Bloody Times: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Manhunt for Jefferson Davis

by James L. Swanson

  There was one more thing. The people wanted to see their Father Abraham, not just his closed coffin. They wanted to look upon his face. That meant his coffin would have to be open for a journey of more than sixteen hundred miles. To Mary Lincoln the idea seemed ghoulish. The idea of exhibiting her dear husband’s remains for all to see horrified her. But at the same time, she liked thinking of a grand funeral pageant that would show what a great man Lincoln had been. She said yes.

  Chapter Eight

  At the Treasury Department George Harrington began adding up the number of people who had to receive an invitation to the White House funeral. Letters and telegrams begging for tickets to the funeral or positions in the procession poured in. While Harrington worked and planned, Abraham Lincoln spent his last night in the White House.

  George Harrington, the man who planned all Lincoln funeral events in Washington.

  Two days after the president died, the coffin was ready. Soldiers carried it to the second-floor Guest Room and placed it on the floor. They lifted the president’s body from the table where he had lain since Saturday afternoon. The soldiers carried him to the coffin—it looked too small. How would they fit him into it? Abraham Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, and the coffin turned out to be just two inches taller. It was a snug fit. If they had tried to bury him in his boots, he would have been too tall.

  The soldiers lifted the coffin and carried it down the stairs. They took it to the center of the East Room and rested it upon a platform. The coffin itself was expensive and magnificent, probably not what Lincoln would have chosen for himself. Why, it had cost almost as much as he paid for his house in Springfield.

  Lincoln’s body lay waiting in the East Room for his funeral. It would not be the first funeral of someone from the Lincoln family in the White House. Three years earlier, Lincoln had attended the funeral of his son Willie. It was, he said, “the hardest trial of my life.”

  William Wallace Lincoln, age eleven, was the president’s favorite son. Tall and thin, Willie looked like his father. His mind worked, Abraham said, in ways that reminded him of himself. Willie was his father’s true companion in the White House and the favorite of many of those who lived and worked there. Lincoln loved no one more.

  In February 1862 both Tad and Willie fell ill with a fever. They got worse, and the president watched over them with a keen eye. During the next two weeks, they became seriously ill. The Evening Star began printing reports on how they were doing. On February 20 the newspaper wrote, “BETTER.—We are glad to say that the President’s second son—Willie—who has been so dangerously ill seems better to-day.”

  But this last report was wrong. Willie Lincoln died the afternoon of February 20, at 5:00 P.M. Lincoln cried out to his secretary, “My boy is gone—he is actually gone!” Willie, he said, “was too good for this earth . . . but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!”

  Willie’s body was laid out in the Green Room of the White House as arrangements were made for his funeral. While the boy’s body lay a short distance away, a man looking for a government job made the mistake of bothering Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had made it a lifelong habit to control his temper, and it was a rare thing when he showed anger in public. But if pushed too far, Lincoln would sometimes unleash his wrath—as he did at this unwelcome visitor.

  “When you came to the door here, didn’t you see the crepe on it?” he demanded. “Didn’t you realize that meant somebody must be lying dead in this house?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lincoln, I did. But what I wanted to see you about was very important.”

  “That crepe is hanging there for my son; his dead body at this moment is lying unburied in this house, and you come here, push yourself in with such a request! Couldn’t you at least have the decency to wait until after we had buried him?”

  On February 23 friends and family viewed Willie’s body at the White House. On February 24, the day of Willie’s funeral, the government offices were closed, as if an important politician had died. Leaders of the government, members of Congress, officers from the army, and other important people from all over Washington came to his funeral.

  The Evening Star published a heartbreaking description of the scene: “His remains were placed in the Green room . . . where this morning a great many friends of the family called to take a last look at the little favorite, who had endeared himself to all guests of the family. The body was clothed in the usual every-day attire of youths of his age, consisting of pants and jacket with white stockings and low shoes—the white collar and wristbands being turned over the black cloth of the jacket.”

  Willie’s coffin was very plain. It had a square silver plate with a few simple words:

  William Wallace Lincoln.

  Born December 21st, 1850.

  Died February 20th, 1862.

  After the funeral Willie’s body was carried to Oak Hill Cemetery in nearby Georgetown. There it was placed in a tomb until the day when Abraham Lincoln could take him home to Illinois.

  Lincoln prayed that Tad, still sick, would be spared. On February 26 the Evening Star reported that he would live: “We are glad to learn that the youngest son of the President is still improving in health, and is now considered entirely out of danger.”

