LINCOLN: A New Birth of Freedom ibook

On the night of the fourteenth of April 1865, a percussion cap fails to fire.

Booth is taken alive on the stage of Ford's Theatre. Abraham Lincoln serves his second term to its end. He is never impeached. He signs the Reconstruction Acts instead of being overridden on them — and in 1868 he takes a third term, carrying every Southern state on the ballots of men who had been slaves four years before.

The Fourteenth Amendment carries his own formula, spoken from a second-floor window three days before he was meant to die: the vote belongs to the man who can read and write, or who has worn the uniform.

It is the most generous settlement any defeated slave society was ever offered, and it is written into the Constitution of the United States, beyond the reach of any legislature.

And it contains, in seven words, the instrument that will take it apart — because somebody in a county courthouse has to decide what reading is.

In 1890 Mississippi sits down to write a new constitution. It needs no poll tax. It needs no grandfather clause. It needs no lie. It transcribes the federal words exactly, hands a registrar a printed card, and lets him choose the passage.

LINCOLN is a cold, documentary alternate history that refuses every comfort its premise offers. He lived. He was magnificent. He was better at it than anybody could be — and it was not a problem that could be solved by being better at it.

Told in ledgers, statutes and committee votes across a hundred and four chapters, counting the cost in two columns to the last page.