THE LOST INDICTMENT OF ROBERT E. LEE

Ahandsome, smartly dressed gentleman arrived at the Kirkwood House in Washington, DC, early in the afternoon on Friday, April 14, 1865. The man asked for a card and a sheet of notepaper, and then wrote down the following message:

For Mr. Andrew Johnson:

I don’t wish to disturb you; are you at home?
J. Wilkes Booth¹

The famous actor John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head around 9:30 p.m. on the night of April 14 while the president sat in a private box with his wife at Ford’s Theatre.² At roughly the same time, another assassin viciously attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home, stabbing him numerous times in the face and throat. Investigators would later discover that the small band of conspirators had also intended to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was little hope that either Lincoln or Seward would survive. Throughout the early morning hours of April 15, Lincoln’s cabinet members understandably assumed there was a broader conspiracy afoot.

Vice President Johnson had gone to bed early in his two-room suite on the second floor of the Kirkwood House on that Friday evening.³ He had been staying at the hotel, which was a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre, since assuming his duties as Lincoln’s vice president a month earlier. Much later, during the trial of Booth’s gang of conspirators, it would be disclosed that Johnson had also been targeted for assassination. A German immigrant named George Atzerodt, who had rented a room on the same floor as Johnson in the Kirkwood House, had been chosen for the deed by Booth. But Atzerodt, having drunk too much on the night of the crimes, lost his nerve and never fulfilled his part of the plan. Booth’s note to the vice president earlier that day may have been an attempt to somehow implicate Johnson in the conspiracy. Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s distraught and emotionally unsteady wife, suspected the note indicated Johnson knew of the monstrous plot.⁴

Awakened shortly after the attacks on Lincoln and Seward, Johnson broke down in tears upon hearing the news. Eventually, he buttoned up his coat and headed over to the house of Mr. Petersen, where the mortally wounded Lincoln lay resting. Directly across the street from Ford’s Theatre, the house provided more space for the six surgeons who attended the president. Alas, all agreed there was little that could be done for Lincoln, who would not survive the bullet wound to his head. Miraculously, Seward would eventually survive his attack, though the scars on his face never fully healed.

By midnight, the medical personnel at Lincoln’s bedside had been joined by members of the cabinet and other leading officials. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles noted in his diary, “the giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him. . . . His features were calm and striking.”⁵ Outside of Petersen’s house, crowds gathered, despite the damp and darkness of the early spring evening in the nation’s capital. The city’s freedmen were especially overwhelmed by grief. Several hundred African Americans congregated on the avenue outside the White House and remained there weeping throughout the following day. Johnson didn’t stay long at the Petersen location, and soon returned to the Kirkwood House, where he spent the next several hours pacing up and down his room, wringing his hands, and muttering, “They shall suffer for this, they shall suffer for this.”⁶

Andrew Johnson, a man of medium height with black eyes and a dark complexion, immediately viewed these attacks as the bloody work of traitors who had spent the previous four years trying to destroy the Union. A southerner himself from Tennessee, who had been threatened and harassed by secessionists for his support of the Union, Johnson would passionately exclaim to anyone who would listen that traitors and treason needed to be punished. After the fall of Richmond in early April, he had declared, “treason is the highest crime known in the catalogue of crimes” and “treason must be made odious and traitors must be punished.”⁷ For Johnson, death would be “too easy a punishment” for the traitors.

Johnson’s desire for retribution represented a stark contrast with the seemingly lenient, benevolent attitude of Abraham Lincoln. On the morning of April 10, the day after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, Johnson had hurried over to the White House so he could protest directly with the president against the indulgent terms given to Lee by Grant. According to one firsthand account, very few people knew at the time that Johnson believed Grant should have held Lee in prison until the administration figured out what to do with him.⁸ During the late afternoon on April 14, just hours prior to the attack at Ford’s Theatre, Johnson had met privately with the president, telling Lincoln he was going too easy on the rebels.⁹ Johnson noted that he’d be much, much tougher on traitors if he were president.

