Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

TWELVE

“Starve the Devils”

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue… until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

—Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

March 4th, 1865

I

Washington, D.C., was under attack, and Abe wasn’t about to miss his chance to see the fighting up close.

On July 11th, 1864, ignoring the pleas of his personal guard, he rode alone on horseback to Fort Stevens, ^* where Confederate General Jubal A. Early was leading 17,000 rebels in a brazen assault on Washington’s northern defenses. The president was greeted by Union officers and whisked directly into the fort, where he would be able to relax and enjoy a cool drink behind the safety of its thick stone walls.

I hadn’t come to be coddled or hear the battle described to me—I’d come to see the horrors of war for myself. To see what others had suffered these three long years, while I had remained behind the walls of warmth and plenty. Try as they might, the officers couldn’t discourage me from peeking over the parapet to watch boys line up and ceremoniously shoot one another—to see them blown apart by [cannon fire] and run through by bayonets.

The sight of Abraham Lincoln towering over the battlefield in his stovepipe hat must have seemed a godsend for the rebel sharpshooters at Fort Stevens that day. Abe had three bullets zip past him in as many minutes, each one giving his minders terrible fits of anxiety. Finally, when a Union officer standing next to him was struck in the head and killed, the president felt a tug at the bottom of his coat, and heard First Lieutenant (and future Supreme Court Justice) Oliver Wendell Holmes yell: “Get down, you damned fool!”

But he didn’t.

He’d completely lost his fear of death.

There were no more vampires at the White House. Abe had banished them in the wake of Willie’s death and his confrontation with Henry. Even the trinity—his most capable and ferocious protectors—had been sent back to New York.

I shall save this Union because it merits saving. I shall save it to honor the men who built it with their blood and genius, and the future generations who deserve its liberty. I shall give every miserable hour to the cause of victory and peace—but I shall be damned if I lay eyes on another vampire.

The first family was now guarded exclusively by living men, and the president guarded less and less at his own insistence. Each day brought new restrictions on his guards; each day fewer rooms he welcomed them in. Over Ward Hill Lamon’s objections, Abe insisted on riding out in an open carriage when the weather was agreeable, and on walking between the mansion and the War Department alone after dark. As Lamon recalled in his memoirs years later: “I believe that it was more than an absence of fear. I believe that it was an invitation of death.”

A journal entry from April 20th, 1862, sums up Abe’s growing fatalism.

In the course of a week, I greet a thousand strange faces in the White House. Should I treat each as the face of my assassin? Indeed, any man willing to give his life to take mine would have little trouble doing it. Am I therefore to lock myself in an iron box and wait for this war to end? If God wants my soul, He knows where He may collect it—and He may do so at the hour and in the manner of His choosing.

In time, through sheer force of will, he would pull himself out of this depression, just as he had all the ones before it. Not long after Willie’s death, when his longtime friend William McCullough was killed fighting for the Union, Abe sent a letter to the grieving daughter McCullough had left behind. The comfort and advice he offered was meant as much for himself as for the girl.

Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

But while Abe was picking himself up and soldiering on, Mary was only getting worse.

She cannot bring herself to leave her bed for more than an hour’s time. Nor can she attend to Tad, who grieves not only for a brother, but a mother as well. I am ashamed to admit that there are moments when the very sight of her angers me. Ashamed because it is no fault of hers that she suffers fits of rage, or believes the charlatans who “commune” with our beloved sons for money. She has borne more than any mother ought to bear. I fear that her mind has gone, and that it shall never return.

II

Though Abe refused to have any direct contact with Henry or the Union, he was pragmatic enough to accept their help in winning the war. In New York, the grand ballroom (where Abe first learned of the Union and its plans for him) had been transformed into a war room, complete with maps, chalkboards, and a telegraph. They acted as envoys to the sympathetic vampires of Europe. They fought where they were able, and supplemented the White House’s intelligence with that collected by their own spies. This intelligence was delivered to Seward, who—after reading and burning the messages—related their contents to the president. From an entry dated June 10th, 1862:

Today comes word that the Confederates are handing Union prisoners over to Southern vampires for the purpose of torture and execution. “We hear of men,” said Seward, “hung upside down and stretched between posts. Using a logger’s saw, two vampires slowly cut the prisoner in half beginning at his [groin]. As they do, a third vampire lies on his back beneath the poor wretch—catching the blood that runs down his body. Because the prisoner’s head is nearest the ground, his brain remains nourished, and he remains conscious until the blade tears slowly back and forth through his stomach, then chest. The other prisoners are made to watch this before being made to suffer it themselves.”

