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JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER VII
BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND
Chapters
JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER VIII
LETTER VII
THE MARTYR
Washington, May 14.
I am sitting in the President's office. He was here very lately, but he will not return to dispossess me of this high-backed chair he filled so long, nor resume his daily work at the table where I am writing.
There are here only Major Hay and the friend who accompanies me. A bright-faced boy runs in and out, darkly attired, so that his fob-chain of gold is the only relief to his mourning garb. This is little Tad., the pet of the White House. That great death, with which the world rings, has made upon him only the light impression which all things make upon childhood. He will live to be a man pointed out everywhere, for his father's sake; and as folks look at him, the tableau of the murder will seem to encircle him.
The room is long and high, and so thickly hung with maps that the color of the wall cannot be discerned. The President's table at which I am seated, adjoins a window at the farthest corner; and to the left of my chair as I recline in it, there is a large table before an empty grate, around which there are many chairs, where the cabinet used to assemble. The carpet is trodden thin, and the brilliance of its dyes is lost. The furniture is of the formal cabinet class, stately and semi-comfortable; there are book cases sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer, but lately plethoric, like the thin body which has departed in its coffin. They are taking away Mr. Lincoln's private effects, to deposit them wheresoever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the maps; they are from the coast survey and engineer departments, and exhibit all the contested grounds of the war: there are pencil lines upon them where some one has traced the route of armies, and planned the strategic circumferences of campaigns. Was it the dead President who so followed the march of empire, and dotted the sites of shock and overthrow?
Here is the Manassas country—here the long reach of the wasted Shenandoah; here the wavy line of the James and the sinuous peninsula. The wide campagna of the gulf country sways in the Potomac breeze that filters in at the window, and the Mississippi climbs up the wall, with blotches of blue and red to show where blood gushed at the bursting of deadly bombs. So, in the half-gloomy, half-grand apartment, roamed the tall and wrinkled figure whom the country had summoned from his plain home into mighty history, with the geography of the republic drawn into a narrow compass so that he might lay his great brown hand upon it everywhere. And walking to and fro, to and fro, to measure the destinies of arms, he often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to ask if his life were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous issues, or whether it was not all a fever-dream, snatched from his sofa in the routine office of the Prairie state.
There is but one picture on the marble mantel over the cold grate—John
Bright, a photograph.
I can well imagine how the mind of Mr. Lincoln often went afar to the face of Bright, who said so kindly things of him when Europe was mocking his homely guise and provincial phraseology. To Mr. Lincoln, John Bright was the standard-bearer of America and democracy in the old world. He thrilled over Bright's bold denunciations of peer and "Privilege," and stretched his long arm across the Atlantic to take that daring Quaker innovator by the hand.
I see some books on the table; perhaps they have lain there undisturbed since the reader's dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual, a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, "Orpheus C. Kerr," and "Artemus Ward." These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard day's labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped Heights of Arlington, reaching down to the shining river side. These scenes he looked at often to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this room and its close applications in the abandon of the theater.
I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes—to slay this public servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.
Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat—a room more narrow but as long—and opposite this adjacent office, a second door, directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private passage to his family quarters. This passage is his only monument in the building; he added nor subtracted nothing else; it tells a long story of duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door opposite his window, and hat in hand, come courtsying to his chair, with an obsequious "Mr. President!"
If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and navy, to go out of the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of it after with much merriment.
Here should be written the biography of his official life—in the room where have concentrated all the wires of action, and where have proceeded the resolves which vitalized in historic deeds. But only the great measures, however carried out, were conceived in this office. The little ones proceeded from other places..
Here once came Mr. Stanton, saying in his hard and positive way:
"Mr. Lincoln, I have found it expedient to disgrace and arrest General
Stone."
"Stanton," said Mr. Lincoln, with an emotion of pain, "when you considered it necessary to imprison General Stone, I am glad you did not consult me about it."
And for lack of such consultation, General Stone, I learn, now lies a maniac in the asylum. The groundless pretext, upon which he suffered the reputation of treason, issued from the Department of War—not from this office.
But as to his biography, it is to be written by Colonel Nicolay and Major Hay. They are to go to Paris together, one as attache of legation, the other as consul, and while there, will undertake the labor. They are the only men who know his life well enough to exhaust it, having followed his official tasks as closely as they shared his social hours.
Major Hay is a gentleman of literary force. Colonel Nicolay has a fine judgment of character and public measures. Together they should satisfy both curiosity and history.
As I hear from my acquaintances here these episodes of the President's life, I recall many reminiscences of his ride from Springfield to Harrisburg, over much of which I passed. Then he left home and became an inhabitant of history. His face was solid and healthy, his step young, his speech and manner bold and kindly. I saw him at Trenton stand in the Legislature, and say, in his conversational intonation:
"We may have to put the foot down firm."
