A House Divided

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  “Dear Speed,” begins Lincoln’s letter of June 19, 1841, “We have had the highest state of excitement here for a week past that our community has ever witnessed; and, although the public feeling is now somewhat allayed, the curious affair which aroused it is very far from being, even yet, cleared of mystery.”

  The actual, known facts closely resemble those I have adopted for the novel. Archibald Trailor, the youngest of three Trailor brothers, was a carpenter living in Springfield. His older brothers, William and Henry, lived elsewhere in Illinois. An eccentric man named Archibald Fisher lived near William and was friendly with him. On the eventful occasion, the two older Trailor brothers, with Fisher in tow, came to Springfield to visit Archibald.

  One evening, all four men went out together “looking about the town,” but only the three brothers returned. The Trailors made preliminary searches for Fisher, but when they did not immediately locate him, William and Henry left Springfield and returned to their respective homes. None of this excited general interest until, several weeks later, the Springfield postmaster received a letter stating that William was suddenly spending great quantities of gold coins and bragging that Fisher had died and willed him $1,500.

  The publication of this letter caused great tumult, and search parties were organized for the supposedly dead man. Cellars, wells, and pits were examined; recently dug graves were reopened; and Hickox’s millpond was drained. Fisher’s body was not found, but what appeared to be bloodstains were uncovered and officers were sent to arrest William and Henry. As a longtime peaceable resident of the community, Archibald Trailor was considered above suspicion.

  Henry Trailor was detained first. After several days of questioning by the mayor and attorney general, Henry confessed that his brothers had killed Fisher and then, after the murder, enlisted Henry in concealing the body. Henry specified that he had seen Fisher’s dead body and described the precise location of the murder and where the body was hidden; upon renewed searching, no body was recovered. Nonetheless, William and Archibald were brought before an examining court on the charge of murder. Lincoln and several colleagues defended the Trailors.

  At this point, a Dr. Gilmore appeared in Springfield and claimed that Fisher was alive and under his care. As Lincoln later recalled, “Gilmore’s story was communicated to Henry Trailor who, without faltering, reaffirmed his own story about Fisher’s murder.” As a result, the townspeople concluded that Gilmore had fabricated his story and was in cahoots with the Trailors; many agitated that Gilmore ought to be arrested and thrown into jail, too.

  A trial commenced. Henry testified to his brothers’ guilt and “bore a rigid cross-examination without faltering or exposure.” Further witnesses supported Henry’s testimony with other evidence of the Trailors’ guilt, including their suspicious actions on the night of Fisher’s disappearance and evidence that William had suddenly come into an inexplicable fortune. These witnesses, reported an early historian, gave “a combination of testimony that seemed to weave a network of circumstances about the prisoners, from which it would appear to any other than a legal mind, to be utterly impossible to extricate them.”

  In response, the defense called Gilmore to testify that Fisher was actually alive and under his care. Gilmore explained that Fisher was “subject to temporary derangement of mind, owing to an injury about his head received early in life.” And indeed, a few days later, Fisher himself, albeit “in bad health,” was conducted back to Springfield. The Trailors were discharged by the court.

  Both Archibald and William Trailor died within two years of their trial. One contemporary said, “If ever a man died of a broken heart it was Archibald Trailor.” Neither man ever explained the suspicious circumstances that had led to the concerns of foul play in the first place. Henry Trailor lived for decades longer, but he never revealed why he had made the false charge of murder against his brothers. According to one early chronicler of the Trailors’ story, “it is said that the three brothers never met after they passed out of the courtroom.”

  Lincoln himself foresaw that only fiction could make sense of the bizarre case. Recounting the history of the Trailor brothers’ saga in the Quincy Whig in June 1846, Lincoln concluded by saying, “It may well be doubted whether a stranger affair ever really occurred.” At the same time, Lincoln noted, “It is readily conceived that a writer of novels could bring [the] story to a more perfect climax.”

