“Leave me be.” She shook him off. She felt half asleep, caught in a nightmare yet dangerously calm. It was not possible that she was in this room, watching the life force ebb from the sixteenth President. She would wake soon, to find herself in her room at the back of the house in the Island, listening to the gurgle of water in her father’s pipes. Or she would not. She wondered if her brother had really done it; and, if so, when it became known who the killer was, what those here present would say or do at the realization that Michael Canner’s sister had stood in their midst and watched Abraham Lincoln die. And she wondered, too, in a distant, dreamy way, why Stanton had brought her here, when surely his career and reputation were the things most keenly at stake; and whether they would hang Michael or shoot him on sight; and whether she herself might, through the inexorable logic of political necessity, be hanged beside him as a conspirator.
There was a bustle. Somebody said that the Chief Justice was downstairs. Stanton was on his feet. “By no means let that man in this room.”
Speed, who had been weeping in the corner, stood. “You cannot keep the Chief Justice out, Mr. Stanton. You cannot command the judicial branch.”
“I will command what needs commanding.” Stanton turned to a brigadier who stood in the doorway. “I want you to prepare orders to place the city under martial law. I want arrest warrants prepared for”—his yellowy eyes roamed over the gathered faces, seemed to pause at Abigail’s, then moved on—“for unnamed conspirators.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some of them may be on the Hill.”
The general swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
In the corner, Fessenden had been whispering with Speed. Lincoln’s old law partner was shaking his head. Fessenden turned to Stanton. “This is difficult to say, Mr. Secretary. But I believe someone should fetch the president pro tempore of the Senate.”
“No,” said Stanton.
“Senator Wade is next in the line of succession—”
“He may be first in line at the gallows after this day’s work.”
In the chilly silence, the only sound was the labored struggle of the scrawny figure on the bed. The doctors had cleared away most of the blood, but it was plain to everyone that the clever eyes would never again open. The bed was too short for him, so they had laid him sideways.
Dan Sickles spoke up. He, too, had been weeping quietly. “Senator Fessenden is right, Mr. Stanton. At least send someone to guard Mr. Wade.”
The Secretary of War for a moment seemed ready to erupt. Certainly his eyes narrowed, and the familiar dangerous flush rose from his neck. Then he turned and snapped a series of angry orders at the general, who fled.
“Mr. Wade will be perfectly safe,” Stanton told the room. “One way or the other.” He laughed, mirthlessly.
Lafayette Baker entered. He beckoned to Stanton, and the two stepped out into the hall. Abigail watched them go.
“They have arrested my brother,” she said.
Jonathan looked at her.
“We always know what happens to each other, the people in my family. We can sniff disaster.” She closed her eyes briefly. “That’s what Nanny says, anyway.”
II
Stanton and Baker had not returned. Another doctor had arrived, and now three were poking and prodding the dying man. Sumner had somehow slipped in, and sat on the far side of the bed, face drawn and pale, holding Lincoln’s hand. His own trembled. Abigail wondered how the great orator had planned to cast his vote, then decided it made no difference.
A black woman came in, head down, with fresh linen and a basin of warm water. The surgeons relieved her of these burdens and placed bloody towels in her cradling arms, and Abigail understood how she herself had been so thoroughly overlooked.
“You know why the two of you are here, don’t you?”
Abigail looked up. “No, Mr. Sickles. I do not.”
“Part of it is political theater: the end of the world as staged by Edwin Stanton. When they do the famous paintings of this moment, he would not want the Great Emancipator to have nobody of your race at his bedside.” Sickles wiped his eyes, and, for once, made no effort to hide the physical pain that was his constant plague. “But there is something more. Stanton feels that he owes you.”
“Owes me for what?”
“For Judith.”
Abigail shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said, although she thought perhaps she would have, but for the overwhelming grief that made it difficult just now to take in anything at all. She shook her head again, and then realized that she was up next to the bed once more, and Sickles was in the corner talking to Jonathan.
