CHAPTER EIGHT
The funeral train departed New York City at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25. The engine steamed north along the Hudson River. After a few hours, darkness and torch flames intensified the drama. The train passed Fort Washington, Mount St. Vincent, Yonkers, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, Tarrytown, Sing Sing, Montrose, and Peekskill.
At 6:20 p.m., the train stopped at Garrison’s Landing, opposite the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The corps of cadets assembled to honor their fallen commander in chief. They passed through the funeral car and saluted. At 9:45 p.m. thousands of people gathered at Hudson to see the train.
General Townsend was surprised to see so many mourners when he looked out the window:
The line of the Hudson River road seemed alive with people. At each of the towns by which it passes, the darkness of night was relieved by torches, which revealed the crowds there assembled.
THE MEMORIAL ARCH ABOVE THE TRACKS AT SING SING, NEW YORK.
At Hudson…elaborate preparations had been made. Beneath an arch hung with black and white drapery and evergreen wreaths, was a tableau representing a coffin resting upon a dais; a female figure in white, mourning over the coffin; a soldier standing at one end and a sailor at the other. While a band of young women dressed in white sang a dirge, two others in black entered the funeral-car, placed a floral device on the President’s coffin, then knelt for a moment of silence, and quietly withdrew. This whole scene was one of the most weird ever witnessed, its solemnity being intensified by the somber lights of the torches, at that dead hour of night.
At 10:55 p.m., East Albany welcomed Lincoln with a torchlight escort that led the funeral train across the river to Albany. Even in the dark, witnesses could make out the signs posted on two houses: THE HEART OF THE NATION THROBS HEAVILY AT THE PORTALS OF THE TOMB. LET US RESOLVE THAT THE MARTYRED DEAD SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN. At 1:30 A.M. Lincoln’s coffin was placed in the assembly chamber of the state capitol and the middle-of-the-night viewing began. The lateness of the hour did not deter the citizens. On they came, at a rate of seventy viewers per minute, more than four thousand an hour.
Upon leaving New York, Townsend had sent his usual positive report to Stanton, in which he commented that he had “examined the remains and they are in perfect preservation,” but did not mention an episode that had occurred while Lincoln’s remains were on view at City Hall. When Stanton learned of the incident by reading the newspapers later that night, he became enraged and dispatched a wrathful telegram that threatened to ruin the reputation and military career of the trusted aide he had personally chosen to command the funeral train.
“I see by the New York papers this evening that a photograph of the corpse of President Lincoln was allowed taken yesterday at New York,” Stanton wrote. “I cannot sufficiently express my surprise and disapproval of such an act while the body was in your charge. You will report what officers of the funeral escort were or ought to have been on duty at the time this was done, and immediately relieve them and order them to Washington. You will also direct the provost-marshal to go to the photographer, seize and destroy the plates and any pictures and engravings that may have been made, and consider yourself responsible if the offense is repeated.”
At the bottom of the handwritten screed, Stanton scrawled a message to Major Eckert at the War Department telegraph office: “Please order this telegram to be delivered to-night, and if the escort has left New York order it to be forwarded to Albany.”
Stanton had assumed, no doubt, that close-up images had been made of Lincoln’s face. That was not an unusual custom in nineteenth-century America. It was common for mourners, especially the bereaved parents of deceased infants or children, to commission photographers to preserve for eternity the faces of the loved and lost. Indeed, some enterprising cameramen specialized in corpse photography, often posing dead infants cradled in the arms of their parents, as though in not death but slumber. But Stanton was likely thinking about the condition of Lincoln’s body. By the time he was photographed in New York, Lincoln had been dead for nine days. Civil War mortuary science could not preserve his body indefinitely. Yes, the undertakers rode aboard the train, but there were limits to the art. Stanton no doubt feared that horrific images depicting Lincoln’s face in a state of gruesome decay would be distributed to the public.
When Townsend arrived in Albany, he had not seen Stanton’s telegram. He sent the secretary of war another sunny report: “We have arrived here safely. Words cannot describe the grandeur of the demonstration in New York and all along the Hudson River. The outpouring of popular feeling, quiet and unaffected, is truly sublime.”
Stanton’s telegram reached Townsend on the morning of April 26 and shattered the general’s sense of aesthetic sublimity. He knew his boss well, including his propensity for angry tirades. If Stanton sounded this ill-tempered on paper, Townsend could only imagine how furiously he was raging back in Washington. And once Stanton learned the full story, Townsend feared, Lincoln’s god of war would become apoplectic.
It was Townsend, and no one else, who had allowed Lincoln’s corpse to be photographed. He decided, before others could report the details of what he had done, to confess and accept the consequences. He immediately telegraphed Stanton: “Your dispatch of this date is received. The photograph was taken while I was present, Admiral Davis being the officer immediately in charge, but it would have been my part to stop the proceedings. I regret your disapproval, but it did not strike me as objectionable under the circumstances as it was done. I have telegraphed General Dix your orders about seizing the plates. To whom shall I turn over the special charge given me in order to execute your instructions to relieve the officers responsible, and shall Admiral Davis be relieved? He was not accountable.”
When Stanton learned that Townsend had permitted the photographs to be made, he decided not to relieve him of command. The train was on the move, in the middle of a synchronized, complicated cross-country journey, and no one on the train possessed better organizational skills to command it than Townsend.
The secretary of war sent a more tempered reply: “As Admiral Davis was not responsible there is no occasion to find fault with him. You being in charge, and present at the time, the sole responsibility rests upon you; but having no other officer of the Adjutant General’s Department that can relieve you and take your place you will continue in charge of the remains under your instructions until they are finally interred. The taking of photographs was expressly forbidden by Mrs. Lincoln, and I am apprehensive that her feelings and the feelings of her family will be greatly wounded.”
Townsend, offended at the insinuation that he had disobeyed an order from the martyred president’s widow, could not resist defending his reputation and replied: “Your dispatch just received. I was not aware of Mrs. Lincoln’s wishes, or the picture would not have been taken with the knowledge of any officers of the escort. It seemed to me the picture would be gratifying, a grand view of what thousands saw and thousands could not see.”
But Townsend had not yet told Stanton everything. It was bad enough that he had allowed the photographs. Even worse, he had posed in the pictures while standing next to President Lincoln’s body. Stanton might have considered this perceived pursuit of personal publicity unforgivable. On April 20, before the funeral train departed Washington, Stanton had issued Townsend detailed, written instructions on the mission, including the admonition that “the Adjutant-General and all the officers in charge are specially enjoined to strict vigilance to see that everything appropriate is done and that the remains of the late illustrious President receive no neglect or indignity.” Could there be a greater indignity than for a commissioned officer of the U.S. Army, a general no less, the man “specially assigned to represent the Secretary of War, and to give all orders in the name of the Secretary as if he were present,” to pose for souvenir photographs with the corpse of the assassinated president? Perhaps only that Admiral Davis, personal representative of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, had also posed for the photos.
