The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Read Free

distant cousin in that business already. She wanted to be a lawyer. This was impossible, she was told, given her color and her sex. But she was determined totry, unaware of how her ambition would carry her to the center of great events.
    The romance, like the violence, came later.
    II
    On the first Monday in February, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred sixty-seven—or, in the larger history, one month exactly before the trial of the sixteenth President of the United States was to begin—Abigail set out upon her journey. Ignoring her mad brother’s derisive insistence that nothing good would come of the effort, she rode the horse-drawn streetcars through the filthy snow to prove to the world that she was indeed the woman she claimed. She had her college degree and her letter of employment and the stony conviction,learned from her late mother, that, whatever limitations the society might place on ordinary negroes, they would never apply to her.
    Abigail boarded the Seventh Street line, which passed near her home, then changed at Pennsylvania Avenue, choosing the second row to avoid a squabble with the white citizens of Washington City, who seemed to consider the rear of the car their own private preserve, but also to avoid the ignominy that came of riding up front with the driver, where nowadays most men and women of her race tucked themselves without a second thought: a discrimination until recently enshrined in city law. The war was over, the slaves were free, and the government of the United States guaranteed the rights of the colored race, but here in the nation’s triumphant capital, in the midst of the most frigid winter in years, everybody was at pains to establish who was who.
    Abigail was a tall young woman, unfashionably slender, with smooth mahogany skin that bespoke more than one dallying slavemaster in her ancestral tree. The hooded coat she wore against the cold was a product of the finest dressmaker in Boston, a gift from her uncle, a physician. The trim was silver fur. The face that peered out suggested a woman who pondered a great deal over the issues of the day, and very deeply, but frowned on most forms of fun. Her gray eyes were sharp and probing; her dimpled chin seemed confident and disapproving. Men tended to find her reasonably pretty, even if not so vivacious as her older sister, Judith, or so innocently beautiful as her younger sister, Louisa. They also tended to find her too distant, too judgmental, too intelligent altogether, for Abigail would always rather read another book than haveanother dance. Nanny Pork, who ran the Canner household, preached the evils of dancing and carousing and most forms of enjoyment, and although Abigail was not precisely the sort to do what she was told, she regarded Nanny with the sort of awe usually reserved for less visible agents of divinity.
    Abigail was twenty-one years old, and parentless, and black, and expecting, somehow, to affect the course of history.
    Maybe even starting today.
    The streetcar pulled up at the carriage block on the corner of Fourteenth Street, near the Willard Hotel, where negroes were not welcome except in service. Abigail stepped carefully down onto the broken stone. Neither the driver nor any of the gentlemen passing on the street made any effort to assist her, but she had not expected them to. The newsboy was the only one who paid her any attention, shouting that Senator Wade was predicting that at least forty of the fifty-four members of the Senate would vote to remove the President from office, and forty, she knew, was more than enough. The boy thrust a newspaper at her with one hand and held out the other for a coin. Abigail ignored him. She stood in the swirling snow and checked the address she had written in her commonplace book. Actually, she had the address marked down firmly in her memory, but her late mother had always taught her to make assurance double sure. Abigail folded the book into her handbag and walked