Down Pennsylvania Avenue one day, wrote Noah Brooks, moved “a Confederate regimental band which had deserted in a body with its instruments, and was allowed to march through the streets of the national capital playing Union airs.”
Congressman Ashley, just from Grant’s headquarters, reported to Lincoln of Grant saying, “For every three men of ours dead, five of theirs; for every three of our cattle dead, five of theirs.” And picking up some paper from a table and crushing it in his hand, “Tell the President I have got them like that!” Ashley said, “It made the cold chills run over me.”
Sheridan had driven Early’s army out of the Shenandoah Valley and reported in late March 780 barns burned, 420,000 bushels of wheat taken, also 700,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,557 horses, 7,152 head of beef cattle. So often now the wagons of Lee went out for food and came back empty. In comparison the Union army had nearly all needs in supplies running over.
After long bickering, with the Confederate Senate reversing itself and by a majority of one voting to arm the slaves for defense, President Davis signed the bill. At last the Negro slave was to be put in the Confederate Army to fight for his master. This was their one final hope for more soldiers.
As from Lee had come to Mrs. Chesnut an impressive saying: “This is the people’s war; when they tire, I stop.” She wrote as though she believed in this hour Lee had said it. When a certain order of passion, faith and endurance goes down, its final extinction is miraculously swift, Mrs. Chesnut mused. It was like the snuffing out of a candle: “One moment white, then gone forever.”
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To one White House caller Lincoln gave his picture of the major strategy of recent weeks. “Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide.” Pointing on a map, he said that Sherman when last heard of had his cavalry, vanguard and infantry columns here, there and there, “expecting to bring them all together here.' Then after a pause: Now when he does that, he’ll—but that reminds me of the horsedealer in Kentucky who got baptized in the river. The ceremony once over he insisted on it a second time. The preacher hesitated but the horse-trader had his way. And when he came up from the second ducking he gasped, ‘There now! Now I can tell the devil to go to hell!”’
Up across North Carolina marched Sherman to Fayetteville, then to Goldsboro, where he paused for rest. Behind them toward Savannah lay 425 miles of foraged and ravaged country. Since July ’63 his men had come on their feet no less than 2,500 miles, fording ordinary streams and flooded rivers, through rains and hot sun. Many were ragged, their trousers half gone from tussling through underbrush. More than half had thrown away their worn-out shoes, some walking barefoot, others with feet wrapped in blanket pieces. They leaped and shouted as they slid into new issues of shoes, uniforms, overcoats, at Goldsboro. The troops were mainly from the West, the Midwest and the Northwest.
Lincoln was to leave Washington to see Grant and have a breakaway from many pressures at Washington. And he might go over with Grant what terms should end the war. Early in March he had written an order through Stanton indicating Grant was to have no conference with General Lee unless on purely military affairs: “. . . you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political questions. Such questions the President holds in his own hands, and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions.”
The President was to sail from Washington on the Bat, a fast, comfortable, well-armed dispatch boat. Then came later orders for Captain Barnes to report at the White House, where, noted the Captain, “Mr. Lincoln received me with great cordiality, but with a certain kind of embarrassment, and a look of sadness which rather embarrassed me. After a few casual remarks he said that Mrs. Lincoln had decided that she would accompany him to City Point—could the Bat accommodate her and her maidservant?”
Barnes was ushered into Mrs. Lincolns presence, noting that “she received me very graciously, standing with arms folded.” Her wishes: “I am going with the President to City Point, and I want you to arrange your ship to take me, my maid and my officer [or guard], as well as the President.” Barnes was bothered. He went to Fox. They agreed the Bat couldn’t be fixed over. Together they went to the White House. 1 here in very funny terms the President
translated our difficulties.” Fox promised another and better boat. On the unarmed and less safe though more spacious River Queen , with the Bat as convoy, the Lincoln family made the trip, Tad sleeping in a stateroom with the guard Crook.
Grant came aboard at City Point. Any hour he expected the enemy, because of their forces dwindling through desertion, to make a desperate attempt to crash the Union lines and force a path toward joining Johnston in North Carolina.
