“MAKE A CHAIN, FOR THE LAND IS FULL OF BLOODY CRIMES.”
My book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer told the story of John Wilkes Booth’s incredible escape from the scene of his great crime at Ford’s Theatre and his run to ambush, death, and infamy at a Virginia tobacco barn. But the chase for Lincoln’s killer was not the only thrilling journey under way as the Civil War drew to a close in April 1865. While the hunt for Lincoln’s murderer transfixed the nation, two other men embarked on their own, no less dramatic, final journeys. One, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, was on the run, desperate to save his family, his country, and his cause. The other, Abraham Lincoln, the recently assassinated president of the United States, was bound for a different destination: home, the grave, and everlasting glory.
The title of this book has three origins—as a prophecy, a promise, and an elegy.
In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown launched his doomed raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, as a way of inciting a slave uprising. This daring but foolhardy attack, viewed as an affront to the institution of slavery, enraged the South and brought the United States closer to irrepressible conflict and civil war. Following his capture, Brown was tried and sentenced to hang. While in a Charles Town jail awaiting execution, he was allowed to keep a copy of the King James Bible. As the clock ticked down to his hanging, Brown leafed through the sacred text, searching for divinely inspired words of justification, prophecy, and warning. He dog-eared the pages most dear to him and then highlighted key passages with pen and pencil marks, including this verse from Ezekiel 7:23: “Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.” On the morning he was hanged, on December 2, 1859, he handed to one of his jailers the last note he would ever write: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address. Although remembered today for its message of peace—“with malice toward none, with charity for all”—the speech had a dark side. In a passage often overlooked, Lincoln warned that slavery was a bloody crime that might not be expunged without the shedding of more blood: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ”
Within days of Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, a Boston photographer published a fantastical carte de visite image to honor the fallen president. That was not unusual; printers, photographers, and stationers across the country produced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ribbons, badges, broadsides, poems, and photographs to mourn Lincoln. But the image from Boston was different, for it expressed a sentiment not of mourning but of vengeance. In
this carte de visite, a stern-faced woman, crowned and draped as Columbia, accompanied by her servant, a screaming eagle about to take flight in pursuit of its prey, keeps a vigil over a portrait of the martyred president and echoes John Brown’s old warning: “Make a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes.” Soon, in the aftermath of the chase for Jefferson Davis and the Lincoln assassination and death pageant, manacles and chains became symbols of the spring of 1865.
Northerners believed that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy had committed many bloody crimes, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the torture, starvation, and murder of Union prisoners of war, and the battlefield slaughter of soldiers. In the South, Lincoln and his armies were seen as perpetrators, not victims, of great crimes. In the climate of these dueling accusations, the people of the Union and the Confederacy both shared a common belief and could agree upon one thing. In the spring of 1865, an era of bloody crimes had reached its climax.
The spring of 1865 was the most remarkable season in American history. It was a time to mourn the Civil War’s 620,000 dead and to bind up the nation’s wounds. It was a time to lay down arms, to tally plantations and cities that had been laid to waste, and to plant new crops. It was a time to ponder events that had come to pass and to look forward to those yet to be. It was the time of the hunt for Jefferson Davis and of the funeral pageant for Abraham Lincoln, each a martyr to his cause. And it was the time in America, wrote Walt Whitman, “when lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d.”