The Lincoln Myth(47)

He hesitated.

“If I offended you.”





TWENTY-EIGHT





WASHINGTON, D.C.


STEPHANIE FELT AWKWARD BEING ALONE WITH DANNY DANIELS. They’d neither seen nor spoken to each other in several months.

“How is the First Lady?” she asked.

“Anxious to leave the White House. As am I. Politics ain’t what it used to be. Time for a new life.”

The Twenty-Second Amendment allowed a person to serve only two terms. Nearly every president had wanted a second term, despite the fact that history clearly taught the last four years would be nothing like the first. Either the president became overly aggressive, knowing he had nothing to lose, which alienated both supporters and detractors. Or he became cautious, placid, and docile, not wanting to do anything that might affect his legacy. Either way, nothing could be accomplished. Bucking the trend, Daniels’ second term had been active, dealing with some explosive issues, many of which she and the Magellan Billet had been involved with solving.

“This table,” Daniels said. “It’s really beautiful. I asked. It’s on loan from the State Department. These chairs were made for the Quayles, during the first Bush’s term.”

She could see he was unusually nervous, his booming baritone voice down many decibels, his look distracted.

“I had breakfast prepared. Are you hungry?”

Arranged on the table before them was a place setting each of white Lenox china adorned with the vice president’s seal. Tulip-shaped stemware stood empty, sparkling in bright morning sun that rained through the windows.

“Chitchat is not your specialty,” she said.

He chuckled. “No, it’s not.”

“I’d like to know what this is about.”

She’d already noticed the file on the table.

Daniels opened the folder and lifted out one sheet, which he handed to her. It was a photocopy of a handwritten letter, the script distinctly feminine, the words difficult to read.

“That was sent to president Ulysses S. Grant on August 9, 1876.”

The signature she could read.

Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.

“Mary Todd was a funny bird,” Daniels said. “Lived a tough life. Lost three sons and a husband. Then she had to fight Congress to award her a pension. It was an uphill battle since, while in the White House, she managed to alienate most of them. Just to shut her up, they finally gave her the money.”

“She was no different than any of the hundreds of thousands of other veterans’ widows who were granted a pension. She deserved it.”

“Not true. She was different. She was Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and, by the time Grant was elected president, no one wanted to hear Lincoln’s name. We worship him today like a god. But in the decades after the Civil War, Lincoln was not the legend he ultimately became. He was hated. Reviled.”

“Did they know something we don’t?”

He handed her another sheet, typewritten.

“It’s the text from the copy you’re holding. Read it.”

I have led a life of most rigid seclusion since I left Washington. If my darling husband had lived out his four years, we would have passed our remaining years in a home we both should have enjoyed. How dearly I loved the Soldier’s Home where we spent so much time while in Washington, and I loathe that I should be so far removed from it, broken hearted, praying death to remove me from a life so full of agony. Each morning, on awakening from my troubled slumbers, the utter responsibility of living another day so wretched appears to me as an impossibility. Without my beloved, life is only a heavy burden and the thought that I should soon be removed from this world is a supreme happiness to me. I wonder each day if I should ever regain my health and my strength of mind. Before they leave me entirely, there is a matter of which you must know. With all of the bereavement I have endured my mind had purged the thought, yet it reoccurred the other night as I lay waiting for sleep. Two years into his first term my beloved was given a message from his predecessor, Mr. Buchanan, one that had been passed from leader to leader since the days of Mr. Washington. Those words greatly upset my beloved. He told me that he wished the message had never been delivered. Three more times we discussed the matter and on each occasion he repeated his lament. His anguish during the war was deep and profound. I always thought it a consequence of being the commander in chief, but once he told me that it was because of the message. In the days before he was murdered, when the war was won and the fight over, my beloved said that those disturbing words still existed. He’d first thought to destroy them but had instead sent them west to the Mormons, part of a bargain made with their leader. The Mormons kept their end, as had he, so it was time to retrieve what he had sent them. What to do with it then he did not know. But my beloved never lived to make that decision and nothing was ever retrieved. I thought you might want to know this. Do with the knowledge as you please. None of this matters to me any longer.