Chapter Three: The Midnight Crossing

Scene 1

The morning mail had arrived in three separate deliveries, and Lincoln had made no progress whatever in reducing it.

He took up a letter from a Cincinnati dry-goods merchant who urged immediate conciliation with South Carolina on the grounds that the river trade could not survive a disruption. Two lines sufficed. He laid it aside. A sheet from a New York assemblyman urged immediate firmness on the grounds that the river trade could not survive a surrender. One line sufficed for that. A third envelope, postmarked Columbus in a hand he did not recognise, he returned to the pile without breaking the seal.

The office was cold at the window and overheated near the stove — one of those arrangements that a borrowed room imposes without apology. He had pushed his chair six inches from the desk to find the narrow band of temperature that was neither. The stove ticked. Outside, the frozen capitol grounds lay under a sky the colour of old pewter, and the elm trees stood without moving, as though they had decided some weeks ago to wait out whatever came next.

He was reading a letter from a Nashville attorney of his acquaintance when the door opened without a knock.

Judge David Davis filled a doorframe the way a courthouse fills a public square — not by height alone but by a settled conviction that the space had been arranged for his occupation. He was carrying his hat and his overcoat, which meant he had come directly from somewhere and intended to go directly somewhere else, and his boots, Lincoln noticed, were of a quality that Springfield did not ordinarily supply. Black calfskin, close-fitted, with a high gloss that the frozen mud of the capitol walk had not yet touched. Lincoln looked at them a moment longer than the situation required.

"I have just come from downstairs," Davis announced, crossing to the near side of the desk without invitation, "and I want you to know that I have done you a considerable service."

Lincoln set the Nashville letter on the stack to his left and drew a folded telegram from the stack to his right. "Tell me about this service," he said.

"There are two men from the Journal waiting in the lower hall. I spoke with them not thirty minutes past, and I told them that the President-elect regards Major Anderson's action as the conduct of a loyal officer performing his duty as he understands it." Davis set his hat on the corner of the desk. "They were very gratified to hear it. I think you will find the morning edition takes a sound position."

Lincoln put the telegram down. He folded his hands on the desk and looked at Davis with the expression he reserved for witnesses who had answered a question other than the one he had asked. "What were your exact words to them, Judge?"

"I have just told you—"

"The exact words. As near as you can render them."

Davis shifted his weight. The stove popped and sent a brief shower of sparks against the iron grate. Lincoln stamped out the one that reached the floorboards. "As near as you can render them," he repeated.

Davis's certainty had begun to settle toward something less comfortable. "I may have said that the President-elect regards the Major's judgment as sound. That the transfer reflects well on the garrison's leadership."

"May have."

"Did say."

"And the reporters understood this to be my position."

"They understood it to be the position of a man close to your counsel, which I am."

Lincoln was still. His hands remained folded. Then he said, "Judge, if those gentlemen print what you have told them, and the Charleston Mercury reprints it by Friday — as they will — then the men inside that fort will wake to the news that the incoming administration has publicly endorsed the action that South Carolina regards as an act of war. Major Anderson will have my name attached to his position before I hold the authority to defend it. Do you understand what that costs him?"

Davis opened his mouth and closed it.

"Go back downstairs," Lincoln said. "Tell those gentlemen you spoke without authority. No statement on military matters will issue from this office or from anyone connected with it."

"That will read as a repudiation—"

"It will read as nothing, because they will print nothing. You will see to it."

Davis took up his hat. His colour had changed in a way that had nothing to do with the stove's warmth. "If you believe silence will serve you better than—"

"I believe," Lincoln said, "that a man who does not yet hold an office ought to be cautious about the opinions he holds in public. I am cautious, Judge. I would be grateful if you were cautious on my behalf." He held out the telegram. "There is also a dispatch here that wants your attention."

Davis took it. He looked at it, then at Lincoln, then at the door — a sequence that told Lincoln everything he needed to know about the Judge's present state of mind — and went.

Lincoln turned back to the morning mail. He drew the next envelope from the pile, slit it with his thumbnail, and began.

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Scene 2

The clerks had gone. The candles he had lit against the early dark threw unsteady shadows across the desk, and the smell of tallow — cheap, faintly rancid, nothing like the beeswax Mary kept at home — hung in the air with the persistence of a guest who has overstayed his welcome. The correspondence had been sorted into rough categories that now seemed less like categories than accusations: letters requiring answers he could not give, letters demanding positions he could not take, letters from men who believed the republic's salvation lay in their particular prescription and who would not forgive him for failing to concur.

Weed's letter was in his right hand. He had read it twice already. He read it a third time.

