How Few Remain (70 page)

The conductor walked down the aisle, big gold watch in hand. “Now departing for Bismarck, Fargo, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!” he intoned. “All aboard!”

A blast from the steam whistle also announced the train’s departure. Cars jolted in their couplings as it began to roll. A vexing thought made Lincoln’s long face grow longer. He wouldn’t be altogether free of the Army’s grip till he passed Fargo and left Dakota Territory. Maybe no one had tried to keep him from leaving Great Falls because the soldiers who would stop him were waiting in Fargo.

He shook his head. He didn’t believe it. No one had tried to keep him from leaving Great Falls because no one knew, or cared, he was leaving. If no one knew he was gone or where he was going, no one could stop him.

No sooner had he settled back in his seat than the young man across the aisle, a fellow who looked like a miner in ill-fitting Sunday best, asked, “Beg your pardon, but ain’t you Abe Lincoln?”

“Yes,” Lincoln answered, warily and wearily. Had he had a dime for every time he’d had a conversation opened with that gambit, he would have been a plutocrat himself. The only commoner opening was,
God damn you, Lincoln, you son of a bitch!
—and that one usually came from older men, men who recalled the sorry course of the War of Secession. “Who are you, son?”

“My name’s Hosea Blackford, Mr. Lincoln,” the youngster said, and stuck out a hand. Lincoln relaxed a little as he shook it;
he’d had enough of curses and to spare lately. It was strong and rough-skinned and callused, the hand of a working man. Blackford went on, “Heard you talk in Helena when you was there.” He nodded, half to himself. “Sure as hell did.”

“Is that a fact?” Lincoln said: a little sentence polite in any context.

“Yes, sir!” Hosea Blackford’s green eyes glowed.
“Hell
of a speech. Made me reckon we ought to get shut of fightin’ our neighbors till we finished muckin’ out our own barn first. Like you said, we had ourselves one revolution, and now we could use ourselves another one.”

“Thank you, Mr. Blackford,” Lincoln said. “Every now and again, when I hear a young man like you speak, my hope for the country revives.”

“Ain’t that somethin’!” Blackford said; after a moment, Lincoln realized it was his equivalent of
Is that a fact?

They talked politics on and off till the miner—Lincoln had indeed pegged that one correctly—got off the train at Oriska, a tiny spot in eastern Dakota Territory, where his sister and brother-in-law had a farm. He didn’t even carry a carpetbag; his suitcase was made of cardboard. When he rose to leave, he pumped Lincoln’s hand again.

“You don’t know what this here’s meant to me,” he said. “Ever since I started thinkin’ about things, I could see they wasn’t right, but I never seen how, or how to go about fixin’ ’em. You done opened my eyes, and I reckon I can go and open some other folks’ eyes my own self. You got yourself a—what’s the Bible word?—a disciple, that’s what it is.”

“Good luck to you, Mr. Blackford,” Lincoln said. “Be the truth’s disciple, not mine. Follow the truth, wherever it may lead you.”

The miner bobbed his head in an awkward nod, then hurried away. At a place like Oriska, the train didn’t stop long. At a place like Oriska, you were lucky if the train stopped at all.

Lincoln smiled at the miner’s stalwart back. He wondered how long Blackford’s enthusiasm would last. Young men burned hot, but they burned out fast, too. Lincoln thought of that ridiculously young cavalry colonel back in Great Falls. He was doing something special now, too. How long before he became a lawyer or a banker or something else stuffy and boring and profitable?
Profitable
.
Lincoln’s lip curled. The owners took the profits, and took them from the sweat of the working man.

A few hours and a few stops out of Oriska, the train halted in Fargo. No soldiers waited for Lincoln. Fargo was a fair-sized town, and the train paused there half an hour, long enough for him to get off and wire his son that he was on the way.

Boarding again, he crossed into Minnesota. Out of these flat farmlands John Pope had driven the Sioux when they rose up against white settlers in the hope that the United States would be too distracted by the War of Secession to bring any great force to bear against them. That had been a double miscalculation on the Indians’ part. The USA had had soldiers enough to fight them and the Confederates both. And, after the war was lost, soldiers originally recruited for it hurled the Indians west across the plains, using numbers and firepower they could not hope to match.

