The First Assassin (4 page)

The entrance was on the Senate side of the building. Inside, several attendants brushed off Lincoln and Buchanan to remove the dust that had collected on their clothes during the ride. There was a mad scramble all around them to get in position for the formal movement onto the platform where Lincoln would give his speech and take the oath. Senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, the diplomatic corps, and guests all had to take their assigned places.

Rook had assigned soldiers to guard the windows above the platform. He decided to make sure they were in position. He left the Senate chamber, turned left, and climbed a staircase. As he was going up, a man was dashing down—a late arrival frantic to take his place in the procession. The rest of the building was empty except for the soldiers at the posts. Everything was as he had expected it.

Peering from a window, Rook saw thousands of people gathering to hear Lincoln’s speech. They stood shoulder to shoulder, covering acres of ground. Some had scrambled up the leafless trees for a better view. There were plenty of troops among them too. All looked well.

At the last window he intended to check, Rook came upon a bright-eyed soldier. “Any trouble here, Private?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

Rook looked outside again. Dignitaries were filing out of the rotunda and onto the platform. Suddenly Lincoln appeared. His back was to Rook, but there was no doubt about his identity. He stood several inches taller than the people around him. There was also that hat. And then there was the applause—wild cheers the likes of which Rook had not heard all day. If the crowd on the Avenue had treated Lincoln coolly, here it adored him. These were his people. Rook realized he probably did not need troops in this throng. If any person tried to harm Lincoln, he would be swarmed by a mob of avengers. This was the climax of the inauguration, the moment when Scott had speculated Lincoln would be most vulnerable to an assassin. Rook suddenly understood that Lincoln had never been so safe. He felt a tremendous sense of relief. It had been impossible to rehearse for this day, and now for the first time he was confident the inauguration would be peaceful.

He stepped away from the window and leaned against the wall. He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead. The soldier across from him was still standing at attention. The whole point of his being here was to make sure another man with a gun would not be. His job was done too.

“Shall we listen to the inaugural?” asked Rook.

“Yes, sir!” The young man was excited at the invitation.

They watched Edward D. Baker introduce Lincoln. He was a senator from Oregon and also one of the incoming president’s closest friends. Rook and the private strained to detect his voice above occasional gusts of wind blowing by the Capitol. It was just possible to hear him, but listening demanded total concentration.

When Baker finished, Lincoln rose to loud applause. From the corner of his eye, Rook noticed the private wore a huge grin—he was obviously a supporter. Lincoln removed his hat, but then realized that he did not have enough hands to hold his hat and protect the pages of his speech from the wind at the same time. He appeared uncertain about what to do. Then a stocky little figure on the stage got up. This was Stephen Douglas, the man Rook had supported for the presidency. The senator took the president’s hat and returned to his seat.

The exchange took place a few feet behind the edge of the platform, and Rook was not sure how many people in the crowd saw what had just happened. That small gesture astonished him. Lincoln’s greatest political rival had come to the rescue. Lincoln was a few lines into his speech before Rook even noticed he had started speaking, he was so struck by what Douglas had done.

Yes, thought Rook to himself, I would take a bullet for Lincoln.

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 1861

“This man is gonna help us, Lucius! It can feel it! All the slaves been talkin’ about it!”

Lucius looked at the short woman standing before him in the foyer. She was trying to speak in a soft voice but could not keep from raising it. This was Nelly, the neighborhood busybody. She had come from next door to borrow a cup of sugar. She was always doing that. Lucius doubted that she really needed the sugar. She just wanted to talk.

“I tell you again, Lucius: he’s gonna to help us!”

“How’s he gonna to do that?”

“He’s gonna to come down here and free us! Why else would all the white folks be so upset? I’ve lived through a bunch of these presidents, Lucius, and sometimes the white folks get upset about them. But they ain’t never been upset like they upset now. This is a whole new kind of upset!”

