Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

  They chose Jefferson Davis as their president.

  Abe’s trinity patrolled the train day and night. Officially, they were “detectives” from Springfield who’d volunteered to look after the new president. His security detail also included a pair of humans—a detective named Allan Pinkerton and his old friend Ward Hill Lamon. Lamon had volunteered to be Abe’s bodyguard out of nothing more than friendly concern for his safety. He was one of the few around the new president who knew the gravity of the threats he faced. In the coming years, White House staff would grow used to seeing Lamon patrol the White House grounds after dark, or sleeping in front of the door to the president’s bedroom. He was big, tough, handy with a gun, and fiercely loyal—and his help was desperately needed.

  Abe’s train was scheduled to stop in at least ten major cities on the way to Washington. In each one, thousands (if not tens of thousands) of locals came in hopes of seeing the new president with their own eyes. Abe would often make an impromptu speech from the rear car—sometimes only inches from those who’d packed in to hear him speak. He would then leave the stations by coach to meet with local leaders, attend banquets, or watch parades in his honor. It was a security nightmare.

  It has been an overwhelming several days. The boys are in fine spirits, though—running about the train, watching the country roll by through its windows. Bob finds it “all so very exciting,” while Willie and Tad seem not the least bit affected by the crowds, or by the presence of so many new faces. Mary, too, seems to be taking it all in stride, though her head has been especially bothersome this trip. *

  For all the excitement, there was a conspicuous tension hanging over the train. Everyone on board felt it, though no one spoke of it openly.

  There are some who have sworn that I shall never live to see the White House. Such talk breeds grave concern (an appropriate kind given the subject) on the faces of my protectors. I, however, can honestly say that it costs me not one nickel of sleep—for I have known death my entire life, and have come to regard him as something of an old friend. Of course, Mary is roused to great anxiety by these rumors (but then, she is roused to great anxiety by a great many things). So long as our boys hear nothing of it, I am content.

  The trip continued without incident for ten days, through Indiana, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—and it began to seem that all the talk of assassination was just that. But on February 22nd in Philadelphia, Abe received an urgent visit from William Seward’s son, Frederick. He came bearing a sealed letter.

  Dear Mr. President Elect,

  Our mutual acquaintance wishes it known that a plot has been discovered in Baltimore. Four men will stab and shoot you to death when you change trains at the Calvert Street Station. He thought it best you should be aware of this, so that you may take every precaution against it.

  Yours,

  —Wm. Seward

  It was decided that Abe, accompanied by Pinkerton and Lamon, and wearing a hat and cloak to conceal his identity from the other passengers, would take a separate train through Baltimore directly to Washington. Pinkerton and Lamon would be armed, Abe wouldn’t.

  This caused quite a squabble, I recall. Lamon (who knew me to be proficient with such weapons) insisted I be given a revolver and a long knife. Pinkerton refused. “I will not have it said that the future president of the United States entered the capital armed!” The two nearly came to blows over the matter, until I offered a compromise: Lamon would carry two of each weapon, and would give them over only if we came under attack. It was agreed to, and we prepared to be off.

  But their plans changed when Pinkerton realized that the trinity was gone.

  [They] had simply vanished somewhere between Philadelphia and Harrisburg—giving no reason for their absence. As I refused to leave Mary and the boys without an armed escort, it was quickly decided that Pinkerton would stay behind and look after them while Lamon accompanied me on the other train. The telegraph lines between Pennsylvania and Maryland were then cut, so that any conspirators would be unable to relay word of our departure from Harrisburg.

  Just after midnight on the 23rd, Abe’s “secret” train passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington.

  There were anxious moments as we passed through the heart of the city (more slowly, it seemed, than any train I had ever ridden on). Could these assassins have discovered our trick? Were they, at this very moment, preparing to bombard our train with cannon fire?

  Abe needn’t have worried. By the time his train rolled through the station, three of his would-be assassins were already dead—and the fourth was dying beneath his feet.

  The partial bodies of four men were found near Calvert Street Station the next morning. From the February 23rd edition of the Baltimore Sun:

  Two gentlemen have had [their] heads taken. Another has been viciously beaten, to the extent that police are as yet unable to determine his age or race. The fourth, it seems, was halved beneath the wheels of a passing locomotive. Incredibly, a witness claims that the gentleman survived for several minutes thereafter—his spine being severed in such a way that he was still able to move his head and arms. He was seen faintly crying out and attempting to drag his remaining body from the tracks before dying.

  Though they never spoke a word about the incident, Abe never doubted that his three vampire protectors had been responsible for the carnage.

