These Honored Dead: A Lincoln and Speed Mystery

by Jonathan F. Putnam

“Aware of any unused beds in town, Speed?”

You seem to keep a close company with the other unmarried men about town. I thought you might have some idea.”

His voice was reedy and higher pitched than one would have expected to emerge from so large a being.

“My experience in sharing a bed, and a narrow one at that, every night with another man is that it’s impossible not to learn of his affairs,” I replied seriously. “So you can either pretend and ignore the obvious or acknowledge it straight away.”

With the defeat of Black Hawk in the war of 1833, a wide new swath of central Illinois—long the preferred destination of impatient, adventurous young men from Kentucky—suddenly became habitable.

Springfield stood on the edge of a vast prairie whose wild grasses rose as high as the late summer wheat in Kentucky.

When I entered her, I felt for the first time in my life I might be in the presence of the Divine. And when it was over I was sure of it, for I had seen in the moment of completion the face of God.

“I’m awfully sorry if I’ve woken you,” I said, whispering so as to avoid disturbing Hurst and Herndon sleeping in the next bed over. I shifted my frame under our bedsheet, and my foot grazed against Lincoln’s bare ankle before finding a new place of repose.

It was still to be many years before the railroad or the telegraph reached Springfield. Thus there was no faster means of discourse with my parents in Louisville than the stagecoaches of the Post Office Department. A letter entrusted to the Department in one place could reach the other in ten days, if Fortune was on your side, or as long as three weeks, if she was not.

Many citizens sought to blame a member of one of the immigrant groups that had lately been flooding into Illinois, either the Irish drawn to the canal work up north by Lake Michigan or the mysterious “Mormon” people who had recently established a colony along the Mississippi.

I always say, a newspaperman who doesn’t have more enemies than readers is doing something wrong.”

A grand new capitol building and courthouse was to rise in the center of the town square, and its perimeter was already chalked out in the grassy field. But after an elaborate ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the new building, the town fathers had thought to ask who was going to pay for the project. The town thought the legislature should; the legislature thought the reverse; and the increasingly cash-poor banks announced they would not lend to either group. Construction had come to a halt, and the lonely cornerstone remained the full extent of the state government in Springfield.

“Our constitution specifically provides any slave forced to work in this state is emancipated from his obligation of service. The only exception is if a slave and slave owner are merely passing through Illinois, from one slave state to another.”

Several of them carried blazing torches. The streets and alleyways thrummed with activity, while the distinctive fishy odor of burning whale oil swirled about.

The Rev. Batchelder, sensing the chance to increase his small flock of high church communicants, ordered that the doors and windows of the church remain open during the service such that the persons outside as well could hear his fine words of joy, sorrow, and holy contemplation.

“That phrase, ‘not proper for a young lady,’ that’s an excuse men use when they don’t want women to know something important.”

“There’s more than one way to gather information, Joshua. It doesn’t have to be all battery or bribery. Sometimes kindness goes a long way.”

one of the most famous things Lord Blackstone said was, it is better ten guilty men escape than one innocent man suffers.

“This whole process is such a spectacle to my eyes,” said the Prussian, as we surveyed the scene. “Back home, this sort of trial would be conducted by the magistrates in secret. The first anyone would know about it would be when the chief magistrate leads the condemned man in chains into the main square and announces he’s been sentenced to death. Then there’s a large public procession, headed by the guild leaders, to a spot outside the town walls, and we all watch the poor fellow get his head chopped off.”

“I’m convinced, from my study of these three persons, as well as others I’ve treated over time, that the depression of spirits, so to speak, is a very real phenomenon. But most of my brother physicians would deny its very existence. Certainly there’s no agreed-upon cure for the symptoms.”