“Lower your voice!” said Lucius in a sharp whisper. He turned to look at the staircase leading upstairs, as if he expected Bennett to come down and scold him for listening to Nelly’s nonsense. He knew his master was waiting for a guest who would arrive soon.

Lucius was used to Nelly’s nattering. She seemed to know everybody on the Battery—and everything, too. Nelly had opinions on most subjects and enjoyed sharing them with anyone who at least would pretend to listen. It always amazed Lucius how she talked with such certainty about things she could not possibly know. Today it seemed as if she had sat in on a dining-room conversation with the Lincolns the night before.

“He’s gonna to help us, Lucius,” said Nelly again. “Hear me now. That man Lincoln is gonna to come down here and let our people go, like Moses did to Pharaoh.”

“What makes you think a white will ever care enough about a black to do that?”

“Lucius, I know of whites right here in Charleston who would free the slaves.”

“You’re crazy, Nelly.”

“I ain’t fibbin’.”

“Maybe Lincoln is a good man. But there ain’t a single white person in Charleston who cares about the slaves, except to make sure they do what they’re told.”

“Have you heard of the Underground Railroad?”

“Of course, Nelly. Don’t say it so loudly.”

“There’s a station right here in Charleston.”

“That ain’t true.”

“Lemme tell you something, Lucius—”

A hard knock came from the front door.

“Nelly, you gotta go now.”

“I’ll slip down the hall. You get the door and I’ll come back.”

The knocker pounded again, this time more urgently. Lucius sensed impatience on the other side. He raised his eyebrows. “Go, Nelly,” he said. “You know where the sugar’s at. Get some and get outta here.”

The knocker banged against the door again, even harder than before. Lucius started for it. He placed his hand on the knob and looked over his shoulder to where Nelly had been standing. At last she was gone. Sometimes the only way to make her leave was to send her on her way. Lucius turned the knob and opened the door.

A man stood on the porch, his hand raised as if he were about to knock again. It was getting dark outside, but Lucius recognized the caller immediately. This was Tucker Hughes, a familiar face in recent weeks. He stepped inside without an invitation, brushing against the slave’s shoulder. Lucius wondered why he had even bothered to knock. Before he could ask for Hughes’s hat, it was shoved at him. “Is he upstairs?” inquired Hughes.

After a lifetime in servitude, Lucius had become accustomed, even numb, to the dozens of little indignities he suffered each day. But for some reason the behavior of Hughes gnawed at him. Over the last year or two, Bennett had taken a fatherly interest in Hughes and treated him almost as a surrogate son. Hughes was a frequent caller when Bennett stayed in Charleston. He had come by every few days since the middle of January.

Hughes raised his eyebrows. “Is he upstairs?” he asked again, this time enunciating the words as if he were speaking to a half-wit.

The nasty tone snapped Lucius out of his thoughts. “Yessir, Mr. Hughes, and I can take you—”

Before Lucius could get the words out of his mouth, Hughes turned toward the steps and started up. Lucius tossed the hat on a chair and sprang after him.

This treatment perturbed the slave. It was not merely the rudeness. He was used to rudeness from white folks. It was the total disregard for the role Bennett had assigned Lucius to play in this house. Lucius should lead Hughes upstairs and announce his presence. If Hughes just barged in, Bennett would think Lucius was not doing his job. The slave would look bad and Hughes would have gained nothing. It was supremely inconsiderate.

Lucius wanted Bennett to think well of him. He had lived with Bennett almost his entire life. They were born the same summer at the Bennett plantation. Lucius’s mother had looked after both of them during their early years, and they played together in the rough egalitarianism of childhood. But it could not last forever—not when one of them was white and the other black. Bennett’s father, Richard, separated the boys around Langston’s seventh birthday. Lucius became a full-time slave hand. Bennett’s father introduced his son to the life of a plantation owner. In the mornings, a tutor taught him grammar, history, and arithmetic. In the afternoons, the overseers showed him how to manage a team of slaves in the field. In the evenings, Lucius would lose sleep when he heard the groans of fellow slaves who had been whipped that day by Langston. The boys rarely spoke to each other then, and they certainly never traded words about the past. Sometimes their eyes would meet and exchange a knowing look, but in a moment it vanished. They had their separate roles.