Major General Dix, who had come in from New York City to Albany, discussed with Townsend how to handle the still irate Stanton. Dix advised the adjutant general to confess everything. Townsend, invoking the protective umbrella of his superior officer, telegraphed Stanton again.
“General Dix, who is here, suggests that I should explain to you how the photograph was taken,” Townsend wrote. “The remains had just been arranged in state in the City Hall, at the head of the stairway, where the people would ascend on one side, and descend on the other. The body lay in an alcove, draped in black, and just at the edge of a rotunda formed of American flags and mourning drapery. The photographer was in a gallery twenty feet higher than the body, and at least forty distant from it. Admiral Davis stood at the head and I at the foot of the coffin. No one else was in view. The effect of the picture would be general, taking in the whole scene, but not giving the features of the corpse.”
On April 26 events in two places far from New York dwarfed in importance the dispute between Stanton and Townsend. Jefferson Davis, still in Charlotte, learned that General Joseph Johnston had surrendered his army to General Sherman. It was essential that Davis abandon the state and cross the border into South Carolina. Mallory stressed the point: “His friends…saw the urgent expediency of getting further south as rapidly as possible, and after a week’s stay in Charlotte they started with an escort of some two or three hundred cavalry.”
And on this day, before dawn, at a farm near Port Royal, Virginia, federal cavalry caught up with Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and shot him dead.
Before Davis departed Charlotte, he wrote to Wade Hampton: “If you think it better you can, with the approval of General Johnston, select now, as proposed for a later period, the small body of men and join me at once, leaving General Wheeler to succeed you in command of the cavalry.”
Then, in haste, Davis wrote a letter to Varina:
Charlotte
April 26. 1865
There is increasing hazard of desertion among the troops. The Cavalry is now the last hope, and how long they will adhere in sufficient numbers to offer resistance is doubtful. I will organize what force of Cavalry can be had. Hampton offers to lead them, and thinks he can force his way across the Mississippi. The route will be too rough and perilous for you and children to go with me. It may be that a safer deposit can be made of your heavy baggage in the neighborhood where you now are than further West—The tide of war will follow me. There will be more quiet out of the track and behind it. I will leave here by or before tomorrow, but will be compelled to move slowly. Will try to see you soon.
Jeffn Davis
Back in New York City, the man who had photographed Lincoln in his coffin, Thomas Gurney, proprietor of one of Manhattan’s most prominent studios, T. Gurney & Son, was getting worried. He had taken unprecedented, newsworthy, and commercially valuable pictures. No other American president had ever been photographed in death. Since Lincoln’s assassination no one, not the famous Mathew Brady or Alexander Gardner of Washington, not any other photographers in Baltimore, Harrisburg, or Philadelphia along the route between Washington and New York City, had succeeded in photographing the president in his coffin.
Gurney hoped to gain publicity by distributing photographic prints to the press to reproduce as newspaper woodcuts, and he hoped to profit by selling to the public mass-produced photographic cartes de visite and large-format photographic prints suitable for framing. On April 26, Gurney sent an urgent telegram, not to Stanton, but to a man he thought might be more sympathetic, Charles A. Dana, the assistant secretary of war: “A dispatch to General Dix directs the seizure and destruction of the photographs taken by us of President’s remains. We have obtained delay until 10 o’clock in hope of securing a revocation of the order. We shall see Mr. Beecher and Mr. Raymond, and hope the Secretary will see the propriety of waiting until all the facts are in his possession. In the meantime can you not assist us?”
Gurney reached out to Henry Ward Beecher, the widely known clergyman, abolitionist, and author, and Henry J. Raymond, the famous editor of the New York Times, and asked them to lobby Stanton and prevent the seizure and destruction of the glass-plate negatives. They agreed and both telegraphed the War Department.
Beecher wrote: “Messrs. Gurney, photographers, wish me to ask you to so far modify your order to General Dix respecting the negatives taken of President Lincoln as to order him to hold them without breaking until Gurney can present to you the facts of the case. They do not intend to have the face represented.” He was joined by Raymond who wrote: “I respectfully join in Mr. Beecher’s request that General Dix may postpone destroying the negatives of President Lincoln taken by Gurney & Son till they can see you.”
A telegram from the War Department arrived at Gurney’s studio, saving the negatives from destruction for the time being, but only if Gurney surrendered all the glass plates and agreed to abide by Stanton’s decision once he determined whether or not to smash them.
Gurney surrendered the glass-plate negatives, plus all the albumen-paper photographs which he had already printed from them. He had no choice. In the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder, emotions were running high. Across the country more than two hundred people had been shot, stabbed, lynched, or beaten to death for making anti-Lincoln statements or for praising his assassin. Stanton had ordered the indiscriminate arrest of more than one hundred people, including the owners of Ford’s Theatre, as suspects in the crime. In Baltimore a mob attacked a photography studio based on rumors that the proprietor was selling images of the infamous John Wilkes Booth.
If Gurney had attempted legal action, no court would have recognized his First Amendment right to protect and publish his photographs. If he failed to surrender them voluntarily, the War Department would have raided his studio and seized them. He complied. The next day an army general notified Stanton from New York City that the offending images were in government custody.
Soon the War Department would ban the sale of other photographs it found offensive. In an order dated May 2, 1865, Major General Lew Wallace, future author of Ben-Hur, suppressed images of the assassin: “The sale of portraits of any rebel officer or soldier, or of J. Wilkes Booth, the murderer of President Lincoln, is forbidden hereafter in this department. All commanding officers and provost marshals are hereby ordered to take possession of such pictures wherever found exposed for sale, and report the names of the parties so offending, who will be liable to arrest and imprisonment if again guilty of a violation of this order.” This unlawful and pointless directive proved impossible to enforce and was soon rescinded.
Stanton’s suppression of the corpse photographs did not succeed entirely. He had wanted to prevent Gurney’s images from surfacing in any form—including being copied into woodcuts or engravings—but the photographer had managed to get prints into the hands of a few artists. At least two newspapers published front-page interpretations of the scene, and Currier & Ives published a fine engraving based partly on Gurney’s work. But Gurney’s negatives were never seen again. Perhaps Edwin M. Stanton had them brought to his office in Washington and, after viewing them, smashed them into unrecognizable shards. Perhaps he sequestered the plates in a secret hiding place, where, to this day, they languish in some forgotten, dustcovered War Department file box, possibly alongside the long-lost, never published autopsy photographs Stanton commanded Alexander Gardner to take of John Wilkes Booth’s body.
