WASHINGTON, FALL 1801
“Mr. Wagner,” Madison said, “how do you assess our relations with Spain?”
“Tedious, painful, often the captive of small-minded men in New Orleans who violate treaties. But all told, more irksome than serious.”
“You don’t regard an open Mississippi as serious?”
“It’s desirable, and naturally our western folk care about it. But they are relatively few in number, and by hook or crook what they ship usually gets through.”
From the beginning there had been trouble over the lands to the south and navigation of the river. Indeed, Spain had tried to maneuver a deal closing the river to American commerce for twenty-five years, obviously hoping to split off everything beyond the Appalachians and attach it to Spanish Louisiana.
By 1795, we were strong enough to demand a treaty that moved the southern border below Natchez and opened the river to American trade. But Spanish officials in Louisiana, took years to comply, and Americans still were harassed and never sure their shipments would pass.
“Mr. Wagner, get clear in your thinking that an open Mississippi is vital to the West, and the West is absolutely vital to the United States and the democracy we’re building.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“No buts, Mr. Wagner. We don’t carry a lot of international
weight now, but we’ll be a power in time, almost certainly a continental nation, and I believe our democracy will be a beacon that lights the world.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure, but meanwhile—”
“Save your doubts, sir! And understand, you and I could run aground very rapidly here. I know the line of thought that argues for cutting off the West and limiting the nation to the original thirteen. Disabuse yourself of that notion; it will never happen. Never. Now, sir, I want a report on our dealings with Spain and recommendations for improving them.”
Lewis popped out of the mansion at a half run, decisions on cutting the army piling up, another damned errand of no importance, and heard someone call his name. He spun about and saw it was that tedious Mr. Wagner with the ramrod up his backside bolting from the State Department and waving his arms. Lewis had long been tempted to drag the gentleman off to a tavern and see if a glass of stout wouldn’t relax him a little; they were both clerks, after all. Wagner was in shirtsleeves and a cold wind was cutting from the north. He was shivering.
“Jesus, man,” Lewis said, “get over here in the lee of the building; you’ll take your death.”
“Thank you,” Wagner said, clasping his arms over his chest. “I just wanted to ask you, you’re experienced on the frontier, did you find the Spanish hostile?”
“Of course.” What an odd question! “Arrogant bastards, still believe they can peel the west off this late in the day, had an encounter with a Spanish captain in Saint Louis—”
Wagner seemed to be turning blue and Lewis decided he’d better hurry. “I’ll just say that it was damned unpleasant and entirely unnecessary. I was ready to teach him a lesson, but I was on his territory, so I backed off. Sum up, they’re hostile as hell, and they expect to take the West from us.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Wagner said.
What an odd duck, Lewis thought, drew his collar closer, and hurried on.
Still, the older man’s question lingered. Did it suggest the administration might be looking westward after all? Lewis had had the feeling lately that he was the only man in Washington who understood that there was some of the nation west of the Appalachians. In fact, the Mississippi was crucial to the West; everything depended on having it open—and not just open for the moment but securely, permanently open! It was high time to bring the Spanish to heel, and after that, the British, at least as far as the American West went. And that included the Pacific Northwest, by God, whether anyone here understood it or not.
Damn it,
that’s
why it was so important to get moving. For the thousandth time he wondered if Mr. Jefferson had the faintest idea of what really was involved in moving a body of men across a continent. He hoped they wouldn’t spring it on him one day and say be ready to go the next, though he’d rather hear that than the nothing he was hearing. Point was, it was ridiculous to delay. Made you wonder if they really were serious men despite all their gravity.
He was still thinking of this when he stepped into into Sim’s Tavern, marking it immediately as surely the meanest hole in Washington. Yes, there was the man Mr. Jefferson had sent him to see, a fleshy fellow with a hank of black hair hanging over his eyes and a purpling complexion, crouched at a small table scribbling on foolscap with a stub pencil, left hand cupped secretively to protect his writing from others’ eyes. It had been five or six days since he’d shaved and, from the look of it, since he’d changed his shirt.
