Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

NINE

At Last, Peace

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us.

—Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming a National Fast Day

March 30th, 1863

I

From the New York Tribune, Monday, July 6th, 1857:

VIOLENT CLASHES TERRORIZE CITY

Curious Sightings in Gang Brawl

by H. Greeley

The savage clashes which laid siege to much of Manhattan these two days and nights have at last been quieted. By order of the Governor, militiamen entered the Five Points late Sunday and engaged the remaining combatants with volley upon volley of musket fire. Untold numbers of dead could this morning be seen lining Baxter, Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets—victims of the worst rioting this or any city has seen in memory. The violence seems to have begun when those notorious Five Points gangs, the Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits, sprung an attack against their shared enemy, the Bowery Boys. It is the opinion of the [police] that the killings began on Bayard Street around Saturday midday, before spreading through the Five Points with all the rapidity and ferocity of a fire.

The innocent were forced to barricade their doors as rival thugs stabbed, shot and bludgeoned one another to death in the streets. Merchants saw their shops destroyed; their wares brazenly stolen in the chaos. Eleven passersby—a woman and child among them—were mauled for no cause but their straying too close to the fight.

CURIOUS SIGHTINGS IN GANG BRAWL

The Tribune was inundated with testimonies of “strange” and “impossible” feats throughout Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Men were said to leap across rooftops “as if carried by the air” in pursuit of one another; climb the sides of buildings “as effortlessly as a cat climbs a tree.”

One witness, a merchant by the name of Jasper Rubes, claims to have seen a Dead Rabbit “lift a Bowery Boy above his head and throw him against the second story of [a Baxter Street factory] hard enough to leave a hole in the bricks.” Incredibly, the victim “landed on his feet,” said the witness, “and kept up the fight as if nothing had happened.”

“His eyes,” said Rubes, “were black as soot.”

Hunting vampires was the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the early 1850s.

Ten months after burying their son, Abe and Mary welcomed another. They named him William “Willy” Wallace Lincoln in honor of the physician who’d stayed at Eddy’s side until the end. In 1853, they welcomed one more boy, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln, born April 4th. Along with ten-year-old Robert, the three formed a “boisterous brood.”

“Bob howls in the next room as I write this,” Abe said in an 1853 letter to Speed. “Mary has whopped him for running off and disappearing. I suspect that by the time I finish this letter he will have run off and disappeared again.”

Abe made very few journal entries in the wake of Eddy’s death. Those six and a half little leather-bound books had become a record of his life with vampires—a record of weapons and vengeance; of death and loss. But those days were behind him now. That life was over. After his entries had resumed in 1865, Abe looked back on that “last, peaceful, wonderful spell.”

They were good years, to be sure. Quiet years. I wanted nothing more of vampires or politics. To think of all that I had missed whiling away the hours in Washington! How much of Eddy’s brief, beautiful life had escaped my notice! No… never again. Simplicity! That was the oath I swore now. Family! That was my errand. When I could not be with my boys at home, I let them run about the office (much to Lamon’s ^* consternation, I suspect). Mary and I took lingering walks, regardless of the season or weather. We spoke of our dear boys… of our friends and futures… of the speed with which the whole of our lives had passed.

There were no letters from Henry. No visits or hints of his whereabouts. At times I wondered if he had finally come to accept that I would hunt no more—or if he himself had fallen prey to the ax. Whatever the reason behind his absence, I was glad for it. For while I had come to regard him with tremendous affection, I loathed every memory the mere mention of his name conjured up.

Abe’s long coat, riddled with the rips and scars of battle, was unceremoniously burned. His pistols and knives were locked in a trunk and forgotten in the cellar. The blade of his ax was allowed to rust. The specter of death, which had hung over the old vampire hunter since his ninth year, seemed at last to be lifting.

It returned briefly in 1854, when Abe received word from a friend in Clary’s Grove that Jack Armstrong was dead. From a letter to Joshua Speed:

The damned fool’s gotten himself killed by a horse, Speed.

Old Jack stood in an early winter [downpour], trying to drag the stubborn beast by its lead. For nearly an hour they tugged against each other. Jack (ever the Clary’s Grove Boy) didn’t think to fetch his coat or holler for help, despite his being one-handed and soaked to the bone. By the time he got the animal out of the rain, Jack had caught his death. He burned a fever for a week, slipped away, and died. It seems an ignoble end to such a sturdy man, does it not? A man who survived so many brushes with death? Who saw the terrible things you and I have seen?

