“You might as well ask what would have been different had Mr. Booth succeeded back in 1865.” Abigail smiled. “The answer, I suspect, is very little. History is larger than any one man, even when that man is Abraham Lincoln. And, certainly, history is larger than any one bullet. Either way, America would roll on toward empire.”
“You seem to believe that our destinies are fixed.”
“At the moment,” she murmured, “it would seem so.”
“And you’re satisfied with that answer?”
Abigail dimpled prettily. “Oh, no, Mr. Hilliman. Not at all. I am never satisfied. But I am content. And so must you be.” She looked him up and down. “I wish you well in the days ahead.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“You are welcome,” she answered, eyes measuring him.
Jonathan gave a final try. “Don’t you ever wonder if—”
“Constantly,” she said, and left him.
Author’s Note
I often shove around historical events in my novels. Here, by keeping the sixteenth President on his feet after Booth, I have committed more mayhem than usual. In the next few pages, I offer a sampling of the ways in which I have played with history. Before we reach that point, however, let me be crystal clear: this is a work of fiction. It is not intended as a brief in support of Lincoln’s impeachment. Historians rank Lincoln as America’s greatest President, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Whether Lincoln committed any impeachable offenses is another matter. Nowadays, the more politically engaged among our citizenry tend to cry “impeachment” whenever a President they happen to dislike does anything remotely controversial. Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it. We have forgotten that there was an era in our history—almost an entire century—when members of the Congress talked constantly about impeachment, and on more than one occasion attempted it.
When I told people I was writing a novel about a hypothetical impeachment trial of Abraham Lincoln, they tended to have one of two reactions. Some assumed that I must believe that Lincoln should have been impeached and removed from office. Others were skeptical that Lincoln could possibly have done anything even colorably impeachable; or assumed that the most likely political attacks would be from the forces favoring slavery. Lincoln has become so large in our imaginations that we might easily forget how envied, mistrusted, and occasionally despised he was by the prominent Abolitionists and intellectuals of his day, including leaders of his own party.
Great people can sometimes do terrible things, and Presidents of the United States are no exceptions. Perhaps Franklin Roosevelt should have been removed from office for herding Japanese-Americans into internment camps, or Harry Truman for incinerating, by design, tens of thousands of innocent people. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, whose contempt for the First Amendment was so complete that he argued, fervently, for the incarceration of critics of American entry into World War I, on the ground that they were disloyal—and partly accomplished his unconstitutional goal. As for Lincoln, the accusations set forth in my novel are nearly all matters of historical record. Lincoln did shut down newspapers he believed were impeding the war effort. He did arrest opposition spokesmen. He did suspend habeas corpus, and ignore court orders demanding the release of prisoners. He did place Northern cities under martial law. He did shut down the Maryland legislature by force. Are these impeachable offenses? That question I leave for the reader to decide; bearing in mind that no recent Chief Executive, no matter how controversial, has any similar litany to his credit.
Those are the facts. What about the fiction?
Fiction revolves not around “What would have happened” but “What could have happened.” The possibility that Lincoln could have been impeached is the fictional premise that tantalized me for many years before I started work on this novel. Let me be clear: I do not believe Lincoln, had he survived Booth’s bullet, should have been impeached. Do I believe he would have been impeached? The question whether Lincoln, had he survived, would have suffered Andrew Johnson’s fate and faced an impeachment trial is of little interest to contemporary historians. But scholars avidly debated this proposition a hundred years ago and more—that is, closer in time to the titanic battles between Radical Republicans and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor. Some writers, many of them apologists for the Southern cause, thought a Lincoln impeachment likely. They pointed out that the Radicals largely despised Lincoln, whom they thought unfit to be President in the first place. They argued that Johnson faced impeachment precisely for carrying out Lincoln’s own “let ’em up easy” policy toward the defeated South.
More recent scholars scoff at the notion that so canny a politician as Lincoln would have seen his presidency wrecked on the treacherous shoals that nearly doomed Johnson, who entirely lacked the talent for persuasion or compromise. And while it is true that Johnson in many instances followed his predecessor’s policies toward the defeated South, and that Congress hated those policies, it is also true that he went a good deal further, committing a series of political blunders that would have been unimaginable from Lincoln. Furthermore, the mercurial, hard-drinking Johnson often seemed to go out of his way to antagonize his congressional adversaries. I quite agree with the consensus: I consider it highly unlikely that the Radicals in Congress would have challenged Lincoln so directly. But it is the “what-ifs” that make fiction such fun.
What about the other facts in the novel? What is real, what is invented?
Let us begin at the beginning. On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth entered the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theatre and shot Abraham Lincoln, who died the following morning. That same night, Secretary of State William Seward was stabbed in the face and neck by Lewis Powell, one of Booth’s coconspirators. Vice President Andrew Johnson was also supposed to be assassinated that night, but George Atzerodt, assigned to do the job, lost his nerve and got drunk instead. In my fiction, it is Booth who failed, and a braver Atzerodt who succeeded. Seward, in real life, recovered from his injuries, although this took some weeks. In my fiction, he went into a steep decline, lingering for years, but as a disfigured invalid who refused to go to the office or receive callers.