  V

  On March 4th, 1861, Abraham Lincoln—exceptional boy of Sinking Springs Farm, apple of his departed mother’s eye, survivor of the trials of Job, and one of the nation’s most accomplished vampire hunters—was sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States.

  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  Tens of thousands gathered in front of a covered wooden platform on the Capitol steps to hear him speak. Little did they know that they were witnessing the largest security operation in history. Troops were stationed around the city, ready to put down any violent protests or large-scale attacks. Police (both uniformed and not) stood guard beneath the podium where Abe spoke, keeping an eye out for anyone who might raise a revolver or long rifle. Closer to the president elect, Ward Hill Lamon hovered on the platform with two revolvers in his coat and a long knife on his belt. The vampires of the trinity were stationed at different points, but they were never far from Abe.

  Only later would I learn that the hearts of two armed men had been discreetly run through during my speech. Unlike the assassins in Baltimore, these had been vampires.

  Five weeks into Abe’s young presidency the country’s strained “bonds of affection” finally broke.

  Fort Sumter, a federal stronghold in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, had been under siege by Confederates since January. The Southerners demanded that the Union troops (commanded by Major Robert Anderson) surrender the fort, as it was in South Carolina, and therefore not the property of the federal government. Abe had done everything in his power to prevent hostilities from breaking out, but Anderson’s men were running desperately short of food, and the only way to resupply them was by sending warships into Confederate territory.

  I am now forced to choose between two evils. Either I must allow a few soldiers to starve, or provoke a war that will undoubtedly kill scores of soldiers. Struggle as I might, I can see no third option.

  Abe sent the ships.

  The first of them reached Charleston Harbor on April 11th. The next morning, before sunrise, Confederate Colonel James Chestnut Jr. gave the order to fire on the fort.

  It was the first shot of the Civil War.

  ELEVEN

  Casualties

  Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this admin
istration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

  —Abraham Lincoln, in a message to Congress

  December 1st, 1862

  I

  On June 3rd, 1861, Stephen A. Douglas was found dead in a stairwell of his Chicago home.

  I have just this hour heard the shocking news. Though the full facts have not yet come to light, I have no doubt that it is the work of vampires—and that I bear some of the responsibility for his murder.

  Publicly, the cause of death was reported as typhoid fever, even though none of Douglas’s friends remembered him feeling unwell the night before he was discovered. The body was taken by coach to Mercy Hospital, where it was examined by a young Chicago physician, Dr. Bradley Milliner. From the autopsy report:

  Four small, circular puncture wounds on deceased’s body—two on left shoulder directly over axillary [artery]; two the neck directly over right common carotid [artery].

  Both sets surrounded by significant bruising; uniformly spaced one and one-half inches apart.

  Whole of deceased’s body badly decayed and gray-blue in color; face is sunken; skin brittle, suggesting death occurred weeks or months before examination.

  Stomach contains brightly colored, whole pieces of undigested food, suggesting deceased ate shortly before death, and that death occurred less than twenty-four hours before examination.

  Along with his observations, Dr. Milliner scribbled a single word in the report’s margin:

  “Incredible.”

  The report itself was deemed “inconclusive” and suppressed by Milliner’s superiors, who thought that releasing such information would only add to the “climate of conjecture and suspicion” surrounding the senator’s death. *

  Lincoln and Douglas had been the most famous rivals in America. For two decades, they’d competed over everything from a woman’s love to the highest office in the land. But for all their political antipathy, the two had grown to respect, even like, each other over the years. Douglas was, after all, one of Abe’s “brilliant beacons” in Washington’s “fog of fools.” And while the so-called Little Giant spent years appealing to Southern passions, he was, in his heart, no son of the South. In fact, Douglas loathed the idea of disunion, going so far as to call secessionists “criminals,” and declaring: “We must fight for our country and forget our differences. There can be but two parties: the party of patriots and the party of traitors. We belong to the first.”

  When the Union began to tear itself apart in the wake of his failed 1860 campaign, it was Stephen Douglas who first reached out to his old rival—the new president elect.

  He wishes to join me in the cause of opposing secession. To that end I have asked him to make a speaking tour of the Border States and the Northwest (those places where the flame of unity might yet be fanned by our efforts, or snuffed out by a lack of them). I can think of no better messenger, no ally more symbolic of the need for unity. I will admit that his offer took me quite by surprise. I suppose it possible that he has come to regret his association with the vampire South, and is looking for some means of redemption. Whatever his reasons, I welcome his help.

  Douglas made pro-Union speeches in three states before returning to Washington. At Abe’s inauguration, with the threat of assassination hanging in the air, he placed himself near the podium and declared, “If any man attacks Lincoln, he attacks me!” And on Sunday, April 14th, 1861, as Fort Sumter was being surrendered to the Confederates, Stephen Douglas was among the first to race to the White House.

