The Clansman
BOOK I
THE ASSASSINATION
CHAPTER IV
A Clash of Giants
ELSIE secured from the Surgeon-General temporary passes for the day, and sent
her friends to the hospital with the promise that she would not leave the White
House until she had secured the pardon.
The President greeted her with unusual warmth. The smile that had only
haunted his sad face during four years of struggle, defeat, and uncertainty had
now burst into joy that made his powerful head radiate light. Victory had lifted
the veil from his soul, and he was girding himself for the task of healing the
Nation’s wounds.
“I’ll have it ready for you in a moment, Miss Elsie,” he said, touching with
his sinewy hand a paper which lay on his desk, bearing on its face the red seal
of the Republic. “I am only waiting to receive the passes.”
“I am very grateful to you, Mr. President,” the girl said feelingly.
“But tell me,” he said, with quaint, fatherly humour, “why you, of all our
girls, the brightest, fiercest little Yankee in town, so take to heart a rebel
boy’s sorrows?”
Elsie blushed, and then looked at him frankly with a saucy smile.
“I am fulfilling the Commandments.”
“Love your enemies?”
“Certainly. How could one help loving the sweet, motherly face you saw
yesterday.”
The President laughed heartily. “I see—of course, of course!”
“The Honourable Austin Stoneman,” suddenly announced a clerk at his
elbow.
Elsie started in surprise and whispered:
“Do not let my father know I am here. I will wait in the next room. You’ll
let nothing delay the pardon, will you, Mr. President?”
Mr. Lincoln warmly pressed her hand as she disappeared through the door
leading into Major Hay’s room, and turned to meet the Great Commoner who hobbled
slowly in, leaning on his crooked cane.
At this moment he was a startling and portentous figure in the drama of the
Nation, the most powerful parliamentary leader in American history, not
excepting Henry Clay.
No stranger ever passed this man without a second look. His clean-shaven
face, the massive chiselled features, his grim eagle look, and cold, colourless
eyes, with the frosts of his native Vermont sparkling in their depths, compelled
attention.
His walk was a painful hobble. He was lame in both feet, and one of them was
deformed. The left leg ended in a mere bunch of flesh, resembling more closely
an elephant’s hoof than the foot of a man.
He was absolutely bald, and wore a heavy brown wig that seemed too small to
reach the edge of his enormous forehead.
He rarely visited the White House. He was the able, bold, unscrupulous leader
of leaders, and men came to see him. He rarely smiled, and when he did it was
the smile of the cynic and misanthrope. His tongue had the lash of a scorpion.
He was a greater terror to the trimmers and time-servers of his own party than
to his political foes. He had hated the President with sullen, consistent, and
unyielding venom from his first nomination at Chicago down to the last rumour of
his new proclamation.
In temperament a fanatic, in impulse a born revolutionist, the word
conservatism was to him as a red rag to a bull. The first clash of arms was
music to his soul. He laughed at the call for 75,000 volunteers, and demanded
the immediate equipment of an army of a million men. He saw it grow to
2,000,000. From the first, his eagle eye had seen the end and all the long,
blood-marked way between. And from the first, he began to plot the most cruel
and awful vengeance in human history.
And now his time had come.
The giant figure in the White House alone had dared to brook his anger and
block the way; for old Stoneman was the Congress of the United States. The
opposition was too weak even for his contempt. Cool, deliberate, and venomous
alike in victory or defeat, the fascination of his positive faith and
revolutionary programme had drawn the rank and file of his party in Congress to
him as charmed satellites.
The President greeted him cordially, and with his habitual deference to age
and physical infirmity hastened to place for him an easy chair near his desk.
He was breathing heavily and evidently labouring under great emotion. He
brought his cane to the floor with violence, placed both hands on its crook,
leaned his massive jaws on his hands for a moment, and then said:
“Mr. President, I have not annoyed you with many requests during the past
four years, nor am I here to-day to ask any favours. I have come to warn you
that, in the course you have mapped out, the executive and legislative branches
have come to the parting of the ways, and that your encroachments on the
functions of Congress will be tolerated, now that the Rebellion is crushed, not
for a single moment!”
