Blood on the Moon

by Edward , Jr. Steers

  Following Old Bob was a carriage carrying Robert Lincoln and Mary Lincoln’s cousin, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley. Elizabeth Grimsley was the daughter of John Todd and was Mary’s favorite relative. She attended Lincoln’s inaugural ball in 1861 and stayed on in the White House for six months following Lincoln’s inauguration. Like so many others, Cousin Lizzie tried to get Lincoln to appoint her to a government job. She had Lincoln’s Springfield friends, including Lincoln’s old law partner and mentor John T. Stuart, write to him asking that he appoint her postmistress. In a letter to Stuart, Lincoln asked, “Will it do for me to go on and justify the declaration that . . . I have divided out all the offices among our relatives?” Later she asked for a Naval Academy appointment for her son John. Johnny received the appointment, she did not. Now she was riding with Robert in place of Mary.

  Strangely missing from family and friends was the woman who had meant the most to Lincoln and who showed him every kindness at a time when his world had turned so very dark. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln was absent from her stepson’s funeral. Now in her seventy-eighth year, “Aunt Sairy” learned from her son-in-law Dennis Hanks that her boy was dead. Five months later William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, would visit the old woman at her home at Goosenest Prairie eight miles south of Charleston, Illinois. Herndon made notes of his visit and conversation with Sarah Lincoln about her son: “I did not want Abe to run for Pres[i]d[en]t—did not want him Elected—was afraid Somehow or other—felt in my heart that Something would happen to him and when he came down to See me after he was Elected Pres[i]d[en]t I still felt that Something told me that Something would befall Abe and that I should see him no more.”86 Years later Dennis Hanks would tell his listeners that when he told “Aunt Sairy” that he had bad news about her stepson, she said before he could tell her, “I knowed they’d kill him. I ben awaitin fur it”87

  Sarah Lincoln was too infirm to make the trip, and Lincoln’s favorite cousin, John Hanks, had come in her place. John would have been at the funeral in his own right. Lincoln considered him a close and good friend. He was the best of a bad lot of the Hanks clan. Cousin John had sailed down the Mississippi with Lincoln in 1830 and was credited with carrying an old fence rail into the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago. John would claim it was a rail split by his cousin Abe. It would give rise to the sobriquet “The Rail Splitter Candidate.” John would take his place among those walking behind the hearse, but none among the tens of thousands of mourners would know who he was or why he was in the procession.

  Back in Washington Mary Lincoln was too distraught to leave her bed. For five weeks she would remain within her room, refusing to see any visitors who came to express their condolences.88 For the next three weeks her only effort would be to insist on her husband’s burial site at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. She sent a telegram to Robert telling him that Oak Ridge would be his father’s final resting place.89 Despite the efforts to build a tomb in the center of town, Mary Lincoln won out. Her husband would be laid to rest in the place of her choosing but without her presence.

  Following the family came the government officials and dignitaries. First the Federal, then foreign ministers, then state and territories, then the District of Columbia. The Springfield city fathers made up the Fifth Division. The Sixth Division was made up of the Christian Commission, “other kindred commissions,” delegations from universities and colleges, followed by clergy, lawyers, physicians, and members of the press. The Seventh Division contained Freemasons, Odd Fellows, other fraternal organizations as well as firemen. The last Division consisted of “Citizens at Large and Colored Persons.” All of the organizations were instructed to march eight abreast and keep their groups in close alignment. No carriages or vehicles were allowed except for the funeral hearse and transportation for family members.90

  To identify the various marshals who were placed in charge of the several divisions, special color sashes and scarves were issued. The grand marshal wore a red, white, and blue sash. Aides to the grand marshal wore red, white, and blue scarves, while marshals wore red scarves and their aides wore blue scarves. Marshals of each individual section within a division wore white scarves “draped with a black rosette on the right shoulder, and tied with crepe on the left side.”91 All in all, there was little room for error and none would occur. Literally thousands of people marched with precision, maintaining the dignity and decorum required of the solemn event.

  The procession formed along Washington Street facing the state capitol building. When it was ready to leave for the cemetery it proceeded east along Washington two blocks to Eighth Street where it turned south for two blocks to Monroe and then turned west marching four blocks to Fourth Street. At Fourth Street it turned north and followed the road all the way to the cemetery entrance. It was, in effect, a large U-turn that passed within two blocks of the Lincoln’s home at Eighth and Jackson before heading north to the cemetery.

  On reaching the cemetery, the procession made its way along a narrow road that led between two ridges separated by a small brook. Built into one of the hillsides was a large receiving vault whose facade resembled a Greek temple. Two large vault doors opened into the receiving crypt. The president’s casket was placed inside the vault on a large marble slab. To its left sat a smaller casket containing the remains of young Willie Lincoln who had accompanied his father on the long trip from Washington.92 The hillside immediately behind the vault was covered with spectators whose elevated position gave them a perfect view of the ceremony below.

