A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (13 page)

“Well, it seemed like the right course to me, but I don't know anything about women and so it wasn't. She said her training had been different from mine. I lacked—let me see if I can remember it exactly—‘those little links which make up the great chain of a woman's happiness.' ”

“I'm sorry, Lincoln. Were you much in love with her?”

“In a partial sort of way, I guess I was. I wasn't in love with her the way I was in love with Ann, but she was quick-minded and agreeable and I could have done a lot worse, and no doubt will do worse if any woman will ever consent to have me.”

He continued lying there flat on his back, his eyes open and staring upward at nothing, his legs hanging over the end of the bed. He breathed heavily. Cage watched him from the desk, where he had been sitting, where he had been busy putting together a short collection—which he thought of as a kind of overture to his great Western symphony—to send off to Little and Brown, the new publishing firm in Boston.

“You just have the blues,” Cage told the dispirited, angular shape on the bed. “There's a Shakespeare play in town. Let's go see it.”

Lincoln was silent for a full two minutes before he turned his head to the side and asked, “What play?”

“
Much Ado About Nothing.
A very decent company from Philadelphia is putting it on. Come with me. It'll do you good.”

Getting Lincoln to the theater was not easy. Cage first had to get him to eat something, which in his martyr's depression he was loath to do. But Cage called down for Mrs. Hopper to bring them up a plate of cold beef and hard-boiled eggs, and Lincoln set upon them with the indifference of a grazing cow.

Walking through town, Lincoln was sure the citizens of Springfield would avoid him, or perhaps actually jeer at him for his role in Ashbel Merritt's loss to Adams, but people greeted him as if the embarrassment had never happened and he was still a favored son of Sangamon County. He sat next to Cage in the crowded theater, his knees drawn up practically to his cadaverous chin in the tight space between the rows of seats, and as the banter between Benedick and Beatrice began in earnest Cage could sense Lincoln mentally uncoiling, light once again entering his sunken-eyed face.

When the actress playing Beatrice struck a pose and proclaimed, “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me!” Lincoln's abrupt laugh shot through the audience, and people in the rows ahead turned to look at him and smile, taking pleasure in his pleasure, grateful for his infectious enthusiasm. The man who thought he had not a friend left in the world settled easily back in his seat, smiling at Cage, his hypo lifting as he discovered that his humiliation in politics and in love were things that perhaps could be borne after all.

“You've restored me, Cage,” he said as they left the theater. “You and Shakespeare. It's remarkable how something as simple as a well-wrought phrase can make you want to live again. How can I thank you, except to—wait a minute, will you?”

He had spotted two of his Whig house colleagues walking out of the theater onto the street. He rushed up to them and, within moments, as deftly as a sheepdog cutting lambs from a flock, had parted them from their wives and begun talking to them about the election.

“We shouldn't let ourselves think for an instant that because Adams beat Ash we're weak,” Cage heard Lincoln say to them. “We won every other race on the ballot and the Democrats can't pretend we didn't. They're going to come at us hard next year and we've got to be ready if we don't want Douglas to take over the Third District and the rest of Illinois along with it.”

Cage listened to the strategizing, intrigued in the way outsiders can be intrigued by an intense discussion of a foreign craft. Lincoln had placed a big hard-knuckled hand on the shoulder of each man, not gripping them like someone claiming dominance
,
just touching them in a confident, comradely way. He was fully recovered now, bursting with ideas about how to keep the Whigs in line and the Democrats off guard.

“Look at Van Buren's subtreasury, his obsession with hard money. Look closely at that and we have our theme for 1838: the ruin of Illinois
,
just waiting to happen. Paper depreciated, banks shut down, the government itself suddenly the supreme steward of what's left of the people's money.”

The two wives pretended not to notice that their husbands had been captured and started a side discussion about the merits of the play. Meanwhile Cage stood off by himself, listening to Lincoln lay out plans for driving a wedge on the subtreasury issue between reasonable-minded Democrats and their hardened Loco Foco allies. The strategy was simple in outline: keep the Whigs together while splitting the Democrats. But Cage had brushed up against enough politics to know that it was dauntingly complex in practice. Once again, he marveled at the way Lincoln seemed to know not just every public man in Illinois but every common voter as well, and to know what that voter wanted or needed, what favors he expected, and what developments he feared.

“You're a patient man,” he told Cage when the impromptu political strategy session had finally broken up and the two legislators were returned to their wives. “First I imposed my pitiable self upon you, then I proceeded to ignore you. Let me buy you a drink. What sort of drink do you want? Or I have a better idea. Don't you have a collected Shakespeare in your room? Let's go there right now and read
Much Ado
aloud. There are parts I'd like to hear again right away, particularly that speech of—”

“No, I'm too tired.”

“Lend me the book, then. I'll read it myself and return it tomorrow. And I promise in the future I'll be a better friend to you. I'll make sure there'll be less ado about me and my woes.”

“I
, TOO, AM A WAVE
on a stormy sea,” Ned Baker declaimed, as he struck the cork ball with his hand, slamming it into the backside of one of the new brick buildings on the square. “I, too, am a wanderer driven like thee!”

