Bloody Times (9 page)

On February 23 friends and family viewed Willie’s body at the White House. On February 24, the day of Willie’s funeral, the government offices were closed, as if an important politician had died. Leaders of the government, members of Congress, officers from the army, and other important people from all over Washington came to his funeral.

The
Evening Star
published a heartbreaking description of the scene: “His remains were placed in the Green room . . . where this morning a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family. The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes—the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket.”

Willie’s coffin was very plain. It had a square silver plate with a few simple words:

William Wallace Lincoln.

Born December 21st, 1850.

Died February 20th, 1862.

After the funeral Willie’s body was carried to Oak Hill Cemetery in nearby Georgetown. There it was placed in a tomb until the day when Abraham Lincoln could take him home to Illinois.

Lincoln prayed that Tad, still sick, would be spared. On February 26 the
Evening Star
reported that he would live: “We are glad to learn that the youngest son of the President is still improving in health, and is now considered entirely out of danger.”

Abraham and Mary Lincoln mourned Willie in different ways. Mary sent away anything that could remind her of her dead son. She threw out all of his toys and would not allow his friends to come to the White House to play with Tad. The sight of them, she said, upset her too much. Instead, Mary found relief in the world of dreams and spirits, where she imagined she saw Willie, along with her other son Eddie, who had died many years ago, and her half brother, Alec, who was Willie’s uncle. “He comes to me every night,” she swore to her sister. “He comes to me . . . and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me.”

Abraham Lincoln saw his son in his memory. Willie died on a Thursday, and every Thursday for several weeks the president locked himself in his office for a time to mourn and to think of his son. No one dared to interrupt him. And at night he dreamed of his lost boy.

Death also visited Jefferson Davis’s White House. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 30, 1864, an officer walking near the Confederate White House saw a crying young girl run out of the mansion and yank violently on the bell cord of the next house. Then another girl and boy fled the White House. A black female servant who followed them told the officer that one of the Davis children was badly hurt. The officer ran inside and found a male servant holding in his arms a little boy, “insensible and almost dead.” It was five-year-old Joseph Evan Davis. His brother, Jeff Jr., was kneeling beside him, trying to make him speak. “I have said all the prayers I know,” said Jeff, “but God will not wake Joe.” Jefferson and Varina were not home.

Joseph had fallen fifteen feet from a porch. He was found lying on the brick pavement, unconscious, with a broken left thigh and a severely contused forehead. His chest evidenced signs of internal injuries. The officer sent for a doctor and then began to rub the boy with camphor and brandy, and applied a mustard on his feet and wrists. The child, he observed, “had beautiful black eyes and hair, and was a very handsome boy.” The treatment, wrote the officer in a letter a few days after the event, seemed to work: “In a short time he began to breathe better, and opened his eyes, and we all thought he was revived, but it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light is extinguished for ever.”

Messengers summoned the president and Varina. When she saw Joseph, she “relieved herself in a flood of tears and wild lamentations.” Jefferson kneeled beside his son, squeezed his hands, and watched him die. The Confederate officer, whose name remains unknown to this day, described the president’s appearance: “Such a look of petrified, unutterable anguish I never saw. His pale, intellectual face . . . seemed suddenly to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.” Almost thirty years earlier, watching Knox Taylor die had driven him into his “great seclusion.” He could not indulge in private grief now. His struggling nation needed him. Davis mastered his emotions in public, but his face could not hide them. “When I recall the picture of our poor president,” wrote the officer, “grief-stricken, speechless, tearless and crushed, I can scarcely refrain from tears myself.”

That night family and friends and Confederate officials called at the mansion, but Jefferson Davis refused to come downstairs. Above their heads, guests could hear his creaking footsteps on the floorboards as he paced through the night. Mary Chesnut remembered “the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above—not another sound. The whole house [was] as silent as death.” The funeral at St. Paul’s Church, reported the newspapers, drew the largest crowd of any public event in Richmond since the beginning of the war. Hundreds of children packed the pews, each carrying a green bough or flowers to lay upon Joe’s grave. Later, Davis had the porch torn down.

