On Secret Service

by John Jakes

  Lon’s solitary ride brought him to the city at first light. A tarnished silver sky spread overhead. Swags of funeral crepe lay in gutters, befouled by dirt and dung. A few crippled veterans were already out, wearing their ragged uniforms and begging with their caps. One sleepy drab, fat as a house, screeched an invitation with her rouged mouth. Lon rode on.

  As his horse plodded up the Avenue, a drizzle began. By the time he handed the reins to a black boy in front of Willard’s, heavy rain pelted the crown of his hat and dripped off the brim. He dodged inside while the boy remained on the curb, hatless and miserable.

  Half a dozen early diners occupied tables in the saloon bar. Another of the many barkeeps Lon knew, an Irishman with flowing auburn mustaches and his left sleeve pinned up, greeted him. Michael had lost an arm serving with McClellan on the Peninsula.

  “Bourbon, Michael.”

  “This early?”

  “Just pour, if you please. The good bottle.”

  Michael filled the glass. “Supposed to rain like the devil today and tomorrow. Maybe longer.” He slid the brimming glass to his customer. “I see one of your birds flew away Monday night.”

  With the glass near his lips, Lon said, “What do you mean?”

  “The reb at Old Capitol. You didn’t know? Wait.”

  Michael rummaged in a pile of newspapers on the back bar. He found the one he wanted, a Star. “Second page.”

  CONFEDERATE SPY

  A SUICIDE.

  OLD CAPITOL INMATE

  FOUND HANGED IN CELL.

  Government Promises Investigation

  to Rule Out Foul Play.

  Lon found Miller’s name in the first paragraph. Margaret’s brother had died sometime during the second night of his incarceration, when Lon was on the chase in Maryland.

  He remembered Miller’s statement that his life would be worthless if he revealed what he knew. Had he foreseen his own weakness, then a confession, and the consequences? Had he insured against retribution with a noose made of bed-sheets? Was it the act of a deranged man, or had others with access to the prison silenced him? Like Booth, Cicero Miller had taken the answers with him. Did they include some that Lafayette Baker and the Honorable Edwin Stanton might want concealed in the silence of eternity?

  Michael cleared his throat. “Care to order breakfast?”

  “I don’t think I’m hungry.” Lon paid for the drink and left it unfinished on the bar when he walked out.

  74

  May 1865

  Persistent rain hammered the depot shed. The funnel stack of the B&O 4-4-0 woodburner trickled a thin line of smoke toward the shed roof. The dampness created a haze, giving the hurrying passengers and porters an insubstantial, wraithlike quality. Lon stood with luggage by the rear steps of a passenger car, perfectly attuned to the morning’s melancholy darkness. It felt more of March than May.

  He smoked a little cigar while he waited. Margaret had gone back inside to look for her friend. The noise of small wooden wheels on the platform caught his attention. A boy of twenty, or what was left of him, sat on a square dolly. He propelled himself toward the head of the train with leather pads tied over his knuckles. Leather protected the stumps where his legs had been sawed away.

  The boy’s sullen eyes touched something in Lon. He tipped his broad-brimmed hat. “Morning, soldier.”

  “Morning.”

  “Which side were you on?”

  The boy braked himself with his knuckle pads. “Does it matter?” He pushed off and disappeared in clouds of steam.

  Searching in the other direction, Lon saw Margaret coming out the depot doors with her friend Hanna Siegel. Hanna’s father languished in Old Capitol, accused of treason. The young woman, an actress, hardly fit the part with her blonde hair crudely chopped short and her clothes all gray and black, like a nun’s. Margaret said she’d lost a lover in the war.

  “I’m sorry I’m late to see you off,” Hanna said as she shook Lon’s hand. Her face was pale, without a single touch of color. “Margaret described your journey. It’s fearfully long.”

  “It should be pleasant and interesting,” Lon answered, precisely because he suspected it might be otherwise. In his carpetbag he carried ship tickets from New York to the Isthmus of Panama, which they would cross in two days, using a second set of tickets for the voyage up the coast to California.

