The Lincoln Project

by Dan Gutman

  Julia had a similar feeling. Shopping and buying things for yourself is always fun, of course, but there’s something hollow about it. You reach a point where you have more than enough stuff, and getting even more of it doesn’t bring you happiness. Your brain cries out for some other kind of fulfillment.

  And David, well, after his experience going back to watch Wilt Chamberlain, he was ready for just about anything. It was like he’d just tasted ice cream for the first time. He wanted more.

  “So what will our adventure be?” Isabel asked anxiously.

  “Can I assume all four of you are on board?” asked Miss Z.

  “Yeah!” they replied as a group.

  “Good!” Miss Z said. “Before we get to your adventure, there’s one more order of business. We need to give you a name.”

  “What do we need a name for?” asked David. “We already have names.”

  “I can’t constantly be calling you David, Luke, Isabel, and Julia,” said Miss Z. “You need a group name. Something punchy.”

  “How about the Time Team?” suggested Isabel. “Because we travel through time, and we’re a team.”

  “That’s lame,” said Julia.

  “How about the Awesome Avengers?” suggested Luke. “Because we’re awesome, and we avenge stuff.”

  “Oh please,” groaned Isabel.

  “There are four of us,” said David. “It could be the something Four. A word that begins with the letter F. Funny. Fearless. Fantastic.”

  “There’s already a Fantastic Four,” said Luke. “It was a comic book and a movie.”

  “Furry,” said David, thinking out loud. “Flying . . . forever . . . flashing. Flashback! How about the Flashback Four?”

  “That sounds cool,” said Luke. “The Flashback Four.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Miss Z said. “Ladies?”

  “It works for me,” replied Isabel.

  “It’s better than the Awesome Avengers,” said Julia.

  “Then it’s agreed,” said Miss Z as she took some papers out of her desk drawer. “From now on you are the Flashback Four.”

  “So where are we going?” asked Isabel.

  “You’re going home, for now,” Miss Z replied, handing each of them a sheet. “Get a good night’s rest, and get these permission slips signed by a parent. I’ll see you here right after school lets out tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME

  I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING, READER. NO parent in their right mind would give permission to let their son or daughter get zapped through time by some experimental smartboard and sent on a mysterious “field trip” to who-knows-where.

  That’s true. But the next day, precisely at three thirty, all four members of the Flashback Four returned to the Hancock Tower with their permission slips signed and dated.

  To get his parents to agree, Luke told them his class would be taking a tour of Fenway Park, and he needed permission. As a diehard Sox fan, his father signed the form without hesitation. He never looked at it to see what he was signing.

  David, on the other hand, was totally honest with his parents. He simply said, “Some rich white lady invented this magical smartboard and she wants to send me and some other kids back in time with it.”

  “Very funny,” his mother replied, taking the permission slip and signing it. She never read the form either.

  Isabel had a long conversation with her parents, who were still learning English. She explained that she needed their permission to go on an educational field trip that could very possibly help her get into college and help her career someday. As soon as he heard the word college, Isabel’s father was reaching for a pen.

  Julia’s parents were both out of the country on separate business trips, so she couldn’t ask them to sign the permission slip. She just signed it herself, forging her mother’s signature, as she had done many times before when her parents weren’t around.

  When the Flashback Four arrived together on the twenty-third floor, Mrs. Vader took their permission slips and ushered them into the office. Miss Z was not there yet.

  “The boss is running a bit late,” Mrs. Vader told the kids. “Can I offer you some tea and cookies while you’re waiting?”

  “That would be lovely,” Isabel said, using her best manners.

  Mrs. Vader wheeled in a cart and poured a cup for each of them.

  “Do you know where Miss Z is going to send us?” Julia asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Have you been on one of these trips yourself?” asked Isabel.

  “Oh, goodness no,” replied Mrs. Vader. “I’m just Miss Zandergoth’s secretary.”

  “Do you mind my asking what happened to her?” Luke asked.

  “I believe she’s stuck in traffic,” said Mrs. Vader.

  “No, I mean, why is she in a wheelchair?”

  “It’s . . . rather personal,” Mrs. Vader replied, after thinking it over for a moment. “I’d rather not get into it.”

  Isabel noticed that Mrs. Vader’s eyes suddenly appeared watery. A single tear slid onto her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away with her sleeve.

  “Does she have a disease or something?” asked David.

  Mrs. Vader just nodded her head and replied simply, “ALS.”

  “That’s Lou Gehrig’s disease,” Luke said. “My uncle had it. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There’s no cure. My uncle died like a year after he got the bad news.”

  “Is Miss Z going to die?” asked Isabel.

  “I’ve said too much already,” Mrs. Vader replied, wheeling the cart out of the room.

  There was an awkward silence as Luke, Julia, Isabel, and David thought about what they had just heard, and wondered if Miss Z’s illness was the reason why they had been recruited in the first place.

  “I bet that’s why she was in such a big rush to finish building the Board,” Luke commented.

  At that moment, the door opened and Miss Z rolled into the room.

  “Sorry I’m late!” she said cheerfully. “Are you kids excited?”

  “Yeah!” all four replied.

