The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  He knelt and pressed a sequence of floor tiles in the linen closet; then he gripped the doorframe on either side and pulled. With a hydraulic whoosh, the whole closet slid out of the wall and pivoted into the hallway.

  In front of him now was a stainless steel door with a combination lock.

  He spun the dial, and the door opened. The space beyond was not much wider than the linen closet, not much deeper than the shower stalls in the bathrooms on either side. Walls, floor, and ceiling were steel lined. Temperature and humidity were strictly controlled. And in case of fire, the room would fill with halon gas to kill the flames and preserve the contents.

  He kept most of his collection in the Antiquaria office on Newbury Street, where he did the daily work of buying and selling everything from Shakespeare Second Folios to signed first editions of the complete James Bond. But here was where he kept the things that mattered most, the treasures he hoped never to part with until the time came to bequeath them to his son or give them to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  Aside from his contractor brother, who had installed this room, the only people who knew about it were Evangeline and his silent partner, Orson Lunt.

  He flipped on the lights. To the left was a wall of tray-type stainless filing cases, all alphabetized. The S drawer held a quarto of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, printed in 1598. In the W file was George Washington’s letter of March 5, 1775, ordering the army to go on to Dorchester Heights.

  And when Peter pulled out the L file, he was looking into the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, forthright, confident, careworn. The picture had been taken by Alexander Gardner in November 1863, a few weeks before the Gettysburg Address. It had been printed on a carte de visite and signed by Lincoln himself. As far as Peter knew, it was one of only a few authentically signed Lincoln cartes in existence.

  But the real treasure lay to the left of the picture.

  In 1864, Lincoln had signed forty-eight printed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, to be auctioned at a Philadelphia fund-raiser for the United States Sanitary Commission. They were known as the Leland-Boker editions, after the printer, and only half were known to exist. Peter Fallon was looking at one of them.

  He would be the anonymous donor at his own show, and he would insist on high security. After all, Robert F. Kennedy’s signed Leland-Boker had recently sold for $3,700,000, the most money ever paid for a presidential document. Peter and Orson Lunt had bought theirs from an Illinois dentist in 1990 for $300,000. It was not as valuable as Kennedy’s, nor as good a deal. Kennedy had paid only $9,500 for his in 1961, and the Kennedy name had given it a provenance that added a premium to any price.

  In the humming quiet of the secret room, Peter studied the single column of type and the confident signature, A. Lincoln. In the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had decreed that those who had been held in bondage for generations would “be then, thenceforward, and forever free” … at least in the rebellious states. He had not freed the slaves in loyal states, because he did not believe the Constitution gave him that right, and he feared that they would secede if he tried, but he had taken the first step toward racial equality in America.

  Peter considered it an act of enormous moral and political courage.

  After the Proclamation, the war was no longer a struggle between the ideologies competing in America since its birth, between those who wanted a strong central government and those who wished, as Jefferson Davis had said, simply “to be left alone.” Lincoln had transformed the war into a struggle over the very meaning of America.

  But like so many in those days, Lincoln would pay for his beliefs with his life.

  Peter glanced at the document to the right of the Gardner photograph, one of the most poignant letters ever penned in America.

  A surgeon named Curtis, of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, had written it to his mother in April 1865. He had gone to the White House on the morning after Lincoln had kept his appointment with the assassin. He had gone to perform the autopsy.

  The letter described a room on the second floor, across the hall from Mrs. Lincoln’s bedroom: a bed, heavy draperies, a wardrobe, sofas occupied by military officers and civilian officials in stunned, grief-stricken silence … and the naked body of the president, covered with a sheet and towels, lying cold and dead on a board suspended between two sawhorses.

  It was a letter of stark clinical detail. The doctor had been performing a primitive forensic analysis, after all. He described the removal and dissection of Lincoln’s brain and the search for the bullet, which he could not find until, “suddenly, it dropped through my fingers and fell, breaking the silence of the room with its clatter into an empty basin beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger—dull, motionless, and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as perhaps we may never realize.”

  How true, thought Peter Fallon.

  The man who fired that bullet, John Wilkes Booth, had heard Lincoln suggest four nights earlier that the nation’s renewal and reconstruction would mean extending the vote to some—but not all—Negro freedmen.

  “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth had been heard to growl. “That is the last speech he will ever give. I will put him through.”

  And so he had.

  Since then, historians had sifted every Lincoln document and observation, searching for meanings and meanings within meanings. They had relived for one generation after another every moment of that terrible Easter weekend. And they had agreed with the young surgeon that the world had seen mighty changes, some because of what Lincoln had done, some because of what he had not lived to do.

  So … was the history now settled?

  How could it be, when an enigmatic letter might emerge a century and a half later, referencing a certain “something” that Lincoln wanted returned. What was it? What changes had it wrought? And how much, Peter had to wonder, would it be worth?

  Time, he decided, for a whole weekend in Washington.

  But before he packed, he texted Antoine Scarborough, his research assistant:

  Abraham Lincoln, a lieutenant named Hutchinson in the telegraph office, a corporal named Jeremiah Murphy. That’s all I got. See what you can find. We’ll talk later.

