The Bride of Texas (76 page)

Could Ambrose have interpreted these words as anything but approval of his actions? And Ollie’s dispatch? Unyielding himself, Ambrose interpreted it in his own way. After all, Ollie was a friend from Liberty. It may never have occurred to Ambrose that political life had taught his old friend flexibility.

Life had indeed taught the governor flexibility. Ollie wrote to Lincoln again — because the situation in Chicago was intensifying — questioning the wisdom of General Order Number Thirty-eight, which he had earlier agreed to. His view now was that it increased Democratic opposition to the war. Expressing his sudden disaffection with General Hascall’s radicalism, Ollie said that military commanders were in fact unnecessary in the Department of the Ohio. Given Washington’s support, the governors themselves could find ways to solve the problems that Hascall was dealing with so ham-handedly.

Lincoln met with Stanton to discuss Morton’s letter, then instructed Stanton to explain to Ambrose that, with his lack of diplomatic tact, Hascall was upsetting public opinion, which was upset enough already. Ambrose was to avoid anything that might jeopardize the position of officials loyal to Washington, like Governor Morton. Lincoln’s message ended with another oblique bit of counsel: the president did not expect General Burnside “to be able, under any circumstances, to satisfy everyone”. The most he expected was that unnecessary irritation be avoided.

Stanton passed these instructions to Ambrose on June 1, not by telegram but by letter. Meanwhile Ambrose, still believing that Lincoln expected him to continue as before, issued General Order Number Eighty-four, and closed down the Chicago
Times
for running a disparaging article about the president.

Unlike Ambrose, I am inclined to expect the worst rather than the best from people, and to suspect their motives. I had to ask myself, therefore, why a politician as experienced as Stanton would send instructions to Ambrose by letter rather than by telegraph, when everyone in Washington was enamoured of that new and useful toy.

If Stanton had put his advice into Morse code, the
Times
wouldn’t have been banned, and many people — including Lincoln, but mainly Ambrose — would have been spared considerable humiliation. Could Stanton have made such an incredible gaffe because he didn’t know what to do himself, thus leaving the decision, as it were, to technological Providence?

The fact that a few days later Stanton did send a telegram gives credence to my assessment.

So does the fact that he sent it to the wrong address.

As soon as the cab bearing Maggie vanished around the corner, I sat down with the manuscript of
Carolina Bride
and examined my conscience. I kept the manuscript in the left-hand drawer of my writing-desk, while in the right was the manuscript of a little novel-in-progress with the working title
Prudence and Premonition;
it was pure Laura Lee, complete with the half-borrowed title. I had written about twenty pages of
Carolina Bride
, and at least ten times more of
Prudence and Premonition
. As usual, inventing things came easily to me.

Well, inventing things.… I read the pages of
Bride
and found that there were only eighteen; then I delved into
Prudence
, and on page forty I felt a wave of heat flood over me. The story’s hero, a handsome farmer called Frederick, is flirting with the clever Maureen, daughter of a small dry-goods merchant who drinks whisky to excess. In the course of Frederick’s stealing a kiss, his shotgun goes off (he’s on his way home from a hunting expedition), and though Maureen is unharmed, her new dress is irreparably scorched. It’s impossible for a girl wearing a badly burned dress to walk home through the village unnoticed, so Fred takes a dress belonging to his sister Kate from the clothesline in the garden and his sweetheart goes upstairs to change in his parents’ bedroom, where she is observed through the open window by the village gossip, Miss Peters. This basic situation would lead to the usual trip to the altar in the face of amusing obstacles.

But had I really invented this story? Feverishly I went back to the eighteen pages of
Carolina Bride
and read them again. There could be no doubt. I hadn’t invented the Labiche-like farce with the coquette and the hunter; I had taken it lock, stock, and barrel, so to speak, from
Carolina Bride
, where it was based on fact. I had merely adapted it slightly to make it fit.

But was it really based on fact? The fact was that Gospel, the cook, had lost her leg. As a seventeen-year-old chambermaid she had been polishing silver while, beside her, the devout slave Henry was no doubt pondering more spiritual matters as he cleaned Massa Sinclair’s shotgun. He had forgotten to check if it was loaded.

