The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen L Carter

  She tried again. “You have the list! It is right there before your eyes!”

  Sumner was gentle. “Miss Canner, what I see before me is a list of names. I have no idea of its provenance. Neither do you. The writer of the list tells us that those whose names appear are committed to the great cause of undoing Lincoln’s tyranny, or may be persuaded to join. He further tells us that some among them will require further consideration. You are taking this to mean that bribes have changed hands. Perhaps you are correct.” He stacked the papers neatly, handed them back. “Now, suppose that everything you say is true. Look at the list. Yes, some members of the House of Representatives appear. As many as a dozen. But the bill to impeach Mr. Lincoln passed by far more than a dozen votes. And there are no names of any Senators. Therefore, by your own hypothesis, the actions of the Senate are beyond reproach.” He tapped the pages. “There are merchants here, a few men of commerce, a lawyer or two, some newspaper editors. A relative of Mr. Hilliman’s—your mother, I gather?—and, of course, Mr. Lincoln’s own lawyer. Perhaps they were all conspirators. Perhaps they were all bribed. None of that tells us whether or not Mr. Lincoln deserves the office he has so dishonored.”

  “What are you saying?” cried Jonathan, in a voice too loud for this cozy, bookish room. “You will still vote to convict? Even in the face of this evidence?”

  Sumner was gentle. “I have not yet decided my vote, Mr. Hilliman. I will, however, say this much. The fact that some wicked men want Mr. Lincoln out of office has no bearing on the question of his guilt or innocence. The argument ad hominem has no proper place in the consideration of moral questions.” This time he stood all the way up, and his bodyguard, who had remained in the shadowy corner throughout the conversation, eased closer. “I am grateful to you for bringing all of this to my attention,” he said. “But I fear that there is nothing I can do.”

  Two minutes later, they were on the sidewalk in front of Sumner’s modest house.

  Jonathan said, “Maybe Sumner is part of the conspiracy.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Why? Is this the Kate Sprague business all over again? He cannot be a conspirator because you admire him?”

  “No. It is because he let us keep the list.” Abigail sighed: a sound she rarely uttered. But much had changed over the past few days. “Senator Sumner does not think as others do. Others always ask who is helped or hurt by a proposal; or who is for it or against it. Only armed with this information can they make up their minds about whether to support or oppose it. They do not care about the proposal. They care whether it helps or hurts their side. Senator Sumner is different. He cares for what is right, and nothing more.” Jonathan was helping her up into the carriage. “And that,” she said, “is why we failed.” She shook her head. “Remember what Mr. Sickles said? That, no matter what we found, it would not change a single vote, because the trial is politics, not law? He was right.”

  Jonathan was sardonic. “He also said that if we ever did find such a list we should just give it to Stanton, and General Baker would see to it that they did not survive their arrests.”

  Abigail sighed. “Do you know what Mr. Lincoln said to me? He said, even if he had the list of conspirators, there was nothing he could do about it. If he ordered their arrests on the eve of the impeachment vote, the entire country would believe that he was locking up his opponents in order to stay in office.”

  “What you are saying is, we have the list and there is nothing we can do with it?”

  “Not until after the trial.” She held the envelope in her hands. “It is over, Jonathan. We are done.”

  II

  And so they went up to the Capitol, to watch the Senators give their speeches, explaining which way they would vote. If all who wished to speak could be heard today, the Senate would vote. Otherwise the trial would adjourn for Easter weekend, resuming on Tuesday. Closing arguments were over. Counsel were no longer seated in front of the body, although the Chief Justice still presided. There was a special section set aside for the lawyers in the back of the chamber, just behind the rows of members of the House. Jonathan joined Sickles and Speed and Rellman there.

  Dennard was absent. He had sent word that he was ill.

  Nobody criticized Jonathan for his tardiness; after the events of last night, they were surprised that he had come at all. To be sure, the lawyers knew only that the two young people had been attacked by a madman in the railroad yards; they knew nothing of any list of conspirators; and if they had, nothing would likely be changed.

