Chapter Nine: The Cabinet of Rivals

Scene 1

The coal fire had burned to ash by half past six, and Lincoln had not yet called for the boy to replenish it. He sat in the borrowed chair at the borrowed desk with his coat still on, his breath faintly visible in the cold air above the papers, and read.

Anderson's dispatch lay on the left side of the desk, its military folds pressed flat by his palm an hour ago, the creases still showing where the courier had carried it folded tight against his body. The handwriting was compact and precise — each letter formed with the economy of someone accustomed to writing under conditions that did not invite leisure. Lincoln had read it twice already. He was reading it a third time now, not because the words had changed but because he was building a case, and a careful lawyer reads the evidence until he knows it better than the man who made it.

The flour, Anderson had written, will sustain the command for approximately six weeks from the date of this communication. The date was the twenty-eighth of February. Six weeks from the twenty-eighth of February placed the garrison's extremity in the second week of April. Lincoln had done the arithmetic without reaching for paper — in his head, carried forward, checked, the way he had learned to do sums in the log schoolroom at Knob Creek. The salt pork would last somewhat longer. The flour was the binding constraint.

He set Anderson's dispatch to the left and drew Scott's memorandum to the right. The memorandum had arrived at seven o'clock by a War Department clerk who had knocked once, left it on Nicolay's desk, and departed without waiting for acknowledgment. Lincoln had retrieved it himself. Nicolay had said nothing. The Executive Mansion at dawn had the quality of a house that does not yet know it has been occupied.

Scott's memorandum ran to four pages, written in a clear, formal hand that was not Scott's own — dictated, then, to a secretary — and it opened with the General's customary tribute to his own experience before proceeding to its conclusions. Lincoln read it slowly, his right forefinger moving along the lines as it had when he was a boy learning to read by firelight, a habit he had never entirely abandoned when the text required close attention.

The memorandum recommended evacuation.

This was not a surprise. Scott had communicated as much in their meeting four days prior, and the logic deployed here was the same: the garrison's supply situation made any attempt at reinforcement a race against the calendar, and the calendar could not be won. Lincoln followed the argument carefully, noting where Scott's reasoning was sound and where it was not, and he arrived, on the second page, at the sentence that stopped him.

Major Anderson's command, Scott had written, cannot sustain itself beyond a period of four weeks from the present date, at which point the question of resupply will have been settled by necessity rather than policy.

Four weeks.

Lincoln turned the pencil end-over-end between his fingers, tapping it twice against the desk's surface. Then he placed the pencil's point against the word four and made a small mark in the margin.

He held both documents side by side, his eyes moving between them. Anderson had written six weeks. Scott had written four. The difference was not a rounding error. A week's provisions in a garrison of eighty men was not a rounding error. It was the difference between a decision that could be deliberated and one that could not — between a window that remained open and one that Scott had, in four words, declared already shut.

He set both documents down. Then he rose, crossed to the door, and opened it.

Nicolay looked up from his desk. The young man's coat was still buttoned; he had not been here long.

"I want General Scott's aide," Lincoln said. "Not a letter — the man himself, if he is in the city. This morning, if it can be managed."

Nicolay reached for his pen. "Yes, sir. Any message to accompany the request?"

"Tell him the President has read the memorandum and has a question about the arithmetic."

He closed the door.

Lincoln's writing hand had grown cold. He was aware of it when he pressed the pencil down to confirm the mark — the stiffness in his fingers, the resistance of muscles that had not moved in an hour. He returned to the desk and held his right hand over the coal grate, not close enough to burn but close enough to feel the faint warmth still rising from the embers. Outside, a cart moved along the avenue, its iron wheels distinct on the frozen ground. He stood there until the stiffness eased.

Then he returned to the desk and drew Anderson's dispatch toward him once more, the memorandum open beside it — six weeks in Anderson's careful hand, four weeks in Scott's, and between them a discrepancy that smelled less of military judgment than of something arranged in advance. Someone had compressed the window. Lincoln intended to know whether the compression was arithmetic or instruction.

