The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  Halsey and Bates looked at each other and waited for Lincoln to speak again. It was several minutes.

  Then Lincoln raised his head from contemplation of the carpet pattern and said, “Is there anything else?”

  Bates whispered, “Not for a while, sir.”

  Lincoln stood. “Then I’m off to bed.”

  Halsey got up and followed Lincoln to the door. “Mr. President, wait.”

  Lincoln stopped. “What else, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m supposed to see you downstairs and delegate an escort.”

  Lincoln stepped into the hallway. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  “But, sir”—Halsey hurried after him—“Secretary Stanton insists.”

  Gas lamps lit their way to the top of the stairs, to the landing at the duty desk, and down to the first floor. The gas was always burning in the War Department.

  Lincoln bounded down, two steps at a time, and his voice echoed with annoyance: “Lieutenant, I walk over here every night by myself. Most nights, I carry a cane to fend off the shadows. Mrs. Lincoln feels better if I do—”

  “She’s right, sir,” said Halsey. “There are people abroad who … who…” Halsey did not want to state the obvious.

  So Lincoln stated it for him: “Would do me harm?”

  “Well, yes, sir.”

  Lincoln turned for the east exit. He was moving quickly, as if running away from the bad news that always seemed to be arriving on the wires.

  At the exit, two soldiers stood guard, two who had been wounded badly enough that door duty in the capital was the best service they could render. One snapped to attention. The other, whose left sleeve was pinned at the elbow, opened the door.

  Lincoln stopped on the threshold and looked out at the White House, glimmering beyond the trees. “If a man is determined to bring me down between here and my front door, Lieutenant, it will be impossible to protect me.”

  “It’s still our job, sir,” said Halsey.

  “So it is.” Lincoln seemed to soften. “So it is. And we wouldn’t want the secretary angry.” Lincoln looked at Halsey and the two soldiers. “He’d have you all shot if he found out I was walking home alone.”

  “You know him better than I, sir,” said Halsey.

  Lincoln pointed to Halsey’s armpit. “Is that one of those newfangled shoulder holsters under your coat? The kind with the spring-loaded clip?”

  “Yes, sir.” Since military officers attached to the civilian telegraph office did not wear their uniforms, Halsey wore a Brooks Brothers tweed suit. He lifted a lapel to reveal holster and pistol. “Adams thirty-one-caliber, double action.”

  “So,” said Lincoln, “if we’re attacked between here and my front door, we’ll have no worries.”

  “No, sir.” Halsey did not add that he was a dead shot, though he was.

  “Then lead on,” said Lincoln.

  And together they stepped into the darkness, following a path through the trees to the crescent-shaped carriage drive. Lincoln moved quickly on those long legs. Halsey hurried to keep up.

  “So tell me, Lieutenant,” said Lincoln as they went, “did you know my son?”

  “No, sir. I was in the Law School. He was a freshman, but I noticed him on occasion in the Yard. He became something of a celebrity at election time, as you can imagine.”

  “I can,” said Lincoln a bit ruefully. “So did I.”

  Gas lanterns illuminated the great portico of the Executive Mansion. A light burned in the bedroom of Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, another in Mrs. Lincoln’s room.

  “I’ve heard,” said the president, “that I did not win a straw poll at Harvard.”

  “You’ve heard correctly, sir.”

  “Do you think the young men were expressing their parents’ opinions?”

  “Well, the Hutchinsons of Massachusetts are in textiles, sir, so—”

  “So you voted for cheap cotton?”

  Halsey sensed movement out on Pennsylvania Avenue. Someone was watching them from the shadows. He stopped and put his hand inside his coat.

  But a voice from the street, a Negro voice in timbre and tone, cried out: “God Bless you, Mr. President.”

  Lincoln raised his hand in a little wave and went on up the flagstone walk.

  The shadow watched a moment longer, then moved away.

  Halsey watched the shadow a moment longer, then hurried after the president.

