by Ron Chernow
Horace Porter provided yet a third version of this watershed moment. Grant stood still, not speaking as he absorbed a series of telegrams. As ever at moments of extreme stress, some stoic composure hardened his features. Finally Julia could tolerate the suspense no longer. “Ulyss, what do the telegrams say? Do they bring any bad news?” “I will read them to you,” he said, with unwonted emotion, “but first prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received, and control your feelings so as not to betray the nature of the despatches to the servants.”36 The most important telegram came from Major Thomas T. Eckert in Washington, who disclosed that Lincoln had been wounded with a pistol shot to the head and would not survive. He noted a simultaneous attack against Secretary of State Seward, who lingered in critical condition. “The Secretary of War desires that you return to Washington immediately.”37
This saddest day of his life would be etched in black in Grant’s memory. Aside from losing the greatest leader he had ever known, he had lost a dear friend of the past thirteen months: “To know [Lincoln] personally was to love and respect him for his great qualities of heart and head, and for his patience and patriotism.”38 Because the South sorely needed Lincoln’s broad understanding, his death was “the greatest possible calamity to the country, and especially to the people of the South.”39 He feared for the peace process consecrated at Appomattox: “I did not know what it meant. Here was the rebellion put down in the field, and starting up in the gutters; we had fought it as war, now we had to fight it as assassination.”40 Another cause for concern arose when Julia asked whether Andrew Johnson would ascend to the presidency. “Yes,” Grant replied, “and for some reason I dread the change.”41 Before long Grant would criticize Johnson for his excessively cozy relationship with white southerners. At this point, however, he worried that his hostility toward former rebels “would be such as to repel, and make them unwilling citizens . . . I felt that reconstruction had been set back, no telling how far.”42 Soon after, it was learned that George A. Atzerodt, who had been assigned to kill Johnson, had roamed around the capital and gotten drunk instead.
Just when Grant imagined he could breathe easier, with the crisis atmosphere of wartime subsiding, the pressure of events now returned with a swift, terrible rush. The Lincoln assassination ushered in an anxious, fragile peace, fraught with fresh dangers, perhaps unimaginable new forms of violence. After Grant took the train north to Burlington, safely depositing Julia and Jesse there, the tracks were cleared so a train could transport him back to Washington, with pickets and patrols guarding the route. At the behest of Assistant War Secretary Charles A. Dana, a special engine preceded the train to detect any explosives embedded along the way. Grant traveled to the capital with Julia’s brother Fred. In Philadelphia, Beckwith said, Dent purchased a pint of champagne that he shared with Grant on the journey. It was a shockingly inappropriate time for Grant to imbibe, with his services so urgently required in Washington, but perhaps he needed to calm his shaken nerves after the shock of Lincoln’s death. Beckwith’s story gains credibility because he typically defended Grant from all drinking allegations and called this the sole time he ever witnessed his “indulgence in liquor of any kind.”43
Grant would long wonder if his presence at Ford’s Theatre might have altered things and whether Julia’s dislike of Mary Lincoln had inadvertently modified the direction of American history. Would Grant, with his acute battlefield instincts, have sensed the assassin’s tread? Would he have been more attentive to security concerns and brought his own security guard? Would the omnipresent Beckwith have sat outside the box, buffering his boss from harm? Such questions surely rattled around endlessly in Grant’s uneasy mind on that long train ride.
The president had been carried to a small boardinghouse across Tenth Street, his long frame laid out in a cramped back room on the ground floor. Cabinet members came to pay their respects while crowds outside awaited word of the president’s condition. Their vigil ended when Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. and Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president within hours. The battle-toughened Stanton lost no time supervising a comprehensive response to the crisis, briefly acting as de facto president. By the time Grant learned of the assassination, the hyperefficient war secretary had already notified nearby forts to seal off the capital and shut down bridges, posted roadblocks, and halted Potomac River traffic. He threw his department’s resources into investigating the conspiracy, interrogating witnesses and casting a huge dragnet across the city that netted Atzerodt and Lewis Powell, who had ferociously slashed Seward. Both men were in custody by the time Grant reached Washington. Despite a sizable reward for his apprehension, Booth escaped and remained at large for another eleven days.