Rumors of Confederate “ghosts” and “demons” snatching men from their tents and drinking their blood spread through the Union ranks during the war’s second summer. Soldiers could be heard singing a popular song around their campfires at night.

From Flor’da to Virginny you can hear him revel,

for ol’ Johnny Reb’s made a deal with the devil.

Sent him up north, that snake-eyed liar,

to drag us boys off to the lake of fire…

In at least one case, these rumors led a group of Union soldiers to turn on one of their own. On July 5th, 1862, Private Morgan Sloss was murdered by five of his fellow soldiers while encamped near Berkley Plantation in Virginia.

They pulled him from his tent in the dead of night and beat him, all the while accusing him of being a “blood-drinkin’ demon.” (Had the boy actually been a vampire, he would have made a better show of defending himself.) They tied him to a hitching post, and set on him with sticks and shovels—demanding he confess. “Tell us yer a blood-drinkin’ demon and we’ll let ya go!” they cried, all the while thrashing him till he wept and begged for mercy. After a quarter of an hour of this, the mumbled confession at last came from his bloodied lips. I suspect the boy would have confessed to being Christ Himself if it had meant an end to his agony. His confession noted, he was then doused in lamp oil and burned alive. The fear he must have felt… the confusion and the fear… I cannot think of it without my fists clenching in anger. If only by some miracle of time and heaven I could have been there to intervene.

Abe found the incident deeply troubling—not only for its cruelty, but because it meant that the Confederate strategy was working.

How can we hope to win this war when our men have begun killing each other? How can we hope to prevail when they will soon be too frightened to fight? For every vampire sympathetic to our cause, there are ten fighting for the enemy. How am I to contest them?

As it often did for Abe, the answer came in a dream. From an entry dated July 21st, 1862:

I was a boy again… sitting atop a familiar fence rail in the cool of a cloudy day, watching travelers pass on the Old Cumberland Trail. I remember seeing a horse cart filled with Negroes, each of them shackled at the wrist, without so much as a handful of loose hay to comfort the bumps of the road, or a blanket to relieve them from the winter air. My eyes met those of the youngest, a Negro girl of perhaps five or six, as they passed. I wanted to turn away (such was the sorrow of her countenance), yet I could not… for I knew where she was being taken.

Night had fallen. I had followed the Negro girl (I know not how) to a large barn—the inside lit by torches and hanging oil lamps. I watched from the darkness as she and the others were made to stand in a line, their eyes firmly fixed on the ground. I watched as a vampire took its place behind each of the slaves. Her eyes found mine as a pair of fangs descended behind her, and a pair of clawed hands grabbed her tiny neck.

“Justice… ,” she said, staring at me.

The fangs tore into her.

Her screams joined my own as I woke.

Abe convened his Cabinet the next morning.

“Gentlemen,” I began, “we have spoken a great deal about the true nature of this war; about our true enemy. We have argued—always in the spirit of friendship—over the wisest way to meet such an enemy, and bemoaned his power to strike fear into the hearts of our men. I daresay that we have even come to share in that fear ourselves. This will not do.

“Gentlemen… let our enemy fear us.

“Let us deny him the laborers who tend the farms of his living allies; who build his garrisons and carry his gunpowder. Let us deny him the poor wretches who are themselves grown as crops to be consumed by darkness. Now, gentlemen, let us starve the devils into defeat by declaring every slave in the South free.”

Cheers went up around the table. Even Salmon Chase (who still refused to believe that vampires were real) saw the strategic genius of attacking the engine of the South. Seward, while joining the others in his approval, offered a piece of humble advice:

[He] suggested that such a proclamation be given to the country on the heels of a victory, so as not to appear an act of desperation.

“Well,” I said, “then I suppose we need a victory.”

