Bloody Times

by James L. Swanson

  Cannon fire announced the start of the procession; guns boomed. Every church and firehouse bell in Washington tolled. Witnesses remembered the sound of the day as much as the sight of it. Tad Lincoln joined the procession, and he and his brother Robert rode in a carriage behind the hearse. The procession was huge. Among the marchers were members of the army, navy, and Marine Corps, and judges, diplomats, and doctors. One group of marchers suggested the cost of the war: wounded and bandaged veterans, many missing arms or legs, many on crutches.

  The hearse that carried Lincoln’s body down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  When the procession reached the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, soldiers carried the flag-draped coffin up the steps of the Capitol. The crowds watched in silence as the soldiers carried the coffin inside and laid it upon a platform. It was left under the dome with a guard of soldiers keeping watch over the dead president.

  Chapter Nine

  When Jefferson Davis rode into Charlotte, the people there were not happy to see him. Only one man would allow the president of the Confederate States of America to set foot in his home. An officer explained why to Burton Harrison: “The major then took me aside and explained that, though quarters could be found for the rest of us, he had as yet been able to find only one person willing to receive Mr. Davis, saying that people generally were afraid that whoever would entertain him would have his house burned by the enemy.”

  Not long after his arrival in Charlotte, Davis gave a speech to an audience that included a number of Confederate soldiers:

  “My friends, I thank you for this evidence of your affection. If I had come as the bearer of glad tidings, if I had come to announce success at the head of a triumphant army, this is nothing more than I would have expected; but coming as I do, to tell you of a very great disaster . . . this demonstration of your love fills me with feelings too deep for utterance. This has been a war of the people for the people . . . and if they desire to continue the struggle, I am still ready and willing to devote myself to their cause. True, General Lee’s army has surrendered, but the men are still alive, the cause is not yet dead; and only show by your determination and fortitude that you are willing to suffer yet longer, and we may still hope for success.”

  At the end of Davis’s speech, somebody handed him a telegram from John C. Breckinridge. Davis read the words in silence: “President Lincoln was assassinated in the theatre in Washington.”

  A few minutes later Davis spoke to his secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory. In a sad voice, Davis said, “I certainly have no special regard for Mr. Lincoln; but there are a great many men of whose end I would much rather have heard than his. I fear it will be disastrous to our people, and I regret it deeply.”

  Jefferson Davis tried to understand what Lincoln’s murder would mean for himself and his cause. Who had killed him, and why? What did this news mean for his retreat, and for his plans to continue the war? Davis would have found it hard to imagine the strength of emotions the assassination had stirred up across the country. Had he known, he might have decided to travel south more quickly.

  Despite the disturbing news of Lincoln’s death, there were some people who agreed with Jefferson Davis that it was still possible for the South to keep the struggle going. On April 19 General Wade Hampton wrote to his president, encouraging him to continue the fight from Texas. “Give me a good force of cavalry and I will take them safely across the Mississippi, and if you desire to go in that direction it will give me great pleasure to escort you. My own mind is made up as to my course. I shall fight as long as my Government remains in existence. . . . If you will allow me to do so, I can bring to your support many strong arms and brave hearts—men who will fight to Texas, and who, if forced from that State, will seek refuge in Mexico rather than in the Union.”

  In Washington Lincoln’s body lay all night in the Capitol. The crowds would have to wait outside. No visitors would be allowed to enter until morning. Thousands of people lined up on East Capitol Street on the afternoon, evening, and night of April 19, waiting for their last chance to see Abraham Lincoln.

  The doors to the Capitol were thrown open on the morning of April 20. People passed between two lines of guards on the plaza, entered the building, and split into two lines that passed on either side of the open coffin. The experience lasted only a few moments. Visitors were not allowed to linger, and they walked past the coffin at the rate of more than three thousand an hour. Only the sound of rustling dresses and hoop skirts broke the silence. At 6:00 P.M. the doors were closed and the public viewing ended. If they had been allowed, the people would have kept coming all through the night.

  Jefferson Davis awoke in Charlotte on the morning of April 20 still determined to continue the fight. Lincoln’s death had changed nothing. Indeed, now that Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, had become president, Davis believed it was even more important not to give in. Johnson was not as generous a man as Lincoln. If the South surrendered to him, the revenge he would take would be more terrible than any suffered under Abraham Lincoln. Davis had made his decision: The Civil War would go on as long as he lived and as long as his soldiers would fight.

  But Davis must have known this. Lincoln’s murder had placed his life in greater danger. If he was captured by Union troops, they would be tempted to take revenge for Lincoln’s murder. Davis might soon join Lincoln in death.

  Stanton had chosen the cities the funeral train would stop in. Now he needed to decide who would travel on it. Just a day before the train was to depart Washington, he made his choice of men to take the president home to Springfield. He chose Brigadier General Edward Townsend to command the train and assigned the men who would serve under him.

