CHAPTER NINE
“ Coffin That Slowly Passes”
While Davis dallied in South Carolina, the new president, Andrew Johnson, signed a proclamation on May 2 that offered a $100,000 reward for his capture. Johnson doubled the amount that Stanton had offered for Booth. Now Davis was the subject of the highest reward in American history. It would take days for news of the reward to reach the Deep South.
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
WHEREAS it appears, from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice, that the atrocious murder of the late President, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, and the attempted assassination of the Honorable WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State, were incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Virginia, and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, Beverly Tucker, George N. Saunders, William Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the Government of the United States, harbored in Canada:
NOW, THEREFORE, to the end that justice may be done, I, ANDREW JOHNSON, President of the United States, do offer and promise for the arrest of said persons, or either of them, within the limits of the United States, so that they can be brought to trial, the following rewards:
One hundred thousand dollars for the arrest of Jefferson Davis.
Twenty-five thousand dollars for the arrest of Clement C. Clay.
Twenty-five thousand dollars for the arrest of Jacob Thompson, late of Mississippi.
Twenty-five thousand dollars for the arrest of George N. Saunders.
Twenty-five thousand dollars for the arrest of Beverly Tucker.
Twenty-five thousand dollars for the arrest of William C. Cleary, late clerk of Clement C. Clay.
The Provost Marshall General of the United States is directed to cause a description of said persons, with notice of the above rewards, to be published.
In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this second day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-ninth.
By the President:
ANDREW JOHNSON
Varina wrote to her husband on May 2, giving him the same advice that Parker had: “Do not try to meet me, I dread the Yankees getting news of you so much, you are the countrys only hope, and the very best intentioned do not calculate upon a stand this side of the river. Why not cut loose from your escort? Go swiftly and alone with the exception of two or three…May God keep you, my old and only love, As ever Devotedly, your own Winnie.”
Mallory decided that there was nothing more he could do to help Davis. At Abbeville he resigned his post as secretary of the navy. His family needed him, he said, and he did not want to flee the country and abandon them. Still, he agreed to remain with Davis’s party for a few more days.
By noon on May 2, the line of people in Chicago who were waiting to view Lincoln’s remains stretched nearly a mile. They came all day, and when the doors to the courthouse were shut at 8:00 p.m., the thousands of people still waiting in line had to be turned away. The cortege, flanked by marchers bearing torches, exited the square and moved north through Washington and Market streets to the Madison Street bridge, and on to the St. Louis and Alton Railway Depot. The Chicago Tribune reminded readers of the city’s special relationship with Abraham Lincoln: He practiced in the federal courts; he debated with Douglas, and five years earlier in May cannon and jubilations celebrated his nomination at the Wigwam convention center. The newspaper wrote that its city had “first summoned him from…obscurity…and demanded that the country…recognize…him [as] one fit to stand in high places.” And now, “he comes back to us, his work finished, the Republic vindicated, its enemies overthrown and suing for peace; but alas! He returns with the crown of martyrdom, the victim of the dastard assassin…his calm, sad face was ever turned westward” to Chicago.
“Taken in all,” boasted the Tribune, “Chicago made a deeper impression upon those who had been with the funeral train from the first than any one of the ten cities passed through before had done…seeing how other cities had honored the funeral, there seemed to be no room for more; and the Eastern members of the cortege could not repress surprise when they saw how Chicago and the North-west came, with one accord, with tears and offerings, to help bury ‘this Duncan.’ ”
Townsend remembered that the “cortege left Chicago at half past nine o’clock p.m. As usual, night was forgotten by the people in their anxiety to show all possible respect for him whom they expected; and bonfires and torches threw their uncertain light upon mourning emblems which were destined to stand in their places as memorials for weeks to come.”
The excitement aboard the train increased. This was the last night. In the morning, the funeral train would complete its journey.
Lincoln was in his home state now, and the emotions of the people huddled around the fires along the tracks reached a fever pitch. The passengers on the train saw more signs that they passed in the night. ILLINOIS CLASPS TO HER BOSOM HER SLAIN BUT GLORIFIED SON. COME HOME, read a sign posted on a house at Lockport. GO TO THY REST, said the one atop a large arch at Bloomington.
The next stop was Lincoln, Illinois, the first town in America named after Abraham Lincoln. This honor had been bestowed in the 1850s before the man became the president. It was a gesture meant to recognize his work as a lawyer. Tonight an arch over the railroad tracks leading into his town displayed his portrait and the motto “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
During the night of May 2 and through the early morning hours of May 3, the residents of Springfield were restless. They had anticipated Lincoln’s homecoming since they heard the news of his death. At first, they had not been sure that he would come home at all. Mary Lincoln had tortured them about the disposition of his remains. She had rejected their initial proposal to bury him downtown, and then she had threatened to deny them his remains entirely and instead keep them in Washington, or send them to Chicago. Mary’s ultimatums infuriated her former neighbors. How dare she deny them, they complained, their just reward for their long association with him?
But once the citizens knew that Springfield would be his final resting place, they began frenzied preparations.
They had finished hanging the decorations and painting the signs. Crepe and bunting blackened the town. Lincoln’s two-story frame house at Eighth and Jackson streets was a decorated masterpiece of mourning. Over the front door of his law office, through which he had passed countless times during his circuit-riding days, hung one of the most stunning and beautifully painted signs seen along the entire funeral route: HE LIVES IN THE HEARTS OF HIS PEOPLE. The townspeople had waited twenty days since Lincoln’s death and thirteen days since the train had left Washington. Beginning tomorrow, over the next two days of May 3 and 4, Springfield would show the nation that no town loved Abraham Lincoln more. It was up to Springfield to stage the final act of the death pageant.
That night Judah Benjamin came to William Parker’s room around 8:00 p.m. and begged him to call on Davis once more and persuade him to leave Abbeville. Parker agreed and proposed that he and three naval officers depart with Davis and escape to the eastern coast of Florida, where they might seize a boat and sail to Cuba or the Bahamas. Parker presented this strategy to Davis, who again refused. But as soon as Parker left, Davis summoned his cabinet. From that meeting, Mallory sent Parker a note saying that Davis had, in part, changed his mind. He agreed to leave Abbeville that night, but he would not break off from his escort and go with the four naval officers to make a run for the coast.
