A More Fragile Union (Book 2): What Follows From This
The President-elect is dead. The Constitution is silent. And the men in the room have until morning.
Abraham Lincoln was shot on a railway platform in Baltimore on the morning of 23 February 1861, nine days before he was to take the oath.
By half past midnight on the twenty-fourth, four men have woken a president who would rather not be disturbed. James Buchanan has eight days left in office and no appetite for any of them. Winfield Scott is seventy-four and cannot mount a horse. Stephen Douglas is dying and knows it. And John Crittenden, whose compromise failed in January, has worked out what none of them wants to say aloud: the Constitution provides for the death of a President. It says nothing whatever about the death of a President-elect. There is no oath, no successor, no procedure. There is a body in the East Room and a country that does not yet know what has happened to it,
What Follows From This is the whole of a single day - 24 February 1861 - told hour by hour. In Montgomery, a six-day-old government decides what to say. At Fort Sumter, a major with eighty-five men lowers his flag to half-staff for a president who was never sworn. In Quebec, a governor general must decide alone, because his instructions from London are fourteen days away. In Rochester, Frederick Douglass stands before a hall that has come for consolation and gives them a question instead.
The series began with Good Morning, Friends, which covered the day of the assassination. This volume is the day after: the improvised government, the vanished chain of command, and a republic discovering that the answer it needs was never written down.Meticulously researched alternate history. The people are real, the situations are real, and the silence in the Constitution is real.
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