  He came today with no appointment, only to find that I was meeting with the Cabinet, and would be thus engaged for quite some time. [Presidential secretary John] Nicolay asked him to call again, but Judge Douglas flatly refused. When I had grown weary of hearing his familiar baritone shouting profanities in the hall, I swung my office door open and exclaimed, “By God, let the man in or we shall have two wars to fight!”

  We met privately for an hour or more. I had never seen him in such a panicked state! “They will march headlong into Washington and kill me!” he cried. “Kill the lot of us! I demand to know what plans you have to combat this menace, sir!” I told him, in the calmest voice I could muster, the truth—that I was to call for 75,000 militia the next morning; that I was to suppress this rebellion with every power of my office and weapon in my arsenal. These reassurances, however, only seemed to deepen his panic. He urged me to call for three times that number. “Mr. President,” he said, “you do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as I do. You do not, and I say this with the deepest respect, sir, know the real enemy you face.”

  “Oh, but I assure you, Mr. Douglas—I know them too well.”

  Thanks to Henry, Abe had known about Douglas’s connection to Southern vampires since their Senate race three years earlier. Douglas, however, never suspected that the gangly, graying man before him had once been the mightiest vampire hunter on the Mississippi.

  I can scarcely describe his astonishment at hearing the word “vampires” pass my lips. Now, with the truth out at last, each of us told the other his story: I of my mother’s death; of my years spent hunting vampires. Douglas of the fateful day when—as a young, ambitious Democrat in the Illinois State Legislature—he was approached by a pair of “sallow” men from the South. “It was then that I first learned of [vampires],” he said. “It was then that I first became intoxicated by their money and influence.”

  Douglas repaid their support by railing against abolitionists in the Senate and by using his natural talent for speechmaking to rally proslavery forces across the country. But he’d begun to question his vampire patrons in recent years.

  “Why do they reject compromise with the North?” he asked. “Why do they seem intent on war at any cost? And why, by God, do they care so fervently for the institution [of slavery] at all? I could see no logic in it, and I could not, in good conscience, continue down the path to disunion.”

  It became clear that Douglas did not know the whole truth; clear that—while guilty of some small treachery—he could not be judged with the likes of the traitorous [Jefferson] Davis. Moved by his remorse, I determined to tell him all: the marriage of slavery and Southern vampires. Their plan to enslave all but the fortunate few of our kind; to keep us in cages and chains as we had kept the Negro. I told him of their plan to create a new America; a nation of vampires—free from oppression, free from darkness, and blessed with an abundance of living men to feast upon.

  By the time I finished speaking, Douglas wept.

  That night, Abe sat at the head of a long table in his office, with Secretary of State William Seward to his left. They were joined by the rest of the Cabinet, all of them anxious to hear why they’d been summoned from their supper tables and rushed back to the White House.

  “Gentlemen,” I said at last, “I wish to speak to you this evening about vampires.”

  Abe had met with his Cabinet on a near daily basis since the inauguration. They’d discussed every detail of the coming war: uniforms, supply lines, commanders, horses, provisions—everything but the truth of what they were really fighting for, and who they were really fighting against.

  And yet I had asked these men to plan me a war! Was it not akin to asking a group of blind men to pilot a steamboat?

  The encounter with Douglas had changed Abe’s mind. When they parted company that evening, he had ordered Nicolay to reconvene the Cabinet at once.

  I thought it crucial that these men—these men who were to be my counsel through untold miseries—knew exactly what they faced. There would be no more revelations in this office. No more half-truths or omissions. Now, just as I had with Douglas, I would tell them the whole truth—with Seward there to endorse every word of it. My history. My hunting. My alliance with a small band of vampires called the Union, and the unthinkable consequences of the coming war.r />
  Some were shocked to hear vampires spoken of at all. [Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Wells and [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon] Chase, it seemed, had managed to go the whole of their lives thinking them nothing more than myth. Wells sat in ashen silence. Chase, however, grew indignant. “I will not stand for folly in the face of war!” he declared. “I will not be summoned from my home to be made a fool for the president’s amusement!” Seward rose to my defense, insisting that every word was true, and admitting his own complicity in keeping it from the rest of the Cabinet. Chase remained unconvinced.

  He was not alone in his doubts. [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton—who had long believed vampires real, but confined to the shadows—was the next to speak. “What sense can it make?” he asked. “Why would [Jefferson] Davis… why would any man conspire against himself? Why would any man hasten his own enslavement?”