Stanton could not resist preserving for himself at least one image of Lincoln’s corpse. Almost a century after the president’s death and burial, a sole surviving photographic print made from one of Gurney’s negatives was discovered in an old archive, which was traced back to Stanton’s personal files. Perhaps Stanton saved it for history. Or perhaps he intended for it never to be seen and to remain his private memento, for his eyes only, a vivid reminder of the spring of ’65 and the “coffin that slowly passes.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the train left the Albany depot and as it proceeded past the cities, towns, and villages on its way to Buffalo, people turned out in multitudes and the crowds got thicker wherever the train was scheduled to pass. The New York Tribunedescribed a mood so solemn that it was as though a funeral had occurred “in each house in central New York.” Little Falls was the next stop, and a local band played a dirge while the women of the city presented flowers for the coffin. A written tribute accompanied their gift: “The ladies…through their committee, present these flowers and the shield, as an emblem of the protection which our beloved President ever proved to the liberties of the American people. The cross, of his ever faithful trust in God, and the wreath as the token that we mingle our tears with those of the afflicted nation.”
Thereafter the train passed through Amsterdam, Fonda, Palatine Bridge, Rome, Green Corners, Verona, Oneida, Canastota, Chittenango, Kirkville, and Manlius. At 11:15 p.m., it made a short stop at Syracuse, where veteran soldiers paid honors, a choir sang hymns, and a little girl handed a small bouquet to a congressman on the train. A note attached to the flowers read: “The last tribute from Mary Virginia Raynor, a little girl of three years of age.”
In Rochester at 3:20 a.m. on Thursday, a collection of military units stood in a line on the north side of the station, and on the south side stood the mayor, twenty-five members of the common council of Rochester, and former president of the United States Millard Fillmore, who got on board and rode to the next stop, Buffalo.
Sometime after the sun rose Thursday morning, tolling bells and booming cannon awoke the citizens of Buffalo who had not already assembled at the railroad depot. Abraham Lincoln had arrived. At 8:00 a.m. a modest procession, which included President Fillmore, escorted the hearse to St. James Hall. The marchers included Company D of the Seventy-fourth Regiment, which, four years earlier, had acted as president-elect Lincoln’s escort when he passed through the city in February 1861 on his way to Washington. After the assassination, Buffalo officials, unaware that the train would come through their city, had already honored Lincoln with a grand funeral procession on the day of the White House funeral in Washington. They decided against staging a second one today. They did not want to exhaust the emotions of their citizens. At 9:35 a.m., after the hearse reached the Young Men’s Association building, Lincoln’s bearers removed his coffin from the vehicle and carried it up the steps into St. James Hall.
Under a simple canopy of drooping black crepe, they laid the coffin on a dais while the Buffalo St. Cecelia Society, a musical group, sang “Rest, Spirit, Rest.” Women from the Unitarian Church placed an anchor of white camellias at the foot of the coffin. For more than ten hours, from a little past 9:30 a.m. until the coffin was closed at 8:00 p.m., thousands of people, including many from Canada who had crossed the border for the occasion, viewed the remains.
At some point while the crowds passed by the corpse in the coffin, news reached Buffalo by telegraph that electrified Townsend and the mourners standing in line: John Wilkes Booth had been taken. “Here,” Townsend recorded, “we first received intelligence of the capture and death of Booth, the assassin.” His body was en route by boat to Washington. Some of the same doctors who performed Lincoln’s autopsy now waited there to dissect Booth’s corpse.
The president’s coffin was closed at 8:00 p.m. and forty-five minutes later, the procession left St. James Hall under military escort. Many of the viewers who had seen Lincoln’s body waited outside so that they could follow the hearse to the railroad depot and watch the train depart a few minutes past 10:00 p.m.
On the night that Lincoln’s train pulled out of Buffalo, Jefferson Davis was staying in Yorkville, South Carolina. And he was still taking his time. His journey south was more like a farewell pageant than a speedy flight. His lack of urgency worried Stephen Mallory: “[T]wo days after…[leaving Charlotte we] reached Yorkville, South Carolina, traveling slowly and not at all like men escaping from the country.”
Wade Hampton wanted to lead his cavalry to the president’s side, but he was a conflicted man. He confessed his dilemma in a letter to General Johnston:
By your advice I went to consult with President Davis…After full conference with him, a plan was agreed on to enable him to leave the country. He charged me with the execution of this plan, and he is now moving in accordance with it. On my return here I find myself not only powerless to assist him, but placed myself in a position of great delicacy. I must either leave him to his fate, without an effort to avert it, or subject myself to possible censure by not accepting the terms of the convention you have made. If I do not accompany him I shall never cease to reproach myself, and if I go with him I may go under the ban of outlawry. I choose the latter, because I believe it to be my duty to do so…I shall not ask a man to go with me. Should any join me, they will…like myself, [be] willing to sacrifice everything for the cause…
And Davis definitely had reason to worry because now that Stanton had Booth, he could focus on Jefferson Davis. Calvary units were already looking for Davis and wanted to kill or capture him. On Wednesday, April 27, one day after Booth was shot and killed, and after Confederate major general Joe Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina, Stanton telegraphed Major General George Thomas about the Confederate president and his rumored treasure:
The following is an extract from a telegram received this morning from General Halleck, at Richmond: “The bankers have information to-day that Jeff. Davis’ specie is moving south from Goldsborough in wagons as fast as possible. I suggest that commanders be telegraphed through General Thomas…to take measures to intercept the rebel chiefs, and their plunder. The specie is estimated at $6,000,000 to $13,000,000.” [S]pare no exertion to stop Davis and his plunder. Push the enemy as hard as you can in every direction.
Thomas forwarded the telegram the same day to Union cavalry major general George Stoneman: “I want you to carry out these instructions as thoroughly as possible.”
Thomas dispatched a second telegram to Stoneman with additional orders:
If you can possibly get three brigades of cavalry together, send them across the mountains into South Carolina to the westward of Charlotte and toward Anderson. They may possibly catch Jeff. Davis, or some of his treasure. They say he is making off with from $2,000,000 to $5,000,000 in gold. You can send Tillson to take Asheville, and I think the railroad will be safe during his absence. Give orders to your troops to take no orders except those from you, from me, and from General Grant.
