The Day Lincoln Lost Read online

  An inventive historical thriller that reimagines the tumultuous presidential election of 1860, capturing the people desperately trying to hold the nation together—and those trying to crack it apart.

  Abby Kelley Foster arrived in Springfield, Illinois, with the fate of the nation on her mind. Her fame as an abolitionist speaker had spread west and she knew that her first speech in the city would make headlines. One of the residents reading those headlines would be none other than the likely next president of the United States.

  Abraham Lincoln, lawyer and presidential candidate, knew his chances of winning were good. All he had to do was stay above the fray of the slavery debate and appear the voice of compromise until the people cast their votes. The last thing he needed was a fiery abolitionist appearing in town. When her speech sparks violence, leading to her arrest and a high-profile trial, he suspects that his political rivals have conspired against him.

  President James Buchanan is one such rival. As his term ends and his political power crumbles, he gathers his advisers at the White House to make one last move that might derail Lincoln’s campaign, steal the election and throw America into chaos.

  A fascinating historical novel and fast-paced political thriller of a nation on the cusp of civil war, The Day Lincoln Lost offers an unexpected window into one of the most consequential elections in our country’s history.

  Praise for The Trial and Execution

  of the Traitor George Washington

  “Sure to please lovers of American history.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A fascinating tale that combines spy thriller elements, political skullduggery, and courtroom drama.”

  —Booklist

  “An exciting narrative.”

  —Post and Courier

  “A fun novel for thriller and history buffs.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  Also by Charles Rosenberg

  Death on a High Floor

  Long Knives

  Paris Ransom

  Write to Die

  The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington

  The Day Lincoln Lost

  A Novel

  Charles Rosenberg

  For Sally Anne

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Historical Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington by Charles Rosenberg

  1

  Kentucky

  Early August 1860

  Lucy Battelle’s birthday was tomorrow. She would be twelve. Or at least that was what her mother told her. Lucy knew the date might not be exact, because Riverview Plantation didn’t keep close track of when slaves were born. Or when they died, for that matter. They came, they worked and they went to their heavenly reward. Unless, of course, they were sold off to somewhere else.

  There had been a lot of selling-off of late. The Old Master, her mother told her, had at least known how to run a plantation. And while their food may have been wretched at times, there had always been enough. But the Old Master had died years before Lucy was born. His eldest son, Ezekiel Goshorn, had inherited Riverview.

  Ezekiel was cruel, and he had an eye for young black women, although he stayed away from those who had not yet developed. Lucy has seen him looking at her of late, though. She was thin, and very tall for her age—someone had told her she looked like a young tree—and when she looked at herself naked, she could tell that her breasts were beginning to come. “You are pretty,” her mother said, which sent a chill through her.

  Whatever his sexual practices, Goshorn had no head for either tobacco farming or business, and Riverview was visibly suffering for it, and not only for a shortage of food. Lucy could see that the big house was in bad need of painting and other repairs, and the dock on the river, which allowed their crop to be sent to market, looked worse and worse every year. By now it was half-falling-down. Slaves could supply the labor to repair things, of course, but apparently Goshorn couldn’t afford the materials.

  Last year, a blight had damaged almost half the tobacco crop. Goshorn had begun to sell his slaves south to make ends meet.

  In the slave quarter, not a lot was really known about being sold south, except that it was much hotter there, the crop was harder-to-work cotton instead of tobacco and those who went didn’t come back. Ever.

  Several months earlier, two of Lucy’s slightly older friends had been sold, and she had watched them manacled and put in the back of a wagon, along with six others. Her friends were sobbing as the wagon moved away. Lucy was dry-eyed because then and there she had decided to escape.

  Others had tried to escape before her, of course, but most had been caught and brought back. When they arrived back, usually dragged along in chains by slave catchers, Goshorn—or one of his five sons—had whipped each of them near to death. A few had actually died, but most had been nursed back to at least some semblance of health by the other slaves.

  Lucy began to volunteer to help tend to them—to feed them, put grease on their wounds, hold their hands while they moaned and carry away the waste from their bodies. Most of all, though, she had listened to their stories—especially to what had worked and what had failed.

  One thing she had learned was that they used hounds to pursue you, and that the hounds smelled any clothes you left behind to track you. One man told her that another man who had buried his one pair of extra pants in the woods before he left—not hard to do because slaves had so little—had not been found by the dogs.

