Bloody Crimes

by James L. Swanson

  GEORGE HARRINGTON, THE MAN WHO PLANNED THE LINCOLN FUNERAL EVENTS IN WASHINGTON.

  knew Harrington, and on occasions when Fessenden was absent from Washington, Lincoln had appointed him acting secretary of the Treasury. Upon Fessenden’s resignation in 1865, Harrington continued to serve under the new secretary, Hugh McCulloch. Stanton believed that Harrington had the keen, quick, and thorough organizational mind essential for this assignment and chose him to take charge of all Washington events honoring the late president.

  Harrington accepted the appointment, which involved more than merely taking charge of events. It was up to him to conjure how the national capital should honor its first assassinated president. Two presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, had died in office, but they had expired from natural causes during peacetime, not from murder at the climax of a momentous civil war. Their more modest funerals were of limited value in planning Lincoln’s. It had been only five years since Harrington and his fellow delegates had nominated Lincoln at the Chicago convention of May 1860.

  Once Harrington got to work, Stanton could focus on what should be done with Lincoln’s corpse after the Washington, D.C., ceremonies. Would the president be interred at the U.S. Capitol, in the underground crypt below the Great Dome, once intended as the final resting place for George Washington? Or would Mary Lincoln take the body home to Illinois, for burial in Chicago, its most important city, or in Springfield, the state capital and the Lincolns’ home for twenty-four years?

  On Saturday afternoon, the autopsy doctors, witnesses, and embalmers departed the Guest Room, leaving Lincoln’s body alone on an undertaker’s board. Now he would repose in the Executive Mansion for three days and two nights, dressed in the same splendid clothes he wore on March 4, 1865, when he rode in a carriage in a grand procession from the White House to the Capitol, where he swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. On that great day the breast pocket of his suit contained a folded sheet of paper bearing 701 words. “With malice toward none,” he said from the marble steps at the East Front of the Capitol. “With charity for all,” he beseeched, “let us bind up the nation’s wounds.” Now, six weeks later, his suit pocket was empty. Few visitors were permitted to view the body until the remains would be carried downstairs to the East Room on April 17 in preparation for opening the Executive Mansion to the public the next morning. Before then only relatives, close friends, and high officials crossed the threshold of his sanctuary and intruded upon his rest.

  Mary Lincoln’s confidante Elizabeth Keckly was one of them. After the president was shot, Mary had sent a messenger from the Petersen house summoning Keckly to her side. Elizabeth mistakenly rushed to the White House, but guards there denied entrance to the free black woman, and she did not gain admittance until the next day. The very sight of Lizzie, as Mary affectionately called her, soothed some of the widow’s pain. They talked, and Mary told Lizzie about her terrible night at Ford’s Theatre and the morning at the Petersen house. Keckly comforted her and then asked to see Abraham Lincoln.

  “[Mrs. Lincoln] was nearly exhausted with grief,” Keckly remembered, “and when she became a little quiet, I received permission to go into the Guest Room, where the body of the President lay in state. When I crossed the threshold…I could not help recalling the day on which I had seen little Willie lying in his coffin where the body of his father now lay.” Three years earlier Keckly had helped wash and dress Willie’s body. “I remembered how the President had wept over the pale beautiful face of his gifted boy, and now the President himself was dead.” Keckly lifted the white cloth shrouding Lincoln’s body. “I gazed long at the face,” she said, “and turned away with tears in my eyes and a choking sensation in my throat.”

  Benjamin Brown French also went to the White House on the afternoon of Sunday, April 16, to confirm that all was going well in the East Room with the preparations for Lincoln’s April 19 funeral. Then he went upstairs to view the embalmed corpse: “I saw the remains of the President, which are growing more and more natural…but for the bloodshot appearance of the cheek directly under the right eye, the face would look perfectly natural.”

  After spending an hour at the Executive Mansion, French visited Secretary of State Seward, who gave him a firsthand account of the savage knife attack he was lucky to have survived. French left Seward’s home with Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont, and they went back to the White House. French wanted to see the corpse again: “We stood together at the side of the form of him whom, in life, we both loved so well.”

  Orville Hickman Browning came to the White House to view the corpse at least twice before the funeral, first for the autopsy on Saturday the fifteenth, and then on Monday the seventeenth. Browning had watched the surgeons saw off the top of his friend’s cranium and remove his brain. It was bloody, ugly work. Two days later, Browning observed how the embalmer’s artistry had improved Lincoln’s appearance. The president, he wrote, “was looking as natural as life, and if in a quiet sleep. We all think the body should be taken to Springfield for internment, but Mrs. Lincoln is vehemently opposed to it, and wishes it to go to Chicago.”

  Except for these visitors and a few others—and the ever-present military honor guards standing in motionless vigil—the corpse was alone. Lincoln had finally won the solitude he craved during his presidency, when patronage seekers, influence peddlers, and lobbyists camped out near his door and harassed him so thoroughly that he felt under perpetual siege in his own office. Lincoln fought back by having a White House carpenter build a partition in the anteroom to conceal him from public view as he crossed between his second-floor office and his living quarters.