When Stoneman received these telegrams, he ordered troops to pursue Jefferson Davis, and on April 27 he telegraphed orders to General Tillson:
I want the Eighth and Thirteenth Tennessee, Miller’s brigade, all sent to Ashevile, and as soon as they are concentrated at that point I wish the following instructions carried out by General Brown, commanding the Second Brigade: Move via Flat Rock or some other adjacent gap to the headwaters of the Saluda River; follow down this river to Belton or Anderson. From that point scout in the direction of Augusta, Ga. The object of sending you to this point is to intercept Jeff. Davis and his party, who are on their way west with $5,000,000 to $6,000,000 of treasure, specie, loaded in wagons…If you can hear of Davis, follow him to the ends of the earth, if possible, and never give him up.
As the Union prepared to cast a wide net to snare its prey, Lincoln rode through New York State, into the darkness of the night. Edward Townsend sensed that the train had begun to leave behind waves of emotion that swelled by the hour: “As the President’s remains went farther westward, where the people more especially claimed him as their own, the intensity of feeling seemed if possible to grow deeper. The night journey of the 27th and 28th was all through torches, bonfires, mourning drapery, mottoes, and solemn music.”
The engine pushed on through New Hamburg, North Evans, Lakeview, Angola, and Silver Creek. At 12:10 a.m., Friday, April 28, the train passed through Dunkirk on the shore of Lake Erie. There, thirty-six young women representing the states of the Union appeared on the railway platform. They were dressed in white, and each wore a broad, black scarf resting across the shoulder and held a national flag in her right hand. This tableau proved so irresistible that when officials in other cities read about it in the newspapers, they copied the idea for their local tributes.
The train passed through Brocton, stopping at 1:00 a.m. in Westfield where, during Lincoln’s inaugural journey, he spoke to Grace Bedell, a little girl who had during the campaign of 1860 written him a letter encouraging him to grow a beard to make him more appealing to women, who would then, the child promised, make their husbands and brothers vote for him. Lincoln grew the beard and won the election. Now, four years later, a delegation of five women led by a Mrs. Drake, whose husband, an army colonel, had been killed the previous year in Grant’s futile frontal assault at Cold Harbor, came aboard bearing a wreath of flowers and a cross. The cross bore the motto “Ours the Cross; Thine the Crown.” Sobbing, they approached Lincoln’s closed casket and were allowed, as a special military courtesy to the war widow, to touch it. They “considered it a rare privilege to kiss the coffin.”
At North East, Pennsylvania, the funeral train stopped to allow General Dix and his staff to disembark. He had traveled with the remains since Philadelphia. Before Dix began his return to New York City, he sent a telegram to Stanton, telling him, “Everything has been most satisfactory.”
The train crossed the Ohio state line and passed through Conneaut, Kingsville, Ashtabula, Geneva, Madison, Perry, Painesville, Mentor, Willoughby, and Wickliffe, where Governor John Brough received the funeral party. Major General Joseph Hooker, now commanding the Northern Department of Ohio, also boarded there.
Abraham Lincoln had once given the command of the Army of the Potomac to the boastful general. “You have confidence in yourself,” the president had written to Hooker, “which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality…But…I have heard…of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government need a Dictator.” Lincoln put Hooker in his place: “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship…And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”
Hooker failed, and after the disaster at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lincoln fired him. When the funeral train crossed the Ohio line into Indiana, Hooker did not disembark. He rode it all the way to Springfield. What must he have thought as he contemplated the flag-draped coffin of the man who had placed in his hands the power to win the war? The train stopped again at Euclid, Ohio, to pick up some of Cleveland’s leading citizens, who had requested the honor of escorting Lincoln’s remains into their city.
On April 28, Davis and his entourage stopped at Broad River, South Carolina, to rest and enjoy a lunch they brought with them. The conversation turned to the subject of how the war had ruined them. John Reagan’s home in Texas had been wrecked and partly burned, Judah Benjamin’s property in Louisiana had been seized by the federals, as had John C. Breckinridge’s property in Kentucky. Stephen Mallory’s home in Pensacola, Florida, had been burned by Union soldiers. Reagan remembered them using dark humor to lift their spirits. “After we had joked with each other about our fallen fortunes the President took out his pocket-book and showed a few Confederate bills, stating that they constituted his entire wealth.” Davis told his cabinet he was pleased that none of them had profited from his service.
Reagan had seen Davis’s scrupulous principles in action two years earlier in 1863, when an officer brought word to Davis that his beloved plantation, Brierfield, situated on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, would fall into the hands of Grant’s forces within a few days. Losing Brierfield would be a financial catastrophe. Friends urged Davis to order Confederate forces to rush to his plantation to rescue his slaves and other property and move them to a safe location. Although he hated to lose his valuables, he bristled at the suggestion: “The President of the Confederacy cannot employ men to take care of his property.”
Later, when Union forces threatened his hill house in Jackson, Mississippi, the location of his fine and extensive library, Davis again refused to use his official position to protect his private property. “Thus,” testified Reagan, “in his unselfish and patriotic devotion to the cause so dear to his heart he permitted his entire property to be swept away.”
Lincoln’s train arrived at Cleveland’s Euclid Street Station on Friday morning, April 28. Edward Townsend sent word to Washington: “The funeral train arrived here safely at 7 o’clock this morning.” Ever since Stanton’s scathing rebuke for the Lincoln corpse photography episode, Townsend made no more comments in his dispatches to the secretary of war. From that point on, he was all business, stating only what time the train arrived and departed from the remaining cities on the route.
Thirty-six cannons fired a national salute to the president. At that moment, if General Townsend was looking out the window of his car, he witnessed a bizarre display, perhaps the strangest sight of their journey so far. A woman, identified by the press only as “Miss Fields, of Wilson Street,” had erected an arch of evergreens near the tracks, on the bank of Lake Erie. As the train passed, Miss Fields, attired in a costume, stood under her arch and struck poses and attitudes of the Goddess of Liberty in mourning.
In the days leading up to the arrival of Lincoln’s remains, Cleveland’s public officials and leading citizens had engaged in an orgy of bureaucratic busyness. It began simply enough. First, the city council created a committee of five men—the mayor, the city council president, and three others—that met on April 19, the day of the White House funeral, to prepare for the train’s arrival. Then the Board of Trade created its own committee to “cooperate” with the city council’s General Committee of Arrangements, which responded by increasing the size of its committee from five to twenty-three men. That committee met on April 22 and created nine subcommittees: “On Location of Remains”; “On Reception”; “On Procession”; “On Military”; “On Entertainment”; “On Music”; “On Decoration”; “On Carriages”; “To Meet the Remains.”
