“I like him,” said Evangeline.
Abigail Lynne Simon called up the stairs, “It’s one thirty. If we leave now, we can get back to Boston tonight. We can drop you in New York.”
Evangeline waved her on. “We’re renting a car, taking our time. We need to be in Boston on Thursday for Peter’s show.”
Abigail said, “See you there, with a camera.” Then she left.
Peter looked at his watch and cocked an eye at Evangeline. “One thirty?”
“Don’t push your luck.” Evangeline stood, slipped her feet back into her shoes, and pulled Peter up. “Let’s walk.”
They linked arms and descended the steps of liberty’s great temple.
Acknowledgments
In the foyer of the new Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership, a tower rises. It’s thirty-four feet high and built of books, fifteen thousand books. It represents the work of many lifetimes, all devoted to a single life, Abraham Lincoln’s. Reading those books could easily become the work of a lifetime, too.
But Lincoln is there. You’ll find him in those books. You’ll find him in the many photographs of his presidential years, a remarkable human portrait of a nation’s agony written in one face. When you enter his presence in print or pictures, you feel as if you can reach out and touch him. His deeds and death may make him the most revered figure in American history, but he always seems accessible.
However, there’s not much left of the Washington that Lincoln inhabited during the years when the nation’s future turned on his every decision. Time has paved the muddy streets, covered the filthy canal, and replaced all but the most famous of the buildings that Lincoln would have known.
And if you’re telling a story set in Lincoln’s Washington, you want your readers to smell that canal, scrape the mud from their boots, and see the skyline that Lincoln saw. You want them to embrace the details of a time long past so that they will live the story with your characters, both the historical and the fictional. To do that, you’ll need help. And I have gotten help in many ways, from many generous people.
Peter Drummey, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has a knowledge of history’s facts and a love of its drama that make him an invaluable resource for the historical novelist who balances fact and drama in every scene. He is also a great student of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Ron Egalka provided extensive expertise on the handguns and weaponry of the era. Madeline “Nonnie” Mullin, curator of the town history room at the Weston Public Library, is a former Washingtonian filled with insights into the history and the geography of her native city. And the library staff made certain that whatever reading material I needed, I got.
Many others took the time to send me information, answer questions, offer hospitality, and challenge my assumptions about the Civil War: Robert Ablondi, James Bartlett, H. W. Brands, David Brno, Lorraine Chickering, Justin Dietz, Josh Henson, Gina and Dennis Podlesak, John Riley of the White House Historical Association, Vivian Spiro, Mark Svrcek and the staff at the Antietam Overlook Farm, and Martin Weinkle.
My daughter, Elizabeth, a long-distance runner who has trained along most of Washington’s streets, served as tour guide on my explorations of the city, past and present. She led me to the Eastern Market, the National Greenhouse, Ford’s Theatre, the Lincoln Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Lincoln Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, the Renwick Gallery, the towpath along the C&O Canal in Georgetown, Rock Creek Park, and Fort C. F. Smith Park in Arlington.
My wife, Chris, played many roles, as always. She cooked some of the dishes that my characters ate. (She now makes a delicious she-crab soup, though she drew the line at “sloosh.”) She drove while I took notes on our research journeys. And she was a stalwart companion in the field. She plunged willingly into the West Woods at Antietam, led our mile-long march from Robert E. Lee’s statue to the Angle at Gettysburg, and braved the mud when I decided to see Ball’s Bluff from the Potomac riverbank. She also waited patiently through more than her share of “writing” weekends.
Of course, we couldn’t have visited those places and walked the ground of history if not for the efforts of so many to preserve the sites and restore the buildings: nonprofit groups like the Civil War Trust, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation; the various municipalities and the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S. National Park Service. Visit, as we did, Manassas, Ball’s Bluff, Harper’s Ferry, Bolivar Heights, the turnout at Grove Farm (site of the famous photograph of Lincoln with McClellan in the field), the town of Frederick, Maryland, the Pry House, the Antietam battlefield, or Gettysburg, and you’ll appreciate their efforts.
Also, anyone seeking to bring the world of the 1860s to life should thank the men who hauled their huge cameras and fragile glass negatives across that rutted American landscape. They left the first photographic record of a nation at war. Some of their names are familiar: Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. But I owe thanks to the lesser-known Titian Peale, son of Rembrandt Peale, grandson of Charles Willson Peale. He climbed into the tower of the Smithsonian castle one August afternoon in 1863 and made a 360-degree panorama of Washington. I referred to it hundreds of times. How much of the Mall did the Armory Square Hospital cover? See the Peale panorama. Was the bridge across the canal at Tenth Street a footbridge? See Peale. Want to see it yourself? Go to the Smithsonian Web site: www.civilwar.si.edu/smithsonian_castle.html.
And though there may be fifteen thousand books about Lincoln and as many about the Civil War, and I have read my share of them, let me mention just a few on Washington itself: a pair of primary sources, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches and Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War; and two excellent social histories, Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson, and Reveille in Washington, the 1942 Pulitzer Prize winner by Margaret Leech.
Thanks also to my agent, Robert Gottlieb, who has been saying for twenty years that I should write a novel about Lincoln, and to my editor at Forge, Bob Gleason, who has been talking since we first met of a novel about the Emancipation Proclamation. I always listen to both of them.
And finally, thanks to family and friends not mentioned here. They leave me alone when I need solitude. They join me for dinner when I need conversation. They read my books, too.
WILLIAM MARTIN
March 2012
BOOKS BY WILLIAM MARTIN
City of Dreams
The Lost Constitution
Harvard Yard
Citizen Washington
Annapolis
Cape Cod
The Rising of the Moon
Nerve Endings
Back Bay
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LINCOLN LETTER
Copyright © 2012 by William Martin
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Getty Images
Map by Jon Lansberg
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Martin, William, 1950–
The Lincoln letter / William Martin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2198-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4713-8 (e-book)
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Collectibles—Fiction. 2. Historians—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 3. Washington (D.C.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 4. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A7297L56 2012
813'.54—dc23
2012019934
First Edition: August 2012
The Lincoln Letter Page 49
