Chapter 9: The Thunderbolt
19 min read
Scene I
The memorandum had reached its third page, and Pickering judged it sound.
He read the final paragraph back to himself without moving his lips, a habit formed across twenty years in rooms where walls were thin and secretaries ambitious. The provisioning figures for the provisional army's Atlantic depots were exact. McHenry had supplied the estimates; Pickering had corrected them. What reached Hamilton's table would be correct, which was the only standard he recognised as binding. He dipped the quill and began the concluding sentence—a period construction that would enumerate the three remaining obstacles to full naval operational readiness by the first of March, the first being—
'Mr. Secretary.'
The pen did not stop. 'Not now, Benton.'
'Sir, I must—'
'The morning post is sorted. Whatever it contains will keep.'
A pause of the kind he had learned to distinguish: not the pause of a man deciding whether to retreat, but the pause of one who has already decided to advance and is merely choosing the precise step. He finished the sentence and looked up.
The clerk stood in the doorway with his hat still in his hand, which meant he had come directly from outside, which meant he had not been at his desk, which meant something had drawn him away at a pace that had not permitted him to set the hat down. Benton was a careful young man. He did not run.
'Speak.'
'There is a message, sir. A presidential message. It is being read in the Senate chamber at this—at this present moment, and the members are—' The hat turned twice in Benton's hands. 'I was told the Secretary of State had not been—that is, I understood the message had not passed through the department in the ordinary—'
'What is the subject of the message?'
The hat stopped turning. 'An envoy, sir. To France.'
The pen was still in his hand. He set it down with care, aligning it in the stand, the nib seated, the barrel straight. The ink from the arrested stroke had bled a dark pool across the memorandum's final paragraph—three pages of argument for expanded naval operations, the figures exact, the conclusions irrefutable, and now the central argument dissolving into black at the edges of the stain. If the session had already begun, if Murray's name was already in the Senate's record, then every calculation in those three pages had ceased to be policy and become archaeology before the ink had dried. If the Senate confirmed the nomination before he could reach the chamber—before he could speak to a single senator—the Federalist position on France would collapse without a member of the cabinet having been consulted in its demolition.
'Repeat what you were told. Exactly.'
'Only that the President has sent a message nominating a minister plenipotentiary to France. The clerk of the Senate—Harrington—he came out to the corridor and told the men waiting there, and one of them sent a boy here, and I—' Benton stopped. The hat turned once more. 'The name given was Murray, sir. Mr. William Vans Murray, at The Hague.'
Pickering stood.
'The message—did Harrington give any indication of the language used? The President's stated grounds?'
'Only that assurances had been received, sir. From Talleyrand. That a minister would be received—' Benton faltered under what Pickering's expression was doing, though Pickering had not raised his voice. 'With the respect due a free and independent nation. Those were the words, I believe.'
'Talleyrand's assurances.' He crossed to the coat-peg beside the door without calling for his secretary. The coat was there; he took it. The wool was cold from hanging against the outer wall all morning, and he felt the chill of it through his waistcoat—bracing, almost useful. 'Talleyrand, who six months ago demanded a douceur of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars before he would consent to receive our ministers in a room with chairs. That Talleyrand.'
Benton said nothing.
'Is the session still in progress?'
'I believe so, sir. It had only just—yes, sir, I believe it continues.'
He moved past Benton into the corridor without further instruction. His footsteps on the stone floor were sharp and even, carrying ahead of him toward the Senate wing. If the session was still in progress, there was yet time—not to prevent the reading, that was done, but to be present for it, to be seen present for it, to read the chamber's face before anyone had composed their expressions for public consumption.
He was halfway down the corridor when the door at the far end opened and Harrington himself emerged—the Senate's own clerk, a grey and careful functionary who had served four administrations and knew better than to walk quickly. He was walking quickly now. He stopped when he saw Pickering, and his expression did the thing that expressions do when a man has been carrying news he hoped to deliver to someone else first.
'Mr. Secretary.' Harrington's hands found each other at his waist, a small, involuntary composure. 'I had intended to send word to your office.'
'You have sent it.' Pickering kept moving. 'The session—is the message read in full?'
Harrington fell into step beside him, which was not what Pickering wanted, but the man's next words stopped him cold.
'Read in full, sir, and the Vice President has already called for the question. He moved with—considerable expedition. Senator Tracy has asked for a delay of one day to permit deliberation, but Senator Langdon has seconded the call for immediate consideration.' Harrington's voice was professionally neutral, which was its own form of information. 'If the Republicans hold together and carry two or three men from your side, the nomination could be confirmed before the chamber rises today.'
