Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (50 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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Lincoln was ready to give up on some of the specifics of what was to be done in the postwar situation, even deferring for the moment the matter of who in the South should be allowed to vote, but he persisted in putting forward his philosophy of what was needed. He did not want trials of the Southern leaders, or hangings. His solution: “Frighten them out of the country,” he told his advisers, waving his hands as if shooing something away. “Let down the bars, scare them off.” He expressed his fears about the “feelings of hate and vindictiveness” among many in Congress.
Unanimity in the room was reestablished when Lincoln asked Grant to tell the cabinet about the surrender at Appomattox. Lincoln was clearly pleased when Grant said of the Confederates, “I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.” Some of Lincoln’s advisers then wanted to know about Sherman’s progress toward finishing things with Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, and Grant responded that he was expecting to hear more about that at any hour.
The reference to Sherman prompted Lincoln to tell the meeting about a dream he had the previous night. He was aboard a ship moving with “great rapidity” toward a shore that he described as “vast” and “indefinite.” Lincoln said that it was the same dream he had before receiving the news of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and other victories. He felt certain that this time the good news was coming from North Carolina. “I think it must be from Sherman,” Lincoln said. “My thoughts are in that direction, as are most of yours.”
The cabinet meeting had finished in time for Grant to make good on his promise to Julia that he would accompany her to Burlington, New Jersey, that evening. As Grant, Julia, and their young son Jesse rode to the station with the wife of General Daniel Rucker, whose carriage they were in, Julia recalled, speaking of the strange person she had seen at lunch, “This same dark, pale man rode past us at a sweeping gallop on a dark horse—black, I think. He rode twenty yards ahead of us, wheeled and returned, and as he passed us both going and returning, he thrust his face quite near the General’s, and glared in a disagreeable manner.” When Mrs. Rucker said, “General, everyone wants to see you,” Grant replied, “Yes, but I do not care for such glances. They are not friendly.”
In Philadelphia, before taking a ferryboat across the Delaware to get the train for Burlington at Camden, New Jersey, the Grants stopped to dine at Bloodgood’s Hotel, near the ferry slip. Grant had not eaten since nine that morning and ordered some oysters. “Before they were ready for him,” Julia said, “a telegram was handed to him, and almost before he could open this, another was handed him, and then a third.” She described her husband’s reaction. “The General looked very pale. ‘Is there anything the matter?’ I inquired. ‘You look startled.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Something very serious has happened. Do not exclaim. Be quiet and I will tell you. The president has been assassinated at the theater. I must go back at once. I will take you to Burlington … see the children, order a special train, and return as soon as it is ready.’”
When Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth was tracked down and killed while resisting capture, Julia thought from seeing pictures of him that he was the “dark, pale man” who had watched her so carefully at lunch and then ridden so close to the carriage taking them to the station. An unsolved element of mystery was added to the shock and horror of the night that Lincoln was shot, dying the next morning. In her memoirs, Julia recalled that the next morning an unsigned letter arrived, saying, “General Grant, thank God, as I do, that you still live. It was your life that fell to my lot, and I followed you on the [railroad] cars. Your car door was locked, and thus you escaped me, thank God.” (Years later, Grant confirmed that such a letter had come; soon after the assassination he said that he wished he had been in the presidential box at the theater when the attack occurred, because he might have been able to disarm Booth, or step in the way of the bullet intended for Lincoln.)
It had indeed been a wider plot, involving a total of nineteen conspirators. The first part was the attack on Lincoln. At about twenty minutes past ten on the evening of April 14, the famous actor John Wilkes Booth, who was not in the play Lincoln and his wife were watching, entered the presidential box and fired his small derringer pistol into the back of Lincoln’s head. Shouting
“Sic semper tyrannis!”—
Thus always to tyrants—Booth leapt to the stage, brandishing a dagger. According to one shocked witness, he exclaimed, “The South shall be free!” before he ran through the wings of the stage and escaped.
At the same time, six blocks away near Lafayette Park, another conspirator, a tall, strong, well-dressed man who was using the name John Powell, entered the house of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who was bedridden from his recent carriage accident. Seward was lying in his sickbed on the third floor, with his broken arm in a cast and a metal brace immobilizing his head and neck as his fractured jaw healed. Powell claimed that he had some medicine that must be given to Seward; brushing past a servant, he had reached the second floor when Seward’s son Frederick confronted him. The mysterious intruder pulled out a revolver. When it failed to fire, Powell repeatedly struck Frederick on the skull with a pistol butt, causing five fractures and leaving him lying in his blood. Pulling out a big bowie knife, the assailant dashed up the next flight of stairs and into Seward’s bedroom, where he ran into Seward’s daughter Fanny and a male army nurse tending to Seward, who was lying helpless in his bed. Powell hit Fanny so hard that she fell to the floor unconscious, and then he slashed the male nurse across the forehead with his knife before hitting him so that he too fell unconscious to the floor. Finally coming to the bed where the defenseless Seward lay, Powell stabbed Seward deep in the cheek, nearly cutting his cheek from his face, and then knifed him several times more, including three stabs into his neck. At this moment Major Augustus Seward, another of the secretary of state’s sons, rushed into the room, and in the ensuing struggle, Powell stabbed him seven times. By this time the army nurse had recovered consciousness and came at Powell, who wrestled with him and stabbed him four more times. Then Powell fled down the stairs, stabbing in the chest a State Department messenger who happened to be entering the house. Having left blood splashed all over the stairs, walls, and front steps, Powell ran from the house, shouting, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” He leapt onto a horse and dashed into the darkness.
