The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (13 page)

General Felix had worked himself into a state. His cheeks bulged redly. He waved to a servant, who refilled his glass. He gulped at the flaming-red wine like a drowning man tasting water.

“Not your McShane, though,” he went on, calm again. “McShane was fighting for the negroes. Last time I saw him—oh, two months ago, it must have been—he was on about how the constitutional amendment to end slavery was the mightiest achievement in the history of the Republic. I suppose Mr. Lincoln feels the same.” The Lion’s mighty hands
demolished a crust of bread. He dipped it in the wine as his daughter looked away. “Doesn’t matter. Lincoln is finished, isn’t he? Trial starts in a couple of weeks, and he’ll be gone in a month.”

This time Meg’s kick was not fast enough. “I believe, sir,” said Jonathan, “that we are going to prevail.”

Hiram Felix nodded distractedly; he was not signaling agreement. “I’m not a political man, Hilliman. Don’t much care who’s in the White House and so forth, as long as our policy is sound. Of course, one has one’s friends. Associates. Men of ideas. The thing is, Hilliman, if this impeachment business goes anywhere—you see my point—if Mr. Lincoln has to leave, well, without a Vice-President, it would be Wade, wouldn’t it? Wade’s an old man, Hilliman. A sort of a caretaker. Besides, it wouldn’t look very good, would it, to attack Lincoln from Capitol Hill, take over the office, then run in ’68. Not the sort of thing our Protestant Republic could countenance. Too European. France, Italy get up to that sort of thing all the time. Not here. No. The ship of state would need a new captain at the helm. Even if the impeachment fails, the Republican Party is split wide open. The country will be ready for change, Hilliman. Somebody new. Reliable. A hero from the war and so forth. Grant, say, if he’s willing. Sherman. Even a man like Garfield has sufficient ambition, from what I hear.” Dark eyes sparkling now as he took another sip. “You never know where the country might turn,” said the Lion of Louisiana.

I

THEY BURIED ARTHUR
McShane the following Monday, in a swirling, feathery snow. The President did not attend the funeral. There had been rumors that he might, and the rumors brought the press out in force, but Lincoln stayed in the White House. Except for the occasional ride out to the Soldiers’ Home, where a stone cottage waited always upon his pleasure, Lincoln had hardly left the Mansion in the year since his wife died. Newspaper stories often described him nowadays as “stooped” or “shrunken,” to say nothing of “moody” or “distracted”—taking care, always, to quote unnamed visitors. According to Dan Sickles, many of the stories were planted by the Radicals, who, faced with the formidable task of reducing the public admiration of the President, had hit upon the strategy of persuading readers that Lincoln had become a pitiful shadow of the man who had won the great war, and no longer possessed the fiber to carry out his duties.

“There is a tradition,” said Sickles, as they sat around the common room later that afternoon, “that once a great war has been won, the leader must at once be deposed. The Romans used to do it. The British, too.”

“Not General Washington,” Abigail pointed out. “He won the war and then served two terms as President.”

“A tradition,” said Sickles, airily. He was stretched on the settee beneath the long window at the end of the room, giving his leg a rest. “Not a law.”

Strained laughter, in which Abigail did not join. She felt, just now, a distance from the others, perhaps because she had been ordered once again to remain behind and hold the fort while the others attended the service and accompanied the remains onward to the Catholic cemetery at Silver Spring. Abigail understood why. Arthur McShane had died in the company of a young black woman. It made perfect sense to spare Mrs. McShane the indignity of burying her husband in the company of another.

The decision rankled nevertheless.

“Speed will be joining us in a day or two,” said Dennard. “He has taken offices on Eleventh Street, but his clerk will work mainly at this table.” A sour glance at the blackboard, where the numbers now read
15–32–7
. They had lost both the newly elected Nebraskans, as expected—the result of the broken deal—and one additional Senator, whose name for the moment escaped Abigail. In any event, they were under one-third again, and needed four of the last seven to prevail. The likelihood of Lincoln’s acquittal seemed small, unless they were able to persuade Sumner. But the great man had not budged from his refusal to meet any of the President’s emissaries. Impeachment was no matter, he was known to have told friends, for wheeling and dealing.

