A Sinister Splendor Read online

  “Van Buren has committed political suicide,” the general had announced. “We can’t win the White House by opposing Texas annexation.”

  “Let us look at the alternatives,” James had suggested.

  This they had tried, but Jackson had found a flaw of some sort with each likely presidential candidate in the party, until the field seemed exhausted. Then the old warhorse had looked James in the eye.

  “You would be the best candidate for the job,” he had announced.

  “Who?” James had replied.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. We’d choose a northern running mate to fill out the ticket—hold the party and the Union together.”

  James had chuckled nervously about this when he told Sarah, and James rarely chuckled.

  “Why are you laughing?” she had asked. “It makes perfect sense.”

  “General Jackson wasn’t serious. James Polk is not exactly a household name. It’s not my time yet, Sarah. Not yet. Vice president is the next rung on the ladder. Then we shall see.”

  All this had swirled in her head for nine days now, making her feel downright dizzy. She knew she should lie down and attempt to sleep, so she kissed James’s forehead and went to the parlor to recline on the sofa. Curling up with an embroidered pillow under her head, she felt as if she could very possibly fall into deep and much-needed slumber. She was almost there when she heard the faint ring of spurs on the stone landing outside.

  The polite rapping of a knuckle on the door made her spring to her feet, hoping she could get there before another knock woke James. Opening the door, she found a young man holding a package wrapped in twine. His horse, well lathered with white sweat, stood in the street, illuminated by the lantern light from the open door. The young man appeared haggard from a hard ride, yet he gallantly swept his hat from his head.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Polk. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but I’ve come from the post office in Nashville.” He handed her the package.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Would you like some tea? Coffee? You may stay the night if you wish.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I have to ride back. There is much to do.”

  She placed her palm on the package, as if to divine the essence of its contents. “Do you know the outcome of the convention?”

  He forced a smile. She couldn’t tell if it was an expression of pity, or fatigue.

  “It’s not my place to say, ma’am. Good evening, and good luck.”

  After he turned away, she closed the door and carried the package into James’s study. She would cut the twine and open the package first, then wake him. She didn’t intend to open the letters from his political operatives, of course, but she could prioritize them for him. After she snipped the string with her sewing scissors and pulled back the thick brown wrapping paper around the bundle, she could not help reading the headline on the Washington Globe.

  Sarah actually gasped. She read the headline again, astonished. Then she quickly read the first few paragraphs of the article.

  “Oh, my,” she whispered. She dragged James’s chair over to the settee where he slept, indifferent to the noise the chair legs made scuffing across the floor. She saw him begin to stir as she sat in the chair next to him. Gently, she shook his shoulder.

  “James … The news has arrived from Nashville … about the convention…”

  His eyes opened and he drew in a deep breath that seemed to lift him upright into a seated pose. “It’s about time,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  “I didn’t open the letters, of course, but I couldn’t help noticing the headline of the Globe.”

  “Is it good news, or bad?”

  “Brace yourself, James. It’s not what we hoped for.”

  His shoulders slumped, but his eyes searched her face for clues. “Out with it, Sarah. I’ve waited long enough.”

  “You’re not going to run for vice president, James. But … you could very well become the next president of the United States of America.” She held the newspaper up in front of his face.

  He read aloud, slowly: “Democrats unanimously nominate James K. Polk for White House bid.”

  She tried to keep herself from absolutely gushing. “Congratulations, James. What do you think?”

  “I think…” He rubbed his face and raked his graying hair back over his head. “I think the Lord sometimes humbles us by granting us more than that for which we have prayed.”

  She thought it better not to tell him that this was exactly the outcome for which she had prayed.

  He got up and kissed her on the cheek. Then he stepped over to his desk and opened the lowest drawer. He picked up from the desktop the stack of documents that represented the scenario of a private law practice. This he shoved deep into the open drawer before kicking it closed with his foot.

  “Now,” he said, turning back to her. He smiled slightly. “Let us read that article and try to determine how in the world James K. Polk ever became the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America.”

  JOHN RILEY

  Mackinac Island, Michigan

  December 7, 1844

  John Riley left his boardinghouse at the end of Market Street and strode east on Huron toward Charles O’Malley’s trading post. Feeling the cold, he turned up the collar of his coat and tugged on the front of his Donegal tweed cap. He left the coat unbuttoned to reveal the green wool sweater that, along with the tweed cap, proudly identified him as, by the grace of God, Irish.

  His breath steamed from his lungs on the cold north wind that whipped across Mackinac Island from Lake Huron. The weather here was not so unlike his boyhood home of Galway, on the western coast of the Emerald Isle. Here, hundreds of Irishmen like himself had come to find work, their familiar brogues a comfort to his ears. Yet he felt so far away from his home, his dear wife, and his beloved son.

  Saturday was payday for Charles O’Malley’s employees and, as such, a day to gather in the trading post for conversation and drink. Riley had been here over a year, working on the docks for O’Malley. He had quickly risen from a common stevedore to a foreman but had yet to save enough money to bring his family across the ocean. At four dollars a month, the wherewithal proved slow to accumulate. It would take a fair sum to sail his kin here. He refused to book passage for them in a coffin ship like the one he had sailed on, where immigrants were crammed together in the dank hold and not even allowed a breath of fresh air above decks for the duration of the voyage. He would not subject his lad and his wife to such rigors. They would sail on a proper vessel when their time came to follow him.

