Chapter One: The Returns

I.

The elms along Jefferson Street had given up their leaves a fortnight since, and their bare branches held nothing of the fading November light. Lincoln walked with his shawl drawn close at the throat, his stovepipe hat adding its absurd height to a frame that required no assistance in that direction, and the cold came at him sideways off the prairie — not the clean cold of a hard freeze but the damp, searching kind that pressed between collar and jaw and would not be dismissed.

Lamon walked to his left, a step and a half behind, one hand resting inside his coat where the pistol rode. Ellsworth was somewhere ahead, threading through the knots of men who had begun to congregate along the route as word spread that Lincoln was walking to the courthouse. The gas-lamps had been lit but had not yet won their argument with the dusk, and the faces of the men pressing toward him surfaced from the dimness one by one, familiar and expectant.

He knew most of them. That was Springfield's gift and its difficulty. He had argued their title disputes and their debts and their domestic catastrophes in the Sangamon County courthouse for the better part of two decades, and there was not a man on Jefferson Street tonight who could not claim some acquaintance. They called to him — Abe, Mr. Lincoln, how does it look, what do you hear from the East — and he answered each with something, a word, a nod, the plain coin of recognition. He had learned from juries before he learned from voters that acknowledgment costs nothing and silence costs everything.

He had not eaten since noon. His stomach registered the fact with the dull insistence of a creditor who has stopped expecting payment but has not yet stopped calling. The smell of roasting chestnuts drifted from a vendor's brazier near the corner, sweet and sharp in the cold air, and his stomach turned once and then settled.

The telegraph office was receiving returns. He needed to be there before the early Eastern numbers arrived in a crowd, before someone read them aloud and gave them a meaning they might not deserve. If Indiana went wrong — and there were men in that state who owed Douglas their livelihoods and would pay the debt at the ballot-box — the evening's calculations would require revision before the newspapers could set a false story in type. He lengthened his stride by a fraction.

"Mr. Lincoln." A hand on his arm — not Lamon's, someone from the crowd. He turned. A young man with ink on his cuff, a reporter's notebook already open. "Will you say something for the Journal, sir? Something the people might carry home tonight?"

"I believe," Lincoln said, "that the people will carry themselves home without much assistance from me."

Laughter, obliging and warm. The reporter wrote something.

He had almost reached the corner of Sixth when the voice cut through — not shouted exactly, but projected with the practised reach of a man accustomed to speaking over crowds.

"South Carolina'll be out of the Union before you set foot in the White House, Lincoln. What do you say to that?"

The laughter stopped. Not tapered — stopped, cleanly, the way a fire stops when you throw a bucket on it. The reporters turned. Two of them had their pencils up.

Lincoln found the man — heavyset, a wool coat gone shiny at the elbows, arms folded, chin forward, planted on the boardwalk as though he owned the plank he stood on. A Democrat, clearly, and not a timid one.

The boardwalk shifted beneath his boot, one plank riding higher than the next, and he steadied himself before Lamon could reach him.

Whatever he said next, two reporters would print. Whatever they printed, South Carolina would read. He could feel the pencils waiting the way a witness feels the court stenographer's silence — the knowledge that the next sentence belongs to the record.

He removed his hat. He held it against his chest with one hand, and with the other he swept a bow of such elaborate courtesy toward the heckler that several men nearby stepped back to give it room. He held the bow a full beat past the point at which any reasonable man would have straightened, and then he straightened.

"Well, sir," he said, "I have heard that South Carolina finds our winters disagreeable. I cannot say I blame her. I find this one disagreeable myself, and I am merely passing through it."

The laughter that returned was not the easy laughter of before. It was the laughter of men who needed somewhere to put their unease, and Lincoln had given them a place. He put his hat back on.

The heckler's arms were still folded. He said nothing more. But the reporters were still writing, and whatever they wrote would be on the wire by morning, and whatever was on the wire would reach Columbia before the week was out.

Lincoln walked on, the smell of wood-smoke and chestnuts thinning behind him, the boardwalk groaning under his boots.

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II.

The telegraph office ran to heat on one side and cold on the other, and nothing could be done about it. The coal stove occupied the northeast corner with the authority of a sitting judge, radiating a dry, metallic warmth that tasted of iron filings at the back of the throat, and those who pressed nearest it had long since shed their coats, while the men at the far end of the table kept their collars turned and their hands in their laps. Lincoln had been given the chair closest to the window — a straight-backed thing with a cracked spindle — and Judge Davis had arranged himself in the wider chair at the table's head without remark or apparent consciousness of the exchange.

Lincoln sat where he had been placed. He had spent twenty years on the circuit learning which battles to fight in courtrooms and which to concede in the antechamber, and a chair was an antechamber matter.

Outside, the bonfire in the courthouse square threw wavering bars of light against the windowpanes that moved across the drift of dispatches on the table. The telegraph key at the operator's elbow — a young man named Ellison, whom Lincoln had addressed twice by name — spoke in bursts and silences, and the room had learned to read the operator's expression before he read a word aloud.

Lincoln turned a pencil end over end between his long fingers, tapping it once on the table each time the key fell silent.

