Lee met with his officers the next day. John B. Gordon remembered staff officers hunkered down on the ground on blankets or on their saddles near a low-burning campfire. There were no camp stools, tents, or tables. Lee rose. One more time they would try to break through Grant’s lines and try to reach Joe Johnston in North Carolina.
That was a pipe dream. Grant had repelled Gordon’s column, which, according to Gordon, had fought to a frazzle. It was finally over. Gordon’s and Longstreet’s forces at Appomattox numbered fewer than 8,000, a skeleton crew of emaciated, worn-out men and boys. “There is nothing left me but to go and see General Grant,” concluded General Lee, “and I had rather die a thousand deaths.”
It had taken twelve days, from the beginning of Grant’s campaign, on March 29, to April 9, to maneuver Lee into a position where he had no other available options.
Lee and Grant met on the ninth at Wilbur McLean’s small brick house, located a little back from the street, near the village of Appomattox. Having exchanged brief notes, the men had come together at last, each of them playing himself to the hilt, the way thousands of newspaper readers and reporters had come to think of them and as the general public would think of them long after their meeting that day passed into legend. The silver-haired Robert E. Lee wore a crisp new full-dress uniform. His boots were shined and decorated with handsome spurs. He sat at an oval table near the front window, his jewel-handled sword, said to be a gift from the state of Virginia, at his side. On the table lay his long buckskin gloves and his gray felt hat, which matched the color of his uniform. Grant was swordless. His trousers were tucked inside mud-spattered top boots. His shoulder straps were the only designation of his rank. He sat at a marble-topped table in the center of the room. “A stranger, unacquainted with the situation,” said John B. Gordon, “would have selected Lee for the conqueror and Grant for the vanquished hero.” Their faces were expressionless. They exchanged a few pleasantries before getting down to business.
The terms of surrender were simple and generous: Lee and his men were to lay down their arms and return home; they were not under any form of arrest as long as they did not take up arms again to fight the United States or disobey its laws; the officers could keep their sidearms and their baggage. When Lee reportedly asked that his soldiers be able to keep their mules or horses for plowing and Grant agreed, Lee said, “This will have the best possible effect on my army. It will be very gratifying and do much towards conciliating our people.” Lee suggested that his army be given rations, and again Grant complied, ordering enough for 25,000 men, a number that included soldiers too ill to fight.
Lee left the house at four o’clock. He paused on the front step before mounting his beloved horse, Traveler. Grant and his men saluted Lee, raising their hats, and Lee returned the gesture before riding off, erect and tall. Grant did not permit his troops to cheer or gloat. “The war is over,” he said, “the rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”
A Confederate soldier devoted to Lee recalled, “When our idolized leader sheathed his sword at Appomattox the world grew dark to us. We felt as if the sun had set in blood to rise no more. . . . But that same stainless hero whom we had followed with unquestioning devotion taught us not to despair. He told us it was the part of brave men to accept defeat without repining. ‘Human virtue,’ he said, ‘should be equal to human calamity.’ ”
The news of his surrender had reached the Confederate government in exile in Danville. No one said a word, and the cabinet officers, along with Jefferson Davis, prepared to board trains yet again in the damp night, this time for Greensboro, North Carolina. The Confederate secretary of the navy said the times were out of joint. In Richmond, at the huge African church where no one of African descent had previously dared speak from the pulpit, black men and women filled every seat; if they couldn’t find a seat, they perched on the windows and stood in the doorway, and the hundreds who couldn’t enter the packed hall at all gathered outside to listen to their black minister speak at last of full freedom.
On the twelfth, the Army of Northern Virginia marched to the Appomattox Court House, where they stacked their arms and folded their regimental flag. Years later, General Longstreet recalled, with sadness and with pride, that the young men then “walked empty-handed to their distant, blighted homes.”
