The Clansman
BOOK II
THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
The First Lady of the Land
THE little house on the Capitol hill now became the centre of fevered
activity. This house, selected by its grim master to become the executive
mansion of the Nation, was perhaps the most modest structure ever chosen for
such high uses.
It stood, a small, two-story brick building, in an unpretentious street.
Seven windows opened on the front with black solid-panelled shutters. The front
parlour was scantily furnished. A huge mirror covered one wall, and on the other
hung a life-size oil portrait of Stoneman, and between the windows were a
portrait of Washington Irving and a picture of a nun. Among his many charities
he had always given liberally to an orphanage conducted by a Roman Catholic
sisterhood.
The back parlour, whose single window looked out on a small garden, he had
fitted up as a library, with leather-upholstered furniture, a large desk and
table, and scattered on the mantel and about its walls were the photographs of
his personal friends and a few costly prints. This room he used as his executive
office, and no person was allowed to enter it without first stating his business
or
presenting a petition to the tawny brown woman with restless eyes who sat in
state in the front parlour and received his visitors. The books in their cases
gave evidence of little use for many years, although their character indicated
the tastes of a man of culture. His Pliny, Cæsar, Cicero, Tacitus, Sophocles,
and Homer had evidently been read by a man who knew their beauties and loved
them for their own sake.
This house was now the Mecca of the party in power and the storm-centre of
the forces destined to shape the Nation’s life. Senators, representatives,
politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign ministers,
and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to the uncrowned king,
and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his house as the first
lady of the land.
When Charles Sumner called, a curious thing happened. By a code agreed on
between them, Lydia Brown touched an electric signal which informed the old
Commoner of his appearance. Stoneman hobbled to the folding-doors and watched
through the slight opening the manner in which the icy senator greeted the
negress whom he was compelled to meet thus as his social equal, though she was
always particular to pose as the superior of all who bowed the knee to the old
man whose house she kept.
Sumner at this time was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress. It
was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at which Stoneman loved to
laugh.
The senator from Massachusetts had just made a speech in Boston expounding
the “Equality of Man,” yet he could not endure personal contact with a negro. He
would go secretly miles out of the way to avoid it.
Stoneman watched him slowly and daintily approach this negress and touch her
jewelled hand gingerly with the tips of his classic fingers as if she were a
toad. Convulsed, he scrambled back to his desk and hugged himself while he
listened to the flow of Lydia’s condescending patronage in the next room.
“This world’s too good a thing to lose!” he chuckled. “I think I’ll live
always.”
When Sumner left, the hour for dinner had arrived, and by special invitation
two men dined with him.
On his right sat an army officer who had been dismissed from the service, a
victim of the mania for gambling. His ruddy face, iron-gray hair, and jovial
mien indicated that he enjoyed life in spite of troubles.
There were no clubs in Washington at this time except the regular
gambling-houses, of which there were more than one hundred in full blast.
Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at
Hall & Pemberton’s Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for its
famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned to like
him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of such singular
fluency that he quite captivated the old Commoner’s imagination.
“Upon my soul, Howle,” he declared soon after they met, “you made the mistake
of your life going into the army. You’re a born politician. You’re what I call a
natural liar, just as a horse is a pacer, a dog a setter. You lie without
effort, with an ease and grace that excels all art. Had you gone into politics,
you could easily have been Secretary of State, to say nothing of the
vice-presidency. I would say President but for the fact that men of the highest
genius never attain it.”
From that moment Colonel Howle had become his charmed henchman. Stoneman
owned this man body and soul, not merely because he had befriended him when he
was in trouble and friendless, but because the colonel recognized the power of
the leader’s daring spirit and revolutionary genius.
On his left sat a negro of perhaps forty years, a man of charming features
for a mulatto, who had evidently inherited the full physical characteristics of
the Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed
with the brightness of the African jungle. It was impossible to look at his
superb face, with its large, finely chiselled lips and massive nose, his big
neck and broad shoulders, and watch his eyes gleam beneath the projecting
forehead, without seeing pictures of the primeval forest. “The head of a Cæsar
and the eyes of the jungle” was the phrase coined by an artist who painted his
portrait.