He saw Lewis and his manner changed. He crouched lower, looking about as if for allies, at a window as if considering flight. He wadded the foolscap and thrust it under his coat.
“Mr. Callender?”
“I’m not—I’m not wanted! You can’t do anything to me!” Voice high and squeaky.
“For God’s sake, calm yourself,” Lewis snapped. “I’m Captain Lewis, President Jefferson’s secretary.”
“Oh,” Callender said, “oh.” His head rolled back, his shoulders moved, tension fleeing. He grinned, the change in expression not an improvement. “So,” he said, “sent his lackey, did he? And about time, too, about Goddamned time!”
He slapped the table with both hands. “Ellen!” he bawled. “Porter!”
A pretty girl with yellow braids crossed over her head and bare arms said, “Now, Mr. Callender, I told you—”
“It’s all right. My friend’s buying.”
She glanced at Lewis. He nodded. She set a foaming glass on the table. Callender downed half with a swallow, set it down with a crash. “Ellen! Another!”
Well, Mr. Jefferson had said the man might not be in very good shape. James Thomson Callender was an editor with a roaring style that he employed heart and soul for the Democratic persuasion, struck Federalists hip and thigh to the cheers of his fellows, so the powers that be convicted him of sedition in arrant violation of the Constitution, imprisoned him for a year under the harshest possible conditions, and fined him two hundred dollars, a fortune for such a man. Paying it had stripped him of press and all he owned.
Unfortunately he had served the whole year before the Democrats were elected, so the most the new administration could do was refund the fine. The president had ordered it repaid immediately, but the marshal in Richmond, an arch-Federalist who had jurisdiction over the monies, was relying on a technical reading of the law to resist the order.
“He had a real grievance,” the president had said, “but the trouble is it’s gone rather madly to his head. He wants repayment immediately, which obviously I can’t order until the law is sorted out. Worse, though, he wants an appointment. Postmaster of Richmond! He’s totally unsuited, and the Federalist holding the position has done nothing to warrant discharge. Anyway, he’s doomed to disappointment. It seems he has conceived a passion for a young woman of social position and feels that as postmaster he’ll have a chance for her hand. I happen to know her father; he wouldn’t let Tom in the door.”
The president had tossed a small sack across the desk. “Here’s fifty dollars in gold out of my pocket. Take it to him as a gesture to tide him over and explain the situation.”
Now, watching this gross, unshaven man drain his glass at a swallow and belch thunderously, Lewis thought how sad that such a creature should fix on a society belle of Richmond as his ideal wife. This innate sympathy vanished, however, when Callender opened his mouth. “About time, by God. Did you bring me my money?”
Lewis started to explain.
“And the commission,” Callender said, not listening. “That’s what counts. I told him what I wanted, sent a letter; and by God, I expect to get it. Y’understand? Ellen! Another!”
Lewis returned to the explanation. Nothing had been decided on appointments, but the postmaster in Richmond probably would not be changed unless malfeasance on his part could be proved. As to the money, the president was advancing from his own funds a sum to ease Mr. Callender’s discomfort until the fine could be remitted. He drew the sack from his pocket and Callender snatched it from his hand and shook its contents onto the table.
“Fifty dollars! Hell, man, that won’t do. Fifty dollars ain’t going to solve my problems.” He shoved the sack into his coat pocket. “Now, you listen to me. I’ve earned what I want, I’ve paid for it, I suffered, Goddamn it, a year rotting in prison, year out of my life, year of suffering like you can’t Goddamn imagine. I’ve paid the price and now I Goddamn well want what I want. Now! You got my commission in your pocket, good, give it to me. You ain’t got it, you better get on your horse and go tell your master if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll—”
“‘If he knows what’s good for him’?” Lewis asked.