The newly formed Springfield Poetical Society had no fixed location in which to meet, but they often convened behind the square where the back walls of the buildings, not quite flush with one another, created a kind of court in which to play fives. The challenge the members of the society had set for themselves was to recite their new poems while making the ball strike the wall in rhythm with their stresses.

Ned Baker—Edward Dickinson Baker—was the man Lincoln seemed to believe was a figure of destiny, and who he had decided must be one of the first recruits to the poetical society. Ned was big and square with sweeping hair and soaring eyebrows and hypnotically pale blue eyes. He was only twenty-five but gave the impression of someone who had impatiently vaulted past youth to assume the air of a supremely confident middle-aged man. And he moved with surprising speed and finesse. He was a better player at fives than any of them, better even than Lincoln, who had an advantage with his long arms and big caveman hands.

Ned was a lawyer and had recently defeated Candlebox Calhoun in a special election for state representative. He had also been a Campbellite preacher. Even as he raced around the court to hit the ball in rhythm, he recited his poem with the urgency of a man reaching out from the pulpit to souls in danger of damnation.

He had come to the last stanza—“For the land I seek is a waveless shore / And they who reach it shall wander no more.” He said the closing word with savage finality as he struck the ball one last time, letting it bounce and dribble to a stop as his powerful voice seemed to reverberate in the empty makeshift ball court.

“ ‘For the land I seek is a waveless shore,' ” Lincoln repeated with reverence. “By God I'll be the first to shake the hand of a man who can write a line like that.”

It was growing dark and they decided to continue their meeting at the county clerk's office, which was vacant at night and just down the hallway in Hoffman's Row from Lincoln and Stuart's own office. The room had a commodious black walnut chair that Ned commandeered before the lamps were lit. He was a man blessed with the assumption that he should always be expected to preside. It was hard not to confirm him in that expectation. If someone had asked Cage in October of 1837 which man in the room that night would soar the highest, might even one day lead the entire nation, he would have thought of Ned Baker in an instant. Lincoln himself held that opinion. Ned's election had made him a new member of the Long Nine, the legislative delegation from Sangamon County that included Lincoln and whose nine members were all six feet or more in height. John Stuart had once stood the nine men against the wall of the house chamber in Vandalia, measured each with a yardstick, added the sums together and announced that if stacked head to toe the Long Nine would reach fifty-four feet eight inches into the air.

“ ‘A waveless shore,' ” Lincoln said as he took his own seat on a hard chair in the county clerk's office. “ ‘A waveless shore.' I don't know that there could be a better metaphor for infinity. I assume that's what it represents.”

“You're correct,” Ned replied. “I had in mind a sort of spreading watery flatness. Also very foggy. Before we left England, my father used to take me to the Kent marshes.”

Cage thought Lincoln's excitement about Ned's passable poem was a little excessive. Baker wrote poetry as well as he did everything else, with casual if not consummate excellence, but the idea of a wave as a restlessly roving spirit, searching for a “distant shore” where it would find peace and oblivion, strained under the weight of its own obviousness. Still, Ned's cadence was strong and consistent—not always the case with the other members of the society who thought of themselves as poets. And Cage was in favor of anything that helped keep Lincoln in a lively mood instead of the demoralized paralysis he had displayed that night after the August election, when he had suffered his simultaneous rejection from Mary Owens and from the voters for Ash Merritt's candidacy.

Simeon Francis was the next to read his composition. Sim was older than the other members of the society, already into his forties. He had the face of a lean man, a sharp nose and a thin-lipped, downward-sloping mouth, but his body was so discordantly broad and fleshy it overlapped his armchair. His poem was an ode to the power of the printed word and a vibrant press, a predictable bit of self-congratulation from the editor of the
Sangamo Journal.
After him came Ash Merritt, his spirit more or less recovered from losing his election to James Adams. For his contribution, he reverted to his doctor's expertise and read a few awkwardly constructed comic lines about bodily eructations:

“Now hear the belching of the wind

The body's noble trumpet!”

Billy Herndon jumped up after Ash had finished, and from the fiery look in his eyes it was apparent he was determined to change the tone. Billy was the youngest of them, only nineteen. His father was Archie Herndon, a choleric Democratic member of the state legislature. Archie had sent his son off to college in Jacksonville where, freed from the strictures of his father's tyrannical thought, Billy had drunk himself wild and become a heathen abolitionist. Illinois College wouldn't have him back, and neither would Archie, so now he clerked in Speed's store and lived in the increasingly crowded upstairs room with Speed and Lincoln.

“I've been trying to write a poem about the evils of Negro bondage,” he said. “But the theme is too important—there's no greater theme, in my opinion, except for maybe the existence of the Deity—and I can't make my language rise to it. So with your indulgence I'll just read ‘The Slave's Lament' by Robert Burns.”

Everyone knew that Joshua Speed's family owned plenty of slaves in Kentucky and they turned to see how he would react, especially since Speed had recently given Billy a job and a place to live. But Speed just smiled indulgently, even tapped his knuckle on the county clerk's desk in time with the poem's refrain: “And alas! I am weary, weary O.”

