The Day Lincoln Lost
Charles Rosenberg
On Sale Date: August 4, 2020
9781335145222, 1335145222
Hardcover
$27.99 USD, $34.99 CAD
Fiction / Alternative History / Thrillers /
Historical
432 pages
About the Book:
An inventive historical thriller
that reimagines the tumultuous presidential election of 1860, capturing the
people desperately trying to hold the nation together – and those trying to
crack it apart.
Abby Kelley Foster arrived in
Springfield, Illinois with the fate of the nation on her mind. Her fame as an
abolitionist speaker had spread west and she knew that her first speech in the
city would make headlines. One of the residents reading those headlines would
be none other than the likely next President of the United States.
Abraham Lincoln, lawyer and
presidential candidate, knew his chances of winning were good. All he had to do
was stay above the fray of the slavery debate and appear the voice of
compromise until the people cast their votes. The last thing he needed was a
fiery abolitionist appearing in town. When her speech sparks violence, leading
to her arrest and a high-profile trial, he suspects that his political rivals
have conspired against him.
President James Buchanan is one such
rival. As his term ends and his political power crumbles, he gathers his
advisors at the White House to make one last move that might derail Lincoln’s
campaign, steal the election, and throw America into chaos.
A fascinating historical novel and
fast-paced political thriller of a nation on the cusp of civil war, The
Day Lincoln Lost offers an unexpected window into one of the most
consequential elections in our country’s history.
EXCERPT
Chapter 1
Kentucky
Early August, 1860
Lucy Battelle’s birthday was
tomorrow. She would be twelve. Or at least that was what her mother told her.
Lucy knew the date might not be exact, because Riverview Plantation didn’t keep
close track of when slaves were born. Or when they died, for that matter. They
came, they worked and they went to their heavenly reward. Unless, of course,
they were sold off to somewhere else.
There had been a lot of
selling-off of late. The Old Master, her mother told her, had at least known
how to run a plantation. And while their food may have been wretched at times,
there had always been enough. But the Old Master had died years before Lucy was
born. His eldest son, Ezekiel Goshorn, had inherited Riverview.
Ezekiel was cruel, and he had an
eye for young black women, although he stayed away from those who had not yet
developed. Lucy has seen him looking at her of late, though. She was thin, and
very tall for her age—someone had told her she looked like a young tree—and
when she looked at herself naked, she could tell that her breasts were
beginning to come. “You are pretty,” her mother said, which sent a chill
through her.
Whatever his sexual practices,
Goshorn had no head for either tobacco farming or business, and Riverview was
visibly suffering for it, and not only for a shortage of food. Lucy could see
that the big house was in bad need of painting and other repairs, and the dock
on the river, which allowed their crop to be sent to market, looked worse and
worse every year. By now it was half-falling-down. Slaves could supply the
labor to repair things, of course, but apparently Goshorn couldn’t afford the
materials.
Last year, a blight had damaged
almost half the tobacco crop. Goshorn had begun to sell his slaves south to
make ends meet.
In the slave quarter, not a lot was
really known about being sold south, except that it was much hotter there, the
crop was harder-to-work cotton instead of tobacco and those who went didn’t
come back. Ever.
Several months earlier, two of
Lucy’s slightly older friends had been sold, and she had watched them manacled
and put in the back of a wagon, along with six others. Her friends were sobbing
as the wagon moved away. Lucy was dry-eyed because then and there she had
decided to escape.
Others had tried to escape before
her, of course, but most had been caught and brought back. When they arrived
back, usually dragged along in chains by slave catchers, Goshorn—or one of his
five sons—had whipped each of them near to death. A few had actually died, but
most had been nursed back to at least some semblance of health by the other
slaves.
Lucy began to volunteer to help
tend to them—to feed them, put grease on their wounds, hold their hands while
they moaned and carry away the waste from their bodies. Most of all, though,
she had listened to their stories—especially to what had worked and what had
failed.
One thing she had learned was
that they used hounds to pursue you, and that the hounds smelled any clothes
you left behind to track you. One man told her that another man who had buried
his one pair of extra pants in the woods before he left—not hard to do because
slaves had so little—had not been found by the dogs.
Still another man said a runaway
needed to take a blanket because as you went north, it got colder, especially
at night, even in the summer. And you needed to find a pair of boots that would
fit you. Lucy had tried on her mother’s boots—the ones she used in the
winter—and they fit. Her mother would find another pair, she was sure.
The hard thing was the
Underground Railroad. They had all heard about it. They had even heard the
masters damning it. Lucy had long understood that it wasn’t actually
underground and wasn’t even a railroad. It was just people, white and black,
who helped you escape—who fed you, hid you in safe houses and moved you,
sometimes by night, sometimes under a load of hay or whatever they had that
would cover you.
The problem was you couldn’t
always tell which ones were real railroaders and which ones were slave catchers
posing as railroaders. The slaves who came back weren’t much help about how to
tell the difference because most had guessed wrong. Lucy wasn’t too worried
about it. She had not only the optimism of youth, but a secret that she thought
would surely help her.
Tonight was the night. Over the
past few days she had dug a deep hole in the woods where she could bury her
tiny stash of things that might carry her smell. For weeks before that, she had
foraged and dug for mushrooms in the woods, and so no one seemed to pay much
mind to her foraging and digging earlier that day. As she left, she planned to
take the now-too-small shift she had secretly saved from last year’s
allotment—her only extra piece of clothing—along with her shoes and bury them
in the hole. That way the dogs could not take her smell from anything left
behind. She would take the blanket she slept in with her.
She had also saved up small
pieces of smoked meat so that she had enough—she hoped—to sustain her for a few
days until she could locate the Railroad. She dropped the meat into a small
cloth bag and hung it from a string tied around her waist, hidden under her
shift.
Her mother had long ago fallen
asleep, and the moon had set. Even better, it was cloudy and there was no
starlight. Lucy put on her mother’s boots, stepped outside the cabin and looked
toward the woods.
As she started to move, Ezekiel
Goshorn appeared in front of her, seemingly out of nowhere, along with two of
his sons and said, “Going somewhere, Lucy?”
“I’m just standing here.”
“Hold out your arms.”
“Why?”
“Hold out your arms!”
She hesitated but finally did as
he asked, and one of his sons, the one called Amasa, clamped a pair of manacles
around her wrists. “We’ve been watching you dig in the woods,” he said.
“Planning a trip perhaps?”
Lucy didn’t answer.
“Well, we have a little trip to
St. Louis planned for you instead.”
As Ezekiel pushed her along, she
turned to see if her mother had been awakened by the noise. If she had, she
hadn’t come out of the cabin. Probably afraid. Lucy had been only four the
first time she’d seen Ezekiel Goshorn flog her mother, and that was not the
last time she’d been forced to stand there and hear her scream.
About the Author:
Charles Rosenberg is the author of the legal thriller Death
on a High Floor and its sequels. The credited legal consultant to the TV shows
LA Law, Boston Legal, The Practice, and The Paper Chase, he was also one of two
on-air legal analysts for E! Television’s coverage of the O.J. Simpson criminal
and civil trials. He teaches as an adjunct law professor at Loyola Law School
and has also taught at UCLA, Pepperdine and Southwestern law schools. He
practices law in the Los Angeles area.
Social Links:
Author website: https://www.charlesrosenbergauthor.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/whomdunnit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whomdunnit/
Buy Links:
IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781335145222
Books-A-Million: https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9781335145222?AID=10747236&PID=7651142&cjevent=dcfae1e7924811ea828701380a1c0e12
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