“The curious life of the fleeing Confederate Government in the ‘Cabinet Car’ at Greensboro continued for nearly a week, and was not all discomfort,” Mallory insisted.
Indeed, the difficulties of their position were minimized by the spirit with which these men encountered every trial. Here was the astute “Minister of Justice,” a grave and most exemplary gentleman, with a piece of half-broiled “middling” in one hand and a hoe-cake in the other, his face bearing unmistakable evidence of the condition of the bacon. There was the clever Secretary of State busily dividing his attention between a bucket of stewed dried apples and a haversack of hard-boiled eggs. Here was the Postmaster-General sternly and energetically running his bowie knife through a ham as if it were the chief business of life, and there was the Secretary of the Navy courteously swallowing his coffee scalding hot that he might not keep the venerable Adjutant-General waiting too long for the coveted tin cup! All personal discomforts were not only borne with cheerful philosophy, but were made the constant texts for merry comment, quaint anecdotes, or curious story.
As soon as Davis arrived in Greensboro on April 11, he wrote to Joe Johnston.
The Secty. Of War did not join me at Danville, is expected here [Greensboro] this afternoon. As your situation may render best, I will go to your Hd. Qrs. immediately after your arrival of the Secty of War, or you can come here…I have no official report from Genl. Lee, the Secty. Of War may be able to add information heretofore communicated. The important question first to be solved is at what point concentration shall be made.
The president had visions of concentrating all available forces at a single strategic place from which he could smash the Union army.
As Davis dreamed of new victories, Richmond, the city from which he had been driven by force of arms, had become the tourist destination for the Washington elites, who pestered high government or military officers for written passes to enter the ruined city. Indeed, Mary Lincoln and a party of her guests had already toured Richmond, and on April 11 the president wrote out a pass authorizing his friend and marshal of the District of Columbia, Ward Hill Lamon, to enter that city. In the spring of 1865, it was the place to be.
On the afternoon of the eleventh Abraham Lincoln sat in his office and wrote out in his vigorous, clear hand the draft of an important speech he planned to deliver from the White House window that night. The president wanted to pay tribute to the armed forces that won the war, prepare the people for his postwar plans, and propose that blacks be given the right to vote. On April 12, General Lee wrote his penultimate letter to Jefferson Davis, telling his commander in chief what he already knew. This was Lee’s official announcement to the president that he had surrendered.
Near Appomattox Court House, Virginia
April 12, 1865
Mr. President:
It is with pain that I announce to Your Excellency the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. The operations which preceded this result will be reported in full…The enemy was more than five times our numbers. If we could have forced our way one day longer it would have been at a great sacrifice of life; at its end, I did not see how a surrender could have been avoided. We had no subsistence for man or horse…the supplies could not reach us, and the men deprived of food and sleep for many days, were worn out and exhausted.
With great respect, yr obdt svt
R. E. Lee
Genl
Before receiving this communication, Davis gave a brief speech—no more than twelve or fifteen minutes long—in Greensboro. He boasted to his audience “how vast our resources still were, and that we would in a few weeks have a larger army than we ever had.” Davis explained how such an army was to be raised. “There is Gen. Lee’s army ought to be 140,000 strong—it is not 40,000—Gen. Johnston’s army is only 15,000—it ought to be 100,000—Three fourths of the men are at home, absent without leave. Now we will collect them, and…then there are a great many conscripts on the rolls who have never been caught—we will get them—and with the 100,000 men from Gen. Lee’s army and the 85,000 men from Gen. Johnston’s, we will have such an army as we have never had before.”
These remarks, more optimistic even than Davis’s “Danville Proclamation” of April 4, rested on wishful thinking, not the situation on the ground. Lee did not have forty thousand fighting men; his effectives numbered fewer than twenty thousand, and Johnston’s forces grew weaker every day. Furthermore, Davis had no real force to round up deserters by the bayonet and compel them to fight. And even if, by some miracle, the Confederacy massed nearly two hundred thousand men, Union forces would still have outnumbered them. And even if Davis could raise such numbers, they could not be fed or supplied.
General Lee’s letter jolted Davis into reality. Robert E. Lee Jr. was present in Greensboro when Davis received it: “After reading it, he handed it without comment to us [Lee and John Taylor Wood]; then, turning away, he silently wept bitter tears. He seemed quite broken at the moment by this tangible evidence of the loss of his army and the misfortune of its general.”
At least Davis knew his family was safe. Varina wrote on April 13, telling him she was now in Chester, South Carolina. She was staying ahead of Union cavalry raiding parties: “The rumors of a raid on Charlotte induced me to come to this side of Charlotte—A threatened raid here induces me to leave here without making an hours stay which is unnecessary—I go with the Specie train because they have a strong guard, and are attended by two responsible men—I am going somewhere, perhaps to Washington Ga…Would to God I could know the truth of the horrible rumors I hear of you—One is that you have started to Genl Lee, but have not been heard of…May God have mercy upon me, and preserve you safe for your devoted wife.”