III

On September 17th, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies collided at Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Confederate forces were commanded by General Robert E. Lee, who’d enjoyed a warm relationship with the president before the war. The Union forces were commanded by General George B. McClellan, a Democrat who despised Abraham Lincoln with every fiber of his being. Abe writes:

[McClellan] thinks me a buffoon—unfit to command a man of his superior breeding and intellect. This would not bother me in the least if only he won more battles! Instead he sits in his camp, using the Army of the Potomac as his personal bodyguard! He suffers from an excess of caution: observing when he should attack, retreating when he should stand his ground and fight. This is a sin that I cannot forgive in a general.

Lee and McClellan’s armies waited quietly in the predawn hours of that Wednesday, September 17th, unaware that they were about to embark on the bloodiest day in American military history. At first light, both sides unleashed their artillery. For nearly an hour the shells flew one after the other, many with fuses timed to make them explode over their targets, sending burning pieces of shrapnel through the bodies of any soldier unfortunate enough to be nearby. From the diary of Union soldier Christoph Niederer, ^* 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps:

I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.

When the cannons fell quiet, Union troops were given orders to fix bayonets and charge across an open cornfield toward the entrenched Confederates. But an artillery battery was waiting for them in the tall stalks, and when they neared, the rebel cannons unleashed round after round of grapeshot, ^* taking heads off and scattering body parts across the field. From a letter by Lieutenant Sebastian Duncan Jr., ^** 13th New Jersey Infantry, 12th Corps:

Stray shot and shell began to whiz over our heads and burst around us… lying just in front of our lines was a great number of dead and wounded. One poor fellow lay just before us with one leg shot off; the other shattered and otherwise badly wounded; fairly shrieking with pain.

When the charge was over, the cornfield was a bare, smoldering ruin covered with the dead and the dying from one end to the other. The wounded were left to suffer alone as shells continued to fall—taking fresh limbs, and scattering the ones that had been taken already. The battle was barely two hours old.

More than 6,000 men would lose their lives at Antietam that day, and another 20,000 would be wounded, many of them mortally.

Lee would eventually be forced into retreat. But after using only two-thirds of his available forces to fight the battle (a fact that continues to baffle military historians), General George B. McClellan simply watched as the battered Confederate Army limped into Virginia to regroup. Had he chased them down, he could have dealt a crippling blow to the South and brought the war to a speedy end.

Abe was furious.

“Damn it!” he cried to Stanton on learning that McClellan had failed to follow the enemy’s retreat. “He has done more to cause me grief than any Confederate!”

He left for McClellan’s camp at Sharpsburg at once.

There’s a famous photograph of Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan sitting across from each other in the general’s tent at Sharpsburg. Both look stiff and uncomfortable. History knows that Abe flippantly told McClellan: “If you do not want to use the army, I would very much like to borrow it.” What history has never known, however, is what happened shortly before that uncomfortable picture was taken.

Upon greeting [McClellan] in his tent and shaking the hands of his officers, I asked that we be given a moment alone. Closing the flap of his tent, I placed my hat upon a small table, straightened my coat, and stood before him. “General,” I said, “I must ask you a question.”

“Anything,” said he.

I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close—so close that our faces were only inches apart. “May I see them?”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

FIG. 8-47. - ABE SITS WITH A NERVOUS GENERAL GEORGE MCCLELLAN IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEIR CONFORNATION AT SHARPSBURG. NOTE THE AXE LEANING AGAINST THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR -- BROUGHT JUST IN CASE HIS HUNCH ABOUT MCCLELLAN HAD PROVEN RIGHT.

I pulled him closer still. “Your fangs, General! Let me have a look at them!” McClellan began to struggle against me, but his feet were no longer touching the ground. “Surely they must be in there,” I said, prying his mouth open with one hand. “For how could any living man seek to prolong the agony of war? Come! Show me those black eyes! Show me those razors and let us face each other!” I shook him violently. “Show me!”

“I—I do not understand,” he said at last.

His confusion was genuine. His fear palpable.

I released him, suddenly ashamed that I had allowed my temper to run wild. “No,” I said. “No, I can see that you do not.” I straightened my coat again and reached for the tent flap.

“Come,” I said. “Let us give Gardner ^* his photograph and be done with each other.”

Abe relieved McClellan of his command a month later.

