The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  It was by then about 1.30; Good Friday was off the calendar at last, and Mary Lincoln was into what everyone in the house, doctors and laymen alike, could see would be the first day of her widowhood. At intervals, supported on either side by Clara Harris and Laura Keene, she would return to the crowded bedroom and sit or stand looking down at her husband until grief overcame her again and the two women would half-guide half-carry her back to the front parlor, where she would remain until enough strength returned for her to repeat the process. She made these trips about once an hour, and each was more grueling than the last, not only because of her own cumulative exhaustion, but also because of the deteriorating condition of the sufferer on the bed, which came as a greater shock to her each time she saw him. Earlier, there had been a certain calm and dignity about him, as if he were in fact aboard “some singular, indescribable vessel … floating, floating away on some vast and indistinct expanse, toward an unknown shore.” Now this was gone, replaced by the effects of agony. The dream ship had become a rack, and the stertorous uproar of his breathing, interspersed with drawn-out groans, filled the house as it might have filled a torture chamber. “Doctor, save him!” she implored first one and then another of the attending physicians, and once she said in a calmer tone: “Bring Tad. He will speak to Tad, he loves him so.” But all agreed that would not do, either for the boy or for his father, who was beyond all knowledgeable contact with anything on earth, even Tad, and indeed had been so ever since Booth’s derringer crashed through the laughter in the theater at 10.15 last night. All the while, his condition worsened, especially his breathing, which not only became increasingly spasmodic, but would stop entirely from time to time, the narrow chest expanded between the big rail-splitter arms, and then resume with a sudden gusty roar through the fluttering lips. On one such occasion, with Mrs Lincoln leaning forward from a chair beside the bed, her cheek on her husband’s cheek, her ear near his still, cyanotic mouth, the furious bray of his exhalation — louder than anything she had heard since the explosion in the box, five hours ago — startled and frightened her so badly that she shrieked and fell to the floor in a faint. Stanton, interrupted in his work by the piercing scream, came running down the hall from his improvised Acting President’s office up front. When he saw what it was he lost patience entirely. “Take that woman out,” he ordered sternly, thrusting both arms over his head in exasperation, “and do not let her in again.”

  He was obeyed in this as in all his other orders, and she remained in the front parlor until near the very end. Meantime dawn came through, paling the yellow flare of gas jets. A cold rain fell on the people still keeping their vigil on the street outside, while inside, in the dingy room made dingier by daylight, Lincoln entered the final stage of what one doctor called “the saddest and most pathetic deathbed scene I ever witnessed.” Interruptions of his breathing were more frequent now, and longer, and whenever this happened some of the men about the bed would take out their watches to note the time of death, then return them to their pockets when the raucous sound resumed. Robert Lincoln — “only a boy for all his shoulder straps,” the guard Crook had said — “bore himself well,” according to one who watched him, “but on two occasions gave way to overpowering grief and sobbed aloud, turning his head and leaning on the shoulder of Senator Sumner.” At 7 o’clock, with the end at hand, he went to bring his mother into the room for a last visit. She tottered in, looked at her husband in confusion, saying nothing, and was led back out again. Stanton was there full-time now, and strangely enough had brought his hat along, standing motionless with his chin on his left hand, his right hand holding the hat and supporting his left elbow, tears running down his face into his beard.

  By this time Lincoln’s breathing was fast and shallow, cheeks pulled inward behind the closed blue lips. His chest heaved up in a last deep breath, then subsided and did not rise again. It was 7.22; the nine-hour agony was over, and his face took on what John Hay described as “a look of unspeakable peace.” Surgeon General Barnes leaned forward, listened carefully for a time to the silent chest, then straightened up, removed two silver half-dollars from his pocket, and placed them carefully on the closed eyes. Observing this ritual, Stanton then performed one of his own. He stretched his right arm out deliberately before him, clapped his hat for a long moment on his head, and then as deliberately removed it, as if in salute. “Now he belongs to the ages,” he said, or anyhow later saw to it that he was quoted as having said. “Let us pray,” one of the parsons intoned, and sank to his knees on the thin red carpet beside the bed.

  Soon thereafter Mary Lincoln was brought back into the room. “Oh, why did you not tell me he was dying?” she exclaimed when she saw her husband lying there with coins on his eyes. Then it came home to her, and her grief was too great to be contained. “Oh my God,” she wailed as she was led out, weeping bitterly, “I have given my husband to die!” Presently she was taken from the house, and the other mourner witnesses picked their way through the wet streets to their homes and hotels near and far.

  Bells were tolling all over Washington by the time Lincoln’s body, wrapped in a flag and placed in a closed hearse, was on its way back to the White House, escorted (as he had not been when he left, twelve hours before) by an honor guard of soldiers and preceded by a group of officers walking bareheaded in the rain. He would lie in state, first in the East Room, then afterwards in the Capitol rotunda, preparatory to the long train ride back to Springfield, where he would at last be laid to rest. “Nothing touches the tired spot,” he had said often in the course of the past four years. Now Booth’s derringer had reached it.

