The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (7 page)

I

“
A BILL OF
impeachment,” said the President, “is a remarkable thing.” He adjusted his glasses and peered down at the printed pages on his desk. “So many words to express such a simple idea.
We want you gone
. That is what they are saying.” He looked up. “The charges don’t really matter.”

“They matter a great deal,” objected James Speed, the attorney general, who was expected shortly to resign his office to assist in preparation for trial. “They are petty and foolish. This is a conspiracy of your enemies. The entire country will see that, sir.”

The President’s office was crowded: Lincoln, Speed, McShane, and Jonathan, as well as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. This time Jonathan had sat outside for two hours before being invited in to take a letter—a letter, albeit, that nobody had yet gotten around to dictating. It was Thursday morning, two days after the House vote, and the entire country thought Lincoln was doomed. So did Bessie Hale, whom Jonathan had now met not once but twice for dinner, and who fairly glowed with the untutored excitement of an innocent to whom change is always thrilling. It is time for Lincoln to go, Bessie enthused. Everybody knows he is not the man he was, she said: not since he was shot in the head two years ago! Not since his wife died last year! And McShane, just two days ago, had hinted at the same thought. But Jonathan, who had not met Lincoln during the war years, found the postwar edition enormously impressive: erudite, confident, decisive.

“Are you with us, Hilliman?” said McShane, sotto voce.

Jonathan blinked. “Yes. Of course, sir.” He glanced at his notes in the dim, skittering daylight. The weather outside was filthy. The weather in Washington was always filthy: filthy rain in the summer; filthy snow in the winter. “You just said that if the House should indeed vote out a bill of impeachment, the lawyers will seek as much time as possible to file a response in the Senate.”

“Try to pay attention,” McShane hissed, tapping the paper.

Jonathan colored. His only function was to listen and take notes and keep his own counsel. He commanded himself to look where his employer was pointing. The list of charges against the President was only tentative. The House of Representatives had adopted a bizarre process through which it first voted to impeach, then appointed a committee (known as the Managers) to draft the actual charges, and last of all would vote on whether to endorse the charges and send the case on to the Senate. The paper on Lincoln’s desk was the result of the deliberations of the Managers. If, as expected, the full House endorsed the document next week, then the Managers would become the prosecutors in the Senate trial.

Lincoln ignored Speed’s foray. “No President in history has been so treated. They tried to do it to poor Tyler, but …”

He trailed off.

“Sir,” Stanton began. “I think that if we—”

Lincoln spoke right over his Secretary of War. “It makes no difference,” he said, morosely, “whether we are the victims of a conspiracy or not. The impeachment will go forward in any case.” He seemed no longer to be looking at anything in the room. His heavy gaze was directed, if anywhere, into a misty future he alone could discern, even if it appeared to those present that he was studying the map of Virginia pinned to the wall. “The Radicals never thought I was the man to fight the war, and now they do not think I am the man to make the peace. I long only to re-create the Union, whereas our congressional friends …” Again he trailed off; shook his head. His Kentucky accent was especially pronounced today. “It is well that Mrs. Lincoln has been spared this indignity.”

“She died a noble death, sir,” said Stanton, who could lie better than any man in Washington City. “Providence be thanked.”

The President nodded. He was on his feet, and so were the other men. He had kept them standing for over an hour, and his Secretary of
War, better known for his temper than for his endurance, was growing wobbly.

“Providence has a mighty peculiar way of distributing her blessings,” said Lincoln. “Sometimes I’m not all that sure she knows which side she’s on.”

“But we know,” Stanton insisted. He coughed into a large handkerchief. His eyes watered. “She is on our side, sir. She has always been on the side of righteousness.”

Another silence. Jonathan was wondering what precisely Stanton considered noble about Mrs. Lincoln’s passing. She had not died of the assassin’s bullet, or even of the Potomac fever. A year ago, while in Illinois on an extended visit, the First Lady had fallen into Lake Springfield and drowned. People said she had entered a long period of mental decline after the attempt on her husband’s life at Ford’s Theatre, but there were always people.