After leaving the camp at Sharpsburg, Abe surveyed the aftermath of the battle for himself. The sight of mangled, rigid bodies strewn across Antietam Creek was enough to bring the emotionally weary president to tears.

I wept, for each of these boys was Willie. Each of them had left a father cursed as I am cursed; a mother weeping as Mary weeps.

Abe sat on the ground beside the corpse of one Union soldier for nearly an hour. He was told that the boy had been struck in the head by cannon fire.

His head was split open at the back, and most of his skull and brains were gone—the result being that his face and scalp lay flat on the ground like an empty bag of grain. The sight of him repulsed me, yet I could not avert my eyes. This boy—this nameless boy—had risen that September morning, unaware that he would never see another. He had dressed and eaten. He had run bravely into battle. And then he had been gone—every moment of his life reduced to a single misfortune. All of his experiences, past and future, emptied onto some strange field far from home.

FIG. 27-C - A GROUP OF FREED SLAVES COLLECTS CONFEDERATE BODIES IN COLD HARBOR, VIRGINIA AFTER THE WAR IN 1865. NOTE THE FANGS VISIBLE IN THE SKULL TO THE KNEELING MAN’S LEFT.

I weep for his mother and father; for his brothers and sisters. But I do not weep for him—for I have come to believe that old saying with all my heart…

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

IV

As horrible as Antietam was, it was the victory that Abe had been waiting for. On September 22nd, 1862, he issued the first Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebel states “forever free.”

Reaction was swift. Abolitionists argued that by freeing only the slaves in Southern states, Abe hadn’t gone far enough. Moderates feared that the measure would only make the South fight with more determination. Some Northern soldiers threatened mutiny, arguing that they were fighting to preserve the Union, not “[Negro] freedom.”

Abe didn’t care.

The only reaction that concerned him was that of the slaves themselves. And judging by the reports that began trickling in during the last months of 1862, it was precisely the one he’d hoped for.

I received today a remarkable account from our allies in New York (related by Seward) of a recent uprising on a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. I am assured that no part of it has been embellished, the account having been conveyed by a runaway Negro boy who witnessed the events firsthand. “The happy news of [the Emancipation Proclamation] having reached their quarters that morning,” said Seward, “the Negroes rejoiced with spirited songs. Their revels, however, were met with the angry whips of their masters, and a wench collected and chained at the ankles—this being the common manner of taking away those who were never to be seen again. Rather than allow this sorry fate to befall her, as they had allowed it to befall so many before, the Negroes formed a mob and encircled the fattening pen into which she had been taken. When they burst in, carrying sickles and scythes, they were met with a sight which made even the bravest of them cry out in horror. A pair of wild-eyed gentlemen knelt over the shackled wench, each of their bloodstained mouths affixed to one of her naked breasts. She was insensible, most of the color having left her by this time. Composing themselves, several of the Negro men raised their weapons and charged at the devils—thinking them mortals. The vampires, however, moved with such speed as to confound them. They leapt about the pen, clinging to the walls with the ease of insects, as blades swung violently about them. Those who led the charge were slain—their throats opened by pointed claws; their heads struck with such force as to render them dead before they fell. But such were their numbers, that the mob was able to overwhelm the gentlemen. Though it took no fewer than six men to restrain each of them, the vampires were finally dragged from the fattening pen, held over a watering trough, and beheaded.”

FIG. 11.2 - ABE’S HOPES WERE REALIZED WHEN SLAVES BEGAN REVOLTING AGAINST THEIR VAMPIRE CAPTIONS IN THE WAKE OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

Word was spreading. The days of America’s vampires were numbered.

On November 19th, 1863, Abe rose before a crowd of 15,000. He pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, cleared his throat, and began to speak:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…

He’d come to Gettysburg to dedicate a memorial to the 8,000 men who had given their lives in the three-day Union victory. As he spoke, Ward Hill Lamon (who can be seen sitting next to Abe in one of the few surviving photos of the event) scanned the crowd anxiously—his hand on the revolver inside his coat; his stomach in knots—for he was the only man protecting the president that day.

For three hours we sat upon that stage. Three hours of ceaseless worry—for I was certain that an assassin would strike. Every face seemed to wear an expression of hatred for the president. Every movement seemed prelude to an attempt on his life.

