Free The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen L. Carter

roused by the sound of wagons brattling to the Eastern and Center Markets for a long day of haggling. Among the shanties of George Town, it was the cries of the junk man and the street peddler; in the retreating forests of TennallyTown, the factory whistles; and in the mansions north of Pennsylvania Avenue, the quiet rapping of a servant at the bedroom door. On the Island, as it was known, the irregular southwest corner of the city, bounded by the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and the fetid remains of the barge canal to the north, the new day was announced by the bells of the dairy wagon on its rounds, and the clattering of hooves as cabs and horsecars arrived at the Seventh Street Wharf, disgorging passengers and cargo to catch the first ferry of the day over to the Virginia side.
    These were the sounds to which Abigail Canner opened her eyes each day, precisely at dawn, unless she had awakened earlier: for it was a peculiarity of her family that the women needed little sleep. Her father, a plumber and bricklayer, had constructed the two-story brick house on Tenth Street, about half a mile south of the towers of the Smithsonian Institution. Several of the better colored families had built nearby, but most of those living on the Island were poor. Now and then the entire house would be jolted from dreams by the thunder of a train rattling off the Long Bridge. Cars moving at that hour almost always carried troops, and Abigail, ever since her return from Oberlin, would lie in her bed, eyes boring into the gray, dreamless dark, hoping against hope that this at last might be the transport bringing Aaron back to her arms.
    But it never was.
    She would rise from the bed she shared with her younger sister, Louisa, who would groan and snuffle and snatch at the covers. Abigail would sit in the window overlooking the frozen mud of Tenth Street, reading her Bible and saying her morning prayers at the ugly brass tripod table, made in England, of which their late mother had been so proud. Then she would perform her ablutions and dress for work in a satin-and-muslin walking dress. She had several, and never wore anything else to the office, even though Dinah said the outfits made Abigail look like her own grandmother. She would wake Louisa, who did not rise easily, making sure that the child was not late for the carriage that collected her and a few others from the Island for transport to the Quaker Method school near the end of Massachusetts Avenue, just below the Patent Office—which, in some peculiar testament to the changing times, stood on the grand hill set aside, in the original plan of the city, for the federal government’s official cathedral.
    With Louisa safely launched, Abigail would see to any needs of Nanny Pork, who was likely at the kitchen table, smoking her pipe and glaring disapproval at whatever caught her glance. Thrice a week a sillyyoung thing named Tilly came to clean and cook and lug coal and do the washing, and on those days Abigail would wait until the girl arrived and give her stern instructions, because Nanny liked to take herself off visiting or shopping when Tilly was in the house, leaving her unsupervised. They had already learned to lock up the silver whenever Tilly or any of her predecessors was due. Nanny liked to say that if Tilly stole anything it would serve Abigail right for going off every day to do men’s work.
    When Nanny finished listing her niece’s latest sins and errors, Abigail would leave the house at last, walking three blocks to catch the cars of the Metropolitan Line for the ride to the office. She would march past the familiar houses, now dusted with bright snowy coverlets: there the home of Mr. and Mrs. Amos, who owned a lumberyard down near the wharf; next the dwelling of old Dr. Sandrin, whose credentials to practice medicine were suspect; and finally, at the corner of Seventh Street, the grand mansion of the sisters Quillen, widows of a certain age who nobody believed were actually