  The construction of this private passage amused the great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend.

  It tells a long story of duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door opposite his window, and hat in hand, came courtsying to his chair, with an obsequious “Mr. President!” If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and navy, to go out the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of it after with much merriment.

  Now that traffic had ceased, and for the first time in four years, the human jackals did not skulk about the second floor, staking out his office. Once, when sick with smallpox, Lincoln had joked, “Now I have something I can give to everyone!”

  The only sounds now were ones Lincoln would have recalled from childhood—wood saws cutting, hammers pounding nails, carpenters at work. Workmen in the East Room were building the catafalque upon which his elaborate coffin, not yet finished, would rest during the public viewing and state funeral. These sounds were the familiar music of his youth, made by his carpenter father, Thomas. It was the echo of his own labor too, when he had a rail-splitting axe placed in his hands at the age of nine. But the noise frightened Mary Lincoln; the hammer strikes reminded her of gunshots.

  Strangely, not once during the days and nights that the president’s corpse lay in seclusion at the White House did Mary make a private visit to her husband. Her last nightmare vision of him, bleeding, gasping, mortally wounded, dying in the overcrowded, stuffy little back bedroom of the Petersen house, had traumatized her and she could not bear to walk the short distance from her bedchamber to the Guest Room and look upon his face now. History does not record whether her son Robert defied her morbid imprisonment of Tad in her frightening mourning chamber and whether he took his little brother to the Guest Room to view their father, just as, three years before, Abraham had carried Tad from his bed to view his brother Willie in death.

  Elizabeth Keckly, one of t
he few people allowed into Mary Lincoln’s room, witnessed her tortured paroxysms. “I shall never forget the scene—the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul.” Keckly worried about Tad. “[His] grief at his father’s death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence. Sometimes he would throw his arms around her neck, and exclaim, between his broken sobs, ‘Don’t cry so, Momma! Don’t cry, or you will make me cry too! You will break my heart.’”

  Outside this room, away from the Executive Mansion, the nation was in upheaval. The assassin John Wilkes Booth had escaped, and Stanton was coordinating an unprecedented manhunt to capture him. Secretary of State Seward and his son Fred were fighting for their lives after Lewis Powell’s botched assassination attempt. Stanton suspected that numerous conspirators, their plans still secret and their strength yet unknown, might still lurk in Washington. Perhaps some of Booth’s conspirators still at large planned to commit additional bloody crimes—like the murder of Lincoln’s entire cabinet. As a precaution, Stanton assigned an around-the-clock military guard to every one of them.

  Jefferson Davis was still on the run. Stanton worried that the “rebel chief,” who was not satisfied to escape Richmond with his life, had ignored General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and, from his mobile command post, was attempting to rally the South to fight on and continue the Civil War. Confederate armies were still in the field and some of its ships still at sea. Hurriedly published newspaper extras shouted the latest news several times a day. Many stories suggested that Lincoln’s murder was part of Davis’s plan to reverse the outcome of the war.

  The newspapers also reported what had been done to Lincoln’s corpse. “The Body of the President Embalmed!” shouted a headline in one broadside extra. The number of deaths during the Civil War had advanced the art and social acceptance of embalming. Once a novelty viewed with distaste and even suspicion, the practice had become commonplace when the broken bodies of so many fallen soldiers were shipped from distant battlefields back home to waiting parents and widows.

  On Sunday morning, April 16, “Black Easter,” ministers across the land mounted their pulpits and, within a few hours, began to transform Abraham Lincoln from a mortal man into a secular saint. While the preachers were delivering their sermons that day, George Harrington began organizing the grandest funeral ceremonies in American history. He took pen, paper, and ink and wrote out in longhand his proposal for honoring the first American president slain by an assassin. The document was brief and only a draft. But it would, over the next three days, set in motion the intertwined actions and coordinated movements of more than one hundred thousand men. In an inspired moment, Harrington had dreamed up a grand idea out of thin air and then captured it on paper. This was his plan:

  Proposed arrangements for the Funeral and disposition of the Remains of the late President, submitted for approval.

  The Executive Mansion, under proper police and guards, to be thrown open during Tuesday, the 18th…for the public to show their respect,—the remains to be in the East Room, under a guard of commissioned [Harrington originally wrote “competent” but struck out that word and replaced it with “commissioned”] Officers of the Army.

  On Wednesday, the procession to form at 11 o’clock, the religious ceremonies to commence at 12, and the procession to move at 2 P.M.

  The remains to be escorted to the Capitol, and there deposited in the Rotunda, to remain under a suitable guard, to be provided by the proper military authorities.

  The delegation especially appointed from Illinois to receive the remains and escort them thither, to be called the “Body Guard,” to have them in official charge after they shall have been deposited in the Capitol.

  The remains to be taken to the depot on Thursday morning, by military escort, a guard of honor, consisting of such Senators and Members of the House of Representatives as may be designated for that purpose by those bodies respectively, and also such other civilians as the Cabinet may determine to accompany the remains to their final resting place. The whole to be accompanied by such military escort as the proper authorities may designate.

