The First Assassin (2 page)

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1861

Langston Bennett threw down his copy of the
Charleston Mercury
. The pages fluttered to the floor as Bennett balled his hands into fists. “Damn him!” he said, sharply but to himself. His anger crested and began to subside. Bennett could almost feel it flow from his body. That was how it always happened—a moment of lost control followed by a quick return to his senses. He let out a sigh, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He ran his fingers through the long gray hair that touched the collar of his shirt. “Something must be done,” he said in a low voice.

He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a blank sheet of paper. Instead of writing, he arched his back and gazed out the window in front of him, through the trees in Battery Park and across the harbor. He could see a couple of ships on the water. Farther to his left, at the harbor’s mouth more than two miles away, he spied a tiny flag flapping above the waves. His eyes narrowed and returned to the page on his desk. He dipped his pen in a small bottle and rattled it around. When he brought it to the top of the page, the pen made a short black mark and ran dry. Now Bennett frowned. He could not even write the first letter of the date. He put the pen down, reached for a bell on his desk, and rang it loudly.

Footsteps sounded on the staircase. The door opened and a tall black man walked in. His wrinkled face told of many years. Bennett remained seated.

“Lucius,” he said. “I’ve run out of ink. Please fetch me some.”

“Yessir.”

“Is there money in the till?”

“I think so.”

“Very well.”

Lucius bent down on one knee and began to pick up the newspaper pages scattered around Bennett’s feet.

“Thank you, Lucius. I became aggravated. That menace Lincoln slipped through Baltimore in the middle of the night on his way to Washington. So he has proven himself to be not only a villain but also a coward. I still have trouble believing this man will actually become president in a few days.”

Lucius could not read the
Mercury
, but he reassembled the pages and placed them on Bennett’s desk before leaving the room. Bennett thought about standing up, but it felt too good to stay seated. This was a sensation that he had started to feel more often, and it might have bothered him if he had actually let it. He was already an old man, having been born seventy-one years earlier—in 1789, the year George Washington was elected president for the first time. Bennett liked to joke that he was as old as the republic itself. That remark was once tinged with pride. When he made it nowadays, though, it sounded more like a complaint—partly because he really was getting old, but mostly because he had lost faith in the republic.

Looking again at the dot of a flag by the harbor’s mouth, he wished he had enough ink in his pen to blot it out: this was Fort Sumter, and inside it a company of men flew their banner in defiance of South Carolina. For two months, Bennett had glared at the flag every day. It was just a dash of color in the distance, but Bennett knew it displayed stars for South Carolina and six other states that had formally withdrawn from the Union. That flag must come down, he thought to himself. It will come down.

He could do nothing about it from the second story of his home and with no ink in his pen. He pushed back from the desk but did not rise to his feet. His leg ached—the left one. He reached down and rubbed it. Sometimes he still bristled when his hand touched the hard wood below his knee. His leg had become a stump fourteen years earlier, during the Mexican War. The surgeons told him it was a choice between his leg and his life, and before Bennett even had a chance to think about what they had said, they had sawed it off. He was glad they did, and he wore the peg like a badge. Many of the wounded men who returned from Mexico tried to hide their disfigurements, but not Bennett. He rolled up his trousers and exposed the peg for all to see.

The leg was a heavy price to pay for service in Mexico, but Bennett bore no regrets. He had bought himself a commission in the army, ready for an adventure. His wife had died many years earlier in childbirth, and his two sons were finally grown. Yet the war was not just a simple diversion for Bennett. The term “Manifest Destiny” had entered the public’s vocabulary, and Bennett believed in it. California and New Mexico belonged in the United States, not in a corrupt Mexico. But more important than any of this, the war would allow the expansion of slavery into new territories. To stay strong, the institution needed to grow. Many Northern politicians, especially those abolitionists in New England, opposed the war for exactly this reason. But the war came and went, with the United States acquiring vast new holdings and the slavery question put off for another day.

About this time, Bennett first encountered the name that now haunted him. The South Carolinian had returned to his plantation home to nurse his wounded limb. In newspapers, he read of a first-term member of Congress who charged the administration of President James Polk with illegal acts in starting the war. This upstart continued the assault for a month with speeches and amendments, and he backed off only when Polk’s treaty with Mexico ending the war arrived in the Senate for ratification. Bennett did not make much of the incident or of the congressman, who did not run for a second term. But he remembered the name. He knew for years that he did not like Abraham Lincoln.

He liked him even less after Lincoln became the Republican nominee for president—and then went on to win the election. Now Bennett was delighted to see the man humiliated. The
Mercury
carried a story about Lincoln’s craven arrival in Washington. Instead of taking the train through Baltimore at noon, as he had been scheduled to do, Lincoln passed through that city in the early morning, while it was still dark, and arrived in Washington at dawn. By the time a huge crowd had assembled at the depot in Baltimore, Lincoln was comfortably checked into a second-story suite at Willard’s, a hotel near the White House.

The incident already was proving to be a huge embarrassment for Lincoln. Supporters said the president-elect had had a warning about a plot against his life in Baltimore, and this news required him to take drastic action. How typical, sneered Bennett. The man had condemned the Mexican War from afar, while others fought and died for their country. Now he was showing himself to be fearful even of the American public. Bennett took some consolation from the fact that Lincoln’s flight through Baltimore had no shortage of critics, even among his allies in the Northern press. Almost nobody thought it was necessary. Bennett smiled at the thought of Lincoln making problems for himself even before his inauguration, when he would suddenly have to confront many other problems not of his own making.

That sense of satisfaction soon faded. The truth was that the president-elect had outfoxed his enemies. He was still alive and unscratched.

A knock on the door interrupted these thoughts.

“Come in,” called Bennett.

Lucius entered the room with a new inkwell.