Not days. Hours.
Pickering turned and walked faster.
Scene II
He arrived at the Senate chamber's threshold to find it in full session, and so he did not enter. He stationed himself at the doorframe instead, coat still buttoned from the cold corridor, and assessed the room.
Twenty-three senators. The gallery nearly empty—a Tuesday morning in February, and whoever had kept this from the press had done so with unusual efficiency. Jefferson in the chair, which was the first thing Pickering marked and the thing he most resented marking. Jefferson sat with both hands folded on the desk before him, his expression one of such composed attention that it wanted only a slight alteration at the corners of the mouth to become something else entirely.
The secretary was reading.
Pickering could not yet hear the words—a senator nearest the door was seized by a coughing fit, and the man gripped the edge of his desk while the spasm ran its course, and Pickering had to step aside to let him breathe, and in the shuffling of those four seconds he caught only fragments: —duly satisfied that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic has given assurances— and then the name, half-swallowed by a final paroxysm: Murray—William Vans Murray— and then the coughing subsided and the room came clear.
—as Minister Plenipotentiary to the French Republic, it being the considered judgment of the Executive that the honour and interest of the United States are best served by the resumption of direct communication—
Pickering stood absolutely still against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest, jaw set so tightly that a vein beat visibly at his temple.
The secretary's voice moved on with the indifferent competence of a man who reads proclamations for his living. Talleyrand had provided assurances, the message said. The assurances were of a character sufficient to satisfy the Executive that a new envoy would be received with the respect due an independent nation. The Executive had further determined that the national interest required an immediate response, and that delay would constitute a failure of the republic's diplomatic obligations under the established law of nations.
The established law of nations.
His own formulation, turned against him like a captured pistol.
He moved his eyes across the chamber. Harper: jaw forward, face red, manifestly unprepared. Goodhue: still, cautious, not yet committed in either direction. Tracy: staring at the desk's surface as though hoping to locate his opinion there. And Sedgwick—
Sedgwick had turned in his seat.
Three rows from the back, his head come round at a precise angle, not looking at Pickering directly but adjacent to him, the way a man looks at a thing he does not wish to be observed looking at. His right hand rested on the desk's edge and his knuckles had gone white. A single brief shake of the head.
Pickering held his gaze for two full seconds. Then he shifted—unhurried—to Tracy, who had looked up from the desk and whose eyes met his across the chamber's width. A glance only. A fraction of a second. Enough. Then to Goodhue, who had not turned but whose shoulders had risen slightly, the posture of a man bracing against a cold wind.
Three men. The nucleus.
And perhaps two hours before Jefferson called the question.
Pickering did not wait for the reading to conclude. He stepped back from the doorframe and turned toward the north corridor. The anteroom off that passage—the one with the cold fireplace, the one the Senate's staff used for storage in winter—would serve. He needed these three men inside it before they spoke to anyone else: before the Republicans found them in the corridor, before Harper's indignation curdled into something public and irretrievable, before the morning's catastrophe had time to harden into the shape of a fait accompli.
The secretary's voice continued its remorseless progress. The assurances had been communicated through the American minister at The Hague, the message said. The Executive had received them through channels whose reliability he had no cause to question, and had acted with the dispatch that the public interest required.
Channels whose reliability he had no cause to question.
That sentence was not addressed to the Senate. It was addressed to him. The most precise rebuke available to a president operating through the formal language of executive communication—and Adams had deployed it with the patience of a man who had been planning the deployment for some time, who had waited for the moment of maximum exposure, who had chosen a Tuesday morning in February when the gallery was empty and Pickering was at his desk writing memoranda that were already obsolete.
At the front of the chamber, Jefferson's hands remained folded. He had not moved. But something in the set of his shoulders had altered by a degree that Pickering, watching, could not precisely name and could not stop watching. Jefferson would call the question the moment the reading finished. He would do it before Harper's indignation could find its voice, before Tracy could draft an amendment, before Pickering could reach a single senator in the corridor. The man had been waiting for this morning for two years, and he was not going to permit it to become an afternoon.
Pickering stepped back from the doorframe and turned toward the north corridor.
He had perhaps twenty minutes.