  A Congressman’s ticket to ride aboard the Lincoln funeral train.

  Stanton also sent Townsend his orders about how everything on the funeral train was to happen. A stickler for detail, he left nothing to chance. At least one officer would be with Lincoln’s body at all times. No one who didn’t belong on the train should be allowed on. Townsend would report by telegraph the arrival and departure of the train at each city. And the train would have to stick to its timetable. Townsend would be responsible for making sure that, in each city, Lincoln’s coffin came back to the funeral train in time for the train to leave on schedule.

  Assistant Adjutant General Edward D. Townsend, commander of Lincoln’s funeral train.

  Stanton issued another order on April 20. It was a public announcement offering a hundred thousand dollar reward for the capture of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and for his coconspirators John Surratt and George Atzerodt. Six days after the assassination, the murderer was still at large. Both the fleeing Confederate president and the killer of the Union president were still on the run. To anyone who dared to help Booth during his escape from justice, Stanton promised the punishment of death.

  On the same day that Stanton announced the reward, Jefferson Davis wondered if Lincoln’s murder might help his cause. “It is difficult to judge of the effect” of the murder, he wrote. “His successor [Andrew Johnson] 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 was struggling unsuccessfully to make sure that his remaining soldiers had what they needed to fight. “General Duke’s brigade is here without saddles,” he wrote on April 20. “There are none here or this side of Augusta. Send on to this point 600, or as many as can be had.” In another letter Davis asked for cannons and more men. Travel was becoming increasingly difficult. On the evening of April 20, John C. Breckinridge, Davis’s secretary of war, wrote from Salisbury, North Carolina, to Davis in Charlotte: “We have had great difficulty in reaching this place. The train from Charlotte which was to have met me here has not arrived.” President Davis replied promptly: “Train will start for you at midnight with guard.”

  On April 20 Robert E. Lee was at home i
n Richmond. He had no army to command. He knew that President Davis was still trying to continue to fight the war. Lee thought he was wrong to do so. Any further fighting must, he believed, turn into bloody, lawless, guerrilla warfare. Better an honorable surrender than that. Lee wrote a remarkable letter to his commander in chief. He urged Jefferson Davis to surrender: “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. . . . A partisan war may be continued . . . 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. . . . I would recommend measures be taken for . . . the restoration of peace.”

  Davis never got Lee’s letter. But even if he had, it would not have convinced him to surrender. Davis still had faith that by crossing to the west of the Mississippi, he would be able to continue the war. Indeed, the arrival in Charlotte that very day of several cavalry units gave Davis new hope.

  Davis had almost decided to leave the country, but when these soldiers and their horses arrived in Charlotte, he changed his mind. “Troops began to come into Charlotte, however . . . and there was much talk among them of crossing the Mississippi and continuing the war,” remembered Stephen Mallory. “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. . . . 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.”

  At 6:00 A.M. on Friday, April 21, one week after the assassination, an escort arrived at the Capitol to accompany Lincoln’s body to the funeral train. Soldiers removed the coffin from the platform, carried it down the stairs, and placed it in a horse-drawn hearse. It was not supposed to be a grand or official procession. There were no drummers, no bands, and no train of marchers. It was just a short trip from the east front plaza of the Capitol to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station.

  But that did not stop the crowds. Several thousand onlookers lined the route and surrounded the station entrance. Edwin Stanton supervised the procession himself to make sure that the transfer of Abraham Lincoln’s body from the Capitol to the funeral train was done with simplicity, dignity, and honor.

  Earlier that morning another hearse had arrived at the station. It had come from Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. When the soldiers carried Abraham Lincoln aboard his private railroad car at 7:30 A.M., the body of his dead son Willie was already there, waiting for him. Once Lincoln had planned to collect the boy himself and take his coffin home. Now two coffins shared the presidential car.

  Members of the honor guard took their places beside the coffin. The train would not take aboard the hearse and horses which had carried Lincoln’s body to the railroad station. Instead, in every city where the train would stop for funeral services, local officials would provide a horse-drawn hearse to take the coffin from the train.

  Mourning ribbon worn by members of the United States Military Rail Road.

  At 7:50 A.M. Robert Lincoln boarded the train. He would not ride all the way to Illinois. He planned to ride the train part of the way, then return to Washington to wrap up his father’s affairs. Mary Lincoln did not board the train; nor did she appear at the station to see her husband off. And she did not allow Tad to go.

  Tad should have gone to the station and then ridden with his father all the way back to Illinois. After Willie’s death, Tad and his father were always together. Sometimes Tad fell asleep in the president’s office, and Lincoln would lift the boy over his shoulder and carry him off to bed. Tad loved to go on trips with his father. He loved to see 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 sixteen-hundred-mile journey. And he would have been proud of, and taken comfort from, the honor paid to his father. But, kept in the White House, Tad saw none of this.

