Mary Lincoln recoiled. “That is horrid! I wish you had not told it. I am glad that I don’t believe in dreams, or I should be in terror from this time forth.”
“Well,” replied the president, “it is only a dream, Mary. Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”
Some accused Lincoln’s old friend Lamon of embellishing, even of concocting the dream. Its Lincolnesque qualities cannot be denied, but Lamon did not write about it until a number of years after Lincoln’s death. Whether or not Lincoln had foreseen his own coffin lying in state in the East Room, he was haunted by other coffins he had seen there, and other places in wartime Washington. And he had carried with him to Washington the memories of other coffins and funerals of long ago.
In May 1861, Elmer Ellsworth, a flamboyant twenty-four-year-old friend of Lincoln’s, was shot and killed after he hauled down a Confederate flag at a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. Ellsworth had worked in Lincoln’s Illinois law office, delivered exciting political speeches to advance Lincoln’s career, and commanded a famous quasimilitary unit, Ellsworth’s Zouaves, a drill team that had thrilled spectators with its exotic costumes and precision choreography. After Lincoln’s nomination in May 1860, people from all over America—including autograph hounds—had inundated Springfield with letters. Lincoln tried to comply with the requests, and he asked Ellsworth to draft a number of replies in his own hand for Lincoln’s signature. Dozens of letters from that period survive, each bearing the identical message in Ellsworth’s neat script—“It gives me pleasure to comply with your request for my autograph”—and each then signed “A. Lincoln” by the nominee himself. Lincoln had grown fond of his enthusiastic, impetuous protégé, and invited him to travel aboard the special train that took the president-elect to Washington in February 1861.
In May 1861, Colonel Ellsworth’s Zouaves were sworn into military service while Lincoln watched, and on May 24 Ellsworth and his troops crossed the Potomac River to take possession of Alexandria, Virginia. For days a defiant rebel flag, visible from the White House, had flown over the town. After landing, Ellsworth led his men in the direction of the telegraph office, but he could not resist stopping at Marshall House, the hotel upon which the offending flag waved atop the roof. The colonel burst inside, climbed the stairs, and hauled down the flag. As he descended to the lobby, the proprietor, James W. Jackson, fired a shotgun blast at his chest, killing him instantly. Ellsworth was still clutching the Confederate flag that had cost him his life. In vengeance, one of his Zouaves killed Jackson on the spot. To this day, a bronze plaque marks the site on Alexandria’s King Street, not in memory of the slain Union officer, but in honor of the secessionist hotel proprietor who was “killed by federal soldiers while defending his property and personal rights.” The plaque goes on to honor Jackson as a “martyr to the cause of Southern Independence.”
Ellsworth’s corpse was brought to the Washington Navy Yard. Someone would have to go to the White House to inform the president. That duty fell to navy captain Gustavus Fox. He arrived at the Executive Mansion, where he went upstairs to Lincoln’s second-floor office. The news staggered the president. Fox left him alone. Lincoln walked to the window. He did not notice when Senator Henry Wilson and a reporter from the New York Herald entered his office. They approached him from behind, but he did not move. He stared through the window, his eyes fixed on the Potomac River and beyond. Startled, Lincoln made an abrupt turn and faced Wilson and the newsman. The president had thought he was alone.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I cannot talk.” Then he burst into tears and buried his face in a handkerchief. The visitors retreated in silence. Lincoln sat down, composed himself, and spoke. “I will make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard. Just as you entered the room, Captain Fox left me, after giving me the painful details of Ellsworth’s unfortunate death. The event was so unexpected, and the recital so touching, that it quite unmanned me.”
Lincoln recalled his young friend’s impetuosity. “Poor fellow! It was undoubtedly an act of rashness, but it only shows the heroic spirit that animates our soldiers…in this righteous cause of ours. Yet who can restrain their grief to see them fall in such a way as this; not by fortunes of war, but by the hand of an assassin.”
He wanted to see the body. Abraham and Mary Lincoln rode in their carriage east from the White House, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Great Dome, and south to the navy yard. For a long time, the president gazed at Ellsworth’s handsome face, unmarred by the shotgun pellets.
“My boy! My boy!” pleaded Lincoln to the dead man. “Was it necessary that this sacrifice be made?” The president wept.
The bloody frock coat, its breast shredded by the fatal blast, would be preserved as a relic and displayed at Union patriotic fairs. Soon the body would be sent north by train to Ellsworth’s parents and fiancée in New York. But not before, the president decided, he could honor his young martyred friend. Lincoln ordered that Ellsworth’s corpse be brought to the White House. There, the next day, at noon on May 25, the president presided over the East Room funeral. After the service, Lincoln rode in the procession that carried Ellsworth’s coffin to the railroad station for the 2:00 P.M. train to New York. Mary Lincoln kept the Confederate flag he had clutched in death. That afternoon the president wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents.
