Gabby Zook had become accustomed to the chaos of the Whitman family, which lived in the basement of a brownstone at 106 North Portland Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Tranquility came down upon the residence during the Christmas season of 1865, and remained during the first cold months of the New Year. Mr. Walt, as Gabby had taken to calling the poet, had found him a job sweeping floors at a mercantile establishment a couple of blocks from home. Mrs. Walt, which was the name Gabby gave Whitman’s mother Louisa, walked him to the store of a morning and back home that night. Gabby particularly like Mrs. Walt who seemed to have a large, loving heart, even though she complained of being sick all the time. He looked forward to the weekends because Mr. Walt came home from Washington where he worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He always had stories of interesting things happening in the government.
After Mr. Walt read him the story in the newspaper about President Johnson firing the head of the Secret Service Lafayette Baker, Gabby leaned forward and wrinkled his brow.
“What does this Mr. Baker look like?”
“Well, let me see,” Mr. Walt began slowly. “I’ve seen him many times myself around Washington City, and I must say I didn’t like the look of him. Which is very unusual for me. I can talk for hours with any common laborer on the street, but I never had a desire to even speak to Mr. Baker. He’s not a big man, perhaps your height, Mr. Gabby. Not quite as old, and with a thick shock of red hair. He walks into a room, and you’d think he hated everyone in it and was determined to shoot and kill each and every one of them.”
Gabby’s eyes widened. “A short red-headed mean man.”
Mr. Walt cocked his head. “Yes, I suppose you could call him mean. Yes, that would be a good word to describe him.”
“That’s him.” Gabby’s hands began to tremble. “That’s the man I’ve been telling you about. The man who killed Adam Christy.”
“Of course he is.” Mr. Walt smiled sympathetically and patted his hand. “Well. I wonder what else interesting is happening in the capital.”
In March, President Johnson vetoed the formation of the Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction, claiming it would impede elected Southern representatives from taking their seats in Congress. Soon afterwards, Johnson vetoed a Civil Rights Bill and asserted it contained portions of the previously vetoed Freedman Bureau bill and predicted the legislation would create a “terrible engine of wrong, corruption and fraud.”
“What do you think about that, Mr. Gabby?”
“All that talk about rights and corruption confuses me,” he admitted, shaking his head.
“Me too.”
“I feel I want to be on President Johnson’s side, but I don’t like the idea of keeping anybody from having his rights. I didn’t have any rights when I was in the basement of the White House, and it made me feel bad.”
Gabby’s humor improved when Mr. Walt read to him in early April that the Senate had overturned the President’s veto. In stories in coming days, Johnson vetoed a bill to admit Colorado to the Union because many Southern states had yet to have their sovereign rights restored.
“Why can’t they all just find a way to get along with each other and stop butting heads?” Gabby asked in May.
“I agree.” Mr. Walt smiled and looked out the window as he sipped his coffee.
***
One story of the crisis-ridden spring of 1866 that did not appear in the New York newspapers was the internal moral battle within Sen. James Lane of Kansas. A year earlier, he had ingratiated himself to Secretary of War Stanton by agreeing to nose around and report on President Johnson’s behavior. When discretion allowed it, Lane would steer the president back into old drinking habits. He had hardened his scruples during the bloody conflict between slave and free factions in Kansas of the 1850s. Lane did not question Stanton’s motives because of the overriding goal of total equality of the former slave population. But now he feared each battle for civil rights had lost its focus and degenerated into a simple exercise of emasculating President Johnson, a man Lane had always respected.
Several times during the spring when Lane’s resolve diminished, Secretary Stanton stiffened it with hard cash, in untraceable small denominations of currency. Several newspapers ran stories based on nebulous government sources that substantial amounts of money had appeared in Lane’s financial portfolio. Rumors of bribery ran amok on Capitol Hill. Finally in June of 1866, the stress of placating Stanton and being at peace with his own inner core of decency forced Lane to take a few weeks rest back in his hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas.
