Grant: A Novel (22 page)

John A. Logan was senator from Illinois, yet another Civil War general. In 1868, when Grant had received 650 of 650 convention votes, Logan had nominated him for his first term as President. His shock of white hair was caricatured by every political cartoonist in Chicago and instantly familiar to every delegate in the Hall. Now he made his way at a steady pace down the aisle from the Illinois delegation; mounted the steps; spoke right away without introduction or notes: “In the name of our loyal citizens, soldiers, and sailors—in the name of loyalty, of liberty, of humanity and justice I nominate Ulysses S. Grant for President!”

A stupendous cheer exploded over his last words, drowning out even the band. In the aisles, on the balconies, Grant Stalwarts roared in a swirling chaos of streamers and confetti. On the railing above Hoar’s platform a young woman dressed in red, white, and blue sang, unheard, at the top of her lungs, as friends clutched her ankles to keep her from falling. Trist sat hunched at his table while the wave of sound rolled and broke over his head, watching a group of men in the balconies open and release umbrella after umbrella, thinking the French would never believe a word of it. He glanced over once at Cadwallader, who was sitting back, lighting a cigar. He squinted up toward the galleries to see if Elizabeth Cameron was there. His mind made a curious leap toward the book he had been reading,
Democracy
. This was it, he thought, this was the unreal democratic thing itself.

Logan had long since disappeared from the podium. As the crowd noticed, its cheers began to fade, little by little, into individual shouts, then murmurs, then a low, tense, nearly palpable silence. Could this be all? Was this the whole of the nomination? The band lowered its instruments. Here and there someone cleared his throat or coughed.

From the second row of the New York delegation now emerged the splendid figure of Roscoe Conkling. He was dressed in a coat of deep, rich burgundy, a yellow cravat, crisp blue trousers. His red hair was curled around his brow, his red beard was combed and thrust forward, bristling with virility. He walked slowly, confidently toward the riser that led to the reporters’ tables. At a gesture one reporter stood and offered his chair. Conkling braced his hand on the man’s back and vaulted from chair to table in a single motion. The vast silence of the Hall grew deeper still, a drawn breath, held. Every eye was on him. He looked to the left, the right. And then at the moment of absolute maximum suspense his clear voice suddenly burst out:

The roar that followed was total bedlam, a tumult of noise that went on twice as long as before, till Conkling himself finally held
up his arms imperiously. The delegates fell panting back into their chairs.

“The need that presses upon this convention,” he cried in the same ringing tones, “is of a candidate who can carry doubtful states both North and South. And believing that he, more surely than any other man, can carry New York against any opponent, and can carry not only the North, but several States of the South, New York is for
Ulysses S. Grant
. Never defeated in peace or in war, his name is the most illustrious borne by living man!”

The Hall was now entirely under Conkling’s spell. He raised his arms again for quiet, then launched into a long, detailed account of Grant’s career, the hero’s relentless, unparalleled drive toward military victory, his magnanimous terms of peace to Lee, his service in Reconstruction, his great courage in 1875 in vetoing the inflation bill, wherein, as the present prosperity showed, he had been exactly right. The criticism of corruption in Grant’s administration he dismissed with a sneer: “We have nothing to explain away. We have no apologies to make. The shafts and arrows have all been aimed at him, and they lie broken and harmless at his feet.”

And as for the objection that a third presidential term was unprecedented—“Having tried Grant twice and found him faithful, we are told that we must not, even after an interval of years, trust him again. Who dares—who
dares
to put fetters on that free choice and judgment which is the
birthright
of the American people?”

And had he stopped right there, Trist thought, he could have called for a vote on the spot. But Lord Roscoe went on a moment too long, he turned his sneers directly and sharply against the Blaine and Sherman forces, and then against the self-declared “independents” of the party—“charlatans, jayhawkers, tramps, and guerrillas”—who hesitated to join at once with Grant, and as he spoke those same independents could be seen all over the Hall hardening, crossing their arms, growing cold.

The peroration was splendid, masterfully delivered. At the end of it yet another twenty minutes of unrestrained bedlam swept over the building—the reporter from the New York
Times
shook his head in rueful amazement and showed his first sentence to Trist:
Today the friends of Grant threw away sobriety and became like boys once more
. Too bad about “sobriety,” Trist thought, pondering
his own report, which would have to be telegraphed to the
Post
in a matter of hours. He watched as exuberant Stalwarts lifted Conkling from their table and swept him on their shoulders back to the New York delegation. Had he learned that jumping-on-the-table trick from Mark Twain last fall, Trist wondered, and the excruciating sense of pause and timing? He scribbled a note for his own first sentence:
Not since Samuel L. Clemens climbed up on a Chicago table and brought the house down …

Around him, other reporters folded their notes and slipped down into the aisles, heading toward the telegraph room. Trist wrote a sentence or two more and then swung down to the floor himself. He had just pushed through confetti ankle deep to the rear of the Hall when something—a voice, a subtle change in the hum and clamor of the crowd—made him stop. Down on the raised platform, even as the Grant demonstration was still trailing away, James Garfield had started to speak. Trist pulled out his notebook again and bumped elbows, he was flabbergasted to see, with Roscoe Conkling himself.

“I have witnessed the extraordinary scenes of this convention with deep solicitude,” Garfield said. His voice had a classicist’s pitch and precision. “As I sat in my seat and witnessed this demonstration, this assemblage seemed to me a human ocean tossed in tempest.” Beside Trist, Conkling grunted. “But I remember that it is not the billows but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. Gentlemen of the convention, your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of our people. When your enthusiasm has passed, we shall find below the storm and passion a calmer level of public opinion.”

