The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (2 page)

HE OPENED HIS
eyes, and was aware at once that the burning in his leg was worse. He groaned and tried to shift, only to realize that a boot was pressing into the wound. He was propped against a tree, hands bound behind him. Through the haze of pain, he was able to make out a small group of men, all of them hooded. The man with his foot on the wound was thickset, and wore a blue mask. Beside him was a taller and thinner man, head covered by a burlap sack with eyeholes cut into it. “He’s awake,” said the man in blue.

“Course he is,” said the man in burlap, “seeing as how you’re pretty much breaking his leg.”

The heavy man stooped. He was sodden with sweat. “Whatcha doin out here, boy? There’s a curfew.”

The black man grimaced, and dropped his eyes. “Sorry, suh.”

“Say that again.”

“Sorry, suh.”

The man in the blue mask stood up and walked over to the others. The black man laid his head against the tree, glad to be free of the pain. His eyes were glazed, but his hearing was fine.

“I don’t like how he sounds,” said the man in blue, who seemed to be the leader. “He’s faking. He’s not one of ours. He’s one of them Northern niggers.”

“I’ve seen this boy,” said the man in brown burlap. “He’s a Dempsey boy.”

The leader’s face was invisible inside the blue hood, but, even so, his posture seemed to communicate disappointment. He leaned close to the prisoner. “Is that true, boy? Do you work for Mr. Dempsey?”

“Mrs. Dempsey, suh. Yassuh.”

“Mrs. Claire Dempsey up Warrenton way?”

“Suh, I don’t know a Missus Claire. I works for Missus Henrietta, at Heddon Hills.”

The release of tension was general. Heddon Hills was indeed the Dempsey family plantation: fallen on hard times, to be sure, since the Yankees came through, but still in Dempsey hands. The man in burlap put his hand on the leader’s shoulder. “Satisfied?”

“No.”

“He’s a Dempsey boy, I told you—”

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,” said the leader. He shook himself free of the other’s grip. “I say he’s educated.”

All five hoods turned his way.

“He’s an educated nigger,” he continued, eyes fairly glowing through the slits. “He’ll ‘Yassuh’ and ‘Nossuh’ till Judgment Day, but behind that black face he’s laughing at us. He’s one of those educated niggers, he’s been to some nigger school somewhere, and now he thinks he’s better than we are.” With a movement of sublime laziness, he tucked the muzzle of his shotgun up against the black man’s chin. “Is that right, boy? You’ve been to some nigger school, haven’t you?”

“Nossuh,” said the prisoner, eyes wide in the smooth brown face.

“You’re a Dempsey boy.”

“Yassuh.”

“Search him.”

Immediately the black man felt his bound hands drawn farther behind him. The pain would have doubled him over but for the shotgun pressing into his neck. One of his captors was going through his pockets, and another through his saddlebags. He heard an exclamation and knew they had found his little supply of greenbacks. Another, and he knew they had found the weapons.

“There’s a letter,” somebody said, and handed it to the thin man who had tried to protect him. He tore open the envelope. “It’s from Mrs. Dempsey all right. It says this here is Royal, and he’s been loyal to her since he was a boy. He never ran off with the Yankees. It says he’s carrying
a message down to a Mr. Toombs in Snickers Gap.” He gave the paper to the leader. “That’s Mrs. Dempsey’s signature. She does some of her banking with me.”

The leader sneered. “And now this boy knows who you are.”

Silence.

The gun barrel prodded the black man’s neck. “What’s the message?”

“Suh?”

“What message does Mrs. Dempsey have you sending to Mr. Toombs?”

“Suh, Mrs. Dempsey wants to invite her goddaughter to spend the holidays at Heddon Hills.”

“That’s the whole message?”

“Yassuh.”

“Enough,” said the man in burlap. “This ain’t who we’re looking for. Let him go, Bill.”

The leader turned his way. “And now he knows who I am, too.” He lowered the shotgun and, without warning, pulled the trigger.

The black man cried out in agony. Wounded now in both thigh and foot, he collapsed against the tree.

Bill crouched beside the prisoner. “Do you think we’re stupid, boy? You think we’re illiterate crackers? I was with Jubal Early for two years. I was a colonel. My friend Jedediah here—since we’re telling names—was a captain. He was with Whiting at Fort Fisher. Now, let me tell you something.” The gun caressed the wounded man’s thigh. “I know who you are. I know what you’re doing. You are a courier for the Yankee secret service.” The black man was shaking his head frantically. “You are a courier, and you are carrying a secret message. Tell us the truth, and tell us where the message is hidden, or I’ll blow your balls off and let you bleed to death, and meanwhile we’ll find the message anyway.”

The man called Jedediah tugged at his arm. The others were already inching toward their mounts. “Come on, Bill. Let’s get out of here.”

“Get him up.”

“What?”

“Get him up. I want him on his horse.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re gonna have us a hanging.”

“But—”

“He’s a spy, Jedediah. Spies get hanged.”

The man in burlap shook his head. “The war’s over.”

“Not for me.”

THE BODY WAS
found two days later by a Union patrol. The night riders had left him in a ditch, after stealing his horse, his weapons, and his money. The soldiers made nothing of it. The night riders were killing colored men all over the South, and there was not much to be done about it. There was no way of investigating, even if anybody had wanted to. Nobody talked to the Yankees.

