CHAPTER 32

The Hurricane Spent

FROM mid-April of ’61 to mid-April of ’65 some 3,000,000 men North and South had seen war service—the young, the strong, the physically fit, carrying the heavy load and taking the agony. The fallen of them had seen Antietam, Murfreesboro, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, each a shambles, a human slaughterhouse. In the burnt and blackened Shenandoah Valley were enough embers of barns and men to satisfy any prophet of doom.

From Malvern Hill and Gettysburg down to Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Island No. Ten, Vicksburg, the Red River and beyond, the burying-grounds deep and shallow held the consecrated dead—some of them lone white skeletons not yet accorded burial—falling from flying lead and steel, from the reapers typhoid, dysentery, inflammations, prison starvation—thousands having crawled away to die alone without witnesses or extreme unction—tens of thousands buried in trenches with mass markers for the nameless and unidentified: UNKNOWN.

They were a host proven in valor and sacrifice—swept to the Great Beyond. No man who actually and passionately loved the cause of either flag could evade moments when he reproached himself for being alive. Robert E. Lee had those moments, well attested. So did Abraham Lincoln.

Killed in action or dead from wounds and disease were some 620,000 Americans, 360,000 from the North, 260,000 of the South—planted in the tomb of the earth, spectral and shadowy, blurred and discordant in their testimonies for posterity as to why they fought the war and cut each other down in the heyday of youth.

They were a host. They were phantoms never absent from Lincoln’s thoughts. Possibly from that vanished host, rather than from the visible and living, Lincoln took his main direction and moved as though the word “reconciliation” could have supreme beauty if he could put it to work.

 

On the calendar it was Holy Week and April the Fourteenth of ’65 was Good Friday. Some were to say they had never before this week seen such a shine of beneficence, such a kindling glow, on Lincoln’s face. He was down to lean flesh and bone, thirty pounds underweight, his cheeks haggard, yet the inside of him moved to a music of peace on earth and goodwill to men. He let it gleam in the photograph Alexander Gardner made this Holy Week. He let it come out in pardons given without inquiry, given even with laughter, as when Senator John A. J. Creswell of Maryland asked release of an old friend who had drifted into the Confederate Army and was now a prisoner in Federal hands. Lincoln told of a lot of young folks who went on a May frolic. “To reach their destination they had to cross a shallow stream, and did so by means of an old flat boat. When they came to return, they found to their dismay that the old scow had disappeared. They were in sore trouble, and thought over all manner of devices for getting over the water, but without avail. After a time one of the boys proposed that each fellow should pick up the girl he liked the best and wade over with her. The masterly proposition was carried out, until all that were left upon the island was a little short chap and a great long gothic-built elderly lady. Now, Creswell, you are trying to leave me in the same predicament. You fellows are all getting your own friends out of this scrape, and you will succeed in carrying off one after another until nobody but Jeff Davis and myself will be left on the island, and then I won’t know what to do. How should I feel? How should T look lugging him over? I guess the way to avoid such an embarrassing situation is to let them all out at once.”

From the north White House portico on the night of April 11, to a crowd jubilating over the surrender of Lee’s army, he had argued and pleaded for admission to the Union of the Louisiana State government, organized and ready for return to the Union. Out of the grandeur of the ending of the war he could picture a long involved misery to follow unless an imperfect beginning was hazarded. “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.” He was weary of government applied by force and gave his forecast: “We, in effect, say to the white man: You are worthless or worse; we will neither help you, nor be helped by you. To the blacks we say: This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, held to your lips we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it.”

He would turn from these dark visions. “If, on the contrary, we recognize and sustain the new government of Louisiana, the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts and nerve the arms of 12,000 [Union loyalists of Louisiana] to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success.”

This speech gave Lincoln’s outline of the policy, or direction of compass, as to how he would reconstruct the Union. He could not go as far as the antislavery radicals in Congress on new civil rights to be immediately given to the Negro freedmen, though he favored the Negro freedmen being given those rights eventually. He believed that the present course of those radicals might stir a strife and a resistance that in the end would bring fresh wrongs to the Negro freedmen. He shrank from having one fixed policy and inflexible plan for every State to be brought back into the Union. And he reasoned with his radical friends: “So great peculiarities pertain to each State, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same State, and withal so new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement.”