A look of intense cunning. “Damn right. I know plenty about him. He ain’t so damn noble; he ain’t so perfect. Folks talk like he’s some kind of god or something. Well, I can tell you he’s mortal man. I know things and I can put ’em out, too. I’ll publish the whole rotten story if I don’t get what I
want! Fifty dollars! Just a down payment on keeping me quiet, you tell him that—”
Lewis reached over and caught his shirtfront, lifted him half across the table, beer glasses crashing to the floor, drew back his fist to smash this rotten bastard into oblivion—
And stopped himself. Callender was squalling, patrons were staring, he saw the girl with the braids duck into a back room to call the owner. What, the president of the United States sent his secretary to a public tavern to thrash somebody? This was the new administration’s style?
“Mr. Callender,” he said, “you’d do well to watch your tongue. And I think you can forget hopes of an appointment.”
Callender crouched in his chair, glaring like a rat. “I’ll make him pay,” he hissed. “You tell him, I’ll make him pay.”
Lewis walked out. He needed to wash his hands.
Mr. Jefferson got a look on his face that reminded Lewis that he was the president of the United States. There was a gentleness about him usually, an easy good humor, a kindness. It wasn’t that you doubted his authority but rather that you didn’t think much about it. But now it was beyond doubt. Lewis had reported on his meeting with Callender.
“Strange,” the president said at last. “The old adage that good deeds make enemies seems to prove out. He’ll make me pay? Who knows what he means—I suspect he has a very twisted mind, not improved by a year in Federalist jails. At any rate, that ends our efforts to help him. Have nothing further to do with him. If he calls on you, grant him no audiences. Understand?”
“Yes, sir!”
In some obscure way Lewis was relieved; but as he left Mr. Jefferson’s office, the familiar darkening took hold. He felt lonely, as if he understood no one and no one understood him, and the world was sweeping along and leaving him untouched and perhaps a bit baffled, which somehow seemed
his fault though he knew it wasn’t. It was a cruel feeling and he knew too well that he couldn’t afford to let it take real hold. His boots echoed on marble floors, and his hands were clenched into fists.
Then at the center hall of the mansion he spied Mrs. Madison sitting in the sun on the south balcony overlooking the swamp and the river. On sudden impulse he decided to join her. He liked Miss Dolley. She was kindly, wise, good humored and he always felt better about things when he talked to her.
She said she was tired; she’d been planning the big diplomatic dinner to be held next month, and Mr. Lemaire was finding her role a bit difficult to accept.
“The Frenchman?” Unconsciously Lewis’s fists doubled. “Maybe I should speak to him.”
She glanced at him quickly. “Ah, Merry,” she said, “no, that won’t be necessary.”
Clearly changing the subject, she asked if he liked his role as the president’s secretary.
He started quietly enough, of course he was honored and all that, but then like a field dike giving way in a freshet it all came tumbling out, wrath and longing and sort of a grief. He didn’t belong here, didn’t fit. He didn’t understand the way people talked, what they meant. There were always implications that seemed to escape him. He was direct, a soldier, he expected things to be as they were and to deal with them. He missed the trail, deep woods, eye cocked on the weather, watching for sign, touch of danger in the air, never knowing what might happen, and then, quiet things too, the way the camp was at night when he walked the perimeter in the dark and checked the sentries. That’s where he wanted to be, in the West, in the open—
And then, much to his surprise, he found himself telling her of the expedition, how Mr. Jefferson had planned one back in 1793 and he’d supposed when the call came this time that that was what was afoot. Imagine, walking a couple thousand miles into the unknown, land no explorer had
ever seen, it would be like Columbus casting off from Genoa, Marco Polo striding across Asia! A magnificent dream … but there hadn’t been a word.
Then, a real fountain he was, pouring out his heart, how he’d proposed himself to command that early expedition, how he’d told Mary Beth Slaney and she’d laughed …