He did not reach for the bell to call for coal.

---

Scene 2

The cabinet room smelled of fresh plaster and pomade, and beneath these, faintly, the ghost of cigar smoke that no quantity of January airing had yet expelled. Seven men had arranged themselves around the mahogany table with the careful imprecision of those who understood that where one sat at such a table was itself a form of speech. Chase had drawn his chair perhaps three inches nearer the head than protocol strictly warranted. Lincoln noted it. He said nothing.

Seward sat at Lincoln's right hand, which was where Seward believed he belonged, and produced from somewhere about his person a folded document that he did not yet open, setting it before him with the patience of a card player who knows the moment will come.

The fire in the grate was doing its insufficient work. The room was too large for it, and the cold came off the plaster walls in a way that the single grate could not answer. A draught moved through the ill-fitted casements, carrying with it the faint mineral smell of the avenue's frozen mud, and the papers nearest the window stirred. Lincoln leaned back in his chair and crossed his long legs, easy and unhurried, as though he had come to a church social rather than a cabinet convened in the shadow of a fortress running short of flour.

Seward began.

He began, as he always began, in the middle of the argument, as though the preamble were a courtesy he extended to lesser minds and had elected to waive. He spoke of General Scott. He spoke of the General's memorandum — the same memorandum that had reached Lincoln's desk that morning, the same memorandum with its compressed timeline, its four weeks where Anderson's own hand had written six — and he quoted from it with the fluency of a man who has never troubled himself to distinguish between a document's conclusions and his own. The military judgment, Seward said, was unambiguous. The garrison could not be relieved within the period remaining. Every naval officer of standing had said as much, or would say it when pressed.

Then he turned to Virginia.

He unfolded the letter. It was a single page, closely written, and Seward read from it in a measured voice — a Virginia Unionist, a man of standing in that convention now deliberating in Richmond, who had conveyed through channels that any attempt to resupply the garrison at Sumter would be read by the wavering delegates as a declaration of coercive intent. Virginia, Seward said, was balanced on a point no finer than a surveyor's pin. She would fall to whichever side applied the greater pressure. And if Virginia fell, Maryland followed, and if Maryland followed —

He let the room complete the geography.

He set the letter down. He said that the administration faced a choice not between war and peace but between the kind of war it would inherit and the kind it would manufacture. To evacuate the garrison was to accept a regrettable necessity and preserve the border states. To attempt resupply was to fire the first shot — not with powder and ball, but with the act itself, which the Southern press would render as an act of invasion before the supply ships had cleared the Potomac's mouth. The blood would be on the administration's hands. The border states would go. The war would be lost before it was begun.

He looked around the table.

Cameron nodded — a careful nod, the nod of a man who has decided that agreement costs nothing and disagreement might cost a great deal. Welles coughed, a sustained, productive cough that bent him forward over the table and interrupted Seward's survey of the room for ten full seconds, the old man's hand pressing against his sternum, his face reddening above his collar, the sound of it thick and wet in the cold air. When Welles straightened, Seward resumed his circuit: Bates, a measured inclination of the head. Smith, the same. Chase held himself very still, his spine imperceptibly lengthened, his eyes fixed at a point beyond the window.

Seward gathered the assents with the quiet satisfaction of a man counting his winnings before the hand is finished.

Lincoln uncrossed his legs.

He said nothing for a moment. The fire snapped once. The draught moved again through the casements, and the papers nearest the window stirred a second time, and no one moved to weight them.

Then he said, in a tone suited to a discussion of the morning's mail, that he would be grateful if each gentleman would submit his opinion in writing before the close of the week — his considered opinion, addressed to the President, on the question of whether it was possible to provision Fort Sumter, and if so whether it was wise to attempt it. He would value each man's individual judgment on the record.

He said he looked forward to reading them.

The room was very quiet. Seward's hand rested on the letter from Virginia. He looked at Lincoln with the expression of a player who has laid out a winning hand and watched the other decline to fold.