Mr. Lincoln listened with dignity, and a ripple of fun played about his eyes
as he looked at his grim visitor. The two men were face to face at last—the two
men above all others who had built and were to build the foundations of the New
Nation—Lincoln’s in love and wisdom to endure forever, the Great Commoner’s in
hate and madness, to bear its harvest of tragedy and death for generations yet
unborn.
“Well, now, Stoneman,” began the good-humoured voice, “that puts me in
mind——”
The old Commoner lifted his hand with a gesture of angry impatience:
“Save your fables for fools. Is it true that you have prepared a proclamation
restoring the conquered province of North Carolina to its place as a State in
the Union with no provision for negro suffrage or the exile and disfranchisement
of its rebels?”
The President rose and walked back and forth with his hands folded behind him
before answering.
“I have. The Constitution grants to the National Government no power to
regulate suffrage, and makes no provision for the control of ‘conquered
provinces.’”
“Constitution!” thundered Stoneman. “I have a hundred constitutions in the
pigeonholes of my desk!”
“I have sworn to support but one.”
“A worn-out rag——”
“Rag or silk, I’ve sworn to execute it, and I’ll do it, so help me God!” said
the quiet voice.
“You’ve been doing it for the past four years, haven’t you!” sneered the
Commoner. “What right had you under the Constitution to declare war against a
‘sovereign’ State? To invade one for coercion? To blockade a port? To declare
slaves free? To suspend the writ of habeas corpus? To create the State of
West Virginia by the consent of two states, one of which was dead, and the other
one of which lived in Ohio? By what authority have you appointed military
governors in the ‘sovereign’ States of Virginia, Tennessee, and Louisiana? Why
trim the hedge and lie about it? We, too, are revolutionists, and you are our
executive. The Constitution sustained and protected slavery. It was ‘a
league with death and a covenant with hell,’ and our flag ‘a polluted rag!’”
“In the stress of war,” said the President, with a far-away look, “it was
necessary that I do things as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to save
the Union which I have no right to do now that the Union is saved and its
Constitution preserved. My first duty is to re-establish the Constitution as our
supreme law over every inch of our soil.”
“The Constitution be d——d!” hissed the old man. “It was the creation, both in
letter and spirit, of the slaveholders of the South.”
“Then the world is their debtor, and their work is a monument of imperishable
glory to them and to their children. I have sworn to preserve it!”
“We have outgrown the swaddling clothes of a babe. We will make new
constitutions!”
“‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’” softly spoke the tall,
self-contained man.
For the first time the old leader winced. He had long ago exhausted the
vocabulary of contempt on the President, his character, ability, and policy. He
felt as a shock the first impression of supreme authority with which he spoke.
The man he had despised had grown into the great constructive statesman who
would dispute with him every inch of ground in the attainment of his sinister
life purpose.
His hatred grew more intense as he realized the prestige and power with which
he was clothed by his mighty office.
With an effort he restrained his anger, and assumed an argumentative
tone.
“Can’t you see that your so-called States are now but conquered provinces?
That North Carolina and other waste territories of the United States are unfit
to associate with civilized communities?”
“We fought no war of conquest,” quietly urged the President, “but one of
self-preservation as an indissoluble Union. No State ever got out of it, by the
grace of God and the power of our arms. Now that we have won, and established
for all time its unity, shall we stultify ourselves by declaring we were wrong?
These States must be immediately restored to their rights, or we shall betray
the blood we have shed. There are no ‘conquered provinces’ for us to spoil. A
nation cannot make conquest of its own territory.”
“But we are acting outside the Constitution,” interrupted Stoneman.
“Congress has no existence outside the Constitution,” was the quick
answer.
The old Commoner scowled, and his beetling brows hid for a moment his eyes.
His keen intellect was catching its first glimpse of the intellectual grandeur
of the man with whom he was grappling. The facility with which he could see all
sides of a question, and the vivid imagination which lit his mental processes,
were a revelation. We always underestimate the men we despise.
“Why not out with it?” cried Stoneman, suddenly changing his tack. “You are
determined to oppose negro suffrage?”
“I have suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana to consider the policy of
admitting the more intelligent and those who served in the war. It is only a
suggestion. The State alone has the power to confer the ballot.”
