The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen L. Carter

Carter uses his protagonist, Abigail Canner, a young black graduate of Oberlin College and part of the Lincoln defense team, as a means to explore the relations of the races in postwar Washington. And Carter, further, has created a murder mystery, for within the first few pages one of Lincoln’s defense lawyers is found dead outside a black brothel, and young Abigail starts her own informal murder investigation. The Senate impeachment trial is only one of the stories in this book, however. In Carter’s novel, the House impeaches Lincoln in early 1867 for his actions both during the Civil War, in suspending habeas corpus, seizing telegrams and closing newspapers, and after the war’s end, in refusing to protect the southern freedmen and conspiring to put Washington, and Congress itself, under military rule. Carter’s fine new novel touches on these questions only lightly, for his purpose, as his title suggests, is to imagine what would have happened if the Radical Republicans had impeached President Lincoln. Had they all been represented, the amendment most likely would have perished. Almost anyone who has studied the Civil War and Reconstruction has thought about the question, or rather, the questions. Would Lincoln have found a way to limit southern white aggression against southern blacks? Could he have done that without a prolonged military occupation? Could he have brought the southern states back into Congress more quickly? And if so, when and how would the Constitution have guaranteed equal protection and black voting rights? We often forget that only one southern state, Tennessee, was represented in Congress when the proposed Fourteenth Amendment received the two-thirds majority of the House and Senate needed for an amendment to be sent to the states for ratification.

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen L. Carter