Chapter Seven: The Oath

Scene One

The fire had gone nearly out.

Lincoln rose from the desk in the grey pre-dawn cold, crossed the sitting room in his stocking feet, and crouched before the grate. The iron handle of the poker burned his palm. He worked the coals apart until a thin orange thread appeared among them, then laid two pieces of kindling across it and waited, his fingers stiff, his breath rising in small clouds above the iron.

The manuscript lay on the desk behind him, sixteen pages in two hands. He had not needed to look at it to know which passages were whose. His own script was angular, the letters pressed hard into the paper, the crossbars of his t's drawn with the flat decisiveness of a man ruling a line on a legal document. Seward's suggested emendations ran in the margins and between struck-through paragraphs in an altogether different character — fluid, slightly inclined, the loops formed with an ease that suggested penmanship had been a pleasure rather than a discipline. Lincoln had noticed this three days ago when Seward's pages first arrived, and felt a clean flash of irritation at the elegance of it. Then he turned back to the fire.

The kindling caught. He added a split log, replaced the grate cover, and stood, pressing his hands against the small of his back where the old circuit complaint had settled in the night. The wood smoke reached him — sweet and faintly resinous, the smell of every courthouse and tavern from the Eighth Circuit, twenty years of riding the Illinois roads in weather exactly this cold.

He returned to the desk. The final passage was Seward's. 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 again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. It was, Lincoln conceded, a finer sentence than anything he had written for that position. His own original had been harder: Shall it be peace, or a sword? The answer rests with you. He pressed the page flat with his palm. He would keep Seward's close. He was not certain he believed it.

The knock came at half past six.

Ward Hill Lamon entered without waiting for a second invitation, which was his way. He was already dressed, the Colt revolver visible beneath his left lapel where his coat hung open from the haste of his coming. His face had the particular set it took on when he had decided what he was going to say and was girding himself to say it regardless of how it was received.

"There is a matter," Lamon said, "that requires your attention before this morning goes any further."

He produced a letter from his breast pocket and placed it on the desk, on top of Seward's emendations. The envelope had been opened. Lincoln studied it for a moment, then picked it up.

The letter was written in a cramped hand on cheap paper, addressed to a party in Richmond whose name had been struck through by whoever had intercepted it. The substance was brief: a plan was described, contingent upon the President-elect's appearance on the East Portico at the appointed hour, involving not fewer than three men positioned along the crowd's northern margin. The language was oblique in the manner of those who fear their own words, but the intent was plain enough. Lincoln read it to the end and set it face-down on the desk.

"There are others," Lamon said. "I have shown you the one I judged most credible. General Scott is aware of the situation in general terms."

"How many others."

"Two additional reports. Different sources, same city." Lamon placed both hands flat on the desk and leaned forward, his weight pressing the wood. "If one of those men fires from the crowd and finds his mark, there is no government. Hamlin has not been briefed on the cabinet. The Senate has not confirmed a single appointment. The republic will have no President, no ministry, and no policy — and the Montgomery authorities will have their answer without the trouble of asking the question."

Lincoln was quiet for a moment. Outside on the avenue, a cart horse went by, its hooves deliberate on the frozen mud, the driver's voice carrying up in a single unintelligible syllable. The fire had caught fully now, and its warmth reached his hands where they rested on the desk, though his fingers remained cold enough that holding the pen steadily would require another quarter hour.

"I am prepared," Lamon said, "to arrange delivery of the address from the Senate chamber. Or there is a mail shirt — chain construction, not heavy — that could be worn beneath your coat without any outward indication—"

"No." Lincoln's voice was level. He drew the face-down letter from the desk, slid it beneath the manuscript pages, out of sight but not discarded. "You will position sharpshooters along the Capitol roofline. General Scott's men. I want them placed before the crowd assembles, and I want them invisible to anyone looking up from the grounds."

Lamon opened his mouth.

"Nothing else changes," Lincoln said. "Not the route, not the platform, not the hour. Not anything a man standing in that crowd could observe."

"If they are not positioned in time—"

"Then you had better go see to it."

Lamon stood with his jaw set for three full seconds. Then he took up his hat from the chair where he had set it and said, with the clipped economy of a soldier accepting an order he intends to execute faithfully and resent privately, "I'll see to it."

The door closed. Lincoln's gaze settled on the manuscript. He had told Lamon nothing about the mail shirt that he had not already decided before Lamon entered the room. If he stepped onto that portico already defeated — already armoured, already hedged — the address would be a formality and the oath an empty form. He reached for the pen. His fingers were still cold. He wrote anyway.

