CHAPTER ONE
SATURDAY, JULY 31, 1875
I’ll confess that I’d longed for a son—what new daddy doesn’t?—but I wouldn’t swap a bare-knuckled champion-to-be for the tiny girl who was smiling and squirming in Clara’s arms. Helen was four and a half months old, and she still had a sweetness I could smell halfway across the room. She started to squeal.
“Your turn,” Clara said.
“I’m not good at this,” I protested.
“Neither was I.”
She had a point, although I didn’t say so. I unbent from my burgundy bergère and reached across and took Helen into my arms. I began to rock her. The squealing ceased.
Clara beamed at me. She was nice enough not to tease.
“So, when’s the next one?” I said, surprising myself.
“I would imagine that is partly up to you,” Clara replied.
For a young woman reared on Millionaires’ Row, in this prim and proper age, Clara could be astonishingly frank about the practicalities of life. We were sitting in her father’s library, the rosewood shelves full of books with uncracked spines, in his Italianate mansion on suave and stately Euclid avenue, in Cleveland. This was where any American should aspire to live, even (or especially) if the money wasn’t his own. Mine wasn’t. I couldn’t help but hear the hammering next door, from the workmen building my new house. I mean our house—Clara’s and little Helen’s and mine. Actually, I mean his house, my father-in-law’s, Amasa Stone’s. It was his wedding gift, and naturally it came with conditions. We had left New York behind, after my five happy years at the Tribune, and had been nesting under Amasa’s (pardon me, Mr. Stone’s) roof for eight weeks, four days, and…let me think…thirteen and a half hours now. But who’s counting?
I worried that I’d made a deal with the devil. Not that Amasa Stone was a devil. He generally meant well, in a hard-nosed way, putting his own interests first. But that’s what people do, particularly self-made millionaires in a world that worships wealth, so I tried to keep my expectations low and my disappointments to a minimum. With mixed success, I might add. My job henceforth was to administer Amasa’s investments, in railroads and steel mills, in oil refining and banks, in stocks and silver, after the financial panic of ’seventy-three had nearly ruined him. (Not even Clara knew that.) My position, vaguely drawn, put me under Amasa’s thumb as well as his roof. But the work itself didn’t sound terribly taxing, and I figured that having my father-in-law finance our bread crusts would give me time to write my half of the epic biography of Lincoln that Nicolay and I had pondered ad nauseam over late-night brandies. Here, something was always in the larder, even if I didn’t know what a larder was. How lucky was I, at what I hoped was a tolerable cost in self-respect. Everything in life had its pluses and minuses, its benefits and costs—wasn’t that so? The goal was to unbalance them rightly.
Moving to Cleveland, not incidentally, made Clara happy, which she hadn’t been in New York. She was too reserved, too sensible—too pure of heart, if I may exaggerate, although not by a lot—to fit in comfortably in the East. I looked across at her. The baby had taken nothing from her health or good looks. She was the kindest person I’d ever known, but it was a kindness backed by steel. She had an unruffled sort of face, unlined, not delicate but handsome, with unapologetic cheeks and a determined chin. Her hair was braided loosely into a bun, and her dark sparkling eyes could peer inside you without seeming to try. There was nothing flimsy about her; her bosom was ample enough to hide in. She was twenty-five years old, to my thirty-six, yet she was sturdy and serene—and content—in a way I could only dream of. Clara was without guile. I had enough for the both of us.
Helen was wriggling again. I was ready to restore her to her mother’s embrace when there was a knock at the door, too deferential for Amasa. The butler entered. He was a black gentleman with a fringe of white hair around a lived-in face. He carried a silver platter on his fingertips as if he were a waiter at Delmonico’s.
“For you, sir,” he said.
A yellow envelope lay on the platter. Across the top, Gothic script announced:
Western Union Telegraph
Amasa owned a chunk of that, too. Scrawled underneath:
Mr. John Hay, Esq.
