Bloody Crimes

by James L. Swanson

  Dr. Leale noted how Mary’s cries unnerved Edwin M. Stanton: “As Mrs. Lincoln sat on a chair by the side of the bed with her face to her husband’s, his breathing became very stertorous and the loud, unnatural noise frightened her in her exhausted, agonized condition. She sprang up suddenly with a piercing cry and fell fainting to the floor. Secretary Stanton, hearing her cry, came in from the adjoining room and with raised arms called out loudly, ‘Take that woman out and do not let her in again.’ Mrs. Lincoln was helped up kindly and assisted in a fainting condition from the room. Secretary Stanton’s order was obeyed and Mrs. Lincoln did not see her husband again before he died.”

  Jefferson Davis awoke on the morning of April 15 ignorant of last night’s bloody crimes in Washington. There was no direct telegraph line between the capital and Greensboro. Davis did not know John Wilkes Booth and had not sent him to kill Lincoln. Davis did not know that Lincoln had been marked for death, that Booth had met with Confederate secret agents in Montreal, Canada, that the actor had assembled a list of Confederate operatives in Maryland and Virginia to help him, and that one of his soldiers, Lewis Powell, a brave combat veteran captured at Gettysburg, had joined Booth’s plot and nearly killed the secretary of state. Nor did Davis know that Booth was on the run, fleeing for the heart of the Confederacy, the prey of what would soon become a nationwide manhunt.

  That morning Davis had no idea that, last night in the Union capital, events beyond his knowledge or control would now reach out to affect his fate. Within hours his longtime archenemy, Vice President Andrew Johnson, an implacable foe of the planter class, would ascend to the presidency. The South could expect no mercy from him. Worse, this morning’s newspapers accused Davis of being the mastermind behind the great crime. Many editorials demanded his death by hanging or horrible torture. A patriotic envelope, published as a souvenir, carried a blood-red vignette of Davis bound on a scaffold facing the guillotine. The stakes were higher now.

  All of this had happened without Davis knowing about any of it. And for several more days, he would not know that Lincoln was dead or that the government of the United States would soon scheme to charge him with murder and put him on trial for his life. Lincoln’s murder was like a violent storm on a distant horizon, its mighty thunderclap taking time to travel a great distance before it caught up with Davis.

  Davis did evacuate Greensboro on April 15 but the move wasn’t prompted by news of Lincoln’s assassination. It was coincidence and the overall military situation. Secretary of the Navy Mallory tried to convince Davis that he should do more than relocate the temporary capital—he should flee the country: “It was evident to every dispassionate mind that no further military stand could be made…But it was no less evident that Mr. Davis was extremely reluctant to quit the country at all, and that he would make no effort to leave it so long as he could find an organized body of troops, however small, in the field. He shrank from the idea of abandoning any body of men who might still be found willing to strike for the cause, and gave little attention to the question of his personal safety.”

  If Davis’s staff had known that Lincoln had just been murdered, they might have been even more forceful in demanding that Davis flee to Mexico, the Bahamas, or Europe to escape the North’s vengeance. But they did not know and went about their packing up for the next stage of their journey south.

  They would no longer enjoy the luxury of railroad transportation. There were no trains at Greensboro, so that afternoon Davis; Colonels Harrison, Lubbock, and Wood; and some of the cabinet members rode horses, while other dignitaries climbed aboard wagons and ambulances. “Heavy rains had recently fallen,” Burton Harrison wrote, “the earth was saturated with water, the soil was a sticky red clay, the mud was awful, and the road, in places, almost impracticable.” The presidential party plotted their route and planned to spend successive nights at Jamestown, Lexington, Salisbury, and Concord, where they would be guests of Victor C. Barringer.