As the Civil War raged on, it was not only Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln who lost those that they loved. In the same year that Willie died, Abraham Lincoln reached out to comfort someone else who had experienced the death of a beloved family member. He wrote a letter to Fanny McCullough, a young girl whose father had been killed in battle. In December 1862, Lincoln received word that Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, the former clerk of the McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois, had been killed in action on December 5, and that his teenage daughter was overcome with grief. Two days before Christmas, on a day Lincoln might have taken Willie—gone ten months now—to his favorite toy store on New York Avenue, and while Mary worked downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.

In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down for her his hard-earned knowledge of life and death. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl, but to the American people. His words to Fanny might have comforted Jefferson Davis when he grieved over Joseph, or Lincoln’s own sons Tad and Robert when they suffered through their father’s death.

Washington, December 23, 1862

Dear Fanny

It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. . . . You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln

On April 17 Jefferson Davis was still on his way to Charlotte. Seventy-two hours after Lincoln’s assassination, he still had no idea that Lincoln had been murdered.

On the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to let the people who had waited all night file into the East Room to see the president’s body. Upstairs Mary Lincoln hid in her room with Tad. He would have liked to see the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the company of these strangers than alone with his grieving mother.

Jefferson Davis had reached Salisbury, North Carolina. There he read a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to let their soldiers go home to their families. They wanted to quit the war. Didn’t these men know that, like them, Davis worried about his wife and children? But the Confederacy’s survival was at stake. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to leave, and the South would lose. Davis wrote back and refused to give his permission.

As he continued on the road to Charlotte, Jefferson Davis remained cheerful. Burton Harrison described him: “He seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was bright and agreeable. He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of trees and many plants; of roads, and how to make them; of the habits of birds, and of a variety of other topics.”

The mood in Washington was sad. For the past three days the people had read newspaper stories of the president’s assassination and death. Today was their first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse.

Thousands of people walked past the coffin. The viewing of Lincoln’s body could have continued all night. But there was work to be done. Thousands more were turned away when it was time to prepare the East Room for the funeral. George Harrington had decided that six hundred people needed to attend—but it would be impossible to squeeze six hundred chairs into the East Room. Only a few of the most important guests, including the Lincoln family, would have their own chairs. Carpenters could build risers, or bleachers, for the rest, if they worked through the night.

While men carried stacks of fresh lumber into the East Room and carpenters sawed, hammered, and nailed them, Jefferson Davis spent a quiet night near Concord, North Carolina. Davis expected to enter Charlotte the next day, and he sent a message to his secretary of war telling him to meet with him there.

Even on April 19, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, last-minute requests to change the route of the train that would carry his body continued to arrive. One letter, from St. Louis, was addressed to Mary Lincoln. “Please grant to us and the people west of the Mississippi, who loved him so well, the respectful request to direct his body to pass by way of Cincinnati to Saint Louis, thence to Springfield.”

But it was too late for Saint Louis and all the other cities that longed for a chance to pay tribute to the president’s dead body. Close to midnight on April 19, Edwin Stanton said firmly that there would be no more changes. The route of the train was final. It would start in Washington and travel to Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, and finally to Springfield.

On the morning of the funeral, a reporter was one of the first guests to enter the East Room. He was allowed to approach Lincoln’s corpse and invited his readers to do the same: “Approach and look at the dead man. . . . He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. . . . The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved close, save for the tuft at the short small chin. The mouth is shut, and like that of one who has put the foot down firm, and so are the eyes, which look as calm as slumber. . . . There are sweet roses and early magnolias, and the balmiest of lilies strewn around, as if the flowers had begun to bloom even in his coffin. . . .”

The funeral guests first came to the Treasury Department. From there they crossed a narrow wooden footbridge, built for the occasion, which led into the White House. As they entered the East Room, they were overwhelmed by the decorations, flowers, and the platform where the coffin lay. No president had been so honored in death, not even George Washington.

One of the few surviving invitations to Lincoln’s White House funeral.

At exactly ten minutes past noon, a man rose from his chair, approached the coffin, and in a solitary voice broke the hush. The minister spoke the solemn opening words of the Episcopal burial service: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

A bishop spoke, and then the minister of Lincoln’s own church delivered the sermon. Did he remember the day when, in the same White House room a little more than three years ago, he’d given another sermon for Willie Lincoln? “Though our President is slain,” he said, “our beloved country is saved; and so we sing of mercy as well as of judgment. Tears of gratitude mingle with those of sorrow, while there is also the dawning of a brighter, happier day upon our stricken and weary land.”