Chapter 9: The Proviso

Scene 1

He had been reading since before the city woke, and the reading had made him dangerous.

The newspapers lay in a loose rank across the desk — the Union, the Intelligencer, the Baltimore Sun — and from each of them the same word rose, repeated until it ceased to be language and became something closer to a drumbeat. Proviso. Representative Wilmot's amendment, attached to the Two Million Dollar Bill on the evening of the eighth, had passed the House on a sectional vote, and the editors of this republic were already constructing their interpretations with the cheerful industry of men who have waited years for precisely this occasion.

Polk set down the Intelligencer and swept the remaining papers into a single stack, squaring their edges against the desk with a sharp double rap. He would not read another editorial. Editorials were the opinions of men who bore no responsibility for the consequences of opinion.

The curtains were drawn against the August morning, but the heat pressed through them regardless — not the clean heat of a Tennessee summer but the particular Washington variety, which arrived laden with the river's exhalations and settled upon the skin like a second garment. His collar was already damp. The taste of the air was brackish, faintly metallic, as though the Potomac itself had risen in the night and breathed into the room. He had not slept more than three hours.

The text of the amendment lay before him, copied in a clerk's hand onto a single sheet: Provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory. He had read it six times. The language was not subtle, but then Wilmot was not a subtle man — a Democrat from Pennsylvania, Polk's own party, who had cast his vote for the war appropriations and then attached this rider to the bill with the bright, uncomplicated enthusiasm of someone who had not yet learned to fear the thing he had detonated.

Polk pushed the breakfast tray to the far edge of the desk without looking at it. The coffee had gone cold; its smell had thickened into something rancid and vegetable.

A letter from Congressman Bayly of Virginia had arrived in the early post: if the amendment was not killed before it reached the Senate, the Southern members would refuse the appropriations bill entire. That was the arithmetic — plain, brutal, admitting of no negotiation. The army in Mexico, Taylor's men drawing rations on credit at Point Isabel, could not be made to wait upon the conscience of David Wilmot. If the appropriations failed, those men would be eating their mules within the month.

The note from Walker arrived at half past seven, carried by a Treasury clerk who retreated before Polk had broken the seal. Walker's hand was small and precise, the script of a man who committed nothing carelessly to paper: I am informed by a source I consider reliable that the Secretary of State supped on the evening of the tenth with Messrs. Hamlin and Dix at the residence of Mr. Burke, where the conversation turned, I am told, at length upon the question of the Proviso and the Northern vote. I thought it my duty to acquaint you with this intelligence before the cabinet assembles this afternoon.

Polk read it once. He opened the desk's left drawer, placed Walker's note inside, and locked it. The small click of the mechanism was the only sound in the room.

A bead of sweat ran into his left eye and he blotted it with his sleeve, smearing ink from the quill he had been holding. He stared at the dark comma drying on his cuff, and then he drew a fresh sheet toward him.

He did not write questions. He wrote names.

Three columns. The first: senators who would kill the amendment without persuasion. The second: senators who required persuasion. The third — shorter, written in a hand that pressed harder into the paper — senators whose positions were unknown to him because their loyalties ran through channels he did not control. Channels that ran, perhaps, through the dining room of Mr. Burke's residence on the evening of the tenth.

He counted the names in the second column. Nine. He would need six of them.

The clock on the mantel showed twenty minutes before eight. Six hours remained before the cabinet assembled. He uncapped the inkwell, dipped his pen, and began drafting the first of nine letters — each calibrated to its recipient, each containing the same essential communication: that the President of the United States regarded the Wilmot Proviso as an assault upon the war effort, and that he would remember, with the long memory of a man who controlled the federal patronage, how each senator had conducted himself in the days ahead.

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Scene 2

The cabinet assembled at two o'clock, and the August heat assembled with it.

Buchanan arrived to the quarter-hour, which Polk noted as one notes a card played with excessive care. The head of the State Department wore a new cravat, pale grey silk knotted with geometric precision, and took his seat at the table's far end with the composed deliberation of an actor who has rehearsed his entrance in a mirror. Walker settled opposite, already arranging his papers. Marcy sat at Polk's right hand, broad and unadorned as a courthouse pillar. Bancroft, Johnson, Mason — each in his appointed chair, the windows thrown open to a Pennsylvania Avenue that offered no relief.

The room smelled of wool and perspiration and the faint mineral char of the coal that had burned in the grate through the previous night's unexpected chill and left its ghost in the air. A horsefly had found its way in and circled the water pitcher with the idiot persistence of its kind. Somewhere below, a drayman cursed his team, the profanity floating up through the open casements and dying against the ceiling plaster.