  The ceremony opened with a prayer followed by a hymn and several scriptural readings. The choir sang and then Reverend A.C. Hubbard read Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The people listened intently to the speech that had captured the nation only eight weeks before: “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” Could this tragic death really be a judgment of the Lord? Was it the nation’s final payment for the sins it had brought upon itself? All across the land preachers were drawing the analogy—as Christ gave his blood to save the world, so Lincoln gave his blood to save the nation.

  Bishop Matthew Simpson, America’s Methodist leader, delivered the funeral oration. He told of the millions of people who turned out across the countryside to honor their fallen leader. “Three weeks have passed and the nation has scarcely breathed easily yet,” he said. “More eyes have looked upon the procession for sixteen hundred miles by night and by day . . . than ever before watched We ask why.” The answer, Simpson said, “is to be found in the man himself.”93 No person so identified “with the heart of the people—understanding their feelings or was more connected with them” than Abraham Lincoln—and the people knew it.94 Simpson finished and Reverend Phineas Gurley offered yet another prayer. A Springfield choir sang a special hymn that Gurley had written shortly after the service in the White House:

  Rest, noble martyr; rest in peace;

  Rest with the true and Brave,

  Who, like thee, fell in Freedom’s cause

  The Nation’s life to save.

  Over one million Americans viewed the remains of Abraham Lincoln as he lay in state in various cities along the long road to Springfield. More than seven million people gathered along the city streets and country fields to pay their respect to the funeral train as it slowly made its way across the country. One in every four Americans had come to see their president or watch his funeral train pass by. All through the day and long dark night people stood for hours, some for days, to watch the lonesome train pass. Small fires cast their glow across the tear-stained faces of America. It was over. The world had never seen anything like it before, nor was it likely ever to see anything like it again. Abraham Lincoln had come home as he had predicted after one of his prescient dreams—home at last.

  Back in Washington, a government clerk working for the Department of the Interior returned to his boardinghouse after a long day of tedious paperwork. Exhausted, he could not sleep. The deep sorrow that welled inside him compelled him to write.
It was what he did best. Sitting at a small table near the center of his room he dipped his pen into an inkwell and tearfully began to inscribe the words that fell from his wounded heart. He wrote of a captain and his ship that had passed through a terrible storm before safely reaching port:

  O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

  Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

  For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

  For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

  Hear Captain! dear father!

  This arm beneath your head!

  It is some dream that on the deck,

  You’ve fallen cold and dead.

  My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

  My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

  The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

  From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

  But I with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.95

  It seemed to Walt Whitman as if the ancient Biblical prophecy had come true. The sun had turned to darkness, and the moon to blood.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations

  NARA

  National Archives Record Administration

  OR

  U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

  RG

  Record Group

  Introduction

  1. Williams reports the figure in personal communication concerning the Lincoln bibliography that he is currently compiling with the assistance of Brown University.

  2. The other three persons are Jesus Christ, William Shakespeare, and Napoleon.

  3. The three books are Thomas R. Turner, Beware the People Weeping (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983); and Thomas R. Turner, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999).

  4. Hanchett, Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, p. 3.

  5. William Hanchett, “Perspectives on Lincoln’s Assassination,” in George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (Chicago: Americana House, 1990), p. ix.

  6. Among these books are Otto Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937); Eisenschiml, In the Shadow of Lincoln’s Death (New York: Wilfred Funk, 1940); Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959); David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr., The Lincoln Conspiracy (Los Angeles: Schick Sunn Classic Books, 1977); and Robert Lockwood Mills, It Didn’t Happen the Way You Think (Bowie, Md:. Heritage Books, 1994).

  7. Perhaps the best book written on the Lincoln assassination is George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (New York: Carrick and Evans, 1940), which was reprinted in 1990. Bryan, nevertheless, relied heavily on secondary sources failing to take advantage of the large primary record then available.

  8. John Y. Simon, remarks at the Fifth Annual Ford’s Theatre Symposium, “Lincoln’s Assassination: Old Assumptions, New Insights,” Washington, D.C., August 3, 1998.

  9. Eisenschiml, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?

  10. Honorable Steny Hoyer, “The Samuel A. Mudd Relief Act of 1997,” quoted in Edward Steers Jr., “His Name Is Still Mudd” (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1997), pp. 134–37.

  11. William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David W. Gaddy, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. xiii.

  12. Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 2:426.