I felt another flush of heat. My serious intentions had converted a real story into the drama I had set in motion in the first chapter of
Carolina Bride
. In fact I had written two variations. The first, rejected and blue-pencilled, turned the pious Henry into Gospel’s beau and his fateful absence of mind into the flirtation of young lovers. The shotgun goes off as it did and hits
Gospel. Justifiably frightened of the wrath of Massa Sinclair, whom I transformed from a good-natured idler into a slave-driver, Henry attempts to escape to the North but is caught and sent down the river. I abandoned this variation because Henry’s motivation to escape struck me as unconvincing, and because I didn’t know how to handle a crippled girl in a novel, even a serious one. But the main reason was my fear that the drastic impact of selling Henry down the river would be hard to surpass in the novel’s climax, which I hadn’t come up with yet. I had learned my poetics from Poe and so, without a qualm, I deleted the passage. The flirtation became an attempted rape — not by Henry, of course, but by the plantation-owner’s son John, who was carrying a loaded shotgun on his back. The shot did not hit Gospel, but shattered a valuable Meissen porcelain vase, and John pinned the blame on Henry. That relatively non-dramatic incident set Henry’s calvary in motion and it was to culminate, exactly according to the lessons I had learned from my mentor, Poe, in his sale down the river at the end of the novel.

I compared the three stories. All they had in common was a simple shotgun blast. The fact that it really happened was irrelevant.

How in God’s name was literature supposed to mirror life?

Ambrose issued the order to halt publication of the
Times
on June 1, and immediately left for Hickman’s Bridge, Kentucky, to prepare for the campaign against Braxton Bragg.

Storey and his editors ignored the order, which was delivered to the
Times
on the morning of June 2. Storey quickly obtained a restraining order from Judge Thomas Drummond and
attempted to serve Drummond’s edict on the officer overseeing the implementation of Ambrose’s order in the
Times
’s editorial offices. The officer refused to take it and returned to Camp Davis, apparently for reinforcements. Storey sent spies on horseback to follow him, and a rumour went round the city that the army was preparing to march on Chicago.

The morning of June 3, just as the paper was being typeset, a fellow rode up to the
Times
building and reported that General John Ammen’s units were marching towards the city. The rumour turned out to be true; the units arrived at half past two. When Storey refused to admit them, the soldiers broke down the door, rushed into the print-shop, stopped the rotary press, carried the bundles of finished newspapers out into the street, and ripped them to shreds with their bayonets.

They missed the smaller job-printing press in the neighbouring workshop, however, and handbills were rolling off it at full steam. “All good and loyal citizens of Chicago who favour Free Speech and Freedom of the Press,” they said, “are invited to assemble in mass meeting in front of
The Chicago Times
on Wednesday evening, June 2, at 8 o’clock.…”

That was the beginning of the drama, or the farce, that raised a philosophical question we Americans will probably be grappling with for as long as America exists.

Soon crowds of people started to stream towards the
Times
building, and about the same time word got out that armed units of Copperheads would be attacking the Republican
Tribune
building, which was loyal to Lincoln. The
Tribune
staff barricaded themselves in the building and declared that they would defend the paper even if they were outnumbered by the Copperheads. The Republicans had no intention, however, of leaving the fate of their newspaper in the hands of pressmen and typesetters, and so eight hundred men of Colonel Hauck’s
Home Guard took up combat positions around the
Tribune
, each man with thirty rounds of live ammunition. My old friend Colonel Jennison appeared as well, with his John Brown beard flying. He marched up and down the ranks of guardsmen, proclaiming in a clear and audible voice that if the traitors dared to attack, the street would be “carpeted with Copperhead corpses.”

To make a long story short, by twilight of that day nebulous terms like “disloyalty” and “weakening the combat morale of the army” had the makings of a very tangible threat.

At half past seven that evening, the street in front of the
Times
building was so jammed with peace supporters that an appeal was made to them from the windows of the editorial offices to move to a bigger square two blocks away. As the milling crowd walked over to the square, there was a lot of confusion, pushing and shoving, and the occasional fist-fight, while over it all hung a thunderous roar. Humphrey said that from his vantage-point in a colleague’s window he could smell the stink of rot-gut whisky rising from twenty thousand throats, and the slogans they chanted were certainly not flattering to Lincoln and his generals. Now and then the very chantable name of Vallandigham rang out, but mostly the demonstrators were calling on Storey to speak.

