The King’s Gambit
James Rada, Jr.
7: Simon Purdue
Lou Preston pushed back his chair and set aside his great-grandfather’s leather-bound journal, the smell of aged paper and dust lifting in a faint cloud. His fingertips tingled from tracing the brittle pages, each line penned in spidery ink more than a century ago. He shook his head, disbelief weighing on him like a millstone.
First, Harley Preston claimed he’d negotiated secret peace terms between the Union and the Confederacy. Then he’d volunteered as a spy for President Lincoln himself. Now, buried in the journal’s margins, Harley insisted that the infamous lost orders at Antietam had been planted intentionally by a wealthy Southern agent— to prolong the war and fatten profiteers’ pockets. None of this appeared in any textbook, nor had family stories ever hinted at such conspiracies.
Lou wondered if the next revelation might be hidden in the very next paragraph: had his great-grandfather tried his hand at writing historical fiction? Sleep found him late that night, his dreams haunted by flickering campfires, grey and blue uniforms mingling in smoke, and the distant crack of rifles at Sharpsburg. Was all that bloodshed simply a gamble in a ruthless game for profit and power?
September 21, 1862
The first time I saw the battlefield at Sharpsburg, the late-summer sun hung low in a dusty haze, revealing rows of discarded muskets and torn uniforms half buried in churned earth. The stench of sweat and rotting flesh drifted in ragged waves across the fields. If Col. Donaldson’s words were true, we’d been herded here by unseen hands, driven into carnage for reasons that stripped warfare of any honor.
“You seem even more glum than me,” Col. Donaldson said, jolting the creak of our saddles as we rode back toward Washington. The road was scarred by wagon ruts and littered with discarded canteens; our horses’ hooves sent stones clattering into roadside weeds.
At the White House, I delivered my report in the hushed, oak-paneled cabinet room, the late afternoon light slanting through tall windows. President Lincoln sat behind a broad desk, his tall frame stooped and his eyes heavy-lidded but piercing in their solemnity. Every wrinkle in his face seemed carved by the war itself.
“All those deaths, and it was worthless,” I said, voice barely above a whisper. My words echoed between the portraits of past presidents.
He pressed two long fingers to his temple. “Many battles prove unnecessary when viewed in hindsight. Some—like the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812—serve no purpose at all. Others, like the Alamo, gain meaning only after the cannon smoke clears. Yet here we remain, locked in deadly embrace unless we find another way.”
“I hope so, sir,” I replied, glancing back toward the blood-soaked fields. “You didn’t see it. That ground makes the strongest case I know for peace—” I thought about the Southern industrialist who had sent the agent to Frederick to ensure the battle happened. “—for any decent human being, at least.”
The president exhaled. “Perhaps. No—yes, you are right. I intend to visit the field myself once things have settled a bit. I don’t want to take soldiers and resources away from helping the wounded.”
January 1, 1863
I think President Lincoln agreed with my impact of the battlefield. He made a proclamation today that challenged the Confederate government and reframed the war. The longer I reflect upon it, the more I feel it was an effort to isolate the Confederacy from some of its supporters and even its own citizens. He declared the slaves in all the rebelling states free. He has positioned this as a war against slavery. It should cause British support to waver as they did away with slavery many years ago. I also expect that when words spreads among the slaves, it will encourage them to escape to the north. If enough of them do it, it could hamper operations. And even among the non-slaveholders, I imagine it would make them rethink their support.
These should all help lead to a speedier conclusion to the war, which will hopefully make Mr. Simon Purdue rethink taking such a treacherous action again.
Col. Davidson said, although his Confederate counterpart is not so strongly in favor of peace, he does not like to see good men die so rich men can get richer. He is the one who gave Col. Donaldson the information of what Purdue planned to do.
War is not for gentlemen and gentle men, but it must be fought at times so that both may exist.
Present Day
With the name of one of the conspirators—Simon Purdue—who had been trying to extend the Civil War, Lou decided to see if he could find out more information. He dove into online archives from his cluttered home office. It was easier than finding information about Col. Donaldson.
Sunlight slanted across his desk, illuminating diagrams of Civil War encampments and glossed photographs of Charleston’s antebellum port. Purdue Industries, he discovered, bore its roots in the very harbor where Simon Purdue had built schooners dyed with indigo and laden with rice and cotton.
By the time the Civil War broke out, oddly enough at Charleston, the family, led by Simon, owned warehouses, a fleet of ships traveling along the coast to Europe, the West Indies, and the Caribbean. They had been preparing to expand their business to South America, but the Union blockade of the south presented a new opportunity. Blockade running. Despite losing an occasional ship, the family’s profits grew immensely.
They drew on Southern pride to continue growing after the war and American pride later. Today, Purdue Industries was a conglomerate with division in shipping, cruise lines, and logistics.
Lou closed his laptop with a soft click. He had at last connected one thread of Harley’s journal to documented fact: Simon Purdue was real, and he had grown rich on wartime deals. But did that equate to deliberate treason in service of perpetual conflict? History’s verdict remained unspoken—but Lou feared that without firmer proof, the journal’s explosive claims would be dismissed as family fantasy.
He tapped a map of research libraries: the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. Somewhere in their ash-stained ledgers or confidential correspondence might lie the names, dates, and coded minutes Harley referenced. It was a daunting quest—perhaps futile—but Lou felt compelled to pursue it. If he could unearth evidence, his great-grandfather’s revelations might secure a place in history rather than vanish as a footnote—or be shrugged off as a hoax. In that possibility lay the promise of setting the record straight—and honoring the man who had risked everything to write it down.