In Washington, Lincoln conducted a full day of business. The city was still celebrating Lee’s surrender, but the president had plenty of work to do. The war was not over. And soon, when it was, he would have to implement his plan for the reconstruction of the South. He had visited the telegraph office early in the morning, then had meetings with General Grant and Edwin Stanton, and another with Gideon Welles. The staff saddled Lincoln’s horse at the White House stables, and he rode to his summer cottage at the Soldiers’ Home. Maunsell Field, an assistant secretary of the Treasury, rode in a carriage beside Lincoln’s horse and they talked along the way. Later, when Lincoln returned to his White House office he wrote out several passes allowing the bearers to visit various points south, including Richmond. Then the president, like other Washingtonians, enjoyed the grand illumination of the city.
Benjamin Brown French, commissioner of public buildings and grounds, enjoyed supervising the decoration and illumination of the public buildings and described the night: “The Capitol made a magnificent display—as did the whole city. After lighting up my own house and seeing the Capitol lighted, I rode up to the upper end of the City and saw the whole display. It was indeed glorious…all of Washington was in the streets. I never saw such a crowd out-of-doors in my life.” French even designed one sign himself. “I had the 23rd verse of the 118th Psalm printed on cloth, in enormous letters, as a transparency, and stretched on a frame the entire length of the top of the western portico [of the Capitol building]…‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.’ It was lighted with gas and made a very brilliant display…as it could be read very far up the Avenue.”
Not everyone in Washington relished the illumination. That night in his room at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, John Wilkes Booth, the young stage star and heartthrob, wrote a letter to his mother. “Everything was bright and splendid,” he said. But, he lamented, “more so in my eyes if it had been a display in a nobler cause.”
The next day, on April 14, Jefferson Davis sent a hurried note to Varina.
Greensboro N.C.
14 April 65
Dear Winnie
I will come to you if I can. Every thing is dark.—you should prepare for the worst by dividing your baggage so as to move in wagons. If you can
go to Abbeville it seems best as I am now advised—If you can send every thing there do so—I have lingered on the road and labored to little purpose—My love to the children and Maggie—God bless, guide and preserve you ever prays your most affectionate
Banny—
I sent you a telegram but fear it was stopped on the road. Genl. Bonham bears this and will [tell] you more than I can write as his horse is at the door and he waits for me to write this again and ever your’s—
Lincoln began another busy day that included breakfast with his son Robert, just back from Appomattox; a cabinet meeting attended by General Grant; meetings with several congressmen; and letter writing, including one to a Union general about the future: “I thank you for the assurance you give me that I shall be supported by conservative men like yourself, in the efforts I may make to restore the Union, so as to make it, to use your language, a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States.” He agreed to escort Mary to the theater that night—Laura Keene was playing in the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s.
In the afternoon Abraham and Mary Lincoln went on a carriage ride to the Navy Yard. He told her that this day, he considered the war to be over. It was Good Friday, and in two days Washington would celebrate Easter. Lincoln wanted to laugh this night. That evening, just before he left the White House for the theater, a former congressman arrived and asked to see him on business. The president wrote a pass giving him an appointment at 9:00 A.M. the next day. As he was stepping into his carriage another former congressman, this one a friend from Illinois, approached him in the driveway. Lincoln said he couldn’t talk then or he would be late for the play. Come back later, the president told him. We will have time to talk then. Lincoln closed the carriage door.
In Greensboro, Davis spent a quiet night wondering what events the coming days might bring. His journey, although difficult, had not been a complete disaster. Yes, he had fled Richmond, lost Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, and abandoned the state of Virginia to the enemy. He did not deny that these disasters had inflicted catastrophic blows upon the cause. Indeed, in his letter to Varina he despaired, saying everything was “dark.” But the situation was not all bad. During his twelve days on the run, he had escaped capture; relocated the Confederate capital twice, first to Danville, then Greensboro; kept the cabinet intact; retained the loyalty of a hand-picked inner circle of aides who vowed to never abandon him; protected his family; and prevented his strategic retreat from unraveling into a disorderly free-for-all. And he had maintained his dignity. He had fled Richmond not like a thief in the night, but as a head of state.
No one living in William Petersen’s house across the street from Ford’s Theatre ever claimed to have seen President Lincoln’s carriage pull over and park across the street. No one in the handsome, threestory brick house watched the coachman, Francis Burke, tighten the slack in the reins, nor did anyone see the president’s valet, Charles Forbes, jump down from the black, closed-top carriage to the dirt street, reach for the handle, and swing open the door for the passengers. Some of the Petersen boarders were out for the evening. The rest were occupied with other things.
They did not watch the president and Mrs. Lincoln or their companions, Major Henry Rathbone, an army officer, and Clara Harris, daughter of a U.S. senator, as they disembarked, walked several yards to the front door of Ford’s Theatre, and disappeared inside. It was Good Friday, at approximately 8:30 P.M., April 14, and they were late. And no one from the Petersen house hurried across Tenth Street, or followed the Lincolns into the theater, and purchased a ticket to the play, as more than 1,500 other Washingtonians had done, to attend the tired old comic chestnut Our American Cousin in the company of the president of the United States.
