The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (188 page)

In addition to the copies made by Marshall’s clerk for normal distribution, others were transcribed and taken to the general for his signature, and these remained for those who had them the possession they cherished most. One such was Henry Perry, the young infantry captain who had refused a drink from Seth Williams’ silver flask three nights before, near Cumberland Church. Later he told how he got it and how he felt, then and down the years, about the man who signed it. “I sat down and copied it on a piece of Confederate paper,” he recalled, “using a drumhead for a desk, the best I could do. I carried this copy to General Lee, and asked him to sign it for me. He signed it and I have it now. It is the best authority, along with my parole, that I can produce why after that day I no longer raised a soldier’s hand for the South. There were tears in his eyes when he signed it for me, and when I turned to walk away there were tears in my own eyes. He was in all respects the greatest man who ever lived, and as a humble officer of the South, I thank heaven I had the honor of following him.”

Lucifer in Starlight

GUNS BOOMED THE NEWS OF APPOMATTOX as dawn broke over Washington next morning, April 10, one week after a similar uproar hailed the fall of Richmond. If the reaction now was less hysterical, if many loyal citizens were content to remain abed, counting the five hundred separate thuds of the salute — as compared to nine hundred the Monday before — that was not only because of the earlier drain on their emotions, it was also because of rain drumming hard on their bedroom windows and mud slathered more than shoetopdeep outside. Still, a carousing journalist observed, the streets were soon “alive with people singing and cheering, carrying flags and saluting everybody, hungering and thirsting for speeches.” They especially wanted a speech from Lincoln, whose presence in town, after his return from down the coast last evening, was in contrast to his absence during the previous celebration. At the Treasury Department, for example, when the clerks were told they had been given another holiday, the same reporter noted that they “assembled in the great corridor of their building and sang ‘Old Hundredth’ with thrilling, even tear-compelling effect,” then trooped across the grounds to the White House, where, still in excellent voice, they serenaded the President with the national anthem.

He was at breakfast and did not appear, but a night’s sleep had done nothing to diminish the excitement he felt on reading Grant’s wire at bedtime. “Let Master Tad have a Navy sword,” he directed in a note to Welles, and added in another to the Secretary of War (omitting the question mark as superfluous on this day of celebration): “Tad wants some flags. Can he be accommodated.” Stanton evidently complied in short order, for when a procession arrived from the Navy Yard a couple of hours later, dragging six boat howitzers which were fired as they rolled up Pennsylvania Avenue, the boy stood at a second-story window and flaunted a captured rebel flag, to the wild applause
of a crowd that quickly swelled to about three thousand. Presently Lincoln himself appeared at the window, and the yells redoubled. “Speech! Speech!” men cried from the lawn below. But he put them off. He would speak tonight, or more likely tomorrow, “and I shall have nothing to say if you dribble it all out of me before.” As the laughter subsided he took up a notion that had struck him. “I see you have a band of music with you,” he said, and when a voice called up: “We have two or three!” he proposed closing the interview by having the musicians play “a particular tune which I will name.… I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. I presented the question to the Attorney General and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is now our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”

The band did, to roars of approval from the crowd, then followed the irreverent rebel anthem with a lively rendition of “Yankee Doodle,” after which Lincoln called for “three good hearty cheers for General Grant and all under his command.” These given, he requested “three more cheers for our gallant navy,” and when they were over he retired, as did the rollicking crowd. Near sundown, a third crew of celebrants turned up, to be similarly put off on grounds that he had to be careful what he said at times like this. “Everything I say, you know, goes into print. If I make a mistake it doesn’t merely affect me nor you, but the country. I therefore ought at least to try not to make mistakes. If, then, a general demonstration be made tomorrow evening, and it is agreeable, I will endeavor to say something and not make a mistake without at least trying carefully to avoid it.”

