Seth Grahame-Smith - Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter

II

Though Abe refused to have any direct contact with Henry or the Union, he was pragmatic enough to accept their help in winning the war. In New York, the grand ballroom (where Abe first learned of the Union and its plans for him) had been transformed into a war room, complete with maps, chalkboards, and a telegraph. They acted as envoys to the sympathetic vampires of Europe. They fought where they were able, and supplemented the White House’s intelligence with that collected by their own spies. This intelligence was delivered to Seward, who—after reading and burning the messages—related their contents to the president. From an entry dated June 10th, 1862:

Today comes word that the Confederates are handing Union prisoners over to Southern vampires for the purpose of torture and execution. “We hear of men,” said Seward, “hung upside down and stretched between posts. Using a logger’s saw, two vampires slowly cut the prisoner in half beginning at his [groin]. As they do, a third vampire lies on his back beneath the poor wretch—catching the blood that runs down his body. Because the prisoner’s head is nearest the ground, his brain remains nourished, and he remains conscious until the blade tears slowly back and forth through his stomach, then chest. The other prisoners are made to watch this before being made to suffer it themselves.”

Rumors of Confederate “ghosts” and “demons” snatching men from their tents and drinking their blood spread through the Union ranks during the war’s second summer. Soldiers could be heard singing a popular song around their campfires at night.

From Flor’da to Virginny you can hear him revel,

for ol’ Johnny Reb’s made a deal with the devil.

Sent him up north, that snake-eyed liar,

to drag us boys off to the lake of fire…

In at least one case, these rumors led a group of Union soldiers to turn on one of their own. On July 5th, 1862, Private Morgan Sloss was murdered by five of his fellow soldiers while encamped near Berkley Plantation in Virginia.

They pulled him from his tent in the dead of night and beat him, all the while accusing him of being a “blood-drinkin’ demon.” (Had the boy actually been a vampire, he would have made a better show of defending himself.) They tied him to a hitching post, and set on him with sticks and shovels—demanding he confess. “Tell us yer a blood-drinkin’ demon and we’ll let ya go!” they cried, all the while thrashing him till he wept and begged for mercy. After a quarter of an hour of this, the mumbled confession at last came from his bloodied lips. I suspect the boy would have confessed to being Christ Himself if it had meant an end to his agony. His confession noted, he was then doused in lamp oil and burned alive. The fear he must have felt… the confusion and the fear… I cannot think of it without my fists clenching in anger. If only by some miracle of time and heaven I could have been there to intervene.

Abe found the incident deeply troubling—not only for its cruelty, but because it meant that the Confederate strategy was working.

How can we hope to win this war when our men have begun killing each other? How can we hope to prevail when they will soon be too frightened to fight? For every vampire sympathetic to our cause, there are ten fighting for the enemy. How am I to contest them?

As it often did for Abe, the answer came in a dream. From an entry dated July 21st, 1862:

I was a boy again… sitting atop a familiar fence rail in the cool of a cloudy day, watching travelers pass on the Old Cumberland Trail. I remember seeing a horse cart filled with Negroes, each of them shackled at the wrist, without so much as a handful of loose hay to comfort the bumps of the road, or a blanket to relieve them from the winter air. My eyes met those of the youngest, a Negro girl of perhaps five or six, as they passed. I wanted to turn away (such was the sorrow of her countenance), yet I could not… for I knew where she was being taken.

Night had fallen. I had followed the Negro girl (I know not how) to a large barn—the inside lit by torches and hanging oil lamps. I watched from the darkness as she and the others were made to stand in a line, their eyes firmly fixed on the ground. I watched as a vampire took its place behind each of the slaves. Her eyes found mine as a pair of fangs descended behind her, and a pair of clawed hands grabbed her tiny neck.

“Justice… ,” she said, staring at me.

The fangs tore into her.

Her screams joined my own as I woke.

Abe convened his Cabinet the next morning.

“Gentlemen,” I began, “we have spoken a great deal about the true nature of this war; about our true enemy. We have argued—always in the spirit of friendship—over the wisest way to meet such an enemy, and bemoaned his power to strike fear into the hearts of our men. I daresay that we have even come to share in that fear ourselves. This will not do.

“Gentlemen… let our enemy fear us.

“Let us deny him the laborers who tend the farms of his living allies; who build his garrisons and carry his gunpowder. Let us deny him the poor wretches who are themselves grown as crops to be consumed by darkness. Now, gentlemen, let us starve the devils into defeat by declaring every slave in the South free.”

Cheers went up around the table. Even Salmon Chase (who still refused to believe that vampires were real) saw the strategic genius of attacking the engine of the South. Seward, while joining the others in his approval, offered a piece of humble advice:

[He] suggested that such a proclamation be given to the country on the heels of a victory, so as not to appear an act of desperation.

“Well,” I said, “then I suppose we need a victory.”

III

On September 17th, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies collided at Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Confederate forces were commanded by General Robert E. Lee, who’d enjoyed a warm relationship with the president before the war. The Union forces were commanded by General George B. McClellan, a Democrat who despised Abraham Lincoln with every fiber of his being. Abe writes:

[McClellan] thinks me a buffoon—unfit to command a man of his superior breeding and intellect. This would not bother me in the least if only he won more battles! Instead he sits in his camp, using the Army of the Potomac as his personal bodyguard! He suffers from an excess of caution: observing when he should attack, retreating when he should stand his ground and fight. This is a sin that I cannot forgive in a general.

Lee and McClellan’s armies waited quietly in the predawn hours of that Wednesday, September 17th, unaware that they were about to embark on the bloodiest day in American military history. At first light, both sides unleashed their artillery. For nearly an hour the shells flew one after the other, many with fuses timed to make them explode over their targets, sending burning pieces of shrapnel through the bodies of any soldier unfortunate enough to be nearby. From the diary of Union soldier Christoph Niederer, *20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps:

I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.