Henry and Clara (25 page)
Authors: Thomas Mallon
“My stepmother was a good politician long before Fort Sumter.” Clara took his hand. “Please, Papa.”
Senator Harris pursed his lips. “You know this is not a good idea, Clara. Asking men to fight their old compatriots.”
“But they won’t be fighting Confederates. They’ll be fighting the Sioux Indians, which means their loyalties won’t be tampered with. They’re wanted for service in the territories.”
“I see I should spend more time in the Blue Room. The intelligence I get in the Senate cloakroom isn’t half so specific and up-to-date.” Harris paused. “All right, my dear. I shall speak to Mr. Lincoln.”
“Thank you, Papa.” She got up to get him his hat and walking stick.
“I don’t mean
now
, Clara!”
“Yes, Papa, right now. If you walk over to the Mansion, you’ll find him up, working with Mr. Hay and Mr. Nicolay. They’re expecting late reports from Sheridan tonight.”
Old Edward, the doorkeeper, led Senator Harris upstairs, where it turned out Mr. Lincoln was alone, eating raisins and an apple — “a seventy-six-inch squirrel,” Dan Sickles once called him.
“Come in, Senator. I’ve let the boys go for the night,” said the President, pointing to Nicolay’s empty office. “I can use your company.”
Harris took a seat across from Lincoln and in an embarrassed rush put forward Clara’s proposal. The President seemed amused. “Mrs. Lincoln speaks admiringly of your daughter’s sense and spirit. Here’s fresh evidence of it.”
“My stepson,” said Harris, taking a handful of raisins from the President, “is a high-strung young man. I find it difficult to plead his particular case when so many are enduring so much, but he has seen some of the worst of this war — Antietam,
Fredericksburg, the Crater — and I couldn’t help thinking as I walked over here that he might be of more use to his country right now if he weren’t in the thick of battle. I fear, given the strain he’s showing, that he might not be quite dependable.”
Lincoln went out to Nicolay’s desk and took a paper from a stack on the blotter. “This is a letter to General Grant that I had John working on. Read it and tell me if I’m having it both ways, for that’s what I want.”
Harris skimmed the draft and read aloud the crucial part, which acknowledged Grant’s opposition but still pushed the Rock Island scheme: “ ‘I did not know at the time that you had protested against that class of thing being done, and I now say that while this particular job must be completed, no other of the sort will be authorized without an understanding with you, if at all. The secretary of war is wholly free of any part in this blunder.’ ” Harris looked up, trying to find whatever words the President wished him to say.
Lincoln took the paper from him and walked it back to Nicolay’s desk. “It’s not the strict truth. I had a pretty fair idea of the general’s point of view all along. But I intend to get this thing done. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see Mr. Stanton and placate him, too. Why don’t you come round to the War Department with me?”
“If you think I can be useful, sir, I shall be happy to.”
Lincoln sat down at his old postmaster’s desk and took out his pen. “Good,” he said. “Now I’ll get your stepson to help me as well.” He said no more until he finished composing an order sending Captain Henry R. Rathbone to Rock Island “to make a special inspection, under instructions to be given him by the provost marshal general, of the prisoners to be enlisted.” He handed the paper to Senator Harris. “That should do it.”
“I’m very grateful, Mr. President.”
Lincoln offered him an apple slice. “I’m sure this isn’t as good as what you grow up in Loudonville, but let’s finish it off. It will fortify us for our little talk with Mr. Stanton in the morning.”
The two men — one tall and craggy as a totem pole, the other smooth and solid as a statue in the Rotunda — sat munching the rest of Mr. Lincoln’s apple in silence, until the President, looking
tired, asked, “So, is there anything else, Senator? A consulate or a clerkship for some worthy New Yorker?”
Harris blushed, but Lincoln, rising for his bedtime, brought a friendly hand down on his shoulder. “We’ve done good business tonight, old friend.” They walked out of the office together, past the war map with its colored pins. “A year from now, less than that with luck, this war will have come to an end, and Henry and Clara will be about the business of giving you and Mrs. Harris a grandchild.”
Harris looked up, surprised, but the President just patted his shoulder once more and blew out the lamp. “The Red Room is a two-way sieve. Mrs. Lincoln spills what secrets she hears in my direction.”
October 14, 1864
Rock Island Prison
Darling Clara,
They lied, of course: Grant, the President and the pater. We were instructed to raise the 1st U.S. Volunteers only from persons born in the North or abroad, despite their service to the Southland. Now, to get our 1,750 men, we are being permitted to take the oath from “discouraged Southerners,” too, which is a good thing, since all the captive voices I hear in this place sound just like the ones I heard calling out from the rebel lines before Burnside sprang the Petersburg mine: each as mellifluous as your old friend Miss Bashford’s.
They are hungry, and the brighter ones realize they will soon be cold. It’s full rations for those who come over, considerably less for those who don’t. The former have been put by Col. Johnson into what we call the calf pen; on the other side of a fence lies the “bull pen,” where the recalcitrant and confused remain. It’s touching to see the odd bit of bread and meat being flung from the sheep to the goats — I wonder if the same generosity manifests itself at Andersonville, or if this is a species of the regional gallantry Miss B. liked to go on about.
My war has come full circle: once again I am a recruitment
officer, this time Honest Abe’s personally appointed one. But what we are doing here is far worse than what we accomplished on the streets of New York. These crackers aren’t being
sold
on the army; they’re being
starved
into it. The denizens of the bull pen fully expect us to slaughter them once the snow falls and supplies are interrupted.