Over at Petersen’s house, it became clear that the end was near for Lincoln around 7 a.m. on April 15. With Secretary of War Stanton, Attorney General James Speed, and several others still in attendance, the president died at 7:22 a.m. Minutes later, church bells tolled throughout the city, announcing the terrible news. A short prayer was offered by Reverend Phineas Gurley amidst weeping in the parlor. With tears streaming down his face, Stanton said, “Now, he belongs to the ages.”¹⁰ Lincoln’s funeral, described by the New York Times as “the greatest pageant ever tendered to the honored dead on this continent,” would be held four days later.¹¹

Despite his intense grief, the energetic Secretary of War had taken control on the evening of the assassination, while Lincoln lay dying and Johnson paced in his room. Upon first hearing of the tragedy, Stanton began an investigation into the crimes, while also organizing Washington’s defenses against a possibly larger conspiracy. All the while, he sent updates to the press and government officials about the events of the evening and early morning. The Secretary of War, who had a reputation for political infighting and opportunism, served his country heroically in those hours before Johnson became the next commander-in-chief. Ironically, he’d become one of Johnson’s bitterest enemies in the coming years.¹²

General Grant was one of the first persons notified by Stanton after the terrible event. The general and his wife had actually been invited by the Lincolns to attend the play that evening, but Grant declined the invitation, instead taking a train to Burlington, New Jersey. Upon hearing the news, Grant returned to Washington, DC, to assist Stanton with the defense of the nation’s capital. When Grant’s wife Julia noted Andrew Johnson would now become president, he remarked “for some reason, I dread the change.”¹³

After Lincoln was pronounced dead, James Speed—who was the brother of a close friend of Lincoln’s in addition to being attorney general—prepared a quick note for the vice president, telling him his inauguration should take place as soon as possible.¹⁴ Johnson replied immediately asking that the ceremony take place at Kirkwood House. Speed and Salmon Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, then began looking into the former cases of Vice Presidents Tyler and Filmore in order to “examine the Constitution and laws.”¹⁵

The inauguration ceremony was brief.¹⁶ Chase administered the oath at 11:00 a.m. with a handful of cabinet members and politicians in attendance. Johnson kissed the Bible and then made a short speech, saying, “The duties of office are mine. I will perform them. The consequences are with God. Gentlemen, I shall lean upon you. I feel that I need your support. I am deeply impressed with the solemnity of the occasion and the responsibility of the duties of the office I am assuming.” Chase concluded the ceremony by saying, “May God guide, support, and bless you in your arduous duties.” Everyone then offered Johnson their “sad congratulations.” According to newspaper accounts, Johnson appeared in good health and “produced a most gratifying impression” upon everyone there.

Many Americans would have required reassurance that the new president was in “good health” and ready for the daunting task ahead of him. Johnson had only been vice president for less than six weeks, and his first public act had been a complete disaster. In the hours before his inauguration ceremony, Johnson drank several glasses of whiskey with the outgoing vice president, Hannibal Hamlin.¹⁷ He then delivered a drunken inauguration speech in which he pointed to each of the cabinet members and told them one by one that they derived their power from the people. When it came time for his oath, he loudly proclaimed, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States.” This disgraceful performance was embarrassing for everyone to watch and Johnson was skewered in the press in the days that followed. When a few cabinet members later expressed concerns, Lincoln calmed their fears by saying, “I have known Andy Johnson for many years; he made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain’t a drunkard.” Johnson most likely wasn’t an alcoholic, though his sons suffered from the disease.

Just like Lincoln, Andrew Johnson had been born in a log cabin to working-class parents. Few contemporaries would have imagined that young Andy, who left his native North Carolina at age seventeen to become a tailor in Tennessee, could eventually become president of the United States of America.¹⁸ He never attended a single day of school in his life, though he did read a tremendous amount of books on his own as a young man. Johnson did possess, however, an abundance of energy and grit—and a considerable amount of stubbornness, too—which served him well as he climbed up through the ranks from alderman to mayor to state representative and senator, then on to governor and US representative and senator, and then finally to vice president and president. Early in Johnson’s career, a journalist described him as a “self-made man—a man for the people and of the people.”¹⁹

A proud Jacksonian Democrat, Johnson vigorously defended the working man against what he believed was a predatory aristocracy in the South. It’s not surprising that Johnson clashed frequently with Jefferson Davis, a wealthy planter and slave owner from Mississippi, during their time together in Congress before the war. In the midst of a particularly acrimonious exchange between the two congressmen, Johnson remarked that Davis was part of an “illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy, who assumed to know a good deal,” yet was lacking in talents and information.²⁰ A reporter on the scene noted that neither Johnson nor Davis would forget the bitterness of that particular debate.

Johnson fought hard on behalf of white working people, but he was never a champion of laboring slaves and freedmen. Like many southerners prior to the war, Johnson owned slaves. And he defended the peculiar institution all the way up until 1863, the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The first slave Johnson bought was a fourteen-year-old girl named Dolly. He’d eventually own eight or nine slaves in total and was proud of the fact that he never sold even one of them. The great African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed upon meeting Johnson for the first time that, “whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.”²¹

Johnson’s racism is shocking to the modern observer, and yet, sadly, it would help explain his policies while in the White House. During his first term in Congress, Johnson reacted with horror to one bill that he feared “would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, wooly headed, ebon-colored negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.”²² For Johnson, equality between the races was unthinkable, and he never deviated from that position. As president, he wrote Governor Thomas Fletcher of Missouri, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”²³

A colleague once said of Johnson that he “had no confidants and sought none.”²⁴ While his racism was shared by many southerners before the war, his steadfast commitment to the Union was not. As a senator from Tennessee, Johnson became the only member from a Confederate state to remain in the Senate. Northerners welcomed his vigorous defense of the Union, particularly in the dark days of 1860 and 1861.