Polk placed the text of the Wilmot Proviso on the table. A single page. He let them read it. Every man present had already read it twice over; they read it again because he required them to, and because the act of reading it together, in this room, under his eye, transformed it from a newspaper curiosity into the subject of a formal proceeding.

"Gentlemen." He waited until the last pair of eyes had lifted from the page. "This republic is engaged in a war that demands appropriations. A member of the House from Pennsylvania has seen fit to attach to those appropriations a condition that would govern the character of any territory we may acquire in consequence of that war." He paused. "I will have each man's position, stated plainly, for the record."

He began with Mason, who opposed. Then Johnson, who opposed. Then Bancroft, who said he opposed it while his gaze found a point on the wall above Polk's head, as though the answer might be read there in the plaster.

Walker said he opposed it without qualification. His eyes moved to Buchanan.

Marcy spoke before Buchanan could draw breath. "The army requires its appropriations. If this amendment kills the bill, General Taylor's men will be on half-rations before the Senate adjourns. Whatever serves the army is what I support."

The room's attention shifted to the far end of the table.

Buchanan adjusted the grey cravat — a minute gesture, thumb and forefinger at the knot — and drew breath with the deliberation of a man composing not a sentence but a fortification.

"Mr. President," he said, "it must be acknowledged that the Proviso, in its present form, presents this administration with difficulties that a more — that is to say, the principle of territorial limitation, while it exceeds the proper scope of a war appropriations measure, reflects a sincerity of conviction among our Northern colleagues that the administration would do well to — "

Polk placed both palms flat on the mahogany.

The horsefly struck the water pitcher with an audible tick. Ice cracked in the silver tray beneath it — a sharp, percussive report — and every man at the table flinched except Polk. The sound hung in the close air and faded. No one acknowledged it.

"Mr. Secretary." His voice did not rise. "Support, or oppose."

Buchanan's gaze found Polk's and held it. The tilted head, the one eye pulling slightly left of true, gave him the aspect of a man attempting to read two documents simultaneously and finding them irreconcilable.

"I oppose it," Buchanan said.

"That is the position of this cabinet." Polk removed his hands from the table. "I will require a memorandum from each of you confirming that opposition in writing, delivered to my secretary before five o'clock. Any man who finds he cannot sign such a memorandum will oblige me by tendering his resignation before he leaves this building."

He rose. The meeting was over.

Around the table, men reached for their papers, for their hats, for any object that gave their hands occupation. Walker's expression, half-turned toward Buchanan, carried the faint satisfaction of a man watching a predicted outcome confirm itself. Buchanan gathered his portfolio without haste, without meeting any eye in the room, and said nothing further.

He had been made to speak. He had been made to choose. And the word he had chosen could not be taken back.

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Scene 3

Marcy caught him in the corridor.

The other secretaries had dispersed — Bancroft toward the staircase, Cave Johnson calling for his hat — and the hallway held only the two of them. The late afternoon light fell in long bars through the tall windows, and the air carried the faint sweetness of cut grass rising from the lawn below, cut through with something sharper: the mineral heat of sun-baked stone from the portico steps.

"A word, Mr. President."

Polk stopped. Turned.

Marcy closed the distance between them in three strides. He kept his voice low, though there was no one within earshot.

"Taylor's situation. It is worse than you have been told."

"Speak."

"Point Isabel is running short. The quartermasters at Matamoros have been drawing on local credit for six weeks — buying on the account of the republic, which is to say on no account at all that the merchants will honour past the end of this month." Marcy did not soften it. "Three weeks of provisions. Perhaps less, depending on how you count what passes for salt pork in that climate. After that, General Taylor will be choosing between retreat and starvation."

A door slammed somewhere deeper in the mansion. Polk's hand came up a half-inch before he caught it and forced it down. He seized the marble windowsill behind him, the stone cool and unyielding against his palm.

"Three weeks," he said.

"Three weeks from today. The quartermasters are not estimating. They are reporting a number."

The Senate had not even received the bill. A week to refer it to committee. Another week of debate — longer, if the Proviso's supporters chose to make speeches. Two weeks at minimum before a vote, and that assumed the kind of cooperation the Senate had not extended to this administration since the day he took the oath.

"If the bill dies," Polk said, "Taylor's army dies with it. That is what Wilmot has done."

"That is what Wilmot has done. Whether he understands it or not."

Polk released the windowsill. He turned to face Marcy fully.

"I want a memorandum. Confidential. Supply dates, credit obligations, the quartermaster's exact accounting. Nothing softened, nothing rounded, nothing that permits a senator to suppose the situation is less than it is."

"For whom."

"For the nine men I intend to visit before the week is out. Each of them will read that memorandum in my presence, and each of them will understand that a vote against the bill is a vote to starve the army of the United States."

