I Am Abraham (12 page)

I startled her once she heard my voice, and she recognized my singular size.

“I could take you out of here, Miss Sybil. Joshua will look after you.”

She clucked at me like a crazed chicken. “Josh can’t even look after himself. Niles would slit his throat.”

“Niles ain’t the law,” I said. “We could run to the sheriff.”

The clucking stopped. “Lincoln, you’re one fine imbecile. The sheriff also owns a piece of my tail. You’d best be gone. That dwarf is vicious. He’ll tattle on me. And don’t you tell a word to Josh. I wouldn’t want him to see me in such a circumstance, you hear?
Promise
, else I’ll blind ye with a stick.”

She didn’t have a stick, and I wasn’t afraid of Niles and his dwarf. It was another matter. She was so pathetic in her porous silk blouse, I had to promise . . .

Niles didn’t last very long, even with the sheriff and half the town behind him. A rich slaver, who’d come from Missouri to look for whores who could perform the filthiest tricks while swinging from a chandelier, didn’t cotton to a colored sporting-club man and broke his neck in a drunken brawl. He never even sat in jail. He bribed the coroner and sailed back to Missouri.

And we
sailed
Illinois, Joshua and I, rode through every patch and cornfield, where we might find a whore’s barn, and found none. That traveling bordello must have disappeared with the sporting-club man’s demise. When we returned to Springfield, Sybil was waiting there for us with her parasol and her petticoats. The whore’s mud was gone, with the flimsy blouses and skirts. She wouldn’t accompany Joshua to Louisville as his concubine or his bride. Sybil had me prepare a lawyer’s letter. She was adamant about it. Joshua would lend her a fixed sum—five hundred dollars—to start her own establishment, and she would go back to being his pretty lady, and reimburse him out of the proceeds.

He mulled over the proposition, because he still wanted to marry her. I had to pull on his ears with all my might to convince him that Sybil had more sense.

“Speed, that girl is volunteering to love you the only way she can. You’ll shrivel into dust without her.”

I knew he would outgrow his love of the West, would pack up and return to Louisville in a couple of years, and he wouldn’t pine for his pretty lady. If there was any heartbreak, it would belong to Sybil.

10.

McIntosh

E
VERY
TIME
I touch the Ohio, I still dream of slaves aboard some flatboat, shackled together, their lips parched, their eyes inflamed, as they are being shipped to the markets of Orleans like forgotten freight. I never saw a white child offer a piece of peppermint to a black child on that boat. I didn’t have the gumption to do it myself; besides, I couldn’t have afforded my own stick of peppermint as a boy.

I feared the Abolitionists just as much. They’d ride in from New England with fire and brimstone in their hearts and rattle a town—they always wore black hats and black coats, like hangmen or undertakers. They arrived in Springfield with a bitter wind, in the autumn of 1837, their torches lighting up their pink little eyes, and rented a hall near the capitol. I rambled over, paid my 2½ cents for a ticket, and wandered into the hall. The place was packed with female sympathizers in winter bonnets and black shawls, with lawyers and Legislators like myself, and with half the colored folks in the county—tenant farmers, fancy men, stevedores in brown coveralls, and the slaves we still had left.

The Abolitionists were in high dudgeon. They had nothing to lose in Illinois. They would have been happy to turn our villages into arsenals, drown Legislators in the Sangamon River, march on the capitol, and torch it into the ground. “Friends, neighbors, Illinois is a rotten sink that doesn’t deserve to survive.” But they didn’t help themselves or the blacks in that hall.

A mob hammered its way in with pipes and cudgels and bargemen’s poles. There was a preacher among these ruffians with the same brimstone as the Abolitionists and the same black hat. “Ye godless men and all your Jezebels,” he spat, “you’ve beshit yourselves. You walk among the black devils and give them succor. Shame on you.”

He jabbed one Abolitionist after the other in the chest with his bargeman’s pole, while his ruffians attacked the rest of us with their cudgels. They were out to blind every black man in the hall and smash his skull. The sheriff arrived with a brace of pepper-pot pistols under his belt—each one with multiple blue barrels and a golden trigger—but he just stood there and wouldn’t involve himself in a farrago that was turning into a slaughterhouse. Women clutched their bonnets and shrieked as I watched a poor soul with his own bloody eyeball in his hand, staring at it like a crazed jeweler. Another colored man had a hole in his head fat as a fist. And the sheriff looked on like some little Napoleon of the West.

“Lincoln, I’m not paid to protect niggers and Abolitionists.”

I grabbed a pepper-pot from under his belt, pulled that golden trigger, and shot a chandelier—the fracas ended in an instant. People stood frozen under the shower of glass and a socking sound that was like a thunderclap. Shards spilled through the air; and it amazed me, more than a little, to watch the patterns of spinning glass, as if I had created a new world in under a minute. And then there was a musical noise, like the hiss of a harp, as the glass spun and spun.

We all stood under that shower, the best and the worst of us. I aimed my pepper-pot at the renegade preacher and cocked the hammer again. He and his ruffians disappeared, and the New Englanders clapped their hands and danced a jig in their Abolitionist boots.

“Brothers and sisters,” I said, “go on out of here whilst you still can, and the next time you talk about firing up a building, make sure you’re not in it.”

Much as I tried, I couldn’t stop the burning and the bloodshed, since Illinois was a State with a Southern soul. Abolitionists often found themselves stuck inside a coat of tar and feathers. There had been little uprisings and insurrections in Illinois and in Missouri, across the Mississip; most of the uprisings had been spurred on by the Abolitionists or a mob of slavers, with colored men and women caught in the middle.