“A tragic day,” said Charles Sumner, close beside her. In the half-light of the late afternoon, the blond-white hair was like a halo around that highly moral head. “To survive the ordeal of the past month, only to fall to the assassin’s blow.”
Evidently, he had decided to vote for acquittal; or so he said, now that it no longer mattered. Yet Abigail longed to believe him, to believe that there might be a second great Washingtonian, after Mr. Lincoln himself, whom she could, unreservedly, admire.
“Mr. Lincoln and I had our disagreements,” said Sumner. “But in the end, I could not be a part of this extra-constitutional revolution.” He blinked, and, to her surprise, tears began to run down the high-boned cheeks. “He did not destroy slavery as I would have destroyed it, but he did destroy it. He did not fight the war as I would have fought it, but he did fight it. And”—wavering on his feet, as if overcome—“and history, I suspect, will judge that he did better than anyone else would have.”
Behind her the surgeon said, “He is gone.”
Abigail spun. So busy had she been staring in surprise at Sumner that she missed the moment of Lincoln’s passing. Now the weeping was general: all these powerful men, and most of them were crying. Stanton placed his hat on his head, then removed it in silent salute. The room blurred, faded, steadied again. Somehow her face was against Jonathan’s chest, and his arms were around her, as, helplessly, she sobbed.
She heard a couple of voices suggesting, timidly, that the new President be sworn in; and louder voices echoing Stanton’s suggestion that the gallows might be a more fitting fate.
“You must not say such a thing,” said a stern voice, which, to her surprise, she recognized as Jonathan’s. “We dare not challenge the line of succession.”
“They challenged it,” said Speed, who had known Lincoln longer than anyone in the room. He looked hard at Sumner.
“No,” said Sickles, tone surprisingly gentle. “That is the one thing they did not challenge.” He actually smiled. “They believed their version of the Constitution, and Mr. Lincoln believed his. There is a kind of honor on both sides.”
Speed would not compromise. “Their side acted out of financial interest—”
“As did some on our side,” said Jonathan, scarcely milder than before. It struck Abigail that he had, in the past few days, grown up. “It is time to let him go.”
“Hilliman is right,” said Sickles, and put his arm around Speed’s shoulders, as the old lawyer wept unashamedly.
The ensuing silence was less prickly than elegiac; the group was mourning, separately and collectively.
“It is a strange thing,” Stanton finally said, watery gaze on the middle distance. He was seated once more on the bed, beside the body. “Had Lincoln lived, he would have been removed, and history would have counted him as yet another in the line of unsuccessful Presidents who have occupied the Mansion since Mr. Jackson’s day. But now he will be celebrated. In centuries to come, America will sing his praises. The man who ended slavery.” A sour look, the words curdling. “The man who saved the Union.” He gestured vaguely toward the window. “One day, a monument to the great Lincoln will stand out there, beside Washington’s.”
Abigail stirred herself. “Are you saying Mr. Lincoln won’t deserve it?”
Stanton’s rheumy eyes swiveled her way, and one had the impressio
n that here was a man who never forgot an enemy. Or forgave one. “That verdict is for history, Miss Canner. Not for us.” Again he turned toward the figure on the bed. Abigail caught something in the Secretary’s expression, an oddly heated look that she first mistook for contempt. Only much later did she identify the emotion as jealousy. Stanton shook his head. “As for Mr. Lincoln, now he belongs to the ages.”
Epilogue
June 10, 1867
FOR ABIGAIL CANNER and Jonathan Hilliman, the ensuing weeks passed swiftly, yet, when they turned their memories back, the days possessed all the bleary slowness of our nightmares. There was, first, the larger story: Lincoln’s funeral, his sudden and majestic elevation from feared dictator to adored martyr. There were the arrests of a nest of conspirators, including the one girl who had survived the bombing at Madame Sophie’s. Many of those arrested by General Baker managed to be shot and killed in the process; therefore, the outlines of the plot that had led to the death of the beloved President were never quite clear.
