Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency.

I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

Was it the dandy in the living room, the gardener in the cutting shed, or the lady of the house,

the first lady, as she was first called, who did the deed?

It was a White House mystery surrounding a presidential leak and a

congressional inquiry at the start of the Civil War. On December 3, 1861, Abraham Lincoln delivered

his first annual message to Congress. He'd been elected 13 months earlier as the 16th president

representing the anti-slavery Republican Party. He wasn't the only president.

By the time he wrote his state of the union address,

Jefferson Davis was calling himself the president of the Confederate States of America.

The civil war was underway and had been for eight months since the bombardment of Fort Sumter,

outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

In his address, President Lincoln announced the

retirement of Winfield Scott, old fuss and feathers, a head of the army who had taken responsibility

for the Union route at Bull Run, or Manassas, if you choose. By the time of his retirement,

the 71-year-old general weighed 300 pounds and was known as old fat and feeble.

McClellan was taking over, the president announced, in his written address.

The speech was not extremely famous. Lincoln had a few others, he scribbled on the back of his

envelope that endured a little longer. It did contain the sturdy line. The struggle of today is not altogether for today.

It is for a vast future also. But there was a problem. Sections of the speech, which was to be read

that afternoon of December 3rd, had already appeared that morning in the New York Herald,

an unprecedented leak. We're waste deep in leaks today, but back then

...