The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  “But he’s back.”

  “From what my boy in the New York FBI tells me, Harrison M. Keeler made some friends on the inside, bad actors who appreciated his expertise in the tax laws they’d been violatin’. They also liked his general attitude toward the governing structures of our fair republic. When he popped up again, he was running a Web site called KnightsofLiberty.com.”

  “We should check that out,” said Evangeline.

  “Yeah, well, they’re into survivalist shit, anti-federal stuff, anti-tax, but anti-big-business, too. They use a star on a blue field as their symbol.”

  “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” said Peter, “one of the earliest symbols of Southern resistance. A good song, too.”

  “Appropriate,” said Henry. “He’s a rebel, through and through.”

  “A real RW,” said Evangeline.

  “What’s that?” asked Henry.

  “Rightie wacko.”

  “Honey, when you get that far out, there ain’t no right and no left, just a big circle. A man can go so far on the right, he ends up comin’ back on the left, or the other way around. Keeler’s last bit on his Web site is all about how we should start shootin’ bankers who’ve been sittin’ on the bailout money from 2008 and won’t lend it. Now, is that a rightie or a lefty or just one pissed-off motherfucker?”

  “Is he in trouble now?” asked Peter

  “Not now. But he’s looked at a few indictments … drug traffickin’, haulin’ guns across state lines. And somebody got killed on his property out in Ohio, and—get this—it was land that some folks say was once owned by the Knights of the Golden Circle.”

  “Who were they?” asked Evangeline.

  “A group of Confederate sympathizers,” said Peter. “Founded in 1858. Had big dreams of making the South the power in an empire that included Mexico and the Caribbean. There were cells in all the border states, where they helped Union deserters and committed sabotage. There’s even a myth that John Wilkes Booth belonged.”

  “So I don’t like ’em on general principles,” said Henry. “Supposedly they buried gold all over the South. Some say they did it so they could keep fighting after Lee surrendered. You can see these treasure maps on all kinds of Web sites. But no one ever found any of this gold. Point is, if you’re in touch with these boys, and in competition with them, you need Henry and his big-ass gun.”

  Evangeline gave Henry a long look, shook her head, and said, “Shit. Just plain shit.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” said Henry. Then he pointed to her sundae. “If you ain’t gonna finish that, can I?”

  “No.” She picked up the plate and scooped the ice cream into her mouth.

  Peter’s iPhone bonged.

  There were two e-mails. The first came from a generic Gmail account.

  He read it, then read it aloud: “‘It’s been said many times in Washington: Follow the money. If you want to know more, meet me tomorrow, alone, 7 A.M., Overland Garage, Nash Street, Rosslyn, spot D32.’”

  Evangeline said, “That sounds fishy.”

  “But interesting.” Peter took a sip of beer. “That’s the Watergate mantra, ‘Follow the money.’ And the sender wants to meet in the garage where Woodward and Bernstein met Deep Throat.”

  Henry clapped his hands together. “Intrigue. I love intrigue.”

  Evangeline said, “What’s the other e-mail?”

  It came from Antoine. Peter read it to them: “‘Daily Republican, 1862: Halsey Hutchinson was accused of murder in August. Allegedly killed niece of NY Congressman Wood, a big Copperhead. Halsey disappeared. I am attaching the news stories. Will keep reading.’”

  Peter clicked on the links. While he drank another Yuengling, he read of the bloody scene in the Willard Hotel, of the charges of John Wilkes Booth, and so on.

  “Amazing,” said Evangeline. “He knew Lincoln and Booth.”

  “It may be a small town today,” said Peter. “It was even smaller back then.”

  There was a note above the next link: “‘Here is the last reference to Halsey. It describes a shoot-out on the Aqueduct Bridge, near the site of Key Bridge today: ‘The shootist, heavily bearded, wore a brown suit and derby. Detective Joseph Albert McNealy of the War Department detective service, says that the man was dressed just as Halsey Hutchinson had been dressed on the night that he murdered Constance Wood, and he used the same kind of pistol, an Adams pocket revolver.’”

  Henry said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  He looked at his computer again. “Harrison M. Keeler. Middle name, McNealy.”

  “And Peter,” said Evangeline, “that pistol you were holding tonight. Bryant called it an Adams. He bought it from Dawkins.”

  “That boy back in Boston is a real history detective,” said Henry.

  TEN

  August 1862

  Halsey Hutchinson needed a friend.

  He was thankful for those he had and for the help they had given, but he needed a friend with power.

  It had been four weeks since the murder of Constance Wood.

  Her uncles had taken her body home to New York. Benjamin had told the newspapers that he blamed her death on the immorality of a war that would cause even upstanding young men like Halsey Hutchinson to commit murder. Then he and Fernando had gotten on to the business of campaigning for Congress.

  Even as Halsey mourned for Constance, he could not imagine how the news had affected his father and sister. He was happy at least that his mother was no longer alive to hear the lies … or the truths.

  In normal times, he would have turned himself in, hired the best lawyer in the capital, and called on his father to help him clear his name … of the Wood murder, at least. The shootings at McDillon’s would require a more complicated explanation. But Halsey feared that if he surrendered himself in wartime Washington, he would be dragged to the Old Capitol and forgotten.