The anteroom smelled of old smoke and something sourer beneath it—men's wool and the damp plaster of a wall that had not dried properly since the last autumn rains. Someone had attempted a fire in the grate; the coals had caught and then subsided, and what remained gave off more smell than heat. The cold had settled into the room's corners and the backs of the chairs, the particular cold of a space that is used but not inhabited.
Pickering took the chair nearest the dead hearth. He did not wait for the others to arrange themselves. He spoke before Sedgwick had fully closed the door.
'Jefferson will call the question within the hour. If he carries Goodhue or Tracy before we have an amendment drafted, Murray sails alone and we have forfeited every restraint we possess. So.' He looked at Sedgwick. 'Sit down.'
Sedgwick sat. Tracy took the chair opposite. Goodhue had not yet chosen a position, which Pickering noted as the first signal of the morning.
'Close the door.'
Tracy did it. The latch caught with a sound like a pistol's cock.
The room was perhaps eight feet across. When Goodhue finally sat, his knee was near enough to Pickering's that the proximity was itself a kind of pressure.
Sedgwick's voice came low and very even. 'The General will not take this quietly.'
'No.' His eyes held Sedgwick's a moment, flat and certain. 'Which is why we must act before the General's opinion can reach Philadelphia—because if we wait for instruction from New York, the vote will have passed and the nomination will stand and there will be nothing for the General's opinion to act upon.' Pickering leaned forward. 'We have this room. We have now. That is the whole of our resources.'
A coal shifted in the grate. The smell thickened.
Goodhue cleared his throat. He was a round man, with the complexion of someone who had spent too many Massachusetts winters indoors, and he carried his caution like a second coat. 'I am not certain there is anything to be done,' he said, 'beyond confirm the nomination and conduct ourselves as men who support their President.'
The word confirm fell into the room like a stone in still water.
'Mr. Goodhue.' Pickering kept his voice entirely level. 'The President has nominated a single envoy, without consultation of his cabinet, without notification through the proper channels of this department. He has done so in a form that permits no collegial check upon that envoy's judgment in Paris—no commission, no instructions drafted in council, no second voice at the table when the Directory begins to press. A solitary minister carrying the republic's full authority in one man's valise.' He paused. 'Confirm that without conditions. By all means. Tell me what that purchase costs.'
Goodhue's jaw tightened. 'What it costs is less than what it costs to be seen publicly opposing a peace mission. The Republicans will print it within the week—Federalists obstruct the President's own envoy. They will make us the authors of war.'
'They will print whatever serves them. That is not new intelligence.'
'It is different,' Goodhue said, and something sharpened in his voice, 'when it is true.'
Pickering let the silence run for three full seconds. He placed his index finger on the table and began to trace a slow circle on its surface, the wood rough and cold under his fingertip.
'Consider what I am proposing.' The circle continued, unhurried. 'Not opposition. Enhancement. The Senate informs the President that it regards his initiative with such gravity, such weight of consequence, that one minister—however capable—cannot bear it alone. The Senate insists upon a commission of three, men of the highest distinction, men whose authority no Directory may dismiss. Chief Justice Ellsworth. Perhaps Henry, if his health permits, or another of equal standing. We are not weakening the President's hand. We are fortifying it. We are saying: the republic takes this mission so seriously that it will send its finest men, not merely its most available one.'
Tracy was nodding slowly. Sedgwick's expression had not changed, but he had leaned forward by an inch.
'Hamilton,' Pickering continued, 'has always understood that the strength of a negotiating position derives from the weight behind it. A commission of three, properly constituted, carries institutional gravity that no single envoy can manufacture. That is not my observation. It is the General's own doctrine, as any man who has corresponded with him on the French crisis will confirm.'
Goodhue's hand came down flat on the table. The sound was not loud, but in the small room it carried. 'You invoke the General's doctrine.' His voice was measured, almost courteous, which made the words cut the more cleanly. 'I wonder, sir, whether that doctrine extends to the circumstance of a cabinet officer conducting the Senate's business from an anteroom while the President is three days' ride distant in Quincy. Because that is what I see before me, and I confess it does not resemble the constitutional arrangement I was taught to revere.'
Pickering lifted his finger from the table and folded both hands in his lap. The circle had stopped.
'Mr. Goodhue.' His tone was even, almost gentle. 'If Murray reaches Paris alone and the Directory extracts from him the concessions they could not extract from Pinckney, from Marshall, from Gerry—if the republic's negotiating position collapses because one man lacked the authority and the temperament to hold it—whose name will history attach to that failure? Not the President's. He will have acted from pacific motives, and the country will forgive him his optimism. The names will be yours. And mine. And every Federalist senator who confirmed the nomination without insisting on the safeguard that prudence demanded.'