The returns from Pennsylvania had been good. He had completed the calculation before the second dispatch finished printing, said nothing, and the room had taken his silence for caution rather than certainty — which suited him well enough.

Then Jesse Dubois unfolded the figures from the city.

He read them aloud with the gravity of a prosecutor delivering an indictment, his voice dropping on the Democratic margin as though the weight of the numbers required a lower register. Forty-two thousand. Perhaps forty-five. He set the paper down and looked around at the assembled men and said he was not certain Lincoln could carry the state.

Someone near the stove drew breath audibly. Another man made a sound that was not quite a word.

If the Empire State went to Douglas or to the fusion ticket, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, and in the House the Southern delegations would hold the balance, and what they would demand in exchange for a president was not a thing Lincoln cared to name aloud in a room full of reporters. Every man at the table understood this. The knowledge sat among them like an uninvited guest.

Dubois began to calculate aloud. He named counties. He named margins. His voice found a momentum of its own — he had discovered an audience for his alarm and the numbers carried him forward the way a current carries a man who has waded in past his knees, each figure feeding the next, the reckoning of catastrophe assembling itself in the warm, smoky air.

Lincoln set the pencil down. He picked up the nearest dispatch, read it, and set it aside.

Then he looked toward Ellison and said, in a tone suited to a conversation about the price of corn, "Tell me — do the ladies across the street put up oysters for their supper this year, or have they gone to the cold ham again?"

Ellison blinked. "Sir?"

"The supper. I was told they do an oyster stew when the occasion warrants." Lincoln considered the dispatch he had just set aside. "I have always found the occasion warrants."

The room took a moment to find itself. Dubois stopped. The man near the stove who had drawn breath let it out. Someone made a sound adjacent to laughter, and then it became laughter, and the New York figures retreated to the paper they had come from.

Ellison said he believed it was oyster stew, yes, sir, and cold ham besides, and that there were sandwiches as well, gesturing toward the untouched plate at Lincoln's elbow.

Lincoln looked at the sandwiches. He did not take one.

He picked up the next dispatch. The key had begun again. In the square below, the bonfire sent up a column of sparks that rose past the window and disappeared into the dark above Springfield, and the room settled itself around Lincoln's composure the way water settles around a stone, finding its level, taking the shape the stone permits.

The upstate returns were expected within the hour. Until they arrived, the election hung suspended between the city figures and whatever the northern counties would answer, and there was nothing to do but wait. Lincoln had always been better at waiting than those who waited with him.

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III.

The upstate returns came in at eleven minutes before midnight.

Hicks — the night operator, who had relieved Ellison at ten — read them from the tape with a voice that climbed an octave on the final figures, and then the room broke open. Ozias Hatch seized Dubois by both shoulders. Someone near the window released a shout. The stove-heat and the press of bodies and the raw smell of tobacco and wet wool thickened the air until it was nearly a substance, and for a moment the office looked like a chapel in which some extraordinary liturgy had just been celebrated, the men around Lincoln transfigured by the firelight from the square, their faces raw with it.

Lincoln sat at the long table. He had set the pencil down.

He looked at the figures Hicks had written on the margin of the tape — the upstate counties, the cities, the sum that had been building for three hours toward this single legible conclusion — and he checked each number against what he had already worked through in his own mind. The numbers confirmed what he had known since half past ten, when the Westchester returns arrived and the margin from the city began to shrink to something manageable. He had said nothing then. He said nothing now.

The stove pressed its heat against the right side of his face. He had endured it for hours without remedy, and he did not move now.

Hatch was speaking his name, gripping his arm above the elbow with both hands, the grip firm enough to feel through the wool. Dubois stood at the window with his arms raised — thanksgiving or surrender, it was difficult to say which. Lamon, by the door, was grinning so broadly that his face looked like it belonged to a younger man.

Lincoln rose. His knee struck the table edge and rattled the plate of sandwiches he had not touched all evening, and he paused, one hand braced against the wood, and the grimace of pain crossed his face and was gone. He steadied himself.

Hicks had gone back to his instrument. The key was chattering again — a sound distinct from celebration, smaller and more insistent — and Lincoln turned toward it with the deliberate attention he had learned to give a telegraph machine when it spoke out of turn. A dispatch arriving now, minutes after the confirmation, was either a correction or something else entirely, and a correction would not come this fast.

"Mr. Lincoln," Hicks said.

The room did not quiet. Lincoln crossed to the instrument and Hicks handed him the tape without comment, the way a court clerk passes a verdict to a judge.

Lincoln read it standing.

The South Carolina General Assembly, sitting in extraordinary session at Columbia, had voted — the figure was given, and the figure was unanimous — to call a convention of the people of South Carolina, to meet on the seventeenth of December, for the purpose of considering the state's relation to the federal Union.

He read it a second time. Not because the language was obscure. The language was perfectly clear. Unanimous. Not a dissenting vote. Not one man in that chamber who had stood and said wait.

The seventeenth of December was forty-one days distant. They had not waited for the official canvass, had not waited for the Electoral College, had not waited for the inauguration. They had voted on the news of his election the way a body votes on a declaration of war — before the enemy can prepare, before the enemy has even taken the field.