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Scene Two

The barouche moved at the pace of ceremony — which is to say, with a slowness that had nothing to do with the horses and everything to do with the watching.

Pennsylvania Avenue stretched before them in the grey March light, and Lincoln sat upright on the right side of the carriage, his coat brushed to a gloss he had not managed in Springfield, his stovepipe hat settled with the deliberate precision of someone who has accepted that every gesture will be read. To his left, President Buchanan occupied the seat with the settled ease of a figure whose appointment with relief was almost upon him. The two of them rode in the particular proximity of men who have nothing to say to each other and no choice but to endure the saying of it.

The crowd was immense, and it was not one thing. It pressed along both sides of the avenue in the way a river divides around a stone — some surging forward with handkerchiefs raised, voices carrying above the iron-rimmed wheels, others standing in silence with arms folded, watching as men watch a fire they did not set. From somewhere near Third Street, a knot of men sent up a sound that the wind off the Potomac took before Lincoln could parse it as welcome or its opposite.

He felt the cold through the wool of his coat, through the thin leather of his dress shoes, and beneath the cold the slow, rhythmic percussion of the wheels on the unpaved avenue, each rut a small jolt that ran up through the seat and into his spine. As the carriage drew level with the second rank, he caught a face turning away — not in distraction, but with the deliberate economy of a decision already made. Northern margin, Lamon had said. Three men, at minimum.

If Scott's sharpshooters were not yet in position — if the confusion of thirty thousand bodies pressing toward the Capitol had disrupted Lamon's arrangements — then the republic's fate turned on the next thirty seconds. Lincoln shifted his weight forward and placed his hand on the carriage rail, his body angling between Buchanan and the line the turned face had described. He kept his eyes ahead.

Buchanan leaned toward him. The President smelled of bay rum and the particular staleness of a man who had not slept well in months.

"I hope, Mr. Lincoln," he said, "that you will find as much pleasure in the office as I have endeavored to find, and as little of its pains as Providence will permit." He paused. "I confess to you, sir, that I shall be a happier man at nine o'clock this evening than I have been at any hour since I took the oath."

Lincoln turned to him. Buchanan's face was florid above his high collar, the eyes holding an expression between shame and relief — the face of someone who has carried something very heavy and can see the place where he will be permitted to set it down.

"I am grateful for your kind wishes, Mr. President," Lincoln said.

"You will find," Buchanan continued, "that the question of the Southern forts is not so intractable as the press has represented it. I have left certain memoranda with the War Department that may prove instructive. The commissioners from South Carolina were, in my judgment, men of reason—"

"Mr. President." Lincoln's voice was quiet and carried no particular edge, which made it, in its way, more final than anger. "I am sensible of your counsel."

He turned back to the street. He would not read the memoranda. The word forts had settled in his chest, and he felt the weight of it spreading outward — Virginia, Maryland, the seven states at Montgomery, the garrison in Charleston Harbour eating through its flour at a rate that would exhaust it by the middle of April.

The barouche hit a rut and jolted hard. Lincoln's stovepipe hat tilted violently forward and he caught it with both hands, the brim cold against his fingers, the motion ungainly and abrupt and entirely ungrand. He resettled it and looked back at the crowd.

The faces thickened as they approached the Hill. Not the ones turned toward him with open celebration but the others — the ones in the second and third rows, the ones who had come to see rather than to cheer. A woman in a grey cloak stood with her children pressed against her skirts, her expression neither hostile nor welcoming but grave, as though she had brought them to witness something she could not yet name. An older man, his collar frayed at the edge, raised neither voice nor hand but tracked the carriage with the steady attention of someone counting the cost of something and not yet finished with the sum.

If the address failed to hold them — if it read in the border states as provocation rather than conciliation — Virginia would call her convention before the week was out, and Maryland after her, and the city of Washington would find itself an island in a Confederate sea. The flour would not be the only thing that ran short.

Above the Hill, the Capitol's unfinished dome rose against the overcast sky. The iron skeleton of its crown was visible through the winter haze, the construction cranes motionless in the cold air. The building had been under construction for a decade. It would be under construction still when this was over, whatever this proved to be.

Buchanan had fallen silent. The carriage smelled of leather and cold wool and bay rum, and beneath those things something else — the smell of prolonged apprehension, of a man who has been afraid for a long time and has grown so accustomed to it that he no longer notices the weight. The Capitol drew nearer. The cranes did not move.