He did not pause. 'If the President accepts the commission—which he cannot refuse without appearing to reject his own party's earnest support—we have ensured the mission proceeds with the structure it requires. If he balks, the Senate has acted in perfect fidelity to its constitutional role. Either way, the nomination as it stands does not reach Paris in the form the President intends.'
Goodhue stared at the table. His hands were spread flat on its surface, fingers wide, as though testing whether the wood would hold.
'You are asking us'—his hands pressed harder against the wood, as though the table itself required steadying—'to dress obstruction in the clothes of deference.'
'I am asking you,' Pickering replied, 'to decide whether you serve this republic or merely its current moment of embarrassment.'
Sedgwick said: 'I am for it.'
Tracy said nothing, but he had stopped shaking his head.
Goodhue looked at Sedgwick. He looked at Tracy. He looked, briefly, at the dead coals in the grate.
'I will not stand against it,' he said.
Pickering rose. He did not offer his hand. 'We have until the Senate reconvenes Thursday morning. If Jefferson carries the question before we have the numbers for a commission amendment, we have lost the only restraint available to us. Two days.' He moved to the door. 'Do not waste them in scruple.'
He opened the door himself and walked out without looking back. Behind him, the latch caught again—that same sharp sound, like something being sealed.
Scene III
The candles in the corridor sconces had been lit by someone other than his own staff—the flames sat too high in their cups, profligate with tallow, the work of a servant who had no reason to be economical with another man's supplies. Pickering walked past them without slowing. The windows at the far end of Congress Hall had gone the colour of pewter, the last February light draining from the glass with the indifferent efficiency of a tide going out. The building was emptying around him, voices retreating toward the street, the day's catastrophe dispersing into the cold.
He had his hands clasped behind his back. He became aware of this and uncoupled them.
'Mr. Secretary.'
The voice came from a doorway to his left—a congressman stepping into the corridor at precisely the angle that made passage impossible without acknowledgement. Pickering stopped.
He knew the man. A Republican from Pennsylvania, one of the younger ones, a Bache intimate before the fever took the editor, the sort who wore his politics in his posture and smiled at Federalists the way a cat watches a bird it has already decided not to hurry toward. His coat was new. His hat was in his hand.
'Mr. Secretary,' he said again, the repetition not a courtesy but a pleasure. 'I find I must offer my congratulations. The President's message today—a most wise and temperate resolution. Peace with France. I confess I had not credited the administration with so sound a judgment.' He paused. 'It is gratifying to be corrected.'
The corridor was not empty. Two clerks had stopped near the stairwell, their attention suddenly engaged by the middle distance. A senator's aide stood near the far door, his departure arrested. Whatever Pickering said in the next ten seconds would be in three men's mouths before supper, and in the Aurora before the week was out if the congressman had any industry at all—which, Pickering reflected, he manifestly did.
He regarded the congressman for a moment that was neither long nor short.
'You are very good.'
His voice came out even.
'The administration,' he continued, 'has at all times pursued the honour and interest of the republic by whatever instrument the circumstances required.' He inclined his head. 'I shall convey your sentiments to the President, should occasion permit.'
The congressman's smile widened. 'I trust you will also convey to him the country's gratitude that he has at last overruled the counsel of those who preferred war to negotiation.' He let the sentence hang, his eyes moving briefly to the clerks at the stairwell. 'The Aurora will say as much tomorrow, I expect. With names attached.'
'The Aurora has never wanted for invention, sir. I doubt it requires your assistance.'
He bowed—not shallow, which would have been contempt, not deep, which would have been concession—and walked past the congressman close enough that the man had to step back against the wall. He did not look back. He heard the congressman say something further, the syllables arriving as sound before meaning, and by the time they resolved he was past the stairwell and the clerks and the aide and the pewter windows, and then he was at his own door, and his hand was on the latch, and the latch gave.
Scene IV
The office was cold. The fire had not been attended since morning, and the room held the particular stillness of a place left to its own devices—papers undisturbed on the writing table, the inkwell's surface filmed with the faint dust that settles in an hour's absence. The candle he carried from the corridor sconce threw his shadow long and unsteady across the wall. He had taken the candle without thinking, which was not like him, but his hands had made the decision before his mind had been consulted.
