THE LONELY YEARS: ABRAHAM AND WILLIE LINCOLN HAUNT MARY IN A FAKE “SPIRIT” PHOTOGRAPH.
The chase for Jefferson Davis and the death pageant for Abraham Lincoln are among the great American journeys. Like the explorations of Lewis and Clark, the settling of the West, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the landing on the moon, the rise and fall of the two Civil War presidents, each a martyr to his cause, altered our history and added to our myths. The history is well known—620,000 dead, the overthrow of old ways of life, and the end of a great but flawed antebellum empire built upon slavery. When Lincoln and Davis fell from power, they also set in motion two myths—the legend of America’s emancipating, secular saint, and the legend of the Lost Cause. The assassination, nationwide mourning, and funeral train for Lincoln; the chase, imprisonment, and long Civil War afterlife of Davis—they haunt American history down to the latest generation.
In the years following Lincoln’s funeral, the melancholy curse that afflicted his family would not lift. During the months after Mary left Washington, there were rumors that she had plundered the White House of valuables; and in 1867, a scheme she hatched with Elizabeth Keckly to exhibit her dresses for money—the “old clothes scandal,” the press dubbed it—made her a national laughingstock. Tad, the president’s constant companion after Willie’s death, died of tuberculosis in 1871, when he was eighteen, having survived his father by just six years. The body of another Lincoln was put aboard a train. The tomb in Springfield was opened, and Tad joined Abraham, Willie, and Eddie.
THE LONELY YEARS: ABRAHAM AND WILLIE LINCOLN HAUNT MARY IN A FAKE “SPIRIT” PHOTOGRAPH.
Mary continued to live as an unsettled wanderer, spending much of her time in Europe. Irrationally, she believed herself destitute. She made mad, vicious accusations of dishonesty and theft against her son Robert, which led him to have her committed to a sanitarium for four months in 1875. She posed for the notorious spirit photographer Mumler, who supplied her with the expected image of the ghosts of Abraham and Willie hovering above her. She finally returned to Springfield and moved into the home of her sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards. It was the house she and Abraham had been married in. As she had after the assassination, Mary spent much time in seclusion in her room, longing for death. She died on July 16, 1882, surviving her husband by seventeen unhappy years. She joined her family in the tomb. The nation did not mourn her passing.
Robert Todd Lincoln became a prominent attorney, businessman, and government official, but after his death in 1926, the Lincoln line died out within two generations. Today there are no direct descendants of Abraham Lincoln.
Varina Davis rose from Jefferson’s deathbed to live a fulfilling life. She helped plan his funeral and took pride in how the South mourned him. Four years later, she oversaw his reburial in Richmond. In 1890, Varina published her book, Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America, a Memoir, by His Wife. Jefferson had dedicated his memoirs to the women of the Confederacy, and in hers Varina remembered the men: “To the soldiers of the Confederacy, who cheered and sustained Jefferson Davis in the darkest hour by their splendid gallantry, and never withdrew their confidence from him when defeat settled on our cause, this volume is affectionately dedicated…” Like her husband, she needed two fat volumes to tell her story. Unlike him, she unburdened her heart. In 1891, in a decision that perplexed many Southerners—and outraged others—she moved to New York City, leaving behind the Southern landscape of her past, but not abandoning her memories of it. She wrote articles, made new friends, maintained a literary salon, and created a Manhattan Confederate circle that included Burton Harrison, who had become a prominent lawyer, and his wife, Constance Cary Harrison. They too wrote about their lives and times in the old Confederacy. Varina Howell Davis died in 1906. All of her sons had preceded Jefferson in death, but through her daughter, Margaret, the line lived on, and today the direct descendants of Jefferson and Varina Davis work to preserve the memory of their ancestors.
Little physical evidence of the Lincoln funeral train survives. The steam engines that performed flawlessly during the sixteen-hundred-mile journey were scrapped long ago. The presidential car performed one more act of service in the summer of 1865. When the wife of Secretary of State Seward died in June—her weak constitution was broken by the bloody assassination attempt in her home—Lincoln’s car carried her body back to Auburn, New York. After that journey, it was retired from service—perhaps its use as a funeral car jinxed it as an unlucky conveyance for future presidents—and in 1866 it was auctioned and purchased by the Union Pacific Railroad. Afterward, the president’s funeral car enjoyed a few decades of celebrity and then, stripped of its decorations and furniture, and suffering from neglect and decay, it perished in a fire. Souvenir photo postcards from the day depict a pile of collapsed, wooden ribs charred black. The other coach cars vanished, and the funeral train survives only in the dozens of photographs taken of it along the route from Washington to Springfield.
