America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  On April 1, Sheridan, with fifty thousand men, attacked ten thousand Rebels under the command of General George E. Pickett at Five Forks, west of Petersburg, and near a key railroad junction. While Pickett attended a fish fry (or shad bake, as Virginians called it), the Federals smashed through the thin Confederate lines, taking five thousand prisoners. News of Sheridan’s victory encouraged Grant to challenge the Rebel entrenchments in front of Petersburg. By this time, there were simply not enough Confederate soldiers remaining to man the trenches. The Federals overran the defenses, sending Lee westward toward Lynchburg in a desperate attempt to meet up with Joseph Johnston’s army. The siege of Petersburg was over.

  It was Sunday, and Jefferson Davis sat worshiping at St. Paul’s Church in Richmond. The congregation consisted mainly of women, many in mourning clothes. The few men present had hobbled in on crutches or were cabinet officers. A messenger found the president, who then quietly excused himself. When other officials began to peel out of their pews, the congregation knew something major was happening. The note told of Lee’s evacuation of Petersburg and of Richmond’s imminent danger.

  By midnight, the Confederate government and their families abandoned the capital. Flickering gaslights cast a yellow pall over crowds in the streets, drunken mobs looting shops, and throngs at the railroad depot. Confederate General Richard Ewell ordered evacuating troops to burn cotton, tobacco, and military stores, and the glow grew brighter, punctuated by explosions from ordnance, turning the city into an inferno. Dogs, cats, and rats ran alongside citizens fleeing the conflagration. The fire destroyed nearly 90 percent of the city center. All that remained of Richmond’s industrial might was isolated brick chimneys and the piers of the city’s three burned bridges. Lincoln telegraphed Grant, “Allow me to tender to you, and all with you, the nation’s grateful thanks for this additional, and magnificent success.” Richmond had finally fallen.43

  Sheridan’s cavalry galloped into the charred Rebel capital on Monday, April 3. Major Atherton H. Stevens Jr. of Massachusetts raised the American flag atop the Capitol. A Richmond woman watching the ceremony wrote, “I saw them unfurl a tiny flag, and I sank on my knees, and the bitter, bitter tears came in a torrent.” As more federal troops entered the city, blacks clustered on the streets and cheered each column as it passed, reserving the loudest acclaim for a black regiment whose band struck up a lively rendition of “Dixie.” The city’s black residents “danced and shouted, men hugged each other, and women kissed.” The following day, President Lincoln, escorted by only ten sailors, toured the still-smoldering city, nodding to thousands of cheering former slaves. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” he exclaimed. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.” A freed slave exulted, “I know I am free, for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.” Lincoln toured the Confederate White House, sat at Jefferson Davis’s desk, ate lunch, and resumed his tour. When officers asked him what policy they should pursue in occupying the city, Lincoln replied, “If you were in my place, you would not press them.”44

  Lee, with his fast dissolving army now numbering fewer than thirty thousand men, found Grant blocking his way to Lynchburg and Sheridan harassing him from the rear, a combined force of more than eighty thousand troops. On Friday, April 7, Grant wrote to Lee: “The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance … and [I] regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking of you the surrender of the … Army of Northern Virginia.” Lee’s depleted men would have to fight through a force three times as large to reach Lynchburg. At dawn on April 9, he tried, but abandoned the assault when he saw the numbers arrayed against him. He had reached a decision. Borrowing Grant’s turn of phrase, he announced, “It would be useless and therefore cruel to provoke the further effusion of blood, and I have arranged to meet with General Grant with a view to surrender.”45

  In the early afternoon, Lee and Grant met in the home of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox Court House. The apple and peach trees surrounding the house were in full color, a beautiful backdrop for a momentous occasion. McLean, ironically, had owned a house near Manassas that the Confederates used as their headquarters during the First Battle of Bull Run. He had moved to a more remote portion of the state to this sturdy brick house with a small green lawn in front to escape the war, and now found himself in the midst of the war’s final act. Lee, resplendent in his finest dress uniform, and Grant, in a crumpled, soiled private’s jacket, reminisced about their Mexican War service, avoiding for some moments the awkward conversation that must follow. Grant allowed the Confederate soldiers to go home with their horses for spring planting, a gesture that Lee remarked “will have the best possible effect upon the men. It will be very gratifying and will do much toward conciliating our people.” Grant ordered twenty-five thousand rations for Lee’s famished army, a welcome sight to soldiers who had been living on parched corn for the past week. It also reflected a well-oiled war machine that could come up with enough food to feed an enemy army so quickly.46

  Grant, initially jubilant at the prospect of meeting Lee, found himself saddened as he stood before the stoic Confederate general. “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.” When news spread among Union ranks about the purpose of the meeting, the men began firing a hundred-gun salute, which Grant immediately stopped, as “we did not want to exult over their downfall.” Some of Grant’s officers requested permission of Lee to go inside the Confederate lines to visit old friends. Lee acquiesced, and soon Union and Confederate were mingling in the gentle spring afternoon at Appomattox. Grant marveled that the former enemies seemed as “friends separated for a long time while fighting battles under the same flag.”47

