The Lincoln Conspiracy (27 page)

“I’m sure none of your thirst for the diaries involves embarrassing Mr. Stanton. You’re to leave the District, Mr. Pinkerton.”

“What of your photograph of me in Alexandria?”

“You have my word that it shan’t circulate and that the plate will be destroyed.”

“I saved your life, McFadden,” Pinkerton said as he stood again. “My goodwill would have me exiled?”

“By tomorrow afternoon.”

“I doubt I can call off my people in Chicago in time. I’ll send a telegram, but they’re already waiting for your wife there.”

“My wife is a capable woman. Good night and goodbye, Mr. Pinkerton.”

Pinkerton held Temple’s eyes for a moment, spat on the floor by the detective’s cane, and then turned on his heel. After Pinkerton left the Willard, Temple reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope bearing Edwin Stanton’s name—with “Lord War” inscribed below it—and left it at the hotel desk with the concierge.

E
dwin Stanton sent two cavalry officers to meet Temple in front of the Capitol on Wednesday morning, an hour before the Grand Review launched into its second day. The Union boys identified Temple by his cane and put him on a separate mount accompanying them. He was to be seated next to the war secretary as a guest in the reviewing stand.

Stanton, round as an egg and resolute as an ironclad, took Temple’s measure as soon as he reached the reviewing stand, scanning him up and down and nodding slightly as he did so. He didn’t extend his hand or ask Temple his name before they made their way to their seats, which would place the two men between Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, both of whom had yet to arrive. Stanton moved deliberately, accustomed as he had become after long years of war and the burdens of his office to giving, rather than receiving, orders.

“There aren’t many who know me as Lord War,” Stanton said as he sat down. “Your diligence is impressive, Mr.…?”

“McFadden. You also are known as Mars?”

“You’ve gotten inside a Vigenère table as well. Also impressive. But you’re putting yourself in a very perilous and untenable place. Why?”

“I agreed to help uphold the law.”

“Come now.”

“It’s the truth,” Temple said, after considering—and deciding against—offering Stanton a more elaborate explanation. “I also deeply admired the president. It isn’t any more complicated than that.”

“Everything in the District right now is more complicated than it appears. Do you mean to do me damage?”

“I mean to find out why President Lincoln was killed.”

Stanton worried about the risks he had taken allowing a stranger to sit so close to him, Grant, and Johnson so soon after the president’s murder. He looked about for his guards, and mopped his brow with a handkerchief before turning back to Temple.

“I could detain you right now,” he said. “Right here and indefinitely, for no other reason than I wish it so. The state has given me those powers, and habeas corpus is just a cloak that we lift and drop as we intend. You would vanish.”

“You want what I have and you don’t have it yet,” Temple said. “If you wanted me arrested, you would have had it done when your men met me earlier at the Capitol. And you did not.”

Crowds were swelling again along Pennsylvania, and with both the Irish Brigade and Sherman’s troops set to march, the morning’s festivities had already turned distinctly rowdy and snapjacket. Scuffles broke out on corners where people jockeyed for better views; some police meant to patrol Pennsylvania Avenue were already drunk; cheers and peals of laughter coursed through windows and from the rooftops of shops and houses; flags and red, white, and blue bunting hung from windows; and, with legions of Union soldiers moving down the boulevard from the Capitol, the sun painted the entire enterprise as if, for a moment, to cleanse it and keep it whole before ancient hatreds threatened to divide it all again in the nights that were to come.

Temple leaned toward Stanton to continue their conversation, but the war secretary ignored him, rising from his chair to meet General Grant and President Johnson as they arrived. Johnson sat to one side of Stanton and, after the war secretary shooed Temple down a seat, Grant sat on the other, leaving Temple perched next to the man who, after Lincoln, was the most popular hero in the North.

