Henry and Clara (17 page)
Authors: Thomas Mallon
It was peace that Mr. Lincoln wanted. To keep it, he was even willing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. It was “the declared purpose of the Union that it
will
constitutionally defend and maintain itself,” but some of what the new President was saying sounded so mild (“The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union”) that she could imagine Henry’s unspoken surprise as he pored over the
Evening Journal
in Uncle Hamilton’s law office. As Clara strained to listen, she realized that all the parallel sentences and rhetorical questions had great beauty, like the balance of a sculpture. Reason
was
sweet, and perhaps this huge gaunt man could hold the Union together by its exercise. In the last few weeks her papa and Uncle Hamilton had muttered much about how it would really be Mr. Seward running the country, from the State Department, but from the sound of this speech she wasn’t so sure.
Still, Mr. Lincoln had seemed so friendless during the procession this morning. Since the Harrises had taken their house at Fifteenth and H streets (just behind Lafayette Square, little more than a stone’s throw from the White House), the city had filled up with visitors — the rich ones trenchering at Willard’s, the poor ones washing in the fountains. But these gawkers would go home soon, and the city’s regular residents, judging from this morning’s parade, seemed anything but well disposed toward the new chief magistrate. So many of them wouldn’t even open their shutters to see him pass!
The city’s uncertainty matched her own. Rumor was the daily
fare, a gruel that left one famished and nervous and asking for more. From the second-floor study where she had begun writing letters to Henry and Mary Hall and Howard, she heard the footsteps and voices of each pair of passersby. Their words came bouncing up from the cobblestones, like sparks. For all the anxiety she could detect in their conversations, she imagined them going home to domestic comforts and certainty. In her own room in this new house there was nothing but the struggle to wait. It was only in her confidential letters to Mary, and in the cautioning ones she received from Howard, that she felt allowed to live her real life, to ponder and acknowledge her heart’s desire. Henry had come to regard Mr. Lincoln’s approaching inaugural as almost a new Law of Motion: until it took effect the world’s whole direction was unforeseeable. In such a period of uncertainty, he could not be expected to discuss the question of marriage. The need to defer to political developments was perhaps the sole point upon which he agreed with her father, and Pauline had never raised the issue since Newport.
If Mr. Lincoln was the god of the new world in which all their lives would proceed, he seemed reluctant to let his creation begin spinning. “I am loth to close,” Clara could hear him saying. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained …” She was distracted from the President’s main clause when Pauline tapped her on the arm, directing her attention to the sight of an old man on the edge of the crowd, walking north with a depressed sort of step, away from the Capitol. It seemed odd that anyone, friend or foe, could be indifferent to anything Mr. Lincoln had to say this morning. It was not the man’s hat or white hair or cigar that finally allowed Clara to identify him; it was the quiet smile on Pauline Harris’s face that made her stepdaughter realize the old man was Thurlow Weed.
15th & H Sts.
Washington, D.C.
April 25, 1861
Dear Mary,
Since Virginia announced its secession from the Union last week, we have lived in fear of imminent siege. The city is so aware of its defenselessness that the last inches of everyone’s nerves are beginning to shred. Even Papa — a United States Senator, you may recall — came home from the Riggs National Bank yesterday afternoon having withdrawn a large sum of money — for what purpose I am not certain, since most of the shops in the city have closed. Mother has sent my sisters back to Albany and has tried to send me home, too, though I have so far successfully resisted.
She is quite calm herself, determined that a mere civil war will not disturb the six years she intends to spend as the wife of Senator Ira Harris. She thanks you, I’ve forgotten to mention, for the New York newspaper clippings about the inaugural. I am afraid, however, that no item can compete with the one from the
Albany Evening Journal
that made mention of her presence at the Union Ball. The combination of being noticed by Mr. Weed’s paper and having the clip sent to her by Emeline has assured its perpetual residence under the glass top of her dressing table. In my stepmother’s boudoir it will forever be late evening, March 4, 1861.
Most of what these dispatches say is true — Mrs. Lincoln did dance a quadrille with Senator Douglas (just as I danced one with Senator Harris), and Mr. Seward did arrive with his
daughter-in-law. And the flags and shields made a handsome sight. But I can assure you that
I
did
not
wear a hoop skirt and have no intention of wearing one — ever. I refuse to live as the clapper inside a great swinging bell. These dancing, perambulating monstrosities were the most humorous sight we’ve seen in the two months we have been here.
Mother’s pleasure in her new role is undiminished by the fact that we are relatively friendless. The Southern ladies who dominate society here have no desire for our company — nor for Mrs. Lincoln’s either, though she is close to being one of them herself. We have been to one of her levees, and she did, to my astonishment, remember me from the Delavan in Feb. I like her, though few others seem to. She is terribly nervous — says whatever flies into her head (“The Chief Usher will scold me for telling you this, but Mr. Lincoln found such a big creepy crawly thing in his shaving basin that he mistook it for his comb”), but she is smart for all that, and truly anxious for her husband. Papa now concedes that Mr. Lincoln is running his own administration.
He (Papa) was growing in happiness and confidence even through Fort Sumter, but since then two events have made him frail and gloomy. One is Virginia’s secession, and the other is the arrival of Henry.