  And Lincoln said, “You haven’t answered my question, Lieutenant. How did you vote in Harvard’s straw poll?”

  “Well, sir—” Halsey decided right there that he would not be intimidated by any man. “—I’m old enough to vote legally.”

  “And—”

  “I voted for Senator Douglas, sir.”

  “So, you and your family are not Abolitionist, then?”

  Halsey said, “Massachusetts is the seat of abolition, but my father and uncle—”

  “Your uncle? Hutchinson of American Telegraph? You thank him for your new position in the War Department, don’t you?”

  “After Ball’s Bluff, my uncle told Secretary Stanton that I had worked for him in Boston. I had learned the telegraph business from the bottom up, so I knew about wires and batteries and resonators and such, so I still had much to offer, despite my wound.”

  Lincoln stopped and looked Halsey in the eye. “I believe you do, Lieutenant.” Then he turned his gaze to the front of the mansion. “I believe all you wounded boys still have much to offer, and all the boys who’ve died had much to offer, too, even … even my own boy.”

  The president’s middle son, twelve-year-old Willie, had been carried off by fever in early March. His youngest, Tad, had barely survived. His wife was said to have gone insane with grief. But Lincoln had soldiered on, through crisis after crisis.… How to persuade McClellan to use the mighty army that he had built? How to make sense of the slaughter at Shiloh? How to justify the freeing of the District slaves?

  Lincoln stared up at the great portico, as if he expected it to fall on his head. Then he said, “I’ve enjoyed our talk, Lieutenant. I will look forward to seeing more of you on my nightly passages.”

  And Halsey Hutchinson watched the long black shadow ascend the stairs, push open the unlocked White House door, and step inside.

  There, he thought, went the loneliest man in the world.

  * * *

  Just before dawn, the telegraphs stopped clattering. So Bates and the key operators retired to a basement room where a pot of coffee always boiled.

  Alone in the office, Halsey relished the morning quiet, a small reward for passing the night in labor. He signed an order for a new key word to be transmitted to all federal stations, hidden in a message about a requisition of shoes for army mules. He lowered the gas in the ring of lights hanging from the ceiling. Then he gathered up his papers and stepped to Eckert’s desk to put them into the assigned pigeonhole.

  And that was when he saw it: the president’s notebook.

  Lincoln had tossed it onto the desk when he began the raisin story. It had slid under the pigeonholes, where it lay forgotten as news arrived of McClellan’s retreat.

  Halsey’s first thought was to put it in the dispatch drawer.

  But what if the contents were private, so private that the president would not want Major Eckert or Stanton reading it? Perhaps he should examine it, just to be certain.

  So he took the book and stepped to the window.

  The sun was appearing somewhere over Maryland. The slanting rays etched patterns of light onto the buildings of Pennsylvania Avenue and created long shadows at the feet of passersby—men riding horses, washerwomen carrying mops and pails, drunks staggering home, mattress maids heading for work or few hours of rest on mattresses of their own.

  Washington was an early town … and a late one.

  Halsey flipped to the last pages and saw a date, April 16. A diary? He read the entry written in Lincoln’s large, well-practiced hand:

  Signed this day
: emancipation for DC. I have ever desired to see city freed from slavery in some satisfactory way. Only question, expediency: What of border state reaction? Would they fear a similar move and secede? This concern stayed my hand until Sen. Sumner asked if I knew the identity of the largest slave holder in Washington. He said, “It is yourself, sir . . now that the Senate has passed the bill to free the District slaves.” So I signed. But … is $300 a head sufficient restitution to preserve loyalty of District slaveholders? And what of more general emancipation?