  “Exactly where and when are we going?” asked Luke.

  “Well,” said Miss Z, “when I say ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ what does that mean to you?”

  “The score of a ball game?” asked David.

  “Are you kidding me?” Miss Z said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t they teach you kids anything in social studies these days?”

  “Four score and seven years ago has something to do with the Gettysburg Address,” Isabel said.

  “Right,” Miss Z replied. “And what do you know about the Gettysburg Address?”

  “Not much,” Isabel admitted. “I think I was absent the day we studied that.”

  “Wasn’t the Gettysburg Address where Abraham Lincoln lived in Gettysburg?” asked Julia.

  “No!” Miss Z shouted, slapping her forehead. “Lincoln never lived in Gettysburg!”

  “Then why did he have a Gettysburg address?” Julia asked.

  Luke rolled his eyes. “The Gettysburg Address was a speech he gave, in Gettysburg,” he said quietly.

  “Thank you!” said Miss Z.

  She rolled closer so she could more easily command their attention.

  “July first, 1863,” she said. “The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War, and its bloodiest battle. Fifty thousand casualties. Do you know how many men that is? Imagine Fenway Park filled to capacity. Now add another thirteen thousand soldiers.”

  “Wow,” David said.

  “Four months later, President Lincoln came to the battlefield to dedicate the cemetery where many of those soldiers were buried,” Miss Z continued. “That’s when he delivered the Gettysburg Address. It’s probably the most famous speech in American history.”

  “So you’re going to send us there?” asked David.

  “Yes,” Miss Z replied. “I’m going to send you to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
on November 19, 1863.”

  “What for? So we can see it?” Julia asked. “Do you need us to be eyewitnesses or something?”

  “In a way, yes,” replied Miss Z. “Actually, I have a job for you to do there.”

  “Aha, here’s the catch,” David said. “It’s about time, right? I knew there would be a catch.”

  Miss Z rolled over to her office wall filled with photos depicting great moments in history.

  “I have been accumulating these pictures my entire adult life,” she said, sighing.

  Then she pointed to the one spot on the wall that was empty.

  “See that space? My goal is to fill it. I need a picture of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. And I need you kids to shoot that picture.”

  CHAPTER 9

  FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO

  READER, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. THERE are plenty of photos of Abraham Lincoln. You’ve probably seen lots of them. In fact, the Library of Congress has about 7,000 photos taken during the Civil War, and 130 of them show Lincoln. There’s just one problem. Read on.

  “Now, let me get this straight,” Luke said to Miss Z. “Your plan is to send the four of us to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the year 1863 so we can take a picture of Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address. Do I have that right?”

  “Exactly!” Miss Z replied. “You see, Luke, photography is a form of time travel, when you think about it. We snap a picture and we capture that moment in time. Forever. It becomes ours. With that photo, we bring the past to us. It could be a hundred years in the past, or five minutes. Either way, we get to step inside that memory. A photo allows all of us to travel through time.”

  “I don’t get it,” Isabel said. “Why do you need another picture of Abraham Lincoln?”

  “You must understand that photography was a very young art form in Lincoln’s time,” Miss Z told the group. “The first photograph in history was taken in 1826, when Lincoln was a teenager. Pictures were still a novelty during the Civil War. The average person didn’t own a camera. They were very big, expensive, and hard to use.”

  Miss Z rolled herself over to her desk and took a folder out of one of the drawers. The children gathered around to peer over her shoulder.

  “Look at this,” she said, opening the folder. “There are only three existing photographs taken at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. None of them are close-ups, and none of them show Lincoln actually giving the speech. This is one of the photos.”

  “It’s blurry,” Julia commented. “Which one of those guys is Abraham Lincoln?”

  Miss Z took a magnifying glass out of her drawer and moved it slowly across the sea of faces in the wide crowd shot.

  “It’s the guy on horseback,” Luke said. “See? He’s wearing one of those stovepipe hats. And it looks like he’s saluting the troops. It must be the president.”

  “That’s what everybody thought for a long time,” Miss Z said. “But if you blow this photo up really big, you’ll see that the guy on horseback has longer hair than Lincoln, and his beard is fuller. Lincoln’s beard was kind of wispy, and he had a slight gap between his beard and his sideburns. This guy doesn’t have that.”

  “It’s the stovepipe hat that throws you off,” David noted. “There are a bunch of guys in the picture wearing those hats.”

  “Also, the guy on the horse has epaulets on his shoulders,” Miss Z told them. “We know that Lincoln was wearing a plain black overcoat that day. And by the way, presidents didn’t start saluting the troops until Ronald Reagan did it in 1981.”

  “So who’s the guy with the stovepipe hat?” asked Julia.

  “He’s probably just some local official,” replied Miss Z.

  “Then where’s Abraham Lincoln?” asked Isabel.

  “Over here,” Miss Z said, moving the magnifying glass slightly to the left of the man with the hat. “He was in front of the speaker’s stand, about to climb up onto the stage.”

  “It’s hard to see that,” said Luke.

