Items related to The Lincoln Letter (Peter Fallon)
Treasure hunters Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington are heading for adventure in Washington, D.C., the sleek, modern, power-hungry capital of America...and the crowded, muddy, intrigue-filled nexus of the Civil War. Their prize? A document of incredible historical importance and incalculable value: Abraham Lincoln’s diary.
What if Lincoln recorded his innermost thoughts as he moved toward the realization that he must free the slaves? And what if that diary slipped from his fingers in 1862? A recently discovered letter written by Lincoln suggests that the diary exists and is waiting to be found. Some want the diary for its enormous symbolic value to a nation that reveres Lincoln. Others believe it carries a dark truth about Lincoln’s famous proclamation—a truth that could profoundly impact the fast-approaching elections and change the course of the nation. Peter and Evangeline must beat these villains to the prize or risk a future that corrupts the vision for which Lincoln fought.
From William Martin, the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Constitution, The Lincoln Letter is a breathless chase across the Washington of today as well as a political thriller set in our besieged Civil War capital. It is a story of old animosities that still smolder, old philosophies that still contend, and a portrait of our greatest president as he passes from lawyer to leader in the fight for the birth of a new freedom.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Friday Night
Peter Fallon received a copy of that letter as an attachment to an e-mail on the third Friday night of September.
He would not have read it, except that it came from Diana Wilmington, an assistant professor at the George Washington University and author of a controversial new book, The Racism and Resolve of Abraham Lincoln. The book had gotten her onto television, radio, magazine covers, and made her one of the most recognizable African American scholars in the country. Peter had also dated her when she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts.
“I’ve been thinking of you,” she wrote. “I still read the Boston gossip pages. (How could I not, after the gossip we inspired?) So that bit about you and Evangeline caught my eye. Not getting married but still having a reception ... genius.”
Yes, thought Peter. Genius. The hall had been rented and the champagne was cold. It was a great party. As for the decision not to get married ... he was not so sure.
He took a sip of wine and kept reading:
“I really liked Evangeline. I thought she was good for you.”
True. Peter couldn’t remember which of them first said, “If it works don’t fix it.” But now, Evangeline was prepping a new project in New York, and Peter was guest-curating a new exhibit in Boston.
“However,” Diana went on, “I’m not writing about your love life. I’d like you to take a look at this attachment.”
Peter clicked to the scanned image of a letter. He glanced first at the header, printed in an Old English typeface: “Executive Mansion.” Beneath it was the word “Washington,” the date April 14, 1865, and to the side, the word “Private” handwritten and circled. Then Peter’s eye dropped to the signature, to the clear and characteristic cursive that was the Holy Grail of autograph collectors everywhere: A. Lincoln.
In an instant, he knew that whatever this was, it was worth seven figures: a Lincoln signature, on a Lincoln letter, written from the Lincoln White House.
Then he looked again at the date and felt a chill: the day Lincoln was shot.
He wiped the sweat from his palms, as if he were touching the original instead of seeing it on a computer screen. He almost went looking for white cotton curatorial gloves.
Could this be Lincoln’s last letter? A last insight into the most analyzed, adulated, biographied, beloved, and, in a few places, detested man in American history? And what did this anonymous lieutenant have that mattered so much at the end of the Civil War?
Peter clicked again on the e-mail:
I held this letter in my hands a week ago, along with the envelope addressed to a Corporal Jeremiah Murphy. A man was offering it for sale to the American Museum of Emancipation. I told him we were very small, hoping to consolidate with the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in 2015, but that I would talk to our board. When I tried to contact him two days ago, he had gone incommunicado. I had been planning to ask you to appraise the letter. Would you be willing to put your skills to finding it, or at least uncovering the story behind it?
Peter lifted the wine bottle. One more tip into the glass would bring him to the bottom of the label. When he drank alone—something he’d been doing more since the wedding that wasn’t—he had a rule: Drink to the bottom of the label and no farther. Stopper the bottle. And every few nights, finish the high-quality dregs. So he poured a bit more, swirled, and sipped.
Then he wrote back:
The last big Lincoln letter to come on the market was his answer to the so-called Little People’s Petition. It went for 3.2m in ’09. That’s where the bidding starts on this, if it’s authentic. So call me. I’m up until midnight.
Then he drank the wine with a little wedge of Époisses: a big cab with a big cheese, an excellent nightcap. And NESN was nightcapping an excellent Red Sox game, which he missed because he had been working on a new exhibit for the Boston Public Library: “A Northern City and the Civil War.”
It was opening on September 22, the 150th anniversary of the day Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. The Leventhal Center was providing battle maps. Rare Books was delivering journals and photos from the famed Twentieth Regiment Collection. Peter was contributing a few things from his Antiquaria catalog, including a presentation copy of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, inscribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. And an anonymous lender was offering a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation itself.
Peter was doing more than guest curators usually did. He considered it a signal honor from his city, so he wanted to earn it.
And Boston was more than his city. It was his town.
