Brave men wasted on a worthless objective, hundreds slaughtered on a Potomac riverbank, half his fine regiment killed, wounded, or captured … all because of blundering leaders, bad intelligence, and the belief that nine hundred men could make a riverborne assault with three rowboats and a barge.…

Perhaps the Lord had been telling them something at Ball’s Bluff. Perhaps the dissolution of the Union was foreordained, so best end the bloodshed quickly.

Halsey drove that thought from his mind whenever it surfaced like a blue-clad body floating in the Potomac. It would never do for a man who now worked in the very brainpan of the war to believe that the war was unwinnable.

Besides, like Bull Run before it, Ball’s Bluff had turned out to be no more than a little pantomime before the play, something to amuse the theater patrons as they made their way to their seats. The real show had begun that spring, when General McClellan took the army south to the Virginia Peninsula. And the biggest scene yet had unfolded at a Tennessee crossroads called Shiloh Meeting House, where more Americans had fallen in two days than in all the previous wars that Americans had fought.

Halsey brought a hand to the scar at his neck and tried to feel some vibration in his broken voice.

Instead, he felt … something … behind him, a movement, a force, a presence. Without turning, he knew what it was: Abraham Lincoln, on his nightly visit. Then he heard the high, reedy voice and sharp prairie accent:

“That sure is a fine song they’re singin’.” Lincoln looked down at the Negroes splashing through the pools of gaslight on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Halsey glanced at the clock over the mantel. “It’s barely ten, sir. You’re out early.”

“And they’re out late.” Lincoln kept his eyes on the Negroes below, though he stayed back so they could not see him. “When I signed the District emancipation, I did not rescind the curfew against coloreds on the streets after ten o’clock.”

“But some would say that tonight, you’ve given them reason to break curfew, sir.”

“Some would.”

From the corner of his eye, Halsey looked up at the president for a clue as to what he was thinking. Of course, no one in Washington looked down on Lincoln, not literally anyway. No one was tall enough. And no one ever really knew what he was thinking until he decided to make his thoughts plain.

Halsey admired the face that so many called “homely” or worse. The features had a masculine strength—bushy black brows, a nose as straight-ahead as the point of a plow, neat furrows cut from the nostrils to the beard. And the skin—permanently browned and leathered—gave evidence that the strength was hard earned, honestly come by in a lifetime of frontier laboring and horseback lawyering.

And just then, Lincoln was smiling.

People said that his little half smile seemed to describe a dozen different benevolent emotions at once. But when a man’s expression could convey so much, it might also be good for conveying nothing at all. Halsey thought that Lincoln’s smile concealed things, too, deep things, mysterious things.

After a moment, Lincoln said, “So, what do we hear from our generals?”

“Dispatches are in the usual place, sir.” Halsey gestured to the desk between the windows: a work surface supported by spindly legs on one side, office safe on the other, a superstructure of pigeonholes, shelves, locking drawers … the beating heart of the brainpan, if there could be such a thing.

All the dispatches from all the battlefronts passed first through the War Department telegraph office … and that desk.

They arrived in cipher on sounding keys that clattered away day and night and even then were setting up a racket in the adjoining room. A key operator translated the dots and dashes into a series of seemingly unrelated words, apparent gibberish. Then he brought them into the cipher room and placed them on the desk by the door. A cipher operator—working from charts, templates, and keywords—made sense of the gibberish. Then he placed the finished message in the top drawer of that desk.

By day, Major Thomas Eckert sat at the desk and ran the office. He cataloged the dispatches, then delivered them to Secretary of War Stanton, whose office adjoined through a screened door on the other side. The irascible and autocratic Stanton would then determine what information he would release to the world and what he would withhold, and since so much of the news was bad, he withheld a great deal. But at night, Eckert and Stanton went home.

Lincoln was usually wide awake and wandering.

He might amble over from the White House at ten or at midnight or in the small hours when the rest of the world was wrapped in sleep. Sometimes he came in shirtsleeves with a gray plaid shawl over his shoulders. Sometimes he wore an old linen duster and floppy felt hat, as if they might disguise Washington’s most recognizable figure. But usually he wore his familiar black suit.

If the wires were buzzing, he would raise the gas in the lamp above Eckert’s desk, take out a book, and wait. If all was quiet, he would soon be on his way back to the White House. But whenever he finished reading through the messages, he would always say, “So, boys, I’m down to the raisins. Anything else?”

That night, cipher operator David Homer Bates looked up from his desk and said, “I’m working on something from General McClellan, sir, if you’d like to wait.”

“Well, I don’t feel much like sleepin’—” Lincoln pulled out the chair.