“Calm,” Trist wrote twice.

“This makes me seasick,” Conkling muttered to Trist and watched to be sure he wrote it down. Then he marched out into the corridors.

On the platform Garfield continued doggedly on, calling for a candidate who could heal the breach in party unity—not increase it—someone who might draw together the votes of the whole country.

He spoke for nearly fifteen minutes by Trist’s watch, a gray, sensible, modest figure preaching reason, and not until the last minute did Trist realize that this was in fact the official nominating speech for John Sherman, because Garfield, by accident or
design or treachery, made no actual reference whatsoever to his candidate’s name until his final sentence; and because every word he uttered about conciliation and calm applied, demonstrably and preeminently, to himself.

“And so,” he concluded, gazing imperturbably at the now placid human ocean seated before him, “I do not present him as a better Republican or a better man than thousands of others that we honor; but I present him for your deliberate and favorable consideration. I nominate
John Sherman of Ohio
.”

Trist held up his watch again. It was past one-thirty in the morning. The last candidate on the schedule was Elihu Washburne, Grant’s old friend, who had no chance whatsoever, everybody knew it, of winning the nomination. Stilson Hutchins would be tearing his hair out in clumps—Trist looked at the sheet of paper where he had written his first sentence, wadded it into a ball.

At an empty chair in the very last row he made a prop of his knees and started again:
A “dark horse” appeared tonight in the closing minutes of the race—James A. Garfield has nominated himself for President
.

By return telegraph Hutchins replied:
BULLFEATHERS. HAVE REWRITTEN LEAD: “GRANT NOMINATION IN SIGHT.”

E
LIHU B. WASHBURNE OPENED HIS GOLD WATCH AND PEERED
at the spidery hands, which showed quarter past six in the morning.

“Come right back here, one hour,” he told the little Irish driver, immigrant, probably illegal.

“Cold and wet, boss.” Black teeth made an apologetic flash in a pucker of doughy white flesh. “Need to be
sure
you’re coming back.”

Washburne had never taken a drink of liquor in his life, which accounted, some people said, for his lifelong irritability. He slapped two silver coins hard on the driver’s bench, then looked significantly at the little round blue-and-white Chicago Hackney license badge dangling from the carriage roof. “I am Congressman Elihu Washburne,” he hissed so furiously that the driver actually seemed to shrink inside his coat. “I am paying a breakfast call in this hotel.” Washburne jerked his head at the painted sign, barely visible through the drizzle, A
NGSTROM’S
R
OOMS
, not strictly speaking a hotel, but nobody was going to tell him that. “I will come out at seven-fifteen precisely and you will take me to the goddam Palmer House Hotel.”

He clambered down, adjusted his collar, and, because he had
once been ambassador to France, appointed by U. S. Grant, and therefore thought of himself as a diplomat, added “Thank you.”

Inside the boarding house he stamped his shoes on a mat and proceeded to a musty, sparely furnished chamber that passed as Angstrom’s dining room. Washburne’s wife was French, but Washburne himself had been born and reared in the rough north woods of Maine, and his heritage—as anybody could tell by a glance at his bulk and scowl—was German. He sat down at John Russell Young’s table, grunted a Teutonic good-morning, and without another word forked a massive slice of boiled Virginia ham onto a spare plate. Then some fried potatoes and gravy. Then poured himself a cup of black coffee.

“Sherman’s gone,” Young told him. “Blaine too.”

Washburne nodded and speared a potato. He hated being told things he already knew, but as a politician and diplomat that was how he spent most of his time. John Sherman, of course, had left for the train station last night directly after the nominating speeches had begun. James G. Blaine had left a little earlier. Both were presumably in Washington now, observing the unwritten Republican rule that candidates keep away from a convention once the balloting starts. Washburne thought it was an odd rule, and as favorite son and official Illinois delegate he had decided to honor it in the breach.

“How was Galena?” he asked, going right to the point.

“Hot.” Young poured a little more coffee into Washburne’s cup and looked suspiciously around the empty room, as if to be sure nobody was listening. Like every newspaper reporter Washburne had ever known, Young had a tiresome kind of theatrical streak. At six-thirty on a Sunday morning there wasn’t going to be anybody up, or anybody awake enough to care what they were saying.

“Hot for June,” Young elaborated, smacking his lips as if he were now an old Illinois farmer. “But the General looked fit and cool.”

“Well, is he coming or ain’t he?” It was too early in the morning to beat around the bush. Washburne looked down and saw that there was nothing left of the ham on his plate except a sweet ivory rind of fat.

“Mrs. Grant would certainly like it.”

Washburne sucked up the rind of white fat like a string of spaghetti.

“She is a very tense lady at the moment, Congressman.”

“That’s because”—Washburne swallowed the fat and licked his fingers—“she wants to be First Lady again. What does
he
want?”

“Calm as if in a battle,” Young said. “Telegrams piling up, neighbors hanging off the porch. He just sits there and smokes his cigars.”

“My best count is three hundred and six,” Washburne told him. “That’s over seventy votes short.”

“Senator Cameron quoted the very same number.”

“Well?”

Young narrowed his eyes and hitched his chair closer to the table, obviously relishing his role as political conspirator. Don Cameron hadn’t trusted the public telegraph, and so had asked the reporter to deliver his message privately, but not before Washburne had got wind of it and had to be included. If Grant would come up to Chicago Sunday night or Monday morning and just
show
himself on the convention floor, a stampede of votes was sure to follow. No delegate could resist the flesh and blood sight of him, that was the theory, and it was probably right.