I Am Abraham (24 page)

Teams of horses suddenly appeared; trainmen attached them to our car.

We rode out of the Calvert Street Station in the middle of the night and traveled past houses that looked like rotting teeth. The moon was out, and Baltimore could have been a cavalcade of meandering avenues and roads. I didn’t see much sign of a mob, just trails of black mud, as we had in Springfield. One lamp was lit, but mostly we moved in the dark. We arrived at Camden Street, where a train was waiting; our own little car was hooked up to it. The ride was smooth as the Devil. I couldn’t even hear the harsh
sting
of the wheels. I kept thinking of that Corsican barber and the nicks he left on Mrs. Small, like crazy wounds of love.

20.

Listen to the Mockingbird

P
oor, poor Buchanan.

Our bachelor President was a stout sort of feller who had his own niece at the White House, Harriet Lane, or Miss Hallie, as she was known in Washington circles. She was an orphan who had lived with her uncle since she was eleven. Miss Hallie was tall and blonde, with violet eyes and a handsome bosom that breathed like a wild bird. She’d gone with Buchanan to London, when he was our minister over there, and Queen Victoria was so taken with Miss Hallie that she called her Madame Ambassador. Harriet wasn’t much different at the White House, where everyone knew her as Buchanan’s First Lady.

It was a signally somber mansion. Miss Hallie had remodeled the whole shebang, but it was still like a cavern with a whole lot of staircases. A gaggle of young men fluttered about in soft collars and black coats. I couldn’t tell if they were Buchanan’s messengers or secretaries. They whispered in the President’s ear and wouldn’t welcome me or my Secretary of State, a little man with a long nose and rumpled gray scalp. Seward had brought me along to meet Miss Hallie and the President. Before I could introduce myself, a dog that was bigger and fatter than a prairie wolf lumbered down the stairs on monstrous paws, growled at us, and lay down next to Buchanan, with one eye open and one eye closed, just like his master.

Turns out Buchanan had a terrible squint. Seward had once sat in Congress with him, but that wasn’t much of a recommendation—the President had a Cabinet full of traitors who were feeding arms and ammunition to the
Secesh
. Buchanan and Miss Hallie would have preferred Seward in my place. He was a gentleman, but Seward had much more sand in him than a President who coddled Southern Senators and let the Union slide into the wind.

The public never took to Buchanan . . . and never tired of his niece. Women named their daughters after her, copied her copious hair. They stood in line to greet Miss Hallie. That lonesome tune “Listen to the Mockingbird” had been dedicated to her.

I’m dreaming now of Hallie

Sweet Hallie, sweet Hallie . . .

Listen to the Mockingbird,

Still singing when the weeping willows wave.

Harriet Lane kept staring at me like some White House witch, with that wild bird beating under her throat. I was startled by the contempt in her violet eyes, her “gracious chill,” as others called it. She clung to Buchanan with her own big hands; the President had a sizable paunch and a shock of silver hair.

Hallie harped about my scrape in Baltimore. “Good Lord, you were nearly scalped.”

Pinkerton must have told the President and Miss Hallie about that mad barber. And she was chattering like that mockingbird in the song—
sweet, sweet Hallie with the sour face
. I wanted to light out of there and avoid the witch. She curtsied to me and Mr. Seward with a strange air of triumph. Then Miss Hallie whispered—in a rather loud voice.

“Mr. Lincoln, sir, be warned. The Confederates have their own sharpshooters now, and they mean to disrupt Inauguration Day—they’re coming up to the District in droves.”

My Secretary of State was furious. “That’s idle gossip.”

“Not according to General Scott.”

“Then we’ll hear it from Scott,” Seward said, scowling at Miss Hallie.

Buchanan was eager to vacate the White House, but not his Hallie. She loved the chandeliers her uncle had installed, paid for out of his own pocket. She was mistress of the levees and government balls. She got along with the Cave Dwellers—the capital’s upper crust—and must have looked down upon Mary and me as nincompoops . . .

