A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (9 page)

“A rattlesnake and an ape!” Lincoln said. “That makes two more creatures we can include alongside our familiar toads and reptiles and slugs. If we were electing animals to put in a menagerie, instead of men to send to the statehouse, well, I expect we'd be pretty well set up.”

Lincoln said he would set aside the question for now of whether a man or an ape could better represent the people of Illinois, but he was pretty sure a Whig toad would be a far sight better at getting a canal dug and roads built than a human Democrat.

The room, and not just the Whig side, blossomed with laughter. Lincoln's voice, once it had warmed up a little, was not really so bad. Though it was thin and high it carried somehow, threading out to the back of the room where Cage and Speed could hear it plainly. Judging from the laughter from outside the windows, it was discernible out in the square as well. And there was a warmth and calmness to Lincoln's public demeanor that helped to puncture the wild histrionics of a moment before, and to bind the people in the room into a shared sense of what was reasonable and what was funny.

Lincoln's opening words were improvised, occasioned by the stir Edwards had created, but he shifted so seamlessly into his speech it was hard to tell where his spontaneous thoughts left off and his prepared remarks began. He offered the standard Whig bill of fare—banks, tariffs, internal improvements—but the familiar ideas sounded newer and bigger as he presented them.

“We may well ask ourselves this question,” he said. “What is government? Is it just a reluctant gathering up of individuals who would rather be left alone? Or could it have something more of harmony to it? Could it be that it doesn't have to be a collection of grumbling voices but a rousing chorus of people who see the need to act together and to accomplish things that would be impossible to do otherwise?”

There was enough partisan sting in his speech to keep it free of airy philosophizing, but there was gravity too, the sense that the man speaking was not just a political operative but a thoughtful steward of the people's business. The audience was stirred, the audience was moved to reflection—a condition the Democrats could not allow to persist.

“This young man will have to be taken down,” George Forquer said when he stood up to follow Lincoln, “and I am truly sorry that the task devolves upon me.”

Forquer was the register of the U.S. Land Office in Springfield, a lush patronage job that had not so coincidentally come his way after he had decided to renounce the Whigs and become a Democrat a few years before. Cage knew him casually—anyone who had bought land in Springfield did—but he had never seen him speak in public. Forquer stood there in silence for a long moment, his head down, as if summoning the will to discharge his painful duty.

He reminded the audience that he himself was not a candidate. He had just come here to speak his mind about matters of deep importance for the future of our beloved Illinois and our beloved country. He would appreciate the indulgence of his friends' attention, though he knew he had done little to deserve their notice, except perhaps to discharge his duties as register as honestly and diligently as he could. He had no ambition for higher office but he admired men who were willing to put themselves before the electorate, if they did so honorably and were untainted by base ambition. Alas, he could not attribute these qualities to Mr. Lincoln, for whom ambition was everything, for whom lies were but common discourse, for whom personal advancement superseded public duty.

“Now it's true,” Forquer said, pointing directly at Lincoln, who was standing not ten feet away, “that a man can't do much about the way he looks. But when I study Mr. Lincoln there, with his comical phiz, with his long arms and his clothes that don't quite fit, I see a man who wants you to think he just wandered up the road from New Salem. I see an actor playing at honesty as he connives and schemes to enrich his friends and to impoverish his state with ‘internal improvements' that he and his mendacious comrades in whiggery have no idea how to pay for.”

Cage could see that Lincoln was struggling to master himself during this attack, to remain patient and expressionless. He carried the act a little too far, his face such a mask of polite attentiveness that it might have seemed to a disinterested observer that he was agreeing with everything his denouncer said. There was a case to be made, of course, that Forquer was right. As would become painfully obvious in only a few years, the Whigs, Lincoln included, had no real idea how to pay for all those canals and railroads without taxing the citizens into penury.

“Mr. Forquer has struck at me, and he has struck hard,” Lincoln declared when it was time for him to speak again. “He has given me a mighty wound. He says I have contrived to look this way on purpose.”