  Senators were speaking in alphabetical order, but, according to the notes Jonathan read over Rellman’s shoulder, several had passed, preferring to make their remarks after they had heard more argument. This did not necessarily betoken any potential uncertainty about their votes; more likely, they wanted time to hone the speeches that historians would study for generations to come.

  Senator James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin was speaking, an opponent of both slavery and negro suffrage, who had strongly supported the war and just as strongly supported Lincoln in the impeachment fight. Jonathan was embarrassed to have the man on the President’s side; but, with the outcome yet in doubt, they could hardly afford to reject any votes for acquittal on grounds of politics.

  “The true basis of the present trouble,” Doolittle proclaimed, “is the constant agitation of those for whom no change is ever enough, those for whom the contrary opinion of their fellow man is to be dismissed as the vicious or unintelligent maunderings of—”

  A flurry at the door.

  Kate Sprague was absent from the trial for the first time, so Abigail was sitting alone. She perked up, watched as the messenger hurried down the aisle.

  A military messenger—in full uniform.

  Doolittle droned on, but nobody was listening. Everybody was watching the runner as he handed a note to the clerk, who handed it up to the Chief Justice. A rising tumult outside caused heads to turn. Chase adjusted his spectacles. He read. He blinked. His soft pink face went pale. Outside, the furore rose. Chase gestured to counsel, then waved them back and gestured instead to Wade, who rose from his desk and marched down the aisle. Chase leaned down. The two men conferred. Wade staggered, and seemed to clutch at his heart. Abigail heard a murmur running along the Senate floor. Chase rapped his gavel.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, voice barely audible. He glanced up at the gallery, swallowed, lifted a trembling hand, began again. “Ladies and gentlemen. It is my—my sad duty—my tragic duty to report that Mr. Lincoln has been shot.” Cries of horror. “We do not yet know whether he will survive.” The gavel came down. Now Chase was shouting to be heard above the tumult. “These proceedings are adjourned, to be resumed upon notice.”

  Pandemonium.

  CHAPTER 57

  Cacophony

  I

  THE HORSECARS HAD vanished. Everywhere, people were running, crying, shouting at no one and everyone, rushing about madly without any thought to destination. Struggling away from Capitol Hill, Abigail heard a military trumpet in the distance, and, closer in, voices raised in vicious argument as three or four men came to blows. Jonathan had firm hold of her hand, and she was grateful for it. She saw no soldiers. She saw no police. She saw no sign that authority existed, or ever had. It was as though the nation’s passions, having spilled over into a horrible war, had been but briefly bridled, and were now running once more at full steam.

  They tried to ask if anyone knew how badly the President was injured, or even where or how the shooting had taken place, but there existed no reliable means of conveying information swiftly, and for every six screaming, rampaging people, there were as many versions of what had happened.

  Abigail had been among the last to leave the turmoil of the Senate Chamber, because the great ladies of Washington had all but climbed over each other in their rush up the aisle and down to their carriages, no doubt hoping to reach their homes before—well, before what was now occurring. The Senators and congressmen, too, had strea
med disorderly toward the door, but when Abigail had looked down, there was Jonathan, looking up at her, cupping his hands, trying to signal, trying to point: Meet me out there, he was saying. Unfortunately, by the time she reached the stairs, the sergeant-at-arms and his men were forcing the crowd out through the west exits.

  Moments later, she was outside the Capitol in the midst of the jostling, struggling throng, not sure where she should be going. Home? The office? Sixth and E? But even as she stood indecisively, Jonathan had materialized beside her. They had to shout to hear each other. He had come straight through the Rotunda when he had realized that she would not be allowed in. He took her hand and dragged her in the direction of the carriages, but the crowd was too thick, and he was certain that the other lawyers had already left.

  “We’ll have to walk!” he yelled.

