AS LINCOLN BEGAN his second term, “he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man,” John Hay observed, “from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased.”
Four years of relentless strain had touched Lincoln’s spirit and his countenance. The aged, wearied face in the life-mask cast by Clark Mills in the spring of 1865 barely resembled the mold Leonard Volk had taken five years earlier. In 1860, noted John Hay, “the large mobile mouth is ready to speak, to shout, or laugh; the bold, curved nose is broad and substantial, with spreading nostrils; it is a face full of life, of energy, of vivid aspiration.” The second life-mask, with its lined brow and cavernous cheeks, has “a look as of one on whom sorrow and care had done their worst…the whole expression is of unspeakable sadness and all-sufficing strength.”
That inner strength had sustained Lincoln all his life. But his four years as president had immeasurably enhanced his self-confidence. Despite the appalling pressures he had faced from his very first day in office, he had never lost faith in himself. In fact, he was the one who had sustained the spirits of those around him time and again, gently guiding his colleagues with good humor, energy, and steady purpose. He had learned from early mistakes, transcended the jealousy of rivals, and his insight into men and events had deepened with each passing year. Though “a tired spot” remained within that no rest or relaxation could restore, he was ready for the arduous tasks of the next four years.
Settling into his daily routine after the inauguration, Lincoln was determined to avoid the thousands of office seekers who again descended “like Egyptian locusts” upon Washington. “The bare thought of going through again what I did the first year here, would crush me,” he confessed. In the first months of his presidency, he had been disparaged for allowing office seekers to accost him at all hours, consuming his energy and disrupting his concentration. Nicolay and Hay had tried to get him to be more methodical, to close his door to outsiders for longer periods, but at the time he had insisted that “they don’t want much; they get but little, and I must see them.” Experience had finally taught him that he must set priorities and concentrate on the vital questions of war and Reconstruction confronting his administration. “I think now that I will not remove a single man, except for delinquency,” he told New Hampshire senator Clark. “To remove a man is very easy,” he commented to another visitor, “but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.”
With two classes of office seekers, however, he was prepared to take a personal interest—artists and disabled veterans. He expressed to Seward his hope that consul positions could be offered to “facilitate artists a little [in] their profession,” mentioning in particular a poet and a sculptor he wished to help. To General Scott, who was working with the Sanitary Commission to find government jobs for disabled veterans, Lincoln emphasized that the Commission should “at all times be ready to recognize the paramount claims of the soldiers of the nation, in the disposition of public trusts.”
With his cabinet, he was satisfied. The only change he made after the inauguration was to replace treasury secretary William Pitt Fessenden with the banker Hugh McCulloch. When he had assumed the post the previous summer, Fessenden had been assured that he could leave once the finances of the country were in good shape. By the spring of 1865, the Treasury was stable, and when Maine reelected him to the Senate for a term to begin on March 4, Fessenden felt free to resign.
Lincoln was sorry to lose his brilliant, hardworking secretary. Fessenden, too, “parted from the President with regret.” During his tenure at the Treasury, his initial critical attitude toward Lincoln had been transformed into warm admiration. “I desire gratefully to acknowledge the kindness and consideration with which you have invariably treated me,” he wrote to the president, “and to assure you that in retiring I carry with me great and increased respect for your personal character and for the ability which has marked your administration.” Noting that the “prolonged struggle for national life” was finally nearing a successful conclusion, he went on, “no one can claim to have so largely contributed as the chosen chief magistrate of this great people.”
Hugh McCulloch was entirely familiar with Treasury operations, having served as comptroller of the currency. When Lincoln first approached him, however, he was nervous about accepting the position. “I should be glad to comply with your wishes,” he told Lincoln, “if I did not distrust my ability to do what will be required of the Secretary of the Treasury.” Lincoln cheerfully replied, “I will be responsible for that, and so I reckon we will consider the matter settled.” McCulloch would remain at his post for four years and was “never sorry” that he had acceded to Lincoln’s wishes. The only other cabinet change Lincoln anticipated was in the Department of the Interior, where, in several months’ time, he intended to replace Usher with Senator James Harlan of Iowa.
The time had also come for John Nicolay and John Hay to move on. The two secretaries had served Lincoln exceptionally well, introducing a systematic order into the president’s vast correspondence and drafting replies to the great majority of letters he received. In their small offices on the second floor of the White House, they had served as gatekeepers, tactfully holding back the crush of senators, congressmen, generals, diplomats, and office seekers endeavoring to gain access to the president. John Hay was particularly adept at keeping the throngs entertained. “No one could be in his presence, even for a few moments,” Hay’s college roommate recalled, “without falling under the spell which his conversation and companionship invariably cast upon all who came within his influence.”
Lincoln had increased their responsibilities with each passing year. In 1864, Nicolay functioned as the “unofficial manager of Lincoln’s reelection campaign” and was dispatched as his personal emissary to ease tensions in Missouri and New York. Hay was chosen to accompany Greeley to Canada, to carry sensitive messages back and forth to Capitol Hill, and to enroll Confederate voters under Lincoln’s plan for the reconstruction of Florida.
More essential to Lincoln than the duties they so faithfully discharged was the camaraderie the young assistants provided him. They were part of his family, like sons during the troubled days and nights of his first term. They would listen spellbound when he recited Shakespeare or told another tale from his endless store. Throughout their years in the White House, they offered Lincoln conversation, undivided loyalty, and love. They were awake late at night when he could not sleep, up early in the morning to share the latest news, offering the lonely president round-the-clock companionship.
At the outset, Hay had been dumbfounded by the haphazard administrative style of the man he nicknamed “the Ancient” or “the Tycoon.” Something of an intellectual snob, the young college graduate had betrayed early on a hint of condescension toward his self-taught boss. Proximity to the president soon altered his opinion. He had come to believe by 1863 that “the hand of God” had put the prairie lawyer in the White House. If the “patent leather kid glove set” did not yet appreciate this giant of a man, it was because they “know no more of him than an owl does of a comet, blazing into his blinking eyes.”
By the spring of 1865, Nicolay, soon to marry Therena Bates, was contemplating the purchase of a newspaper in Washington or Baltimore, while Hay wanted time for his studies and his active social life, too long constrained by fourteen-hour workdays. While they would both miss Lincoln, they were glad to escape the constant struggles with Mary—the “Hellcat,” as they irreverently called her—who still resented their claims on her husband’s attention. Indeed, soon after Lincoln’s reelection, Mary had enlisted the help of Dr. Anson Henry in an effort to replace Nicolay with the journalist Noah Brooks. Nicolay had apparently tried to talk with Lincoln about his problems with Mary, but the president had refused any such discussion.
Seward found worthy alternatives for both Nicolay and Hay. When the consulate in Paris opened up in March, he recommended Nicolay for the job. The president agreed, understanding the significance of the opportunity for his loyal assistant. “So important an appointment has rarely been conferred on one so young,” the National Republican commented when the Senate confirmed Nicolay without a dissenting vote. Nicolay was thrilled. The position paid five thousand dollars a year, allowing him to start married life on solid ground.
Once Nicolay was confirmed, Seward turned his attentions to Hay, with whom he had become especially close over the years. Many nights Hay had wandered over to Seward’s house, where he was certain to find a good meal, vivid conversation, and a warm welcome. Moreover, in watching Seward and Lincoln together, Hay had recognized that the secretary of state had been the first cabinet member to recognize Lincoln’s “personal preeminence.”
In mid-March, Seward arranged for Hay to receive an appointment as secretary of the legation in Paris. “It was entirely unsolicited and unexpected,” Hay told his brother Charles. “It is a pleasant and honorable way of leaving my present post which I should have left in any event very soon.” He had thought of returning to Warsaw, Illinois, but Paris, France, was far more exciting. Hay planned to stay at the White House for another month or so, until arrangements were completed for Noah Brooks to assume his duties. Then he and Nicolay would sail for Europe to begin their new adventures. “It will be exceedingly pleasant,” Nicolay said, “for both of us, to be there at the same time.”
Spring seemed to revive the spirits of Mary Lincoln, who invariably sank into depression each February, with the anniversary of Willie’s death. “We are having charming weather,” she wrote to her friend Abram Wakeman on March 20. “We went to the Opera on Saturday eve; Mr Sumner accompanied us—we had a very gay little time. Mr S when he throws off his heavy manner, as he often does, can make himself very very agreeable. Last evening, he again joined our little coterie & tomorrow eve,—we all go again to hear ‘Robin Adair,’ sung in ‘La Dame Blanche’ by Habelmann. This is always the pleasant time to me in W. springtime, some few of the most pleasant Senators families remain until June, & all ceremony, with each other is laid aside.” A few days later, she wrote a note to Sumner, telling him that she would be sending along a copy of Louis Napoleon’s manuscript on Julius Caesar, which she had just received from the State Department and knew he would want to read. “In the coming summer,” she promised, “I shall peruse it myself, for I have so sadly neglected the little French, I fancied so familiar to me.”
Like his mother, Tad Lincoln possessed “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though [his] heart would break.” The painter Francis Carpenter recounted an incident when photographers from Brady’s studio set up their equipment in an unoccupied room that Tad had turned into a little theater. Taking “great offence at the occupation of his room without his consent,” Tad locked the door and hid the key, preventing the photographers from retrieving their chemicals and supplies. Carpenter pleaded with Tad to unlock the door, but he refused. Finally, the president had to intervene. He left his office and returned a few minutes later with the key. Though Tad “was violently excited when I went to him,” Lincoln told Carpenter, “I said, ‘Tad, do you know you are making your father a great deal of trouble?’ He burst into tears, instantly giving me up the key.”
Most of the time, however, Tad was “so full of life and vigor,” recalled John Hay, “so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises.” From dawn to dusk, “you could hear his shrill pipe resounding through the dreary corridors of the Executive residence…and when the President laid down his weary pen toward midnight, he generally found his infant goblin asleep under his table or roasting his curly head by the open fire-place; and the tall chief would pick up the child and trudge off to bed with the drowsy little burden on his shoulder, stooping under the doors and dodging the chandeliers.”
Though Tad never developed a love of books, and “felt he could not waste time in learning to spell,” he had a clever, intuitive mind and was a good judge of character. “He treated flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness and contempt,” marveled Hay, “but he often espoused the cause of some poor widow or tattered soldier, whom he found waiting in the ante-rooms.” His enterprising nature and natural shrewdness would augur well for him once his schooling was completed. With all his heart, Lincoln loved his “little sprite.”
IN LATE MARCH, Lincoln, Mary, and Tad journeyed to City Point to visit General Grant. For Lincoln, the eighteen-day sojourn was his longest break from Washington in four years. Grant had issued the invitation at the suggestion of his wife, Julia, who had been struck by constant newspaper reports of “the exhausted appearance of the President.” Grant worried at first about the propriety of issuing an invitation when the president could visit without waiting “to be asked,” but on March 20, he wrote a note to Lincoln: “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you and I think the rest would do you good.”
Delighted with the idea, Lincoln asked the Navy Department to make arrangements for a ship to carry him south. Assistant Secretary Fox was not happy to be assigned the task, for he believed “the President was incurring great risk in making the journey.” To minimize danger, he ordered John Barnes, commander of the Bat, a fast-moving gunboat, to report to the Washington Navy Yard at once. Work immediately commenced on the interior of the armed ship to make alterations necessary “to insure the personal comfort of the President as long as he desired to make the Bat his home.” To discuss the meals and amenities Lincoln might require, Fox brought Barnes to the White House. Lincoln told Barnes “he wanted no luxuries but only plain, simple food and ordinary comfort—that what was good for me would be good enough for him.” Barnes returned to the Navy Yard to supervise the changes.
