Bloody Crimes

by James L. Swanson

  Jefferson Davis would enjoy his liberty a while longer; he was fortunate that Stanton’s fearsome proclamation did not yet implicate him as an accomplice to Lincoln’s murder or offer a cash reward for his capture. But if Stanton was not prepared to accuse Davis of Abraham Lincoln’s murder, the newspapers were.

  On the same day that Stanton issued the reward, Davis, writing from Charlotte to General Braxton Bragg, wondered if Lincoln’s murder might help his cause: “Genl. Breckinridge…telegraphs to me, that Presdt. Lincoln was assassinated in the Theatre at Washington…It is difficult to judge of the effect thus to be produced. His successor is a worse man, but has less influence…[I] am not without hope that recent disaster may awake the dormant energy and develop the patriotism which sustained us in the first years of the War.”

  Davis busied himself with other military correspondence, including dispatches to General Beauregard on April 20 indicating a scarcity of supplies. “General Duke’s brigade is here without saddles. There are none here or this side of Augusta. Send on to this point 600, or as many as can be had.” In another dispatch Davis asked for cannons and more men, but the replies he received did not indicate that there were any to be sent.

  Things were breaking down elsewhere, too. On the evening of April 20, Breckinridge wrote from Salisbury, North Carolina: “We have had great difficulty in reaching this place. The train from Charlotte which was to have met me here has not arrived. No doubt seized by stragglers to convey them to that point. I have telegraphed commanding officer at Charlotte to send a locomotive and one car without delay. The impressed train should be met before reaching the depot and the ringleaders severely dealt with.”

  Davis replied promptly: “Train will start for you at midnight with guard.”

  In Richmond, Robert E. Lee was at home as a private citizen. He still wore the Confederate uniform and posed in it when Mathew Brady showed up to take his photograph, but he had no army to command. He knew that Davis was still in the field, trying to prolong the war. Lee disagreed with that plan. Any further hostilities must, he believed, degenerate into bloody, lawless, and ultimately futile guerilla warfare. Better an honorable surrender than that. Lee and Davis had enjoyed a good wartime partnership, and he knew the president valued his judgment. On April 20, General Lee composed a remarkable letter to his commander in chief, urging him to surrender.

  Mr. President:

  The apprehension I expressed during the winter, of the moral condition of the Army of Northern Virginia, have been realized. The operations which occurred while the troops were in the entrenchments in front of Richmond and Petersburg were not marked by the boldness and decision which formerly characterized them. Except in particular instances, they were feeble; and a want of confidence seemed to possess officers and men. This condition, I think, was produced by the state of feeling in the country, and the communications received by the men from their homes, urging their return and the abandonment of the field…I have given these details that Your Excellency might know the state of feeling which existed in the army, and judge of that in the country. From what I have seen and learned, I believe an army cannot be organized or supported in Virginia, and as far as I know the condition of affairs, the country east of the Mississippi is morally and physically unable to maintain the contest unaided with any hope of ultimate success. A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence. It is for Your Excellency to decide, should you agree with me in opinion, what is proper to be done. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.

  I am with great respect, yr obdt svt

  R. E. Lee

  Genl

  In the confusion after Appomattox, Davis never received the letter. If he had, its sentiments would have failed to convince him to end the war. Even if Davis had received it, and if he agreed with Lee’s view that resistance east of the Mississippi was futile, he still had faith in a western confederacy on the far side of the Mississippi. Yes, he agreed with Lee on the impropriety of fighting a dishonorable guerilla war. He would not scatter his forces to the hills and sanction further resistance by stealth, ambush, and murder. But Davis, unlike Lee, still believed he could prevail with conventional forces.

  Davis and Lee did not communicate again until after the war was over. Indeed, the arrival in Charlotte that very day of several cavalry units gave Davis new hope. According to Mallory:

  No other course now seemed open to Mr. Davis but to leave the country, as he had announced his willingness to do, and his immediate advisers urged him to do so with the utmost promptness. Troops began to come into Charlotte, however…and there was much talk among them of crossing the Mississippi and continuing the war. Portions of Hampton’s, Duke’s, Debrell’s, and Fergusson’s commands of the cavalry were hourly coming in. They seemed determined to get across the river and fight it out, and whenever they encountered Mr. Davis they cheered and sought to encourage him. It was evident that he was greatly affected by the constancy and spirit of these men, and that he became indifferent to his own safety, thinking only of gathering together a body of troops to make head against the foe and so arouse the people to arms.

  On Friday, April 21—one week after the assassination—Edwin Stanton, Ulysses S. Grant, Gideon Welles, Attorney General James Speed, Postmaster General William Dennison, the Reverend Dr. Gurley, several senators, members of the Illinois delegation, and various army officers arrived at the Capitol at 6:00 a.m. to escort Lincoln’s coffin to the funeral train. Soldiers from the quartermaster general’s department, commanded by General Rucker, the officer who had led the president’s escort from the Petersen house to the White House,

  A CONGRESSMAN’S TICKET TO RIDE ABOARD THE LINCOLN FUNERAL TRAIN.

  removed the coffin from the catafalque in the rotunda and carried it down the stairs of the East Front. The statue of Freedom atop the Capitol looked down upon the scene from her omniscient perch.

