This is a valuable tonic to the overriding images of 19th-century blacks as universally downtrodden and “grindingly poor.” Dissolute and unfortunate characters appear, but so do upwardly mobile young women, enterprising members of the middle class and truly wealthy African-Americans. And there is no shortage of clattering carriage rides, heavy petticoats and other clichés of historical fiction.īut amid the overt conjuring of Washington, D.C.’s past-or Washington City, as it was known in Lincoln’s day-there’s a fresh perspective on the capital’s political and social entanglements, particularly among pthe city’s African-American inhabitants. At 500-plus pages, it’s a weighty book indeed, and at times feels a bit too much like a con-law text. President Andrew Johnson, writes Carter, “faced impeachment precisely for carrying out Lincoln’s own ‘let ’em up easy’ policy toward the defeated South.”Ī law professor at Yale and the author of the groundbreaking novel The Emperor of Ocean Park, celebrated for its depiction of contemporary middle-class African-American life, Carter here takes plenty of liberties with the historical record-shifting the order of events or inventing them outright-but he has populated his book with real-life figures, often placing real-life speeches in their mouths. Would the Great Emancipator have done enough to protect liberated slaves had he survived beyond 1865? Radicals in his own party weren’t sure. The third and fourth counts are debatable-and intriguing. On the first two counts, Lincoln is, as a matter of fact, guilty, as Carter acknowledges. So Carter arranges for Lincoln to be impeached in the Senate for suspending habeas corpus in Maryland, censoring newspapers, failing to protect freed blacks and usurping Congress’s authority. “Lincoln has become so large in our imaginations,” the author writes, “that we might easily forget how envied, mistrusted, and occasionally despised he was by the prominent abolitionists and intellectuals of his day.” What if Lincoln had not been assassinated on April 14, 1865, barely a month into his second term? Would he have paid for his attempt to win the Civil War and keep the country unified? Written as a mystery (there’s a conspiracy against Lincoln afoot), this meaty novel tries to sharpen our rosy view of the 16th president.
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel
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