After Davis met with the cabinet he wrote a letter that evening to his private secretary about his plans. He confessed his low morale and disparaged the troops, which Lee had never done.
Abbeville S.C.
[2] May 65 9 P.M.
To Burton Harrison:
My Dear Sir:
The courier has just delivered yours and I hasten to reply—I will leave here in an hour and if my horse can stand it will go on rapidly to Washington [Georgia]—The change of route was I think judicious under the probabilities of the Enemy’s movements.
I can however learn nothing reliable and have to speculate—I think all their efforts are directed for my capture and that my family is safest when furthest from me—I have the bitterest disappointment in regard to the feeling of our troops, and would not have any one I loved dependent upon their resistance against an equal force—
Many thanks for your kind attention and hoping as time and circumstances will serve to see you am as ever your friend J
At 11:00 p.m., Davis left Abbeville. He, the cabinet, and his personal staff rode at the head of the column, in advance of the cavalry escort. The wagons carrying the Confederate treasury and deposits from the Richmond banks followed, accompanied by Secretary of War Benjamin and the troops.
Lincoln’s funeral train steamed into Springfield on the morning of Wednesday, May 3. His journey was now almost complete. He had been on the move since April 21. It was as though, while the train stayed in motion, he wasn’t quite dead. Edward D. Townsend dispatched his usual, matter-of-fact telegram to Secretary of War Stanton: “The funeral train arrived here without accident at 8.40 this morning. The burial is appointed at 12 p.m. to-morrow, Thursday [May 4].” The brief text spoke in a detached voice empty of emotion. Townsend concealed the feeling of relief that must have been his as the train rolled into the Springfield depot.
He recorded his true feelings years later in his memoirs:
“Thus closed this marvelous exhibition of a great nation’s deep grief. It seemed as though for once the spirit of hospitality and of all Christian graces had taken possession of every heart in every place. Not one untoward event can be recalled. Every citizen rivaled his neighbor in making kindly provision for the comfort of the funeral
company while in their midst. Unstinted hospitality was not forgotten in the exceeding pains taken with the public displays.”
Townsend had done it. Under his command, the funeral train had transported the corpse of Abraham Lincoln 1,645 miles from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois, and it had arrived on schedule. During its thirteen-day odyssey, the train never broke down, suffered an accident, or deviated from the master timetable. At every stop along the way, the honor guard performed flawlessly. Not once did they falter in their handling of the heavy casket. Carrying the coffin off the train, loading it into the hearse, unloading it from the vehicle, carrying it upon their shoulders to the place of public viewing and laying it down on the catafalque, raising it from the catafalque after the viewing, and then reversing the process to bring Lincoln back to the train required stamina and concentration. Whenever they carried the president’s body, whether on level ground, up and down steep winding staircases, or onto a ferryboat, whether in daylight or darkness, in sunshine or a driving rain, the veteran Union army soldiers of the casket team never made a misstep. Now, in Springfield, they would carry the president of the United States upon their shoulders for the last time.
Townsend reflected on the journey with pride: “The guard of honor having thus surrendered their trust, began to realize how closely their interest had centered upon this object which, for [thirteen] days and twelve nights, had scarcely for one moment been out of their sight.”
In this tumultuous and violent spring of 1865, the funeral journey was a peaceful triumph. When the train left Washington, there was no guarantee of that. Beginning the night of April 14, the public mood had fluctuated between a feeling of mournful sadness and an urge for bloodthirsty vengeance. Violence could have erupted any point on the route, just as it had the night of the assassination. In an instant, the funeral processions might have degenerated into ugly demonstrations against Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy, and the Southern people.
During those thirteen days in April and May, many Northerners, including Edwin Stanton, continued to believe that Davis and the Confederacy were behind John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to murder Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward to throw the Union into chaos. Indeed, during Lincoln’s death pageant from Washington to Springfield, every member of the cabinet, plus the Chief Justice of the United States, remained under armed guard around the clock to thwart anticipated additional assassinations.
But nothing untoward happened. The millions of Americans who had either viewed Lincoln’s corpse, participated in the huge processions, or watched the train pass by remained peaceful. Yes, the petty criminals who always prowl through urban crowds—especially the infamous pickpockets of New York City—preyed on some of the mourners. But the crowds did not beat or murder anyone they judged guilty of insulting the martyred Lincoln. Nor did they cry out for vengeance upon the sight of Lincoln’s corpse, or shout anti-Confederate epithets as the cortege rolled by.
Even the signs and banners spoke words of mourning, not vengeance. Only a handful demanded justice—or revenge. Of all the public utterances, from the White House funeral in Washington to the graveside prayer in Springfield, and at all points between, only once did an overwrought orator surrender to an explicit impulse for vengeance. Instead, the bereaved millions adopted Lincoln’s second inaugural message of peace and reconciliation as their own.
From Springfield, General D. C. McCallum, the superintendent of the United States Military Railroad, who had ridden the rails all the way from Washington to ensure that everything went as planned, also reported to Stanton that he had accomplished his mission: “The duty assigned me has been completed promptly and safely, and I believe satisfactorily to all parties.”
Like Townsend, McCallum understated the meaning of what he had done. The journey of the Lincoln funeral train across America was a tour de force of railroad engineering and military planning. Without the railroads to move troops, rifles, artillery, ammunition, rations, horses, equipment, and other supplies over thousands of miles of standardized track, the Union might not have won the Civil War. Railroad technology had proven to be a key advantage over the Confederacy. Yes, the North might have prevailed in the end, but without railroads, victory would have taken longer, and at a price more dear in blood. Trains helped win the war, and now, at its end, one train, its progress followed by an entire people, helped bring the country together.
Lincoln was home, back at the Great Western Railroad station where his journey began four years earlier, on February 11, 1861, one day before his fifty-second birthday. When he left for Washington that morning, he contemplated that he might never return. He stood on the platform of the last car, looked at the faces of his neighbors, and spoke:
My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feelings of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old one. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To his care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.
Four years later, he had returned.
