1
The package was very tightly sealed.
There was a heavy cord around it fastened with thick blobs of wax and Tad Lincoln, who had been christened Thomas, stood fidgeting while his father worked at it patiently, with the old horn-handled knife that opened and shut with a sharp click.
Outside was the gloom of late December. That December of 1863, when the fortunes of the Federal armies had taken a little swing upward, but when war still lay like a poisonous, tragic, and heartbreaking shadow over a whole country. But to Tad Lincoln December meant Christmas, and packages meant surprises, important to a ten-year-old boy.
Tad stood first on one foot, then the other, impatiently, because Papa was so slow in opening this package. A round-faced boy, with his mother’s brown eyes and hair, he was a sturdy figure in the miniature uniform of a Union colonel that his father had had made for him. The coat fitted him jauntily, all the brass buttons fastened up in regulation fashion; there were epaulets and braid and long trousers lying properly over his toes, so that the copper toes of his boots showed. He had a belt and a sword, but he was not wearing them now. Swords were for engagements, reviews, and parades, the officers of Company K had instructed him. Among friends indoors an officer took off his belt and hung it in a safe place.
His father’s fingers were mighty long and bony, Tad was thinking, and awkward, too. One thumbnail was thicker and darker than the other nails and Tad touched it gently with his forefinger.
“What makes your thumb like that, Papa?” he asked.
The long yellowed hand put down the knife and the deep-set, steel-gray eyes of Abraham Lincoln studied the thumb intently as though he had never seen it before.
“Once there was an ax, Tad,” he drawled, his heavy eyebrows flicking up and down, his long mouth quirked up at one corner. “It didn’t want to go where I aimed it, so I said, says I, now who is boss here, Mister Ax, you or Abe Lincoln? You chop where I aim for you to chop, Mister Ax. So I made it hit where I wanted it to hit but it jumped back and took a whack at me just to show me that it could be the boss if it wanted to.”
“It might have cut your hand off,” worried Tad, still rubbing the dark nail.
“It might—but it didn’t. It was a well-meaning ax. Just independent, like a lot of people.”
“People take whacks at you, don’t they? I hear about it,” Tad said.
“Yes, some of ’em do.” Lincoln picked up the knife again, poked at the stubborn seals. “But mostly afterwards they cooperate.”
“Those people in New York didn’t,” insisted Tad. “Mother was scared to death when those draft riots were on and people yelled at her in that store. The police had to stand all around us with guns and you know something? Bob was scared but I wasn’t. Ole Bob was plumb scared green.”
“That was a bad time, son.” A seal came loose at last and fell in scarlet fragments to the rug. He attacked a second one, gripping the knife, the skin stretched tight over his fleshless knuckles. “It was bad because people weren’t mad at you. They were mad at me, not at Bob or your mother. They didn’t want to be drafted to fight in this war and I said they had to be drafted.”
“Well, golly, you’ve got to have soldiers! General Grant and General Rosecrans and everybody are yelling for more troops. You have to get ’em, you can’t make ’em out of air. Hurry and open it, Papa. Don’t you want to see what’s in it?”
“I think I know what’s in it. Yes, Tad,” he went on musingly, as though he talked to himself. “I’m supposed to make soldiers out of air; anyway the New York newspapers seemed to think so. Make ’em out of air and feed ’em on air and give ’em air to shoot with.”
“And then if General Lee licks us you’re to blame!” cried Tad. “Oh, I know, John Hay and Mr. Nicolay hide the papers but I find ’em. Papa, I read where one New York paper called you a gorilla.”
“What do you think, Tad? Don’t I look like one a little?” Lincoln dropped the knife, shambled bent across the room, his long arms dangling, his hands almost touching the floor. As the boy drew back aghast he bared his long teeth and snarled and Tad began to cry suddenly.
“No—no! Don’t do it!”
Lincoln laughed loudly, lifted him, setting the lad on his knee, holding him close. “For a man wearing the Union uniform, you scare easy, Colonel,” he teased. “Remember this, Tad. Names never hurt anybody. And the gorilla is one beast that’s never been tamed and only a heavy chain can master him.”
“Open the box,” gulped Tad, scrubbing his eyes with the cuff of his blue Union coat. “If anybody sent me a Christmas present, I’d want to know what it was.”