The rumor that the actual assassin had been a colored man was dismissed as just that: a rumor. The newspapers announced that it was a disgruntled Confederate corporal named Waverly who had done the deed, wearing blackface, hoping to stir up a race war. Secretary Stanton said so, and all the dozens of witnesses agreed, even those who had previously said something else. As for Waverly himself, although it had been thought at first that he had made his escape, his body was found a day or two later, crushed to death in the train yards beyond the Seventh Street depot.
Poetic justice, the leader-writers agreed—although some of the pro-Lincoln papers insisted that he had been killed by his own employers, and wanted Stanton (who was obviously running things) to determine exactly who those employers had been.
Then there was the mysterious disappearance of the prominent Washington attorney David Grafton. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but nothing came of it. As it happened, Grafton’s clerk, a man named Plum, vanished, too; but nobody noticed. The lawyer was obviously the more important mystery. Some stories placed him in the West Indies, others in Canada or Mexico. A handful of papers reported that Grafton had been murdered by “his own people”—like Corporal Waverly—and the body disposed of in secret, in order to prevent disclosure of the names of the wealthy men at the very top of the conspiracy. But the wealthy were always being accused of everything in America, and nobody took the stories at all seriously.
Less noticed were the announcements by eight separate congressmen and two Senators that they had decided not to seek re-election. Several disclosed plans for extended travel abroad. In this they were joined by a handful of industrialists and their sycophants, who moved to second or third houses in France or England until matters calmed a bit at home. August Belmont was not among them. Belmont issued a public statement decrying the vicious murder of Lincoln, and demanding a further investigation. In this he was joined by several other great men whose firms would profit from a lower tariff.
In a less public action, Belmont & Co. sold its warrants in Hilliman & Sons back to the issuer, at considerably less than par.
Benjamin Wade, seventeenth President of the United States, made clear that he would not, as had been his intention, raise tariffs and soften the money. On the contrary: he would govern, to the best of his ability, as his great predecessor would have, had he survived. Indeed, President Wade himself was ill; there was some question whether he would survive the year and a half left to the term.
Certainly nobody expected him to run in 1868. The smart money was still on Chase, but the violence and conspiracy in the nation’s capital, along with the continuing unrest at the South and the continued looming threat of the dying but still-dangerous powers of Old Europe, were leading already to calls for a stronger hand at the helm, the hand of a warrior. A successful Civil War general, say. Sherman, maybe. Or, best of all, Grant, who continued to disclaim any interest in the White House, but with an increasingly decreasing fervor.
As for Hiram Felix, another military leader who had once been spoken of as presidential timber, he had taken ship with his daughter Margaret, and his widowed sister, Clara, to Central America, hired by one of the banking combines to manage their affairs in that region of the world.
All of which brought Jonathan and Abigail, on this fine June Monday morning, to the Seventh Street railroad depot, a short stroll from the Bannerman house. She had allowed him, this one last time, to drive her. The porters had loaded the bags onto luggage carts and wheeled them away. Now Jonathan stood with her beside the gleaming cars that would carry her south. Abigail was wearing a blue ladies’ traveling suit, ordered from a Boston dressmaker under the guidance of Dinah Berryhill. She looked fresh and smart and beautiful.
“What will you do?” she asked. The gray eyes glistened. “Sit for the bar as planned?”
“I suppose I might.” Jonathan looked away. “Only the firm is shut.”
“You suppose.” She pouted in mock disapproval. “It is my understanding that President Wade has also offered you a position.”
“As a deputy in the Treasury Department.”
“It is said to be lucrative.”
He colored. “I suppose I shall consider it. I shall need a source of income, as I have declined to enter the family business.”
“Once more, you ‘suppose.’ ” Her tone was stern. “If I may say so, Mr. Hilliman, you seem to possess an insufficiency of information about your own life.”