  Abraham and Mary Lincoln mourned Willie in different ways. Mary sent away anything that could remind her of her dead son. She threw out all of his toys and would not allow his friends to come to the White House to play with Tad. The sight of them, she said, upset her too much. Instead, Mary found relief in the world of dreams and spirits, where she imagined she saw Willie, along with her other son Eddie, who had died many years ago, and her half brother, Alec, who was Willie’s uncle. “He comes to me every night,” she swore to her sister. “He comes to me . . . and stands at the foot of my bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me.”

  Abraham Lincoln saw his son in his memory. Willie died on a Thursday, and every Thursday for several weeks the president locked himself in his office for a time to mourn and to think of his son. No one dared to interrupt him. And at night he dreamed of his lost boy.

  Death also visited Jefferson Davis’s White House. On the afternoon of Saturday, April 30, 1864, an officer walking near the Confederate White House saw a crying young girl run out of the mansion and yank violently on the bell cord of the next house. Then another girl and boy fled the White House. A black female servant who followed them told the officer that one of the Davis children was badly hurt. The officer ran inside and found a male servant holding in his arms a little boy, “insensible and almost dead.” It was five-year-old Joseph Evan Davis. His brother, Jeff Jr., was kneeling beside him, trying to make him speak. “I have said all the prayers I know,” said Jeff, “but God will not wake Joe.” Jefferson and Varina were not home.

  Joseph had fallen fifteen feet from a porch. He was found lying on the brick pavement, unconscious, with a broken left thigh and a severely contused forehead. His chest evidenced signs of internal injuries. The officer sent for a doctor and then began to rub the boy with camphor and brandy, and applied a mustard on his feet and wrists. The child, he observed, “had beautiful black eyes and hair, and was a very handsome boy.” The treatment, wrote the officer in a letter a few days after the event, seemed to work: “In a short time he began to breathe better, and opened his eyes, and we all thought he was revived, but it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light is extinguished for ever.”

  Messengers summoned the president and Varina. When she saw Joseph, she “relieved herself in a flood of tears and wild lamentations.” Jefferson kneeled beside his son, squeezed his hands, and watched him die. The Confederate officer, whose name remains unknown to this day, described the president’s appearance: “Such a look of petrifie
d, unutterable anguish I never saw. His pale, intellectual face . . . seemed suddenly to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.” Almost thirty years earlier, watching Knox Taylor die had driven him into his “great seclusion.” He could not indulge in private grief now. His struggling nation needed him. Davis mastered his emotions in public, but his face could not hide them. “When I recall the picture of our poor president,” wrote the officer, “grief-stricken, speechless, tearless and crushed, I can scarcely refrain from tears myself.”

  That night family and friends and Confederate officials called at the mansion, but Jefferson Davis refused to come downstairs. Above their heads, guests could hear his creaking footsteps on the floorboards as he paced through the night. Mary Chesnut remembered “the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above—not another sound. The whole house [was] as silent as death.” The funeral at St. Paul’s Church, reported the newspapers, drew the largest crowd of any public event in Richmond since the beginning of the war. Hundreds of children packed the pews, each carrying a green bough or flowers to lay upon Joe’s grave. Later, Davis had the porch torn down.

  As the Civil War raged on, it was not only Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln who lost those that they loved. In the same year that Willie died, Abraham Lincoln reached out to comfort someone else who had experienced the death of a beloved family member. He wrote a letter to Fanny McCullough, a young girl whose father had been killed in battle. In December 1862, Lincoln received word that Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, the former clerk of the McLean County Circuit Court in Bloomington, Illinois, had been killed in action on December 5, and that his teenage daughter was overcome with grief. Two days before Christmas, on a day Lincoln might have taken Willie—gone ten months now—to his favorite toy store on New York Avenue, and while Mary worked downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.

  In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down for her his hard-earned knowledge of life and death. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl, but to the American people. His words to Fanny might have comforted Jefferson Davis when he grieved over Joseph, or Lincoln’s own sons Tad and Robert when they suffered through their father’s death.

  Washington, December 23, 1862

  Dear Fanny

  It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. . . . You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.

  Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.

  Your sincere friend,

  A. Lincoln

  On April 17 Jefferson Davis was still on his way to Charlotte. Seventy-two hours after Lincoln’s assassination, he still had no idea that Lincoln had been murdered.

