Bloody Crimes (27 page)

At 2:00 p.m., soldiers in the East Room surrounded the coffin,
lifted it from the catafalque, and carried Abraham Lincoln out of the White House for the last time. They placed the coffin in the hearse. Funeral guests designated to join the procession took their places in the line of march. Everything was ready. Soon, for the first time since the morning of April 15, when the soldiers took him home, Lincoln was on the move again. This second procession on April 19 dwarfed the simple one that had escorted him from the Petersen house to the White House.

Cannon fire announced the start of the procession: Minute guns boomed near St. John’s Church, City Hall, and the Capitol. At churches and firehouses, every bell in Washington tolled. They tolled too in Georgetown and Alexandria. In later years, witnesses recalled the sound of the day as much as the sight of it. Tad Lincoln emerged from seclusion to join the procession, and he and his brother Robert rode in a carriage behind the hearse. The mile-and-a-half trip between the White House and the Capitol took Abraham Lincoln past familiar places—the Willard Hotel, where he had spent his first night in Washington as president-elect; Mathew Brady’s studio, where he had gone to pose for many photographs. His hearse also carried him past the National Hotel, where he had once spoken from the balcony to a regiment of Union soldiers, and where his assassin had spent his last night on the eve of the murder. The procession was immense and included every imaginable category of marcher: military officers from the army, navy, and Marine Corps; enlisted men; civil officials; judges; diplomats; and doctors—“physicians to the deceased,” read the printed program. One corps of marchers suggested the cost of the war: wounded and bandaged veterans, many of them amputees missing arms or legs, many on crutches. The procession was immense and took two hours to pass a given point. Indeed, when the front of the column reached the Capitol, the rear had still not cleared the Treasury Department.

George Alfred Townsend described the arrival of the remains at the Capitol:

“The cortege passed to the left [north] side of the Capitol, and entering the great gates, passed the grand stairway, opposite the splendid dome, where the coffin was disengaged and carried up the ascent. It was posted under the bright concave, now streaked with mournful trappings, and left in state, watched by guards of officers with drawn swords. This was a wonderful spectacle, the man most beloved and honored in the ark of the republic…Here the prayers and addresses of the noon were rehearsed and the solemn burial service read.”

When the soldiers carried the flag-draped coffin up the stairs, they walked past the very spot where Lincoln had delivered his second inaugural address. That day began stormy, but as Lincoln began to speak, the sun burst through the clouds. On the day of his funeral it was beautiful and clear. The crowds watched in silence as the soldiers carried the coffin inside and laid it upon a catafalque in the center of the rotunda. Many of the people waiting to enter the Capitol to view the corpse had been there six weeks earlier and had heard Lincoln deliver his inaugural address. They marveled at this terrible reversal of fortune.

CHAPTER SEVEN
“The Cause Is Not Yet Dead”

W
hen Jefferson Davis rode into Charlotte on April 19, its citizens were not happy to see him. North Carolina had sent more men into action in the battle at Gettysburg than any Confederate state but Virginia—they suffered heavy casualties in Pickett’s Charge—and the people of Charlotte no longer felt the enthusiasm for the Confederacy that the state’s valiant sons had demonstrated at Gettysburg two years earlier. Only one man, Lewis F. Bates, a transplanted Yankee, would allow Davis to set foot in his home.

An officer explained to Burton Harrison the reason for this embarrassing lack of Southern hospitality. While the people were willing to offer shelter to Davis’s entourage, they were afraid that anyone who offered refuge to the president would later have his house burned down by Union cavalry raiders.

Harrison was dubious of Davis’s would-be host, but “there seemed to be nothing to do but to go to the one domicile offered. It was on the main street of the town, and was occupied by Mr. Bates, a man said to be of northern birth, a bachelor of convivial habits, the local agent
of the Southern Express Company, apparently living alone with his negro servants, and keeping with them a sort of ‘open house,’ where a broad, well equipped sideboard was the most conspicuous feature of the situation—not at all a seemly place for Mr. Davis.” Davis would come to regret his stay with Mr. Bates.