The next morning, Lincoln summoned Barnes back to the White House. Embarrassed at the thought that workers had stayed up all night to make alterations that might now require additional work, Lincoln explained apologetically that “Mrs. Lincoln had decided that she would accompany him to City Point, and could the Bat accommodate her and her maid servant.” Barnes was, “in sailor’s phrase, taken ‘all aback,’” knowing that the austere gunboat “was in no respect adapted to the private life of womankind, nor could she be made so.” He returned to the Navy Yard, where “the alterations to the Bat were stopped and the steamer River Queen was chartered.” The change of plans was particularly upsetting to Fox, who “expressed great regret that the determination of Mrs. Lincoln to accompany the President” had forced the shift to “an unarmed, fragile, river-boat, so easily assailed and so vulnerable.” He directed Barnes to follow Lincoln’s steamer in the Bat, but still could not shake his anxiety. Though aware of the danger, Lincoln remained relaxed and cheerful, talking about the problems of accommodating womenfolk at sea “in very funny terms.”
The presidential party, which included army captain Charles B. Penrose, Tad and Mary Lincoln, Mary’s maid, and Lincoln’s bodyguard, W. H. Crook, departed from the Arsenal Wharf at Sixth Street at 1 p.m. on Thursday, March 23. Stanton had been laid up for several days, but against Ellen’s advice, he took a carriage to see Lincoln off, arriving minutes after the River Queen’s departure. Anxious about the president’s safety, Stanton panicked an hour later when “a hurricane swept over the city.” The “terrific squalls of winds, accompanied by thunder and lightning, did considerable damage here,” the Herald’s Washington correspondent reported. “The roof of a factory on Sixth street was blown off into the street and fell upon a hack, crushing the horses and its driver.” In some neighborhoods, trees were felled and houses destroyed, “while down the river the steamboats and sailing craft were dashed about with great violence.” Leaving his bed once again, Stanton went to the War Department and telegraphed Lincoln at 8:45 p.m. “I hope you have reached Point Lookout safely notwithstanding the furious gale that came on soon after you started…. Please let me hear from you at Point Lookout.”
Lincoln, meanwhile, was enjoying himself immensely. While Tad raced around the ship, investigating every nook and befriending members of the crew, Lincoln remained on deck, watching “the city until he could see it no more.” Once inside, he listened with relish to the adventures of the River Queen’s captain, who had chased blockade runners early in the war. “It was nearly midnight when he went to bed,” Crook recalled.
Crook, who shared a stateroom with Tad, was “startled out of a sound sleep” by Mary Lincoln. “It is growing colder,” she explained, “and I came in to see if my little boy has covers enough on him.” Later that night, Crook was awakened by the steamer passing through rough waters, which felt as if it were “slowly climbing up one side of a hill and then rushing down the other.” The next morning, still feeling seasick, Crook noted that the turbulent passage had apparently not disturbed Lincoln. On the contrary, the president looked rested, claimed to be “feeling splendidly,” and did “full justice to the delicious fish” served at breakfast.
Mary would nostalgically recall her husband’s fine humor during this last trip to City Point. “Feeling so encouraged” the war “was near its close,” and relieved from the daily burdens of his office, “he freely gave vent to his cheerfulness,” to such an extent that “he was almost boyish, in his mirth & reminded me, of his original nature, what I had always remembered of him, in our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well.”
Crook recalled that “it was after dark on the 24th” when the River Queen reached City Point. He would long remember the beauty of the scene that stretched before him, “the many-colored lights of the boats in the harbor and the lights of the town straggling up the high bluffs of the shore, crowned by the lights from Grant’s headquarters at the top.”
Newly minted captain Robert Lincoln escorted General and Mrs. Grant to call on the president shortly after he arrived. “Our gracious President met us at the gangplank,” Julia Grant recalled, “greeted the General most heartily, and, giving me his arm, conducted us to where Mrs. Lincoln was awaiting.” Leaving the two women together, the men went into the president’s room for a short consultation, “at the end of which,” reported Crook, “Mr. Lincoln appeared particularly happy,” reassured by Grant’s estimation that the conflict was nearing an end. After the Grants left, Lincoln and Mary, appearing “in very good spirits,” talked late into the night.
While the Lincolns were breakfasting the next day on the lower deck, Robert came by to report that the review planned for that morning would have to be postponed. Rebels had initiated an attack on Fort Stedman, only eight miles away. With Grant and Sherman closing in upon him, Lee had decided to abandon Petersburg and move his army south to North Carolina, hoping to join General Joseph Johnston and prevent Sherman from joining Grant. Abandoning Petersburg meant losing Richmond, but it was the only way to save his army. The attack on Fort Stedman, intended to open an escape route, took the Federals by surprise. Nonetheless, within hours, Grant’s men succeeded in retaking the fort and restoring the original line.
After breakfast, Lincoln walked up the bluff to Grant’s headquarters, where plans were made for a visit to the front. As the presidential party passed by the battle sites, it became clear that the engagement had been more serious than first realized. “The ground immediately about us was still strewn with dead and wounded men,” recalled Barnes. The Confederates had suffered nearly five thousand casualties; the Federals over two thousand. Burial parties were already at work as ambulances transported the wounded to the hospital and surgeons attended those still lying in the field. When a long line of captured Confederate soldiers passed by, “Lincoln remarked upon their sad and unhappy condition…his whole face showing sympathetic feeling for the suffering about him.” On the return trip, he commented “that he had seen enough of the horrors of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end, and that there would be no more bloodshed or ruin of homes.”
“I am here within five miles of the scene of this morning’s action,” Lincoln telegraphed Stanton from Meade’s headquarters in the field. “I have seen the prisoners myself and they look like there might be the number Meade states—1600.” Unsettled by Lincoln’s proximity to the front, Stanton replied, “I hope you will remember Gen. Harrison’s advice to his men at Tippecanoe, that they ‘can see as well a little further off.’” But for the soldiers in the field who greeted him with heartfelt cheers, Lincoln’s presence at the scene revealed that “he was not afraid to show himself among them, and willing to share their dangers here, as often, far away, he had shared the joy of their triumphs.”
Seated at the campfire that night, Lincoln seemed to Horace Porter much more “grave and his language much more serious than usual.” Undoubtedly, the grisly images of the dead and wounded were not easily dismissed. As the night wore on, the president rallied and “entertained the general-in-chief and several members of the staff by talking in a most interesting manner about public affairs, and illustrating the subjects mentioned with his incomparable anecdotes.” Toward the end of the evening, Grant asked, “Mr. President, did you at any time doubt the final success of the cause?” “Never for a moment,” Lincoln replied.
Grant then turned the conversation to the Trent affair. According to Grant, Seward had given “a very interesting account” of the tangled questions involved during his visit the previous summer. “‘Yes,’ said the President; ‘Seward studied up all the works ever written on international law, and came to cabinet meetings loaded to the muzzle with the subject. We gave due consideration to the case, but at that critical period of the war it was soon decided to deliver up the prisoners. It was a pretty bitter pill to swallow, but I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted upon us.”
Lincoln continued, “I felt a good deal like the sick man in Illinois who was told he probably had n’t many days longer to live, and he ought to make his peace with any enemies he might have. He said the man he hated worst of all was a fellow named Brown, in the next village…. So Brown was sent for, and when he came the sick man began to say, in a voice as meek as Moses’s, that he wanted to die at peace with all his fellow-creatures, and he hoped he and Brown could now shake hands and bury all their enmity. The scene was becoming altogether too pathetic for Brown, who had to get out his handkerchief and wipe the gathering tears from his eyes…. After a parting that would have softened the heart of a grindstone, Brown had about reached the room door when the sick man rose up on his elbow and called out to him: ‘But see here, Brown; if I should happen to get well, mind, that old grudge stands.’ So I thought that if this nation should happen to get well we might want that old grudge against England to stand.” Everyone laughed heartily, and the pleasant evening drew to a close.
On Sunday morning, the River Queen carried the presidential party downriver to where Admiral Porter’s naval flotilla awaited them, “ranged in double line, dressed with flags, the crews on deck cheering.” As each vessel passed by, reported Barnes, Lincoln “waved his high hat as if saluting old friends in his native town, and seemed as happy as a schoolboy.” After lunch aboard Porter’s flagship, the River Queen sailed to Aiken’s Landing. There, arrangements were made for Lincoln to ride on horseback with Grant to General Ord’s encampment four miles away while Mary Lincoln and Julia Grant followed in an ambulance. “The President was in high spirits,” observed Barnes, “laughing and chatting first to General Grant and then to General Ord as they rode forward through the woods and over the swamps.” Reaching the parade ground ahead of the ladies, they decided to begin the review without them, since the troops had been waiting for hours and had missed their midday meal. General Ord’s wife, Mary, asked if “it was proper for her to accompany the cavalcade” without Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant. “Of course,” she was told. “Come along!”
Meanwhile, the ambulance carrying the women had encountered great discomfort due to the corduroyed road, which jounced them into the air each time a log was struck. Concerned that the agonizingly slow pace would make them late for the review, Mary ordered the driver to go faster. This only made things worse, for the first “jolt lifted the party clear off the seats,” striking their heads on the top of the wagon. Mary “now insisted on getting out and walking,” recalled Horace Porter, who had been assigned to escort the ladies, “but as the mud was nearly hub-deep, Mrs. Grant and I persuaded her that we had better stick to the wagon as our only ark of refuge.”
When Mary finally reached the parade grounds and saw the attractive Mrs. Ord riding beside her husband in the place of honor that should have been her own, she erupted in an embarrassing tirade against Mrs. Ord, calling her “vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers.” Mrs. Ord, according to one observer, “burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs. Lincoln refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs. Grant tried to stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified.”
That evening Mary continued her harangue at dinner, manifestly aggrieving her husband, whose attitude toward her, marveled Captain Barnes, “was always that of the most affectionate solicitude, so marked, so gentle and unaffected that no one could see them together without being impressed by it.” Knowing his wife would awake the next morning humiliated by such a public display of temper, Lincoln had no desire to exacerbate the situation. Perhaps, as Mary’s biographer suggests, the blow in the wagon that Mary suffered to her head had initiated a migraine headache, spurring the irrational outburst of wrath. Whether from illness or mortification, she remained sequestered in her stateroom for the next few days.
At this time, General Sherman was on his way to City Point. His army had stopped in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to resupply, leaving him several days to visit Grant and discuss plans for the final push. When Sherman arrived, he and Grant eagerly greeted each other, “their hands locked in a cordial grasp.” To Horace Porter, “their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war tragedy.” After talking for an hour, they walked down to the wharf and joined the president on theRiver Queen. Lincoln greeted Sherman “with a warmth of manner and expression” that the general would long remember, and initiated “a lively conversation,” intently questioning Sherman about his march from Savannah to Goldsboro.
The talk darkened as Sherman and Grant agreed that “one more bloody battle was likely to occur before the close of the war.” They believed Lee’s only option now was to retreat to the Carolinas. There, joining forces with Johnston, he would stage a desperate attack against either Sherman or Grant. “Must more blood be shed?” Lincoln asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” That was not in their hands, the generals explained. All would depend upon the actions taken by Robert E. Lee.
The next morning, March 28, Sherman and Grant, accompanied this time by Admiral Porter, returned to the River Queen for a long talk with Lincoln in the upper saloon. With the war drawing to a close, Sherman inquired of Lincoln: “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.?” Lincoln replied that “all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in the their shops.” He wanted no retaliation or retribution. “Let them have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.”
Regarding Jefferson Davis and his top political leaders, Lincoln privately wished they could somehow “escape the country,” though he could not say this in public. “As usual,” Sherman recalled, “he illustrated his meaning by a story: ‘A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a friend, he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, [the man] accepted. In preparing the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy-bottle, and said the lemonade would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest said, if he could do so “unbeknown” to him, he would not object.’” Sherman grasped the point immediately. “Mr. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, ‘unbeknown’ to him.”
