Mrs. Lincoln's Rival (10 page)

“Mr. Seward enjoys a certain prominence, to be sure,” said Kate, “but no more so than you. Your lifetime of service, your experience in governance, your devotion to the cause of abolition—all mark you as equally deserving of a senior position.”

“Mr. Lincoln did say that if Seward had declined, he would have offered the State Department to me without hesitation.”

It seemed odd that Mr. Lincoln was apparently able to offer the highest position in the cabinet to one man, yet was somehow prevented from giving the next most important post to another. “Did Mr. Lincoln mention anyone else he is considering for secretary of the treasury?”

“No, but—” He hesitated. “On the way to Springfield, I heard rumors that Mr. Lincoln had already offered the post to General Cameron, and that he had accepted.”

Bewildered, Kate shook her head. “That makes no sense. That would make your entire journey to Springfield a cruel farce. Why measure your interest in a position that has already been filled?”

“There could be any number of reasons, and I believe I have contemplated every one of them.”

“Keeping in mind that one cannot decline what has not been offered . . .” Kate hesitated. “Did you decline?”

“Not outright.” As Kate breathed a sigh of relief, he added, “I told him I was unprepared to accept the position if it were extended to me. I reminded him that I had six years in the Senate to look forward to, and that I could be of service to him and to the nation in that capacity as well if not better than in the cabinet.” He smiled ruefully. “He didn’t dispute the point, but he didn’t agree either.”

In the days that followed, Father and Mr. Lincoln had met again, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two other advisors, but always to confer at great length, earnestly and seriously. Father had come away from their interviews impressed with the president-elect’s grasp of the complexities of the constitutional crisis facing the nation, his willingness to accept advice, and his warm, amiable nature. On Sunday Father attended church services with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, and on Monday morning Mr. Lincoln saw Father off at the train station with the parting request that he consult with trusted friends about accepting the Department of Treasury post, which Mr. Lincoln was still unable to offer.

“Will you?” Kate asked, trying not to sound too hopeful. “Consult with people you trust, I mean, and consider accepting the position, should it be offered?”

“I’ve already begun,” Father admitted. “My pride is not too great for that. I wrote to several friends from the train asking them to speak well of me to Mr. Lincoln. I confess—and this is for your ears alone, daughter—that I would like to be offered a cabinet position, but not to seem to seek it—and I don’t yet know if I will accept one if it is eventually offered.”

Kate nodded, greatly relieved that her father’s wounded pride had not compelled him to refuse to serve in Mr. Lincoln’s administration. Although he would not be first in rank, he would command a great deal of authority and influence during a time of increasing national uncertainty. She knew of no better man—none wiser, none more ethical—to be at the president’s side in a crisis.

And, she admitted to herself, it could only help him in four years’ time if the nation learned now what a strong, intelligent leader he was, and would be.

• • •

The morning after Father’s homecoming, the newspapers were ablaze with news from South Carolina. The previous day, while Father was writing letters to trusted friends from a jolting railcar, the
Star of the West
sailed into Charleston Harbor and was fired upon by militia and young military cadets. Struck in the mast but not seriously damaged, the steamer nonetheless was forced back into the channel and out to the open sea.

On that same day, far to the south, delegates in Mississippi voted in favor of secession. The next day, Florida seceded from the Union, and the next, Alabama. One after another they fell, like books carelessly arranged on an unsteady shelf, but just when Kate began to believe that no voice of reason and prudence remained in the South, former president John Tyler, living in retirement in Richmond, Virginia, published an appeal for a convention to make one last great effort to resolve the crisis. Two days later, Georgia seceded, and two days after that, five senators from Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi—some defiantly, others full of sorrow—rose to offer farewell speeches before resigning their seats in the Senate and leaving Washington for their homes in the South. The papers somberly described how Senator Jefferson Davis, the last to speak, reiterated his opinion that states did have the constitutional right to leave the Union, and that his home state of Mississippi had justifiable cause for doing so. Even so, he regretted the conflict that had divided them. “I am sure I feel no hostility toward you, senators from the North,” he said. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I feel, is the feeling of the people whom I represent toward those whom you represent.” He expressed his hopes that their separate governments would eventually have peaceable relations, and made his own personal apology for any pain he might have inflicted upon any other senator in the heat of discussion. “Mr. President and senators,” he concluded, weary from illness and strain, “having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require, it only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.”

