CHAPTER 38

A “Hippodrome of Sorrow”

On the morning of Monday, April 24, Lincoln made his last visit to the city that had been more help and more trouble to him than any other in the Union. A vast throng lined the Hudson River waterfront to watch the ferry Jersey City bring his coffin over from the train terminal there to the dock at the foot of Desbrosses Street. They were as silent as they’d been the last time he’d visited four years earlier. Some of the women wore full widow’s weeds, and everyone wore at least a black crepe armband or one of the memorial badges sold by enterprising street vendors. Men and boys bared their heads and women quietly wept as mournful church bells tolled and cannons boomed, their white smoke rolling out over the choppy water.

The city had been preparing all week. A committee headed up by Tweed, Tammany bigwigs, and various prominent businessmen organized a huge procession. Every building from the grandest hotel to the humblest hovel wore some kind of mournful decoration, “crape or black folds or drapery or black muslin, rosettes, sable emblems,” Carl Sandburg would write. “In store fronts and home windows were busts of Lincoln and little paper monuments resembling marble. Medals and plaques of bronze and copper were common, his face outlined on each.” A species of grief industry had grown up during the war, mass-producing such memento mori items for retail. Over the entrance of Barnum’s museum was a large black urn of smoking incense, with the words “LINCOLN” and “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Banners hung everywhere, citing scripture or Shakespeare (“Oh, the pity of it, Iago—the pity of it”). One quoted the new pennies that had appeared in 1864, which used “In God We Trust” for the first time. Another simply read “Death to Assassins.”

Lincoln’s casket had ridden across the river in a modest hearse; he’d be transferred to a much fancier one for the city’s official farewell to him the next day. The 7th Regiment in their crisp grays formed an honor guard around the hearse. They had not fought a single battlefield engagement during the war, but when it came to marching through the streets, no city unit looked finer. General Dix and other officers led the way. The contingent who’d ridden on the seven-car funeral train from Washington came behind the hearse in carriages. Among them were Lincoln’s friends Ward Lamon and General David Hunter and his aide John Hay, all of whom had ridden on his train from Springfield to Washington four years earlier. Behind them Mayor Gunther and city dignitaries trod on foot. The procession followed a path up to Canal Street, over to Broadway, and down to City Hall.

City Hall wore black ribbons from the top of its cupola to the ground. Over its entrance a banner proclaimed, “THE NATION MOURNS.” On the steps a thousand members of local German musical societies sang the towering “Pilgrims’ Chorus” from Tannhäuser as the coffin was carried in. The coffin was placed on an elaborate altar and the lid opened. Then some 150,000 viewers, in two very long lines, shuffled past straight through Monday afternoon, straight through the night, right up to noon Tuesday, when another 300,000 were said still to be waiting. Many mentioned with dismay how sunken and shriveled the president looked. Brooklyn’s Dr. Holmes had not done the embalming.

A little before one o’clock Tuesday afternoon, the undertaker for the City of New York, a man named Peter Relyea, brought the new hearse to be used in the day’s procession. He’d spent the last three days working on it around the clock, out on the street at the corner of East Broadway and Grand. It “just about paralyzed all beholders with its magnificence.” It was immense, fourteen feet long and seven wide, and glistening black, with glass walls. Relyea had trimmed the inside with white satin. From the ceiling a golden eagle hung over the casket. Outside on the roof he had affixed a miniature “gold and white temple of Liberty with a half-masted small flag fluttering.” Other flags and black plumes fluttered around it. Sixteen horses wearing black cloaks and hoods pulled the grandly gloomy vehicle, each led by a black groom.

The casket was carried out to this enormous catafalque, and the huge procession that Tweed and company had planned slowly unwound. It comprised an astounding 160,000 participants. The whole city, even the bars, had been closed, and the whole population turned out, a sea of humanity that swamped Manhattan below 14th Street. Most contemporary estimates put the crowd at half a million. Few of these people had ever voted for Lincoln. Many had despised him, a good number of them had rioted against his policies, and some had plotted treason against him. A few had even colluded in or at least kept silent about John Wilkes Booth’s plans.

So why had this largely hostile city, this city of sedition, massed to pay him their last regards? Historians tend to reason that his murder, the first presidential assassination in American history, shocked and frightened them into this display of respect. A sense of guilt, they say, may also have played a part. In his 1929 Myths After Lincoln, Lloyd Lewis, a Chicago newspaperman and friend of Sandburg, took a more cynical point of view. He derided the “show” New York put on as a “hippodrome of sorrow, much of it pure ostentation,” “half circus, half heartache.” It was a warm, soft spring day; everybody was off work and had nothing else to do. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers loved parades and processions and would turn out en masse at the slightest provocation. In this instance, morbid curiosity may have played as large a part as guilt.