  Four companies of the Twelfth Veteran Reserve Corps stood by to escort the hearse to the train. This was not supposed to be a grand or official procession. There were no drummers, no bands, and no cavalcade of thousands of marchers. It was just a short trip from the East Front plaza to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station at First Street and New Jersey Avenue, a few blocks north of the Great Dome. But that did not deter the crowds.

  Several thousand onlookers lined the route and surrounded the station entrance. Although this last, brief journey in the capital—Lincoln’s third death procession in Washington—was not part of the official public funeral events, Stanton supervised it himself to ensure that the movement of Lincoln’s body from the Capitol to the funeral train was conducted with simplicity, dignity, and honor.

  Earlier that morning, another hearse had arrived at the station before the president’s. It had come from Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where they had unlocked the iron gates of the Carroll vault. When the soldiers carried Abraham Lincoln aboard his private railroad car at 7:30 a.m., Willie was already there, waiting for him. Lincoln had planned to collect the boy himself and take his coffin home. Now two coffins shared the presidential car.

  The railroad car used to transport Lincoln’s body was not built as a funeral car. Constructed over a period of two years at the U.S. Military Rail Road car shops in Alexandria, Virginia, the car, named the United States, was built as a luxurious vehicle intended for use by the living Lincoln. Although the presidential car had been completed in February prior to Lincoln’s 1865 inauguration, he never rode in it or even saw it. The elegant interior, finished with walnut and oak, and upholstered with crimson silk, contained three rooms—a stateroom, a drawing room, and a parlor or dining room. A corridor ran the length of the car and gave access to each room. The exterior was painted chocolate brown, hand-rubbed to a high sheen, and on both sides of the car hung identical oval
paintings of an eagle and the coat of arms of the United States. As soon as Stanton knew that Lincoln’s body would be carried home to Illinois by railroad, he authorized the U.S.M.R.R. to modify the car, decorate it with symbols of mourning, and build two catafalques so that it could accommodate the coffins of the president and his son.

  Willie would have enjoyed calculating the railroad timetable for this trip. He used to delight his father by calculating accurate timetables for imaginary railroad journeys across the nation.

  Members of the honor guard took their places beside Lincoln’s coffin. Under the protocols established by Stanton and Edward Townsend, the president of the United States was never to be left alone. “There was never a moment throughout the whole journey,” Townsend recalled, “when at least two of this guard were not by the side of the coffin.”

  The hearse and horses that had carried Lincoln’s body down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol, and from there to the train station, were not being boarded onto the train. Instead, in every city where the train was stopping for funeral services, local officials were required to provide a suitable horse-drawn hearse to transport the coffin from the train to the site of the obsequies.

  At 7:50 a.m. Robert Lincoln boarded the train, but he planned to leave it after just a while and return to Washington to wrap up his father’s affairs. Mary Lincoln did not come to the station to see her husband off—nor did she permit Tad to go. He should have gone to the station and then ridden with his father and brother all the way back to Illinois.

  After Willie’s death, Tad and Abraham were inseparable. Sometimes Tad fell asleep in the president’s office, and Lincoln lifted the slumbering boy over his shoulder and carried him off to bed. Tad loved to go on trips with his father and had relished their recent visit to City Point and Richmond. He loved to see the soldiers, and he enjoyed wearing—and posing for photos in—a child-size Union army officer’s uniform, complete with a tiny sword, that Lincoln had given him. Tad would have marveled at the sights and sounds along the 1,600-mile journey. And he would have been proud of, and taken comfort from, the tributes paid to his father.

  A pilot engine departed the station ten minutes ahead of the funeral train to inspect the track ahead. At 7:55 a.m., with five minutes to spare, Lincoln’s secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, arrived from the White House and boarded the train to ensure that all was in order. In all, about 150 men were on the train that morning. The manifest included the twenty-nine men—twenty-four first sergeants and four officers—from the Veteran Reserve Corps who would serve as the guard of honor; nine army generals, one admiral, and two junior officers also serving in the guard of honor; a number of senators, congressmen, and delegates from Illinois; four governors; seven newspaper reporters; David Davis, an old friend of Lincoln’s and a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; and Captain Charles Penrose, who had accompanied Lincoln to Richmond.

  With so many dignitaries present at the station, the crowd failed to recognize two of the most important men on the passenger manifest. In the days to come, the success or failure of this vital mission would turn in large part upon their work. To accomplish it, they alone would have unfettered access to the president’s corpse at any time of the day or night. These were the body men, embalmer Dr. Charles Brown and undertaker Frank Sands. For the next thirteen days, it was their job to keep at bay death’s relentless companion, the decomposing flesh of Abraham Lincoln.

  At exactly 8:00 a.m. the wheels of the engine Edward H. Jones began to revolve and the eight coaches it pulled began to move.

  When Lincoln’s train left Washington, the special funeral duties of Benjamin Brown French were done. It had been the most incredible seven days he had ever witnessed during his long tenure in Washington.