As the night passed, the city of Washington, so joyous and relieved about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox less than a week before, filled with chaotic horror. Lincoln was mortally wounded and was unconscious and sinking but not yet dead. It was believed that Seward could not live. At the Kirkwood House, the hotel where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying, a detective searched the room of a man named George A. Atzerodt, who had checked in that morning and was no longer there, and found a concealed loaded pistol and a bowie knife. There was reason to think that other government figures were targets for assassination and might be killed at any time. Orders were given to army sentries surrounding the city to let no one pass through their lines, and soldiers were placed on guard at the houses of the nation’s leaders. Every train leaving the city for Baltimore had soldiers aboard, searching for suspects. Inside Ford’s Theatre, all the actors and employees were detained for questioning. In the streets, when the crowds saw police escorting individuals who were in fact witnesses who wished to tell what they had seen in the hope of helping the investigation, they thought they were seeing some of the plotters, and cries arose for them to be hanged on the spot.
At the boardinghouse near the theater where Lincoln had been taken, Mary Todd Lincoln, who had witnessed the attack as she sat beside her husband and had cradled him in her arms until he was carried away, screamed at Assistant Treasury Secretary Maunsell B. Field, “Why didn’t he shoot me! Why didn’t he shoot me! Why didn’t he shoot me!” In the confusion, Secretary of War Stanton first went to Seward’s house, where there was blood all the way from the front door to the third-floor bedroom where Seward had been attacked; he and the other victims were being treated by hastily summoned doctors. (All would survive.) Anyone would have been severely shaken by the nightmare scene of blood splashed everywhere; Stanton never commented on whether the shattering moment reminded him of the suicide of his brother, during which “the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Stanton went next to the house where Lincoln lay. When he saw Lincoln, Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes whispered to him, “Mr. Lincoln cannot recover.” Stanton, a man who never displayed his emotions, began sobbing loudly, his shoulders convulsively shaking for several minutes. The other members of Lincoln’s cabinet joined Stanton there by midnight; Stanton soon composed himself and took control of the situation, using the little house as a command post for sending out communications about the governmental emergency. Standing beside Lincoln’s bed when the president died at 7:22 the next morning, April 15, 1865, Stanton said quietly, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
The news of the attack on Lincoln spread from Washington across the North like a thunderclap.
The New York Times,
appearing on the streets the morning of April 15 with a report sent from Washington before Lincoln died, had the headline, “AWFUL EVENT,” with the subheadlines, “
President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin,” “The Act of a Desperate Rebel,” “No Hopes Entertained of His Recovery.
” Word of his death followed swiftly, flashed across the nation’s telegraph lines. It was almost impossible to believe: in the hour of victory, with the restoration of the Union a step away, the man who had led the nation through its darkest hours had been torn from the people he loved and served.
On that Saturday morning, the bells began tolling. Stores shut their doors; in New York City an art gallery closed, leaving in its big glass window only one empty picture frame. Broad ribbons of black crepe began appearing on houses, churches, and public buildings. In the camps of the Army of the Potomac, there was anger at the South, but the main reaction was one of stunned grief. One officer said his men “seemed stupefied by the terrible news.” A young soldier of the 148th Pennsylvania burst into tears, sobbing, “He was our best friend. God bless him,” and a private wrote home, “What a hold Old Abe had on the hearts of the soldiers of the army could only be told by the way they showed their mourning for him.” When Admiral David Dixon Porter heard the news upon landing at Baltimore aboard the USS
Tristram Shandy
, he wrote his mother, “The United States has lost the greatest man she ever produced.”
During the next days, the headlines were followed by editorials and tributes; speeches and sermons were given everywhere. On April 19, the voice of intellectual New England was heard at the Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson told the assembled mourners, “The President stood before us as a man of the people … His occupying of the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of mankind, and of the public conscience … His powers were superior. This man grew according to the need.” Speaking of Lincoln’s wartime leadership, he said, “There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epic. He is the true history of the American people in this time.”
At the time Emerson was speaking, Walt Whitman, who so greatly admired Lincoln, had already begun pouring out his grief in a poem, “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day.” He would later publish two other heartfelt tributes—“O Captain! My Captain!” and the sublime “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the latter with its line, “O powerful western fallen star!”—but having cared for so many wounded Union soldiers, in his first shock Whitman clung to something of which he was certain. The average soldier believed, rightly, that Lincoln cared about him and admired him, and using the word “celebrate” to mean commemorate, honor, and solemnize, Whitman wrote of the bond that he knew existed between them and their murdered leader:
Hush’d be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.
 
No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
 
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.
As they invault the coffin there,
Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.
 
Once again, while all in the North learned of Lincoln’s death swiftly, because of the need for communications sent to Sherman’s army to go part of the way by ship, news traveled slowly from Washington to Sherman’s headquarters in North Carolina. At eight o’clock on the morning of April 17, forty-eight hours after Lincoln’s death, Sherman and several of his staff were boarding the special train of one locomotive and two passenger cars taking him north from Raleigh to meet Joseph E. Johnston near Durham to discuss the terms of surrender of Johnston’s army. At that moment, Sherman said, “The telegraph operator, whose office was up-stairs in the depot-building, ran down to me and said that he was at that instant of time receiving a most important dispatch in cipher from Morehead City, which I ought to see. I held the train for nearly half an hour, when he returned with the message translated [decoded] and written out.”

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