General Dix rode at the head of the procession; Admiral Farragut and the ancient General Winfield Scott were also present. Every city unit of army, navy, and marines marched. Whitman’s brother George marched with Brooklyn’s 51st. Behind them snaked a seemingly endless line of groups representing all the city’s businesses, lodges, labor unions, and civic organizations. “The Henry Clay Debating Society, the German Bakers, the Turner Sharpshooters, the German Carvers, Hose Companies galore, Temperance Cadets, women’s clubs, all were in line hoisting mottoes,” Lewis wrote. “The children of Brooklyn’s Fifth Ward waved the legend ‘The hand of the assassin has entwined the name of Abraham Lincoln in a wreath of immortality.’” Some groups had built mourning floats.

Two hundred black New Yorkers brought up the very rear of the line. More had wanted to participate, but Tweed and Tammany, fearing it might set off new rioting, at first banned them. Secretary Stanton, who had the ultimate say, telegraphed General Dix that “no discrimination regarding color should be exercised.” Dix provided the black marchers with an armed escort, but it was unnecessary. White onlookers applauded politely as they went by.

Crowds lined the procession route in “a dense human hedge twelve or fifteen feet deep” according to the Times. Thousands more, including a six-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, leaned out of every window and watched from every rooftop. Some homeowners and landlords along the route posted handbills outside their doors, charging admission of up to forty dollars; many had removed the window casements so that more heads could crowd the openings. Viewers hung from every lamppost and tree.

Gus Schurmann was in the crowd. He would grow up to hold various civil service jobs, be active in veterans’ groups like the Grand Army of the Republic and the Mozart Veterans Association, and serve as the president of the city’s Republican Party. He died of tuberculosis in 1905 at the age of fifty-six and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. A maker of tin soldiers for collectors recently offered one of Gus as a little bugler.

All over the city, through the whole long march, church bells tolled and cannons boomed. The procession brought the coffin up to the same Hudson River Railroad depot on 30th Street where President-elect Lincoln had entered the city four years earlier. At 4:15 the Lincoln Special, hung with black bunting, chugged out of the station, bound for Albany.

John Wilkes Booth died early the next morning. He had fully expected to be cheered for ridding the land of the tyrant Lincoln. Instead, he’d found himself on the lam, hunted and hated, with a bounty on his head. Before dawn on April 26 a detachment of the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry found him holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. When he wouldn’t come out, they set fire to the barn. They were under strict orders to take him alive; Stanton wanted a trial.

But one man who rode with the 16th answered to a higher authority: Sergeant Thomas “Boston” Corbett, the castrated fanatic who’d upset the businessmen at the Fulton Street prayer meetings before the war. When the war started, he had signed up with the 12th New York Militia—the same regiment Frank Barlow had originally joined, led by Colonel Dan Butterfield. Carrying his Bible with him everywhere, Corbett continued to make himself a nuisance as he ranted at his fellow soldiers and even Colonel Butterfield about their ungodly speech and actions. He was court-martialed but reenlisted, and was serving with the 16th Cavalry when he was taken prisoner in 1864. He nearly died of scurvy and starvation in the infamous Andersonville prison, from which he escaped twice and was twice recaptured, before being released in an exchange.

On the morning of April 26, Sergeant Corbett aimed a Colt pistol through a crack in the tobacco barn wall and, flagrantly disobeying orders, shot John Wilkes in the neck behind the ear. He later told the Times that “it seemed to me that God had directed it, for apparently it was just where he had shot the President.” Booth was dragged from the burning barn and died shortly after, muttering, “Useless… Useless.”

The officers on the scene arrested Corbett. Secretary Stanton was livid with him. But Corbett was hailed as a hero throughout the North, and Stanton bowed to public sentiment. “The rebel is dead,” he said in pardoning Corbett. “The patriot lives.”

Corbett returned to New York City, where he was feted as an avenging angel, had his portrait done by Mathew Brady, then went back to his evangelizing. Over the next decade he would wander restlessly from one place to another, made increasingly paranoid by threatening mail from die-hard Confederates. In the 1880s, working as a doorman for the Kansas state legislature, he pulled a gun on legislators he may have believed were mocking God. He was confined to an insane asylum but escaped, to no one knows where, although there were sightings of him in various places for many years. It’s possible he went to Mexico to live out his final years in obscurity. Another theory puts him in Minnesota, where he may have perished in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.