None of the majestic horse-drawn hearses, which had once caused the public to marvel at their size and extravagance, exists today. All of the catafalques save one—the one on which Lincoln’s coffin rested when he lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, and upon which dead presidents still repose—are gone. The fabric that covers it today is of a more recent vintage: Benjamin Brown French never got back the black shroud his wife had sewn to drape the catafalque. From all the hearses and catafalques, only a few relics survive, scattered among historical societies and private collections: framed slivers of wood, swatches of black cloth, frayed bits of flag, strips of silver fringe, bullion tassels, dried flowers, and the like. From the New York City funeral, one of the twelve, halberd-topped flag poles mounted to Lincoln’s hearse survives, preserved by the assistant undertaker and identified for future generations by his sworn affidavit.
One museum has tried to re-create what it must have been like to experience the Lincoln death pageant and view his corpse. In Springfield, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum built a replica of the city’s Hall of Representatives, where the president lay in state. The original room, which still exists, is one block away in the Old State House, where it is fitted out as the legislative chamber Lincoln would recognize from his day. But in the museum’s facsimile chamber, it is forever May 3-4, 1865. Black crepe and bunting smother the space, and upon an inclined catafalque rests a replica of Lincoln’s coffin. The overall effect is somber and impressive, until one takes a closer look. The corpse is missing; the coffin is closed. How could a Lincoln museum, of all places, commit such a spectacular historical error? In Springfield, as in each city where a public viewing occurred, the coffin was open. The American people were desperate to see Lincoln’s remains.
At the museum’s grand opening, a visitor pointed out the error to an employee. “We know,” the official replied. “We did it on purpose. We can’t show what it was really like. We can’t have an open coffin with a wax figure inside. It would upset the children.”
Perhaps the children of 1865 were hardier than today’s generation—during the national obsequies, tens of thousands of children viewed Lincoln’s remains. Nonetheless, the museum chose to go to great effort and expense to create an exhibit that is not authentic. Strangely, the museum was not reluctant to construct a replica of Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre, and to place in it a life-size figure of John Wilkes Booth assassinating the president. Nor was the gift shop reluctant to sell to children a plastic, toy replica of the Deringer pistol Booth used to murder Abraham Lincoln, or to place a second life-size figure of Booth not far from the main entrance, within sight of other figures of Lincoln and his family, and Fredrick Douglass. It is bizarre that in the city where Lincoln lies buried, multiple effigies of his assassin stand erect. Thus, the Lincoln museum there enjoys the singular distinction
of being the only presidential library and museum in America to boast a waxworks devoted to an assassin.
In a strange twist, another museum in Springfield, the Museum of Funeral Customs, has fabricated not one but several replicas of Lincoln’s coffin, which are loaned out for exhibition, and for educational purposes. The lids will open, but the coffins are empty. Wax figures are not included.
Not long after the funeral train left Springfield and returned to Washington, a legend spread of a Lincoln ghost train that rolled down the tracks each spring. An undated, fugitive newspaper clipping, found pasted in an old scrapbook from the late 1860s, is the only surviving evidence of the tale:
A PHANTOM TRAIN
THE DEAD LINCOLN’S YEARLY TRIP OVER THE
NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILROAD
A correspondent in the Albany (N.Y.) Evening Times relates a conversation with a superstitious night watchman on the New York Central Railroad. Said the watchman: “I believe in spirits and ghosts. I know such things exist. If you will come up in April I will convince you.” He then told of the phantom train that every year comes up the road with the body of Abraham Lincoln. Regularly in the month of April, about midnight, the air on the track becomes very keen and cutting. On either side it is warm and still. Every watchman when he feels this air steps off the track and sits down to watch. Soon after the pilot engine, with long black streamers, and a band of black instruments, playing dirges, grinning skeletons sitting all about, will pass up noiselessly, and the very air grows black. If it is moonlight clouds always come over the moon, and the music seems to linger, as if frozen with horror. A few moments after and the phantom train glides by. Flags and streamers hang about. The track ahead seems covered with black carpet, and the wheels are draped with the same. The coffin of the murdered Lincoln is seen lying on the centre of the car, and all about it in the air and the train behind are vast numbers of blue-coated men, some with coffins on their backs, others leaning on them.
