16

THE CONCLUSIVE MOVEMENT of the Civil War began on the night of March 29, when Grant outflanked the Confederate lines around Petersburg by attacking a village to the west named Five Oaks. Out of a climactic battle on April 1, a war correspondent arrived at the River Queen with Confederate battle flags. Lincoln followed the struggle on maps aboard the River Queen, but made occasional visits to the trenches as well. On the morning of April 3 came the news that Lee had evacuated Petersburg during the night.

Lincoln took Tad into Petersburg, where they met General Grant, and Lincoln pumped his hand in gratitude. When they returned to the ship at City Point, Lincoln received the message that Richmond too had been abandoned by the enemy. Again Lincoln and Tad and their escort set out, on the gunboat Malvern, up the James to the Confederate capital. It was a ruined city that Lincoln, landing on its docks, inherited—the Confederates had fired it. On coming ashore Lincoln was surrounded by black men and women calling his name, shouting God’s blessings on him and singing of glory. It was a curious moment. Lincoln, who had bedeviled this city for so many years, was guarded by a mere dozen sailors, and the remaining white citizens, who had not fled to Danville but who abominated him, watched from behind their solemn curtains as a black crowd danced around him in the ravaged and hungry streets. A cavalry escort came and took him to military headquarters—Jefferson Davis’s executive mansion, from which Davis had fled. Lincoln walked around the empty rooms and asked for a glass of water. As he sat in Jefferson Davis’s chair, he was cheered by the headquarters company.

Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, had been injured in a carriage accident and had withdrawn to his house on Lafayette Square. He was appalled, like the rest of the cabinet, when he discovered that Lincoln intended to let the Rebel Virginia legislature reconvene to manage the civil side of Virginia’s reconstruction. Seward and the rest of the cabinet began to dissuade Lincoln, telling him they would not countenance the idea of unrepentant Rebel legislators being permitted to continue governing with the consent of the Federal government.

In the meantime Mary returned to City Point, in company with Lizzie Keckley, and the Lincolns visited Richmond again. When the River Queen returned to Washington from Richmond late on April 9, Stanton brought the president a telegram from Grant: GENERAL LEE SURRENDERED THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA THIS MORNING.

 

The next day, the entire city, or nearly so, celebrated. The fine actor John Wilkes Booth, who had been a sour witness to Lincoln’s second inauguration, did not share in the national festivity. On the night of April 11 the crowd spilled onto the White House lawn; there were serenades and a demand for a speech by the president. The peace brought “joyous expression which could not be restrained,” said Lincoln. But now the question of Reconstruction lay ahead. “Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.” He reminded them of the situation in Louisiana, where a Union legislature was opposing the idea of the franchise for blacks. He pondered aloud about the case there on the lawn, and as a result there was merely polite applause when he finished. The puzzled response daunted him. John Wilkes Booth witnessed this evening event as well. Booth came from a Maryland family of actors, and his elder brother, Edwin, was a noted member of the profession. Edwin was said to have saved Robert Lincoln from an accident at a New Jersey train station and was a devout Union man. John Wilkes Booth had chosen to live in the North throughout the war, but hated Lincoln as an American version of Caesar, the destroyer of genuine republican values. Lincoln had most recently seen Booth act in Washington in the tragedy The Marble Heart, and did not know how passionately the actor hated him. Booth had set up a cadre of agents, including the Confederate spy John Surratt, whose mother owned a boardinghouse in Georgetown, and they had pursued a plan to kidnap Lincoln on the road from the Soldiers’ Home to Washington on the night of March 30, and hold him to ransom for the South’s independence. But Lincoln’s carriage had failed to appear, and now Booth set his group to kill Secretaries Stanton and Seward. He himself would look to the tyrant.

In the second week of April, Mary, in Lamon’s company, mentioned that he looked dreadfully solemn. Lincoln explained that he had a dream which had haunted him. “About ten days ago I retired very late,” said Lincoln, according to Lamon:

 

I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I had left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along . . . Determined to find the cause of the state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. . . . “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The president,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.

 

“That is horrid,” Mary said. “I wish you had not told it.” But Lincoln reassured her that the dream meant it was someone else who would be attacked, not him, for dreams were never literal.

