Bloody Crimes (18 page)
The bed, along with most of the other contents of the death room, including the chairs, the washstand, and even the gaslight jet that was mounted to the wall, were purchased by Colonel William H. Boyd of Syracuse, New York, for his son Andrew, a young Lincoln enthusiast and early collector who had published, in 1870, a pioneering bibliography of early writings about the president.
In 1889 and 1890, Andrew Boyd corresponded with the Chicago candy millionaire Charles F. Gunther, an obsessive collector who would stop at almost nothing to acquire unique historical treasures like the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond, which he purchased, dismantled stone by stone, and reassembled for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Gunther decided he had to possess Lincoln’s deathbed and the accompanying furniture and paid Boyd one hundred thousand dollars for the bed alone.
In the 1920s, the Chicago Historical Society acquired Gunther’s hoard and constructed an exact replica of the room in which Abraham Lincoln died, right down to the reproduction wallpaper and the prints hanging on the walls. It was a sensational attraction, and for decades awestruck Chicago schoolchildren pushed a button that triggered a dramatic sound recording which, from a hidden loudspeaker, narrated the events of April 14 and 15, 1865. Alas, several years ago, the museum broke up the riveting display, dismissing it as no longer in fashion.
S
tanton ordered the army to remove Lincoln’s corpse from the Petersen house and transport it to the White House. Soldiers brought a wood box and placed the president’s body inside it. They carried the makeshift coffin into the street and placed it in a horse-drawn hearse. Major General C. C. Augur, head of the military district of Washington, D.C., and commander of the presidential escort, ordered all officers in the procession, including General D. H. Rucker, Colonel Louis H. Pelouze, and Captains Finley Anderson, C. Baker, J. H. Crowell, and D. C. Thomas, to march on foot and not ride horses. It was as if they were preparing to enter a battle. During the Civil War, officers, even generals, often led their troops forward into combat on foot, with swords drawn. They walked as a sign of respect for their fallen commander. They removed their hats and marched bareheaded. In the field officers always wore their hats into combat. Now they doffed them as an additional sign of deference.
Augur gave the command and the escort got under way. There was no band or drum corps to beat the slow tempo of the age-old military funeral march. The officers set the pace with the thud of their own steps on the dirt street. Corporal James Tanner, who had transcribed in shorthand the testimony Stanton had extracted from witnesses through the night, had gone home after the deathbed climax. About two hours after Lincoln died, Tanner was back in his room in the house one door south of the Petersen house. He looked outside. “I stepped to the window and saw the coffin of the dead President being placed in the hearse which passed up Tenth street to F and thus to the White House. As they passed with measured tread and arms reversed, my hand involuntarily went to my head in salute as they started on their long, long journey back to the prairies and the hearts he knew and loved so well, the mortal remains of the greatest American of all time.”
On the street the scene was less solemn. Dr. Charles Sabin Taft had lingered at the Petersen house for two hours because he had not
wanted to leave while the body still lay there. When the army officers and soldiers carried Lincoln’s coffin outside, into view of the immense crowd, Taft followed them out the front door into the street, where he witnessed a violent, horrifying scene: “A dismal rain was falling on a dense mass of horror-stricken people stretching from F Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. As they made a passage for the hearse bearing the beloved dead, terrible execrations and mutterings were heard.”
But not everyone in that crowd loved Abraham Lincoln. A few rebel sympathizers yelled insults at the president as the coffin passed them by, and enraged mourners turned on them and even killed some. According to Dr. Taft, “one man who ventured a shout for Jeff Davis was set upon and nearly torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd.”
Noah Brooks did not learn of the assassination until the morning. He could not believe it—yesterday morning he had been at the White House having breakfast with the president. He began walking the streets of the gloomy capital, taking in the mood of the people and the sights of a city draping itself in mourning clothes. He felt himself drawn to the place of the great crime: “Wandering aimlessly up F Street toward Ford’s Theatre, we met a tragical procession. It was headed by a group of army officers walking bareheaded, and behind them, carried tenderly by a company of soldiers, was the bier of the dead President, covered with the flag of the Union, and accompanied by an escort of soldiers who had been on duty at the house where Lincoln died. As the little cortege passed down the street to the White House, every head was uncovered, and profound silence which prevailed was broken only by sobs and by the sound of the measured tread of those who bore the martyred President back to the home which he had so lately quitted full of life, hope, and cheer.”
