“This came for you while you were away.” An awkward look. “A messenger brought it.”
“From where?” she asked, very surprised, because she recognized the handwriting. “From whom?”
“I fear he didn’t say.”
The flaps were still sealed—Abigail checked. She tore them open. Judith’s note was short, and simple. She was safe, but she had to go away for a while. She warned Abigail not to ask after her or come looking for her. “And please take care of Nanny.”
For the first time in hours, Abigail smiled.
III
The gallery quieted. The occasion had begun with great dignity: the Senators had entered, then the Chief Justice. One of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court had sworn in the Chief Justice as presiding officer, and he in turn swore in the Senators. Representative Bingham, on behalf of the Managers, read aloud the four Articles of Impeachment. The Sergeant-at-Arms then shouted for the President of the United States to come forward, although everybody knew he was nowhere in the vicinity. The body formally took notice of the fact that the President would instead be represented by counsel, who were then summoned. The members of the House marched in, and were assigned seats in the back and along the wings. The counsel for the President presented their credentials. It was all done with splendid pomp and decorum.
And then the shouting started, the battle over the tricky matter of Wade’s status. Lincoln’s supporters hoped to make him an issue. Their argument was carried on by Senators, not by counsel, who sat with their eyes to the front and their mouths shut, for the vote was expected to be close, and neither side could afford new enemies. Wade, as president pro tempore of the Senate, would of course succeed to the Presidency should Lincoln be removed. Some of the very few pro-Lincoln newspapers considered Wade’s not-quite-secret ambition the driving force behind the impeachment. The Radicals answered that Wade was in fading health, and taking on the office would be a burden, a sacrifice on behalf of a shattered nation, no more. On the floor of the Senate, the Lincoln faction contended that Wade, as the potential beneficiary of Senate action, should not be entitled to a vote. The Radicals argued that depriving Wade of a vote would deprive his Ohio constituents of their suffrage, adding that no one had ever challenged Wade’s integrity.…
In the end, the Senate went into closed conference, and emerged with the conclusion that Wade would be entitled to the same vote as anyone else. But Abigail suspected that the senior Senator from Ohio, who hated Lincoln with the same passion he had once brought to hating slavery, would have little if anything to say.
IV
The preliminaries at last concluded. The Chief Justice adjusted his spectacles and let his heavy gaze move across the chamber. He was a fleshy, fussy man, said to be vain about the dignity due his position. He was vain on other subjects, too, and tended to see himself as surrounded by intellectual and moral pygmies. That, at least, was how Dan Sickles described him, and although Abigail had never warmed to Sickles, she had met no one wiser in the ways, and weaknesses, of Washington’s worthies.
“Gentlemen, Managers of the House of Representatives,” Chase rumbled, “you will now proceed in support of the articles of impeachment.” Another tap of the gavel, for the members proved harder to quell than the spectators. “Senators will please give their attention.”
This was it, then. The formal presentation of the case against the President of the United States: in effect, the opening statement of the trial.
Benjamin Butler arose: the same Butler whom Lincoln had tried to recruit as vice-presidential candidate in 1864, and who had rebuffed the overture so rudely. Butler was a rotund, jowly man, now balding; a few years ago, while serving as a general during the war, he had been trim and tall and handsome. He had in common with Lincoln that both had been hated by the Southerners.
To Abigail Canner, men like Benjamin Butler and Thaddeus Stevens were heroes, far larger than this poor mortal life, the great figures of the battle to eradicate slavery. Each was a fierce Radical. Butler, while serving as military governor of New Orleans, had hanged a man for tearing down the Union flag, and ordered that any woman who was impolite to the Union troops should be treated as a prostitute. He had also armed the slaves. As for Stevens, the Pennsylvania congressman had been one of the earliest and most vehement supporters not only of emancipation but of full equality of the races. He shared his house with a colored woman, whom most people considered to be his common-law wife. Unlike Butler, Stevens was small and fierce-eyed, with a full head of hair. As everyone knew, he was dying, and had already picked out a burial plot in one of the rare cemeteries that interred whites and blacks in the same section; but he was determined to live long enough to see Lincoln, whom he hated, overthrown.
“Mr. President and gentlemen of the Senate,” Butler began. “The onerous duty has fallen to my fortune to present to you, imperfectly as I must, the several propositions of fact and law upon which the House of Representatives will endeavor to sustain the cause of the people against the President of the United States, now pending at your bar.”
The people. Abigail had not thought about the charges that way. Mr. Lincoln and his lawyers talked about the Radicals; as a formal matter, the charges were brought by the House of Representatives; it had not occurred to her that the Managers would proceed as in a criminal trial, asserting that they acted in the name of the people. And she wondered whether the late Arthur McShane, who so revered the Constitution in its perfection, would agree.