Again, said opponents of the President, he was “backward,” he played with “compromises,” and what he termed “magnanimity” was in reality weakness, the same lack of decision he had shown so often in conduct of the war. They wanted to capture, try, and hang Jeff Davis. They could not understand the report of Lincoln saying: “This talk about Mr. Davis tires me. I hope he will mount a fleet horse, reach the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and ride so far into its waters that we shall never see him again.” Nor could the inflexible radicals gather what was in the President’s mind in such a case as that of Jacob Thompson, a Confederate commissioner in Canada who had fomented raids and ship explosions in the Great Lakes region. To a War Department query whether they should arrest and hold Thompson if found in Maine as expected, Lincoln drawled, “No, I rather think not. When you have an elephant by the hind leg, and he’s trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”

Whether the spirit and method of Lincoln were to have their way throughout the reconstruction of the Southern States, or whether his radical opponents would control, no one knew on this April the Fourteenth.

 

On that night the President and Mrs. Lincoln with two friends are seated in a box in Ford’s Opera House, watching a second-rate play titled Our American Cousin. The play has gone on till past ten o’clock. In an easy rocking chair and hidden from the audience by curtains at his left, Lincoln leans back free from immediate cares.

And where might he be roaming in thought? If it is life he is thinking about, no one could fathom the subtle speculations and hazy reveries resulting from his fifty-six years of adventures drab and dazzling in life. Who had gone farther on so little to begin with? Who else as a living figure of republican government, of democracy in practice, as a symbol touching freedom for all men—who else had gone farther over America, over the world? If it is death he is thinking about, who better than himself might interpret his dream that he lay in winding sheets on a catafalque in the White House and people were wringing their hands and crying “The President is dead!”—who could make clear this dream better than himself?

Furthermore if it is death he is thinking about, has he not philosophized about it and dreamed about it and considered himself as a mark and a target until no one is better prepared than he for a sudden deed? Has he not a thousand times said to himself, and several times to friends and intimates, that he must accommodate himself to the thought of sudden death? Has he not wearied of the constructions placed on his secret night ride through Baltimore to escape a plot aimed at his death? Has he not laughed to the overhead night stars at a hole shot in his hat by a hidden marksman he never mentioned even to his boon companion Ward Hill Lamon, to whom he did report one occasion of a shot whizzing past him on one horseback ride when he lost his hat? And who can say but that Death is a friend, and who else should be more a familiar of Death than a man who has been the central figure of the bloodiest war till then known to the Human Family—who else should more appropriately and decently walk with Death?

 

Through an outer door and through a little hallway to the door of the box where Lincoln is seated comes an Outsider. He has waited, lurked, made intricate preparations for this moment. Through a little hole he had gimleted in the box door that afternoon he studies the occupants of the box and his Human Target seated in an upholstered rocking armchair. Softly he opens the door, steps toward his prey, in his right hand a one-shot brass derringer pistol. He lengthens his right arm, runs his eye along the barrel in a line with the head of his victim less than five feet away—and pulls the trigger.

A lead ball crashes into the left side of the head of the Human Target, “crossing the brain in an oblique manner” and lodging behind the left eye. For Abraham Lincoln it was lights out, good night, farewell and a long farewell to the good earth and its trees, its enjoyable companions, and the Union of States and the world Family of Man he had loved. He lingered, unseeing, unconscious. At a house across the street the last breath was drawn at 7:21 the next morning.

Wild scenes followed at the national capital and over the country. The assassin, one John Wilkes Booth, a stage tragedian, tainted with insanity yet marvelous with primitive cunning, surrounded by pursuers in a burning barn in Virginia, died from a bullet. Deep shifts in government policy began. The mourning over Lincoln was vast and not merely national but international. More than any other figure he towered as some token and foreshadowing of a free world learning freedom and discipline.

 

The funeral procession of Lincoln took long to pass its many given points. Many millions of people saw it and personally moved in it and were part of its procession.

The line of march ran seventeen hundred miles.

As a dead march nothing like it had ever been attempted before.

Like the beginning and the end of the Lincoln Administration, it had no precedents to go by.

It was garish, vulgar, massive, bewildering, chaotic.

Also it was simple, final, majestic, august.

In spite of some of its mawkish excess of show and various maudlin proceedings, it gave solemn unforgettable moments to millions of people who had counted him great, warm and lovable.