I could guess who had sent it—Whitelaw Reid, who had been my nominal boss and boon companion at the New-York Tribune. The Esquire was his idea of a jab.
I handed Helen back to Clara and used my bone-handled pocketknife to slit open the envelope.
My dear Hay, Andrew Johnson died this morning in Elizabethton, wilds of East Tennessee. The most hated man in America. Can you go? Reid
Can I? My wife and daughter would fare just fine without me, and my father-in-law would sputter at my gallivanting and then acquiesce. Occasionally I needed to do something absurd.
* * *
I caught the noon train south, toward Columbus. No trouble with the reservations, not when your father-in-law is a director of the railroad and of four or five others. I had a compartment to myself. It was paneled in mahogany, curtained in silk, upholstered in velvet, trimmed in ebony and gold, carpeted in a tapestry caressing my feet—a testament to what my pal Clemens has dubbed the Gilded Age. But what, pray tell, was wrong with gilded?
The conductor brought me the Columbus newspapers. The printers’ strike in Kentucky, the anthracite coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania, the weavers’ strike in Massachusetts, the shoe cutters’ strike in New York—what on earth was the world coming to? I tried not to feel nostalgic for the blood and terror of civil war. At least right and wrong had seemed clear then, and the imperatives were obvious to all. Things were different now. I was a Republican to the bone, but I pined for the days when Labor hadn’t loathed Capital, and capitalism hadn’t been running amok. Its titans reigned as tyrants greedier than tsars. Vanderbilt was buying up railroads—Amasa’s, among others—and a Clevelander named Rockefeller was busy cornering the market in oil refining. This much was clear: The pastoral America was passing. The horse’s or ox’s pace was giving way to the bustle of rail. Industry, enterprise, expansion, ambition, acquisitiveness, extravagance, ostentation—anything worth doing was worth overdoing.
Below the front-page dispatches on the Missouri floods and the latest in the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s sensational trial for adultery, The Dispatch ran a short item:
Andy Johnson’s Apoplexy.
GREENEVILLE, TENN., July 31—Ex-President Johnson received a very severe stroke of paralysis at 4 o’clock on Wednesday at his daughter’s residence in Carter county. Feeling has been partially restored to his left side. He speaks intelligently, and hopes are entertained of his recovery.
Old news.
I tried to picture the dear departed. Physically, ol’ Andy had a presence. He was of solid build, with a massive head, a jut-jawed face, piercing eyes, thick hair to his earlobes. He was invariably clad in the style of the old statesmen, in doeskin trousers and a black broadcloth coat. I had never seen the man smile. The last time I had seen him at all (not counting the half hour he had hovered by Lincoln’s deathbed during that awful, awful night), he was drunk. That was on the fourth day of March in ’sixty-five, at the inauguration for Lincoln’s second term as president and ol’ Andy’s first as vice president. Before the ceremony started, he had gulped down a tumbler of whisky—blaming his unfinished recovery from typhoid fever—and then another and, as he was leaving to be sworn in, yet a third. (I had this on good authority, from Hannibal Hamlin, the man whose job he took.) He was sozzled when he delivered his inaugural address, ranting at the cabinet, lionizing “the people,” embarrassing everyone in sight, possibly including himself, until Hamlin prevailed on him to stop. Lincoln forgave him—of course!—but I am a lesser soul.
I stared out of the window awhile. The hills near Cleveland had slipped behind us, and the land lay as flat as a windless sea. Wood fences that used to be white surrounded fields of wheat and corn, strewn with red barns (red paint was the cheapest) and silos and stables. Once upon a time, or so I’d heard, a squirrel could scamper from the Atlantic shoreline clear to Ohio without touching the ground. But ever since the lumbermen had given way to farmers, those days were gone.
In Columbus, I picked up the evening newspapers, which had caught up with the ex-president’s fate. In The Cincinnati Daily Star:
Copyright © 2023 by Burt Solomon
