Emilie also wanted the president’s help in safeguarding her investment in supplies of cotton stranded down South. Lincoln, no doubt with misgivings, wrote a note giving her amnesty (based on her taking the oath) and said, “Mrs. Helm claims to own some cotton at Jackson, Mississippi, and also some in Georgia; and I shall be glad upon either place being brought within our lines, for her to be afforded the proper facilities to show her ownership, and take her property.”
Safely home, Emilie kept asking for favors. Now she wanted to provide clothing for Rebels held prisoner at Camp Douglas. She returned to the White House for another visit in the fall of 1864, still desirous of protecting her cotton. Shortly after that visit, upon learning of the death of her half brother Levi, she turned on Lincoln, calling Levi “another sad victim to the powers of more favored relations.” She also charged in a letter to Lincoln, “Your minnie [sic] bullets have made us what we are.” She said that fact gave her “additional claim” in seeking Lincoln’s favors and called herself “a woman almost crazy with misfortune.”
Lincoln tried to help her with the cotton, but was frustrated when it accidentally burned up. After the Civil War and the assassination of her in-law in the White House, Emilie Todd Helm had to eke out a living as a musician until another Lincoln, Abraham’s oldest son, Robert, came to the rescue. He used his influence to obtain her an appointment as postmistress in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
Meanwhile, Mary Todd Lincoln’s half brothers David, Alexander, and Sam and her brother George all served in the Southern armies. Still another half sister, Martha, allegedly took advantage of a Lincoln pass to smuggle medicines to her favorite side in the war—the Confederacy.
Lee’s Final Order
General Order #9
Hd Quarters
Army of Nor. Va.
10 April 1865
After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.
I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them.
But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that would have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.
By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection.
With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.
R. E. Lee
Gen’l
Julia Reads a Note
IT WAS JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX, AND JULIA DENT Grant thought it all so very odd. First was the man who came to her hotel room with a message from Mrs. Lincoln. Then there were the four “peculiar” men sitting together at lunch. Finally, there was the angry-looking man, “dark, pale,” who galloped past the Grant couple’s carriage late that day and “glared in a most disagreeable manner.” And last, there was the mysterious letter.
It was Good Friday, April 14. The Grants—still buoyed by the excitement of great events—had begun their day in a room at Willard’s Hotel (today’s Willard International Hotel) after returning the day before from City Point on the James River opposite Richmond. Julia Grant was anxious to return to their cottage in Burlington, New Jersey, outside Philadelphia, for a few days of quiet and rest—in short, for resumption of a normal life.
Her husband (she called him “Ulys”) wasn’t sure he could wind up his affairs in Washington quite in time. “I wish I could,” he told her, “but I have promised Mr. Lincoln to go up this morning and with him to see what can be done in reference to the reduction of the army.”
That appointment was scheduled for nine o’clock in the morning, but before the Union’s victorious general could leave his hotel quarters there came a tap at the door. It was a message from Abraham Lincoln—one of his last ever. It said to please come at eleven o’clock instead of the earlier hour because his son Robert had just returned from his own army duty, “and I want to see something of him before I go to work.”
Although this would make it even more difficult for the Grants to get away in time for the train trip to New Jersey, the general still promised his wife to do whatever was possible about leaving that day.
After he left their room another rap came at the hotel door. When Julia Grant innocently said, “Come in,” there appeared “a man dressed in light-colored corduroy coat and trousers and with a rather shabby hat of the same color.”
When she told the stranger she had expected a bellboy bringing cards, he “reddened,” bowed to her, and asked if she indeed were Mrs. Grant.
Assured that she was, the man said he had been sent by Mrs. Lincoln, “to say she will call for you at exactly eight o’clock to go to the theater.”
Perhaps this odd messenger didn’t know it, but Julia Grant was not all that enamored of Mary Todd Lincoln’s ways. They had had a couple of run-ins, you might say, while the Lincolns visited the Grant headquarters at the Richmond-Petersburg apex just days earlier.
Julia Grant related her own reaction: “To this I replied with some feeling (not liking either the looks of the messenger or the message, thinking the former savored of discourtesy and the latter seemed like a command), ‘You may return with my compliments to Mrs. Lincoln and say I regret that as General Grant and I intend leaving the city this afternoon, we will not, therefore, be here to accompany the President and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater.’”
You would think that a White House messenger at that point would bow out of the room and hurry on back with the reply. After all, why should he care who went to Ford’s Theatre with the Lincolns? But there was no bowing for this messenger.
By Julia Grant’s own account (The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, first published in 1975), he hesitated, then was bold enough to say: “Madam, the papers announce that General Grant will be with the President tonight at the theater.”
Julia Grant wasn’t going to debate with the man. She simply told him to deliver her reply as given and dismissed him. Oddly, he smiled as he left. Oddly, too, it was only a short time before she would see the same strange messenger again—as she had lunch that day with General John A. Rawlins’s wife and two of their respective children.
