Bloody Crimes

by James L. Swanson

  The mirrors in the East Room, the Green Room, and all the other reception rooms were covered with mourning drapery, the frames wrapped with black and the glass concealed by white crepe. It was impossible to see a reflection. It was Lincoln’s wish that Willie’s body remain in the Green Room and not be moved to the East Room for the funeral service, which was conducted by Rev. Dr. Gurley.

  Gurley described Willie as “a child of bright intelligence and peculiar promise.” The minister listed his qualities: “His mind was active, inquisitive, and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive.” Everyone who knew the boy, Gurley continued, loved him: “It is easy to see how a child, thus endowed, would, in the course of eleven years, entwine himself around the hearts of those who knew him best.”

  The president, who could usually speak with pride about his ability to master his emotions, could not contain himself. Willie, he said, “was too good for this earth…but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” Willie’s death seemed to summon forth his father’s accumulated, buried pain from a lifetime’s worth of losses. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” Lincoln moaned. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” He was coming apart. No one in Washington had known Lincoln during the old New Salem days three decades ago. If any friends from that ghost town of Lincoln’s long-lost past had been present at Willie’s funeral, they would have recognized the familiar signs that made them fear for Lincoln’s mind and life thirty years ago, after the death of Ann Rutledge.

  Most of the guests in the East Room joined the procession to Georgetown. At Oak Hill, Willie’s coffin was carried into the small chapel, where the Rev. Dr. Gurley performed a brief service. After the funeral guests went home, Willie’s casket was hidden below the floorboards of the chapel in a subterranean storage pit until graveyard workers carried him to the Carroll vault.

  Lincoln prayed that Tad, still sick, would be spared. On February 26, the Evening Star reported that he would live: “We are glad to learn that the youngest son of the President is still improving in health, and is now considered entirely out of danger from the disease which prostrated him.” The Star went beyond reporting of the facts, and in an editorial beseeched its readers to consider the president: “Death has invaded the home of our Chief Magistrate, ‘whose heart is torn.’ Let the people stop to shed a tear with the President, who has so nobly earned their regard.”

  In the days ahead Abraham and Mary mourned Willie in different ways. Mary sought relief in the world of dreams and spirits. “He comes to me every night,” she swore to her sister Emilie Todd Helm. “He comes to me…and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me. When I thought of my little son in immensity, alone, without his mother to direct him, no one to hold his little hand in loving guidance, it nearly broke my heart.” Soon Mary would call upon spiritualists and mediums to cross over to Willie’s realm. Mary banished from her sight all earthly reminders of her dead son. She disposed of his toys and forbade his playmates to return to the White House to play with Tad. The sight of them, she said, upset her too much.

  No ghosts came to Lincoln’s bedchamber. Willie had died on a Thursday, and for several weeks, the president locked himself in his office every Thursday for a time to mourn and to conjure up memories of his son. No one dared intrude upon these reveries. And at night he dreamed of his lost boy.

  Lincoln loved to read passages from literature aloud to his friends. One day in May, he recited lines from Shakespeare’s King John. “And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say / That we shall see and know our friends in heaven. / If that be true, I shall see my boy again.” Then he wept uncontrollably.

  Death also visited Jefferson Davis’s White House. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 30, 1864, an officer walking near the Confederate White House saw a crying young girl run out of the mansion and yank violently on the bell cord of the house next door. Then another girl and a boy fled the White House. A black female servant who followed them told the officer that one of the Davis children was badly hurt. The officer ran inside and found a male servant holding in his arms a little boy, “insensible and almost dead.” It was five-year-old Joseph Evan Davis. His brother, Jeff Jr., was kneeling beside him, trying to make him speak. “I have said all the prayers I know,” said Jeff, “but God will not wake Joe.” Jefferson and Varina were not home.

  Joseph had fallen fifteen feet from a porch. He was found lying on the brick pavement, unconscious, with a broken left thigh and a severely contused forehead. His chest evidenced signs of internal injuries. The officer sent for a doctor and then began to rub the boy with camphor and brandy, and applied mustard on his feet and wrists. The child, he observed, “had beautiful black eyes and hair, and was a very handsome boy.” The treatment, wrote the officer in a letter a few days after the event, seemed to work: “In a short time he began to breathe better, and opened his eyes, and we all thought he was reviving, but it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light is extinguished for ever.”

  Messengers summoned the president and Varina. When she saw Joseph, she “relieved herself in a flood of tears and wild lamentations.” Jefferson kneeled beside his son, squeezed his hands, and watched him die. The Confederate officer, whose name remains unknown to this day, described the president’s appearance: “Such a look of petrified, unutterable anguish I never saw. His pale, intellectual face…seemed suddenly ready to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.” Almost thirty years earlier, watching Knox Taylor die had driven him into his “great seclusion.” He could not indulge in private grief now. His struggling nation needed him. Davis mastered his emotions in public, but his face could not hide them. “When I recall the picture of our poor president,” wrote the officer, “grief-stricken, speechless, tearless and crushed, I can scarcely refrain from tears myself.”