He stood there in silence, with his bird's-nest hair and his arms sticking out of the sleeves of his coat, giving the absurdity of this proposition time to sink in. “I submit to you that only the Creator could have come up with such an apparatus as myself.”

The audience laughed and then, laughter not being enough, applauded. For the second time that day, Lincoln had discharged a blustery accusation and won the crowd over to his side.

“Now, Mr. Forquer commenced his speech by saying I would have to be taken down, and that he was the one to do so. Whether he has ably performed that task is something for you to decide, as it is for you to decide which of us is more practiced in the tricks and trades of politicians.

“I noticed as I was riding into town yesterday that Mr. Forquer now lives in a very large, very handsome new house, and on top of this very large and very handsome new house is the first lightning rod I believe I've seen in Springfield. I congratulate Mr. Forquer for having the foresight to install this device, which will no doubt protect his very large and very handsome new house from the storms that rage from time to time in our beautiful Illinois skies.

“But the more acquaintance I have with Mr. Forquer, the more I wonder if his fears are strictly atmospherical, or if they arise from some other worrisome source. Because as you know, he was able to pay for that house and for that useful ornament on top of it by virtue of his appointment to his present office, which was bestowed upon him by President Jackson himself in gratitude—or shall we say in recompense—for his eagerness to jump over the broom and attach himself to the Democrats. My fellow citizens, I may be young as Mr. Forquer says, I may be ill-made, I may even have been ‘taken down' as he promised to do, but I doubt that I will ever come down so low as to change my politics, my party, and indeed my principles, for the chance of an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then have to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God!”

The room erupted. There were jeers and halfhearted cries of “unfair” from the Democrats, but the applause grew louder and drowned them out. Lincoln stepped back with a studiously blank expression, as if he was not aware that he had just delivered a killing blow.

“Come on, let's go up and congratulate him,” Speed said. The two of them tried to make their way forward, but they were caught in a surging crush of people who were on the same errand. Lincoln himself was overwhelmed, doing his best to shake all the hands that were stretched out to him. He was smiling and nodding, but still working hard not to let the triumph show on his face.

“A very able speech,” Speed told Lincoln when they finally reached him. “Very able. You nailed him in a box and you buried him deep.”

“Well, I expect George'll dig himself out soon enough.”

He saw Cage and eagerly shot out his hand. Cage was heartened by the beaming smile on Lincoln's face.

“There you are. It's about time we saw each other again. No doubt you've forgotten all about me. I ran across a poem I want to show you. If you and Speed can come over to—”

Before he could convey the rest of the sentence he was seized by John Stuart, who proclaimed he had delivered a perfect skinning—and then Lincoln was gone, vanished into a congratulatory crush of Whig political operatives.

“To the young man who needed to be taken down, but was not,” Joshua Speed said that evening, holding aloft a glass of beer. “You know what will have to be taken down, don't you? Forquer's damned lightning rod. Can anybody look at it now and not break into laughter?”

They had come to the Globe for dinner after listening to the remainder of the day's oratory—most of it the usual forgettable gasconading. The tavern was crowded, the taproom a hive of opinionated men putting forth their blustery assessments of Lincoln's rhetorical victory over Forquer. Speed set down his glass and began cutting up his fricasseed chicken with elegant strokes of his tableware—his cultivated Kentucky upbringing never far from the surface.

“What do you think about our friend?” he asked Cage. “He liked plunging the knife in, didn't he?”

“He was doing his best not to let us see how much.”

“Are you talking about Lincoln?” Stephen Douglas had just appeared at Speed's side and was standing there with one fat, short leg propped up on the bench next to him. He reached onto the table, helped himself to a pickle, and temporarily removed the gigantic cigar that was in his mouth in order to eat it. “It's well known old Abe has a cruel streak. We saw it today, didn't we? I think he'd just as soon smother a baby bird as smell a flower.”