Four men came into the dining room together. “I thought I recognized in one of them the messenger of the morning, and one, a dark, pale man, played with his soup spoon, sometimes filling it and holding it half-lifted to his mouth, but never tasting it.”
The same slow-eater “seemed very intent on what we and the children were saying.” He was so disconcerting that Julia Grant thought he was “crazy.” When Julia asked Mrs. Rawlins to take a furtive look at the four men, she agreed that there was “something peculiar about them.” Julia then suggested they might be Southern partisans, “a part of Mosby’s guerrillas.” She told her friend the suspect men “have been listening to every word we have said.”
The incident only added to Julia Grant’s unease on this fateful day. In the morning, after dismissing the “messenger” from Mrs. Lincoln, Julia had sent word to her husband “entreating him” to take her home to New Jersey that evening and stressing that she did not wish to go to the theater. “I do not know what possessed me to take such a freak,” she wrote later, “but go home I felt I must.” And again at lunch, Julia Grant blurted out to her friend Mrs. Rawlins, “I believe there will be an outbreak tonight or soon [of guerrilla or partisan activity, apparently]. I just feel it, and I am glad that I am going away tonight.”
By the tim
e of her late lunch, Julia Grant had heard back from her husband. He had been attending a Cabinet meeting, but his message was: Pack the trunks. They indeed would take the late afternoon train for Philadelphia.
So it was that in the late afternoon they were leaving Willard’s in a carriage bound for the railroad depot. Just then, “this same dark, pale man rode past us at a sweeping gallop on a dark horse—black, I think.” The “same” dark pale man as at lunch.
The mysterious rider forged twenty yards ahead, turned, and swept back, “and as he passed us both going and returning, he thrust his face quite near the General’s and glared in a disagreeable manner.”
Grant was startled enough to “draw back” as the stranger made his return circuit. In reply to a pleasantry offered by their companion in the carriage, General Daniel Rucker’s wife, Grant said, “I do not care for such glances.”
Neither of the Grants knew it then, but they had just brushed up against John Wilkes Booth. As Julia Grant said in her memoirs, she was “perfectly sure” her mysterious, corduroy-clad “messenger” was one of the four men at lunch, as was Booth, the very same man who had ridden past the Grants’ carriage with such glaring countenance.
That night Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, as is well known. But what had the assassin been doing all day? That morning Booth’s crisscrossing travels around the Federal capital included a stop to visit fellow conspirator Lewis Paine, who later said his assignment from Booth was to assassinate Ulysses S. Grant.
Booth encountered theater owner James Ford, who excitedly told the actor that a large crowd was expected at the theater that night—to see Grant.
Booth made other stops and conducted other errands, but he also dropped out of the sight of latter-day historians for an hour or two. Could it have been for a late luncheon with three coconspirators in view of Julia Grant’s nearby table?
Publicly in view again late in the afternoon, Booth hired a lively horse from Pumphrey’s Livery Stable at the Mall and then was seen riding the mare, sometimes at a canter, on nearby streets. He allowed her to race a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue.
He made a stop at the theater, spoke to property man James Maddox, then raced off again.
He was soon at the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania, location of the Willard’s hostelry. He encountered a fellow actor, one John Matthews, and asked him to deliver a letter to the editor of the National Intelligencer.
While they were talking, they saw across the street a company of Union soldiers marching along as escort for a column of prisoners. “My Great God, Matthews! I have no longer a country!” Booth exclaimed.
Just then, wrote Theodore Roscoe in his book Web of Conspiracy, Grant’s carriage, with a small cavalry escort, was leaving Willard’s for the rail depot. “Booth angled the nimble mare over for a closer look at the General.” Then, as the carriage continued on its way, he rode back to the Willard—quite likely passing the carriage coming and going, as Julia Grant later wrote.
Booth found out from the “curbstone loungers” that the Grants were off to the Philadelphia train and New Jersey. That meant one less target would be available at the theater that night—but also fewer escorting soldiers and officers to get in the way.
The Grants, safe on their train, had not quite reached their destination of Burlington that night when they heard of the horrifying events at Ford’s Theatre. They had passed through Philadelphia and were waiting for the ferry to take them across the Delaware River to their next train in New Jersey. As they ate dinner in a restaurant near the ferry landing, Grant was handed three telegrams, one after the other. “The General looked very pale.”
When Julia asked what had happened, Ulysses told her Lincoln had been assassinated (although he actually didn’t die until the next morning). Grant then accompanied his wife and their daughter Jesse to the cottage at Burlington and returned during the night to Washington by special train.
The very next morning, a still-stunned Julia Grant found a chilling letter in the flood of telegrams and mail that reached the Grants in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. “General Grant, thank God, as I do,” it said, “that you still live. It was your life that fell to my lot, and I followed you on the [railroad] cars. Your car door was locked, and thus you escaped me, thank God!”