On April 14, Good Friday, the day of the Savior’s crucifix-ion, there was a cabinet meeting, which General Grant attended. It dealt extensively and heatedly with Reconstruction, but its general mood was exultant. The Lincolns were going to the theater that night, too, since John Ford of Ford’s Theatre had sent tickets to Laura Keene’s benefit performance of the farce Our American Cousin. In the remaining hours of Good Friday, Lincoln issued a number of pardons and reprieves. At about five the Lincolns rolled out of the White House gate on the way to the Navy Yard, and Lincoln told Mary, “We must both be more cheerful in the future; between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have been very miserable.” There was a note of poignancy in that “must both be more cheerful.” He saw, however, his second term ending in peace, and then they might go out to California, and visit the Holy Land.

They were back at the White House between six and seven to eat dinner. Mary tried to beg off going to the theater, which they had arranged to attend with Senator Harris’s daughter and her fiancé, Major Rathbone. But Lincoln said that though he was tired himself, he needed a good laugh. Before they set off Lincoln and a detective dashed over to the War Department to see if there had been any news of the expected localized Confederate surrender in North Carolina. Then he and Mary got into the presidential carriage. Mary wore a gray silk dress and a bonnet, and Lincoln his overcoat and white kid gloves. They would collect Miss Harris and Major Rathbone on the way to the theater. At eight-thirty the Lincolns and their guests alighted from the carriage and moved into the theater. The audience gave him a standing ovation. To the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the president and his party made their way to the state box, above the stage.

The play began. The president was absorbed. Onstage the American cousin who had gone back to England and outraged his British relatives was crying, “Don’t know the manner of good society, eh? Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.” It was at that time that Booth reached the presidential box, ready to kill Lincoln with one shot. He had climbed the staircase from the lobby to the dress circle, sidled past the back row of spectators, among whom the chief reaction was one of annoyance, and flashed a card at the White House footman. The Washington policeman who was supposed to be guarding Lincoln in his box had gone to the front of the dress circle, and Booth being a familiar thespian face, the footman let him go inside to the president. Booth immediately put a single-shot Derringer behind Lincoln’s head, by the left ear. The shot entered the left side of Lincoln’s skull and exited the right. The assassin then slashed Major Rathbone’s arm with a dagger, and climbed down to the stage by the theater curtain, catching a spur in the fabric and falling heavily, cracking his shin. On stage he yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” and perhaps, “The South shall be free!” Some of the audience wondered if these expletives were part of the play, since Booth was such a well-known actor. Major Rathbone and Miss Harris were both screaming at people to stop Booth, but Booth was not stopped. He escaped to Virginia over the Anacostia Bridge, but would be shot dead two weeks later when the authorities set fire to a tobacco barn near Port Royal in which he was hiding.

An army surgeon came into the box to attend to the president, and tried to clear his throat. The surgeon gave him artificial respiration and massaged the area of his heart. His heart did pick up, but the army surgeon murmured, “His wound is mortal, it is impossible for him to recover.” Mary cried, “Oh, my God, and have I given my husband to die?” Fearful that Lincoln would die at once if he was placed upright, the doctor demanded that he be kept horizontal.

Across Tenth Street from the theater was a boardinghouse, and one of the boarders called out that the president could be brought and laid out there. Carried into the boardinghouse, Lincoln lay across a four-poster bed in a back room. Mary, who had followed, cried that she must get Taddie to come—he loved Taddie so, and Taddie’s voice would revive him. The doctors, knowing that it could not be so, led her to a front parlor. Robert arrived, as did John Hay, General Halleck, Secretaries Welles and Stanton, and Senator Sumner. Robert saw that his father’s eye was bloated and the eye socket bruised. Sumner held the president’s hand as he died. Stanton, weeping, immediately set up a court of inquiry there in the boardinghouse. Mary, visiting the at least moribund if not dead Lincoln, cried, “Love, live but one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.” The actress Laura Keene, star of Our American Cousin, kept her company and tried to console her during the time she was not actually at Lincoln’s bedside. He expired at 7:22 A.M. the next morning. For lack of Lincoln, it was Stanton who said the apposite thing: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

He had become the bloodied nation incarnate.