My dear Sir and Madam,
In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew. And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit. To me, he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes; and I never heard him utter a profane, or intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for so laudably, and, in the sad end, so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them, no less than for himself.
In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen child.
May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in a common affliction.
A. Lincoln
This was not the last condolence letter Lincoln wrote during the war, nor was this the last funeral he witnessed in his White House. As word of Ellsworth’s death spread across the country, he became a popular hero celebrated in prints, sheet music, badges, and, in the most unusual mourning relic of the Civil War, an imposing and elaborate ceramic pitcher decorated with painted bas-relief panels depicting his death and the slaying of his murderer. Noah Brooks said of the Ellsworth craze: “The death of Ellsworth, needless though it may have been, caused a profound sensation throughout the country, where he was well known. He was among the very first martyrs of the war, as he had been one of the first volunteers. Lincoln was overwhelmed with sorrow…and even in the midst of his increasing cares, he found time to sit alone and in grief-stricken meditation by the bier of the dead young soldier of whose career he had cherished such great hopes.”
The Civil War had opened with a funeral and now it would close with one. Indeed, a member of the Zouaves wrote that “Colonel Ellsworth was the war’s first conspicuous victim; Lincoln himself the last.”
In October 1861, five months later, Lincoln suffered another personal loss. Edward D. Baker, an old friend from the Illinois political scene in
the 1830s and 1840s, a former congressman who had moved to California in the 1850s, was now a U.S. senator from Oregon. Lincoln had named his firstborn son, Eddie, who died in 1850 when he was three years old, after him. Baker was in Washington in March 1861 for Lincoln’s inaugural ball and could have served out the war in the safety of the halls of Congress, but he wanted to see action, so Lincoln offered him a commission as a brigadier general of volunteers. Such a high rank would require that Baker resign from the Senate, so he asked the president to make him a colonel, allowing him to keep his seat.
On October 21, 1861, during the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, a confusing and embarrassing Union disaster fought not far from Washington near Leesburg, Virginia, Baker was killed. On the day before his death, on a beautiful fall afternoon, he had been idling with Lincoln on the White House lawn. The next day, when the president visited General McClellan’s headquarters, the army commander told him that Baker was dead. Lincoln reeled, and when he left McClellan’s office, he almost fell into the street.
When he returned to the White House, he gave orders that he would receive no visitors and he was unable to sleep that night. On October 24, Abraham and Mary Lincoln attended Baker’s funeral at a private home in Washington. After the funeral Lincoln joined the procession to Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill. In 1848, when Lincoln was a congressman, he helped organize the funeral there for former president and member of the House of Representatives John Quincy Adams, and had helped escort Adams’s remains to Congressional. The day after Baker’s funeral Lincoln canceled a cabinet meeting, and that evening he received the colonel’s father, son, and nephew.
By now death in the war was no longer a distant, abstract thing to Lincoln. It reached into his own house, as death had many times before in his boyhood, youth, and manhood in Illinois. First his mother, then his sister, then Ann Rutledge, then his little son Eddie, and the others. Baker’s death hit him hard. Yes, he had grieved for the young Ellsworth, but he had known the youth for less than two years. Baker was different—their friendship went back more than a quarter of a century. Twice in the first year of the war Lincoln had bid farewell to two friends.
Willie Lincoln, only ten years old, also bid Baker good-bye, by composing for him what can only be called a death poem, which was published in Washington’s National Republican newspaper. Willie had inherited many of his father’s traits, and in this composition, he revealed a glimmer of Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong fascination with poems of loss and death. Indeed, Lincoln not only read and recited such poetry, he wrote it. Willie’s melancholy poem foreshadowed a time when he would be not the author but rather the subject of sad poems.
In February 1862, four months after the death of Edward Baker, Lincoln suffered the most painful loss in his life. It was the single event, more than any other, that crushed his spirit and killed the joy inside him. William Wallace Lincoln, age eleven, was the president’s favorite son. Eddie had died too young and too long ago for Abraham to envision the kind of young man he might have become. Abraham and his oldest boy, Robert, were not close. Robert did not look like his father, and he was in temperament more like his mother’s family, the Todds.
Lincoln had provided Robert all the opportunities that life had denied him. This son never had to work a hard day of manual labor in his life, and the president had him educated at Exeter and Harvard. But Robert was becoming a snob who seemed at times embarrassed by the crude vestiges of Abraham’s frontier background and lack of education. Tad was a lovable, impulsive, impish, and undisciplined little boy who suffered from a speech impediment and who had inherited his mother’s mercurial and selfish nature.