The language was Seward's in all but the handwriting — subordinate clauses stacked like buttresses against a cathedral wall, each one qualifying the last until the original proposition was so armoured against objection that objection seemed almost impolite. Weed had inquired, with characteristic indirection, whether the President-elect might be disposed to receive certain of the Senate's border-state members informally, in the spirit of the season, to discuss matters of mutual constitutional concern. He had expressed confidence in Lincoln's patriotism. He had expressed confidence in Lincoln's flexibility. He had expressed, in particular, the President-elect's known flexibility on matters of detail — the phrase sitting in the middle of the third paragraph as though it had always been there, as though Lincoln had placed it himself.

Lincoln put the letter down and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw red.

He had been awake since four o'clock. Before that, he had lain in the dark beside Mary and listened to the house settle around him — the tick of cooling plaster, the distant complaint of a shutter hinge, Tad's cough from the room above, dry and sharp, arriving at intervals too regular to be accidental and too irregular to be rhythmic. He had counted the coughs the way another man might count the strokes of a clock, and between them he had thought about Seward's letter, and about the seven states that had announced their intention to leave the Union, and about the fact that he could prevent none of it — not the secession, not the seizure of federal arsenals and customs houses, not the slow attrition of the army's officer corps as Southern men resigned their commissions and went home to serve a government that did not yet exist. He could prevent nothing. He could only write letters.

He took his hands from his eyes. The candle flames steadied.

Known flexibility on matters of detail.

He had expressed no such thing. Not to Weed, not to Seward, not to any living soul. He had said to Seward directly and in plain language that the contest must come, and that he preferred it sooner. He had refused the Crittenden proposals in terms that left no interpretive room. And yet here was Thurlow Weed, Seward's instrument and the most accomplished political mechanic in the Republic, attributing to him a position he had never occupied — committing it to paper, routing it toward Washington, where it would circulate through Senate cloakrooms and drawing rooms as though it carried Lincoln's own seal.

The letter was not inquiry. It was foundation-laying — the first timber of a structure Seward intended to inhabit before March, in which Lincoln's silence would become acquiescence and acquiescence would become policy.

If Lincoln did not answer it tonight, by the time his reply reached Albany the timber would already be set. Weed would have spoken to three senators. Those senators would have spoken to the press. And the President-elect's known flexibility would have become the settled understanding of every man in Washington who wished to believe it.

Lincoln took a fresh sheet from the stack at his elbow and uncapped the inkwell. He held the pen above the paper for a long interval, then wrote a single sentence, read it back, and drew a line through it. The second attempt went three lines before he stopped, crossed those out as well, and sat with his chin resting on his free hand, listening to the wind find the gaps in the window frame — a thin, persistent whistle, almost musical, almost mocking.

Then he began the third time, and this time he did not stop.

He wrote to Mr. Weed with expressions of regard for the Senator's distinguished service and his known devotion to the Union's preservation — phrases that were true in their way and useful in their deniability. He wrote that he had given careful consideration to the Senator's thoughtful communication. He wrote that he trusted the Senator would understand that a man in his present position must be especially scrupulous in distinguishing between his personal sentiments and his public obligations.

He then wrote, in the careful hand of one who had spent two decades drafting contracts that could not be disputed after the fact, that the platform on which he had been elected was not a collection of sentiments but a binding declaration of principle — that the people of the free states had voted, in November last, upon the proposition that the peculiar institution of the South shall not be extended into the territories of this Republic, and that this proposition admitted of no qualification, no arrangement of detail, no flexibility of any variety, known or unknown, which a gentleman in Springfield had expressed or could express consistently with his duty to those who had elected him.

He praised Senator Seward's patriotism in the next paragraph at some length.

He read the letter back twice. The compliments were genuine enough. They were also, he thought, as close to a warning as courtesy permitted — the kind a man might deliver with a firm hand on the shoulder and a pleasant expression, so that the recipient could not afterward say he had been threatened, only that he had been made to understand something he had previously chosen not to understand.

Then he folded it, addressed it to Mr. Thurlow Weed, Albany, New York, and set it with the outgoing correspondence.

The candle nearest him guttered and recovered. The tallow smell had thickened. Outside, the wind had risen, and he could hear it now not as a whistle but as a low, steady pressure against the building's western face — the sound of weather arriving, or of something larger than weather, moving toward him across a distance he could not yet measure.

He did not reach for the next letter. He sat, and the room was quiet, and for a moment the only sound was the wind and the small, patient labour of the candle flames consuming what sustained them.

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Scene 3

The packet from the State Capitol arrived after supper, delivered by a boy whose boots left wet prints across the parlour threshold. Lincoln thanked him, shut the door against the January cold — it had teeth tonight, the wind driving through the seams of the house with an audible moan — and stood with the bundle in his hands while Mary settled back into her chair by the fire, her needlework returned to her lap with the patient efficiency of a woman who has learned not to ask too quickly.