Butler meanwhile was explaining why, due to “the novelty of the proceeding,” he would likely speak for some while. Dennard had estimated ninety minutes. Abigail listened closely as the balding Butler laid out the same charges, in very much the same language, as in the bill of impeachment itself. There were four counts: the first related to the suspension of habeas corpus, the second to the censorship of newspapers and the seizure of private telegrams, the third to the supposed inattention to the protection of the freedmen, and the fourth to his desire to overthrow the authority of the Congress. She had brought her commonplace book and was making notes. The trial would meet four days each week, Monday through Thursday, from noon until five in the afternoon, with Friday sessions as needed. Abigail expected to spend most of those days right here, although she and Rellman were available for other assignments as well. Jonathan would sit at the counsel table with Dennard, Speed, and Sickles. Abigail felt the yearning. To be a lawyer in so important a litigation. Her pencil flew across the page. She would, she knew, grow accustomed in time to the surroundings, to the occasion, even to the fluttering determination of the great ladies of the city to ignore her.
“Excuse me.”
A whisper at her ear, breathy and confident at once. Abigail looked up. There stood a slim, pale woman whom Abigail recognized from sketches in the newspapers before she opened her delicate mouth.
“I’m Katherine Sprague,” said the newcomer, extending a gloved hand. Beneath her fancy hat, unfashionably blond hair was piled high on her head. “We have not been formally introduced, but we attended the same reception at the Eameses’ two weeks ago. Is this seat available?”
Abigail was not often struck wordless, but just now, for a moment, she could conjure nothing to say. Katherine Sprague. The daughter of the Chief Justice, who even now was fussily presiding over the trial. Katherine Sprague, just a few years older than Abigail herself, married to the wealthiest man in the Senate; the same Katherine Sprague who was said to be puzzling constantly over how to manipulate her ambitious father into the White House. When Michael spoke of the people who, Kate Sprague would be foremost among them.
No doubt, buried in the texts on professional ethics she had yet to read, she would find rules limiting contact between lawyers and the judges presiding over their cases; but Kate was no judge, and Abigail no lawyer, not after her constant exclusion from the heart of things. And, besides, the ambition that beat like a second heart within her chest would not allow her to consider rebuffing an overture from
the foremost of the people who.
In truth, the moment only seemed to stretch eternally: all of this flashed through Abigail’s mind in no more than a second. And by that time, she was already offering a formal hand to meet the one offered.
“Of course I remember, Mrs. Sprague. You played chess against that Southern gentleman. I fear that I missed the exhibition, but I was impressed by your confidence.”
“Thank you, dear. But it took him all of five minutes to defeat me, so, whatever you thought of my confidence, my performance, I fear, was not terribly impressive.” A broad smile, seemingly genuine. “And, please, call me Kate.”
Abigail smiled back.
As the great ladies of Washington stared in dismayed astonishment, and made lists in their minds of whom to tell first, Kate Sprague, the city’s most prominent hostess, settled into the seat beside the obstreperous negress.
V
Meanwhile, a few feet from the counsel table, Congressman Butler was growing angrier; and louder. He railed against the President for not being present in person to answer the charges. “Mr. Lincoln should be here,” said Butler, more than once, in what seemed a departure from his text. He nodded toward the defense table, although his argument was with his own colleagues. “The prosecution has been weak in the knees. We should have demanded his presence. He should have been required to stand before this body and listen to the charges against him.” As Butler’s anger rose, his voice grew more hoarse and throaty.
“Pardon me,” said Butler. He sipped his water, resumed his assault. “We face a circumstance unique in history. In other times and in other lands it has been found that despotism could only be tempered by assassination”—a sigh went through the gallery, and Butler, seeing that he had misfired, hurried on—“and nations living under constitutional governments even have found no mode by which to rid themselves of a tyrannical ruler, except by overturning the very foundation and framework of the government itself.”
Butler continued in that vein, fulminating about Lincoln’s supposed tyranny in the high-sounding language that was the fashion of the day among public men; and it occurred to Jonathan, sitting stoically beside Sickles at the brightly polished counsel table, that Lincoln never talked that way. The President’s language was clear and straightforward, without pretension or pomposity. Lincoln’s homespun humility provided another reason for his opponents to despise him. Most of the Radicals had matriculated at the finest schools in the land; Lincoln had nary a degree to his name.
When the Radicals looked at the President, they saw not just a moral but an intellectual inferior.
Certainly Ben Butler considered Lincoln a lesser man than himself. One might never know, as his peroration wound down, that just three years ago Butler had seriously considered Lincoln’s invitation to join him as vice-presidential candidate.
“You are a law among yourselves,” Butler concluded, meaning that it was entirely up to the Senators to decide what constituted an impeachable offense. No crime was necessary, said Butler, having cast his notes aside. “You may remove the President for any act that is either subversive of some fundamental principle of government or highly prejudicial to the public interest.” The censorious eyes roamed along the senatorial ranks. “Mr. Lincoln’s entire tenure in office easily meets these tests.”
Butler sat. He had spoken for an hour and a half.
The Chief Justice declared a thirty-minute recess, after which Thaddeus Stevens would complete the opening statement on the part of the Managers.
As the Senate rose, Jonathan turned to Sickles. “Butler as much as said that they can remove the President because they disagree with him politically!”