  General emancipation? Could the president actually be thinking such thoughts? Opposing slavery was hardly the same as freeing more than four million ignorant Negroes. Of course, the president was talking to himself here, clarifying ideas in his own mind. Halsey thought about closing the book, but he read on:

  What of freed Negroes? Black man will never be mental equal of white man, so full citizenship significant problem. Citizenship means suffrage. Black suffrage? Radical Repubs insist it must follow a general emancipation. I will seek another path when this war is over. Whether it lasts three more months or three more years, we will face great challenges in rebuilding trust between the sections, challenges best met by removing the Negroes from the debate. I will seek a solution that benefits all, North and South, black and white: Negro colonization. I support amendment to District emancipation, providing funds for such purpose. But to where? Africa? Central America? Must discuss with their leaders. Immediate general emancipation is a thing I consider but am not ready to do. The real problem with a general emancipation is—

  There the writing stopped, at the place where Bates had asked about the raisins.

  Again Halsey thought about shoving this diary into one of the locking drawers, but he could not resist turning to the front page.

  The first entry was dated March 3, 1861, the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration.

  Congress proposes Constitutional amend’t, stating federal gov’t “shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states.” I am for the old ship and the chart of the old pilots. There is no need for amend’t to protect interests of slave owners. It is not now and never will be my intention to interfere with them in their own states, as I’ll say t’morrow.

  Halsey flipped through a few more pages, read a few more entries. Each one revealed some new bit of the president’s thinking about slavery and his attitude toward the Negroes, whose existence in bondage may have been the catalyst for the war but was not, in the eyes of thinking men like himself, the true reason for fighting it.

  In an entry for early March 1861, Lincoln jotted down calculations:

  $400 per slave x number of slaves in Border States = cost of how many days of war? Compensated emancipation cheaper than fighting.

  In April, a week after the war had begun, Lincoln wrote:

  Gloom and torment. Await troops, but only Mass. answers call. Do we have any army but what comes from Mass. Where are the rest? Do they hesitate, thinking this is war to free the Negro? This is not a war to free the Negro. The central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity of proving that popular gov’t is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority may break away whenever they choose. If we fail, it will go far to prove incapability of people to govern themselves.

  Halsey heard echoes.… Lincoln had said much of this publicly, but not all of it. And though he could appear the gloomiest of men—until he told a story—he could not have wanted Americans to know that their leader had ever been afflicted by “gloom and torment.”

  Halsey realized that his mouth had gone dry. Spittin’ cotton. That’s what the soldiers called it when a man’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth before battle. But for Halsey it happened as he read the thoughts of the man whose election had caused all the battles … or so some claimed.

  And he decided, right then, that he would not betray those thoughts. Those that were private and unspoken might also be incendiary. Best return them to the president as soon as possible. But when?

  Now.

  Though Halsey was not supposed to leave his post, he would rather answer questions about a brief absence than about a small leather-bound diary. So he slipped it into his breast pocket, turned, and …

  … bumped into a slope-shouldered man dressed mostly in brown—brown suit, brown vest, brown tie, brown porkpie hat, thick brown beard, stubby brown cigar.

  “Leavin’ early, Lieutenant?” Even his voice sounded brown, low pitched and dark.

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Wouldn’t want you sneakin’ off before your shift ends, not after stuffin’ government property in your pocket.”

  Halsey looked into the brown eyes beneath the thick brown brow. The color described the man. Halsey hoped the color red did not describe his own face. He said, “Detective Joseph Albert McNealy, you are a suspicious man.”

  “So there’s nothin’ in your pocket?”

  “What’s in my pocket’s my own business.”

  McNealy flashed a smile, tobacco-stain yellow in that nest of brown facial hair. “We live in a city under siege, Lieutenant. There’s rebel spies on every corner. There’s rebel sympathizers in every family. There’s even rebels in this building, I suspect.”

  “Is that why you’re sneaking around at six in the morning?”

  There came a commotion in the hall—shuffling feet, snapping heels, muskets presenting, and a single voice rising. It was the sound that always preceded the puffed-up man in the swallowtail coat. Then he appeared:

  Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, already in high dudgeon, and the day hadn’t even begun yet. He stomped along the hallway, stopped at the cipher room door, and scowled through tiny spectacles at Halsey and the detective. The scowl, the long graying beard, and the shaven upper lip gave him the look of a prophet who believed in a god of vengeance, not of love. “What dispatches have come in overnight?”