  He had also read the words “shot while escaping” in the papers. Before District emancipation, it had been the fate of more than one fugitive slave. It had also happened to deserters and to a whoremaster who had been taken as a spy and never even made it to the Old Cap.

  So Halsey doubted that a man accused of four murders, also “armed and dangerous,” would have much chance.

  His carte de visite had quickly appeared on wanted posters across the city. Clerks in every telegraph office had surely been ordered to watch for anyone sending messages to the Hutchinsons of Boston. And a detective had probably been dispatched to intercept all mail arriving at the homes of Halsey’s father and sister.

  So, he had decided to disappear, at least for the time being.

  But to where? As he had joked grimly to himself, when the Lord dropped a man into shit, perhaps he should stay there.

  Jubilo’s brothers needed help on the wagon, since Jubilo and Jim-Boy had taken better jobs digging fortifications. Hauling night soil was hard work, done best with at least three sets of hands: a hole man, a rope man, and a tub man.

  The Freedoms were planning to look for help at the contraband camp on Q Street, where runaways had been gathering ever since the District emancipation.

  But on Halsey’s first morning with them, the family matriarch, who called herself Mother Freedom, had brought her face close to his, studied, and said, “I do not see a guilty man before me. I see the blue eyes of one who tips his hat to colored men, which he don’t have to do, which means he must show respect to all of God’s humans, which he don’t have to do, which means he’s a Godly man, which most men is not. And I am on the side of God. So, the Freedom family will give this Godly man safe lodgin’ in the shed out back, which he ain’t to leave till dark, and if he do, he ain’t to come back till dark. He will repay us by workin’ on the wagon.”

  “Do that mean we don’t have to pay him?” Zion—the youngest, tallest, and scrawniest of the brothers—had asked.

  “A man does a honest night’s work,” Mother had answered, “he gets a honest night’s pay. We are not
slave drivers. But we’ll charge him half his pay for lodgin’ and food.”

  Zion had looked Halsey from head to foot. “How do we know we can trust him? How do we know he won’t get us all in trouble?”

  “We can trust him because I have looked in his eyes,” Mother had said. “He won’t get us in trouble because he’s in too deep himself.”

  Hallelujah, the oldest brother, nearly as big as Jubilo and more practical than Zion, had said, “This man ain’t workin’ with us, ’less he work the hole.”

  “He’ll work the hole.” Mother Freedom had raised her chin as regally as a queen giving a decree. “He’ll be the new ’prentice hole man … if that meet with his approval.”

  “It does,” Halsey had answered.

  After a short time in the presence of that small but formidable woman, in her little freestanding house on the east edge of the city, with Jesus and Frederick Douglass looking down from engravings above the fireplace, Halsey would have approved no matter what she had asked him to do, even if it meant climbing into the waste hole of a privy and shoveling shit into a bucket so that a man at the top of the hole could lift the bucket and hand it to another man who dumped it into a tub and carried it to a wagon … for that is exactly the job she had given him.

  But there would be advantages to hiding here.

  The Freedoms discouraged visitors with two barking dogs … and a powerful stink. They called the lot next to their house the compostin’ yard. They dumped the waste there each morning and dutifully covered it with a layer of dirt. Then, while the boys slept through the day, Mother Freedom sold the compost to farmers who hauled it out to Maryland to fertilize their fields. And the neighbors didn’t complain, because the Freedoms saw to it that their gardens and corn patches were fertilized for free.

  The brothers had Negro night passes, of course, but no one ever checked them, because the police never bothered the soil wagon. It wasn’t worth the smell.

  So it would be safe work for Halsey, especially if he could somehow pass for a Negro. So he put on gloves, buttoned his collar high, kept his hat pulled low, and let his beard grow. Within a week, it covered most of his face with thick black hair. And to cover the white parts, Mother Freedom gave him a piece of burnt cork.

  The first time he blackened his face, she chuckled and said, “Don’t you go singin’ ‘Camptown Races’ on us, boy, or we have to put you in the coon show.”

  “I don’t sing … anymore.”

  “No, not with that there croakin’ voice you got.”

  And he had ridden the wagon, worked the hole, and done as he was told. Hallelujah needed to remind him only once to tip his hat to the few white people that passed in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  But he could not live like this for long. So he waited until his beard was so bushy that only those who had looked into his eyes would recognize him, while those who had glanced at his wanted poster would walk blithely by. Then he tested the day-lit streets.

  As the Freedom wagon was rolling toward home one morning, he got off and told the brothers that he would see them at nightfall. He wiped the burnt cork from his face, put a shovel over his shoulder, and walked. He walked with the knowledge that the smell he absorbed at night would keep most people at a distance, including detectives and Provost Guard. He walked all day, as if familiarizing himself again with the city that he had come to know and hate. He even walked to Lafayette Park, sat on a bench, read a newspaper, and watched for McNealy.

  But McNealy never came.