He broke the string himself. Most of it was the usual accumulation — office-seekers, editors requiring his endorsement of their papers, two senators whose letters he recognised by the seals and set aside unopened. Then the letter from Charleston, forwarded through three hands, the outermost envelope much handled, its corners soft from a coat pocket or a mail pouch. The handwriting on the inner envelope was spare and vertical. Military.

He read it standing.

The fire snapped in the grate, and from upstairs came the sound of Tad's voice raised in some argument with Willie, the elder boy's response too low to make out — a murmur of authority, or the attempt at it. Then quiet again.

He went through it a second time, more slowly.

Major Anderson wrote as soldiers write when they have practised restraint until it has become the only language available to them. He did not say he was frightened. He said the garrison was in good spirits. He did not say the walls were inadequate. He said the fortification afforded certain defensive advantages, and certain others that the position at Moultrie had not. He did not say his men might starve. He said that the present stores of salt pork would sustain the command for approximately six weeks, and that the flour supply was somewhat less than that, and that he had reduced daily rations by one-third as a precautionary measure, and that he wished to apprise the proper authorities of these facts so that appropriate decisions might be made in good time.

Six weeks. Less for the flour.

Lincoln carried the numbers forward the way he had learned to do it in a courthouse — to their conclusion, before he allowed himself to consider what the conclusion meant. The fourth of March was sixty-three days distant. The flour would not last to the inauguration. If Buchanan did nothing — and Buchanan would do nothing, because Buchanan had made an art of nothing — then the men inside that fort would be choosing between surrender and starvation before Lincoln had spoken his oath.

His legs found the chair by the fire without any evident instruction from his mind, and he sat.

The fire shifted. A log rolled against the iron dogs and sent a shower of sparks across the hearthrug in a bright scatter. Mary was on her feet before he looked up, stamping them out with her slipper, three quick precise stamps. She straightened and looked at him.

"What is it?"

"A letter."

"I can see that it is a letter, Mr. Lincoln." She crossed toward him, her needlework forgotten on the chair. "You have been standing there ten minutes and you have not moved."

He folded it along its creases and put it in his breast pocket.

"Anderson writes of difficulties," he said. "Nothing that cannot be managed."

Mary stood close enough that he could smell the faint cedar from the chest where she kept her good wool. She studied his face with the attention she had given it for twenty years — a different order of attention from what anyone else brought to the exercise.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the answer I have."

"Abraham." She said it quietly, without rising inflection. Not a reproach. Something nearer to a verdict.

He met her eyes directly, which was itself a form of evasion.

"The situation at the fort is delicate," he said. "There are men who depend on decisions not yet made, and the making of those decisions requires that certain things remain — contained. For now."

She held his gaze for a long moment.

"And when will they cease to require that?"

When the office compels obedience rather than requests it.

The fire had settled back to its steady work, the sparks gone. From upstairs came the creak of a floorboard, Tad's heavier footfall moving toward his bed.

"How are the boys?" Lincoln said. "Was Tad's cough any better this afternoon?"

Mary looked at him — through him, perhaps — and returned to her chair. She took up her needlework.

"It was somewhat better," she said. "The camphor helped."

She did not look up again.

Lincoln sat with Anderson's letter pressed against his chest, the paper warm now from his body's heat, and thought about flour.

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Scene 4

He had arrived before Nicolay, before the doorman, before the building's fires had been laid. The second-floor office held the grey January morning at a remove, and the cold had settled into the room's corners with the patience of a creditor who knows he will eventually be paid. Lincoln had not bothered to light the stove. He sat at the desk in his overcoat, and his breath made small, dissipating clouds above the papers he had arranged before him.

The map was from Blunt's Coast Pilot, a published survey of the approaches to Charleston Harbor, the kind of thing any merchant captain might own. He had found it at the bookseller on Adams Street three days prior, paying from his own pocket, paying in coin, saying nothing to the proprietor beyond a remark about the weather. It lay open now, the harbour's geometry rendered in careful ink: the channel, the shoals, the three fortifications at their respective points — Moultrie to the northeast, Castle Pinckney nearer the city, and Sumter at the harbour's throat, where Anderson's garrison was quartered and counting what remained of its provisions.

He traced the channel with his finger. The main ship passage ran between the bar and the inner harbour, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide at its broadest, narrowing as it passed between Sumter and Moultrie. Any vessel approaching from the sea would be under the guns of both positions for the better part of twenty minutes. If the South Carolina batteries on Morris Island were operational — and Anderson's letter had mentioned earthworks, though not their armament — the channel became a corridor of converging fire from three directions. A transport would need darkness, a favourable tide, and either extraordinary luck or covering warships.

He had none of these to offer. He had a map, a letter from a desperate officer, and sixty-three days of constitutional impotence.

