Bloody Crimes (33 page)

Major General Dix, who had come in from New York City to Albany, discussed with Townsend how to handle the still irate Stanton. Dix advised the adjutant general to confess everything. Townsend, invoking the protective umbrella of his superior officer, telegraphed Stanton again.

“General Dix, who is here, suggests that I should explain to you how the photograph was taken,” Townsend wrote. “The remains had just been arranged in state in the City Hall, at the head of the stairway, where the people would ascend on one side, and descend on the other. The body lay in an alcove, draped in black, and just at the edge of a rotunda formed of American flags and mourning drapery. The photographer was in a gallery twenty feet higher than the body, and at least forty distant from it. Admiral Davis stood at the head and I at the foot of the coffin. No one else was in view. The effect of the picture would be general, taking in the whole scene, but not giving the features of the corpse.”

O
n April 26 events in two places far from New York dwarfed in importance the dispute between Stanton and Townsend. Jefferson Davis, still in Charlotte, learned that General Joseph Johnston had surrendered his army to General Sherman. It was essential that Davis abandon the state and cross the border into South Carolina. Mallory stressed the point: “His friends…saw the urgent expediency of getting further south as rapidly as possible, and after a week’s stay in Charlotte they started with an escort of some two or three hundred cavalry.”

And on this day, before dawn, at a farm near Port Royal, Virginia, federal cavalry caught up with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and shot him dead.

Before Davis departed Charlotte, he wrote to Wade Hampton: “If you think it better you can, with the approval of General Johnston, select now, as proposed for a later period, the small body of men and join me at once, leaving General Wheeler to succeed you in command of the cavalry.”

Then, in haste, Davis wrote a letter to Varina:

Charlotte

April 26. 1865

There is increasing hazard of desertion among the troops. The Cavalry is now the last hope, and how long they will adhere in sufficient numbers to offer resistance is doubtful. I will organize what force of Cavalry can be had. Hampton offers to lead them, and thinks he can force his way across the Mississippi. The route will be too rough and perilous for you and children to go with me. It may be that a safer deposit can be made of your heavy baggage in the neighborhood where you now are than further West—The tide of war will follow me. There will be more quiet out of the track and behind it. I will leave here by or before tomorrow, but will be compelled to move slowly. Will try to see you soon.

Jeffn Davis

Back in New York City, the man who had photographed Lincoln in his coffin, Thomas Gurney, proprietor of one of Manhattan’s most prominent studios, T. Gurney & Son, was getting worried. He had taken unprecedented, newsworthy, and commercially valuable pictures. No other American president had ever been photographed in death. Since Lincoln’s assassination no one, not the famous Mathew Brady or Alexander Gardner of Washington, not any other photographers in Baltimore, Harrisburg, or Philadelphia along the route between Washington and New York City, had succeeded in photographing the president in his coffin.

Gurney hoped to gain publicity by distributing photographic prints to the press to reproduce as newspaper woodcuts, and he hoped to profit by selling to the public mass-produced photographic cartes de visite and large-format photographic prints suitable for framing. On April 26, Gurney sent an urgent telegram, not to Stanton, but to a man he thought might be more sympathetic, Charles A. Dana, the assistant secretary of war: “A dispatch to General Dix directs the seizure and destruction of the photographs taken by us of President’s remains. We have obtained delay until 10 o’clock in hope of securing a revocation of the order. We shall see Mr. Beecher and Mr. Raymond, and hope the Secretary will see the propriety of waiting until all the facts are in his possession. In the meantime can you not assist us?”

Gurney reached out to Henry Ward Beecher, the widely known clergyman, abolitionist, and author, and Henry J. Raymond, the famous editor of the
New York Times,
and asked them to lobby Stanton and prevent the seizure and destruction of the glass-plate negatives. They agreed and both telegraphed the War Department.

Beecher wrote: “Messrs. Gurney, photographers, wish me to ask you to so far modify your order to General Dix respecting the negatives taken of President Lincoln as to order him to hold them without breaking until Gurney can present to you the facts of the case. They do not intend to have the face represented.” He was joined by Raymond who wrote: “I respectfully join in Mr. Beecher’s request
that General Dix may postpone destroying the negatives of President Lincoln taken by Gurney & Son till they can see you.”

