I Am Abraham (21 page)

The blue eyes rolled about in his head like someone in a trance; it was a trick that medicine men used at a monster show. But none of them had Beecher’s flair for drama, none of them had Beecher’s passion. And slowly, he reconstructed John Brown.

“An old man, kind at heart, industrious, peaceful, went forth, with a large family of children, to seek a new home in Kansas. . . . He saw his first son seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten like a dog by the officer in charge, and long lying at death’s door! Another noble boy, without warning, without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead.”

I could hear men and women weep; I watched them clutch and flail their handkerchiefs, dab their eyes, as they sat on those circular seats, enthralled, fixing on Beecher’s words, mimicking his sounds with little movements of their bodies. And then that gentle whisper was gone.

“The shot that struck the child’s heart crazed the father’s brain,” Beecher said with a
Shakespearean
wave of his arms and a stamping of his foot that sounded like a thunderbolt coming from his cupola. “He goes to the heart of a Slave State. One man; and with sixteen followers!” Beecher ogled his eyes like a monster to make his point and tell us how such a
phantom
and his followers captured the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. That demented old man, he said, “is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The governor, the officers of the State, and all the attorneys are pygmies compared to him.”

That snarling look of his grew into an angel’s smile as he turned John Brown into a martyr. The whole congregation fell silent with the wonder of his tale. They would have resurrected Brown, if they could have, and carried him up to the cupola. And for a moment I did have a vision of John Brown standing with Beecher in the pulpit, his face all scratched and blood on his beard.

T
HE
MINUTE
I
ARRIVED
at Astor House I realized that Woods & Heckle weren’t the right tailors for Manhattan, and I wasn’t much better off at Plymouth Church—I didn’t have Mr. Beecher’s soft satin look. So I wasn’t sorrowful when a snowstorm was predicted for the evening of my lecture. I hoped to God that the snow would keep all the Quality folks away. I was filled with such melancholia I didn’t know where to turn, whether to slink back across the ferry and ride the rails to Illinois, or lose myself somewhere in this wilderness of people. I’d been to Manhattan with Mary, three years before, when we visited half the emporiums and dry goods bazaars on Broadway; I watched that wonderment in her eyes, that pinch of gluttony, as if she meant to try on every sable coat and silver fox muff in Manhattan, while the floor managers stared at my country duds with suspicion and disdain . . .

The Young Republicans snatched me from the foolscap pages of my lecture and acted as my bodyguards on a stroll up Broadway. My
unholies
must have unhinged me a little, because I’d never seen such hullabaloo, like waves of people spilling out of a python’s belly and shouting their own mad songs. Old men assaulted you, selling the finest silk umbrellas. Merchants came roaring out of their shops to entertain you and lure you inside with their feast of goods—fur coats and boots the color of blood, footstools and firearms, &c., &c.

The real encounter wasn’t on the sidewalks. The road itself was a great shopping bazaar, with the interruption of coaches and other vehicles. There were tents in the middle of the road, hucksters who sold their wares out of a leather shelf that reminded me of the bits and pieces of an accordion; there were pickpockets and acrobats—they were all polite; and every single one had a sense of politics and a point of view. I could have spent hours engaging them in long discussions. The women and men were all skitterish around me. They recognized my stovepipe hat and long, lean look from some sketch of my debates with Dug. It’s kind of odd but I felt comfortable near these hucksters and acrobats, as if they were vagabonds and circuit riders of their own, and their frenzied gestures could mimic the finest sandpaper—and rub off a bit of my melancholy.

I resisted the Young Republicans’ pleas to sit down with their kinsmen, who would have mortified me with their Manhattan airs, and I labored over my lecture until dark. I kept thinking of John Brown and Beecher in his floating pulpit. I could sniff the storm from my window. I watched the swirl of snow until it was time to leave for the Cooper Institute.

The Great Hall was a huge rectangle about as long as a city block. The suckers had to pay twenty-five cents to get in and hear the wild man of the West. But the snow had kept a good portion of people away—still, there was a crowd of over fifteen hundred crackers in their Quality clothes. The women seemed as tall and aristocratic as Adèle Douglas; their diamond necklaces gleamed under the gas lamps. I hadn’t lost my wits, even with all my sadness. I employed my own
spy
, asking an old acquaintance from Springfield to stand as far back as he could in the hall and signal with his cane if I couldn’t be heard.

I stumbled over the first few sentences as I tried to lower the pitch of my voice. I didn’t stamp my foot like Mr. Beecher or wave my hands like a windmill. I stood correct. I had to squint, because I wouldn’t wear my spectacles in front of all the grandees, who might have thought a little less of me in my specs. And I lit into them like a duke.

Mary had worked with me for two whole months—had me shed
most
of my drawl. I would read the Bible with her in a sonorous tone, practice my vowels in front of the mirror until I spoke with the voice of a metropolitan saint.

I shoved the Founding Fathers into my speech. “This is all Republicans ask—all Republicans desire—in relation to slavery. As those Fathers marked it, so let it again be marked, as an
evil
not to be extended. . . .”

I told the audience that I wanted to address a few words to the Southern people. “When you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to
Black Republicans
.”