Lincoln dug the last seal away, cut the cord, and tore off the heavy paper. “Now, John Hay would say I’m a fool to open this,” he remarked. “He’ll say there could be something in it to blind or cripple me.”
“Maybe you’d better not, Papa,” Tad cried anxiously. “Let me call somebody.”
“No, Tad. I trust the man who brought it and I know what’s in it. It isn’t a Christmas present exactly. I earned it in a kind of a way. Look!” He opened the heavy box and the smaller one inside that was covered with gold-colored plush.
“A watch!” exclaimed the boy.
“A solid gold watch.” Lincoln held it out carefully on his big palm. “From Mr. James Hoes, Esquire, of Chicago. I won it, Tad. Mr. Hoes offered the watch as a prize for the one making the biggest contribution of funds to their Sanitary Commission fair. I sent them a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and they auctioned it off for three thousand dollars, so I won the watch.”
“You’ve already got a watch, Papa, but I haven’t got one,” said Tad eagerly.
Lincoln drew his old watch from his pocket, loosed it from the chain and seals. “I don’t have a solid gold watch. This old turnip is sort of worn. I guess I timed too many speeches and juries with it. But you’re not big enough for a watch, Tad. Not till you can wear a vest and have enough stomach to hold up a chain.”
“Willie had a vest and he wasn’t so very much bigger than me,” argued Tad.
A shadow of pain ran over his father’s gaunt face and the tears, always quick when any emotion stirred him, were bright in his sunken eyes. The agony of Willie’s untimely death was still raw and aching in his heart.
“Willie was twelve years old, Tad. When you are twelve you can have a vest.”
“And a watch?”
“And a watch. Not this one.” Lincoln clicked the fastening of the bright new timepiece and dropped it into his pocket, along with the key that wound it. “I guess Bob will have to have this old one. Bob’s a man now and a man needs a watch.”
“He thinks he’s a man just because he can shave,” Tad scoffed. He studied his father’s face for a moment. “Why did you grow a beard, Papa? You didn’t have a beard when I was a little boy.”
“You’re still a little boy, fellow.” Lincoln gave him a poke in ribs. “Maybe I raised these whiskers because a little girl in New York asked me to. Maybe I just did it to keep my chin warm.”
“All Bob has is little patches in front of his ears. They look silly.”
Lincoln lifted his long body erect and walked to the window.
“You’d better be respectful to your big brother, Tad,” he said dryly. “Some of the newspapers that don’t like me are printing that Bob Lincoln has made a million dollars out of this war. For a young fellow still in Harvard only twenty years old, I’d say he had uncanny perspicacity.”
Tad frowned thoughtfully. “It’s a lie, ain’t it, Papa?” In his agitation the boy’s tricky palate betrayed him as it often did. “It’s big, dirty rie!”
Lincoln’s bony shoulders twitched upward, sagged with resignation. “Son, if all the lies that have been printed about the Lincolns were piled up in a heap, they’d reach near to the top of that monument out yonder.”
Tad came to stand beside him and looked out of the half-finished shaft that would some day honor Washington. Now it was only a beginning, lost in a spidery web of scaffolding.
“Be plenty tall,” he observed. “If Bob had all that money, would it reach to the top, Papa? He could buy everything he wanted, couldn’t he? Horses and carriages and gold watches and everything. Can’t you put people in jail for telling such lies? You’re the president.”
Lincoln stood still, looking down on the trampled mall where a herd of cattle pastured, beef animals gathered to feed the Army of the Potomac. His eyes took on the faraway inscrutable look that so often baffled his intimates and infuriated his enemies; the look that lost itself on the horizon of a great land torn by hate and drenched in an anguish of blood and fire. Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, had deepened that hurt in his eyes and cut new lines about his mouth and brooding brows. Three years of war, and in the nation there seethed a dozen angry factions. Copperheads, only by a miracle defeated in Ohio; furious mobs resisting conscription in the cities; even in the Congress, oppositionists, critics, outright enemies.
Only a few weeks since, he had stood facing that raw November wind on the Gettysburg hill, speaking that little piece that now he was embarrassed to remember, the speech that the papers had dismissed as insignificant, dedicating the ground where slept more than sixty thousand Union and Confederate dead. The dull ache in Abraham Lincoln’s heart turned bitter as he thought of his own son, who should be in uniform and who was growing restless and unhappy at being the one young man of army age who was not permitted to fight for his country. Yet he dared not let Robert enlist. The President’s son would be a prime hostage should he be captured, and used no doubt to wring concessions from his father.