At its next meeting, the General Committee of Arrangements established a “Civic Guard of Honor,” then divided that group of dozens of men into six “squads.” Every leading gentleman in town craved the honor of serving on one of these committees. In just a few days, Cleveland had created more levels of bureaucracy to receive the remains in one city than the War Department needed to plan and staff the entire thirteen-day trip of the funeral train halfway across America.
The good citizens were so busy forming committees, subcommittees, and lesser divisions they failed to realize that, until the subcommittee of “Location of Remains” pointed it out, they did not have one public building or hall in all of Cleveland big enough to accommodate the viewing of the president’s remains. They would have to construct a new building in little more than a week. How was it possible? Saner heads prevailed, and somebody suggested a temporary outdoor pavilion. They could make it look like a Chinese pagoda. No one would forget that.
The committee members were also so distracted that they failed to set aside hotel rooms for the elected officials and members of the U.S. military escort traveling aboard the train. The passengers did not live on the train, which had no sleeping cars. Such cars joined the train from time to time but did not eliminate the need for proper accommodations. The escorts stayed in hotels and dined in restaurants along the route. The Cleveland hotels were so overbooked that even the commanding general of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train could not find a room. Townsend recalled the episode: “To a gentleman, a stranger to me, who kindly lent me his room at a hotel, I was indebted for fifteen hours’ unbroken sleep, to bring up arrears.”
In South Carolina, Jefferson Davis crossed the Broad River at Scaife’s Ferry, and then the Tyger River at Gist’s Ferry. That day, in a letter dated April 28, Varina Davis, then in Abbeville, replied to Jefferson’s letter of April 23, in which he had chastised himself for bringing her to ruin. She dismissed his apology, reminding him that she had never expected a life of privilege and ease: “It is surely not the fate to which you invited me in brighter days, but you must remember that you did not invite me to a great Hero’s home, but to that of a plain farmer. I have shared all your triumphs, been the only beneficiary of them, now I am but claiming the privilege for the first time of being all to you now these pleasures have past for me…I know there is a future for you.” But not, she thought, in South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida. Varina advised him to give up the cause east of the Mississippi River. “I have seen a great many men who have gone through [Abbeville]—not one has talked fight—A Stand cannot be made in this country. Do not be induced to try it—As to the trans Mississippi, I doubt if at first things will be straight, but the spirit is there, and the daily accretions will be great when the deluded of this side are crushed out between the upper, and nether millstone.”
Federal officials may have fantasized that the Confederate president was fleeing with millions of dollars in looted gold, but Davis was down to his last gold coin—and even then he gave it away. John Reagan watched him do it:
On our way to Abbeville, South Carolina, President Davis and I, traveling in advance of the others, passed a cabin on the roadside, where a lady was standing in the door. He turned aside and requested a drink of water, which she brought. While he was drinking, a little baby hardly old enough to walk crawled down the steps. The lady asked whether this was not president Davis; and on his answering in the affirmative, she pointed to the little boy and said, “He is named for you.” Mr. Davis took a gold coin from his pocket and asked her to keep it for his namesake. It was a foreign piece, and from its size I supposed it to be worth three or four dollars. As we rode off he told me that it was the last coin he had, and that he would not have had it but for the fact that he had never seen another like it and that he had kept it as a pocket-piece.
Officially, the president of the Confederacy was now personally penniless, and that might possibly hinder his escape down the road. Davis might need to buy food, pay for lodgings, bribe a Yankee soldier or a Confederate guerilla, pay his way across the Mississippi River, or secure an ocean-bound vessel in Florida. Poverty jeopardized his chances of success. Bestowing his last gold piece to the infant was a symbolic gesture. It was the casting off of all worldly goods. Yes, his caravan traveled with several hundred thousand dollars in gold and silver—not the majority of the Confederacy’s funds—but Davis considered that treasure sacrosanct and unavailable for his personal use. That money belonged to the Confederate government, not its president. Now the only riches he possessed were the residual love and goodwill of the people. He hoped that, in the days ahead, as he pushed deeper into the Southern interior, the people there would show him better hospitality than he had received in Greensboro and Charlotte. His aides assured him that it would be so. In South Carolina and Georgia, they promised, the people still loved him and believed in the cause.
In Cleveland, the hearse transported Lincoln’s coffin to the public square where the pagoda—the city fathers called it the Pavilion—had been erected. The wood structure, which measured twenty-four by thirty feet, and fourteen feet high, was an amazing confection of canvas, silk, cloth, festoons, rosettes, golden eagles bearing the national shield mounted at each end of the building, and “immense plumes of black crepe.” And, as at every other venue along the journey, the interior was stuffed with all manner of flowers. Evergreens covered the walls, and thick matting carpeted the floor to deaden into silence the sound of all footsteps. Over the roof, stretched between two flagpoles, was a streamer that bore a motto from Horace: “Extinctus amabitur idem” (Dead, he will be loved the same). And to set the somber mood, it was raining, “dripping like tears on the remains of the good man in whose honor the crowd had gathered,” according to a journalist’s account written at the time.
The embalmer opened the coffin and judged the body ready for viewing. According to one sympathetic chronicler of the ceremonies, “the features were but slightly changed from the appearance they bore when exposed in the Capitol at Washington.” But the journey had begun to take its toll on the corpse. Lincoln’s face turned darker by the day, and the embalmer tried to conceal this with fresh applications of chalk-white potions. All through the day and night the people came, one hundred thousand of them, before the gates to the
IN CLEVELAND, CROWDS WAIT TO VIEW LINCOLN’S CORPSE IN THE CELEBRATED “PAGODA” PAVILION.
square were shut at 10:00 p.m. The coffin was closed at 10:10 p.m., and one hour later it was carried to the hearse.
Just as Lincoln’s remains departed the scene the rain, which had been heavy throughout much of the day, turned into a torrential downpour. The water spoiled the decorations, and the mourning crepe cried streaks of black tears. From the railroad station Townsend telegraphed Washington at 11:30 p.m., Friday, April 28: “The funeral train is ready, and will start at midnight.” A New York Times correspondent confirmed Townsend’s earlier observation that something was happening as the train continued west: “Everywhere deep sorrow has been manifested, and the feeling seems, if possible, to deepen, as we move Westward with the remains to their final resting place.”
