Bloody Crimes (25 page)

Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

Your sincere friend,

A. Lincoln

Two days later, on their first Christmas without Willie, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, remembering their lost boy, and recalling Fanny McCullough and all the men who fell at Fredericksburg, and perhaps all the fallen men from all the battles, left the White House on Christmas Day and rode in their carriage from hospital to hospital, visiting wounded soldiers.

There was more grief to come. No wartime funeral in Washington had prepared the population—or the president—for the sensational catastrophe of June 17, 1864. It happened while Lincoln was returning to the capital aboard a special 8:00
A.M
. train from Philadelphia, where the day before he had attended the Great Central Fair
to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an organization that aided wounded soldiers.

On the morning of the seventeenth, as Lincoln’s train steamed south to Washington, more than one hundred young women were at work in the so-called “laboratory” of the U.S. Arsenal, making small-arms ammunition. The room was filled with unstable, combustible black powder. Outside the building, someone had set out several pans of fireworks to dry in the sunlight. At ten minutes before noon, a pan of fireworks ignited and cast a spark through an open window into the laboratory.

The president, a lifelong newspaper addict, must have read in the afternoon editions of the
Evening Star
what happened next: “After the powder on the benches caught, the fire spread down rapidly, blinding the girls and setting fire to their clothes. Many of them ran to the windows wrapped in flames, and on their way communicated the fire to the dresses of others.”

The fire, followed by a terrific explosion, caused male workers on the grounds to sprint to the laboratory from all directions. Some of the men wrapped the fleeing, burning girls in tarpaulins to extinguish the flames. Other men gathered the girls up in their arms and ran for the river: “One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his arms and hands badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill, the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen near by, and who thus probably saved the girls from a horrific death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured.”

Desperate arsenal workers searched the debris for survivors. They knew these girls and had flirted with some of them. In an undated photograph taken some time before the explosion, a group of the women, dressed in bright, pretty hoopskirts and joined by several of the men, posed on the front porch of the laboratory. Now, in the ruins, they found only the dead. “The bodies were in such a condi
tion that it was found necessary to place boards under each one in order to remove them from the ruins…they were carried out and placed upon the ground.” Unsupported, the burned corpses would have crumbled and broken into pieces. The “charred remains of those who had perished,” the
Evening Star
reported, “were laid upon the ground and covered over with canvass.”

The
Star
’s reporter rushed back to newspaper row to file his story in time to make the 2:30 p.m. edition: “When our reporter left the scene of the disaster nineteen bodies had been taken from the ruins, but they were so completely burnt to a crisp that recognition was impossible.” The survivors were “frightfully” wounded.

A little after 4:00 p.m., the coroner arrived to examine the dead. “The canvas covering the remains was then removed, and the most terrible sight presented itself to the view of those standing around. The charred remains of seventeen dead bodies lay scattered about, some in boxes, some on pieces of boards, and some in large tin pans, they having been removed from the ruins in these receptacles. In nearly every case only the trunk of the body remained, the arms and legs being missing or detached. A singular feature of the sad spectacle was that presented by a number of bodies nearly burned to a cinder being caged, as it were, in the wire of their hooped skirts…Many of the bodies seem to have been crisped quite bloodless.”

The scene was like a battlefield field hospital littered with the grisly evidence of amputations. “In a box was collected together a large number of feet, hands, arms and legs, and portions of the bones of the head, which it would be impossible to recognize.”

One woman was identified by her boots. Another still wore a fragment of blouse or skirt, and “her remains were subsequently recognized by a portion of dress which remained upon her unconsumed. The whole top of her head was, however, gone, and the brain was visible; and but for the fragment of dress it would have been impossible to recognize her.”

The youth of the victims—one was just thirteen years old—and
the horrific nature of their hideous injuries shocked the city. “Seventeen Young Women Blown to Atoms” said the headline of the
Daily Morning Chronicle
the next day.

The funeral service, an outdoor ceremony to be held on the site of the tragedy, was scheduled for Sunday, June 19. The arsenal’s master carpenter needed time to make proper coffins. He also built a wood pavilion measuring twenty by fifteen feet and standing three feet off the ground. Upon it fifteen coffins lay side by side. Twenty-five thousand people, including President Lincoln—described by the press as “mourner in chief”—and Secretary of War Stanton, assembled on the arsenal grounds. After the service, the burial procession left the arsenal at 3:00 p.m., moved up Four and a Half Street, and then along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Congressional Cemetery. Lincoln’s carriage followed the hearses. He had come this way before, first for John Quincy Adams and then for Colonel Edward Baker.

At Fourth Street, the small funeral procession of thirteen-year-old Sallie McElfresh joined the main procession. “Her body,” reported the
Daily Morning Chronicle,
“was encased in a splendid coffin, decorated with wreaths, which was carried in a beautiful modern child’s hearse.” Lincoln could not have avoided seeing Sallie’s tiny coffin.

At the cemetery, two large burial pits—each one six feet long, fifteen feet wide, and five and a half feet deep—had been dug six feet apart on the west side of the cemetery. The dead had been divided into two groups, the known and the unknown, and they would be buried that way. Male employees of the arsenal handled the ropes and lowered each coffin, one at a time, into its grave. The crowd was dense, and as it pressed forward many women had their dresses torn in the scrum. Police held the throng at bay to allow the families to approach the pits. There, reported the
Evening Star,
“was another scene of anguish—the relatives, or many of them, giving way to loud cries, and hanging over the chasm, calling the deceased by their names.”