  “It’s exciting that you’re going,” Hanna said. “And very courageous.”

  Margaret said, “We’ve both had our fill of the East.”

  “Do you have any plans for San Francisco, Mr. Price?”

  “No plans. But we’ll be fine. California’s rich with opportunity.” So said the rapturous prose of T. Fowler Haines, anyway. Mention of the future reminded him of the letter folded in his inner pocket.

  Negro porters hurried the last luggage into the cars. A conductor bellowed the all-aboard. “I’ll write,” Hanna promised, embracing her friend.

  “Write me of your father, too.”

  “Even if they hang him? It’s the likely outcome.”

  “Oh, Hanna.” Margaret drew her in, the embrace this time almost motherly. Hanna struggled to smile. Lon tipped his hat and helped Margaret up the steps.

  “Poor dear thing,” Margaret sighed as they settled on the plush seats. “She’s utterly lost.”

  Lon tossed his hat on the overhead rack. “She has a lot of company.”

  The car was infernally hot. Flames flickered behind the slotted door of a stove at the forward end. Margaret waved at Hanna Siegel as the train began to move. When they passed out of the shed into the rain, she and Lon settled back in a moment of silent communion. They held hands. Lon’s index finger gently caressed the plain gold band on her ring finger.

  “I have something to show you.”

  “What?”

  “A letter. It was at the desk when I settled our hotel bill.” He took it from his pocket and unfolded it on his knee. Inscribed in an elegant hand, the paragraphs brimmed with complimentary phrases. Outstanding ability. Sterling character. And promises. Glowing future. A firm with plans for rapid national and international expansion. Margaret fixed on the signature.

  “Your old employer.”

  “Yes, the boss. In Chicago. Mr. Pinkerton wants to hire me again.”

  “Is it something you want to do? We can cancel our tickets.”

  “It’s the only thing I know how to do,” Lon said as the cars clicked and rattled through the northern suburbs where dead trees stood, never to grow green again. Shell holes cratered the fields and road. He thought of all the killing and brutality; of how for a time he’d become a machine fit only for that.

  “I want no part of it, Margaret. I just had to show you.”

  “It’s your decision.”

  “Thank you.”

  He tore the letter in half. He walked to the head of the car, spit on his fingers to protect them, pulled the hot handle of the stove door. He tossed the pieces in the fire and walked back up the aisle while they burned. It would be a long, hard recovery. People such as Margaret’s friend, with ruined lives, might never recover. At least the clandestine war was over for him, though he’d be haunted forever by Sledge’s words. Dirt rubs off.

  He’d covered himself with it. Would he ever be clean? Only the night before, readying for bed, he’d lost his temper when Margaret had made an innocent joke about the number of times he dipped his hands in a washbasin every day.

  Her war was over too. She felt she’d failed her father; it would haunt her. She admitted she’d grieve for her brother, Cicero, because that was necessary and proper, but the love she had felt for him had been withered by what he had become.

  No matter how any of them tried to forget, the great struggle would be the single most important event of their lives. They would never be free of it. As they passed through Baltimore, Lon held Margaret in his arms while she stared at familiar sights and wept.

  Afterword

  The history of spying in the American Civil
War is a subject that intrigued me the moment I discovered it years ago. I promised myself that someday, when I had an opportunity and a publisher who shared my excitement, I’d write a novel about it.

  What I found remarkable is the arc of Civil War espionage throughout a relatively few years. At the beginning, the effort on both sides was founded on enthusiasm, not experience. The spying was laughably amateurish during the first months, when martial ardor overruled common sense and everyone predicted a quick end to the war. Soon enough, Pinkerton operative Tim Webster was caught and hanged in Richmond, and spying was no longer a game for genteel men and women, but a savage battle without rules.

  The literature on the subject is not large. Some of the primary sources, written by real players in the drama, are unreliable. I refer particularly to Allan Pinkerton’s Spy of the Rebellion and Lafayette Baker’s History of the United States Secret Service. Scholars long ago dismissed both as self-serving and far off the mark historically. Both books are interesting to read, but not for useful information.

