Posted Sunday night, June 28, 2020.
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Detail from a posthumous portrait of Abraham Lincoln by William Cogswell. 1869. The White House, via Wikimedia Commons.
William Seward can’t believe he was in the room where it happened...
Seward was having some difficulty in comprehending what he had just witnessed. Two lawyers and a professional general who had been called in his day to the bar, had sat in a room and removed from an entire people their one inviolable right which had proved, upon test, to be as easily violable as a man transmitting a dozen or so words from a slip of paper to the telegraph wire. In six week, Congress would return. In six weeks, Seward was certain that an act of impeachment would be drawn up against the president. He wondered what his own line should be. After all, he was the advocate of the strong line; and certainly there was nothing stronger than what Lincoln had just done. Yet no Congress would ever allow the basic law of the land to be overthrown. But could the country endure an impeachment and a trial of the President during a war? Perhaps Lincoln could be persuaded to resign.
----from “Lincoln” by Gore Vidal.
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