The ministers read services for the dead, and the crowd repeated the chant “Farewell, sisters, farewell.” Standing nearby, Lincoln did
not speak publicly that day. It was the biggest funeral he had ever seen. Yes, seven months earlier he had spoken at the dedication of the new national military cemetery at Gettysburg, a battlefield where thousands had perished, but that was not a funeral, and the men he honored there had been long buried. The arsenal tragedy was fresh, its wounds raw. Not one of the Washington papers commented on Lincoln’s demeanor at Congressional Cemetery or described how he reacted when the girls were lowered into the ground. Surviving accounts do no more than note his presence. Later, as best can be told, Lincoln never spoke or wrote of what he saw this day.

That evening the president, accompanied by his secretary John Hay, went to Ford’s Theatre to attend a concert of sacred music. Abraham Lincoln often went to the theater when he wanted to forget.

W
hile Lincoln’s body lay in the East Room on the night of April 17, and while thousands mourned and prepared for the next day’s public viewing, elsewhere in Washington one man gloated over his harvest of Lincoln blood relics. Mose Sandford, one of the men at the War Department hardware workshop who had built Lincoln’s temporary pine-box coffin to transport his body from the Petersen house to the White House on the morning of April 15, wrote a letter to a friend, describing how he plundered Lincoln’s possessions from the temporary Petersen house coffin. “I found one of the sleeves of his shirt one of his sleeve buttons,” he wrote, “black enameled trimmed with gold and the letter ‘L’ on the out side with ‘A.L.’ underneath that I sent to the Sect of War. The Bosom of his shirt was the next thing which met my eye as it had considerable blood upon it so I just confiscated the whole of it.” He even took the screws that had held down the box’s lid.

O
n April 17 Jefferson Davis, on the way to Charlotte, spent the night in Salisbury, North Carolina. Seventy-two hours had elapsed since
Lincoln was assassinated, and still Davis had no news of the events in Washington.

Nor did he know that on this night, and the next morning, Union general William T. Sherman contemplated what should be done about Davis’s future. On the seventeenth, Sherman met with most of his generals to discuss Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina and to analyze the meeting Sherman had attended the day before with Johnston at the Bennett house to discuss that army’s possible surrender. But Sherman and his staff also talked about the Confederate president.

“We discussed…whether, if Johnston made a point of it, I should assent to the escape from the country of Jeff. Davis and his fugitive cabinet; and some one of my general officers, either Logan or Blair, insisted that, if asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.”

Like Abraham Lincoln, Sherman would not have been disappointed if Jefferson Davis escaped the Union’s pursuit and fled the country.

In Salisbury, Davis received a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to disband their command and send their men home. They wanted to quit the war. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread like a contagion and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to go home, and the South would lose the war. The Confederate president replied: “Our necessities exclude the idea of disbanding any portion of the force which remains to us and constitutes our best hope of recovery from the reverses and disasters to which you refer. The considerations which move you to the request are such, if generally acted on, would reduce the Confederate power to the force which each State might raise for its own protection. On the many battle-fields within the limits of your State the sons of other States have freely bled…”

Didn’t these men know that Davis also worried about his own wife and children? Moreover, the Confederacy’s survival was at stake.
He continued writing. “My personal experience enables me fully to sympathize with your anxieties for your homes and for your families, but I hope I have said enough to satisfy you that I cannot consistently comply with your request, and that you will agree that duty to the country must take precedence of any personal desire.”

Davis’s morale remained high. Burton Harrison witnessed it firsthand: “During all this march Mr. Davis was singularly equable and cheerful; he seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was bright and agreeable…He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of trees and many plants; of roads, and how to make them; of the habits of birds, and of a variety of other topics. His familiarity with, and correct taste in, the English literature of the last generation, his varied experiences in life, his habits of close observation, and his extraordinary memory, made him a charming companion when disposed to talk.”

Although they had evacuated Richmond more than two weeks earlier, Harrison observed that Davis’s entourage shared his optimism: “Indeed…we were all in good spirits under adverse circumstances.”

O
n the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to admit the throng that had waited all night to file into the East Room to view the president’s remains. Upstairs, Mary Lincoln and Tad remained in seclusion in her room. He would have liked to have seen the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the consoling company of these loving strangers than in the secluded and unwholesome bedchamber of his unstable mother.

For the past three days the newspapers had been saturated with accounts of the president’s assassination and death. Today was the people’s first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse. While the
public viewing was under way, as thousands of people walked past the coffin, with the White House funeral less than twenty-four hours away, George Harrington was trying to locate Bishop Matthew Simpson, who was in Philadelphia, to let him know he was expected to speak tomorrow at the president’s funeral.

The Philadelphia Telegraph Office responded to Harrington’s telegraph: “Bishop Simpson was not at home and his daughter says she cannot answer it. She says he is going to Washington tonight? Respectfully / H.B. Berry / Manager / American Telegraph Office.”

Eventually the divine’s family dispatched a telegram from Philadelphia to Harrington: “Bishop Simpson is absent from home he will be in Washington City tomorrow morning. E M Simpson.” Then another telegram arrived, this one from Simpson: “Just received your invitation. Am willing to assist. What part of the services am I expected to take. M. Simpson.” If his train was not delayed, he would arrive the next day, just in time. He would prepare his text through the night and during his train ride. There would be no time once he arrived in Washington.

B
y this point, Harrington was becoming overwhelmed by a last-minute deluge of requests for funeral tickets, press passes to the White House, and permission to march in the procession. For every request Harrington disposed of, another came in the door.