I couldn’t avoid the debacle at Harper’s Ferry—it was like a bullet in the brain that would echo through eternity unless I stopped it right here and now.

“You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise”—if an enterprise it was. A ticket to madness, I’d say.

“John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate.”

Then I stared down from the lectern; there wasn’t a sound in that hall except the sizzle of gas. Men clutched their own arms, women hid under their veils, as if my words had corrupted them a little, like a snakebite. They were fearful—and eager to listen.

“You will rule or ruin in all events,” I said of the Southerners.

“You will not abide the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”

I appealed to all the men and women in the audience, that we should not be frightened away by menaces of destruction to the government,
nor of dungeons to ourselves
. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The silence was suddenly broken. The audience rose up from its seats—menfolk stamped their feet and tossed their hats into the air while their wives waved handkerchiefs. A few of them even whistled in an unladylike manner. My throat was as parched as a turkey caller after the hunt; the bones in my hands were as stiff as the dead. And then all these folks came rushing up to the podium, like I was some wonder who’d come to disturb their tranquility. They grabbed at my elbow to see if I was genuine or not. I was fearful now. What sort of devilment had I unleashed? Was I
another
John Brown, sent to rile the “countryside” of Manhattan, with my talk of highwaymen? I’d come into their lion’s den with my own Republican thunder, and none of them were fit enough to steal it from me.

Yet I knew I wasn’t made for these city folks, with their silk scarves and lorgnettes and opera glasses that a general might have used to espy a battlefield a couple of hills away. Bedecked in their silver fox coats, they had such a look of
acquisition
on their faces, it was as if they could own me with a simple clasp of the hand. I understood how Black Hawk must have felt when he was first trundled from town to town like a peacock in war paint, and folks were startled to hear him palaver in their own tongue and reason as well as they could. So I lit out of there after the very last handclasp with a prominent Manhattan prince.

18.

Prairies on Fire

I
ARRIVED
UNDER
A
witch’s sky, black as blood, without the stationmaster to greet me or clutch my gripsack; every stall was locked in the middle of the night, but the miasma had commenced to seep out of me in the cars, the closer we got to Illinois. I wanted to wipe out the memory of that Manhattan hall, but I couldn’t find much rest in Springfield. I had crossed some invisible line, and I couldn’t go back to my regular route.

First they would come one at a time, stand outside the storm-riddled gate of our home on Franklin Street, with their hats in their hands, peek wild-eyed at my window and disappear, and then they arrived in droves, with their children, too. Some had traveled two hundred miles in a covered wagon; others had arrived on foot, and when Mary offered them a cracker or a crust of bread, they fiddled with their hats and muttered, “We
jest
came to have a look at Mr. Lincoln.” And then they were gone, replaced by yet another crop of pilgrims, until I figured I’d never have a moment of peace.

Next my generals arrived with their whiskers and stern chins and all their tally sheets and declared flat out that my little hobnob in Manhattan had propelled me right into the Presidential race. My talk at the Cooper Institute had spread like wildfire as a Republican credo. That still couldn’t explain the pilgrims outside—most of them were as unlettered as I had once been. My generals told me I’d have to hurry up and present a line of attack if I wanted to be a candidate. The taste was in my mouth, a little. But first I had to meet with some of those pilgrims.

Not one of them had heard about that shindig in the Great Hall or had seen any handbills summarizing the speech. Then why had they come on a pilgrimage to Springfield? They shrugged their shoulders and covered their eyes with their hats. One of the pilgrim women was carting a tattered picture of Adèle. I thought she had witnessed my debates with Dug, and that had fired her up.

“Ain’t that Dolley Madison?” she asked.

The other women tittered at her. “Dolley’s
daid
.”

No, it had nothing to do with handbills or debates. These farmers had heard a fly buzz, and my name had been passed from farm to farm like an incessant melody, and a son or a neighbor or some vagabond who had eaten their corn told them about a lean man who had come out of the dust to represent a cousin of theirs in the circuit court, and they fell in love with tales of his Kentucky drawl, and so a whisper flew from farm to farm, and they had to see this Abraham for themselves, squat outside his house like some half-mad pilgrim and move on. They weren’t thinking of canvasses; most of these men had never voted. Andy Jackson could still have been President for all they cared; and Dolley Madison could have been his mistress in the White House.

My communion with these pilgrims lent me a kind of raw courage, and I told my generals they could scratch my name on their tally cards. I was the Party’s dark horse, with all the pale markings of a palomino—a maverick without much chance. Seward of Manhattan was the lead horse and Governor Chase of Ohio was hanging hard on to his tail. Chase men and Seward men got into brawls. We heard about these epic battles that could spill out onto the streets of a town until lamps shattered and Seward men lay moaning at the side of a ripped-up road. My generals worried that Seward men got bolder with each melee, and would
whup
us when it came our turn to fight. But they were mad dogs that loved the smell of each other’s feculence. And while their generals battled among themselves over the convention site, our generals convinced the National Committee that the convention ought to be held in Chicago, where Republicans could find their Western whoop, and where we could pack the house with our own mad dogs. We stole the lightning bolts right out from under Seward and Chase.