(16)
THE SIMPLE, FIERCE DEED
Identifying themselves as the nonexistent 4th Missouri Cavalry, William Quantrill and thirty-three men, disguised in blue uniforms, set out on New Year’s Day 1865 and rode east. Quantrill’s intention: to assassinate the president.
Ever since Lincoln’s election, the grandiose guerrilla had been plotting to save the Confederacy. He would reconstitute his band of Missouri outlaws; they would saddle their horses, gallop into Washington, and shoot Lincoln dead. The Federal army would collapse, the Confederacy would rise, and Quantrill, to whom fame mattered more than country, would be hailed a hero forever.
Calling himself Captain William Clarke of the 4th Missouri, Quantrill moved slowly. Frequently sidetracked by the joy of highway murder, he and his men hung around Kentucky, where people hid in the brush when they heard Quantrill was coming. In Danville, Kentucky, he and his boys lined up the citizens, robbed the local stores, and gutted the telegraph office. At New Market, they captured and burned nine army wagons and killed three guards. Near Hartford, Kentucky, Quantrill rode into a Federal camp and tricked two Federal officers with whom he’d chatted confidentially, convincing them that he and his gang needed guides to the Ohio River. The Federal officers helpfully suggested one of their men, who knew the country well, and another enlisted man. A third Federal soldier volunteered to help out as well. A few miles from the Union encampment, Quantrill shot two of the bluebellies and hanged the third.
Quantrill and his gang still intended to make their way to Washington, but they were too late. On the evening of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, at ten o’clock, while Abraham Lincoln and his wife were sitting in the upstairs box at Ford’s Theatre watching a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the box, pointed his small single-shot derringer at the back of Lincoln’s head, and pulled the trigger. The simple, fierce deed: that’s what the bereaved poet Walt Whitman would call the assassination of this president.
BOOTH’S SIMPLE, FIERCE deed encapsulated all the brutality, all the gore, all the hatred of the past four years, all the contradictions and confusions and sorrow; it was the culmination of war and the consequence. And funneling the horror of those four years into the tragedy of one man’s death, this simple, fierce deed seemed more than people could bear. It was as if there had been a death in every home, wrote New York Times editor Henry Raymond. Every family folded in sorrow, many of them for the second or third time. The reporter Noah Brooks said that men and women and children wandered the streets of Washington on the morning of April 15, tears streaming down their faces, while the bells were tolling and with the flags lowered to half-mast, it almost seemed, at the very same time. The simple, fierce deed: the North was stupefied, and the South too, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
There had been four years of unaccountable, untold violence that no one could have prepared for; now no one was prepared for this, never this, the assassination that Lincoln had been warned of and that he, for some reason, had shrugged away, as if he had almost sought it out. He’d been having a strange recurring dream about seeing himself mourned in the East Room after his assassination; it was half a foreboding, half a wish. Acquainted with death, too much death, perhaps he had assumed that he had already imbibed it during this great war—when he walked through devastated Richmond or stood, the summer before, on the parapet at Fort Stevens, his tall stovepipe hat an easy target. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had yelled for him to get down, damned fool. Not long afterward, a soldier standing near Lincoln had been shot.
Quantrill and his boys he
ard the news the day after the assassination when they had stopped for a few drinks as they wended their slow, murderous way to Washington. Quantrill, already in his cups, raised another glass. Less than a month later, on May 10, he was fatally shot in the back by Federal guerrillas who stormed James Wakefield’s barn in Spencer Country, near Taylorsville, Kentucky, where he and his men were sleeping in the hayloft. He died less than three weeks later in a Louisville military hospital.