Billy was not yet a lawyer nor even a student of law, and his rhetorical skills had not been honed. His voice was thin and had no drama in it, so that the endless refrains of “I am weary, weary O” became tedious and even comical. Nevertheless, the group could see the last one coming and joined in rowdily, as if for a drunken chorus—not the effect Billy Herndon had wanted.

“I don't see that Negro slavery is a fit subject for laughter,” he told them.

“We weren't laughing at slavery,” Lincoln reassured Billy, putting his hand on the younger man's shoulder. “Much less were we laughing at you. We were just caught up in Burns's musicalness and it got the better of us.”

Billy reached into the battered haversack that had contained his copy of Burns and pulled out a sheaf of handbills and started passing them out. “We can sit around here and listen to poetry about Negro slavery, or we can do something about it.”

Speed took the paper, a notice for an upcoming lecture by an abolitionist preacher named Porter, wadded it up—not angrily—and tossed it into the wooden wastepaper basket. Lincoln studied the paper for a moment and neatly folded it over and over again until he was able to file it away into his waistcoat pocket, where it could be judiciously forgotten.

“I'll go hear Reverend Porter,” Cage said. “In my opinion slavery is an injustice without parallel and I'll listen to anyone who wants to speak out against it.”

“I will too,” Ned Baker said. “What about you, Lincoln? Are you coming?”

“I'm entombed in legal matters. Stuart is out on the circuit and I have to manage our caseload here in Springfield.”

“What Lincoln means to say,” Speed translated, “is that if he's spotted at an abolitionist rally he might as well drink hemlock.”

“When it comes to political suicide,” Ned said, “caution can sometimes kill you just as dead as poison. I'm not an abolitionist radical, but why not hear the man out?”

“I'll do better than that,” Lincoln said. “I'll read every word of Reverend Porter's lecture when it's published.”

Ned Baker, nobler and more reckless than Lincoln, laughed out loud, half in exasperation, half in admiration at his friend's rhetorical evasiveness. The great issue of slavery was still avoidable in those days, if you danced nimbly enough, if you didn't let your principles entrap you.

“I think of slavery as a regrettable infirmity,” Speed said. “Like a fever. A strong body politic will eventually throw it off, but if you subject it to the deadly remedy—like abolition—you're likely to kill the patient. Anyway, if we don't get back to being a poetical society we'll turn into a debating society and all hope for harmony will be lost.”

“There should be no harmony!” Billy said. “Harmony is an evil in this case! Haven't you read what's been happening in Alton? A man like Lovejoy speaks out against slavery and mobs tear apart his printing presses, not once but three times!”

“The harassment of Lovejoy is a great wrong,” Lincoln said.

“Yes, it is, Mr. Lincoln, and slavery is a far greater wrong.”

They went on talking about Lovejoy, the famous preacher and abolitionist editor, and even Speed agreed it was an admirable thing for him to risk his life for his beliefs, extreme and unproductive though they were. Abolition was no kind of answer, he said, a remark that led the conversation inevitably to the topic of colonization, which Lincoln and most of the others favored as the most humane and ingenious solution.

“It's no sort of solution at all,” Cage said. “It's a wild dream to think we can send all the Negroes back to Africa.”

“Henry Clay doesn't think so,” Lincoln said.

“Henry Clay!” Billy Herndon sputtered. “Is Henry Clay God? Is every sentence he utters sacred text?”

“Oh, I guess pretty much.” The statement was so guileless and absurd and Lincoln's grin so lazily conniving that there was no high ground left for Billy to stand on. Lincoln had a way of turning the mood of a room this way or that as it suited him. And now that he had managed not to ensnare himself in the abolition question, he announced that after staying up almost all night writing various pleadings and petitions and praecipes he had managed to scratch out a poem of his own.

It was a short, bad poem, written in a tone of humorous chivalry in defense of fallen women. He had not had time to commit it to memory, so he stood in front of the group and held up the expired legal document on whose back the poem had been written. He struck theatrical poses as he read it and, infected by the laughter of his audience, began to chortle as he came to the final stanza.

“Whatever spiteful fools may say—

Each jealous, ranting yelper—

No woman ever
played
the
whore

Unless she had a man to help her.”

There was applause and appreciative hooting, and Ned Baker declared the poem should be put to music and sung in taverns, the drunker the singers the better.

“Well, Cage,” Lincoln said, “what sayest thou? Is it the work of a natural poetical critter or just a four-o'clock-in-the-morning lawyer?”

“I can only point out the obvious. A man who would use the word ‘yelper' is a man who is very desperate for a rhyme.”

They laughed at Cage's lighthearted riposte, but Lincoln's poem had had a cold effect on him. His mind was too preoccupied with Ellie these days not to be struck by the jarring word “whore.” Lincoln's poem meant nothing, of course. It was thoughtless doggerel. But the simple fact that he had written it, had probably labored over it, chuckling to himself late at night as he crossed out lines and counted out its stresses, was vaguely disappointing.