  Lee walked out of the house and faced his men. Speaking softly, he confided, “I have done for you all that it was in my power to do. You have done all your duty. Leave the result to God. Go to your homes and resume your occupations. Obey the laws and become as good citizens as you were soldiers.” Recently wounded Rebel soldiers lay on wooden pallets as Lee spoke. They asked their comrades to prop them up so they could see the general. Tears streaked down the begrimed faces of the Rebel soldiers. When he finished, there was silence, except for a few muffled groans. Lee mounted his horse, Traveler, and cheers erupted as he rode toward the men, his head uncovered, his countenance reflecting a deep sorrow. All the men took off their hats, including the Union soldiers. Some noticed water welling in the general’s eyes. As his horse waded slowly through the ranks, the men brushed their hats against the animal’s withers. The soldiers stacked their arms, some smashing their weapons on rocks so that a serviceable gun would not fall into the hands of the enemy, and set down their cartridge boxes. They tenderly folded their battle-worn, torn, and bloodstained flags, and laid them down as well. Some men rushed forward to press the flags to their lips. The war was over.48

  In Chicago early Monday morning, citizens awakened by the roar of cannon thought for a moment their city was under attack. Washington set off a five-hundred-gun salute that shattered all the windows in Lafayette Square. Lincoln appeared before a large crowd around the White House and asked the band to play “Dixie,” “one of the best tunes I have ever heard.” He joked with his attorney general that the song was now a “lawful prize” of war. Similar celebrations erupted in cities throughout the North. It would be another two weeks before Joseph Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman in North Carolina, and more than a month before the last Confederate force, the Army of Trans-Mississippi under the command of General E. Kirby Smith, surrendered, but the war ended, for all intents and purposes, on that bright day in Virginia, April 9, 1865. An array of factors converged to doom the Confederacy: a disintegrating economy, a war-weary civilian population, the inability
to manufacture and distribute provisions for the armed forces, social class and geographic divisions, and a limited reservoir of manpower. The most important failure, though, occurred on the battlefield. The Union victory was not inevitable. General George Pickett had it right when asked about the reasons for the demise of the Confederate States of America: “The Yankees had something to do with it.”49

  Some Rebels wanted to continue the conflict and undertake a guerrilla war against the Yankee invaders. Jefferson Davis toyed with the idea for a time. Lee would have none of it. Guerrillas, he said, “would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they may [otherwise] never have occasion to visit.” A private in the Army of Northern Virginia summarized the feelings of some of his comrades: he “would be very much tempted to become a desperado and prey upon our enemy in every possible way that a strong feeling of hate and vengeance could devise.” But he thought better of it. “With my little ones still living and looking so anxiously for my safe return, I must take care of myself and try to live to protect them, and care for them.” Most white southerners, whatever their personal animus toward Yankees, thought continuation of the war by any means was, as a former Confederate senator from Texas noted, “madness.” Going home was what the Rebel soldier thought about after April 9.50

  As news of Appomattox spread throughout the South, despair and depression were much more common emotions than defiance. A soldier noted that he and his comrades, as well as the civilians they encountered on their way home, were “steeped in a fatal lethargy, unwilling or unable to resist or forward anything.” A Georgia girl confided to her diary, “The demoralization is complete. We are whipped, there is no doubt about it.” A woman in North Carolina confessed that she slept “endlessly.” The paralysis would eventually dissipate, but not the memory.51

  According to friends who saw President Lincoln on Good Friday, April 14, he seemed “in perfect health and in exuberant spirits,” as if a great burden had lifted. During a cabinet meeting that day Lincoln related a recurring dream of a ship “moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.” If anyone in attendance offered an interpretation, it has been lost to posterity, though the president had similar dreams when he anticipated good news. He hoped to hear soon from General Sherman that Joseph Johnston had surrendered the Army of Tennessee. Lincoln had also experienced darker dreams recently about an assassination and funeral services in the East Room of the White House. He had received enough death threats that he created a special compartment marked “Assassinations” on his stand-up desk. He made light of these menacing messages, but lately, they had begun to trouble him.52

  An especially heavy schedule of appointments kept the president busy until 8:30 P.M., when he and Mrs. Lincoln departed for Ford’s Theatre to take in the comedy Our American Cousin. He had invited Grant and his wife to accompany them, but the general declined, saying he wanted to spend time with his family in New Jersey. The Washington rumor mill buzzed that Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant did not get along.