  To this day, Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators remains mysterious and in some respects controversial. Among the questions:

  Did the Richmond government and its secret service create an “action team” led by Booth? A recent work called Come Retribution makes that case.

  Did radical Republicans, enraged by Lincoln’s moderate approach to Reconstruction, encourage or collaborate with the plotters? In 1937, Otto Eisenschiml, a lay historian, published a book called Why Was Lincoln Murdered? Eisenschiml advanced the theory that Edwin M. Stanton, hiding behind a mask of loyalty, conspired to murder the President and then facilitated the escape of Booth and his cohorts. The book was popular for a decade or so, until its “evidence” was finally proved wrong and its thesis dismissed except by those who see conspiracies everywhere.

  Of course, both theories are grist for novelists, and I’ve taken advantage of that, just as I did in Love and War, the second volume of the North and South Trilogy. In that book, building on the “what if?” premise, I invented what I felt was a plausible plot to assassinate Jefferson Davis. Davis was hated by many of his peers, and his life, like Lincoln’s, was threatened many times.

  The Booth conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, then kill him along with Seward and Johnson, literally fills huge books with details of the movements of the those involved: who met whom when; who checked in or out of which hotel; so forth. I have simplified much of this and shifted dates slightly in a couple of instances. The essential details have not been altered, though I must caution again that Richmond’s involvement in the scheme remains a theory, not a fact.

  The comic-opera surveillance of Rose Greenhow’s residence on a rainy night in August 1861 happened as described, though of course the fictional characters weren’t present.

  The flight of the balloon Liberty is fictitious, though representative of the scouting done by Professor Lowe’s aerial unit.

  Hanna’s capture at Catlett’s Station is based on fact. An unidentified young woman disguised as a soldier was apprehended and hauled before J. E. B. Stuart, who ordered her sent to Richmond for very much the same reasons that he states in the novel. The young woman’s fate is unknown. She had no gallant officer to countermand Stuart’s order.

  For purposes of the story I moved the residence of Secretary of State William Seward to Franklin Square in Washington. Actually he resided in Lafayette Square.

  The lives of historical figures didn’t end when the war ended. Here is what happened to a few of them:

  Lafayette Baker’s harsh methods tarnished his image and brought denunciations from the press. He retired from the War Department in 1866 with the rank of brigadier general. The following year he published his highly suspect memoir mentioned earlier. He died in 1868.

  Federal troops captured Jefferson Davis in Georgia a month after the surrender. Two years of imprisonment ruined his health. Though indicted for treason, he was never tried. After Johnson’s amnesty proclamation of 1868, Davis returned to his Mississippi plantation. He spent his last days writing a two-volume history of the Confederacy. He died in 1889.

  John Singleton Mosby resumed his law practice in Virginia after the war. He became a Republican, endorsed Grant for president, and was appointed U.S. consul at Hong Kong by another Civil War foe, President Hayes. One of the more interesting and enigmatic leaders of the rebellion, Mosby died in 1916, at the age of eighty-three.

  George McClellan carried only three states as the presidential candidate of the Democrats in 1864. His reputation never quite recovered from his hesitant Peninsula campaign. He served one term as governor of New Jersey and died in 1885. A son, George McClellan Jr., was both a member of Congress and mayor of New York City.

  Allan Pinkerton’s brief career in military intelligence is generally considered undistinguished, if not inept. This is usually attributed to his blind loyalty to McClellan—the desire to please and support his patron at the expense of truth and good judgment. Following his return to Chicago, Pinkerton continued to head what became, and remains, an international private-detective and security agency. Pinkerton operatives fought crime all over the country. They pursued Western outlaws, including the famous Butch Cassidy gang. But as the years passed, the original focus changed. The agency, a Civil War bastion of liberal abolitionism, marred its image by hiring on for thuggish strikebreaking against the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coalfields, workers in the Homestead steel mill strike, and the like. Even so, Allan Pinkerton is regarded as a pioneer and innovator in crime fighting. After his death in 1884, his sons Robert and William carried on the business he founded.