  Two more men boarded the train as it waited at the station. In the days to come, the success or failure of this mission would depend upon their work. They were the “body men,” embalmer Dr. Brown and undertaker Frank Sands. For the next thirteen days, it would be their job to keep Abraham Lincoln’s corpse looking as lifelike as possible.

  At exactly 8:00 A.M. the wheels of the engine turned, and the eight railroad cars it pulled began to move.

  Lincoln’s train would reach Baltimore in four hours. No one knew exactly what would happen at the first stop outside Washington. No one anticipated what was to come: bonfires, torches, arches of flowers, hand-painted signs, banners, and masses of people along the way at all hours of the day or night. Parents held out sleepy-eyed infants and even uncomprehending babes in arms, so that one day they could tell their children: “You were there. You saw Father Abraham pass by.”

  Without anyone in the government ordering it, this train became more than the funeral for one dead man. Somewhere between Washington and Springfield, the train became a symbol of the cost of the Civil War. It represented a mournful homecoming for all the men—Union and Confederate—who had died on the battlefield. It was as if an army of the dead—and not one solitary man—rode aboard that train.

  Lincoln’s funeral car.

  Chapter Ten

  But this transformation had not yet taken place as the train approached Baltimore. The whole state of Maryland, and Baltimore in particular, were known for being unfriendly to Lincoln. Four years ago, on his way to become president, Lincoln’s train had traveled through Baltimore. People there were rumored to be plotting to kill him. Lincoln passed through the city in secrecy in the middle of the night.

  But now all was peaceful as the train arrived at Baltimore at 10:00 A.M. Townsend telegraphed Stanton promptly: “Just arrived all safe.” Thousands of sincere mourners stood in heavy rain to await the president. The honor guard aboard the train carried the coffin from the car and placed it in a hearse drawn by four black horses.

  The hearse was designed to display the coffin. According to one spectator, “The body of this hearse was almost entirely composed of plate glass, which enabled the vast crowd . . . to have a full view of the coffin. The supports of the top were draped with black cloth and white silk, and the top of the car was handsomely decorated with black plumes.”

  A procession got under way and marched to the Merchant’s Exchange. It took three hours to reach Calvert Street. The column halted, the hearse drove to the southern entrance of the Exchange, and Lincoln’s bearers carried him inside. There they laid the coffin beneath a dome, upon a platform about three feet tall, with columns on the four corners. A canopy fourteen feet tall was draped with black cloth, trimmed with silver fringe, and decorated with silver stars. Around the platform, Townsend saw, “were tastefully arranged evergreens, wreaths, calla-lilies, and other choice flowers.”

  In Baltimore there would be no ceremonies, sermons, or speeches; there was no time for that. Instead, as soon as Lincoln was in position, guards threw the doors open and the public mourners filed in. Over the next four hours, thousands viewed the body. The upper part of the coffin was open to reveal Lincoln’s face and chest.

  In Baltimore, Edward Townsend established two rules. First, no one except the officers and men of the United States army traveling aboard the train was ever allowed to touch the president’s coffin. Townsend was firm: “No bearers, except the veteran guard, were ever suffered to handle the President’s coffin.” Second, Townsend had forbidden mourners to get too close to the open coffin, to touch the president’s body, to kiss him, or to place anything, including flowers, in the coffin. Any person who violated these rules would be seized at once and removed from Lincoln’s presence.

  At about 2:30 P.M.,
with thousands of citizens, black and white, still waiting in line to see the president, local officials ended the viewing. Lincoln’s bearers closed the coffin and carried it back to the hearse. A second procession delivered Lincoln’s body to the North Central Railway station in time for the scheduled 3:00 P.M. departure for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

  The first stop had gone well. General Townsend sent a telegram to the Secretary of War:

  BALTIMORE, April 21, 1865.

  Hon. E. M. STANTON,

  Secretary of War:

  Ceremonies very imposing. Dense crowd lined the streets; chiefly laboring classes, white and black. Perfect order throughout. Many men and women in tears. Arrangements admirable. Start for Harrisburg [Pennsylvania] at 3 p.m.

  E. D. TOWNSEND,

  Assistant Adjutant-General

  On the way to Harrisburg, the train stopped briefly at York, where the women of the city had asked permission to lay a wreath of flowers upon Lincoln’s coffin. Edward Townsend allowed six women to come aboard. While a band played a dirge and bells tolled, they approached the funeral car, stepped inside, and laid their large wreath of red and white flowers on the coffin. The women wept bitterly as they left the train. Soon, at the next stop, their flowers would be pushed aside in favor of others.

  The train arrived at Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania, at 8:20 P.M. on Friday, April 21. Townsend reported to Edwin Stanton: “Arrived here safely. Everything goes on well.” It was dark and a heavy rain was falling. “Slowly through the muddy streets, followed by two of the guard of honor and the faithful sergeants, the hearse wended its way to the Capitol,” Townsend wrote.