The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  “The war is over,” said Halsey. “All the right moments have passed.”

  “Not if Lincoln hopes to rebuild the country. They’re already carpin’ at him over that speech Tuesday night … the Louisiana business, givin’ niggers the right to vote—”

  “Soldiers who fought deserve the vote,” said Halsey. “Even colored soldiers.”

  “The Democrats’ll want to keep the niggers down, which is what they wanted from the beginning. The Radical Republicans’ll want vengeance on the South for startin’ a war to protect slavery. The Democrats’ll blame the Radical Republicans for startin’ a war to free the slaves. It’s politics. Except now we start backstabbin’ again instead of frontstabbin’.”

  “Which side are you on?”

  “My own, Corporal Lieutenant Whoever. Haven’t you figured that out by now? My own.” McNealy took a long puff of his cigar. “Just like every other man in this damn city, expect maybe for Lincoln.”

  “And every wounded man in this ward.”

  McNealy shrugged, as if he didn’t care about any of them. “Lincoln will want the daybook to keep his early ideas on Reconstruction away from the public.”

  “So you want to bribe the president?”

  “I’d rather do business with men who have more to lose.”

  “More than Lincoln?”

  “Imagine you’re a congressman. Benjamin Wood, say. You’re happy that the war is finally over and you’re still in office, ready to fight Lincoln’s plans for nigger citizenship. Then a detective tells you he has evidence you’ve dodged your gambling debts for years, that you’re a deadbeat hiding behind the honor of your office. Or you’re a Radical Republican senator, ready to hand the niggers the keys to every front door in Dixie, ready to punish the South like Cain punished Abel. And the same detective asks you about a ring of little-boy smugglers.”

  “You don’t care which side you blackmail, do you?”

  “I told you a long time ago, I have no time for integrity.” McNealy took another puff on his cigar. “This war has made me a corrupt man. But I’ll swap the daybook for the ledger. I’ll blackmail the men who deserve it. And you can do what you want with the daybook. Assuming, of course that you have the ledger.”

  Halsey did not tell him that it was in the sack under his bed. He said, “I know where it’s hidden.”

  “How soon can you get it?”

  “By tonight. Friday night. Do you have the daybook?”

  “Not with me.”

  Halsey said, “Bring it here tonight. We’ll make the exchange.”

  McNealy looked around. “Not here. Not on your ground.”

  “Are you afraid of a few sick soldiers?”

  “We meet on neutral ground or not at all.”

  “No dark alleys,” said Halsey. “No saloons where your friends can jump me.”

  “In the open, on the Tenth Street Footbridge, right over the canal. You come from the north, I come from the south. Even in the dark, you’ll have a clear field of view. And you’ll have the gun to protect you.”

  “And if you close my escape route—”

  Just then Mrs. Cannon came along, muttering about men smoking and chattering in the dark. She stopped at the sight of McNealy, and said, “You again? Get out of here right this instant, or I’ll wake up the wardmaster.”

  McNealy blew cigar smoke at her.

  She huffed and scurried off.

  McNealy seemed amused. He stood and said to Halsey, “The decision is yours. Meet me in the middle or not. Eight thirty sharp.”

  “And if not?”

  “Wait for the Provost Guard, and start thinkin’ of some alibis for—” He pretended to count on his fingers. “—six murders. You follow?”

  “As I told you once before, ‘Go where there is no path and leave a trail.’ I’ve followed enough.”

  “Poetry. Once you were just educated. Now you’re experienced. And still you spout poetry. Think of somethin’ better.”

  * * *

  Halsey lay awake the rest of the night, making plans and looking for pitfalls in the road that suddenly had appeared before him.

  At first light, he wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln:

  Dear Mr. President,

  I have the honor of informing you that something you lost on April 16, 1862, may have been recovered by a friend named Halsey Hutchinson. He would return it to you at the first possible moment. When he or a representative approaches, he hopes that you will be receptive, especially given his personal difficulties in ’62.