  Rough travel conditions would not intimidate Davis. He was not a creature softened by effete, cocooned salons. He was ready for the physical challenge that lay ahead. He had endured journeys far more arduous than this journey away from Richmond promised to be. As a seven-year-old child, he rode a pony 500 miles up the Natchez Trace from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, where he met General Andrew Jackson; in 1833, while an army officer, he and his unit of dragoons (a heavy, mounted cavalry) traveled 450 miles through difficult territory to a remote post on the Arkansas frontier; in 1834, Davis and the dragoons made a 500-mile round trip from their fort into Comanche territory, enduring 100-degree heat, exhaustion, and dehydration; in 1845, Jefferson and Varina traveled from Vicksburg to Washington, D.C., through the northern route into Ohio, where severe winter weather and ice on the Ohio River required them to continue by sled; he traveled to Mexico for the war, experienced hard travels there, made a 1,000-mile trip home to Mississippi, and then returned to Mexico; in December 1862, as president of the Confederacy, he embarked on a twenty-seven day, 3,000-mile inspection tour of the South; later, he made other long, wartime journeys through his embattled country; and in Richmond he often went on dangerous, 20-mile night rides on horseback to visit Lee’s headquarters and other military posts. A lifetime of difficult journeys had accustomed Davis to the hardships of the road.

  At the Petersen house, the Reverend Dr. Gurley called everyone around the deathbed. “Let us pray,” he said as all present in the room kneeled. “He offered a most solemn and impressive prayer,” recalled Dr. Leale. “We arose to witness the struggle between life and death.” Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath at 7:21 and 55 seconds. At 7:22 and 10 seconds his heart stopped beating. He was dead.

  No one knew it yet, but the mourning that began in the back room of a boardinghouse in downtown Washington would continue well beyond Lincoln’s death. What began there could not be contained. Soon, the assassination would set in motion strange forces, a national phenomenon, the likes of which America had never seen. In the days to come, the footsteps of millions of Americans would join the small procession that began, in the words of Walt Whitman, that “moody, tearful night” when a handful of their fellow citizens made a pilgrimage to look upon their dying president. By morning almost sixty people had come and gone from the Petersen house.

  Dr. Taft recalled that “immediately after death, the Rev. Dr. Gurley made a fervent prayer, inaudible, at times, from the sobs of those present. As the surgeons left the house, the clergyman was again praying in the front parlor. Poor Mrs. Lincoln’s moans, which came through the half-open door, were distressing to hear. She was supported by her son Robert, and was soon after taken to her carriage. As she reached the front door she glanced at the theater opposite, and exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, that dreadful house! That dreadful house!’”

  Lincoln’s death was not the last sadness to haunt the Petersen house. By 1870, William and Anna Petersen’s two youngest children, Anne and Julia, had died, and on June 18, 1871, the Metropolitan Police found William Petersen lying unconscious on the grounds of the Smithsonian. He had poisoned himself. He was taken to the hospital, where he died the same day from an overdose of the drug laudanum. Before succumbing, Petersen told the police he had been taking the substance “once or twice a week” for several years. The coroner ruled his death accidental. He was fifty-four years old. Given the notoriety of his house six years earlier, the Washington Evening Star noted his sad end.

  Exactly four months later, Anna Petersen died. Her body was laid out in the house, and the funeral was held two days later. Just ten days after her funeral, the firm of Green & Williams sold at public auction the entire contents of the house. An ad in that day’s Evening Star stated that the furnishings would be sold on the premises. Crowds assembled outside the Petersen house, just as they had on that terrible night six and one-half years before. Once again, strangers crowded the halls and first-floor rooms. The auctioneer led the customers and the curiosity seekers from room to room. In the front par
lor, he sold “1 horsehair covered sofa” for $15.25. The price was high, up to three times the value for a like item. But this was the sofa where a shattered, sobbing Mary Lincoln spent most of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15, 1865. In the back bedroom, the auctioneer put up a lot listed in the inventory as “1 bedstead & 2 Mattresses,” appraised at $7. The bidding soared to $80, the highest price paid for any item in the house. This was the bed where Lincoln died.