In a jolting coach over the military railroad from City Point toward the front Lincoln rode past scenery where in the first daylight hours that morning men had been mowed down by fort guns and men had fought hand to hand with bayonet and clubbed musket. Confederate troops under General John B. Gordon had taken Fort Stedman and pressed on with the aim of destroying a railroad and Union supply stores. The Union troops had rallied, had driven the enemy back and retaken Fort Stedman—and Lincoln’s breakfast hour, as he wired Stanton, saw the fight “ending about where it began.” Lincoln saw close up the results of desperate combat on more than a small scale. Reports gave Union losses at 500 killed and wounded, 500 captured; Confederate losses 800 killed and wounded, 1,800 captured.
While the President journeyed to the front via railway, Mrs. Lincoln was joined by Mrs. Grant, who was living with her family on the ship Mary Martin. The two women rode in an ambulance over a muddy, rough corduroy road. They were to join the President and Meade’s staff in reviewing Crawford’s division. As the wagon rolled along, Adam Badeau, Grant’s secretary, seated with his back to the horses and facing the ladies, did his best at conversation, mentioning that all the wives of officers at the army front had been ordered to the rear, a sure sign of big action soon to come. Not a lady had been allowed to stay at the front, continued Badeau, unaware of what he was getting into, not a lady except Mrs. Griffin, the wife of General Charles Griffin, she having a special permit from the President.
Swift as a cat leap, Mrs. Lincoln: “What do you mean by that, sir? Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?” Badeau saw the face of a woman boiling with rage. He tried smiling toward this face, to show there was no malice. Badeau’s smile was timed wrong. “That’s a very equivocal smile, sir,” he now heard. “Let me out of this carriage at once. I will ask the President if he saw that woman alone.”
Badeau and Mrs. Grant tried to smooth and quiet her but failed. Mrs. Lincoln ordered Badeau to have the driver stop, and Badeau hesitating, she thrust her arms past him and took hold of the driver. By now however
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Mrs. Grant was able to coax Mrs. Lincoln to be still and to wait. As they alighted at the reviewing ground General Meade walked up, paid his respects to Mrs. Lincoln, escorted her away, later returning her with diplomatic skill, Mrs. Lincoln informing Badeau, “General Meade is a gentleman, sir. He says it was not the President who gave Mrs. Griffin the permit, but the Secretary of War.” Thus ran Badeau’s account.
Badeau and Mrs. Grant agreed “the whole affair was so distressing and mortifying that neither of us must ever mention it again.” No inkling of it seemed to reach Meade, who wrote to his wife of her own visit to his headquarters that week “it seems so like a dream I can hardly realize you have been here.” The President had spoken of Mrs. Meade, “expressed regret that your visit should have been so abruptly terminated,” while “Mrs. Lincoln spoke very handsomely of you and referred in feeling terms to our sad bereavement [the recent death of a child].”
On the soil where Union countercharges began Lincoln saw the dead in blue and gray and butternut lying huddled and silent, here and there the wounded gasping and groaning. He saw a collection of prisoners taken that morning, a ragged and dusty crew, and remarked “on their sad condition,” noted Barnes. “They had fought desperately and were glad to be at rest. Mr. Lincoln was quiet and observant, making few comments.” On the train a “worn and haggard” Lincoln saw the loading of the Union wounded. “He remarked that he had seen enough of the horrors of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end.” Wrote the guard Crook of this day, “I saw him [Lincoln] ride over the battlefields at Petersburg, the man with the hole in his forehead and the man with both arms shot away lying, accusing, before his eyes.”
Beyond the immediate scene Lincoln gazed on that day other fighting had gone on. The Union troops advanced along the whole of Lee’s right, taking entrenched picket lines. The Union estimate put their own losses at 2,080 as against 4,800 to 5,000 Confederate. Lee next day was writing Davis, “I fear now it will be impossible to prevent a junction between Grant and Sherman.”
Lincoln sat for a while at the headquarters campfire, according to Colonel Horace Porter, and as the smoke curled about his head during certain shiftings of the wind he brushed it away from time to time by waving his right hand in front of his face. To Grant and staff men gathered around he spoke of appalling difficulties’ the administration had met, field losses, troubles in finance and foreign affairs, how they had been overcome by the unswerving patriotism of the people, the devotion of the loyal North, and the superb fighting qualities of the troops. He drifted into a more cheerful vein and got into his storytelling stride by way of the Trent Affair, reeling off an elaborate version of the barber and his worried customer: “He began by
lathering face, nose, eyes and ears, stropped his razor on his boot, and then made a drive at the man’s countenance as if he had practised mowing in a stubble-field. He cut a bold swath across the right cheek, carrying away the beard, a pimple, and two warts. The man in the chair ventured to remark: ‘You appear to make everything level as you go.’ ‘Yes,’ said the barber; ‘and if this handle don’t break, I guess I’ll get away with most of what’s there.’ The man’s cheeks were so hollow that the barber couldn’t get down into the valleys with the razor, and the ingenious idea occurred to him to stick his finger in the man’s mouth and press out the cheeks. Finally he cut clear through the cheek and into his own finger. He pulled the finger out of the man’s mouth, snapped the blood off it, glared at him, and cried: ‘There, you lantern-jawed cuss, you’ve made me cut my finger!’ And so England will discover that she has got the South into a pretty bad scrape by trying to administer to her, and in the end she will find that she has only cut her own finger.”
