The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Stephen L. Carter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carter, Stephen L., [date]

  The impeachment of Abraham Lincoln / by Stephen L. Carter — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95840-2

  1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A78I47 2012

  813’.6—dc23 2012005890

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket design by Kelly + Cardon Webb

  v3.1

  for Antoinette Wright

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Book I: February—March 1867 Indictment

  Chapter 1: Clerk

  Chapter 2: Caution

  Chapter 3: Vote

  Chapter 4: Unease

  Chapter 5: Ambition

  Chapter 6: Inspector

  Chapter 7: Visitor

  Chapter 8: Widow

  Chapter 9: Consolation

  Chapter 10: Proposition

  Chapter 11: Invitation

  Chapter 12: Preparation

  Chapter 13: Salon

  Chapter 14: Emissary

  Chapter 15: Deputation

  Chapter 16: Nocturne

  Chapter 17: Obsession

  Chapter 18: Audience

  Chapter 19: Luncheon

  Chapter 20: Expertise

  Chapter 21: Financier

  Chapter 22: Respects

  Chapter 23: Interruption

  Chapter 24: Mollification

  Chapter 25: Alley

  Chapter 26: Betrayal

  Chapter 27: Theories

  Chapter 28: Urgency

  Book II: March—April 1867 Trial

  Chapter 29: Managers

  Chapter 30: Consolation

  Chapter 31: Ruse

  Chapter 32: Motivation

  Chapter 33: Errand

  Chapter 34: Entrepreneur

  Chapter 35: Interruption

  Chapter 36: Books

  Chapter 37: Assignment

  Chapter 38: Spy

  Chapter 39: Warning

  Chapter 40: Supplicant

  Chapter 41: Rescue

  Chapter 42: Hypothesis

  Chapter 43: Industrialist

  Chapter 44: Department

  Chapter 45: Confidante

  Chapter 46: Lantern

  Chapter 47: Sacrifice

  Chapter 48: Strategy

  Chapter 49: Return

  Chapter 50: Conversation

  Chapter 51: Confrontation

  Chapter 52: Summation

  Chapter 53: Possibility

  Chapter 54: Contest

  Chapter 55: Conspirators

  Chapter 56: Moralist

  Chapter 57: Cacophony

  Chapter 58: Elegy

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Reader’s Group Guide

  This is a work of fiction. I have played games with far more history than even the title suggests; and yet many parts of the story are truer to the historical narrative than, at first blush, the reader might suppose. A compendium of my changes may be found in the author’s note at the end of the book.

  —S.L.C.

  “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”

  —Abraham Lincoln, July 4, 1864, as recorded in the diary of his secretary, John Hay

  “Mr. Lincoln has four long years of strife before him; and as he seems little inclined to change his advisers, his course of action, or his generals, we do not believe that the termination of his second period of government will find him President of the United States.”

  —London Gazette, commenting on Lincoln’s re-election in 1864

  Prologue

  April 14–16, 1865

  TURMOIL.

  The President was dying.

  As the grim news spread through Washington City, angry crowds spilled into the cold, muddy night. Abraham Lincoln had been shot at Ford’s Theatre, on Tenth Street. The wounds were mortal, people were saying. There was no way he could survive. The war was over, the South utterly vanquished, yet somehow its withered hand had reached up into the nation’s capital and extracted this bitter revenge. The crowds became mobs, looking for somebody to hang. Some wanted to burn Ford’s to the ground. Others marched toward Old Capitol Prison, where many leaders of the late rebellion were still being held. Rumors passed from mouth to mouth: The Vice-President had been murdered in his rooms at Kirkwood House. The Secretary of State had been stabbed to death in his mansion on Lafayette Square. Confederate troops were advancing on the city. Or Union troops: nobody seemed to know for sure, and a coup d’état had been rumored for years. Outside Ford’s Theatre, a man in the blood-spattered uniform of an army major and a doctor carrying a candle fought their way into the street. A group bearing Lincoln’s unmoving body followed behind. Mrs. Lincoln, face like chalk, clutched her husband’s stiff hand. People leaned in, trying to see or touch. Men groaned. Women wept. A soldier banged on the door of a row house across the way. They carried the President inside and shut the door. People craned to peer in the windows. Minutes later, Secretary of War Stanton, the most feared man in Washington, arrived in an unguarded carriage and raced inside. Other officials followed. Furious soldiers took up positions on the sidewalk but seemed to have no clear orders. They battered members of the crowd for practice. Other men went in. The people who had been closest to the body passed on the story: the President’s head was a mass of blood.

  Meanwhile, the hue and cry had been raised. That actor fellow. Wilkes Booth. He had shot the President and leaped to the stage, then escaped on horseback. Somehow the mob was armed now, looking for someone to whom they might do mayhem. Booth would be best, but any Southern sympathizer or paroled Confederate soldier would do, or, in the absence of so obvious a target, any man dressed in gray, or a Catholic, or a darkie. In the confusion, Stanton took command. He ordered the city sealed. Trains were stopped. Guards allowed no one across the bridges. Telegrams were sent to military commanders in Virginia and Maryland, warning them to watch for men on horses fleeing Washington. On the Potomac River, a steamer was prepared as a floating prison should any of the conspirators be apprehended, the better to protect them from the mob: good order required that they be hanged swiftly by soldiers rather than by citizens.