Many spirits, claimed the storyteller, accompanied Lincoln:
It seems then that all the vast armies that died during the war are escorting the phantom train of the President. The wind, if blowing, dies away at once, and all over the earth a solemn hush, almost stifling, prevails. If a train were passing, its noise would be drowned in silence, and the phantom train would ride over it. Clocks and watches would always stop, and when looked at are found to be from five to eight minutes behind. Everywhere on the road, about the 27th of April, the time of watches and trains is found suddenly behind. This, said the leading watchman, was from the passage of the phantom train.
More tangible than any ghost trains are the railroad tracks. For the most part, the route followed by the Lincoln funeral train still exists, marked by ancient railroad beds and the villages, towns, and cities on the map when the train passed by. Yes, the aging iron rails forged by the Civil War were replaced long ago, but track locations rarely change, and many of the same railroad beds over which Lincoln’s coffin rode are still in the same place, a hundred and fifty years later. Few of the residents who live along the route today know about the torches, bonfires, arches, cannon fire, and huge crowds, or that Lincoln’s corpse once passed that way, and perhaps even stopped in their town.
New Yorkers who commute daily from their bedroom communities along the Hudson River, north of Manhattan, have no idea when they return home each night that they are traveling over the
same route taken by the Lincoln funeral train. The stops, Hastings-on-Hudson, Tarrytown, Ossining, Croton, and beyond, are the same ones called out by the conductor on Lincoln’s train. Every day in America, thousands of railroad passengers, unbeknownst to them, follow the route of the funeral train.
Other vivid and more venerated evidence of the death pageant survives: the blood relics—locks of Lincoln’s hair, tiny pieces of his skull, the probe and other medical instruments, bloodstained pillows and towels, the physicians’ bloody shirt cuffs; the fatal bullet, of course; and still more death relics, lurid and macabre ones, best not spoken of. Many of them repose in the Army Medical Museum, or in private collections, handed down from generation to generation, or sold off by the descendants of the ancestors who had once cherished them.
More common than blood relics are the ribbons, timetables, badges, song sheets, broadsides, prints, and photographs produced and sold commercially to millions of mourners of April and May 1865. Even today, it is not unheard of for a silk mourning ribbon, a printed railroad timetable, or an original carte de visite of one of the hearses to turn up at an out-of-print bookstore, antique shop, or estate sale located along the old route of the funeral train.
George Harrington could not have foreseen it, but when he planned the state funeral for Abraham Lincoln, he was planning the funeral for a future president too, one destined to be elevated to that office a century after Lincoln’s election, and who, like Father Abraham, would die by an assassin’s hand. On November 22, 1963, when the president’s body was flown home from Dallas, Texas, to Washington, D.C., a man awaited the landing of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base that evening. It was Angier Biddle Duke, U.S. chief of protocol. When Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing the bright pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, stepped off the presidential jet, Duke approached her and spoke one sentence.
“Madam, how may I serve you?” he asked.
“Make it like Lincoln’s,” she said.
A few nights later, after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, as the motorcade headed back to the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy’s car broke away from the others. After her vehicle crossed Memorial Bridge, it turned left. Ahead, the thirty-six huge, snowy, marble columns glowed like a classical Greek Temple. Mrs. Kennedy’s car braked to a stop on the plaza, and she gazed up at the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln enshrined in his memorial.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis became a greater legend in death than he had been in life. After he fell from power, his stock rose in the South—”He suffered for us”—and he became not only the defeated Confederacy’s “representative man,” but also the living catalyst for a new movement, the Lost Cause. He symbolized a collective dream: The South may have lost the war, but it was not wrong, and even in defeat it shone with honor and remained the superior civilization. During Davis’s 1886-87 speaking tour, he soared to new heights of glory, surpassing the prestige and fame he once possessed as president of the Confederate States of America. In his old age, it seemed, the South could not have loved him more. Until he died.
