A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (14 page)

Cage kept his disquiet to himself, and Lincoln—a brilliant reader of other men's thoughts—didn't seem to notice it.

“But we've yet to hear from the master,” he declared.

Cage stood and read some lines he had written in the last few weeks, lines that had yet to find their place in a finished piece of work with a discernible theme. It was a notion he had been working on since that spring morning a year and a half ago when he had ridden home alone after spending the night with Lincoln in New Salem. The birdsong breaking through the stillness had made him think of musical notes, and to wonder if music itself was not a human invention but a code buried in the suspirating rhythms of the world. It was a complex thought that kept flying out of his grasp, and he knew, even as he read his lines aloud, that he had not yet caught it. There was appreciative nodding and grunting on the part of his friends as he finished, but the poem sounded abstruse to him. Worse, it sounded useless. Cage looked over at young Billy Herndon. He could tell that Billy had barely listened to his poem. He was still fuming over the issue of slavery and the persecution of Reverend Lovejoy, and how Lincoln with his mocking trifle and Cage with his hazy ponderings had helped turn the conversation away from the great moral question looming over them all.

I
T WAS A BRIGHT OCTOBER MORNING
but the sky rippled with darkness as unending flocks of passenger pigeons flew above Springfield on their southern migration, depositing a light snowfall of bird waste that spattered the hats of the crowd gathered in front of the First Presbyterian Church.

There were in fact two crowds, a smaller one with the intent of entering through the front doors to hear Reverend Josiah Porter speak about abolition, and a larger one resolved to prevent them from doing so. Jacob Early was there, standing with the latter group, his arms resolutely crossed.

“Well, hello there
,
Jacob,” Ned Baker called out as he approached with Cage and Billy Herndon. He offered his hand with such hearty goodwill that Early—compromised by his own essentially friendly nature—had no choice but to uncross his arms to shake it.

“What are you doing standing out here in front of the church?” Baker asked him.

“You know damn well what we're doing, Ned,” Early said. “We have a peaceable community here, and we don't care to have some abolitionist who calls himself a preacher come along and stir everything all up.”

“You're planning to keep a preacher from walking into a church?” Cage asked.

“Do I know you?”

“Second battle of Kellogg's Grove.”

Early peered at Cage. Early had been a captain at Kellogg's Grove and Cage only a militia private beneath his notice. But Cage remembered him vividly, as he remembered every other deeply incised detail of that day. He had last seen him during the courthouse debate when Early and Ninian Edwards had been bombarding each other with lowly insults. Face to face now, he was struck by how young Early looked, how young he must have been at the time he had commanded Lincoln and Stuart and Reed in his spy company. He still had traces of that native authority, though his waistcoat strained against the weight he had put on since. The angry men at the church door shuffled behind him as if it were a settled thing that he was in command.

Early finally nodded at Cage but—still acknowledging the gap in their long-ago rank—declined to say anything to him.

“I don't see your friend Lincoln here,” he said instead to Baker. “He's got the sense to stay away, and you aren't likely to be growing any turnips here either.”

“I don't care a thing in the world about a turnip. I just like to hear a learned man speak from time to time.”

“Open a sack and let all the niggers loose at the same time?” a man standing next to Early said. “That doesn't sound like the teaching of any kind of learned man to me.” He shifted his attention to Cage. “And just so you know, I'll knock you or anybody else in the head if you intend to help get that preacher in here.”

Cage had seen this man holding forth in the taverns and hotels and coffeehouses of Springfield. He was a wealthy landholder and failed Democratic candidate for the assembly named Nimmo Rhodes. He was of normal height but so powerfully thick in the chest that the sleeves of his coat were pinched and creased under his arms. He had a marvelously round face that was incongruent with the menace in his eyes.

“You might as well try to knock me in the head now,” Cage told him, “because that's exactly what I intend.”

“Let's not get excitable, Nimmo,” Early told Rhodes, gently pulling him back by the arm. “This isn't a mob.”

But it was a mob, or turned into one almost as soon as the Reverend Josiah Porter was spotted walking down the street on his way to the church, gripping his Bible so hard that his knuckles were white. He was a fierce-looking man to begin with, and he was surrounded by five or six acolytes who were clearly acting as bodyguards. About fifty people, including Cage and Baker, had come to hear him speak, but there were twice that number blocking the doors to the church.

The confrontation that took place came on swiftly and was hauntingly silent. The crowd guarding the doors tensed up and closed ranks, Reverend Porter's men stepped forward and shoved into them without saying a word, and suddenly the two groups closed into a grunting, heaving, trampling mass. No one spoke, no one struck anyone else with fists or deadly implements, but it was violent all the same, a press of men with their feet planted grinding into one another in such a tight mass that in an instant Cage was afraid for his life. He might have fallen, or someone (Nimmo Rhodes being a likely suspect) might have kicked his feet out from under him; in either case he went down onto the street. He tried to stand but was packed in so tight by the shoving men still on their feet that there was no room to bend his knees. Looking up through the thicket of flailing arms, he could see the sky only in flickering glimpses. He gasped for breath but there was no air, only a growing cloud of street dust. He had almost passed out by the time he fought his way back to the surface. He gulped air and watched as one of the combatants—pro- or anti-abolitionist, it was impossible to know—lost his footing and fell, his head cracking into Cage's cheekbone on the way down.