“That was quick,” said Bennett.

“We had this downstairs, sir.”

Lucius stood still for a moment. Bennett shifted his chair back behind the desk and dipped his pen in the new inkwell. It came out shimmering black. Bennett grinned as a drip of ink came off the end.

“You know, Lucius, my hair was once this color.”

“Yes, I do know,” said Lucius, who allowed himself a smile.

Bennett’s hair had started to turn gray when he shipped out to Mexico. Upon his return, it had gone almost completely white. Now he wore it in the shoulder-length style of many Southerners, and it framed his broad face. His head rested on top of a big-boned body. He was once a muscular man, and traces of his former strength were unmistakable. Even at his advanced age, sitting in a chair, Bennett exuded a sense of brute power.

“Thank you, Lucius. That will be all.”

“Yessir,” said the slave, who exited the room.

For most of his life, Bennett had looked younger than he really was. He owned a large, upcountry plantation that grew cotton and rice. He spent about half his time there. Many plantation owners were content to let their slaves and hirelings do all the work, but not Bennett. He enjoyed the physical life of the farm and participated in it whenever he could, even after the wooden leg took away much of his usefulness. He had always hired overseers, and now he relied on them more than ever before. Yet he continued to go into the fields regularly, giving orders and sweating in the sun alongside the slaves whose own toil helped make him one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina.

This habit puzzled Bennett’s peers, who did not understand why he would choose to spend so much of his time so close to slaves engaged in manual labor. They preferred a soft life of leisure. But Bennett believed the work was good for both the body and the mind. When he went off to Mexico in his late fifties, he looked and felt a good fifteen years younger. His presence in the fields also had a positive effect on the whole plantation. Bennett knew there was no such thing as the “happy slave” of legend, but he also knew there was more contentment among his slaves than there was among other slaves on neighboring farms. Just as soldiers appreciated seeing their general near the front lines, slaves appreciated seeing their master in a crop field.

Bennett himself believed strongly in the institution of slavery. He despised the Northern abolitionists who wanted to destroy it. They were radicals who had no appreciation of history, he thought. Aristotle regarded men as innately unequal and considered slavery the most natural thing in the world. It made plain sense that some would rule and others would serve.

There were some in the South who had doubts about slavery. George Washington, the Virginian, was one: he had freed his slaves upon his death. Bennett, however, considered slavery a positive good. Northerners who wanted to meddle with the South’s way of life were supreme hypocrites, he thought. The industrial labor all around them was just another kind of forced servitude. Workers were wage slaves living in urban squalor. Northern industrialists cared only for making money. Bennett provided for his slaves in ways that went far beyond compensating them for their time on the job. Some of them, such as Lucius, even felt like family.

He knew the name of almost every slave on his plantation—and there were more than two hundred of them. When one died, he often delivered a short eulogy and was able to cite a few personal characteristics. He made a special effort to keep families together too. This was not always possible, but Bennett regarded himself as generous when it came to these matters. When he did sell a few slaves, he tried to sell them as families. When he had to split up a family, he tried to sell them to a neighbor and allow visitation. When he bought slaves, he often inquired about whether close family members were also available. He could recall several times purchasing slaves he did not really need, just to keep a family in one piece. It was something no Northern industrialist would have understood.

Gazing out the window again, his eyes settled once more on Sumter. “Here is a family that won’t remain together,” he muttered. The Battery below him had been fortified some years ago, and before that it was a place for hanging pirates. He imagined Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, swinging from a tree. Then he reflected on the likely consequences. That seawall would need to be lined with cannons again.

There was no way to avoid strife between North and South now. Passions ran too high. Bennett felt betrayed by what had happened to make it so. Even after Mexico, he had done his part to hold off the sectional conflict. During the 1850s, he helped finance the filibustering expeditions of Narciso Lopez and John Quitman to Cuba as well as William Walker’s forays into Nicaragua—again with the purpose of national expansion foremost in his mind. They were total failures, but Bennett nevertheless remained committed to doing what he could to keep North and South bound together by a single constitution that permitted the South to keep its way of life.

Bennett might have maintained this optimism even now if it had not been for what had happened in Kansas—or “Bleeding Kansas,” as the press had taken to calling it. His two sons also had served in Mexico. Soon after returning, they moved to Kansas, with their father’s encouragement. The idea was to found a new Bennett plantation as soon as Kansas could be admitted to the Union as a slave state—but both young men became entangled in the violent disputes over the territory’s future. In 1856, within a few weeks of John Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, antislavery factions gunned down both Bennett boys. Neither had married, so their deaths left Bennett without an heir. He was totally alone, except for his slaves.

That was the moment when his mind turned on the question of union. Like virtually every other member of Charleston’s elite society, Bennett now believed the time had come for his state to part ways with the rest of the country. First he gave his leg, then he gave his money, and finally he gave his sons—all for the sake of preserving a country that seemed to show no appreciation for these sacrifices. Children should expect one day to lose their parents, but parents should not have to lose their children after they have weathered the vulnerabilities of youth and grown into healthy adults.

And still this was not enough for the Northern radicals, who had just elected this foul man to the presidency. Lincoln’s name had not even appeared on Southern ballots. The unionists say they are for Union, thought Bennett, and yet they elevate a man whom thousands of citizens did not even have the privilege of voting
against
. How could any democracy worth its name permit that to happen? It was an insult to half the country. More than half of it, really—a few weeks earlier, Bennett had added up the popular vote totals cast for Lincoln and his three opponents. The president-elect had won less than forty percent of all the votes cast. Now he would rule over more than thirty million Americans. He was a false president. Life in the South would change in fundamental ways. Bennett imagined that even the local postmasters, named to their patronage jobs by this thieving politician in Washington, would stop censoring the abolitionist screeds from the mail.