The soldiers took the corpse up to Winchester and turned it over to the colored Benevolent Association, who would bury the remains somewhere. But before the soldiers surrendered the body, they took the boots, because supplies were still short, and if they didn’t fit you, you could always trade with somebody they did. And the boots were passed a good way down the line before somebody found the false lining, and the wad of paper hidden inside. He thought it was money, but it turned out to be just a list of names. The private told his sergeant, who said the dead man was probably in the black market. The names were his customers. The sergeant told the private to deliver the paper to the office of the adjutant general, just in case military personnel were involved. The soldier meant to do just that in the morning, but that night he went drinking in town, got into a bar fight, and wound up with his head smashed in. He died the next morning.

The sergeant took his duties seriously. He asked the dead private’s tentmates to go through the man’s things and bring him the letter with the list of names. When they came back an hour later to say they couldn’t find it, the sergeant looked for himself.

The letter was gone.

I

THEY WERE HANGING
white folks in Louisiana and shooting black folks in Richmond. Union troops had invaded Mexico, Canada, Cuba, and every brothel in the South. Confederate troops were holed up in the Smoky Mountains, waiting for the signal to attack. The casket of the First Lady, who had drowned last year while visiting relations in Illinois, had been exhumed, and found empty. Meanwhile, Abe Lincoln, facing an impeachment trial, was sneaking off to see a medium in New York, and Jefferson Davis, onetime leader of the rebellion and supposedly locked up in Fort Monroe, was actually in Philadelphia, sipping champagne with his rich friends.

None of this was true, but all of it was in the newspapers.

It was late winter of 1867, nearly two years after the end of the war, and reporters were inventing rumors almost faster than their editors could print them. The nation, everyone agreed, was a mess. If only it had been old Abe who was shot dead that night instead of Andy Johnson, his Vice-President. If Johnson were President now—so moaned the editorial writers—the nation would be in considerably better shape.

All of which helped explain why Abigail Canner had finally given up on reading the papers. She was smarter than any five reporters put together, and perfectly capable of making up her own stories. But she didn’t want to be a reporter: she had a brother and a distant cousin in that business already. She wanted to be a lawyer. This was impossible, she was told, given her color and her sex. But she was determined to
try, unaware of how her ambition would carry her to the center of great events.

The romance, like the violence, came later.

II

On the first Monday in February, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred sixty-seven—or, in the larger history, one month exactly before the trial of the sixteenth President of the United States was to begin—Abigail set out upon her journey. Ignoring her mad brother’s derisive insistence that nothing good would come of the effort, she rode the horse-drawn streetcars through the filthy snow to prove to the world that she was indeed the woman she claimed. She had her college degree and her letter of employment and the stony conviction,
learned from her late mother, that, whatever limitations the society might place on ordinary negroes, they would never apply to her.

Abigail boarded the Seventh Street line, which passed near her home, then changed at Pennsylvania Avenue, choosing the second row to avoid a squabble with the white citizens of Washington City, who seemed to consider the rear of the car their own private preserve, but also to avoid the ignominy that came of riding up front with the driver, where nowadays most men and women of her race tucked themselves without a second thought: a discrimination until recently enshrined in city law. The war was over, the slaves were free, and the government of the United States guaranteed the rights of the colored race, but here in the nation’s triumphant capital, in the midst of the most frigid winter in years, everybody was at pains to establish who was who.

Abigail was a tall young woman, unfashionably slender, with smooth mahogany skin that bespoke more than one dallying slavemaster in her ancestral tree. The hooded coat she wore against the cold was a product of the finest dressmaker in Boston, a gift from her uncle, a physician. The trim was silver fur. The face that peered out suggested a woman who pondered a great deal over the issues of the day, and very deeply, but frowned on most forms of fun. Her gray eyes were sharp and probing; her dimpled chin seemed confident and disapproving. Men tended to find her reasonably pretty, even if not so vivacious as her older sister, Judith, or so innocently beautiful as her younger sister, Louisa. They also tended to find her too distant, too judgmental, too intelligent altogether, for Abigail would always rather read another book than have
another dance. Nanny Pork, who ran the Canner household, preached the evils of dancing and carousing and most forms of enjoyment, and although Abigail was not precisely the sort to do what she was told, she regarded Nanny with the sort of awe usually reserved for less visible agents of divinity.

Abigail was twenty-one years old, and parentless, and black, and expecting, somehow, to affect the course of history.

Maybe even starting today.

The streetcar pulled up at the carriage block on the corner of Fourteenth Street, near the Willard Hotel, where negroes were not welcome except in service. Abigail stepped carefully down onto the broken stone. Neither the driver nor any of the gentlemen passing on the street made any effort to assist her, but she had not expected them to. The newsboy was the only one who paid her any attention, shouting that Senator Wade was predicting that at least forty of the fifty-four members of the Senate would vote to remove the President from office, and forty, she knew, was more than enough. The boy thrust a newspaper at her with one hand and held out the other for a coin. Abigail ignored him. She stood in the swirling snow and checked the address she had written in her commonplace book. Actually, she had the address marked down firmly in her memory, but her late mother had always taught her to make assurance double sure. Abigail folded the book into her handbag and walked north. The tiny flakes were like pinpricks on her bright cheeks. She took care not to slip on the ice, but a wall of wind still almost knocked her from the cobbled sidewalk into the frozen mud of Fourteenth Street. As she regained her footing, two white women, heading the other way, began a very loud conversation about how, since the war, half the negroes in town seemed to be drunk from breakfast on.