His hair was black and glossy and stood in dishevelled profusion on his head
between a kink and a curl. He was an orator of great power, and stirred a negro
audience as by magic.
Lydia Brown had called Stoneman’s attention to this man, Silas Lynch, and
induced the statesman to send him to college. He had graduated with credit and
had entered the Methodist ministry. In his preaching to the
freedmen he had already become a marked man. No house could hold his
audiences.
As he stepped briskly into the dining-room and passed the brown woman, a
close observer might have seen him suddenly press her hand and caught her sly
answering smile, but the old man waiting at the head of the table saw
nothing.
The woman took her seat opposite Stoneman and presided over this curious
group with the easy assurance of conscious power. Whatever her real position,
she knew how to play the role she had chosen to assume.
No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history of a
great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of American
life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and followed her
catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat. Did he aim to make
this woman the arbiter of its social life, and her ethics the limit of its moral
laws?
Even the white satellite who sat opposite Lynch flushed for a moment as the
thought flashed through his brain.
The old cynic, who alone knew his real purpose, was in his most genial mood
to-night, and the grim lines of his powerful face relaxed into something like a
smile as they ate and chatted and told good stories.
Lynch watched him with keen interest. He knew his history and character, and
had built on his genius a brilliant scheme of life.
This man who meant to become the dictator of the Republic had
come from the humblest early conditions. His father was a worthless character,
from whom he had learned the trade of a shoemaker, but his mother, a woman of
vigorous intellect and indomitable will, had succeeded in giving her lame boy a
college education. He had early sworn to be a man of wealth, and to this purpose
he had throttled the dreams and ideals of a wayward imagination.
His hope of great wealth had not been realized. His iron mills in
Pennsylvania had been destroyed by Lee’s army. He had developed the habit of
gambling, which brought its train of extravagant habits, tastes, and inevitable
debts. In his vigorous manhood, in spite of his lameness, he had kept a pack of
hounds and a stable of fine horses. He had used his skill in shoemaking to
construct a set of stirrups to fit his lame feet, and had become an expert
hunter to hounds.
One thing he never neglected—to be in his seat in the House of
Representatives and wear its royal crown of leadership, sick or well, day or
night. The love of power was the breath of his nostrils, and his ambitions had
at one time been boundless. His enormous power to-day was due to the fact that
he had given up all hope of office beyond the robes of the king of his party. He
had been offered a cabinet position by the elder Harrison and for some reason it
had been withdrawn. He had been promised a place in Lincoln’s cabinet, but some
mysterious power had snatched it away. He was the one great man who had now no
ambition for which to trim and fawn and lie, and for the very reason that he had
abolished
himself he was the most powerful leader who ever walked the halls of
Congress.
His contempt for public opinion was boundless. Bold, original, scornful of
advice, of all the men who ever lived in our history he was the one man born to
rule in the chaos which followed the assassination of the chief magistrate.
Audacity was stamped in every line of his magnificent head. His choicest
curses were for the cowards of his own party before whose blanched faces he
shouted out the hidden things until they sank back in helpless silence and
dismay. His speech was curt, his humour sardonic, his wit biting, cruel, and
coarse.
The incarnate soul of revolution, he despised convention and ridiculed
respectability.
There was but one weak spot in his armour—and the world never suspected it:
the consuming passion with which he loved his two children. This was the side of
his nature he had hidden from the eyes of man. A refined egotism, this passion,
perhaps—for he meant to live his own life over in them—yet it was the one
utterly human and lovable thing about him. And if his public policy was one of
stupendous avarice, this dream of millions of confiscated wealth he meant to
seize, it was not for himself but for his children.
As he looked at Howle and Lynch seated in his library after dinner, with his
great plans seething in his brain, his eyes were flashing, intense, and fiery,
yet without colour—simply two centres of cold light.
