The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  Beyond that was a toll road that would take him another eight miles or so—past swamps, ravines, and hillocks peppered with stunted pines and under the Cumberland Canal viaduct—to Alexandria. Normally he could get there in one to two hours depending on the condition of the roads. Today, with the Long Bridge stuffed with wagons, horses, and pedestrians swarming the District to attend the parades, his carriage moved at a crawl, and he had given himself more than three hours to travel so as not to miss his parley.

  Three hours was raw sacrifice. Among their many disciplines, the Pinkertons functioned on proper time management. It was, as Pinkerton himself made sure to invoke time and again in tutorials he gave to his staff, the bedrock of their organization. A minute wasted could never be recaptured. Yet here he was, pulled along by a promise and a note into offering up the better part of an afternoon. Patriotism was a worthy end, too, however, and Pinkerton and his staff were Union men through and through. His day and his time lumbering along to Virginia could both be redeemed if he retrieved at the Marshall House what he needed.

  As he entered Alexandria, Pinkerton found the town pleasing. It was orderly, industrious, and tightly controlled, as every good town should be. It had its houses surrounded by fine gardens, its stores in squat brick buildings, and its churches green with ivy on almost every square, and warehouses and wharves laced its riverfront. A town that once had proudly displayed secession flags from its custom house and its homes was now little more than a military outpost fortified with Union cannon.

  The Marshall House was handsome, if modest: three stories and an attic encased in red brick. Pinkerton entered and inquired after McFadden. Yet another note awaited him, and he scanned it before crumpling it into a ball and rushing back into the street. As the note instructed, he made his way to a green carriage at the curb about a block up from the hotel. A woman’s hand dangled from the window, a scarlet kerchief ringed in white lace hanging from her fingertips, just as the note had said.

  “You’ve stolen something that belongs to me,” Pinkerton said to the woman inside, quickly assessing her clothing, her carriage, and the unusual cosmetics that gave her lips and cheeks a deep red glow—a glow that most sensible or discreet women in Washington who shunned the use of face paints would label as “forward.”

  “You should join me in my carriage because the town of Alexandria—wait, I’m being unfair—because the gentlemen monitoring the entrances to most of the fine establishments here won’t permit a woman entry if she’s without a man,” Mary Ann Hall said.

  Pinkerton leaned into the carriage’s window, seething. His hours had been squandered after all, and he was forced to waste them on a painted lady. He could have slipped into a full fury, but that would have meant submitting to his emotions. He was a modern man and a student of discipline, and he chose instead to alight upon a proper strategy and pursue the information he needed.

  He stepped away from the carriage, adjusted his jacket, and drew a long and calming breath. The woman observed him, amused. He paid her no heed and returned to the carriage, injecting just enough force into his demands to convey that he meant to control the situation, but would do so as a gentleman.

  “Tell me about the telegram you sent me from here, and about the diaries that McFadden jayhawked,” he said.

  “I don’t know a thing about diaries, Mr. Pinkerton. And I didn’t send you a telegram from here.”

  “You most assuredly did. Who else would know to meet me here for this particular game and at this particular hour?”

  “Temple McFadden, of course. He directed me to tell you that he sent the telegram and that he asked me to meet you here to—”

  “To try to seduce me?”

  “I’m not speaking of bedroom entertainments.”

  “Don’t you get uppity with me, you strumpet,” Pinkerton fumed. “I have good suspicion about how one like you makes your way in the world.”

  His self-possession lost once again, Pinkerton stepped away from the carriage and adjusted his jacket. He inhaled deeply and reminded himself of his goals for the day.

  He was interrupted by Mary Ann, who had stepped down from her carriage and leaned in close to his ear. He could smell the lavender perfume in her hair and on her throat, and he backed away in embarrassment, looking around in jerks to see if anyone was watching them. Mary Ann pressed in closer again, pulling Pinkerton toward her by one of his lapels.

  “I have a message for you. Mr. McFadden said he would like to speak with you at the Willard tomorrow evening, also at six.”

