upon.
By the time I finished speaking, Douglas wept.
That night, Abe sat at the head of a long table in his office, with Secretary of State William Seward to his left. They were joined by the rest of the Cabinet, all of them anxious to hear why they’d been summoned from their supper tables and rushed back to the White House.
“Gentlemen,” I said at last, “I wish to speak to you this evening about vampires.”
Abe had met with his Cabinet on a near daily basis since the inauguration. They’d discussed every detail of the coming war: uniforms, supply lines, commanders, horses, provisions—everything but the truth of what they were really fighting for, and who they were really fighting against.
And yet I had asked these men to plan me a war! Was it not akin to asking a group of blind men to pilot a steamboat?
The encounter with Douglas had changed Abe’s mind. When they parted company that evening, he had ordered Nicolay to reconvene the Cabinet at once.
I thought it crucial that these men—these men who were to be my counsel through untold miseries—knew exactly what they faced. There would be no more revelations in this office. No more half-truths or omissions. Now, just as I had with Douglas, I would tell them the whole truth—with Seward there to endorse every word of it. My history. My hunting. My alliance with a small band of vampires called the Union, and the unthinkable consequences of the coming war.
Some were shocked to hear vampires spoken of at all. [Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Wells and [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon] Chase, it seemed, had managed to go the whole of their lives thinking them nothing more than myth. Wells sat in ashen silence. Chase, however, grew indignant. “I will not stand for folly in the face of war!” he declared. “I will not be summoned from my home to be made a fool for the president’s amusement!” Seward rose to my defense, insisting that every word was true, and admitting his own complicity in keeping it from the rest of the Cabinet. Chase remained unconvinced.
He was not alone in his doubts. [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton—who had long believed vampires real, but confined to the shadows—was the next to speak. “What sense can it make?” he asked. “Why would [Jefferson] Davis… why would any man conspire against himself? Why would any man hasten his own enslavement?”
“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
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.