The death of Jefferson Davis caused a convulsion of emotion and memory. His funeral, like Lincoln’s, represented not just the passing of one man but of an era. Four years after Davis died, the funeral train that carried him from New Orleans to Richmond roused the South and stunned the North. Once more, Americans stood beside railroad tracks, holding signs, bearing torches, and igniting bonfires, waiting for a train to pass by. A tumultuous response welcomed him back to the old capital, where he would reign forever over the dreams of a lost cause. In the 1890s, the White House of the Confederacy was transformed into the Museum of the Confederacy, a shrinelike repository for treasured battle flags, war artifacts, and memories. In 1907, when three hundred and twenty-five thousand people turned out for the dedication of his monument in Richmond, Davis was at the apex of his fame. On that day, his partisans were sure that his name would endure forever and that history would honor him, no less than Lincoln, as a great American.
They were wrong. The twentieth century came to belong to Abraham Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis. His eclipse began as early as 1922, with the completion of the Lincoln Memorial. A grandiose, overwrought monument had been proposed in 1865, not long after the assassination, but, fortunately for the nation, it was never built. The model vanished long ago, but survives in a rare photograph buried in the files of the Library of Congress. Indecision and political squabbling delayed Lincoln’s national memorial for fifty-seven years. In the meantime, while Lincoln waited, two monuments had been erected for Davis in Richmond, one at his gravesite in Hollywood Cemetery and the other on Monument Avenue.
The Lincoln Memorial overshadowed these Richmond monuments in physical scale and symbolism. It represented the growing power of the Lincoln legend and the Northern interpretation of the War of the Rebellion. It would not have surprised Davis to know that on the day former president William Howard Taft presented the memorial to President Warren G. Harding, with Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert looking on, blacks in attendance were forced to sit in segregated seating. Davis had been dubious of how blacks would fare in postwar America. He believed that once the Union freed the slaves, the North would not welcome them as neighbors or equal citizens. Instead, Davis suspected, Northerners viewed blacks as an abstraction, as a convenient cause they would abandon after the war. Racism and hatred, Davis suggested, were not exclusively Southern phenomena. It took a different kind of Southern senator and president—Lyndon B. Johnson—to redeem Lincoln’s promise that had been denied during dedication day, on the steps of his own memorial.
Southerners continued to memorialize Jefferson Davis. His capture site languished in obscurity for years and was, in time, overgrown by pines and brush. It was a quiet, forgotten place. This was no landmark of Confederate glory, and few Southerners cared to visit the spot where Davis’s presidency and their last hope for independence had died. In 1894, a local photographer named J. H. Harris, from the town of Tifton in Berrien County, Georgia, went there twenty-nine years later to take, he boasted in his caption, the only photo in the world of the “exact spot” of Davis’s last camp. At some point, Davis loyalists marked the place when they hammered into the ground a wooden
stake nailed to a crude, handmade sign: SITE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS’ CAMP AT THE TIME OF CAPTURE, MAY 10, 1865.
On June 3, 1936, on a spring day seventy-one years after the end of the Civil War, and the 128th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s birthday, the ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Ocilla, Georgia Chapter, dedicated a handsome monument at the site. Consisting of a large concrete slab bearing a concrete plaque sculpted in bas relief, with a bronze bust of Davis, the main text of the memorial reads: “Jefferson Davis—President of the Confederate States of America. 1861-1865.” This monument was meant to celebrate not capture, defeat, or imprisonment, but the “unconquerable heart” of the man who, in enduring those trials, became a beloved symbol to his people. In a dedication-day photograph taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration (a government agency the very existence of which would have roused Davis’s skepticism of broad federal authority), the new monument dominates the image, but if you look several feet to its left, low in the frame, the old, handmade wooden sign still holds its ground.
Other monuments to Davis mark the landscape near his birthplace in Kentucky, and in his home state of Mississippi. At the U.S. Capitol, a larger than life bronze sculpture of Davis stands in National Statuary Hall, its presence a tribute to two things: his service as a U.S. senator, and his significant influence on the architecture and modern-day appearance of the Capitol building.