  Yours,

  Corporal Jeremiah Murphy,

  Armory Square Hospital

  Halsey had considered making the letter more anonymous, but the president might not bother with it, or his secretary might toss it. He thought also about signing his real name, but that might guarantee that the Provost Marshal got the letter rather than the president. So he chose the middle road as Murphy.

  At six in the morning, he dressed and told Mrs. Cannon that he was going to take some exercise on the Mall and perhaps meet a certain lady on her way to work.

  “I like your lady friend. But I can’t say as much for your male friends when they come around puffin’ cigars in the middle of the night.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Well”—she gave him a wink—“marry that girl, if she’ll have you. Stay away from that other feller.”

  * * *

  Good Friday 1865 had dawned clear but cool.

  Halsey could see his breath as he paced in front of the ladies’ quarters, waiting for Samantha. She emerged with another nurse around six thirty. He begged a moment, so Samantha sent her friend out to the barouche that was waiting for them on Seventh Street.

  “I’ll be right along,” she said.

  Halsey put the letter into her hand. “I need you to deliver this. I need you to do it this morning.”

  She looked at the address. “You want me to deliver this to the president?”

  “To Major Eckert. He walks from the National Hotel to the War Department every morning at seven. Give it to him. Ask him to give it to the president.”

  “But—”

  Halsey said, “McNealy found me. We’ve made a deal.”

  “A deal? Do you trust him?”

  “No. But it’s this or an arrest. He gave me back my gun as a gesture of goodwill.”

  “Goodwill from a man you don’t trust?”

  “He may be lulling me. And the gun had no bullets. He may think I can’t find any in a few hours. But it’s already loaded.”

  Samantha put the letter into her purse, waved the barouche away, and led Halsey to a bench beside the flowerbed. The tulips were closed tight in the morning chill.

  And he told her his plan: to get the daybook as soon as possible and get it to the president as soon as possible after that. “All done and settled tonight, God willing.”

  “All tonight? Why tonight? What if we can’t get close to him?”

  “As long as I hold the book,” he said, “I’ll be in danger, and so will you. The Provosts may come after me, or McNealy’s enemies, who may smell the blackmail he’s planning. And trusting McNealy is a fool’s game.”

  She looked off toward the Capitol dome, backlit by the rising sun.

  He said, “Three years ago, I stood on the corner of Pennsylvania and Fifteenth as the president’s carriage went by. I’d been carrying the book all day. I wanted to stop the carriage and give it to the president. But his wife was with him. She was dressed in black for their dead boy. I couldn’t intrude. I’ve wished every day since that I stopped that carriage. I would never have ended up in this trouble.”

  “Well, one thing’s for certain”—Samantha stood—“Mrs. Lincoln will be in a happier mood tonight.”

  * * *

  As long as he was in the ward as Corporal Jeremiah Murphy, Halsey felt safe, so he napped. Midmorning sleep still came easily. He was still healing. Besides, whatever was coming that night, he would need his strength.


  When Samantha’s voice awakened him, the slant of light through the windows told him it was after noon.

  “I waited for Major Eckert in the hotel lobby,” she whispered. “He came down at seven. I stepped up to him and told him I was a nurse, and I had a soldier who needed to get a letter to the president.

  “He said, ‘Tell him to mail it’ as if he were telling a streetwalker to stand aside.

  “I held it out to him and said, ‘It’s important, sir. It’s something that will matter to the president, so he wants to know the president receives it.’

  “Eckert looked at the address and saw, ‘President A. Lincoln, the White House’ on the front. Then he turned it over and, Halsey, I swear that his brow furrowed suspiciously when he saw the name Jeremiah Murphy. Where had he heard it?”

  “Stanton. It’s the name I gave to Stanton the other day. I didn’t think he’d remember, there was such commotion in the War Department.”