Not long after Lincoln’s remains reached Springfield, Jefferson Davis arrived in Washington, Georgia. His party had crossed the Savannah River very early in the morning, and while en route to Washington, they were informed that the federal cavalry was at that place, and they were looking for Davis. They stopped at a farmhouse and ate breakfast and fed their horses.
By this time, Davis’s escort was war weary and demoralized. They wanted to go home. John Reagan knew what else they wanted: “After they crossed the Savannah River and camped, and before reaching Washington, [Davis’s] cavalry, knowing that they were guarding money, demanded a portion of it.” If the government on wheels failed to pause here to pay them, they were going to seize the money. “[Breckinridge] told me that after he reached Washington the cavalry demanded that the silver and gold coin, equal to the amount of the silver bullion, should be divided among them, and that he and the officers commanding them found it necessary to yield or to risk their forcibly seizing it.”
It was here that Judah Benjamin decided to leave Davis and make his own escape. The president’s pace was too leisurely for Benjamin’s taste, and he thought he would have a better chance on his own. He had never been comfortable riding a horse and set out in a carriage. Reagan spoke to him before he set off: “I inquired where he was going. ‘To the farthest place from the United States,’ he announced with emphasis, ‘if it takes me to the middle of China.’ He had his trunk in the carriage with his initials, J. P. B., plainly marked on it. I inquired whether that might not betray him. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘there is a Frenchman traveling in the Southern States who has the same initials, and I can speak broken English like a French-man.’”
Benjamin’s departure deprived Davis’s party of the good humor of its court jester in chief. It also suggested how Davis should travel from this point on—alone, or with no more than a couple of aides. Benjamin’s strategy served him well in the days ahead. His secretary of state gone, Davis mounted his horse and led the way to Washington, wary of reports of its occupation by the enemy. “We found no Federal cavalry at Washington,” recalled Reagan, “where we remained a few days. Before reaching that place, General Breckinridge and myself, recognizing the importance of the capture of the President, proposed to him that he put on soldier’s clothes, a wool hat and brogan shoes, and take one man with him and go to the coast of Florida, ship to Cuba, thence by an English vessel to the mouth of the Rio Grande. We proposed [he] take what troops we still had, to go west, crossing the Chattahoochee between Chattanooga and Atlanta, and the Mississippi River, and to meet him in Texas. His reply to our suggestion was: ‘I shall not leave Confederate soil while a Confederate regiment is on it.’”
Davis had been willing to abandon Richmond—and its citizens—for the good of the Confederacy, but what he told Reagan was not sound military strategy. If he hoped to avoid capture, his advisers were right. He needed to move fast to the Mississippi River or Florida.
When Davis trotted his horse into Washington, Georgia, late on the morning of May 3, accompanied by an advance party of about forty men, the people welcomed their president as if he rode at the head of a triumphant army. Fate had spared this town during the war, and the citizens, unlike many in neighboring North Carolina, had not turned against the Confederacy. Eliza Andrews described the scene:
About noon the town was thrown into the wildest excitement by the arrival of President Davis. He is traveling with a large escort of cavalry, a very imprudent thing for a man in his position to do, especially now that Johnston has surrendered, and the fact that they are all going in the same direction as their homes is the only thing that keeps them together. He rode into town at the head of his escort…and as he was passing by the bank…several…gentlemen were sitting on the front porch, and the instant they recognized him they took off their hats and received him with every mark of respect due the president of a brave people. When he reined in his horse, all the staff who were present advanced to hold the reins and assist him to dismount.
A rumor spread that Yankees in pursuit of Davis were advancing on the town from two directions, but there was nothing to it. Another wild rumor spread through town that Davis was there. Once “the president’s arrival had become generally known,” Eliza wrote with pride, “people began flocking to see him.” This was the warm welcome that Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, had withheld from Davis. In Georgia, the people’s delight at his presence improved his morale.
Davis received a dispatch from Secretary of War Breckinridge reminding him of their conversation the previous night in Abbeville, urging him to flee, and reporting on the military situation. There were almost no Confederate soldiers in the vicinity to protect Davis: “The troops are on the west side of the Savanah, and guard the bridge,” Breckinridge wrote. “A pickett which left Cokesbury after dark last evening reports no enemy at that point. I have directed scouts on the various roads this side of the river. The condition of the troops is represented as a little better, but by no means satisfactory. They cannot be relied upon as a permanent military force. Please let me know where you are.”
Varina also sent a letter telling him to not make a stand, to leave his escort, and to flee.
In Springfield, the honor guard removed Lincoln’s body from the train, escorted it to the State House, where he had served as a legislator, given his famous “House Divided” speech, and, in another part of the building, set up an office after his election as president. His guards laid the coffin on a catafalque in the Hall of Representatives. Springfield was not a great American city, and its officials knew they could not hope to rival the pageantry displayed in Washington, Philadelphia, New York City, or Chicago. Nor could Springfield match the stupendous crowds or financial resources marshaled by the major cities. Indeed, Lincoln’s hometown had to borrow a hearse from St. Louis. However, what the state capital could not offer in splendor, it vowed to lavish in an emotional catharsis that would outdo every other city in the nation.
Few in Springfield were disappointed that Mary Lincoln was not on that train, even if it meant no Lincolns had made the trip from Washington. This morning, for the first time since the funeral train left Washington, the honor guard also removed Willie’s coffin from the presidential car.
The embalmer Charles Brown and undertaker Frank Sands opened Lincoln’s coffin. He had been dead for eighteen days, and his corpse had not been refrigerated. Only preservative chemicals and makeup had kept him presentable during the journey. At the beginning, at the White House funeral, Lincoln’s face looked almost natural. He changed along the way. People had started to notice it as early as New York City. The face continued to darken, making necessary several reapplications of face powder during the trip. Travel dust and dirt had settled on the corpse during each open-coffin viewing, and the body men had to dust his face and black coat faithfully. Lincoln no longer resembled a sleeping man. Now he looked like a ghastly, pale, waxlike effigy.
The doors to the State House opened to the public at 10:00 A.M. on May 3 and stayed that way for twenty-four hours. It was the first round-the-clock viewing of the entire funeral pageant. Mourners ascended the winding staircase to the Representatives’ Hall, approached the corpse from Lincoln’s left, walked around his head, and then departed down the same stairs. During the night, trains continued to arrive in Springfield, and people without lodgings wandered the streets until dawn.