In St. Louis, last year, a mulatto cook named McIntosh—a freeman—who worked on a steamboat, tried to rescue a couple of black crew members; these boatmen had been apprehended for fighting near the docks; and when he interfered in their arrest, McIntosh was arrested, too. One of the deputy sheriffs mocked McIntosh and told him he would have to sit in jail for five years. McIntosh pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. The report of this stabbing spread like wildfire that April. An angry mob plucked McIntosh right out of jail and dragged him across town. The mob chained McIntosh to a chestnut tree, set him on fire, and watched him burn. The next morning his charred body was still chained to the tree. His skull had become a plaything for the children of St. Louis. They shot peas and tossed rocks at the holes where his eyes had once been. And there weren’t a lot of folks who were really astonished.

I couldn’t bring McIntosh back with words scratched on a page, but at least I could remember him. And when the Young Men’s Lyceum, that society of social lions, asked me to deliver a speech, I decided to talk about McIntosh and the mob rule that had descended upon the United States in the spring of ’36. I didn’t hobnob with most of the lions, though I might have, since Joshua Speed was part of their company when he wasn’t gallivanting with Sybil Weg. But I wouldn’t have been comfortable in a ruffled shirt, and I lacked the funds to buy one. So I appeared in my usual garb of dusty gabardine at the Second Presbyterian Church one Saturday night in January, nine or ten months after I’d removed to Springfield—the wind was howling fierce.

I stood up at the pulpit in front of these fine men, several of whom served with me in the Legislature—others were bankers and shopkeepers—and delivered a talk entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” I’d labored long and hard on that address. The written hand wasn’t natural to me. I had to polish and re-polish the speech, deliver it in front of a mirror in Joshua’s bedroom, with a few of the store’s clerks as my audience. Joshua might have helped the novice lecturer, but I wouldn’t ruin it for him. I wanted him to hear the
shock
of my delivery for the first time at the Young Men’s Lyceum.

I’d babbled in front of the Legislature, I’d electioneered, but I wasn’t a fire-breather like the Abolitionists—I couldn’t electrify an audience, have women swoon at my feet. There were no ladies at the Lyceum. And many of these social lions weren’t used to the timbre of my voice, that sudden squeak.

I warned the lions. “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. . . . If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

I talked about a certain madness—the madness of mob rule—that threatened a land where negroes and whites supposed to be leagued with them were chased into every corner, “till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest.”

I mentioned McIntosh, how he had suffered an inglorious death, “all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world.” I didn’t condone the stabbing he did—the death of that deputy. But no justice was served by chaining McIntosh to a tree. The mob of tomorrow will burn and hang the innocent and the guilty at will, and make a jubilee of it, I said. The spit was flying. The screech in my voice was gone. Suddenly I was a baritone, in full force.

Thus I spoke to the Lyceum. My lips were dry. My throat was parched. My voice had fled into the roof. I didn’t belong with these young lions. I could have been the monster at a monster show I’d seen as a child. There were two or three tents. The monster might have been a bearded lady or a man with a shark’s skin. I never had much faith in these unnatural beings, assuming with a boy’s cunning and bewilderment that both the beard and the fish skin had been painted on. But still I looked and looked. I couldn’t take my eyes off the monster. And I must have haunted these young men the way the bearded lady had haunted me, as someone only half authentic. The bearded lady couldn’t sing out her lament. She had no voice beyond her deformity, real or unreal. And I, Abraham Lincoln, with my wild hair and look of a gigantic scarecrow, must have amused them, even
frightened
them a little with my harangue about mobs and political institutions.

I talked of the Founding Fathers and their wild experiment that folks might make their own destiny without a tyrant to guide or govern them. “If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves, and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded.”

The Revolution had created a living history, with scars and wounds. But the histories found in every family were now gone. “They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls.” And we had to fight against that silent quarry with sober reason. “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. . . .”

I had been wrong about these social lions, including Ninian Edwards and other members of the Long Nine. They clapped and clapped in their silk and satin for the monster on the pulpit. And then I thought of McIntosh, his skull and bones clinging to a tree.

11.

King Richard & the Lexington Lioness

U
NTIL
MY
SPEECH
at the Lyceum, Ninian and his wife, Elizabeth, had never invited me to their house on the Hill. Elizabeth Edwards was a busybody and the biggest matchmaker in town. She had a long nose, like a bird of prey, and piercing silver eyes. She took it upon herself to summon up suitable brides for Springfield’s most eligible bachelors. And since it was hard to find belles of good breeding, she had to import them from Louisville or Lexington, where she had grown up. She herself was a Todd, one of Kentucky’s
superior
families.

When I showed up at Elizabeth’s Saturday-night soirees, wearing white gloves, she was polite enough, but she never glanced at me with her eagle eyes. Elizabeth wasn’t going to waste her time on a no-account like Abe Lincoln. She could chatter on and on about my exquisite lecture at the Lyceum—it had been published in the
Sangamo
Journal
. But she didn’t believe for a minute that I belonged on Quality Hill.

I kind of felt the same way. I couldn’t dance up a storm even with some of the second-rate belles who were allotted to me. I shuffled around, with the skirts of my coat flaring up like a rooster’s crippled wings. I didn’t know any of the latest steps. I’d never been to dancing college. So the boundaries were crisp and clean. I was at war with Elizabeth Todd Edwards, but it was a war of whispers. She was always whispering when I was around, as if I were a tall skeleton in white gloves, and it wasn’t worth her while to match me up with one of her belles.

I drank her punch, I politicked, and avoided her cotillions as much I could. Still, I was included in the Coterie, that inner circle of lions and young lionesses around Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, who must have calculated some, since I was a lawyer and Legislator to be reckoned with. The social lions might have had their fancy cuffs, but their tongues failed them in front of a jury, whereas I could clown and be the jackanapes. I could move a jury of farmers by telling a barnyard tale. Lawyer Lincoln was soon sought after in the near and far counties of Illinois.