"Mr. President." Seward's voice was measured, but something had tightened beneath the measure. "I wonder whether written opinions, at this juncture, are the most expedient instrument. The military counsel is already on the record. What the moment requires, I should think, is a decision — not a further canvass of positions already known to this room."

"Then the written opinions will confirm what is already known," Lincoln said, "and cost us nothing but the ink."

Seward looked at him. Lincoln held his gaze with the amiable patience of a man who has all afternoon and knows that the other does not.

"I shall have mine to you by Thursday," Seward said at last.

"I am grateful," Lincoln said.

---

Scene 3

The corridor ran westward from the cabinet room toward the residential stairs, and the afternoon light through its tall window had gone the colour of cold pewter, the sun already falling behind the Potomac's far bank. Lincoln's boots sounded on the bare boards. Beside him, Chase walked with the contained precision of a man who had settled his pace before he rose from his chair and would not be hurried from it.

The other cabinet members had dispersed — Seward first, with a cordial word and a cigar retrieved from his breast pocket, Cameron next, Welles with a hand pressed to his sternum against another cough. Blair alone had lingered to say something further, but Lincoln had not encouraged it. There would be time for Blair.

Chase had not left. He had gathered his papers, set his chair back from the table with the careful attention of a man returning borrowed property, and then simply remained, as though the room had not yet released him.

They walked now in silence. The boards were cold underfoot, the sound of their steps distinct in the empty corridor. Chase spoke first.

"I confess, Mr. President, that the question before us admits no resolution that does not exact some cost from this administration's moral standing."

Lincoln did not answer immediately. Down the corridor, a servant crossed from one doorway to another carrying a rattling tea tray, and both men fell silent until the footsteps receded.

"You said something of the enslaved millions," Lincoln said, when the sound had gone. "In the meeting."

"I did."

"I want to hear that argument in full."

Chase straightened — not by much, his posture being already exemplary — but there was a perceptible elongation, as though he had found a quarter-inch of additional height somewhere above the collar.

"It has always been my conviction that the incoming administration will be judged not merely upon the question of Union, but upon the moral character of the means by which it seeks to preserve that Union. If the government's first significant act is the abandonment of a federal garrison — the lowering of the national flag under duress, before the eyes of every slaveholding interest in the South — then we have communicated to the millions held in bondage that this government values its own comfort above the principle of its founding."

He paused. The words had the quality of something rehearsed, though not dishonestly so.

"It is not a question, then, of the garrison's tactical value," Chase continued. "It is a question of what we say to history."

Lincoln slowed his stride, and then slowed further, until he had nearly stopped, and Chase had to turn and face him rather than continue the easy motion of walking and talking. The window was at their backs. Lincoln's shadow fell long down the corridor.

"Mr. Chase," he said. "If it fell to you — if you were the one to write the order — what would you say to Major Anderson's men when you told them to lower the flag?"

Chase blinked. The question had not arrived from the direction he had expected.

"I should say," he began, "that the government, in its deliberation —"

"Not to the government. To the men." Lincoln's voice was mild, unhurried, without edge. "They have been in that fort since December. They have reduced their rations. They are watching the batteries go up on every point of land around them. What do you write to those men, if you are the one to write it?"

The corridor was quiet. Somewhere below them, a door opened and closed.

Chase's hands, which had been at his sides, moved briefly before settling again. He looked toward the window.

"I should convey," he said, "the government's profound —"

"Gratitude."

"Yes."

"And then you tell them to come home."

"Yes."

Lincoln waited.

"It is a terrible thing to write," Chase said. The elevated register had dropped, fractionally, into something less constructed. "I do not pretend otherwise. But the alternative —" He stopped. He had arrived somewhere he had not intended to arrive, and he stood there a moment, visibly calculating the distance back to his argument.

"The alternative," Lincoln said, very quietly, "is what I am trying to understand."

Chase looked at him then — not the careful, measuring look of the cabinet table, but something more direct, and less certain.