  “That’s all? I have been subjected to the Long Bridge and I missed an appointment to escort Mrs. Lincoln to the B&O so I could be here. And this is all?”

  “No, that is not all. Mr. McFadden said he promises you that this will be the last time that you will be humbugged. Now I must absquatulate.”

  Mary Ann climbed into her carriage and rolled off into the evening while Pinkerton yanked his hat from his head and threw it in anger onto the ground, digging his heel into it after it landed.

  From his perch on the second floor of a building across the street, Alexander Gardner was pleased with himself. Even at a distance, with unpredictable variables and a late afternoon light, he had been able to take one good photograph of Pinkerton’s encounter with Mary Ann.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE GRAND REVIEW

  Alexander suggested that Temple get to Pennsylvania Avenue early Tuesday morning, well before the parade began at nine. They planned to meet at 15th Street, in full view of the Treasury and catty-corner from the President’s House, in front of which two large, canopied reviewing stands stood on either side of Pennsylvania. The stands would seat hundreds of military and political dignitaries who would observe and honor this final gathering of the army before troops were mustered out and sent home.

  People were already jockeying for space on the sidewalks when Temple arrived, and Alexander was setting up his camera and other equipment on the top row of a small set of wooden bleachers that the government reserved for newspapermen and photographers covering the event. Temple, allowed entry by a soldier after he flashed the press pass that Alexander had given him for the inauguration months earlier, hobbled up the bleachers on his cane, balancing a thick bouquet of red roses in his left arm.

  “My guess is that the posies aren’t for me,” Alexander said.

  “Not today. They’re for Mr. Brooks whenever he arrives.”

  “No insult taken. And I have a gift for you anyway.”

  Alexander handed him a clean, clear photograph of Mary Ann and Pinkerton outside the Marshall House. Temple slipped it into his jacket and patted his friend on the shoulder.

  “Noah’s over there,” Alexander said. “Introduce yourself. Gently. He still feels Lincoln’s loss.”

  Noah Brooks was sitting alone at the end of one of the bleachers, slowly fanning himself with a newspaper and letting his head flop back as he looked up into the trees. He had several other newspapers from different cities piled next to him, a notepad and pencil in his lap, and a bright white carnation that was inadequately pinned to his lapel and sagged forward from his jacket as if it were napping. Brooks was bald and bearded and was so lost in thought that he didn’t appear to notice the occasional fly landing amid the small beads of perspiration on his forehead. By dint of a graceful pen and his frequent coverage of the president for the Sacramento Daily Union, Brooks had also become an intimate of Lincoln’s—more advisor than reporter, critics said—as well as one of the most well-known, closely followed journalists in Washington.

  Temple’s cane knocked against the wooden bleachers, the sound preceding him as he made his way, and the tapping forced Brooks from his reverie. He looked at Temple, shading his eyes with his newspaper and tilting his head.

  “Alexander’s friend?”

  “Yes, Temple McFadden,” he said as he bent to put down the bouquet so he could shake Brooks’s hand.

  “No need for courtesies, you can just sit down,” Brook
s said, digging through the pile by his hip. “How’d you get the limp?”

  “I was born in Ireland and had some poor luck.”

  “So Ireland caused it, or was it poor luck?”

  “Both.”

  “Do you follow the papers?”

  “Not nearly as many as you, I’m afraid.”

  “Here’s an observation that will appear in tomorrow’s Daily Illinois State Journal on the parade we are about to witness today, written by a colleague who has shared with me a preview of his disappointment with the color line: ‘If Negro troops were in the vicinity and were intentionally excluded from the display, the fact should cause a feeling of shame to tingle upon the cheek of every loyal man in the land. The troops, who have met the common foe and assisted to vanquish him, had a right to be represented here as they were upon the field of battle.’ ”

  “I had a discussion of the Negro soldiers’ absence in the Grand Review with a friend of mine on Sunday,” Temple said. “He is a Negro himself and deeply resents this inequity.”