  Still another
man said a runaway needed to take a blanket because as you went north, it got colder, especially at night, even in the summer. And you needed to find a pair of boots that would fit you. Lucy had tried on her mother’s boots—the ones she used in the winter—and they fit. Her mother would find another pair, she was sure.

  The hard thing was the Underground Railroad. They had all heard about it. They had even heard the masters damning it. Lucy had long understood that it wasn’t actually underground and wasn’t even a railroad. It was just people, white and black, who helped you escape—who fed you, hid you in safe houses and moved you, sometimes by night, sometimes under a load of hay or whatever they had that would cover you.

  The problem was you couldn’t always tell which ones were real railroaders and which ones were slave catchers posing as railroaders. The slaves who came back weren’t much help about how to tell the difference because most had guessed wrong. Lucy wasn’t too worried about it. She had not only the optimism of youth, but a secret that she thought would surely help her.

  Tonight was the night. Over the past few days she had dug a deep hole in the woods where she could bury her tiny stash of things that might carry her smell. For weeks before that, she had foraged and dug for mushrooms in the woods, and so no one seemed to pay much mind to her foraging and digging earlier that day. As she left, she planned to take the now-too-small shift she had secretly saved from last year’s allotment—her only extra piece of clothing—along with her shoes and bury them in the hole. That way the dogs could not take her smell from anything left behind. She would take the blanket she slept in with her.

  She had also saved up small pieces of smoked meat so that she had enough—she hoped—to sustain her for a few days until she could locate the Railroad. She dropped the meat into a small cloth bag and hung it from a string tied around her waist, hidden under her shift.

  Her mother had long ago fallen asleep, and the moon had set. Even better, it was cloudy and there was no starlight. Lucy put on her mother’s boots, stepped outside the cabin and looked toward the woods.

  As she started to move, Ezekiel Goshorn appeared in front of her, seemingly out of nowhere, along with two of his sons, and said, “Going somewhere, Lucy?”

  “I’m just standing here.”

  “Hold out your arms.”

  “Why?”

  “Hold out your arms!”

  She hesitated but finally did as he asked, and one of his sons, the one called Amasa, clamped a pair of manacles around her wrists. “We’ve been watching you dig in the woods,” he said. “Planning a trip perhaps?”

  Lucy didn’t answer.

  “Well, we have a little trip to St. Louis planned for you instead.”

  As Ezekiel pushed her along, she turned to see if her mother had been awakened by the noise. If she had, she hadn’t come out of the cabin. Probably afraid. Lucy had been only four the first time she’d seen Ezekiel Goshorn flog her mother, and that was not the last time she’d been forced to stand there and hear her scream.

  2

  They had moved her to a waiting wagon, which was enclosed by wooden slats, with crude benches built in along each side. A gate hung open at the foot. Lanterns on the four corners cast a ghostly light.

  As Lucy stood at the bottom of the wagon, Goshorn pulled her shift up and held it above her head.

  “Perhaps I should keep you after all,” he said. “You’ll be ripe soon.” He paused, as if thinking it over. “But I need the money, and you’ll bring a right fine price.”

  She held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t notice the bag strung around her waist.

  She heard Amasa say, “I wish you’d keep her, Father.”

  “You can sow your oats elsewhere,” Goshorn said. He dropped the shift and stared into Lucy’s eyes, trying, she thought, to make her avert her gaze. She stared back and tried to fix his ugly face in her memory.

  “Get in the wagon,” Goshorn said.

  She climbed in and saw that there were six other Negroes already sitting on the benches, each of them manacled, the manacles tied by rope to railings atop the slats. They all appeared to be asleep. Two white men were also dozing on the benches. She assumed they were guards of some kind.

  At the foot of the wagon, Goshorn was talking to a man, who handed him a sheaf of papers. Goshorn looked through them, and said, “This is a sale on consignment, right?”

  “That’s right, Zeke. You keep title to her until I actually sell her. That’s when you get your money. If she doesn’t sell, I bring her back.”

  “She’ll sell,” Goshorn said.

  Lucy didn’t understand the fancy words, but she did understand that they were talking about her like she was a cooking pot. It made her so angry she began to tremble.

  “She’s perhaps cold,” the man said. “She’s shaking violently.” He went over and touched her neck. “Nope. Warm as can be. Hope she’s not got the fever. That’ll bring down the price right quick.”