By 10:00 A.M. on May 4, seventy-five thousand people had passed by the presidential body. The coffin was removed from the capitol and placed in the hearse waiting on Washington Street. The procession began at 11:30 A.M., passing by Lincoln’s home at Eighth and Jackson streets, then heading west to Fourth Street, and down Fourth to Oak Ridge Cemetery, about a mile and a half from town. Oak Ridge was not a traditional urban cemetery with tightly spaced headstones lined up in rows. Instead, it was a product of the rural cemetery movement that had swept America, which had transformed old-fashioned graveyards into nature preserves with brooks, sloping valleys, oak trees, and tombs situated in sympathy with the natural landscape.
Lincoln’s guards removed his coffin from the hearse, carried it into the limestone tomb, and laid it on a marble slab. Willie’s coffin rested near him.
Bishop Matthew Simpson, who had officiated at the White House funeral, delivered the last oration at Oak Ridge Cemetery. “Though three weeks have passed,” he reminded his listeners, and “the nation has scarcely breathed easily yet. A mournful silence is abroad upon
the land.” Simpson then set the unprecedented pageant in historical context: “Far more eyes have gazed upon the face of the departed than ever looked upon the face of any other departed man. More eyes have looked upon the procession for sixteen hundred miles or more, by night and day, by sunlight, dawn, twilight and by torchlight, than ever before watched the progress of a procession.” It was the end of an era, he said: “The deepest affections of our hearts gather around some human form, in which are incarnated the living thoughts and ideas of the passing age.”
Simpson read Lincoln’s second inaugural speech at tomb-side. Invoking the president’s mantra of “Malice toward none,” Simpson proposed forgiveness for the “deluded masses” of the Southern people: “We will take them to our hearts.” And we must, said Simpson, continue Lincoln’s work: “Standing, as we do today, by his coffin and his sepulcher, let us resolve to carry forward the work which he so nobly begun.”
But the bishop scorned Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders:
Let every man who was a Senator…in Congress, and who aided in beginning this rebellion, and thus led to the slaughter of our sons and daughters, be brought to speedy and certain punishment. Let every officer…who…has turned his sword against…his country, be doomed to a felon’s death. This…is the will of the American people. Men may attempt to compromise and restore these traitors and murderers to society again, but the American people will rise in their majesty and sweep all such compromises…away, and shall declare that there shall be no peace to rebels.
This shocking, tomb-side lust for revenge echoed Job Stevenson’s remarks in Columbus. It would have horrified Lincoln.
Lincoln’s pastor, the Reverend Dr. Gurley, who had completed the long journey from the assassination-night deathbed at the Petersen house to the grave in Springfield, again gave the last prayer, which was followed by a funeral hymn he had composed for the occasion. There was nothing more to say. They closed the iron gates and locked Abraham and Willie Lincoln in their tomb. Then everybody went home.
Carl Sandburg evoked the dénouement better than any witness present that day: “Evergreen carpeted the stone floor of the vault. On the coffin set in a receptacle of black walnut they arranged flowers carefully and precisely, they poured flowers as symbols, they lavished heaps of fresh flowers as though there could never be enough to tell either their hearts or his.
And the night came with great quiet.
And there was rest.
The prairie years, the war years, were over.”
The coffin was just one of the things that made the Washington, D.C., events the most expensive funeral in American history. In a bound accountant’s ledger titled “Funeral Expenses of the late Abraham Lincoln,” handwritten in a clerk’s neat script on twenty-eight lined, blue-gray pages, is the itemized list of the costs. It is all here—the names of the vendors, the goods or services they provided, and the price. No matter how trivial the purchase or inconsequential the cost, the information did not escape the ledger. These facts and figures, dry and impersonal as they are, and most never published, form a strangely fascinating book of the dead.
The government purchased wagonloads of fabric to hang in mourning—several thousand yards of black cambric, fine white silk, alpaca, cotton velvet, black crepe, black Silesias, and black draping—along with boxes of nails and tacks to attach the textiles to the major public buildings. John Tucker & Co. billed the government $161.00 for “Labor and material at President’s House,” including “1260 feet of lumber plus 1 gross screws, and 40 pounds of nails plus labor.” The wood was used to build the bleachers for the funeral in the East Room. Another firm submitted an invoice of $358.14 for “Preparing East Room for President’s Funeral.”The largest bill—$4,408.09—was from John Alexander, which covered a variety of goods and services, including more than three thousand yards of fabric, twelve boxes of pins, and thirty packs of tacks, plus “putting front of President’s House in mourning ($50.00) [and] East Room ($30.00); upholstering catafalque East Room ($75.00); [upholstering] Funeral Car ($50.00); [upholstering] Rail Road Car ($85.00).” The last expense connected with the White House was not submitted until May 27, five weeks after the funeral: “Removing draping and platform from East Room. $45.20, less for lumber returned.”
Fabrics were purchased not only to clothe the public buildings but to dress Mary Lincoln too. On April 19, the day of the funeral, Harper & Mitchell submitted its bill for “1 mourning dress ($60.00); 1 shawl ($25.00); 1 crape veil ($10.00); 5 yards black crape ($20.00); Gloves and handkerchiefs ($7.50); 5 pair hose ($5.00); 1 crape bonnet ($15.00) TOTAL $142.50.” Mary Lincoln, who remained in seclusion, had no public use for the black mourning dress and accessories.
Decorating the Capitol and preparing it to receive Lincoln’s corpse involved additional costs. Benjamin Brown French submitted a bill for “services superintending the draping of the Rotunda & erection of Catafalque $15.00, plus $2.50 reimbursement for cash paid for ribbon,” and John R. Hunt invoiced the government $20.00 for “upholstering catafalque and draping west wing U.S. Capitol.” E. H. Litchfield and eight additional carpenters, riggers, gasfitters, and assistants were paid $33.50 to get the rotunda ready for Lincoln to lie there in state on April 19 and 20: “Extra services draping the Dome and lighting the gas and attending the same.” And George Whiting submitted bills of $28.50 and $25.05 for “refreshments sent to Capitol for Officers in charge of the President’s remains” on the two days that Lincoln lay in state.