He had his roots in Southie. He’d gone to BC High and Harvard. He ran his business from the third floor of a Newbury Street bowfront that was above an art gallery that was above a restaurant. He had Red Sox season tickets and sat on the boards of two Boston museums. And he could never imagine moving to New York, no matter how much he liked to visit.
Evangeline had decided that she didn’t want to live anywhere but New York, which made marriage a problem and led them to face a hard truth: They both liked their independence, no matter how much they loved each other.
So they’d had a party instead of a wedding and settled for status quo ante. No sharing of utility bills or toothpaste, no extracurricular sharing of themselves, either.
While he waited for Diana Wilmington to call, Peter e-mailed Evangeline:
See you Sunday. We’ll have fun on the battlefields.
Then he poured the rest of the wine.
* * *
How did we decide that a little thing like a city would keep us apart?
That was what Evangeline Carrington was thinking as she rode a taxi down the West Side the next morning. But she didn’t think long, because she was catching the 8 A.M. Acela to Washington for her biggest professional adventure yet.
The travel writer was trying television.
She had always written—for satisfaction, for pay, for therapy. She wrote in her attic when she was a girl. She wrote for the Crimson when she went to Harvard. She wrote her way through Columbia School of Journalism after her first breakup with Peter. And after her first marriage fell apart, she wrote about the places she went to escape.
She had built a nice career, but every year, there were fewer travel magazines and fewer travel sections in fewer newspapers. So it was time for the next step. She’d thought about a blog. But Peter urged her to think big: television.
And she had an idea for a show, but not for the Travel Channel or PBS. No, when she thought television, she thought History Network.
Her idea: a photogenic journalist takes you to fun places. Sure, it had been done before. But Evangeline was planning to explore the best sites, restaurants, and hotels for the history-oriented traveler, and each bundle of shows would have a theme: Revolutionary New England, the Oregon Trail, New York in the Ragtime era....
The network fell in love ... with her, with her pitch, and with her plan for the first bundle: Travels in Civil War Country, yet another angle for their wall-to-wall Civil War sesquicentennial progra...
William Martin has written ten novels, an award-winning PBS documentary on the life of George Washington, and a cult-classic horror movie. His first Peter Fallon novel, Back Bay, spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, Martin has been telling the American story, from the Pilgrims to 9/11. His novels, including Cape Cod, Citizen Washington, Annapolis, and The Rising of the Moon, have established William Martin as, in the words of Publishers Weekly, “a storyteller whose smoothness equals his ambition.” He was the 2005 recipient of the New England Book Award. Martin has three grown children and lives near Boston with his wife.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Prologue
On the last day of his life, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter. If he was angry, anger did not reveal itself in his handwriting, which was typically clean and open. If he was euphoric, and those who observed him that day attested later that he was, euphoria did not express itself either.
The letter lacked the poetry of his best speeches and demonstrated none of the cold and relentless logic of his political writing.
It was as simple, direct, and as blunt as a cannonball:
Dear Lieutenant Hutchinson,
It comes to my attention that you are still alive. This means that you may still be in possession of something that I believe fell into your hands in the telegraph office three years ago. It would be best if you returned it, considering its potential to alter opinions regarding the difficulties just ended and those that lie ahead. If you do, a presidential pardon will be considered.
A. Lincoln.
Lincoln did not inform his secretary about the letter.
It was unlikely that he wanted questions regarding correspondence with an officer who had served not only in the field but also in the War Department telegraph office, before coming into significant personal difficulty.
It would also have appeared strange that Lincoln did not address the letter to Lieutenant Hutchinson. He sent it instead to Private Jeremiah Murphy at the Armory Square Hospital on Seventh Street.
But even a president had his secrets.
Lincoln sealed the letter and slipped it into a pile of outgoing correspondence, some to be mailed, some to be hand delivered around the city.
It was just after eight when his wife appeared in the doorway to his office, where he was finishing a chat with a congressman. She was wearing a white dress with black stripes and a bonnet adorned with pink silk flowers. She had always favored flowers. But she had worn them less and less in the last four years. No woman who had lost a son and two half brothers, no woman who had watched her husband grow old under history’s heaviest burden, would be inclined to wear anything but black. Still, flowers and dress did nothing to soften her voice. “Mr. Lincoln, would you have us be late?”
He said, “To night, we shall laugh.”
Then he called for his carriage, and they went to the theater.
ONE
Friday Night
Peter Fallon received a copy of that letter as an attachment to an e-mail on the third Friday night of September.
He would not have read it, except that it came from Diana Wilmington, an assistant professor at the George Washington University and author of a controversial new book, The Racism and Resolve of Abraham Lincoln. The book had gotten her onto television, radio, magazine covers, and made her one of the most recognizable African American scholars in the country. Peter had also dated her when she was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts.
“I’ve been thinking of you,” she wrote. “I still read the Boston gossip pages. (How could I not, after the gossip we inspired?) So that bit about you and Evangeline caught my eye. Not getting married but still having a reception ... genius.”
Yes, thought Peter. Genius. The hall had been rented and the champagne was cold. It was a great party. As for the decision not to get married ... he was not so sure.
He took a sip of wine and kept reading:
“I really liked Evangeline. I thought she was good for you.”
