Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,95

both sides, the sputtering sound would have been banished immediately, and the instrument would have worked perfectly.

More than ever, Bell was convinced of the necessity for secrecy. He had worked as hard as he possibly could, using every conceivable resource and idea, and still he had made a devastating mistake. Although, in his letter to Mabel, Bell described as faithfully as he could all that had happened at the White House that night, even drawing a sketch of the room, he sternly reminded her that the letter was intended for no one but her. “Private and confidential,” he wrote in a postscript. “Don’t tell any one the contents.”

• CHAPTER 19 •

ON A MOUNTAINTOP, ALONE

Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are

grown in darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

On July 23, three days before Bell arrived at the White House with his induction balance, Conkling had woken early in his room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, already seething with anger. While most of the hotel’s occupants still slept, Conkling sat down to breakfast dressed in his customary black cutaway suit, yellow waistcoat, and brightly colored butterfly bow tie, an array of newspapers spread before him. As he did every day, his private secretary had carefully marked with blue pencil any article in which Conkling’s name appeared. On that day, the papers were awash in blue.

Conkling, who had always worked in the shadows, demanding secrecy and anonymity, had rarely approved of anything that was written about him. Now, the mere sight of his name in print could be relied on to leave him trembling with rage. Picking up the New York Times, he saw, printed in bold letters across the front page, the words “ROSCOE CONKLING BEATEN.” It was a headline no New Yorker, least of all Conkling himself, had ever expected to see.

Since his dramatic resignation in May, Conkling had called in every favor and used every opportunity for intimidation to win back his Senate seat. For more than two months, the citizens of New York had been forced to wait for the New York legislature to hold an election while Conkling and his men, including the vice president of the United States, had made promises, threats, and even alliances with Democrats. After the president’s shooting, Conkling was rarely seen in public, but had redoubled his efforts behind the scenes, forcing those Stalwarts who were still loyal to him to meet every morning at ten to “renew their pledges of firmness and adherence.”

Despite the desperate efforts of what one New York newspaper mockingly referred to as “Conkling’s Servile Band,” an election had finally taken place on July 22. Not only had Conkling failed to regain his seat that day, but he had lost it to a rumpled, overweight, little-known congressman named Elbridge Lapham, a man to whom he scarcely would have deigned to speak in the past.

The fact that Lapham was a professed Stalwart only further enraged Conkling. Simply by accepting the seat, he railed, Lapham showed himself to be a traitor, and he “must not reap the reward of his perfidy!” The contest, however, had been decided, and Conkling was astonished to find himself powerless to change it.

Finishing his breakfast, Conkling stood up from the table and walked across the room to where his suitcase sat, already packed. Despite the early hour, a clutch of reporters waited in the hotel lobby for him, watching as he descended the stairs looking “moody and fretful.” He quickly paid his bill and then turned to leave, ignoring the men hovering nervously around him. In answer to their questions, he would say only that he was going away. “No one,” one reporter wrote, “dared to ask him his destination.”

Conkling was going home to Utica, to the three-story gray stone mansion on the Mohawk River that he had bought with a single year’s salary when he was practicing law. His wife, a quiet, practical woman who recoiled from her husband’s political and social intrigues, lived there with their daughter in relative seclusion. Since taking his place in the Senate fourteen years earlier, Conkling had made only rare and brief appearances in Utica, and he did not plan to stay long now.

Although, in the wake of his humiliating defeat, he vowed that he was “done with politics now and forever,” no one who knew him believed that he was about to bow out gracefully. Conkling would never again debase himself by