“But the truth is this little ‘suggestion’ of yours is only a bone thrown to
radical dogs to satisfy our howlings for the moment! In your soul of souls you
don’t believe in the equality of man if the man under comparison be a
negro?”
“I believe that there is a physical difference between the white and black
races which will forever forbid their living together on terms of political and
social equality. If such be attempted, one must go to the wall.”
“Very well, pin the Southern white man to the wall. Our party and the Nation
will then be safe.”
“That is to say, destroy African slavery and establish white slavery under
negro masters! That would be progress with a vengeance.”
A grim smile twitched the old man’s lips as he said:
“Yes, your prim conservative snobs and male waiting-maids in Congress went
into hysterics when I armed the negroes. Yet the heavens have not fallen.”
“True. Yet no more insane blunder could now be made than any further attempt
to use these negro troops. There can be no such thing as restoring this Union to
its basis of fraternal peace with armed negroes, wearing the uniform of this
Nation, tramping over the South, and rousing the basest passions of the freedmen
and their former masters. General Butler, their old commander, is now making
plans for their removal, at my request. He expects to dig the Panama Canal with
these black troops.”
“Fine scheme that—on a par with your messages to Congress asking for the
colonization of the whole negro race!”
“It will come to that ultimately,” said the President firmly. “The
negro has cost us $5,000,000,000, the desolation of ten great States, and rivers
of blood. We can well afford a few million dollars more to effect a permanent
settlement of the issue. This is the only policy on which Seward and I have
differed——”
“Then Seward was not an utterly hopeless fool. I’m glad to hear something to
his credit,” growled the old Commoner.
“I have urged the colonization of the negroes, and I shall continue until it
is accomplished. My emancipation proclamation was linked with this plan.
Thousands of them have lived in the North for a hundred years, yet not one is
the pastor of a white church, a judge, a governor, a mayor, or a college
president. There is no room for two distinct races of white men in America, much
less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. We can have no inferior
servile class, peon or peasant. We must assimilate or expel. The American is a
citizen king or nothing. I can conceive of no greater calamity than the
assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal. A
mulatto citizenship would be too dear a price to pay even for emancipation.”
“Words have no power to express my loathing for such twaddle!” cried
Stoneman, snapping his great jaws together and pursing his lips with
contempt.
“If the negro were not here would we allow him to land?” the President went
on, as if talking to himself. “The duty to exclude carries the right to expel.
Within twenty years we can peacefully colonize the negro in the tropics, and
give him our language, literature, religion, and system of government under conditions
in which he can rise to the full measure of manhood. This he can never do here.
It was the fear of the black tragedy behind emancipation that led the South into
the insanity of secession. We can never attain the ideal Union our fathers
dreamed, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation
is neither possible nor desirable. The Nation cannot now exist half white and
half black, any more than it could exist half slave and half free.”
“Yet ‘God hath made of one blood all races,’” quoted the cynic with a
sneer.
“Yes—but finish the sentence—‘and fixed the bounds of their habitation.’ God
never meant that the negro should leave his habitat or the white man invade his
home. Our violation of this law is written in two centuries of shame and blood.
And the tragedy will not be closed until the black man is restored to his
home.”
“I marvel that the minions of slavery elected Jeff Davis their chief with so
much better material at hand!”
“His election was a tragic and superfluous blunder. I am the President of the
United States, North and South,” was the firm reply.
“Particularly the South!” hissed Stoneman. “During all this hideous war they
have been your pets—these rebel savages who have been murdering our sons. You
have been the ever-ready champion of traitors. And you now dare to bend this
high office to their defence——”
“My God, Stoneman, are you a man or a savage!” cried the President. “Is not
the North equally responsible for slavery? Has not the South lost all? Have not the
Southern people paid the full penalty of all the crimes of war? Are our skirts
free? Was Sherman’s march a picnic? This war has been a giant conflict of
principles to decide whether we are a bundle of petty sovereignties held by a
rope of sand or a mighty nation of freemen. But for the loyalty of four border
Southern States—but for Farragut and Thomas and their two hundred thousand
heroic Southern brethren who fought for the Union against their own flesh and
blood, we should have lost. You cannot indict a people——”
“I do indict them!” muttered the old man.