  While the gold shipment robbery scheme in the novel (my attempt at a ‘more perfect climax’) is my invention, many of the elements of that scheme actually did take place in Illinois in the tumultuous 1830s and 1840s. Crucially, in an era of “hard money,” the amount of gold and silver coinage physically held by a bank in its vaults determined the amount of paper money or credit it could issue and therefore the economic activity the bank could foster. In one speech in the era, Lincoln complained about gold and silver coins “rusting in iron boxes” in bank vaults instead of being used in circulation.

  The State Bank of Illinois was organized in the mid-1830s, with branches in several cities around the state, including Springfield and Chicago. From the start, the state banking system was riddled with mismanagement and corruption. The Chicago branch really did go broke when its cashier, W. H. Brown, lost $26,000 in bank funds in a scheme “to engage in pork speculation with two Chicago commission men.” At one point in the late 1830s, the State Bank “suspended its discount [lending] business until it received a shipment of $280,000 in gold and silver from New York and New Orleans.” And resourceful, armed banditti roamed the open Illinois prairies of the 1830s, searching for stagecoaches to rob. Gold and silver shipments destined for the State Bank were frequent targets.

  Lincoln served on the joint select committee to investigate the State Bank in the Illinois legislature, and he gave several speeches on the banking turmoil that occasioned much excitement among his contemporaries, although they are notable to the modern reader mostly for their extreme length and nearly impenetrable subject matter.

  The state of banking in Illinois did not improve quickly thereafter. An ardent spiritualist by the name of Seth Paine founded the Bank of Chicago in 1852. One of his first official actions was to hire a trance medium, a Mrs. Herrick, to give banking officers the advice of departed spirits. As one historian has recounted, “The spirit of Alexander Hamilton [the first secretary of the treasury] was, through Mrs. Herrick, to direct the policy of the bank. If a person came in to do business and Mrs. Herrick or the spirits did not approve of him, he was unceremoniously thrown out onto the street by some burly bouncers kept for that purpose.”

  Work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, designed to link Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, began in 1836 but ground to a halt when the state ran out of money from the combined effects of the nationwide Panic of ’37 and the state’s own financial mismanagement. Ironically, it was the failure of the State Bank in the early 1840s that spurred the state to fund renewed work on the canal, as the legislature realized that the only way out of the crisis was the revenue that the completed canal would produce.

  The canal finally opened for navigation in April 1848. Almost immediately, it was overtaken by the emergent railroad as the primary means of passenger travel in the region. Nonetheless, the canal continued to play an important role in facilitating the shipment of goods throughout the 19th century. It remained in use until 1933.

  Today, a system of rivers, lakes, canals, and gates termed the Illinois Waterway connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. And the state’s belief that the rude collection of hovels perched on the muddy ground beside Lake Michigan was destined to become a major hub for trade was soon realized. Chicago became one of the ten largest cities in the country by 1860 and the nation’s second largest by 1890, a status it would hold for the following century.

  The Ladies’ Education Society was founded in Jacksonville, Illinois (about thirty miles west of Springfield) in October 1833. It is recognized as one of the oldest women’s organizations in th
e United States. Shortly thereafter, the society created the Jacksonville Female Academy for the education of young women in the frontier state. The only qualifications for an applicant were that she desire education and be capable of benefiting from it. By the 1835–1836 term, the academy had sixty-eight pupils. It had a remarkably modern mission. As the 1836 catalog announced, “The object of the instruction imparted in this Institution is the cultivation of the physical, moral and intellectual facilities, in such a manner as that the pupils shall be prepared to perform well their part in the several relations of society to which they may be called.”

  The Sudden Change of December 1836, when a freak, sudden cold blast raced across the region, was one the most-recalled weather events in the early history of Springfield. At least four men who were caught out on the prairie froze to death, and countless livestock were lost. As one early historian related, “It has been told to me time and again that chickens and geese, also hogs and cows, were frozen in the slush as they stood, and unless they were extricated by cutting the ice from about their feet, remained there to perish.”