The people, the masses, nameless and anonymous numbers of persons not listed nor published among those present—these redeemed it.

They gave it the dignity and authority of a sun darkened by a vast bird migration.

They shaped it into a drama awful in the sense of having naive awe and tears without shame.

They gave it the color and heave of the sea which is the mother of tears.

They lent to it the color of the land and the earth which is the bread-giver of life and the quiet tomb of the Family of Man.

Yes, there was a funeral.

From his White House in Washington—where it began—they carried his coffin and followed it nights and days for twelve days.

By night bonfires and torches lighted the right of way for a slow-going railroad train.

By day troops with reversed arms, muffled drums, multitudinous feet seeking the pivotal box with the silver handles.

By day bells tolling, bells sobbing the requiem, the salute guns, cannon rumbling their inarticulate thunder.

To Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, they journeyed with the draped casket to meet overly ornate catafalques.

To Albany, Utica, Syracuse, moved the funeral cortege always met by marchers and throngs.

To Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, they took the mute oblong box, met by a hearse for convoy to where tens of thousands should have their last look.

Then to Springfield, Illinois, the old home town, the Sangamon near by, the New Salem hilltop near by, for the final rest of cherished dust.

Thus the route and the ceremonial rites in epitome.

 

In Greensboro, North Carolina, at a rather ordinary house, in an upstairs room having a bed, a few small chairs, a table with pen and ink, Jefferson Davis, with four remaining Cabinet members and two veteran generals, held a final meeting over the affairs of the Confederate States of America, its government, its armies and prospects.

President Davis spoke to a man he had humiliated and quarreled with more than three years. “We should like to have your views, General Johnston.”

With sharp intensity as if in anger, General Johnston: “My views are, sir, that our people are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight. . . . We cannot place another large army in the field. . . . My men are daily deserting in large numbers. . . . Since Lee’s defeat they regard the war as at an end. . . . I shall expect to retain no man beyond the by-road or cow-path that leads to his house. . . . We may perhaps obtain terms that we ought to accept.”

Davis sat unmoved. He had been calm throughout, having said: “Our late disasters are terrible, but I do not think we should regard them as fatal. I think we can whip the enemy yet, if our people turn out. . . . Whatever can be done must be done at once. We have not a day to lose.” Thus Johnston had answered, as though to break the calm of the unruffled President Davis who still seemed to carry himself as the head and front of a powerful government, commander in chief of powerful armies that had not melted away, innocent of realities.

 

The farmhouse where Johnston and Sherman talked surrender terms

 

His eyes on the table, his fingers folding and refolding a piece of paper, Davis heard Johnston, waited, and suddenly in low easy tone: “What do you say, General Beauregard?” The reply: “I concur in all General Johnston has said.”

They agreed a letter should be written to Sherman asking for terms. Johnston asked President Davis to write it—which he did. They parted.

In a little farmhouse near Greensboro, North Carolina, the two generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston signed a peace closing out the war. Sherman had his talk with Lincoln and Grant in mind and in the first draft peace terms were about what those other two would have arranged. Then Stanton interfered, gave the public statements outrageously unjust to Sherman, so the peace terms were rewritten to agree with those Grant and Lee signed at Appomattox. From the Potomac to the Rio Grande military operations ended, the armies went home.

 

The sunset of the Confederacy had shaded over into evening stars, into lasting memories of a Lost Cause.

In its Richmond capitol building the enemy pawed among remaining fragments of its archives.

In its earlier and first capitol building at Montgomery, Alabama, Union horsemen made merry.

In the sky its final embers of hope had flickered and sunk and the overhead constellations lighted tall candles for remembrance.

For millions of the struggling masses of Southern people the war had settled nothing in particular, and their lives centered around the same relentless question that guided them before the war began—“How do we earn a living?”

Some would find welfare and kindness in the old Union. Two sections of the country fought a duel and came out with honors enough for both—this was the philosophy of some who really loved two flags—and why was a mystery—was their personal secret. Some who had starved and suffered and taken wounds in the rain and lived on the food of rats and lost everything except a name for valor and endurance-some of these could never repent or be sorry.

A Kentucky father who had lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South, set up a joint monument over then two graves, inscribed: “God knows which was right.”