The laugh following this subsided, and Grant asked, “Mr. President, did you at any time doubt the final success of the cause?” And Lincoln, leaning forward in his camp chair, with an emphatic right-hand gesture: “Never for a moment.”
Next day Barnes “found Mr. Lincoln quite recovered,” lamenting the loss of life, confident the war was ending, pleased at news that Sheridan from the Shenandoah Valley had moved in a big swing around Lee’s army to the north and arrived safe at Harrison’s Landing to join Grant that day.
The President’s eyes caught on three tiny kittens, wandering, mewing as if lost. He picked up one and asked it, “Where is your mother?” Someone answered, “The mother is dead.” And as he petted the little one: “Then she can’t grieve as many a poor mother is grieving for a son lost in battle.” Gathering the two others in his hands, he put them on his lap, stroked their fur, and according to Admiral Porter, meditated, “Kitties, thank God you are cats, and can’t understand this terrible strife that is going on.”
The River Queen moved down the James River and from her deck Lincoln saw the bank lined with men shouting, laughing, swimming, watering their horses—Sheridan’s men washing off the dust and grit of the Shenandoah Valley. They spotted the President and sent him cheers. The River Queen passed through a naval flotilla. The crews cheered the Commander in Chief, saw his tall frame in a long-tailed black frock coat, a cravat of black silk carelessly tied, a black silk hat. Barnes noted, “As he passed each vessel he waved his high hat, as if saluting friends in his native town, and seemed as happy as a school boy.”
Up the James steamed the River Queen to Aiken’s Landing for a field review of part of the Army of the James. Sheridan came aboard. The President ended his long-held handshake. “General Sheridan, when this peculiar war
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began I thought a cavalryman should be at least six feet four high, but — still gazing down on the short General—”1 have changed my mind—five feet four will do in a pinch.”
Ord on one side, Grant on the other, escorted the President over a rough corduroy road two miles to the reviewing ground. An ambulance followed bringing Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant in care of Colonel Horace Porter and Adam Badeau. Improved springs on the ambulance only served to toss the occupants higher, but Mrs. Lincoln in fear that they would miss the review asked Porter for more speed. The driver accommodated till the mud flew from the horses’ heels, and the ladies’ hats were jammed and heads bumped against the top of the wagon. “Mrs. Lincoln now insisted on getting out and walking,” wrote Porter, “but as the mud was nearly hub-deep, Mrs. Grant and I persuaded her that we had better stick to the wagon as our only ark of refuge. ”
Meantime the President, with a squadron of 20 or more officers and orderlies, rode through woods and swamp. Standing at “parade rest” the division had waited for hours. The troops cheered the Commander in Chief. The review over, shellfire began on the enemy picket line in sight, heavy skirmishing lines moved forward, took the picket-line trenches, swelled the day’s total of prisoners to 2,700, repulsed two fierce counterattacks, ending the day with Union losses of about 2,000 to 4,000 Confederate.
Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff at this review had his first look at Lincoln and wrote to his wife: “The President is, I think, the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on; there is also an expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face that is offensive (you recognize the recounter of coarse stories). On the other hand, he has the look of sense and wonderful shrewdness, while the heavy eyelids give him a mark of almost genius. He strikes me, too, as a very honest and kindly man; and, with all his vulgarity, I see no trace of low passions in his face. On the whole, he is such a mixture of all sorts, as only America brings forth. He is as much like a highly intellectual and benevolent Satyr as anything I can think of. I never wish to see him again, but, as humanity runs, I am well content to have him at the head of affairs.”
Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant had arrived late for the review but in time for Mrs. Lincoln to see Mrs. Ord riding near the President in the reviewing column, though equally near her husband, who was the immediate commander of the troops under review. Seeing the ambulance drive in on the parade line, Mrs. Ord excused herself with, “There comes Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant—I think 1 had better join them.” The accounts of Barnes, Porter and Badeau as to what then happened agreed that there were embarrassing moments and bitterly pathetic exhibitions, Badeau’s later recollections being more complete in detail, though having slight discrepancies. It seemed,
however, that as Mrs. Ord joined them, Mrs. Lincoln furiously exclaimed: “What does this woman mean by riding by the side of the President and ahead of me? Does she suppose that he wants her by the side of him?” She went into a frenzy that mingled extravagant rage and drab petulance. “All that Porter and I could do,” wrote Badeau, “was to see that nothing worse than words occurred. ” They feared some wild scene of violence enacted before the troops so calmly standing at “present arms.” One outburst flung itself at Mrs. Grant: “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” Mrs. Grant kept cool, saying she was quite satisfied with her present position, that it was far greater than she had ever expected to attain. Mrs. Lincoln: “Oh! you had better take it if you can get it. ’Tis very nice.” Then the slings of reproach were sent at Mrs. Ord, with Mrs. Grant quietly and at some risk defending her friend.
A nephew of Secretary Seward, a young major and a member of General Ord’s staff, a joker, rode alongside and blurted out with a rich grin: “The President’s horse is very gallant, Mrs. Lincoln. He insists on riding by the side of Mrs. Ord.” This of course helped no one. Mrs. Lincoln cried, “What do you mean by that?” and young Major Seward shied away in a crazy gallop.
When the review had ended—and the troops were moving toward the enemy picket lines and death and wounds—Mrs. Lincoln in the presence of a group of officers, according to Badeau, hurled vile names at Mrs. Ord and again asked what Mrs. Ord meant by following the President. Enough of this sent Mrs. Ord into tears, into asking what in the world she had done. Mrs. Lincoln stormed till she spent her strength. A manner of silence ensued. Porrer believed “Mrs. Lincoln had suffered so much from the fatigue and annoyances of her overland trip that she was not in a mood to derive much pleasure from the occasion.” Badeau saw “everybody shocked and horrified.” Barnes found Mrs. Grant silent and embarrassed. “It was a painful situation, from which the only escape was to retire. Mrs. Ord and myself with a few officers rode back to City Point.”
On the return trip of the River Queen , “the President seemed to recover his spirits,” according to Horace Porter, who thought perhaps the strength and fighting quality he witnessed that afternoon in the Army of the James “had served to cheer him up.” Whatever his mood, whatever the trouble he might be disguising, he told Colonel Porter one of his favorite funny stories, repeating the same story later to Grant.
Of what happened that evening of March 26 when the River Queen returned to her moorings at City Point Badeau wrote: “That night the President and Mrs. Lincoln entertained General and Mrs. Grant and the General’s staff at dinner on the steamer, and before us all Mrs. Lincoln berated
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General Ord to the President, and urged that he should be removed. He was unfit for his place, she said, to say nothing of his wife. General Grant sat next and defended his officer bravely.”
Lincoln and Grant said good night. With the war and more on his hands the President was not at ease. Out in the dark night along a 40-mile front 100,000 men and more lived hugging the dirt of the earth, some in tents but more in huts and shelters. Soon they might go into the wildest, bloodiest battle of the whole war. Beyond lay the solemn matter of what kind of a peace should be signed. Yet along with these problems was a personal grief.
He sent off the ship an orderly who about 11 o’clock awakened Captain Barnes with a message that the President would like to see him. Barnes stepped into his clothes in a hurry, boarded the River Queen , and found Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln awaiting him in the upper saloon. A few essentials Captain Barnes would disclose: “Mr. Lincoln took little part in the conversation which ensued, which evidently followed some previous discussion with Mrs. Lincoln, who had objected very strenuously to the presence of other ladies at the review, and had thought that Mrs. Ord had been too prominent in it; that the troops were led to think she was the wife of the President, who had distinguished her with too much attention. Mr. Lincoln very gently suggested that he had hardly remarked her presence; but Mrs. Lincoln was not to be pacified, and appealed to me to support her views. Of course I could not umpire such a question, and could only state why Mrs. Ord and myself found ourselves in the reviewing column, and how immediately we withdrew from it upon the appearance of the ambulance with Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant. I extricated myself as well as I could, but with difficulty, and asked permission to retire, the President bidding me good-night sadly and gently.”
