“Davis has only his own survival in mind,” I said. “He and his allies are pilot fish—cleaning the teeth of sharks to avoid being themselves bitten. Perhaps they have been promised power and riches in this new America, exemption from chains. But know this—whatever they have been promised is a lie.”
Chase could bear it no longer. He rose from his seat and left the room. I waited for others to join him. Satisfied that none would, I continued.
“Even now,” I said, “there is a part of me that finds it all impossible to believe. A part of me that expects to wake from a half-century’s dream. Even after all these years, and all of the things I have witnessed. And why not? After all, to believe in vampires is to reject reason! To acknowledge a darkness that is not supposed to exist anymore. Not here, in this great age, where science has illuminated all but a few mysteries. No… no, that darkness belongs in the Old Testament; in the tragedies of Shakespeare. But not here.
“That, gentlemen… that is why they thrive. That belief—that we live beyond the reach of darkness—is one that vampires have worked tirelessly to instill through the centuries. I submit to you that it is nothing less than the greatest lie ever sold to mankind.”
II
Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, Virginia seceded from the Union, and the Confederate capital was relocated to its industrial heart, Richmond. Over the next few weeks, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed. There were now eleven states in the Confederacy, with a combined population of nine million people (four million of which were slaves). Even so, most Northerners were convinced that the war would be a short one, and that the “sechers” (secessionists) would be stamped out by summer’s end.
They had reason to be confident. The North, after all, had more than twice the population of the South. It had railroads that could speed troops and provisions to the battlefield in a fraction of the time; superior factories to supply boots and ammunition; warships to blockade ports and pound coastal cities. Pro-Union newspapers urged the president to bring about a “swift end to this unpleasantness.” Cries of “Forward to Richmond!” were heard across the North. Henry Sturges agreed. In a telegram dated July 15th, he used a quote from Shakespeare to send Abe a coded message * : strike Richmond now.
Abraham,
“In God’s name, cheerly on, courageous friends, to reap the harvest of perpetual peace, by this one bloody trial of sharp war.” **
—H
Abe followed the advice. The day after receiving the letter, he ordered the largest fighting force ever assembled on North American soil—35,000 men—to march from Washington to Richmond under the command of Brigadier General Irvin McDowell. Most of McDowell’s soldiers came from the 75,000 militiamen hurriedly called up in the wake of Fort Sumter. They were, for the most part, farmers and tradesmen. Baby-faced teenagers and frail old men. Some had never fired a shot in their lives.
McDowell complains that his men are inexperienced. “You are green,” I told him, “but [the Confederates] are green also. You are all green alike! We must not wait for the enemy to come marching into Washington. We must meet him where he lives! To Richmond, by God!”
To get there, McDowell and his men would have to march twenty-five miles south into Virginia, where General Pierre Beauregard and 20,000 Confederates were waiting for them. In the sweltering heat of Monday, July 21st, 1861, the two armies met near the town of Manassas. It would be remembered as the First Battle of Bull Run—so named for the little creek that would soon run red.
Two days after the battle, a Union private named Andrew Merrow wrote home to his new bride in Massachusetts. * His letter paints a gruesome picture of the day’s events, and offers some of the earliest evidence that the Confederate Army had vampires in its ranks.
We had [the Confederates] whipped at the start. Blessed with greater numbers, we drove the devils south up Henry House Hill, and into a group of trees at its peak. What a sight to see them scatter like mice! To see our ranks spread half a mile wide! To hear the cracking of gunpowder from all directions! “Let us chase them all the way to Georgia!” cried Colonel Hunter, to the delight of the men.
As we neared the top of the hill, the rebels covered their retreat by firing on us. The gun smoke grew so thick that one could scarcely see ten yards into the trees where they hid. From behind this curtain of smoke suddenly came a chorus of wild yells. The voices of twenty or thirty men, growing louder by the moment. “First ranks! Fix bayonets!” ordered the colonel. As they did, a small band of Confederates emerged from the smoke, running toward us as fast as any men have ever run. Even from a distance, I could see their strange, wild eyes. There was not a rifle, or a pistol, or a sword among them.
Our first ranks began to fire, yet their rifles seemed to have no effect. Melissa, I shall swear until my grave that I saw bullets strike these men in their chests. In their limbs and faces. Yet they continued to charge as if they had not been hit at all! The rebels smashed into our ranks and tore men apart in front of my eyes. I do not mean to suggest that they ran them through with bayonets, or fired on them with revolvers. I mean to say that these rebels—these thirty unarmed men—tore one hundred men to pieces with nothing more than their bare hands. I saw arms pulled off. Heads twisted backward. I saw blood pour from the throats and bellies of men gutted by mere fingertips; a boy grasping at the holes where his eyes had been a moment before. A private three yards in front of me had his rifle plucked away. I was close enough to feel his blood on my face as its stock was used to smash his skull in. Close enough to taste his death on my tongue.
