As the night passed, the city of Washington, so joyous and relieved about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox less than a week before, filled with chaotic horror. Lincoln was mortally wounded and was unconscious and sinking but not yet dead. It was believed that Seward could not live. At the Kirkwood House, the hotel where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying, a detective searched the room of a man named George A. Atzerodt, who had checked in that morning and was no longer there, and found a concealed loaded pistol and a bowie knife. There was reason to think that other government figures were targets for assassination and might be killed at any time. Orders were given to army sentries surrounding the city to let no one pass through their lines, and soldiers were placed on guard at the houses of the nation’s leaders. Every train leaving the city for Baltimore had soldiers aboard, searching for suspects. Inside Ford’s Theatre, all the actors and employees were detained for questioning. In the streets, when the crowds saw police escorting individuals who were in fact witnesses who wished to tell what they had seen in the hope of helping the investigation, they thought they were seeing some of the plotters, and cries arose for them to be hanged on the spot.
At the boardinghouse near the theater where Lincoln had been taken, Mary Todd Lincoln, who had witnessed the attack as she sat beside her husband and had cradled him in her arms until he was carried away, screamed at Assistant Treasury Secretary Maunsell B. Field, “Why didn’t he shoot me! Why didn’t he shoot me! Why didn’t he shoot me!” In the confusion, Secretary of War Stanton first went to Seward’s house, where there was blood all the way from the front door to the third-floor bedroom where Seward had been attacked; he and the other victims were being treated by hastily summoned doctors. (All would survive.) Anyone would have been severely shaken by the nightmare scene of blood splashed everywhere; Stanton never commented on whether the shattering moment reminded him of the suicide of his brother, during which “the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Stanton went next to the house where Lincoln lay. When he saw Lincoln, Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes whispered to him, “Mr. Lincoln cannot recover.” Stanton, a man who never displayed his emotions, began sobbing loudly, his shoulders convulsively shaking for several minutes. The other members of Lincoln’s cabinet joined Stanton there by midnight; Stanton soon composed himself and took control of the situation, using the little house as a command post for sending out communications about the governmental emergency. Standing beside Lincoln’s bed when the president died at 7:22 the next morning, April 15, 1865, Stanton said quietly, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
The news of the attack on Lincoln spread from Washington across the North like a thunderclap. The New York Times, appearing on the streets the morning of April 15 with a report sent from Washington before Lincoln died, had the headline, “AWFUL EVENT,” with the subheadlines, “President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin,” “The Act of a Desperate Rebel,” “No Hopes Entertained of His Recovery.” Word of his death followed swiftly, flashed across the nation’s telegraph lines. It was almost impossible to believe: in the hour of victory, with the restoration of the Union a step away, the man who had led the nation through its darkest hours had been torn from the people he loved and served.
On that Saturday morning, the bells began tolling. Stores shut their doors; in New York City an art gallery closed, leaving in its big glass window only one empty picture frame. Broad ribbons of black crepe began appearing on houses, churches, and public buildings. In the camps of the Army of the Potomac, there was anger at the South, but the main reaction was one of stunned grief. One officer said his men “seemed stupefied by the terrible news.” A young soldier of the 148th Pennsylvania burst into tears, sobbing, “He was our best friend. God bless him,” and a private wrote home, “What a hold Old Abe had on the hearts of the soldiers of the army could only be told by the way they showed their mourning for him.” When Admiral David Dixon Porter heard the news upon landing at Baltimore aboard the USS Tristram Shandy, he wrote his mother, “The United States has lost the greatest man she ever produced.”
During the next days, the headlines were followed by editorials and tributes; speeches and sermons were given everywhere. On April 19, the voice of intellectual New England was heard at the Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson told the assembled mourners, “The President stood before us as a man of the people … His occupying of the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of mankind, and of the public conscience … His powers were superior. This man grew according to the need.” Speaking of Lincoln’s wartime leadership, he said, “There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epic. He is the true history of the American people in this time.”
At the time Emerson was speaking, Walt Whitman, who so greatly admired Lincoln, had already begun pouring out his grief in a poem, “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day.” He would later publish two other heartfelt tributes—“O Captain! My Captain!” and the sublime “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the latter with its line, “O powerful western fallen star!”—but having cared for so many wounded Union soldiers, in his first shock Whitman clung to something of which he was certain. The average soldier believed, rightly, that Lincoln cared about him and admired him, and using the word “celebrate” to mean commemorate, honor, and solemnize, Whitman wrote of the bond that he knew existed between them and their murdered leader:
Hush’d be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.
No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat—no more time’s dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.
As they invault the coffin there,
Sing—as they close the doors of earth upon him—one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.