Farms grew thicker and towns larger and closer together as the train carried Lincoln east. Minneapolis and St. Paul were real cities; some in the East that had been settled a hundred years longer could not compare to them.

The passengers who boarded at the two rival centers were perhaps more warmly inclined to Lincoln than people from the rest of the United States. In Minnesota, he was remembered as much for being the man who’d driven the Indians out of the state as for being the man who’d lost the War of Secession. With a sort of melancholy pride, he recalled that he’d carried Minnesota in the election of 1864. Recalling that wasn’t hard; he hadn’t carried many states.

The Republicans hadn’t carried many states since, not till public disgust at the Democrats’ unending soft line toward the CSA swept Blaine into the White House the autumn before. And now Blaine had taken a hard line, and done no better with it than Lincoln. How long would it be before the Republicans carried many states again?

Lincoln thought he had the answer, or at least an answer, to that question. He’d thought so for ten years and more now, as he’d watched factories boom and capitalists send their spaniels to Europe on holiday and workers live in squalid warrens at which those pampered spaniels would have turned up their noses. He’d been able to make only a handful of party leaders pay any attention to him till now.

Now
, he thought,
now they no longer have any choice. If they don’t heed me now, the party will surely go under
.

And then, as the train passed from Minnesota into Wisconsin, he closed his fat Shakespeare, took off his reading glasses and put them in their leather case, and buried his face in his hands. These past ten years, he hadn’t even succeeded in persuading his own son he was right. He doubted he would persuade Robert even now. His son, having enriched himself at the practice of law, thought like a rich man these days.

Not that Robert would be anything but glad to see him. In family matters, they were close, as they always had been. Only in politics did a chasm separate them: the chasm that yawned between a man satisfied with his lot and another who could see how many in the country he loved had no reason to be satisfied with theirs.

The tracks beat south and east as they ran through Wisconsin. Lincoln knew no great joy when he left that state and came into Illinois, even though he’d lived more of his life in the latter state than anywhere else. Illinois had repudiated him in 1864, and had not looked on him kindly since, no matter how great a power in the land Robert had become.

Chicago sprawled along the shores of Lake Michigan. Everything came together there: Great Lakes commerce (however damaged that was at the moment because of the war), Mississippi River commerce (with the same caveat), and railroads from east, south, and west. Smoke from its factories darkened the skies. The great stockyards made the air pungent. The other scent in the air, the one Robert breathed day and night, was the scent of money.

Even with five train stations, Chicago seemed undersupplied. Lincoln’s train waited in the yard of the Chicago and Northwestern depot for close to an hour until a platform became available. It inched its way forward, then sighed to a stop.

Robert Lincoln was waiting on the platform. As he embraced his father, he said, “By all accounts, you’ve had a busy time of it.” His tone was no more ironic than he could help.

“Maybe a bit,” Lincoln allowed, matching dry for dry. “It’s good to see you, son. You look well.”

“Thank you, sir.” In his late thirties, Robert Lincoln was plainly his father’s son; his neat beard only strengthened the resemblance. But, having his mother’s blood in him as well, he was several inches shorter than Abraham, a good deal wider
through the shoulders and the face, and, by all conventional standards, a good deal handsomer as well.

“So you’ll put up—and put up with—your radical old father for a while, will you?” Lincoln asked, a little later, as they made their way toward Robert’s carriage.

“You know I don’t fancy the direction in which your politics have taken you,” his son answered. “You also know that matters not at all to me when it comes to the family. If you’re willing enough to put up with a son reactionary enough to believe in earning money and keeping what he earns, we’ll get on splendidly, as we always have.”

“Good,” Lincoln said. He climbed into the carriage.

Robert tipped the porter who had carried the bags, and who now heaved them up behind the seats. The man lifted his cap, murmured thanks, and departed. To his driver, Robert Lincoln said, “Take us home, Kraus.”

“Yes, sir.” By his accent, Kraus had not been in the United States long. He too tipped his cap, then flicked the reins and got the carriage rolling.

