Our One Common Country (43 page)

After Lincoln sent him home, John Stephens became an aide to a Rebel general. He practiced law after the war. When his uncle became governor, John was appointed adjutant general. For the rest of his life, he displayed in a frame in his parlor Lincoln's letter sending him home to his uncle, with its unblotted ink and its autographed picture. They passed to his descendants.

 

WILLIAM HATCH

Colonel William Hatch, the commissioner's aide at City Point, represented Missouri's First District in Congress between 1879 and 1895, serving part of that time with Stephens. He was an architect of the federal land grant college system.

 

JUDAH BENJAMIN

Judah Benjamin fled with Davis and his party as far as Georgia, then split off from the pack, too unfit or too clever to keep riding with the prey of every federal cavalryman in the state. He made his way to London, became a distinguished barrister, wrote the standard legal treatise on the sale of personal property, and served as Queen's Counsel. He died in France in 1884, having never returned to America.

Robert E. Lee

Lee never recovered emotionally from the war. He urged the Southern people to renew their American citizenship and embrace the Union, rejected lucrative offers for the commercial use of his name, and served for little pay as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, now Washington and Lee University. He recruited Northern boys to be educated there, with simple expectations. “We have but one rule here, and it is that every student be a gentleman.” He was once heard to say that the error of his life had been to choose a military education. He died at the age of sixty-three, in 1870. His last delirious words were said to be of General A. P. Hill, as Stonewall Jackson's had been. “Tell Hill he must come up. Strike the tent.”

 

SARAH PRYOR

In the 1880s, Sarah Pryor was living in Manhattan, where her husband had become a judge. When former president Grant and Mrs. Grant came by for an unexpected visit, she served them tea, toast, and oysters, and showed the general a relic that her sons had found: two bullets that had fused in midair. He asked her if they had found it at Petersburg.

“Yes,” she said, “but not when you were shelling the city. It was picked up on our farm after the last fight.”

“He looked at me with a humorous twinkle in his eye. ‘Now look here,' he said, ‘don't you go about telling people I shelled Petersburg.' ”

 

SLAVES AND THE SIEGE LINE

After the war, desperately poor freed slaves took up residence in the abandoned earthen forts on the Petersburg siege line and sustained a bare existence selling relics to tourists. By 1867, their inventory had been depleted. “Bullets are risen in value now,” a visiting Englishman said. “I bought three of a little nigger for five cents; one was genuine, the other two had been expressly cast for sale by the little nigger's father.”

 

 

The Northerners after the War

 

FRANCIS PRESTON BLAIR

On the day Lincoln was shot, Preston Blair came into the city from Silver Spring to be there for the end of the war. He went to bed a happy man. When the awful news arrived, the family let him sleep while soldiers ringed the house. The Sage of Silver Spring lived another eleven years and died at the age of eighty-five, having added Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant to his roster of mentored presidents. In the end, he and his sons became Democrats again. His descendants include the actor Montgomery Clift, a great-grandson of Montgomery Blair.

 

WILLIAM SEWARD

The attempt on his life left Seward in shock, and his doctors and family kept him ignorant of Lincoln's death. On Easter Sunday, two days after the conspirators' bloody work, his bed was wheeled to a window for a view of Lafayette Square. He turned to his nurse in tears when he saw the War Department's flag. “The president is dead! He would have been the first to call on me, but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there is the flag at half-mast.” A few days later, Gideon Welles told his diary that Seward was said to have “sat up in bed and viewed the procession and hearse of the president, and I know his emotion. Stanton, who rode with me, was uneasy and left the carriage four or five times.”

With a face deeply scarred, Seward survived the wounds he had suffered on the night of Lincoln's death. He stayed on as Johnson's secretary of state and welcomed a hundred Southern dignitaries to his home within months of the end of the war. In December 1865, he certified the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which eight occupied states had endorsed, some more legitimately than others. In 1866, Seward put pressure on Napoleon III to withdraw French forces from Mexico, gave a diplomatic dinner party honoring Madame Benito Juarez, whose husband the French had deposed, and suggested in a toast that Juarez would reenter Mexico City within the year. Napoleon's minister to Washington
advised Paris to take this no more seriously than any of Seward's other indiscretions, typically served up with dessert.

In 1867, he advanced his dream of expanding the United States throughout North America, persuading President Johnson and Congress to buy Alaska from the Russians for $7.2 million. Lincoln's former secretary of the treasury, the acerbic William Pitt Fessenden, a senator once again, promised to support the acquisition of the frozen waste (“Seward's Folly,” as his critics were soon calling it), but only if “the Secretary of State be compelled to live there, and the Russian government required to keep him there.”

Seward died at seventy-one in 1872, after traveling the world in retirement, to wide acclaim. The former White House aide John Hay recalled that “the only word of regret at Lincoln's superior fortune I ever heard from the Secretary was a noble and touching one. . . . ‘Lincoln always got the advantage of me, but I never envied him anything but his death.' ”

 

ULYSSES S. GRANT

Soon after the war, Seward squelched Grant's proposal to enforce the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico. Grant got it done in his own irrepressible way. “I sent Sheridan with a corps to the Rio Grande to have him where he might aid Juarez in expelling the French from Mexico. These troops got off
before they could be stopped,
and went to the Rio Grande, where Sheridan distributed them up and down the river. . . .” [Emphasis added]A weakening of Napoleonic will ensued. Two days after the last French soldier left, Napoleon's surrogate, the Archduke Maximilian, surrendered to Juarez, who responded to Seward's messages urging mercy by presenting the Austrian nobleman to a firing squad.