Amid the scenes created by the disordered brain of a tragically afflicted woman, young Captain Barnes felt himself drawn to the one person he saw as writhing inwardly more than any other, writing, “I came to feel an affection for him that none other inspired.” The melancholy of Lincoln he believed related in part to the torments Mrs. Lincoln was under. I had the greatest sympathy for her and for Mr. Lincoln, who I am sure felt deep anxiety for her, Barnes noted. His manner towards her was always that of the most affectionate solicitude, so marked, so gentle and unaffected that no one could see them together without being impressed by it. Though a common undertone phrase for her was crazy woman, Barnes more humanly decent description ran. She was at no time well; the mental strain upon her was great, betrayed by extreme nervousness approaching hysteria, causing misapprehensions, extreme sensitiveness as to slights or want of politeness or consideration.”
At intervals during this City Point visit, however, several credible observers without particular prejudice agreed in the main with Badeau’s account that "Mrs. Lincoln repeatedly attacked her husband in the presence of officers because of Mrs. Griffin and Mrs. Ord.” As for the head of the state, wrote Badeau, “He bore it as Christ might have done, with supreme calmness and dignity; he called her ‘mother’, pleaded with eyes and tones, endeavored to explain or palliate the offenses of others, till she turned on him like a tigress; and then he walked away,” hiding his face that others might not see it. Toward Mrs. Grant, Mary Todd Lincoln showed no relenting, according to Badeau once rebuking the General’s wife, “How dare you be seated until I invite you?”
Barnes reported as usual to the President, received “marked kindness,” and in a small stateroom converted into an office heard Lincoln read dispatches from Stanton and from the front, while Tad ran in and out, sometimes “clinging to his father and caressed affectionately by him.” Barnes inquired about Mrs. Lincoln, hoping she had recovered from the fatigue of the previous day. “Mr. Lincoln said she was not well at all, and expressed the fear that the excitement of the surroundings was too great for her or for any woman.”
In the roomy log cabin of Grant, Lincoln spent the forenoon mainly in talk with Admiral David D. Porter, Grant a listener “in grim silence, or only answering direct questions from Mr. Lincoln” in monosyllables. In very good spirits that morning was Lincoln, thought Barnes. “Running his hands with an upward movement through his rumpled hair he would stretch himself out, and look at the listeners in turn as though for sympathy and appreciation.” Grant, however, “seldom smiled.” He was thinking about his armies. If Lee escaped the net now spread, the war might go another year or two—or longer.
Four years now since Fort Sumter at Charleston had crumbled. Now that captured fort was under repair, and Stanton, Admiral Dahlgren, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher and Nicolay to represent the President, were preparing to go down and hold a flag-raising ceremony of speeches and prayers, with the Union banner again floating from that citadel where the war had begun.
A steamer put Sherman ashore at City Point late in the afternoon of March 27. Grant was there waiting. They walked to Grant’s cabin. Sherman had talked nearly an hour when Grant interrupted. “I’m sorry but the President is aboard the River Queen." They took Admiral Porter and soon the three found Lincoln alone in the after cabin. Sherman and Lincoln after nearly four years again faced each other. The conversation ranged from laughter to solemnity.
Next morning, March 28, on the River Queen came a conference of the three pivotal Northern men of the war, with Admiral Porter present. Both Grant and Sherman supposed that one or the other of them would have to fight one more bloody battle, and that it would be the last. “Mr. Lincoln
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exclaimed, more than once,” wrote Sherman, “that there had been blood enough shed, and asked us if another battle could not be avoided. The generals told Lincoln they could not control that event.
Sherman came now to a momentous point. He wrote of it later: “I inquired of the President if he was all ready for the end of the war. What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.? Should we allow them to escape, etc.? He said he was all ready; all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops. As to Jeff. Davis, he was hardly at liberty to speak his mind fully, but intimated that he ought to clear out, escape the country,’ only it would not do for him to say so openly.”
Lincoln was this day talking with two men like himself terribly intimate with awful authority. They were hammering out a national fate. Before them hazards and intricacies lay too vast to put on paper. Lincoln hesitated at outlining for his generals any peace terms or reconstruction policies beyond the few simple conditions he had named at Hampton Roads.