Grant entered a bleak, rainy capital already clothed in mourning, with church bells chiming mournfully, flags drooping at half-mast, and hundreds of former slaves gathered before the White House “weeping and wailing their loss,” wrote Gideon Welles.44 The lieutenant general was hurried into the presence of the new president. While Grant knew the original plot had contemplated killing more than Lincoln and Seward, he didn’t expect fresh episodes of violence to unfold, reassuring Julia that the plot had “expended itself and there is but little to fear.”45 For all that, Grant adopted unusual precautions, returning to the Willard Hotel twice daily for meals and staying indoors at night. When he set eyes on images of John Wilkes Booth, he immediately recognized the sinister horseman who had shadowed his path to the train station and knew that he himself had stood on the death list of intended victims. By mid-May, the Grants had moved into the vacated Georgetown residence of General Halleck, where three officers and fifteen privates functioned as constant sentinels around the house.
Events conspired to pile huge new burdens on Grant’s shoulders. He had to oversee the formal rituals of grief, with every post draped in mourning for thirty days. Many field commanders refused to believe the calamitous reports of Lincoln’s murder and Grant had to verify the awful news for them. With possible military threats still hanging in the air, he reviewed the preparedness of nearby forts, Stanton instructing him that “I feel it my duty to ask you to consider yourself specially charged with all matters pertaining to the security and defense of this National Capital.”46 As he toiled to secure Washington, Grant couldn’t shake off the deep grief that had seized him. A man named Charles H. Jones was unwinding balls of crepe at the War Department, when he entered a third-floor office where the lights were dimmed and the occupant sat at his desk with his head slumped forward. “Pardon me,” Jones said. When the man lifted his eyes, Jones realized with astonishment that it was Grant in a state verging on exhaustion. “Don’t mind me,” Grant told him. “Carry out your orders.”47
Just a week earlier, Grant had behaved with exceptional generosity toward Lee and his men. Now, as apocalyptic fears convulsed Washington, worries arose that the disbanding rebel army might be teeming with secret conspirators and assassins. Executing a temporary volte-face, Grant was especially preoccupied with Virginia. John T. Ford, manager of the theater where Lincoln was slain, was in Richmond. Grant had Ord arrest him and send him under guard to Washington. In a striking retreat from his recent forgiving mood, Grant submitted to atypical rage, rashly asking Ord to arrest the mayor and members of the old Richmond city council as well as paroled officers who had not taken oaths of allegiance. “Extreme rigor will have to be observed whilst assassination remains the order of the day with the rebels.”48 Ord sent back an admirably coolheaded reply, noting that if he arrested Lee and members of his staff in Richmond, the Civil War might resume. Upon reflection, Grant tempered his hasty response, telling Ord that arresting the Richmond politicians was merely a suggestion, not an order.
