The President's Daughter (55 page)

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love or admiration. Lincoln's appointments and military concessions include too large a number of Democrats: Benjamin Butler, Daniel Sickles, Franz Sigel, Thomas Meagher. He also has to satisfy the aspirations for military glory of politicians—McClellan, who wants to be President; Butler, who wants to be President; Grant, who wants to be President; Hooker, who wants to be President; and Sherman, who wants to be President; etc., etc. Of the whole lot, General Grant is probably the best. But it is worse than murder to give such high commands to Banks, Sigel, and McClellan.
Burnside is as timid as a grandmother; McClellan is almost criminally pro-South, arrogant, disrespectful of the President, although he loves his men and his men adore him. Two-eyed Meade is of two minds: backward and forward; Hooker is insubordinate; Fremont is too isolated from everyone; Pemberton and Hayes are no better than mediocre as probable heroes of the war.

Oh, my Harriet, I begin to suspect that I have not much of the warrior in my composition. The pride and pomp of war, the continual sound of drums and bugles, as well played as any in the world, the prancing and trampling of the light horse platoons, which are paraded in the streets every day, hold no charms for me. I long for domestic scenes, for your playing, for Beverly's new twins. Do you think I am somewhat jaded this morning for one of my years and considering the gravity and insipidity of my employment?

Good night. It is so dark that I cannot see to add more than that. I am, with the utmost tenderness,

Yours, ever yours,
Thor

P.S.: Imagine!—-it is practically our eighteenth wedding anniversary and not one moment of it has been out of tune with adoration.

FORT WENTWORTH, MISSOURI
SEPTEMBER
17
TH
, 1862

Ma Tante,

I have not seen any fighting, but much hard riding and marching and much friendly contact with troops mostly from the border states: Kentucky and Tennessee. Ours is only one humble voice, but what I have seen and heard reinforces our conversations about the policy of Lincoln in this war. He wants to put down the slaveholding rebellion and at the same time protect and preserve slavery. That is why he is losing the war both in the East and the West. This policy hangs like a millstone around his neck. Weakness, faintheartedness, and inefficiency are the natural result. The mental and moral machinery of mankind cannot long withstand such disorder. It offends reason, wounds the sensibilities, and shocks the moral sentiments of man. Can you give me one good reason why this should not be an abolition war? Is not abolition plainly forced upon the United States as a necessity of national existence? And is not an abolition war on Lincoln's part the natural and logical answer to be made to the Rebels? Granted, he does this to keep the loyalty of the border states, but is it worth
it? It arms the enemy while it disarms its friends, our own northern army. Cut off the connection between the fighting master and the working slave, and you at once feel an end to this rebellion because you destroy that which feeds it. Moreover, I personally feel, from what I have seen, that doing this would not offend the border states.

The Union men in the border states are intelligently so. If they are men who set a higher value upon the Union than upon slavery, many recognize slavery as the thing of all others which is the most degrading to labor and free men. They dare not say so now, but let the government say the word and I am convinced they would unite to send this vile thing to the grave and rejoice in it. What good thing has slavery done that it should be allowed to survive a rebellion of its own creation? Why should your country pour out its blood and treasure in order to protect and preserve the guilty cause of all its troubles?

Moreover, the evil of this policy exerts a chill upon the moral sentiment of mankind. It gives the Rebels the advantage of seeming merely to be fighting for the right to govern themselves. Thus you divest the war on Lincoln's part of all those grand elements of progress and philanthropy that naturally win the hearts and command the reverence of all men, and allow it to assume the form of a meaningless display of brute force, more likely to attract some Lafayette with twenty thousand men to help the Rebels and their four million slaves, than a Garibaldi ready to aid and defend the Union.

Lincoln's slaveholding, slave-catching, slave-insurrection policy gives the South the sympathy that would naturally flow toward the North and which would be mightier than lightning, whirlwind, or earthquake in extinguishing the flames of this momentous slaveholding war. At least that is how I see it, Aunt Harriet.

