But their plans changed when Pinkerton realized that the trinity was gone.
[They] had simply vanished somewhere between Philadelphia and Harrisburg—giving no reason for their absence. As I refused to leave Mary and the boys without an armed escort, it was quickly decided that Pinkerton would stay behind and look after them while Lamon accompanied me on the other train. The telegraph lines between Pennsylvania and Maryland were then cut, so that any conspirators would be unable to relay word of our departure from Harrisburg.
Just after midnight on the 23rd, Abe’s “secret” train passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington.
There were anxious moments as we passed through the heart of the city (more slowly, it seemed, than any train I had ever ridden on). Could these assassins have discovered our trick? Were they, at this very moment, preparing to bombard our train with cannon fire?
Abe needn’t have worried. By the time his train rolled through the station, three of his would-be assassins were already dead—and the fourth was dying beneath his feet.
The partial bodies of four men were found near Calvert Street Station the next morning. From the February 23rd edition of the Baltimore Sun:
Two gentlemen have had [their] heads taken. Another has been viciously beaten, to the extent that police are as yet unable to determine his age or race. The fourth, it seems, was halved beneath the wheels of a passing locomotive. Incredibly, a witness claims that the gentleman survived for several minutes thereafter—his spine being severed in such a way that he was still able to move his head and arms. He was seen faintly crying out and attempting to drag his remaining body from the tracks before dying.
Though they never spoke a word about the incident, Abe never doubted that his three vampire protectors had been responsible for the carnage.
V
On March 4th, 1861, Abraham Lincoln—exceptional boy of Sinking Springs Farm, apple of his departed mother’s eye, survivor of the trials of Job, and one of the nation’s most accomplished vampire hunters—was sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Tens of thousands gathered in front of a covered wooden platform on the Capitol steps to hear him speak. Little did they know that they were witnessing the largest security operation in history. Troops were stationed around the city, ready to put down any violent protests or large-scale attacks. Police (both uniformed and not) stood guard beneath the podium where Abe spoke, keeping an eye out for anyone who might raise a revolver or long rifle. Closer to the president elect, Ward Hill Lamon hovered on the platform with two revolvers in his coat and a long knife on his belt. The vampires of the trinity were stationed at different points, but they were never far from Abe.
Only later would I learn that the hearts of two armed men had been discreetly run through during my speech. Unlike the assassins in Baltimore, these had been vampires.
Five weeks into Abe’s young presidency the country’s strained “bonds of affection” finally broke.
Fort Sumter, a federal stronghold in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, had been under siege by Confederates since January. The Southerners demanded that the Union troops (commanded by Major Robert Anderson) surrender the fort, as it was in South Carolina, and therefore not the property of the federal government. Abe had done everything in his power to prevent hostilities from breaking out, but Anderson’s men were running desperately short of food, and the only way to resupply them was by sending warships into Confederate territory.
I am now forced to choose between two evils. Either I must allow a few soldiers to starve, or provoke a war that will undoubtedly kill scores of soldiers. Struggle as I might, I can see no third option.
Abe sent the ships.
The first of them reached Charleston Harbor on April 11th. The next morning, before sunrise, Confederate Colonel James Chestnut Jr. gave the order to fire on the fort.
It was the first shot of the Civil War.
ELEVEN
Casualties
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
—Abraham Lincoln, in a message to Congress
December 1st, 1862
I
On June 3rd, 1861, Stephen A. Douglas was found dead in a stairwell of his Chicago home.
I have just this hour heard the shocking news. Though the full facts have not yet come to light, I have no doubt that it is the work of vampires—and that I bear some of the responsibility for his murder.
Publicly, the cause of death was reported as typhoid fever, even though none of Douglas’s friends remembered him feeling unwell the night before he was discovered. The body was taken by coach to Mercy Hospital, where it was examined by a young Chicago physician, Dr. Bradley Milliner. From the autopsy report:
Four small, circular puncture wounds on deceased’s body—two on left shoulder directly over axillary [artery]; two the neck directly over right common carotid [artery]. Both sets surrounded by significant bruising; uniformly spaced one and one-half inches apart.Whole of deceased’s body badly decayed and gray-blue in color; face is sunken; skin brittle, suggesting death occurred weeks or months before examination. Stomach contains brightly colored, whole pieces of undigested food, suggesting deceased ate shortly before death, and that death occurred less than twenty-four hours before examination.
Along with his observations, Dr. Milliner scribbled a single word in the report’s margin:
“Incredible.”
The report itself was deemed “inconclusive” and suppressed by Milliner’s superiors, who thought that releasing such information would only add to the “climate of conjecture and suspicion” surrounding the senator’s death. *
Lincoln and Douglas had been the most famous rivals in America. For two decades, they’d competed over everything from a woman’s love to the highest office in the land. But for all their political antipathy, the two had grown to respect, even like, each other over the years. Douglas was, after all, one of Abe’s “brilliant beacons” in Washington’s “fog of fools.” And while the so-called Little Giant spent years appealing to Southern passions, he was, in his heart, no son of the South. In fact, Douglas loathed the idea of disunion, going so far as to call secessionists “criminals,” and declaring: “We must fight for our country and forget our differences. There can be but two parties: the party of patriots and the party of traitors. We belong to the first.”