Then there were the expenses connected to the president’s body. Cooling & Bros. billed the government $6.00 for the hearse used to remove the corpse from the Petersen house, $75.00 for the six horses that pulled the hearse on the funeral day procession, plus one hearse for “removing President and son,” on April 21, the day Lincoln’s train left Washington. Drs. Brown and Alexander charged $100.00 for “embalming remains of Abraham Lincoln late President of the U.S.,” and $160.00 to ride the train: “16 days Services for self & Asst. @ $10.00 per day.” The single most expensive item recorded in the ledger was the casket, from the firm of Sands & Harvey: “Coffin covered with fine Broad Cloth, lined with fine White Satin silk trimmed with best mounting, solid silver plate, bullion fringe tassles & etc, heavy lead lining & walnut outside case for the late President, Abraham Lincoln. $1500.00.”
The funeral expenses totaled $28,985.31. As an addendum, one last entry was written on an otherwise blank page in the ledger: “Money actually expended in attending the Widow from Washington D.C. to Chicago Illinois. $47.00.” That expense closed out the book.
Back in Washington, D.C., the federal government shut down the day of the funeral. Offices were closed, flags flew at half-staff, public buildings remained draped in black, and military officers wore black crepe ribbons around the coat sleeves of their uniforms. John Wilkes Booth lay in a secret, unmarked grave on the grounds of the U.S. Army penitentiary at the Old Arsenal along the river, and at that walled, fortress prison eight of his accused conspirators languished in shackles and hoods awaiting their trial by military tribunal. Those proceedings would begin in a few days. Ford’s Theatre remained closed and under guard. Secretary of State William Seward recovered from his wounds. At the White House, Lincoln’s office had been sealed like a ship in a bottle, preserved just as the president left it on the afternoon of April 14. His widow continued her refusal to vacate the Executive Mansion, thus denying its proper use by the new president, Andrew Johnson. She had become the subject of much talk. At the Petersen house, Private William Clarke went to sleep each night covered by the same quilt that had warmed the dying president. Soldiers back from the war once again got drunk in saloons, and people dining out at public houses gorged themselves on the delicacy of the day, fresh oysters. George Harrington, back to his routine, went about his usual business at the Treasury Department. And Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton thought about Jefferson Davis.
All across America, cities marked the hour of Lincoln’s entombment. One newspaper stated: “by the open grave of Abraham Lincoln stood this day the American people…a nation in…mourning looking into the open grave of a President…do not forget that open grave, nor the unparalleled crime which caused it to be dug.” It was true. On this day, at the precise hour—noon, Springfield time—tens of millions of his fellow citizens “all across this broad land,” in the words of his first inaugural address, paused to honor Abraham Lincoln.
In Washington, Georgia, a few hundred of Jefferson Davis’s fellow citizens honored him on his second day with them. Eliza Andrews was thrilled to have Davis in her town: “I am in such a state of excitement…Father and Cora went to call on the President, and…father says his manner was so calm and dignified that he could not help admiring the man. Crowds of people flocked to see him, and nearly all were melted to tears.” Not only did the townspeople gather around Davis but they put together an enormous feast. “The village sent so many good things for the President to eat,” recalled Eliza, “that an ogre couldn’t have devoured them all, and he left many little delicacies, besides giving away a number of his personal effects, to people who had been kind to him.”
It was in Washington that Mallory left the president’s caravan. Davis understood that it was time for Mallory to return to his family and despite the desperate situation, he took time to compose a warm farewell letter: “It is with deep regret that I contemplate this separation. One of the members of my first cabinet we have passed together through all the trials of war and not the less embarrassing trials to which the Congress has of late subjected the Executive…I will ever gratefully remember your uniform kindness and unwavering friendship to myself.” Davis did not know it then, but it was the last letter he would write as president of the Confederate States of America.
Next he made what would be his last official appointment. A clerk drafted the document for his signature: “M. H. Clark Esq is hereby appointed Acting Treasurer of the Confederate States, and is authorized to act as such during the absence of the Treasurer.”
Davis then finally agreed to take action he should have chosen days ago. “After some delay at Washington,” Reagan remembered, “we induced Mr. Davis to start on south with an escort of ten men, his staff officers and secretary, and to leave General Breckinridge to wind up the business of the War Department, and me to close the business of the Post Office Department and the Treasury…We were then to go on and overtake him.” Davis left Washington in the morning. Reagan stayed behind in the town, planning to catch up with his president sometime that night. After Reagan wasted valuable time burning piles of Confederate currency, he left Washington by midnight.
Eliza Andrews watched Davis ride out the night of May 4: “The President left town about ten o’clock, with a single companion, his unruly cavalry escort having gone on before. He travels sometimes with them, sometimes before, sometimes behind, never permitting his precise location to be known.” She had heard rumors that the Union army did not want to capture Davis: “The talk now is…that the military authorities are conniving the escape of Mr. Davis…The general belief is that Grant and the military men, even Sherman, are not anxious for the ugly job of hanging such a man as our president, and are quite willing to let him give them the slip, and get out of the country if he can. The military men, who do the hard and cruel things in war, seem to be more merciful in peace than the politicians who stay at home and do the talking.” Davis’s departure from Washington made the feisty and irrepressible Eliza sad: “This, I suppose, is the end of the Confederacy.”
But Davis’s war years were not over yet. Abraham Lincoln’s journey may have ended, but Jefferson Davis was determined to press on. That night Davis’s party camped near the Ogeechee River. The next day Union cavalry rode into Washington. Eliza Andrews had been right. Davis’s departure was the end, at least in her town.
Northern newspaper editorials reflected upon the meaning of the assassination and the funeral train:
Twenty days after the terrible night on which the assassin’s bullet destroyed the most precious life in the American nation, the body which that great and good man animated, is deposited in the humble cemetery…in ceremonies which are the saddest that may ever be performed on American soil.
What do those twenty days suggest! Twenty days of National mourning; twenty days with flags at half-mast; twenty days with emblems of sorrow on the peoples’ dwellings, with sable drapery and solemn mottoes on all public buildings; twenty days of such tokens of love, such tributes as never before were paid to mortal man?