How should we have hung upon his accents then had we anticipated his virtues and his fate.
Death is requisite to make opinion grave. We looked upon Mr. Lincoln then as an amusing sensation, and there was much guffaw as he was regarded by the populace; he had not passed out of partisan ownership. Little by little, afterward, he won esteem, and often admiration, until the measure of his life was full, and the victories he had achieved made the world applaud him. Yet, at this date, the President was sadly changed. Four years of perplexity and devotion had wrinkled his face, and stooped his shoulders, and the failing eyes that glared upon the play closed as his mission was completed, and the world had been educated enough to comprehend him.
The White House has been more of a Republican mansion under his control than for many administrations. Uncouth guests came to it often, typical of the simple western civilization of which he was a graduate, and while no coarse altercation has ever ensued, the portal has swung wide for five years.
A friend, connected with a Washington newspaper, told me that he had occasion to see Mr. Lincoln one evening, and found that the latter had gone to bed. But he was told to sit down in the office, and directly the President entered. He wore only a night shirt, and his long, lank hirsute limbs, as he sat down, inclined the guest to laughter. Mr. Lincoln disposed of his request at once, and manifested a desire to talk. So he reached for the cane which my friend carried and conversed in this manner:
"I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself. There's a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don't you think so? You have seen these fishing poles that fit into a cane? Well, that was an old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I 'spose they use'em yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one's hand will change his appearance? Old women and witches would'nt look so without sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that."
In this way my friend, who is a clerk, in a newspaper office, heard the President talk for an hour. The undress of the man and the witness of his subject would be staples for merriment if we did not reflect that his greatness was of no conventional cast, that the playfulness of his nature and the simplicity of his illustration lightened public business but never arrested it.
Another gentleman, whom I know, visited the President in high dudgeon one night. He was a newspaper proprietor and one of his editors had been arrested.
"Mr. Lincoln," he said, "I have been off electioneering for your re-election, and in my absence you have had my editor arrested. I won't stand it, sir. I have fought better administrations than yours."
"Why, John," said the President, "I don't know much about it. I suppose your boys have been too enterprizing. The fact is, I don't interfere with the press much, but I suppose I am responsible."
"I want you to order the man's release to-night," said the applicant. "I shan't leave here till I get it. In fact, I am the man who should be arrested. Why don't you send me to Capitol Hill?"
This idea pleased the President exceedingly. He laughed the other into good humor.
"In fact," he said, "I am under restraint here, and glad of any pretext to release a journalist."
So he wrote the order, and the writer got his liberty.
It must not be inferred from this, however, that the President was a devotee to literature. He had no professional enthusiasm for it. The literary coterie of the White House got little flattery but its members were treated as agreeable citizens and not as the architects of any body's fortune.
Willis went there much for awhile, but yielded to his old habit of gossiping about the hall paper and the teapots. Emerson went there once, and was deferred to us if he were anything but a philosopher. Yet he so far grasped the character of his host as to indite that noble humanitarian eulogy upon him, delivered at Concord, and printed in the WORLD. It will not do to say definitely In this notice how several occasional writers visited the White House, heard the President's views and assented to them and afterward abused him. But these attained no remembrance nor tart reproach from that least retaliatory of men. He harbored no malice, and is said to have often placed himself on the stand-point of Davis and Lee, and accounted for their defection while he could not excuse it.
He was a good reader, and took all the leading NEW YORK dailies every day. His secretaries perused them and selected all the items which would interest the President; these were read to him and considered. He bought few new books, but seemed ever alive to works of comic value; the vein of humor in him was not boisterous in its manifestations, but touched the geniality of his nature, and he reproduced all that he absorbed, to elucidate some new issue, or turn away argument by a laugh.
As a jester, Mr. Lincoln's tendency was caricatured by the prints, but not exaggerated. He probably told as many stories as are attributed to him. Nor did he, as is averred, indulge in these jests on solemn occasions. No man felt with such personal intensity the extent of the casualties of his time, and he often gravely reasoned whether he could be in any way responsible for the bloodshed and devastation over which it was his duty to preside.
An acquaintance of mine—a private—once went to him to plead for a man's life. He had never seen the man for whom he pleaded, and had no acquaintance with the man's family. Mr. Lincoln was touched by his disinterestedness, and said to him:
"If I were anything but the President, I would be constantly working as you have done."
Whenever a doubt of one's guilt lay on his mind, the man was spared by his direct interference..
There was an entire absence in the President's character of the heroic element. He would do a great deed in deshabille as promptly as in full dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect, regardless of the route to it.
He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course, while they only argued it out.
His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but Moreau—not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin.
His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the President.
So dwelt the citizen who is gone—a model in character if not in ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he has bent so often,—in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations, of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory.
READ LETTER VIII: JOHN WILKES BOOTH: LETTER VIII