“Let’s go show Mama the watch.” He shook off his dismal musings and scrubbed Tad’s brown head with the flat of his palm, straightening the collar of the uniform that was Tad’s pride and glory.
Tad looked up confidingly. “You know what Mama is worrying about, Papa? She owes an awful lot of money in New York. She’s afraid you’ll find it out. She said on the train when we came home that I mustn’t tell you all the things she bought because you had troubles enough to kill three men.”
Lincoln hunched a shoulder, stretching his lips into a dry smile. “See how my back is breaking down, Tad? That’s General Rosecrans. And this side is General McClellan and General Meade made it worse when he let Lee get away across the river.”
“You cried then, I remember. Men don’t cry.”
Strong men had wept enough tears to put the Potomac in flood these last years, Lincoln was thinking. “When will it end?” he said aloud, with a groan. John Hay, his faithful secretary, looked up quickly from his desk in the outer room.
“When we’ve killed all the Rebs, I reckon,” said Tad complacently. “But if we killed ’em all I’d have a lot of uncles killed, wouldn’t I? I had one killed at Chickamauga already, my uncle Helm.—He was a general,” he told John Hay.
“It’s happened in a good many families, Tad,” Hay said. “That’s because we’re all Americans.”
“Well, my mother was Southern to begin with,” declared Tad, “so I’m kind of half Southern but I got over it.”
“Southerners are good folks, son,” Lincoln admonished him. “Fine people most of them. Just mistaken, that’s all—just mistaken.”
“They fight good,” was Tad’s comment, as they went down the hall.
Abraham Lincoln always stepped carefully and quietly in this big house. He had never been at home in the White House. He always had a secret, haunting feeling of guilt as though he were a guest and a strange, uneasy, even an unworthy, guest. Mary, his wife, had no such inhibitions. She loved to sweep down the wide stairway, her widely flounced skirts moving elegantly over her hoops, her tight small bosom, her round white arms and her round white chin held proudly and complacently. All this was her due, her manner said, and her husband’s humility and trick of effacing himself occasionally irked and angered her.
She was writing a letter at a desk when they entered her sitting room. The intent creases in her brow softened as the boy ran to her.
“Look Mama—look at Papa’s new solid gold watch! He got it for the ’Mancipation Proclamation.”
Lincoln pulled out the watch, grinning boyishly. Mary’s eyes brightened as she fingered the handsomely engraved case.
“Why, it must be terribly expensive,” she approved. “What does Tad mean about the Proclamation?”
“I sent a copy to Chicago. They auctioned it off.”
“For three thousand dollars,” added Tad.
“My Heaven, you mean they got three thousand dollars just for that piece of paper?” exclaimed Mary.
“It was a pretty important paper, Mary, to a million or so poor black people anyway. A copy would be a historic memento a hundred years from now. Understand—” he fended off the small glint of avidity that so often troubled him in Mary Lincoln’s pale gray eyes “—this was a charity thing. For their fair out there in Chicago.”
“You only made one copy?” She turned the watch in her small, plumb fingers.
He hedged uneasily sensing the trend of her thinking. “I made one or two for old friends. No—” he raised a hand “—I’m not making any more, so put that idea out of your mind.”
She flared. “Why do you always accuse me of things I’m not even thinking?” she cried angrily.
“Maybe because I know you better than you know yourself, my dear,” he said gently. “You were thinking that this is a nice watch but that three thousand dollars is three thousand dollars.”
“Well, it is a nice watch but it never cost that much money,” she admitted grudgingly.
“Mary, this watch was a prize. It was competition. Anybody else could have won it, anybody who contributed more to their fair than I did.” He took the watch from her hands and slid it back to his pocket. “Here—” he handed her the old one—“put this away. You can give it to Bob when he comes home. Run along now, Tad, I’ve got work to do.”
Tad slipped out of the room a bit disconcerted. Mama ought not to have got mad. She was trying not to get mad so often, his father assured him. They had to help her, be careful not to provoke her. Tad skittered down the long stairs almost colliding with a workman who carried a stepladder, with a long wreath of greenery hung over his shoulder.