  In addition to the three Trailor brothers, many of the supporting characters in the novel are also drawn from life. As in the novel, the Trailor brothers’ case was prosecuted unsuccessfully by Illinois attorney general Josiah Lamborn. Lamborn’s legal career was characterized by ever greater failure. Shortly after he joined the bar, the Illinois Supreme Court found his conduct “highly censurable … undignified and degrading,” but narrowly declined to disbar him. His most famous assignment was leading the prosecution of the five men accused of murdering Mormon founder Joseph Smith in Carthage, Illinois, in May 1844. All of the defendants were acquitted. When he was not renominated for the position of attorney general, Lamborn is said to have begun drinking heavily. He died of delirium tremens—alcohol withdrawal—several years after his term ended, at the age of thirty-eight.

  Judge Samuel Treat presided over the Sangamon County Circuit Court from 1839 to 1848. He later served on the Illinois Supreme Court and Federal District Court for Illinois. In all, he served continuously in the judiciary for forty-eight years, during which time he presided in over 1,000 cases in which Lincoln appeared as attorney.

  William “Big Red” May was the first mayor of Springfield, having previously served as an Illinois representative in Congress. He was replaced in Congress by Lincoln’s law partner, John T. Stuart. After his mayoralty, Big Red was infected by Gold Rush fever and headed to California. He died in Sacramento in 1849.

  Major Elijah Iles was a Springfield founder, businessman, and entrepreneur, who built the grand American House across from the new state capitol building in 1839. Major Iles had commanded the young Lincoln in the Black Hawk War of 1831–1832. Remarkably, the expedition in which Iles served included two future U.S. presidents (Lincoln and Zachary Taylor) as well as Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy.

  Other real-life members of Lincoln and Speed’s circle of friends and rivals in 1840 Springfield included Democratic politician and long-time Lincoln rival Stephen Douglas (forever linked with Lincoln through his participation, two decades later, in the landmark Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, as well as a presidential candidate against Lincoln in the 1860 election); the young, Princeton-educated lawyer James Conkling; Speed’s store clerk Billy Herndon, later to become Lincoln’s final law partner; Simeon Francis, publisher of the Sangamo Journal; the postmaster James Keyes; the court clerk James Matheny (later the best man at Lincoln’s wedding); Lincoln’s office boy Milton Hay; and the political scion (and Lincoln’s future brother-in-law) Ninian Edwards. Ninian’s niece Matilda Edwards was among the young women of Springfield who were courted by both Lincoln and Speed.

  August Belmont was born in 1813 in Hesse, Germany, and grew up in the Free City of Frankfort. He was apprenticed to the Rothschild banking empire and sent to the New World to expand the empire in 1837, at age twenty-four. He quickly became a prominent banker, eventually settling in New York City. In later years, Belmont and Lincoln had a complex relationship. Belmont chaired the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860 that nominated Stephen Douglas to run against Lincoln. Still, Belmont strongly opposed Southern succession, and he supported the Union cause during the Civil War, although he wrote a steady stream of correspondence to Lincoln and his cabinet members, offering unsolicited (and, one imagines, unwelcome) advice on the prosecution of the war.

  After the war, Belmont became one of the leading figures of the Gilded Age. He also found time for his interests as a sportsman. In 1867, he organized a horse race in New York City that survives to this day with his name. The Belmont Stakes is run every year in June as the final leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown. Belmont died at his Fifth Avenue mansion in November 1890. It was front-page news in the following morning’s New York Times.

  As a young boy, the little “chief herdsman” Bill Davidson testified for Lincoln in a hotly disputed case. As Davidson would recall seven decades later, Lincoln “took my hand in his and talked to me in a kind and sympathetic way … Every time the lawyers on the other side tried to bully and frighten me, Lincoln appealed to the judge on my behalf. He so won my childish affections that he always held a warm place in my heart.”

  All of which brings us to Mary. Mary Todd was the subject of a highly spirited courting competition when she moved to Springfield in the fall of 1839 to live with her elder sister, Elizabeth (Todd) Edwards. One contemporary observer of Mary in Springfield wrote, “Miss Todd is flourishing largely. She has a great many beaux.” The qualities Mary was seeking in a potential suitor are striking. She told her sister she sought “a good man, with a head for position, fame and power, a man of mind with a hope and bright prospects, rather than all of the houses and gold in the world.”