In Europe at that hour could be heard the prediction that Sherman would take over the Washington Government and run it. Delane of the London Times spoke fears of that event. For two years Lincoln and these two generals had been welding a strange partnership that worked. Amid malice, conspiracy, jealousies, amid crooked and crazy entanglements of human impulse and motive that made the war a dismal swamp-jungle affair, the three held together. Of each of them it had been graphically said that he was intensely American and could have been bom and made nowhere but in the “U.S.A.” They read each other now by signals, intentions and hopes.
Sherman was eager to hear any specific recommendations that might have occurred to the mind of the President. Of the answers Sherman later wrote:
Mr. Lincoln was full and frank in his conversation, assuring me that in his mind he was all ready for the civil reorganization of affairs at the South as soon as the war was over; and he distinctly authorized me to assure Governor Vance and the people ol North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies laid down their arms, and resumed their civil pursuits, they would at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens ol a common country; and that to avoid anarchy the State governments then in existence, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him as the government de facto till Congress could provide others ... His earnest desire seemed to be to end the war speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation, and to restore all the men of both sections to their homes . . . When at rest or listening, his legs and arms seemed to hang almost lifeless, and his face was care-worn and haggard; but, the
moment he began to talk, his face lightened up, his tall form, as it were, unfolded, and he was the very impersonation of good-humor and fellowship.”
The three Northern pivotal men were parting, Sherman to remember Lincoln in a most simple manner: “Sherman, do you know why I took a shine to Grant and you?” “I don’t know, Mr. Lincoln, you have been extremely kind to me, far more than my deserts.” “Well, you never found fault with me.”
Lincoln and Sherman had done most of the talking, Grant not mentioning a matter he later brought before Lincoln. “I told him that I had been very anxious to have the Eastern armies vanquish their old enemy. If the Western armies should be even upon the field, operating against Richmond and Lee, the credit would be given to them for the capture, by politicians and noncombatants from the section of country which those troops hailed from. Western members [of Congress] might be throwing it up to the members of the East that they were not able to capture an army, or to accomplish much but had to wait until the Western armies had conquered all the territory south and west of them, and then come on to help them capture the only army they had been engaged with. Mr. Lincoln said he saw that now, but had never thought of it before, because his anxiety was so great that he did not care where the aid came from so the work was done.”
Back at City Point Lincoln kept close to Grant, whose company he would lose in a day or two, when a big push was to begin and Grant would live at the fighting front with his troops in motion.
That sword of Robert E. Lee—how it had vanished and come back and held its ground beyond prophecies! With those valiant bayonets on which the Confederate Government had been carried for three years, could Lee again swing round and baffle pursuit, perhaps win to the mountains, fight guerrilla style till he could recruit a new army?
What did the night’s darkness hold? Would Grant take Lee? If he did, then both the structure and the dream of a Confederate States of America were sunk with the fabrics of all shadows and dust. A republican Union of States cemented and welded with blood and iron would stand for a long time among World Power nations, committed to government of, by, and for the people. Only for the assurance of that reality had Lincoln cared to toil and groan these last four years of burdens and bitterness.
Beyond the screen and mist of the night lay what? Peach blooms and apricot blossoms had risen in the air the last few days in rare spots. April was near. What of this April?
At 8:30 the morning of March 29, 1865, Lincoln went ashore from the River Queen to Grant’s shanty. They were putting the horses aboard the railroad train that was to take Grant and his staff to the Petersburg front.
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Mrs. Grant stood by, her face pale and sorrowful. At the door Grant kissed her, over and again, joined Lincoln; the two walked down to the railroad platform. “Mr. Lincoln looked more serious than at any other time since he had visited headquarters,” noted Horace Porter. “ The lines in his face seemed deeper, and the rings under his eyes were of a darker hue. It was plain that the weight of responsibility was oppressing him.” At the train the President gave a warm handshake to the General and to each member of the staff, and then stood near the rear end of the car while they went aboard. The train was ready to start. They all raised their hats in respect to the President. His hat went off to them and his voice was broken and he couldn’t hide it as he called to them: “Good-by, gentlemen. God bless you all! Remember, your success is my success.” The whistle sounded. The train moved. Grant was off to a campaign all hoped would be his last and the last of the war.
Lighting a cigar Grant went over plans with staff officers, once saying: “The President is one of the few who has not attempted to extract from me a knowledge of my movements, although he is the only one who has right to know them. He will be the most anxious man in the country to hear from us. I think we can send him some good news in a day or two.”
