A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (15 page)

“Anarchy is bad for business,” Ash Merritt said. “The citizens of Alton will find that out soon enough. No one will leave their homes to go to the shops.”

They took turns making economic and political and ethical pronouncements. To anybody who read the papers, it was plain that what had happened to Lovejoy in Alton and what could have happened to Reverend Porter in Springfield was not unique. The national economy was in crisis, the populace was on edge, lawlessness was everywhere, self-appointed avengers springing up in the streets of every American city. A pickpocket had been lynched in Vandalia only a few months ago, all across the country there had been riots and inchoate attacks, and recently a free black man in St. Louis, suspected of murder, had been chained to a tree and set alight without any thought of formally charging him with a crime.

“They say he sang a hymn while he was on fire,” Ned Baker solemnly remarked.

“It would be very difficult for a man to sing a song while he was burning to death,” Ash observed with his doctor's knowledge. “The mind in such a case is too distracted.”

“You're talking about irrelevancies!” Billy Herndon shouted. His eyes were dry now, but they were still red with emotion. “Mobs exist because slavery exists and there are men who are trying to stop it. The thing to do, the only thing to do, is to root out slavery in the first place.”

“There's no grub hoe that big, Billy,” Speed said. “I wish there was.”

Speed sounded sincere. Probably he was, momentarily setting aside the fact that his own fortune had grown root and branch from his family's slaves. There was nothing unique in his situation. Springfield was full of enlightened men in whom sincerity and hypocrisy were woven tight.

“Well, somebody here should do something,” Billy said. “Somebody here should at least
say
something.”

Lincoln had been silent during much of this conversation, his face set in its familiar aspect of tortured thoughtfulness. Now when he looked up he noticed that the men in the room had all turned their eyes toward him and were waiting for him to speak.

“Well, I reckon Billy's right,” he considered, running his hand thoughtlessly through his hair until it ended up looking like a clump of crow feathers. “Something has to be said.”

“L
ET REVERENCE FOR THE LAWS
be breathed by every American mother,” Lincoln orated from beneath a molting buffalo robe in his law office, “to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in—”

“Stop right there,” Cage said. “You should choose one. The babe should either lisp or prattle.”

“Why can't the babe do both?”

“Because lisping and prattling will collide in the mind of the listener and create a distraction. Also, it's too ornate. Is this a speech or is it a sonnet? By the way, there's a terrible smell in here.”

Lincoln said he hadn't noticed but that he would join in the search for the source of the offensive odor. He stood up from the narrow bench on which he was lying, clutching the buffalo robe around his shoulders, and then lay lengthwise on the floor so that he could see beneath a couch against the opposite wall. He retrieved a plate on which lay a half-eaten piece of cheese whose surface had grown a fungal blush as green and shiny as a velvet waistcoat. He opened a window, letting in a freezing January wind, and tossed the cheese out onto the street.

“If the defenestration of the cheese has had the desired effect,” Lincoln said, “I will continue.”

Cage sat in the office's hard client chair, bundled up in the under-heated room with his fur hat and gloves on, a scarf around his throat, and resumed listening to Lincoln practice his speech. He was to deliver it later that week to the Young Men's Lyceum, and he was nervous about it. A high-minded speech about the undesirability of mob rule, if it succeeded, would help restore the public's trust in his judgment after the unpleasant reaction to his Sampson's Ghost letter-writing campaign.

Stuart and Lincoln's law office was on the second floor of Hoffman's Row
,
just above the courtroom. In fact, it must have originally been envisioned as a storage room for court documents, since a hinged door in the floor connected it directly to the courtroom below. The room was spacious enough but so crowded with books and piles of legal papers that it might have been half its size. Since Stuart was so often gone—out on the circuit or campaigning for Congress or both at the same time—the office had been left to conform itself to the character of the firm's junior partner. It was a shambling but intriguing mess, in which nothing ever seemed close to hand, but at the same time never quite out of reach of its long-armed occupant.

“New reapers will arise,” Lincoln read, dramatically casting off the buffalo robe. It fell to the floor in a mighty moth-eaten heap, and Cage would not have been surprised to see a host of burrowing animals scurry out from under it. “And they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have done so before them.”

Cage was a little startled by where Lincoln's thoughts led him next, because it seemed these “men of ambition” were not to be trusted at all. He declared that public men who would find themselves satisfied with a traditional public office—even the governorship or the presidency—“belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”

Lincoln struck a teapot pose, his arm flung high in the low-ceilinged room. “What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon—Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path.”

Cage was so infatuated with his friend's eccentric and fervent performance that he didn't think to interrupt him again. He sat in his chair and listened to the whole thing all the way to the end. The speech seemed to be a call to arms against the “mobocratic spirit,” against the Napoleons and Caesars who would destroy the country's political institutions and its common history, but there was a degree of infatuation with the family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle that Lincoln couldn't quite mask. Was he warning the people against the rampaging leader he feared was resident in his own ambition, hidden within his own heart?

“I don't know what to make of it,” Cage told him honestly when he had finished and had struck his last lunging pose. “Read me the part about reason again.”

“Cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason must—”

“You make the cure sound more forbidding than the disease. I want to live in a warm-blooded country, not the Republic of Logic.”

“You just complained that it was too ornate! I'm being forceful and direct here. And honest, by the way. Do you want me to imply that reason should be warm and soggy?”

“I thought this speech was going to be about slavery.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Why would I not think that? It's the great issue of the day. It's what's driving the mobs in the first place.”

“You can give a speech about slavery, if you want,” Lincoln said. “Your future doesn't hang on your reelection, but since mine does, this speech is about the perpetuation of our political institutions, which are under threat—not from slavery but from disorder.”

