Heaven and Hell (27 page)

And where will they find their young knights now, when so many fell as you did, my dearest, in the Virginia woods and fields? ...

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About fifty ladies and gentlemen of the district gathered in the clearing at Six Oaks, by the river. Carriages were parked nearby, and horses tethered. The white spectators ringed two-thirds of the open space, with the low, wet ground nearest the river segregated for black coachmen and servants, all of whom had presumably entered into employment contracts with their masters.

The winter day was warm. Long shafts of dust-moted light patterned the tan ground where three middle-aged riders galloped in a line, their lances leveled at the small wood rings hanging on strings tied to tree limbs.

Hooves pounded. The first rider missed all the rings. So did the second. The third, a gray beard, speared one, then another. An old bugle blared in imitation of a herald's trumpet; the crowd rewarded the victor with desultory applause.

While two more riders prepared, a fat woman who entirely filled one of the seats of a shabby open carriage complained to the gentleman standing beside the vehicle.

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the stipend would end. The yearly total was substantial, so the mere thought of its loss alarmed the lawyer. At the same time, it didn't grieve him one bit to be shed of dealing personally with Elkanah Bent. An obese malcontent with persecution fantasies, Bent always blamed his career failures on others. Hardly any surprise in that: Bent's late father, a Washington lobbyist named Starkwether, had chosen an unstable woman for his brood mare. She came from a large border-state family that included several persons with histories of mental disorder. One of them had even carried the taint to Washington, although she had managed to control or hide it during years of public scrutiny and personal tragedy.

Bent's mother had never acknowledged her son. He took his name from a farm couple who had raised him in Ohio. He'd gone from Ohio to West Point, and then to failure after failure. By now, his mother was ancient (in the way of the elderly, Dills still thought of himself as middle-aged), but the woman's age didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she accepted his lies and wrote bank drafts regularly.

To maintain his high living standard, Dills had recently taken on certain other work. He was a conduit through which five hundred or one thousand dollars could travel to this or that senator willing to use his influence to obtain an Army commission for the applicant. Dills skimmed a percentage for making it unnecessary for such a politician to meet personally and perhaps be seen with a former brevet colonel or brigadier
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desperately hunting reemployment. Dills fancied that he sanitized the bribe money as it passed from hand to hand.

Dills was also a pardon broker. All sorts of Washingtonians had rushed into that work, including women with no asset other than their sexual favors. A legal background had put Dills in the forefront of brokers.

His connections with a few notable Democrats and many powerful Republicans helped too. At the moment he had thirty-nine pardon applications on his desk.

Earlier in the year he'd taken President Johnson an application from Charleston that bore an intriguing name: Main. That was the last name of one of the men Bent held responsible for his various difficulties, starting with his dismissal from West Point. Although the applicant's first name was Cooper and that of Bent's enemy was Orry, they were both South Carolinians, so Dills assumed a connection. He'd never been south of Richmond, but he envisioned the lower part of Dixie as one great heaving sea of cousins, all related and inbred by marriage.

Nature arranged a wet snowfall for Dills's birthday, a further guarantee of an empty office. He locked up and walked three blocks to the A Winter Count 173

hushed rooms of his favorite club, the Concourse. He wandered through the club until he found someone he knew fairly well, a Republican member of the House.

"Wadsworth. Good morning. Join me in a whiskey?"

"Bit early for me, Jasper. But do sit down." Representative Wadsworth of Kentucky laid aside a copy of the Star and signaled a waiter to move a chair. Dills was a tiny man, with tiny hands and feet.

Seated in the huge chair, he resembled a child.

The whiskey arrived. Dills saluted his fellow member before he" sipped. "What kind of session do you think it will be?" His question referred to the Thirty-ninth Congress, reconvened early in the month.

