The King’s Gambit

James Rada, Jr.

2: Peace Negotiations

Lou Preston perched on the creaking attic floorboards of his family’s weathered house, just south of Gettysburg. Sunlight slanted through a dusty dormer window and illuminated the motes dancing in the stale air. He swept his gaze over the tangle of moth-eaten furniture, battered cardboard boxes, and heaps of forgotten clothing.

Did his great-grandfather ever throw anything away?

Well, he couldn’t place all the blame on Harley. He was just the first Preston to buy the house, but four generations had lived here, adding to the clutter in the attic. So, looking at it from that perspective, his family had done a pretty good job keeping things from getting out of hand up here.

Every time Lou moved something or brushed up against an item, it sent a cloud of dust into the air, causing him to cough roughly. He had opened the windows to get some air circulating so that it wouldn’t smell so musty.

Amid that clutter, in the far corner where shadows clung, sat an old steamer trunk that made Lou’s pulse quicken. The trunk looked as though it had been churned out of a turn-of-the-century luggage shop: roughly four feet long, three feet tall, and two feet deep. Its wood core was sheathed in cracked, russet leather—once supple but now hardened—and cinched with broad, patinated straps fastened by brass buckles dulled to a soft green. Heavy iron corners were scored and dented, hints of where it had bumped against railcars, docks, and ship railings long ago. It was a piece of luggage with stories to tell of many journeys.

Something that age was obviously Harley’s, but Lou couldn’t remember hearing any stories of his great-grandfather traveling. The Gettysburg Battlefield had been his world. He had fought here during the Civil War, returned to be the superintendent of the battlefield park, and lived at the very edge of the park property. He had walked every trail and road through the park. Indeed, he had planned many of them during his time as superintendent. He had also seen to the placement of many of the 1,328 monuments, markers, memorials, and plaques on the battlefield.

Lou hesitated for a moment, inhaling the mixed scent of old leather, dust, and something faintly sour—maybe rust or the perfume of moldering paper. Beyond the trunk lay other curiosities: an antique rifle with a trigger guard worn smooth by a hundred years of handling, odds and ends from the Civil War era that his great-grandfather might once have prized. But the trunk drew him inexorably closer, as though it held some secret meant specifically for him.

He edged it nearer to the sunlit window. Light flashed off the buckles and straps, highlighting the lock’s sturdy steel clasp. Lou’s shoulders sagged at the sight of the lock—of course it was locked—and he muttered to himself, “And I’ll bet the key’s buried somewhere up here.” There was no telling where an antique steamer trunk key might have gone over the decades. He wondered if he would even recognize it if he saw it.

He flicked open the small blade of his penknife, the metal catching the light as he slipped it under the clasp. It would be a shame to damage the trunk, but he needed to see what was inside of it in order to decide what to do with it. He was here to clean out the attic and get the house ready for sale.

Lou twisted, bending the thin metal plate at the lock’s base, but the clasp remained stubbornly shut. Frustration stiffened his jaw. He dug the blade in again, angling it beneath the lock itself. The leather scraped and the wood whined as he gouged a shallow trench alongside the hardware. He wasn’t intending on keeping the trunk, but he did need to see what was inside before he tossed it into the roll-off dumpster sitting beside the house.

Singh! The lock finally gave way with a dull click.

A triumphant grin spread across Lou’s face as he pushed back the leather-reinforced lid. A rush of stale air mixed with a whiff of mothballs and old canvas. Inside, the trunk was packed snugly as if someone had geared up for a long journey: Civil War–era uniforms folded stiffly, their faded blue cloth still bearing rows of brass buttons; a small stack of yellowed Gettysburg newspapers, edges brittle; maps of the battlefield that someone had marked with notations about the monuments; two pairs of worn leather boots, the soles cracked; and, pressed on top, a leather-bound journal tied with a frayed piece of twine. Nothing flashy, nothing overtly valuable—yet to Lou, every piece felt weighty with history.

He thought he might want to hold on to the uniform and journal. They were undoubtedly his great-grandfather’s, which made them family heirlooms. When he was a boy, he had known his great-grandfather before Harley had died. Items like this would help Lou hold on to those memories.

Lou gently lifted the journal, its cover textured like the hide of some long-deceased beast. Untying the twine, he opened the front flap to reveal unlined pages, browned at the edges, ink faint but legible. Harley’s handwriting curled across the paper, neat yet compact. Lou flicked through the entries, discovering that they chronicled his great-great-grandfather’s service as an aide to Colonel David Donaldson during the Civil War.

Lou’s heart thudded when the name “Lincoln” appeared on a page, followed by “Jefferson Davis” and references to clandestine discussions. He skimmed the pages quickly to get an idea of what Harley was writing about. According to the journal, Colonel Donaldson—once a Southerner himself—had quietly shuttled messages between President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a bid to negotiate peace between the Union and Confederacy as early as 1863.

Lou’s mind spun. He knew the broad strokes of Civil War history—after all, he’d grown up on these grounds—but he’d never heard of any genuine secret parley between the two leaders.

He rubbed his eyes. They were stinging from trying to read in the dimming sunlight of the setting sun. Having already put in a few hours of work, Lou decided to knock off for the day and read the journal in better light. He carefully settled the trunk lid back into place and closed the attic door behind him, leaving the room looking undisturbed. Downstairs, he sank into the plush sofa in the parlor, a shaded lamp flickering beside him. The journal lay open in his lap, its pages crackling as he turned them.

Beginning in March 1862, Harley’s entries spoke little of battlefield carnage—no detailed accounts of ironclads clashing at Hampton Roads, the deaths at Antietam, Shiloh’s thunder, or impact of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, he wrote about the undercurrent of possible peace as early as the following year. At first, Lou had thought Harley had confused peace talks with the Emancipation Proclamation, but Lou quickly realized that the talk of peace was something separate. It began as hopeful rumination and then as concrete strategy exchanged with Colonel Donaldson.

Lou hunched forward, reading lines dense with speculation: How might the war end? Could the United States remain intact while slavery persisted? Would the North ever recognize a Confederate States of America? What concessions might the Union demand? What might the Confederacy demand?

Maybe the Union would give the South more of the patronage jobs they had complained about not having enough of? That didn’t seem a big enough gain for what they were being asked to give up.

Then there was the question of who was in the driver’s seat to have the power to ask for those items? Lincoln had apparently been the one to open the negotiations at Antietam. While he hailed the battle as a Union victory, the fact that he had opened the negotiations gave Davis an advantage. That didn’t seem to make a lot of sense unless the Union was in a worse position than was generally known. The South had won many of the early battles in the war, but by the time of the Battle of Antietam, things were supposed to have been turning in the Union’s favor.

He closed the journal, its weight settling in his hands. This was no mere family trinket, but a primary document that could rewrite a pivotal chapter of American history.

If Harley’s words were true, they pointed to a hidden diplomacy that, if revealed, might alter the country’s understanding of the Civil War’s trajectory.

Lou stared into the shadows beyond the lamp’s glow, mind racing. The next step was clear: he had to find corroboration—Colonel Donaldson’s personal papers, Lincoln’s correspondences, Davis’s records. Only then could he determine if this buried trove was genuine revelation or the product of one man’s private imagination. Either way, he realized, what lay ahead would change everything he thought he knew about his family and the nation itself.