One day, when Lucius was about fifteen, he walked by an open window at the Bennett manor and heard the familiar voice of Langston arguing with his father. Eavesdropping was a skill that slaves honed to perfection, and Lucius decided to listen.

“I won’t do it, Father! I cannot!”

“Langston, he is a slave and you are his master. There can be no favorites on a plantation. You must set aside whatever childish feelings you once had for him from what your responsibilities are today.”

“You are asking me to punish Lucius for no reason—for a reason I am to invent! This test you have devised for me is not fair to him!”

The boy was shouting, but his father replied with cool insistence.

“Langston, you are becoming a man, and you must bury those sentiments. They do not befit a member of our class.”

“No, Father, I cannot do it—and I will not do it!”

Lucius heard footsteps stomping across the floor followed by the slam of a door. He decided he had better get on his way when he heard the elder Bennett mutter something to himself. The words were hard to make out, but Lucius thought he could hear them well enough: “If that’s how you’re going to be, Langston, then there’s only one way to deal with the problem.”

A week later, Lucius was sold to another plantation ten miles away. The night he arrived, an overseer led him into the fields, where two other overseers waited in the darkness. They beat him senseless. “Just breakin’ you in, boy,” said one of them. Lucius crawled back to the slave shanties when it was done. The overseers knocked him around the next night too, and the one after that. The beatings grew more sporadic over time, but they never stopped—and they rarely occurred for a reason.

The abuse went on for years. Lucius grew into manhood, but he wondered how long he could hold up. During the day, he was forced to work harder than ever before. He had managed to escape whippings at the Bennett farm. At his new home, with its owner in Charleston most of the time, the overseers had the run of the place. They were cruel men. Lucius felt the lash constantly. He believed the overseers had it in for him. He believed he was a marked man. There were other slaves who were more resistant to authority, and some who did not work very hard. Lucius thought he was the only one to be singled out for torture.

Not once was he given a pass to visit his mother, who still lived on the Bennett farm. Slaves who had close kin nearby routinely earned this privilege. Lucius thought about running away, but he was kept in such a state of exhaustion and pain that he did not consider himself capable. He figured he would be caught and beaten worse than ever before. Was it really worth going on this way?

Lucius decided it was not. He resolved to end it all. One day, he positioned himself alone in the fields, away from where the other slaves were working. It was sure to attract the attention of an overseer. By the middle of the morning, it had. One of them started walking in his direction. Lucius thrust his hand into an overgrown patch of weeds, and his fingers grasped the handle of a butcher knife he had stashed there. As the man approached, Lucius thought to himself, This is going to be easy.

The overseer stopped about twenty feet away from where Lucius crouched. Instead of hurling insults at the slave and demanding that he move into the other field, he just stood there for a moment. He was not even holding his whip. This confused Lucius.

“If you think I wanna beat the life out of you, boy,” sneered the overseer, “you’d be right.”

Lucius tightened his grip on the knife. Just take a few steps this way, he thought. The overseer needed to come a little closer before Lucius could pounce.

“But I’m not gonna,” said the overseer. “It’s your lucky day, boy. Follow me.”

He turned around and started walking to the manor. His back was to Lucius. He seemed completely unaware that the slave presented any kind of threat. Perhaps this was the time to strike. But now Lucius was curious. He looked down at the knife. It will cut just as well tomorrow, he thought. He hid it and followed the man whose life he had spared.

A few minutes later, he stood in front of the manor. The overseer told him that he had been sold.