"Stormy," Wadsworth said. "Issues that go all the way back to Wade-Davis remain unresolved, and the leadership of our party is dedicated to settling them." Wade-Davis, a bill drafted in response to Lincoln's moderate plan for Reconstruction, set much tougher requirements for readmission of the Confederate states. Lincoln had let the bill die with a pocket veto, thereby goading. Congressmen Wade and Davis to restate their case in their so-called Manifesto, a blistering document asserting the right of the Congress to control postwar reunification. The
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Manifesto, published in Greeley's ferociously Republican New York Tribune, marked out the lines of the battle to which Wadsworth referred.

"Stormy,

eh?" Dills mused. "Rather a dramatic word." He was thinking melodramatic.

"But entirely appropriate," the congressman said. "Look at the forces already in motion." He ticked them on his fingers. "In both the House and the Senate we have successfully denied seats to the elected representatives from the traitor states. Compliance by those states with the President's few requirements is not enough reparation for the crime of rebellion. Not nearly enough. Two, we have formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction--"

','The Committee of Fifteen. A direct affront to Mr. Johnson. Really, though, do you construe it entirely as a radical apparatus? Most of the members are moderates or conservatives. Senator Fessenden, the chairman, is far from radical."

"Oh, come, Jasper. With both Thad Stevens and Sam Stout on the committee, do you have any doubt of its direction? To continue--"

he folded another finger down--"Lyman Trumbull is already drafting a Senate bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau. If that doesn't provoke His Accidency, I'm Marse Bob Lee."

"I'll grant you that one," Dills said, nodding. Johnson's opposi 174 ' HEAVEN AND HELL

tion to the Bureau, on grounds that it interfered with the rights of the separate states, was one of the great running fights of his administration.

Dills was reasonably familiar with the Bureau, because of a client, a rich political hack named Stanley Hazard. He was a member of the Pennsylvania family that included George Hazard, the second of Elkanah Bent's declared enemies. Stanley had hired Dills for secret legal work involving ownership of some highly controversial property.

"A friend of mine," Dills continued, "close to the Bureau says they're hearing all sorts of horror stories from the South. Stories of Negroes tricked into signing work contracts that are virtually slave labor agreements."

"Yes, precisely," Wadsworth said. "Mississippi enacted its Black Codes in November. Among other things, they stipulate that a Negro can be arrested, even beaten, if he's accused of vagrancy. Who's to say what that is? Is it occupying the same sidewalk as a white man? Merely passing through a town? It now appears that each of the erring sisters will enact similar codes, to guarantee a docile work force. They're fools down there, Jasper, arrogant fools. Apparently the war taught them
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nothing. Those of us in the Congress must take over their instruction."

"Johnson will continue to resist."

"Of course. And when you speak of him, you raise the great central issue to which all the others are related. Where does political sovereignty rest? Not with the President or his army, in my opinion.

Military conquests made by the United States, whether foreign or domestic, can be policed only by the Congress. I believe that, Thad Stevens believes that, Ben Wade believes that. And we have a three to one majority in Congress to make our view prevail. Over the corpse of Mr. Johnson's political future, if need be," Wadsworth concluded with a smug smile.

"Perhaps your word stormy hardly covers it, then. Should we say cataclysmic?"

Wadsworth shrugged. "Label it however you wish. Andrew Johnson is headed for disaster."

That subject exhausted, Wadsworth remarked that he had just returned from New York, where he'd seen Joe Jefferson starring in his own adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. "Friends saw it in September at the Adelphi in London. They said it was a huge hit, not to be missed. I concur. You must see it, Jasper."

Dills replied that the theater didn't interest him.

"Literature, then? Have you read that amusing story about the California jumping frog? It's being reprinted everywhere. It's by some young sprout of a writer named Clemens."

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Dills said he didn't like fiction. He didn't deem it immoral, as many clerics did; he only thought it inconsequential, unrelated to the real world.

Wadsworth rose and consulted his pocket watch. "My dear Jasper,"

he said wryly, "does anything in the world interest you?"

Seated in the plush chair, his tiny feet inches above the carpet, Dills said, "Power interests me. Who has it? Who is losing it? Who is scheming to regain it?"