In one of his greatest speeches, delivered in the Senate in December 1860, he said South Carolina had put itself “in an attitude of levying war against the United States.”²⁵ He added, “it is treason, nothing but treason.” A few months later, Johnson declared on the Senate floor that if he were president and was faced with traitors, he would “have them arrested and if convicted, within the meaning and scope of the Constitution, by Eternal God,” he’d have them executed.²⁶ Throughout the war, Johnson exhibited defiance and bravery in the face of relentless attacks by secessionists. His commendable performance during the initial phases of the war made him an attractive choice for vice president in 1864. Facing a tough reelection campaign, Lincoln had felt a War Democrat would strengthen the ticket considerably, so Vice President Hamlin was replaced with Johnson. The party appreciated Johnson’s pugnacity, and the choice was well received. Just hours after Lincoln died, Henry Ward Beecher—the abolitionist and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe—spoke for many northerners when he said, “Johnson’s little finger was stronger than Lincoln’s loins.”²⁷ That line echoed the thoughts of a leading advisor to England’s Charles I, who had said, “the little finger of the prerogative was heavier than the loins of the law.”²⁸ Ominously perhaps for Johnson, Charles’s clash with Parliament ended with his beheading.

Gideon Welles arranged for Johnson’s first cabinet meeting to be held at noon on Saturday, April 15.²⁹ The cabinet had met a day earlier, with Lincoln presiding. On that occasion, Lincoln had said he wanted to “avoid the shedding of blood, or any vindictiveness of punishment.”³⁰ He made it clear to his colleagues that he didn’t want to hang even the worst of the rebels. Throwing up his hands as if scaring sheep, he said, “Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off.” Stanton even noted that Lincoln spoke very kindly of General Lee and others of the Confederacy.³¹ At the new president’s first meeting on April 15, Johnson promised that his policy, in all of the essentials, would be the same as Lincoln’s. And he asked the members of the cabinet to continue in their jobs without any change.

The next day, Sunday, April 16, Johnson indicated his policy toward the rebel leadership wouldn’t be quite the same as Lincoln’s. At a cabinet meeting in the morning, Johnson announced that he was “not disposed to treat treason lightly,” and he’d punish the leading rebels “with exemplary severity.”³² He provided more detail when he met with his former colleagues from the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War at his temporary headquarters at the Treasury Department later that day. The committee’s chairman, Senator Benjamin Wade, greeted Johnson by saying, “Johnson, we have faith in you. By the Gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.”³³ Johnson then replied, “I am very much obliged to you gentlemen, and I can only say you can judge of my policy by my past. Everybody knows what that is. I hold this: Robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime; and crime must be punished. The law provides for it and the courts are open. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.”³⁴

The Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War had been created in 1861 to oversee what appeared to be an increasingly lackluster war effort. Johnson had been an initial member of the group, which consisted of four senators and four representatives. Another original member was George Washington Julian, a radical Republican congressmen from Indiana. He had helped lead the fight to free the slaves and now called for stern punishments for traitors. Even though he and Johnson shared a desire for harsh punishments of the rebels, Julian had been disappointed when Johnson was first nominated to be vice president. According to Julian, Johnson “always scouted the idea that slavery was the cause of our trouble, or that emancipation could ever be tolerated without immediate colonization.”³⁵ Indeed, Julian believed Johnson was “at heart, as decided a hater of the negro and of everything savoring of abolitionism, as the rebels from whom he had separated.”

Julian spent much of the weekend after Lincoln’s assassination with the Radical Republican leadership. Surprisingly, he noted in his diary that the hostility and contempt for Lincoln’s lenient policies were undisguised, and he reported, “the universal feeling among radical men here is that his death is a godsend.”³⁶ That’s why Senator Ben Wade said there “will be no trouble running the government now.” Lincoln and Seward had been “the great leaders in the policy of mercy,” and Grant’s terms with Lee had been too easy. With Lincoln gone and Seward gravely wounded, Julian believed “justice shall be done and the righteous ends of the war made sure.” Another member of the committee, Republican senator from Michigan Zachariah Chandler, wrote to his wife, “I believe that the Almighty God continued Mr. Lincoln in office as long as he was useful, and then substituted a better man to finish the work.”³⁷ Chandler ultimately concluded that Lincoln’s “heart was too good—too full of the milk of human kindness.”