“THE HEAVIEST BLOW which has ever fallen on the people of the South has descended,” lamented The Richmond Whig, mourning less for Lincoln than for its shattered country. General Joe Johnston, who would soon surrender to Sherman (he had continued fighting for some days after Appomattox), also thought the assassination a calamity for the South. And Confederate general Richard Ewell wrote to Grant saying that he and his officers had been shocked by the “appalling crime”—as well as the tendency to connect the South with it. “Need we say that we are not assassins,” Ewell archly declared, “nor the allies of assassins, be they from the North or from the South, and that coming as we do from most of the States of the South we would be ashamed of our own people, were we not assured that they will reprobate the crime.” But in Louisiana, Sarah Dawson noted that “the more violently ‘Secesh’ the inmates, the more thankful they are for Lincoln’s death, the more profusely the houses are decked with the emblems of woe. They all look to me like ‘not sorry for him, but dreadfully grieved to be forced to this demonstration.’ ”
Among the surgeons and members of the cabinet gathered at Lincoln’s deathbed, it had been the gruff secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who had been at Lincoln’s side immediately after the president had been moved from Ford’s Theatre to a boardinghouse nearby. Lincoln lay diagonally across a bed far too short for his long body. The pillow was soaked with dark blood. And when he was pronounced dead just eight minutes before seven-thirty in the morning, it was Stanton who, tears spilling down his cheeks, uttered the memorable words: now he belongs to the angels, or ages; no one is quite sure which, but either worked poignantly well.
Stanton, who needed to bring the war to a conclusion, also needed to bring the assassin or assassins to quick justice. So too the cantankerous vice president, Andrew Johnson, who wondered if the actor Booth could have managed the horrid act himself, particularly since more than one foul deed had been perpetrated the night before. At his home in Lafayette Square, Secretary of State Seward had been recovering from injuries recently sustained in a carriage accident when a man, posing as a doctor or someone bringing medicine, had rushed into his room and slashed the secretary with his knife in the neck and face. The assailant had also fractured the skull of Seward’s son Frederick with a pistol that had misfired and wounded the secretary’s nurse, the convalescent soldier Private George Robinson, before fleeing the premises.
Who knew, then, how many people were involved, how many officials had been targeted? It was rumored that Jefferson Davis was part of the conspiracy; perhaps General Ewell had heard that or just assumed that the North would look to the South for the culprits. Stanton had straightaway begun interviewing witnesses, dictating orders, telegraphing for more detectives, updating generals. For he knew that by calling the Emancipation Proclamation treason, Jeff Davis had put a price on Lincoln’s head, since treason was a capital crime. But it couldn’t be proved that Davis or other Confederate leaders had had anything to do with this dreadful thing, and besides it was easier, more comforting, and less incendiary to assume that the assassination had been the brainchild of the actor John Wilkes Booth, a man sometimes called the flower of the Confederacy.
Booth was the son of the great and famous Junius Brutus Booth, an erratic actor of enormous talent with an affection for alcohol who by the end of his life was known as Crazy Booth, the Mad Tragedian. Booth was also the younger brother of Edwin, himself an actor since his teens; by his twenties, Edwin’s rendition of Richard III rivaled that of his father, and eventually his huge celebrity eclipsed that of the Mad Tragedian. But the notoriety of John Wilkes would far exceed either Edwin’s or his father’s.
During his youth on the family farm in Maryland, John Wilkes felt constrained and abandoned; he tried the stage but didn’t share his father or brother’s talent or their fame (not yet anyway). The critics were harsh; “He would have flashes, passages, I thought of real genius,” said Walt Whitman, but they were only flashes. Yet he was so good-looking, with his dark hair, white skin, and magnificent mustache, that he was soon called the handsomest man in America. But like his father, John Wilkes was unreliable. He preferred self-dramatizing to losing himself in a role: at twenty-six, the young dandy draped himself in a long black greatcoat, oozed chivalry and savoir-faire, and invited—indeed, required—a measure of adoration.