Waiting on him when he returned home was the abolitionist editor of the Kansas Tribune Edmund Ross. Ross had left his prosperous newspaper enterprise in Wisconsin during the 1850s to move to Kansas where he advocated the free-state movement. At the outbreak of the war, Ross joined the northern forces to combat slavery and rose to the rank of major. He was a tough courageous man who had two horses shot from underneath him during one battle. Ross did not hesitate to confront his senator, James Lane, at every opportunity that presented itself.
“Sen. Lane,” Ross began in his blustering baritone when he cornered him at a livery stable in Leavenworth. “You, sir, still have not adequately explained your vote to uphold Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. I asked you at the town hall meeting not a week ago. Again, I asked you on the courthouse steps when you were dedicating a plaque to the war dead and still you evaded. My God, man, you stood with me with I first came to Kansas to fight for the cause of abolition.”
“Well, if you would not talk constantly and I could get a word in edgewise, I could make you understand what so many other thoughtful men found self-evident.”
A stable boy approached the men. “Mr. Lane, sir, your carriage is ready for your daily ride.”
“He’s not going anywhere until he explains why he supported Johnson in blocking a colored man’s rights. The war is over. Slavery is dead. What would it serve to fight civil rights now?”
“We have enough laws to protect colored rights. We don’t need laws on top of laws on top of laws.”
“Sen. Lane,” the young man said, gently pushing his way into the conversation. “This horse and carriage have to be back to take the mayor and his wife to supper. I have to give him water and brush him down proper before the mayor takes him out.”
“Boy, I said this would take only a second!” Ross bellowed.
“You talk about rights? What about this young man’s rights? How can you think of the colored when you don’t treat a simple white stable boy with respect?” Lane fought back.
“You’re changing the topic again. You’re trying to put me on the defensive and I just won’t have it!”
Lane turned away, put his arm around the groom’s shoulder and tossed back, “Maybe you want to get rid of me so you can become senator!”
“I might just do that!” Ross yelled to no avail.
As Lane mounted the carriage, he noticed the young man had a slight limp as he climbed into the driver’s seat and took the reins. He seemed stooped over on purpose to hide his true height. Probably the result of a war wound, Lane decided, and did not press the matter. Long carriage rides were among the few activities that alleviated his melancholia. The dry winds of the prairie helped to clear his mind.
“Where you hankerin’ to visit today, Sen. Lane?” the driver asked as they lost their view of town through the trees.
The young man had indiscernible features. He wore an oversized duster and an enormous flop hat. The more the senator stared at the driver’s back, the more he was convinced this person was older than he acted.
Lane frowned. “You’re not Joe, my usual driver. He knows my favorite routes.”
“No, I’m not Joe. Sorry to inconvenience you, sir.”
“Well, just head north.” Lane waved his hand vaguely. “It makes no difference.”
A few miles passed in silence before the driver spoke again. “Make way! Presidential pardon! Make way!”
Lane sat up abruptly. “What the hell did you say?”
“You know very well what I said, Sen. Lane. They were my words from just a year ago in the prison yard where Mrs. Surratt and the others were about to be hanged.”
“Your words? Who the hell are you?”
The driver turned and smiled. His features clearly were those of a man in his twenties. His dark eyes were piercing and malevolent. Lane knew he had seen this person before but could not quite place him.
“You stood in our way so that those foul soldiers could hang a good and honorable woman.”
Lane’s flinty eyes lit in indignation. “That woman was as guilty as sin! She had to die to restore peace to our nation!”
“And you have to die to restore peace to my nation.” The driver pulled a gun from an inside pocket of his duster.
“No!”
Lane jumped from the carriage, but before his body reached the ground, the driver put a bullet through his skull. The shooter jumped from the carriage seat and watched the horse pick up speed, turn and head back to the livery stable in Leavenworth. He placed the gun a few inches from Lane’s hand where his body lay on the road. Then he slowly walked South, with a slight limp to his gait.