General Scott was next on Seward’s list. We visited him at the War Department. The tallest man in Washington at six foot five, and also one of the fattest. Old Fuss & Feathers was seventy-five years old. He received us while napping on the biggest sofa I had ever seen. He snored with one eye open, like Buchanan’s great big dog. It took two of his aides to rouse him from his slumber. But he was alert as Moses once his eyes weren’t shut.

Told him how chagrined I was about having to sneak into the District in a slouch hat.

“Ah,” he said, suddenly serious, “but you couldn’t have come in any other way—
alive
.” He had sent his sharpshooters to Baltimore—they were crouched in the rafters when our night train arrived at the Calvert Street Station. But I can’t recall one of ’em firing a shot at the barber and his cohorts.

Seward’s bushy eyebrows commenced to twitch with alarm. “That is yesterday’s news, General Scott. What about the inauguration? There will be spies
everywhere
in the capital—and an abundance of lunatics who have promised their brothers that Mr. Lincoln will never be sworn in.”

“Ah,” said that oracle from his sofa. “But the President’s safety is now in my hands. I may have lost some soldiers to the
Secesh
, but my sharpshooters are loyal to me. I’ll bottle up Pennsylvania Avenue with our cannon, and if those Rebels raise a stink, I’ll blow them to hell.”

All his bluster couldn’t seem to calm Mr. Seward. He had sensed the danger long before I ever did. Seward did not want to see the Republic ripped apart by wolves. He was much more worried about my welfare than the bachelor President and his niece, or Old Fuss & Feathers with his cannon and his company of sharpshooters.

“Mr. Lincoln, I am not so sanguine about General Scott’s sharpshooters as he is.”

“Seward, neither am I.”

I couldn’t get Miss Hallie’s tune out of my head. We’d become a nation of mockingbirds, full of malicious chatter. I wondered if Hallie had put a hex over the White House. So I was awful curious when a cavalry officer in a blond mustache scuffled with my bodyguards outside my door at the Willard. This officer wasn’t carrying any papers—or a weapon in his sleeve. He couldn’t have been much of a sharpshooter, but my bodyguards still knocked him about. He had one of Miss Hallie’s calling cards in his possession. I sent the bodyguards away while the cavalryman commenced to tear off his mustache—it was Hallie herself. And she looked much sadder away from the President’s rooms.

“Please forgive my little masquerade. But I would have been mobbed if I hadn’t worn a mustache. And I must speak with you, Mr. President.”

I didn’t know what to think of this sudden visitation. She’d become a vagabond, dislodged by her own conspicuousness. A revenue cutter was named after her, the
Harriet Lane.
Songs about Buchanan’s niece were as loud as any cry for war. She was a prisoner at the White House who couldn’t go abroad without creating a stir.

“Your uncle’s still President, Miss Hallie. I’m nothing but the next sucker in line for his chair.”

I felt like a
sucker
. Buchanan’s incompetence, his downright disappearance from the Presidency, had encouraged the Disunionists, led them into open rebellion.

“But I had no right to be so rude,” she said. “And I was
unforgivably
rude.”

“What’s eating you, Miss Hallie?”

It was the
Secesh
. Folks blamed her Uncle for not holding the country together. She had tried, but whenever she sat Unionists and the
Secesh
at the same table, they flung food and crockery at each other until she and her uncle had civil war at the White House.

Better the White House than the nation.

I didn’t say that to Miss Hallie. She and Buchanan swept calamity under the rug—had their shindigs and let our Southern Sisters slip into their own masquerade of a “union.” Now we had hell to pay. And I had to stand in the dark, with blood and rain about to piss from the sky.

“I should have been more generous,” she said. “That’s my flaw. I’m much too possessive. I didn’t want to share Uncle’s abode with you and Mrs. Lincoln. You shouldn’t blame him. He can’t abide the District. I’m the one who’s happy here, minding my uncle and his
store
. That’s what it is, Mr. Lincoln—the nation’s store, where everything under the sun is up for grabs. And I
worshiped
every minute—the politics, all the little flirtations with Uncle’s generals. I am a horrible flirt.”