"Mr. President." Chase's voice had steadied again, the register climbing back toward its habitual elevation. "I will say this plainly, since you have asked for plainness. If the written opinions reach you by Thursday, and if they counsel evacuation as I expect the majority will, you will be under very considerable pressure to act upon that counsel before the week is out. Seward will see to it. He has already spoken to Scott's office — I have this on sufficient authority — and the General's aide stands prepared to certify that the four-week figure admits of no revision upward." He paused. "You asked for the arithmetic this morning. You will not receive it from Scott's man. What you will receive is a confirmation of the memorandum."

Lincoln regarded him. The pewter light lay across both their faces.

"You have sufficient authority for that."

"I do."

"Then I am grateful you have told me." Lincoln resumed walking. After a moment, Chase fell into step beside him. "I shall want your written opinion by Thursday as well, Mr. Chase. Your own judgment — not the majority's."

"You will have it," Chase said.

They reached the foot of the residential stairs. Lincoln put his hand on the newel post and did not yet ascend.

"I have not yet submitted my written opinion," Chase said.

"I know it," Lincoln said. "Write it tonight, while the argument is still unsettled in your mind. A settled argument makes a poorer document."

He said it the way another man might say good evening — without inflection, without apparent weight — and yet Chase stood at the foot of the stairs a moment after Lincoln had gone up, his hand not quite reaching for the banister, his gaze fixed on the middle distance where the thought had landed and not yet dissolved.

---

Scene 4

The gaslight had been lit against the early dusk, and the maps on the table drank the light unevenly — Charleston Harbor rendered in pale ink, its channels and shoals and the small, squared shape of Fort Sumter sitting at the harbor's throat like a bone that could not be swallowed and would not come free. Lincoln stood over it with his coat still on, one hand pressed flat against the table's edge, the other tracing the outer ring of Confederate battery positions along Morris Island. The paper was cold under his fingertip. Fox had arranged the charts with a naval officer's precision, each one overlapping the last by exactly the correct margin, and Blair stood at the room's far end, his argument rehearsed so many times it had curdled into restlessness — a restlessness that showed in the set of his shoulders, in the way his hands would not be still.

"The approach from the northeast," Fox said, moving his hand across the channel. He was compact and direct, his syntax clipped to the bone by years of giving orders in wind. "The current runs at three knots at the flood. Small boats — hired sloops, nothing that draws the eye — could ride it in under two hours from the bar."

"At night."

"Necessarily, sir. A moonless night. The batteries on Morris Island cannot depress their guns sufficiently to strike a vessel running close under the channel wall. Their field of elevation was designed for a ship of the line, not a flat-bottomed provision boat."

Lincoln traced the outline of the harbor again, slowly, as though committing the geography to his body as well as his mind. His finger found Fort Sumter's position and rested there while Fox spoke.

"What of Cummings Point?"

Fox paused. A coal shifted in the grate behind them, settling with a dry report. The smell of coal smoke sharpened briefly in the room.

"That," Fox said, "is the difficulty."

Blair moved from the far end of the room, not quite interrupting, but his boots were loud on the floor. "The difficulty has an answer. Tell him."

"Mr. Blair." Lincoln did not look up from the map. "Let Mr. Fox speak."

Fox spread both hands over the chart. "A battery completed at Cummings Point commands the main ship channel at a range of twelve hundred yards. Plunging fire. A single gun crew that knows its business could sink a provision sloop before she reaches the fort's water gate." He said it without decoration, the way a surgeon names a complication. "If the battery is complete, the plan fails."

The room held the admission. Lincoln's hand remained on Sumter's position.

"Is it complete?"

"As of the twenty-second of February, no." Fox reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet — a letter, Lincoln could see, written in a cramped hand on what appeared to be commercial stationery. "A naval colleague stationed at Charleston before the secession ordinance. He writes that the emplacements there were framed but not yet mounted. The traversing platforms were unfinished. The garrison at the Point was small and the work was proceeding slowly."