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Scene Three

The wind off the Potomac found every seam in the platform's construction and came through them without apology.

Lincoln stood at the lectern with the manuscript in both hands, the Capitol rising behind him — the dome's unfinished rim against the March sky like the lip of a vessel not yet filled, the derricks and cranes skeletal above the assembled thousands — and before him the grounds spread out in numbers he had not fully apprehended until this moment. Twenty-five thousand, perhaps thirty. They pressed against each other in the cold, breath rising in small columns, faces turned upward with an expression he could not easily name. Not welcome, precisely. The attentiveness of people who have understood that something irrevocable is about to occur and have come to be present when it does.

Chief Justice Roger Taney stood to his left, the Bible already open. Lincoln had seen older men, had seen men near death, but Taney's frailty was of a particular order — the frailty of conviction that has outlasted the body that holds it, so that only the conviction remains and the flesh is merely its vehicle. Eighty-three years. The hands that held the book trembled with a sustained, fine vibration, as though the nerves had given up regulation and settled for constancy. The eyes were still sharp, and they were not kind.

Lincoln stepped forward and extended his hand.

Taney took it. The grip was dry and without pressure, the bones sharp beneath the skin, and the old man held it for precisely the interval that form required and released it. He did not speak. The silence was itself a ruling — the author of Dred Scott receiving the man whose election had repudiated it, finding nothing in the occasion that required his commentary.

Lincoln withdrew his hand and turned to the crowd.

Stephen Douglas materialised at his elbow. He had come up the platform steps with the ease of long practice — twenty years of making himself at home in every significant room in the republic — and he held out his hand without ceremony. Lincoln looked at the stovepipe hat in his own hands, the tall silk hat he had carried up from the carriage seat and had no place to set, and Douglas took it from him without being asked. A small gesture. No one on the platform remarked upon it, but several saw it, and the crowd in the front ranks saw it, and it passed through them as a murmur distinct from the general noise.

"You will do well," Douglas said, low enough that only Lincoln could hear. Then, lower still: "God help you."

Lincoln turned to the Chief Justice.

Taney raised the Bible with both hands and steadied it, the trembling audible in the slight rattle of the cover against his wrists. He began the oath in a voice that had once carried through courtrooms without effort and now required visible marshalling to reach even this short distance.

Lincoln placed his right hand on the open page.

The leather was cold. His palm registered the grain of it, the slight roughness where age had textured the cover, and beneath his hand the pages moved with the small, sustained trembling of Taney's hands. He repeated the words in a voice he threw over the heads of the men on the platform and into the crowd below, each phrase clear and unhurried — the voice of a man who had argued before juries in courthouses where the wind came through gaps in the siding and the acoustics were indifferent to justice.

Preserve, protect, and defend.

The words were a promissory note drawn against a treasury he had not yet inventoried. If the seven states at Montgomery took them as a declaration of war rather than a statement of constitutional duty — if the border states heard coercion where he had intended fidelity — then the oath itself would become the occasion of the conflict it was sworn to prevent. He had written the speech to thread that passage. He did not know if he had succeeded. He would know within the fortnight.

The words went out over the thousands massed below and the wind caught them and carried them east, toward the river, toward Maryland, toward Virginia, toward the states already gathered at Montgomery around their new flag.

He finished.

Taney lowered the Bible.

Lincoln turned from him and faced the crowd, and the crowd received his attention in a surge of sound that broke and then held, quieted not by command but by the collective understanding that the speaking was about to begin.

He drew the manuscript from his coat. The pages were marked in two hands. He found his place and lifted his eyes to the crowd.

Fellow citizens of the United States.

A gust took the pages and he clamped them with his forearm, losing half a breath before recovering, and the crowd saw only a pause — a man gathering himself — and he found his place and went on.

He read through the constitutional argument, the careful enumeration of the government's obligations, the plain statement that he had no lawful power to interfere with the institutions of the Southern states where those institutions already existed. He read it steadily, his voice carrying, and he watched the crowd as he read — not the front ranks, who were already decided, but the middle distance, the faces of those who had come uncertain and would leave with a judgment.

He came to the final passage. Seward's words. He had not glanced at the margins where the emendations ran in their schooled cursive, but he did not need to — he had read them so many times in the preceding days that they had become indistinguishable from his own, and it was only now, standing before the crowd in the cold, that he understood they were not.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.

He spoke the words and looked up from the page.