He was also a good shot, a good horseman, and a ladies’ man singularly fixated on Lincoln, whom he despised. His root and branch were Southern, and, like William Quantrill, he saw himself as the South’s savior—a leading man who would preserve its whiteness, its honor, and its future. Persuasive, he presumably drafted several men, among them the Confederate courier John Surratt—though it’s also possible that Surratt may have drafted Booth. Surratt was a known agent who traveled often between Richmond and Montreal at the behest of Judah Benjamin and the Confederate Secret Service. He packed stolen goods in his wagon, stuffed secret messages in his boot heel, or lined the pages of James Redpath’s Life of John Brown with Confederate dispatches on his runs up to Canada and back. About a week before Lincoln’s assassination, Benjamin had evidently given Surratt several such dispatches to take to Montreal and paid him $200 in gold for his expenses. From Montreal, Surratt had gone to Elmira, New York, also in the service of the Confederacy. That’s where he had been, he later said, when he had learned of Lincoln’s death.
The shady Surratt claimed that Booth had approached him with a plan. “I was led on by a sincere desire to assist the South in gaining her independence,” he explained. “I had no hesitation in taking part in anything honorable that might tend towards the accomplishment of that object.” That honorable plan involved kidnapping the president and whisking him off to Richmond, where Booth would ransom him for Confederate prisoners of war.
Booth often met Surratt at the boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., that his profligate and recently deceased father had purchased for his mother some years earlier. On the night of March 17, about a month before the assassination, Surratt had left the boardinghouse, unhitched his horse, and raced off with six other men. When he returned, he was clasping his pistol so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. “My hopes are gone,” he had moaned. Pale and glum, Booth followed him into the parlor and quickly closed the door behind him. Lincoln’s schedule had changed. There had been no kidnapping.
Disappointing as that night had been, the next weeks were worse: the fall of Richmond; Appomattox; and during Holy Week, on Fat Tuesday, April 11, to be exact, Lincoln had stood on the second-floor balcony of the White House and read from a carefully prepared text. Tall and magnanimous, he said he favored giving the vote to certain black men—the soldiers and the smart ones—now that victory clearly belonged to the Union. Booth heard the speech. “That means nigger citizenship,” he said. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. This is the last speech he will ever make.”
On Good Friday, Booth went to the Surratt place on H Street, handed John’s mother, Mary Surratt, a parcel—it looked like a few saucers wrapped together in brown paper—and asked her to carry it out to Surrattsville, the place named for her deceased husband’s post office and tavern. The tavern was also locally known as a safe house for Confederate couriers and spies. Mrs. Surratt later claimed she had been going to Surrattsville that very afternoon to collect a debt, but when she arrived, she reputedly told the tavern keeper, an unreliable boozer named John Lloyd, to keep “those shooting-irons ready.” The shooting irons were the carbines her son had concealed behind the wall upstairs, the same carbines that Booth and another accomplice had fetc
hed just hours after the president was murdered. That would be the evidence marshaled against her thanks in part to the testimony of Lloyd, who was eager to save his own neck. It would send her to the gallows.
John Lloyd wasn’t charged, and John Surratt was headed to Rome, where, known as John Watson, he joined the Zouaves stationed at the Vatican. But others—namely, George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell (aka Lewis Payne)—were arrested. For, according to Booth’s diary, Atzerodt was to kill Vice President Johnson and Lewis Powell (formerly one of Mosby’s rangers) was to assassinate Seward. Atzerodt had gotten cold feet, though Powell had done his best. Also arrested were Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold, both of them boyhood friends of Booth. Each had served as a Confederate soldier for a brief period and had signed on to the foiled March kidnapping plot. Edmund “Ned” Spangler was a carpenter who worked at Ford’s Theatre and presumably had Booth’s horse ready for his escape. Spangler too was arrested, and so was Mary Surratt.
Unfortunately for Mrs. Surratt, while the police were interrogating her, Powell had showed up at her door at midnight. Carrying a pickax, he claimed he’d come to dig a gutter at the widow’s request, although she said she didn’t know him. That didn’t look good. Nor did the photograph of Booth hidden on her mantelpiece. Nor did the situation look good for Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the physician who had attended to the leg Booth had fractured when he had jumped from the president’s box onto the stage below, crying “sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”).
Ecstatic Nation Page 40