“Gentlemen,” he said at length. “I am going to ask you to
undertake for the Government, the Nation, and yourselves a dangerous and
important mission. I say yourselves, because, in spite of all our beautiful
lies, self is the centre of all human action. Mr. Lincoln has fortunately gone
to his reward—fortunately for him and for his country. His death was necessary
to save his life. He was a useful man living, more useful dead. Our party has
lost its first President, but gained a god—why mourn?”
“We will recover from our grief,” said Howle.
The old man went on, ignoring the interruption:
“Things have somehow come my way. I am almost persuaded late in life that the
gods love me. The insane fury of the North against the South for a crime which
they were the last people on earth to dream of committing is, of course, a power
to be used—but with caution. The first execution of a Southern leader on such an
idiotic charge would produce a revolution of sentiment. The people are an
aggregation of hysterical fools.”
“I thought you favoured the execution of the leaders of the rebellion?” said
Lynch with surprise.
“I did, but it is too late. Had they been tried by drum-head court-martial
and shot dead red-handed as they stood on the field in their uniforms, all would
have been well. Now sentiment is too strong. Grant showed his teeth to Stanton
and he backed down from Lee’s arrest. Sherman refused to shake hands with
Stanton on the grandstand the day his army passed in review, and it’s a wonder
he didn’t knock him down. Sherman was denounced as a renegade and traitor for
giving Joseph E. Johnston the terms Lincoln ordered him to give.
Lincoln dead, his terms are treason! Yet had he lived, we should have been
called upon to applaud his mercy and patriotism. How can a man live in this
world and keep his face straight?”
“I believe God permitted Mr. Lincoln’s death to give the great Commoner, the
Leader of Leaders, the right of way,” cried Lynch with enthusiasm.
The old man smiled. With all his fierce spirit he was as susceptible to
flattery as a woman—far more so than the sleek brown woman who carried the keys
of his house.
“The man at the other end of the avenue, who pretends to be President, in
reality an alien of the conquered province of Tennessee, is pressing Lincoln’s
plan of ‘restoring’ the Union. He has organized State governments in the South,
and their senators and representatives will appear at the Capitol in December
for admission to Congress. He thinks they will enter——”
The old man broke into a low laugh and rubbed his hands.
“My full plans are not for discussion at this juncture. Suffice it to say, I
mean to secure the future of our party and the safety of this nation. The one
thing on which the success of my plan absolutely depends is the confiscation of
the millions of acres of land owned by the white people of the South and its
division among the negroes and those who fought and suffered in this war——”
The old Commoner paused, pursed his lips, and fumbled his hands a moment, the
nostrils of his eagle-beaked nose breathing rapacity, sensuality throbbing in his
massive jaws, and despotism frowning from his heavy brows.
“Stanton will probably add to the hilarity of nations, and amuse himself by
hanging a few rebels,” he went on, “but we will address ourselves to serious
work. All men have their price, including the present company, with due
apologies to the speaker——”
Howle’s eyes danced, and he licked his lips.
“If I haven’t suffered in this war, who has?”
“Your reward will not be in accordance with your sufferings. It will be based
on the efficiency with which you obey my orders. Read that——”
He handed to him a piece of paper on which he had scrawled his secret
instructions.
Another he gave to Lynch.
“Hand them back to me when you read them, and I will burn them. These
instructions are not to pass the lips of any man until the time is ripe—four
bare walls are not to hear them whispered.”
Both men handed to the leader the slips of paper simultaneously.
“Are we agreed, gentlemen?”
“Perfectly,” answered Howle.
“Your word is law to me, sir,” said Lynch.
“Then you will draw on me personally for your expenses, and leave for the
South within forty-eight hours. I wish your reports delivered to me two weeks
before the meeting of Congress.”
As Lynch passed through the hall on his way to the door, the
brown woman bade him good-night and pressed into his hand a letter.
As his yellow fingers closed on the missive, his eyes flashed for a moment
with catlike humour.
The woman’s face wore the mask of a sphinx.