He pulled the memorandum from the drawer where he had thrust it that morning. The ink-stain was black and irregular across the final paragraph, dried now into the paper's weave. He looked at it without sitting down—three pages of argument that had been policy at nine o'clock and were now a record of his own obsolescence.
Then he held the corner of the sheet over the candle's flame. The paper caught. He held it until the heat reached his fingers, then set the burning sheet in the empty dish beside the inkwell and watched it contract and blacken and go to ash.
His stomach seized—a hard cramp, low and sudden. He pressed his palm against his side until the spasm passed, then stood straight and looked at the ash in the dish, which had already lost its shape.
He drew a fresh sheet from the box.
He dipped the quill.
My dear General,
He wrote the salutation and stopped. Outside, a carriage crossed the cobblestones below the window, its iron wheels loud in the cold air, and then it was gone, and the street was quiet, and the candle burned without guttering.
He sat with the salutation before him and considered what came next.
The commission was the first stone in the wall, and he had laid it today. But a wall requires more than one stone, and he had spent enough years in the construction of policy to know that the materials must be prepared before the builder arrives. The instructions to the envoys—whenever the commission was finally confirmed, whenever its members were finally named—those instructions would pass through this office. Through his hands. He would draft them, or he would review them, or he would find in them, upon careful examination, ambiguities that required clarification, terms that required precision, conditions that the Directory must satisfy before any substantive negotiation could commence. The law of nations was a capacious instrument. He had used it as a sword; he could use it as a lock.
And yet.
He looked at the salutation. My dear General. The intimacy of it—the ease with which he had written it, the ease with which Hamilton would read it, the ease with which two men could, across the distance of a courier's ride, conduct the republic's business in the republic's despite. He was sensible, in this moment, of something he did not ordinarily permit himself to examine: that what he was doing bore a name, and that the name was not prudence and was not patriotism and was not the defence of principle against executive overreach. The name was simpler and less comfortable than any of those, and he felt it now as he felt the cold of the room—not as an abstraction but as a physical fact, present and undeniable and not warm.
He pressed his palm flat on the desk's surface.
Then he thought of Murray in Paris. Murray at a table with Talleyrand's subordinates, alone, without the weight of a commission behind him, without the institutional gravity that the republic's honour demanded—Murray, who was a capable man, Pickering would grant him that, but capable men had sat at French tables before and had departed with less than they carried in. Pinckney had departed with nothing. Marshall had departed with nothing. Gerry had stayed so long he had nearly departed as a Frenchman. And now Adams, in his Quincy solitude, reading dispatches that Pickering had not been permitted to evaluate, had decided that this time would be different, that Talleyrand's assurances were worth the republic's honour, that the careful construction of two years could be surrendered on the strength of a diplomat's letter from The Hague.
The doubt, if it had been a doubt, passed.
He wrote the next line.
The letter would reach New York in two days, if the roads held. Hamilton would read it, and what followed would not be stoppable by any instrument short of the President's own hand—and the President was in Quincy, three days' hard riding from Philadelphia. Three days in which a great deal could be accomplished by men who did not require his presence to act. The commission would be proposed Thursday morning. If Hamilton's correspondents moved quickly, Sedgwick and Tracy would have the General's explicit endorsement before Goodhue's nerve could fail. Pickering had watched the man's hands on that table. I will not stand against it was not the same as I am for it, and the distance between those two positions was precisely the distance a frightened man could travel in forty-eight hours.
The quill moved steadily now, the scratch of nib on paper the only sound in the cold room.
Below the window, a horse struck sparks from the frozen cobblestones—a single rider, moving at the pace of a man with somewhere to be before dark. Heading north, by the sound of it. Pickering did not look up. He was already on the second paragraph, the one that would tell Hamilton not merely what had happened today but what could yet be made of it—because today was not the end of anything. Today was the moment the President had believed himself to have won, and presidents who believed themselves to have won had a way of relaxing their vigilance at precisely the wrong instant.
He wrote on. The candle burned without guttering. The ash in the dish held its shape a moment longer, and then a draught from the ill-fitted window touched it, and it came apart, and was nothing.
But the letter was not yet finished, and it would be finished tonight, and it would travel north in the morning, and by Thursday Goodhue would receive a visitor whose name Pickering had not yet written but whose errand was already decided—because the commission was only the first move in a sequence that did not end with the Senate's vote, and Pickering had never in his life stopped at the first move.