The Day Lincoln Lost

by Charles Rosenberg

  Herndon read it and said, “My God, they’ve written an editorial, condemning you in advance for pardoning her even though she’s not yet been convicted and you’ve not been elected.” He laughed.

  “Yes, the Democratic papers are trying hard to create an issue for me out of this.”

  “What does Harper’s Weekly have to say?”

  “I don’t think they’ve yet spoken on the issue. We must keep in mind, though, that they have endorsed Senator Douglas. So they will likely demand I promise not to pardon her.”

  “Have you thought, Lincoln, of just putting out a general statement that doesn’t take a position one way or the other? Just gives the arguments on both sides and seems statesmanlike.” He laughed. “You are quite good at that.”

  Lincoln pursed his lips and shook his head. “I still don’t cotton to the idea of breaking the long tradition that candidates don’t campaign once they are nominated.”

  “Douglas is doing it. He is campaigning all over the South.”

  “And looks desperate by doing it, Billy. But enough of that topic. Did you discover where Lucy is being hidden?”

  “No. I suspect the baker of being the Stationmaster, but when I followed him, he just ended up going home.”

  Lincoln raised his eyebrows. “You followed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the street?” He raised his eyebrows even farther.

  “Yes, in the street.” In confirming it Herndon realized how foolish it had been. To distract Lincoln from pursuing the matter further, he got up and walked around the office using a taper to light the gas lamps, since it was starting to get dark.

  When he was done, Lincoln said, smiling broadly, “So, are you hoping to abandon law and go to work for Pinkerton?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. But speaking of Pinkerton, Billy, I haven’t heard from him since the discovery of the death of the slaveholder. Have you?”

  “I have heard only that Annabelle Carter is continuing to look for the escaped slave.”

  “Who?”

  “Ah, sorry. I thought I had told you about her. She is a female detective Pinkerton employs. I met her when I went to Chicago. She is very impressive.”

  “Is she the one who discovered the death of the slaveholder?”

  “No. Our friend the radical editor did, at least to hear him tell it.”

  “Well,” Lincoln said, “perhaps we had best put you to work as a lawyer, which, unlike detection, is something that you are quite good at.”

  Herndon had grown to be suspicious of praise by Lincoln, because it often meant that he was about to be sent on some legal mission that Lincoln himself preferred to avoid.

  “What do you have in mind, Lincoln?”

  “Mrs. Foster is going to need a lawyer.”

  Herndon shrank back, and it was not feigned. “Oh no! That is a very poor idea. For one thing, if you don’t wish anyone to associate you with Mrs. Foster’s cause, that would accomplish just the opposite.”

  “I don’t agree. You are known as a strong abolitionist. So it would make sense for you to want to do it.”

  “Why don’t you ask someone else?” Herndon said. “There are a number of very good lawyers hereabouts.”

  “I’ve asked all of the ones I think would be capable of it. They’ve all come up with various reasons to say no.”

  “Well, if I agree to do it, who will pay me? I am not doing this one for free.”

  “I’m sure a wealthy abolitionist can be dug up to foot the bill,” Lincoln said.

  “When is the trial?”

  “October 16. Three weeks before Election Day.”

  “There is still another problem, Lincoln. We haven’t been asked to represent Mrs. Foster.”

  “I’m going to take care of that right now.”

  “What about the original mission you sent me on? To find Lucy Battelle.”

  “Let’s leave it to Pinkerton and his men—and women. They are professionals.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. Can you lock up the office, Billy? I won’t be back this evening.”

  “Where are you heading?”

  “Home first, and then to jail.”

  31

  Lincoln had known the sheriff for many years, and he knew him to be a man who often worked late. He was not surprised, then, that when he approached the jail there was a light lit in the sheriff’s office.

  The sheriff looked up as he came in. “Why, Mr. Lincoln, what brings you here this time of evening? Things uneasy at home?” The sheriff knew, of course, of the difficulties of Lincoln’s marriage, so it didn’t surprise Lincoln that the sheriff thought he might be out for a stroll just to escape from the house.

  “No, things are fine at home, Sheriff. I’m here to see one of your prisoners.”

  “I thought now that you were nominated to the highest office in the land that you had suspended your law practice.”

  “I have, but Billy has not suspended his, and it is on his behalf that I’m here.”

  “Is he representing drunks again?” He laughed. “We have two in custody at the moment, but I thought he had long ago moved on from that.”

  “It is Mrs. Foster I want to see.”

  The sheriff blinked. “Well... I wonder if she’ll want to see you. You know, a friend went to that speech she gave at Second Presbyterian a while back—the one that’s gotten her indicted—and he said she didn’t appear too fond of you.”

  “No?”

  “No. He said she called you the slave hound of Illinois.”

  “I see. Well, people have called me a lot of things. But in any case, could you inquire if Mrs. Foster might do me the honor of seeing me?”

  “If she says yes, do you want to meet her in her cell or in a room in the courthouse?”

