The House of Lincoln: A Novel

by Nancy Horan

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

"Strong on fine detail yet cognizant of the expansive historical context, Horan's newest is wonderfully immersive, memorable, important, and pertinent." —Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Nancy Horan, author of the million-copy New York Times bestseller Loving Frank, returns with The House of Lincoln, which tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. President to Great Emancipator and presents Lincoln's Midwestern home as a complex third home front of the Civil War.

Rich with historical detail, The House of Lincoln is an insightful account of Lincoln's transformative vision for democracy as observed through the eyes of a young immigrant who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield, Illinois from Madeira, Portugal.

Showing intelligence beyond society's expectations, fourteen-year-old Ana Ferreira is offered a job in the Lincoln household assisting Mary Lincoln with their boys and with the hosting duties borne by the wife of a rising political star. Ana bears witness to the evolution of Lincoln's views on equality and the Union and observes in full complexity the psyche and pain of his bold, polarizing wife, Mary. Yet, alongside her dearest friend in the Black community, Ana confronts the racial prejudice her friend encounters daily as she watches the inner workings of the Underground Railroad, and directly experiences how slavery contradicts the promise of freedom in her adopted country.

Culminating in an account of the little-known Springfield race riot of 1908, The House of Lincoln takes readers on a journey through the historic changes that reshaped America and continue to reverberate today.

 

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Release date: June 6, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Print pages: 346

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

FEBRUARY 1909

Below, the men are eating turtle soup.

Seated in the gallery above, Ana follows the courses outlined on a menu tucked into the souvenir program. Happily, she thought to bring her opera glasses. Never has the Arsenal looked so festive, with swooping buntings and American flags suspended in pairs like giant butterflies over the long banquet tables. She recognizes many faces above the boiled shirts: judges, bankers, lawyers, doctors, land developers, politicians—more than seven hundred of Springfield’s “quality.” On the main dais, two foreign ambassadors sit admiring the immense French and English flags floating for their benefit among the Stars and Stripes. How festive, she thinks. And how utterly different from the way the building looked six months ago.

From the gallery she can see tension melt into camaraderie among the men as the waiters circulate, bottles in hand. Amusing that only the priest and one other fellow have turned their glasses over. The others drink champagne as they study the menus, remarking on the crabs, the guinea squabs, the tenderloins yet to come. A tittering glee sweeps through the auditorium as oysters arrive.

“Five barrels of them,” comments a young woman seated to her right. “And more than a ton of ice cream for dessert. My husband helped haul it in.”

Unlike the other women in the balcony, Ana does not have a husband or brother who is a member, nor has she paid the twenty-five-dollar ticket fare to be here. She knows why she has been invited to the birthday bash: she’s meant to be a decorative relic from times past, and that is all right. She has dressed the part by wrapping her throat in a piece of her mother’s lace, stuck through by an ancient brooch.

At the podium, the first speaker is throwing his voice. “Picture for a moment Lincoln’s arrival in Springfield, a poorly dressed young man riding into town alone, bent on making a name for himself…”

Her stomach lets out a gastric rumble and she thinks of the uneaten lamb stew in her icebox. It will be a long evening. If Robert Lincoln shows up, though, it will be worth near starvation. She shifts in her seat, closes her eyes, and prepares to endure the affair to its end.

“Arrival,” she hears the speaker say again. And as if she’s sipped the Log Cabin punch the men are now enjoying, she feels light-headed and almost swoons from the sudden, vivid memory of her own arrival in Springfield in 1849, some sixty years ago.

---

“The exiles are here!” someone had shouted that day as she tumbled off the train into the chilling November morning. Clusters of men and women stood waiting for them. A man wearing a minister’s collar shouted out names—Vasconcelles, Ferreira, DeFrates—while a big blond woman in a fur hat sorted Ana’s family and the others into shivering groups. Ana hunched beneath a thin wool cape the Presbyterian ladies in New York had given her.

Family groups were directed to spare bedrooms or a few empty houses the church people had found for the ragged band of religious exiles. One hundred thirty Portuguese immigrants were in their group, and not one of them fully understood the words puffing like clouds from the mouths of the welcomers.

