“Come with us,” Asia says to Rosalie, knowing that she won’t. She says that crowds give her a headache.
The roads are so jammed, they unsettle Fanny, who prefers to stay out of the mud but also at a certain distance from other horses. She dances about the puddles and, Asia suspects, may even on occasion be hoping to shake her off and go home. Fanny’s had a foal that she’s now reluctant to leave.
It’s discovered that the Bel Air banner, needed to decorate the stage, was left behind so John says he’ll ride back for it. He and Cola take off at a reasonable clip, hugging the side of the road rather than weaving through the traffic moving in the other direction. Asia hears the crowd gasp. Cola is on his knees; a bit of ground has crumbled beneath his hoofs. But John leaps off, pulls Cola upright, and remounts without a foot in a stirrup, simply springing unaided to Cola’s back. He gives the crowd a quick, careless salute, then urges Cola forward again.
Asia is aware of the fluttering handkerchiefs and hearts around her. “He’s so handsome,” a woman nearby says. “Who is he?”
Asia goes to stable Fanny. A wall of black clouds is forming to the west and they must all hope that the rain will hold off. Only the stage is covered.
There’s a parade to the platform. People crowd the sides of the roads to make room for the marching Know-Nothings. She worried that John would not be back in time, but there he is, carrying the flag of the party, red and white stripes and in the blue corner, an eagle spreading his wings aggressively over the ballot box. Superimposed on the stripes are the words NATIVE AMERICAИS, BEWARE OF FOREIGИ IИFLUEИCE.
Had Asia worn her hoop skirt instead of her riding habit, she could have kept a space for herself—hoops are growing larger as bonnets shrink. As it is, she’s crowded into a woman who smells of roses and also to a man with a large mole on one cheek who smells of drink. “Please excuse me, miss,” he tells her. “I’m being shoved in all directions and having the devil’s own time keeping my feet underneath me,” but Asia can see perfectly well that it’s not the crowd that has him swaying.
She’s impressed with Davis’ speech, which focuses on the dangers of popery. He speaks simply, persuasively, and from the heart, or so it seems to Asia. She judges him chaste and elegant. He has an abundance of curly hair and a magnificent mustache. But if the crowd around her represents the party, she’s less impressed with them.
She’s almost home when a sudden downpour soaks Fanny’s flanks and mane, her own bonnet and skirt. She arrives on the porch like some drowned thing, her hair and sleeves plastered to her skin, and Rosalie brings her tea and towels, pulls her shivering and dripping inside to stand in front of the fire, stripping off her wet stockings. Thunder rattles the windows. She’d felt quite patriotic, quite engaged, while listening to the speeches. The rain has sobered her up. “I never saw such a queer collection of people,” she tells Rosalie, toweling the rain from her face and hair, but she can’t put her finger on just what was so queer about them.
John arrives hours later, after the rain has stopped and the sun gone down, with no such concerns. He’s been in the saloon with the other Know-Nothings, reliving a day of unalloyed triumph. Asia takes one look at his glowing face and tells him that the time will come when he must choose—politics or the theater. “You can’t do both,” she says. “Father always said that.”
Mother agrees.
* * *
—
Henry Winter Davis will win his race. John doesn’t know that he’s just supported a man who will devote himself to keeping Maryland in the Union, who will castigate Lincoln in the strongest possible terms for his leniency towards the South, a plan, he’ll say, that, whatever Lincoln proclaims, guarantees the return of slavery in all but name.
Lincoln and the Lost Speech
Come as the winds come, when forests are rended; Come as the waves come, when navies are stranded.
—Sir Walter Scott, as quoted by Lincoln, as remembered by witnesses to the Lost Speech
In 1856, in Bloomington, Illinois, Lincoln speaks extemporaneously at the convention where the Republican Party is being created. Some in attendance say later that this speech had such power, was limned with such divine fire, that no one who heard it was unchanged. “In a brief moment every one in that . . . assembly came to feel as one man, to think as one man and to purpose and resolve as one man. Rarely if ever was so wonderful an effect produced by an oration. It was the speech of his life in the estimation of many who heard it,” Judge John M. Scott wrote. He was quite safe in saying so, since no text survives to trouble the matter. Those reporters charged with transcription claim they were so transported they forgot to take notes.
Or else the speech’s disappearance was calculated. It seems that Lincoln, speaking off the record, allowed himself to express a more radical form of anti-slavery than his usual. It seems to have been an angry speech. Lincoln apparently argued that no compromise with slavery was possible—that the nation must either be all slaveholding or all free.
Friends tell him later that he has gone too far and they believe he’s been persuaded. But in two years he will repeat himself and this time for the ages—“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he will say.
The speech establishes him as a leader in the Republican Party and soon he is being asked to speak so often and in so many places it becomes tiresome. He begins to hear from people who want him to run for the presidency.
* * *
xiii
Despite Mother’s obstruction, Asia has managed to amass a fair collection of materials for Father’s biography. She and John work together to wrestle it all into order. The manuscript is always open, always in Asia’s thoughts.
Skinner-Street, February 27th, 1817
Sir:
I witnessed your performances of Richard and Iago, and you may, perhaps, not be displeased with receiving a few hints and remarks from a person of old experience in matters of literature and taste.
With your Richard, I was not altogether satisfied. You got through it with much bustle, activity, and energy, and were rewarded with almost unexampled applause; but it appeared to me a representation rather of promise, than of that full conception and meditation, I long for in a performer. Your Iago struck me very differently: I mean in the third act of the play for the rest was not excellent. I have seen Garrick, and most of the eminent performers of the last age. But I confessed that that evening I saw something new . . . your tones of insinuation, in particular, when it was your part to infuse the poison of jealousy into Othello, were so true that, by my faith . . . I immediately became impressed with the persuasion, This Booth will make a real actor. I set down these things because, as you are a very young man, they may be of use to you . . .
I am Sir, your obedient Servant,
William Godwin
* * *
—
As well as helping with the manuscript, John has begun to prepare for his own life on the stage. He’s set himself the task of memorizing Shakespeare’s plays and Cibber’s adaptations. A slow study, he repeats the speeches so often that, passing by on their own business, one or another of the little Hall children will stop to supply the word he missed, the line he needs. The whole farm speaks in iambic pentameter.