In real life, Mary Todd Lincoln survived her husband by many years. But even while her husband was alive, she struggled with what was likely depression, although some historians believe that she suffered from bipolar disorder. Much of Mrs. Lincoln’s life after the assassination was spent in penurious circumstances, and she spent time in a mental institution.
My foreground characters—in particular, the Canners, the Hillimans, and the Bannermans—are all invented. But most of the background characters, including all of the named political figures and journalists, are real. In the White House, the only invention is Major Clancy. Among Abigail’s circle, although the Mellisons, the Berryhills, and the sisters Quillen are all invented, George Vashon, Charles Finney, and Kate Sprague are real. So are the other great women of Washington whom Abigail encounters, including Fanny Eames, Crete Garfield, and Mary Henry. Among Jonathan’s paramours, Margaret Felix, like her father, is fictional. Lucy Lambert “Bessie” Hale is real, and likely did have a romantic relationship of some sort with Booth, although most serious historians doubt that they were engaged.
I have necessarily invented a great deal of dialogue, but I have tried, when the record supports it, to have my characters speak words they actually spoke, even if, in real life, they spoke the words on a different occasion and on a different subject than the one I might have assigned. The anecdotes I attribute to Lincoln all appear in various Lincoln sources, most of them in a form very close to the form they take on the pages of my novel. (This includes the story in chapter 10 that mentions Lincoln’s brother. The story is almost certainly untrue, as his brother died when Lincoln was still very young. But that is the way he told the tale.) Many of the phrases I place in August Belmont’s mouth during his meeting with Jonathan Hilliman are adapted, albeit freely
, from Belmont’s speeches and correspondence, as compiled in Letters, Speeches and Addresses of August Belmont, privately published in 1890. The pro-slavery argument presented by Hollis Chastain in chapter 38 is certainly drawn from an article in the Southern Presbyterian Review, just as he says—but, being a fictional character, Dr. Chastain was not the author. In addition, the sermon Dr. Chastain describes giving on the occasion of Lincoln’s shooting was actually delivered by the Reverend John Lansing Burrows of the First Baptist Church of Richmond. Most important, several of the speeches at my fictional impeachment trial are borrowed in pertinent part from speeches at the trial of Andrew Johnson. For example, Speed’s defense of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus is drawn from a similar speech by one of Johnson’s lawyers, who asked during the trial whether the Senate would have been prepared to impeach Lincoln for that act—and then proceeded to explain its necessity, much as Speed does here.
What about the black community at this time? Our shared notion that the entire darker nation in the middle years of the nineteenth century was just out of slavery and grindingly poor is the sort of racist nonsense that continues nowadays to provide a peculiar comfort to black and white alike. Although history has little to say about them, there were indeed a handful of wealthy black families in America at this time, and the Berryhills in particular are something of a composite. Moreover, there were at that time many black families in what we might now think of as the middle class. Business ownership was not unusual, and not a few held college degrees and were trained professionals. And so an ambitious and well-educated young woman like Abigail Canner could indeed have traveled in the circles she does in my story, and dreamed of involvement in great events.
AS TO THE games I have played with history, I have no doubt that the astute reader will have spotted many. For example, Major General Dan Sickles did not actually retire from the army until 1869, but that would be too late for him to ride to Lincoln’s aid as in my story. Howard University was not actually founded until March of 1867, just about the time my hypothetical impeachment trial begins. Also, in 1861, George Vashon was living in Pennsylvania, and therefore, unless he visited Washington, is unlikely to have advised Abigail Canner’s parents to send her to the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1861.
As far as I have been able to determine, Ibsen’s play Brand was not performed in the United States in 1867. My invented Columbia Unification Party should not be confused with the Unification Party formed in 1873 by former Confederate officers in an effort to harness the black vote in the South. (It failed.) For dramatic reasons, I have changed the date of Nevada’s admission to the Union from 1864 to 1866, and moved Nebraska’s admission in 1867 ahead by a few days. In real life, the price of Nebraska’s admission was indeed the promise to send to Washington two Senators who would support the impeachment—albeit of Johnson, not Lincoln.
Port Hudson, Louisiana, was actually captured by General Nathaniel P. Banks, not, as in my story, by General Hiram Felix; and the siege took place simultaneously with, not subsequent to, the siege of Vicksburg. Senator William Pitt Fessenden, at the time of these events, was likely living in a boarding house near the Capitol, not in the cottage I built for Abigail to visit. And although it is entirely plausible that an upwardly mobile middle-class household such as the Canners presented would have subscribed to Peterson’s Magazine, the article about the fashions of the previous century and the short story about the lovers in the snow were actually published some years prior to the events in my novel.
At Yale, Third Society (now known as Wolf’s Head) was not founded until 1884, and therefore Whit Pesky could not possibly have been a member. The Anti-Slavery Conference, from whose report Benjamin Butler reads during the trial, would likely not have ended in time for him to have the report available. His quotation, however, is accurate. The Beecher-Tilton scandal did not take place until the early 1870s, and therefore could not have been debated during a trial occurring in 1867. (As in my novel, the Managers of the impeachment case against President Andrew Johnson also sought to imply the respondent’s involvement in sexual scandal.)