  As he walked on in long strides, his boots pounding the boardwalk under his 210 pounds of muscular bulk, he glanced out toward Haldimand Bay and noticed the domelike wigwams along the lakeshore on Windermere Point. These were the birch bark homes of the Ojibway Indians, who had lived here for untold generations before Frenchmen and Englishmen invaded their paradise. Riley could empathize with a people dispossessed of their homeland. As long as he could remember, his Ireland had suffered the indignities of living under English rule. He dreamed of returning someday to run the bloody bastards into the sea and reclaim the Ould Sod for himself and his people.

  Like many an Irish lad who hated England, Riley had nonetheless volunteered to serve in the British Army. How better to someday defeat them than to infiltrate their ranks and learn their strategies? With the Brits, he had fought as a regimental pioneer against Afghan tribesmen from Kabul to Jellalabad, acquiring the rank of sergeant major. He had also served as an artilleryman and knew his way around cannon.

  Returning to Ireland, he found his home in the grips of a deepening famine and struck out for America to find better prospects for his family until the day came when they could return to drive the hated English from the Emerald Isle. His very reason for immigrating here, to Mackinac Island, Michigan—instead of to Boston or New York—was to position himself nearer to the despised English troops in British C
olumbia, as war between America and Canada was likely, over the boundary dispute out West.

  As he marched on toward O’Malley’s trading post, past the fish markets at the head of the docks, he saw an American shop owner weaving toward him, already Saturday night drunk at four in the afternoon. The man stumbled into Riley’s shoulder and bounced off of him, into a butcher shop wall.

  “Hey, watch where you’re goin’, you big mick!” the man said, the words slurring all over the American accent.

  Riley stopped and turned to face the drunkard. “The name’s John,” he said.

  The man’s eyes widened, then blinked nervously. “Oh, John Riley. I didn’t recognize you with your collar up.”

  “You don’t own the whole boardwalk,” Riley grumbled.

  “Of course not. My apologies. Good day to you, Riley.” The sorry sot turned and staggered on his way.

  Riley felt his fists unclench as he, too, resumed his walk. Known as a brawler with a short fuse, he enjoyed his reputation as a man not to be crossed. He stepped off of the boardwalk into the mud of Fort Street, wending his way between ox-drawn carts, mule teams, and a few fellow pedestrians. He glanced up the steep street at Fort Mackinac, perched on the rocky bluff, now garrisoned by Company K of the Fifth Infantry, U.S. Army.

  More than once he had considered walking into the fort to enlist. A private could earn seven dollars a month. At that wage, he could save enough to sail his family to America by the time his five-year enlistment had ended. And the army was recruiting. War fever was in the air, with the presidential election at stake. In fact, the elections had already occurred, a month ago, but the final results had yet to reach John Riley’s ears here on this frontier island in Lake Huron.

  He strode on between the sloping vegetable gardens of Fort Mackinac to his left and the docks lined with fishing boats to his right. He spent six days a week on those docks, making sure O’Malley’s goods got loaded onto the right steamers. The bulk of the trade was in hundred-pound barrels of salted whitefish bound for Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. Additional traffic in jugs of maple sugar, bales of furs, and kegs of fish oil had to be sorted and shipped on the appropriate vessels. He also had to receive and sign for merchandise imported for O’Malley’s retail enterprises on the island, including everything from cloth to ink, potatoes to candles, French brandy to oriental spices. As a dock foreman, he bossed two dozen men, but he often bent his own back to loading and unloading alongside his subordinates.

  Charging on down the boardwalk through the cold, Riley came to the red brick blockhouse that served as his boss’s trading post. He glanced up at the gold letters on the emerald background of a sign that read “Charles O’Malley.” He grabbed the door handle and looked through the glazed glass windows to find the interior jammed with fellow Irishmen.

  The moment he opened the door, an unusually boisterous hum of voices—even for a Saturday—assaulted his ears. Men sang, yelled, laughed.

  A young stevedore who worked under Riley removed his dudeen pipe from his mouth. “Top of the day, John,” he said, a whiskey slur on his smoky breath.

  Riley nodded and watched the crowd part for him as he made his way to the sales counter where O’Malley typically sat on Saturdays, conversing with his countrymen about Old Ireland, world affairs, and new American developments. Behind the counter, Riley admired the shelves stacked with bolts of cloth, reams of paper, tins of smoked oysters, kegs of gunpowder, bundles of fishnets, bars of lead … He removed his coat, breathed in the tobacco smoke, and pulled his tweed cap from his head.

  “If it isn’t John Riley!” O’Malley said, his voice booming above the hum of voices in the trading house. “Pour the man a cup of potcheen!” The Irish boss of Mackinac Island, O’Malley wielded substantial authority on the docks and remained ever partial to his kinsmen from Ireland. He was a few years older than Riley, who was himself a well-traveled twenty-seven.