  That night family friends and Confederate officials called at the mansion, but Jefferson Davis refused to come downstairs. Above their heads, guests could hear his creaking footsteps on the floorboards as he paced through the night. Mary Chestnut remembered “the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above—not another sound. The whole house [was] as silent as death.” The funeral at St. Paul’s Church, reported the newspapers, drew the largest crowd of any public event in Richmond since the beginning of the war. Hundreds of children packed the pews, each carrying a green bough or flowers to lay upon Joe’s grave. Later, Davis had the porch torn down.

  In December 1862, Lincoln received word that Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, the former clerk of the McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois, had been killed in action on December 5, and that his teenage daughter was overcome with grief. On December 13, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the Army of the Potomac suffered terrible casualties in a series of futile infantry charges against Confederate troops sheltered behind stone walls. It was an illconceived, costly, senseless, and even shameful performance by General Ambrose Burnside. Two days before Christmas, on a day Lincoln might have taken Willie—gone ten months now—to his favorite toy store on New York Avenue, and while Mary worked downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.

  Lincoln sat at the big table in his second-floor office, reached for an eight-by-ten-inch sheet of lined paper bearing the engraved letterhead “Executive Mansion,” and began to write. What came from his pen was more than a polite and perfunctory note. In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down his hard-earned knowledge of life and death for an inexper
ienced girl. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl but to the American people.

  Washington,

  December 23, 1862

  Dear Fanny

  It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

  Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

  Your sincere friend,

  A. Lincoln

  Two days later, on their first Christmas without Willie, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, remembering their lost boy, and recalling Fanny McCullough and all the men who fell at Fredericksburg, and perhaps all the fallen men from all the battles, left the White House on Christmas Day and rode in their carriage from hospital to hospital, visiting wounded soldiers.

  There was more grief to come. No wartime funeral in Washington had prepared the population—or the president—for the sensational catastrophe of June 17, 1864. It happened while Lincoln was returning to the capital aboard a special 8:00 A.M. train from Philadelphia, where the day before he had attended the Great Central Fair to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an organization that aided wounded soldiers.

  On the morning of the seventeenth, as Lincoln’s train steamed south to Washington, more than one hundred young women were at work in the so-called “laboratory” of the U.S. Arsenal, making small-arms ammunition. The room was filled with unstable, combustible black powder. Outside the building, someone had set out several pans of fireworks to dry in the sunlight. At ten minutes before noon, a pan of fireworks ignited and cast a spark through an open window into the laboratory.

  The president, a lifelong newspaper addict, must have read in the afternoon editions of the Evening Star what happened next: “After the powder on the benches caught, the fire spread down rapidly, blinding the girls and setting fire to their clothes. Many of them ran to the windows wrapped in flames, and on their way communicated the fire to the dresses of others.”

  The fire, followed by a terrific explosion, caused male workers on the grounds to sprint to the laboratory from all directions. Some of the men wrapped the fleeing, burning girls in tarpaulins to extinguish the flames. Other men gathered the girls up in their arms and ran for the river: “One young lady ran out of the building with her dress all in flames, and was at once seized by a gentleman, who, in order to save her, plunged her into the river. He, however, burned his arms and hands badly in the effort. Three others, also in flames, started to run up the hill, the upper part of their clothing was torn off by two gentlemen near by, and who thus probably saved the girls from a horrific death, but in the effort, they too were badly injured.”

  Desperate arsenal workers searched the debris for survivors. They knew these girls and had flirted with some of them. In an undated photograph taken some time before the explosion, a group of the women, dressed in bright, pretty hoopskirts and joined by several of the men, posed on the front porch of the laboratory. Now, in the ruins, they found only the dead. “The bodies were in such a condition that it was found necessary to place boards under each one in order to remove them from the ruins…they were carried out and placed upon the ground.” Unsupported, the burned corpses would have crumbled and broken into pieces. The “charred remains of those who had perished,” the Evening Star reported, “were laid upon the ground and covered over with canvass.”

  The Star’s reporter rushed back to newspaper row to file his story in time to make the 2:30 p.m. edition: “When our reporter left the scene of the disaster nineteen bodies had been taken from the ruins, but they were so completely burnt to a crisp that recognition was impossible.” The survivors were “frightfully” wounded.

  A little after 4:00 p.m., the coroner arrived to examine the dead. “The canvas covering the remains was then removed, and the most terrible sight presented itself to the view of those standing around. The charred remains of seventeen dead bodies lay scattered about, some in boxes, some on pieces of boards, and some in large tin pans, they having been removed from the ruins in these receptacles. In nearly every case only the trunk of the body remained, the arms and legs being missing or detached. A singular feature of the sad spectacle was that presented by a number of bodies nearly burned to a cinder being caged, as it were, in the wire of their hooped skirts…Many of the bodies seem to have been crisped quite bloodless.”

