The Lincoln Deception (23 page)

T
he opening scene in this novel—the deathbed statement of John Bingham about the mysterious midtrial disclosure of Mrs. Mary Surratt—is drawn from
Bingham of the Hills,
a largely unread 1989 biography of Bingham by Erving E. Beauregard. Beauregard describes the scene in a single paragraph and attributes it to a family story related to him by the grandson of Bingham's physician. I came upon the passage while researching a book about the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial (
Impeached
); it stuck in my mind for several years and would not be dislodged. I read widely about the Booth conspiracy and became dissatisfied with the standard portrayal of Booth as the crazed, vindictive assassin. The conspiracy was too big to fit in that frame. Because the provenance for Bingham's deathbed scene is by no means sturdy, and because Bingham never disclosed what Mrs. Surratt told him, a fictional treatment allowed me the freedom to explore the Booth conspiracy in the speculative fashion warranted by the known facts.

The character of Jamie Fraser is inspired by the physician who attended John Bingham but is an entirely fictional character. Speed Cook also is inspired by an actual person: Moses Fleetwood Walker, who came from Steubenville, Ohio, and was the last black man to play in the big leagues until Jackie Robinson officially broke the color barrier. More about Walker is in David Zang's book,
Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer.
The various Surratts and Booths portrayed in the book, along with Bessie Hale and the widows of Lafayette Foster and Ulysses Grant, all were alive in 1900, when Cook and Fraser set off to unravel the secrets of the Booth conspiracy—all, that is, but the fetching Eliza, John Wilkes Booth's illegitimate daughter. Although it is entirely plausible that Booth sired a child out of wedlock, and although a courtesan named Nelly Starr did attempt to kill herself after the Lincoln assassination, Eliza is an entirely fictional character. Also, Lafayette Foster
was
second in line for the presidency in April 1865, a fact that seems to have interested virtually no one over the years. Until now, that is.

I am grateful to a number of people for helping this novel along, beginning with my extraordinary agent, Will Lippincott, who supported me on this departure from my previously beaten path. I am most fortunate that John Scognamiglio, my editor at Kensington, saw some potential in this book and has been an insightful reader. I also thank the early readers who have helped improve all of my books, and did so again: Solveig Eggerz, Joye Shepperd, Catherine Flanagan, Phil Harvey, Robert Gibson, Frank Joseph, Kathy Lorr, Leslie Rollins, Susan Clark, Tom Glenn, Alice Leaderman, and Linda More-field.

I have heard it said that when a man writes a book, his principal purpose is usually to impress some woman. For me, it's always the same woman—my wife, Nancy. She says she likes this one. I hope so.

Please turn the page for a very special Q&A
with David Stewart!

 

That's exactly the reason. The assassination denied America the leadership of its greatest president at the beginning of perhaps his greatest challenge—rebuilding a nation torn apart by civil war and somehow integrating the freed slaves into American life. And there are still so many unanswered questions about the crime.

 

This was not just a lone gunman, some crazed lunatic. Booth had assembled a team of assassins, though not all were terribly impressive human beings. They targeted anywhere from three to five top officials of the Union government—not just President Lincoln, but also his vice president, his Secretary of State, and very likely his Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief of the Union Army. As the lead character in the novel realizes, it was not an assassination so much as an attempted coup d'état. Could this one unemployed actor plan all of that by himself? Hard to imagine.

 

Bingham was the lead prosecutor of the Booth conspirators in the summer of 1865, and as a congressman went on to write the guarantees of “due process” and “equal protection” in the Fourteenth Amendment. On his deathbed in 1900, Bingham confided to his doctor that Mrs. Mary Surratt—one of the Booth conspirators who was hanged—had told him a secret that could destroy the republic. The secret, he said, would die with him, and so it did. This book tries to imagine the terrible secret that Mr. Bingham took to his grave.

 

Really, five broad points:

It was a giant conspiracy that targeted the top leaders in the North; as noted above, more of a coup d'état than an assassination. Not the plan of a lone crackpot.

Booth and several of his coconspirators lived without resources for many months before the assassination; someone was paying for them. (“Follow the money!”)

Booth and John Surratt both were agents of the Confederate secret service.

Booth's escape route led him repeatedly to Confederate spies as he successfully evaded thousands of Union soldiers who were searching for him; not something a lone evil genius could have achieved.

Mr. Bingham's deathbed statement: What else could he have learned from Mary Surratt that would have threatened to destroy the republic?

 

That relationship was one of the challenging elements of the writing process, and the short answer is that it's a very rocky partnership—as you would expect. They are united in their need to find out the truth about the Lincoln assassination, but race and experience keep pushing them apart. America was a very racist place in 1900; the Jim Crow segregation laws were spreading, and it was fascinating and infuriating to imagine the feelings of an educated and sophisticated African-American like Speed Cook. The bond between the two men becomes real and powerful through the story, but I felt that a racial divide would always be there. And so it is, right to the end.

 

Cook is an entirely fictional character, but he was inspired by a very real man, Moses Fleetwood (“Fleet”) Walker, who came from Steubenville, Ohio. Walker was, in fact, the last African-American to play in the big leagues between 1888 and 1947, had attended Oberlin College and the University of Michigan, and was a fighter for the rights of black people. He wrote a remarkable pamphlet after the turn of the century arguing that black people should return to Africa because they would never be treated fairly in America. For a multi-talented man like Fleet Walker, being a black man in America in 1900 had to be a special form of torture.

 

It was all about this particular story. I first read about Mr. Bingham's deathbed statements when I was researching my second book,
Impeached,
about the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson (Mr. Bingham was the lead prosecutor in that trial, too!). The account of Mr. Bingham's deathbed statement appears in a very obscure biography and has never been explored by anyone. I walked around with it in my head for three years, trying to figure out what I could do with it. I read as much as I could about the Lincoln assassination and finally decided that only a fictionalized account would allow me the freedom to explore what Mr. Bingham said and what it might have meant.

 

The most obvious reason is that Mr. Bingham told no one about his secret until 1900 and I wanted to be faithful to that fact. There's a saying about historical fiction that you can make up a lot, but Abraham Lincoln has to be tall; that is, you should be faithful to facts when they're known. Also, sometimes an investigation can be more successful many years later, when passions have cooled; some people may be more likely to talk when they are facing the prospect of taking their secrets to the grave. Finally, I have always loved Josephine Tey's novel,
The Daughter of Time,
in which a twentieth-century detective attempts to investigate the strangling of the little princes in the Tower of London almost five hundred years earlier. I hoped to work some of that same magic with the Booth story.

Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2013 by David O. Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

 

Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

ISBN: 978-0-7582-9067-0

ISBN-10: 0-7582-9067-5

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-7582-9068-7
ISBN-10: 0-7582-9068-3
First Kensington Electronic Edition: September 2013