Both Julian and Chandler alluded to a theme that would appear time and again in the various eulogies, speeches, and letters in the days and weeks after Lincoln’s death. Many northerners, freedmen, and even southern Unionists believed Lincoln was too kind to provide the justice the traitors deserved.³⁸ Because God had a plan for America, he had mysteriously taken Lincoln’s life at the conclusion of the war, leaving the stern and unforgiving Andrew Johnson to finish the job. The fact that Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday somehow gave it all even more religious significance. Two days later, on Easter Sunday, Reverend C. Parker from the First Dutch Reformed Church spoke of the “great leniency of the late President toward the rebels.”³⁹ Parker floated the idea that “it might have been the purpose of the Almighty that this leniency should not continue, and that the task of punishing traitors should be accomplished with a sterner purpose.”

Literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his eulogy for Lincoln in Concord, Massachusetts, eloquently developed the theme of the kindly Lincoln, who was ill-suited to the harsh work of justice.⁴⁰ He began by saying that he doubted “if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will cause, on its announcement.” But Emerson later declared that, despite the pain, the awful event was already “burning into glory around the victim.” Lincoln had lived long enough “to keep the greatest promise that ever man made to his fellow men—the practical abolition of slavery.” Though he had died tragically, Lincoln had accomplished more than any other American except for George Washington.

Emerson further wondered if Lincoln had “reached the term” and perhaps “could no longer serve us.” It might even be possible that “what remained to be done required new and uncommitted hands—a new spirit born out of the ashes of the war; and that Heaven, wishing to show the world a completed benefactor, shall make him serve his country even more by death than his life.” He then concluded by declaring, “The kindness of kings consists in justice and strength.” The rebels had outraged our easy good nature, and had driven loyal Americans “to an unwonted firmness, to secure the salvation of this country in the next ages.”

Herman Melville—poet, lecturer, and author of Moby Dick —addressed these themes in verse. In his poem “The Martyr,” he begins,

Good Friday was the day
of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime
Of clemency and calm—

When the yearning he was filled
To redeem the evil-willed,
And, though conqueror, be kind;
But they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness and their blindness,
And they killed him from behind.

Here, the saintly Lincoln is killed from behind—John Wilkes Booth, everyone knew, shot Lincoln in the back of the head—despite the president’s benevolent intentions toward the rebels. And Melville writes “they killed him”—apparently all of the Confederacy bore responsibility for the murder.⁴¹

Melville, like Emerson, hints that God may have felt a sterner leader might be needed for the work ahead:

He lieth in blood—

The father in his face;

They have killed him, the Forgiver—
The Avenger takes his place,
The Avenger wisely stern,
Who in righteousness shall do
What the heavens call him to,
And the parricides remand;

For they killed him in his kindness,
In their madness and their blindness,
And his blood is on their hand.

The “Avenger,” of course, is Andrew Johnson, who was widely known among Americans to have a tougher stance on traitors than Lincoln. The American people, according to Melville, would support Johnson in stern measures. He concludes with,

There is sobbing of the strong
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.

The murder of Lincoln promised to usher in a harsher environment for the likes of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate leaders.

If Emerson and Melville provided especially eloquent expressions of the mysteries of Providence, the Pastor Alonzo Quint delivered a much more earthly appeal for justice in his Easter Sunday sermon following the assassination. Where Emerson cryptically spoke of a new age, and Melville talked of baring the iron hand, Quint clearly laid out a detailed case for the destruction of Southern chivalry, “root and branch, twig and leaf.”⁴²

At the beginning of his Easter sermon at the North Congregational Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Quint remembered Lincoln had spoken kindly of Lee and his army and was planning on a wide amnesty. “Then he was murdered,” Quint reminded his parishioners.⁴³ He then chastised the Confederates for violating their oaths and sense of honor. And he singled out General Lee for his “fiendish treatment of prisoners.”⁴⁴ Even though Booth shot the president, Quint believed Southern chivalry was responsible for the crime. Other sermons that day boldly stated that Davis and Lee were no different than Booth. As we see in Melville’s poem, this was another theme that emerged in the aftermath of the assassination. Regardless of whether or not the Confederate leadership actually planned the assassination directly, it bore responsibility for the act, which was a natural result of treason, according to many northerners and freedmen. Quint believed generals like Lee were “murderers all” and that prison should be their home until the “halter should say that treason is a crime.”⁴⁵ In addition to the generals, rebel statesmen and judges should be severely punished, too.