For the previous three weeks, the newspapers had obsessed over the minutiae of the funeral obsequies. No insignificant detail was too obscure to observe and print. They reported it all by naming, in each city, hundreds of people who had participated in the local procession; by identifying every military unit—and its roster of officers—that marched or rode in the cortege; by identifying every public official and dignitary in the parade, down to specifying in which carriages they rode; by identifying every local civic organization in the procession, including descriptions of the costumes worn by their members; by naming every band and every tune played; and by naming every weeping woman who had laid flowers upon the coffin.
The papers took particular interest in the hearses constructed in each city for the president; they described these vehicles with admiring, exacting, and even maniacal detail. The published description of each hearse was so precise it could have served as a verbal blueprint for the construction of an identical replica without the aid of drawings, plans, or photographs. Newspapers in New York and Chicago gave special credit to the local hearse makers who dreamed up these impossible, extravagant vehicles. Lincoln, who ridiculed decorative excess, would likely have laughed at the sight of them, and been embarrassed that his remains were carted about in vehicles so costly in labor and materials. Some of them looked like small houses, not hearses, and they were as big as the log cabin where Lincoln was born, or the one he occupied as a young man.
Reporters had taken note of every sign, banner, floral arch, or bonfire they saw along the railroad tracks, and they copied down mottoes they saw along the procession routes. In New York City, a book published after the obsequies preserved the texts of hundreds of signs and banners, even revealing where each one was observed. A century and a half after Lincoln’s funeral procession passed through old Gotham, one can stand at 356 Broadway and know that on April 25, 1865, a sign in the window read “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”;” or at 555 Broadway, where the sign read “A nation bowed in grief will rise in might to exterminate the leaders of this accursed Rebellion”;” or at 759 Broadway, where it read “He was a man, take him for all in all.”
Newspapers published every word of every sermon, every prayer, every oration, and every impromptu speech uttered. Moreover, several hundred ministers printed pamphlets that preserved for posterity the sermons they preached on Black Easter, Sunday morning, April 16, and on the next several Sundays.
Whenever the president’s corpse was carried off the train for public viewing, newspaper stories swooned with lavish testimonials supplied by awestruck journalists. Their accounts of richly designed catafalques lying amid their exquisitely morbid surroundings sound more like the enthusiasms of florists and interior decorators than observations by seasoned war reporters. These death chambers resembled voluminous Arabian tents erected indoors, fashioned from hundreds of yards of black fabric, accented with silver highlights. Newspapers singled out the visionaries who created these fantastic settings. Those lucky enough to view Lincoln’s corpse loved it—they had never witnessed anything as impressive.
Every story mentioned the floral arrangements—their appearance, preciousness, and scent; crosses, anchors, and wreaths of only the choicest japonicas, roses, jet blacks, and other types, either suspended in midair, presented in Greek vases, laid on the coffin, or placed near it on floors carpeted with evergreens.
The combined effect of these black chambers of death, the heaps of beautiful flowers and their overpowering sickly sweet odor, the coffin open to view, and the face of the martyred president, frozen and ghostly pale, must have overwhelmed the senses of the more than one million Americans who experienced it. Jeremiah Gurney’s controversial and long-lost New York City photograph, the sole surviving image taken of Lincoln in death, can only hint at the awesome majesty of the scene.
These stories carried every American who read them to Lincoln’s side and allowed people to imagine what it must have been like to behold his face, or to watch his coffin pass by. And not just in the cities and states closest to them. Journalists made it possible for the American people to ride aboard that train, and to imagine they had marched in every procession, joined every torchlight parade, heeded every prayer, inhaled the scent of every flower, and wept at the coffin’s every opening.
For the one million Americans who had viewed Lincoln in death, the stories reminded them of the wonders they had seen. For the seven million who kept vigil along the route of the passing train, the stories told of places where it had been, and where it had gone.
In the Old Testament, David’s child is struck down by an angry God. “Now he is dead, wherefore should I fast?” David asked. “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). The Lincoln funeral train fulfilled and simultaneously dethroned the truth of this biblical lament. Yes, he was dead, and the people went to him. But not all of his people could make that journey. So, although dead, Lincoln did return. He returned to the people of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio who voted for him in the presidential elections of 1860 and 1864, and to the well-wishers he met during his inaugural journey east in 1861; he returned to Indiana, site of early boyhood memories; he returned to Chicago, city of his political destiny; he returned to the prairies of Illinois and his old clients; and he returned to Springfield, his home for a quarter century.
Lincoln’s coffin became a kind of ark of the American Covenant, possessing hidden meanings and mysterious powers. The death pageant was both a civic and a religious event. Through the national funeral obsequies, Americans mourned the death of their president and elevated him to the pantheon of American political sainthood, equaled only by George Washington. They honored his achievements: He had won the war, saved the Union, and set men free. They united behind his principles and vowed to bear the burden of his “unfinished work.” And they reaffirmed, by the tributes they paid to him, that his great cause was worth fighting and dying for.
The death rites also had religious significance. Millions of the faithful pondered why God had allowed Abraham Lincoln to be murdered at the height of his accomplishments and glory. Across the country, ministers compared Lincoln’s Good Friday assassination to the passion of Christ. Their sermons suggested a divine purpose overshadowing Lincoln’s death. God had called him home, some suggested, because his work was done. God took him now, others warned, because he would have been too merciful to rebel traitors. Now was not the time not for Lincoln’s mercy, but for justice and vengeance. Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, sensed this mood. “Beware the people weeping,” he wrote, “when they bare the iron hand.” Soon, the fates of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leadership, and John Wilkes Booth’s conspirators would be decided by some of the very people now weeping for their martyred hero.
The twenty-day death pageant transfigured Abraham Lincoln from man to myth. On the day he was murdered, he was not universally loved—even in the North. His traveling corpse became a touchstone that offered catharsis for all the pain the American people had suffered and stored up over four bloody years of civil war. For whom did they mourn? For their slain president, of course. But this outpouring of national sorrow could not be for just one man. “Not for you, for one alone; / Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,” wrote Walt Whitman. And so they mourned, not for this one man alone but for all of the men; for every son, every brother, every lover, and every husband, and every father lost in that war. It was as though, on that train, in that coffin, they were all coming home. Lincoln’s death pageant for Abraham Lincoln was a glorious farewell to him and to the three hundred and sixty thousand men of the Union who, like their Father Abraham, had perished for cause and country.