When the Union began to tear itself apart in the wake of his failed 1860 campaign, it was Stephen Douglas who first reached out to his old rival—the new president elect.
He wishes to join me in the cause of opposing secession. To that end I have asked him to make a speaking tour of the Border States and the Northwest (those places where the flame of unity might yet be fanned by our efforts, or snuffed out by a lack of them). I can think of no better messenger, no ally more symbolic of the need for unity. I will admit that his offer took me quite by surprise. I suppose it possible that he has come to regret his association with the vampire South, and is looking for some means of redemption. Whatever his reasons, I welcome his help.
Douglas made pro-Union speeches in three states before returning to Washington. At Abe’s inauguration, with the threat of assassination hanging in the air, he placed himself near the podium and declared, “If any man attacks Lincoln, he attacks me!” And on Sunday, April 14th, 1861, as Fort Sumter was being surrendered to the Confederates, Stephen Douglas was among the first to race to the White House.
He came today with no appointment, only to find that I was meeting with the Cabinet, and would be thus engaged for quite some time. [Presidential secretary John] Nicolay asked him to call again, but Judge Douglas flatly refused. When I had grown weary of hearing his familiar baritone shouting profanities in the hall, I swung my office door open and exclaimed, “By God, let the man in or we shall have two wars to fight!”
We met privately for an hour or more. I had never seen him in such a panicked state! “They will march headlong into Washington and kill me!” he cried. “Kill the lot of us! I demand to know what plans you have to combat this menace, sir!” I told him, in the calmest voice I could muster, the truth—that I was to call for 75,000 militia the next morning; that I was to suppress this rebellion with every power of my office and weapon in my arsenal. These reassurances, however, only seemed to deepen his panic. He urged me to call for three times that number. “Mr. President,” he said, “you do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as I do. You do not, and I say this with the deepest respect, sir, know the real enemy you face.”
“Oh, but I assure you, Mr. Douglas—I know them too well.”
Thanks to Henry, Abe had known about Douglas’s connection to Southern vampires since their Senate race three years earlier. Douglas, however, never suspected that the gangly, graying man before him had once been the mightiest vampire hunter on the Mississippi.
I can scarcely describe his astonishment at hearing the word “vampires” pass my lips. Now, with the truth out at last, each of us told the other his story: I of my mother’s death; of my years spent hunting vampires. Douglas of the fateful day when—as a young, ambitious Democrat in the Illinois State Legislature—he was approached by a pair of “sallow” men from the South. “It was then that I first learned of [vampires],” he said. “It was then that I first became intoxicated by their money and influence.”
Douglas repaid their support by railing against abolitionists in the Senate and by using his natural talent for speechmaking to rally proslavery forces across the country. But he’d begun to question his vampire patrons in recent years.
“Why do they reject compromise with the North?” he asked. “Why do they seem intent on war at any cost? And why, by God, do they care so fervently for the institution [of slavery] at all? I could see no logic in it, and I could not, in good conscience, continue down the path to disunion.”
It became clear that Douglas did not know the whole truth; clear that—while guilty of some small treachery—he could not be judged with the likes of the traitorous [Jefferson] Davis. Moved by his remorse, I determined to tell him all: the marriage of slavery and Southern vampires. Their plan to enslave all but the fortunate few of our kind; to keep us in cages and chains as we had kept the Negro. I told him of their plan to create a new America; a nation of vampires—free from oppression, free from darkness, and blessed with an abundance of living men to feast upon.
By the time I finished speaking, Douglas wept.
That night, Abe sat at the head of a long table in his office, with Secretary of State William Seward to his left. They were joined by the rest of the Cabinet, all of them anxious to hear why they’d been summoned from their supper tables and rushed back to the White House.
“Gentlemen,” I said at last, “I wish to speak to you this evening about vampires.”
Abe had met with his Cabinet on a near daily basis since the inauguration. They’d discussed every detail of the coming war: uniforms, supply lines, commanders, horses, provisions—everything but the truth of what they were really fighting for, and who they were really fighting against.
And yet I had asked these men to plan me a war! Was it not akin to asking a group of blind men to pilot a steamboat?
The encounter with Douglas had changed Abe’s mind. When they parted company that evening, he had ordered Nicolay to reconvene the Cabinet at once.
I thought it crucial that these men—these men who were to be my counsel through untold miseries—knew exactly what they faced. There would be no more revelations in this office. No more half-truths or omissions. Now, just as I had with Douglas, I would tell them the whole truth—with Seward there to endorse every word of it. My history. My hunting. My alliance with a small band of vampires called the Union, and the unthinkable consequences of the coming war.
Some were shocked to hear vampires spoken of at all. [Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Wells and [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon] Chase, it seemed, had managed to go the whole of their lives thinking them nothing more than myth. Wells sat in ashen silence. Chase, however, grew indignant. “I will not stand for folly in the face of war!” he declared. “I will not be summoned from my home to be made a fool for the president’s amusement!” Seward rose to my defense, insisting that every word was true, and admitting his own complicity in keeping it from the rest of the Cabinet. Chase remained unconvinced.