Five days later, Louisiana seceded.

Although to Kate it seemed a futile effort, plans were swiftly made to organize Mr. Tyler’s Peace Convention. And in the final days of January, Father at last received an appointment, though not the one he had been hoping for.

Much to Father’s chagrin, for he had long been an outspoken opponent of any compromise with the secessionist and slaveholding powers, Governor Dennison appointed him a delegate to the Peace Convention in hopes that the crisis could be resolved through negotiation before Mr. Lincoln took office. Father would be returning to Washington sooner than expected, and in a role he never could have imagined and did not want.

F
EBRUARY
1861

T
his is a mortifying embarrassment,” Father grumbled as he paged through a sheaf of documents Governor Dennison had sent over from his office in the capitol. “I’ve stated very clearly, in person and in print, that I object to any conciliation with the secessionist states until after Mr. Lincoln takes office. Dennison knows that.
Everyone
knows that. It will seem the height of hypocrisy for me to sit down with these traitors now.”

“It isn’t hypocritical merely to meet with them, if you don’t give in to their demands.” Kate glanced over his shoulder at the papers lined up neatly on his desktop. The conference would open at the Willard Hotel in Washington City on February 4, she read, and former president John Tyler himself would be the chairman. “It isn’t hypocrisy to represent the state of Ohio at the request of your governor, or to listen to what the secessionists have to say for themselves. Also, don’t underestimate your influence, Father. You might achieve some good there.”

“I can’t imagine what. I doubt that most of the rebellious states will send delegates. Those who most need to listen to reason won’t be present to hear it.” Shaking his head, Father organized the papers into a neat stack and placed them into the leather satchel she and Nettie had given him for Christmas the year he became governor. “Our time would be better spent strengthening the capital’s defenses against an attack from the South. There are fewer than a thousand federal troops and local militia stationed around Washington, and their loyalty to the Union is by no means certain.”

“Couldn’t President Buchanan summon troops from the Western frontier?”

“He could, but he won’t. He’s afraid that a show of military strength would only heighten the tensions, so instead he’s determined to be the very model of inaction.” Frowning, Father set the satchel aside and rose from his desk. “I’m also displeased to be obliged to depart for Washington sooner than I had intended. I expected to have another month to prepare, to close up the house here, to find a proper home for you and your sister there.”

“I’ll take care of matters here,” Kate reminded him, tucking her hand through his arm and giving it a reassuring pat. “Once you’re in Washington, you’ll be able to find temporary lodgings for us, and that will do until I join you and can begin the search for a proper home.”

So Father and Nettie packed and prepared and departed Columbus for Washington, arriving on February 1. On that same day Texas seceded from the Union, as if to mock Mr. Tyler’s vain hopes for peace.

Upon their arrival, Father and Nettie first stayed with longtime friends, Elizabeth and Louis M. Goldsborough, the daughter and son-in-law of Father’s mentor in his legal studies, William Wirt. A few days later, Father rented a suite of rooms at the Rugby House at the corner of Fourteenth and K streets. “It used to be a private boys’ school but it is newly made a hotel,” Nettie wrote to Kate the day they moved in. “It is brick and in a quiet part of the city and I like it very much. I have made a friend across the hall, a gentleman by the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and yes, I do mean the writer. He is very shy but he is nice to me.”

Kate was pleased that at last Nettie had found something to like about Washington City. Her earliest letters had been full of homesick longing for their lovely, comfortable home, for her cousins and playmates, and for the pretty, bustling city of Columbus. Nettie’s first incredulous, appalled impression of Washington City was that of a squalid rural village where cows, pigs, and geese roamed freely through the streets, which were cloudy with dust on dry days and ran thick with mud when it rained. Pennsylvania Avenue and a few adjacent blocks of Seventh Street were paved, but the cobblestones were broken and uneven, and mud oozed up between the cracks.