  The Union had been struck a hard blow, and wanted revenge.

  From Philadelphia to New York to Chicago, newspapers were out with special late editions, their entire front pages devoted to the shooting. Some headlines pronounced the President already dead. Editors who had been Lincoln’s sworn foes eulogized him as the nation’s savior; others, who had openly despised Mrs. Lincoln, assured the nation that they stood beside the First Lady in her impending widowhood. In the war-ravaged South, where few
telegraph lines were intact, the news moved more slowly. Lincoln’s longtime bodyguard, Allan Pinkerton, was in New Orleans, and would not learn of the shooting for several days. In the cities of the North, vengeful citizens marched. Church doors were flung open so that people might pray for the President’s recovery. But the prayers, like the mobs, seemed fruitless. Everybody knew that it was too late. Little squares of black crepe began to appear in windows, signaling a nation already mourning.

  That was Friday. By Saturday, however, the rumors began to change. Perhaps all was not lost. The doctors had cleaned the wound repeatedly and removed the clotting blood. And a miracle was occurring. The President’s indomitable will was asserting itself. He was breathing strongly on his own, his eyes were fluttering open, and the damage to his brain appeared less severe than first thought. The telegraph flashed the news across the country: Lincoln lives! True, Vice-President Andrew Johnson was dead, and the Secretary of State so badly wounded that he might not see another day, but Abraham Lincoln, savior of the nation, seemed to be improving.

  He had been shot on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he rose.

  By the middle of the week, the President was sitting up, meeting with his staff, once again in charge of the affairs of the nation. Across the country, people cheered. Those who felt otherwise kept their disappointment to themselves, content to bide their time.

  November 19, 1866

  The night riders were gaining.

  Bending low, the black man spurred his tiring horse down the tangled leaf-strewn lane. On either side, fields thick with brightleaf tobacco stretched into the chilly Virginia darkness. Just a few miles ahead loomed the lower slopes of the Shenandoah, with its welcoming forest. If he could only reach the tree belt, he would be safe. A few miles to the north, an entire brigade of Union troops garrisoned the town of Winchester, but with three hooded pursuers only a few hundred yards behind, his chances of reaching either sanctuary were small. He had a pistol in his saddlebag and a knife in his belt, and he knew that if he slowed to draw either, the night riders would have him.

  That would be bad.

  In a hidden pocket sewn beneath the lining of his right boot was the message. If he was caught and searched, the night riders might find it.

  That would be worse.

  He rode faster. The autumn drizzle turned to steam on the horse’s burning flanks. He heard a low crackle that might have been distant lightning or a nearby gunshot. He rounded a bend, jumped a fallen tree, nearly spilled on the other side. Very soon his mount would collapse.

  Pounding hooves and shouting voices carried across the night air. The riders were close behind. He searched for a turnoff but found none. Had he possessed a sense of irony, he might have considered that not far to the south was Appomattox Court House, where, a year and a half earlier, Lee had surrendered the Army of Virginia, ending the Civil War but setting off the more secretive conflict in which he himself was now playing so carefully scripted a part. But there was no time for such musings. The moon had burst from the clouds, and lighted the path to escape.

  Up ahead, the road split into two branches. He took the southmost fork, which led, if he remembered correctly, to a shattered plantation and an old church. His pursuers, he reasoned, would break into two groups to make sure that they did not lose him. He could make his stand in the church, or even the plantation house, if he just got there ahead of them. He was not a great shot, but from hiding he could certainly handle one or two men coming up the road toward—

  The sudden hard burning in his leg, followed by the horse’s shriek, told him that bullets were being fired. He heard the flat clap of the gun as the horse threw him. He hit the frozen earth hard. More shots followed. Just before he passed out, he realized that he had been chased into a trap, forgetting, in his desperation to escape the men behind him, to worry about what might be waiting out front.

  HE OPENED HIS eyes, and was aware at once that the burning in his leg was worse. He groaned and tried to shift, only to realize that a boot was pressing into the wound. He was propped against a tree, hands bound behind him. Through the haze of pain, he was able to make out a small group of men, all of them hooded. The man with his foot on the wound was thickset, and wore a blue mask. Beside him was a taller and thinner man, head covered by a burlap sack with eyeholes cut into it. “He’s awake,” said the man in blue.

  “Course he is,” said the man in burlap, “seeing as how you’re pretty much breaking his leg.”

  The heavy man stooped. He was sodden with sweat. “Whatcha doin out here, boy? There’s a curfew.”

  The black man grimaced, and dropped his eyes. “Sorry, suh.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Sorry, suh.”

  The man in the blue mask stood up and walked over to the others. The black man laid his head against the tree, glad to be free of the pain. His eyes were glazed, but his hearing was fine.

