discussing the news or politics when she is present. All the more remarkable then that Wilkes and Edwin, who oftentimes have difficulty speaking to each other in private, agree to do so onstage. There will be a performance of
Julius Caesar
at the Winter Garden on Broadway in New York, a benefit to raise money for a bronze bust of Shakespeare to be installed in Central Park. Wilkes, clean-shaven for the occasion, portrays Marc Antony. Edwin plays Brutus. In retrospect, it should have been the other way round. Mother sits in the audience. At one point incipient panic runs through the house on the rumor that the theater is on fire. In fact, it is the hotel next door that is the target of arsonists. It is one of a dozen structures, including P.T. Barnum's museum of freaks and curiosities, that Confederate agents from Canada have tried to set ablaze. To that end they have employed Greek fire that a local chemist has concocted for them using phosphorous and paint thinner. He has, however, cheated them by utilizing inferior materials and pocketing the difference in price to maximize his profit. Wilkes is disgusted when he learns of the bungled exercise in official pyromania. He wonders whether he is the only competent person other than General Lee trying to bring the United States government to its knees.

He feels pretty good about bringing people like Dave Herold into the kidnapping plot. He makes bold enough while on another visit to New York, and again a little while later, to approach a former
acting colleague, Sam Chester, first talking in loaded generalities, then subtle hints, finally in veiled blatancies. Chester is used to reading texts for their concealed meanings and deflects the silent demands for a response. When Wilkes continues to feel him out at other meetings obviously contrived for this purpose, Chester finally expresses his horror at what his friend is suggesting. Wilkes reacts as though he has been wounded in battle. He has to be careful, more careful now than ever, more careful every day, yet he finds he can work things out only by resort to pencil and paper.

“There will be many in this enterprise,” he writes in a memorandum to himself. “In the end I am unsure what the number will be. Dozens will be necessary, even scores, I have no doubt. I shall recruit as the need arises and opportunity allows, but I must not lose sight of the fact that this is a conspiracy of one, by myself, and therein the danger, for there is none who can measure a mind-storm such as that which has caused me to assume incorrectly that my old acquaintance of the boards has the intellect to see the solution to the problems that command the urgent attention of us all.”

The mind-storms that sometimes overtake him, often seeming to come from nowhere, always trouble him after the fact but are invigorating at the time. They speed the mechanisms of the brain. He sees with perfect clearness and celerity the actions that are necessary and their consequences. Sometimes, when the condition has swept up and obliterated the predictable thinking of the workaday world, he finds
all
of his senses grow instantly sharper and his faculties enlarge. Once, at Asia's, he looked across the parlor and suddenly saw the spines of all the books in intaglio relief, as though they had been carved out of stone like inscriptions on classical monuments, but colored brightly. He has come to cherish these moments of transcendence. (Is there another word? He doubts that there can be.) They provide him with enormous advantages in making decisions, though
other powers are oftentimes demanded to clean up the unintended minor consequences. This is his advantage over others. Anyone can acquire simple information, even secret information. The ability to analyze it both before and afterward is given to few. Its absence is notably apparent in, for example, the dullards assigned to Canada.

He keeps appearing in rural Maryland. Still using the pretense of wishing to invest his oil profits in farmland, he continues to scout all possible routes by which Lincoln might be transported to Richmond through the enemy's lines. A local doctor who might have property for sale is kind enough to introduce him to another such person, Samuel Mudd MD, whose place the actor later visits. The bottom has fallen out of farm property in Maryland because of the devastating ban on slavery in the new constitution. The doctor and the visitor discuss this. Wilkes raises some questions about easy places to get across the river into Virginia unseen. He is a professional actor, after all. He knows how to use his voice to project innocence or whatever other state or emotion he wishes, regardless of the lines in the script. He is, however, unsure of his audience this time. He doesn't know whether his own voice is too subtle for Doctor Mudd's ears. He is in the market for a horse as well. Mudd recommends a neighbor with an animal for sale. Wilkes makes the purchase.

