Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Negro girl of perhaps five or six, as they passed. I wanted to turn away (such was the sorrow of her countenance), yet I could not… for I knew where she was being taken.
Night had fallen. I had followed the Negro girl (I know not how) to a large barn—the inside lit by torches and hanging oil lamps. I watched from the darkness as she and the others were made to stand in a line, their eyes firmly fixed on the ground. I watched as a vampire took its place behind each of the slaves. Her eyes found mine as a pair of fangs descended behind her, and a pair of clawed hands grabbed her tiny neck.
“Justice… ,” she said, staring at me.
The fangs tore into her.
Her screams joined my own as I woke.
Abe convened his Cabinet the next morning.
“Gentlemen,” I began, “we have spoken a great deal about the true nature of this war; about our true enemy. We have argued—always in the spirit of friendship—over the wisest way to meet such an enemy, and bemoaned his power to strike fear into the hearts of our men. I daresay that we have even come to share in that fear ourselves. This will not do.
“Gentlemen… let our enemy fear us.
“Let us deny him the laborers who tend the farms of his living allies; who build his garrisons and carry his gunpowder. Let us deny him the poor wretches who are themselves grown as crops to be consumed by darkness. Now, gentlemen, let us starve the devils into defeat by declaring every slave in the South free.”
Cheers went up around the table. Even Salmon Chase (who still refused to believe that vampires were real) saw the strategic genius of attacking the engine of the South. Seward, while joining the others in his approval, offered a piece of humble advice:
[He] suggested that such a proclamation be given to the country on the heels of a victory, so as not to appear an act of desperation.
“Well,” I said, “then I suppose we need a victory.”

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
III
On September 17th, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies collided at Antietam Creek, near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The Confederate forces were commanded by General Robert E. Lee, who’d enjoyed a warm relationship with the president before the war. The Union forces were commanded by General George B. McClellan, a Democrat who despised Abraham Lincoln with every fiber of his being. Abe writes:
[McClellan] thinks me a buffoon—unfit to command a man of his superior breeding and intellect. This would not bother me in the least if only he won more battles! Instead he sits in his camp, using the Army of the Potomac as his personal bodyguard! He suffers from an excess of caution: observing when he should attack, retreating when he should stand his ground and fight. This is a sin that I cannot forgive in a general.
Lee and McClellan’s armies waited quietly in the predawn hours of that Wednesday, September 17th, unaware that they were about to embark on the bloodiest day in American military history. At first light, both sides unleashed their artillery. For nearly an hour the shells flew one after the other, many with fuses timed to make them explode over their targets, sending burning pieces of shrapnel through the bodies of any soldier unfortunate enough to be nearby. From the diary of Union soldier Christoph Niederer, * 20th New York Infantry, 6th Corps:
I had just got myself pretty comfortable when a bomb burst over me and completely deafened me. I felt a blow on my right shoulder and my jacket was covered with white stuff. I felt mechanically whether I still had my arm and thank God it was still whole. At the same time I felt something damp on my face; I wiped it off. It was bloody. Now I first saw that the man next to me, Kessler, lacked the upper part of his head, and almost all his brains had gone into the face of the man next to him, Merkel, so that he could scarcely see. Since any moment the same could happen to anyone, no one thought much about it.
When the cannons fell quiet, Union troops were given orders to fix bayonets and charge across an open cornfield toward the entrenched Confederates. But an artillery battery was waiting for them in the tall stalks, and when they neared, the rebel cannons unleashed round after round of grapeshot, * taking heads off and scattering body parts across the field. From a letter by Lieutenant Sebastian Duncan Jr., ** 13th New Jersey Infantry, 12th Corps:
Stray shot and shell began to whiz over our heads and burst around us… lying just in front of our