  “She’ll be good once you’re underway,” Goshorn said.

  “I don’t know...” the man said.

  “She’s young and strong. If she gets the fever, stop a day or two, and she’ll recover. They almost always do. Or if you think she’s faking, whip her until she stops. That works, too.”

  Lucy felt a deep fear settle over her. She needed to hide her anger. At least for now.

  The man seemed to think about it, then nodded. “Alright. I’ll take her.”

  Goshorn signed one of the pages and handed it back, whereupon the man dropped some coins into his hand. “Here’s a small amount of earnest money, so I’ll have something at risk, too,” he said.

  She heard Goshorn say, “Thank you. When do you think I’ll see the full price?”

  “Assuming the weather holds, we should be in St. Louis in three days. So Thursday if we’re lucky. The sales are usually on Saturday, and the paperwork will take a day after that to finish up. Then three days back here. So you should have the rest of your money in ten days if all goes well.”

  “That sounds good,” Goshorn said.

  “Or you could take 70 percent of the estimated price right now,” the man said. “That way, I’ll take title now, and you won’t have to worry about my having to come back. And I’ll be taking the risk she’ll sell low.”

  “Thanks, Luke,” Goshorn said, “but I think she’ll sell high, so I’ll stick with the current deal, just like last time.”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “She don’t look like she can pick a lot of cotton.”

  “Well then she’ll sell as a pretty house slave. For one of them fancy mansions they have down in Mississippi.”

  “Have it your way,” Luke said. He closed the wagon gate up and headed for the front, poking one of the dozing guards as he went by. The man looked up, startled.

  “Tom, tie her up like the others,” Luke said.

  “I think we should put ’em in ankle fetters,” Tom said. “Now there are seven of them, and just three of us.”

  “No, that will give ’em cuts and bruises down there, and folks will argue the price down for that. They ain’t going nowhere, and you both got what you need to keep them in line.”

  Lucy looked more closely at the guards and saw that each carried a short whip in his belt and had a heavy club at his side.

  Tom picked up a piece of rope from the wagon floor, looped one end around Lucy’s manacles and tied it off with an elaborate knot. He tied the other end to the top rail, but left enough slack so that Lucy could move her hands freely.

  “There you go, sugar,” he said.

  “My name is Lucy.”

  “Look like sugar to me.” He grinned and she saw that half his teeth were missing.

  As the wagon began to move, Goshorn and Amasa stood there, watching them go.

  “Bye, sugar,” Goshorn said. “Enjoy Mississippi.”

 
Lucy imagined putting her hands around Goshorn’s throat and squeezing until the life went out of him.

  * * *

  At the end of the second day of travel, Lucy knew they must be getting near St. Louis. The man called Luke had said it would be a three-day trip.

  Her grandmother had been to St. Louis once, and had told her about it. She said it was in a place called Missouri—a state she called it. And to the north was a free state called Illinois.

  Lucy didn’t understand what a state was or what made one state free and another slave, but she did remember what her grandmother had said to do. “If you can get near St. Louis and you can get free, go north ’til you get to Illinois, but watch out for slave catchers. You got to get to the Underground Railroad. They will take you to Canada, where slaves are free.”

  Her grandmother had seemed to know a lot about the Railroad, except how to contact it.

  Lucy remembered asking, “Yaya, how will I know where north is?”

  Her grandmother had taken her outside and showed her how to find the Big Dipper and the North Star. “Just follow that star,” she said. “There will be north.”

  Lucy spent a few minutes thinking about her grandmother, who had died right before Christmas. She missed her. Then she turned her attention to how to escape.

  Lucy had noticed that her manacles were too big for her wrists. Her wrists were unusually thin and her hands quite small despite her height. To avoid anyone noticing, she had tried to keep her forearms up so the manacles slid back onto a thicker part of her arms. When they were given thin blankets to keep themselves warm at night—hardly necessary in the humid August air—the other slaves had let theirs drop to the floor. Lucy had kept hers spread across her wrists and midsection, frequently complaining about being cold.

  The first night that had almost been her undoing, when Tom said, “I can keep you warm, sugar.”

  She had said, once again, “My name is Lucy,” which seemed, for some reason she could not fathom, to keep him at bay. Or perhaps he was simply afraid of what Luke would do to him if he damaged the “merchandise,” a term Luke had used several times to refer to the slaves.