Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

leave a hole in the bricks.” Incredibly, the victim “landed on his feet,” said the witness, “and kept up the fight as if nothing had happened.”
“His eyes,” said Rubes, “were black as soot.”
Hunting vampires was the furthest thing from Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the early 1850s.
Ten months after burying their son, Abe and Mary welcomed another. They named him William “Willy” Wallace Lincoln in honor of the physician who’d stayed at Eddy’s side until the end. In 1853, they welcomed one more boy, Thomas “Tad” Lincoln, born April 4th. Along with ten-year-old Robert, the three formed a “boisterous brood.”
“Bob howls in the next room as I write this,” Abe said in an 1853 letter to Speed. “Mary has whopped him for running off and disappearing. I suspect that by the time I finish this letter he will have run off and disappeared again.”
Abe made very few journal entries in the wake of Eddy’s death. Those six and a half little leather-bound books had become a record of his life with vampires—a record of weapons and vengeance; of death and loss. But those days were behind him now. That life was over. After his entries had resumed in 1865, Abe looked back on that “last, peaceful, wonderful spell.”
They were good years, to be sure. Quiet years. I wanted nothing more of vampires or politics. To think of all that I had missed whiling away the hours in Washington! How much of Eddy’s brief, beautiful life had escaped my notice! No… never again. Simplicity! That was the oath I swore now. Family! That was my errand. When I could not be with my boys at home, I let them run about the office (much to Lamon’s * consternation, I suspect). Mary and I took lingering walks, regardless of the season or weather. We spoke of our dear boys… of our friends and futures… of the speed with which the whole of our lives had passed.
There were no letters from Henry. No visits or hints of his whereabouts. At times I wondered if he had finally come to accept that I would hunt no more—or if he himself had fallen prey to the ax. Whatever the reason behind his absence, I was glad for it. For while I had come to regard him with tremendous affection, I loathed every memory the mere mention of his name conjured up.
Abe’s long coat, riddled with the rips and scars of battle, was unceremoniously burned. His pistols and knives were locked in a trunk and forgotten in the cellar. The blade of his ax was allowed to rust. The specter of death, which had hung over the old vampire hunter since his ninth year, seemed at last to be lifting.
It returned briefly in 1854, when Abe received word from a friend in Clary’s Grove that Jack Armstrong was dead. From a letter to Joshua Speed:
The damned fool’s gotten himself killed by a horse, Speed.
Old Jack stood in an early winter [downpour], trying to drag the stubborn beast by its lead. For nearly an hour they tugged against each other. Jack (ever the Clary’s Grove Boy) didn’t think to fetch his coat or holler for help, despite his being one-handed and soaked to the bone. By the time he got the animal out of the rain, Jack had caught his death. He burned a fever for a week, slipped away, and died. It seems an ignoble end to such a sturdy man, does it not? A man who survived so many brushes with death? Who saw the terrible things you and I have seen?
In the same letter, Abe admitted to being “unnerved” by his “lack of anguish” over Armstrong’s passing. He grieved, sure. But this was a “different sort of grief,” unlike the crippling depression that had followed his mother’s death, Ann’s, and Eddy’s.
I fear that a life of death has made me numb to both.
Four years later, Abe would defend Jack’s son, “Duff” Armstrong, when he stood trial for murder. Abe refused payment. He worked tirelessly, litigated passionately, and (with a stroke of legal brilliance) won Duff his freedom, * a final thank-you to a brave friend.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
II
The same year that saw Abe mourn the loss of an old friend saw him dragged back into politics by an old rival.
Abe had known Senator Stephen A. Douglas since they were both young Illinois state legislators (and eager suitors of Mary Todd). Though a Democrat, Douglas had long been opposed to allowing slavery into territories where it didn’t already exist. But in 1854, he suddenly reversed himself and championed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill that repealed the federal ban on the spread of