You can't deny it: Wilkes does have a thespian's knowledge of how to plumb the meaning of daily life, with all its comedies, dramas and curtain-raisers. He lingers in the area, making the acquaintance of a Lincoln-hating local who is expert at getting people into Virginia without being seen, using his intricate knowledge of the smallest marshes and waterways. Within hours, Wilkes takes the man aside and confides his intentions. Like Chester, the fellow is alarmed. “Why,” Wilkes writes in his notes, “have the beautiful mind-storms begun to betray me so? I do not understand. Do I misjudge others or do they wish to betray me from their ignorance of the importance
of what must be done?” Shortly, however, he brings the man around. Even so, that night he burns the notes to himself. He must do so every night, he tells himself. However circumspect I am, he says silently, I cannot allow myself to be caught with notes more than a few hours old, if indeed with any whatsoever.

He collects equine accomplices as well as human ones. Back in the District, he asks Sam Arnold to acquire a horse and gig while he himself asks people at John Ford's theater, where he often gets his mail, to recommend a boarding stable. The theater's carpenter suggests one in Baptist Alley, which runs right behind the building.

Wilkes's acquaintance John Surratt is a slender young man with the serious, ethereal and most of all bloodless look of the divinity student he recently was and would like to be again were he not intent on becoming a spy instead. When his father died in Sixty-two, he had to abandon his studies and go to work tending the tavern and hotel (it is also the post office) that the family owns in Surrattsville and for most purposes
is
Surrattsville, ten miles below the District, on Maryland soil. All the residents nearby knew Surratt senior. Now all of them know the junior one.

Surratt looks even younger than his twenty years, but Wilkes knows full well that there is more to him than meets the eye. He knows that the Surrattsville tavern is a safe house for Confederate couriers passing north or south, and for who knows what other skulduggery. The information is so common that the authorities in Washington have sacked Surratt as the village's part-time post master upon hearing of his politically unsavory longings. Wilkes and Surratt have not been in touch of late, but then Fortune and necessity reunite them. Two days before Christmas, Surratt meets Wilkes in
Washington, where they then run into Doctor Mudd, who has come into the city for last-minute shopping. With Surratt is another young man, a former classmate who now boards at 541 H Street, the house that Surratt's mother inherited and has turned into a rooming house. As Missus Surratt knows so well, Washington is a city with too few beds. It is also one with strange bedfellows. The boarder with Surratt is Louis Weichmann, who is wearing blue trousers with a stripe on the legs. They are part of his uniform as a member of an infantry unit made up of War Department employees. Weichmann used to work there for the general in charge of feeding Confederate prisoners. Wilkes does what he does so well and invites everybody to join him for a drink. Surratt, Mudd and Weichmann end up in Booth's room at the National.

The next day, Wilkes dashes to New York again in the grip of another mind-storm. Confronting Sam Chester once more, he tells him bluntly of the plot against Lincoln, tells him that he must take part or be blackmailed, or even risk being shot with a small but heavy-caliber pistol that Wilkes says he has taken to carrying for just such occasions. Chester naturally thinks Wilkes has gone mad.

Running now with all engines burning, Wilkes returns to the District by way of Philly. There he pays two calls, the first on his sister, the other on a theatrical manager he has known for years. He gives Asia another packet to put in the safe: evidence incriminating Chester in the plot. Such tactics are an essential element of his plan, for evidence of someone's association with Wilkes's efforts, however flimsy the claim, will, under the rules in use at the time, preclude that person from testifying for the prosecution. From the theatrical manager he begs a favor: persuade John Ford to hire Sam Chester for his stock company in the capital. He suggests to Surratt, a good patriot, that he follow his own example and sign over all his property to others so that it cannot be confiscated by the federal government should matters go awry.

March 1865. Family troubles and publishing details back in New York will soon truncate Walt's brief return to the District, but while he is here, he must not forsake the spectacle. The crowd is certainly the largest he and the others have ever seen. Certainly it is the thickest, the most dense. How many thousands? The newspapers' estimate is fifty, all jostling one another, waiting for the president to leave the Senate chamber of the Capitol, where he has renewed his vows, and come outside onto the giant east portico to speak to them. There are a few hundred Negroes in the throng below, and many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of white men in blue uniforms. It is shortly after noon on a cold day, Saturday the fourth, and it is raining. An uncountable number of hats, of every type and variety, seem to bob atop the mob like blossoms tossed upon the ocean. The dome of the great white building has finally been completed and seems all the more impressive against the endless and dispirited gray sky.