  The scene was like a battlefield field hospital littered with the grisly evidence of amputations. “In a box was collected together a large number of feet, hands, arms and legs, and portions of the bones of the head, which it would be impossible to recognize.”

  One woman was identified by her boots. Another still wore a fragment of blouse or skirt, and “her remains were subsequently recognized by a portion of dress which remained upon her unconsumed. The whole top of her head was, however, gone, and the brain was visible; and but for the fragment of dress it would have been impossible to recognize her.”

  The youth of the victims—one was just thirteen years old—and the horrific nature of their hideous injuries shocked the city. “Seventeen Young Women Blown to Atoms” said the headline of the Daily Morning Chronicle the next day.

  The funeral service, an outdoor ceremony to be held on the site of the tragedy, was scheduled for Sunday, June 19. The arsenal’s master carpenter needed time to make proper coffins. He also built a wood pavilion measuring twenty by fifteen feet and standing three feet off the ground. Upon it fifteen coffins lay side by side. Twenty-five thousand people, including President Lincoln—described by the press as “mourner in chief”—and Secretary of War Stanton, assembled on the arsenal grounds. After the service, the burial procession left the arsenal at 3:00 p.m., moved up Four and a Half Street, and then along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Congressional Cemetery. Lincoln’s carriage followed the hearses. He had come this way before, first for John Quincy Adams and then for Colonel Edward Baker.

  At Fourth Street, the small funeral procession of thirteen-year-old Sallie McElfresh joined the main procession. “Her body,” reported the Daily Morning Chronicle, “was encased in a splendid coffin, decorated with wreaths, which was carried in a beautiful modern child’s hearse.” Lincoln could not have avoided seeing Sallie’s tiny coffin.

  At the cemetery, two large burial pits—each one six feet long, fifteen feet wide, and five and a half feet deep—had been dug six feet apart on the west side of the cemetery. The dead had been divided into two groups, the known and the unknown, and they would be buried that way. Male employees of the arsenal handled the ropes and lowered each coffin, one at a time, into its grave. The crowd was dense, and as it pressed forward many women had their dresses torn in the scrum. Police held the throng at bay to allow the families to approach the pits. There, reported the Evening Star, “was another scene of anguish—the relatives, or many of them, giving way to loud cries, and hanging over the chasm, calling the deceased by their names.”

  The ministers read services for the dead, and the crowd repeated the chant “Farewell, sisters, farewell.” Standing nearby, Lincoln did not speak publicly that day. It was the biggest funeral he had ever seen. Yes, seven months earlier he had spoken at the dedication of the new national military cemetery at Gettysburg, a battlefield where thousands had perished, but that was not a funeral, and the men he honored there
had been long buried. The arsenal tragedy was fresh, its wounds raw. Not one of the Washington papers commented on Lincoln’s demeanor at Congressional Cemetery or described how he reacted when the girls were lowered into the ground. Surviving accounts do no more than note his presence. Later, as best can be told, Lincoln never spoke or wrote of what he saw this day.

  That evening the president, accompanied by his secretary John Hay, went to Ford’s Theatre to attend a concert of sacred music. Abraham Lincoln often went to the theater when he wanted to forget.

  While Lincoln’s body lay in the East Room on the night of April 17, and while thousands mourned and prepared for the next day’s public viewing, elsewhere in Washington one man gloated over his harvest of Lincoln blood relics. Mose Sandford, one of the men at the War Department hardware workshop who had built Lincoln’s temporary pine-box coffin to transport his body from the Petersen house to the White House on the morning of April 15, wrote a letter to a friend, describing how he plundered Lincoln’s possessions from the temporary Petersen house coffin. “I found one of the sleeves of his shirt one of his sleeve buttons,” he wrote, “black enameled trimmed with gold and the letter ‘L’ on the out side with ‘A.L.’ underneath that I sent to the Sect of War. The Bosom of his shirt was the next thing which met my eye as it had considerable blood upon it so I just confiscated the whole of it.” He even took the screws that had held down the box’s lid.

  On April 17 Jefferson Davis, on the way to Charlotte, spent the night in Salisbury, North Carolina. Seventy-two hours had elapsed since Lincoln was assassinated, and still Davis had no news of the events in Washington.

  Nor did he know that on this night, and the next morning, Union general William T. Sherman contemplated what should be done about Davis’s future. On the seventeenth, Sherman met with most of his generals to discuss Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina and to analyze the meeting Sherman had attended the day before with Johnston at the Bennett house to discuss that army’s possible surrender. But Sherman and his staff also talked about the Confederate president.