Bloody Crimes (17 page)
One of the last Petersen house visitors was Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings and grounds. Operating from an office in the U.S. Capitol, French was in charge of all the major
public federal buildings in Washington, including the White House and the Capitol. A larger-than-life personality and longtime veteran of the Washington political and social scene, he had, for decades, known everyone of importance in the national capital. Unbeknownst to them, he had recorded his impressions in a secret diary.
President Franklin Pierce, a friend of Jefferson Davis, had appointed French commissioner in 1853 but forced him out in 1855. Once Lincoln arrived in Washington in 1861, the savvy veteran lobbied for reappointment. He secured several inconclusive meetings with the president and Mary Lincoln, but the president nominated someone else. When the Senate failed to confirm that appointment, Lincoln, after dangling French in suspense, finally signed his commission on January 29, 1862. Although French owed his position to the president, he disliked the first lady and clashed frequently with Mary over her misuse of White House expense accounts. On April 14, French went to bed around 10:00
P.M.
, and during the night no one had thought to send a messenger to summon him to the Petersen house. French slept well until daylight: “I awoke and saw that the streetlamps had not been extinguished. I lay awake, perhaps 1/2 an hour, & seeing that they were still burning, I arose and saw a sentry passing before my house. I thought something wrong had happened, so I dressed & went down & opened the front door.”
Downtown at the Petersen house, Dr. Leale knew Lincoln would not live much longer: “As morning dawned it became quite evident that he was gradually sinking and at several times his pulse could not be counted two or three feeble pulsations being felt and followed by an intermission when not the slightest movement of the artery could be felt. The inspiration now became very prolonged accompanied by a guttural sound. At 6:50am the respirations ceased for some time and all eagerly looked at their watches until the profound silence was disturbed by a prolonged inspiration, which was soon followed by a sonorous expiration.”
As Benjamin French stood in front of his house on Capitol Hill, a
soldier came along and said, “Are not the doings of last night dreadful?” French asked what he meant by that. The soldier replied, “Have you not heard?” and told French that the president had been shot in Ford’s Theatre “and Secretary Seward’s throat cut in his residence.” French hurried to the East Front of the Capitol, ordered the building closed, and sped to the Petersen house. There he found Lincoln, who was still alive, in the back bedroom. “[He] was surrounded by the members of his cabinet, physicians, Generals, Members of Congress, etc. I stood at his bedside a short time. He was breathing very heavily, & I was told, what I could myself see, that there was no hope for him.”
French gazed at his wounded president and patron with a mixture of personal and professional concern. If Lincoln died, he would have much to do in the next few days. It would be his responsibility to decorate all the public buildings in the city with the appropriate symbols of mourning. As he hovered over the deathbed in the crowded little bedroom, perhaps he already wondered where, in all of Washington, could he hope to find enough black mourning crepe and bunting.
French left Lincoln’s bedside and entered the front parlor, where he found Mary and Robert Lincoln. “I took Mrs. Lincoln by the hand, and she made some exclamation indicating the deepest agony of mind. I also shook hands with Robert, who was crying audibly.” French noticed three women who sat near Mary Lincoln: her friend Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Senator James Dixon of Connecticut; Elizabeth’s sister, Mrs. Mary Kinney; and Kinney’s daughter Constance.
After a few minutes somebody asked French to take the president’s carriage and fetch Mary Jane Welles, wife of the secretary of the navy and another of Mary Lincoln’s friends.
When he arrived at the Welles home, he could not persuade Mary Jane to come out. “Mrs. Welles was not up, & a lady at the house said she was too unwell to go, so I returned to the carriage, but, before we could get away, someone said from the upper window that Mrs. Welles would go. I returned to the house and waited for her to dress
and take a cup of tea & some toast, & then the carriage took us round to the President’s House—I, supposing she was to go there and be ready to see Mrs. Lincoln when she should get home. She thought I was mistaken, and that she was to go 10th Street.” French got out of the carriage, ordered the coachman to drive Mary Jane Welles to the Petersen house, and entered the White House. He instructed the staff to close the house, and then he went home to Capitol Hill for breakfast.