The post-assassination hysteria attained such a fever pitch that Grant feared Joseph Johnston might be tempted to resume the fight. Not taking any chances, he dispatched Sheridan to move promptly with six to eight thousand cavalry men to join Sherman and stymie any
chance for Johnston’s army to escape. Nonetheless, he continued to believe that a just policy toward Confederate soldiers was far more likely to reconcile them to Union victory than a punitive one. When a group of Mosby’s partisans asked to surrender and be paroled, Grant leapt at the chance, telling Stanton, “It will be better to have Mosby’s . . . men . . . as paroled prisoners of War than at large as Guerrillas.”49
In the days after Lincoln’s death, Julia Grant behaved with all due decorum and “went many times to call on dear heart-broken Mrs. Lincoln, but she could not see me.”50 Mary Lincoln hadn’t relented in her feelings toward Julia and perhaps nursed a grudge that the Grants had snubbed the Ford’s Theatre invitation; in any event, she chose to be alone with her grief. Among the many tasks heaped on Grant was organizing the obsequies to Lincoln when his casket lay in state in the White House. With Lincoln dead, a new responsibility had settled upon Grant, who became the foremost symbol of the Union and the political agenda ratified by the war, most notably justice for the freed slaves. Already carrying on the Lincoln legacy, which would shape his worldview in future years, he came up with an ideal gesture to honor the dead president, commanding Ord to send up one of the best black regiments from Virginia for the funeral ceremony. At ten o’clock on the morning of April 19, a solitary Grant took up his position by Lincoln’s catafalque in the East Room of the White House and with the ramrod-straight posture of a soldier stood guard as tears coursed freely down his cheeks, a highly unusual show of emotion for him. Sheltered by an open black canopy that afforded views from all four sides, the walnut coffin rested on a raised platform. Mary Lincoln was too grief-stricken to attend, and Captain Robert Lincoln ranked as the sole family member present. Many years later, attending the dedication of a Lincoln museum, Grant summed up the importance of the dead president, the first in American history to be assassinated: “His fame will grow brighter as time passes and his great work is better understood.”51
At 2 p.m., the presidential entourage, Grant included, accompanied the coffin to the Capitol, where it remained on view for several days in the rotunda. Then the presidential remains began a lengthy, roundabout journey to Springfield, Illinois, for the burial. Pausing in many cities, it covered seventeen hundred miles, an estimated seven million people converging on the railroad tracks to pray and weep and tip their caps in homage as the train rode by. The nation had never witnessed such a mass outpouring of emotion, not even for George Washington, who had died from natural causes at a more advanced age. As the train wound toward Illinois, a New York cavalry detachment cornered John Wilkes Booth in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. After the wooden structure was set ablaze, Booth was shot and dragged to the porch of a nearby farmhouse, where he died, but not before he attempted to lay claim to Confederate martyrdom. At the end, he supposedly said, “Tell my mother I die for my country.”52
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS RUDELY SNATCHED away just as many Americans had learned to appreciate his benevolence and farsighted wartime leadership. Nobody could have served as a fit successor to Lincoln, but the rise of Andrew Johnson to the presidency was an especially cruel stroke for the nation. About five feet ten inches tall and solidly built, Johnson was a humorless, pugnacious man, thin-skinned and vindictive, with a fiercely turbulent expression and close-set, beady black eyes. He was placed on the ticket with Lincoln in 1864, not for outstanding talent or intelligence, but because Republicans hoped to broadcast their status as a full-fledged Union party by drafting a border state Democrat from Tennessee. As the only senator from a secession state to retain his seat in the U.S. Congress—a courageous stand that endeared him to Republicans—a heroic aura had burnished Andrew Johnson for a time.
His accidental presidency started promisingly enough when he announced plans to retain members of Lincoln’s cabinet. Widely accused of being drunk at Lincoln’s second inaugural, he worked to project a more presidential demeanor. When George Templeton Strong visited his temporary office at the Treasury Department, where Johnson had hung two flags—the one draped over Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre, the other showing the long gash where Booth’s spur had slashed the fabric as he leapt to the stage—he was pleasantly surprised by Johnson’s sedate behavior, finding him “dignified, urbane, and self-possessed.”53
The early life of this rough-hewn president contained remarkable features. Born in a log cabin, reared by poor, illiterate parents in North Carolina, he was apprenticed to a tailor and ran away as an adolescent to Tennessee, where he opened a tailor shop. In future years, he would always be faultlessly dressed, at least looking the part of a model politician. At age eighteen, he began to leave behind the trappings of frontier life when he married sixteen-year-old Eliza McCardle, a shoemaker’s daughter, who taught him to read and write. Like Lincoln, Johnson became a fanatic for self-improvement, avoiding theater, gambling, and horse races and admitting he “never had much time for frivolity.”54 As he prospered, he came to own five slaves, whom he freed in late 1863. Living among large landowners who condescended to him, he always felt like an outsider. Their patronizing attitude deposited a bitter residue in his nature, a seething resentment and profound ambivalence toward the planter class, whom he longed to ape and punish at once.