The men of Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, known as the Bucktails, were assigned to guard the Executive Mansion (as well as the Soldiers Home, where the President had use of a cottage) in 1862. But the Bucktails were disbanded at the end of the war, and so could not have provided continuing security, as in my story. The episodes Mr. Manager Butler raises in cross-examining General Sherman in chapter 48 are told just as history says they occurred. The closing arguments of Managers Butler and Stevens in the novel are adapted somewhat freely from closing arguments offered by the Managers in Johnson’s trial.
Lafayette Baker’s term as head of the federal intelligence service was more checkered than my tale suggests, but I have tried to incorporate parts of the truth into my central mystery. So, for example, the real-life Baker was indeed accused of spying on Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, an accusation that ended the general’s career. But it is unlikely that Baker’s motives were anything other than either self-aggrandizement or paranoia. Incidentally, Baker died in 1868, a year after my story takes place. Although a few writers do indeed believe Baker was poisoned, I am skeptical. Still, the possibility works wonderfully well in a novel.
I also redated certain real documents, to fill the gap between the date of the real Lincoln’s death and the years of my fictional Lincoln’s presidency. For example, the letter from the Reverend Ezra Kinney requesting the President’s autograph was actually sent in December 1864, not, as in the novel, December 1866.
The speech by Curran de Bruler quoted by Abigail in her initial encounter with Dan Sickles was not actually delivered until 1898. The Soldiers and Sailors National Convention did indeed adopt the resolutions mentioned by General Felix in Chapter 19, demanding more money for veterans, but in January 1866, more than a year before the novel begins.
I have altered the order of mortality, and not only by allowing Lincoln to live and causing Johnson to die. So, for example, Congressman James Blaine—whom some historians believe to have been as corrupt as in my tale and others do not—was not murdered in the spring of 1867. He actually died of a heart attack a quarter of a century later. Thaddeus Stevens was indeed a dying man at the trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868. In 1867, he was failing, but not nearly as rapidly as in my story. History has little to say about the life of Sophia Harbour, but she also did not die in 1867. For the record, Madame Sophie, as she was known, did indeed run a brothel of two prostitutes. It is listed in the report of the Provost General, who, just as in my novel, kept detailed records of the city’s bawdy houses. However, the record-keeping function lapsed with the end of the war, and the office of Provost Marshal General was actually abolished in 1866, its functions handed over to other agencies. I needed it to last a bit longer because, without its existence, I could not have made a plausible case for an official registry of prostitutes in the capital.
I have altered several aspects of the Senate rules for impeachment trials, as adopted at the trial of Andrew Johnson. Perhaps the one most noticeable is that at Johnson’s trial, only one lawyer from each side was permitted to present opening argument; and only one was allowed to present closing argument. (Incidentally, Dennard is right and Butler wrong in their colloquy about the hearsay rule. The Senate should have heard Sherman’s testimony.)
On the other hand, many aspects of the era that the reader might believe to have been invented were not. Thus, although I have no reason to think that chess champion Paul Morphy visited Washington, D.C., in 1867, he did indeed serve on General Beauregard’s staff at the Battle of Bull Run, and his family fortune did indeed come from the importation and trading of slaves. The corrupt reselling of military discharge papers, in which Whit Pesky may have had a hand, was a considerable business both during and after the war. The word “progressive,” which I put in Senator Sumner’s mouth, actually did not appear as an adjective until some years later, but already by the end of the C
ivil War had popped up in public speeches as a noun. The tale of the dispute between the Augusta Railroad and the South Carolina Railroad is true—including the part about the engine being moved to block the tracks—but I have played with the timing just a bit.
For those wondering what became of B Street, the address of the Smithsonian Institution in the novel, the name was later changed to Independence Avenue along the southern border of the Mall, just as B Street north of what is now the Mall became known as Constitution Avenue. (B Street remains in both Northeast and Southeast Washington.)
I have kept most of the terminology of the day, and of the Senate, with some important exceptions. For example, during an impeachment trial, as during any other session of the Senate, the presiding officer of the body is always addressed as “Mr. President”—even when the President of the United States is on trial, and the Chief Justice of the United States presides. I decided that this might cause too much confusion. Therefore, in my story, the Chief Justice is addressed as “Your Honor,” as he would have been in a regular courtroom.
Although I have tried to be cautious in my language, I have not been entirely fair to the linguistic style of the nineteenth century, especially in the upper classes, where contractions, for example, were frowned upon, and the language of formal occasions was even more elaborate and Latinate than the novel suggests. Except for the formal presentations on the floor of the Senate, I have rendered much of the public speech in slightly less flowery form than that effected by public figures of the time. I have spelled the word “negro” throughout with a small “n,” in keeping with the practice of the day. Similarly, I have spelled “moustache” with the “o” that is no longer a part of the American usage. I have also used a handful of words anachronistically. For example, to say that someone has flown the coop is probably an early twentieth-century coinage, and certainly did not occur earlier than the late nineteenth; but the phrase just fit too well into the scene at the end of chapter 28. There are others, too.
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 58