William was Lincoln’s true heir. Tall and thin, he resembled his father in posture and physical gestures. Intellectual, analytical, and thoughtful, his mind worked in ways that reminded Lincoln of himself—and this pleased him. Willie was his father’s true companion in the White House. The president was not alone in his admiration. Willie’s maturity, splendid manners, and winning personality impressed all who met him, including Lincoln’s cabinet. He was a favorite of many White House regulars. Lincoln loved no one more.
In February 1862, Tad and Willie fell ill with a fever, probably contracted from contaminated water that supplied the White House. Their condition worsened, and the president watched over them with a keen eye. On the night of February 5, he left a White House reception and went upstairs to their sickbeds. His boys were not improving, and during the next two weeks, they became grievously ill. The Evening Starbegan publishing daily reports on their condition.
February 18: “NO RECEPTION TO-NIGHT—The continued indisposition of the President’s children, one of whom, Willie, we regret to say, is extremely ill, will prevent the usual Tuesday night’s reception at the Executive Mansion from taking place.”
February 19: The paper reports that Willie continues critically ill, but that Tad has not yet been dangerously sick. “Everything that skillful physicians—Drs. Hall and Stone—and ceaseless care can do for the little sufferers, is being done.”
February 20: “BETTER.—We are glad to say that the President’s second son—Willie—who has been so dangerously ill seems better to-day.”
The last report proved wrong. Willie was delirious, and he died the afternoon of February 20, at 5:00 P.M. Lincoln cried out to his secretary, John G. Nicolay: “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—he is actually gone!”
On the morning of February 21, all the members of the cabinet called upon the president and later that day signed a joint letter addressed to the Senate and House of Representatives asking Congress to cancel the annual Washington’s birthday illumination of the public buildings, scheduled for the next night. William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edwin M. Stanton, Gideon Welles, Edward Bates, and Montgomery Blair wrote that the president “had been plunged into affliction” by his son’s death.
On February 22, in a story headlined “Little Willie Lincoln,” the Evening Star reported the sad details of the boy’s death. After Willie was embalmed, Lincoln viewed his son’s body in the Green Room.
That same day in Richmond, which had replaced Montgomery, Alabama, as the new Confederate capital, Willie Lincoln’s death did not postpone the February 22 inauguration of Jefferson Davis, which was scheduled specifically on George Washington’s birthday. It was a glorious and auspicious day for Davis. The Confederate president saw himself not as a rebel or a traitor but as the true inheritor of the legacy of George Washington and the revolutionary generation. He believed it was the Southern Confederacy, not the federal Union, that upheld the spirit of 1776. That evening, Davis was feted at a wonderful party in the White House of the Confederacy.
In Washington, at Lincoln’s White House, an opportunistic office-seeker made the mistake of intruding upon Lincoln’s anguish to request a petty postmaster’s position. Like George Washington, Lincoln had made it a lifelong habit to control his temper, and only rarely did he show anger in public. But if pushed too far, Lincoln would on occasion explode. This was one of those moments.
“When you came to the door here, didn’t you see the crepe on it?” Lincoln demanded. “Didn’t you realize that meant somebody must be lying dead in this house?”
“Yes, Mr. Lincoln, I did. But what I wanted to see you about was very important.”
“That crepe is hanging there for my son; his dead body at this moment is lying unburied in this house, and you come here, push yourself in with such a request! Couldn’t you at least have the decency to wait until after we had buried him?”
The president asked his old friend Orville Hickman Browning to be in charge of the funeral arrangements and burial. Browning rode in a carriage to Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery to inspect the family tomb that the clerk of the United States Supreme Court, William T. Carroll, had offered as Willie’s temporary resting place until the president could take him home to Illinois. It was also Oak Hill where Jefferson Davis had buried his son Samuel Emory Davis, who died of illness on June 13, 1854, when he was
less than two years old.
On February 23, friends and family viewed Willie’s body at the White House. On February 24, the day of Willie’s funeral, the government offices were closed, as if an important man of state had died. All official Washington knew the boy. Members of the cabinet, foreign ministers, members of Congress, military officers, and other important Washingtonians attended his funeral.
The Evening Star published a heartbreaking description of the scene:
His remains were placed in the Green room at the Executive mansion, where this morning a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family. The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes—the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket. The countenance wore a natural and placid look, the only signs of death being a slight discoloration of the features.
The body lay in the lower section of a metallic case, the sides of which were covered by the winding sheet of white crape. The deceased held in the right hand a boquet composed of a superb camellia, around which were grouped azalias and sprigs of mignionette. This, when the case is closed, is to be reserved for the bereaved mother. On the breast of the deceased, was a beautiful wreath of the flowers, already named, interspersed with ivy leaves and other evergreens; near the feet was another wreath of the same kind, while azalias and sprigs of mignionette were disposed about the body.
The metallic case is very plain, and is an imitation of rosewood. On the upper section is a square silver plate, bearing, in plain characters, the simple inscription:
Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis Page 17