  “Walk where?”

  “I don’t know, but we should go.”

  They did, finally reaching the corner of Second and B. The throng was thinner here, and a streetcar came clattering up, part of the Anacostia & Potomac Line, the driver shouting and cursing and sounding his horn to clear a lane. The entire crowd converged as one, and Abigail and Jonathan found themselves pushed to the front. Jonathan stepped on and tried to tug her aboard, but she lost her grip because she was being pummeled. She wound up lying in the mud. An egg struck her shoulder. She heard epithets. Somehow she was on her feet. Angry hands snatched at her. She broke free. Jonathan was beside her again. A bottle shattered on the cobbles. The streetcar started off. A voice said to get the nigger. Then Abigail was moving, skirts billowing, as, running beside Jonathan, she fled the growling mob. From the frenzied shouts, she was able to distill one fact:

  This time, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln was black.

  II

  Their pursuers thinned, then vanished. Abigail and Jonathan walked along C Street, remaining south of Pennsylvania Avenue but north of the canal, in the sliver of Washington City where respectable people never went. The newspapers had their late editions out. Lincoln had been shot as he left Mr. Seward’s Old Clubhouse to walk back to the Mansion. The stories did not say where he was now, or whether he was alive. By the time they reached Seventh Street, they could see that the mobs now had direction. They were heading west, toward the White House.

  “Where do you want to go?” said Jonathan.

  Abigail considered. But briefly; for the ambitions of former days had been drained. “Home,” she said.

  “I shall walk you.”

  They crossed the canal on the Seventh Street Bridge, and continued south, then southwest, striding along in near-silence, each alone with the painful thoughts. They passed carriages and streetcars, houses and farms, and barely spoke. They were no longer touching; but their presence together was a message of its own.

  “I should have known,” Abigail said, at least twice, through her tears. “From the night we saw Mr. Lincoln outside the Mansion, my brother has been plotting. His talk of violence, his hatred of Mr. Lincoln, his threats before he vanished—”

  “You don’t know that it was Michael.”

  “I do know, and so do you.”

  On the Island, lights were burning in every house. She thought she heard dancing on the air the sound of keening, but imagination might have been playing her false. She remembered how Wilkes Booth’s entire family had been arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, except for a brother who escaped to Canada. But Nanny was not physically capable of flight, and Abigail would never abandon her.

  “Suppose it was the rebels,” Jonathan finally said. “John Wilkes Booth was a rebel sympathizer. Colonel Waverly was with the Confederate secret service. Why not whoever shot Lincoln today?”

  “I would very much like to believe that. It would make things”—a grim smile—“ever so tidy.” The humor faded. The crunch of the odd spring snow underfoot had grown quite loud. “But the South is better off with Mr. Lincoln in the Mansion than if he should be succeeded by Mr. Wade. Nor are the Radicals likely to be guilty. They are, after all, on the verge of removing Mr. Lincoln through entirely legal means.”

  “Unless the rumors are true that Lincoln has done a deal to repeal the Morrill Tariff. That would likely switch a vote or two.”

  “It no longer seems probable,” said Abigail, heavily, “that the votes in the Senate shall matter.”

  To this there was no reply to be made, and they trudged on in silence, until at last they reached Tenth Street.

  “I can make it from here.”

  “No doubt,” he said, and stayed beside her.

  But as they approached the house, a good forty-five minutes after starting out, it was clear that something was wrong.

  Standing outside were several soldiers, commanded by a lieutenant. Two military carriages blocked the road.

  Already!

  Abigail broke into a run. Jonathan followed.

  The soldiers stopped them at the gate. “Are you Miss Abigail Canner?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are to come with us.”

  Jonathan got between her and the soldiers. On the porch, Nanny was being physically restrained by Louisa and Octavius and a couple of neighbors: she would do battle with the Devil himself to protect her niece, and a squad of infantry frightened her not at all.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Jonathan demanded.