  In five short paragraphs, Harrington had his template—even if the arrangements raised as many questions as they answered. For how many hours should the White House be kept open for the public to view the remains? How many people per hour could squeeze through the doors—and how many thousands more would try? Who should receive invitations to the funeral? The East Room was the biggest chamber in the White House, but it could never hold everyone who would demand the right to attend. Without even calculating the dimensions and square footage, Harrington knew the room could hold fewer than a thousand people at a standing reception, and the funeral guests would be seated, thus consuming additional, scarce space. And where would he get all those chairs? The entire Executive Mansion did not contain enough furniture to seat hundreds of people. And when arranging the chairs, Harrington would have to be careful to reserve enough space for the catafalque, and for aisles. That was just for the White House events. After the funeral, who would march in the procession to the Capitol? How would this procession be organized? Who would keep order in the streets? George Harrington needed help.

  It was one thing to sketch an outline of the funeral events on a piece of paper but quite another to fill in all the details and then execute them. Harrington knew that Lincoln’s funeral ceremonies would be the largest and most elaborate series of public events ever held in the nation’s capital, and possibly the entire nation. He could not possibly organize all of them himself—a public viewing at the White House on April 18; a private White House funeral attended by hundreds of dignitaries on April 19, followed immediately by a grand, synchronized, and incomparable procession from the White House to the U.S. Capitol; a lying in state and public viewing in the Capitol rotunda under the Great Dome on April 20; and the departure of the president’s remains from Washington on April 21. Only one institution in the country possessed the men, command structure, and logistical experience to conduct such an event—the U.S. Army.

  That afternoon, Harrington called a crucial meeting at the Treasury Department for 5:00 P.M., and he summoned by messenger several of the most important army officers in Washington, including Major General and Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck, Major General and commander of the military district of Washington C. C. Augur, and Assistant Adjutant General and skilled War Department administrator William A. Nichols. Harrington also invited Benjamin Brown French to attend.

  “I had agreed to meet Assist. Secretary Harrington at the Treasury Dept. at 5, to aid in making the programme of Arrangements for the funeral,” French recalled, “so I remained at the President’s until that hour, then went to the Treasury Dept.”

  One by one, messengers arrived at Harrington’s office bearing responses. Among the acceptances were those from W. A. Nichols, assistant adjutant general: “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of this date, stating that the Sec’y of War had designated me as one, on part of the Army, to confer in relation to the funeral ceremonies of the late President. As requested I will be present at the meeting fixed at the hour of 5 o’clk P.M. to-day”; from H. W. Halleck, army chief of staff: “I was notified by the Secy of War to meet you at 7 o.c. this evening & so wrote to Genl Augur, but will meet you as soon after 5 as I can”; and from C. C. Augur, commander of the military district of Washington: “I have received your note, and will be at the place you indicate at 5. P.M. today.”

  When Harrington’s chosen men convened at the Treasury Department next door to the White House, the footsteps of their heavy boots echoed through the marble-paved halls. They had much work to do and little time. Gathered around Harrington’s desk, they had just sixty-eight hours to plan Abraham Lincoln’s state funeral.

  They met for an hour, adjourned at 6:00 P.M., and agreed to reconvene in one hour. “[We] agreed,” French wrote in h
is diary, “to return at 7 to meet with several Senators, Members of the House & Military officers.” When the commissioner of public buildings returned he found, among others, two assistant secretaries of the Treasury, George Harrington and Maunsell B. Field (who had been at the Petersen house); Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont; Richard Yates, former Illinois congressman, Civil War governor, and now U.S. senator; former congressman Isaac N. Arnold from Illinois; Governor Richard J. Oglesby; Major Generals Henry W. Halleck and C. C. Augur; Brigadier General George W. Nichols from the adjutant general’s office; Admiral William B. Shubrick; and Lawrence A. Gobright, longtime Associated Press correspondent in Washington. They spent another hour talking about the arrangements and agreed to meet again the next day at 2:00 P.M.

  Harrington appeared strained under the burden. Before Easter evening was over, he wrote a letter to his patron, former Treasury secretary William Pitt Fessenden, updating him on various events but ending by saying, “What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue…the whole charge of the funeral fixed for Wednesday has been put on me. Heavens I have enough to do without this.”

  Although Harrington complained privately about his duties, he knew, at least, that they would end once the Washington ceremonies concluded. As soon as Lincoln’s corpse was ready to depart the national capital, his work would be done. Stanton had taken upon himself the responsibility for the next stage of the president’s journey.

  The next day, Monday, April 17, Harrington was overwhelmed by letters, telegrams, and personal visitors who hounded him and beseeched him, seeking advantage. Some sought tickets to the funeral, others the right to march in the procession. Some wanted a license to sell mourning goods to the government, while others alerted him to special deliveries of flowers and asked him to confirm their arrival. Some supplicants did not wait for invitations and simply announced that they were coming.