He folded the dispatch once, the paper stiff between his fingers. He folded it again. A third time, pressing each crease flat with the ball of his thumb, working the fold until the paper submitted, until the words were contained and the thing was small enough to fit inside a coat without showing. He slid it into his inner pocket.

Around him the celebration continued. Hatch still had hold of his arm.

"Gentlemen," he said, and the room — or most of it — quieted. "I believe I will go home and tell Mrs. Lincoln that she is to be mistress of the White House."

The laughter was immediate and genuine, and several men began talking at once, and Dubois clapped him on the back hard enough to stagger a smaller man, and Lincoln smiled at each of them in turn — Hatch, Dubois, Lamon at the door, young Hicks already bent back to his key — and moved toward the stairs.

The dispatch pressed against his ribs. The room smelled of coal-smoke and sweat and the cold draught from the window, and the key was still chattering as he descended, and he did not look back.

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IV.

He did not go directly home.

At the foot of the courthouse stairs he turned left instead of right, away from the bonfire and the procession, and walked half a block south to where the street emptied into darkness. Lamon followed without question, though Lincoln caught the half-second hesitation in his step — the recalculation of a man who had expected to turn the other way.

The torchlight procession was behind them now, the singing fading into something indistinct, and the street ahead held only the wind and the creak of a shop-sign swinging on its chains. Lincoln stopped at the corner where the boardwalk ended and the frozen mud of the unpaved road began. He could feel the cold through the soles of his boots, rising from the ground itself, patient and indifferent.

"Hill."

"Sir."

"You were saying something about Seward."

Lamon paused. "I was saying he will expect State."

"He will." Lincoln stood with his hands in his pockets, looking south along the dark road that led, eventually, to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to the river, and from the river to the cotton country where the word unanimous was at this moment moving along the telegraph wires with the force of a cannonade. "And once he has it?"

"He will manage you."

"Yes." Lincoln pressed his thumb against the folded paper through the wool of his coat. "And Cameron?"

"War. The War Department."

"Chase?"

"Treasury. And after Treasury, your chair."

"You have a gift for brevity tonight, Hill."

"The cold, I expect."

A dog was barking somewhere to the north, at the retreating procession, its fury carrying clearly in the still air. Lincoln listened to it for a moment. Then he turned to face Lamon directly, which he did not often do when they walked together; Lamon was one of the few men in Springfield who did not have to look up to meet his eyes.

"I will tell you what troubles me," Lincoln said. "It is not Cameron, and it is not Chase, though both will give me cause enough. It is that I have won an election tonight, and before the morning papers are set, South Carolina will have begun the work of leaving. And I will sit in Springfield for the better part of four months with no more authority than the man who sweeps the statehouse steps, while the Union comes apart, and the present occupant of the Executive Mansion does nothing — because he believes he has no constitutional power to act and no political will to discover otherwise."

Lamon said nothing.

"What would you have me do?"

"Walk me home," Lincoln said. "And say nothing of what I have just told you to any living soul."

"I would not."

"I know it."

They turned back toward Eighth Street. The bonfire's glow still stained the sky behind them, but ahead the street was dark, and the only light was the lamp in the upstairs window of his house at the end of the block — steady, yellow, solitary. Mary's lamp. She would be sitting up with the newspaper and a cold cup of tea, and she would want to know everything, and he would tell her about Pennsylvania and the margin in Indiana, and he would not speak of the dispatch folded against his ribs, not tonight, because tonight she deserved the victory without the shadow, and tomorrow the shadow would be in every newspaper in the country and there would be no keeping it from her or from anyone.

The wind moved through the bare elms overhead and carried with it the faint smell of the bonfire — ash and pine-sap and something acrid beneath, the smell of green wood forced to burn before its season.

At the gate he stopped. The iron latch was cold enough to sting. He lifted it; it held. He lifted it again and it rattled but did not give. The third time it rose, and the gate swung inward on a hinge that wanted oil, the protest of it loud in the empty street.

"Good night, Hill," he said.

"Good night, Mr. Lincoln."

He walked up the path. The porch boards groaned under his weight. Behind him, Lamon's boots retreated on the boardwalk, and then there was silence, and the wind, and the lamp burning above.

He put his hand on the door.

From upstairs came the creak of a chair — Mary, shifting her weight, listening for his step. In a moment she would call down, or descend, and he would have to arrange his face into something that was not a lie but was not the whole truth either, and he would have to hold that arrangement through whatever she asked of him tonight.

The dispatch was still warm from his body, the creases softened now, the words inside it no less unanimous for being hidden. Forty-one days to the convention. Then the vote. Then the thing itself, moving faster than any relief expedition he could order, faster than any message he could send — and he could not yet order or send anything, because the authority to act was four months away and the crisis was already here, already decided, already unanimous, and the men in that chamber in Columbia had not waited and would not wait and there was nothing between their resolution and its execution but the turning of days he could not stop.

He opened the door. The hallway smelled of lamp-oil and the remains of supper — roasted meat, something sweet, the ordinary smell of a house that did not yet know what it was about to become.

He went in.