In the same letter, Abe admitted to being “unnerved” by his “lack of anguish” over Armstrong’s passing. He grieved, sure. But this was a “different sort of grief,” unlike the crippling depression that had followed his mother’s death, Ann’s, and Eddy’s.

I fear that a life of death has made me numb to both.

Four years later, Abe would defend Jack’s son, “Duff” Armstrong, when he stood trial for murder. Abe refused payment. He worked tirelessly, litigated passionately, and (with a stroke of legal brilliance) won Duff his freedom, ^* a final thank-you to a brave friend.

II

The same year that saw Abe mourn the loss of an old friend saw him dragged back into politics by an old rival.

Abe had known Senator Stephen A. Douglas since they were both young Illinois state legislators (and eager suitors of Mary Todd). Though a Democrat, Douglas had long been opposed to allowing slavery into territories where it didn’t already exist. But in 1854, he suddenly reversed himself and championed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill that repealed the federal ban on the spread of slavery. President Franklin Pierce signed it into law on May 30th, enraging millions of Northerners and stirring up long-simmering tensions on both sides of the issue.

Try as I might, I could not ignore my anger. It seeped into my mind as water is drawn into the roots of a tree, until at last it permeated the whole of my being. Sleep provided no refuge, for I was nightly visited by a sea of black faces, each the nameless victim of a vampire. Each of them crying out to me. “Justice!” they cried. “Justice, Mr. Lincoln!”

That [slavery] existed at all was insult enough. That I knew the institution to be doubly evil made it all the worse. But this! The idea of slavery’s diseased fingers reaching farther north and west! Reaching into my own Illinois! It would not stand. I had retreated from politics, but when asked to debate [Douglas] on the issue, I could not refuse. Those ghostly faces would not permit me to.

On October 16th, 1854, Lincoln and Douglas squared off in front of a large Peoria, Illinois, crowd. A reporter with the Chicago Evening Journal described his amazement at witnessing Abe speak.

His face [began] to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart.

“I cannot but hate it!” said Mr. Lincoln of the proposal. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself!”

I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.

“I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world!” he continued. “Enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites!”

His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot of it. In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet as I learned that character at Sunday school in my childhood.

Though it failed to sway Douglas or his allies in Congress, the speech would nonetheless prove a turning point in Abe’s political life. His anger over the slavery issue (and by extension, the vampire issue) had nudged him back into the political arena. His genius and eloquence that night in Peoria would ensure that he never left it again. The speech was transcribed and reprinted across the North. The name Abraham Lincoln began to take on national significance among the opponents of slavery. In the years to come, one of its passages would prove eerily prophetic.

“Is it not probable that the contest will come to blows, and bloodshed? Could there be a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence, on the slavery question, than this?”

Senator Charles Sumner lay unconscious on the Senate floor, facedown in a pool of his own blood.

The abolitionist had been attacked by a thirty-seven-year-old congressman named Preston Smith Brooks, a proslavery South Carolinian who’d taken offense at the Massachusetts senator’s mocking of his uncle in an antislavery speech two days earlier. On May 22nd, 1856, Brooks entered the Senate chamber accompanied by a fellow South Carolina congressman named Laurence Keitt and approached Sumner at his writing desk. “Mr. Sumner,” said Brooks, “I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” Before Sumner had a chance to reply, Brooks began to beat his head with his gold-tipped cane, opening new gashes with each blow. Blinded by his own blood, Sumner staggered to his feet before collapsing. His victim now unconscious and bleeding, Brooks continued to strike until his cane broke in two. As horrified senators rushed to Sumner’s aid, they were held back by Keitt, who brandished a pistol and yelled, “Let them be!”

The blows fractured Sumner’s skull and vertebrae. He would live but wouldn’t be able to return to his Senate duties for three years. When South Carolinians heard of the attack, they sent Brooks new canes by the dozen. ^*

I am more assured than ever of my being wise to leave Washington, and more certain than ever that it is a repository of idiots—just as I am certain that we are now on a course for the “great calamity” Poe warned of those long years ago. One can see the masts of an angry fleet on the horizon, and every week seems to bring them a mile closer. If, as many think, it is the winds of war that fill their sails, then it is a war I am content to let others fight. My boys are healthy. My wife is in good spirits. And we are a long, long way from Washington. I am happy to make a speech or two; happy to lend my pen where it is needed. But I am happy. And happiness, I have decided, is a noble ambition. I have lost too much already, and have been a slave to vampires these thirty years. Let me now be free. Let me now seek the enjoyment of whatever time God may grant me. And if this peace be merely prelude to some peril or other, so be it. I shall enjoy the peace.