  “Oh, her cell will be fine I think.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” the sheriff said.

  While he was gone, Lincoln looked around the office. On the wall behind the desk a thick ring of keys hung on a big nail. On the sheriff’s desk lay a large, leather-bound notebook. The cover said Jail Register. Next to it was a porcelain figurine, which featured a brown-and-white spotted cow on a white stand and, next to it, a calf with the same markings.

  The sheriff returned and said, “Mrs. Foster has agreed to see you.” Then he seemed to notice for the first time that Lincoln was carrying a small cloth sack.

  “I will need to ask you what is in the bag, Mr. Lincoln.”

  “Apples.” He held it open for the sheriff to inspect for himself.

  The sheriff peered in. “Harmless enough, I guess.”

  “I wanted to ask you, Sheriff, before we go on back, why you have those cows on your desk.”

  “It’s because when my father came out here in ’30, he intended to be a dairy farmer. I was a child and was made to milk the cows.”

  “What happened to the business?”

  “My mother and father both died of the milk sickness not long after we got here.”

  “My mother, Nancy, died of that same thing. When I was nine.”

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  Lincoln broke the silence. “How did you go from cows to keys?” He gestured at the ring on the wall.

  “Went to live with an aunt and uncle in Chicago, along with my three sisters, got into police work there and then came back here. Got a job as deputy sheriff to start. You know the rest.”

  “Funny how way leads on to way for all of us.”

  “True, and I don’t need to ask your story. It’s all in your campaign biography.”

  “You read that?”

  “Of course. Everyone in town has read it.”

  “Guess so. Well, time to look in on Mrs. Foster.”

  The sheriff led Lincoln
back to the far set of three cells. Mrs. Foster’s cell was the only one that was occupied. She was sitting on the long brown bench. When she saw Lincoln and the sheriff, she got up, although with some difficulty, placing her hand on the small of her back and grimacing as she rose.

  Lincoln spoke first. “Good evening, Mrs. Foster. I am Abraham Lincoln.”

  “And I, as you no doubt already know, am Abby Kelley Foster.”

  They stood looking at each other for a moment, neither speaking.

  Finally, she smiled and said, “Why do they call you Old Abe? You don’t look all that old.”

  “I don’t quite know why they call me that. I’m only fifty-one.”

  “Well, I must say that you look much younger than you did in the one photo I’ve seen of you. I think it was in Harper’s Weekly.”

  “Why, thank you. But please sit down, Mrs. Foster. You look as if you are ailing, and I don’t mean to make you stand.”

  She sat down and said, “Sheriff, why don’t you let Mr. Lincoln come into the cell? It would make it much easier for us to talk.”

  The sheriff shrugged and said, “I don’t see why not. I doubt Mr. Lincoln is here to help you escape, and I doubt you will injure him. I will need to fetch the key to the lock. I neglected to bring the keys with me.”

  While they waited for the sheriff to return, Lincoln said, “I have heard you are on the Graham diet, and so I brought you some fresh apples.” He held up the sack.

  “I’m sorry to seem impolite, but where are they from?”

  “Mrs. Lincoln’s brother brought them.”

  “I have read that her brothers are from Kentucky.”

  “Yes.”

  “And so these apples were likely grown by slave labor, in which case I cannot eat them because I have taken the pledge not to buy slave-produced products.”

  Lincoln thought about it for a moment—he didn’t wish to lie to her—and finally said, “I really don’t know if that is so. At my wife’s family’s home in Lexington, there were a few apple trees right next to the house, and I think it was the family children who picked them.”

  “Did they not also own slaves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I cannot eat them.”

  “Mrs. Foster, I would hazard that the dress you are wearing is made of cotton. And if that is so, that cotton must have been grown and picked by slaves. Unless you know of cotton fields in Ohio, Pennsylvania or New York.”

  “You may be right. I have oft been accused of being too rigid on these things. And my Quaker upbringing tells me it is rude to refuse a gift. Please leave the apples and I will see.”

  “If you don’t eat them yourself, you can no doubt find someone around here who is a less principled eater,” Lincoln said and smiled.

  Just then the sheriff returned and opened the padlock that locked the door to the wall. “I will leave the two of you and come back in perhaps fifteen minutes.”

  Lincoln went into the cell, and Mrs. Foster said, “Please sit down.”

  Lincoln sat on the other end of the bench and handed her the apples. “I will leave these with you, Mrs. Foster.”

  “Please call me Abby. Our Quaker tradition is to use first names.”

  “That will please me just fine.”

  “Good. May I call you Abraham?”

  “Of course.”

  “When you are elected president, I suppose I will need to address you as Mr. President.”

  “If I am so fortunate—and I cannot know if the nation will turn out to be fortunate in the event—please come to the White House and call me there anything you want.”

  “I hope if you are elected that you will keep the fate of the poor slave in mind, Abraham.”

  “I think of slavery all the time, Abby. All the time. It is evil beyond evil. I would hope that by the end of my term it will be gone from our land or if not, it will at least not have spread beyond where it is now.”