The 156-foot stub of the Washington Monument stood forlornly in the midst of an open field where cattle grazed, its construction halted by political squabbling, uncertainty, and vandalism. The Capitol too was unfinished, but there, at least, construction continued; the incomplete, truncated dome loomed above the landscape surrounded by derricks and scaffolding, flanked by bare, unadorned marble wings and surrounded on all sides by a scattering of workers’ sheds, tools, piles of bricks, and blocks of marble. Citizens dumped refuse in the old city canal, which often spilled over into the marsh to the south of the Executive Mansion grounds, and throughout the city, foul outhouses abounded, giving off a fetid miasma that the hotel keeper cheerfully warned Nettie would only worsen come spring and summer.

Kate was somewhat taken aback by her sister’s critical review of their new home. Although she couldn’t dispute a single one of Nettie’s observations, and honesty compelled her to admit that the capital did offer a peculiar mix of grandeur and squalor in close proximity, Kate had always chosen to focus on the city’s more pleasant attributes—the elaborate mansions and lovely gardens of the wealthier residents, the grand estates in the surrounding countryside, the opulent marble edifices that housed the various federal departments, and the splendid, extravagant entertainments put on by the social elite. True, it did take a bit of care and practice to navigate the city as one made one’s way from dignified residence to grand reception without ruining skirts and shoes in the mud, but Kate considered that a small inconvenience compared to the exciting, invigorating rush of Washington City, and she could not wait to return.

Kate and her maid, Vina—who was unmarried and quite willing to leave Columbus for the excitement and adventure of a strange new city—traveled by train to Washington, where her father and sister met them at the station. Nettie held her hand and pointed out sights they passed along the way to the Rugby House—the Center Market on the Avenue between Seventh and Ninth streets, its stalls heaped with fruit, vegetables, fish, and beef and swarming with flies; her favorite cake and ginger-soda stands at the foot of Capitol Hill; the broad swath of grass south of the Executive Mansion where the Washington Potomacs played the popular game from New York called baseball. Hiding her amusement, Kate allowed Nettie to believe that she was glimpsing the familiar sights for the first time rather than spoil her sister’s pleasure.

Father saw them safely to the large, unpretentious Rugby House before kissing Kate quickly on the cheek and apologizing for his retreat to the Peace Convention at Willard Hall, which was proceeding as badly as he had expected. Only twenty-five of the thirty-four states had answered the opening roll call; none of the seven seceded states had sent delegates, nor had Arkansas, nor five western states. Meanwhile, on that same day far to the south in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives from the seceded states were meeting to organize a unified Confederate government. John Tyler’s own granddaughter raised the Confederate flag at the opening ceremonies.

As the senior delegate from Ohio, Father had tried to organize the more radical delegates from other Northern states under his leadership. In his first major speech, he emphasized that restriction of, not war upon, the South’s “peculiar institution” would be the policy of the new administration. “This goes against my personal beliefs,” Father admitted to Kate later, who needed no reminder of her father’s opposition to slavery wherever it existed. “But it is the Republican Party platform, and Mr. Lincoln has professed his intention to follow it.” Factions were so divided that Father would consider the conference a success if its sole achievement was keeping the important border states in the Union until Mr. Lincoln took office.

In the days that followed, while her father toiled at Willard Hall, Kate paid calls and deftly provided noncommittal answers to questions about her father’s role in the new administration. According to the Washington press, one day Father was certain to be named secretary of the treasury, the next he was unquestionably out of contention. To Kate’s satisfaction, some editors ran lengthy appeals to Mr. Lincoln urging him to offer Father the Treasury. The newspapermen knew the future no better than the Chases did, but that did not stop them from making contradictory announcements and printing demands that Mr. Lincoln was likely to ignore.

As Kate made her social rounds and searched for a more permanent residence for the family, she was dismayed to discover how many old acquaintances had closed up their fine mansions and had departed the city for their homes in the South. Some ladies were glad to go, loudly and defiantly condemning the United States and the “Illinois abolitionist ape” who would soon take the presidential chair, while others were grief-stricken, longing to remain but obliged to obediently follow their husbands out of the city and out of the Union. The friends they had left behind told Kate sadly of tearful farewells and solemn vows that the conflict between their states would not sever their bonds of affection. Perhaps wives could not choose their own country, but they could choose whom they loved.