A telegram from the War Department arrived at Gurney’s studio, saving the negatives from destruction for the time being, but only if Gurney surrendered all the glass plates and agreed to abide by Stanton’s decision once he determined whether or not to smash them.

Gurney surrendered the glass-plate negatives, plus all the albumen-paper photographs which he had already printed from them. He had no choice. In the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder, emotions were running high. Across the country more than two hundred people had been shot, stabbed, lynched, or beaten to death for making anti-Lincoln statements or for praising his assassin. Stanton had ordered the indiscriminate arrest of more than one hundred people, including the owners of Ford’s Theatre, as suspects in the crime. In Baltimore a mob attacked a photography studio based on rumors that the proprietor was selling images of the infamous John Wilkes Booth.

If Gurney had attempted legal action, no court would have recognized his First Amendment right to protect and publish his photographs. If he failed to surrender them voluntarily, the War Department would have raided his studio and seized them. He complied. The next day an army general notified Stanton from New York City that the offending images were in government custody.

Soon the War Department would ban the sale of other photographs it found offensive. In an order dated May 2, 1865, Major General Lew Wallace, future author of
Ben-Hur,
suppressed images of the assassin: “The sale of portraits of any rebel officer or soldier, or of J. Wilkes Booth, the murderer of President Lincoln, is forbidden hereafter in this department. All commanding officers and provost marshals are hereby ordered to take possession of such pictures wherever found exposed for sale, and report the names of the parties so offending, who will be liable to arrest and imprisonment if again guilty of a violation of this order.” This unlawful and pointless directive proved impossible to enforce and was soon rescinded.

Stanton’s suppression of the corpse photographs did not succeed entirely. He had wanted to prevent Gurney’s images from surfacing in any form—including being copied into woodcuts or engravings—but the photographer had managed to get prints into the hands of a few artists. At least two newspapers published front-page interpretations of the scene, and Currier & Ives published a fine engraving based partly on Gurney’s work. But Gurney’s negatives were never seen again. Perhaps Edwin M. Stanton had them brought to his office in Washington and, after viewing them, smashed them into unrecognizable shards. Perhaps he sequestered the plates in a secret hiding place, where, to this day, they languish in some forgotten, dustcovered War Department file box, possibly alongside the long-lost, never published autopsy photographs Stanton commanded Alexander Gardner to take of John Wilkes Booth’s body.

Stanton could not resist preserving for himself at least one image of Lincoln’s corpse. Almost a century after the president’s death and burial, a sole surviving photographic print made from one of Gurney’s negatives was discovered in an old archive, which was traced back to Stanton’s personal files. Perhaps Stanton saved it for history. Or perhaps he intended for it never to be seen and to remain his private memento, for his eyes only, a vivid reminder of the spring of ’65 and the “coffin that slowly passes.”

O
n Wednesday afternoon, the train left the Albany depot and as it proceeded past the cities, towns, and villages on its way to Buffalo, people turned out in multitudes and the crowds got thicker wherever the train was scheduled to pass. The
New York Tribune
described a mood so solemn that it was as though a funeral had occurred “in each house in central New York.” Little Falls was the next stop, and a local band played a dirge while the women of the city presented flowers for the coffin. A written tribute accompanied their gift: “The ladies…through their committee, present these flowers and the
shield, as an emblem of the protection which our beloved President ever proved to the liberties of the American people. The cross, of his ever faithful trust in God, and the wreath as the token that we mingle our tears with those of the afflicted nation.”

Thereafter the train passed through Amsterdam, Fonda, Palatine Bridge, Rome, Green Corners, Verona, Oneida, Canastota, Chittenango, Kirkville, and Manlius. At 11:15 p.m., it made a short stop at Syracuse, where veteran soldiers paid honors, a choir sang hymns, and a little girl handed a small bouquet to a congressman on the train. A note attached to the flowers read: “The last tribute from Mary Virginia Raynor, a little girl of three years of age.”

