Gore Vidal - Lincoln

ACCLAIM FOR
GORE VIDALs
LINCOLN

A brilliant marriage of fact and imagination. Its just about everything a novel should bepleasure, information, moral insight. [Vidal] gives us a man and a time so alive and real that we see and feel them. A superb book.

The Plain Dealer

Utterly convincing Vidal is concerned with dissecting, obsessively and often brilliantly, the roots of personal ambition as they give rise to history itself.

Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

An astonishing achievement. Vidal is a masterly American historical novelist. Vidals imagination of American politics, then and now, is so powerful as to compel awe.

Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books

The best American historical novel Ive read in recent years.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Vanity Fair

[A] literary triumph. There is no handy and cheap psychoanalysis here, but rather a careful scrutiny of the actions that spring from the core of Lincoln himself. We are left to figure out the man as if he were a real person in our lives.

Chicago Sun-Times

Lincoln reaches for sublimity. This novel will, I suspect, maintain a permanent place in American letters.

Andrew Delbanco, The New Republic

Vidal is the best all-round American man of letters since Edmund Wilson. This is his most moving book.

Newsweek

It is remarkable how much good history Mr. Vidal has been able to work into his novel. And I findastonishingly enough, since I have been over this material so many timesthat Mr. Vidal has made of this familiar record a narrative that sustained my interest right up to the final page.

Professor David Donald, Harvard University

GORE VIDAL
LINCOLN

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the Army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.

NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE
BY
GORE VIDAL

Burr

Lincoln

1876

Empire

Hollywood

Washington, D.C.

The Golden Age

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 2000

Copyright 1984 by Gore Vidal

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1984.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Vidal, Gore, 1925
Lincoln.
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Fiction. I. Title.
PS3543.126L5 1984 813.54 83-43185
eISBN: 978-0-307-78423-0

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

PART I

E LIHU B. WASHBURNE opened his gold watch. The spidery hands showed five minutes to six.

Wait here, he said to the driver, who said, How do I know youre coming back, sir?

At the best of times Congressman Washburnes temper was a most unstable affair, and his sudden outbursts of ragehe could roar like a preacher anticipating hellwere much admired in his adopted state of Illinois, where constituents proudly claimed that he was the only militant teetotaller who behaved exactly like a normal person at five minutes to six, say, in the early morning of an icy winter dayof the twenty-third of February, 1861, to be exact.

Why, you black! As the cry in Washburnes throat began to go to its terrible maximum, caution, the politicians ever-present angel, cut short the statesmans breath. A puff of unresonated cold steam filled the space between the congressman and the Negro driver on his high seat.

Heart beating rapidly with unslaked fury, Washburne gave the driver some coins. You are to stay here until I return, you hear me?

I hear you, sir. White teeth were quickly bared and unbared in the black, cold-puckered face.

Washburne buttoned up his overcoat and stepped carefully onto the frozen mud that was supposed to be the pavement of a stately avenue leading to the squalid train depot of Washington City, capital of thirty-four United States that were now in the process of disuniting. He fluffed up his beard, hoping to better warm his face.

Washburne entered the depot as the cars from Baltimore were rattling to a halt. Negro porters were slouched along the sidings. Huge carts stood ready to be filled with Northern merchandise to be exchanged for Southern tobacco, raw cotton, food. Currently, the Southerners were saying that Washington City was the natural capital of the South. But they did not say it, if they were wise, in Washburnes irritable Western presence.

Just past the locomotive, the representative of Illinoiss first District stationed himself in front of an empty gilded wagon whose sides were emblazoned with the name of Gautier, the towns leading caterer, a Frenchman who was, some claimed but never he, the lost Dauphin of France.

As Washburne watched the sleepy travellers disembark, he wished that he had brought with him at least a half-dozen Federal guards. Since the guards were just coming off night duty, no one would think it odd if they should converge, in a casual sort of way, upon the depot. But the other half of the semi-official Joint Congressional Committee of Two, Senator William H. Seward of New York, had said, No, we dont want to draw any attention to our visitor. You and I will be enough. Since the always-mysterious Seward had then chosen not to come to the depot, only the House of Representatives was represented in the stout person of Elihu B. Washburne, who was, suddenly, attracted to a plainly criminal threesome. To the left, a small sharp-eyed man with one hand plunged deep in his overcoat pocket where the outline of a derringer was visible. To the right, a large thickset young man with both hands in his pocketstwo pistols? In the center, a tall thin man, wearing a soft slouch hat pulled over his eyes like a burglar, and a short overcoat whose collar was turned up, so that nothing was visible between cap and collar but a prominent nose and high cheekbones covered with yellow skin, taut as a drum. In his left hand he clutched a leather grip-sack containing, no doubt, the tools of his sinister trade.