  On the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to let the people who had waited all night file into the East Room to see the president’s body. Upstairs Mary Lincoln hid in her room with Tad. He would have liked to see the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the company of these strangers than alone with his grieving mother.

  Jefferson Davis had reached Salisbury, North Carolina. There he read a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to let their soldiers go home to their families. They wanted to quit the war. Didn’t these men know that, like them, Davis worried about his wife and children? But the Confederacy’s survival was at stake. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to leave, and the South would lose. Davis wrote back and refused to give his permission.

  As he continued on the road to Charlotte, Jefferson Davis remained cheerful. Burton Harrison described him: “He seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was bright and agreeable. He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of trees and many plants; of roads, and how to make them; of the habits of birds, and of a variety of other topics.”

  The mood in Washington was sad. For the past three days the people had read newspaper stories of the president’s assassination and death. Today was their first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse.

  Thousands of people walked past the coffin. The viewing of Lincoln’s body could have continued all night. But there was work to be done. Thousands more were turned away when it was time to prepare the East Room for the funeral. George Harrington had decided that six hundred people needed to attend—but it would be impossible to squeeze six hundred chairs into the East Room. Only a few of the most important guests, including the Lincoln family, would have their own chairs. Carpenters could build risers, or bleachers, for the rest, if they worked through the night.

  While men carried stacks of fresh lumber into the East Room and carpenters sawed, hammered, and nailed them, Jefferson Davis spent a quiet night near Concord, North Carolina. Davis expected to enter Charlotte the next day, and he sent a message to his secretary of war telling him to meet with him there.

  Even on April 19, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, last-minute requests to change the route of the train that would carry his body continued to arrive. One letter, from St. Louis, was addressed to Mary Lincoln. “Please grant to us and the people west of the Mississippi, who loved him so well, the respectful request to direct his body to pass by way of Cincinnati to Saint Louis, thence to Springfield.”

  But it was too late for Saint Louis and all the other cities that longed for a chance to pay tribute to the president’s dead body. Close to midnight on April 19, Edwin Stanton said firmly that there would be no more changes. The route of the train was final. It would start in Washington and travel to Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, and finally to Springfield.

  On the morning of the funeral, a reporter was one of the first guests to enter the East Room. He was allowed to approach Lincoln’s corpse and invited his readers to do the same: “Approach and look at the dead man. . . . He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. . . . The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved close, save for the tuft at the short small chin. The mouth is shut, and like that of one who has put the foot down firm, and so are the eyes, which look as calm as slumber. . . . There are sweet roses and early magnolias, and the balmiest of lilies strewn around, as if the flowers had begun to bloom even in his coffin. . . .”

  The funeral guests first came to the Treasury Department. From there they crossed a narrow wooden footbridge, built for the occasion, which led into the White House. As they entered the East Room, they were overwhelmed by the decorations, flowers, and the platform where the coffin lay. No president had been so honored in death, not even George Washington.

  One of the few surviving invitations to Lincoln’s White House funeral.

  At exactly ten minutes past noon, a man rose from his chair, approached the coffin, and in a solitary voice broke the hush. The minister spoke the solemn opening words of the Episcopal burial service: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in
me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

  A bishop spoke, and then the minister of Lincoln’s own church delivered the sermon. Did he remember the day when, in the same White House room a little more than three years ago, he’d given another sermon for Willie Lincoln? “Though our President is slain,” he said, “our beloved country is saved; and so we sing of mercy as well as of judgment. Tears of gratitude mingle with those of sorrow, while there is also the dawning of a brighter, happier day upon our stricken and weary land.”

  While the three ministers spoke for almost two hours, more than a hundred thousand people waited outside the White House. In the driveway, six white horses were harnessed to the magnificent hearse that would carry Lincoln’s body. Nearby more than fifty thousand marchers and riders were waiting in line. Another fifty thousand spectators lined Pennsylvania Avenue. Most wore symbols of mourning: black badges containing small photographs of Lincoln, white silk ribbons bordered in black with his picture, small American flags with statements of grief printed in black letters over the stripes, or just simple strips of black crepe wrapped around coat sleeves.

  The night before there was not a vacant hotel room in all of Washington, and many people from out of town slept along the streets or in public parks. Some mourners had arrived near the White House as early as sunrise to stake out the best viewing positions. By 10:00 A.M. there were no more places left to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue. Faces filled every window, and children and young men climbed lampposts and trees for a better view. By the time the funeral services ended and the procession to the Capitol got under way, they had already been waiting for hours.