There was no shortage of passion or violence on either side of the slavery issue. Infuriated by the attack on Charles Sumner, a radical abolitionist named John Brown led an attack on a settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, in the Kansas Territory. On the night of May 24th, 1856 (just two days after Sumner was beaten), Brown and his men brutally murdered five proslavery settlers, dragging each man from his home, running him through with a sword, and firing a bullet into his skull for good measure. It was the first in a series of reprisals that would be dubbed Bleeding Kansas. The violence would continue for three years and claim over fifty lives.

On March 6th, 1857, the Supreme Court pushed the country closer to the brink.

Dred Scott was a sixty-year-old slave who’d been trying to win his freedom in the courts for more than a decade. Between 1832 and 1842, he’d traveled with his master (U.S. Army Major John Emerson) through the free territories of the North, acting as a personal valet. During these travels, Scott married and had a child (all on free soil), and upon the major’s death in 1843, tried to buy his freedom. But the major’s widow refused, continuing to hire him out and pocketing the wages for herself. Advised by abolitionist friends, Scott sued for his freedom in 1846, on the grounds that he’d ceased to be property the moment he’d set foot in free territory. The case worked its way through the courts, attracting national attention before finally reaching Washington in 1857.

In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Scott, arguing that the Founding Fathers had considered Negroes “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” when they drafted the Constitution. Consequently, Negroes couldn’t be citizens of the United States, and couldn’t bring suit in federal court to begin with. They had no more right to due process than the plows they drove.

It was a devastating outcome for Scott, but it had implications far beyond his personal freedom. In issuing its ruling, the Court declared that:

Congress had exceeded its authority when it banned slavery from spreading to certain territories—and that these territories had no power to ban slavery on their own.

Slaves and their descendants (whether free or not) were not protected by the Constitution, and could never be United States citizens.

Escaped slaves who reached free soil were still the legal property of their masters.

In the wake of the Dred Scott ruling, the Albany Evening Journal accused the Supreme Court, Senate, and newly inaugurated President James Buchanan of being part of a “conspiracy” to spread slavery, while the New York Tribune ran an editorial that captured the fury of many Northerners:

Now, wherever the stars and stripes wave, they protect slavery and represent slavery…. This, then, is the final fruit. In this, all the labors of our statesmen, the blood of our heroes, the life-long cares and toils of our forefathers, the aspirations of our scholars, the prayers of good men, have finally ended! America the slave breeder and slaveholder!

Southern Democrats were more emboldened than ever, some boasting that the ruling would lead to “slave auctions on Boston Common.” Republicans and abolitionists had never been more electrified in their opposition. America was beginning to tear itself apart.

But few Americans knew just how much danger they were really in.

III

On June 3rd, 1857, Abe received a letter addressed in a familiar scrawl. It contained no inquiries after his health or happiness; no regards to his family.

Abraham,

I beg you forgive my failure to write these five years. You must also forgive my abruptness, for matters here require my urgent attention.

I must ask another sacrifice of you, Abraham. I realize how presumptuous a request it must seem given all that you have suffered, and what little enticement I can offer against the contentment of home and family. Trust that I would not burden you unless the situation was dire, or if there were any other man capable of what I ask.

I have enclosed everything necessary to your swift passage to New York. If you are willing, then I beg you come no later than 1st August. Further instructions will be delivered upon your arrival. However, if your answer is no, I shall not bother you again. I ask only that you write at once with your refusal, so that we may consider a new strategy. Otherwise I look forward to our reunion, old friend—and to giving you the explanation you have long deserved.

It is time, Abraham.

Ever,

—H

Enclosed were various train and steamboat schedules, $500, and the name of a boardinghouse in New York City where a room had been rented under the name A. Rutledge.

Oh, how [the letter] annoyed me! Henry was clever indeed—for though he claimed to have little enticement to offer, every word was designed to entice: the self-censure; the flattery; the promise of an explanation—even the name left at the boardinghouse! That he would have me abandon my affairs, my family, and cross a thousand miles without so much as an intimation of the purpose!

And yet I could not refuse.

And this was more annoying than the letter itself, for Henry was right. It was time. Time for what, I knew not. Only that the whole of my life… the suffering, the errands, the death… that it had all been leading to something more. I had felt this, even as a child—the sense that I had been placed on a long, straight stretch of river from which there could be no deviation. Carried ever faster by the current… surrounded by wilderness on both sides… destined to collide with some unseen object far, far downstream. I had never spoken of this feeling, of course, for fear of being thought vain (or worse, being proven wrong—for if every young man who was assured of his future greatness was proven correct, the world would be brimming with Napoleons). Now, however, the object was beginning to take shape, though I could not yet make out its features. If a thousand miles was the price of seeing it clearly at last, then so be it. I had traveled farther for less.

