The Day Lincoln Lost

Welcome to my The Day Lincoln Lost 

 About the Author:

Charles Rosenberg is the author of the legal thriller Death on a High Floor and its sequels. The

credited legal consultant to the TV shows LA Law, Boston Legal, The Practice, and The Paper

Chase, he was also one of two on-air legal analysts for E! Television’s coverage of the O.J.

Simpson criminal and civil trials. He teaches as an adjunct law professor at Loyola Law School

and has also taught at UCLA, Pepperdine and Southwestern law schools. He practices law in the Los Angeles area.

Social Links:

Author website: https://www.charlesrosenbergauthor.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CharlesRosenbergAuthor/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/whomdunnit

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whomdunnit/

Chapter 1

Kentucky

Early August, 1860

Lucy Battelle’s birthday was tomorrow. She would be twelve. Or at least that was what

her mother told her. Lucy knew the date might not be exact, because Riverview

Plantation didn’t keep close track of when slaves were born. Or when they died, for that

matter. They came, they worked and they went to their heavenly reward. Unless, of

course, they were sold off to somewhere else.

There had been a lot of selling-off of late. The Old Master, her mother told her, had at

least known how to run a plantation. And while their food may have been wretched at

times, there had always been enough. But the Old Master had died years before Lucy

was born. His eldest son, Ezekiel Goshorn, had inherited Riverview.

Ezekiel was cruel, and he had an eye for young black women, although he stayed

away from those who had not yet developed. Lucy has seen him looking at her of late,

though. She was thin, and very tall for her age—someone had told her she looked like a

young tree—and when she looked at herself naked, she could tell that her breasts were

beginning to come. “You are pretty,” her mother said, which sent a chill through her.

Whatever his sexual practices, Goshorn had no head for either tobacco farming or

business, and Riverview was visibly suffering for it, and not only for a shortage of food.

Lucy could see that the big house was in bad need of painting and other repairs, and

the dock on the river, which allowed their crop to be sent to market, looked worse and

worse every year. By now it was half-falling-down. Slaves could supply the labor to

repair things, of course, but apparently Goshorn couldn’t afford the materials.

Last year, a blight had damaged almost half the tobacco crop. Goshorn had begun to

sell his slaves south to make ends meet.

In the slave quarter, not a lot was really known about being sold south, except that it

was much hotter there, the crop was harder-to-work cotton instead of tobacco and those

who went didn’t come back. Ever.

Several months earlier, two of Lucy’s slightly older friends had been sold, and she had

watched them manacled and put in the back of a wagon, along with six others. Her

friends were sobbing as the wagon moved away. Lucy was dry-eyed because then and

there she had decided to escape.

Others had tried to escape before her, of course, but most had been caught and

brought back. When they arrived back, usually dragged along in chains by slave

catchers, Goshorn—or one of his five sons—had whipped each of them near to death.

A few had actually died, but most had been nursed back to at least some semblance of

health by the other slaves.

Lucy began to volunteer to help tend to them—to feed them, put grease on their

wounds, hold their hands while they moaned and carry away the waste from their

bodies. Most of all, though, she had listened to their stories—especially to what had

worked and what had failed.

One thing she had learned was that they used hounds to pursue you, and that the

hounds smelled any clothes you left behind to track you. One man told her that another

man who had buried his one pair of extra pants in the woods before he left—not hard to

do because slaves had so little—had not been found by the dogs.

Still another man said a runaway needed to take a blanket because as you went

north, it got colder, especially at night, even in the summer. And you needed to find a

pair of boots that would fit you. Lucy had tried on her mother’s boots—the ones she

used in the winter—and they fit. Her mother would find another pair, she was sure.

The hard thing was the Underground Railroad. They had all heard about it. They had

even heard the masters damning it. Lucy had long understood that it wasn’t actually

underground and wasn’t even a railroad. It was just people, white and black, who

helped you escape—who fed you, hid you in safe houses and moved you, sometimes

by night, sometimes under a load of hay or whatever they had that would cover you.

The problem was you couldn’t always tell which ones were real railroaders and which

ones were slave catchers posing as railroaders. The slaves who came back weren’t

much help about how to tell the difference because most had guessed wrong. Lucy

wasn’t too worried about it. She had not only the optimism of youth, but a secret that

she thought would surely help her.

Tonight was the night. Over the past few days she had dug a deep hole in the woods

where she could bury her tiny stash of things that might carry her smell. For weeks

before that, she had foraged and dug for mushrooms in the woods, and so no one

seemed to pay much mind to her foraging and digging earlier that day. As she left, she

planned to take the now-too-small shift she had secretly saved from last year’s

allotment—her only extra piece of clothing—along with her shoes and bury them in the

hole. That way the dogs could not take her smell from anything left behind. She would

take the blanket she slept in with her.

She had also saved up small pieces of smoked meat so that she had enough—she

hoped—to sustain her for a few days until she could locate the Railroad. She dropped

the meat into a small cloth bag and hung it from a string tied around her waist, hidden

under her shift.

Her mother had long ago fallen asleep, and the moon had set. Even better, it was

cloudy and there was no starlight. Lucy put on her mother’s boots, stepped outside the

cabin and looked toward the woods.

As she started to move, Ezekiel Goshorn appeared in front of her, seemingly out of

nowhere, along with two of his sons and said, “Going somewhere, Lucy?”

“I’m just standing here.”

“Hold out your arms.”

“Why?”

“Hold out your arms!”

She hesitated but finally did as he asked, and one of his sons, the one called Amasa,

clamped a pair of manacles around her wrists. “We’ve been watching you dig in the

woods,” he said. “Planning a trip perhaps?”

Lucy didn’t answer.

“Well, we have a little trip to St. Louis planned for you instead.”

As Ezekiel pushed her along, she turned to see if her mother had been awakened by

the noise. If she had, she hadn’t come out of the cabin. Probably afraid. Lucy had been

only four the first time she’d seen Ezekiel Goshorn flog her mother, and that was not the

last time she’d been forced to stand there and hear her scream.