Bloody Crimes (24 page)

On the morning of February 21, all the members of the cabinet called upon the president and later that day signed a joint letter addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives asking Congress to cancel the annual Washington’s birthday illumination of the public buildings, scheduled for the next night. William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, Gideon Welles, Edward Bates, and Montgomery Blair wrote that the president “had been plunged into affliction” by his son’s death.

On February 22, in a story headlined “Little Willie Lincoln,” the
Evening Star
reported the sad details of the boy’s death. After Willie was embalmed, Lincoln viewed his son’s body in the Green Room.

That same day in Richmond, which had replaced Montgomery, Alabama, as the new Confederate capital, Willie Lincoln’s death did not postpone the February 22 inauguration of Jefferson Davis, which was scheduled specifically on George Washington’s birthday. It was a glorious and auspicious day for Davis. The Confederate president saw himself not as a rebel or a traitor but as the true inheritor of the legacy of George Washington and the revolutionary generation. He believed it was the Southern Confederacy, not the federal Union, that upheld the spirit of 1776. That evening, Davis was feted at a wonderful party in the White House of the Confederacy.

In Washington, at Lincoln’s White House, an opportunistic office-seeker made the mistake of intruding upon Lincoln’s anguish to request a petty postmaster’s position. Like George Washington, Lincoln had made it a lifelong habit to control his temper, and only rarely did he show anger in public. But if pushed too far, Lincoln would on occasion explode. This was one of those moments.

“When you came to the door here, didn’t you see the crepe on it?” Lincoln demanded. “Didn’t you realize that meant somebody must be lying dead in this house?”

“Yes, Mr. Lincoln, I did. But what I wanted to see you about was very important.”

“That crepe is hanging there for my son; his dead body at this moment is lying unburied in this house, and you come here, push yourself in with such a request! Couldn’t you at least have the decency to wait until after we had buried him?”

T
he president asked his old friend Orville Hickman Browning to be in charge of the funeral arrangements and burial. Browning rode in a carriage to Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery to inspect the family tomb that the clerk of the United States Supreme Court, William T. Carroll, had offered as Willie’s temporary resting place until the president could take him home to Illinois. It was also Oak Hill where Jefferson Davis had buried his son Samuel Emory Davis, who died of illness on June 13, 1854, when he was less than two years old.

On February 23, friends and family viewed Willie’s body at the White House. On February 24, the day of Willie’s funeral, the government offices were closed, as if an important man of state had died. All official Washington knew the boy. Members of the cabinet, foreign ministers, members of Congress, military officers, and other important Washingtonians attended his funeral.

The
Evening Star
published a heartbreaking description of the scene:

His remains were placed in the Green room at the Executive mansion, where this morning a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family. The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes—the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket.
The countenance wore a natural and placid look, the only signs of death being a slight discoloration of the features.

The body lay in the lower section of a metallic case, the sides of which were covered by the winding sheet of white crape. The deceased held in the right hand a boquet composed of a superb camellia, around which were grouped azalias and sprigs of mignionette. This, when the case is closed, is to be reserved for the bereaved mother. On the breast of the deceased, was a beautiful wreath of the flowers, already named, interspersed with ivy leaves and other evergreens; near the feet was another wreath of the same kind, while azalias and sprigs of mignionette were disposed about the body.

The metallic case is very plain, and is an imitation of rosewood. On the upper section is a square silver plate, bearing, in plain characters, the simple inscription:

W
ILLIAM
W
ALLACE
L
INCOLN
.
B
ORN
D
ECEMBER
21
ST
, 1850.
D
IED
F
EBRUARY
20
TH
, 1862.

The mirrors in the East Room, the Green Room, and all the other reception rooms were covered with mourning drapery, the frames wrapped with black and the glass concealed by white crepe. It was impossible to see a reflection. It was Lincoln’s wish that Willie’s body remain in the Green Room and not be moved to the East Room for the funeral service, which was conducted by Rev. Dr. Gurley.

Gurley described Willie as “a child of bright intelligence and peculiar promise.” The minister listed his qualities: “His mind was active, inquisitive, and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive.” Everyone who knew the boy, Gurley continued, loved him: “It is easy to see how a child,
thus endowed, would, in the course of eleven years, entwine himself around the hearts of those who knew him best.”

The president, who could usually speak with pride about his ability to master his emotions, could not contain himself. Willie, he said, “was too good for this earth…but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” Willie’s death seemed to summon forth his father’s accumulated, buried pain from a lifetime’s worth of losses. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” Lincoln moaned. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” He was coming apart. No one in Washington had known Lincoln during the old New Salem days three decades ago. If any friends from that ghost town of Lincoln’s long-lost past had been present at Willie’s funeral, they would have recognized the familiar signs that made them fear for Lincoln’s mind and life thirty years ago, after the death of Ann Rutledge.

M
ost of the guests in the East Room joined the procession to Georgetown. At Oak Hill, Willie’s coffin was carried into the small chapel, where the Rev. Dr. Gurley performed a brief service. After the funeral guests went home, Willie’s casket was hidden below the floorboards of the chapel in a subterranean storage pit until graveyard workers carried him to the Carroll vault.