At another memorial service in the New York Custom House, a speaker believed Lincoln’s death was the work of God, so that punishment could be meted out to the Confederate leaders. Midway through the speech, attendees were yelling, “Hang Lee!” and “The rebels deserve damnation!”⁴⁶ In general, the Easter sermons were consistent in their demand for punishing rebels—whether by hanging, exile, or the confiscation of property.

The question of which and how many rebels must be punished was on the minds of many northerners in the days immediately after Lincoln’s murder. An early meeting between the new president and radical Republican leader Ben Wade illustrated Johnson’s thinking early on. The president asked, “Well, Mr. Wade, what would you do were you in my place and charged with my responsibilities?”⁴⁷ Wade replied, “I think I should either force into exile or hang about ten or twelve of the worst fellows: perhaps by way of full measure, I should make it thirteen, just a baker’s dozen.” Johnson then asked, “But how are you going to pick out so small a number and show them to be guiltier than the rest?” Wade confidently answered, “It won’t do to hang a very large number, and I think if you would give me time, I could name thirteen that stand at the head in the work of the rebellion. I think we could all agree on Jeff Davis, Toombs, Benjamin Slidell, Mason, and Howell Cobb. If we did no more than drive these half-dozen out of the country, we should accomplish a good deal.” Johnson concluded the meeting by expressing surprise that Wade was prepared to “let the traitors escape so easily.” He indicated that he intended a much more thorough policy of punishment toward the rebel leadership and hoped Wade would provide his “heartiest support.”

Andrew Johnson would have been well aware that a large number of ordinary citizens supported his desire to make treason odious. In the weeks after taking office, Johnson received hundreds of letters from all across America.⁴⁸ Many of the letters—from veterans, widows, and others deeply affected by the war—expressed enthusiasm for Johnson’s tougher approach toward the rebels, especially Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Those two leaders topped everyone’s list of those who should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Many of the citizen correspondents were in no mood for leniency. A former soldier named Apollos Comstock urged that Lee be arrested “with the other leading military and civil acknowledged heads of Treason,” and then killed “by poison or pistol or knife.” George Cothman of Buffalo wrote that “Lee prolonged the war two years let him hang and die a traitor’s death,” and added, “Therefore don’t talk to me of mercy or sympathy for Lee any more than for Jeff Davis. There’s no difference between traitors.” Elisha Chick also zeroed in on the leadership, writing, “The leaders and the forward men of this rebellion ought to be hung or driven from the country, their property confiscated, their lands divided up.” Encouragingly, she told Johnson, “The people will sustain you in any measures however stringent you may think it proper to adopt.” Another writer said simply, “The whole of the North says hang those culprits.”

The citizens who wrote Johnson addressed a number of common themes. They loved Lincoln, but thought he would have been too lenient in pursuing justice. Mary Caldwell wondered if “perhaps God saw that Mr. Lincoln never having experienced what treason is, would be too lenient than he [Andrew Johnson] who had lived in the midst of traitors during this great strife, who has suffered everything but death at their hands.” The writers also believed that the Confederate leadership—Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, at the very least—should face punishment. As Samuel Snyder wrote, the ordinary and ignorant rebels should be forgiven, “but certainly all well informed and designing rascals should be severely punished.” And finally, the writers felt the assassination of Lincoln was somehow a natural result of treason against the Union. One citizen described John Wilkes Booth as having graduated from the “university of treason” that had Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee as teachers.

One of the most heartfelt letters to Johnson, written by a former veteran from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, is representative of the mass of correspondence, but its simple emotional power makes it stand out, too.⁴⁹

To: Andrew Johnson, President of the Greatest Republic on Earth
I congratulate you on your having arisen to this high and responsible and very useful position.

When the terrible news came of the assassination of President Lincoln I was for one disheartened. Not knowing much of your previous history I feared that the consequences would be exceedingly disastrous. But I am thankful to see the Presidential seat so well filled. (comparatively I might say more than filled). My fears are dispelled and my hopes are realized.

In your case we see that virtue has received its well merited reward. You were from a slave holding state. You stood by your Country and its Constitution. You opposed secession and Rebels. We now see your exaltation. Forming a wonderful contrast to the degradation of Jeff Davis.

We were pleased to hear of the speedy retribution visited upon Booth the assassin and the capture of Davis too. From this point the cry is hang him! hang him! As a Christian I cannot conscientiously ask for vengeance. But I shall not weep if justice is meted out to him as i know it will be when all is known to you.