He got here on the 15th, the day Mr. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops, and of course he showed up at the door with a mock salute (and more clippings for Mother). “At the service of the Republic,” he announced, coming into the parlor. I fear he will be in the army very soon, but he tells me little, and I think his exact plans are uncertain. He reached Washington just in time, since right now nothing is getting in or out. We are “protected” by the District Militia — who are no smart set of Zouaves, I assure you — and we await
relief
, the word on every set of lips in every conversation.
I await my own relief, of course, but bringing up the question of marriage right now would be an enterprise whose hopelessness bordered on teaching Sybil Bashford manners. (At least these national troubles have unburdened us of any
obligation to witness her exchanging rings and slaves with her beau ideal next month. The last I heard
Clara never finished this letter. It was rendered obsolete by the event she heard being shouted in the street below. “They’ve come!” cried two girls to three others, who took up the cry until there was a great rush of women and men and small children and dogs, all of them heading to the depot, where, if the rumor was true, the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment was now arriving.
By the next morning, relief of the city was well under way, principally through the appearance of the Seventh New York, a bewildered few of whom still reverently carried the sandwiches that Delmonico’s had provided at their departure. Their encampment ended up being the Capitol building itself, inside the House chambers and galleries. The Eighth Massachusetts moved into the Rotunda, the Sixth having taken over the furnace room. During the next week the city’s population cheered all of them on their daily parades up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Inside their legislative premises, the city’s saviors put their feet up on the desks, played the banjo, and pretended to bellow speeches on the issue that had brought them here in the first place. The guard around the Capitol was no more disciplined than the rest of the carnival going on inside, and on most mornings any citizen who appeared vaguely familiar or just respectable was permitted to wander in. Ladies took food baskets, and boys brought their wooden swords to be signed and admired.
Curiosity led Henry and Clara up the Hill on the morning of May 3. Miss Harris’s recognition by a doorkeeper, who remembered flirting with her on the morning of the inaugural, gained the couple access to the House gallery. Henry spotted an acquaintance from the Seventh and waved down to him. “Hurrah for Old Abe!” shouted the young man in greeting. Some of his companions made it into a chant, as if the President who had summoned them here had occupied the house at the other end of the avenue for eight years instead of eight weeks.
“Join us!” they shouted with hands cupped to the sides of their mouths.
Henry shook his head no, but cried down “Soon!” before flashing first ten fingers and then another two.
“The Twelfth,” he said to Clara.
“Do you mean the twelfth of May?” she asked with alarm.
“It’s not a date,” he explained. “It’s a regiment. Or it will be. Tomorrow Old Abe is going to direct that it be organized at Fort Hamilton, up in New York harbor.”
“How do you know this?”
“Have you forgotten, Cous’, that we now have family connections to the great powers?”
“Papa told you?”
“Last night. It appears I could go in as a captain, which I’m not likely to do anywhere else.”
Clara said nothing. Henry’s entry into the army had been inevitable since April 15. She was determined not to erupt in a flood of silly tears, which she felt no impulse toward in any case. She was simply overwhelmed with weariness at her design’s defeat. Looking down on the hundreds of boys below, some of Albany’s bachelors among them, she thought that she would probably never marry anyone, let alone Henry.
“Where is your regiment likely to go?”
“Nowhere for ages. Once it’s raised, it’s got to be trained. You can bet, however, that when it’s ready we’ll be sent to only the most hazardous places — that is, if your father has any influence with General Scott and Old Abe.”
“Don’t make jokes like that. How can you even imagine such horrors about Papa?”
The two of them were swept aside by a twenty-year-old private in pursuit of an eight-year-old boy, who’d succeeded in beaning him with an orange. Henry brought Clara over to the balcony’s railing.
“Why do you look so glum?” he asked her.
“Oh, Henry,” she said wanly.
“
Oh
,
Henry
,” he mimicked. “Cheer up, my darling. It will be a short war. Your father — the senator — says he’s sure of it. It will probably be finished before the Twelfth ever leaves Fort Hamilton.” He raised her chin with his fingers. “And I’ll never
make jokes about Senator Ira Harris again. He may not be my father, but he’s agreed to be my father-in-law, once the war is over, so I’ll desist.”
“What?” Her expression changed completely.
“Yes. It was all approved by him and the mater during last night’s regimental discussion, conducted after you’d gone to bed. I’m rather surprised you were able to sleep through it.”
“How did you convince them?”
“I told them that if they refused, I would invest my money in the South and sit out the war in England and write inconvenient letters to the Albany and Washington press.”
She laughed. “Did they think you were serious?”
“How do you know I wasn’t?”
In fact, she didn’t. “I’m so happy!” she cried. “Maybe this war
is
a blessing — God forgive me for saying it — but if it’s what brought them around …” She could never have foreseen that in February, but she should have. Mr. Lincoln’s world
was
a new one; all the old laws were repealed.
“That and one more thing brought them around,” he said.
“What was that?”
“I told them I would start pursuing Louise if they refused me you.”
He covered her open mouth with his hand. “That
was
a jest, Clara. J-e-s-t.”
She bit down on his finger, and when he didn’t withdraw it she closed her eyes and began caressing it with her lips. Giddy and thrilled and fearful, she had only one question: “When do you go?”
“Tomorrow morning, now that the rail line to Annapolis is open again.”
She pressed her face against his chest.
“Courage, Clara. Remember, your sagacious papa says it will be over in a trice. And while you’re living here,” he said, turning her head so she could see over the balcony to the noisy spectacle below, “think of what a play you’ll get to watch.”