Lincoln was close to death now, and Mary returned to the bedroom. Dr. Taft recalled the scene: “Her last visit was most painful. As she entered the chamber and saw how the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor. Restoratives were applied, and she was supported to the bedside, where she frantically addressed the dying man. ‘Love,’ she exclaimed, ‘live but one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.’” Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch said that Mary Lincoln’s presence “pierced every heart and brought tears to every eye.”
Elizabeth Dixon witnessed Mary’s collapse: “Just as the day was struggling with the dim candles in the room we went in again. Mrs. Lincoln must have noticed a change for the moment she looked at him she fainted and fell upon the floor. I caught her in my arms & held her to the window which was open…She again seated herself by the President, kissing him and calling him every endearing name—The surgeons counting every pulsation & noting every breath gradually growing less & less—They then asked her to go into the adjoining room.”
Dr. Leale noted how Mary’s cries unnerved Edwin M. Stanton: “As Mrs. Lincoln sat on a chair by the side of the bed with her face to her husband’s, his breathing became very stertorous and the loud, unnatural noise frightened her in her exhausted, agonized condition. She sprang up suddenly with a piercing cry and fell fainting to the floor. Secretary Stanton, hearing her cry, came in from the adjoining room and with raised arms called out loudly, ‘Take that woman out
and do not let her in again.’ Mrs. Lincoln was helped up kindly and assisted in a fainting condition from the room. Secretary Stanton’s order was obeyed and Mrs. Lincoln did not see her husband again before he died.”
J
efferson Davis awoke on the morning of April 15 ignorant of last night’s bloody crimes in Washington. There was no direct telegraph line between the capital and Greensboro. Davis did not know John Wilkes Booth and had not sent him to kill Lincoln. Davis did not know that Lincoln had been marked for death, that Booth had met with Confederate secret agents in Montreal, Canada, that the actor had assembled a list of Confederate operatives in Maryland and Virginia to help him, and that one of his soldiers, Lewis Powell, a brave combat veteran captured at Gettysburg, had joined Booth’s plot and nearly killed the secretary of state. Nor did Davis know that Booth was on the run, fleeing for the heart of the Confederacy, the prey of what would soon become a nationwide manhunt.
That morning Davis had no idea that, last night in the Union capital, events beyond his knowledge or control would now reach out to affect his fate. Within hours his longtime archenemy, Vice President Andrew Johnson, an implacable foe of the planter class, would ascend to the presidency. The South could expect no mercy from him. Worse, this morning’s newspapers accused Davis of being the mastermind behind the great crime. Many editorials demanded his death by hanging or horrible torture. A patriotic envelope, published as a souvenir, carried a blood-red vignette of Davis bound on a scaffold facing the guillotine. The stakes were higher now.
All of this had happened without Davis knowing about any of it. And for several more days, he would not know that Lincoln was dead or that the government of the United States would soon scheme to charge him with murder and put him on trial for his life. Lincoln’s murder was like a violent storm on a distant horizon, its mighty
thunderclap taking time to travel a great distance before it caught up with Davis.
Davis did evacuate Greensboro on April 15 but the move wasn’t prompted by news of Lincoln’s assassination. It was coincidence and the overall military situation. Secretary of the Navy Mallory tried to convince Davis that he should do more than relocate the temporary capital—he should flee the country: “It was evident to every dispassionate mind that no further military stand could be made…But it was no less evident that Mr. Davis was extremely reluctant to quit the country at all, and that he would make no effort to leave it so long as he could find an organized body of troops, however small, in the field. He shrank from the idea of abandoning any body of men who might still be found willing to strike for the cause, and gave little attention to the question of his personal safety.”
If Davis’s staff had known that Lincoln had just been murdered, they might have been even more forceful in demanding that Davis flee to Mexico, the Bahamas, or Europe to escape the North’s vengeance. But they did not know and went about their packing up for the next stage of their journey south.
They would no longer enjoy the luxury of railroad transportation. There were no trains at Greensboro, so that afternoon Davis; Colonels Harrison, Lubbock, and Wood; and some of the cabinet members rode horses, while other dignitaries climbed aboard wagons and ambulances. “Heavy rains had recently fallen,” Burton Harrison wrote, “the earth was saturated with water, the soil was a sticky red clay, the mud was awful, and the road, in places, almost impracticable.” The presidential party plotted their route and planned to spend successive nights at Jamestown, Lexington, Salisbury, and Concord, where they would be guests of Victor C. Barringer.