  Lincoln, Douglas, and Speed, among many others, all vied avidly for her hand. Speed had his moments—Mary complained good-naturedly in a letter to an intimate friend about “Mr. Speed’s ever-changing heart, which he is about to offer to another shrine”—but in this field, as in so many others in their intertwined lives, the final battle came down to Lincoln and Douglas. Douglas is reputed to have proposed marriage; years later, Mary told a confidante that she had turned him down with a chillingly prescient statement: “ ‘I can’t consent to be your wife. I shall become Mrs. President, or I am the victim of false prophets, but it will not be as Mrs. Douglas.’”

  That left Lincoln. As suggested in the novel, Lincoln faced opposition from the self-consciously aristocratic clutch of Todd sisters, who had grown up in one of the leading families in Lexington, Kentucky, before being sent, one after the other, to find husbands in Springfield. Mary’s next older sister, Frances, considered Lincoln “the plainest man” in Springfield, and her eldest sister (and guardian), Elizabeth, later recalled that “Lincoln was unable to talk to women and was not sufficiently educated in the female line to do so.” Nonetheless, sometime during 1840, Lincoln and Mary moved from friendship to courtship and wooing. As of the time the novel ends, in the late summer of 1840, it appeared to Springfield observers that the two ambitious young persons were on a smooth path to marriage and a lifetime of commitment and harmony.

  The truth was very different, but that’s a story best told at another time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Like the other books in the Lincoln & Speed Mystery series, this novel is the product of substantial original historical research. In addition to those persons thanked in previous volumes, I want to thank the following for their assistance with my research efforts: Kathy L. Nichols, executive director of the Farmington Historic Plantation in Louisville, the Speed family home where Joshua grew up; Devin Payne Serke, assistant director at Farmington; Tom Wright of the Mary Todd Lincoln House in Lexington, Kentucky; and Tim Waits at the historic Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.

  A House Divided benefited greatly from the careful reads and sympathetic notes of Joshua F. Thorpe, Christin Brecher, and Michael Bergm
ann. Initial drafts of certain chapters of the novel were developed as part of a writing group at the peerless New York Society Library. My colleagues at the NYSL included Lillian Clagett, Susan Dudley-Allen, Janet Gilman, Jane Murphy, Alan Siegel, Helena Sokoloff, Victoria Reiter, Carolyn Waters, and Mimi Wisebond. Writer and editor Patrick LoBrutto gave helpful input on an early sketch of the novel. Elena Hartwell generously lent me her equine expertise.

  My publisher Matt Martz at Crooked Lane Books continues to provide fantastic support for my Lincoln & Speed series. I am grateful for the efforts of the entire Crooked Lane team, including Sarah Poppe, Jenny Chen, and Ashley Di Dio. My agent Scott Miller is a rock-solid guiding light and all-around good guy.

  I have been fortunate in the past year to begin working with the tireless Kathie Bennett of Magic Time Literary on publicity matters. I am grateful for the continuing efforts of Kathie and her team, including Roy Bennett and Susie Zurenda.

  My work on this book has been greatly aided by the support and encouragement of friends and family too numerous to list by name. I’ll mention here only Roifield Brown, Shannon Campbell, Joel and Carla Campbell, Steven Everson, Donna Gest, Marc Goldman, Laura Kupillas, Atif Khawaja, C. Mark Pickrell, Bob and Rosemary Putnam, Joel Schneider, Mark Stein, David Thorpe, Alina Tugend, and Caroline Werner.

  I could not have written the book without the love and support of my three sons, Gray, Noah, and Gideon Putnam, and of my wife, Christin Putnam. Christin is the first and last reader of every word I write, as well as an inexhaustible source of good cheer, keen editorial notes, and crucial plot points. You are my everything, Christin. I love you very much.