The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (76 page)

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 realized 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.”

“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.

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.