“I suppose I should get myself a clerk,” said Sickles. “Everybody else seems to have one.” He glanced at Abigail. “Are you available, my dear?”

She chose to take the question as rhetorical.

“We have a great deal of work, et cetera, ahead of us,” said Dennard. He was a more distant man than McShane, with none of the familiarity or teasing. He was a man of considerable girth, yet lacked the bonhomie common to her experience of fat people. Instead, Rufus Dennard was staid, even stiff, and often spoke in a murmur that suggested that anything louder would constitute a breach of professional ethics. “I see no reason to worry about that habeas nonsense and the rest. That is just for the newspapers. The real fight will be over Counts Three and Four.” Adjusting his thick glasses as he glanced at the broadsheet. “Failing to protect the freedmen. Defying the authority of the Congress, et cetera.”

“In other words,” intoned Sickles, from his spot by the window, “they are irritated at Mr. Lincoln for making up his own mind.” He grunted, shifting the wooden leg to a more comfortable angle. “Our fine solons will not be satisfied until they can give orders to the President.”

Dennard colored slightly but made no response. “The House Managers—that is evidently what the prosecutors are calling
themselves—the Managers have promised us a list of their witnesses this week. Under the rules adopted by the Senate, the prosecution is under no obligation to tell us why they are calling particular witnesses, and I believe that the Managers will do their best to confuse us as to their purposes. So among our most important tasks will be—”

A peremptory knock on the door. Before Mr. Little could open it, in strode Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, followed by a uniformed soldier with long, luxuriant moustaches and a red patch on his epaulette: the bodyguard who accompanied him everywhere.

Stanton glared around the room. His eyes lingered on Abigail, then swept onward. “Dennard. A word.”

The two men stepped into Dennard’s office, leaving the door ajar. Abigail, sitting nearest, strained to catch a word. Stanton was obviously angry; from what Jonathan had told her of the man, he usually was. She heard “that woman” and she heard “confidential” and she heard “message” and she heard “President.” The choleric and mistrustful Stanton was complaining about her presence. Any moment, Dennard would emerge and command her to the Library of Congress on a trumped-up errand, while the others remained to hear Stanton out.

Then came Dennard’s low rumble, clear as crystal and perhaps meant to be so. “Miss Canner is my clerk. I will not send her away.”

Abigail was unable to help peering into the room. The taller Stanton stared furiously at pudgy Dennard, and Stanton’s anger had been known to reduce the toughest of men to groveling. Even now, two years after the war, those who opposed him too sharply had a way of finding themselves under investigation by War Department auditors, or, in a few sad cases, vanishing into some dank and distant military prison. But pudgy Dennard, leaning against his desk, soft arms folded, was casual in his disdain of Stanton’s power: he did not even bother to contest the stare.

“Very well,” said Stanton. “Be it on your head.”

The two men trooped back into the common room.

Dennard started to speak, but the Secretary of War rode right over him. “Gentlemen,” he said, as if Abigail were not present. “The leaders of this conspiracy are traitors. In any other nation they would hang. But Mr. Lincoln is a meek and forgiving man, the soul of charity. We must therefore let events carry us along a bit longer.” A wet cough nearly bent him in two. “My sources tell me that the Managers are searching for a document, a letter of some kind that supposedly is some sort of
admission of guilt on Count Four.” He looked around the room, fingers combing through the rich brown beard. His eyes and nose both watered slightly, and Abigail wondered whether the stories were true, that Stanton used opium. “The letter, supposedly, is in Mr. Lincoln’s hand, or the hand of a close adviser, and discusses a plan, under certain contingencies, to impose military government on the District of Columbia. Not a war measure. The letter, supposedly, is dated after the war. Within the past year and a half.” He paused to allow them to absorb this. He meant, since Lincoln’s troubles with the Radicals began. “I am here to assure you,” Stanton concluded, “that no such letter exists.”

