Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

the masts of an angry fleet on the horizon, and every week seems to bring them a mile closer. If, as many think, it is the winds of war that fill their sails, then it is a war I am content to let others fight. My boys are healthy. My wife is in good spirits. And we are a long, long way from Washington. I am happy to make a speech or two; happy to lend my pen where it is needed. But I am happy. And happiness, I have decided, is a noble ambition. I have lost too much already, and have been a slave to vampires these thirty years. Let me now be free. Let me now seek the enjoyment of whatever time God may grant me. And if this peace be merely prelude to some peril or other, so be it. I shall enjoy the peace.
There was no shortage of passion or violence on either side of the slavery issue. Infuriated by the attack on Charles Sumner, a radical abolitionist named John Brown led an attack on a settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, in the Kansas Territory. On the night of May 24th, 1856 (just two days after Sumner was beaten), Brown and his men brutally murdered five proslavery settlers, dragging each man from his home, running him through with a sword, and firing a bullet into his skull for good measure. It was the first in a series of reprisals that would be dubbed Bleeding Kansas. The violence would continue for three years and claim over fifty lives.
On March 6th, 1857, the Supreme Court pushed the country closer to the brink.
Dred Scott was a sixty-year-old slave who’d been trying to win his freedom in the courts for more than a decade. Between 1832 and 1842, he’d traveled with his master (U.S. Army Major John Emerson) through the free territories of the North, acting as a personal valet. During these travels, Scott married and had a child (all on free soil), and upon the major’s death in 1843, tried to buy his freedom. But the major’s widow refused, continuing to hire him out and pocketing the wages for herself. Advised by abolitionist friends, Scott sued for his freedom in 1846, on the grounds that he’d ceased to be property the moment he’d set foot in free territory. The case worked its way through the courts, attracting national attention before finally reaching Washington in 1857.
In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Scott, arguing that the Founding Fathers had considered Negroes “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” when they drafted the Constitution. Consequently, Negroes couldn’t be citizens of the United States, and couldn’t bring suit in federal court to begin with. They had no more right to due process than the plows they drove.
It was a devastating outcome for Scott, but it had implications far beyond his personal freedom. In issuing its ruling, the Court declared that:
Congress had exceeded its authority when it banned slavery from spreading to certain territories—and that these territories had no power to ban slavery on their own. Slaves and their descendants (whether free or not) were not protected by the Constitution, and could never be United States citizens. Escaped slaves who reached free soil were still the legal property of their masters.
In the wake of the Dred Scott ruling, the Albany Evening Journal accused the Supreme Court, Senate, and newly inaugurated President James Buchanan of being part of a “conspiracy” to spread slavery, while the New York Tribune ran an editorial that captured the fury of many Northerners:
Now, wherever the stars and stripes wave, they protect slavery and represent slavery…. This, then, is the final fruit. In this, all the labors of our statesmen, the blood of our heroes, the life-long cares and toils of our forefathers, the aspirations of our scholars, the prayers of good men, have finally ended! America the slave breeder and slaveholder!
Southern Democrats were more emboldened than ever, some boasting that the ruling would lead to “slave auctions on Boston Common.” Republicans and abolitionists had never been more electrified in their opposition. America was beginning to tear itself apart.
But few Americans knew just how much danger they were really in.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
III
On June 3rd, 1857, Abe received a letter addressed in a familiar scrawl. It contained no inquiries after his health or happiness; no regards to his family.
Abraham,
I beg you forgive my failure to write these five years. You must also forgive my abruptness, for matters here require my urgent