“Be careful that you don't accidentally describe yourself,” Speed said.

“No sir, my blood runs hot. Any baby bird that died at my hands would have to call me a name first.”

Cage knew Douglas casually. It was impossible to live in Illinois and not know him, since he took such delight in electioneering and appearing at chopping bees and husking frolics, studiously turned out in homespun to appeal to his rustic electorate. Through political guile if not through legal brilliance he had gotten himself appointed the state's attorney, and now he was running for the assembly from Morgan County. His opponent was John J. Hardin, whom people called the handsomest man in Illinois when they were not calling John Stuart the handsomest man in Illinois.

Stephen Douglas was not the handsomest man in Illinois. He was squat as a toad, with beady eyes and a bulbous nose. But he was such a lively and agreeable toad it was no task at all to overlook his appearance. And the titanic self-regard that would have been reprehensible in other men somehow made Douglas even more agreeable.

“But even we Democrats,” he said, “have to admit that Forquer misjudged his enemy, and for that he was reduced to a quivering pudding. But enough of that. Tell me what I can do for you gentlemen once I get to the statehouse. How can I help you prosper? How can I turn your journey through life into a beautiful never-ending song?”

He bantered with them a few moments more and then shook their hands and slapped their backs and continued working his way through the tavern, laughing and promoting himself, reaching up on his tiptoes to throw taller men into affectionate headlocks and breathe into their faces.

Cage observed this display with the same fascination he might have watched an arcane mating ritual or some other puzzling manifestation of natural history. Then there was a sudden bustle of interest near the door. Cage and Speed looked up to see Lincoln entering, along with John Stuart, Ninian Edwards, and most of the rest of the Whig partisans. Stephen Douglas greeted Lincoln with a theatrical bow, then as if the mock praise was not deep enough, went to his knees and greeted him as the savior of the merchants, farmers, mechanics, and pork packers of Illinois. In the same ironic spirit Lincoln leaned down and bade his Democrat foe to rise, and the laughter among all the political men rippled back to where Cage and Speed were eating their meal.

“It's amusing to watch, isn't it?” Speed said. “Do you think you could ever be a public man like that?”

“Not for an instant.”

“The interesting thing about Lincoln,” Speed said, “is that he's both the most public man and the most private man I've ever known. He has to hover rather precisely between the poles of his personality. Any deviation might pull him apart.”

“You make him sound fragile.”

“Oh, we're all fragile, I suppose,” Speed said indifferently, his mind now set on a different object. “How is your house? Is it fully occupied?”

“Yes, at the moment. Why? Are you looking for a place to live?”

“A friend might be.”

“Who?”

“A friend.”

Speed's grin was delighted and conniving. His blue eyes shone through the smoky tavern atmosphere. He held the pose until Cage finally understood his meaning.

“Do you mean to say—a woman?”

“Well, I can't keep her with me, can I? I live above my store. And I don't want to set her up in a dark alley someplace. She's not a common whore, for God's sake. A room in a lodging house, with perhaps a discreet entrance, is what's needed. You could count on me paying her bill, of course.”

“There's no vacancy. And if there were, and Mrs. Hopper discovered the arrangement, which she would, she'd quit in outrage. And there I'd be with no one to keep the house.”

“Then you'd be free to hire somebody else who wouldn't be so starchy about it! But I can tell by the way you're looking at me you're starchy yourself. A New England puritan, bound by your iron code of whatever.”

“Not at all. If you want to keep a woman that's your business.”

“She could be your woman too.”

“What?”

“Cage, she's not a
wife.
Why can't she be shared?”

Speed reached across the table, slapped Cage affectionately on the arm, and went back to the enthusiastic cutting-up of his fricassee. His breezy attitude, his jocular charge of an “iron code,” left Cage a bit unsettled. He did not think himself a servant of propriety, a pious enforcer of conventional morality—but perhaps that was what he unknowingly was.