  13. “Black flag” was presumably a reference to the pirate black flag that bore a skull and crossbones and signified a “no-holds barred” type of warfare. Thus no one was excluded nor was any action excluded in achieving a successful end, including murder. The term “black flag warfare” appeared in the Philadelphia Age, a daily newspaper, on March 11, 1864, in reference to Colonel Ulric Dahlgren’s raid and the papers found on his body. In denouncing Dahlgren’s alleged plan to sack Richmond and kill Jefferson Davis, the Age referred to the action as “black flag warfare,” condemning the Lincoln administration and its supporters. See Joseph George Jr., “Black Flag Warfare,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, July 1991, p. 314.

  14. Statement of George A. Atzerodt. Joan L. Chaconas, “Unpublished Atzerodt Confession Revealed Here for the First Time,” Surratt Courier 13, no. 10 (October 1988): 1–3.

  15. Tidwell, Hall, and Gaddy, Come Retribution, pp. 416–21.

  16. For one such opinion see Mark E. Neely Jr., “Come Retribution, A Review,” American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (June 1990): 913–14.

  17. In Bryan, Great American Myth, p. 7.

  1. The Apotheosis

  1. The weapon used by Booth was a cap and ball pocket pistol manufactured in Philadelphia by Henry Deringer. The word “derringer” has come to mean other makes of small, one-shot pistols of similar design.

  2. Henry S. Safford to O.H. Oldroyd, June 25, 1903, Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C.

  3. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W.W Norton and Company, 1960), 2:283–86. Hereafter referred to as Beale, ed., Welles Diary.

  4. The laws of succession in April of 1865, should the president and vice president be killed or incapacitated, called for the president pro tempore of the Senate to serve as acting president. Senator Lafayette S. Foster of Connecticut held this position.

  5. Charles A. Leale, Lincoln’s Last Hours: Address Delivered before the Commandery of the State of New York Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (New York: privately printed, 1909).

  6. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), p. 157.

  7. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century Publishing Company, 1890), 10:302.

  8. David B. Chesebrough, “No Sorrow like Our Sorrow”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 1.

  9. Ibid., pp. 36–37.

  10. 10. Ibid., p. 39.

  2. You Are in Danger

  1. Emma LeConte, quoted in Carolyn L. Harrell, When the Bells Tolled for Lincoln: Southern Reaction to the Assassination (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997), p. 59.

  2. Texas Republican, April 28, 1865.

  3. Galveston Daily News, April 27, 1865. For an excellent essay on the reaction in Texas to Lincoln’s death see John M. Barr, “The Tyrannicide’s Reception: Responses in Texas to Lincoln’s Assassination,” Lincoln Herald 91, no. 2 (summer 1989): 54–63.

  4. Joshua Allen to “Mother,” January 26, 1861, Illinois Historical Preservation Agency, Springfield, II. Joshua Allen’s politics led him into the subversive organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, where he supported the secession of southern Illinois into the Confederacy. His activities resulted in his arrest and imprisonment in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. He was later elected to the Thirty-seventh and the Thirty-eighth U.S. Congress filling the seat of his former law partner Major General John A. Logan, who joined the Union army. Allen was defeated for reelection in 1864 by Logan, who denounced him as a traitor.

  5. Harold Holzer, Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), p. 340.

  6. Ibid, p. 342.

  7. Ibid, p. 336.

  8. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1968; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 120.


  9. Tidwell, Hall, and Gaddy, Come Retribution, pp. 227–33.

  10. Norma B. Cuthbert, ed, Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861 (San Marino, Calif: Huntington Library, 1949).

  11. David C. Mearns, ed., The Lincoln Papers, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 2:442.

  12. Ibid, 2:443.

  13. Cuthbert, ed, Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, p. xv.

  14. Ibid, p. 84.

  15. Baltimore Sun, February 25, 1865, p. 1, col. 2.

  16. Baltimore American, February 26, 1865, p. 1, col. 4.

  17. New York Times, February 25, 1861, p. 1, col. 1.

  18. Elihu B. Washburne, “Abraham Lincoln in Illinois,” North American Review 141 (1885): 456–57.

  19. Benson J. Lossing, A History of the Civil War, 1861–1865, and the Causes that Led Up to the Great Conflict (New York: War Memorial Association, 1912), p. 109.

  20. Rufus Rockwell Wilson, Lincoln in Caricature (New York: Horizon Press, 1953), p. 109.

  21. Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1841–1865, ed. Dorothy Lamon Teillard (Chicago: A.C. McClung, 1895), p. 33.

  22. Ibid, p. 274.

  23. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 2:211.

  24. Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 5:484–85.

  25. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), p. 303.

  26. Robert W. McBride, “Lincoln’s Body Guard,” Indiana Historical Society Publications 5, no. 1 (1911): 21.

  27. James O. Hall, “The Mystery of Lincoln’s Guard,” Surratt Society News 7, no. 5 (May 1982): 4–6.

  28. Ibid.