Marcy's jaw worked once. He had been a lawyer before he administered soldiers' fates, and he recognised the document's purpose without requiring explanation. A senator could dismiss an abstraction. He could not dismiss a quartermaster's ledger with a date written at the bottom.

"I will have it by morning," Marcy said.

"Tonight."

The word hung between them. Marcy heard in it what Polk intended him to hear: that three weeks permitted no mornings, no courtesies, no accommodation of any man's convenience, including the Secretary of War's.

"Tonight, then."

He turned and went back toward the cabinet room. Polk remained at the window. Through the glass he could see the lawn shimmering in the heat, and beyond it the rooftops of the city stretching toward the Capitol dome — the building where, tomorrow morning, men would arrive with Wilmot's rider in their coat pockets and the comfortable assumption that the administration's difficulties were not their emergency.

He would disabuse them of that assumption. One by one. With numbers.

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Scene 4

The study was dark when Buchanan came.

Polk had not lit a second lamp. The single flame threw a narrow column of light across the desk's surface and left the rest of the room in a brown, tobacco-scented murk — the dry cedar of the drawer linings, the ghost of some previous occupant's habits that no amount of airing had dispelled. The curtains were still drawn from morning. Polk sat behind the desk with his hands folded, and when Buchanan entered he did not rise.

Buchanan had brought papers. He arranged them across his knee — the rustle of the sheets loud in the silence — and cleared his throat with the small, preparatory sound of a practised advocate about to address the bench.

"I have given the matter considerable thought since this afternoon's proceedings." He unfolded the uppermost sheet. "It is my judgment — and I offer it as a judgment grounded in the necessities of the present session — that there exists a course by which the administration may satisfy both sections without sacrifice of principle."

Polk said nothing.

"The Missouri Compromise line. Extended to the Pacific. Thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, as the permanent boundary between slave and free territory in all lands acquired from the Mexican Republic." He smoothed the paper against his knee. "The South retains what lies below. The North accepts what lies above. This construction has precedent in the most solemn compact this republic has produced. It cannot be characterised as capitulation — "

"It can be characterised," Polk said, "as Wilmot's amendment wearing a different coat."

Buchanan's chin lifted. "I beg your pardon, sir. The two propositions are not — "

"They are identical in their essential concession. Both acknowledge that Congress possesses the authority to determine the character of territory acquired by this republic. The Proviso says Congress shall exclude slavery from all such territory. Your line says Congress shall exclude it from half. The principle is the same. You have merely haggled over the acreage."

The lamp flame bent sideways, stirred by some draught from the corridor, and the shadows rearranged themselves across the walls. Buchanan's fingers had gone still on the paper.

"I have reason to believe," Buchanan continued — and in the slight thinning of his voice Polk heard the effort it cost him to proceed — "from conversations I have had, hypothetically and without commitment, that two or three Northern members would receive such a proposal with considerable relief. The difficulty is not with territorial expansion but with the question of what character — "

Polk rose from his chair.

The movement was abrupt enough that Buchanan stopped. Polk came around the desk — not behind it, around it — and stood over Buchanan's chair, close enough that the smell of tallow and ink and his own unwashed collar was apparent to both of them. The tooth that had troubled him for three weeks sent a lance of pain through his jaw. He pressed his hand to his cheek, briefly, and then let it fall.

"You have been conducting conversations." He spoke the word conversations the way a prosecutor names a forgery — holding it up, turning it, letting the room see its counterfeit edges. "With Northern senators. On the question of how to modify the Proviso — which this cabinet determined this afternoon to oppose — and you come to me now with what you believe to be a solution."

"The conversations were hypothetical — "

"They were the conduct of a man positioning himself for the Democratic nomination in the middle of a war." The voice had not risen. It had dropped, which was worse. "You sat in that room four hours ago and said you opposed the Proviso. You said it in front of six witnesses. And now you arrive with a compromise that concedes its central principle, and I am to believe you reached this position between two o'clock and nightfall."

Buchanan's forefinger had begun its rapid percussion against the arm of the chair.

"I will say plainly what is before you," Polk said. "This cabinet, or your campaign. You cannot conduct both from this building."

Silence. The lamp guttered. The smell of hot tallow sharpened and then steadied.

Buchanan looked up at him. The head at its habitual angle, the gaze settling into something harder than Polk had seen from him before — not contrition, not calculation, but a cold recognition, deliberate and contained, of a blow received and not yet returned.

"I oppose the Proviso." Flat. Final.

Polk held his gaze for a long moment. Then he stepped back behind the desk and sat down.