As on the day before, a band preceded the military procession, but today the musicians were playing the anthem that had come to
symbolize Sherman and his Army of the Tennessee, “Marching Through Georgia.” As the band’s refrains boomed louder, the throngs along Pennsylvania began to sing along with the music:

The song was a preamble for the appearance of Sherman himself, who sat tall on Lexington, his chestnut stallion, and rode in a new uniform before sixty-five thousand of his men, including some of the same bummers and free Negroes who had passed along with their ragtag gear and plunder in front of Augustus’s house. The mounted infantry of the Ninth Illinois rode ahead of Sherman and cleared a path for the general and his troops as crowds surged toward the war hero, offering him wreaths and gifts. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Sherman’s army had played as they left a gutted, ravaged Atlanta the year before, replaced “Marching Through Georgia,” and Sherman bowed in his saddle toward the crowd. All of the onlookers roared in response, clapping and calling out his name.

When Sherman passed the reviewing stand, he saluted President Johnson with his sword, dismounted, and climbed the steps up to the platform. Sherman and Stanton harbored a well-known hatred of each other; Stanton suspected Sherman of having designs on the presidency and loathed his insubordination, while Sherman saw Stanton as overly sympathetic toward the Negro and in too much of a rush to reconstruct the South in the image of the North. When Stanton extended his hand to Sherman, the general ignored it and shook hands with his good friend Grant instead. Temple was asked to move down yet again so that Sherman could sit beside Grant.

A minister on the platform, observing Sherman slighting Stanton, rose and shouted: “Edwin M. Stanton, savior of our country under God, rise and receive the greetings of your friends!” When
Stanton refused to stand, the minister repeated himself: “Edwin M. Stanton, savior of our country under God, rise and receive the greetings of your friends!” As waves of applause rolled out from the same onlookers who had cheered Sherman earlier, Stanton stood up and received the ovation. Sherman, refusing to acknowledge the moment, leaned in toward Grant and whispered in his ear.

The generals took no notice of or interest in Temple, and for the rest of the day he would occasionally lean out from his seat and look down the aisle to scrutinize Stanton, taking stock of his comportment, his demeanor, and his reactions to the surges of emotion that accompanied the crowd’s response to each new military regiment as it passed by for review and with each thundering volley of rifle fire that sounded up and down Pennsylvania. When Temple’s friend Michael Gleason, a captain in the Irish Brigade of Illinois, rode by with his sword raised, Temple cheered him, and he noticed Stanton cheering heartily as well. But such outpourings were rare from the war secretary, who was almost regal in his self-possession and who took in the last hours of the Grand Review as a man entranced by the human spectacle and made somber and weary by the sacrifices that gave rise to it.

When the parade ended at three-thirty, the reviewing stand emptied quickly as the dignitaries tried to escape the crush on Pennsylvania. Crowds encircled Sherman, who lost his temper as he and his wife were besieged; he screamed, “Damn you, get out of the way! Get out of the way!” Temple noticed that Sherman’s protests drew a faint smile from Stanton, but the war secretary knew better than to let himself be caught gloating. His lips re-formed into a thin line and he turned toward Temple, finally ready after several hours to converse. The two of them, and Stanton’s contingent of four bodyguards, were the only ones left on the platform.

“An entire army, the mightiest and deadliest ever assembled, marches through Washington in two days and then disappears forever into the citizenry,” Stanton said. “A million men of war turned into men of peace in only forty-eight hours.”

“Four
years
and forty-eight hours,” Temple said. “With the Union preserved.”

“The South is subdued, not conquered. There is still mighty work to be done to bring our Southern brethren into the fold, and it will be all the more daunting with President Lincoln away from us.”

“Pardon my impatience, Mr. Secretary, but why have you kept me here for so prolonged a time? Isn’t our business straightforward?”

“In good time, Mr. McFadden, all will become apparent. I want you to consider what stands between the end of this war and a reconstructed South of a fit with the nation that surrounds it. What stands in the way, sir?”

“The Southerners themselves, I would imagine.”