Sickles grinned. “This is Washington, son. Down here, no matter what they say, politics is the only reason anybody does anything.”
VI
“Have the police made any progress?”
The question took Abigail by surprise. She felt the hollow guilt of one who is caught at sin, for she had been studying the fine dresses and hats of the great Washington ladies, wondering whether they looked down on her simpler costume. She noticed that the ladies, Kate included, had all brought little fans, and were fluttering them furiously. Odd choice in winter: she wondered why.
“My understanding,” she admitted, “is that they have very few clues.”
“That is very strange,” mused Mrs. Sprague, fan working. “Mr. McShane was a man of some prominence in this city.” Down below, the Senate was coming back. “And a close friend of Father as well. I wonder that more pressure has not been brought to bear.”
Abigail, as it happened, wondered the same thing. In time she would grow accustomed to Kate Sprague’s eerie ability to guess what she was thinking, but just now she felt a little frightened; and, in consequence, let slip more than she probably should have.
“It seems to me,” Abigail said, “that if there has been pressure, it has been the other way around.”
Kate’s fan did not quite mask her tiny smile of triumph.
VII
The other House Managers were Representatives Bingham and Stevens. They were, along with Butler, among the purest of the Radicals. Actually, Butler was in only his first term in the Congress, and the assignment as Manager should by rights have gone to a more senior man. But Butler was popular with the voters; when he demanded a place for himself, the leadership dared not refuse.
Now Thaddeus Stevens rose. He was shaky, and it seemed unlikely that he would be able to remain on his feet, as protocol required, for the hour or so that his remarks were expected to require. Indeed, given his poor health, Abigail wondered if he would even survive the trial. But when he spoke, his voice was almost biblical in its rolling and thunderous power. There was no quaver. There was no doubt. He was speaking what his conscience told him was rock-bottom truth; and he would admit no differences of opinion.
“Mr. Lincoln,” he began, “is the greatest tyrant this nation has ever known. And given that he now commands the most formidable army on the face of the planet, and uses it for his own purposes without regard for law or morality, he may be, at this instant, the greatest tyrant in the world.”
No quarter, then; no compromise.
“Mr. Stevens is a true hero of the nation,” Kate whispered.
“Indeed,” said Abigail. She coughed. She had discovered the point of the fluttering fans. Despite the wintry weather outside, here in the upper reaches of the Senate Chamber cigar smoke from below gathered thickly. After two hours, it was like being on a battlefield.
“He may not last the trial,” said Kate.
“His voice is as powerful as ever,” said Abigail. But she, like all the nation, knew that Stevens was dying. He had been born, she reminded herself, marveling, while George Washington was President. At Oberlin, she had been spellbound by Professor Finney’s encomiums to the great orator.
Down in the well, the old man’s body began to sag, but he grabbed the edge of the table and pressed on, carried by his own righteous fury. He described the President’s offenses in great detail, and with magnificent plumage, his eloquence easily outdoing the practical Butler. He announced, with evident glee, that the chamber would be provided with evidence of a letter “of unchallengeable provenance” that set forth clearly his intention to continue and even expand his tyranny.
A flurry in the chamber.
Stevens never paused. It was not enough, he said, that Lincoln had violated the Constitution and the liberties of the American people. It was not enough that he had shown himself timid and unreliable in protecting the colored race so recently rescued from the most vicious bondage. He was a conspirator, sneered Stevens—a deceiver who made plans in the darkness for that which he would not dare to defend in the bright light of the day. Abigail tensed, guessing what would come next. Stevens looked around the chamber. A deceiver, he said, must be cast out—he was borrowing from Revelation—and his whole wicked Administration with him, as the deceiver’s angels were cast out of the Heavenly Firmament.
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br /> This brought a gasp, and more catcalls.
Stevens continued to outline the evidence the Managers would present, none of it surprising, except for one detail.
Stanton.
He announced that the Secretary of War would be called—involuntarily, said Stevens—to testify to the President’s constant interference with the conducting of military campaigns, the demoralizing effect of his repeated removals of general officers for following the will of Congress, and his insistence on ignoring the pleas of his own martial governors across the South, who warned of the harms suffered by the freedmen, and the growing political power of the former slaveholders.
“How is that possible?” Jonathan whispered.
Sickles told him to hush.
“I thought there was an arrangement,” the young man persisted. “Stanton keeps his office but will not testify.”
“Never act surprised in a courtroom,” said Sickles, his eyes not leaving Stevens’s smug face. “As far as anybody knows, everything that happens is exactly what you expected to happen.”
The gavel came down. “Silence in the chamber,” hissed Chase, his eyes on Sickles, whom the entire Congress seemed unanimously, if mysteriously, to despise.
Stevens resumed. Stanton, he said, would testify with enormous reluctance and under the compulsion of subpoena. He would tell of the President’s hostility to the Reconstruction Acts, and to the Congress itself; and how, on more than one occasion, he heard the President propose closing the Congress down, if necessary by force.
“None of that is true,” Jonathan murmured.
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 29