Abe arrived in New York City on July 29th. Not wanting to raise suspicion (or leave his family unattended), he’d decided to take Mary and the boys along for a “spontaneous” trip to experience the wonders of New York City.

They couldn’t have picked a worse time to visit.

The city was in the midst of a violent summer. Two rival police forces had been locked in a bloody battle for legitimacy since May, leaving crime largely unchecked—a field day for muggers and murderers alike. The Lincolns reached New York just three weeks after the worst gang rioting in the city’s history, rioting in which witnesses described seeing men perform “impossible feats.” Abe had seen New York only once before, briefly passing through on his way north. Now he was able to appreciate the largest, most energetic of all American cities for the first time.

The drawings do it no justice—it is a city without end or equal! Each street gives way to another more grand and bustling than the last. Buildings of such size! Never have I seen so many carriages crowded together. The air rings with the clopping of horseshoes against cobblestones and the murmur of a hundred conversations. There are so many ladies carrying so many black parasols, that if a man were to look down from a rooftop, he would scarcely see the sidewalk. One imagines Rome at its height. London and its grandeur. ^* Mary insists we stay a month at least! For how else can we ever hope to appreciate such a place?

On the night of Sunday, August 2nd, Abe rose from bed, dressed in the dark, and tiptoed out of the room where his family slept. At precisely eleven-thirty, he crossed Washington Square and walked north, just as the note slipped under his door that morning had instructed. He was to meet Henry two miles up Fifth Avenue, in front of the orphanage at the corner of Forty-fourth Street.

With each passing block the streets grew emptier. Darker. Here, the grand buildings and murmuring sidewalks melted into rows of two-story homes, nary a candle alight in any window. Nary a gentleman about. Passing though Madison Square Park, I marveled at the unfinished skeleton of some immense, unknown structure. ^** Marveled at the absolute quiet. The barren streets. I began to imagine myself the only soul in New York, until the sound of heels against cobblestones caught my ear.

Abe glanced over his shoulder. The silhouettes of three men followed close behind.

How had they escaped my notice until now? In light of the city’s recent troubles, I thought it best to double back and head south to Washington Square, back to the safety of gaslight and crowded streets. Henry could wait. Oh, what a damned fool I was! I had ventured out unarmed, knowing too well that many a gentleman had been robbed (or worse) on these streets of late—and that the police could hardly be counted on to intervene. Silently cursing myself, I turned left down Thirty-fourth Street. My heart sank as I heard their footsteps follow me around the bend—for now there could be no question of their intent. My pace quickened. Theirs quickened. “If only I could reach Broadway,” I thought.

He wouldn’t. His pursuers broke into a sprint. Abe did the same, making another left and running between two lots in hopes of eluding them.

My speed could still be trusted—but as fast as I was, [they] were faster. All hope of escape lost, I turned and met them with my fists.

Abe was nearly fifty years old. He hadn’t wielded a weapon or been in a fight for fifteen years. Even so, he managed to land a few blows on each of his assailants before one of them landed his own, knocking him out cold.

I woke in absolute darkness, the faint rumble of a coach’s wheels beneath me.

“Put him out again,” said the unfamiliar voice.

A sharp, oh so brief pain on the top of my head… the universe before me in all of its color and majesty… and then… nothing.

“I am deeply sorry,” said the familiar voice, “but we can trust no living man with our whereabouts.”

It was Henry.

My hood was presently removed, and I found myself in the center of a grand, two-tiered ballroom, its intricate ceiling thirty feet above my aching head; its long, dark red curtains drawn; the whole lit dimly by chandeliers. Gold upon gold. Marble upon marble. The finest carvings and furnishings, and a floor of wood so dark and polished it might have been black glass. It was the most splendid room I had ever seen or, for that matter, ever thought possible.

Three men of varying age and build stood behind Henry, each leaning against the hearth of a kingly marble fireplace. Each with contempt in his eyes. These, I assumed, were my assailants. A pair of long sofas faced each other in front of the fireplace, with a low table in between. Upon this, a silver tea service reflected the light of the fire, casting strange, intoxicating patterns on the walls and ceiling. A diminutive, graying gentleman sat on the left sofa, teacup in hand. I had seen him before… I was sure of it… but in my confused state I could not place him.