The downpour lasted for most of the night as the train steamed from Cleveland to the Ohio state capital, Columbus. But the foul weather could not deter the people from turning out along the tracks. According to one contemporary account, “Bonfires and torches were lit, the principal buildings draped in mourning, bells tolled, flags floated at half-mast, and the sorrowing inhabitants stood in groups, uncovered and with saddened faces gazing with awe and veneration upon the cortege as it moved slowly by.”
Five miles from Columbus, the passengers witnessed a pitiful tribute that stood out in stark contrast to all the elaborate, official processions and ponderous orations that had gone on before. Those who saw it were taken aback by its heartfelt simplicity: “An aged woman bare headed, her gray hairs disheveled, tears coming down her furrowed cheeks, holding in her right hand a sable scarf and in her left a bouquet of wild flowers, which she stretched imploringly toward the funeral car.” Her gesture was as eloquent as a cannonade of one hundred minute guns, the tramp of one hundred thousand mourners marching through the great cities of the North, and as richly decorated hearses and death chambers. Abraham Lincoln would have noticed her. She was an eerie reminder of his aged, pioneer stepmother, who had survived him and awaited his return to the prairies. “I knowed when he went away he’d never come back alive,” she’d said upon hearing of the assassination.
The train pulled into the Union Depot at Columbus early on Saturday, April 29. It was as it had been in Cleveland: a reception committee of elected officials, military officers, and leading citizens; an escort to the capitol building by a massive military and civic procession; and lying in state in another death chamber bedecked with the now predictable and overflowing quantities of flowers and mourning decorations. Lincoln’s bearers removed his coffin and placed it in yet another fabulous hearse, this one topped with a canopy that resembled a Chinese pagoda. The organizers back in Cleveland must have taken that as a tribute to their unforgettable pavilion. The hearse drove off to the state capitol and at 9:30 a.m. Lincoln’s coffin was laid upon the catafalque. As usual, the president’s honor guard left behind on the train the smaller, second coffin that had accompanied Lincoln’s in the presidential car from Washington.
In the press accounts of the funeral pageant, little mention was made of Willie Lincoln. His coffin was never unloaded from the train. He did not ride in the hearse with his father in any of the funeral processions. His closed coffin—he had been dead for three years—did not lie next to the president’s at the public viewings. The national obsequies were for the head of state. But in Columbus, Willie Lincoln was not forgotten. General Townsend was the recipient of the gesture: “While at Columbus I received a note from a lady, wife of one of the principal citizens, accompanying a little cross made of wild violets. The note said that the writer’s little girls had gone to the woods in the early morning and gathered the flowers with which they had wrought the cross. They desired it might be laid on little Willie’s coffin, ‘they felt so sorry for him.’ ”
Of the dozens of mourning songs composed for Abraham Lincoln, only one of them, “The Savior of Our Country,” was dedicated to “little Willie.” The lyrics described an eerie, father-son reunion in heaven.
Father! When on earth you fell Father! Was my mother well?
When I fell your Mother cried! Then unconsciously I died.
Glory forms our sunlight here! Astral Lamps our Chandelier!
Rode you here among the stars, In a train of silver cars!
Willie! On the earth look back! Father! Tis a speck of black!
Robed in Mourning as you see! Mourns the Earth for you and me!
God is Father! God is dear! May I have two Fathers here?
Father! On our Golden pave Gingles something from your grave!
Willie! Yes, Four Million Chains, Bring I here where Justice Reigns.
From the Land your Father saves! Chains that bound Four Million Slaves!
Willie! On the earth look back! Father! Tis a speck of black!
Robed in Mourning as you see! Mourns the Earth for you and me!
But the song was wrong. If Willie had looked down from heaven upon the earth, he would have seen, through the night sky, not only a dim “speck of black.” He would have seen a ribbon of flame unspooling across the land as torches and bonfires marked his and his father’s way home.
On April 29, Davis crossed the Saluda River at Swancey’s Ferry, South Carolina. Federal cavalry had a difficult time picking up his trail. Southerners tried to thwart the president’s pursuers. One Yankee cavalryman complained: “The white people seemed to be doing all they could to throw us off Davis’ trail and impart false information to their slaves, knowing the latter would lose no time in bringing it to us.” Later, reports by blacks to Henry Harnden, First Wisconsin Cavalry, and Benjamin D. Pritchard, Fourth Michigan Cavalry, led them directly to the Davises.
General James Wilson outlined his plan for the pursuit. He did not single out one particular unit to capture Davis. Instead, he planned to flood a whole region with manhunters to increase the chance that one unit among many might catch Davis in the net. “Soon after I heard that Johnston had surrendered to General Sherman…I received information that Davis, under an escort of a considerable force of cavalry, and with a large amount of treasure in wagons, was marching south from Charlotte, with the intention of going west of the Mississippi River,” Wilson reported. He set a number of units in motion with the hope of intercepting Davis at any point he might attempt to pass through Union lines.
Georgia was now the focal point. Wilson knew that after Davis left Charlotte, he would not turn west or east and risk remaining in North Carolina. Those routes would not lead him to the banks of the Mississippi River or to a safe ocean port. The Union had locked down North Carolina’s Atlantic coast. Turning west or east would bring Davis into contact with federal troops. There was only one place to go—down through South Carolina and into Georgia—and General Wilson knew it:
I immediately directed Brevet Brigadier General Winslow, temporarily in command of the Fourth Division, to march to Atlanta, and from that place watch all the roads north of the mouth of the Yellow River, to send detachments to Newman, Carrollton, and Talladega, as well as to Athens and Washington. Brigadier General Croxton, commanding First Division, was directed to picket the Ocmulgee from the mouth of the Yellow River to Macon, to send his best regiment to the east of the Oconee, via Dublin, with orders to find the trail of the fugitives and follow them to the Gulf or the Mississippi River, if necessary. I directed Col. R. H. G. Minty, commanding the Second Division, to picket the Ocmulgee from [Macon] to Hawkinsville, and the 6th to extend his line rapidly down the Ocmulgee and Altamaha as far as the mouth of the Ohoopee. He also sent a force to Oglethorpe to picket the Flint River and crossings from the Muscogee and Macon Railroad to Albany, and 300 men to Cuthbert, to hold themselves in readiness to move in any direction circumstances might render advisable. A small detachment of men was also sent to Columbus, Georgia.