  “To Ireland!” Riley said, taking a sip of the homebrew whiskey handed to him by a compatriot. He did not drink much, but he knew how to ingratiate himself among his countrymen.

  “Erin go Bragh,” O’Malley replied, punctuating his toast with a swallow. He then handed Riley a stack of gold and silver coins he had counted out for the foreman’s weekly wages.

  As he dropped the specie into his pocket, Riley signed for his pay, his ornate script standing out among the rude Xs slashed on the ledger by most of his colleagues.

  “Pray, what’s all the fuss about in here today?” Riley asked, returning the quill pen to the inkwell.

  O’Malley slapped a newspaper down on the desk in front of him and pointed to the top of the left column. “You can read the news for yourself, John, unlike these unlettered spalpeens around you!” He waved his hand in fake derision at the men surrounding him, all of whom took the good-natured jest as intended. Only an Irishman could get away with calling another Irishman a spalpeen without causing a fistfight. Many of these men had, indeed, worked as itinerant farmhands back in Ireland, as the term suggested.

  John Riley glanced at the newspaper: the Daily National Intelligencer, the mouthpiece of the Whig Party, published in Washington, DC. He noted the paper’s date: November 26, 1844—just eleven days ago. This issue of the Intelligencer must have sailed on the swiftest of steamers through lakes Erie and Huron.

  His eyes moved down to the first column, where he scanned through the verbose journalistic styling for the crux of the news held therein: “It is now certain that at the late elections … electors have been chosen of whom a majority will cast their votes … so that, in effect, JAMES K. POLK, of Tennessee, has been chosen President … The disappointment and pain with which this result has filled our breasts…”

  The news, however disappointing to the defeated Whigs, stirred the fighting blood down in John Riley’s viscera. So this was the reason for the commotion in O’Malley’s trading post today. Polk, against all odds, had won the election.

  Though still an immigrant who had no vote, Riley had followed the campaign closely. He thought back on the Whig’s flippant campaign slogan, “Who is James K. Polk?” Indeed, most Americans he had overheard discussing the race early on could not answer that question. But Henry Clay, the Whig candidate and founder of the Whig Party, was a well-known politician and a household name. His election was supposed to have been inevitable. Apparently the Whigs had underestimated James K. Polk, the Democrats, and the attitude of the citizenry.

  Polk had run on expansion for the country—into Oregon and Texas. Rumor held that he wanted California, too. However bold and arrogant his Manifest Destiny platform, it seemed a narrow majority of American voters agreed with Polk on his expansionist schemes.

  It was Polk’s campaign cry that had first gained Riley’s approval. “Fifty-four forty or fight!”—a reference to the border dispute between the United States and England, out West in the Oregon country. In his campaign, Polk had demanded that the Brits give up their claims in the West as far north as 54 degrees and 40 minutes of latitude—all the way up to the southern tip of the Russian colony of Alaska. The Brits wouldn’t go along with that, of course, but Polk was threatening to take the soil by force if elected.

  War with the bloody British!

  Now that the dark horse, James K. Polk, had pulled off the upset, war with England was a virtual certainty. Imagine! Having once served in the queen’s army, now taking up arms against the bastards!

  “What are you thinking, John?” said O’Malley. “That menacing look on your face would frighten the devil himself.”

  The men around him fell into silence, awaiting his reply.

  “Polk has won the election. There will be war with England out West in the Oregon country. I’m thinking the time is nigh for John Riley to kill some bloody Brits. I’ll swear to Saint Patrick that I will attain my former rank of sergeant major, or die in the trying!”

  A cheer of approval roared around him.

  “As God is my witness, John Riley, if you join the army,
I’ll join with you!” said a red-haired youth standing at Riley’s elbow.

  “I’m not your recruiter, lad. Choose your own path. If you follow me, you’ll march straight into the jaws of bloody hell, where a man is more likely to get buried than brevetted.”

  “I’ll march with you!” the youth insisted.

  “If we’re to fight the Brits, I’ll enlist as well!” another man promised.

  “Careful,” O’Malley said. “There’s another war brewing down on the Texas border. What’s to keep the U.S. Army from sending you to Mexico instead of Oregon?”

  Now the whole room quieted as illiterate dockworkers listened to O’Malley and Riley—perhaps the only two men present who could read a newspaper.

  “What threat is Mexico, compared to the almighty British Empire?” Riley argued. “There will be plenty of troops from the southern states to march to the Mexican border. The regulars in the north will stay in the north to fight the Brits. It’s only logical.”

  “Military logic?” O’Malley said.

  “We can almost see the bloody redcoats across Lake Huron from here,” Riley said, jutting a finger northward. “What sense would it make to march men from here to Mexico when the real threat is just across Saint Mary’s River in Canada?”

  “What makes you so sure the Americans will go to war with England?”

  “Polk’s promise: ‘Fifty-four forty or fight!’”

  O’Malley scoffed. “The words of a politician carry the weight of a gnat! If England offers a reasonable compromise, Polk will take it. You don’t really think he wants to fight two wars at once, do you?”