“What’s that for?” the boy demanded.
“For the Christmas receptions and things. Decorations. Don’t know how I’ll get it hung. Can’t drive no nails in this wall. Hard as rock. Nails just bends double.”
“You could glue it,” suggested Tad helpfully.
“Yah!” scorned the workman. “Get along out of my way, boy.”
“My father is the President!” stated Tad, sternly, drawing himself up in his uniform.
“He is that, but you ain’t—nor no colonel either.”
“I am so. I’m an honorary colonel.”
“Call it ornery and I’ll agree. Now quit bothering me. I’ve got to figure where to put up two Christmas trees.”
“Two?” Tad’s eyes widened.
“One down here and one up yonder—private, for you I reckon. So everybody wants to get a favor out of your Pa can send you a present.”
“All I want,” sighed Tad, backing off to watch the man ascend the ladder, “is my nanny goat back.”
“Your nanny goat has likely been made into stew by this time. You won’t be driving a goat team through this house any more, busting up things and ruinin’ the floors.”
“I bet I get her back,” bragged Tad. “All Company K is helping me look for her.”
“Soldiers have got more important things to do than hunt goats,” stated the man from his perch. “They got to find out who put that bullet through your old man’s hat.”
Tad was galvanized with excitement. “Hey! He never told me.” He tore back up the stairs.
Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, was just coming out of his father’s office. Tad backed off and flattened himself against the wall. Mr. Stanton was running the war; he was tall and grim with a long gray beard but no mustache to soften a stern mouth, and his eyes could look very hard and coldly at a boy through his round spectacles. Behind Stanton marched Senator Sumner and Tad knew him too. Senator Sumner was always mad about something and now, as he strode past the boy, Tad heard him mutter angrily, “Amnesty! Amnesty! I’d give North Carolina amnesty at the end of a rope!”
Tad wriggled behind the visitor and slipped in before anyone closed the door. He marched straight to the desk where John Hay was putting papers in envelopes and licking the flaps.
“Who shot a bullet through my father’s hat?” he demanded.
Hay pressed down the flap with a fist. “Who told you that, Colonel Thomas Lincoln?” he inquired with careful unconcern.
“You never told me,” stormed Tad, “nor my father—nor Mama.”
“Your mother doesn’t know about it. We hope she’ll never know. Also we hope your father won’t ride alone out there at the Soldier’s Home any more.”
“Cavalry ride with him. With drawn sabers.”
“Now they do. But he rode alone out there and somebody shot a bullet through the top of his high silk hat. He doesn’t want his family or anybody worried about it, so I wouldn’t mention it if I were you, Colonel.”
“I won’t.” Tad was flattered by being addressed as colonel, and he liked his father’s grave secretary. He obeyed John Hay more readily than any one else. “But I want to see the hat.”
“We burned the hat. Too bad—it was a good eight-dollar hat.” Hay folded another sheet after verifying the scrawled signature: A. Lincoln. “We burned it by order of the President.”
Tad looked a trifle shaken. He came close and leaned on the desk. “Why do people want to kill my father, Mr. Hay? They do. I know. That’s why we have Company K here in the house and all over the yard.”
John Hay shook his head. “This is war, Tad. You could ask, why is there a war? Why are there millions of people over there across the river who’d liked to blow up this town and kill everybody in it? Everybody who stands for the Union. Give me an answer to that and I’ll answer your why. It’s a black cloud of hate, Colonel, smothering everything decent in the country. Maybe it will lift some day. Meanwhile there’s not much sense to it.”
“Maybe some of those mean Secesh over there stole my nanny goat! I have to go out and see if the boys have heard anything about her. She was a nice goat. She liked me; she licked my fingers. She wouldn’t just run off like Papa said.”
“Maybe,” remarked Hay, “she went over to see why General Meade let Lee’s army get away from him. Go hunt your goat and don’t bother your father. He’s had people swarming in there for the last hour.”
“All the women,” observed Tad, wise beyond his years, “have got a boy they want to be a colonel or a captain. And all the men want to know why Papa doesn’t take Richmond.”
“Get on out of here, Tad, or I won’t give you any Christmas present.”
“You know what I want,” stated Tad at the door. “My nanny goat back.”