“You’re going back to Bennett’s,” said the overseer. “I think you’re worthless, but they must want you bad. I hear you fetched a high price. They must wanna rough you up too—when you came over here a few years back, old Mr. Bennett insisted that we beat you as much as we pleased and then some.”

The overseer said all this with a smile on his face. Lucius hated him for that. For a fleeting moment, he wished he still had the knife in his hand. “Here’s a pass to their place. You have to be there by sundown. You know the way,” said the overseer. “Now get out of my sight!”

Lucius collected a few belongings. Then he walked back to the home he had not seen for years. That evening, as he reacquainted himself with familiar faces that had grown several years older, he learned the news: Richard Bennett had died two weeks earlier. His son Langston was running the plantation.

These memories flashed through Lucius’s mind as he followed Tucker Hughes up the stairs. He was determined to catch the younger man.

Bennett had treated Lucius very well as the years passed into decades. He had let Lucius start a family, gave him a prestigious job inside the plantation house, and now rarely traveled anywhere without his favorite servant. Lucius once heard it said that the art of being a slave is to rule one’s master. He knew that nobody ruled Bennett, but he also believed that he had achieved a position of reasonable comfort. He doubted that someone who was not white could have a better life in the South. At the same time, he privately shared Nelly’s hope that his whole race might be free one day. He wanted that for his grandchildren more than himself. He never said such a thing, of course. Not even to Nelly.

The urgency of the moment again intruded on these thoughts. Hughes was about to enter the study.

“Please, Mr. Hughes! Let me!” said Lucius.

Hughes looked up irritably but took a step back. Lucius nodded to him—a thank-you that was not heartfelt—and opened the door. Inside, Bennett looked up. Piles of books and newspapers cluttered the room. Both Lucius and Hughes knew that Bennett was a voracious reader. He read almost every word in every issue of the
Charleston Mercury
and
De Bow’s Review
plus several other periodicals. He even used to get
Harper’s Weekly
, which was published in New York. Yet the local bookshops stopped carrying it when it printed pictures of Lincoln.

“Mr. Hughes is here, sir.”

Hughes entered the room, arms outstretched. “Langston,” he said, with a big grin on his face.

The men exchanged greetings. Hughes eventually took a seat and picked up a book on a table beside him. He flipped to the title page:
The War in Nicaragua
, written by William Walker and published by S. H. Goetzel & Co. in Mobile. On the facing page, a picture of Walker made him look harmless, even effeminate. It was hard to believe this man had led a small army of American adventurers into Nicaragua and had briefly become the little country’s president.

“It’s surprising how photographs are appearing everywhere,” said Hughes.

“It may be a passing fancy,” grunted Bennett. “I’ve never had mine taken.”

“Really? We have to do something about that.” Hughes continued to flip through the pages of the Walker book. “Are we mentioned in here?”

“Fortunately not.”

The light in the room brightened. Hughes looked up to see Lucius adjusting an oil lamp.

“It arrived last fall, around the time of Walker’s death,” said Bennett. “He wrote it to raise money for that final expedition—the one that killed him.”

“I was sorry to hear what had happened,” said Hughes.

“There was a time when you and I believed he held promise. His success might have changed recent events for the better. If some part of Spanish America had been integrated into the Union, we might have averted this whole secession crisis.”

“We did what we could. Yet we were foolish to think the Northern states would ever permit a filibuster like Walker to succeed in one of his conquests—and let Nicaragua, Cuba, or any part of Mexico into the Union as a slaveholding state. I am coming to believe the North actually wants this calamity.”

Hughes set the book back on the table where he had found it. “How exactly did he die? All I heard was that he was executed.”

“The Brits caught him in Honduras plotting a new incursion. They handed him over to the locals, who put him in front of a firing squad.” Bennett lowered his voice. “After they had riddled his body with bullets, the captain walked over to his slumped form, placed the barrel of his musket in Walker’s face, and pulled the trigger. The shot obliterated his features.”