Next night he was back, as promised, and they were there to hear him in their thousands, packed shoulder to shoulder on the White House lawn and looking up at the same window. Off in the drizzly distance, Arlington House — R. E. Lee’s former home, long since commandeered by the government he had defied — glittered on its hillside beyond the Potomac, illuminated tonight along with all the other public buildings, while nearer at hand, gilded with light from torches and flares, the Capitol dome seemed to float like a captive balloon in a gauzy mist that verged on rain. To one observer yesterday, seeing him for the first time, Lincoln “appeared somewhat younger and more off-hand and vigorous than I should have expected. His gestures and countenance had something of the harmless satisfaction of a young politician at a ratification meeting after his first election to the Legislature. He was happy, and glad to see others happy.” Tonight, though, he was different. Appearing after Tad had once more warmed the crowd by flourishing the Confederate banner, he seemed grave and thoughtful, and he had with him, by way of assuring that he would “not make a mistake without
at least trying carefully to avoid it,” a rolled-up manuscript he had spent most of the day preparing. What he had in mind to deliver tonight was not so much a speech as it was a closely written document, a state paper dealing less with the past, or even the present, than with the future; less with victory than with the problems victory brought. The crowd below did not know this yet, however, and Noah Brooks — a young newsman who was slated to replace one of his private secretaries — saw “something terrible in the enthusiasm with which the beloved Chief Magistrate was received. Cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause rolled up, the President patiently standing quiet until it was over.”

“Fellow Citizens,” he said at last. Holding a candle in his left hand to light the papers in his right, he waited for new cheers to subside, and then continued. “We are met this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.” Cheered again, he sought relief from the difficulty of managing both the candle and his manuscript by signaling to Brooks, who stood behind one of the window drapes beside him, with what the journalist called “a comical motion of his left foot and elbow, which I construed to mean that I should hold his candle for him.” With both hands free to grip the sheaf of papers, and Brooks extending the light from behind the curtain, he went on with his speech, dropping each read page as he began the next. Unseen by the crowd, Tad scrambled about on the balcony floor to catch the sheets as his father let them flutter down. “Another, another,” he kept saying impatiently all through the reading, heard plainly because of a hush that soon descended on the celebrants on the lawn below.

Referred to afterwards by Brooks as “a silent, intent, and perhaps surprised multitude,” they were in fact both silent and surprised, but they were more confused than they were intent. Until Lincoln began speaking they had not supposed tonight was any occasion for mentioning sadness, even to deny it, and as he continued along other lines, equally unexpected at a victory celebration, their confusion and discomfort grew. After this brief introduction, scarcely fitting in itself, he spoke not of triumphs, but rather of the problems that loomed with peace; in particular one problem. “By these recent successes,” he read from the second of the sheets that fell fluttering to his feet, “the reinauguration of the national authority — reconstruction — which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with — no one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized
and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.”

This then was his subject — “the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction” — and he stayed with it through Tad’s retrieval of the last dropped sheet, addressing himself less to his listeners, it seemed, than to the knotty problem itself, and in language that was correspondingly knotty. For example, in dealing with the claim that secession, while plainly illegal, had in fact removed from the Union certain states which now would have to comply with some hard-line requirements before they could be granted readmission, he pronounced it “a merely pernicious abstraction,” likely to “have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends” left and right of the stormy center. “We all agree that the seceded states, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those states, is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the states from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.”

In regard to the new state government in Louisiana, which had the support of only ten percent of the electorate, he acknowledged the validity of criticism that it was scantly based and did not give the franchise to the Negro. All the same, though he himself wished its constituency “contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand [voters] instead of only twelve thousand, as it does,” and though he preferred to have the ballot extended to include the blacks — at least “the very intelligent” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers” — he did not believe these shortcomings invalidated the present arrangement, which in any case was better than no arrangement at all. “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.” For one thing, the state legislature had already voted to ratify the 13th Amendment, and the sooner its authority was recognized by Congress, the sooner all men would be free throughout the land. He had thought long and hard about the problem, as well as about various proposals for its solution, “and yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state, and withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details
and collaterals.… In the present ‘situation,’ as the phrase goes, it maybe my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper.”

That was the end, and he let it hang there, downbeat, enigmatic, inconclusive, as perfunctory and uncertain, even in its peroration, as the applause that followed when his listeners finally understood that the speech — if that was what it had been — was over. Tad gathered up the last sheet of manuscript, and as Lincoln stepped back into the room he said to Brooks, still holding the candle out from behind the window drape: “That was a pretty fair speech, I think, but you threw some light on it.” Down on the lawn, the misty drizzle had turned to rain while he spoke, and the crowd began to disperse, their spirits nearly as dampened as their clothes. Some drifted off to bars in search of revival. Others walked over to Franklin Square to serenade Stanton, who might do better by them.