Lincoln Raw Read online

  About the Cover

  The picture on the right is a copy of an ambrotype taken on May 7, 1858. Forty-nine-year-old Lincoln had just won the Duff Armstrong “Almanac” murder trial, and 22 year-old Abraham Byers stopped him in the street outside the courthouse. When Byers asked Lincoln to pose for a photograph, Lincoln protested. He said that his rumpled white linen suit was not fit for a portrait; nonetheless, the younger Abraham prevailed.

  The cover is a reverse image of Byers’ photograph, showing Lincoln’s face as if viewing it in a mirror. The novel that follows is an attempt to interpret his life the way he likely perceived it.

  Credit goes to Heather Steward Fowler for creating this cover, which with a single picture, captures the essence of Lincoln Raw—a biographical novel.

  Copyright © by DL Fowler 2014. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Heather Steward Fowler

  For additional information visit http://dlfowler.com

  Visit the author’s blog http://dlfowler.wordpress.com

  ISBN 9781370047932

  Published in the United States by Harbor Hill Publishing

  Dedication

  Gertrude S. Baccus

  (1908-2001)

  My teacher, who inspired me, believed in me, and loved me, as she did for so many students over the years.

  Contents

  About the Cover

  Dedication

  Author’s Notes

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Acknowledgements

  Additional Reading

  About the Author

  Your Opinion Matters

  Readers Guide

  Author’s Notes

  The inspiration to write a novel based on Abraham Lincoln’s life came in part from reading Jackie Hogan’s Lincoln, Inc.: Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America. As a sociologist, Hogan explores the ways we employ Lincoln today (as American culture has done since his death) in our political, ideological, personal, and national struggles; the ways we simultaneously deify and commercially exploit him; the ways he is packaged and sold in the marketplace of American ideas. In Lincoln, Inc. we see our proclivity for projecting onto Lincoln the way we see ourselves, who we think we are, and who we wish we could be.

  Lincoln Raw is a biographical novel in which I attempt to look at life through Lincoln’s eyes as he was coming of age. I focus on his humanity by dramatizing his responses to the world as he likely saw it, filtered through his sensitivities, emotions, and values. As we look at the events of his life—beginning with childhood—and keep our focus on how he responded to various forms of disorder, injustice, and abuse, we can better understand the passions that drove many of his policies and decisions as president.

  I build Lincoln’s story around events that have been described by those who were close to him. When confronted with different versions of emotionally charged events, I do not discount those incidents, but synthesize the accounts to produce scenes which seem consistent with his development at the time they occurred. I am indebted to the biographical works of Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk, among others, for their insights into Lincoln’s personality and the events that shaped his character.

  Every character in the novel—except one—is a real person with whom Lincoln interacted in some way. In each case, they are presented in a manner consistent with the way in which they were regarded by Lincoln. For example, throughout his life Lincoln demonstrated an attitude toward his father that suggested the elder Lincoln was abusive and unfair. The son’s assessment may not have been accurate, but it was the perception that he lived by. Lincoln also probably saw his marriage as being less blissful than might have been the case. As with all of us, perception is reality. We respond emotionally to our perceptions, and those responses contribute to the development of our character.

  Writing about Lincoln is tricky, in part because today’s author must reconcile three distinct periods of Lincoln scholarship that take different slants on who he was and what he believed.

  During the first period (the demi-God era, including biographies written from the time of his death until the early 20th century), Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, and son, Robert, wielded a great deal of influence (some say censorship) over what biographers should say in molding his legacy. The image Mary championed seems to have differed from how she treated him while he was alive. Robert, who was often embarrassed by his father’s backwardness (his unkempt appearance, frontier style of language, and lack of formal education), likely wanted to recreate his father in the image of the man he wanted to remember. After his father’s death, Robert committed his mother to an insane asylum for a brief time and destroyed many of her private papers and letters. Biographers of this period were also sensitive to the nation’s need for a narrative that would facilitate healing after the assassination and Civil War.

  The result of these influences was a tendency to discredit perspectives that were not in sync with the needs of the era. Casualties of such biases included two people who knew Lincoln intimately: Billy Herndon, his law partner, and Hill Lamon, his friend and bodyguard. It was Herndon who first exposed the Ann Rutledge story based on extensive interviews with members of her family and people who lived in the small village of New Salem. Objections to the Ann Rutledge stories by Mary Todd and Robert contributed greatly to the efforts by biographers to discredit Herndon.

  Ironically, in the current era of Lincoln studies, that discrediting has been discredited, and today's leading Lincoln scholars such as Michael Burlingame and Joshua Shenk suggest that sufficient evidence exists to support the hypothesis that a close bond between Lincoln and Rutledge existed. They also argue that proving whether the relationship rose to the level of an engagement is trivial compared to understanding the role her premature death, combined with the deaths of his sister and mother, played on Lincoln’s psychology.