  The bed, along with most of the other contents of the death room, including the chairs, the washstand, and even the gaslight jet that was mounted to the wall, were purchased by Colonel William H. Boyd of Syracuse, New York, for his son Andrew, a young Lincoln enthusiast and early collector who had published, in 1870, a pioneering bibliography of early writings about the president.

  In 1889 and 1890, Andrew Boyd corresponded with the Chicago candy millionaire Charles F. Gunther, an obsessive collector who would stop at almost nothing to acquire unique historical treasures like the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond, which he purchased, dismantled stone by stone, and reassembled for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Gunther decided he had to possess Lincoln’s deathbed and the accompanying furniture and paid Boyd one hundred thousand dollars for the bed alone.

  In the 1920s, the Chicago Historical Society acquired Gunther’s hoard and constructed an exact replica of the room in which Abraham Lincoln died, right down to the reproduction wallpaper and the prints hanging on the walls. It was a sensational attraction, and for decades awestruck Chicago schoolchildren pushed a button that triggered a dramatic sound recording which, from a hidden loudspeaker, narrated the events of April 14 and 15, 1865. Alas, several years ago, the museum broke up the riveting display, dismissing it as no longer in fashion.

  Stanton ordered the army to remove Lincoln’s corpse from the Petersen house and transport it to the White House. Soldiers brought a wood box and placed the president’s body inside it. They carried the makeshift coffin into the street and placed it in a horse-drawn hearse. Major General C. C. Augur, head of the military district of Washington, D.C., and commander of the presidential escort, ordered all officers in the procession, including General D. H. Rucker, Colonel Louis H. Pelouze, and Captains Finley Anderson, C. Baker, J. H. Crowell, and D. C. Thomas, to march on foot and not ride horses. It was as if they were preparing to enter a battle. During the Civil War, officers, even generals, often led their troops forward into combat on foot, with swords drawn. They walked as a sign of respect for their fallen commander. They removed their hats and marched bareheaded. In the field officers always wore their hats into combat. Now they doffed them as an additional sign of deference.

  Augur gave the command and the escort got under way. There was no band or drum corps to beat the slow tempo of the age-old military funeral march. The officers set the pace with the thud of their own steps on the dirt street. Corporal James Tanner, who had transcribed in shorthand the testimony Stanton had extracted from witnesses through the night, had gone home after the deathbed climax. About two hours after Lincoln died, Tanner was back in his room in the house one door south of the Petersen house. He looked outside. “I stepped to the window and saw the coffin of the dead President being placed in the hearse which passed up Tenth street to F and thus to the White House. As they passed with measured tread and arms reversed, my hand involuntarily went to my head in salute as they started on their long, long journey back to the prairies and the hearts he knew and loved so well, the mortal remains of the greatest American of all time.”

  On the street the scene was less solemn. Dr. Charles Sabin Taft had lingered at the Petersen house for two hours because he had not wanted to leave while the body still lay there. When the army officers and soldiers carried Lincoln’s coffin outside, into view of the immense crowd, Taft followed them out the front door into the street, where he witnessed a violent, horrifying scene: “A dismal rain was falling on a dense mass of horror-stricken people stretching from F Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. As they made a passage for the hearse bearing the beloved dead, terrible execrations and mutterings were heard.”

  But not everyone in that crowd loved Abraham Lincoln. A few rebel sympathizers yelled insults at the president as the coffin passed them by, and enraged mourners turned on them and even killed some. According to Dr. Taft, “one man who ventured a shout for Jeff Davis was set upon and nearly torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd.”

  Noah Brooks did not learn of the assassination until the morning. He could not believe it—yesterday morning he had been at the White House having breakfast with the president. He began walking the streets of the gloomy capital, taking in the mood of the people and the sights of a city draping itself in mourning clothes. He felt himself drawn to the place of the great crime: “Wandering aimlessly up F Street toward Ford’s Theatre, we met a tragical procession. It was headed by a group of army officers walking bareheaded, and behind them, carried tenderly by a company of soldiers, was the bier of the dead President, covered with the flag of the Union, and accompanied by an escort of soldiers who had been on duty at the house where Lincoln died. As the little cortege passed down the street to the White House, every head was uncovered, and profound silence which prevailed was broken only by sobs and by the sound of the measured tread of those who bore the martyred President back to the home which he had so lately quitted full of life, hope, and cheer.”