“Surely,” went on the even, throbbing voice, “surely, the vastness of this
war, its titanic battles, its heroism, its sublime earnestness, should sink into
oblivion all low schemes of vengeance! Before the sheer grandeur of its history
our children will walk with silent lips and uncovered heads.”
“And forget the prison pen at Andersonville!”
“Yes. We refused, as a policy of war, to exchange those prisoners, blockaded
their ports, made medicine contraband, and brought the Southern Army itself to
starvation. The prison records, when made at last for history, will show as many
deaths on our side as on theirs.”
“The murderer on the gallows always wins more sympathy than his forgotten
victim,” interrupted the cynic.
“The sin of vengeance is an easy one under the subtle plea of justice,” said
the sorrowful voice. “Have we not had enough bloodshed? Is not God’s vengeance
enough? When Sherman’s army swept to the sea, before him lay the Garden of
Eden, behind him stretched a desert! A hundred years cannot give back to the
wasted South her wealth, or two hundred years restore to her the lost seed
treasures of her young manhood——”
“The imbecility of a policy of mercy in this crisis can only mean the reign
of treason and violence,” persisted the old man, ignoring the President’s
words.
“I leave my policy before the judgment bar of time, content with its verdict.
In my place, radicalism would have driven the border States into the
Confederacy, every Southern man back to his kinsmen, and divided the North
itself into civil conflict. I have sought to guide and control public opinion
into the ways on which depended our life. This rational flexibility of policy
you and your fellow radicals have been pleased to call my vacillating
imbecility.”
“And what is your message for the South?”
“Simply this: ‘Abolish slavery, come back home, and behave yourself.’ Lee
surrendered to our offers of peace and amnesty. In my last message to Congress I
told the Southern people they could have peace at any moment by simply laying
down their arms and submitting to National authority. Now that they have taken
me at my word, shall I betray them by an ignoble revenge? Vengeance cannot heal
and purify: it can only brutalize and destroy.”
Stoneman shuffled to his feet with impatience.
“I see it is useless to argue with you. I’ll not waste my breath. I give you
an ultimatum. The South is conquered soil. I mean to blot it from the map.
Rather
than admit one traitor to the halls of Congress from these so-called States I
will shatter the Union itself into ten thousand fragments! I will not sit beside
men whose clothes smell of the blood of my kindred. At least dry them before
they come in. Four years ago, with yells and curses, these traitors left the
halls of Congress to join the armies of Catiline. Shall they return to
rule?”
“I repeat,” said the President, “you cannot indict a people. Treason is an
easy word to speak. A traitor is one who fights and loses. Washington was a
traitor to George III. Treason won, and Washington is immortal. Treason is a
word that victors hurl at those who fail.”
“Listen to me,” Stoneman interrupted with vehemence. “The life of our party
demands that the negro be given the ballot and made the ruler of the South. This
can be done only by the extermination of its landed aristocracy, that their
mothers shall not breed another race of traitors. This is not vengeance. It is
justice, it is patriotism, it is the highest wisdom and humanity. Nature, at
times, blots out whole communities and races that obstruct progress. Such is the
political genius of these people that, unless you make the negro the ruler, the
South will yet reconquer the North and undo the work of this war.”
“If the South in poverty and ruin can do this, we deserve to be ruled! The
North is rich and powerful—the South a land of wreck and tomb. I greet with
wonder, shame, and scorn such ignoble fear! The Nation cannot be healed until
the South is healed. Let the gulf be closed in which we bury slavery, sectional
animosity, and all strifes and hatreds. The good sense of our people
will never consent to your scheme of insane vengeance.”
“The people have no sense. A new fool is born every second. They are ruled by
impulse and passion.”
“I have trusted them before, and they have not failed me. The day I left for
Gettysburg to dedicate the battlefield, you were so sure of my defeat in the
approaching convention that you shouted across the street to a friend as I
passed: ‘Let the dead bury the dead!’ It was a brilliant sally of wit. I laughed
at it myself. And yet the people unanimously called me again to lead them to
victory.”
“Yes, in the past,” said Stoneman bitterly, “you have triumphed, but mark my
word: from this hour your star grows dim. The slumbering fires of passion will
be kindled. In the fight we join to-day I’ll break your back and wring the neck
of every dastard and time-server who fawns at your feet.”
