Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter

One witness, a merchant by the name of Jasper Rubes, claims to have seen a Dead Rabbit “lift a Bowery Boy above his head and throw him against the second story of [a Baxter Street factory] hard enough to leave a hole in the bricks.” Incredibly, the victim “landed on his feet,” said the witness, “and kept up the fight as if nothing had happened.”

“His eyes,” said Rubes, “were black as soot.”

Hunting vampires was the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the early 1850s.

Ten months after burying their son, Abe and Mary welcomed another. They named him William “Willy” Wallace Lincoln in honor of the physician who’d stayed at Eddy’s side until the end. In 1853, they welcomed one more boy, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln, born April 4th. Along with ten-year-old Robert, the three formed a “boisterous brood.”

“Bob howls in the next room as I write this,” Abe said in an 1853 letter to Speed. “Mary has whopped him for running off and disappearing. I suspect that by the time I finish this letter he will have run off and disappeared again.”

Abe made very few journal entries in the wake of Eddy’s death. Those six and a half little leather-bound books had become a record of his life with vampires—a record of weapons and vengeance; of death and loss. But those days were behind him now. That life was over. After his entries had resumed in 1865, Abe looked back on that “last, peaceful, wonderful spell.”

They were good years, to be sure. Quiet years. I wanted nothing more of vampires or politics. To think of all that I had missed whiling away the hours in Washington! How much of Eddy’s brief, beautiful life had escaped my notice! No… never again. Simplicity! That was the oath I swore now. Family! That was my errand. When I could not be with my boys at home, I let them run about the office (much to Lamon’s *consternation, I suspect). Mary and I took lingering walks, regardless of the season or weather. We spoke of our dear boys… of our friends and futures… of the speed with which the whole of our lives had passed.

There were no letters from Henry. No visits or hints of his whereabouts. At times I wondered if he had finally come to accept that I would hunt no more—or if he himself had fallen prey to the ax. Whatever the reason behind his absence, I was glad for it. For while I had come to regard him with tremendous affection, I loathed every memory the mere mention of his name conjured up.

Abe’s long coat, riddled with the rips and scars of battle, was unceremoniously burned. His pistols and knives were locked in a trunk and forgotten in the cellar. The blade of his ax was allowed to rust. The specter of death, which had hung over the old vampire hunter since his ninth year, seemed at last to be lifting.

It returned briefly in 1854, when Abe received word from a friend in Clary’s Grove that Jack Armstrong was dead. From a letter to Joshua Speed:

The damned fool’s gotten himself killed by a horse, Speed.

Old Jack stood in an early winter [downpour], trying to drag the stubborn beast by its lead. For nearly an hour they tugged against each other. Jack (ever the Clary’s Grove Boy) didn’t think to fetch his coat or holler for help, despite his being one-handed and soaked to the bone. By the time he got the animal out of the rain, Jack had caught his death. He burned a fever for a week, slipped away, and died. It seems an ignoble end to such a sturdy man, does it not? A man who survived so many brushes with death? Who saw the terrible things you and I have seen?

In the same letter, Abe admitted to being “unnerved” by his “lack of anguish” over Armstrong’s passing. He grieved, sure. But this was a “different sort of grief,” unlike the crippling depression that had followed his mother’s death, Ann’s, and Eddy’s.

I fear that a life of death has made me numb to both.

Four years later, Abe would defend Jack’s son, “Duff” Armstrong, when he stood trial for murder. Abe refused payment. He worked tirelessly, litigated passionately, and (with a stroke of legal brilliance) won Duff his freedom, *a final thank-you to a brave friend.

II

The same year that saw Abe mourn the loss of an old friend saw him dragged back into politics by an old rival.

Abe had known Senator Stephen A. Douglas since they were both young Illinois state legislators (and eager suitors of Mary Todd). Though a Democrat, Douglas had long been opposed to allowing slavery into territories where it didn’t already exist. But in 1854, he suddenly reversed himself and championed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill that repealed the federal ban on the spread of slavery. President Franklin Pierce signed it into law on May 30th, enraging millions of Northerners and stirring up long-simmering tensions on both sides of the issue.

Try as I might, I could not ignore my anger. It seeped into my mind as water is drawn into the roots of a tree, until at last it permeated the whole of my being. Sleep provided no refuge, for I was nightly visited by a sea of black faces, each the nameless victim of a vampire. Each of them crying out to me. “Justice!” they cried. “Justice, Mr. Lincoln!”

That [slavery] existed at all was insult enough. That I knew the institution to be doubly evil made it all the worse. But this! The idea of slavery’s diseased fingers reaching farther north and west! Reaching into my own Illinois! It would not stand. I had retreated from politics, but when asked to debate [Douglas] on the issue, I could not refuse. Those ghostly faces would not permit me to.

On October 16th, 1854, Lincoln and Douglas squared off in front of a large Peoria, Illinois, crowd. A reporter with the Chicago Evening Journal described his amazement at witnessing Abe speak.

His face [began] to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart.

“I cannot but hate it!” said Mr. Lincoln of the proposal. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself!”

I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.

“I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world!” he continued. “Enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites!”

His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot of it. In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet as I learned that character at Sunday school in my childhood.

Though it failed to sway Douglas or his allies in Congress, the speech would nonetheless prove a turning point in Abe’s political life. His anger over the slavery issue (and by extension, the vampire issue) had nudged him back into the political arena. His genius and eloquence that night in Peoria would ensure that he never left it again. The speech was transcribed and reprinted across the North. The name Abraham Lincoln began to take on national significance among the opponents of slavery. In the years to come, one of its passages would prove eerily prophetic.

“Is it not probable that the contest will come to blows, and bloodshed? Could there be a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence, on the slavery question, than this?”

Senator Charles Sumner lay unconscious on the Senate floor, facedown in a pool of his own blood.