Nonetheless, I will galvanize these rebels out of their gray and into our blue — all so they can go kill the red man. If they do a thorough job of that, what say you, Clara, to our heading west once we’re married? We can settle near some fort in Colorado and grow gaudily rich off the silver dug out of the new earth, and never again hear a syllable of oratory. I dreaded the war, but I thought it would at least blow away the old men and leave something new and exciting once the smoke cleared. Now I know the old men have managed to run the war as they did their businesses and law firms and all else. I hate what they’ve done and what I’ve seen. Had your Mr. Lincoln let the wayward sisters depart in peace, I’d have grown harmlessly, biliously old; as it is, a million lie dead and I, dear girl, am a wreck, deservedly so.
Kiss mother and the girls for me. I kiss you myself — right now — this moment —
Henry
She read it twice, and she decided she would not cry over it. Surely this was a
good
letter, she thought, forcing herself, as she sat in her father’s study, to read it a third time. Henry had emerged from the torpor that gripped him after Petersburg. A wreck? Nonsense. He would not be looking west, and toward their marriage, if he were. This letter was a fine thing, however sad it might sound. Papa and Mr. Lincoln had saved him —
she
had saved him, right in this room, kept him alive. The war would end, and he would come home knowing that he owed her his life. And then they would make life together. A child, children, and a new life for themselves. Yes, maybe they would go west. On a shelf behind her, she looked for Papa’s copy of Parkman. She carried it upstairs to read, humming as she went.
C
LARA MOVED
the flowers from the left side of her waist to the right. The mirror told her they looked better there, but for a moment she wondered if the shift might disrupt some symbolic meaning.
They were awash in portents. Mrs. Lincoln’s latest enthusiasm was Spurzheim, the German who thought the bumps on everyone’s head had significance. The day before yesterday, when the President paraded to his second inaugural, everyone decided the dark clouds meant that peace was still further off than they’d been hoping. But when the sun broke through, right over Mr. Lincoln’s head as he began his speech, the crowd cried its approval. The President went on to promise moderation, not marvels, but at that moment you could have convinced anyone, even Henry, that a glorious victory was only weeks away.
Mrs. Lincoln could use peace immediately. Since the reelection she’d become stranger, even less settled than before. Last month, in a response to one of her husband’s own ominous dreams, she had ordered a thousand dollars’ worth of mourning. She painstakingly explained to everyone in the Blue Room that this was a way of cheating fate, not abetting it, but no one felt the act’s strategic nature made it any less morbid. Clara tried to imagine her as she must be right now, across the park and inside the White House, getting into her dress for tonight’s ball at the patent office. Clara knew it was white silk covered with point lace, and that she’d be wearing a lace shawl over it. She further knew, from John Hay, that the dress had cost
$2,000
. Still, spending two times as much on the festive as the funereal had to be a good sign.
Clara had no intention of covering her own shoulders tonight. The only thing her ensemble would have in common with Mrs. Lincoln’s was the spray of violets she now pinned into her hair. Another look in the mirror proved the deep apricot silk she had on to be a marvelous choice; she was already too old for pastels and chiffons, and if she had her way tonight, she would take a giant step toward being, at last, at thirty-one, a married woman.
She could hear Pauline in the next bedroom, straining to get herself into the purple bombazine she’d bought.
Much more tasteful than bright colors during wartime, don’t you think, Clara?
What Clara really thought was that, except for her beloved feathered headdress, Pauline would look like one of the Catholics’ giant statues wrapped up for Lent. Her stepmother was doubly happy if she could criticize Clara and the First Lady in one fell swoop of moral fashion. Mrs. Lincoln had consistently disappointed her these past four years: any solidarity that might have arisen from mutual antipathy to Mr. Seward and Mr. Weed had long since congealed, on Mrs. Harris’s part, into hostility. Indifference by the First Lady toward the whole Harris family would have been preferable to the way she dispensed social favors exclusively to Clara and Ira. Things had reached a pitch of pique on Friday, when Mrs. Lincoln insisted that Senator Harris be her escort to the swearing-in of the new, dead-drunk Vice President. Clara, now putting some jasmine in with the violets, relished recalling the sight of Pauline, looking on from a distant part of the Senate gallery and practically having a seizure over her banishment. This morning at breakfast she’d actually told her husband, “I hope that tonight you’ll be cautioned by Andy Johnson’s example,” the first reference anyone in the family had ever made to Ira Harris’s steadily greater tippling. The poor old thing had been crushed by the remark, unable to make a sound as he spooned his egg and munched the rest of his bacon. Well, Clara hoped he would take as much punch and spirits as he liked tonight. She had a small design that depended on his slight inebriation.
Bless Papa, he’d already done so much. When the Rock Island
mission was finished and she urged him once more to keep Henry away from battle, she’d never expected her father would manage to bring Henry home, six days before Christmas, with a promotion to major and a job — behind a desk! — a few blocks away in the provost marshal’s office. Henry was commanding eighteen clerks and messengers now, disbursing hundreds of thousands of dollars to every regiment in the army. “In a year or two,” she’d said, flinging her arms around him while he worked at a ledger in Papa’s study one night, “you’ll have put yourself out of business, paid the last volunteer and draftee and helped send them home. You’ll shut the cash drawer and hear a nice hollow thud, and we’ll know the war is over for good.”