Union troops caught Jefferson and Varina Davis in Georgia on May 10. Just as they had when Lincoln sneaked into Washington in 1861, newspapers and cartoonists in the North made rich sport of the story that Davis was wearing ladies’ clothing when captured. It was Varina’s fault. As the soldiers approached, she threw a woman’s coat and shawl over her husband as a disguise. (Barnum was soon displaying in his museum what he claimed was this very outfit.) She also probably saved his life. When the soldiers accosted them, she grabbed Davis’s arm as he reached for his pistol. Had he pulled it he would almost certainly have been shot, as the soldiers had orders to take him dead or alive. They took him in irons to Fort Monroe. Greeley called for an orderly trial; the Times wanted a quick execution. The debate would drag on for two years while Davis was held without bail or trial; Greeley would lead the effort that ultimately sprung him.

That June, in the Traveler’s Club on Fifth Avenue at 14th Street, Thomas Francis Meagher attended a lecture on the brand-new Montana Territory and thought he heard a chance for a fresh start. He needed one. He ended the war with his once glittering military career seriously blemished. By appealing directly to Lincoln he had finally managed to get a backwater command late in 1864. It lasted only a few weeks. He was drinking heavily and created such confusion and disorder that Grant removed him. In New York, the Dalys and other leaders of the Irish community had turned irrevocably against him. He needed to aim his life in a new direction, and like many thousands of others he now thought that direction was westward ho.

On July 4 the surviving six hundred members of the Irish Brigade led a parade from 23rd Street up to 42nd and then down to Union Square. The untouched 7th marched with them, along with many other city militia units that, unlike the Irish Brigade, had seen little or no action in the war. Robert Nugent rode at the head of the Irishmen. Thomas Francis Meagher was nowhere to be seen. He left New York for good that month and was in Montana by the fall. It was the lawless, wildest West. The discovery of gold there during the war had drawn a motley assortment of whites into what had been Indian land. By 1865 it was home to some thirty thousand bandits, vigilantes, prospectors, die-hard Rebels, a handful of U.S. cavalry scattered in remote forts, even Fenians. They were generally and often violently hostile to one another, to the Indians, and pretty soon to Meagher as well. With the dilatory territorial governor spending most of his time back east, Meagher became acting governor. He tried his hand at negotiating treaties with the Indians; when that failed, he organized a militia to force them into compliance. He failed at that as well. He tried to organize the rough and wide-flung citizenry to apply for statehood, and failed.

On the evening of July 1, 1867, he went over the rail of a steamboat and the swift Missouri River carried him away. His body was never found. Some thought he had been pushed by one of the many enemies he’d made in less than two years out west. Others said he was drunk. He was forty-three.

Edwin Booth stayed out of the public eye for the rest of 1865. In January 1866 he returned to the Winter Garden as Hamlet. The Herald expressed outrage that the brother of Lincoln’s assassin would show his face, but most of the other papers were supportive. The theater was packed to the gaslights on opening night, and when the moody Dane first appeared in act 1, scene 2 the entire audience stood and applauded. Tears in his eyes, Booth bowed deeply.

When the Winter Garden was gutted by fire in 1867, Booth decided to build his own theater. The opulent Booth’s Theatre opened at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street in 1869. It was a great artistic and popular triumph at first, but Booth outspent his box-office receipts on lavish productions and lost the space to bankruptcy in 1874. A few years later the building was converted into a dry goods store.

Booth continued to act for other producers, and his fame only rose. He shared the stage with a young man named Maurice Barrymore, patriarch of the acting family. He toured the country, traveling by private train, hailed as the greatest Shakespearean alive, packing houses where ticket prices went as high as one hundred dollars. The one city where he refused to perform was Washington. In the South, people mostly seemed interested in seeing John Wilkes’s brother. In Mobile he got a letter from Boston Corbett, asking for free tickets. Edwin groaned and sent them. Performing as Richard II in Chicago on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1879, Booth gave in to a sudden urge to stand while delivering a soliloquy he usually recited sitting down. As he rose, a bullet ripped by him right where he’d been seated. Another missed him as well. A dry goods clerk from St. Louis had fired two pistol shots at him from the balcony. Booth claimed his second sight had saved him. The shooter was a mad celebrity stalker.

In 1888, Booth would move to the capacious Greek Revival town house at 16 Gramercy Park South. Putting his wealthy neighbors’ noses out of joint, he dedicated the first two floors to the Players Club, a gathering place for men of artistic and literary bent, and the Gilded Age industrialists and politicians who liked to drink with them. Women weren’t admitted as members until a hundred years later. Early members included Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, Nikola Tesla, Astors, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts. William Tecumseh Sherman also joined. He moved to New York after retiring from the army in 1884 and was a devoted patron of the arts. He would die in the city in 1891. Booth presided over club affairs, lived upstairs, and died in 1893 in a room the club still preserves as it was in his day. In 1918 the club donated the statue of Booth as Hamlet that stands in Gramercy Park.