  LINCOLN’S FUNERAL CAR.

  He wanted to retrieve a souvenir as a tangible link to the historic week in which he had played an important part. He wrote a letter to Quartermaster General Meigs:

  It is my intention to have the mausoleum, intended for the remains of Washington, beneath the crypt of the Capitol, thoroughly cleaned & properly fitted, and to place in it the catafalco on which the body of our late beloved President lay in the rotunda, there to be preserved as a memento.

  The cloth which covered it—made and trimmed by the hands of my wife—was taken with the remains. I should be very glad, when it has done all its duty, that it may be returned to me, to be placed upon that sacred memorial. Will you be pleased, if you conveniently can, to have it so ordered.

  While Lincoln’s funeral train moved north without incident, the Confederate trains continued to experience difficulties. John C. Breckinridge had more railroad problems and communicated them to Davis in Charlotte at 9:00 a.m. on the twenty-first: “Paroled men and stragglers seized my train at Concord. Operator reports that engine and tender escaped, and will be here presently. I have telegraphed General Johnston to guard the bridges and organize these men to receive subsistence and transportation…”

  But train troubles were the least of his worries. General Joe Johnston had lost all interest in prolonging the war. At this point two things occupied Johnston’s mind: how to negotiate the surrender of his army to General Sherman, and how to get his hands on some of the Confederate gold. On April 21 he asked Breckinridge for money: “I have heard from several respectable persons that the Government has a large sum of gold in its possession. I respectfully and earnestly urge the appropriation of a portion of that sum to the payment of the army, as a matter of policy and justice. It is needless to remind you that the troops now in service have earned everything that the Government can give them, and have stood by their colors with a constancy unsurpassed—a constancy which enables us to be now negotiating with a reasonable hope of peace on favorable terms.”

  Lincoln’s train would reach Baltimore in four hours, and in the days ahead, the train was scheduled to stop many times for official honors, processions, ceremonies, and viewings, but, for the most part, those plans were just dry words, miles, and timetables printed on paper. These documents said nothing of other things to come: spontaneous bonfires, torches, floral arches, hand-painted signs, banners, and masses of people assembled along the way at all hours of the day or night. No government official in Washington had ordered these public manifestations. Stanton did not expect the train itself to take on a life of its own and to become a venerated symbol in its own right.

  The train’s progress fed not just on firewood and water but on human passions to animate its momentum. At each stop it took aboard the tone and temper of each town and its people. The moving train was like a tuning fork, or an amplifier. The more time it spent on the road, and the greater distance it traveled, the more it picked up the sympathetic vibrations of the nation’s pride and grief. It intensified and harmonized the emotions of the people. It became more than the funeral train for one dead man. It evolved into something else. What happened was not decreed. Nor could it be resisted.

  Somewhere between Washington and Springfield, the train became a universal symbol of the cost of the Civil War. It came to represent a mournful homecoming for all the lost men. In the heartbroken and collective judgment of the American people, an army of the dead—and not just its commander in chief—rode aboard that train.

  In every city where the train stopped—or even just passed through—the people knew it was coming and had read newspaper accounts of the events that had occurred in other cities that preceded it up the line. This built excitement into a fever pitch and created a desire to outdo the honors already rendered in other cities. General Townsend felt the change. Parents held out their sleepy-eyed infants and even uncomprehending babes in their arms, so that one day they could tell their children, “You were there. You saw Father Abraham pass by.”

  MOURNING RIBBON WORN BY MEMBERS OF THE U.S. MILITARY RAIL ROAD.

  Baltimore was a strange but necessary destination. Maryland had remained in the Union, but it was anti-Lincoln and pro-Confederate. Four years ea
rlier, when president-elect Lincoln passed through the city, he had to do so secretly in order to avoid assassination. The threats from the Baltimore conspiracy were real. A gang of dozens of men had sworn to kill Lincoln. Disloyal, rioting mobs would soon attack and kill Union soldiers in the street. Lincoln arrived in the city in the middle of the night and had to change trains, which involved uncoupling his car from one train, using horses to pull it one mile along the tracks to another station, and then coupling it to a second train. This was the moment of maximum danger. His enemies did not know he had gained safe passage through Baltimore until after he was gone and had arrived in Washington.

  Lincoln’s escape in Baltimore led to public ridicule and false charges: The president had adopted a disguise; he was a coward who had abandoned his wife and children to pass through the city on another train. Cartoonists caricatured Lincoln sneaking through town wearing a plaid Scotch cap and even kilts. Later, he regretted skulking into Washington. It was not an auspicious way to begin a presidency.

  Baltimore was home ground for John Wilkes Booth, and he recruited some of his conspirators there. Indeed, a letter found in Booth’s trunk on the night of April 14 suggested that he had multiple conspirators in the city and that he might have sought sanctuary there. It might have been considered obscene to stop the train there, to carry Lincoln’s murdered body into the city that had wished him so much ill and that might revel in his assassination.

  Before leaving Washington, General Townsend had sent a telegram to General Morris, who was in command there, giving him advance warning to prepare for the president’s arrival in Baltimore on April 21 and to receive the remains in person.