  “Who are you?” snapped the lieutenant.

  “My name is Jonathan Hilliman, and I will have you know—”

  “Good. Then we have both of you.”

  The soldiers put them in the back of one of the carriages. An armed sergeant climbed inside and sat across from them. Two others grabbed onto bars on the outside. As they rolled off, Abigail turned to look at Nanny.

  They had not even given her a chance to say goodbye.

  III

  “Where are you taking us?” demanded Jonathan, in his best Hilliman.

  “Mr. Stanton’s orders, sir.”

  The guard sitting across from them had drawn the curtains over the windows, and although he was scrawny, he looked battle-hard; not a man to argue with. By this time, most of the conscripts were out of the army. Those who remained were the ones who wanted to.

  Abigail, sitting silent, was struggling against her own restlessness, fed by her fear of small spaces and her fear of failure and her fear of … well, of this. Of what was happening right now. This was how Michael had always said it would be. Some night, when you least expected it, they would scoop you off the street and spirit you off to some hidden place, where they would do to you the things they did to colored people who failed to smile fast enough, or grovel deep enough: that was Michael’s phrase. And what kept her from drowning in fear was only the knowledge that whatever they did to colored people they would not dare do to a Hilliman.

  “Are we under arrest?” said Jonathan.

  The guard, stony-faced, did not respond.

  “Because you know we had nothing to do with what happened today.” He banged a hand against the side of the coach. Abigail had never seen him so unnerved. “You can’t just arrest people without warrants.”

  But of course they could. Abigail almost smiled. Just the other day, on the floor of the Senate, James Speed had laid out an elaborate argument for the proposition that during times of national emergency the military could indeed “sequester” those who threatened efforts to bring order. And, certainly, tonight qualified as an emergency.

  “Is the President even alive?” Jonathan demanded.

  The guard stared.

  The carriage shuddered to a halt, bumped forward, stopped again. They heard a gate open. The rig moved slowly up an incline, and then the door was flung open from the outside. There were soldiers everywhere.

  They were at the White House.

  CHAPTER 58

  Elegy

  I

  THE PRESIDENT’S BREATHING was raspy and, even to Abigail’s untutored ear, far too slow. His skin had taken on the gray waxiness that she remembered from her mot
her’s final battle with the varioloid. They had laid Lincoln on his modest bed in the cramped confines of the presidential apartments on the second floor. The tiny room was crowded, and Abigail was still not entirely sure why she and Jonathan were present, but Dan Sickles had told them downstairs that Stanton had insisted.

  The President would have wanted it this way, Sickles had whispered. That’s what Stanton says, and, right now, what he says is all that matters.

  The Mansion was full of soldiers; as, evidently, was the city. So swiftly had the military glided in that a half-hysterical part of her wondered whether what had happened might have been less an assassination attempt than the signal for a coup d’état.

  “Robert is on his way from Philadelphia,” said Noah Brooks, standing by the door, looking less shaken than keen to observe. “Tad and his aunt are in Springfield. It will take them two days to get here.”

  “He won’t last that long,” said Stanton harshly.

  Abigail was standing no more than three feet from the bed. She had been reluctant to move so close, but the throng had jostled and shoved, and here she was. Nobody paid her any mind. Perhaps they thought she was a nurse, or a domestic. It occurred to her that there were times when the near-invisibility of the colored servant class to their white masters could constitute an advantage. She gazed down at the wrecked, fading figure of the man by whose direction the war to liberate her people had been fought, and all at once the future that had always seemed to her so bright and rosy was pale and dim, and very far off. Her eyes grew misty. She heard sobbing, womanly and aching, then noticed that she was the only woman in the room. She wiped her eyes.

  “Maybe we should go,” said Jonathan kindly. He was beside her, quite close, but he was a stranger, a man she had never known and never would.

  “No.”

  “There is no earthly reason to put yourself through this,” he said, and took her elbow.