I have been in the army as a volunteer. And I have or did have three brothers two of whom have been drafted. One my eldest Brother (a healthy and stout good looking young man) volunteered in the summer of 1862. In the year 1863 he was made a prisoner by the Rebels at Gettysburg and carried to Belle Island near Richmond where he died before the close of the year. Literally starved to death in his own country for which he was fighting. O, God! it drives me almost frantic when I think of these barbarities. Why common and speedy murder looks like mercy compared to such cruelty. The Black Hole of Calcutta has been out done in our own free Country.

It is just that those who caused such terrible suffering should lose their lives. The world should not be troubled with them longer. How can we live in the same country with men of such principles? I hope those principles will be something more than smothered.

I would like to see you and take you by the hand but I do not expect to be in Washington for years yet. I have been reading what you said to the Sunday school children of your City. It did me good (I am superintending a little Sunday school). I intend to read your speech to my Scholars on Sunday.

Of course you will not have time to answer such an unimportant letter. But I would feel highly complimented if you could but send me your autograph.
God be with you.

Lincoln’s death became a touchstone for the grief of so many citizens.⁵⁰ Not only did the writer lose a president, he lost his eldest brother, a “healthy and stout looking young man,” who cruelly died of starvation in a prison camp. The pain of the loss is still raw: “O, God! It drives me almost frantic when I think of these barbarities.” And the requirements of justice were clear: “those who caused such terrible suffering should lose their lives. The world should not be troubled with them longer. How can we live in the same country with men of such principles?”

Americans mourned Lincoln intensely and keenly sought out justice because they were also mourning their fathers and brothers who had died in the war. Overall, roughly 750,000 Americans from both sides were killed, with many more wounded and missing. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust reminds us that all of this death “marked a sharp and alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die.”⁵¹ It was a very sad time in America in the aftermath of the war and Lincoln’s violent death.

Walt Whitman captured this sadness beautifully in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”⁵² Whitman loved Lincoln and would even wait for him in the mornings, so he could see the president ride by when he was returning from the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln’s summer lodgings during much of the war.⁵³ Whitman also had a strong connection with ordinary soldiers from his volunteering at DC military hospitals. This poem was for both Lincoln and the ordinary soldiers. He begins his elegy by referring to Lincoln—the great star in the western sky:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war . . .

In a powerful image, Whitman talks of breaking copious sprigs of lilac for all of the coffins:

. . . now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you, O death.

In the days after Lincoln’s death, Americans were looking to heal their “republic of suffering,” and many were hoping to punish those who they believed caused that suffering.

In addition to all of the letters flowing in, the new president had thirty-two formal appointments in the two weeks after April 16.⁵⁴ He frequently met with state delegations in his temporary workspace at the treasury building. On April 16, he met with the Illinois delegation. On the twenty-first, he met with delegations from Ohio, Maine, and Indiana. Three days later, he welcomed a delegation from every single southern state. The president spent a tremendous amount of time listening to the American people and their representatives during the first days of his administration.

In a typical meeting, Johnson would say a few words to each of the delegations, being sure to include his standard declaration that treason and traitors should be made odious. His talk to the Indiana delegation provided an especially clear statement of his policy toward the rebels and was described by one reporter as “his most definite committal to the line of policy he proposes to pursue.” Another reporter believed the Indiana address was “more important than any he has yet delivered.”

In his remarks to the Hoosier delegation led by Governor Oliver P. Morton, Johnson began, as he often did, by reminding his listeners that “in reference to what my Administration will be, while I occupy my present position, I must refer you to the past.”⁵⁵ Then he moved on to the main theme of the address: treason and traitors. As usual, he emphasized that treason was a crime that must be punished. He also noted that most people would, of course, prefer to be kind and lenient, but sometimes the effect of such a policy is to “produce misery and woe to the mass of mankind.” He then concluded his remarks on treason by making a distinction between the rebel leadership and the majority of southern working people:

. . . while I say that the penalties of the law, in a stern and inflexible manner should be executed upon conscious, intelligent, and influential traitors—the leaders, who have deceived thousands upon thousands of laboring men who have been drawn into this rebellion—and while I say, as to the leaders, punishment, I also say leniency, conciliation, and amnesty to the thousands whom they have misled and deceived.

Johnson clearly envisioned punishing Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, while also providing a path to amnesty for the vast majority of southerners had who supported the Confederacy.

This common-sense notion of singling out the leadership for punishment while forgiving everyone else was widely held by northerners after the war. One of the most eloquent presentations of that argument had been made by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, arguably the most famous orator in America at that time, at the flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on Friday, April 14. The ceremony marked the fourth anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter and was just hours before the assassination of Lincoln.