The President finally spoke. “The victors always think they’re righteous, but then they always seem to start a mighty unrighteous squabbling over the spoils.” He continued gazing at the map. The war was nearly two years over, but the President’s office on the second floor of the Executive Mansion was crowded with evidence of his constant worry that the conflict might at any moment erupt again. On a side table, Northern newspapers screamed rumors of Confederate troops continuing to do battle in the Smoky Mountains. Pigeonholes in the President’s desk held dispatches from military governors, warning of dire conspiracies being hatched beneath their feet.

“If I might make a suggestion,” McShane began. Stanton, as if by way of comment, coughed harder, and had no time to grab a handkerchief. His bushy beard was a mess.

Mr. Lincoln turned away from the map and waved McShane silent. His gaze passed slowly around the room, then returned to rest on Jonathan. And although, when the President spoke, he was addressing the entire group, Jonathan could not resist the feeling that the words were directed particularly to his own ears.

“The Congress has a constitutional duty,” said Lincoln, “but I have a constitutional duty of my own. They want me out of this office, and, believe me, I would willingly yield it if I could. But the work of binding up the Union is not yet completed, and, until it is, I cannot yield.” Lincoln’s right eyelid began to droop, making him look sleepy, but Jonathan sensed a growing alertness. “They have their duty,” the President
repeated, “but I have mine, too. I have taken an oath registered in Heaven to see that the laws are faithfully executed. I will rebuild the Union. I will not allow the Congress to break apart what has been so carefully knit back together. And it is your job”—the eyes began to roam again—“to make them accept it. We must not let this thing come down to a contest of wills. But I will do my constitutional duty.” A slow smile. “So, now that they’ve voted out this impeachment bill, you fellows go up to Capitol Hill and make sure they’re not in all that big a hurry to hold the trial.”

McShane said, “They will probably give us no more than a week to prepare.”

The President’s nod was amused. “Make them see reason. That’s your job.”

“If they refuse—”

“They will not refuse,” said Stanton, voice thick with unexpected fury. “They
dare
not refuse.”

Arthur McShane was a small man, but he stood up to the towering President and his vicious Secretary of War. Jonathan had worked for the lawyer for nearly a year, and had never been prouder of him. “With respect,” said McShane, “the Congress is likely to do pretty much as it pleases. The members believe that the President ignores their wishes and their decrees. In a sense, that is what this trouble is about.”

Stanton turned toward the President. “Sir, these are difficult times. You have, as you said, a constitutional responsibility. And I think, given the power you wield under the Constitution, that the Senators would have to accept as
fait accompli
whatever you decided.”

The President’s expression never changed, but those eyelids drooped a little lower. Satisfaction? Anger? Jonathan had no way to guess. Yet he sensed a great sorrow in the man, together with a degree of disappointment in his available advisers of the moment: the sycophantish Speed, the volcanic Stanton. Absent from these counsels was the man on whose advice the President had most relied over the years. Secretary of State William Seward had been attacked on the same night that Lincoln was shot and Vice-President Johnson murdered. Seward had survived, but with injuries so debilitating that in the two years since he had not set foot outside his house, across the avenue from the Mansion. Lincoln still visited his old friend regularly, but those occasional conversations could not substitute for daily meetings in this office. Many a Washington
hand insisted that, had Seward been healthy, his peculiar ability to pour balm on troubled political waters might have avoided the impeachment fight altogether.

When, at last, Lincoln spoke, he seemed to be addressing no one at all.

“The cost of a war,” said the President, “is impossible to estimate in advance. Later, when a great conflict ends, yes, we look back and engage in our learned arguments on whether the end was worth the great sacrifice. But that comes later. When we are deciding whether to begin, our judgment rests on the principles we believe to be at stake. Somehow, to somebody, they always seem to be worth fighting for. And maybe sometimes they are. But wars continue long after one side surrenders. Every conflict plagues the peace that follows it.” Mr. Lincoln’s gaze had fixed once more upon the map.

It occurred to Jonathan that the President had not made up his mind; that he was struggling, as he had during the war, between the need to follow the strictures of the Constitution and the need to prevail. That Lincoln wrestled, where most men followed the expedient path, increased Jonathan’s admiration for him.