  At 10 o’clock that Saturday morning, less than three hours after Lincoln died in the tailor’s house two blocks away, Andrew Johnson took the oath of office in the parlor of his suite at the Kirkwood House, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the mansion that was soon to be his home. After kissing the Bible held out to him by Chase, he turned and made a short speech, a sort of extemporaneous inaugural, to the dozen senators and cabinet members present, all with faces that showed the strain of their all-night vigil. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have been almost overwhelmed by the announcement of the sad event which has so recently occurred.” Other than this he made no reference to his predecessor, and as for any policy he would adopt, “that must be left for development as the Administration progresses.… The only assurance I can now give of the future is reference to the past. Toil, and an honest advocacy of the great principles of free government, have been my lot. The duties have been mine; the consequences are God’s.”

  If this sounded at once conventional and high-handed, if some among the new President’s hearers resented his singular omission of any reference to the old one — “Johnson seemed willing to share the glory of his achievements with his Creator,” a New Hampshire senator observed, “but utterly forgot that Mr Lincoln had any share of credit in the suppression of the rebellion” — there were those beyond reach of his voice just then who were altogether delighted with the change, as they saw it, from a soft- to a hard-peace Chief of State. Back from Richmond that same day, most of the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War spent the afternoon at a caucus held to consider “the necessity of a new cabinet and a line of policy less conciliatory than that of Mr Lincoln.” They had been upset by a number of things, including his recent speech from the White House window, and Julian of Indiana complained that “aside from his known tenderness to the rebels, Lincoln’s last public avowal, only three days before his death, of adherence to the plan of reconstruction he had announced in December 1863, was highly repugnant.” All in all, “while everybody was shocked at his murder,” Julian declared, “the feeling was nearly universal that the accession of Johnson to the Presidency would prove a godsend to the country.”

  Sure enough, when they requested through their chairman a meeting with the new President — himself a member of the committee until he left the Senate, three years ago, to take up his duties as military governor
of Tennessee — he promptly agreed to see them the following day, not at the White House, which was in a turmoil of preparation for the funeral, but next door at the Treasury Department. It was Easter Sunday, and Ben Wade, as chairman, got things off to a rousing start. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” he said. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.”

  Lincoln’s life had ended, so to speak, in a tailor shop; Johnson’s could be said to have begun in one, plying needle and thread while his wife taught him to read. Since then, he had come far — indeed, all the way to the top — with much of his success attributable to his skill as a stump speaker whose specialty was invective. Nor did he disappoint his Jacobin callers now in that regard. One year older and half a foot shorter than his predecessor, he thanked Wade for the warmth of his greeting and launched at once into a statement of his position on the burning issue of the day, repeating, with some expansion and adjustment of the words, what he had said on the steps of the Patent Office, twelve days back. “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime — and crime must be punished. Treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished.” The impression here was as strong as the one produced at the Republican rally, two days after the fall of Richmond, and it was also encouraging to learn that the text under his lips when he kissed the Bible held out to him by Chase the day before, open to the lurid and vengeful Book of Ezekiel, carried a similar burden of blame and retribution: And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. But as for them whose heart walketh after the heart of their detestable things and their abominations, 1 will recompense their way upon their own heads, saith the Lord God. Although he made them no commitment as to changes in the cabinet he had inherited — not even regarding dismissal of the twice-injured Seward, whom they detested — they did not expect that; not just yet. It was enough, for the present, that he was with them. They knew him of old; he was of them, a long-time colleague, and they counted on him to come down stronger on their enemies all the time. They knew, as their chairman had said at the outset, there would be no trouble in running the government now.

  Anyhow they thought they knew, and when Johnson presently issued a proclamation offering rewards that ranged from $100,000 to $10,000 for the capture of Jefferson Davis and certain of his “agents,” on charges of having conspired to incite the murder of Abraham Lincoln, their cup nearly ran over. Zachariah Chandler, for one, was pleased with the prospect brought about by the assassination, and he said as much in a letter he wrote his wife in Michigan, one week after the Easter meeting. “Had Mr Lincoln’s policy been carried out, we should have had Jeff Davis, Toombs, etc. back in the Senate at the next session of Congress, but now their chances to stretch hemp are better.… So mote it be.”

  2

  Escorted by a small band of Tennessee cavalry, Davis and his official family left Greensboro on the morning Lincoln died, April 15, all on horseback except the ailing Trenholm, accompanied in his ambulance by Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, crowding seventy years of age, and Judah Benjamin, for whom a saddle was an instrument of torture. While they toiled southwest over clay roads made slippery by recent heavy rains, Joe Johnston waited in his Hillsboro headquarters, forty miles northwest of Union-occupied Raleigh, for a reply to his request, sent through the lines the day before — Good Friday; Lincoln had been right, after all, about good news in the offing — for “a temporary suspension of active operations … to permit the civil authorities to enter into the needful arrangements to terminate the existing war.” Reluctant to have the overture made, even though he himself, under pressure from his advisers, had written the message the Virginian signed, Davis had said he was not “sanguine” as to the outcome. But the response, received by Johnston on Easter Sunday, showed Sherman to be a good deal more receptive to the notion than the departed President had expected. “I am fully empowered,” the Ohioan replied, “to arrange with you any terms for the suspension of further hostilities between the armies commanded by you and those commanded by myself, and will be willing to confer with you to that end.” He proposed surrender on the same terms Grant had given Lee, a week ago today, and spoke in closing of his “desire to save the people of North Carolina the damage they would sustain by the march of this army through the central or western parts of the state.”