Other acquaintances intended to remain in the city only until after the inauguration, when a new regime would succeed them. One of Kate’s first calls was to Miss Harriet Lane, who was so distracted by her beleaguered uncle’s political struggles that she seemed to have given little thought to her plans after her departure from the White House. “I wish it were you who would take my place here,” Miss Lane confessed with a sudden, unexpected passion, “and even more so, that your father would take my uncle’s, although perhaps that is not a position I should wish on any man. I don’t know what to think of this frontier Republican, or his wife. I can’t imagine how either will be prepared for the roles they are so ambitious to undertake.”

“I wish the same,” said Kate solemnly, but then she smiled mischievously. “But only because then the question of where my family will reside would be answered without any more trouble on my part.”

Miss Lane laughed, her enormous troubles forgotten for a moment, which was precisely what Kate had intended.

Although Kate could make light of her fruitless search for a proper home to amuse her friend, in truth, she found little humor in it. Few of the available properties met Father’s strict criteria. Their new home must be a handsome, gracious residence, comfortable enough for a family and yet suitable for entertaining large numbers of guests in fine style. It must be an easy walk to the Capitol, where Father expected to work, but also to the White House, in the event that the appointment he still hoped for was finally offered. Most important, it must be within Father’s means, not only the rent but the cost of upkeep, furnishings, and servants. Father was burdened with debt, how sizable he would not say and Kate dared not insult him by asking. Although he was trying to sell their home in Columbus as well as a few properties in Cincinnati, the real estate market was too depressed to tempt any buyers. Cost would be the most difficult criterion to satisfy, Kate thought ruefully, but she refused to believe that her father had given her an impossible task.

• • •

On February 11, Mr. Lincoln, his family, and various dignitaries, assistants, and trusted friends departed Springfield for Washington City in a special train car adorned with patriotic bunting and fitted with all the modern conveniences and luxuries befitting the status of its illustrious occupant. The train would follow a long, circuitous route through several cities and towns, both to allow the president-elect to greet as many supporters along the way as he could and to thwart anyone who might attempt to do him harm. Numerous threats had been made upon his life from the day he won the nomination, and they had steadily increased ever since, spiking after the election, the secession of South Carolina, and Mr. Buchanan’s failed attempt to relieve Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. The most vile threats came from the Southern press, who brazenly printed their menacing declarations in shockingly lurid detail. Of course, Kate only assumed that these editorials were the most vile; it was entirely possible, even probable, that Mr. Lincoln received much worse through the post.

When Kate considered the effect of the threats upon Mr. Lincoln’s family, how frightened and concerned for his safety his wife and sons must surely be, she felt a painful twinge of sympathy—and the barest breath of relief that her father had not become the target of such fierce hatred.

Despite the vitriol in the press, the labors of the Peace Conference continued, although Father rarely had any progress to report. Then, two days after Mr. Lincoln left Springfield, the Peace Convention set their work aside and adjourned shortly before noon so that the delegates could attend the official counting of the states’ electoral votes.

Earlier that morning Kate had asked her father if she could accompany him, and he had agreed, so Kate dressed in a sensible, flattering dress of dark-blue wool trimmed in pale-yellow ribbon, strolled a few blocks down Fourteenth Street from the Rugby House to the Willard, and waited in the ladies’ parlor for the delegates to emerge from the adjacent Willard Hall, a former Presbyterian church that the Willard brothers had transformed into a lecture and performance venue. The Willard, like the Neil House in Columbus, was not only the city’s finest and largest hotel but also a nexus of Washington society and politics. Mr. Hawthorne had told Kate he thought it more justly called the center of Washington and the nation than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department, which was perhaps why he had taken rooms at the Rugby House instead. Recently the Willard brothers had gamely endeavored to maintain peace between contentious factions by assigning Southern guests rooms on a single floor and urging them to use the ladies’ Fourteenth Street entrance, while Northerners were encouraged to use the main doors on the Pennsylvania Avenue side. Even so, they were bound to encounter one another in the hotel’s public rooms, which were illuminated by gaslight and opulently furnished in rosewood, damask, lace, and velvet and smelled of cigar smoke and spilled whiskey—and were not, perhaps, quite the place for a well-bred young woman to sit alone.

Fortunately, her father soon arrived, greeted her with a kiss on the cheek, and offered her his arm. “Dare I ask how your morning went?” Kate asked as they hurried off.