Later that afternoon, Sherman left City Point to return to his troops and prepare for the expected battle. Saying goodbye to the president, he “was more than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people,” and his “absolute faith in the courage, manliness, and integrity of the armies in the field.” To be sure, “his face was care-worn and haggard; but, the moment he began to talk, his face lightened up, his tall form, as it were, unfolded, and he was the very impersonation of good-humor and fellowship.” A decade later, Sherman remained convinced of Lincoln’s unparalleled leadership. “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”
Lincoln walked to the railroad station early the next morning to bid farewell to Grant, who was heading to the front for what they hoped would be the final offensive against Lee. Oppressed by thoughts of the expected battle, “Lincoln looked more serious than at any other time since he had visited headquarters,” recalled Horace Porter; “the lines in his face seemed deeper, and the rings under his eyes were of a darker hue.” As the train pulled away from the platform, Grant and his party tipped their hats in honor of the president. Returning the salute, his “voice broken by an emotion he could ill conceal,” Lincoln said: “Good-by, gentlemen, God bless you all!”
As Grant was leaving City Point, Seward was heading south to join Lincoln. “I think the President must have telegraphed for him,” Welles surmised, “and if so I came to the conclusion that efforts are again being made for peace. I am by no means certain that this irregular proceeding and importunity on the part of the Executive is the wisest course.” The Tribune concurred: “We presume no person of even average sagacity has imagined that the President of the United States had gone down to the front at such a time as this in quest merely of pleasure, or leisure or health even.” That he hoped to “bring peace with him on his return,” the editorial suggested, was “too palpable to be doubted.”
Though Lincoln clearly would have loved “to bring peace with him on his return,” he went to City Point with no intention of engaging in further negotiations. He had, in fact, sought a “change of air & rest,” as well as the chance “to escape the unceasing and relentless pressure of visitors.” More important, he wanted to underscore his directive that Grant should converse with Lee only with regard to capitulation or solely military concerns. Grant was “not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands.” Lincoln wished to ensure that his lenient policy toward the rebels would not be undercut by a punitive agenda.
He knew that work was accumulating on his desk as his second week of absence from Washington began, but he was not yet ready to return. “I begin to feel that I ought to be at home,” he telegraphed Stanton on March 30, “and yet I dislike to leave without seeing nearer to the end of General Grant’s present movement. He has now been out since yesterday morning…. Last night at 10.15, when it was dark as a rainy night without a moon could be, a furious cannonade, soon joined in by a heavy musketry-fire, opened near Petersburg and lasted about two hours. The sound was very distinct here, as also were the flashes of guns upon the clouds. It seemed to me a great battle, but the older hands here scarcely noticed it, and, sure enough, this morning it was found that very little had been done.” Stanton replied promptly, “I hope you will stay to see it out, or for a few days at least. I have strong faith that your presence will have great influence in inducing exertions that will bring Richmond; compared to that no other duty can weigh a feather…. A pause by the army now would do harm; if you are on the ground there will be no pause. All well here.”
Seward, who had most likely come to keep Lincoln company, remained only two days. On April 1, he accompanied Mary back to Washington. The Lincolns had apparently decided that, after her public outburst, she would be better off in the White House, away from prying reporters. Moreover, Lincoln had related to her a dream in which the White House had caught fire, and Mary wanted to assure herself that all was well. Once she was aboard the steamer heading north, her spirits lifted abruptly. Fellow passenger Carl Schurz talked with her on the voyage. She “was overwhelmingly charming to me,” he wrote to his wife. “She chided me for not visiting her, overpowered me with invitations, and finally had me driven to my hotel in her own state carriage. I learned more state secrets in a few hours than I could otherwise in a year…. She is an astounding person.”
All that day, Lincoln haunted the telegraph office at City Point, anxiously awaiting news from Grant. Returning to the River Queen, he could see “the flash of the cannon” in the distance, signaling that the battle for Petersburg had begun. “Almost all night he walked up and down the deck,” Crook recalled, “pausing now and then to listen or to look out into the darkness to see if he could see anything. I have never seen such suffering in the face of any man as was in his that night.”
The battle was intense, but by early morning, the Federals had broken through Petersburg’s outer lines of defense and had almost reached General Lee’s headquarters at the Turnbull House. Realizing he could no longer hold on, Lee ordered his troops to withdraw from both Petersburg and Richmond. That evening Lincoln received the news that Grant had “Petersburg completely enveloped from river below to river above,” and had taken “about 12,000 prisoners.” Grant invited the president to visit him in Petersburg the following day.
Earlier that day, Lincoln had moved from the luxurious River Queen to the compact Malvern, Admiral Porter’s flagship. Concerned by the cramped quarters, Porter had offered Lincoln his bed, “but he positively declined it,” Porter recalled, choosing instead “the smallest kind of a room, six feet long by four and a half feet wide.” The next morning he insisted he had “slept well,” but teasingly remarked that “you can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard.” Realizing that the president’s six-foot-four frame must have overhung the bed considerably, Porter got carpenters to knock down the wall, increasing the size of both the room and the bed. When Lincoln awoke the next morning, he announced with delight that “a greater miracle than ever happened last night; I shrank six inches in length and about a foot sideways.”
To reach Grant, who was waiting in “a comfortable-looking brick house with a yard in front” on Market Street in Petersburg, Lincoln had to ride over the battlefields, littered with dead and dying soldiers. Years later, his bodyguard could recall the sight of “one man with a bullet-hole through his forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” As Lincoln absorbed the sorrowful scene, Crook noticed that his “face settled into its old lines of sadness.” By the time he reached Grant, he had recovered himself. Grant’s aide Horace Porter watched as Lincoln “dismounted in the street, and came in through the front gate with long and rapid strides, his face beaming with delight. He seized General Grant’s hand as the general stepped forward to greet him, and stood shaking it for some time.” Lincoln showed such elation that Porter doubted whether he had “ever experienced a happier moment in his life.”
Lincoln and his lieutenant general conferred for about an hour and a half on the piazza in front of the house while curious citizens strolled by. Though no word had arrived yet from Richmond, Grant surmised that, with the fall of Petersburg, Lee had no choice but to evacuate the capital and move west along the Danville Road, hoping to escape to North Carolina, in which case the Federals would attempt to “get ahead of him and cut him off.” Grant had hoped to receive word of Richmond’s fall while still in the president’s company, but when no message arrived, he felt compelled to join his troops in the field.
Lincoln was back at City Point when news reached him that Union troops commanded by General Weitzel had now occupied Richmond. “Thank God that I have lived to see this!” he remarked to Admiral Porter. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.”
For Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government, the nightmare was just beginning. Twenty-four hours earlier, the Confederate president had received the devastating news of Lee’s evacuation plans. Seated in his customary pew at St. Paul’s Church for the Sunday service, Davis had received “a telegram announcing that General Lee could not hold his position longer than till night, and warning [him] that we must leave Richmond, as the army would commence retreating that evening.”
“Thereupon,” an attendant at the service noted, Davis “instantly arose, and walked hurriedly down the aisle, beneath the questionings of all eyes in the house.” Summoning his cabinet to an emergency session, he made preparations for a special train to carry the leading officials and important government papers south and west to Danville, where a new capital could be established. As word of the evacuation of the troops spread, the citizenry panicked, and a general exodus began. In the tumult, a small fire, deliberately set to destroy the tobacco warehouses before the Federals arrived, raged out of control, burning “nearly everything between Main street and the river for about three-quarters of a mile.” All the public buildings in its path, including the offices of the Richmond Examiner and the Inquirer, were destroyed, leaving only the Customhouse and the Spotswood Hotel.
The news of Richmond’s capture on April 3, 1865, reached the War Department in Washington shortly before noon. When over the wire came the words “Here is the first message for you in four years from Richmond,” the telegraph operator leaped from his seat and shouted from the window, “Richmond has fallen.” The news quickly “spread by a thousand mouths,” and “almost by magic the streets were crowded with hosts of people, talking, laughing, hurrahing, and shouting in the fullness of their joy.” A Herald reporter noted that many “wept as children” while “men embraced and kissed each other upon the streets; friends who had been estranged for years shook hands and renewed their vows of friendship.”
Gathering at the War Department, the crowd called for Stanton, who had not left his post for several nights. “As he stood upon the steps to speak,” recalled his aide A. E. Johnson, “he trembled like a leaf, and his voice showed his emotion.” He began by expressing “gratitude to Almighty God for his deliverance of the nation,” then called for thanks “to the President, to the Army and Navy, to the great commanders by sea and land, to the gallant officers and men who have periled their lives upon the battle-field, and drenched the soil with their blood.” Stanton was “so overcome by emotion that he could not speak continuously,” but when he finished, the crowd roared its approval.
Seward, who had been at the War Department awaiting news of Richmond’s fall, was urged to speak next. Clearly understanding that the moment belonged to Stanton, he kept his remarks short and humorous. He was beginning to think that it was time for a change in the cabinet, he began. “Why I started to go to ‘the front’ the other day, and when I got to City Point they told me it was at Hatcher’s Run, and when I got there I was told it was not there but somewhere else, and when I get back I am told by the Secretary that it is at Petersburg; but before I can realize that, I am told again that it is at Richmond, and west of that. Now I leave you to judge what I ought to think of such a Secretary of War as this.” The crowd erupted in “loud and lusty” cheers, and a “beaming” Stanton led them in a chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Newspapers raced to issue special editions. “The demand seemed inexhaustible,” the Star reported, “and almost beyond the power of our lightning press to supply.” One hundred Herald couriers, “as fleet on foot and as breathless with enthusiasm as Malice with his fiery cross,” raced to distribute papers in every section of the city. EXTRA! GLORIOUS! FALL OF RICHMOND! read the headlines, adding that black troops were among the first to enter the city. For anyone who missed the cries of the newsboys, the sound of eight hundred guns, fired at Stanton’s order, marked the signal triumph.
That night, with bands playing in the streets, candles sparkling in the windows of government buildings, and flags flying from every housetop, Seward joined a group of guests for dinner at Stanton’s house. The evening’s joy was diminished only by the anxiety Stanton and Seward shared for Lincoln’s safety. Earlier that day, Seward had talked with James Speed about his fear that “if there were to be assassinations, now was the time.” With the fall of Richmond, Seward told Speed, “the Southern people would feel as though the world had come to an end.” At such moments, history suggested, desperate men might be prompted to take desperate action, and “the President, being the most marked man on the Federal side, was the most liable to attack.” Aware that Mary had invited Speed to join her two days later on a return trip to City Point, Seward begged him to “warn the President of the danger.”
Stanton, who worried constantly about the president’s safety, needed no reminders that the situation was more hazardous than ever. He had tried to keep Lincoln from going to Petersburg, asking him “to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequence of any disaster to yourself,” and pointing out that while generals must run such risks “in the line of their duty,” political leaders were not “in the same condition.” Lincoln was already back from Petersburg when he received Stanton’s telegram. He thanked the secretary for his concern and promised to “take care of [himself],” while simultaneously announcing his intended departure for Richmond the next day.
At 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, April 4, Lincoln set forth on his historic journey to Richmond. When the Malvern reached the channel approaching the city, its passage was blocked by “wreckage of all sorts,” including “dead horses, broken ordnance, wrecked boats,” and floating torpedoes. They were forced to transfer to the captain’s barge, which was towed in behind a little tug manned by marines. When the tug went aground, the president’s arrival was left to the rowing skills of a dozen sailors. The situation was unnerving to Crook. “On either side,” he recalled, “we passed so close to torpedoes that we could have put out our hands and touched them.”