  TWO

  April 1862

  That night the Negroes sang.

  They sang in the churches where they worshipped the white Jesus. They sang in the hammer-nail hovels where they lived. They even sang on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Uncle Abe might hear them in his fancy white house.

  From the second-floor windows of the War Department telegraph office, Lieutenant Halsey Hutchinson watched them go by.

  They were singing spirituals and minstrel songs and marching songs, too, songs that climbed Jacob’s ladder and raised a ruckus and blessed John Brown, whose body by then had been three years a-molderin’ in the grave, but whose truth was surely marching on through that warm spring night, because Congress had passed an emancipation act for the District of Columbia. And after five days of rumination, the president had signed the bill, freeing three thousand slaves with the stroke of a pen … and the promise of restitution to the District slave owners.

  So the Negroes sang.

  Halsey Hutchinson did not much care about them. He had joined the army to preserve the Union. But he could not blame them for celebrating.

  He even hummed a bit of “John Brown’s Body” himself. It was a tune with a stir to it. It made a man want to march. It made him want to sing out from deep in his chest. It had even inspired a Massachusetts lady to write new lyrics that she called a battle hymn. Halsey had read the lyrics in the Atlantic Monthly, but he had not yet committed them to memory. It would not have mattered, because he could not sing … anymore.

  A year earlier, when he gathered with his wine-punching friends in Boston clubs or performed for adoring females in fancy parlors, he could give out with the voice of a baritone angel. And no lieutenant had
ever offered a sweeter hymn at Camp Massasoit, where the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry had mustered and trained and worshipped through six weeks of summer Sabbaths. And during those long autumn nights of tenting on the Potomac, his songs had made the waiting easier for any who heard him … Billy Yank or Johnny Reb across the river.

  Now it was a wonder that he could even talk.

  A rebel bullet had struck him in the throat, leaving his voice a graveled whisper, perfectly distinct but no longer loud enough to be heard by men in the midst of battle.

  That same bullet had also damaged his resolve. One moment he had been rallying his men at the base of a promontory called Ball’s Bluff, the next he was sprawled in the mud with blood gushing from a wound at his collar. By the grace of God, it had been a glancing wound, but a wound nonetheless, as if someone had struck him in the neck with a ball-peen hammer.

  He still believed in the sanctity of the Union. But after Ball’s Bluff, he had begun to wonder if the Lord believed otherwise. Brave men wasted on a worthless objective, hundreds slaughtered on a Potomac riverbank, half his fine regiment killed, wounded, or captured … all because of blundering leaders, bad intelligence, and the belief that nine hundred men could make a riverborne assault with three rowboats and a barge.…

  Perhaps the Lord had been telling them something at Ball’s Bluff. Perhaps the dissolution of the Union was foreordained, so best end the bloodshed quickly.

  Halsey drove that thought from his mind whenever it surfaced like a blue-clad body floating in the Potomac. It would never do for a man who now worked in the very brainpan of the war to believe that the war was unwinnable.

  Besides, like Bull Run before it, Ball’s Bluff had turned out to be no more than a little pantomime before the play, something to amuse the theater patrons as they made their way to their seats. The real show had begun that spring, when General McClellan took the army south to the Virginia Peninsula. And the biggest scene yet had unfolded at a Tennessee crossroads called Shiloh Meeting House, where more Americans had fallen in two days than in all the previous wars that Americans had fought.

  Halsey brought a hand to the scar at his neck and tried to feel some vibration in his broken voice.

  Instead, he felt … something … behind him, a movement, a force, a presence. Without turning, he knew what it was: Abraham Lincoln, on his nightly visit. Then he heard the high, reedy voice and sharp prairie accent:

  “That sure is a fine song they’re singin’.” Lincoln looked down at the Negroes splashing through the pools of gaslight on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Halsey glanced at the clock over the mantel. “It’s barely ten, sir. You’re out early.”

  “And they’re out late.” Lincoln kept his eyes on the Negroes below, though he stayed back so they could not see him. “When I signed the District emancipation, I did not rescind the curfew against coloreds on the streets after ten o’clock.”

  “But some would say that tonight, you’ve given them reason to break curfew, sir.”

  “Some would.”

  From the corner of his eye, Halsey looked up at the president for a clue as to what he was thinking. Of course, no one in Washington looked down on Lincoln, not literally anyway. No one was tall enough. And no one ever really knew what he was thinking until he decided to make his thoughts plain.

  Halsey admired the face that so many called “homely” or worse. The features had a masculine strength—bushy black brows, a nose as straight-ahead as the point of a plow, neat furrows cut from the nostrils to the beard. And the skin—permanently browned and leathered—gave evidence that the strength was hard earned, honestly come by in a lifetime of frontier laboring and horseback lawyering.

  And just then, Lincoln was smiling.

  People said that his little half smile seemed to describe a dozen different benevolent emotions at once. But when a man’s expression could convey so much, it might also be good for conveying nothing at all. Halsey thought that Lincoln’s smile concealed things, too, deep things, mysterious things.

  After a moment, Lincoln said, “So, what do we hear from our generals?”

