Bloody Crimes

by James L. Swanson

  A STRIP OF BLACK CLOTH. A Washington Lady Shows Her Grief at Jeff. Davis’ Death. Probably the only outward evidence of sympathy for “the lost cause” and tribute to the memory of Jefferson Davis to be seen in this District is to be found at No. 235 Second Street southeast, occupied by Mrs. Fairfax. The shutters of the house are all closed and the slats tightly drawn while running across the entire front of the house, between the windows of the first and second floor, is a broad strip of black cloth looped up with three rosettes—red, white, and red. Mrs. Fairfax is known to have been an ardent supporter of the Confederate cause, and married State Senator Fairfax, of Fairfax County, Va. During the war of the rebellion she gave all the assistance to the South possible, and repeatedly crossed the lines, carrying to the Confederates both information and substantial assistance. It was through knowledge obtained by such expeditions as this that leaders of the Confederate side were enabled to anticipate movements of the Union armies and in a number of instances checkmate them. The house on Second street yesterday attracted more attention, probably, than ever before, and the emblems of mourning were the cause of considerable comment among the neighbors and travelers on that street.

  In Alexandria, Virginia, where George Washington had kept a town house, where slave pens and markets once flourished, where Colonel Elmer Ellsworth was killed twenty-eight years ago, and where Lincoln’s funeral car was built in the car shops of the United States Military Railroad, the sounds of mourning rose above the city and echoed over the national capital. Old Washingtonians remembered when the bells had tolled for Lincoln. Now they heard them toll for Jefferson Davis.

  There was a magnificent funeral in New Orleans, a huge procession just like the one in Washington for Lincoln, and Davis was interred at Metairie Cemetery. But on the day Davis was buried, everyone knew this was only a temporary resting place. It was understood that Varina Davis would in due course select a permanent gravesite elsewhere. Several states, including Mississippi, vied for the honor. In 1891, Varina stunned Davis’s home state. She vetoed its proposal and chose Virginia. Davis would return to his capital city, Richmond.

  On May 27, 1893, almost three and a half years since Davis’s death, his remains were removed from the mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery. A hearse carried his coffin to Camp Street, to Confederate Memorial Hall, a museum crammed with oak and glass display cases filled with Civil War guns, swords, flags and relics. From 5:00 P.M. on the twenty-seventh until the next afternoon, Davis lie there in state. Then a procession escorted his body to the railroad station, where it was placed aboard the train that would take him to Richmond. Like Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, the one for Jefferson Davis that left New Orleans on May 28 did not rush nonstop to its destination. First it paused at Beauvoir, where waiting children heaped flowers upon the casket. The train stopped briefly at Mobile shortly after midnight on May 29 to change locomotives, then stopped at Greenville, Alabama, at 6:00 A.M. People lined the tracks, and wherever the train halted, mourners filled Davis’s railroad car with flowers.

  Arriving in Montgomery during heavy rains early on the morning of May 29, the train was met by fifteen thousand people. For the first time since Davis’s remains left New Orleans, they were removed from the train. A procession escorted the hearse to the old capitol, where in 1886 he experienced his great resurrection. While Davis lie in state in the chamber of the Alabama supreme court, bells tolled and artillery boomed. A large banner reminded mourners that “He Suffered for Us.” To anyone who remembered the Lincoln funeral cortege, the sight of another presidential train winding its way through the nation, its passage marked by crowds and banners, and by the scent gunpowder and flowers, the experience was familiar and eerie. Floral arches erected in towns along the route of Davis’s final journey proclaimed “He lives in the Hearts of his People.” Once, identical words greeted Lincoln’s train.

  Davis’s train reached Atlanta at 3:00 P.M. on May 29, and forty thousand people passed by his coffin. The train pushed on through Gainesville, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; and then into North Carolina, where it passed through Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro, and Durham. All along the way, people built bonfires, carried torches, rang bells, and fired guns to honor the esteemed corpse. At Raleigh, the coffin was removed again, placed in a hearse, and paraded through town. After lying in state there, Davis was taken to Danville, Virginia, his first refuge after he left Richmond the night of April 2, 1865.