My senses returning, I noticed perhaps twenty more gentlemen scattered about the room, some standing behind me, some seated in high-backed chairs against the walls. Another twenty loomed above, looking down from the shadowy mezzanines on each side of the room. It was clear [they] meant to keep their faces hidden.

“Please,” said Henry. He motioned for Abe to sit across from the diminutive gentleman.

I hesitated to come any closer until Henry (sensing the reason behind my reluctance) motioned to my assailants, and they removed from the fireplace. “I give you my word,” he said as they went, “no further harm shall befall you tonight.” Believing him sincere, I took a seat across from the gentleman whom I could not yet place, clutching the back of my head with my left hand and steadying myself with the other.

“Vampires,” said Henry—tilting his head toward the three men who now took their seats along the wall.

“Yes,” said Abe. “I’d worked that out on my own, thank you.”

Henry smiled. “Vampires,” he said, motioning around the ballroom. “The cursed, bloodsucking lot of us. The exceptions being yourself… and Mr. Seward here.”

Seward…

Senator William Seward was the former governor of New York, one of the leading antislavery voices in Congress, and the man widely expected to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1860. He and Abe had met nine years earlier while campaigning for General Zachary “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor in New England.

“A pleasure to see you again, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, extending his hand.

Abe shook it. “Likewise, Mr. Seward, likewise.”

“You are doubtless aware of Mr. Seward’s reputation?” asked Henry.

“I am.”

“Then you must know that he is a favorite to be nominated this time around.”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” said Henry. “But tell me… did you know that Seward here has hunted and destroyed nearly as many vampires as you have?”

Abe had to bite his lip to keep his jaw from dropping. Bookish, privileged little Seward—a vampire hunter? Impossible.

“Revelations,” said Henry. “Revelations are what bring us together tonight.” Henry paced in front of the hearth.

“I have brought you here,” he said, “because my colleagues wished to see for themselves the purpose that I have seen in you. To see this Abraham Lincoln I have spoken of these many years. I have brought you here because they wanted proof that you were capable of what we ask; to judge you directly before going any further.”

And how shall I be judged? By the expediency with which I behead them?

A man’s voice rang out of the darkness: “I am sure we can find a more agreeable method than that, Mr. Lincoln.”

A few scattered laughs echoed through the room. Henry silenced them with a wave of his hand.

“It is already done,” he said. “From the moment you were carried into this room, they saw your past and your pain; peered into your soul—just as I have. Had you been deemed unworthy, you would not have been permitted to wake among us.”

“ ‘Us…’ ” said Abe. “I have long believed that vampires form no alliances.”

“Desperate times. Our enemies have allied themselves—so must we. They have recruited living men to their cause—so have we.”

Henry stopped pacing.

“There is a war coming, Abraham,” he said. “It is not a war of man, but it is man who shall spill his blood fighting it—for it concerns his very right to be free.

“A war… ,” he continued. “And you of all men must win it.”

There was nothing else now—no vampires in the mezzanines, no Seward or silver tea service… there was only Henry.

“There are those of my kind,” he said, “who choose to remain in the shadows. Who cling to that last piece of themselves that is human. We are content to feed and be forgotten. To go about our cursed existence in relative peace, killing only when our hunger becomes unbearable. But there are others of my kind… those who see themselves as lions among sheep. As kings—superior to man in every way. Why, then, should they be confined to darkness? Why should they fear man?

“It is a conflict that began long before there was an America. A conflict between two groups of vampires: those who seek to coexist with man, and those who would see all of mankind in chains—bred, raised, and corralled as cattle.”

Judge us not equally, Abraham…

“These fifty years,” said Henry, “we have done everything in our power to prevent this war. Each of the errands I have sent you on—each has been with the aim of destroying those who would see it hastened, and your efforts—those of Seward and others—have indeed slowed its progress. But we can no longer hope to prevent it. Indeed, not four weeks ago we saw the first battle fought here on the streets of New York.”

Strange sightings… impossible feats…

“Our enemies are shrewd,” said Henry. “They have made their cause the cause of the South. Allied themselves with living men who defend slavery as fervently as they. But these men have been deceived into quickening their own doom, for Negroes are only the first of the living to be enslaved. If we lose, Abraham, then it is only a matter of time before every living man, woman, and child in America is a slave.”

Abe felt as if he might be sick.

“That, old friend, is why we must not lose. That is why we have allied ourselves. We are vampires who believe in the rights of man,” said Henry. “We are the Union… and we have plans for you, old friend.”