Fair weather of several days on the evening of March 29 gave way to torrents from the sky. Fields became beds of quicksand. Troops waded in mud above their ankles. Horses sank to their bellies and had to be pulled out with halters. Wagon wheels sank to the hubs and in some cases above the axles to the wagon box. Roads became sheets of water. Marching on such terrain was only worse than trying to sleep in wet blankets on soaked ground. On March 30 men’s tempers showed. Rawlins gloomed and Grant held that soon as the weather cleared up the roads the men would be gay again.
Having studied his map, as he relayed telegrams to Stanton, Lincoln commented: Judging by the two points from which General Grant telegraphs, I infer that he moved his headquarters about one mile since he sent the first of the two dispatches. Also to Stanton, Lincoln wired the personal item that Mrs. Lincoln had started for Washington, and he would thank Stanton “to see that our coachman is at the Arsenal wharf at Eight (8) o’clock to-morrow morning, there wait until she arrives.”
Sheridan went on dashing where the fire was most furious, waving his battle Hag, praying, swearing, shaking his fist, yelling threats and blessings. With fixed bayonets and a final rousing cheer, the Union columns under General Ayres overran the enemy earthworks, swept everything before them, killed or captured in their immediate front every man whose legs had not saved him.
Lincoln while this battle raged did his best at picturing it from a dispatch sent by Grant. He wired Seward that “Sheridan, aided by Warren, had
at 2. P.M. pushed the enemy back so as to retake the five forks, and bring his own Head Quarters up ...” The next two days Lincoln sent to Stanton a series of Grant’s dispatches, relayed as Grant wrote them, and these the Secretary of War gave to the press. Thus millions of readers in the North had what they took as authentic information about the crumbling of Lee’s lines foreshadowing the fall of Richmond.
Anxious Northern readers, including a horde of speculators and gamblers, saw in the public prints that Sheridan with his cavalry and the 5 th corps had captured three brigades of infantry, several thousand prisoners—that Grant had telegraphed at 4:30 P.M. April 2: “The whole captures since the army started out will not amount to less than 12,000 men, and probably fifty pieces of artillery . . . All seems well with us, and everything is quiet just now.” And Lincoln had telegraphed Grant: “Allow me to tender to you, and all with you, the nations grateful thanks ... At your kind suggestion, I think I will visit you to-morrow.”
At a lesser price than predicted Lee’s army was cut off from Richmond, and on the night of April 2 his troops, ordered out of Petersburg and other points on the line, were reconcentrating to march west. Lincoln boarded a railroad car at City Point and rode to Petersburg, where Grant and his staff were waiting, ready to go. Grant wrote of their meeting, “About the first thing that Mr. Lincoln said to me was: ‘Do you know, general, that I have had a sort of sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this.’ “ At City Point Lincoln wired Stanton at 5 P.M. this April 3: “. . . staid with Gen. Grant an hour & a half and returned here. It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands, and I think I will go there to-morrow.”
As Lincoln visited the sick and wounded among avenues of hospital tents at City Point that week, Adelaide Smith, the nurse, heard the camp talk that when the President’s party came to one set of tents young Dr. Jerome Walker of the Sanitary Commission pointing at them said, “Mr. President, you do not want to go in there.” “Why not, my boy?” “They are sick rebel prisoners.” “That is just where I do want to go,” and he strode in and shook hands from cot to cot.
Shot-torn in both hips, lay Colonel Harry L. Benbow, who had commanded three regiments at Five Forks. And according to Colonel Benbow: “He halted beside my bed and held out his hand. I was lying on my back, my hands folded across my breast. Looking him in the face, ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘do you know to whom you offer your hand?’ ‘I do not,’ he replied. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you offer it to a Confederate colonel who has fought you as hard as he could for four years.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand.’ ‘No, sir,’ I replied, ‘I will not,’ and I clasped his hand in both of mine.”
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Over 5,000 men of both sides were in City Point hospitals. Lincoln tried to visit every last man of them but couldn’t find time to make the complete rounds. His right arm lame from handshaking, the head surgeon said it certainly must ache. Lincoln smiled, mentioned “strong muscles,” stepped out the door of the surgeon’s shanty, took an ax, sent chips of logs flying, then paused and slowly with his right arm raised the ax till he was holding it at full horizontal without a quiver. Before leaving he was offered what he might like by way of a drink. He took a glass of lemonade.
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