[Mary] is inconsolable. It is just as well, for I am of no mind to console. Sent word to Speed and Armstrong requesting they come. Received a letter from Henry expressing his condolences, and his promise to arrive [in Springfield] no later than tomorrow midday. How he learned of Eddy’s passing, I do not know.
Eddy was laid to rest in Hutchinson’s Cemetery, just a few blocks away from Abe and Mary’s house.
I held on to Bob and Mary for the whole of the service, the three of us weeping. Armstrong and Speed stood at our side, as did many friends and well-wishers. Henry watched from a distance, not wanting to cause me any added grief by raising Mary’s suspicions. * However, he saw to it that I received a note before the service. In it were his further condolences… and a reminder that there was another way.
A way to see my boy again.
Despite what must have been a maddening temptation to see his little boy again, Abe surrendered to reason.
He would be small forever. An angelic murderer. I could not bear the thought of keeping him locked away in the dark. Of teaching him to kill so that he might live. I could not condemn my son to hell.
Mary wrote a poem (possibly with Abe’s assistance), which was published in the Illinois State Journal around the time of Eddy’s burial. The final line is engraved on his tombstone.
Those midnight stars are sadly dimmed,
That late so brilliantly shone,
And the crimson tinge from cheek and lip,
With the heart’s warm life has flown—
The angel of Death was hovering nigh,
And the lovely boy was called to die.
The silken waves of his glossy hair
Lie still over his marble brow,
And the pallid lip and pearly cheek
The presence of Death avow.
Pure little bud in kindness given,
In mercy taken to bloom in heaven.
Happier far is the angel child
With the harp and the crown of gold,
Who warbles now at the Savior’s feet
The glories to us untold.
Eddy, meet blossom of heavenly love,
Dwells in the spirit-world above.
Angel Boy—fare thee well, farewell
Sweet Eddy,
We bid thee adieu!
Affection’s wail cannot reach thee now
Deep though it be, and true.
Bright is the home to him now given…
Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
NINE
At Last, Peace
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us.
—Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming a National Fast Day
March 30th, 1863
I
From the New York Tribune, Monday, July 6th, 1857:
VIOLENT CLASHES TERRORIZE CITY
Curious Sightings in Gang Brawl
by H. Greeley
The savage clashes which laid siege to much of Manhattan these two days and nights have at last been quieted. By order of the Governor, militiamen entered the Five Points late Sunday and engaged the remaining combatants with volley upon volley of musket fire. Untold numbers of dead could this morning be seen lining Baxter, Mulberry and Elizabeth Streets—victims of the worst rioting this or any city has seen in memory. The violence seems to have begun when those notorious Five Points gangs, the Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits, sprung an attack against their shared enemy, the Bowery Boys. It is the opinion of the [police] that the killings began on Bayard Street around Saturday midday, before spreading through the Five Points with all the rapidity and ferocity of a fire.
The innocent were forced to barricade their doors as rival thugs stabbed, shot and bludgeoned one another to death in the streets. Merchants saw their shops destroyed; their wares brazenly stolen in the chaos. Eleven passersby—a woman and child among them—were mauled for no cause but their straying too close to the fight.
CURIOUS SIGHTINGS IN GANG BRAWL
The Tribune was inundated with testimonies of “strange” and “impossible” feats throughout Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Men were said to leap across rooftops “as if carried by the air” in pursuit of one another; climb the sides of buildings “as effortlessly as a cat climbs a tree.”
One witness, a merchant by the name of Jasper Rubes, claims to have seen a Dead Rabbit “lift a Bowery Boy above his head and throw him against the second story of [a Baxter Street factory] hard enough to leave a hole in the bricks.” Incredibly, the victim “landed on his feet,” said the witness, “and kept up the fight as if nothing had happened.”
“His eyes,” said Rubes, “were black as soot.”
Hunting vampires was the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the early 1850s.
Ten months after burying their son, Abe and Mary welcomed another. They named him William “Willy” Wallace Lincoln in honor of the physician who’d stayed at Eddy’s side until the end. In 1853, they welcomed one more boy, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln, born April 4th. Along with ten-year-old Robert, the three formed a “boisterous brood.”
“Bob howls in the next room as I write this,” Abe said in an 1853 letter to Speed. “Mary has whopped him for running off and disappearing. I suspect that by the time I finish this letter he will have run off and disappeared again.”
Abe made very few journal entries in the wake of Eddy’s death. Those six and a half little leather-bound books had become a record of his life with vampires—a record of weapons and vengeance; of death and loss. But those days were behind him now. That life was over. After his entries had resumed in 1865, Abe looked back on that “last, peaceful, wonderful spell.”
They were good years, to be sure. Quiet years. I wanted nothing more of vampires or politics. To think of all that I had missed whiling away the hours in Washington! How much of Eddy’s brief, beautiful life had escaped my notice! No… never again. Simplicity! That was the oath I swore now. Family! That was my errand. When I could not be with my boys at home, I let them run about the office (much to Lamon’s * consternation, I suspect). Mary and I took lingering walks, regardless of the season or weather. We spoke of our dear boys… of our friends and futures… of the speed with which the whole of our lives had passed.
There were no letters from Henry. No visits or hints of his whereabouts. At times I wondered if he had finally come to accept that I would hunt no more—or if he himself had fallen prey to the ax. Whatever the reason behind his absence, I was glad for it. For while I had come to regard him with tremendous affection, I loathed every memory the mere mention of his name conjured up.
Abe’s long coat, riddled with the rips and scars of battle, was unceremoniously burned. His pistols and knives were locked in a trunk and forgotten in the cellar. The blade of his ax was allowed to rust. The specter of death, which had hung over the old vampire hunter since his ninth year, seemed at last to be lifting.
It returned briefly in 1854, when Abe received word from a friend in Clary’s Grove that Jack Armstrong was dead. From a letter to Joshua Speed:
The damned fool’s gotten himself killed by a horse, Speed.
Old Jack stood in an early winter [downpour], trying to drag the stubborn beast by its lead. For nearly an hour they tugged against each other. Jack (ever the Clary’s Grove Boy) didn’t think to fetch his coat or holler for help, despite his being one-handed and soaked to the bone. By the time he got the animal out of the rain, Jack had caught his death. He burned a fever for a week, slipped away, and died. It seems an ignoble end to such a sturdy man, does it not? A man who survived so many brushes with death? Who saw the terrible things you and I have seen?