“—I’m old enough to vote legally.”

“And—”

“I voted for Senator Douglas, sir.”

“So, you and your family are not Abolitionist, then?”

Halsey said, “Massachusetts is the seat of abolition, but my father and uncle—”

“Your uncle? Hutchinson of American Telegraph? You thank him for your new position in the War Department, don’t you?”

“After Ball’s Bluff, my uncle told Secretary Stanton that I had worked for him in Boston. I had learned the telegraph business from the bottom up, so I knew about wires and batteries and resonators and such, so I still had much to offer, despite my wound.”

Lincoln stopped and looked Halsey in the eye. “I believe you do, Lieutenant.” Then he turned his gaze to the front of the mansion. “I believe all you wounded boys still have much to offer, and all the boys who’ve died had much to offer, too, even … even my own boy.”

The president’s middle son, twelve-year-old Willie, had been carried off by fever in early March. His youngest, Tad, had barely survived. His wife was said to have gone insane with grief. But Lincoln had soldiered on, through crisis after crisis.… How to persuade McClellan to use the mighty army that he had built? How to make sense of the slaughter at Shiloh? How to justify the freeing of the District slaves?

Lincoln stared up at the great portico, as if he expected it to fall on his head. Then he said, “I’ve enjoyed our talk, Lieutenant. I will look forward to seeing more of you on my nightly passages.”

And Halsey Hutchinson watched the long black shadow ascend the stairs, push open the unlocked White House door, and step inside.

There, he thought, went the loneliest man in the world.

*   *   *

Just before dawn, the telegraphs stopped clattering. So Bates and the key operators retired to a basement room where a pot of coffee always boiled.

Alone in the office, Halsey relished the morning quiet, a small reward for passing the night in labor. He signed an order for a new key word to be transmitted to all federal stations, hidden in a message about a requisition of shoes for army mules. He lowered the gas in the ring of lights hanging from the ceiling. Then he gathered up his papers and stepped to Eckert’s desk to put them into the assigned pigeonhole.

And that was when he saw it: the president’s notebook.

Lincoln had tossed it onto the desk when he began the raisin story. It had slid under the pigeonholes, where it lay forgotten as news arrived of McClellan’s retreat.

Halsey’s first thought was to put it in the dispatch drawer.

But what if the contents were private, so private that the president would not want Major Eckert or Stanton reading it? Perhaps he should examine it, just to be certain.

So he took the book and stepped to the window.

The sun was appearing somewhere over Maryland. The slanting rays etched patterns of light onto the buildings of Pennsylvania Avenue and created long shadows at the feet of passersby—men riding horses, washerwomen carrying mops and pails, drunks staggering home, mattress maids heading for work or few hours of rest on mattresses of their own.

Washington was an early town … and a late one.

Halsey flipped to the last pages and saw a date, April 16. A diary? He read the entry written in Lincoln’s large, well-practiced hand:

Signed this day: emancipation for DC. I have ever desired to see city freed from slavery in some satisfactory way. Only question, expediency: What of border state reaction? Would they fear a similar move and secede? This concern stayed my hand until Sen. Sumner asked if I knew the identity of the largest slave holder in Washington. He said, “It is yourself, sir . . now that the Senate has passed the bill to free the District slaves.” So I signed. But … is $300 a head sufficient restitution to preserve loyalty of District slaveholders? And what of more general emancipation?

General emancipation? Could the president actually be thinking such thoughts? Opposing slavery was hardly the same as freeing more than four million ignorant Negroes. Of course, the president was talking to himself here, clarifying ideas in his own mind. Halsey thought about closing the book, but he read on:

What of freed Negroes? Black man will never be mental equal of white man, so full citizenship significant problem. Citizenship means suffrage. Black suffrage? Radical Repubs insist it must follow a general emancipation. I will seek another path when this war is over. Whether it lasts three more months or three more years, we will face great challenges in rebuilding trust between the sections, challenges best met by removing the Negroes from the debate. I will seek a solution that benefits all, North and South, black and white: Negro colonization.