Perhaps this war should never have taken place, but having taken place, it should at least be for the right reason.

Affectionately,
Maurice

“I'm going to South Carolina.”

Willy Boss and I looked up in surprise as Thenia strode into the warehouse, hat, coat, and carpetbag in hand, as if she were already on her way to the railroad station. I straightened up, my bright yellow smock worn over my crinoline skirts making an identical but larger conical shape to my pyramid-shaped apothecary cap. I could have been a pumpkin. I pulled off my gloves.

“Thenia, you can't find anybody there now, in the middle of a war!”

“Mrs. Wellington's right, Ma. What are you going to do once you get there?”

“The government's called for volunteers to help teach the contrabands coming over to the Union side from Virginia. Thousands of slaves are freeing themselves and crossing over to the Union lines. The military is using them to construct earthworks and trenches, and as laborers on bridges and dikes, and for cooks and laundresses, but who's going to
teach
them? Especially the children? A lot of white women, abolitionists, have already volunteered. It beats washing dirty linen for the Sanitary Commission. These people need nursing, too. They're war refugees and victims like any other. Our navy, of which my son is a proud member, has captured the entire coastline of South Carolina and the islands: Hilton Head, Port Royal, and Beaufort are all incorporated into the government's military department of the South. The thousands of ex-slaves there need help. Will you keep Willy for me?”

It was the longest speech I had ever heard Thenia make without stuttering. “Of course I will. But why not wait at least until Richmond is taken?”

“Because Richmond may take years to fall. Because Lincoln may make peace before it falls. People are so fed up with this war, they're saying it's impossible to conquer the South.”

“What about Raphael's wife and child?”

“I asked Suzanne to come with me and bring Aaron, but she's afraid of the South. She's a northerner, never been beyond the Mason-Dixon line. ‘What if the Confederates overrun Fort Monroe and sell me into slavery?' she says. I say nobody's going to overrun Fort Monroe with my son guarding it.”

“Where will you go?”

“To Hilton Head, South Carolina. The relief program has been approved by President Lincoln and Secretary Chase. It's called the Port Royal Experiment. We've been told that all volunteers will sail from New York to Hilton Head on the steamer
United States
in a fortnight. I'll be on it. It will almost be like sailing to the Cape colony to see Abe again.”

I stood there in my yellow dunce cap and my yellow apothecary's smock, holding my white gloves and gazing at Thenia with awe and affection. Suddenly, Thenia enfolded me in her arms and I buried my face in her shoulder. With a shock I realized she was a tall, broad, strong woman. Strong. She was the same height as I. When would I stop thinking of her as a thirteen-year-old child? She was forty-nine years old, a grandmother. And she was leaving me and going in harm's way.

“I'll take care of Willy for you, and look out for Suzanne and Aaron.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Wellington.”

“Good-bye . . . Mrs. T. H. Boss. And God keep and bless you.”

“Well, President Lincoln has a ‘great' victory,” said Sarah. “Let's see if Salmon P. Chase is right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked Sarah outside her office, where I had gone to tell her the news about Thenia.

“Lincoln's supposed to use Lee's defeat at Antietam to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. If the South doesn't come back into the Union by January first, 1863, all the slaves in the Confederacy are free! It was one hell of a cabinet meeting! I understand the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, stood up with tears streaming down his face two days ago after the battle, crying, ‘Nothing from the army! Nothing from the army! Instead of following up the victory and attacking and capturing the Rebels, McClellan has let Lee escape across the river ... oh dear, oh dear. Your orders, Mr. President, were for him to
destroy
Lee's army. . . .” Then Chase said, ‘If McClellan thinks he is going to get around the President and avoid annihilating Lee, he's wrong unless Lee intends to surrender of his own accord!' General McClel-lan's told the President that he's achieved a ‘great victory,' that Maryland is free from enemy occupation and that Pennsylvania is safe. He'd damned well better be telling the truth, because we're acting on that statement! ‘

“Then Halleck, general-in-chief of the armies, stood up and said that the character of the war had changed within the last year, and that there was now no longer any possibility of reconciliation. ‘We must conquer the Rebels or be conquered by them,' he said. ‘Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put
hors de combat.
It is now a question of subjugation.' The old South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and new ideas. That's what Halleck told the cabinet and the President. Stanton, Chase, Stewart, and Bates agreed. Smith and Blair acquiesced. As did the President. He's to give the South a hundred days to come round.

