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 journal.
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 ABE?S 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