He tried for a jolly tone. “And what about you? Will you once more take up your quest to read law? Sumner said he would take you on. Chase. Any one of the Radicals would be delighted.”
“I will decide when I return from the South.” Jonathan was about to speak, but Abigail covered his mouth with a gloved hand. “I know. Probably my Aaron is dead. But I have to see for myself. I have to know that he is dead. I am sure you understand that. President Wade has made Mr. Baker give me all of the information his people have gathered on where the rebels kept colored prisoners from the war. If Aaron is alive, I will find him. If he is not, I will prove it. Either way, the uncertainty will end.”
“And then?”
The pixie grin, first time in a long while. “Why, I shall return north, I suppose, finish my studies, and obtain admission to the bar. After that, perhaps I shall allow some clever young man to marry me.” Allow.
But the grin faded. Judith fell like a shadow between them, as, most likely, she always would. For Lincoln had been wrong. Judith had not stayed safe. She had been warned by Noah Brooks that the conspirators had come to suspect her role. They wanted the list; they might reasonably guess that Judith knew its hiding place. And so she had fled, relying on her own resources as always. But down in Virginia, the great Chanticleer, already suspected as a link in the chain, had walked into some kind of trap—not even Baker had all the details—and was not seen again. That was what Stanton had felt the need to make up for. Of Lydia, the baby, there was no word.
Nor was there word of Michael. But Jonathan had a theory. Abigail obviously believed that her brother knew or suspected that their sister was a Union spy. It was not clear exactly when Judith was captured; but suppose that Michael had heard, perhaps through his own contacts in Virginia, of what happened to her; and, in a fury, had stalked Lincoln and shot him?
Obviously, Waverly could not have done the deed: he was shot the night before. Let future historians make of that detail what they might.
What Jonathan could not see clearly was why Stanton had let Michael escape. The answer, he suspected, was that he hadn’t. Michael had been cornered in some abandoned barn and shot dead, as those Baker tracked were almost always shot dead, and then Waverly had been substituted as a more publicly acceptable assassin.
Maybe.
But another question tickled at the back of his mind. Abigail had never told him precisely what became of the list of “potential conspirators,” or of the pages from Stanton’s journal. Jonathan had never asked—
He realize
d that he had missed what Abigail was saying. She had asked him about next year’s presidential election: an event he cared about not in the slightest. He was, indeed, done with politics. But Abigail, as so often, was raising a question only in order to answer it.
“I suppose it makes no difference,” she murmured, finger on her chin in that gesture that so fascinated him. She spoke with the confidence now of the experienced political observer. “Mr. Chase can run. Mr. Butler can run. They can all run. Whichever party nominates General Grant is going to win.”
“You are sure, then, that Grant wants to be President?”
“If there is one thing I have learned over the past two months, Mr. Hilliman, it is that every man in this city wants to be President.”
“Not I.”
“Not yet.”
Two porters passed them, trundling a cart laden with baggage. A sharp whistle announced a train’s departure, although not Abigail’s.
They looked at each other, reminiscing without speaking. They had come a long way from that silly day they met, when the first words out of Jonathan’s mouth had been an unintended insult. Now, as they walked toward the second-class car, there was much he wanted to say to this remarkable woman: That he would be here waiting when she returned. That she would love New England. That he would not trade an instant of their time together for any prize available in this life. That he would wrap Hilliman & Sons in a ribbon and hand it over to Belmont for half a penny if it meant that they could be together.
But he understood Abigail too well by now, and knew that such proclamations would only embarrass her. She was no longer interested in promises. The only way to prove his willingness to wait would be to wait. From what he had seen of that Octavius fellow, he would be waiting, too; and even Fielding might return; but Jonathan resolved to wait better.
They were at the foot of the steps now, searching for the words with which to say goodbye.
“What do you think would have been different?” he asked finally. “If Lincoln had lived, I mean.”
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 57