“Here we were in a solitary boat,” Admiral Porter remembered, “after having set out with a number of vessels flying flags at every mast-head, hoping to enter the conquered capital in a manner befitting the rank of the President of the United States.” Lincoln was not disturbed in the slightest. The situation reminded him, he cheerfully noted, of a man who had approached him seeking a high position as a consulate minister: “Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.”
No sooner had the presidential party reached the landing than Lincoln was surrounded by a small group of black laborers shouting, “Bress de Lord!…dere is de great Messiah!…Glory, Hallelujah!” First one and then several others fell on their knees. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln said, his voice full of emotion, “that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The men stood up, joined hands, and began to sing a hymn. The streets, which had been “entirely deserted,” became “suddenly alive” with crowds of black people “tumbling and shouting, from over the hills and from the water-side.”
An ever-growing crowd trailed Lincoln as he walked up the street. “It was a warm day,” Admiral Porter noted, and Lincoln, whose tall figure “overtopped every man there,” was easily visible. From the windows of the houses along the two-mile route, hundreds of white faces looked on with curiosity at the lanky figure, “walking with his usual long, careless stride, and looking about with an interested air and taking in everything.”
Lincoln’s bodyguard was relieved when they finally reached the safety of General Weitzel’s headquarters, for he thought he had glimpsed a figure in Confederate uniform pointing a gun at Lincoln from a window along the route. Weitzel and his officers had occupied the stucco mansion that Jefferson Davis had abandoned only two days earlier. Captain Barnes recalled that when Lincoln walked into the “comfortably furnished” office of the Confederate president, he crossed the room “to the easy chair and sank down in it.” To all present, it seemed “a supreme moment,” but Lincoln betrayed no sense of exaltation or triumph. His first words, softly spoken, were simply to ask for a glass of water. The water was promptly supplied, along with a bottle of whiskey. An old black servant still at his post told them that “Mrs. Davis had ordered him to have the house in good condition for the Yankees.”
Lincoln had already toured the mansion, seeming “interested in everything,” and had met with the members of General Weitzel’s staff, when the Confederate assistant secretary of war, John Campbell, arrived to see him. Lincoln welcomed Campbell, whom he had met two months earlier at the Hampton Roads Conference. While the details of their conversation were later disputed, it appears that Lincoln, still fearing that Lee might engage in a final battle, agreed to allow the Virginia legislature to convene, on the understanding that they would repeal the order of secession and remove the state’s troops from the war.
Riding through the city that afternoon in an open carriage, the president and his entourage found the Confederate statehouse “in dreadful disorder, signs of a sudden and unexpected flight; members’ tables were upset, bales of Confederate scrip were lying about the floor, and many official documents of some value were scattered about.” When they finally returned to the flagship, both Admiral Porter and William Crook were greatly relieved. Having worried all day about Lincoln’s safety, Crook later wrote that it was “nothing short of miraculous that some attempt on [Lincoln’s] life was not made. It is to the everlasting glory of the South that he was permitted to come and go in peace.”
As Lincoln rested on the Malvern that night, all the public buildings in the nation’s capital were illuminated by order of the secretary of state. “The city was all alight with rockets, fireworks, and illuminations of every description,” observed Noah Brooks, “the streets being one blaze of glory.” It seemed “the entire population of Washington” had poured into the streets to share in the triumph and view the brilliant spectacle produced by “thousands of lighted candles.”
Though Seward joined in the glorious celebrations, he continued to fret. The following day he told Welles that he had secured a revenue cutter to take him to Richmond with some important papers that required the president’s immediate attention. “He is filled with anxiety to see the President,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and these schemes are his apology.”
Minutes after taking leave of Welles, Seward nearly lost his life in a carriage accident. Fanny and her friend Mary Titus had come to the Department to join her father and brother Fred for their “customary” afternoon ride. As the horses moved up Vermont Avenue, the coachman stopped to close the carriage door, which had not been properly latched. Before he could return to his seat, the horses bolted, “swinging the driver by the reins as one would swing a cat by the tail.” Both Fred and Seward jumped out, hoping they could stop the runaway horses. Fred was not hurt, but Seward caught his heel on the carriage as he jumped, and landed “violently upon the pavement,” causing him to lose consciousness.
“The horses tore along,” Fanny recorded in her diary, and “we seemed to be whirling on to certain destruction.” At an alley, they “turned. We brushed against a tree,” and headed straight toward the corner of a house, where she feared she would be “crushed to death.” Fortunately, a passing soldier got control of the reins and brought an end to the terrifying ride. Rushing back to the place where her father had fallen, Fanny was horrified to find his broken body, “blood streaming from his mouth.” At first she feared he was dead.
For two hours after he was carried to his home, Seward remained unconscious. When he came to at last, he was delirious with pain, having suffered a broken jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder. Doctors arrived, and Fanny could hear his agonized cries through the bedroom door. When she was finally allowed to see him, “he was so disfigured by bruises…that he had scarcely a trace of resemblance to himself.”
Hearing the news, Stanton rushed to Seward’s bedside, where, Fanny recalled, he “was like a woman in the sickroom.” He ministered carefully to his friend, perhaps remembering childhood days when he had accompanied his father on sick calls. He “wiped his lips” where the blood had caked, “spoke gently to him,” and remained by his side for hours. Returning to the War Department, Stanton sent Lincoln a telegram at City Point: “Mr Seward was thrown from his carriage his shoulder bone at the head of the joint broken off, his head and face much bruised and he is in my opinion dangerously injured. I think your presence here is needed.”
Receiving the message shortly before midnight, Lincoln advised Grant that Seward’s accident necessitated his return to Washington. Meanwhile, Mary and her invited guests, including James Speed, Elizabeth Keckley, Charles Sumner, Senator Harlan, and the Marquis de Chambrun, were steaming toward City Point. At dawn the next morning, Mary sent a telegram to Stanton: “If Mr Seward is not too severely injured—cannot the President, remain until we arrive at City Point.” By this time the surgeon general had determined that Seward had suffered no internal injuries. Stanton informed Mary that there was “no objection to the President remaining at City Point.” A few hours later, he sent word to Lincoln that Seward was recovering. “I have seen him and read him all the news…. His mind is clear and spirits good.”
When Mary’s party arrived at noon on April 6, Lincoln brought them into the drawing room of the River Queen and relayed the latest bulletins, all positive, from Grant. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously changed,” Senator Harlan noted. “He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been attained.” Nonetheless, the marquis marveled, “it was impossible to detect in him the slightest feeling of pride, much less of vanity.”
While the visitors went off to Richmond, Lincoln remained at City Point to await further word from Grant. Welcome news soon arrived—a copy of a telegram from Sheridan, reporting a successful engagement with Lee’s retreating armies that had resulted in the capture of “several thousand prisoners,” including a half-dozen generals. “If the thing is pressed,” Sheridan predicted, “I think Lee will surrender.” Lincoln rejoined: “Let the thing be pressed.”
That evening Julia Grant, accompanied by Lincoln’s old friend E. B. Washburne, joined the Lincoln party on the River Queen. The conversation turned on what should be done with Jefferson Davis if he were apprehended. “Don’t allow him to escape the law,” one of the group said, “he must be hung.” At once Lincoln interjected: “Let us judge not, that we be not judged.”
On Saturday morning, Lincoln and his guests visited Petersburg. At a certain spot, the marquis recalled, “he gave orders to stop the carriage.” On his previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a “very tall and beautiful” oak tree that he wanted to examine more closely. “He admired the strength of its trunk, the vigorous development of branches,” which reminded him of “the great oaks” in the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed “an old country graveyard” where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” On the train ride back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle “basking in the warm sunshine on the wayside.” He asked that the train be stopped so that the turtle could be brought into the car. “The movements of the ungainly little animal seemed to delight him,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared “a happy laugh” all the way back to the wharf.
Such distractions could not forestall the afternoon’s grim task. Lincoln visited injured soldiers at City Point, moving “from one bed to another,” the marquis recalled, “saying a friendly word to each wounded man, or at least giving him a handshake.” At one bed, he held the hand of a twenty-four-year-old captain who had been cited for bravery. “The dying man half-opened his eyes; a faint smile passed over his lips. It was then that his pulse ceased beating.” Lincoln remained among the wounded for five hours and returned to the steamer depleted. “There has been war enough,” he said when the marquis inquired about troubles with France over Mexico, “during my second term there will be no more fighting.”
That evening, as the River Queen prepared to return to Washington, Grant’s officers and staff came to say farewell. Lincoln had hoped to remain at City Point until Lee’s surrender, but he felt he should visit Seward. “As the twilight shadows deepened the lamps were lighted, and the boat was brilliantly illuminated,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled, “it looked like an enchanted floating palace.” When the military band came aboard, Lincoln asked them to play “La Marseillaise” in honor of the Marquis de Chambrun.
As the River Queen steamed toward Washington on Sunday, “the conversation,” Chambrun recalled, “dwelt upon literary subjects.” Holding “a beautiful quarto copy of Shakespeare in his hands,” Lincoln read several passages from Macbeth, including the king’s pained tribute to the murdered Duncan:
Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
Lincoln read the lines slowly, marveling “how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim,” and when he finished, “he read over again the same scene.” Lincoln’s ominous selection prompted James Speed to deliver Seward’s warning about the increased threat upon his life. “He stopped me at once,” Speed recalled, “saying, he had rather be dead than to live in continual dread.” Moreover, he considered it essential “that the people know I come among them without fear.”
Early that evening, the steamer passed by Mount Vernon, prompting Chambrun to say to Lincoln, “Mount Vernon and Springfield, the memories of Washington and your own, those of the revolutionary and civil wars; these are the spots and names America shall one day equally honor.” The remark brought a dreamy smile to Lincoln’s face. “Springfield!” he said. “How happy, four years hence, will I be to return there in peace and tranquility.”
Years later, Chambrun remained intrigued by Lincoln’s temperament. On first impression, he “left with you with a sort of impression of vague and deep sadness.” Yet he “was quite humorous,” often telling hilarious stories and laughing uproariously. “But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes, and all his features would at once bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear.”
Lincoln’s bodyguard, William Crook, believed he understood something of the shifting moods that mystified the French aristocrat. He had observed that Lincoln seemed to absorb the horrors of the war into himself. In the course of the two-week trip, Crook had witnessed Lincoln’s “agony when the thunder of the cannon told him that men were being cut down like grass.” He had seen the anguish on the president’s face when he came within “sight of the poor, torn bodies of the dead and dying on the field of Petersburg.” He discerned his “painful sympathy with the forlorn rebel prisoners,” and his profound distress at “the revelation of the devastation of a noble people in ruined Richmond.” In each instance, Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him—the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.
DIRECTLY UPON HIS RETURN to Washington, Lincoln went to Seward’s bedside. “It was in the evening,” Fred Seward recalled, “the gas-lights were turned down low, and the house was still, every one moving softly, and speaking in whispers.” His father had taken a turn for the worse. A high fever had developed, and “grave apprehensions were entertained, by his medical attendants, that his system would not survive the injuries and the shock.” Frances had hurried down from Auburn to find her husband in a more serious state than she had imagined, his face “so marred and swollen and discolored that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity; his voice so changed; utterance almost entirely prevented by the broken jaw and the swollen tongue. It makes my heart ache to look at him.” His mind was “perfectly clear,” however, and he remained, as always, “patient and uncomplaining.”