Wilson also alerted troops in Florida, in case Davis was able to slip through Georgia and make a run for the coast and escape the United States on an oceangoing vessel:
General McCook, with 500 men of his division, had been previously ordered to Tallahassee, Florida, for the purpose of receiving the surrender of rebel troops in that State. A portion of his command at Albany was directed to picket the Flint River thence to its mouth. He was instructed to send out small scouting parties to the north and eastward from Thomasville and Tallahassee. The troops occupied almost a continuous line from the Etowah River to Tallahassee, Florida, and the mouth of the Flint River, with patrols through all the country to the northward and eastward, and small detachments at the railroad stations in the rear of the entire line. It was expected that the patrols and pickets would discover the trail of Davis and his party and communicate the intelligence by courier rapidly enough to secure prompt and effective pursuit.
In Columbus, former Ohio congressman Job E. Stevenson delivered a memorial address at 4:00 p.m. that was unlike any other given in any city since the train had left Washington. It was a unique cry for vengeance. Stevenson accused the South of many crimes and warned that its people must suffer justice. He proclaimed:
But he was slain—slain by slavery. That fiend incarnate did the deed. Beaten in battle, the leaders sought to save slavery by assassination. Their madness presaged their destruction…They have murdered Mercy and Justice rules alone…They have appealed to the sword; if they were tried by the laws of war, their barbarous crimes against humanity would doom them to death. The blood of thousands of murdered prisoners cries to heaven. The shades of sixty-two thousand starved soldiers rise up in judgment against them…Some wonder why the South killed her best friend. Abraham Lincoln was the true friend of the people of the South; for he was their friend as Jesus is the friend of sinners—ready to save when they repent. He was not the friend of rebellion, of treason, of slavery—he was their boldest and strongest foe, and therefore they slew him—but in his death they die; the people have judged them, and they stand convicted, smitten with remorse and dismay—while the cause for which the President perished, sanctified by his blood, grows stronger and brighter…Ours is the grief—theirs is the loss, and his is the gain. He died for Liberty and Union, and now he wears the martyr’s crown. He is our crowned President…Let us beware of the Delilah of the South.
At 6:00 p.m. the doors to the capitol were closed and a procession escorted Lincoln’s body back to the Great Central Railway depot. At 8:00 p.m. tolling bells signaled the train’s departure from Columbus. It steamed west through Pleasant Valley, where giant bonfires lit up the country for miles; Unionville; Milford; Woodstock; Urbana, where illuminated color transparencies hung from the arms of a large cross; Piqua, where ten thousand people assembled close to midnight; Covington; Greenville; and New Paris, where more giant bonfires lit the sky.
The cortege crossed into Indiana in the middle of the night. At 3:10 a.m. on Sunday, April 30, it rolled into Richmond, the first town across the border. Despite the late hour, city bells rang and twelve thousand people turned out to watch the train pass under an impressive arch twenty-five feet high and thirty feet wide, while a woman costumed as the Genius of Liberty, flanked by a soldier and a sailor, wept over a mock coffin of Lincoln. The train stopped long enough for a committee of ladies to come aboard and place a floral wreath on each coffin. The motto on Willie’s tribute read: “Like the early morning flower he was taken from our midst.” All through the night, on the long, rural stretches of open country between the towns, farmers kept watch. The Indiana State Journal reported: “All along the line
RAILROADS RAN SPECIAL TRAINS TO THE CITIES WHERE LINCOLN’S BODY LAY IN STATE.
the farm-houses were decorated, and their inmates had gathered in clusters, and by a light of bonfires caught a glimpse of the train that was bearing from their sight the remains.”
At 7:00 a.m. the train arrived at Union Depot in Indianapolis. In the rain, a hearse fourteen feet long, fourteen feet high, covered with black velvet and decorated with white plumes, silver stars, and a striking silver eagle, drew the president to the rotunda of the Indiana State House. At the Washington Street entrance, the hearse passed under another massive arch, which featured pillars surmounted by busts of Washington, Webster, Clay, and, of course, Lincoln. The coffin was placed on a catafalque over which was suspended a pagoda-like, black canopy studded with silver stars. A bust of Lincoln, wearing a laurel wreath, was placed at the head of the coffin. The public viewing began at 9:00 a.m., and the mourners included a contingent of black Masons displaying a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and banners bearing the mottoes “Colored Men, Always Loyal” and “Slavery Is Dead.” By 10:00 p.m., more than a hundred thousand people had viewed the remains. City officials had planned a grand procession to escort Lincoln’s body back to the railroad station, but heavy rain forced its cancellation.
“At midnight the route was resumed for Chicago,” Townsend reported. “While the darkness prevailed, the approach to every town was made apparent by bonfires, torches, and music, while crowds of people formed an almost unbroken line.”
At 8:30 a.m. on May 1, the train stopped briefly at Michigan City, Indiana, where decorations again made a deep impression on Townsend: “A succession of arches, beautifully trimmed with white and black, with evergreens and flowers, and with numerous flags and portraits of the President, was formed over the railway track.” He took particular notice of the mottoes painted on two signs: “Abraham Lincoln, the noblest martyr of freedom, sacred thy dust; hallowed thy resting place” and “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail.”
Near the arches Townsend spotted, through the darkness and illuminated by fires, sixteen young “maidens” dressed in white and black and singing “Old Hundred,” a popular Civil War song set to a mournful tune. Another group of women attired in white, each carrying a small Union flag, stood on a flower-laden platform, encircling a woman who posed in a motionless tableau as the figure of America. Another sixteen ladies entered the funeral car and reenacted a now familiar ritual—in tears, they placed flowers on Lincoln’s coffin.
On one of the arches, a motto spelled with flowers read: “Our guiding-star has fallen.” In 1861, Lincoln’s election won him the nickname “The star of the west, or the comet of 1861.” Now, Walt Whitman called him “O powerful, western fallen star.”
That same morning, Varina wrote another letter to Jefferson.
Washington
9 O’Clock –
Monday morning [May 1, 1865]
My Dearest Banny,
…I shall wait here this evening until I hear from the courier we have sent to Abbeville—I have given up hope of seeing you but it is not for long—Mr Harrison now proposes to go in a line between Macon and Augusta, and to avoid the Yankees by sending some of our paroled escort on before, and to make towards Pensacola—and take a ship or what else I can…still think we will make out somehow. May the Lord have you in his holy keeping I constantly, and earnestly pray—I look upon the precious little charge I have, and wonder if I shall it with you soon again—The children are all well Pie [infant daughter Varina Anne] was vaccinated on the road side, as I heard there was small pox on the road—she is well so far—the children have been more than good, and talk much of you…
Oh my dearest precious Husband, the one absorbing love of my whole life, may God keep you free from harm.
Your devoted wife.