“Quite a nabob you’re getting to be, son, everyone bowing and scraping over you as if you were an earl on the way to becoming a duke,” Lincoln said, hiding dismay behind facetiousness. Robert, who understood him very well without agreeing with him in the slightest, gave him a sharp look. Lincoln sighed; he hadn’t really intended to provoke his son. He tried to smooth it over: “As I told you, it
is
good to see you—better than setting eyes on anyone else I’ve seen lately, and that is a fact.”

“Unless I’m much mistaken, it’s also faint praise.” But Robert, fortunately, sounded amused, not angry. He went on, “Being held superior to John Pope, whom I suspect you have in mind, is closely similar to being reckoned taller than a snake, lighter than an elephant, or more in favor of abolition than an Alabama planter.” His tone grew more sympathetic: “It was very unlucky for you, Father, that you had to fall foul of a man who bore you a grudge from the War of Secession.”

“Few U.S. soldiers from the War of Secession bear me no grudge.” Lincoln spoke with sadness but without resentment. “They have their reasons: whom better to resent than a man who led them into a losing war? Suffering in war is hard enough in victory, but ten times harder in defeat.”

“Few of them are so resentful as to want to put a rope around your neck,” Robert said.

Lincoln thought of Pope. He thought of Colonel—now Brigadier General—Custer. He thought of the bloodthirsty guard he’d been assigned, who would still have been soiling his drawers when the War of Secession ended. He didn’t answer.

Robert said, “Now that you’re here, Father, how do you aim to amuse yourself and stay out of mischief?”

“Amusing myself should be simple enough,” Lincoln replied, “for I intend to get myself into as much mischief as I can: which is to say, I intend to struggle for the soul of the Republican Party. Our main plank can no longer be permanent, unyielding hostility toward the Confederate States. We have tried that twice now, and Blaine is failing with it as badly as I failed. The people will never give us a third chance, and I see no way to blame them for their reluctance. Fighting the Confederate States, England, and France, we are simply overmatched.”

“A conclusion I reached myself some time ago,” Robert said as they rolled into the fashionable North Side neighborhood he called home. He paused to get his pipe going, then asked the inevitable question: “And what plank would you put in its place?”

“Justice for the working man, and freeing him from oppression at the hands of the capitalist who owns the factory in which he labors,” Lincoln said. “We have lost sight of the fact that capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.”

“You intend to convene a meeting of Republican leaders and convince them of this doctrine?” Robert said.

“I do,” Lincoln answered simply.

“They will eat you up, Father, the way savages in the South Sea Islands eat up missionaries who are sent to convert them to a new faith they do not want.”

“Perhaps they will,” Lincoln said. “I aim to make the effort regardless. For I tell you this, son: if the Republican Party
will not
build on this plank, some other party
will
, and
will
make a go of it.”

    General Orlando Willcox held out his hand. “Good-bye, Colonel. I have enjoyed your presence here, and I shall miss you.”

“I thank you,” Alfred von Schlieffen said.

“And I shall miss you as well,” Frederick Douglass said, his voice as deep and pure as a tone from the lower register of an organ. “You always treat me as a man first, and as a black man after that if at all.”

“You are a man: so I have seen,” Schlieffen said, as he might have to a soldier who had fought well. Captain Oliver Richardson scowled at him. He took no notice of Willcox’s adjutant, but climbed up behind the private who would take him to the train on which he’d return to Philadelphia.

South of the Ohio, cannon still bellowed and rifles still rattled. Schlieffen’s driver let out a wistful sigh. “Colonel, you reckon the president’s going to take the Rebs up on that call for peace this time?”

“I am not the man to ask,” Schlieffen told him. “Your own officers will a better idea have of what your president wills—
wants
—to do.” Had he worn Blaine’s shoes, he would have made peace on the instant, and then got down on his knees to thank the Lord for letting him off on such easy terms. But that was not the question the soldier had asked him.

After spitting a brown stream of what the Americans called tobacco juice into the road, the driver said, “My officers won’t give me the time of day. Hellfire, they won’t tell me whether it’s day or night. I was hopin’ you might be different.”

A German officer would not give one of his common soldiers the time of day, either. A German common soldier would not expect to get the time of day from one of his officers. The American private sounded aggrieved that he was not made privy to all his superiors’ opinions and secrets. Americans, Schlieffen thought, sometimes let the notion of equality run away with them.