“The god of war,” said Lincoln, sadly, “is never satisfied.”

II

Neither, as it happened, was Abigail Canner, left alone in the office while the others went over to the Mansion to meet the President. Holding the fort, McShane called it, borrowing from General Sherman, under whom he had served. Here she was, an honors graduate of Oberlin Collegiate Institute, and for two weeks she had been assigned to sweep and dust and, on a good day, collect the unruly files McShane left hither and thither, tying their green ribbons into neat bows, and slipping them into the proper drawers and pigeonholes.

“You’re not just holding the fort,” Michael had teased her. “You’re cleaning it.”

Yet Abigail did it all without complaint. She had learned the rules of hard work from Nanny Pork, who yelled at you if you failed to do your chores; if you did them, she yelled at you for failing to do them right. If Abigail spent her days dusting and filing; if she was frustrated daily by her exclusion from important meetings, she nevertheless was here,
in this momentous time, near enough to the center of things that she fancied she could feel the throbbing excitement of the nation’s leaders as, day by day, the possibilities for Lincoln’s survival waxed and waned.

But Abigail did her tidying, then sat down with the same first volume of Blackstone she had been examining in her private hours for the past two weeks. Mr. Little, who seemed to come and go as he pleased, had caught her more than once, but never said anything about it. Since Jonathan did not seem to mind, and even encouraged her, she supposed that the only person from whom she was hiding her secret studies was Mr. McShane, who turned out to be serious in his intention to limit her to chores scarcely removed from those assigned to Mr. Little. She was busily making notes about feudal land tenures when a knock on the door announced a visitor, who walked in without ever quite being invited: David Grafton, a lawyer with offices down on the first floor.

“I gather that you are here alone for the moment,” he said. “Good. I have been looking forward to this chance.”

He was an elegantly attired but oddly bent man, hips one way, torso the other, shoulders a third. He looked as if he had been twisted into a corkscrew by inhuman hands: the crooked man from the fairy tale. The truth was, he had been run over by a horsecar ten years ago, and should have died from the experience. But David Grafton was a man of indomitable will. Until two years ago, he had been the middle partner in what was then known as Dennard, Grafton & McShane. Jonathan was hazy on what had led to the crooked man’s departure, but on one rule he was crystal clear: Abigail was not to speak to him, at any time, for any reason.

“But why not?” she had asked. “He said hello to me the other day in the street.”

“Because he is evil come to earth,” said Jonathan, by no means a religious man. “Because he has made it his life’s work to sow discord, and to see to it that others reap the whirlwind.”

III

“Mr. McShane is not in,” said Abigail, on her feet, fists tightly clenched. “I shall tell him you were here.”

“Tell him what you like,” said Grafton lightly; his dark cloak fit perfectly the image Jonathan had sketched. “I am not here to see McShane, Miss Canner. I am here to see you.”

“I … I am rather busy.”

“I see that.” Eyeing the volume of Blackstone, then turning toward the wood stove. He stooped, opened the door, peered in. “Quite a fire burning there. Your work, or Mr. Little’s?” He slammed the door, then crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his upper arms. “The others are over at the Mansion, but not you, eh?”

“I am … holding the fort.”

“Indeed. In my offices, there is a man who keeps the fire burning and there are clerks who work on legal matters. Only on legal matters. They do not hold the fort.” He was near the window now. He had pulled a pipe from somewhere in his cloak and made to clean the bowl. “Perhaps you would like to make a change.”

He has made it his life’s work to sow discord
.

“You are very kind, Mr. Grafton, but I am quite happy where I am.”

“Pity.”

“I am afraid I must—”

“McShane is a good man,” said Grafton, as if Dennard was not. The visitor was prodding inside his pipe with a metal reamer. He turned the bowl upside down, rapped it on the side table. Wet dottle fell onto a silk handkerchief he had thoughtfully laid out. “A fine lawyer. Sound in his politics,” Grafton continued. He spooned fresh tobacco from a pouch. “Rather a rare thing these days, isn’t it?”