Storey was no orator, though, and he knew better than to mount the podium. So the crowd — including some three thousand Copperheads sporting their buttons — had to make do with unremarkable substitute speakers, and then a resolution was adopted which included the statement that they would sacrifice life and fortune “and all but liberty to preserve the Union” but that “they would not sacrifice their liberties, though life and fortune go together.” Clashes with the police increased but the constabulary maintained control, so that nothing happened to give General Ammen a reason to declare
martial law. One tipsy fellow in a linen coat sporting a big copperhead in its buttonhole put his hat on a walking-stick and waved it over the heads of the crowd, shouting that he could “rally enough Copperheads to squelch the
Tribune”
, then set out unsteadily towards the offices of that newspaper, where a frowning Colonel Jennison was eagerly observing his progress. But the police picked him up before he could get into trouble.

Next day, the Republicans held a rally. Colonel Jennison publicly reiterated the suggestion he had made privately at our house — that his people would be glad to hang the Illinois traitors if the namby-pambies from Chicago were too soft for the job, because there was nobody left to hang back in Kansas. Even so, the Republicans’ meeting was far more peaceful than the stormy demonstration of the Peace Democrats. Just before the speeches started, they learned that Lincoln had ordered General Burnside to rescind the order to suppress the
Times
, and that Burnside had done so.

What had happened? Telegrams had flown back and forth across the country. The first was sent from Chicago to Washington right after lunch on June 3 by a group of businessmen and politicians, all in positions more or less dependent on public opinion and alarmed at the approaching cries of an incensed mob. It asked the president to revoke Burnside’s edict. Two of the telegram’s authors were professional politicians, Lyman Trumbull and Isaac Arnold, who appended an urgent postscript asking the president to give the resolution his “serious and prompt consideration”.

As the president was reading the wire from the Chicago
businessmen, Ambrose was reading another telegram in Kentucky, this one from Halleck: instead of marching against Bragg in Tennessee, he was to organize reinforcements for General Grant and send them to Vicksburg in all haste. No sooner had he started working on that problem than yet another telegram arrived, this one from Secretary of War Stanton asking him to rescind the order suppressing the
Times
, on the president’s orders.

With no way of knowing what was going on behind the scenes, how could Ambrose, in Kentucky, have grasped it all? He apparently cursed but immediately wired the requisite instructions to General Ammen in Chicago. Then he turned his attention back to Vicksburg.

Later, it turned out that the president, assailed by requests, resolutions, reports, calls for help, and appeals, finally made his decision after reading the urgent addendum from the old congressional professionals, Arnold and Trumbull. He conferred with Stanton and thought he had settled the dilemma. But not even half an hour after Stanton’s dispatch to Burnside, the telegraph in the Office of the President was tapping out a new message from Congressman Arnold in Chicago, stating that his postscript to the earlier telegram did not imply any opinion in the matter of rescinding the order to stop publication of the
Times
. The president, accustomed to finding his own way through allegories and chaos, was far better than Ambrose at reading between the lines, and so at six o’clock that evening one more telegram flew across the wires from Stanton to Burnside in Kentucky with a message that was clear despite the tangled syntax: “The President directs me to say that if you have not acted upon the telegram, you need not do so but may let the matter stand as it is until you receive a letter by mail forwarded yesterday.”

All of this reinforces my contention that Stanton left the solution of the dilemma to the technical possibilities of communication. It is hard to believe, for example, that he didn’t know about the telegram Halleck had sent to Ambrose in Kentucky the previous day, ordering him to stand down from an offensive against Bragg and organize reinforcements for Grant at Vicksburg. He was, after all, Secretary of War. And yet his own wire vaguely but unquestionably revoking the previous order to rescind the suppression of the
Times
was sent not to Kentucky but to Cincinnati, where Ambrose most certainly was not, and had not been for quite some time. Had the telegram been sent to the proper address, it would have reached Ambrose before half past six on the evening of June 4, when Ambrose wired General Ammen that the
Times
could proceed to publish as usual. In Cincinnati, the captain on duty who received Stanton’s dispatch took a while to realize that it had been sent to the wrong address and to redirect it to Ambrose at Hickman’s Bridge.