True. Peter couldn’t remember which of them first said, “If it works don’t fix it.” But now, Evangeline was prepping a new project in New York, and Peter was guest-curating a new exhibit in Boston.
“However,” Diana went on, “I’m not writing about your love life. I’d like you to take a look at this attachment.”
Peter clicked to the scanned image of a letter. He glanced first at the header, printed in an Old English typeface: “Executive Mansion.” Beneath it was the word “Washington,” the date April 14, 1865, and to the side, the word “Private” handwritten and circled. Then Peter’s eye dropped to the signature, to the clear and characteristic cursive that was the Holy Grail of autograph collectors everywhere: A. Lincoln.
In an instant, he knew that whatever this was, it was worth seven figures: a Lincoln signature, on a Lincoln letter, written from the Lincoln White House.
Then he looked again at the date and felt a chill: the day Lincoln was shot.
He wiped the sweat from his palms, as if he were touching the original instead of seeing it on a computer screen. He almost went looking for white cotton curatorial gloves.
Could this be Lincoln’s last letter? A last insight into the most analyzed, adulated, biographied, beloved, and, in a few places, detested man in American history? And what did this anonymous lieutenant have that mattered so much at the end of the Civil War?
Peter clicked again on the e-mail:
I held this letter in my hands a week ago, along with the envelope addressed to a Corporal Jeremiah Murphy. A man was offering it for sale to the American Museum of Emancipation. I told him we were very small, hoping to consolidate with the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in 2015, but that I would talk to our board. When I tried to contact him two days ago, he had gone incommunicado. I had been planning to ask you to appraise the letter. Would you be willing to put your skills to finding it, or at least uncovering the story behind it?
Peter lifted the wine bottle. One more tip into the glass would bring him to the bottom of the label. When he drank alone—something he’d been doing more since the wedding that wasn’t—he had a rule: Drink to the bottom of the label and no farther. Stopper the bottle. And every few nights, finish the high-quality dregs. So he poured a bit more, swirled, and sipped.
Then he wrote back:
The last big Lincoln letter to come on the market was his answer to the so-called Little People’s Petition. It went for 3.2m in ’09. That’s where the bidding starts on this, if it’s authentic. So call me. I’m up until midnight.
Then he drank the wine with a little wedge of Époisses: a big cab with a big cheese, an excellent nightcap. And NESN was nightcapping an excellent Red Sox game, which he missed because he had been working on a new exhibit for the Boston Public Library: “A Northern City and the Civil War.”
It was opening on September 22, the 150th anniversary of the day Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation. The Leventhal Center was providing battle maps. Rare Books was delivering journals and photos from the famed Twentieth Regiment Collection. Peter was contributing a few things from his Antiquaria catalog, including a presentation copy of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, inscribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. And an anonymous lender was offering a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation itself.
Peter was doing more than guest curators usually did. He considered it a signal honor from his city, so he wanted to earn it.
And Boston was more than his city. It was his town.
He had his roots in Southie. He’d gone to BC High and Harvard. He ran his business from the third floor of a Newbury Street bowfront that was above an art gallery that was above a restaurant. He had Red Sox season tickets and sat on the boards of two Boston museums. And he could never imagine moving to New York, no matter how much he liked to visit.
Evangeline had decided that she didn’t want to live anywhere but New York, which made marriage a problem and led them to face a hard truth: They both liked their independence, no matter how much they loved each other.
So they’d had a party instead of a wedding and settled for status quo ante. No sharing of utility bills or toothpaste, no extracurricular sharing of themselves, either.
While he waited for Diana Wilmington to call, Peter e-mailed Evangeline:
See you Sunday. We’ll have fun on the battlefields.
Then he poured the rest of the wine.
* * *
How did we decide that a little thing like a city would keep us apart?
That was what Evangeline Carrington was thinking as she rode a taxi down the West Side the next morning. But she didn’t think long, because she was catching the 8 A.M. Acela to Washington for her biggest professional adventure yet.
The travel writer was trying television.
She had always written—for satisfaction, for pay, for therapy. She wrote in her attic when she was a girl. She wrote for the Crimson when she went to Harvard. She wrote her way through Columbia School of Journalism after her first breakup with Peter. And after her first marriage fell apart, she wrote about the places she went to escape.
She had built a nice career, but every year, there were fewer travel magazines and fewer travel sections in fewer newspapers. So it was time for the next step. She’d thought about a blog. But Peter urged her to think big: television.
And she had an idea for a show, but not for the Travel Channel or PBS. No, when she thought television, she thought History Network.
Her idea: a photogenic journalist takes you to fun places. Sure, it had been done before. But Evangeline was planning to explore the best sites, restaurants, and hotels for the history-oriented traveler, and each bundle of shows would have a theme: Revolutionary New England, the Oregon Trail, New York in the Ragtime era....
The network fell in love ... with her, with her pitch, and with her plan for the first bundle: Travels in Civil War Country, yet another angle for their wall-to-wall Civil War sesquicentennial progra...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBrilliance Audio
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1423385071
- ISBN 13 9781423385073
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
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