  In point of fact, Sherman was even more pleased than he sounded: not only because, as he later said, “the whole army dreaded the long march to Charlotte” and beyond, “back again over the thousand miles we had just accomplished,” but also because of his own fear that Johnston, overtaken, might “allow his army to disperse into guerrilla bands” and thereby cause the war to be “prolonged indefinitely.” Surrender of course would obviate both of these unwanted eventualities, and Sherman, with Grant’s example before him — “Glory to God and our country,” he had exclaimed in a field order passing the news of Appomattox along to his troops, “and all honor to our comrades in arms, toward whom we are marching! A little more labor, a little more toil on our part, the great race is won, and our Government stands regenerated after four long years of war” — fairly leaped at the invitation thus extended. Accordingly, after assuring Washington that he would “be careful not to complicate any points of civil policy” in the terms he planned to offer, he arranged with Johnston to meet at noon on Monday, April 17, midway between the picket lines of the two armies.

  That would be somewhere between the Confederate rear at Hillsboro and his own advance at Durham Station, twenty-odd miles up the track from Raleigh. Monday morning, as he was boarding the train that would take him and his staff to the midday meeting, a telegrapher came hurrying down the depot stairs with word that a coded message from the War Department, sent by steamer down the coast, was just coming over the wire from Morehead City. Sherman waited nearly half an hour for it to be completed and decoded, then took it from the operator, who came running back much excited. It was from Stanton and it had been nearly two days in transit. “President Lincoln was murdered about 10 o’clock last night in his private box at Ford’s Theatre in this city, by an assassin who shot him through the head by a pistol ball.” Seward too had been gravely hurt, and Andrew Johnson was about to take over even as Stanton wrote the final words of the message: “I have no time to add more than to say that I find evidence that an assassin is also on your track, and I beseech you to be more heedful than Mr Lincoln was of such knowledge.”

  Sherman thrust the sheet of flimsy into his pocket and said nothing of it to anyone but the telegrapher, whom he swore to secrecy. Aboard the train as it chuffed along he sat tight-lipped all the way to Durham, where he and his staff changed to horses for the flag-of-truce ride toward Hillsboro to meet Johnston. They encountered him and his party about five miles out, also under a flag of truce, and here, midway between their lines of battle, the two generals met for the first time in person: although, as Sherman put it afterwards, looking back on the hundred-mile minuet they had danced together in North Georgia from early May through mid-July, “We knew enough of each other to be well acquainted at once.” Riding side by side — forty-five-year-old “Uncle Billy,” tall and angular, and his spruce, spare companion, thirteen years his senior, “dressed in a neat gray uniform,” a blue staffer noted, “which harmonized gracefully with a full beard and mustache of silvery whiteness, partly concealing a genial and generous mouth” — they led the small blue-gray column to a roadside house owned by a farmer named James Bennett, whose permission they asked for its use, and then went in, leaving their two staffs in the yard. Once they were alone Sherman took the sheet of flimsy from his pocket and handed it over without comment. As Johnston read it, “perspiration came out in large drops on his forehead,” his companion observed, and when he had finished he denounc
ed the assassination as “the greatest possible calamity to the South,” adding that he hoped Sherman did not connect the Confederate government with the crime. “I told him,” the red-head would recall, “I could not believe that he or General Lee, or the officers of the Confederate army, could possibly be privy to acts of assassination; but I would not say as much for Jeff Davis … and men of that stripe.”

  Johnston made no reply to this, and the two proceeded at once to the subject arranged beforehand. Both agreed that any resumption of the fighting would be “the highest possible crime,” the Virginian — outnumbered four to one by enemy troops in the immediate vicinity, and ten to one or worse by others who could be brought to bear within a week — even going so far as to define the crime as “murder.” All the same, they soon reached an apparent impasse. For while Sherman rejected any proposal designed to lead to negotiations between the civil authorities, Davis had consented to the meeting only if it was to be conducted on that basis; which, incidentally, was why he had not been “sanguine as to ultimate results.” Johnston, however, stepped over the barrier by proposing that he and Sherman “make one job of it,” then and there, by settling “the fate of all armies to the Rio Grande.” Taken aback, the Ohioan questioned whether his companion’s authority was that broad. Johnston replied that it was, or anyhow could be made so by the Secretary of War, whose orders would be obeyed by Taylor, Forrest, Maury, and all the others with forces still under arms, including Kirby Smith beyond the Mississippi. In fact, he said, he could send a wire requesting Breckinridge to join them overnight. Sherman demurred; he could not deal with a member of the rebel cabinet, no matter how desirable the outcome. However, when Johnston pointed out that the Kentuckian was also a major general, and could be received on that basis, Sherman agreed. They would meet tomorrow, same time, same place, soldier to soldier, and work out the details, all of which would of course be dependent on approval by his Washington superiors, civil as well as military.