Lincoln Read Free Page B

but years ago, you and I once spoke together at Tremont Temple in Boston …”
    “In September of 1848. You were canvassing New England for Zachary Taylor, and you wore a long linen duster in the street. I thought
you’d
forgotten.”
    “And you were wearing yellow pantaloons like the ones you’re wearing now. I guess politicians like us never forget anything. Good morning, gentlemen.” With that, Lincoln was gone.
    Washburne turned to Seward. “What do you think, Mr. Seward?”
    Seward frowned. “I don’t know. I’m not used to prairie statesmen, if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Washburne.”
    “Forgiven. After all, you and I are used to each other. But Abe isn’t really Western, you know. In fact, he isn’t really like other people.”
    “In what way? I thought he was very much your typical Western politician, man of the people, a splitter of rails, that kind of thing.”
    Washburne laughed. “That was all made up for the campaign.”
    “You mean Honest Abe the Rail-Splitter is a fraud?”
    “Yes and no. I’m sure he split a rail or two in his youth, but he’s always been a politician and a lawyer. The honest part is true, of course. But all the rest was just to get out the vote at home.”
    “And here I thought we had another ‘Tippecanoe’ Harrison on our hands.”
    “No, Mr. Seward, what we’ve got on our hands is a very complicated secretive sort of man. Don’t underestimate him.”
    Seward stared at Washburne to see if this might be some kind of obscure Western joke. When he saw that Washburne was serious, he smiled what journalists referred to as “Seward’s sly, Jesuit smile.” “Well, I don’t think I’m ever apt to do that, considering this peculiar line of work we’re in.”
    “You’ll be his secretary of state, won’t you?”
    Seward nodded. “That’s the plan.
If
we see eye to eye.”
    “What’s your condition?”
    “That we agree on the rest of the Cabinet. I would like to see a Cabinet of like-minded men. I’m a Whig. I’m a moderate. So’s Mr. Lincoln. So are most of our party’s leaders. But I’m afraid he’ll insist on including out-and-out abolitionists like Chase, and Whigs like Bates, and Democrats like Welles.”
    “What’s wrong with that?” Washburne played the innocent. Actually, he knew Seward’s game—the so-called Albany Plan had been secretly formulated during the fall by Seward and his chief henchman, Thurlow Weed, the proprietor of
The Albany Evening Journal
. They wanted to exclude from the Cabinet such presidential contenders as Chase. They wanted, most ambitiously—not to mention unConstitutionally—to turn Lincoln into a figurehead; the actual administration of the country would be taken over by Seward, the party’s national leader and most famous man. Seward would be premier to Lincoln’s powerless monarch.
    “I think it most statesmanlike,” said Washburne cautiously, “to bring together all the pro-Union elements—Democrats and abolitionists as well as Whigs and moderates. Even”—he smiled at Seward—“if some of them are rivals like Chase. After all, he’s picked
you
, his principal rival.”
    “I was.” Seward struck the elegiac note. “But no longer. I’m now too old ever to be the President.” Seward smiled to show that he was serious; thereby convincing Washburne that he was not. “But to have Chase and the others on the premises may be too much for him to handle. Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”
    Seward slid his arm companionably through Washburne’s. As the two men left the dining room, the doors were thrown open for the first breakfasters of the day—a horde of pale children, who shouted and wept as their grim-faced mothers herded them with pleas and cuffs to the buffet table.

TWO
    D AVID HEROLD stared at the front page of the
Evening Star;
then he did something that he had never done before: he actually bought a copy of the paper from the ancient Negro who had been selling newspapers at the corner of H and