Neither spoke. Buchanan gathered his papers from his knee, folded them once with deliberate precision, and placed them inside his coat. He rose. He crossed to the door without turning. The latch clicked. The corridor's smell — beeswax, damp plaster — entered briefly and was gone.

Polk sat in the diminished light. The tooth throbbed. He pressed his tongue against it and tasted iron.

He had meant to discipline a subordinate. He had created an adversary — one who would sit at the cabinet table tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until one of them left this city, conducting the republic's foreign affairs with the punctuality and competence and quiet, durable hatred of a man who remembers everything and has learned the value of patience.

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Scene 5

He wrote by feel more than light.

The oil lamp had burned low enough that the wick threw a reddish, unsteady column, and the shadows at the room's edges had thickened into something almost solid. Polk did not call for more oil. He had been sitting long enough that the chair's wooden back had pressed a familiar ache between his shoulder blades, and he did not wish to invite, by summoning a servant, any witness to the state of the room or the man in it.

The diary lay open before him. He had written three paragraphs in his habitual hand — clipped, each assertion delivered as verdict. He had recorded the cabinet meeting. He had recorded Marcy's assessment of Taylor's provisions. He had described the evening's conference with Buchanan in language so stripped of heat that a reader might have supposed two men had discussed an adjustment to postal routes.

He stopped writing.

He set down the pen and stood, and the act of standing — breaking the posture he had held since morning, the curved spine, the hunched shoulders, the head bent over paper — sent a wave of pain through his lower back that made him grip the desk's edge until it passed. He was forty-nine years old. He moved like a man of sixty.

He crossed to the window and drew the curtain.

The city lay below him in the August dark, its few gas lamps throwing circles of yellow light along Pennsylvania Avenue. The Capitol dome was a pale shape against the sky, unfinished, its scaffolding visible even at this distance — the republic's temple, half-built, open to the rain. He pressed his forehead against the glass. It was warm. Even the glass held the day's heat and would not release it.

From the avenue came the watchman's call — past eleven and all's well — the words worn smooth by repetition into pure sound, pure ritual.

All was not well.

The Proviso would die in the Senate. He would see to that — with Marcy's memorandum, with the nine letters drafted that morning, with every instrument of persuasion available to the executive. But the question the amendment had asked would not die with it. He had understood this, in the abstract, for months. What he understood now, standing at the glass with the night pressing against his forehead, was something more precise: that Buchanan had understood it too, and that his Missouri Compromise line — his 36°30' extended to the ocean — was not a statesman's solution but a statesman's confession. The line acknowledged that the question existed. Slave or free. Every river valley and desert basin and coastal plain from the Rio Grande to the Pacific shore. Every acre taken from Mexico asked it again. Presidential authority could determine the answer for a session, for a Congress, for a term. It could not prevent the asking.

He turned from the window.

The diary lay open on the desk, the ink drying on the last sentence he had written. He walked back to it and looked down at the page. The handwriting was steady, controlled, legible — twenty years of public life compressed into a hand that had learned to govern itself as rigorously as it had governed everything else.

He picked up the pen. He held it over the page.

He wrote: That the war's origins may be questioned by —

He stopped. The nib rested against the paper without moving. A small blot spread beneath it, dark and widening, and he lifted the pen before it could ruin the line.

He did not finish the sentence. A diary was a document, and documents survived their authors, and what he had understood — that the war he had made and the territory he would win carried within them a question that might one day crack this republic along its central seam — was not a thing a president committed to paper. Not while the war continued and the appropriations hung in the balance and the Secretary of State nursed his grievance in the dark.

He closed the diary. He locked the drawer.

He remained standing at the desk, his hand still on the key. Tomorrow Buchanan would arrive at the State Department and sit beneath his portrait of Jackson — the one Polk had noticed, on his single visit to those offices, was slightly larger than the portrait hanging in the Executive Mansion — and he would conduct the foreign policy of this republic with punctuality and competence, with every courtesy the office demanded and none that he felt. The accusation would not be forgotten. It would be folded away, as a man folds a promissory note, and kept in the dark until the rate of return justified its presentation. He would do his work. He would bide his time. He would find, when the season was right, a use for the memory of this evening.

That was tomorrow. Tonight, there remained the nine letters, two of which were still unfinished, and the Senate would convene in the morning, and Wilmot's rider was already in the hands of men who would carry it to the floor with the solemn enthusiasm of those who believe they are making history rather than unmaking an army. Polk pulled the nearest letter toward him, uncapped the inkwell, and dipped the pen.

The watchman's voice came up from the avenue again, fainter now, moving south — past eleven — and then the city swallowed it, and there was nothing but the scratch of the nib against the page and the question sealed in the locked drawer and the long night's work still ahead.