Years later, General Edward Townsend reflected upon what had been, for him, the journey of a lifetime:
Mr. Lincoln, on his way from Springfield to Washington in 1861, had passed through all the cities where now his mortal remains had rested for a few hours on their way home. At the principal places he had had enthusiastic public receptions. There could not now be wanting many sad contrasts in the memories of those who had participated in the first ovations to the new President, and who now remained to behold the last of him on earth. Can there be imagined one item wanting to perfect this grandest of human dramas? It is entire; it is sublime!
It took a poet, Walt Whitman, to summarize in a few lines the meaning of it all:
When lilacs last in the door-yard 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.
O ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, With the tolling bells’ perpetual clang, Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.
Not for you, for one alone; Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring.
After Lincoln was in his tomb, the funeral train party broke up. Not all of the travelers would return to Washington together on that train. Yes, the military officers and the escort would ride back as a group and, once they emptied the compartment of armfuls of decaying flowers, they would take the vacant presidential car back to Washington. The train, which departed Springfield on May 5, would not retrace the identical route by which it had come. Torches and bonfires would not light the way home. No crowds bid the funeral train farewell when it left Springfield for its anticlimactic, homeward-bound journey. Curious eyes might have noticed the train as it chugged east, but huge crowds no longer gathered at the depots to watch it pass, and no one fired cannons.
The elected officials, government appointees, and other special passengers who had ridden the train from Washington to Springfield made their own way back. Their special War Department pass entitling them to free, round-trip travel did not restrict them to the presidential train. Many, including members of the Illinois delegation, tarried in Springfield or visited other local points. Some made stops in other states before they returned to Washington.
In late April, Major General James Wilson, the twenty-seven-year-old Union cavalry prodigy, heard rumors that Davis had left Charlotte and was traveling south through the Carolinas, heading for Georgia. The chase for Jefferson Davis was not like the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. On April 2, the night Davis fled Richmond, Abraham Lincoln still had a war to win. Victory occupied his mind, not the whereabouts of the Confederate president. Once Davis abandoned his capital, Lincoln considered him irrelevant, and certainly not a serious threat to Union military operations. The danger came from the armies of Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. To Lincoln, the fleeing Davis was of little tactical or strategic importance. For other reasons, Lincoln did not want to capture Davis at all. To help heal the rift between North and South, Lincoln wanted no treason trials or prison sentences, and certainly no public hangings. He cued his cabinet and several of his generals on his desires. Between April 2 and April 14, Lincoln issued no orders to hunt down Davis. Instead, Lincoln had issued him an unwritten, unofficial free pass to escape.
That changed with the assassination. Now the federal government wanted Davis not only as a traitor but as a suspect in the murder of the president. As Stanton and the War Department began the pursuit of Booth, the Bureau of Military Justice began building a legal case against Davis. But the capture of Booth, not Davis, was the first priority. Within hours of the assassination, the first cavalry units rode out in pursuit of the assassin. His trail was still hot, he could not have ridden far from Washington, and, as far as Stanton knew, he was alone. Small units of soldiers and detectives could be employed effectively to search Maryland and northern Virginia.
By April 14, Davis’s trail had gone cold. He had traveled far from Washington, and at some points during his escape, he enjoyed the protection of up to a few thousand armed and mounted men. Davis had traveled too far to enlist Washington detectives, or to send small
cavalry units deep into Virginia and the Carolinas in pursuit. And if they located his position, Davis’s armed escort could outgun them. No, the chase for Davis would require more men, probing deeper south in a wide screen spread across a few hundred miles of territory. The War Department had to throw out a wide net, and hope that Davis stumbled into it. But because the war was not over, and because Booth remained at large until April 26, the hunt for Davis was postponed and did not begin in earnest until early May.
On May 7, Wilson ordered Colonel Robert Minty, commander of the Second Cavalry Division, to, as Minty stated later, “make immediate arrangements to prevent the escape of Jefferson Davis across the Ocmulgee and Flint Rivers, south of Macon.” Minty’s old unit, the Fourth Michigan Cavalry, was in Macon. Recruited in Detroit in 1862, the Fourth was an experienced, combat-seasoned, hard-riding regiment. He directed its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pritchard, to leave that evening in pursuit of Davis. Minty told him where to set up a screen of pickets, but that if he learned that Davis had already crossed the Ocmulgee, to follow and “capture or kill him.”
Pritchard and about four hundred men departed Macon at 8:00 P.M., intending to proceed down the south bank of the river for seventy-five to a hundred miles, scouting the country on both sides of the river “as far as the strength of my command would permit for the purpose of capturing Jeff. Davis.” After marching seventy-five miles, Pritchard arrived at Abbeville at 3:00 P.M. on May 9. There he encountered Lieutenant Colonel Harnden, commander of the First Wisconsin Cavalry, who told him that a wagon train had crossed the Ocmulgee the previous midnight at Brown’s Ferry a mile and a half north of Abbeville.
The Wisconsin men went off down the main road while Pritch-ard’s followed the river route. The two units did not know that they were on a collision course. Before leaving Abbeville, Pritchard divided his command, taking with him 128 of his best riders plus officers. He left Abbeville at 4:00 P.M. and headed toward Irwinville.
On May 5, Jefferson Davis and the few men still traveling with him made a camp near Sandersville, Georgia. The next day, Burton Harrison directed Varina’s wagon train to camp off the road near Dublin, Georgia. Around midnight, Davis’s party stumbled upon her campsite. More than a month had gone by since Davis had seen his family, but now finally they were reunited. They traveled together on May 7 and that night camped between Dublin and Abbeville, Georgia.
The president took his eight-year-old son, Jefferson Davis Jr., shooting. Unlike the day in Richmond when Jefferson ordered pistol cartridges for Varina and taught her how to shoot a revolver in self-defense, this was for fun. The boy would have no need to defend himself with firearms. Colonel William Preston Johnston observed the target practice. The president “let little Jeff. shoot his Deringers at a mark, and then handed me one of the unloaded pistols, which he asked me to carry.” When Davis and Johnston turned their discussion to their escape route, the colonel “distinctly understood that we were going to Texas.” Johnston said that he did not think they could get there by going west through the state of Mississippi, suggesting it might be safer to make for the Florida coast and sail through the Gulf of Mexico to the Texas coast. “It is true,” Davis replied, “every negro in Mississippi knows me.” He guessed that it would be impossible to travel incognito through his home state without being recognized by at least one slave.