Not long after he arrived in Charlotte, Davis gave a speech to an audience that included a number of Confederate soldiers in the city:

My friends, I thank you for this evidence of your affection. If I had come as the bearer of glad tidings, if I had come to announce success at the head of a triumphant army, this is nothing more than I would have expected; but coming as I do, to tell you of a very great disaster; coming, as I do, to tell you that our national affairs have reached a very low point of depression; coming, I may say, a refugee from the capital of the country, this demonstration of your love fills me with feelings too deep for utterance. This has been a war of the people for the people, and I have been simply their executive; and if they desire to continue the struggle, I am still ready and willing to devote myself to their cause. True, General Lee’s army has surrendered, but the men are still alive, the cause is not yet dead; and only show by your determination and fortitude that you are willing to suffer yet longer, and we may still hope for success. In reviewing my administration of the past four years, I am conscious of having committed errors, and very grave ones; but in all that I have done, in that I have tried to do, I can lay my hand upon my heart and appeal to God that I have had but one purpose to serve, but one mission to fulfill, the preservation of the true principles of constitutional freedom, which are as dear to me to-day as they were four years ago. I have nothing to abate or take back; if they were right then, they are right now, and no misfortune to our arms can change right into wrong. Again I thank you.

At the conclusion of the speech, somebody handed Davis a telegram just received from John C. Breckinridge. Davis read the words in silence: “President Lincoln was assassinated in the theatre in Washington on the night of the 11th inst. Seward’s house was entered on the same night and he was repeatedly stabbed and is probably mortally wounded.” Breckinridge had the date wrong, and Seward had survived. But Abraham Lincoln was dead.

John Reagan was there when Davis received the news: “At Charlotte…we received the melancholy news of the assassination of President Lincoln. [Davis] and members of the Cabinet, with one accord, greatly regretted the occurrence. We felt that his death was most unfortunate for the people of the Confederacy, because we believed that it would intensify the feeling of hostility in the Northern States against us, and because we believed we could expect better terms from Lincoln than from Johnson, who had shown a marked hostility to us, and was especially unfriendly to President Davis.”

Stephen Mallory, Davis’s secretary of the navy, was not present when Davis received the message, but they spoke about it a few minutes later. Mallory told Davis he did not believe it. The president said it sounded like a canard, but in revolutionary times events no less startling occurred constantly. Then Mallory expressed to Davis his “conviction of Mr. Lincoln’s moderation, his sense of justice, and [Mallory’s] apprehension that the South would be accused of instigating his death.”

Davis replied, Mallory wrote, in a sad voice: “I certainly have no special regard for Mr. Lincoln; but there are a great many men of whose end I would much rather have heard than his. I fear it will be disastrous to our people, and I regret it deeply.”

The myth took hold that Davis rejoiced at the news. Several weeks later, at the trial of Booth’s accomplices, Lewis Bates swore under oath that Davis read Breckinridge’s telegram aloud and then announced to the crowd: “If it were to be done, it were better it were well done.” But it was a lie. Then Bates said that when Breckenridge and Davis
met in his house a day or two later, and Breckenridge expressed regret at Lincoln’s death, Davis disagreed: “Well, General, I don’t know, if it were to be done at all, it were better that it were well done; and if the same had been done to Andy Johnson, the beast, and to Secretary Stanton, the job would then be complete.” Bates’s falsehoods dogged Davis for the rest of his life.