  “Well, Stanton must have told Eckert, because Eckert stood there, tapping the envelope on his fingertips, ruminating.…

  “And then Booth appeared on the stairway. He was turned out in polished boots, with his hair and mustache pomaded, like he was getting ready for a performance. You could smell the perfume of it as he went past. He looked right at me, but he didn’t recognize me. It was as if he was in a different world. Eckert barely glanced at him.”

  “A man who sees the president every day can’t be too impressed with actors,” said Halsey.

  “Then Eckert put the letter into his coat and promised he’d hand it to the president.”

  “You did well.”

  “The president is now forewarned of you and of the daybook, which we can give him”—she smiled, reached into her pocket, and pulled out two theater tickets—“tonight.”

  The tickets had a preprinted header, FORD’S THEATRE, and the words DRESS CIRCLE on the side. Below that were the printed words: TIME and ATTRACTION. Handwritten next to them, Friday, April 14, 8 P.M. and Our American Cousin.

  “The president and his wife are going,” she said. “It’s in the papers.”

  “But it starts at eight. I’m supposed to make the exchange at eight thirty.”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  Later in the afternoon, Halsey begged a day pass from the wardmaster, who threatened to declare him healed and put him out on Monday if he spent more time walking the streets than resting and recovering.

  Then Halsey went up to Pennsylvania, stopped in front of the National Hotel, looked around, and climbed into Noah’s shoeshine chair.

  Noah said, “Shine, sir?”

  Halsey answered with his brogue, “Do you shine a soldier’s shoes?”

  “I shine any man’s shoes who pay my price.” Noah answered with none of the old jauntiness. And his hair had gone all white in two and a half years.

  Halsey watched him work for a bit; then he looked up at the clouds that had come rolling in. “A sad sky for a sad day, the day they crucified the Lord.”

  “Yes, sir. A sad day for sho’. But a good Black Baptist still have to work.”

  “And your sons? Are they working?”

  Noah raised his head. His old brown eyes were rimmed in little broken red vessels. “My boys in the hotel is workin’. My boy with the Colored Troops is … dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Noah.” Halsey had hoped to proceed more cautiously, but the name just blurted out with the emotion.

  “How’d you know my name? And how come you speak it in that gravelly voice?” The old eyes squinted down, then glimmered with recognition. “You … I thought you was dead.”

  “I’m sorry about your son. When did it happen?”

  “Last week. I heard the night before last.”

  “How?”

  “Secesh sharpshooter, down Roanoke Island. But … what’s it matter?”

  Halsey waited for the emotions to settle in both of them. He let Noah shine, and he wondered how to ask for help.

  But as if he knew, Noah looked up and said, “Don’t seem in my recollection that you ever think of nothin’ in this chair but askin’ me to help you somehow. Why you here today?”

  “I need help. Again.”

  The hands stopped working. “I ain’t much in the mood for givin’. I done give too much already.”

  “Are you still agin’ any man who’s agin’ Mr. Lincoln?”

  “Yep. And I’se agin’ any man who lies to me or my boys, what boys I has left.”

  Halsey leaned down. “I need their help tonight.”

  Noah gave Halsey a long look, then spit on his shoes.

  II.

  On Good Friday, the city usually went quiet at nightfall, especially when nature enhanced the gloom of Scripture with a mist that deadened the sounds of carriage and hoof and shrouded the streetlamps in a cowl of gray.

  Good Christians stayed at home. Waiters in restaurants stood idle. The theaters, if they opened at all, played half empty. Even iniquitous Murder Bay entertained fewer sinners.

  But not that night. As Halsey walked from Ward A to the lady nurses’ quarters, he could hear shouting, faint music, happy gunfire, as if nothing could dampen the spirits of the city, even after four days of celebrating.

  Halsey hoped that he might celebrate himself. To sit in a theater again, to gaze up from the dark at the brilliantly gaslit stage, to hear a real orchestra instead of the brass and drum that had been so relentless in wartime, to laugh at the farcical goings-on in Our American Cousin … these would be wonders, especially if he went to the theater with the daybook—and his future—in his hand.