A gifted debater, Johnson rose fast through the political ranks in Tennessee, starting as mayor of Greeneville before going to the state legislature and shifting from Whig to Democrat. He was determined to soar in politics, and a friend depicted his tumultuous career as “one intense, unceasing, desperate upward struggle.”55 Before the Civil War, he progressed from congressman to two-term Tennessee governor to U.S. senator. The obstinate Johnson barged ahead with sharp elbows, and President James K. Polk, who came from his state, perceived him as “vindictive and perverse in his temper and conduct.”56 An abrasive quality to Johnson’s ambition tended to offend people and later left him isolated in the White House, where he trusted few people and dispensed with confidants. Although Johnson portrayed himself as a tribune of the common people, his selective populism encompassed poor whites but excluded blacks. After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, he made a speech that held up slavery as beneficial. His talk was larded with tributes to “honest yeomen,” mingled with tirades against the “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy” that owned slaves.57 Somehow his sympathy never extended to the slaves themselves.
When it came to preserving the Union during the war, Andrew Johnson was a brave, stalwart supporter. A rabble-rousing orator, he didn’t mince words when South Carolina seceded, calling it “levying war against the United States” and accusing southern rebels of “treason.”58 It took immense courage for him to maintain this view, and he confronted threats and was burned in effigy for his outspoken stand. When the state capital of Nashville fell to the Union, Lincoln named Johnson military governor of the state, hoping he would mobilize support for the federal cause.59 He enforced Unionism in a bullheaded manner that antagonized people. As the journalist Henry Villard wrote, “He was doubtless a man of unusual natural parts, [but] had too violent a temper and was too much addicted to the common Southern habit of free indulgence in strong drink.”60 By late 1863, Johnson had converted to abolitionism as part of his vendetta against the slavocracy, but not from any real regard for those in bondage. “Damn the Negroes,” he insisted, “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.”61 Influenced by the Emancipation Proclamation, he told a delegation of free blacks in Nashville he would stand as their Moses, leading them “through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace.”62 For Republicans, Johnson’s nomination was perilous because he was a racist at heart and a robust Democrat—two flaws that could no longer be papered over once he became president.
In his initial comments about Johnson, Grant sounded mildly optimistic. “I have every reason to hope that in our new President we will find a man disposed and capable of conducting the government in its old channel.”63 In moments of crisi
s, he thought, people should rally around the president, affording him the benefit of the doubt. On April 21, he offered this generous assessment of Johnson:
It is impossible that an ordinary man should have risen to the position which Pres. Johnson has and have sustained himself throughout. His start was in the South where he had an aristocracy to contend against without one advantage except native ability to sustain him. I am satisfied the country has nothing to fear from his administration. It is unpatriotic at this time for professed lovers of their country to express doubts of the capacity and integrity of our Chief Magistrate.64
Before long, Grant’s stouthearted faith would be severely tested as the new president went from being too harsh toward Confederate leaders to being too obliging. During his first week as president, Johnson issued a statement that “instigators of this monstrous rebellion” would pay the full price for their actions, seemingly the antithesis of Grant’s large-hearted spirit at Appomattox.65
Once sworn in, Johnson had to cope with the last remnants of war. The news of Lee’s surrender had not penetrated many corners of the rural South, and Sherman still had to negotiate the surrender of Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina. While Sherman knew he could overpower his opponent, he feared the defeated army might splinter into marauding guerrilla bands. “There is great danger that the confederate armies will dissolve and fill the whole land with robbers and assassins,” he told Grant.66 Jefferson Davis, still blinded by zeal, wanted to prosecute a now hopeless war, telling Johnston and Beauregard, “I think we can whip the enemy yet, if our people will turn out.” With soldiers deserting in droves, Joseph Johnston brushed aside this attitude as purely delusional. “My views are, sir, that our people are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight.”67 Convinced Johnston would surrender when he learned Lee had done so, Grant authorized Sherman to offer him the identical terms, which Sherman commended as “magnanimous and liberal.” He promised Grant: “Should Johnston follow Lee’s Example, I shall of course grant the Same.”68 Had Sherman stuck to this promise, he would have spared himself a world of trouble.