On April 19, when Varina wrote to Jefferson from Abbeville, she mentioned the “fearful news” that “fills me with horror”—but she wasn’t referring to Lincoln’s death, which she still didn’t know about, but instead about the recent Confederate military disasters, which included the disbanding of General Lee’s army and the surrender of General Longstreet’s corps. Then she turned her attention to her husband and his well-being. “Where are you—how are you—What ought I to do with these helpless little unconscious charges of mine are questions which I am asking myself always. Write to me of your troubles freely for mercy’s sake—Do not attempt to put a good face upon them to the friend of your heart, I am so at sea…”

On April 19, General Wade Hampton wrote to President Davis from Hillsborough, North Carolina, encouraging him to continue the fight from Texas. “Give me a good force of cavalry and I will take them safely across the Mississippi, and if you desire to go in that direction it will give me great pleasure to escort you. My own mind is made up as to my course. I shall fight as long as my Government remains in existence…If you will allow me to do so, I can bring to your support many strong arms and brave hearts—men who will fight to Texas, and who, if forced from that State, will seek refuge in Mexico rather than in the Union.”

T
he crowds standing before the East Front of the Capitol would have to wait outside all night before they could see Lincoln. No visitors would be allowed to enter the rotunda until morning. As at the White House the night before the public viewing there, Lincoln would rest
alone. Only his honor guard watched over him. Townsend described the scene: “At night the jets of gas concealed in the spring of the dome were lighted up, so that their bright reflection upon the frescoed walls hurled masses of burning light, like marvelous haloes, upon the little box where so much that we love and honor rested on its way to the grave. And so through the starry night, in the fane of the great Union he had strengthened and recovered, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, zealously guarded, are now reposing.”

If the doors to the rotunda had been thrown open that night, thousands of people would have poured in to see him. Lincoln’s private, silent night in the rotunda was an intermission to the great drama, a pause that allowed the tension to build. For those thwarted by the long lines at the White House, the morning of April 20 would be their last chance to see him. Many onlookers who had crowded the East Front to watch Lincoln’s coffin ascend the stairs did not leave the grounds once it vanished inside. Determined to keep an all-night vigil to guarantee their entry to the Capitol the next morning, thousands of people lined up on East Capitol Street.

I
n Charlotte, Davis tried to fathom all the implications of Lincoln’s murder. He must have recalled the many wartime rumors of Yankee plots to kidnap or murder Davis in Richmond. Now it had happened to Lincoln. But who had killed him, and why? What did this news mean for his retreat and for his plans to continue the war? Davis had not heard about the assassination until five days after it happened and he did not know about the funeral and procession that had started Lincoln’s transformation into an American saint. Lincoln’s death had made Davis’s cause even more difficult to sustain. Davis could not imagine the intensity of emotions unleashed by the assassination. But had he sensed it in any way, he might have increased the speed and urgency of his journey south.

C
lose to midnight on the day of Lincoln’s White House funeral, Edwin Stanton telegraphed Major General Dix in New York City and told him that the route of the death pageant was now set. “It has been finally concluded,” Stanton wrote, “to conform to the original arrangements made yesterday for the conveyance of the remains of the late President Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield, viz, by way of Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago to Springfield.”

T
he doors to the Capitol were thrown open on the morning of April 20. People passed between two lines of guards on the plaza, entered the rotunda via the East Front, split into two lines that passed on either side of the open coffin, and exited through the West Front. The experience was quick. Visitors were not allowed to linger, and they walked through the rotunda at the rate of more than three thousand an hour. At 10:00 a.m. a heavy rain soaked more than ten thousand people waiting in line. The mourners did not include the Lincoln family but did include Petersen house boarders George and Huldah Francis: “We saw him the last time in the Capitol the day before he was carried away…” In the dimly lit rotunda only the sound of rustling dresses and hoopskirts broke the silence. At 6:00 p.m. the doors were closed and the public viewing ended. The people, if permitted, would have kept coming all through the night.

J
efferson Davis awoke on the morning of April 20 with continued resolve. For him, Lincoln’s death had changed nothing. Indeed, in Davis’s mind, the ascendancy of Andrew Johnson made it more imperative to stave off defeat. If the South surrendered to Johnson,
his vengeance would be more terrible than any suffered under Lincoln. Davis had made his decision: The Civil War would go on as long as he lived. But he must have also known that Lincoln’s murder placed his life in greater danger. If he came under the hand of Union troops, he might be fated to join Lincoln in death.