Ana was nine years old at the time, but the image in her mind of that day was precise as an engraving. She’d stood with her hand in her father’s grip and stared out at a river of mud that was said to be the main street. Pigs with feet sunk in the oozing mess nosed around the half-buried wheels of a driverless carriage. Just beyond it, a spread of abandoned boots—perhaps twenty-five or thirty of them in all sizes—poked up from the porridge-thick earth. This was the first of many mysteries she encountered in her first months in Springfield. It was likely the children had been lifted out of their little boots by their parents—she could imagine that—but what about the grown-ups who left behind their large leather footwear? Who lifted them out of the muck? Her mother would say such a feat was the work of God, as she often said about odd things difficult to explain. Ana had pictured a whole collection of shoeless citizens being sucked up into heaven in one grand resurrection.

She’d not bothered her mother with any questions that day, for Genoveva Ferreira had nearly collapsed in a fit of weeping. Ana understood now that she was heartsick with longing, standing there remembering the lovely cobblestone streets of her hometown in Madeira. But Ana’s father was beaming. He had looked around at the foraging animals in the mud and uttered one of the few English expressions he knew: Good morning!

---

“The Great Emancipator,” comes a voice from the podium. Ana shakes off the gauzy reverie and scans the crowd on the main level.

“You knew the Lincoln family,” says the young woman next to her.

“Long ago.” Ana now regrets mentioning it earlier.

“He would have been pleased by such an event in his honor,” the woman adds in a hushed voice.

“Mr. Lincoln?” Ana presses a finger to her lips but the words come out anyway. “Oh, my dear, he would have leaped out the nearest window.”

CHAPTER TWO

JULY 1851

The limestone paving heated her thighs through her dress as she watched the shoppers across the street on Chicken Row. From her perch on the top step of the huge stone Capitol, she could see men hauling gunnysacks of flour and tubs of grease to canvas-hooded wagons with chairs lashed to their sides. Yoked oxen were bellowing in the street. Beside one wagon, a woman with a bolt of cloth in her arms argued with her husband. It was 9:00 a.m. and every pole around the square had a horse tied to it. Weaving through the human and animal legs in the street, a black-and-white hog went about his business.

“Pocilga,” her mother said of Springfield. A pigsty. The remark pained Ana. She loved this town. When they came at dawn to set up their stand, she liked nothing better than to feel the morning unfold around the square as awnings lowered, newspapers opened on benches, wooden sandwich boards took their places in front of stores. Today, yes, she could see garbage all over the place. Food scraps, chunks of broken bricks and wood, rags, and fat piles of horse droppings that made women lift their skirts. Filth like this, her mother was quick to point out, would never be permitted in Funchal, her hometown in Madeira. A merchant would be fined if he failed to sweep the section of road in front of his shop.

Ana glanced from time to time toward the spot where her mother had positioned her stand, right at the corner where Chicken Row met the street market around the corner on Sixth. From the Capitol’s steps, she could see Genoveva Ferreira hold up a plucked bird for a shopper’s look. Ana watched to see if her free hand would beckon her to come translate. Her feet itched to run on the grass. She was thin and long-legged and could outrun her brother, but she stayed still on the step. Of the five of them in the family, Ana was the one who spoke English best. It was a mark of pride, but it kept her tethered to her mother, who spoke only Portuguese.

Sitting nearby, her friend Cal traced with a finger the small shell shapes in the steps. She turned to Ana, lifting her face, freckled as the chicken eggs her own mother was selling at the street market. “You hungry yet?”

Ana nodded.

“What you got?”

Ana sighed and laid out what was in her sack. An apple and a hard chunk of sausage. The stray dog called Jasper who ate rocks all day came over to have a look and turned tail.

“Even he don’t want my lunch.”

Cal waited until Jasper had scampered a distance off, then produced a surprise out of a square of newspaper—a thick biscuit slathered with applesauce. She pulled it apart and gave Ana half. In the sunlight, Cal’s hair was an explosion of curly red tendrils jittering around her head.

They had been friends since the first day Ana’s mother joined the other vendors at the market. Cal was the same age, eleven, and had the same job, watching over her younger brother, Paul, while her mother worked.

Ana had a second job, running errands for people in her neighborhood. Cal often went with her through the downtown area, delivering notes to the druggist or buying some item at the general store for an elderly senhora. It was a new privilege and a streak of freedom for both girls to go out together into the busy streets on their own. Ana had been lonely and awkward two years ago when they first arrived. She thought only in Portuguese. Every sentence she ventured back then felt like a wobble across a rope bridge. Not anymore. She had ripped a blank page out of the back of her father’s Bible and made a small map of the businesses surrounding the square, labeling each store with the names of the merchants in tiny print. Now she thought in English part of the time. She knew more people in the shops, knew more about the merchandise and shopkeepers than most people in her neighborhood.

