The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen L. Carter Read Free Book Online

Oberlin and in Washington City both, was battling the presumption among her classmatesthat if you were black you must have been a slave until the Emancipation Proclamation; or, if you had been born free, then your parents surely scrubbed kitchens or waited tables. In either event, you were unlikely to have opened a book until the kind people of the American Missionary Association or the Freedmen’s Bureau dragged you off to a dreary one-room schoolhouse in the middle of some benighted Southern swamp. When Abigail told her classmates that her father built houses, they imagined shacks on a plantation; and when she told them that the Berryhills had built frigates for the Royal Navy a century ago, her classmates assumed that they swept out the shipyards after hours.
    Dinah, meanwhile, was still talking about Jonathan. “Rich young men,” she proclaimed, “are always engaged. They rarely marry, but they are always engaged.”
    In Hebrew, Dinah’s name meant “judgment,” and she lived up to it constantly.
    “I must say, Mr. Lincoln’s opponents seem quite passionate,” Dinah continued. “Why, poor Thaddeus Stevens is dying, and he came to the House today to condemn the man.”
    “Mr. Lincoln has broken no laws,” said Abigail, already sounding like the lawyer she hoped to be. Yet she, too, had been saddened by the condition of Stevens, the most senior of the Radicals, and the Abolitionist most beloved by educated negroes. “There is no case.”
    “Of course there is a case,” said Dinah, who, coming from a business family, shied away from abstractions. She laid a saucy hand on her hip. “My father is afraid to commit any important business confidences to either telegram or post for fear that Mr. Lincoln’s Secret Service might seize the message. Some who would otherwise speak out against the President choose not to do so, lest they wind up in one of Mr. Stanton’s secret military prisons. That is not politics, Abigail. That is tyranny.”
    “Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves,” said Abigail, doggedly. She remembered her grueling interview with General Baker, and wondered at her own certainty—and her motives. Although nobody had mentioned that conversation since, and her standing at the office seemed even to have improved, a part of her worried that some dire consequence still lay ahead.
    Dinah’s laugh was hard and mannish, the laugh of one who has seen it all and long forgotten how to be impressed. “Abby, darling, he is being impeached by the Radicals of his own party. They would have freed the slaves, too. That is not what this quarrel is about.”
    “Then what is it about?”
    “Goodness, darling. The man tried to put the army over Congress! To establish military government in this city, with himself at the head! He is a petty tyrant, a tyrant running our great Protestant Republic! Really, what else does one expect when we choose an uneducated Westerner to be—Stop! Stop him!”
    A small, dark, slim figure had darted from the throng and snatched Dinah’s fancy handbag. He ran on—
    Only to scream in agony a second later as an absurdly tall man, white and broad and grizzled, stepped out of the crowd and snapped his wrist.
    “Sorry, Miss Dinah,” said the giant, with a sheepish grin. He had a flaming-red beard, and a bright scar along the side of his neck. His ancient jacket of butternut gray, a relic of the war, was evidence that he had been on the losing side. “I tried not to hurt the fool,” he rumbled.
    The fool, as it happened, was a negro boy, no more than ten or twelve, and Abigail ached at the image, the brown boy struggling in the painful grip of the white Goliath as the crowd backed away.
    “You may release him, Corporal,” said Dinah. She bent over, laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and lectured him in a stern whisper, finger waving in his face. All the time, the boy looked at the ground, and cradled his wounded wrist. He nodded. Dinah slapped him lightly on the side of his head, and