  The funeral train arrived in Richmond at 3:00 A.M. on May 31. In the middle of the night, a silent procession escorted the coffin from the station to the state capitol. Artillery fire woke the city later that morning, and twenty-five thousand people, including six thousand children, passed by his casket. At 3:30 P.M. a grand procession escorted his remain to Hollywood Cemetery. There, a simple gravesite ceremony and a bugle playing taps ended his last journey.

  In preparation for this day, word was sent to Washington, D.C., to Oak Hill Cemetery, where workers opened a small grave that had gone undisturbed since 1854, almost forty years before. The body of Samuel Davis was brought to Richmond to rest by his father. And

  THE NEW ORLEANS FUNERAL PROCESSION.

  FLORAL TRIBUTE AT THE RALEIGH CEREMONIES.

  THE RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA, FUNERAL PROCESSION,

  ON THE WAY TO RICHMOND.

  in Hollywood Cemetery, another grave was opened so that Joseph Davis, buried in 1864, could rest beside his father too.

  Jefferson Davis had survived Abraham Lincoln by twenty-four years. Now, his journey also done, he joined him in the grave.

  For several years after Davis’s reburial, efforts to raise a memorial to him in Richmond floundered. The Jefferson Davis Monument Association, organized in 1890, had, in collaboration with the United Confederate Veterans, been confounded by disagreements about the location, artist, cost, and design of the monument. Finally, in 1893, 150,000 people attended the laying of the cornerstone. Fifteen thousand Confederate veterans marched in the parade. Then the project stalled again, and in 1899 the men of the UCV admitted defeat and handed the task over to the women of the South, who had founded the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

  Adopting the motto “Lest we forgot,” the UDC rolled out a strategic and passionate campaign to raise the necessary funds. Not only had Davis been the chief executive and chosen leader of the Confederacy, exhorted the UDC in a fund-raising letter, “he was our martyr, he suffered in his own person the ignominy and shame our enemies would have made us suffer. This was thirty-five years ago, and his monument is yet to be built. The women of the South have solemnly sworn to wipe out this disgrace at once.”

  The campaign worked. As the money rolled in, the women beseeched the famous Southern sculptor Edward Valentine, renowned for his bronze bust of Robert E. Lee and also his Lee sculpture in the chapel at Washington and Lee University, to design the Davis monument and its companion sculpture. In 1907, fourteen years after Davis’s reburial in Richmond, his monument was ready. On April 16, Confederate veterans, aided by three thousand children, pulled on two seven-hundred-foot ropes and dragged the eight-foot-tall bronze of Davis along Monument Avenue. Dedication day was scheduled for June 3, Davis’s ninety-ninth birthday, and the climax of a major, weeklong Confederate reunion in the city.

  Two hundred thousand people stood along the parade route from the capitol to the monument, more people than had lined Pennsylvania Avenue for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession. An additional 125,000 people gathered near the monument. After an address by Virginia governor Claude A. Swanson, Margaret Hayes, Davis’s sole surviving child, unveiled her father’s sculpture. Cannon fired a twenty-one-gun salute, an honor traditionally reserved for the president of the United States. Behind the bronze figure of Davis, his right arm outstretched and pointing to the old capitol of the Confederacy, there arose a sixty-foot-tall column topped by a female figure, Vindicatrix. Three mottoes adorn the base: “Deo Vindici” (the motto on the wartime Great Seal of the Confederacy); “Jure Civitatum” (for
the rights of the states); and “Pro Aris Et Focis” (for hearth and home). Below the bronze figure a tablet bears the dedication: “Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate Sates of America, 1861-1865.”

  After the ceremonies were over, the greatest crowd that had ever assembled in his name went home.

  EPILOGUE

  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 assas
sin 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.