She and Cal took little notice of the men in tailed coats who moved in and out of the Capitol carrying carpetbags bulging with papers. Other people interested them more: the butcher, his belly wrapped in a clean white apron every morning, whistling different bird sounds as he swept his section of the walk. The afflicted young man who sat on his haunches on an old church pew outside the saddle store, spewing ugly words. And there were always people passing through, heading to California or Oregon. Across the street was one of them, that woman holding a roll of fabric who looked just now as if she might cry.

“What does she say to him, you think?” Ana said. It was a watching game they had.

“Who? That lady over there? I know what he’s saying. ‘You’re gonna wish you had food instead of cloth if we get stuck in snow. It tastes better.’”

“Ugh.” Ana put down her biscuit. “Why you bring that up?”

Everybody in town, even Ana, knew the tale of the families who had set out from Springfield with a wagon train for California seven years ago. Trapped in the mountains by blizzards, they ended up eating the bodies of the dead to survive.

From the corner of her eye, Ana spotted her mother’s hand go up. She jumped to her feet and raced over to the stand, where a short, dark-haired woman was examining the chicken pies spread out on her mother’s crate. She had a boy with her who looked to be about eight, her brother Joao’s age.

“Ma’am?”

“How much for three?”

“Quanto custa para três?” Ana asked her mother.

“Vinte centavos cada.”

Twenty cents each did not please the woman, whose mouth puckered like a coin purse. “It should be less if I buy all of them.” Her son turned away, embarrassed.

“E possível pagar cinquenta centavos para os três?” Ana asked.

Her mother’s face spoke her dismay. She smoothed her apron, looked down. Ana knew she was weighing whether to hold out for full price. She nodded finally.

“Maybe fifty cents,” Ana said.

The woman savored her triumph with a grin as she filled a sack with the pies and walked away with her boy.

“Raios te partam,” her mother sniped as the woman departed. May thunderbolts cleave you.

---

“Joao! Food!” Ana spotted him chasing a ball and waved the apple in the air. Her brother ignored her. “Joao!” she hollered again, just to irk him. He wanted to be called Joe, but their mother wouldn’t hear of it.

“He wants an American name,” her father had argued in Joao’s defense.

“Joao is a strong name,” her mother argued back.

Emmanuel Ferreira dismissed the remark with a philosophical shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

“You are too proud,” their father always said.

Ana knew what he really meant. Genoveva Ferreira still clung to the high position her family held in the old country. Emmanuel, who came from humbler people, was more practical. Adaptar, he told her. You will feel better.

---

Ana went back over to the market where her mother stood a stone’s throw from some Irish vendors who called out to people in an accent the girl found musical. Her mother was wary of these people. “Catholics,” she had warned her children. It was the Catholics in Madeira, after all, who had terrorized the Presbyterian converts and chased them out of the island. But their father had already become an American. “Here, they are the despised ones,” he would say. “Don’t be afraid of them. They are running from their own troubles.”

Ana could see with her own eyes that some of them were as tattered as her family had been when they came to this town. The vendors were a jumble of immigrants, mainly Irish and German. Some were longtime Americans but new arrivals in town—from Missouri and Kentucky mostly. Friction snapped among them, but they kept their tempers in check, lest the market master throw them out.

Cruel remarks made in English by customers flew right past her mother’s ears, but they reached Ana’s, who sometimes felt as if she were a spy in the land of Illinois. Locals didn’t expect her to know what they were saying.

“Those are no good,” one woman remarked to another as they paused in front of the stand.

“O que ela diz?” her mother asked.

“Good pies, Mama.”

---

Today Ana had two errands: medicine from Birchall and Owen, and new heels from the cobbler for her father’s boots that swung heavy in her burlap bag. She did her business at the drugstore first, presenting a note to Caleb Birchall with a drug name she’d copied down from a senhora’s medicine bottle.

“Another liver problem over in Little Madeira, Ana?” Mr. Birchall said, shaking his head.

“He is the same liver, sir. Of Mrs. Santos.”

Mr. Birchall laughed and Ana shrank back, her ears and cheeks burning.

“You said it fine,” Cal whispered. “Don’t be ascared of him.”