The faces before him were not the faces Seward had imagined when he wrote them. They were not the faces of a people on the verge of reconciliation, waiting only for the right appeal to their better nature. They were the faces of a people already divided — already sorted, already positioned on their respective sides of a line that no address, however finely wrought, was going to dissolve. The woman in the grey cloak he had seen from the carriage stood near the front with her children still pressed against her skirts, and her expression had not changed from what it had been on the avenue — grave, watchful, waiting to see what the cost would be. The older man with the frayed collar stood three rows back, and his eyes held something that was not hostility but was not hope either. It was the expression of someone who has heard a great many promises and has learned to wait for the accounting.

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

Seward had written these words in the belief that they would reach across the breach and find purchase on the other side. Lincoln spoke them now and understood that the breach was wider than Seward had measured it, and that the words, however beautiful, were addressed to a country that was already, in all the ways that mattered, two countries. The speech's conciliatory close was not a bridge. It was a letter written to a correspondent who had already departed, left on a table in an empty room.

He finished. The assembled thousands received the final words with a sound that was neither the roar of celebration nor the silence of rejection but something between — the sound of people absorbing something they had not expected to find so difficult to absorb.

He stood at the lectern for a moment after the last word, the wind pressing against the pages in his hands, and then he gathered the manuscript and stepped back.

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Scene Four

The anteroom was stifling.

Someone had fed the grate too liberally in anticipation of the ceremony's end, and the coals had worked themselves into a sustained fury that no one had since troubled to moderate. Lincoln felt the heat press against his face before he had fully crossed the threshold — a dry, aggressive warmth that made the air above the iron fender shimmer slightly. He worked one finger beneath his cravat and pulled it loose by half an inch.

Seward was already inside.

He stood at the window with his back to the door, hat in hand, and he did not turn immediately when the latch sounded — the performance, Lincoln noted, of a man who has decided to be found at ease rather than in expectation. When he did turn, his expression carried something close to reverence, calibrated with the precision of long practice.

"Mr. President." He let the title settle in the room between them. "I confess I had not expected to feel the weight of that address quite so immediately. The galleries, the crowd — they felt it. One could observe it in their faces."

Lincoln set his hat on the corner of the desk. Nicolay stood near the door, a leather document case held against his chest, his eyes moving between the two men.

"You are generous, Mr. Seward." Lincoln drew a chair from beneath the desk and sat in it without ceremony, the long angles of him folding into the seat in the way they always did, knees too high, spine curved against the back. "Sit down."

Seward did not sit.

"The closing words," he said, his tone acquiring the particular colouring of a man who has been waiting to say a thing and can now be seen to say it only incidentally. "I believe they struck the proper register. The better angels of our nature — that is the language the border-state men will carry home. That is what will hold Virginia in her place while we pursue the conversations already in progress with the commissioners." He paused, selecting from several available truths. "Judge Campbell has been receptive."

"Receptive," Lincoln said.

"To the proposition that the government does not intend coercion. That the forts question admits of a patient resolution. He has communicated as much to certain members of the Virginia convention, and they have — provisionally — agreed to delay the secession vote pending developments."

Lincoln said nothing. He opened the desk's top drawer and withdrew a folded sheet of paper — his own handwriting, dated three days prior. He set it on the desk between them, face up.

"I wrote these questions before you entered this room, Mr. Seward. Before the ceremony. Before I took the oath." His voice was quiet, almost conversational. "The first question on that list is whether any member of this administration has made representations to the Confederate commissioners, or to any intermediary acting on their behalf, regarding the government's intentions toward Fort Sumter." He did not look at Seward. He looked at the paper. "I see that you have answered it."

The gas lamps hissed. Seward's gaze dropped to the paper and returned to Lincoln's face. The colour in his cheeks deepened by a single shade.

"The conversations with Campbell are preliminary in nature," Seward said. "Nothing has been committed to in writing. What I communicated was understood to be — the representations I have made are entirely consistent with—"

"Nicolay."

Nicolay stepped forward and opened the document case. He produced a single folded paper — military stationery, the fold precise, the seal already broken — and placed it on the desk without speaking.

Lincoln unfolded it. He did not read it aloud immediately. He read it through once in silence, his expression unchanged, while Seward stood on the other side of the desk and the fire ticked and shifted in the grate and the sounds of the inaugural celebration pressed in faintly through the window — a band somewhere to the south, the distant murmur of the crowd dispersing. Then Lincoln set the paper flat on the desk and read it aloud in a voice so stripped of inflection it might have been a bill of lading:

"The provisions of the garrison will sustain the command for a period not to exceed six weeks from the date of this communication. Salt pork remains adequate beyond that interval; it is the flour which constitutes the binding constraint. I have reduced daily rations by one quarter and do not believe further reduction is practicable without material effect upon the men's capacity for duty. I await the government's instruction."