  “How?”

  “At this point I do not know exactly how that will all come about or what my role in it will be.”

  “President Buchanan is on record as opposing slavery, but all that his term as president has brought us is the Dred Scott case, holding that Negroes, enslaved or free, are not citizens. And that Congress may not bar slavery from the territories.”

  “It is a terrible decision, certainly.”

  “There are more slaves now than when Buchanan took the oath of office. So forgive me, Abraham, if I do not trust you to make your hopes come true.”

  “Perhaps you would at least agree that my heart is in the right place. I do not know if you are aware, but when I was in Congress—now so long ago—I introduced a bill to free the slaves in the District of Columbia.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him as if, Lincoln thought, she had just caught a child in an obvious lie. “But, Abraham, in that bill you stipulated, did you not, that the slave owners would be compensated for their emancipated slaves?”

  “Yes, of course. It would otherwise have had no chance at all of passage.”

  “But that is the very point. The slaves should be freed, not because it is doable or practical or will make some people feel better about themselves, but because it is a pure matter of justice.”

  They were both silent for a moment, as the word justice hung in the air between them.

  Finally, Lincoln rose and began to pace the cell. “I understand your position,” he said. “But I did not come tonight to debate with you how justice on the slavery issue might be achieved. Much as I suspect I might learn a great deal from you if we had the time to discuss it.”

  “Why did you come, then?”

  He stopped pacing and looked directly at her. “To offer you legal representation in your upcoming felony trial.”

  She looked surprised. “You?”

  “No, my partner, William Herndon. He is an excellent lawyer and a staunch abolitionist of many years standing.”

  “I am planning to represent myself.”

  “You are much more likely to be convicted if you do that.”

  “Then I may become a martyr of sorts and do a thousand times more good preaching from inside a prison than from out.”

  “You are naive about that, Abby. Women’s prisons are as bad as or worse than men’s prisons. You are likely to die there. And even if you don’t, they are not likely to let you write or speak from inside.”

  “Prisoners are permitted to write letters. I know this.”

  “Not of the kind you hope to write. They will be censored or destroyed.”

  “Perhaps...if you are president...”

  He smiled. “Ah, you, too, have a pardon on your mind.”

  “If you are truly opposed to slavery, Abraham, it would seem a logical thing to do.”

  “Way leads on to way in politics, and one can never predict the situation at a particular time, Abby. And in any case, I have not been elected yet and it would be presumptuous of me even to contemplate it.”

  “What is the advantage of having this partner of yours represent me?”

  “I have a sense the government’s case against you is weak, and that he will get you acquitted.”

  “Which will benefit you, too, will it not, Abraham? Because you will not need to consider a pardon if I am acquitted. Or answer those who are demanding you take a position on it now.”

  He grinned. “It’s true, Abby, that the acquitted are in no need of pardons.”

  “Tell me more of this partner of yours.”

  Lincoln sat back down on the bench, looked her directly in the eye and saw that she did not look away. In his many years in the legislature, trying to persuade men to vote his way on a bill, he had learned that if he could get them to lock eyes with him, he had a chance to persuade them to his side. It was a talent he had. And so, eye to eye, he began t
he task of selling Billy to her.

  “Billy Herndon studied law with me,” he said. “And when he was admitted to the bar—sixteen years ago now—I asked him, even though he was newly minted as a lawyer, to be my partner. It was a good choice. Indeed, an excellent choice. He has tremendous skills as a lawyer, and he also has great passion.”

  “When I was first here in Springfield, Abraham, I inquired about you, for obvious reasons. It is not often that you find yourself on the home ground of a likely future president.”

  “And?”

  “I was told that you are the best jury lawyer in Illinois.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Why should I not want you instead of your junior partner?”

  “If I cannot speak now to the issue of a possible pardon for you, I think I can hardly be your lawyer and advocate for your acquittal.”

  “I see.”

  “I should also mention that Billy can help you find a way to use the trial as a platform for your views. I suspect every major newspaper in the country will have a reporter there.”

  “If he is such a great lawyer, why do you call him Billy instead of William or Mr. Herndon?”

  Lincoln blinked. It was a good question, but one he had neglected ever to ask himself. Billy had never complained, and Mrs. Foster—Abby as she wanted to be called—had been the first person ever to mention it. He gave her the best answer he could come up with.

  “I suppose I would say that it is a term of affection born of long acquaintance.”

  “What does he call you?”

  “Lincoln.”

  She laughed. “Won’t Billy representing me make it seem as if you are in accord with my being acquitted?”

  “I can avoid that in various ways, Abby. Among other things, and to be direct about it, I suspect I will find a reason to visit some other town during your trial.”

  “Ah.”

  “Will you accept his offer to represent you?”

  “I don’t know that I’d want to afford him.”

  “I’m sure one of your wealthy abolitionist friends will come forward to take care of that.”

  “My husband, Stephen, is coming here tomorrow from Massachusetts. I will discuss it with him.”