“The extreme sensitiveness of the wounded arm,” Fred recalled, “made even the touch of the bed clothing intolerable. To keep it free from their contact, he was lying on the edge of the bed, farthest from the door.” When Lincoln entered the room, he walked over to the far side of the bed and sat down near the bandaged patient. “You are back from Richmond?” Seward queried in a halting, scarcely audible voice. “Yes,” Lincoln replied, “and I think we are near the end, at last.” To continue the conversation more intimately, Lincoln stretched out on the bed. Supporting his head with his hand, Lincoln lay side by side with Seward, as they had done at the time of their first meeting in Massachusetts many years before. When Fanny came in to sit down, Lincoln somehow managed to unfold his long arm and bring it “around the foot of the bed, to shake hands in his cordial way.” He related the details of his trip to Richmond, where he had “worked as hard” at the task of shaking seven thousand hands as he had when he sawed wood, “& seemed,” Fanny thought, “much satisfied at the labor.”
Finally, when he saw that Seward had fallen into a much-needed sleep, Lincoln quietly got up and left the room. Drained by Seward’s grievous condition, Lincoln revived when Stanton burst into the White House bearing a telegram from Grant: “General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon upon terms proposed by myself.” It was later said that “the President hugged him with joy” upon hearing the news, and then went immediately to tell Mary.
Although it was close to 10 p.m., Stanton knew that Seward would want to be awakened for this news. “God bless you,” Seward said when Stanton read the telegram. This was the third time Stanton had come to see Seward that Sunday. “Don’t try to speak,” Stanton said. “You have made me cry for the first time in my life,” Seward replied.
BOTH GRANT AND LEE had acquitted themselves admirably at the courtly surrender ceremony that afternoon at the Appomattox Court House. “One general, magnanimous in victory,” historian Jay Winik writes, “the other, gracious and equally dignified in defeat.” Two days earlier, Grant had sent a note to Lee asking him to surrender. In light of “the result of the last week,” Grant wrote, he hoped that Lee understood “the hopelessness of further resistance” and would choose to prevent “any further effusion of blood.” At first Lee refused to accept the futility of his cause, contemplating one last attempt to escape. But Sunday morning, with his troops almost completely surrounded, Lee sent word to Grant that he was ready to surrender.
As the distinguished silver-haired general dressed for the historic meeting, his biographer writes, he “put on his handsomest sword and his sash of deep, red silk.” Thinking it likely he would be imprisoned before day’s end, he told General William Pendleton, “I must make my best appearance.” He need not have worried, for Grant was determined to follow Lincoln’s lenient guidelines. The terms of surrender allowed Confederate officers, after relinquishing their arms and artillery, “to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authority,” on the condition that they never “take up arms” against the Union “until properly exchanged.”
As Grant continued to work out the terms, he later recalled, “the thought occurred to me that the officers had their own private horses and effects, which were important to them, but of no value to us; also that it would be an unnecessary humiliation to call upon them to deliver their side arms.” He therefore added a provision allowing officers to take their sidearms, as well as their private horses and baggage. This permission, Lee observed, “would have a happy effect upon his army.” Before the two men parted, Lee mentioned that “his army was in a very bad condition for want of food.” Grant responded immediately, promising to send rations for twenty-five thousand men.
As Lee rode back to his headquarters, word of the surrender spread through the Confederate lines. He tried to speak to his men, but “tears came into his eyes,” and he could manage to say only “Men, we have fought the war together, and I have done the best I could for you.” If Lee had trouble expressing his grief and pride, his soldiers showed no such reservations. In an overwhelming display of respect and devotion, they spontaneously arranged themselves on “each side of the road to greet him as he passed, and two solid walls of men were formed along the whole distance.” When their cheers brought tears to Lee’s eyes, they, too, began to weep. “Each group began in the same way, with cheers, and ended in the same way, with sobs, all along the route to his quarters.” One soldier spoke for all: “I love you just as well as ever, General Lee!”
At dawn the next day, Noah Brooks heard “a great boom.” The reverberation of a five-hundred-gun salute “startled the misty air of Washington, shaking the very earth, and breaking the windows of houses about Lafayette Square.” The morning newspapers would carry the details, but “this was Secretary Stanton’s way of telling the people that the Army of Northern Virginia had at last laid down its arms.”
“The nation seems delirious with joy,” noted Welles. “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering—all, all jubilant. This surrender of the great Rebel captain and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the Rebellion.” A spontaneous holiday was announced in all departments. Employees poured into the streets.
An exuberant crowd of several thousand gathered at the White House. “The bands played, the howitzers belched forth their thunder, and the people cheered,” reported the National Intelligencer. Despite shouted demands for him to speak, Lincoln hesitated. He was planning a speech for the following evening and did not want to “dribble it all out” before he completed his thoughts. If he said something mistaken, it would make its way into print, and a person in his position, he modestly said, “ought at least try not to make mistakes.” Still, the crowd was so insistent that the president finally appeared at the second-story window, where he “was received in the most enthusiastic manner, the people waving their hats, swinging their umbrellas, and the ladies waving their handkerchiefs.”
When the assembly quieted down, Lincoln acknowledged their euphoria with a smile of his own. “I am very greatly rejoiced to find that an occasion has occurred so pleasurable that the people cannot restrain themselves.” These words drew even wilder cheers. Lincoln then announced a special request for the band. “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he began. “Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it.” This was followed by tumultuous applause. “I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.” In requesting the patriotic song of the South, Lincoln believed that “it is good to show the rebels that with us they will be free to hear it again.” The band followed “Dixie” with “Yankee Doodle,” and “the crowd went off in high good-humor.”
“If possible,” Mary wrote, “this is a happier day, than last Monday,” when the news of Richmond’s capture had reached Washington. Her exhilaration was evident in a note she wrote to Charles Sumner the next morning, inviting him and the marquis to join her in a carriage ride around the city to see the grand illumination and to hear the president speak. “It does not appear to me,” she wrote, “that this womanly curiosity will be undignified or indiscreet, qu’en pensez vous?”
Illuminated once again, the city was spectacular to behold. The windows of every government building were ablaze with candles and lanterns, and the lights of the newly completed Capitol dome were visible for miles around. “Bonfires blazed in many parts of the city, and rockets were fired” in ongoing celebrations. Knowing the president was going to address the public, Stanton put his men to work decorating the front of the War Department “with flags, corps badges and evergreens.”
When Lincoln came to a second-story window on the north side of the White House, “he carried a roll of manuscript in his hand.” He had explained to Noah Brooks that “this was a precaution” against colloquial expressions that might offend men such as Charles Sumner, who had objected previously to phrases such as “the rebels turned tail and ran” or “sugar-coated pill.” At the sight of the president, the immense crowd’s enthusiasm was loosed in “wave after wave of applause,” requiring him to stand still for some time until the din subsided.
“The speech,” Noah Brooks observed, “was longer than most people had expected, and of a different character.” Instead of simply celebrating the moment, Lincoln wanted to address the national debate surrounding the reintroduction of the Southern states into the Union, “the greatest question,” he still believed, “ever presented to practical statesmanship.” He acknowledged that in Louisiana, where the process had already begun, some were disappointed that, in the new state constitution, “the elective franchise is not given to the colored man.” He felt the right of suffrage should be extended to blacks—to those who were literate and those “who serve our cause as soldiers.” On the other hand, the new Louisiana constitution contained a number of remarkable provisions. It emancipated all the slaves within the state and provided “the benefit of public schools equally to black and white.” The state legislature, which had already revealed its good intentions by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, was empowered specifically “to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man.” Were they to cast out the hard work already achieved, Lincoln asked rhetorically, or trust that this was the start of a process that would eventually produce “a complete success”? Relying on a simple, rustic image to convey the complex question, he wondered if “we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”
In the crowd that evening was Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. The younger brother of the famed Shakespearian actor Edwin Booth, whose performances Lincoln so admired, Wilkes had also acquired popularity as an actor. Unlike his older brother, who supported the Union, John Wilkes “had spent the most formative years of his youth in the South” and had developed an abiding passion for the rebels’ cause. In recent months, this passion had become a full-blown obsessive hatred for the North. Since the previous summer, he and a small group of conspirators had evolved a plan to kidnap Lincoln and bring him to Richmond, where he could be exchanged for rebel prisoners of war. The capture of Richmond and the surrender of Lee rendered the plan useless, but Booth was not ready to yield. “Our cause being almost lost,” he wrote in his diary, “something decisive and great must be done.”
Two other conspirators were with Booth in the crowd—drugstore clerk David Herold and former Confederate soldier Lewis Powell, also known as Lewis Payne. When Lincoln spoke of his desire to extend suffrage to blacks, Booth turned to Powell. “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make,” he said. He pleaded with Powell to shoot Lincoln then and there. When Powell demurred, Booth proclaimed, “By God, I’ll put him through.”
Curiously, Lincoln had recently experienced a dream that carried ominous intimations. “There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me,” Lincoln purportedly told Ward Lamon. “Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping…. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along…. Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’”
Lamon also described what he claimed was the president’s attempt to evade the dire portent of the dream. “Don’t you see how it will turn out?” Lincoln comforted Lamon. “In this dream, it was not me but some other fellow that was killed…. Well, let it go. I think the Lord in His own goodtime and way will work this out all right. God knows what is best.” Historian Don Fehrenbacher is persuasive that Lamon’s chronology is confused, which casts doubt on the veracity of the entire story. Yet Lincoln’s penchant for portentous dreams and his tendency to relate them to others were remarked on by many of his intimate acquaintances.
While radicals, including Sumner and Chase, believed that universal suffrage should be mandated, rebel leaders should be punished, and the federal government should assume control of the seceded states, “a large majority of the people” approved of Lincoln’s speech. “Reunion,” according to Noah Brooks, “was then the foremost thought in the minds of men.”
Lincoln’s support for the quickly assembled imperfect governments in Louisiana and elsewhere drew further criticism from radicals. He believed “there must be courts, and law, and order, or society would be broken up, the disbanded armies would turn into robber bands and guerillas.” That same belief had informed his conversations with Judge Campbell in Richmond and his conditional permission for the old Virginia legislature to assemble. At the time of their meeting, five days before Lee’s surrender, Lincoln had hoped the Virginians would vote to take back the order of secession and remove Virginia’s troops from the war. He also felt that it was sound policy to let “the prominent and influential men of their respective counties…come together and undo their own work.”
Lincoln’s cabinet strongly disagreed with the idea of letting the rebel legislature assemble for any reason. In Seward’s absence, Stanton assumed center stage, telling Lincoln “that to place such powers in the Virginia legislature would be giving away the scepter of the conqueror; that it would transfer the result of victory of our arms from the field to the very legislatures which four years before had said, ‘give us war’; that it would put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring trouble with Congress.” Stanton insisted that “any effort to reorganize the Government should be under Federal authority solely, treating the rebel organizations and government as absolutely null and void.”
Attorney General Speed expressed his accord with Stanton’s assessment in the meeting and, afterward, privately with Lincoln. The president confessed to Welles that the opposition of Speed and Stanton troubled him tremendously. Welles provided no relief. He, too, “doubted the policy of convening a Rebel legislature,” and predicted that, “once convened, they would with their hostile feelings be inclined perhaps, to conspire against us.” Lincoln still disagreed, maintaining that if “prominent Virginians” were to come together, they would “turn themselves and their neighbors into good Union men.” Nonetheless, Welles said, “as we had all taken a different view he had perhaps made a mistake, and was ready to correct it if he had.”
Lincoln’s thinking was further influenced by a telegram from Campbell to General Weitzel, which suggested that Campbell was indeed assuming more powers for the legislature than he and Lincoln had originally discussed. In the late afternoon of April 12, Lincoln walked over to the War Department to confer again with Stanton. Stanton’s clerk A. E. Johnson recalled that Lincoln sat on the sofa and listened intently while Stanton, “full of feeling,” reiterated his passionate opposition to allowing the legislature to convene, warning that “the fate of the emancipated millions” would be left in the hands of untrustworthy men, that “being once assembled, its deliberations could not be confined to any specific acts.”