Lincoln prayed that Tad, still sick, would be spared. On February 26, the
Evening Star
reported that he would live: “We are glad to learn that the youngest son of the President is still improving in health, and is now considered entirely out of danger from the disease which prostrated him.” The
Star
went beyond reporting of the facts, and in an editorial beseeched its readers to consider the president: “Death has invaded the home of our Chief Magistrate, ‘whose heart is torn.’ Let the people stop to shed a tear with the President, who has so nobly earned their regard.”

In the days ahead Abraham and Mary mourned Willie in differ
ent ways. Mary sought relief in the world of dreams and spirits. “He comes to me every night,” she swore to her sister Emilie Todd Helm. “He comes to me…and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me. When I thought of my little son in immensity, alone, without his mother to direct him, no one to hold his little hand in loving guidance, it nearly broke my heart.” Soon Mary would call upon spiritualists and mediums to cross over to Willie’s realm. Mary banished from her sight all earthly reminders of her dead son. She disposed of his toys and forbade his playmates to return to the White House to play with Tad. The sight of them, she said, upset her too much.

No ghosts came to Lincoln’s bedchamber. Willie had died on a Thursday, and for several weeks, the president locked himself in his office every Thursday for a time to mourn and to conjure up memories of his son. No one dared intrude upon these reveries. And at night he dreamed of his lost boy.

Lincoln loved to read passages from literature aloud to his friends. One day in May, he recited lines from Shakespeare’s
King John.
“And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say / That we shall see and know our friends in heaven. / If that be true, I shall see my boy again.” Then he wept uncontrollably.

D
eath also visited Jefferson Davis’s White House. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 30, 1864, an officer walking near the Confederate White House saw a crying young girl run out of the mansion and yank violently on the bell cord of the house next door. Then another girl and a boy fled the White House. A black female servant who followed them told the officer that one of the Davis children was badly hurt. The officer ran inside and found a male servant holding in his
arms a little boy, “insensible and almost dead.” It was five-year-old Joseph Evan Davis. His brother, Jeff Jr., was kneeling beside him, trying to make him speak. “I have said all the prayers I know,” said Jeff, “but God will not wake Joe.” Jefferson and Varina were not home.

Joseph had fallen fifteen feet from a porch. He was found lying on the brick pavement, unconscious, with a broken left thigh and a severely contused forehead. His chest evidenced signs of internal injuries. The officer sent for a doctor and then began to rub the boy with camphor and brandy, and applied mustard on his feet and wrists. The child, he observed, “had beautiful black eyes and hair, and was a very handsome boy.” The treatment, wrote the officer in a letter a few days after the event, seemed to work: “In a short time he began to breathe better, and opened his eyes, and we all thought he was reviving, but it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light is extinguished for ever.”

Messengers summoned the president and Varina. When she saw Joseph, she “relieved herself in a flood of tears and wild lamentations.” Jefferson kneeled beside his son, squeezed his hands, and watched him die. The Confederate officer, whose name remains unknown to this day, described the president’s appearance: “Such a look of petrified, unutterable anguish I never saw. His pale, intellectual face…seemed suddenly ready to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.” Almost thirty years earlier, watching Knox Taylor die had driven him into his “great seclusion.” He could not indulge in private grief now. His struggling nation needed him. Davis mastered his emotions in public, but his face could not hide them. “When I recall the picture of our poor president,” wrote the officer, “grief-stricken, speechless, tearless and crushed, I can scarcely refrain from tears myself.”

That night family friends and Confederate officials called at the mansion, but Jefferson Davis refused to come downstairs. Above their heads, guests could hear his creaking footsteps on the floorboards as he paced through the night. Mary Chestnut remembered
“the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above—not another sound. The whole house [was] as silent as death.” The funeral at St. Paul’s Church, reported the newspapers, drew the largest crowd of any public event in Richmond since the beginning of the war. Hundreds of children packed the pews, each carrying a green bough or flowers to lay upon Joe’s grave. Later, Davis had the porch torn down.

I
n December 1862, Lincoln received word that Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, the former clerk of the McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois, had been killed in action on December 5, and that his teenage daughter was overcome with grief. On December 13, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the Army of the Potomac suffered terrible casualties in a series of futile infantry charges against Confederate troops sheltered behind stone walls. It was an illconceived, costly, senseless, and even shameful performance by General Ambrose Burnside. Two days before Christmas, on a day Lincoln might have taken Willie—gone ten months now—to his favorite toy store on New York Avenue, and while Mary worked downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.

Lincoln sat at the big table in his second-floor office, reached for an eight-by-ten-inch sheet of lined paper bearing the engraved letterhead “Executive Mansion,” and began to write. What came from his pen was more than a polite and perfunctory note. In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down his hard-earned knowledge of life and death for an inexperienced girl. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl but to the American people.

Washington,

December 23, 1862

Dear Fanny

It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.