  “As we all should. But we all don’t. There is work ahead for this country.”

  “Mr. Brooks, are you able to speak about President Lincoln?”

  “No.”

  “On a single subject, no more.”

  “And no, again. I have lost many of my words since he was murdered.”

  “Can you speak to me about the president and the railroads?”

  “Mr. McFadden, you are intrusive and insensitive, which recommends you for a career as a reporter.”

  “I’ll forward my case, then: what was President Lincoln’s opinion of the railroads?”

  “Both enthralled and dismayed,” said Brooks, giving in and shaking his head. “He thought trains would knit the country together, increase prosperity, and propel settlement in the West. So he supported them. Later, near the end, I think he became worried about the financial and political power the rail barons were amassing.”

  “So he would—”

  “Nothing more about President Lincoln!” Brooks said. “I can barely manage his absence. Enough of the man. Gardner said you were interested in something other than that.”

  “If I’m not imposing, I would like to get these to Mr. Stanton,” Temple said, holding out his bouquet. “I assume that he would know you from your time working with President Lincoln.”

  “You want me to give flowers to the war secretary?”

  “Victory roses. Yes.”

  “Mr. Stanton is going to be sitting with President Johnson and General Grant in the reviewing stand, and they will be surrounded by soldiers and guards. I have no hope of approaching him. But there’s someone else who will get your bouquet to Mr. Stanton; trust me with that. It will happen once the parade begins.”

  “I am in your debt.”

  “The world turns on favors, Mr. McFadden.”

  Temple returned to Alexander’s end of the bleachers and sat down, stretching out his bad leg to relieve the flash of pain he felt behind his thigh. He tugged at Alexander’s sleeve when he spotted Mathew Brady entering the bleachers and hauling his own photography equipment, but Alexander refused to look at his former mentor.

  “Yesterday The New York Times predicted that nobody would stand in the sun for several hours just to watch a never-ending line of soldiers,” said Alexander. “It appears that that was a miscalculation.”

  Crowds were now lacing the mile-and-a-half stretch between the Capitol and the President’s House, leaning out of open windows, lining rooftops, filling doorways, standing on sidewalks, and climbing trees. They were present in such abundance—greater in number than the crowds that attended the inaugural or President Lincoln’s funeral procession in the District—that members of the cavalry had to keep the spectators at bay lest they pour into the streets.

  The firehouse had sprayed down Pennsylvania that morning so that the dust wouldn’t be kicked into clouds when the infantry and cavalry presented themselves. Hanging in the portico of the Treasury building was a flag from the department’s own regiment, torn at the bottom where John Wilkes Booth’s spur had caught it as he leapt from the president’s box in Ford’s Theatre after shooting him. And across the uncompleted façade of the Capitol was a large banner, proclaiming in outsized block letters, “THE ONLY NATIONAL DEBT WE CAN NEVER PAY BACK IS THE DEBT WE OWE TO OUR VICTORIOUS UNION SOLDIERS.”

  Beneath the banner, on the steps of the Capitol, a choir of about two thousand schoolgirls erupted into song as soon as General Meade’s soldiers began their march down Pennsylvania. The schoolgirls had chosen “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Miss Howe had published to great acclaim in the Atlantic Monthly three years before.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

  His truth is marching on.

  Meade and his staff led their troops on horseback, with the eighty thousand soldiers of the Army of the Potomac following them in a dark blue phalanx, row after row of thirty men abreast spanning the width of Pennsylvania Avenue, their bayonets raised at their shoulders and gleaming in the sun, bursts of purple-tinged white and yellow.

  An hour or so behind Meade came General Sheridan’s cavalry, who in turn were followed by the Zouave volunteers, dressed in bright red skullcaps and bespoke navy uniforms trimmed in crimson. Mounted artillery came next, pulling cannon by the hundreds, followed by tens of thousands of other infantry marching flawlessly in a rectangular, navy-hued block. A blizzard of flowers and flower petals swirled around the troops, flung from the sidewalks, rooftops, and trees by spectators; occasionally a woman would burst from the crowd and hang a garland around the neck of a horse as an officer passed.