Finally, Lincoln stood up and walked over to Stanton’s desk, where he wrote what would be the final telegram issued under his name from the War Department. He directed General Weitzel to withdraw the original permission for the legislature to convene. “Do not now allow them to assemble; but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.” Stanton was pleased, believing “that…was exactly right.”
On Thursday, April 13, Grant journeyed to Washington, where Stanton had planned a celebration in his honor. “As we reached our destination that bright morning in our boat,” Julia Grant recalled, “every gun in and near Washington burst forth—and such a salvo!—all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.” Grant went to see the president while Julia, at the Willard Hotel, received “calls of congratulations all day.” Later in the afternoon, she and Ellen Stanton joined their husbands at the War Department. There, Julia recalled, “Stanton was in his happiest mood, showing me many stands of arms, flags, and, among other things, a stump of a large tree perforated on all sides by bullets, taken from the field of Shiloh.” He enthusiastically detailed plans for the illumination of his department that night, and “facetiously remarked: ‘They are going to illuminate at the Navy Department, I know, for they sent and borrowed two or three boxes of candles from my department.’”
For the first time since Willie’s death, Mary Lincoln seemed positively carefree. She had received a delightful note from her husband the day before, only “a few lines,” but “playfully & tenderly worded, notifying, the hour, of the day, he would drive with me!” She wrote a number of letters, all brimming with vitality. “We are rejoicing beyond expression, over our great and glorious victories,” she told James Bennett. To her friend Abram Wakeman, she described in detail the “charming time” she had enjoyed at City Point. “I wish very much you had been with us, even our stately dignified Mr Sumner acknowledged himself transformed, into a lad of sixteen.” She told Sumner that her new volume of Julius Caesar had arrived, and she invited him to join her that evening at the White House for a visit with General Grant.
GOOD FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865, was surely one of Lincoln’s happiest days. The morning began with a leisurely breakfast in the company of his son Robert, just arrived in Washington. “Well, my son, you have returned safely from the front,” Lincoln said. “The war is now closed, and we soon will live in peace with the brave men that have been fighting against us.” He urged Robert to “lay aside” his army uniform and finish his education, perhaps in preparation for a law career. As the father imparted his advice, Elizabeth Keckley observed, “his face was more cheerful than [she] had seen it for a long while.”
At 11 a.m., Grant arrived at the White House to attend the regularly scheduled Friday cabinet meeting. He had hoped for word that Johnston’s army, the last substantial rebel force remaining, had surrendered to Sherman, but no news had yet arrived. Lincoln told Grant not to worry. He predicted that the tidings would come soon, “for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War.” Welles asked him to describe the dream. Turning toward him, Lincoln said it involved the navy secretary’s “element, the water—that he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.” Grant remarked that not all those great events had been victories, but Lincoln remained hopeful that this time this event would be favorable.
The complexities of reestablishing law and order in the Southern states dominated the conversation. A few days earlier, Stanton had drafted a plan for imposing a temporary military government on Virginia and North Carolina, until the restoration of civilian rule. “Lincoln alluded to the paper,” Stanton later recalled, “went into his room, brought it out, and asked me to read it.” A general discussion revealed that most of the cabinet concurred, although Welles and Dennison objected to the idea of undoing state boundaries by uniting two different states into a single military department. Recognizing the validity of this objection, Lincoln asked Stanton to revise his plan to make it applicable to two separate states.
Lincoln said that “he thought it providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned,” since he and the cabinet were more likely to “accomplish more without them than with them” regarding Reconstruction. He noted that “there were men in Congress who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate. He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over.”
As for the rebel leaders, Lincoln reiterated his resolve to perpetrate no further violence: “None need expect he would take any part in hanging or killing those men, even the worst of them.” While their continued presence on American soil might prove troublesome, he preferred to “frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off.” To illustrate his point, he shook “his hands as if scaring sheep,” and said, “Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.”
After the cabinet meeting, Stanton and Speed descended the stairs together. “Didn’t our Chief look grand today?” Stanton asked. Years later, Speed held fast “to the memory of Lincoln’s personal appearance” that day, “with cleanly-shaved face, well-brushed clothing and neatly-combed hair and whiskers,” a marked contrast to his usual rumpled aspect. Stanton later wrote that Lincoln seemed “more cheerful and happy” than at any previous cabinet meeting, thrilled by “the near prospect of firm and durable peace at home and abroad.” Throughout the discussion, Stanton recalled, Lincoln “spoke very kindly of General Lee and others of the Confederacy,” exhibiting “in marked degree the kindness and humanity of his disposition, and the tender and forgiving spirit that so eminently distinguished him.”
Later that day, Lincoln put into practice his liberal policy toward the rebel leaders. Intelligence had reached Stanton at the War Department that “a conspicuous secessionist,” Jacob Thompson, was en route to Portland, Maine, where a steamer awaited to take him to England. Operating from Canada, Thompson had organized a series of troublesome raids across the border that left Stanton with little sympathy for the Confederate marauder. Upon reading the telegram, Stanton did not hesitate a moment. “Arrest him!” he ordered Assistant Secretary Dana. As Dana was leaving the room, however, Stanton called him back. “No, wait; better to go over and see the President.”
Dana found Lincoln in his office. “Halloo, Dana!” Lincoln greeted him. “What’s up?” Dana described the situation, explaining that Stanton wanted to arrest Thompson but thought he should first “refer the question” to Lincoln. “Well,” said Lincoln, “no, I rather think not. When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he’s trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”
Mary Lincoln’s memories of her husband’s infectious happiness that day match the recollections of his inner circle. She had never seen him so “cheerful,” she told Francis Carpenter, “his manner was even playful. At three o’clock, in the afternoon, he drove out with me in the open carriage, in starting, I asked him, if any one, should accompany us, he immediately replied—‘No—I prefer to ride by ourselves to day.’ During the drive he was so gay, that I said to him, laughingly, ‘Dear Husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness,’ he replied, ‘and well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day, the war, has come to a close—and then added, ‘We must both, be more cheerful in the future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.’”
As the carriage rolled toward the Navy Yard, Mary recalled, “he spoke of his old Springfield home, and recollections of his early days, his little brown cottage, the law office, the court room, the green bag for his briefs and law papers, his adventures when riding the circuit.” They had traveled an unimaginable distance together since their first dance in Springfield a quarter of a century earlier. Over the years, they had supported each other, irritated each other, shared a love of family, politics, poetry, and drama. Mary’s descent into depression after Willie’s death had added immeasurably to Lincoln’s burdens, and the terrible pressures of the war had further distorted their relationship. His intense focus on his presidential responsibilities had often left her feeling abandoned and resentful. Now, with the war coming to an end and time bringing solace to their grief, the Lincolns could plan for a happier future. They hoped to travel someday—to Europe and the Holy Land, over the Rockies to California, then back home to Illinois, where their life together had begun.
As the carriage neared the White House, Lincoln saw that a group of old friends, including Illinois governor Richard Oglesby, were just leaving. “Come back, boys, come back,” he told them, relishing the relaxing company of friends. They remained for some time, Governor Oglesby recalled. “Lincoln got to reading some humorous book; I think it was by ‘John Phoenix.’ They kept sending for him to come to dinner. He promised each time to go, but would continue reading the book. Finally he got a sort of peremptory order that he must come to dinner at once.”
The early dinner was necessary, for the Lincolns had plans to see Laura Keene in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre that evening. After supper, the president met with Noah Brooks, Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, and Speaker Colfax, who was soon to depart for California. “How I would rejoice to make that trip!” Lincoln told Colfax, “but public duties chain me down here, and I can only envy you its pleasures.” The president invited Colfax to join him at the theater that night, but Colfax had too many commitments.
To Noah Brooks, Lincoln had never seemed “more hopeful and buoyant concerning the condition of the country…. He was full of fun and anecdotes, feeling especially jubilant at the prospect before us.” His parting words, Brooks recalled, focused on the country’s economic future. “Grant thinks that we can reduce the cost of the army establishment at least a half million a day, which, with the reduction of expenditures of the Navy, will soon bring down our national debt to something like decent proportions, and bring our national paper up to a par, or nearly so with gold.”
Speaker Colfax was among several people who declined the Lincolns’ invitation to the theater that evening. The morning edition of the National Republican had announced that the Grants would join the Lincolns in the president’s box that night, but Julia Grant had her heart set on visiting their children in New Jersey, so Grant asked to be excused. The Stantons also declined. Stanton, like Chase, considered the theater a foolish diversion and, more important, a dangerous one. He had fought a losing battle for months to keep the president from such public places, and he felt that his presence would only sanction an unnecessary hazard. Earlier that day, “unwilling to encourage the theater project,” Stanton had refused to let his chief telegrapher, Thomas Eckert, accept Lincoln’s invitation, even though the president had teasingly requested him for his uncommon strength—he had been known to “break a poker over his arm” and could serve as a bodyguard.
It was after eight when the Lincolns entered their carriage to drive to the theater. “I suppose it’s time to go,” Lincoln told Colfax, “though I would rather stay.” While nothing had provided greater diversion during the bitter nights of his presidency than the theater, Lincoln required no escape on this happy night. Still, he had made a commitment. “It has been advertised that we will be there,” he told his bodyguard, Crook, who had the night off, “and I cannot disappoint the people.” Clara Harris—the daughter of Mary’s friend Senator Ira Harris—and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, joined the Lincolns in their carriage.
AS THE LINCOLNS RODE to Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street, John Wilkes Booth and three conspirators were a block away at the Herndon House. Booth had devised a plan that called for the simultaneous assassinations of President Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward, and Vice President Johnson. Having learned that morning of Lincoln’s plan to attend the theater, he had decided that this night would provide their best opportunity. The powerfully built Lewis Powell, accompanied by David Herold, was assigned to kill Seward at his Lafayette Square home. Meanwhile, the carriage maker George Atzerodt was to shoot the vice president in his suite at the Kirkwood Hotel. Booth, whose familiarity with the stagehands would ensure access, would assassinate the president.
Just as Brutus had been honored for slaying the tyrant Julius Caesar, Booth believed he would be exalted for killing an even “greater tyrant.” Assassinating Lincoln would not be enough. “Booth knew,” his biographer observes, “that in the end, the Brutus conspiracy was foiled by Marc Antony, whose famous oration made outlaws of the assassins and a martyr of Caesar.” William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Mark Antony, must not live. Finally, to throw the entire North into disarray, the vice president must die as well. The triple assassinations were set for 10:15 p.m.
STILL BEDRIDDEN, Seward had enjoyed his best day since his nearly fatal carriage accident nine days earlier. Fanny Seward noted in her diary that he had slept well the previous night and had taken “solid food for the first time.” In the afternoon, he had “listened with a look of pleasure to the narrative of the events of the Cabinet meeting,” which Fred, as assistant secretary, had attended in his father’s stead. Later in the afternoon, he had listened to Fanny’s reading of “Enoch Arden” and remarked on how much he enjoyed it.
The three-story house was full of people. The entire family, except Will and Jenny, were there—Frances, Augustus, Fred, Anna, and Fanny. In addition to the half-dozen household servants and the State Department messenger rooming on the third floor, two soldiers had been assigned by Stanton to stay with Seward. In the early evening, Edwin Stanton had stopped by to check on his friend and colleague. He stayed for a while, chatting with other visitors until martial music in the air reminded him that War Department employees had planned on serenading him that night at his home six blocks away.
After all the guests left, “the quiet arrangements for the night” began. To ensure that Seward was never left alone, the family members had taken turns sitting by his bed. That night Fanny was scheduled to stay with him until 11 p.m., when her brother Gus would relieve her. George Robinson, one of the soldiers whom Stanton had detailed to the household, was standing by. Shortly after 10 p.m., Fanny noticed that her father was falling asleep. She closed the pages of the Legends of Charlemagne, turned down the gas lamps, and took a seat on the opposite side of the bed.