Our lines broke. I am not ashamed to say that I dropped my rifle and ran with the others, Melissa. The rebels gave chase, overtaking and savaging men on either side of me as we retreated. Their screams following me down the hill.
Reports of similar “rebel charges” poured in from McDowell’s commanders. “Well,” he is rumored to have said (on learning that the Union was in full retreat), “we brought the superior army, but it seems they brought the superior men.” McDowell had no idea that those “superior men” weren’t men at all.
The fighting lasted a matter of hours. When the gun smoke gave way, more than a thousand men were dead, another three thousand severely or mortally wounded. From the diary of Union Major General Ambrose Burnside:
I rode past a small pond at dusk and saw men washing their wounds in it. The water had turned quite red as a result—but this did not deter the desperate from drinking it when they crawled to its edge. Near this, I saw the body of a rebel boy who had been hit by a shell. Only his arms, shoulders and head remained—his eyes open and face expressionless. A group of buzzards was gathered around him, picking at his entrails. Pecking at the bits of his brain that had spilled onto the ground. It is a sight that shall never leave me.
And yet I have seen a hundred such horrors this day. A man could walk a mile in any direction without his feet touching the ground—such are the number of bodies. Even as I write this, I hear the screams of the wounded on the air. Begging for help. For water. In some cases, begging for death.
I have no more fear of hell, for I have this day seen it with my own eyes.
The North was in a state of shock and mourning after Bull Run.
Had I only listened to Douglas! To McDowell! Had I only called for more men and given them more time to train—this war might be over, and the suffering and death of thousands avoided. It is clear, now, that the South means to compensate for her smaller numbers by sending vampires to the fields of battle. So be it. I have spent a lifetime hunting vampires with my ax. I shall now spend a little while longer hunting them with my army. If this is to be a long and costly struggle, then let us redouble our resolve to win it.
Once its shock subsided, the North took a cue from its president and dug its heels in. Men turned out in droves to enlist, and states pledged new regiments and provisions. On July 22nd, 1861, the day he signed a bill calling for 500,000 new troops, Abraham Lincoln scribbled a prescient thought in his jou
rnal.
Let us pray now for the future dead. Though we do not yet know their names, we know that there shall be far too many of them.
III
It had been a bitter, frustrating winter for the president and his Cabinet. With rivers frozen and roads covered with mud and snow, there was little either army could do but tend its fires and wait for the thaw. On February 9th, 1862, his 53rd birthday, Abe was in his office when the first sign of spring came at last.
I have just received word of [General Ulysses S.] Grant’s success at Fort Henry in Tennessee. It is a crucial victory for us in the west, and a welcome change from these long months of waiting. Together with the sound of my rascals playing outside, it is a fine Sunday indeed!
“Rascals” Tad and Willie Lincoln—seven and ten years old, respectively—were the unquestioned life (some would say scourge) of the White House. The boys spent countless hours running rampant over the mansion and its grounds during the first year of their father’s presidency, a fact that aggravated some of Abe’s associates to no end, but offered the president a much-needed distraction from the stresses of running a country and a war.
The sound of my boys at play is (too often, I confess) the only joy between sunrise and sleep. I am therefore too happy to wrestle and chase them about whenever the opportunity presents itself—and regardless of who looks on. Not one week ago, [Iowa Senator James W.] Grimes walked into my office for an appointment, only to find me pinned to the floor by four boys: Tad and Willie holding my legs, Bud and Holly * my arms. “Senator,” I said, “if you would be kind enough to negotiate the terms of my surrender.” Mary thinks it beneath the dignity of a president to gambol so, but were it not for these moments—these tender little pieces of life—I should go mad in a month’s time.
Abe was a doting, loving father to all three of his boys, but with Robert off at Harvard (where he was guarded by a handful of local men and vampires) and Tad “too young and wild to be still,” he grew especially fond of Willie.
He has an insatiable appetite for books; a love of solving riddles. If there is a fight, he can be counted on to step in and make the peace. Some are eager to point to the similarities between us, but I do not see us as so very similar—for Willie has a kinder heart than I, and a quicker mind.
As he celebrated the good news that Sunday afternoon, Abe happened to catch a glimpse of his boys playing on the frost-covered South Lawn below his office window.
Tad and Willie were busy holding a court-martial for Jack * as they often did—accusing him of this offense or that. Not ten yards from where they played, two young soldiers (not much more than boys themselves) looked after them—both of them shivering, no doubt wondering what they had done to deserve such an assignment.
They were just two of the dozen living guards who patrolled the White House and its grounds around the clock. At Abe’s insistence, his wife and children were accompanied by no fewer than two men (or one vampire) whenever they ventured outdoors. There were no fences between the street and the mansion in 1862. The public was free to roam the grounds—even enter the mansion’s first floor. As journalist Noah Brooks wrote, “the multitude, washed or unwashed, always has free egress and ingress.” The multitude was not, however, permitted to carry firearms onto the property.