"Then you've certainly spent your life in the right town. And you've
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got a damn good show ahead of you. If you're a gambler, bet on my side--to win. Oh, by the way, I saw the announcement on the members'

board. Happy birthday, Jasper."

Wadsworth left, his final words serving as the only celebration for Jasper Dills this year. No matter; Dills was content with his clubs, his whiskey, his stipend from Bent's mother--and his choice seat for the coming struggle.

"Cataclysmic" might not be an exaggeration, he thought. As Wadsworth said, one merely had to consider the forces involved, and the stakes. They were enormous. Nothing less than political control of Southern legislatures and Southern votes, which in turn meant control of Southern land and Southern wealth. In the course of Dills's recent work for Stanley Hazard, his oafish client had shown some figures that vividly illustrated just how rich the pickings were.

His imagination liberated by a second drink, Dills tried to foresee events. Certainly the issue of the Freedmen's Bureau would touch off a new civil war. But the poor clod from Tennessee would be outgeneraled by a Stevens, a Wade, a Stout, a Sumner. Johnson merely wanted to be fair and constitutionally correct; they wanted to turn a minority party into the ruling party, with Negro votes tipping the balance. Johnson fought for principle, as did a few of the radicals. But the radicals as a group fought for a more inspiring cause: their own craving for power.

Suddenly, pleased and smiling, Dills murmured, "A circus. That's a better metaphor than weather, or war." He immediately refined it to a Roman circus. With Mr. Johnson the Christian surrounded by ravening lions.

There was no doubt how the contest would end. But it would certainly be worth watching. He must step up his pardon work, his influence peddling in connection with Army commissions, and even the number of letters perpetuating the fictions about Elkanah Bent. All of it would help him hold onto his box seat for the bloody spectacle soon to be enacted in the Washington arena.

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Congress passed a bill; the President refuses

to approve it, and then by proclamation

puts as much of it in force as he

sees fit. ... A more studied outrage on

the legislative authority of the people

has never been perpetrated. . . . The authority

of Congress is paramount and

must be respected.

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From the Wade-Davis Manifesto

august [864

1

19

i

The voice reached the remote corners of the House floor and every seat in the packed gallery, including Virgilia Hazard's in the front row. It was the morning of January 8, 1866.

Virgilia had listened to the speaker many times. Even so, he still had the power to send a shiver down her spine. Those who heard Representative Sam Stout, Republican of Indiana, for the first time always marveled that such a magnificent voice issued from such an unlikely body. Stout was round-shouldered and pale as a girl kept out of the sun.

His thick brows and wavy, oil-dressed hair looked all the blacker by contrast.

Congressman Stout was Virgilia's lover. For some time he'd kept her in a four-room cottage on Thirteenth Street, up in the Northern Liberties.

He refused to do more than that, refused to be seen in public with her, because he was married to a flat-chested drab named Emily, and because he had enormous ambition. This morning he was on the threshold of a great step upward. His speech was intended to rerriove any doubt about his qualifications.

During the first ten minutes, he had reiterated the familiar Radical positions. The South had in fact seceded, and Lincoln had been wrong to call the act constitutionally impossible. By seceding, the Confederate states had "committed suicide" and so were subject to regulation as

"conquered provinces." Virgilia knew the argument, and the key phrases, by heart.

Knuckles white on the podium, Stout built to his climax. "And so, a philosophic chasm separates this deliberative body from the chief executive. It is a chasm so broad and deep, it cannot, perhaps should not, be bridged. Our opponent's view of the Constitution and the attendant political process epitomizes all that we reject--most especially
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a leniency toward the very people who nearly destroyed this republic."

He expected reaction there, and got it. Below, in special seats on the House floor, several senators led the applause. Among them Virgilia recognized the aristocratic Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, caned by a South Carolina hotspur at his Senate desk before the war; he'd almost died of the injury. So different from Sumner and Thad Stevens in some respects, Sam Stout was like them in one essential way: he believed in the moral Tightness of Negro equality, not merely in the political exploitation of it.