The battleground of alternate history about the Civil War is so crowded there’s barely room to wield a cavalry sword, let alone a pen. Long before Mr. Lincoln started hunting vampires, we had Harry Turtledove and his army of astute novels; Ward Moore, Harry Harrison and Peter Tsouras have all fought on this field, along with Winston Churchill’s essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” and even James Thurber’s story “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox.”
But rather than shifting the outcome of some crucial battle, try nudging a single bullet. Just an inch. That’s what Stephen L. Carter does in his thoughtful new thriller: Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in the hours after John Wilkes Booth shot him. Oh, the president came close to the grave, to be sure, but then his indomitable will asserted itself. “The damage to his brain appeared less severe than first thought. . . . On Easter Sunday, he rose.”
(Knopf) - ”The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln” by Stephen L. Carter.
So begins “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln,” Carter’s fifth novel. The Yale law professor has enlisted real figures before in his best-selling tales of intrigue, but this is his deepest foray into the slippery world of alternate history. With an encyclopedic command of period detail and the courage to alter it whenever he wants, Carter has created an entertaining story rooted in the legal, political and racial conflicts of 19th-century America.
A brisk prologue gallops through the failed assassination in 1865 and a mysterious confrontation with a spy several months later. Then the novel opens in earnest nearly two years after the South has been dragged back into the Union. Compromise is poison, the parties can agree on nothing, and political brinksmanship has ground Washington to a halt. Things were so different back then. “If Johnson were President now,” newspapers whine, “the nation would be in considerably better shape.”
Yes, the assassins got Vice President Andrew Johnson in this version of history, but other famous characters strut through these pages fully animated, especially Lincoln, so conflicted, so deceptively rustic, with those drooping eyes that can look sleepy or piercing. Nowadays, in the shadow of that 120-ton statue and the Christ mythology that has coalesced around the Great Emancipator, it’s jarring to be reminded of what a political animal our 16th president was — and how varied were his enemies.
When alive, Lincoln faced not just the hatred of the Confederacy, but the condescension and disapproval of the abolitionist wing of his own party. By sparing his life that night at Ford’s Theatre, Carter has subjected him to a thousand cuts from assassins on all sides. The South wants revenge; radicals can’t stomach his beneficent Reconstruction; and defenders of liberty are still aghast at his imperial actions during the war: arresting political opponents, suspending habeas corpus, ignoring court orders to release prisoners, closing the Maryland legislature, shutting down newspapers. In high dudgeon, the House votes to impeach the president. The stage is set for drama.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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