  “Dispatches are in the usual place, sir.” Halsey gestured to the desk between the windows: a work surface supported by spindly legs on one side, office safe on the other, a superstructure of pigeonholes, shelves, locking drawers … the beating heart of the brainpan, if there could be such a thing.

  All the dispatches from all the battlefronts passed first through the War Department telegraph office … and that desk.

  They arrived in cipher on sounding keys that clattered away day and night and even then were setting up a racket in the adjoining room. A key operator translated the dots and dashes into a series of seemingly unrelated words, apparent gibberish. Then he brought them into the cipher room and placed them on the desk by the door. A cipher operator—working from charts, templates, and keywords—made sense of the gibberish. Then he placed the finished message in the top drawer of that desk.

  By day, Major Thomas Eckert sat at the desk and ran the office. He cataloged the dispatches, then delivered them to Secretary of War Stanton, whose office adjoined through a screened door on the other side. The irascible and autocratic Stanton would then determine what information he would release to the world and what he would withhold, and since so much of the news was bad, he withheld a great deal. But at night, Eckert and Stanton went home.

  Lincoln was usually wide awake and wandering.

  He might amble over from the White House at ten or at midnight or in the small hours when the rest of the world was wrapped in sleep. Sometimes he came in shirtsleeves with a gray plaid shawl over his shoulders. Sometimes he wore an old linen duster and floppy felt hat, as if they might disguise Washington’s most recognizable figure. But usually he wore his familiar black suit.

  If the wires were buzzing, he would raise the gas in the lamp above Eckert’s desk, take out a book, and wait. If all was quiet, he would soon be on his way back to the White House. But whenever he finished reading through the messages, he would always say, “So, boys, I’m down to the raisins. Anything else?”

  That night, cipher operator David Homer Bates looked up from his desk and said, “I’m working on something from General McClellan, sir, if you’d like to wait.”

  “Well, I don’t feel much like sleepin’—” Lincoln pulled out the chair. “—so cipher on. Maybe it’s the casualty numbers.”

  Earlier dispatches from McClellan had described an attack across a dam on the Warwick River, an attempt to pierce rebel positions before Yorktown, but it seemed that McClellan had lost his nerve once the Vermonters who led the attack gained a toehold. This did not surprise Halsey. Back in October, McClellan had not even bothered himself about the crossing at Ball’s Bluff. Maybe it was something about rivers.…

  But Halsey did not share his thoughts with the president. It was not his place. Instead he busied himself with paperwork at his desk in the corner.

  Bates put his head to the work in front of him.

  Lincoln took a pencil and small red leather-bound notebook from his pocket and began to write.

  Then Bates looked up. “Mr. President, I’ve been working in this office for the better part of a year, and I’m puzzled about something.”

  Lincoln said, “What is it?”

  “Whenever you read through the telegrams, sir, when you get to the last one, you always say you’re ‘down to the raisins.’ Why is that?”

  Lincoln chuckled and cocked his head.

  Halsey sensed a story coming on.

  “Well, now—” Lincoln tossed the notebook onto the desk, then leaned back in the chair and unfolded those long legs, so that they seemed to travel halfway across the room.

  Yes, thought Halsey, another story.

  “There was this little girl back in Springfield,” Lincoln began. “And it was her birthday. And she ate so much raisin-and-spice cake—the kind with the thick white butter-frostin’—that she looked like a foundered horse, with
a belly so full, she could barely move and sickly-white skin the same color as that frostin’. And right after her little friends left, she took to castin’ up her accounts.”

  “You mean she vomited?” asked Halsey.

  “Lieutenant, you do make me wonder what my son can be learning at that Harvard College. Castin’, pukin’, chuckin’, tossin’ … all fine euphemisms for the act of vomiting.”

  “If my experience with the Harvard punch bowl is any indication, sir, your son will be familiar enough with the act if not with the terminology.”

  “Well, every boy must learn his lessons,” said Lincoln, “though I have to admit that the taste of spirits never held much interest for me.”

  “But, sir,” said Homer Bates, “the raisins?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lincoln. “The little girl kept pukin’ for so long, her parents thought she might cast up her very own stomach and die right then, right on her birthday. So they sent for the doctor. He came and gave her belly a listen, then he asked to see the last thing she’d tossed. So they brought him the chamber pot. He took one look at the little black bits floatin’ in the pot bottom, and said, ‘Folks, don’t you worry none at all. She’ll be better and better soon, ’cause she’s down to the raisins.’”

  After a moment Bates’s moon face brightened and he laughed.

  Halsey managed a smile. “‘Down to the raisins.’ That means her stomach’s empty … nothing more to see.”

  “Just that,” said Lincoln. “So … when I read through the pile to the message I saw on my last visit, I know that I need go no further, because I’m down to the raisins.”

  “Well, sir—” Bates got up and gave him a sheet of yellow paper. “—have a raisin.”

  Lincoln laughed, took the dispatch, and read.

  First, his little smile fell off. Then his voice lost all good humor. “Three Vermont companies. Thirty-nine casualties. Thirty-nine more sons with grieving mothers. And the position abandoned.” He held the dispatch for a moment; then he let it flutter to the floor, as if it were simply too heavy.