In 2009, America celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday with great fanfare. President and Mrs. George W. Bush hosted several pre-bicentennial events, including the first black-tie White House dinner ever held in Lincoln’s honor. The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History mounted major exhibitions. The Ford’s Theatre Society raised fifty million dollars to renovate the theater and its museum in time for Lincoln’s birthday on February 12. The Newseum, located on a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue overlooking the route of the April 19, 1865, funeral procession, offered an exhibition on the assassination, mourning pageant, and manhunt for Lincoln’s killer. Museums in several other cities put on exhibitions. Filmmakers produced several documentaries, and in 2008 and 2009, authors published nearly one hundred books on the sixteenth president. The U.S. Mint and Post Office produced commemorative coins and stamps.
On June 3, 2008, another bicentennial passed almost without notice. Not many Americans were aware of, let alone chose to celebrate, the two hundredth birthday of Jefferson Davis. There were no White House dinners, major exhibitions, shelves of new books, or coins and stamps. Few people know his story. Most have never read a book about him, and no one reads his memoirs anymore. Many people would not recognize his face, and some would not even remember his name. Indeed, when he does make the news, it is more likely in connection with a fevered effort to change the name of some high school named after him a long time ago. Jefferson Davis is the Lost Man of American history.
The Lincoln bibliography, more than fifteen thousand titles, dwarfs the literature on Davis. Lincoln is served by a cottage industry that produces dozens of books, articles, conferences, and lectures every year. There is no Davis cottage industry. The one exception is the Papers of Jefferson Davis project, a labor of love and of exquisite scholarly merit. But these volumes are purchased by historians and libraries, not the general public.
What explains the rise and fall of Davis in American popular memory? He lost, and history tends to reward winners, not losers. But there must be more to it than that. Perhaps it comes down to the slaves, the song, and the flag. The Confederate past is controversial. In the spring of 2010, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the governor of Virginia created a furor by proclaiming Confederate History Month, a celebration condemned by some as, at best, insensitive and, at worst, racist. A historical figure who owned slaves, wished he “was in the land of cotton,” and waved the Stars and Bars must today be rebuked and erased from popular memory, not studied. Better to forget. Perhaps, someday, someone will demand that his statue be banished from the U.S. Capitol.
In Richmond, the Confederate White House and the Museum of the Confederacy, two of the finest Civil War sites in the country, are in trouble. Once central to that city’s identity, they languish now in semi-obscurity, overshadowed physically by an ugly complex of medical office buildings and challenged symbolically by a competing, sleek new Civil War museum at the Tredegar Iron Works, the former cannon manufactory. The Museum of the Confederacy has fallen on hard times and into local disfavor, dismissed by some as an antiquarian dinosaur, by others as an embarrassing reminder of the racial politics of the Lost Cause. Its very name angers some who insist that perpetuating these places of Confederate history is tantamount to a modern-day endorsement of secession, slavery, and racism. According to numerous newspaper stories, the Museum and the White House are barely hanging on, and have considered closing, or dividing the priceless collection among several institutions. Their failure would be a loss to American history. Unless a benefactor comes forward to save them, their long-term future remains uncertain.
There was one place where the legacy of Jefferson Davis was safe, at his beloved postwar sanctuary, Beauvoir. There, on the Mississippi Gulf, he had found the peace that had eluded him during his presidency and during his unsettled postwar wanderings. In an outbuilding, a three-room cottage he set up as his study, he shelved hundreds of books and piled more on tables. A photograph preserves the interior of this time capsule: books everywhere, his desk and chair where he sat and composed his letters and articles, and where he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.
After Davis’s death, Beauvoir lived on as a monument, and it became a retirement home for aged Confederate veterans who came to live there. When the last of them died off, Beauvoir became a Davis museum and library. The institution flourished for decades until one day in late August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf hard. The main house, a lovely, nine-room Gothic cottage set upon pillars, was gutted down to the walls. All seven of the outbuildings were destroyed. Countless artifacts were lost, including Davis’s Mexican War saddle, as well as the notorious raglan and shawl he wore on the morning he was captured.
His library did not escape the hurricane. On that day, the sanctuary where Jefferson Davis labored to preserve for all time the memory of the Confederacy, its honored dead, and the Lost Cause was, by wind and water, all swept away.