Lincoln straightened. His back seized — a spasm from hours of sitting — and he pressed his fist into the small of his back and stood rigid for a moment before the pain released, his expression neither announcing the discomfort nor dismissing it. Then he took Fox's letter and read it.

"How long," he said, "before the platforms are finished."

"Three weeks. Perhaps four. My correspondent estimated mid-April at the earliest, if the work continued at its present pace."

Mid-April. Lincoln set the letter down on the map. Anderson's flour would last to mid-April. Fox's window would close at mid-April. The two deadlines were not parallel lines — they were the same line, narrowing to a single point, and beyond that point there was nothing to navigate toward.

"So." He studied the chart. "We have perhaps three weeks in which a resupply by small boat is physically possible. And Major Anderson has perhaps the same interval before his garrison can no longer feed itself."

"That is my understanding," Fox said.

Blair could not contain it any longer. "Then the question is decided, Mr. President. We must move within the fortnight or not at all."

Lincoln did not answer him. He picked up Fox's letter again and read the passage about the traversing platforms a second time, his eyes moving without haste. Blair watched him. Fox watched him. The gaslight hissed. The coal in the grate ticked and settled, and the smell of it thickened in the close air of the room.

"Mr. Fox," Lincoln said, "I will want your estimate of what vessels are required and what provisions they can carry. In writing, if you please. By nightfall."

"Yes, sir."

"And the moon phase for the first two weeks of April."

"I have it already." Fox touched the second chart, a tidal table, its columns close-printed and exact.

Blair stepped forward, placing both hands on the table's edge across from Lincoln, his weight shifting onto his palms. "Mr. President. I must speak plainly. If we wait upon written estimates and tidal tables, we will have waited too long. The commissioners from Montgomery are at this moment in rooms on Pennsylvania Avenue awaiting an answer on Sumter's disposition. Seward has been in communication with them — I have this from a source I will not name but whose reliability I will warrant with my office. Whatever Seward has told them, it has bought us days, not weeks. If they receive word that this administration is conducting feasibility studies rather than acting, they will conclude that the government intends to move — and Beauregard will be ordered to complete those batteries on an accelerated schedule." He looked at Lincoln across the map. "We do not have until Thursday."

The gaslight hissed. Somewhere in the corridor beyond the closed door, a clock struck the half-hour.

Lincoln looked at the map — at the battery positions Blair's words had just made more urgent, at the channel Fox's letter had just made more precarious, at the harbor's pale ink geography that now contained, as though it had always contained it, the reckoning of eighty-three men and their remaining flour. He looked at these things for a long moment without speaking, his hands at his sides, quite still.

Then he turned to Fox.

"The moon phase," he said. "What is it for the night of the ninth of April?"

Fox consulted the tidal table without hesitation. "New moon, sir. Full dark."

"And the current at the flood?"

"Three knots, as I said. Favourable."

Lincoln nodded once. He did not look at Blair. He took his coat from the chair where he had set it and moved toward the door, pausing with his hand on the frame.

"Mr. Fox. I will have your written estimate tonight. Not by nightfall — now, before you leave this room. Set it down while the charts are before you." He looked back at the pale rendering of the harbor — at the small square where eighty-three men were eating their way through what remained of their flour while the men at Cummings Point hammered platforms into place, and the Confederate commissioners sat in their hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting for a promise that Seward had made and Lincoln had not authorized and Blair did not yet know existed, and while in Scott's office, at this very hour, an aide was preparing a certification that the four-week figure admitted of no revision upward. "And Mr. Blair — I will want to know the name of your source before morning. Not because I doubt your word. Because by morning, that source may be the only man in Washington whose account of Seward's communications I can verify against my own."

He went out. The door did not close fully behind him; the latch did not catch. Through the gap came the sound of his boots on the corridor boards, receding, and then the sound of another door opening somewhere deeper in the house, and then nothing.

Blair looked at Fox across the map of Charleston Harbor.

"He already knows," Blair said.

Fox said nothing. He reached for the tidal table and began to fold it with the careful economy of a man preparing to move quickly.