Not knowing when she would see Jefferson again, Varina had to make a number of decisions by herself to protect her children. Before reaching the Savannah River, her party heard rumors of a smallpox epidemic. Burton Harrison described how Varina reacted: “We started the morning of the second day after I arrived in Abbeville, and had not reached the Savannah River when it was reported that small-pox prevailed in the country. All the party had been vaccinated except one of the President’s children.” Harrison revealed a telling detail absent from Varina’s account: “Halting at a house near the road, Mrs. Davis had the operation performed by the planter, who got a fresh scab from the arm of a little negro called up for the purpose.”
In Chicago, minute guns fired to announce the 11:00 a.m. arrival of the funeral train. The cortege pulled into a temporary station at Park Row, one mile north of the railroad depot. Tens of thousands of people had been waiting in the streets for hours. Others observed from buildings. According to one account, “every window was filled with faces, and every door-step and piazza filled with human beings, while every tree along the route was eagerly climbed by adventurous juveniles.”
Mourners filled Lake Park, the big stretch of land east of Michigan Avenue, from the street to the shore of Lake Michigan. At the train station, ten thousand children massed behind military units and city officials. The Chicago Tribune suggested that upon Lincoln’s arrival the waters of Lake Michigan, “long ruffled by storm, suddenly
THE CHICAGO FUNERAL ARCH.
calmed from their angry roar into solemn silence, as if they, too, felt that silence was an imperative necessity of the mournful occasion.” A huge, triple-peaked Gothic funeral arch had been erected at the center of Park Place. Lincoln’s coffin was laid near the arch, and thirty-six high school girls, each dressed in white and wearing a black crepe sash, placed a flower on the coffin.
Townsend remembered the biggest arch of the entire journey: “A magnificent arch spanned the street where the coffin was taken from the car, and under this the body rested while a dirge was sung by a numerous band of ladies dressed in white, with black scarves.” The honor guard placed the coffin in the hearse, and the procession to the courthouse began.
The hearse, eighteen feet long and fifteen feet high, with a white satin sunburst mounted on black velvet at the head of the coffin, and drawn by ten black horses, moved west on Park Row to Michigan Avenue, then north on Michigan past Randolph Street, then west on Lake Street to the Courthouse Square at Clark Street. The Chicago Tribune estimated that more than 120,000 people marched in or witnessed the procession. One of them, Daniel Brooks, a guest of the Chicago Board of Trade, had, as a sixteen-year-old, taken part in George Washington’s funeral procession in 1799.
Now Townsend observed “nearly every building on Michigan Avenue…was dressed in mourning, and many displayed touching mottoes.” One man, Townsend recalled, “who had accompanied the train from Washington, telegraphed to have conspicuously laced on the front of his residence—‘Mournfully, tenderly bear him to his rest.’ He told me these words were suggested by the really tender care with which the Veteran sergeants—always the bearers—lifted and carried their charge.” The hearse stopped at the south door of the courthouse, and the coffin was carried inside and laid upon a catafalque at the center of the rotunda.
The chamber was a confection of black, white, and silver crepe, fabric, velvet, metallic fringe, and more. Other cities had done that. Chicago boasted of an extra “new and solemn” decorative effect: “The roof of the catafalque…was a plain flat top of heavy cloth, in which were cut thirty-six stars. Over these were placed a layer of white gauze, and over this several brilliant reflectors, which caused the light to shine through the stars, upon the body below, with a softened, mellow radiance.” One of the banners in the room read: “He left us sustained by our prayers; He returns embalmed in our tears.”
Public viewing began at 5:00 p.m., and by midnight more than forty thousand people had viewed Lincoln’s corpse.
Jefferson Davis spent an uneventful night in Cokesbury, South Carolina, at the home of General Martin Witherspoon Gary. He left there on May 2 before daylight, and at about 10:00 that morning he rode into Abbeville. The townspeople were happy to see him. Captain Willaim Parker, the naval officer safeguarding the Confederate treasure wagon train, had arrived before Davis. Parker turned the gold over to John Reagan, and released his young naval cadets from service. Parker called on Davis and found him alone at the home of Colonel Armistead Burt. They conferred in private for an hour.
“I never saw the President appear to better advantage than during these last hours of the Confederacy,” remembered Parker. “He showed no signs of despondency. His air was resolute; and he looked, as he is, a born leader of men.”
When Parker revealed that he had disbanded his command of naval cadets, Davis said, “Captain, I am very sorry to hear that,” and repeated the words several times. Davis regretted the loss of a single soldier. Parker explained that Mallory had given the order. “I have no fault to find with you, but I am very sorry Mr. Mallory gave you the order.”
Davis suggested that they remain in Abbeville for four days, but Parker warned him that if he stayed that long he would be captured. Davis replied that he would never desert the Southern people. “He gave me to understand,” recalled Parker, “that he would not take any step which might be construed into inglorious flight. The mere idea that he might be looked upon as fleeing seemed to arouse him.”
Davis rose from his chair and began pacing the floor, repeating several times that he would “never abandon his people.” Davis’s attitude emboldened Parker to speak frankly: “Mr. President, if you remain here you will be captured. You have about you only a few demoralized soldiers, and a train of camp followers three miles long. You will be captured, and you know how we will all feel that.” Parker delivered almost an ultimatum: “It is your duty to the Southern people not to allow yourself to be made a prisoner.” The naval officer told him how to escape: “Leave now with a few followers and cross the Mississippi…and there again raise the standard.”
Davis refused, even though, Parker recalled, “I used every argument I could think of to induce him to leave Abbeville.”
In the streets outside, order was breaking down, and Davis’s presence there did nothing to deter people from breaking into government warehouses. “We witnessed,” recalled John Reagan, “the raids made on the provisions by the citizens. I was forced to the thought that the line between barbarism and civilization is at times very narrow.”
After Davis met with Parker, he conferred with several cavalry officers. “When we reached Abbeville,” reported Reagan, “we were there joined by the remnants of five brigades of cavalry. The President had a conference with their commanders, and sought to learn of their condition and spirit.”
Their flesh was weak, and their spirit was not willing. Davis could not motivate them to fight on. Stephen Mallory recounted the scene: “The escort was here collected, or so much of it as was left, and upon conversing with its officers, Mr. Davis was candidly apprised by some of them that they could not depend upon their men for fighting, that they regarded the struggle as over. The officers themselves, and a few men, were ready to do anything in their power to secure his safety; but he became satisfied that the escort was almost useless. He was again urged by his friends to push on south for Florida or west for the Mississippi to secure escape from the country; but the idea of personal safety, when the country’s condition was before his eyes, was an unpleasant one to him, and he was ever ready to defer its consideration.”