Once again, while all in the North learned of Lincoln’s death swiftly, because of the need for communications sent to Sherman’s army to go part of the way by ship, news traveled slowly from Washington to Sherman’s headquarters in North Carolina. At eight o’clock on the morning of April 17, forty-eight hours after Lincoln’s death, Sherman and several of his staff were boarding the special train of one locomotive and two passenger cars taking him north from Raleigh to meet Joseph E. Johnston near Durham to discuss the terms of surrender of Johnston’s army. At that moment, Sherman said, “The telegraph operator, whose office was up-stairs in the depot-building, ran down to me and said that he was at that instant of time receiving a most important dispatch in cipher from Morehead City, which I ought to see. I held the train for nearly half an hour, when he returned with the message translated [decoded] and written out.”
The telegram was from Stanton: it gave the facts of Lincoln’s assassination and said there was reason to think that Grant, newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson, and other political and military leaders might be targets themselves. (Sherman would also receive a warning from Stanton of a report that he was a specific target, but nothing came of that.)
Reading this telegram as the train waited for his order to pull out, Sherman immediately found himself “dreading the effects of such a message at that critical time.” He knew that “Mr. Lincoln was particularly endeared to the soldiers, and I feared that some foolish woman or man in Raleigh might say something or do something that would madden our men, and that a fate worse than that of Columbia would befall the place.” Telling the telegraph operator to let no one learn of Lincoln’s death, Sherman said nothing of this to his staff officers and simply let it be known that he would return to Raleigh that afternoon.
About two and a half hours later, Sherman was greeted politely by Johnston, whom he had never met,
at a place in the countryside a few miles from Durham, and the two of them went into a small frame house that belonged to a local farmer and his wife, James and Nancy Bennett. “As soon as we were alone together I showed him the dispatch announcing Mr. Lincoln’s assassination, and watched him closely. The perspiration came out in large drops on his forehead, and he did not attempt to conceal his distress. He denounced the act as a disgrace to the age, and hoped I did not charge it to the Confederate Government. I told him I could not believe that he or General Lee, or the officers of the Confederate army, could possibly be privy to acts of assassination; but I would not say as much for Jeff. Davis.”
Turning to the immediate military situation, Johnston readily agreed that “any further fighting would be ‘murder;’ but he thought that, instead of surrendering piecemeal, we might arrange terms that would embrace all the Confederate armies.” When Sherman asked Johnston if he had the authority to surrender all the Confederate forces still spread out in places like Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and parts of Georgia, Johnston said that he did not but indicated that he thought that, “during the night,” he could get Davis’s agreement for what Sherman termed “a universal surrender.” They agreed to meet at the same place the next day and ended what Sherman called an “extremely cordial” conversation, “satisfying me that it could have but one result … to end the war as quickly as possible.”
Back in Raleigh, Sherman issued a Special Field Order to his army, informing the troops of Lincoln’s assassination, denouncing the crime and at the same time saying he knew that “the great mass of the Confederate army would scorn to sanction such acts.” He cautioned his officers “to watch the soldiers closely, to prevent any violent retaliation by them,” and it was well that he did. A major wrote in his diary, “The army is crazy for vengeance.” Most of the troops contented themselves with storming around their bivouacs, shouting angrily and bellowing out the song, “We’ll Hang Jeff Davis to a Sour Apple Tree,” but about two thousand men from one encampment headed toward Raleigh, and only the threat of being blasted by their own artillery—a battery was placed right in the road, the cannon aimed at them—stopped the potential violence. Sherman spent the night riding from one of his divisions to another, keeping the peace, and later said, “Had it not been for me Raleigh would have been destroyed.” The next day, a large meeting of citizens of Raleigh convened at the Wake County Court House. In an action that helped calm the situation to some degree, the meeting quickly drafted, approved, and circulated a resolution “to express our utmost abhorrence of the atrocious deed.” (When a Southern lady expressed to Sherman her pleasure that Lincoln had been killed, he replied, “Madam, the South has lost the best friend it had.”)
Conferring with his generals about the overall situation, Sherman found that their greatest concern was that he sign something that would guarantee an end to the fighting. They had chased Johnston and his hardened troops all over the South. Johnston still had forty-five thousand men in the area, and Sherman said that his generals now told him that if these negotiations failed “they all dreaded the long and harassing march in pursuit of a dissolving and fleeing enemy—a march that might carry us back again over the thousand miles that we had just accomplished. We all knew that if we could bring Johnston’s army to bay, we could destroy it in an hour, but that was simply impossible in the country in which we found ourselves.” Sherman, remembering his conversation with Lincoln at City Point, asked his generals if he should let Jefferson Davis and his fleeing cabinet “escape from the country” if they fell into his army’s hands. One of them, mentioning the capital of the British island chain of the Bahamas off the Florida coast, replied that, “If asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.”