Lincoln withdrew Anderson's letter from his breast pocket and unfolded it beside the map. He smoothed the creases flat with the side of his hand. Then he drew a fresh sheet toward him and wrote Dear General Scott.

He stopped. The pen hovered.

What he required from the General was information: the depth of the main channel under the bar at full tide, the range of the batteries now being erected on Morris Island, the capacity of a steam-driven transport to approach under covering darkness. He did not require the General's opinion on the propriety of the inquiry. He would not ask for it.

But the question beneath the question was whether Scott would answer at all. He held no commission, no office, no constitutional standing to make demands of the army he would soon inherit. If Scott chose to refer the inquiry to Secretary of War Holt, or to ignore it altogether, or — worse — to mention it to one of the Southern officers still serving on his staff, then Lincoln would have revealed his interest in Charleston's defences to precisely the men who would use that knowledge against him. The letter was not merely a request for information. It was a wager — his secrecy against Scott's discretion, with Anderson's garrison as the stake.

He wrote the salutation and continued. His back seized as he bent over the desk — the old circuit-riding complaint, a deep spasm along the left side of his spine — and he pushed his chair back and stood with both hands pressed flat against his lower back, jaw set, waiting for the muscle to release. It did, after a moment, grudgingly. He sat again and resumed.

A footfall sounded in the doorway behind him.

Nicolay came in quietly, as was his habit — the young man had a secretary's instinct for making himself small in doorways — and then he stopped, because he had seen the map.

Lincoln did not turn immediately. He heard Nicolay's footstep halt, heard the quality of the silence that follows a discovery.

"Mr. Lincoln." A pause. "Forgive the hour. I thought I might begin on the morning correspondence before—" Another pause, shorter. "Is that Charleston Harbor?"

Lincoln turned. Nicolay stood in the doorway—slight, twenty-eight, his gaze already moving from the map to Anderson's letter, which lay beside it, unfolded.

"Sit down, John."

Nicolay sat.

Lincoln studied him for the space of several seconds. Then he slid the map toward Nicolay and placed Anderson's letter on top of it.

"Read that. The passage beginning with the salt pork."

Nicolay found it and read without comment, without the small sounds men make when they wish to signal their comprehension. He finished and looked up.

"How long do they have."

It was not quite a question.

"Six weeks," Lincoln said. "Perhaps a little more, if they are careful with the flour." He turned back to the sheet before him. "I am writing to General Scott. Privately. The letter goes by your hand and no other, and you will say nothing of it to anyone who arrives at this office today, regardless of their station or their friendship with me. Not to Davis. Not to Trumbull. Not to any man who walks through that door. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"If this letter is seen by the wrong eyes before it reaches Scott, then every man in that garrison is made more vulnerable than he already is. Anderson has told me what he has. What he lacks must not become common currency in Washington—not now, not before the authority to act upon it is mine to exercise."

Nicolay said nothing. His hand rested on the letter, steady.

Lincoln wrote. The cold in the room was pronounced; his fingers had stiffened and the pen required a firmer grip than the work warranted, but he did not stop. The sentences formed as he had rehearsed them through the sleepless hours — each question precise, each phrasing weighed to convey urgency without presumption, authority without the office that would make authority legitimate.

When he had finished, he went through it once, made a single emendation near the end — changing might be practicable to is practicable, because the distinction was the letter's entire argument — and set the pen down.

He folded the sheet, fitted it into the envelope, and sealed it with wax. He held the pressure until the wax firmed beneath his thumb.

He held the sealed letter out.

Nicolay took it. He put it inside his coat, against his chest, and buttoned the coat over it.

"Before the visitors arrive," Lincoln said.

Nicolay rose and went to the door. His hand was on the latch when Lincoln spoke again.

"John."

Nicolay turned.

"How many days until the fourth of March?"

"Sixty-three, sir. As of this morning."

Lincoln looked at the map — the channel, the shoals, the narrow throat of the harbour where eighty-five men were eating a breakfast that would not come sixty-three more times. He looked at it the way a man looks at a sum he has already calculated and does not wish to calculate again, because the answer has not changed and will not.

"The flour will not last that long," he said.

The door opened. Footsteps on the stair — two sets, then three, the building rousing itself to the day's business. Voices in the hall below, a name called out, the particular clatter of men arriving with purposes they believed urgent. In a quarter-hour the anteroom would be full, and every one of them would want something Lincoln was not yet empowered to give, and he would receive them all with the same patient attention, and none of them would know about the map, or the letter sealed inside Nicolay's coat, or the sixty-three mornings that stood between this moment and the authority to act.

He folded the map along its original creases and set it beneath the stack of correspondence, out of sight.

The first knock came before he had straightened in his chair.