At half-past three o’clock, a small, bearded man with a rifle was spotted approaching the White House from the direction of Lafayette Square. The sentry assigned to the North Entrance leveled his weapon and ordered the man to stop—yelling at the top of his lungs.
FIG. 3A-1. - SOUTH LAWN OF THE WHITE HOUSE UNDER HEAVY GUARD, CIRCA 1862. THE MAN ON THE PORTICO IS BELIEVED TO BE A MEMBER OF ABE̱S TRINITY.
The commotion drew me to the north windows, where I watched the little man continue his approach, a rifle held across his body. Guards came running now from every corner of the grounds, alerted, as we had been, by the repeated shouts of “stop at once or be shot!”
Three of these guards came running quite a bit faster than the others, and made straight for the intruder with no fear of being shot. At the sight of their advance (and, I suspect, their fangs), the little man at last dropped his rifle and raised his hands in the air. He was nonetheless brought violently to the ground, and his pockets searched by Lamon while the trinity held his limbs. I was later told that he seemed frightened; confused. “He gave me ten dollars,” he supposedly said with tears in his eyes. “He gave me ten dollars.”
Only now, with the immediate danger passed, did my eyes find two of the several soldiers now forming a circle around the intruder.
Abe’s heart stopped. They were the same young soldiers who’d been looking after Willie and Tad.
His children were alone.
The boys had been too engrossed to pay any mind to the shouting, or notice their shivering guards running off to investigate it. In this vulnerable moment, they were set upon by a stranger.
He, too, might have escaped their notice, had the heel of his boot not come down on their doll and brought an end to their game. Willie and Tad looked up to see a man of average height and build standing over them, wearing a long black coat, with a scarf and top hat to match. His eyes were obscured by dark glasses, and his lip obscured by a thick brown mustache. “Hello, Willie,” he said. “I have a message for your father. I would very much like you to give it to him.”
Now it was Tad’s screams that brought the guards running.
The vampires were the first to arrive, with Lamon and several soldiers on their heels. I came bounding down the steps of the South Portico next, and found Tad frightened and crying, but seemingly unharmed. Willie, however, was rubbing his tongue with his coat sleeve and spitting repeatedly. I took him in my arms and looked him over—turning his face and neck this way, that way—all the while praying there were no wounds on his body.
“There!” Lamon cried, pointing to a figure running south. He and the trinity gave chase, while the others hastened us into the house. “Alive!” I cried after them. “Alive!”
Lamon and the trinity chased the figure across Pennsylvania Avenue and through the Ellipse. * When it became clear that he couldn’t keep pace, the breathless Lamon drew his revolver and, with no regard for the innocent bystanders he might have hit, fired at the distant figure until his cartridges were spent.
The trinity was gaining on its target. The four vampires ran south toward the unfinished Washington Monument, into the field of grazing cattle that surrounded it. Construction of the massive marble obelisk (at 150 feet, it was only one-third its eventual height) had been halted, and a temporary slaughterhouse erected in its shadow to help meet the needs of a hungry army. It was into this long, wooden building that the stranger now disappeared, desperate to lose the killers who were only fifty yards behind him. Perhaps there would be knives to fight with inside… blood to throw them off his scent… anything.
But there were no carcasses in the slaughterhouse that Sunday afternoon. No workers cutting the throats of cattle. Only dozens of metal hooks hanging from rafters overhead, each reflecting the late-day sun that squeezed through the open doors at both ends of the long building. The stranger ran across the bloodstained wooden floor looking for a place to hide, a weapon to wield. He found neither.
The river… I can lose them in the river…
He sprinted toward an open door at the far end, determined to head south to the Potomac. Once there, he would dive beneath its surface and slip away. But his exit was blocked by the silhouette of a man.
The other door…
The stranger stopped and turned back—there were two more silhouettes behind him.
There would be no escape.
He stood near the center of the long building as his pursuers advanced from either end, slowly, cautiously. They meant to capture him. Torture him. Demand to know who’d sent him, and what he’d done to the boy. And, if captured, chances were that he would tell them everything. This he could not allow.
The stranger smiled as his pursuers neared. “Know
this,” he said. “That you are the slaves of slaves.” He took a breath, closed his eyes, and leapt onto one of the hanging hooks, stabbing himself through the heart.
I like to think that in his final moments, as his body convulsed and blood poured from his nose and mouth—joining that of the animals’ below—that he saw the flames of hell beneath his feet, and felt the first of an eternity’s agony. I like to think that he was afraid.
As guards sealed the White House and searched the grounds, Willie sat in his father’s office, calmly relating what had happened, while a doctor looked him over.
The stranger had grabbed his face, he said, pried his mouth open, and poured something “bitter” into it. My thoughts turned at once to my mother’s death from a fool’s dose of vampire blood, and I fell into silent despair at the thought of seeing my beloved little boy suffer her fate. The doctor found no signs of injury or symptoms of poisoning, but made Willie swallow several spoonfuls of powdered charcoal * as a precaution (an experience he found far worse than the assault itself).