Rough travel conditions would not intimidate Davis. He was not a creature softened by effete, cocooned salons. He was ready for the physical challenge that lay ahead. He had endured journeys far more arduous than this journey away from Richmond promised to be. As a
seven-year-old child, he rode a pony 500 miles up the Natchez Trace from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, where he met General Andrew Jackson; in 1833, while an army officer, he and his unit of dragoons (a heavy, mounted cavalry) traveled 450 miles through difficult territory to a remote post on the Arkansas frontier; in 1834, Davis and the dragoons made a 500-mile round trip from their fort into Comanche territory, enduring 100-degree heat, exhaustion, and dehydration; in 1845, Jefferson and Varina traveled from Vicksburg to Washington, D.C., through the northern route into Ohio, where severe winter weather and ice on the Ohio River required them to continue by sled; he traveled to Mexico for the war, experienced hard travels there, made a 1,000-mile trip home to Mississippi, and then returned to Mexico; in December 1862, as president of the Confederacy, he embarked on a twenty-seven day, 3,000-mile inspection tour of the South; later, he made other long, wartime journeys through his embattled country; and in Richmond he often went on dangerous, 20-mile night rides on horseback to visit Lee’s headquarters and other military posts. A lifetime of difficult journeys had accustomed Davis to the hardships of the road.
A
t the Petersen house, the Reverend Dr. Gurley called everyone around the deathbed. “Let us pray,” he said as all present in the room kneeled. “He offered a most solemn and impressive prayer,” recalled Dr. Leale. “We arose to witness the struggle between life and death.” Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath at 7:21 and 55 seconds. At 7:22 and 10 seconds his heart stopped beating. He was dead.
No one knew it yet, but the mourning that began in the back room of a boardinghouse in downtown Washington would continue well beyond Lincoln’s death. What began there could not be contained. Soon, the assassination would set in motion strange forces, a national phenomenon, the likes of which America had never seen. In the days to come, the footsteps of millions of Americans would join
the small procession that began, in the words of Walt Whitman, that “moody, tearful night” when a handful of their fellow citizens made a pilgrimage to look upon their dying president. By morning almost sixty people had come and gone from the Petersen house.
Dr. Taft recalled that “immediately after death, the Rev. Dr. Gurley made a fervent prayer, inaudible, at times, from the sobs of those present. As the surgeons left the house, the clergyman was again praying in the front parlor. Poor Mrs. Lincoln’s moans, which came through the half-open door, were distressing to hear. She was supported by her son Robert, and was soon after taken to her carriage. As she reached the front door she glanced at the theater opposite, and exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, that dreadful house! That dreadful house!’”
L
incoln’s death was not the last sadness to haunt the Petersen house. By 1870, William and Anna Petersen’s two youngest children, Anne and Julia, had died, and on June 18, 1871, the Metropolitan Police found William Petersen lying unconscious on the grounds of the Smithsonian. He had poisoned himself. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the same day from an overdose of the drug laudanum. Before succumbing, Petersen told the police he had been taking the substance “once or twice a week” for several years. The coroner ruled his death accidental. He was fifty-four years old. Given the notoriety of his house six years earlier, the
Washington Evening Star
noted his sad end.
Exactly four months later, Anna Petersen died. Her body was laid out in the house, and the funeral was held two days later. Just ten days after her funeral, the firm of Green & Williams sold at public auction the entire contents of the house. An ad in that day’s
Evening Star
stated that the furnishings would be sold on the premises. Crowds assembled outside the Petersen house, just as they had on that terrible night six and one-half years before. Once again, strangers crowded
the halls and first-floor rooms. The auctioneer led the customers and the curiosity seekers from room to room. In the front parlor, he sold “1 horsehair covered sofa” for $15.25. The price was high, up to three times the value for a like item. But this was the sofa where a shattered, sobbing Mary Lincoln spent most of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15, 1865. In the back bedroom, the auctioneer put up a lot listed in the inventory as “1 bedstead & 2 Mattresses,” appraised at $7. The bidding soared to $80, the highest price paid for any item in the house. This was the bed where Lincoln died.