The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free PDF Page A

the fan nevertheless, an affectation that had become popular among Washington City’s more fashionable ladies. Now she fluttered it before her face. “And exactly which part of it is nonsense, Mr. Hilliman? The part where Mr. Lincoln stays or the part where Mr. Lincoln goes? Because both can’t be false, you know.”
    Her logic was so absurd that Jonathan had to smile, as no doubt he was meant to. “I believe that Mr. Lincoln will serve out his term and then retire.”
    “Now, that is a fascinating notion, Mr. Hilliman.” She had the fan going again. “Because I thought you said a moment ago that Mr. Lincoln would do what is best for the country.”
    “As I am certain he will.”
    Her smile widened. Bessie Hale was one of the city’s great belles. If wagging tongues were to be believed, her charms had snared, over the past few years alone, such men as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., son of the great poet; John Hay, Noah Brooks’s predecessor as Lincoln’s private secretary; and even Robert Lincoln, the President’s eldest son.There were other stories, too, some of them more sinister, but nobody dared repeat them, because her father, John Parker Hale, American minister to Spain, remained enormously influential in politics at home. It was said that he had stepped down from the Senate and requested the appointment to Madrid in order to remove his headstrong daughter from the moral swamp that all New Englanders believed Washington City to be; but somehow Bessie had managed to escape Madrid; and it had been Jonathan’s bad luck to encounter her leaving Lincoln’s office just as he and his employer had arrived.
    “Then you see my point, Mr. Hilliman. That is what will be so fabulously exciting. Waiting to hear whether Mr. Lincoln has decided that the best interest of the country requires him to remain in this mansion beyond his term.” Bessie looked supremely satisfied with herself. She touched his arm. “Now I must be off. I have another engagement. But we shall fix a date for dinner, shan’t we?”
    “I believe—”
    “Shall we say Thursday, at eight? At the National?”
    And then she was gone down the hallway, not waiting to hear his response. As usual, Bessie Hale got her way. The commitment was unavoidable, he told himself. He could not risk offending Bessie, whose father still influenced votes in the Senate; votes Mr. Lincoln might need at trial. Yet he shuddered to imagine what his fiancée, Margaret Felix, would say were she to learn that he was to dine with the egregious Miss Hale. When Meg warned him about the wiles of Washington’s women, it was Bessie she had in mind.
    Jonathan glanced nervously at Noah Brooks, who was busily writing away, pretending to have heard nothing. Although not much more than thirty, Brooks was already balding, and his muttonchop whiskers made him appear older still.
    The Executive Mansion, it was said, aged its occupants.
    Mr. Lincoln has not been the same since Mrs. Lincoln passed
.
    The door to the President’s office remained firmly shut. Aside from McShane, Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, was inside. So was Attorney General James Speed. Jonathan wondered how long he would be waiting. Some days he had remained in the hallway for three or four hours, against the possibility that he might be summoned to record a letter or other document.
    Why
not
live out his days here in the President’s House?
    Jonathan sank onto one of the sagging wooden benches provided forpetitioners hoping to see the President. The Executive Mansion was falling apart. Many of the great rooms downstairs had been refurbished beautifully by Mrs. Lincoln, at an expense so fabulous that the Congress had opened an investigation. But the second floor—the puny family apartments, and this rabbit warren of offices for the President and his tiny staff—remained as they had been for most of the century: cramped, dingy, ill lighted.
    As recently as a year ago, the shadowed hallway, decrepit or not, would