  The Lincoln party arrived while the play was in progress. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had a pleasant carriage ride to the theater with another couple, who reported that the Lincolns had acted like “newlyweds,” talking about taking trips together to Paris and California. At Ford’s, the audience and the members of the cast cheered as Lincoln entered his box over the stage and settled into his specially provided rocking chair. Shortly after 10:00 P.M. a shot rang out from the direction of the box. Some in the audience thought it was part of the play, until a man, recognized as John Wilkes Booth, the actor, jumped from the box to the stage, brandishing a knife, staggering on an injured left leg, and shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis”—“Thus always to Tyrants”—before exiting stage right. At that moment, a cry rang out, “Our President! our President is shot! catch him—hang him!” Twelve days later, a federal agent shot Booth inside a flaming barn in the northern Virginia countryside. The popular actor had played his final role as Brutus. The assassin’s last entry in his diary: “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me.”53

  A small group of men carried the unconscious president to a house across the street and placed him in a rear bedroom. It was clear that the president’s condition was grave. A bullet had gone from the back of his head to lodge near his right eye. Government officials, doctors, and military personnel assembled inside the house, and a larger throng collected on the street outside. News circulated that another assassin had attacked Secretary of State William H. Seward and only the quick actions of his son and nurse (Seward was recovering from a carriage accident) saved his life.

  Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 on the morning of April 15. Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. Johnson, a former Democrat from Tennessee, was the only U.S. senator from the seceded states to remain loyal to the Union. Republicans placed him on the ticket to legitimize their designation as the Union party in the 1864 presidential election. Belligerent toward the Rebels, he had a considerable following among Radical Republicans, especially those wary of Lincoln’s prayer, “with malice for none; with charity for all.”54

  Northerners, still in the midst of celebrations, now plunged into mourning. On April 19, Lincoln reposed in the East Room of the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln and her son Tad remained sequestered, too overcome with grief to attend the ceremony. Her eldest son, Robert, represented the family. General Grant stood alone at the head of the catafalque. Government officials, military officers, and the diplomatic corps filled the rest of the room. A funeral carriage, led by a detachment of black troops, followed by a riderless horse and ranks of wounded soldiers on crutches, transported the president’s body to the Capitol Rotunda as bells tolled throughout Washington, bands played dirges, and people along the route up Pennsylvania Avenue wept. It was spring in the nation’s capital and the lilacs were in bloom. On Friday, April 21, Lincoln’s body began the sixteen-hundred-mile journey back home to Springfield, Illinois.

  Walt Whitman was at his mother’s home in Brooklyn when he heard of Lincoln’s assassination. “Mother prepared breakfast—and other meals afterwards—as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by any of us.” He hurried back to Washington to view the funeral procession. And he wrote,

  When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d

  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.55

  Lincoln had forged a personal bond with Americans, white and black, and they with him. During the long, cruel war, he articulated their frustrations, softened their grief, elevated their hopes, and allowed them to laugh, even at him occasionally. He led his nation through the fire of a bloody civil war and convinced his constituents that the Union and their freedom would be stronger for it. “He has been appointed … to be laid as the costliest sacrifice of all upon the altar of the Republic and to cement with his blood the free institutions of this land,” a group of ministers memorialized. A grieving soldier wrote that he and his comrades “had all come to look upon [Lincoln] as the chosen leader under whose guidance, peace, and prosperity, the gift of the dear God would come to the nation and to them all.” The annealing process would facilitate a national healing. He had become Walt Whitman’s prophesied “Redeemer President,” securing salvation for a nation and its people.56

  More than seven million mourners lined the railways from Washington to Springfield to salute, stare, wave, or weep as the “Lincoln Special,” its nine cars draped in black, passed, with an outsized portrait of the president wreathed in garlands on the cowcatcher. At the larger cities, mourners were able to pay their respects as Lincoln’s body lay in state in a government building. In Philadelphia, three hundred thousand people forming a column three miles long filed by the coffin. In New York City, where citizens had often voiced criticism of Lincoln and the war, a half-million citizens jammed sidewalks and rooftops to view the cortege. When Lincoln’s
body reached Chicago, nearly two weeks after it left Washington, D.C., his skin had darkened appreciably, requiring a quick cosmetic touch-up to restore a “natural” color to his face. A procession up Michigan Avenue drew thirty-seven thousand people. Two days later, on May 4, the train arrived in Springfield, where more mourners viewed Lincoln’s body lying in state. As the president was finally laid to rest, the minister read the Second Inaugural Address. And Whitman wrote:

  Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

  Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

  With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,

  With the show of the States themselves as of crapeveil’d women standing.…

  With the tolling bells’ perpetual clang,

  Here, coffin that slowly passes,

  I give you my sprig of lilac.57

  Southerners had mixed responses to Lincoln’s death. Many exulted in his demise: “Lincoln’s death seemed … like a gleam of sunshine on a winter’s day.” The black crepe hanging from businesses and homes in southern cities owed less to deep affection for the departed president than to fears of retaliation from occupying federal troops. A minority, however, believed that Lincoln’s Second Inaugural hinted at a relatively mild program of reconstruction. General Joseph E. Johnston declared the assassination “the greatest possible calamity to the South.” A planter wrote in his diary that Lincoln’s death “is … in my judgment one of the greatest misfortunes that could have befallen the country.… [It is] in my opinion, a great loss to the whole country & especially to the South—as from him, we had a right to expect better terms of peace than from any one else.… Oh! my poor country—What have you yet to Suffer.”58