“To a point. They will stand in the way of the Negro and the rights of the freedmen. They will resist rule from the North. They are bitter and will be so well into the future. There is all of that. But there is also our new class of industrialists in the North made robust and wealthy by the engines of this war and the inventiveness of our citizenry. They have designs on the western territories, and they would be content to force our politicians to bargain for fewer concessions from a defeated South—if the Secesh are willing to cede the expansion of the West to the railroad interests, and to permit a new railroad to be built through the South and Texas.”

“I am at a loss as to how this involves my letter to you,” Temple said. “I have abided this delay today in the hope that I would gain more than a tutorial.”

Stanton shook his head. He was a man whom the war had made rough as bark and who had come to understand things he had never wanted to consider. He reached into the pocket on his vest, made tight by the pressure of his girth, and withdrew the note Temple had left for him at the Willard. He unfolded it, then waved away his bodyguards as he read from it in a whisper that only he and Temple could hear:
“ ‘Dear Mars: The Booth diary speaks of you, in conjunction with Patriot, Avenger, Tyrant, Goliath, Wise Man, and Drinker. Mrs. Lincoln’s diary speaks of misery, of course, and of the railroads. I would
like an interview with you. Please send your men to fetch me tomorrow morning in front of the Capitol building. I am identified by my cane, my wayward hobble, and my height. If your men do not arrive for me I will register you as uninterested and go on my way.’ ”

Stanton folded the note again and slipped it back into his vest pocket.

“You have a strong, confident script. It speaks well of you.”

“Who are these people, Patriot and the rest?” Temple asked.

“Mr. McFadden, I have chosen not to answer your questions today. My men here are going to take you into custody.”

“I don’t have the diaries with me.”

“I’ve kept you here these long hours today so you wouldn’t cause any interferences in Swampdoodle, which is where, I believe, the diaries are, yes? In safekeeping with Jack Flaherty—‘Nail’ to his friends and to you, but a boodler and a thug to the rest of us. You are a worthy man, but you’re interfering and in an arena beyond your scope and abilities.”

“You’re wrong about the diaries.”

“About one of them, you mean? Of course. Only one is in Swampdoodle. The other is with your wife and Mrs. Lincoln on her private rail cars to Chicago.”

Temple stumbled back a step, dizzied, trying to calculate how long it would take him to get back to Swampdoodle. And where, between Chicago and here, Fiona might be. His breathing started to come in rushes and he tightened his grip on his cane, looking away from Stanton and trying to decide where on Pennsylvania Avenue he could secure a horse.

“I can see your thoughts revolving, but there isn’t any time left for you on this. Robert Lincoln will intercept his mother’s diary, and no one is going to take the widow at her word about her scribblings in a journal. Everyone considers her quite mad. I imagine Robert will have to have his mother institutionalized on some coming date,” Stanton said, shaking his head. “And, as I’m also sure you know, Lafayette
Baker has a long list of resentments and injuries cataloged against you and Mr. Flaherty, and he has shared them with me. You’ve seriously injured a number of his men and embarrassed him in the fields around Augustus Spriggs’s handsome new home, and Mr. Flaherty even shot one of Mr. Baker’s marksmen from the trees. These men were and are agents of our government, and you have intruded upon their work. Mr. Baker has ventured into Swampdoodle today and I am sure shots have been exchanged, but with all of the rifle fire accompanying our parade, I doubt anyone heard them. I am sorry this has taken such an ugly and unfortunate shape. I truly am.”

Temple saw regret trace its way across Stanton’s face, but he had no time to consider the matter further. He pivoted on his cane, his mind spinning as he skittered down the aisle, away from Stanton. The war secretary nodded to his guards, who closed in on Temple from either side. Temple cracked his cane across the knees of the first soldier and then clubbed him in the jaw as he dropped. The soldier behind him had his bayonet drawn, but Stanton ordered him to take Temple alive; the soldier hesitated, and Temple turned on him and sliced his cane into the side of the man’s head and then butted him in the stomach with it as he collapsed. But Temple never saw the two guards vaulting over the bleachers toward him from several rows above, and when they reached him, one of them threw his arms around him in a bear hug. The other slammed his gun into Temple’s head, snapping his neck sideways and causing his vision to blur.