While the man noted down the purchase in his record book, they studied the patent medicines lining the shelves. The tins and bottles and paper boxes were an ongoing wonder to both of them. Cal read out a name on a blue bottle that captivated her. “H. G. Farrell’s Celebrated Arabian Liniment. Says you can use it on men or beasts.” They stared at the label picturing a desert oasis with camels, a tent, and palm trees.

“You ever seen a camel where you come from?”

“Yes.”

Cal eyed her in awe. “You ride one?”

Ana smiled. “No, I never see one,” she said, caught out. “But I see these.” She pointed to the palm trees. “In Trinidad.”

---

In the shoe shop, the cobbler looked over the battered boots, deciding whether they were worth saving. “Come back tomorrow afternoon,” he said and gave them each a horehound drop. Together, they walked east on Jefferson toward Cal’s house, and then Ana split off to head up Ninth. She continued north four blocks to the neighborhood the townspeople called Little Madeira, where Portuguese was the language spoken under the roofs and on the porch stoops of the two- and three-room cottages lining the streets.

There were three rooms in this rented house—the kitchen, her parents’ bedroom in back, and a middle room with two makeshift sleeping areas outlined by blankets on clotheslines. Beatriz and Ana had one section; Joao had the other. Ana walked into the kitchen picturing in her mind how the evening would be, as it always was on hot summer days.

Her older sister, Beatriz, was home from her cleaning job. She’d already had her way with the latest newspapers Ana brought home, having cut out pictures of hairstyles and dresses she liked. Beatriz stood cooking at the stove, while her father scrubbed his face and hands in a bucket. Her mother was in bed with the door closed. In a few hours, after dinner, the grown-ups would drift out of the other houses into the street. A man people called Six Bits would deal out cards to his friends in a game of bisca. He had acquired this name because he sawed trees for a living and went down the streets offering to cut up cords of wood, calling out, “Six bits, no split!”

Another man, a brickmaker who wore a blue carapuça cap, with its high skinny tail pointing up like the spout of an oilcan, would continue teaching Joao how to play the cavaquinho. Ana wondered how it was possible that little guitar as well as the hat had both made it unbroken from the old country to this town. The man always sang sad songs about a lost love.

Ana would kick a can with the others on her block, then sit on the stoop and listen to the women tell stories. In the dark, they’d remember walking as children to white houses tucked into the green hills of Madeira. Their talk would be of birdlike orange flowers shooting up out of the earth, of creamy white flowers drooping like soft bells from trees, and mountains soaring into the clouds.

That evening played out as she imagined. Fireflies winked as conversation turned to their fearful passage across the ocean from their green homeland to the muggy fields of Trinidad.

“I carried the Lord’s Prayer under my dress all the way from Funchal,” an old woman reminded everyone. She went inside her house and emerged with a faded piece of parchment paper, its gold lettering nearly erased by its long journey plastered against her chest, as she traveled from the island of Madeira to the island of Trinidad to this landlocked island called Springfield in the middle of America.

CHAPTER THREE

While her mother talked continually of old times, Ana’s father seemed to arrive home each day from his construction job with a new excitement. Recently, he’d made a barter exchange with a fellow carpenter. For building some cabinets in the man’s house, Emmanuel Ferreira received a set of wood combs and rollers for painting. The fellow explained that these were tools for making patterns. You could make cheap wood molding look like walnut or oak or mahogany by combing grain patterns into the wet paint with the tools. The man showed Emmanuel what he knew.

Her father brought leftover paint from a work site and experimented on the wood trim. Something lit on fire inside Emmanuel Ferreira that summer night he finished the parlor baseboard. To his daughter’s list of errands, he added a stiff skunk-hair paintbrush.

It was nearly noon on Wednesday by the time Ana got to Cal’s house four blocks away to collect her. Usually Ana found her on the porch, ready to go, but today Cal invited her to come in and eat lunch with her mother, brother, and an aunt who lived with them.

“Callie Patterson, bring her that chair,” Cal’s mother said. “Sit down, child.” She went over to an iron pot sitting on its legs in the fireplace ashes, lifted the lid, and scooped out a ladle full of stew. “Eat now.”

Ana spooned up the stew, thick with rabbit and carrots and potatoes. She liked the browned corn cakes, all the food coming out of that fireplace. The stew tasted so much better than what her sister made. She smiled to hear “Callie” across the table. The Patterson family members were the only ones allowed to call her that. Cal preferred Cal.