Could the letter have been from Lewis Paine, whose real name was Lewis Thornton Powell? It is unlikely, since it was without a doubt Paine-Powell who brutally attacked and almost killed Secretary of State William Seward and his son Frederick at their Washington home the night of the Lincoln assassination.
Paine-Powell, along with four others who took part in the Lincoln plot, was hanged for his own bloody deed, and Booth died in a fire marking the end of his escape attempt. But no one knows who the writer of the mysterious letter to General Grant was, even today.
Freedom Still Denied
FREEDOM WAS AT HAND, WITHIN HER GRASP, BUT SLAVE CHILD ARMACI ADAMS didn’t know it. Richmond had long since fallen; the slaves were free; and Lincoln was dead. Still, on a lone farm in Tidewater, Virginia, the young black girl slaved on. No one had told her.
Dey never give me my age. White folks kept hit an’ never give it ter me.
She might have been five years old when Richmond fell in 1865. Then again, she might have been about fifteen.
Before Emancipation, life as a slave to Isaac Hunter and his “Missus” was sheer hell. You could call both of them “hell cats.” The old Marse was a preacher, but he was wicked. Las’ time I seed ’im he was comin’ f’om a revival drunk. Mean and wicked.
That time, before Emancipation, when poor Uncle Toney ran away and was caught, Ole man Hunter an’ hi son beat ’im all de morning. Dey took turns. After a while dey got tired an’ went in ter dinner and lef him hanging ’dere. He was tied up in de air wid his han’s crossed an’ his toes jes touchin’ de groun’.
The father and son went back to beating Uncle Toney again—until the middle of the afternoon. They then “pickled” him, soaking him with salted water, and let him down. He “mos’ nigh” died, but he did live, only to be sold down South upon his recovery.
Meanwhile, most of the Hunter slaves were being sold off. Armaci probably would have been, too, but for an accident. As she told it many years later, the Hunters never provided enough to eat, and she used to sit by the side of a fireplace poaching corn. One day her dress caught fire and she was badly burned on the neck and legs before a passerby saw her running with her dress blazing, threw his coat around her, and smothered the fire. She was on crutches “fur a lon’ time.”
One day the slave cook, Aunt Rose, was looking at young Armaci and crying. And she said, “Honey, I don’ never ’spect ter see you anymo.’” Armaci was too young to understand at first.
The next day, the Marsa took her and a team of pretty claybank ponies to Norfolk—to sell both Armaci and the animals. As they proceeded down Main Street, the girl saw a man up on a block and people “jes a-hollerin’ ’roun’ him”—bidding. The next thing she knew, her “ole man” took her into the back of a vacant store and took off her clothes. Then he and another man looked her over—“examined me.” But the prospective buyer balked ’cause he ’fraid I won’ be no good on account o’ de burn scars.
Armaci went back to Huntersville and never was sold. Soon only two men were left to work the farm, while the young, unsalable girl, not yet into her teenage years, was left to do all the housework.
In time another of her jobs was minding the turkeys, a thankless task because “dey runs eve’y which-a-way.” One day after Richmond had fallen to the Union armies, there were some Union soldiers across a creek at some fairgrounds. She noticed one of the soldiers “patrolin’ by” with his rifle on his shoulder, and soon she heard a loud bang. Seconds later, the soldier came into view again, with a turkey slung across his shoulder.
One o’ dem turkeys done got ’cross de creek an’ dat sojer done shot ’im.
Here was trouble, real trouble, for the sla
ve girl. She was “scared weak” when she realized it. She herded the rest of the turkeys together and hustled them back to the farm, but she was too late. The Missus was standing outside and counting the big birds. All at once she yelled, “Isaac! One o’ dem yaller turkeys is gone!”
Dat man grabbed me an’ strip me naked—after freedm min’ you—an’ whupped me wid a bull whup ontill I fainted. Atter dat I don’ know how long he beat me. When I come ’roun dey were washin’ me down in pickle.
At the time of that incident, Armaci was “free” in theory. All slaves were free in theory by the end of the Civil War in April 1865, if not earlier by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. All but a handful, that is, who didn’t know and weren’t told—like Armaci. In a 1930s interview transcript subsequently published in Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, edited by Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, she calculated she was about thirteen before she escaped the Hunter farm in Huntersville.
“How long I been free, I don’ know,” she said so many years later. “I wondered why eve’body done gone, but dey kept me so close in de house I couldn’ fin’ out.” By their former slave girl’s account, the Hunters clearly did their best to keep her from learning she could walk away free at any time. She finally did find out and ran away.
She found refuge with a black family named Foreman at nearby Norfolk Mission College, found work, and never went back to the Hunter place.
Surprisingly Kind Fate
WHEN, AT THE TENDER AGE OF SIXTEEN OR SEVENTEEN, DORENCE ATWATER WENT off to the American Civil War with the 1st Connecticut Cavalry Squadron in August of 1861, he surely had no idea that he was destined to become a prisoner, at one time or another, of both warring governments. Sometime later he became a good friend and literary model for Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Sea Islands.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 33