“That's enough! That's enough!” Ned Baker was shouting. The confrontation had been going on for some time now, but Baker was the first person who seemed to have actually spoken any words since it began, and as his voice rose out of the confused silence it had an arresting force. “We're neighbors! We don't have any reason to be fighting each other.”

He reached out and grabbed an ashen-faced Reverend Porter by the shoulder. “All this man wants to do is—”

“—free all the niggers!” someone in the mob shouted. Men were still shoving and surging against each other, but the struggle was more like a loosening knot now. Behind the colliding front lines, there were pockets of calm.

“No,” Baker said. “He wants to walk into a church of God! Is Springfield the sort of town that won't let a man do that? Are we the kind of people who will
kill
a man to keep him from doing that?”

He turned to Early.

“Is that who we are
,
Jacob?”

“Nobody wants to kill anybody,” Early had to admit. “But we don't want to listen to his kind of talk.”

“Then
don't
!” Baker yelled, almost laughing at the obviousness of the solution. “Just don't listen!”

Early thought about that while he put out an arm to settle down Rhodes and the other still-agitated men who were standing immediately next to him. Then he turned around and took a step back so he was facing the crowd that was blockading the church.

“Gentlemen, we hold strong views and we've expressed them strongly. No one can be in doubt about where we stand on the question of abolition, which at its heart is not a principle at all but a devious tactic to disrupt comity and civil behavior. You've seen the abolitionists at their work already this morning. They would like nothing better than to keep us all agitated and off our guard. But we're the opposite of agitated, we are calm in our convictions. And having made those convictions known, we're now at liberty to go home to our hearths and our families and enjoy this beautiful God-given day.”

Cage, his eye swelling shut, noticed Early exchanging a satisfied nod with Ned Baker and then walking away, Nimmo Rhodes and the rest of the crowd hesitating at first and then following him down the street, roughly jostling the members of Reverend Porter's audience as they went.

When Reverend Porter finally began his lecture the church was only half full. Cage sat with Ned and Billy Herndon in the front, staring at the preacher through his one open eye, feeling the satisfying and righteous pain in his injured sinus. There was no blood but he was sure the left side of his face was grotesquely swollen and discolored. He could not wait to present the wound he had suffered in the abolition war to Lincoln, who had probably watched the confrontation on the street from the safety of his law office window. It was partly Lincoln's slipperiness on the matter that had made Cage determine to attend the lecture in the first place. Cage was naturally wary of men who were sure of themselves, whose beliefs and prejudices and ambitions were purposefully visible to all the world. That was why Lincoln's hidden motives and even more hidden self intrigued him more than Ned Baker's open passion. But there were some issues, a very few, that would find you out no matter how cleverly you disguised yourself. And so he had to be here, where history was brewing.

If Porter was still shaken by the melee outside the church, his voice did not betray it. His own church was in Sugar Creek, but the call of God and the demands of justice had sent him all around Illinois to speak out against slavery. He spoke with a benevolent South Carolina accent but his tone was chastising and firm. He had prepared for the ministry in Cincinnati, he said, where he had tried but failed to keep the great question of human bondage separate from his theological studies. Slavery was God's challenge to the human conscience. It was the crisis of our time, it would not go away, it could not be resolved by impractical expediencies like colonization. The only thing that would resolve it, that would restore God's blessing upon this morally blighted country, was the immediate liberation of all the men, women, and children of the imprisoned Negro race.

He urged his audience to disregard the confrontation that had taken place outside the church this morning. It was nothing. It was the reflexive spasm of ignorance and prejudice. The harassments he himself had suffered in preaching God's truth about slavery did not compare to what Reverend Lovejoy had endured in Alton. Bandits had tried to tar and feather him, they had repeatedly destroyed his printing presses, yet not only did the
Alton Observer
continue to appear on the streets but Lovejoy himself had called for a statewide antislavery meeting for that next week.

During the two hours the reverend spoke, Cage's eye swelled tighter, and by the end of the talk he was light-headed and his cheek was throbbing with pain. Baker and Herndon congratulated him on his noble wound. He went home, ignoring Mrs. Hopper's horrified look as he walked through the parlor and up the stairs. At his desk, he set down his memories of the eventful morning, conflating the righteous creative energy he felt with the vivid pain in his cheek.

One night a little more than a week later the usual Whig crowd was once again gathered at the back of Speed's store when Billy Herndon burst through the door and ran past the merchandise and appeared in front of them with tears streaming down his face.

“They shot him dead!”

He was crying so hard that it took him a moment to calm himself and deliver the rest of the news about who exactly had been shot. Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist editor and minister whom Reverend Porter had praised in his lecture the week before, had been killed by a mob in Alton.

“They shot him dead. He was trying to keep them from destroying his new printing press and they killed him. Five times he was shot.”

The men in the store reacted with grim silence. Their Whiggish views on slavery and its extension into other states and territories were various—a few of them were theoretically in favor of abolition, some believed in the dream of colonization, some like Speed came from families that still held slaves and therefore could not denounce the institution without hypocrisy, others like Lincoln stood cautiously to the side, observing, waiting, testing the ground for a place to take a firm stand. But they were united in their horror at the outbreak of mob rule. They were ambitious but conscionable men, and a society without order was a threat to their dreams.

“We would not have allowed such a thing to happen in Springfield,” Speed said.

“It almost happened last week,” Cage said. He knew his observation was supported by the appearance of his face. When he had looked in the mirror that afternoon the grotesque swelling was finally gone but there was still a many-hued bruise below his eye. “And it might happen yet.”