  The second era of Lincoln (the Romantic period) was dominated by efforts to convert the demi-god into a folk hero. Carl Sandburg made an indelible contribution to Lincoln's legacy by spotlighting his meager beginning (though he soft-pedaled it to a degree) and his meteoric rise to power.

  The third era, beginning about the middle twentieth century, has focused on Lincoln's psychology and asks the question, what made this man?

  Lincoln Raw draws mostly from the current era of scholarship and tries to show Lincoln's personality development by looking at events through his eyes. By most accounts he was emotionally sensitive, introspective, and melancholy. In his time, those characteristics often attracted awe, admiration, and respect. During Lincoln’s time, melancholy people were co
nsidered to possess special insights and consequently, were regarded as exceptional, rather than deficient.

  Lincoln's misunderstood, almost conflicting, views on slavery and abolition are part of what attracted me to his story. In his speeches over decades in public life, he was equally critical of radicals at both ends of the spectrum. Despite his professed life-long hatred for slavery, Lincoln discouraged abolitionist policies. Instead, he repeatedly declared slavery should be allowed to die a slow death and drew a hard line against allowing "the extension of a bad thing [slavery].” To him, slavery was wrong, specifically because of its unfairness—It is wrong for a man to eat bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Nonetheless, he held that it was protected by the Constitution where it was in place when the country was formed.

  The same level of conflict that appears in his politics also shows up in his religious views, which when explored honestly and wholly, should give all of us pause when we claim that God is on our side. Lincoln declared more than once that he was not Christian (most prominently in a conversation with Newt Bateman which is captured in the latter third of this book), but he articulated and lived the teachings of Christ more fully than most people who claimed to be faithful in his day.

  Much of the dialogue in these pages is drawn from original sources, including letters, speeches, journals, and notes from interviews with Lincoln’s contemporaries. Some original material, particularly italicized excerpts from speeches and writings, has been edited for clarity.

  Like most of us, Lincoln employed a variety of voices. For instance, his oratorical voice, which matured over the years, was distinct from his conversational voice, just as his storyteller voice differed from his letter writing voice. He sounded different when engaged in formal conversations than in casual banter with an intimate. In Lincoln Raw, his narrator voice falls somewhere between his storyteller voice (especially in the use of present tense) and the style he might have employed when writing a letter. In each case, given how much language has changed over the past two centuries, I have found it helpful to adapt Lincoln’s voice so it is more attuned to modern readers. Even so, I tried to maintain as much as practical the colloquialisms and language style that were true to Lincoln’s times and usage. I was particularly surprised to learn that the expression “what’s up?” was in common usage in mid-nineteenth century America.

  If reading Lincoln Raw prompts you to investigate his life in more depth, you’ll find an abundance of scholarly material in the sources I have listed at the end of the book under “Additional Reading.”

  I hope you enjoy reading Lincoln Raw—a biographical novel and I look forward to your comments.

  DL Fowler

  March 25, 2014

  LINCOLN RAW

  a biographical novel

  That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Chapter One

  The Executive Mansion, Washington City

  April 14, 1865

  People gossip about my face. Some say I’m steeped in gloom over little Willy’s death. Others insist this great conflict weighs on me like an oxen yoke. According to my copper-headed Kentucky playmate, Austin Gollaher, I was melancholy even as a baby.

  In my youth, neighbors called me lazy. Cousin Dennis Hanks pronounced me a dullard. Today, some contend my countenance betrays uncommon wisdom, while others argue I’m simple and indolent, a gorilla posing as a man. A man’s shadow merely betrays his presence. To know him, we must probe the stripes from which he bleeds.

  Still in my faded dressing gown and broken down slippers, I look out my office window upon the city. Traces of last night’s pyrotechnics hang in the air, and yesterday’s mantle of gray has yielded to splashes of red, white, and blue. Flags and buntings announce the Rebel Army’s surrender while reflections from the morning sun dance on the Potomac like scattered jewels.

  The river’s stench must have stopped General Lee’s men from crossing over when they had the chance, warning them of an invisible plague lurking in its waters. Seeds of disease are deposited in the Potomac by rivulets of human waste and refuse that flow along our streets and into its currents. Even this great mansion is no safe harbor from the pestilence. Our little Willy was taken by an epidemic of fever, and Mother is almost insane from grief.

  I covet the luxury of mourning in the same fashion she does. Willy is not the only son I’ve lost since assuming this Office, and with every soldier’s death, a piece of me dies also. The blood of those who’ve perished in this great conflict could fill the little Knob Creek near my boyhood home, and their families’ tears would flood the fields around it.