At first, Abe had insisted on going to Gettysburg without any guard, worried that the sight of armed men would be “inappropriate” at an event honoring those who’d died for their country. Only after Lamon half-jokingly threatened to sabotage the president’s train to prevent the trip did Abe agree to bring him along.

… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abe folded the paper and took his seat to moderate applause. He’d spoken for all of two minutes. In that short time, he’d given perhaps the greatest speech of the nineteenth century, one that would be forever ingrained in America’s consciousness. And in that short time, Ward Hill Lamon, Abraham Lincoln’s most devoted human bodyguard, had reached a decision that would forever alter the course of America’s history.

FIG. 14C-3. - WARD HILL LAMON SITS IMMEDIATELY TO ABE’S RGHT IN THE MOMENTS AFTER THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, NERVOUSLY SCANNING THE CROWD FOR VAMPIRE ASSASSINS. A CLOSER LOOK AT THE EDGE OF THE PHOTO SUGGESTS THAT HIS FEARS MAY HAVE BEEN JUSTIFIED.

The anxiety at Gettysburg had been more than he could bear. As they rode back to Washington, Lamon respectfully told the president that he could no longer guard him.

V

On the night of November 8th, 1864, Abe walked though driving wind and rain, alone.

I resolved to sit in the telegraph office alone and await the returns, just as I had in Springfield four long years ago. If I lost, I did not wish to be consoled. If I won, I did not wish to be congratulated. For there were many reasons to welcome the first outcome, and mourn the second.

The war had claimed nearly 500,000 lives by Election Day. Despite these unimaginable losses, growing war-weariness, and deep divides over emancipation in the North, Abe and his new vice president, Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, won in a landslide against George B. McClellan (the same McClellan Abe had confronted after Antietam). Eighty percent of the Union Army voted to reelect its commander in chief, an astonishing number given the fact that Abe had run against a former Union general, and given the miserable conditions they’d endured for years. On hearing the election results, Union troops outside the Confederate capital of Richmond gave such a cheer that its beleaguered citizens were sure the South had just surrendered.

They had reason to expect defeat. Richmond had been surrounded for months. Atlanta (the heart of Southern manufacturing) had been captured. Across the South, emancipated slaves continued to escape to Northern lines by the tens of thousands—crippling Southern agriculture, and forcing Confederate vampires to scavenge for easy blood. As a result, the dreaded “ghost soldiers” who had slaughtered and terrorized Union troops became increasingly scarce. By the time Abe was inaugurated for the second time on March 4th, 1865, the war was all but over.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

During the procession that followed his address, a battalion of Negro soldiers joined the others marching past the president’s reviewing stand.

I was moved to tears as they passed, saluting me—for in each of their faces I saw the face of a nameless victim crying out for justice; of a little girl passing by on the Old Cumberland Trail all those many years ago. On each of their faces I saw the anguish of the past, and the promise of the future.

General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army on April 9th, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War. The following day, Abe received a letter in a familiar scrawl.

Abraham,

I beg you put enmity aside long enough to read a few words of congratulations.

It brings me joy to report that our enemy has begun its exodus—many back to Europe, others to South America and the Orient, where they are less likely to be hunted. They have looked to the future, Abraham—and they have seen that America is now, and shall forever be, a nation of living men. Like your namesake, you have been a “father to many” these four long years. And like your namesake, God has asked impossible sacrifices of you. Yet you have endured it all as brilliantly as any man could have hoped. You have blessed the futures of those who share this time on earth, and those who have yet to live.

She would be proud.

Ever,

—H

As a boy, Abe had vowed to “kill every vampire in America.” While that had proven impossible, he’d done the next best thing: he’d driven the worst of them out of America. There was one vampire, however, who refused to leave… who believed that the dream of a nation of immortals was still within reach—so long as Abraham Lincoln was dead.

His name was John Wilkes Booth.

FIG. 3E - JOHN WILKES BOOTH (SEATED) POSES FOR A PORTRAIT WITH CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS IN RICHMOND, CIRCA 1863. IT IS ONLY KNOWN PICTURE OF BOOTH IN HIS TRUE VAMPIRE FORM.