Peace was beginning to smile. Rough weather and choppy seas were ahead—but the worst was over and could not come again. The hurricane was spent, the high storm winds gone down.

Tragedy was to go on and human misery to be seen widespread. Yet it was agreed two causes directed by Lincoln had won the war. Gone was the old property status of the Negro. Gone was the doctrine of Secession and States’ Rights. These two.

Black men could now move from where they were miserable to where they were equally miserable—now it was lawful for them to move—they were not under the law classified as livestock and chattels. Now too the Negro who wished to read could do so; no longer was it a crime for him to be found reading a book; nor was it now any longer a crime to teach a Negro to read. The illiterate, propertyless Negro was to be before the law and the Federal Government an equal of the illiterate, propertyless white—and many sardonics were involved. And in spite of its many absurd and contradictory phases the Negro had a human dignity and chances and openings not known to him before—rainbows of hope instead of the auction block and the black-snake whip.

Decreed beyond any but far imagining of its going asunder was Lincoln’s mystic dream of the Union of States, achieved. Beyond all the hate or corruption or mocking fantasies of democracy that might live as an aftermath of the war were assurances of long-time conditions for healing, for rebuilding, for new growths. The decision was absolute, hammered on terrible anvils. The Union stood—an amalgamated and almost an awful fact.

Now too, as Lincoln had pledged, a whole mesh of trammels and clamps on Western migration were to be cut loose. The homesteaders held back by the Southern landed proprietors could go. And the Pacific railways could go; the jealousies suffocating them were out. With almost explosive force the industrial, financial, and transportation systems of the North could be let loose, free to go. The war had done that. Incidental costs might be staggering, but the very onrush of them was to testify that they had been under restraint. Now they could go—with all their benefits and exploitations, their mistakes from which they must later learn to cease and desist.

Now also, as a result flowing from the war, the United States was to take its place among nations counted World Powers. The instinct of the Tories and the imperialists of the British Empire that they, if the North won its war for the Union, would have a rival was correct. And as a World Power the expectation was it would be a voice of the teachings of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson—and Lincoln—speaking for republican government, for democracy, for institutions “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That too was the hope of the British masses, the workingmen whose decisive stand for the Union and emancipation had helped the North win, as also did the counsels of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Argyll, and a fraction of the upper classes. Though there might come betrayals and false pretenses, the war had put some manner of seal on human rights and dignity in contrast with property rights—and even the very definitions of property.

In a storm of steel and blood, without compensation and rather with shrill crying of vengeance, with the melancholy and merciless crying out loud that always accompanies revolution, property values of some $3,000,000,000 had gone up in smoke, had joined the fabrics of all shadows. In sacrifice and moaning one property category had been struck off into emptiness and nothing. At terrific human cost there had been a redefinition of one species of property.

The delicately shaded passages of the second inaugural wept over the cost of doing by violence what might have been done by reason. Yet looking back it was seen that violence and not reason was ordained. With all its paradoxes and perfect though cruel sincerities, with all its garrulous pretenses and windy prophecies, the war testified to the awfulness of pent-up forces too long unreasonably held back. Of what avail the wisdom of the wise who could not foresee a House Divided and prepare it against storm that threatened final hopeless wreck and ruin? Of what service either the eminently practical men or the robed and assured professional and learned classes if human advance must be at such cost of suffering?

Out of the smoke and stench, out of the music and violet dreams of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes. This was in the mind of many. None threw a longer shadow than he. And to him the great hero was The People. He could not say too often that he was merely their instrument.

These were meditations and impressions of the American people in days following April 14 of 1865.

The ground lay white with apple blossoms this April week. The redbird whistled. Through black branches shone blue sky. Ships put out from port with white sails catching the wind. Farmers spoke to their horses and turned furrows till sundown on the cornfield. Boys drew circles in cinder paths and played marbles. Lilac bushes took on surprises of sweet, light purple. In many a back yard the potato-planting was over. In this house was a wedding, in that one a newborn baby, in another a girl with a new betrothal ring. Life went on. Everywhere life went on.

To General Robert E. Lee in Northern Virginia one day came a young mother. She wanted his blessing for her baby. He took the little one in his arms, looked at it, looked at her. Then came the slow words: “Teach him he must deny himself.”

 

TAPS (“LIGHTS OUT”)