On May 8, Davis decided to part from his family and at dawn he rode on with his personal staff and a small military escort. By that night he had made little progress through heavy rains, and Varina’s train caught up with him in Abbeville, a speck of a town consisting of just a few buildings. When Harrison finally found Davis, he was sleeping on the floor of an abandoned house. Word of a Yankee cavalry patrol twenty-five miles away in Hawkinsville persuaded Davis that his wife’s party should drive on through the bad weather and not stop to rest. He was too tired to leave the house and come outside to see Varina. He would, he assured Harrison, catch up to them after he rested for a while in Abbeville. Later in the night, Jefferson’s party followed Varina’s, and they reunited before dawn on May 9. The two groups traveled twenty-eight miles together for the day, stopping at 5:00 P.M.
Davis decided to make camp for the night with Varina’s wagon train near Irwinville. They pulled off the road, and the pine trees helped conceal their position. President Davis’s escort did not set up a defensive camp, circling their wagons in a compact circle, picketing their horses and mules inside the ring, and pitching tents or laying out bedrolls within the perimeter. Davis was not camping on the western
plains of the frontier of his youth, and he expected no attack from Native Americans during the night. Forming a wagon train into a circle made sense on the wide open plains, but not in the Georgia pines.
If Union cavalry discovered his position and charged his camp in force, his small entourage could not outgun them, and if the federals were able to surround a small camp drawn up in a tight circle, it would be difficult for Davis to take advantage of the confusion of battle and escape. So, instead, Davis’s party pitched camp with an open plan, scattering the tents and wagons over an area of about one hundred yards. Now, any Yankee who rode into one part of the camp during the night would not be able to see to the other side of it. A small force of eight to twelve enemy cavalrymen could not gain control of the entire camp, and the men guarding the president had a decent chance of outfighting such a small patrol.
If the chosen few of the president’s escort had come this far, now that their numbers had dwindled to less than thirty, from a force of several thousand men, they could be trusted to fight to the death to save the president and his family. If there was a fight, then Davis, unless captured at once, could escape into the woods while it was dark.
The arrangement was perfect, but for one oversight. Tonight the camp posted no guards to keep vigil through the dawn. A handful of cavalrymen, led by Captain Givhan Campbell, were out scouting instead of guarding the camp. As the members of the little caravan began to fall asleep, they faced two dangers in the night: attack from ex-Confederate soldiers—ruthless, war-weary bandits bent on plunder—or an attack from the Union cavalry, on the hunt for President Davis. It was no secret that bandits had been shadowing Varina Davis’s wagon train for several days, and they could strike anytime without warning. That was the reason Davis had reunited with Varina, instead of pushing on alone.
Davis’s aides knew that it was too dangerous for him to continue traveling with his wife’s slow-moving wagon train. “Fully realizing that so large a party [of nearly thirty people] would be certain to attract the attention of the enemy’s scouts, that we had every reason to believe [that they] were in pursuit of us,” recalled Governor Lubbock, “it was decided at noon [May 9] that as soon as we had concluded the midday meal the President and his companions would again bid farewell to Mrs. Davis and her escort.”
Davis did not plan to spend the night of May 9 camped with his wife and children near Irwinville. Unless he abandoned the wagon train and moved fast on horseback, accompanied by no more than three or four men, he had little chance of escape. By this time the Union was flooding Georgia with soldiers and canvassing every crossroads, guarding every river crossing, and searching every town. Furthermore, the federals had recruited local blacks with expert knowledge of back roads and hiding places, to help in the manhunt for the fugitive president of the slave empire. The former slaves relished the task and its irony. Even if Davis did not know it, by May 9 he was at imminent risk of capture, and possible death. Thus, remembered Lubbock, “we halted on a small stream near Irwinville…and dinner over, saddled our horses, and made everything ready to mount at a moment’s notice.”
Burton Harrison spoke for the entire inner circle when he said that Davis needed to separate from the wagon train and entourage:
We had all now agreed that, if the President was to attempt to reach the Trans-Mississippi at all, by whatever route, he should move on at once, independent of the ladies and the wagons. And when we halted he positively promised me…that, as soon as something to eat could be cooked, he would say farewell, for the last time, and ride on with his own party, at least ten miles farther before stopping for the night, consenting to leave me and my party to go on our own way as fast as was possible with the now weary mules.
Harrison proposed that the president take Lubbock, Wood, Johnston, and possibly Reagan with him, and that Harrison remain with Mrs. Davis, the children, and the rest of the wagon train personnel. Davis told his aides that he would leave the camp sometime during the night. “The President notified us to be ready to move that night,” affirmed Reagan.
Davis told him that he would eat dinner, stay up late, and leave on horseback after it was dark. He was dressed for the road: dark felt, wide-brimmed hat; signature wool frock coat of Confederate gray; gray trousers; high, black leather riding boots, and spurs. His horse, tied near Varina’s tent, was already saddled and ready to ride, its saddle holsters loaded with Davis’s pistols.
Harrison felt sick and retired early. “After getting that promise from the President,” he remembered, “and arranging the tents and wagons for the night, and without waiting for anything to eat (being still the worse for my dysentery and fever), I lay down upon the ground and fell into a profound sleep.”
Harrison was certain that when he awoke, Davis would be gone. Captain Moody stretched a piece of canvas above Harrison’s head and lay down beside him. Several of the men, including Reagan, stayed up late talking, waiting for Davis to give the order to depart. It never came.
The delay puzzled Lubbock: “Time wore on, the afternoon was spent, night set in, and we were still in camp. Why the order ‘to horse’ was not given by the President I do not know.”
“For some reason,” Reagan said, “the President did not call for us that night, though we sat up until pretty late.”
Wood and Lubbock fell asleep under a pine tree no more than one hundred feet from Davis’s tent, with Johnston, Harrison, and Reagan sleeping somewhere between them and Davis.