  “I don’t like how he sounds,” said the man in blue, who seemed to be the leader. “He’s faking. He’s not one of ours. He’s one of them Northern niggers.”

  “I’ve seen this boy,” said the man in brown burlap. “He’s a Dempsey boy.”

  The leader’s face was invisible inside the blue hood, but, even so, his posture seemed to communicate disappointment. He leaned close to the prisoner. “Is that true, boy? Do you work for Mr. Dempsey?”

  “Mrs. Dempsey, suh. Yassuh.”

  “Mrs. Claire Dempsey up Warrenton way?”

  “Suh, I don’t know a Missus Claire. I works for Missus Henrietta, at Heddon Hills.”

  The release of tension was general. Heddon Hills was indeed the Dempsey family plantation: fallen on hard times, to be sure, since the Yankees came through, but still in Dempsey hands. The man in burlap put his hand on the leader’s shoulder. “Satisfied?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a Dempsey boy, I told you—”

  “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,” said the leader. He shook himself free of the other’s grip. “I say he’s educated.”

  All five hoods turned his way.

  “He’s an educated nigger,” he continued, eyes fairly glowing through the slits. “He’ll ‘Yassuh’ and ‘Nossuh’ till Judgment Day, but behind that black face he’s laughing at us. He’s one of those educated niggers, he’s been to some nigger school somewhere, and now he thinks he’s better than we are.” With a movement of sublime laziness, he tucked the muzzle of his shotgun up against the black man’s chin. “Is that right, boy? You’ve been to some nigger school, haven’t you?”

  “Nossuh,” said the prisoner, eyes wide in the smooth brown face.

  “You’re a Dempsey boy.”

  “Yassuh.”

  “Search him.”

  Immediately the black man felt his bound hands drawn farther behind him. The pain would have doubled him over but for the shotgun pressing into his neck. One of his captors was going through his pockets, and another through his saddlebags. He heard an exclamation and knew they had found his little supply of greenbacks. Another, and he knew they had found the weapons.

  “There’s a letter,” somebody said, and handed it to the thin man who had tried to protect him. He tore open the envelope. “It’s from Mrs. Dempsey all right. It says this here is Royal, and he’s been loyal to her since he was a boy. He never ran off with the Yankees. It says he’s carrying a message down to a Mr. Toombs in Snickers Gap.” He gave the paper to the leader. “That’s Mrs. Dempsey’s signature. She does some of her banking with me.”

  The leader sneered. “And now this boy knows who you are.”

  Silence.

  The gun barrel prodded the black man’s neck. “What’s the message?”

  “Suh?”

  “What message does Mrs. Dempsey have you sending to Mr. Toombs?”

  “Suh, Mrs. Dempsey wants to invite her goddaughter to spend the holidays at Heddon Hills.”

  “That’s the whole message?”

  “Yassuh.”

  “Enough,” said the
man in burlap. “This ain’t who we’re looking for. Let him go, Bill.”

  The leader turned his way. “And now he knows who I am, too.” He lowered the shotgun and, without warning, pulled the trigger.

  The black man cried out in agony. Wounded now in both thigh and foot, he collapsed against the tree.

  Bill crouched beside the prisoner. “Do you think we’re stupid, boy? You think we’re illiterate crackers? I was with Jubal Early for two years. I was a colonel. My friend Jedediah here—since we’re telling names—was a captain. He was with Whiting at Fort Fisher. Now, let me tell you something.” The gun caressed the wounded man’s thigh. “I know who you are. I know what you’re doing. You are a courier for the Yankee secret service.” The black man was shaking his head frantically. “You are a courier, and you are carrying a secret message. Tell us the truth, and tell us where the message is hidden, or I’ll blow your balls off and let you bleed to death, and meanwhile we’ll find the message anyway.”

  The man called Jedediah tugged at his arm. The others were already inching toward their mounts. “Come on, Bill. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Get him up.”

  “What?”

  “Get him up. I want him on his horse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re gonna have us a hanging.”

  “But—”

  “He’s a spy, Jedediah. Spies get hanged.”

  The man in burlap shook his head. “The war’s over.”

  “Not for me.”

  THE BODY WAS found two days later by a Union patrol. The night riders had left him in a ditch, after stealing his horse, his weapons, and his money. The soldiers made nothing of it. The night riders were killing colored men all over the South, and there was not much to be done about it. There was no way of investigating, even if anybody had wanted to. Nobody talked to the Yankees.

  The soldiers took the corpse up to Winchester and turned it over to the colored Benevolent Association, who would bury the remains somewhere. But before the soldiers surrendered the body, they took the boots, because supplies were still short, and if they didn’t fit you, you could always trade with somebody they did. And the boots were passed a good way down the line before somebody found the false lining, and the wad of paper hidden inside. He thought it was money, but it turned out to be just a list of names. The private told his sergeant, who said the dead man was probably in the black market. The names were his customers. The sergeant told the private to deliver the paper to the office of the adjutant general, just in case military personnel were involved. The soldier meant to do just that in the morning, but that night he went drinking in town, got into a bar fight, and wound up with his head smashed in. He died the next morning.