On his way to meet Johnston again that afternoon, Sherman felt mounting pressure to get the entire situation settled. Today he found Johnston, while making statements that proved to be entirely honest, also to be as adroit in negotiations as he had been in his long series of retreats. Johnston had prepared himself for this second meeting as fully as a lawyer prepares for a negotiation or a trial. Sherman said that he “assured me that he had the authority to surrender all the Confederate armies, so that they would obey his orders to surrender on the same terms with his own, but he argued that, to obtain so cheaply this desirable result, I ought to give his men and officers some assurance of their political rights after the surrender.”
This was taking Sherman right into the area of “civil policy” that Stanton and Grant insisted he avoid. Sherman pointed out that an 1863 proclamation of amnesty by Lincoln, still in force, enabled every Confederate soldier below the rank of colonel to regain citizenship “by simply laying down his arms, and taking the common oath of allegiance”; he added that Grant’s terms to Lee had embodied the same principle, extending it, as Sherman told Johnston, “to all the officers, General Lee included.” The procedure for regaining full citizenship, Sherman reassured Johnston, was established; this meeting, however, was not to determine everyone’s postwar civil status, but to stop the fighting.
Johnston conceded that “the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear,” but he insisted that there needed to be some guarantees about their postwar status committed to paper. He then told Sherman that John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was nearby and available to join their discussion.
This gave Sherman pause. Breckinridge, the prewar vice president of the United States under Democratic president James Buchanan, had run for president against Lincoln under the Southern Democrat banner in the four-way 1860 presidential race, losing to Lincoln but winning more electoral votes than the other two contestants. Named by Kentucky to serve in the United States Senate, late in 1861 he had resigned to go with the South, serving for three years in the Confederate Army and rising to the rank of major general. Ten weeks before this meeting between Sherman and Johnston, Breckinridge had been appointed by Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s secretary of war. “I objected,” Sherman said of this proposal that Breckinridge sit in with them, “on the score that he was then in Davis’s cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to [military] belligerents.” Johnston countered with the thought that “Breckinridge was a major-general in the Confederate army, and might sink his character of [not act as] Secretary of War.”
Sherman thought about all this. He had an army that had already shown it could explode with wrath about Lincoln’s assassination, and he could understand that now, more than ever, the soldiers of the South might want to know what lay ahead for them if they surrendered. He had his generals urging him to get it all settled; they did not want another long march to hunt down an elusive foe. The night before, Sherman had written to one of his generals who was stationed at New Bern, “There is great danger that the Confederate armies will dissolve and fill the whole land with robbers and assassins,” and added that he needed to restore order: “I don’t want Johnston[’]s army to break up in fragments.”
Sherman also remembered his meeting with Lincoln and Grant aboard the River Queen, during which, as Admiral Porter remembered it, Lincoln expressed the thought that “he wanted peace on almost any terms.” Perhaps Sherman thought that to have Breckinridge—a man who was both a Confederate general and the Confederate secretary of war—enter the discussions now might add further weight to this parlay’s authority to create a widespread cease-fire. He agreed to have Breckinridge join them; as soon as he arrived, Breckinridge “confirmed what he [Johnston] had said as to the uneasiness of the Southern officers and soldiers about their political rights in case of surrender.” At this point, a Confederate courier brought in a sheaf of papers for Johnston, who explained that they were from John Reagan, the South’s postmaster general, who was traveling with Davis as the Confederate president moved through the South to avoid federal capture. After Johnston and Breckinridge looked over these papers and had “some side conversation,” as Sherman put it, Johns
ton handed one of the documents to Sherman. It was the Confederate government’s proposal for peace, apparently ready to sign if Sherman would just do that. Sherman looked at the document: “It was in Reagan’s handwriting, and began with a long preamble and terms, so general and verbose, that I said they were inadmissible.”
There the three men sat, Sherman perhaps a bit nettled that the Confederate government, its armies defeated on the battlefield, would try to set the terms for peace. He was not going to sign what had been put before him, but he felt he must do something.
Then recalling the conversation of Mr. Lincoln, at City Point, I sat down at the table, and wrote off the terms, and explained that I was willing to submit these terms to the new President, Mr. Johnson, provided that both armies should remain in statu quo until the truce declared therein should expire. I had full faith that General Johnston would religiously respect the truce, which he did; and that I would be the gainer, for in the few days it would take to send the papers to Washington, and receive an answer, I could finish [repairing] the railroad up to Raleigh, and be the better prepared for a long chase.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 42