  Samantha was waiting near the flowerbed. She was wearing the same powder blue dress and parasol she had been wearing on that long-ago July Fourth, but she protected herself from the night air with a navy blue cape of heavy wool.

  Halsey was wearing a black suit from the donation bin, a white shirt, and a black tie, along with a wide-brimmed floppy black hat, perfect for pulling down over the eyes. She commented on how handsome he looked, and how “mysterious.”

  In the glow cast by the Capitol dome, a man-made moon above Washington, they went over the plan once more:

  She would wait in front of the theater. She would try to find a spot at the front of the crowd that would gather to see the president alight. And she would tell him, even if she had to shout, that Lieutenant Hutchinson had to see him.

  They could not count on the letter having reached Mr. Lincoln. So she would try to gauge his response. Eye contact or a spoken comment would be positive. If he went with his head down, focused on his own affairs or on his own company, she would mark that, too, and try at intermission to get close to him. But by then, if all went well, Halsey would be with her, enjoying the play, with the book in his pocket and Lincoln in his box, waiting to receive it.

  There was no guarantee, they both knew, that anything would go well.

  Then she asked again, “Why must it be done like this? Why not let me walk into the White House during some reception and simply tell the president your story?”

  Halsey said, “I promised myself that I would put the president’s private thoughts into the president’s hands. This time, I will not fail.”

  He walked with her up Tenth to Pennsylvania and saw her to the good side of the street. She kissed him and hurried away.

  * * *

  Halsey returned to Ward A to collect himself.

  Mrs. Cannon saw him walk in and held out a note. “This just come for you. A government messenger brung it, no less.”

  Halsey took the letter and went back to his bed.

  The two men from Five Forks were already asleep.

  George Smith was reading the paper by the oil lamp on his table.

  It was just after eight.

  Halsey pulled out a box of matches, lit his oil lamp, opened the letter.

  When he read the header, Executive Mansion, he let out a gasp.

  George Smith glanced up.

  Halsey said,
“It’s all right.” Then his eye dropped to the signature. A. Lincoln. The president had read his letter and answered!

  Halsey scanned the page. And the words “presidential pardon” leaped out at him. Then he read more slowly, every word, twice. A presidential pardon will be considered.

  It was all that he had hoped for.

  He thought to run back to Ford’s Theatre to tell Samantha that she could just enjoy the show, but he was seeing McNealy in a little more than twenty minutes. If he was late, McNealy might not wait. It might all fall apart. And once he had the daybook, it would all fall into place.

  He pulled the pistol from his rucksack. He had loaded it in the middle of the night, with powder and ball. He had sealed each chamber with a plug of bacon grease to keep the moisture out. Now he popped the cylinder and, taking care that no one other than George Smith saw him, he put little copper percussion caps on the five nipples at the back of the five chambers. Then he popped the cylinder back into the gun and put it in his pocket.

  George Smith said, “Do you need some help?”

  “I wish I could count on you, George.”

  “If you’re runnin’, take me with you.”

  “When I do, maybe I will.”

  The former Frowner smiled at the mere thought of freedom.

  Halsey folded the letter and slid it into George Smith’s pocket. “This is what you can do for me. Take care of this till I get back. Don’t read it. Don’t tell anyone.”

  If things went wrong on the footbridge, and there was a good chance that they would, Halsey did not want to lose that letter. And after Samantha, there was no one he trusted more than George Smith.

  * * *

  What about Noah’s two sons? Would they be waiting? Could he still trust them?

  Halsey stepped out onto Seventh Street and heard the thwang of a Jew’s harp. Jacob Bone was standing across the street, at the head of one of the many paths that wound through the darkness of the Smithsonian Park. He was playing a tune called “Kingdom Coming,” about the year of Jubilo.

  He stopped playing as Halsey approached. He looked Halsey straight in the eye. It was the gaze of a proud young man. “My daddy say you need some help.”

  “Just hide behind a tree and watch the south end of the Tenth Street Footbridge. Play your Jew’s harp, keep your eye peeled. You see anyone other than McNealy—”