  As for the news in the paper … there was none of emancipation, as yet, perhaps because there had been no Union victories, as yet. And because there had been no news of emancipation, the Abolitionists had continued to hammer at Lincoln.

  For a week, Halsey had been following the exchanges between the president and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.

  Greeley had written an open letter to the president called “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” It was the prayer of emancipation.

  Lincoln had responded with an open letter of his own, in which he said, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

  Halsey had heard echoes of his conversation with Lincoln on the Ariel. And he had wondered what the Abolitionists would say if they knew that as far back as the Seven Days, Lincoln had been composing a document that would change everything.

  Halsey had begun the war as a Unionist without much commitment one way or the other to Abolition. In Boston, he had known few freedmen and did not mix with the Abolitionist crowd. In the regiment, he had run with officers who worried less about the Negro than about the social standing of the other officers.

  But in Washington, he had met Negroes of character, industry, faith, and goodness of heart, people who wanted no more for their families than any white man did for his. And he had come to understand that the white man’s greatest sin was in seeing these people at best as inferiors and at worst as a species of property.

  This war, Mother Freedom had told him, was to be the expiation of that sin.

  Expiation. A three-dollar word, thought Halsey. But Mother Freedom used such words and used them well.

  She had learned to read in a Quaker school. Now she read widely and kept a collection of books in a little case beside the fireplace: the Bible, Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography of a Slave, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Oliver Twist, which she read to her sons to show them that “not only colored folks had hard lives,” and Fort Lafayette by “Ben Wood, the congress-man, a book to tell us what the other side thinks of us.”

  She even subscribed to the Liberator, “that fine Abolition paper by that up-north Boston man, Mr. Garrison.” And when the August 22 edition arrived in the mail, she sat Halsey down to discuss it, because it contained reports on Lincoln’s open letter and on another controversy:

  Two weeks earlier, Lincoln had invited a delegation of freed slaves to the White House. Mother had proclaimed it her proudest moment, “the first time that Negroes ever went into the White House by the front door without holding it first for the white folk.”

  But the Liberator now reported what Lincoln had said to those freed slaves: He had begun by admitting that slavery was the greatest wrong ever inflicted on a people. Then he had added, “But when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. On this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Would it not be better if we separated?” Then he had asked those freed slaves, men raised up in American bondage who had since tasted American liberty, if they would consider leading a Negro migration to Africa or Central America.

  Mother Freedom read this story aloud to Halsey, took off her reading glasses, and shook the paper at him. “This is the first time I am angry with Mr. Lincoln.”

  So were the Abolitionists. In the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison took Lincoln sternly to task, saying that the nation’s four million slaves were “as much the natives of this country as any of their oppressors.” And they were entitled to live here and “die in the course of nature.”

  “Your Mr. Garrison speaks truth,” Mother said.

  “I agree,” Halsey answered. “Lincoln’s wrong. And that’s not a thing that I say often.”

  But Halsey was left wondering later, in his little shit-smelling shed, what Lincoln’s game was.

  Did he believe his own words? Or was he simply trying to soften the blow of emancipation, which would anger many Northerners and hurt the party in the fall elections? Was he preparing Americans, before revealing in his proclamation the cold military logic and sure moral rectitude of freeing the slaves? Or was he simply the man he had described to Halsey months before, nervously walking a rail fence between two fields, one filled with furious Abolitionists and the other with rabid Negro-haters of every political stripe from Se
cessionist to Copperhead.

  Halsey did not know, but he decided that if he needed a friend, he should go straight to the most powerful man he knew.

  Being “armed and dangerous,” he wouldn’t be able to stroll into the White House. And if he attempted to sneak into the president’s cottage at night, he might be shot by some insomniac veteran who was armed and dangerous, too. So one morning, he cleaned the cork off his face, jumped off the wagon, and headed for Vermont Avenue.

  * * *

  Each day, the president rode down the Seventh Street Turnpike from the Soldiers’ Home, took Rhode Island Avenue to Iowa Circle, picked up Vermont and rode on to the White House, a journey of three miles that he usually made on horseback, alone. Sometimes young Tad rode along on a pony that went with tiny mincing steps to keep up. And sometimes, Lincoln rode in his carriage with his secretary, John Hay.

  But he would always pass between seven and nine, so Halsey got there early on the Thursday morning of August 28. He picked a quiet spot in the block between N and M Streets. Then he leaned on a lamppost and opened a newspaper.

  The day was clear and hot. August offered no more mercy than July.

  And according to the paper, Robert E. Lee was offering no mercy, either.

  As Halsey read, he read his own understanding of events into the story:

  Annoyed with McClellan’s perpetual “slows” and perhaps growing more distrustful of the general since Halsey’s last report, Lincoln had created another army out of troops that McClellan had expected to reinforce him. It was called the Army of Virginia, General Pope commanding.

  And like a man who knows that some barking dogs will never bite, Robert E. Lee knew that McClellan would never attack his flank if he turned on Pope. So he did.

  After weeks of maneuvering and skirmishing, the Army of Virginia was now facing a second battle in the railhead town of Manassas, along the banks of Bull Run.