  Now that Lincoln’s body had been taken away, the drama at the Petersen house was done. The house was empty now, but for the Petersen family and its tenants, and the evidence of what had happened there: bloody handkerchiefs, pillowcases, sheets, and towels, plus water pitchers, mustard plasters, and liquor bottles. And muddy

  THE BLOODY DEATHBED SHORTLY AFTER LINCOLN’S BODY WAS REMOVED.

  footprints. Disgusted by the mess made of his house, William Petersen collected some of the stained linens and heaved them out a rear window. The front door faced east, and the morning light flooded the hallway all the way to the back bedroom. Two of Petersen’s tenants, Henry and Julius Ulke, brothers and artists, entered the empty death chamber. Bloodstained pillows, sheets, and a coverlet—later someone stole it and it was never seen again—lay on the bed. They were still wet. The Ulkes recognized a historic opportunity. They retrieved Henry’s camera, set up its tripod at the southwest end of the room, and aimed the lens at the bed. To compose the best possible photo, they pushed the bed back to its original position in the northeast corner of the room. Henry Ulke uncovered the big lens and exposed his glass-plate negative for up to one minute, saturating it with the scene. Then he made one or two more plates.

  Why did the Ulkes photograph the death room? Being commercial photographers, they must have intended to print multiple albumen-paper copies from their negatives and market them to the public. Soon, the Washington papers would be filled with advertisements offering photos of Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth, for sale. An exclusive photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed made shortly after his body had been removed, before the bloody sheets and pillows had been taken away, would be a commercial coup. Such an image would transport viewers into the Petersen house and allow them to imagine what it must have been like to be at the dying president’s side.

  Strangely, no evidence survives to suggest that the Ulkes ever attempted to market the photograph. No contemporary newspapers copied it as a woodcut, no carte de visite examples with letterpressprinted captions—a telltale sign of commercial exploitation—have ever been found, and only two or three original prints from the negatives have been located, the first one not until almost a century later.

  Several artists sketched the death room, several others made oil paintings, and printmakers published more than fifteen different artworks depicting Lincoln in his deathbed, surrounded by mourners. Perhaps the Ulkes decided that their photograph of the empty bed was too stark and graphic, unlike the more romanticized prints that sanitized Lincoln’s death. In the days to come, Stanton would suppress other photographs connected to
the assassination, and it is possible he learned of this one and judged it too shocking a memento. Seaton Munroe might not have approved of the graphic image. In the days after the assassination, he complained about the lust for blood relics: “Even then I could fancy the relic hunter plying his vocation, and bruing his ready handkerchief in the clotted blood, that he might preserve, exhibit, and mayhap peddle his gruesome trophy! I have lately seen in print an account of the preservation and partition of the blood-stained dress of Laura Keene.”

  BLOOD RELIC: A PILLOW FROM LINCOLN’S DEATHBED.

  William J. Ferguson, a prior visitor to the Petersen house, had seen the spindle bed in the photograph before. He returned to the house on the night of April 14. “I joined Mr. Petersen’s son—a lad with whom I chummed; and went with him through the basement of the house to the stairs at the rear. Climbing them, we came to the floor of the room where Mr. Lincoln had been taken. It was a room formerly occupied by a Mr. Matthews, still a member of our company. I had delivered parts during the season to him and others in the room. On one of these visits I saw John Wilkes Booth lying and smoking a pipe on the same bed in which Mr. Lincoln died.”

  The complete story of the Ulkes and their remarkable photograph remains a mystery. In an odd twist, a few years after the assassination, Henry Ulke painted an official oil portrait of Edwin M. Stanton that hangs today in Washington at the National Portrait Gallery.