Fred Seward later wrote that “there seemed nothing unusual in the occurrence, when a tall, well dressed, but unknown man presented himself” at the door. Powell told the servant who answered the bell that he had some medicine for Mr. Seward and had been instructed by his physician to deliver it in person. “I told him he could not go up,” the servant later testified, “that if he would give me the medicine, I would tell Mr. Seward how to take it.” Powell was so insistent that the boy stepped aside. When he reached the landing, Fred Seward stopped him. “My father is asleep; give me the medicine and the directions; I will take them to him.” Powell argued that he must deliver it in person, but Fred refused.
At this point, Fred recalled, the intruder “stood apparently irresolute.” He began to head down the stairs, then “suddenly turning again, he sprang up and forward, having drawn a Navy revolver, which he levelled, with a muttered oath, at my head, and pulled the trigger.” This was the last memory Fred would have of that night. The pistol misfired, but Powell brought it down so savagely that Fred’s skull was crushed in two places, exposing his brain and rendering him unconscious.
Hearing the disturbance, Private Robinson ran to the door from Seward’s bedside. The moment the door was opened, Powell rushed inside, brandishing his now broken pistol in one hand and a large knife in the other. He slashed Robinson in the forehead with his knife, knocking him “partially down,” and headed toward Seward. Fanny ran beside Powell, begging him not to kill her father. When Seward heard the word “kill,” he awakened, affording him “one glimpse of the assassin’s face bending over” before the large bowie knife plunged into his neck and face, severing his cheek so badly that “the flap hung loose on his neck.” Oddly, he would later recall that his only impressions were what a fine-looking man Powell was and “what handsome cloth that overcoat is made of.”
Fanny’s screams brought her brother Gus into the room as Powell advanced again upon Seward, who had been knocked to the floor by the force of the blows. Gus and the injured Robinson managed to pull Powell away, but not before he struck Robinson again and slashed Gus on the forehead and the right hand. When Gus ran for his pistol, Powell bolted down the stairs, stabbing Emerick Hansell, the young State Department messenger, in the back before he bolted out the door and fled through the city streets.
The clamor had roused the entire household. Anna sent the servant to fetch Dr. Verdi, while Private Robinson, though bleeding from his head and shoulders, lifted Seward onto the bed and instructed Fanny about “staunching the blood with clothes & water.” Still fearing that another assassin might be hiding in the house, Frances and Anna checked the attic while Fanny searched the rooms on the parlor floor.
Dr. Verdi would never forget his first sight of Seward that night. “He looked like an exsanguinated corpse. In approaching him my feet went deep in blood. Blood was streaming from an extensive gash in his swollen cheek; the cheek was now laid open.” So “frightful” was the wound and “so great was the loss of blood” that Verdi assumed the jugular vein must have been cut. Miraculously, it was not. Further examination revealed that the knife had been deflected by the metal contraption holding Seward’s broken jaw in place. In bizarre fashion, the carriage accident had saved his life.
“I had hardly sponged his face from the bloody stains and replaced the flap,” Verdi recalled, “when Mrs. Seward, with an intense look, called me to her. ‘Come and see Frederick,’ said she.” Not understanding, he followed Frances to the next room, where he “found Frederick bleeding profusely from the head.” Fred’s appearance was so “ghastly” and his wounds so large that Verdi feared he would not live, but with the application of “cold water pledgets,” he was able to stanch the bleeding temporarily.
Once Fred was stabilized, Frances drew Dr. Verdi into another room on the same floor. “For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Seward,” asked the befuddled doctor, “what does all this mean?” Verdi found Gus lying on the bed with stab wounds on his hand and forehead, but assured Frances that he would recover. Frances barely had time to absorb these words of comfort before entreating Dr. Verdi to see Private Robinson. “I ceased wondering,” Verdi recalled, “my mind became as if paralyzed; mechanically I followed her and examined Mr. Robinson. He had four or five cuts on his shoulders.”
“Any more?” Verdi asked, though not imagining the carnage could go on. “Yes,” Frances answered, “one more.” She led him to Mr. Hansell, “piteously groaning on the bed.” Stripping off the young man’s clothes, Verdi “found a deep gash just above the small of the back, near the spine.”
“And all this,” Verdi thought, “the work of one man—yes, of one man!”
IN PREPARING FOR the attack on the vice president, George Atzerodt had taken a room at the Kirkwood Hotel, where Johnson was staying. At 10:15, he was supposed to ring the bell of Suite 68, enter the room by force, find his target, and murder him. When first informed that the original plan to kidnap the president had shifted to a triple assassination, he had balked. “I won’t do it,” he had insisted. “I enlisted to abduct the President of the United States, not to kill.” He had eventually agreed to help, but fifteen minutes before the appointed moment, seated at the bar of the Kirkwood House, he changed his mind, left the hotel, and never returned.
JOHN WILKES BOOTH had left little to chance in his plot to kill the president. Though already well acquainted with the layout of Ford’s Theatre, Booth had attended a dress rehearsal the day before to better rehearse his scheme for shooting Lincoln in the state box and then escaping into the alley beside the theater. That morning he had again visited the theater to collect his mail, chatting amiably in the front lobby with the theater owner’s brother, Harry Ford. Booth had already taken his place inside the theater when the Lincolns arrived.
The play had started as the presidential party entered the flag-draped box in the dress circle. The notes of “Hail to the Chief” brought the audience to their feet, applauding wildly and craning to see the president. Lincoln responded “with a smile and bow” before taking his seat in a comfortable armchair at the center of the box, with Mary by his side. Clara Harris was seated at the opposite end of the box, while Henry Rathbone occupied a small sofa on her left. Observing the president and first lady, one theatergoer noticed that she “rested her hand on his knee much of the time, and often called his attention to some humorous situation on the stage.” Mary herself later recalled that as she snuggled ever closer to her husband, she had whispered, “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” He had looked at her and smiled. “She wont think any thing about it.”
During the performance, the White House footman delivered a message to the president. At about twelve minutes after ten, the impeccably dressed John Wilkes Booth presented his calling card to the footman and gained admittance to the box. Once inside, he raised his pistol, pointed it at the back of the president’s head, and fired.
As Lincoln slumped forward, Henry Rathbone attempted to grab the intruder. Booth pulled out his knife, slashed Rathbone in the chest, and managed to leap from the box onto the stage fifteen feet below. “As he jumped,” one eyewitness recalled, “one of the spurs on his riding-boots caught in the folds of the flag draped over the front, and caused him to fall partly on his hands and knees as he struck the stage.” Another onlooker observed that “he was suffering great pain,” but, “making a desperate effort, he struggled up.” Raising “his shining dagger in the air, which reflected the light as though it had been a diamond,” he shouted the now historic words of the Virginia state motto—“Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants)—and ran from the stage.
Until the screams broke forth from the president’s box, many in the audience thought the dramatic moment was part of the play. Then they saw Mary Lincoln frantically waving. “They have shot the President!” she cried. “They have shot the President!” Charles Leale, a young doctor seated near the presidential box, was the first to respond. “When I reached the President,” he recalled, “he was almost dead, his eyes were closed.” Unable at first to locate the wound, he stripped away Lincoln’s coat and collar. Examining the base of the skull, he discovered “the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.” Using his finger “as a probe” to remove “the coagula which was firmly matted with the hair,” he released the flow of blood, relieving somewhat the pressure on Lincoln’s brain. Another doctor, Charles Sabin Taft, Julia Taft’s half brother, soon arrived, and the decision was made to remove the president from the crowded box to a room in the Petersen boardinghouse across the street.
By this time, people had massed in the street. The word began to spread that assassins had attacked not only Lincoln but Seward as well. Joseph Sterling, a young clerk in the War Department, rushed to inform Stanton of the calamity. On his way, he encountered his roommate, J. G. Johnson, who joined him on the terrible errand. “When Johnson and I reached Stanton’s residence,” Sterling recalled, “I was breathless,” so when Stanton’s son Edwin Jr. opened the door, Johnson was the one to speak. “We have come,” Johnson said, “to tell your father that President Lincoln has been shot.” Young Stanton hurried to his father, who had been undressing for bed. When the war secretary came to the door, Sterling recalled, “he fairly shouted at me in his heavy tones: ‘Mr. Sterling what news is this you bring?’” Sterling told him that both Lincoln and Seward had been assassinated. Desperately hoping this news was mere rumor, Stanton remained calm and skeptical. “Oh, that can’t be so,” he said, “that can’t be so!” But when another clerk arrived at the door to describe the attack on Seward, Stanton had his carriage brought around at once, and against the appeals of his wife, who feared that he, too, might be a target, he headed for Seward’s house at Lafayette Square.
The news reached Gideon Welles almost simultaneously. He had already gone to bed when his wife reported someone at the door. “I arose at once,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and raised a window, when my messenger, James called to me that Mr. Lincoln the President had been shot,” and that Seward and his son had been assassinated. Welles thought the story “very incoherent and improbable,” but the messenger assured him that he had already been to Seward’s house to check its veracity before coming to see his boss. Also ignoring his wife’s protests, Welles dressed and set forth in the foggy night for the Seward house on the other side of the square.
Upon reaching Seward’s house, Welles and Stanton were shocked at what they found. Blood was everywhere—on “the white wood work of the entry,” on the stairs, on the dresses of the women, on the floor of the bedroom. Seward’s bed, Welles recalled, “was saturated with blood. The Secretary was lying on his back, the upper part of his head covered by a cloth, which extended down over his eyes.” Welles questioned Dr. Verdi in a whisper, but Stanton was unable to mute his stentorian voice until the doctor asked for quiet. After looking in on Fred’s unconscious form, the two men walked together down the stairs. In the lower hall, they exchanged what information they had regarding the president. Welles thought they should go to the White House, but Stanton believed Lincoln was still at the theater. Army quartermaster general Meigs, who had just come to the door, implored them not to go to 10th Street, where thousands of people had gathered. When they insisted, he decided to join them.
Twelve blocks away, in his home at Sixth and E streets, Chief Justice Chase had already retired for the night. Earlier that afternoon, he had taken a carriage ride with Nettie, intending to stop at the White House to remonstrate with Lincoln over his too lenient approach to Reconstruction and his failure to demand universal suffrage. At the last minute, “uncertain how [Lincoln] would take it,” Chase had decided to wait until the following day.
He was fast asleep when a servant knocked on his bedroom door. There was a gentleman downstairs, the servant said, who claimed “the President had been shot.” The caller was a Treasury employee who had actually witnessed the shooting “by a man who leaped from the box upon the stage & escaped by the rear.” Chase hoped “he might be mistaken,” but in short order, three more callers arrived. Each “confirmed what I had been told & added that Secretary Seward had also been assassinated, and that guards were being placed around the houses of all the prominent officials, under the apprehension that the plot had a wide range. My first impulse was to rise immediately & go to the President…but reflecting that I could not possibly be of any service and should probably be in the way of those who could, I resolved to wait for morning & further intelligence. In a little while the guard came—for it was supposed that I was one of the destined victims—and their heavy tramp-tramp was heard under my window all night…. It was a night of horrors.”
When Stanton and Welles arrived at the crammed room in the Petersen boardinghouse, they found that Lincoln had been placed diagonally across a bed to accommodate his long frame. Stripped of his shirt, “his large arms,” Welles noted, “were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance.” His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so much vitality” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.