  I give a letter to my secretary, George Nicolay. Hardly more than a boy, he’s entirely trustworthy, and nothing escapes his keen eyes. On our walks through the city, he can spot mal-intended ruffians from blocks away, though if we were set upon, reckon I’d be the one protecting his bony frame.

  The letter is a reply to General James Van Alen who complains I exposed myself carelessly while visiting Richmond this week. Nicolay thinks it best to assure him appropriate precautions will be taken in the future. My friend Ward Hill Lamon, Marshall of Washington City, a massive man equal to me in height but much greater in girth, reminds me daily of those who want me dead. Hill claims there are more than eighty plots against my life. There are times he could have added me to that list. Nonetheless, were it not for my decision to dispatch him to Richmond on Wednesday, he’d be haranguing me over Mrs. Lincoln’s plans to attend theatre this evening.

  A recent dream buoys me; its details are etched in my memory, carved there by repetition. Invariably, it foreshadows momentous events. The morning would be made even brighter if it heralds the much anticipated news from General Sherman that the remaining rebel units under General Johnston have capitulated.

  In my vision, I float at a rapid pace across a dark expanse of water to an unknown destination. But this time, unlike the previous occurrences, Austin Gollaher appears and calls me back to a memorable Sunday morning of our boyhood.

  In 1816—my seventh year as I am told—we live on a tiny farm near the Gollaher family in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Once a wilderness, now this patch of earth is regarded as a peaceful valley. Surrounded by spiraling hills and deep gorges, our place lies along a branch of the Rolling Fork known as Knob Creek. Father tells us stories of the times before the Indians were vanquished from these parts—a time when they tormented people as far east as Virginia. He witnessed their inhumanity when he was a child.

  When not tending the farm, Father works at the distillery down where the creek and Rolling Fork join together. That is, unless he’s hunting, or out in the woods brooding, or dreaming up schemes to make a better life.

  Last year’s winter lingers as the next one begins. The few sprouts that emerged from our late-May planting succumbed to aberrant snows and frosts in June. We replanted, only to suffer more crop-killing frosts through late July and August. A half-inch layer of ice stayed on the ground through most of September, but has finally melted during a brief interlude of moderate October weather. The resulting runoff swells our little branch to its brim.

  As the morning sun breaks over the horizon, a biting wind whistles through our cabin, confirming that the year-long winter has merely taken a respite and lurks nearby, ready to resume its assault. I roll out of my cornhusk bed to find Mother fixing breakfast. She’s a rugged woman, but today she’s decked out in her best Sunday dress. Her coarse black hair cascades onto her shoulders. It’s the dress that snugs around her waist, rather than draping loosely from her bony shoulders to her narrow hips. She wears it when she hauls us down to the holy-roller camp meetings to hear preachers who’ve come through these parts; she can whoop it up with the best of them. It’s also what she wears when Father is away and she sets about on affairs of her own.

  I exchange glances with my sister Sally. Her eyes are deep-set and grey like my own. In spite of her being two years older, she looks up at me
, and me down at her. She’s stout like Father, but that’s the only way they’re alike.

  We don’t ask what sort of business Mother is up to, but at breakfast, she tells us Mrs. Gollaher will be calling today.

  I cock my head. “And Austin, too?”

  “Yezzun. The two of y’all ‘ll have the whole day to play. Father done gone off scoutin’ for land ‘cross the ‘hio River.”

  “How long he be gone?”

  “He be back when he be back, as always,” she answers.

  Folks often talk of Providence smiling on them. When that happens, their insides must get warm the same as mine do when Mother tells me Father is away.

  After breakfast, I take a perch on our split-rail fence and wait for Austin. He’s three years older than me, but not taller. We’d rather be dead than apart, even though we don’t always see eye to eye on things.

  Once, while we’re playing at his cabin he says, “You loose a coon or fox from your father’s traps again, I’m tellin’.”

  I say back, “We’ve no right takin’ more ‘n we need. It’s mean to harm animals for no reason.”

  We argue until Mrs. Gollaher takes his side and scolds me. It doesn’t matter what they think. Right is right.

  A week later, Father hauls me along to check his traps. He gets a coon in the first one, and about a dozen yards away a fox struggles to get free from a snare. Father yells, “Ha!” and crows about his trappin’ skills. Then he loads his flintlock and aims at the coon’s head.

  My shoulders grow taut.

  The rifle’s report sends a sharp pain ricocheting through my throat and head.

  I choke back tears as Father walks over to the next trap and bends down to inspect the fox. He crouches like a thieving pirate digging through his plunder, shakes his head, and sends me to the next trap thirty yards away. The trap sits at the end of a game trail, which winds through a thicket and comes out near the creek. In it he has caught another fine fox.