Abraham Lincoln loved the theater, and during the Civil War he had attended many plays at Ford’s and Grover’s, Washington’s two leading, and rival, playhouses. Tonight, twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln enjoyed Aladdin at Grover’s, a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Lincolns’ other surviving son, twenty-two-year-old Robert, home from his duties on Grant’s staff, chose to stay at the White House to read.
The next few hours passed without incident. Passing by Ford’s that night was the customary Friday-night foot and horse traffic, as well as revelers in the ongoing war’send celebration. At Ferguson’s restaurant, adjacent to the theater’s north wall, patrons ate their meals without the owner, James Ferguson, who had gone to Ford’s hoping to see General Grant. Earlier that day, newspaper ads had mistakenly touted the general as Lincoln’s theater guest. They were wrong: He and his wife, Julia, had declined the invitation and left town.
At Taltavul’s Star Saloon, the narrow brick building just south of Ford’s, customers gulped their whiskeys and brandies and tossed their coins on the bar as payment. One patron—a handsome, paleskinned, black-eyed, raven-haired, mustached young man—placed his order, drank it, and left the bar without speaking a word.
If anyone from the Petersen house had been watching the front door of the Star Saloon between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M., he might have recognized John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous stage stars in America, as he emerged wearing a black frock coat, black pants, thigh-high black leather riding boots, and a black hat. Booth turned north up Tenth Street, observed the president’s carriage parked several yards in front of him, and then turned right, toward the theater, passing under the white painted arch and through Ford’s main door, the same one the president had passed through about an hour earlier. If his intention was to see the play, Booth was impossibly late.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Borne by Loving Hands”
The Petersen house was no different from hundreds of other boardinghouses that had enjoyed a thriving business during the last four years in overpopulated wartime Washington. Indeed, this style of urban living had been commonplace ever since the District of Columbia was established as the national capital. Military officers, cabinet members, senators, and congressmen—including a one-term representative named Abraham Lincoln elected from Illinois in 1846—were veterans of Washington’s traditional boardinghouse culture.
William Petersen, like many homeowners in Washington, rented out extra rooms to boarders. Born in Hanover, Germany, William and his wife, Anna, had emigrated to the United States in 1841, when they were twenty-five and twenty-two years old. Landing in the port of Baltimore, they moved to Washington and on February 9, 1849, purchased the lot at 453 Tenth Street for $850. Petersen, a tailor, hired contractors to build him a large, attractive, four-level brown brick row house with a tall basement and three main stories. By 1860, the year Lincoln was elected president and South Carolina seceded from the Union, nine boarders resided there, along with the Petersens’ seven children, bringing the household total to eighteen occupants living in eleven rooms.
At one moment the street between the Petersen house and Ford’s Theatre was quiet. At the next, sometime between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M., dozens of playgoers rushed out the doors onto Tenth Street. This was not an audience’s ordinary, leisurely exit at the end of a performance. And the play was not over yet—the last scene had not yet been performed. People began pushing one another aside and knocked one another down to squeeze through the exits, like a great volume of water bursting through a tiny hole in a dike. Some of the first men who escaped the theater fled in both directions on Tenth Street toward E and F streets, shouting crazy, unintelligible words as they ran. Within seconds they turned the corners and vanished from sight. Then hundreds of men, women, and children escaped Ford’s and gathered in the street. Many screamed. Others wept. Soon more than one thousand panicked playgoers were crowded in front of the theater. Screaming, cursing, shouting, weeping, their voices combined into a loud and fearful roar. Something had gone terribly wrong inside Ford’s Theatre.
At first it appeared that the theater might have caught fire. Fires were a constant and almost unpreventable danger in nineteenth-century urban America. Wood buildings, fabric drapes, errant candles, whale-oil lamps, p
rimitive gas lighting, and the lack of effective firefighting equipment led to disastrous conflagrations that had nearly destroyed several major American cities. New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and other urban centers had each suffered fantastic firestorms that spread from building to building and burned wide swaths through the hearts of their residential, commercial, and industrial districts.
Fires were so commonplace that Currier & Ives published numerous prints depicting American cities ablaze, meticulously handcoloring each calamitous scene with menacing orange and yellow flames. Fire was such a source of dread that long before the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson compared the antebellum conflict over slavery to a “fire bell in the night” that might burn down the American house.
Theater fires were especially dangerous. Wood stages, huge fabric curtains, footlights of open gas flames, and large audiences seated in close quarters with few exits could prove a deadly combination. Fifty-four years earlier, in 1811, a horrible fire in Richmond killed more than seventy-five playgoers. Those not consumed by flames or smoke leaped to their deaths, according to a rare surviving print of the disaster. In Washington, in 1862, just three years before, Ford’s Theatre had burned to the ground and a new one, guaranteed fireproof by the Ford brothers, arose in its place.
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