He set the dispatch down.

"Major Anderson writes from Fort Sumter." Lincoln folded the paper once, precisely, and placed it in his coat pocket. "The garrison cannot hold its position past the middle of April. Fewer weeks than that, if Anderson's arithmetic proves optimistic." He looked at Seward directly for the first time since the man had entered the room. "Now, I reckon there is a question here worth putting plainly. What negotiations does the Secretary of State propose to conduct in six weeks that could not be conducted in six months, if the garrison were resupplied?"

The elaborate social machinery — the cigar that might have appeared, the digressive anecdote that might have bridged the silence — none of it materialised. Seward retrieved his hat from the windowsill where he had set it and held it at his side, and the firelight moved across his face.

"The question of Sumter," he began, "is one which must be considered in relation to the broader—"

"I will not tell Judge Campbell," Lincoln said, "that the government does not intend to resupply the garrison." He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "I will not tell him that, because it is not true, and because if it were true, the conversations he is conducting on our behalf would be conducted on a false premise, and the men who delayed Virginia's convention in reliance upon that premise would have been deceived by their government." He paused. "I will not govern that way."

The silence that followed was the silence of a man revising his understanding of the room he is standing in.

"You will need the cabinet's assent," Seward said at last. His voice had shed its warmth. "For any resupply. Cameron, Welles, Chase — they have not been consulted. The logistics alone would require—"

"Then we will consult them." Lincoln rose from the chair. He was very tall in the low-ceilinged room, and the standing was itself a statement that required no elaboration. "Tomorrow morning. Seven o'clock. I will require your attendance, Mr. Seward, and I will require your support. Not your acquiescence — your support. If you cannot give it, I will need to know that before seven o'clock, not after."

Something moved behind Seward's eyes — calculation, or the beginning of a revised calculation — and then he inclined his head, precisely the depth required by courtesy and not a fraction more.

"Seven o'clock," he said.

He crossed to the door. His hand was on the latch when Lincoln spoke again.

"Mr. Seward." The words were quiet, but they stopped the man's hand on the iron. "Judge Campbell will receive no further communications from this government until the cabinet has met. None. If he enquires, you will tell him the President is considering the matter. You will not tell him what the President is considering."

Seward turned. For a moment the two men regarded each other across the stifling room — the fire between them, the smell of hot iron and coal ash thick in the air, the distant music pressing in through the glass — and then Seward said, "I understand you, Mr. President," and went out.

The door closed.

Lincoln remained standing. He drew Anderson's dispatch from his coat pocket and unfolded it again. The paper was warm from his body. He read the final line once more — I await the government's instruction — and stood with it in his hands, the fire at his back, the celebration outside, the six weeks already running.

He had spent the morning taking an oath to preserve a thing that was, in measurable and practical terms, dissolving. The oath did not stop the dissolution. It only made him responsible for it. He had known this before he raised his hand over Taney's Bible, and he had raised his hand anyway, and now the knowing had a different quality — not the abstract knowledge of a man who has studied a problem, but the specific, physical knowledge of someone who has signed his name to it and cannot unsign it.

He would need to write to Anderson before the night was out. He would need to tell him something — that relief was coming, or that it was not, or that the government was deliberating, which was its own kind of answer and the least honest of the three. He did not yet know which it would be. He knew only that whatever he wrote would be the first act of a presidency that had, until this hour, existed only in the form of a promissory note, and that the note was now due, and that the man holding it was him.

He folded the dispatch and returned it to his pocket. He crossed to the desk, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and dipped the pen. The nib hovered above the page.

Outside, the band had found a steadier tempo. The crowd's murmur had thinned to something more dispersed, individual voices separable now from the general sound, the great assembly already coming apart into the particular lives that had composed it. In a few hours they would be in their homes, or their boardinghouses, or their taverns, and they would have an opinion about what they had heard, and that opinion would travel by post and by wire to every county in every state that still acknowledged the authority of the government he had just sworn to preserve.

The nib touched the paper.

Dear Major Anderson — he wrote, and stopped. The fire ticked behind him. Somewhere beyond the window, the music played on, bright and insistent, entirely indifferent to the fact that the man at the desk had not the faintest notion how to finish the sentence he had just begun, and that the garrison in Charleston Harbour would be eating its last flour before he found out.