Midway through his powerful address, Reverend Beecher said, “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South.”⁵⁶ He believed the southern ruling class had tricked the common people “with lies, with sophistries, with cruel deceits and slanders.” The result was the desolation and destruction of the South. For their sins, Beecher argued, “God will reveal judgment and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants,” and then these “most-accursed and detested of all criminals” will be tormented for all eternity by God. Sternly, the Reverend added, “thus shall it be with all who betray their country, and all in heaven and upon earth will say, amen.” As for the common people who were misled, Beecher urged forgiveness, and hoped that the resources of the nation would be applied to rebuilding their prosperity.

The idea of concentrating on punishing the top Confederate leaders had been formally presented to President Lincoln right before the close of the war. After Lincoln returned from his visit to recently liberated Richmond in early April, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gave him a letter from legal expert Francis Lieber proposing a general prosecution of the leading rebels. Lieber, a legal authority who had written for the administration General Orders No. 100 —an authoritative compilation of legal guidelines for the armies in the field—desired the trial and execution of roughly a dozen to twenty of the most prominent leaders. He created two lists for Lincoln.⁵⁷ The first list consisted of those who must be included: Davis, Beauregard, Wilder, Stephens, and Breckinridge. The second list was made up of those who could not be excluded: “General Lee &c, &c.” Sumner told Lieber that Lincoln “read it with much interest.”

The first move against the Confederate leadership came rather quickly after the assassination.⁵⁸ On May 2, 1865, Secretary of War Stanton wrote Brigadier General Joseph Holt, the top lawyer for the army, saying the president wanted a list of persons from Canada and Richmond who may have been complicit in the murder of Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Seward. Wasting no time, Holt replied later that day with some names. He advised Stanton that he had heard testimony indicating that Jefferson Davis, George Sanders, Beverley Tucker, Jacob Thompson, William Cleary, and Clement Clay were all behind the assassination plot. Stanton then prepared a proclamation offering rewards for the capture of the men on the list, which was promptly approved by President Johnson and published that same day. The proclamation offered a reward of $100,000 for the capture of Davis, with smaller rewards for the other alleged conspirators.⁵⁹ Stanton and Holt were even more intent on punishing rebels than the unforgiving Johnson—the hard-liners had clearly seized the reins of the new administration.

In the weeks after offering rewards for the capture of Davis and the others, the Johnson administration slowly and methodically began apprehending the leading members of the Confederate States of America.⁶⁰ On May 10, Union cavalrymen finally discovered and arrested Jefferson Davis in southern Georgia, after a widely publicized manhunt. In a last-ditch effort to escape capture, Davis had put on a waterproof coat that looked very much like a woman’s dress, thereby providing northern cartoonists, among others, with rich fodder for unflattering depictions of the proud southerner.

The diminutive Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president and former ally of Lincoln, was arrested at his home in Georgia. His captors transported him north on the same steamer as Jefferson Davis. They eventually took him further north, however, and imprisoned him at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. Clement Clay, one of the alleged conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, voluntarily gave himself up to Union troops, who transported him to Fort Monroe, where he became Davis’s neighbor. James Seddon, a former Secretary of War for the Confederacy, was arrested in Virginia and jailed at Fort Pulaski in Georgia.

Many Confederate leaders successfully eluded their northern captors. Robert Toombs, a former Secretary of State for the Confederate States of America, escaped by sailing from New Orleans to Havana. He eventually ended up in Europe, where he remained until 1867. John C. Breckinridge, who ran for president against Lincoln in 1860 and succeeded Seddon as the Confederacy’s Secretary of War, also made his way to Cuba. He, too, ended up in Europe, returning to the United States in 1868. The uncompromising Judah Benjamin, who filled multiple roles for the Confederacy, fled to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

One of the Confederacy’s top two leaders remained in limbo, however. In April and May of 1865, the Johnson administration wasn’t quite ready to proceed against Robert E. Lee, who, along with Davis, was at the very top of the Confederate hierarchy. Still a prisoner on parole, Lee chose not to flee, remaining—at least temporarily—in his new home in Richmond, Virginia. Many northerners believed Lee should be on the short list of those Confederates deserving of punishment. A strong case was made against him in the press and other public forums.