“Then the President said, ‘The people in the rebellious states must understand they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail, come back into the Union unhurt. If they expect to have the Union as it was, then now is the time, before the Constitution is amended to abolish slavery forever.' At which Caleb Smith said, ‘Th-th-there goes Indiana.' And Chase declared, ‘Blacks should be armed.' “

At this, Sarah stopped breathless on the steps of the Godey Publishing House and turned to me, grabbing my hand as if she were shoving a rifle in
it. I stared at her without really seeing her. The reality of what she was saying stopped my heart.

Around us thronged a war city: soldiers, sailors, merchants, cabs, carriages, ambulances, couriers, covered wagons, munitions carts, army nurses, elegant cavalrymen on horseback, foot soldiers shouldering muskets, mules, oxen, stray dogs. A large cannon was being pulled down Market Street on a railway flatcar; omnibuses clattered across russet bricks; to the east the masts and chimneys of ships in the navy yard stuck into the sky, children played, street urchins raced between traffic, an organ-grinder's plaintive song could be heard, while buckboards of army uniforms, tied in thick bundles that resembled corpses, rattled along Market Street on their way to the quartermaster's.

And above all this din and life and striving, just above our heads, hovered the letters of that word,
emancipation,
with which I had cursed my father on his deathbed. There it hovered over Sarah and me, two white ladies discussing a secret meeting of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. Didn't I consider myself free without this proclamation of Lincoln's? If I did, then why was my heart beating like a troop of thundering bulls, and why was the firmament of my men's faces orbiting around my head like missiles?

If Abraham Lincoln's proclamation went through on the first of January, my husband and sons would be, by force of arms, emancipating their own wife and mother. Thomas Jefferson's grandsons would be doing what he hadn't had the courage to do. I had suddenly become the posterity of two presidents—the one who enslaved me and the one who would set me free. I felt the puzzled, loving eyes of my men all turned toward me. I wouldn't think about that now, I decided. I would think about that by and by—when I was calmer. And I turned my eyes toward Abraham Lincoln.

We hold these truths to he self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson

Sitting here, in the Oval Office at the White House, waiting for the delegation of free black citizens I have to persuade to leave the United States of their own free will, I can't help thinking that if there hadn't been a Thomas Jefferson, there wouldn't be an Abraham Lincoln. Oh, not that I'm comparing myself to the great Jefferson, the inventor of our national identity. No, I'm a journeyman President, the Tycoon, unloved, unreelectable, who has Jefferson's wolf slavery by the ears and is being very seriously manhandled by it—shaken like a brown bear shakes the last piece of meat from a coyote bone.

President Jefferson must have felt at times as lonely as I do, sitting here in this rocking chair. What? Oh, I've heard the stories about his secret slave family. I've snickered with the rest in cabinet meetings about the great revolutionary and his black Aphrodite. But quite frankly, I feel as another President did, the only one perhaps who knew the story firsthand and at the time it happened: John Adams. He said (and he said it as a President, a Yankee, and a gentleman) that he believed the story was true, and that it was the tragic, irrevocable consequence of chattel slavery. I believe that too, and moreover, here I sit, the other tragic, irrevocable consequence of chattel slavery. The convoluted relationships of southerners with their slaves, who
are often their blood kin, their ancestral twins, their dark shadows, are nobody's business unless . . . unless these relations touch the body politic of the United States.