  When Sheridan’s troops reached the reviewing stand at the President’s House, a cry went up from the crowd as George Custer, the twenty-six-year-old war hero, approached on his stallion, Don Juan. Custer, the youngest general in the army and with his face and shoulders awash in a cascade of long honey-blond ringlets scented with cinnamon oil, was undeniably brave and an indisputable showboat. His leather jackboots were polished like mirrors, and he wore them over a pair of green corduroys; further departures from Union issue included a black velvet jacket edged in silver trim, a felt slouch hat with a broad brim, a billowy white sailor shirt boasting embroidered stars on its collar, and a crimson scarf that Custer kept loosely tied around his neck.

  The ladies swooned.

  When one of them burst off the sidewalk to hang a garland on Don Juan’s neck, Custer’s horse bolted away from his division, and the general had to maneuver to control him. He galloped past the reviewing stand before Custer got him under control, and only then because another officer rode his horse into Don Juan’s path to contain him. As his stallion settled, Custer turned back to the reviewing stand, sweeping his hat off his head and bowing in the saddle as he passed Johnson, Grant, and Stanton. The crowd screamed his praises again.

  As Custer circled past the bleachers to rejoin his division, Noah Brooks stood up and yelled to him. Custer, as attuned to reporters and publicity as he was to his clothing, trotted over to the newspaperman.

  “Say, General Custer, I have a bouquet to honor Mr. Stanton,” Brooks shouted. “Will you be so kind as to deliver it to the war secretary?”

  “I shall, Noah, but you’ll owe me an interview this evening.”

  “The bargain is struck, General.”

  Custer took the bouquet, turned his horse around, and trotted over to the reviewing stand. The only stars in the parade that were bigger than the pair on Custer’s collar were those atop the reviewing stand, which were crafted from ferns and flowers, each of them about three feet high. Red, white, and blue banners hung from the roof of the stand and were draped across its front. Forty soldiers, in two lines of twenty, guarded the very center of the stand, where Johnson, Grant, and Stanton sat, while another eight p
rotected the rest of the stand’s expanse. As Custer rode up, the cluster of soldiers in the center simply parted, allowing the war hero to bring Don Juan to the very edge of the stand.

  “I have a victory bouquet from an admirer of Mr. Stanton’s, the renowned and incomparable journalist Noah Brooks.”

  Stanton stood up, the roses were passed up to him, and Custer tipped his hat and rode off. As the clapping died down, Stanton plucked a note card from the center of the bouquet and adjusted his spectacles as he read it:

  Mr. Stanton: I am in possession of the misplaced diaries. Please arrange a meeting today through Mr. Brooks or I will be forced to publicize what I have.

  Stanton sighed and exhaled, rubbing his fingers along the edges of the bloodred petals resting in his lap.

  HUNDREDS OF MILES away from the Grand Review, Mary Todd Lincoln was adjusting to the ill effects of a fitful and sleepless night on the Pioneer. They had reached Pittsburgh earlier in the day, at six in the morning, and the twelve hours she had spent on the train before then had been filled with headaches and tears. In Pittsburgh they were forced to get off the train so that it could change tracks, and now, several hours further along, she was regaining her senses as she reclined in her bed in the sleeper car. Lizzy was rubbing her temples, while Fiona dabbed at her forehead with a moist cloth. Robert and Tad had spent most of the day in the parlor car avoiding their mother, playing checkers, and napping.

  “I never should have begun reading that forsaken diary of mine last night,” she said, the back of her hand pressed across her eyes. “Such turmoil.”

  “Just breathe deeply,” Fiona said. “Try to distract yourself.”

  Snapping upright and pulling her sheets around her shoulders, Mrs. Lincoln accused Fiona of deliberately bringing the diary to cause her pain and slapping at the cloth that Fiona was using to wipe her head. Lizzy asked her to stop screaming, but she continued until her small, pale, fleshy hands were balled into fists.