Indeed, one of the most constant demands that emerged from the national discussion on treason and traitors was that Lee was foremost among those deserving of punishment. Fiery abolitionist Wendell Phillips referred to Lee as the “bloodiest and guiltiest” of all the rebels and believed there would be “little fitness in hanging any lesser wretch.”⁶¹ Frederick Douglass went further, saying John Wilkes Booth was “was not one whit guiltier” than General Lee—a sentiment shared by many.⁶² An editorial in the New York Tribune offered a similar view of Lee, arguing that “such a man is more guilty than any other.”⁶³ The Cleveland Morning Leader declared that compared to Jefferson Davis, who was often referred to as the “arch-traitor,” Lee was “the wickeder and baser of the two” because it was “a selfish ambition that led him, Judas-like to betray his country.”⁶⁴ The Ohio Farmer ’s stance was equally harsh: “Robert E. Lee is now so poor that he has not the wherewith to clothe himself. If this be true, let the government relieve him at once—give him ten feet of rope, and six feet of soil. If every traitor earned this reward, Lee surely is the one.”⁶⁵

Many observers couldn’t bear the thought that Lee remained unpunished and was free to go about his business in Richmond. Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child spoke of the arrogance of former rebels like Lee. In the journal Harper’s Weekly, a writer lamented the fact that Lee remained unapologetic for his actions during the war.⁶⁶ Especially provocative was Lee’s farewell to his troops, where the general offered his admiration to those soldiers who—the columnist adds—“would have destroyed this nation.” As long as unbowed traitors such as Lee remained unpunished, they were thought to be “ready at any favorable moment to open fire again upon the national life and honor.” An editorial in The Liberator, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s publication, believed the farewell order was a “slap in the face” to loyal soldiers.⁶⁷ The New York Times concurred, viewing the “farewell order” to the troops as a sign of defiance and an offense against propriety. The same editorial felt Lee’s decision to be photographed by Mathew Brady in “the toggery of the bastard Confederacy” had troubling political undertones.⁶⁸

Lee’s critics often accused him of complicity in the abuse of Union prisoners of war, an extremely emotional topic for Americans at that time. Many believed Lee, as the Confederacy’s leading general during the final years of the war, should have protested the atrocious conditions in the southern prisons. Phillips said Americans shouldn’t have to “tolerate in our streets the presence of such a wretch whose hand upheld Libby Prison and Andersonville, and whose soul is black with sixty-four thousand deaths of prisoners by starvation and torture.” One editorial writer wrote that Lee, “in his tent, might have almost heard the groans of the starving, rotting soldiers of the Union upon Belle Isle and in Libby prison, yet who spoke never a word nor lifted a finger for their relief.” The fact that Lee could have done something but didn’t was a sign of his poor character, according to several publications. An editorial in The Liberator argued, “Lee had the power to prevent or mitigate the sufferings of our prisoners, the worst tyrant and tormenter, from the remotest ages of Paganism down to the cruelest instrument of the French Reign of terror, was not so wicked as he.” Critics of Lee found it impossible to believe that he was unable to alleviate the suffering of northern prisoners.

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune led the way among the nation’s newspapers in making the case that Lee be tried and punished for treason. In “The Paroled Rebel Soldiers and the General Amnesty,” a lengthy editorial published on June 4, 1865, the New York Times argued that Grant’s agreement with Lee was a military arrangement only that did not protect the Confederate general from prosecution for treason once the war was over.⁶⁹ For the Times, Lee levied war against the United States “more strenuously than any other man in the land, and therefore has been specially guilty of the crime of treason, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.” Consequently, the government must bring a case against the rebel general in chief. The Chicago Tribune was possibly even more critical of Lee, and devoted considerable space to challenging his reputation for having Christian values.

In the heated atmosphere after the Lincoln assassination, quite a few northerners compared Lee to the infamous John Brown, the abolitionist who was captured, tried, and hanged for the Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859. Brown had been found guilty of treason against the state of Virginia after a jury deliberated for only forty-five minutes. In a letter to the lieutenant governor of Maryland, which was made public in May 1865, the abolitionist Dr. J. E. Snodgrass argued that Lee should be indicted for treason against the state of Maryland, just like Brown had been indicted on charges against Virginia.⁷⁰ Lee, of course, had invaded Maryland in 1862, which culminated in the battle of Antietam. Snodgrass noted that far more lives were lost and more property was destroyed by Lee’s treason than by Brown’s. Yet, Brown had fought for a cause he believed to be just, while Lee was now saying he didn’t support slavery, and had thought secession was a bad idea all along. Coincidentally, it had been Colonel Robert E. Lee of the US Army that eventually put down John Brown’s short-lived rebellion at Harper’s Ferry.

Andrew Johnson, now famous for his vow to make treason odious, surely heard the growing drumbeat for bringing Lee to justice. While the former Confederate general remained free at his home in Richmond, Johnson—working with Attorney General James Speed and a zealous federal judge for Virginia named John C. Underwood—set in motion a process for bringing formal charges against him. America’s southern president, who had steadfastly supported the Union throughout the war, would soon confront the southern hero who had tried to destroy it.

“THEY SHALL SUFFER FOR THIS, THEY SHALL SUFFER FOR THIS.”