Abigail resisted the urge to look over at Sickles, but recalled sharply the envelope she had caught him removing from McShane’s desk two days after the murder.

Dennard, no fool, filled the silence. “Are you assuring us in your own name or in the name of our client?”

Stanton wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “In this matter, there is no distinction.” He smiled savagely. “Of course, you are always welcome to ask Mr. Lincoln yourself. He will tell you the same.”

“I will likely do exactly that.”

The murderous glare again. “And he will tell you precisely what I said he will tell you.” He looked around. “I’ll tell you what does exist, at least according to rumor. There is a list out there. A list of the men who are conspiring against the President. We will find the list, and then we will hang the conspirators.” With that, Stanton swept up his moustachioed bodyguard by eye, and was gone.

II

As a consolation prize for her exclusion from the funeral that morning, Dennard had given Abigail a motion to draft.
Just for practice, et cetera
, he had explained.
Not to be filed. Just to see how you do
. The motion asked for the exclusion of all testimony in which witnesses would say what others had told them the President said or did. This was covered by the hearsay rule, one of the oldest and most treasured propositions in Anglo-American jurisprudence. In her innocence, Abigail had imagined that she would impress them all by finishing her work by the time the funeral ended; instead, she had barely found time to begin. By the time Stanton left, it was past four in the afternoon. Dennard and Sickles left just after, leaving Abigail and Jonathan alone in the common room.

“I wanted to apologize,” he said after a bit.

“Apologize for what?”

“The funeral—”

“Please, do not trouble yourself. I managed to keep myself occupied.” She returned to the evidence treatise she had been consulting. She had never imagined that there might be so many exceptions to so seemingly simple a rule. She liked her rules straightforward and clear, like the ones Nanny Pork preached at home, and the pastor reinforced on Sundays. She had imagined, somehow, that law would be the same.

“Do you think it exists?” said Jonathan, suddenly. “The letter Stanton was talking about?”

Again she lifted her head. “I really wouldn’t have any idea.”

“I saw your face. You were less surprised than the rest of us. Come on, Abigail. Tell me what you think.”

Again she saw Sickles prying the drawer; and wondered what had possessed her to assist him; and subsequently to keep silent. The excitement of being invited, however briefly, into the inner circle?

“I think,” said Abigail, “that you and I have a great deal of work to do.”

But now she was disturbed. One of those simple rules she so cherished forbade false witness. Real life was always harder than the rules made it seem. Maybe that was why people spent so much time looking for ways around them.

She turned a page, not really concentrating. The gas lamps sputtered. One went out with a gasp of surprise. They both looked up sharply; and laughed; and returned to their work.

But Jonathan found his gaze drawn again and again toward Abigail, whom he found, quite simply, remarkable.

He had never spent so much time in the company of a woman of her color. Those with whom he had had conversations had mostly been women he met in service, or perhaps working in some shop. He had known educated negroes, of course. They were not uncommon at the North. Indeed, at the dinner table of his uncle Thrace, the Episcopal bishop in Boston and a director of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Jonathan had been held rapt by the rhetorical brilliance of men like Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummell and a schoolteacher said to be a grand-nephew of the poet Phillis Wheatley, although that claim, Uncle Thrace told him later, was unlikely: there were faux Wheatley relatives everywhere. A year or two before the war, Jonathan had traveled
with his uncle on a trip west to raise funds to purchase slaves and free them. In the town of Chatham, near Toronto, they had sat in the parlor of a man named Stanton Hunton, a major property owner and former slave who had been associated with John Brown, and whose children were all being educated in the modern way. Hunton had become prosperous, and owned valuable land in Canada and Michigan. On the train ride back east, Uncle Thrace assured his nephew that the black man, if once offered the opportunity to improve his mind and keep what he earned, could within a generation or two take his place beside the white in the political councils of the nation. But he said nothing about social life, and he said nothing about the black woman.