  Halsey pulled himself to attention: “Three from Tennessee, sir, two from Manassas, and—”

  “The Peninsula! What news from the Peninsula? From McClellan?”

  “Just a moment, sir.” Halsey went to the desk and got the pile of dispatches.

  Stanton snatched them and hurried on. “Stay close, Lieutenant. I’ll be answering to these presently.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McNealy watched Stanton step into his office; then he said to Halsey, “The secretary cannot abide General McClellan.”

  Stanton’s disembodied voice boomed out, “I also cannot abide War Department detectives wasting time here when the whole city is crawling with no-gooders.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered McNealy, “I’m heading out now, sir.” Then he turned back to Halsey and whispered, “The only thing he can abide less is a man who works for him who is not working for him. You follow?”

  “No.”

  “A man who may be working for himself. A man who may be pocketing War Department information when everyone’s off drinking coffee. Something worth a pretty penny to some rebel spy, maybe.”

  Halsey reddened now. He could feel it in his cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment but anger. He knew how to draw a perfect five-pointed star with five pistol shots at a hundred paces. He knew what it felt like to take a bullet for his country. He knew what the generals were thinking before the president did. He would not brook the suspicions of this Chicago door-peeper. But as he grabbed McNealy’s lapel, he heard Stanton’s voice echo down the hallway: “Lieutenant Hutchinson. Come in here!”

  McNealy’s eyes shifted. “Best see what your boss wants.”

  Halsey brought his face close to the detective’s. “No man questions my integrity.”

  “Integrity is a young man’s luxury, Lieutenant. My job is too important for integrity.” McNealy then peeled Halsey’s fingers one-by-one from his lapel. “I’ll be watching.” And one of the most accomplished rebel-catchers in the War Department detective service set out to catch a few more.

  II.

  It was not until
an hour later that Halsey’s shift ended and he could hurry down the stairs and step into the sunshine.

  Ordinarily he relished April mornings on the Potomac. No New England chill in the air, no east wind puffing the last exhalations of winter off the Atlantic. Here spring days came in gentle and warm and could make a man forget for a few moments the cataclysm engulfing the nation. But not that morning.

  Halsey looked around to make sure that McNealy was not watching from behind some pillar or post. Then he took the path through the trees to the White House carriage drive, where he was reminded that one man’s cataclysm could be another man’s opportunity… … or another woman’s.

  They were already lining up, as they did each dawn—office seekers, favor seekers, friends, relatives, relatives of relatives, men bearing letters of introduction, women bearing petitions of mercy, widows, orphans, inventors, scoundrels, scalawags, the sons of scalawags, and the sons of rich men, too—all waiting for nine o’clock, when the White House would officially open and they would crowd in under the portico, into the foyer, up the stairs, and if they were lucky, all the way to the reception room outside the president’s office, their petitions in one hand, their business cards in the other, their expectations high that before the day ended, the president himself would summon them to a personal audience and satisfy their petition or solve their problem.

  It was said that at the beginning, Lincoln had spent most of his day with these people.

  His secretaries had imposed some order on the process, so that he could put in a proper day’s work. But he still insisted on seeing them. He called it his “public opinion bath.”

  Halsey ignored the dirty looks as he bypassed the line and went up to Edward McManus, the doddering majordomo who had been answering the White House door since the days of Andy Jackson.

  McManus had a fringe of chin whiskers like the president’s and a florid Irish face. “The gates open at nine,” he said. “The line forms at the back. Just give me your card and go to the back. The president decides who he sees and who he don’t, but the back is where the line forms.”

  “Official business. Tell the president Lieutenant Halsey Hutchinson requests a moment of his time.”