With her family and Ana, Cal was a great mimic. She could imitate the walk of a policeman or the body of an angry child throwing a fit, and she did a fair imitation of several accents, though she never mimicked Ana’s. Today she playacted the weeping woman holding the fabric as her auntie, a big-boned, serious woman, allowed a smile. Ana stared at the men’s boots the woman was wearing. Cal had once said her aunt liked to hunt and trap.

After eating, the girls went to a couple of stores looking for the paintbrush. The owner at Barton’s Dry Goods stood at the front door working a wad of tobacco into his cheek. He was short and thick. When they stepped to enter, the man stuck out his leg to block the door without uttering a word. Ana was confused and then hurt. She felt as if she’d been slapped. Cal spun on her heels and kept walking. “Don’t look back,” she said.

The second store’s clerk knew both girls and said he could order the paintbrush, and they were laughing again as they walked over to Fourth Street to collect her father’s boots. Arriving at Coleman and Donnegan’s, they paused to examine a poster in the window featuring a man’s boot.

“French and American calf, sheepskins. Oak bark leather soles.” Ana mouthed each word as she read.

Inside, the air was heavy with the stink of tannin, probably coming from a four-foot-high pile of leather hides stacked in a back corner across the room. The owners of the shop, both in leather aprons, were sitting at their cobbler benches behind the front counter.

“Almost done,” Mr. Donnegan called out. The girls walked over to a shelf where shoe samples were displayed. These were not for touching, but Cal was a neighbor to the Donnegan family and felt comfortable stroking the kid leather of a lady’s slipper.

Ana heard the door open behind them and a new smell entered the place, a sweaty horse smell. She turned to see three men, one of whom carried a handbill in his fist. All of them were wearing guns, and one had handcuffs looped over his belt. Lawmen, she thought.

The oldest man, whose hair hung like pale corn tassels from under his hat, held up the picture of a man with a description of some kind written below it. “Any of you seen him?”

Ana looked at it and shook her head, as did Cal and Mr. Coleman, who appeared terrified.

Mr. Donnegan did not rise to have a look but continued away at his work.

“Which one is Donnegan?” The man turned his gaze toward Coleman first.

“I am.” Mr. Donnegan stopped sewing and stared back at the rude man.

“Heard you might know his whereabouts,” the lead man said. “Show it to him.” He shoved the picture toward Cal, who reluctantly took it, ducked under the pass-through section of the counter, and handed it to the cobbler.

Mr. Donnegan glanced at the poster. “Never saw him.”

Ana stood frozen, holding her breath. The other two men beside her muttered to each other as the second yellow-haired man, probably the son of the lead man, lifted the counter gate and walked over to where Cal and Mr. Donnegan were. He reached for something in his shirt, and Ana felt her knees wobble. She steadied when she saw that the thing he pulled out was not a gun or knife but a pouch. He opened the drawstring and dumped a pile of gold and silver coins into the cobbler’s apron.

“Seven hundred dollars,” he said. His mouth was a menacing smirk. “I’ll be back when you’ve had time to think on that.”

William Donnegan sat staring at his lap, as if cow dung had just landed there.

The men left the shop cursing. The last man out slammed the door furiously, causing the whole room to shake. Just then, Ana noticed the stack of stiff cowhide pelts in the corner begin to slide. In a split second, fingers reached out from the bottom of the stack and stopped it from cascading further, then disappeared back under the pile. Startled, Ana looked to Cal, who refused to look back at her.

Mr. Coleman leapt to his feet then, took Emmanuel Ferreira’s boots from his partner’s worktable, and handed them over to Ana. “No charge today,” he said. He offered the hard candy to them and saw them to the door.

“Did you see the hand?” Ana blurted when they were outside.

Cal grabbed hold of her friend’s elbow, sucked her lips inward, and shook her head.

The men were out of sight now. Ana longed desperately to be under her mother’s arm, and they walked quickly toward the market.

“Who are they?”

Cal was straining to hold back tears. “Slave catchers.” She turned to Ana. “If you tell, they won’t let us out of their sight.” She was talking about their mothers, and she was right. “It’s a secret.” Cal searched her eyes. “Are you going to tell?”

Ana hesitated. “No.”

“Do you promise?”

Goose bumps rose on Ana’s arms. The terror she’d felt inside the shop returned to make her knees shake. She hugged her chest to stop her body’s quivering.

“All right.”