Mary spent most of the endless night weeping in an adjoining parlor, where several women friends tried vainly to comfort her. “About once an hour,” Welles noted, she “would repair to the bedside of her dying husband and with lamentation and tears remain until overcome by emotion.” She could only rotely repeat the question “Why didn’t he shoot me? Why didn’t he shoot me?” Though everyone in the room knew the president was dying, Mary was not told, out of fear that she would collapse. Whenever she came into the room, Dr. Taft recalled, “clean napkins were laid over the crimson stains on the pillow.”
Early on, Mary sent a messenger for Robert, who had remained at home that night in the company of John Hay. He had already turned in when the White House doorkeeper came to his room. “Something happened to the President,” Thomas Pendel told Robert, “you had better go down to the theater and see what it is.” Robert asked Pendel to get Hay. Reaching Hay’s room, Pendel told him, “Captain Lincoln wants to see you at once. The President has been shot.” Pendel recalled that when Hay heard the news, “he turned deathly pale, the color entirely leaving his cheeks.” The two young men jumped in a carriage, picking up Senator Sumner along the way.
Mary was torn over whether to summon Tad, but was apparently persuaded that the emotional boy would be devastated if he saw his father’s condition. Tad and his tutor had gone that night to Grover’s Theatre to see Aladdin. The theater had been decorated with patriotic emblems, and a poem commemorating Fort Sumter’s recapture was read aloud between the acts. An eyewitness recalled that the audience was “enjoying the spectacle of Aladdin” when the theater manager came forward, “as pale as a ghost.” A look of “mortal agony” contorted his face as he announced to the stunned audience that the president had been shot at Ford’s Theatre. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed, Tad was seen running “like a young deer, shrieking in agony.”
“Poor little Tad,” Pendel recalled, returned to the White House in tears. “O Tom Pen! Tom Pen!” Tad wailed. “They have killed Papa dead. They’ve killed Papa dead!” Pendel carried the little boy into Lincoln’s bedroom. Turning down the bedcovers, he helped Tad undress and finally got him to lie down. “I covered him up and laid down beside him, put my arm around him, and talked to him until he fell into a sound sleep.”
By midnight the entire cabinet, with the exception of Seward, had gathered in the small room at the Petersen boardinghouse. An eyewitness noted that Robert Lincoln “bore himself with great firmness, and constantly endeavored to assuage the grief of his mother by telling her to put her trust in God.” Despite his brave attempts to console others, he was sometimes “entirely overcome” and “would retire into the hall and give vent to most heartrending lamentations.” Almost no one was able to contain his grief that night, for as one witness observed, “there was not a soul present that did not love the president.”
To Edwin Stanton fell the onerous task of alerting the generals, taking the testimony of witnesses at the theater, and orchestrating the search for the assassins. “While evidently swayed by the great shock which held us all under its paralyzing influence,” Colonel A. F. Rockwell noted, “he was not only master of himself but unmistakably the dominating power over all. Indeed, the members of the cabinet, much as children might to their father, instinctively deferred to him in all things.”
Throughout the night, Stanton dictated numerous dispatches, which were carried to the War Department telegraph office by a relay team of messengers positioned nearby. “Each messenger,” Stanton’s secretary recalled, “after handing a dispatch to the next, would run back to his post to wait for the next.” The first telegram went to General Grant, requesting his immediate presence in Washington. “The President was assassinated at Ford’s Theater at 10.30 to-night and cannot live…. Secretary Seward and his son Frederick were also assassinated at their residence and are in a dangerous condition.” The dispatch reached Grant in the Bloodgood Hotel, where he was taking supper. He “dropped his head,” Horace Porter recalled, “and sat in perfect silence.” Noticing that he had turned “very pale,” Julia Grant guessed that bad news had arrived and asked him to read the telegram aloud. “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received,” he warned. As he made plans to return to Washington, he told Julia that the tidings filled him “with the gloomiest apprehension. The President was inclined to be kind and magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”
At 1 a.m., Stanton telegraphed the chief of police in New York, telling him to “send here immediately three or four of your best detectives.” Half an hour later, he notified General Dix, “The wound is mortal. The President has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.” Three hours later, he updated Dix: “The President continues insensible and is sinking.” Early eyewitness accounts, Stanton revealed, suggested “that two assassins were engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the President.”
Shortly after dawn, Mary entered the room for the last time. “The death-struggle had begun,” Welles recorded. “As she entered the chamber and saw how the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor.” Restoratives were given, and Mary was assisted back to the sofa in the parlor, never again to see her husband alive.
No sooner had “the town clocks struck seven,” one observer recalled, than “the character of the President’s breathing changed. It became faint and low. At intervals it altogether ceased, until we thought him dead. And then it would be again resumed.” Lincoln’s nine-hour struggle had reached its final moments. “Let us pray,” Reverend Phineas D. Gurley said, and everyone present knelt.
At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. Stanton’s concise tribute from his deathbed still echoes. “Now he belongs to the ages.”
When Mary was told that he was gone, she piteously demanded, “Oh, why did you not tell me that he was dying.” Her moans could be heard throughout the house. Finally, with Robert’s help, she was taken to her carriage, which had waited in front of the house through the long night.
Until the moment of Lincoln’s death, Stanton’s “coolness and self-possession” had seemed “remarkable” to those around him. Now he could not stop the tears that streamed down his cheeks. In the days that followed, even as he worked tirelessly to secure the city and catch the conspirators, “Stanton’s grief was uncontrollable,” recalled Horace Porter, “and at the mention of Mr. Lincoln’s name he would break down and weep bitterly.”
While Stanton’s raw grief surprised those who had seen only his gruff exterior, John Hay understood. “Not everyone knows, as I do,” he wrote Stanton, “how close you stood to our lost leader, how he loved you and trusted you, and how vain were all the efforts to shake that trust and confidence, not lightly given & never withdrawn. All this will be known some time of course, to his honor and yours.”
Salmon Chase was up at dawn. Soldiers had guarded him through the “night of horrors,” and he was ready to join his colleagues at Lincoln’s side. As he reached 10th Street, however, he encountered Assistant Treasury Secretary Maunsell Field. “Is he dead?” Chase asked. “Yes,” Field replied, noting that Chase’s “eyes were bloodshot, and his entire face was distorted.” The Chief Justice had arrived too late, the president was already dead, and his colleagues had dispersed. Uncertain what to do next, Chase walked to Seward’s house. Guards had been stationed to prevent entry, but Chase was recognized and allowed into the lower hall. There, doctors told him that Seward “had partially recovered” and, though still in critical condition, “might live—but that Mr. Frederick Seward’s case was hopeless.”
Chase headed toward the Kirkwood Hotel to call on the man who represented the future: the soon-to-be president, Andrew Johnson. In Johnson’s suite, he encountered his old enemies Montgomery Blair and his father. He took Old Man Blair’s hand and “with tearful eyes said ‘Mr. Blair I hope that from this day there will cease all anger & bitterness between us.’” The old gentleman responded with equal warmth and kindness.
Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,” Elizabeth Blair remarked to her husband in a letter later that day. “Their grief is as honest as that of any one of our side.” An editorial in the Richmond Whig expressed similar sentiments, observing that with Lincoln’s death, “the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has descended.”
In distant St. Louis, where his son Barton had found him a new house with a large garden and a comfortable study, Edward Bates was shaken by “the astounding news” that reached him by telegram. In his diary, he remarked that beyond the “calamity which the nation has sustained, my private feelings are deeply moved by the sudden murder of my chief, with and under whom I have served the country, through many difficult and trying scenes, and always with mutual sentiments of respect and friendship. I mourn his fall, both for the country and for myself.”
News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. “He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.
“The history of governments,” John Hay later observed, “affords few instances of an official connection hallowed by a friendship so absolute and sincere as that which existed between these two magnanimous spirits. Lincoln had snatched away from Seward at Chicago the prize of a laborious life-time, when it seemed within his grasp. Yet Seward was the first man named in his Cabinet and the first who acknowledged his personal preeminence…. From the beginning of the Administration to that dark and terrible hour when they were both struck down by the hand of murderous treason, there was no shadow of jealousy or doubt ever disturbed their mutual confidence and regard.”
FLAGS REMAINED AT HALF-MAST in the nation’s capital until the last week of May, when citizens from all over the country came to Washington to witness “the farewell march” of nearly two hundred thousand Union soldiers who would soon disband and return to their homes. Stanton had orchestrated the two-day pageant as a final tribute to the brave men who had fought on battlefields from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Gettysburg to Vicksburg, Atlanta to the sea. “Never in the history of Washington,” reported Noah Brooks, “had there been such an enormous influx of visitors as at that time. For weeks there had been so vast a volume of applications for accommodations at the hotels and boarding-houses that every available nook and corner had been taken.”
Schools and government buildings were closed for the occasion. Reviewing stands had been built all along Pennsylvania Avenue, “from the Capitol to the White House.” A covered platform had been erected to seat President Andrew Johnson, General Grant, and an assortment of dignitaries. The weather was beautiful on both days: “The air was bright, clear, and invigorating.”
The first day was dedicated to the Army of the Potomac. Hour after hour the troops filed past in review—the cavalry, the mounted artillery, the infantry, the engineering brigades—each with their distinctive uniforms and badges, accompanied by “the clatter of hoofs, the clank of sabers, and the shrill call of bugles.” It was, Gideon Welles marveled, a “magnificent and imposing spectacle.”
“You see in these armies,” Stanton predicted, “the foundation of our Republic—our future railway managers, congressmen, bank presidents, senators, manufacturers, judges, governors, and diplomats; yes, and not less than half a dozen presidents.” (He was very nearly right, for five of the next seven presidents would be Civil War veterans: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.)
Over a quarter of a century earlier, in 1838, young Abraham Lincoln had spoken with fervor of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were by then mostly gone, the fabled scenes of their great struggle for American independence growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” In that war, “nearly every adult male had been a participant,” he said, “in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother,” until “a living history was to be found in every family.” Such he had said was no longer true for his generation.
Now a new “living history” had been forged in the families of nearly three million Union soldiers who had fought to create what their matured leader had called “a new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue that warm spring day knew they had accomplished something that would change their lives and their nation forever.
The second day belonged to the Army of the West, marching with solemn dignity behind General Sherman. “The streets were filled with people to see the pageant,” Sherman recalled. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
When Sherman came to the corner of Lafayette Square, someone pointed to an upper window of a brick house where Seward, still too feeble to walk on his own, had been carried to witness the parade. “I moved in that direction and took off my hat to Mr. Seward,” Sherman recalled. “He recognized the salute, returned it, and then we rode on steadily past the President, saluting with our swords.”
All of Washington was present, Gideon Welles sadly noted—congressmen, senators, justices, diplomats, governors, military officers, the members of the cabinet, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. “But Abraham Lincoln was not there. All felt this.” None felt that absence more keenly than the members of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer than one counsellor.” By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their country and secure their own places in posterity.
“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”
The poet Walt Whitman felt much the same. “I have more than once fancied to myself,” Whitman wrote in 1888, “the time when the present century has closed, and a new one open’d, and the men and deeds of that contest have become somewhat vague and mythical.” He fancied that at some commemoration of those earlier days, an “ancient soldier” would sit surrounded by a group of young men whose eyes and “eager questions” would betray their sense of wonder. “What! have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touch’d his hand?” Though conceding that the future might decide differently about the prairie president, Whitman had no trouble speaking for his own generation: “Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”
Even Whitman might have been amazed by the scope of Lincoln’s legacy by the time the new century arrived. In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”
Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.
“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”
“EVERY MAN IS SAID to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter to the people of Sangamon County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state legislature. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” An indomitable sense of purpose had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.
His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.
With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words—“With malice toward none; with charity for all”—voiced in his second inaugural to lay out the visionary pathway to a reconstructed union. The deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages—to be revered and sung throughout all time.