The President broke into a laugh that only increased the old man’s wrath.
“I protest against the insult of your buffoonery!”
“Excuse me, Stoneman; I have to laugh or die beneath the burdens I bear,
surrounded by such supporters!”
“Mark my word,” growled the old leader, “from the moment you publish that
North Carolina proclamation, your name will be a by-word in Congress.”
“There are higher powers.”
“You will need them.”
“I’ll have help,” was the calm reply, as the dreaminess of the poet and
mystic stole over the rugged face. “I would be a presumptuous fool, indeed, if I
thought that for a day I could discharge the duties of this great office without
the aid of One who is wiser and stronger than all others.”
“You’ll need the help of Almighty God in the course you’ve mapped out!”
“Some ships come into port that are not steered,” went on the dreamy voice.
“Suppose Pickett had charged one hour earlier at Gettysburg? Suppose the
Monitor had arrived one hour later at Hampton Roads? I had a dream last
night that always presages great events. I saw a white ship passing swiftly
under full sail. I have often seen her before. I have never known her port of
entry, or her destination, but I have always known her Pilot!”
The cynic’s lips curled with scorn. He leaned heavily on his cane, and took a
shambling step toward the door.
“You refuse to heed the wishes of Congress?”
“If your words voice them, yes. Force your scheme of revenge on the South,
and you sow the wind to reap the whirlwind.”
“Indeed! and from what secret cave will this whirlwind come?”
“The despair of a mighty race of world-conquering men, even in defeat, is
still a force that statesmen reckon with.”
“I defy them,” growled the old Commoner.
Again the dreamy look returned to Lincoln’s face, and he spoke as if
repeating a message of the soul caught in the clouds in an hour of
transfiguration:
“And I’ll trust the honour of Lee and his people. The mystic chords of
memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living
heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the
Union, when touched again, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our
nature.”
“You’ll be lucky to live to hear that chorus.”
“To dream it is enough. If I fall by the hand of an assassin now, he will not
come from the South. I was safer in Richmond, this week, than I am in
Washington, to-day.”
The cynic grunted and shuffled another step toward the door.
The President came closer.
“Look here, Stoneman; have you some deep personal motive in this vengeance on
the South? Come, now, I’ve never in my life known you to tell a lie.”
The answer was silence and a scowl.
“Am I right?”
“Yes and no. I hate the South because I hate the Satanic Institution of
Slavery with consuming fury. It has long ago rotted the heart out of the
Southern people. Humanity cannot live in its tainted air, and its children are
doomed. If my personal wrongs have ordained me for a mighty task, no matter; I
am simply the chosen instrument of Justice!”
Again the mystic light clothed the rugged face, calm and patient as Destiny,
as the President slowly repeated:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right,
as God gives me to see the right, I shall strive to finish the work we are in, and bind
up the Nation’s wounds.”
“I’ve given you fair warning,” cried the old Commoner, trembling with rage,
as he hobbled nearer the door. “From this hour your administration is
doomed.”
“Stoneman,” said the kindly voice, “I can’t tell you how your venomous
philanthropy sickens me. You have misunderstood and abused me at every step
during the past four years. I bear you no ill will. If I have said anything
to-day to hurt your feelings, forgive me. The earnestness with which you pressed
the war was an invaluable service to me and to the Nation. I’d rather work with
you than fight you. But now that we have to fight, I’d as well tell you I’m not
afraid of you. I’ll suffer my right arm to be severed from my body before I’ll
sign one measure of ignoble revenge on a brave, fallen foe, and I’ll keep up
this fight until I win, die, or my country forsakes me.”
“I have always known you had a sneaking admiration for the South,” came the
sullen sneer.
“I love the South! It is a part of this Union. I love every foot of its soil,
every hill and valley, mountain, lake, and sea, and every man, woman, and child
that breathes beneath its skies. I am an American.”
As the burning words leaped from the heart of the President the broad
shoulders of his tall form lifted, and his massive head rose in unconscious
heroic pose.
“I marvel that you ever made war upon your loved ones!” cried the cynic.
“We fought the South because we loved her and would not let her go.
Now that she is crushed and lies bleeding at our feet—you shall not make war on
the wounded, dying, and the dead!”
Again the lion gleamed in the calm gray eyes.