Now that Lincoln’s body had been taken away, the drama at the Petersen house was done. The house was empty now, but for the Petersen family and its tenants, and the evidence of what had happened there: bloody handkerchiefs, pillowcases, sheets, and towels, plus water pitchers, mustard plasters, and liquor bottles. And muddy
THE BLOODY DEATHBED SHORTLY AFTER LINCOLN’S BODY WAS REMOVED.
footprints. Disgusted by the mess made of his house, William Petersen collected some of the stained linens and heaved them out a rear window. The front door faced east, and the morning light flooded the hallway all the way to the back bedroom. Two of Petersen’s tenants, Henry and Julius Ulke, brothers and artists, entered the empty death chamber. Bloodstained pillows, sheets, and a coverlet—later someone stole it and it was never seen again—lay on the bed. They were still wet. The Ulkes recognized a historic opportunity. They retrieved Henry’s camera, set up its tripod at the southwest end of the room, and aimed the lens at the bed. To compose the best possible photo, they pushed the bed back to its original position in the northeast corner of the room. Henry Ulke uncovered the big lens and exposed his glass-plate negative for up to one minute, saturating it with the scene. Then he made one or two more plates.
Why did the Ulkes photograph the death room? Being commercial photographers, they must have intended to print multiple albumen-paper copies from their negatives and market them to the public. Soon, the Washington papers would be filled with advertisements offering photos of Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth, for sale. An exclusive photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed made shortly after his body had been removed, before the bloody sheets and pillows had been taken away, would be a commercial coup. Such an image would transport viewers into the Petersen house and allow them to imagine what it must have been like to be at the dying president’s side.
Strangely, no evidence survives to suggest that the Ulkes ever attempted to market the photograph. No contemporary newspapers copied it as a woodcut, no carte de visite examples with letterpressprinted captions—a telltale sign of commercial exploitation—have ever been found, and only two or three original prints from the negatives have been located, the first one not until almost a century later.
Several artists sketched the death room, several others made oil paintings, and printmakers published more than fifteen different artworks depicting Lincoln in his deathbed, surrounded by mourners. Perhaps the Ulkes decided that their photograph of the empty bed was too stark and graphic, unlike the more romanticized prints that sanitized Lincoln’s death. In the days to come, Stanton would suppress other photographs connected to the assassination, and it is possible he learned of this one and judged it too shocking a memento. Seaton Munroe might not have approved of the graphic image. In the days after the assassination, he complained about the lust for blood rel
ics: “Even then I could fancy the relic hunter plying his vocation, and bruing his ready handkerchief in the clotted blood, that he might preserve, exhibit, and mayhap peddle his gruesome trophy! I have lately seen in print an account of the preservation and partition of the blood-stained dress of Laura Keene.”
BLOOD RELIC: A PILLOW FROM LINCOLN’S DEATHBED.
William J. Ferguson, a prior visitor to the Petersen house, had seen the spindle bed in the photograph before. He returned to the house on the night of April 14. “I joined Mr. Petersen’s son—a lad with whom I chummed; and went with him through the basement of the house to the stairs at the rear. Climbing them, we came to the floor of the room where Mr. Lincoln had been taken. It was a room formerly occupied by a Mr. Matthews, still a member of our company. I had delivered parts during the season to him and others in the room. On one of these visits I saw John Wilkes Booth lying and smoking a pipe on the same bed in which Mr. Lincoln died.”
The complete story of the Ulkes and their remarkable photograph remains a mystery. In an odd twist, a few years after the assassination, Henry Ulke painted an official oil portrait of Edwin M. Stanton that hangs today in Washington at the National Portrait Gallery.
Soon other artists created assassination oil paintings, including the first, Carl Bersch, who painted the scene of Lincoln being carried across the street from Ford’s to the Petersen house, to “make it the center and outstanding part of the large painting I shall make, using the sketches I made earlier in the evening, as an appropriate background. A fitting title for the picture would, I think, be ‘Lincoln Borne by Loving Hands on the Fatal Night of April 14, 1865.’ Altogether, it was the most tragic and impressive scene I have ever witnessed.” Once in the collection of the White House, this haunting painting was transferred to the National Park Service in 1978. The morbid work, judged unsuitable for the eyes of future presidents, made its way back to Ford’s Theatre, where it hung for almost thirty years until it was banished to storage.
CHAPTER FIVE
“The Body of the President Embalmed!”
M
ary Lincoln had arrived at the White House about two hours ahead of her husband. She had not slept all night, but this was not a place where she could find rest. Elizabeth Dixon had accompanied her from the Petersen house. “At nine o’clock we took her home to that house so changed for her and the Doctor said she must go immediately to bed. She refused to go into any of the rooms she had previously occupied, ‘not there! Oh not there’ she said—and so we took her to one she had arranged for the President for a summer room to write in—I remained till eleven o’clock (twelve hours from the time I went to see her) and then left her a lonely widow, everything changed for her, since they left so happily the evening previous.”
When the cortege arrived from Tenth Street, Mary did not gather herself, go downstairs, and receive the president with honors as he entered his White House for the last time. Lincoln’s army tendered those honors without her. Abraham Lincoln’s homecoming at 11:00
A.M
. on April 15, 1865, was the most dramatic moment in the Executive