  “Yes, that’s the problem,” Miss Z said. “In any case, all the pictures are fuzzy and none of them shows Lincoln actually delivering the Gettysburg Address. And if we don’t have a photo of an event, it’s almost like the event didn’t happen.”

  “If I go to a party and I don’t shoot a selfie with my friends,” Julia said, “I kinda feel like I wasn’t even at the party.”

  The others rolled their eyes.

  “Sometimes I feel like stuff we learn about in history is made up,” Luke noted. “It doesn’t seem real. Like Christopher Columbus arriving in America. Did that ever really happen?”

  “Yes, but if you saw a photo of Columbus landing on the beach, you’d believe it, right?” asked Miss Z. “A photo brings a moment of time into our consciousness.”

  “Sometimes even that’s not enough,” Isabel said. “This girl I know told me she thinks we never landed on the moon. She says all those pictures of the astronauts are fakes. She thinks the whole space program was a hoax.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” said Luke.

  “I have a question,” Isabel said. “If there were photographers at Gettysburg taking pictures, how come none of them got a shot of Lincoln giving his speech? He was the president of the United States. You’d think the photographers would be all over him.”

  “Good question,” Miss Z said. “Here’s my guess—the Gettysburg Address is just ten sentences long. It only lasted about two minutes. By the time the photographers set up their primitive cameras with those big glass plate negatives, the speech was over. That’s why I need to send you kids back to Gettysburg—to get the shot that those photographers missed.”

  “I can use my cell phone,” Julia said, pulling it out of her purse. “Hey, maybe Abraham Lincoln will pose for a selfie with me! That would be cool to post on Instagram!”

  Miss Z snorted.

  “Cell phone?” she said, opening up another drawer on her desk. “No, if you’re going to go back to 1863, you’re going to do it right.”

  She reached into her drawer and pulled out a very expensive Nikon digital single-lens reflex camera with a zoom lens.

  “Nice,” Luke said, examining the camera closely. “And you’re gonna show us how to use this thing? It looks pretty complicated.”

  “Of course.”

  “So I guess you’re gonna sell the picture we take and make millions of dollars from it, eh?” asked Julia.

  “Is that all you think about, money?” asked Isabel.

  “No,” Julia replied, shooting an angry look at Isabel.

  “I’m not going to sell it at all,” Miss Z said. “I already told you—I want to put the photo up on my wall. And eventually, down the line, I hope to build a museum filled with these photos of great moments in history. But of course, that won’t be for a long time.”

  The Flashback Four shot nervous glances at one another. They knew that Miss Z would probably not be around to see the opening of her museum. But Miss Z didn’t know they knew that.

  During the discussion about Gettysburg, David had been sitting and listening without saying much, but looking increasingly uncomfortable.

  “I’ve got a problem with all this,” he finally announced.

  “What is it, David?” asked Miss Z.

  “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, my skin is a little darker than everybody else’s here,” he said pointedly. “And you’re planning to send the four of us back to 1863.”

  “Yeah, so?” asked Julia, not quite putting two and two together.

  “There was this little thing called slavery going on back then,” David told them. “You may have heard of it. If I go back to 1863, they might try to make me into a slave.”

  “Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania,” Luke pointed out. “It was a Northern state. They didn’t have slavery there.”

  “So what?” David said, his voice rising a bit. “I saw that movie Twelve Years a Slave. The guy was in New York when he got kidnapped. I’m not about to get myself
sold into slavery just so we can take a picture.”

  All eyes turned to Miss Z.

  “I’m glad you brought that issue up, David,” she said. “You know, it was no coincidence that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The Gettysburg Address is engraved on the wall there. Here, let me show you something.”

  She opened the middle drawer of her desk and fished around until she found a faded, yellowed piece of paper.

  “Lincoln was wrong about one thing,” Miss Z told the group. “In the Gettysburg Address, he wrote, ‘The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.’ As it turned out, what he said there would be remembered for a long time.”

  “Wow,” Isabel said, putting out a hand to touch the paper. “Is that the real thing?”

  “Oh, I wish it was,” Miss Z said, chuckling. “There are only five known drafts of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln’s handwriting. This is just a copy. But I’ve studied it, analyzed it. Do any of you know what ‘four score and seven years ago’ refers to?”

  David, Isabel, and Julia shook their heads.

  “One score means twenty,” Luke finally said. “So four score is eighty. Four score and seven years ago means eighty-seven years ago.”

  “That’s right!” Miss Z said. “And do you know what year was eighty-seven years before 1863?”

  Julia pulled out her cell phone. The others did the math in their heads. David came up with the answer first.

  “Seventeen seventy-six,” he said.

  “Correct,” said Miss Z. “When Lincoln wrote ‘our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,’ he wasn’t talking about 1787, the year the Constitution was written and the United States became a country. He was talking about 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Your point?” asked Luke.

  “There’s a big difference between the Declaration and the Constitution,” Miss Z explained. “The Declaration said all men are created equal. The Constitution didn’t say all men were created equal. In the Constitution, some men were more equal than others. Slavery was considered a part of life, in at least some parts of the country. The Constitution left it up to each state to decide on slavery. In fact, in the Constitution, a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person. At the time, one out of every eight Americans was a slave.”