  Edwin M. Stanton lived only four years after the war ended, and they were stormy ones. He feuded with Andrew Johnson, who removed him from office. When the Senate refused to confirm the removal, Johnson dismissed Stanton a second time. Stanton barricaded himself in his office where he remained for several weeks. He left government service after the failed impeachment of Johnson and lived only one more year, his health broken.

  The remarkable Elizabeth Van Lew continued her secret work for the Union until the end of the war. Though constantly under suspicion, she survived unscathed thanks to a combination of influence and her carefully cultivated image of craziness. While most of Richmond mourned when the Yankees marched in, Miss Van Lew exulted. “What a moment!…Civilization advanced a century!” As a reward for her services, President Grant appointed her postmaster of Richmond, a position she held for eight years. She died in 1900. Her gravestone in Shockoe Hill Cemetery was later defaced in retribution for her spy work.

  The fates of the Lincoln conspirators were varied. Edwin Stanton ordered Booth’s body rushed to Washington by steamer, his identity concealed by an anonymous canvas bag. A similar secrecy attended Booth’s burial in a hole dug in the dirt floor of the old capital penitentiary. Only Stanton and a few trusted associates knew the whereabouts of the corpse.

  Under Stanton’s guidance, Lafayette Baker assembled the evidence against Booth’s co-conspirators, eight in number: Herold, Paine, Atzerodt, O’Laughlin, Arnold, and Mrs. Surratt, plus Edward Spangler, a sometime carpenter and stagehand at Ford’s who tended Booth’s horses in the small stable behind the theater, and Dr. Samuel Mudd of Maryland, who treated the actor’s broken leg. The outcome of the trial—eight verdicts of guilty—was never in doubt. Herold, Paine, Atzerodt, and Mrs. Surratt were hung. The other four were shipped to the Federal prison on the Dry Tortugas off the coast of south Florida.

  As it has in the past, the University of South Carolina at Columbia served as my research base. I thank the staff of Thomas Cooper Library, under the direction of my friend Dr. George Terry. Thanks also to librarian Jan Longest of the University of South Carolina, Beaufort branch at Hilton Head.

  Helpful people and institutions cleared up many a difficult point or question for me. I thank especially Denny Hattler, and the research staff of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. I am part
icularly indebted to Pat Falci, past president of the Civil War Roundtable of New York. Mr. Falci vetted the manuscript, and caught a number of small but meaningful errors, now corrected. He understands my passion for trying to get it right in every instance. As always, I must state for the record that no person or institution providing help is in any way responsible for the story I have crafted with a mixture of fact and invention.

  I owe a debt to several individuals at the Dutton and NAL divisions of Penguin Putnam for their enthusiastic support of the project. I warmly thank Clare Ferraro, president of Viking Penguin, Plume; Louise Burke, who heads Signet/NAL; Carolyn Nichols, the Signet/NAL editorial director; and of course Phyllis Grann, who presides over all.

  On this book, my editor, Doug Grad, and I worked together for the first time. I happily add Doug’s name to the list of fine editors who have spotted flaws and smoothed out wrinkles in my novels over the years.

  This afterword is being finished in the late summer of 1999. By the time it sees print, I will have passed a big milestone:

  On April 12, 1950, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction cut a check for $25, payment for the first piece of fiction that I sold after several years of trying. I was all of eighteen at the time. The fifteen-hundred-word story, “Machine,” still occasionally surfaces in sf anthologies. April of 2000 will mark my fiftieth year as a professional writer.

  Publishers, editors, and the public have made it possible. Readers have been extraordinarily good to me over the years. I hope I’ve returned the favor somewhat. Far more important than earnings or bestseller status—neither of which I ever expected—has been the Niagara of written and electronic mail telling me that my books have done more than merely pass the time, they have brought forth entertainingly some of the history of the United States and its involvement in world events.

  To work for fifty years as a writer takes not only a lot of sweat and angst, it takes a lot of help and support from others. Notably, I must acknowledge my debt to my attorney and good counselor of the past twenty-five years, Frank R. Curtis, Esq. He is always there, and always right.