He said this crossly as he sat down on his bench, shivering, his breath frosty. Cage kicked the buffalo robe across the floor to him—a gruff peace offering—and Lincoln bent down and wrapped himself once more in the hideous garment.

“There are some nice phrases,” Cage admitted. “Something about artillery?”

“The silent artillery of time.”

“Yes, that was it. Very effective.”

“Thank you.”

Lincoln sat there musing for a long moment, troubled by Cage's criticism, or by something deeper.

“When I was a boy in Kentucky,” he finally said, “this place we called Knob Creek, we were right on the edge of the turnpike. I remember seeing slaves being marched down the road to Nashville. My father's been a hard man all his life but you would have thought he was tender-hearted as a deacon, the way he looked at those coffles of poor Negroes when they were walking past, all manacled together. I guess he'd been treated poorly enough himself—the land titles were all shingled up in those days and he'd already lost his claim to two farms by then—that he didn't see those men as nigger slaves but just poor unfortunate souls like himself.

“And those two times I went down to New Orleans on a flatboat I saw the slave markets there. Right in the middle of town, there'd be those Negroes in their pens and people standing there auctioning them off. No difference than if they were selling cattle. Signs hanging out in front like it was a dry goods store—‘So & So and Co., Slaves for Sale.' It seemed so normal it turned your mind in on itself, till you thought there was something wrong with you for thinking it was strange. It's odd what us humans can make room for in our minds.”

“That's a speech I'd like to hear,” Cage said.

“Well, you're going to hear this one instead, I'm afraid. Listen, Cage, if slavery isn't wrong, nothing's wrong. But outright abolition's impossible—it would tear the country apart. The Constitution itself protects it. And if I start preaching abolition the only thing that's going to get abolished is me. So take me as I am if you still want to be my friend—I'm not going to get any better than what you see right now.”

He gave the speech that Saturday night, taking a few of Cage's suggestions but ignoring most. The babe lisped and prattled both, Lincoln struck his poses and warned against Caesar and Napoleon and safely called for the crumbling temple of liberty to be rebuilt, “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”

The crowd that had gathered at the Baptist church to hear him was not nearly as critical as Cage had been. Speed and Baker and Herndon and Merritt and all the usual Whig crowd were there, and since the Young Men's Lyceum was a nonpartisan group there were Democrats as well. Even Jacob Early was in attendance. He had been maintaining since the Reverend Porter incident that he had never been the leader of a mob, only of a civil-minded protest against radical and incendiary ideas.

There was little to disagree with in Lincoln's remarks—who didn't want a peaceful society uninfected by mob savagery?—but despite his reservations Cage found himself stirred just as strongly as the rest of the audience. Beneath the staginess, there was authentic passion, and beneath the passion there was something stronger, a steadily ensnaring grip of logic. When Lincoln reached his concluding rhetorical burst—“The gates of hell shall not prevail against it!”—his listeners responded with boisterous applause that he had engineered with great craft throughout his speech, and finally made as inevitable as a reflex. It was done. Abraham Lincoln had banished the memory of Sampson's Ghost. He was no longer an anonymous character assassin but a lone voice crying out for honor and decency in a time of chaos.

Cage got to his feet with the rest and put his hands together, applauding for the tame sentiments that had been written and delivered with such conviction. Joshua Speed stood across the church aisle, huzzahing. When he caught Cage's eye he smiled and jerked his head slightly backwards, indicating something or someone behind him. And two rows back, there she was. The club was called the Young Men's Lyceum but it had always graciously opened its doors to women who might want to hear a lecture about the properties of water or the moral question of capital punishment. Still, it was a shock to see Ellie there, standing contentedly by herself, politely applauding with her gloved hands. She wore an austere woolen dress of pale green, and over her shoulders a carriage shawl of a teasingly different shade. He had never seen her outside of her rooms, and the fact that she was so suddenly and blatantly visible to him and to all the world filled him with anxious longing.

She saw him, didn't smile but tilted her head in complicit acknowledgment, slipped out of the pew and toward the back of the church as the rest of the audience was surging forward to congratulate the speaker. In her hurried pace as she retreated, in the firm set of her shoulders, he recognized that she was sending him a signal not to follow her, that they had no business meeting each other in public. Of course he wanted to disregard this. Why should he care about his reputation? He wasn't running for office. But he knew that his eagerness was a dangerous thing—it was the enemy of her respect for him.

So he went home, waited a week, working late into the night, driven by a sudden mood of despairing solitude. He was twenty-eight years old and he held in his hand a letter that had come that afternoon from Little and Brown: “Though we see much promise in these skillful verses, we feel that your exclusive focus on Western settings and themes may not coincide with the interests of our reading audience, whom we perceive as being mostly of the city-dwelling type. Therefore we regret that we cannot make you an offer of publication. If you find that your work begins to extend beyond the geographical boundaries you appear to have set for it, we would be very happy to consider further submissions.”

The small-minded, dismissive response infuriated him. But the verdict that came with it—no publication—scared him. Was he staking his time and his talent on a literary enterprise that the rest of the world would find to be of no interest? Was his project of a real western literature just the defensive reaction of a man trapped in the provinces, far from where things could actually be expected to happen?

He could have thrown the letter away or burned it in the fireplace, where the coals were glowing, waiting to receive it. But instead he folded it and slipped it between the pages of his notebook, where it might serve as a goad should his confidence ever begin to recover. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” Lincoln had said in his speech. “It thirsts and burns for distinction.” He had meant it in the form of a warning against the dictatorial usurpers of democracy, but wasn't just such a raging drive necessary to accomplish anything lasting? He certainly could not imagine Lincoln—or Baker, or Stuart, or even young Billy Herndon—without it.