In Rochester at 3:20 a.m. on Thursday, a collection of military units stood in a line on the north side of the station, and on the south side stood the mayor, twenty-five members of the common council of Rochester, and former president of the United States Millard Fillmore, who got on board and rode to the next stop, Buffalo.

Sometime after the sun rose Thursday morning, tolling bells and booming cannon awoke the citizens of Buffalo who had not already assembled at the railroad depot. Abraham Lincoln had arrived. At 8:00 a.m. a modest procession, which included President Fillmore, escorted the hearse to St. James Hall. The marchers included Company D of the Seventy-fourth Regiment, which, four years earlier, had acted as president-elect Lincoln’s escort when he passed through the city in February 1861 on his way to Washington. After the assassination, Buffalo officials, unaware that the train would come through their city, had already honored Lincoln with a grand funeral procession on the day of the White House funeral in Washington. They decided against staging a second one today. They did not want to exhaust the emotions of their citizens. At 9:35 a.m., after the hearse reached the Young Men’s Association building, Lincoln’s bearers removed his coffin from the vehicle and carried it up the steps into St. James Hall.

Under a simple canopy of drooping black crepe, they laid the cof
fin on a dais while the Buffalo St. Cecelia Society, a musical group, sang “Rest, Spirit, Rest.” Women from the Unitarian Church placed an anchor of white camellias at the foot of the coffin. For more than ten hours, from a little past 9:30 a.m. until the coffin was closed at 8:00 p.m., thousands of people, including many from Canada who had crossed the border for the occasion, viewed the remains.

At some point while the crowds passed by the corpse in the coffin, news reached Buffalo by telegraph that electrified Townsend and the mourners standing in line: John Wilkes Booth had been taken. “Here,” Townsend recorded, “we first received intelligence of the capture and death of Booth, the assassin.” His body was en route by boat to Washington. Some of the same doctors who performed Lincoln’s autopsy now waited there to dissect Booth’s corpse.

The president’s coffin was closed at 8:00 p.m. and forty-five minutes later, the procession left St. James Hall under military escort. Many of the viewers who had seen Lincoln’s body waited outside so that they could follow the hearse to the railroad depot and watch the train depart a few minutes past 10:00 p.m.

O
n the night that Lincoln’s train pulled out of Buffalo, Jefferson Davis was staying in Yorkville, South Carolina. And he was still taking his time. His journey south was more like a farewell pageant than a speedy flight. His lack of urgency worried Stephen Mallory: “[T]wo days after…[leaving Charlotte we] reached Yorkville, South Carolina, traveling slowly and not at all like men escaping from the country.”

Wade Hampton wanted to lead his cavalry to the president’s side, but he was a conflicted man. He confessed his dilemma in a letter to General Johnston:

By your advice I went to consult with President Davis…After full conference with him, a plan was agreed on to enable him to
leave the country. He charged me with the execution of this plan, and he is now moving in accordance with it. On my return here I find myself not only powerless to assist him, but placed myself in a position of great delicacy. I must either leave him to his fate, without an effort to avert it, or subject myself to possible censure by not accepting the terms of the convention you have made. If I do not accompany him I shall never cease to reproach myself, and if I go with him I may go under the ban of outlawry. I choose the latter, because I believe it to be my duty to do so…I shall not ask a man to go with me. Should any join me, they will…like myself, [be] willing to sacrifice everything for the cause…

And Davis definitely had reason to worry because now that Stanton had Booth, he could focus on Jefferson Davis. Calvary units were already looking for Davis and wanted to kill or capture him. On Wednesday, April 27, one day after Booth was shot and killed, and after Confederate major general Joe Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina, Stanton telegraphed Major General George Thomas about the Confederate president and his rumored treasure:

The following is an extract from a telegram received this morning from General Halleck, at Richmond: “The bankers have information to-day that Jeff. Davis’ specie is moving south from Goldsborough in wagons as fast as possible. I suggest that commanders be telegraphed through General Thomas…to take measures to intercept the rebel chiefs, and their plunder. The specie is estimated at $6,000,000 to $13,000,000.” [S]pare no exertion to stop Davis and his plunder. Push the enemy as hard as you can in every direction.