I wanted to shake Hallie like a rag doll. Her damn insouciance had blinded her to everything.

“You don’t have to move out, Miss Hallie. You can board with us at the White House. Mrs. Lincoln will look after all your needs.”

She didn’t understand a word I’d said. She started to laugh, and then I saw the harsh lines under her violet eyes, like a revenue cutter out of control, the
Harriet Lane
in hostile waters.

“Oh, I couldn’t leave Uncle to his own devices,” she said, clutching my hand. “But I wasn’t fooling about those
Secesh
sharpshooters.”

I promised Miss Hallie I’d be careful, not to assuage her guilt, but to let her have her little dream of destruction. She’d conjured up half those sharpshooters in her head, and there wasn’t much I could do about that other half. She put her mustache back on and her cavalryman’s cape. I kissed her hand, like some bittersweet adversary, and my bodyguards let her out the door. She hadn’t conjured up
all
that destruction—there was violence in the March wind, in the sway of the trees, in the blue hiss of the lamps . . .

The entire District was still a contagion of mud and dust. God help man or beast caught in the mud. And here we were supposed to have a Presidential parade. Dusters requisitioned to sweep the avenues found a quagmire instead. The army had to arrive with caissons and a company of sappers, else that mud would never have been removed in time.

The morning was overcast. I didn’t have the least notion to descend into the dusty heart of the District. A note had been slipped under our door at the Willard.

If you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your Dumpling and play the Devil with you.

Mary commenced to scream. “There are assassins in the house! You will never arrive on Capitol Hill.”

“Mother, hush up! You’re scarifying the boys.”

I put Bob in charge, appointed him grand marshal of the Lincolns, and I strode downstairs in my shiny black boots and white kid gloves, my speech and spectacles in my pocket. Folks curtsied and bowed to me in the lobby. The moment I appeared on Pennsylvania Avenue, a band arrived and tootled “Hail to the Chief.” I climbed aboard a barouche and sat opposite Buchanan, who hid behind the curtains like a wizened boy. He must have known we were hurtling toward a bloodbath that none of us could escape. Coward that he was, he smoothed his own feathers and wouldn’t even wrassle with the rogue States.

The President seemed very pale. “Lincoln,” he said, “if you’re as pleased to inherit the White House as I shall feel upon returning to Wheatland”—his country manor in Pennsylvania—“you, sir, are a happy man.”

I looked up and saw riflemen crouching on the roofs along Pennsylvania Avenue. They were wearing green coats.
Lincoln green
—like Robin Hood.

I was startled by the boldness of these men, who hopped from roof to roof with their long rifles, and without the least fear of falling. Some of them leaned over the lip of a roof to hail the
two
Commanders-in-Chief in the carriage. It must have confused them some to have a pair of Presidents in the same car. I waved back with my white gloves. I couldn’t see much of the parade. Other riflemen in Lincoln green swarmed around the carriage. I espied Old Fuss & Feathers on Capitol Hill, in all the finery of a General-in-Chief, with silver tassels and gold epaulettes. He was sitting on a horse that swayed under his immensity. His own artillerymen had to clutch his saddle, else the horse might have collapsed.

I
STOOD
IN
FRONT
of the tiny speaker’s table on an enormous wooden plank that jutted out from the eastern portico of the Capitol. My boots creaked. I pulled out my spectacles, turned for an instant, and could spot sharpshooters in the Capitol’s windows, like a band of green crows.

My voice shot across that plain of people with its own high pitch. I argued that no State
upon
its
mere
notion
can lawfully get out of the Union. If it could, we would live at the edge of anarchy.
The Union is unbroken
, I said. I did not mention the Confederacy, could not. But I promised the people of the Southern States that a Republican administration would not rob them of their property or peace of mind.