After a short stint as Secretary of War under President Andrew Johnson, replacing Edwin Stanton, Grant succeeded Johnson in 1869. His presidency was spoiled by scandal. None of it touched him personally, but his aide Orville Babcock, who had escorted the Southern peace commissioners to Hampton Roads, was brought down. Swindled out of his savings after he left the White House, Grant faced destitution before Mark Twain convinced him to write his memoirs and published them. He finished them a few days before he died at the age of sixty-three. They left his widow comfortable for life.

 

JULIA GRANT

Julia Grant entertained lavishly as first lady, brought an unprecedented level of opulence and style to the White House, forbade everyone but her husband to smoke there, and ordered “colored visitors” to be admitted to her Tuesday afternoon receptions, to which the public was invited. (The staff excluded them anyway.)

The widowed Mrs. Grant wrote her own important memoirs and rejected lucrative offers to publish them. Candid as they were, she preferred to let “several generations” pass before they were unveiled. They first saw print in 1975. A doyenne of Washington society, the former first lady befriended the wives of Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, and Roosevelt, as well as Varina Davis, attended the dedication of Grant's tomb, and was laid at his side in 1902.

 

EDWIN STANTON

In 1868, Andrew Johnson was impeached, primarily for removing Stanton as Secretary of War and replacing him with Grant in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, a congressional usurpation of presidential powers. The Senate acquitted Johnson by a single vote. In 1869, knowing that Stanton was dying, President Grant appointed him to the Supreme Court, his life's ambition. He died four days after the Senate confirmed him.

 

THOMAS ECKERT

A month after the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, Major Eckert was appointed Assistant Secretary of War and promoted to brevet brigadier general, jumping three grades in a single bound. A subordinate thought Eckert and Eddie Stanton, another Assistant Secretary, “imitated Stanton's arrogance, and both were petty tyrants instead of big ones, like their model.”

On April 14, 1865, still impressed by the major having broken several pokers over his arm, Lincoln asked Stanton to have Eckert accompany him as a bodyguard to Ford's Theatre. Stanton said no. So did Eckert. He was said to be too busy.

In 1867, Stanton got Eckert a job at Western Union. He rose to become its president in 1893 and chairman of the board in 1900, still telling friends how he had stopped General Grant “right there” when he challenged Eckert's authority at City Point.

 

HORACE GREELEY

In 1872, the Democrats and Liberal Republicans nominated Greeley to challenge Grant for the presidency. Alec Stephens called it a choice between hemlock and strychnine. Greeley lost all but six Southern and Border States, each of which might have voted for Crazy Horse had he run against Grant. Before the month was out, Greeley suffered a mental breakdown and died in an institution.

 

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

After the last Rebel army surrendered, Sherman declared himself “sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine . . . ‘tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated . . . that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.” He succeeded Grant as Commanding General of the United States Army in 1869, presided over the Indian wars of the late 1860s and1870s, and unleashed vengeance, desolation, and blood on the Sioux after Custer's annihilation at Little Bighorn. Politics were anathema to him. Recruited to seek the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1884, he issued the classic line, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”

He died on February 14, 1891. His worthiest Rebel adversary, General Joseph Johnston, refused to wear his hat at the funeral in New York, saying Sherman would not have worn his, had their roles been reversed. Catching a cold that progressed to pneumonia, Johnston died a few weeks later.

 

EDWARD ORD

General Edward Ord, Grant's collaborator in the peace overtures to General Longstreet, earned much of the credit for running Lee down and
was present at his surrender. At Grant's direction, Ord investigated the Lincoln assassination and concluded that the Confederate government and its leaders had not been complicit in it. He died of yellow fever in 1883. In the Spanish American War, Ord's son and namesake led Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders up San Juan Hill and was killed at the summit.

 

THADDEUS STEVENS

In increasingly ill health, carried about the capitol in a chair, Thaddeus Stevens led the way for a punitive reconstruction; helped prevent the hanging of any Rebel leaders; championed the adoption of the Fourteen Amendment prohibiting state and local governments from discriminating in matters of life, liberty, or property; and spearheaded the impeachment of Andrew Johnson after he resisted the civil rights legislation that Stevens introduced. He died in 1868. Having demanded to be buried in a racially integrated cemetery, he caused that rare distinction to be carved on his tombstone as a monument to the “equality of man before his creator.”

 

SUNSET COX

After his Ohio constituents removed him from Congress in 1864, Cox moved to Manhattan, whose residents returned him there in 1868. He was said to be one of the only honest men in the shadow of Boss Tweed and explained that he had voted against the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 because slavery was already “dead by the bullet,” and the Southern peace commission ought not to be driven away. In an age that valued solemnity, he was criticized for his witticisms on the House floor, “more anxious to annoy his opponents than to extinguish them.” In 1885, Grover Cleveland made him the Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, replacing Lew Wallace. He died in 1889.

 

MARY, TAD, AND ROBERT TODD LINCOLN

Tad died of heart failure at the age of seventeen, the third of Mary Todd Lincoln's four sons to pass away in childhood. That and her husband's murder in her presence left her all but mad. In 1875, she was
institutionalized temporarily by Robert Todd Lincoln, her only surviving son, who served as Secretary of War under presidents James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, ambassador to the Court of Saint James's under President Benjamin Harrison, and president of the Pullman Palace Car Company. He became a wealthy man, and participated in the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.

 

JOHN HAY

Lincoln's young aide John Hay wrote postwar editorials for the
New York
Daily Tribune,
admired by his friend Mark Twain as the only man who ever worked for Horace Greeley and was not afraid of him, a distinction that “could not be made too conspicuous.” He served as Secretary of State under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

A diarist to the end, Hay made an entry in 1905, less than three weeks before he died: “I dreamt last night that I was in Washington and that I went to the White House to report to the President, who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln. He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised by Lincoln's presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.”