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

by James L. Swanson

  Not long after Lincoln’s remains arrived in Springfield, Jefferson Davis arrived in Washington, Georgia. By this time Davis’s escort was weary and unhappy. They wanted to go home. John Reagan knew what else they wanted: “Before reaching Washington, [Davis’s] cavalry, knowing that they were guarding money, demanded a portion of it,” he remembered. If the government failed to pay them, they were going to seize the money. Breckinridge and the officers commanding the cavalry gave in and handed out a portion of the money.

  It was in Washington that Judah Benjamin, the secretary of state, decided to leave Davis and make his own escape. The president’s pace was too slow for Benjamin’s taste, and he thought he would have a better chance to avoid capture on his own. He had never been comfortable riding a horse and set out in a carriage. Reagan spoke to him before he set off and asked where he was going. “To the farthest place from the United States,” Benjamin responded, “if it takes me to the middle of China.”

  Others pushed Jefferson Davis to try to escape, once again urging him to strike out alone or with one companion and get out of the country or over the Mississippi. He responded, “I shall not leave Confederate soil while a Confederate regiment is on it.”

  In Washington, Georgia, the people welcomed their president as if he rode at the head of a triumphant procession. Eliza Andrews, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a judge and a plantation owner, described the scene:

  “About noon the town was thrown into the wildest excitement by the arrival of President Davis. . . . He rode into town at the head of his escort . . . and as he was passing by the bank . . . several . . . gentlemen were sitting on the front porch, and the instant they recognized him they took off their hats and received him with every mark of respect due the president of a brave people. When he reined in his horse, all the staff who were present advanced to hold the reins and assist him to dismount.” This was the warm welcome that Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, had withheld from Davis.

  Jefferson Davis, his remaining friends, and soldiers stayed in Washington for a few days. But it could not be long. A letter from Varina and a dispatch from Breckinridge again urged Davis to flee. If he hoped to avoid capture, his advisers were right. Jefferson Davis needed to move fast to the Mississippi River or Florida.

  In Springfield the honor guard removed Lincoln’s body from the train and took it to the Statehouse, where they laid it on a platform. This morning, for the first time since the funeral train left Washington, the honor guard also removed Willie’s coffin from the presidential car.

  Springfield was not a great American city, and its people knew they could not hope to rival the displays of Washington, Philadelphia, New York City, or Chicago. Lincoln’s hometown even had to borrow a hearse from St. Louis. However, Springfield meant to prove that Abraham Lincoln meant more to his hometown than he did to any other city in the country.

  Springfield welcomes Lincoln home.

  The embalmer and undertaker opened Lincoln’s coffin. He had been dead for eighteen days. Only chemicals and makeup had kept him presentable during the journey. At the beginning, at the White House funeral, Lincoln’s face had looked almost natural. He had changed along the way. The face continued to darken, and more and more white face powder had to be applied. Lincoln no longer resembled a sleeping man. Now he looked like a ghastly, pale, waxlike statue.

  The doors to the Statehouse opened to the public at 10:00 A.M. on May 3 and stayed that way for twenty-four hours. It was the first round-the-clock viewing since Lincoln had died. During the night trains continued to arrive in Springfield, and people without lodgings wandered the streets until dawn.

  By 10:00 A.M. on May 4, seventy-five thousand people had passed by the presidential body. The coffin was removed from the Statehouse and placed in the hearse waiting on Washington Street. The procession began at 11:30 A.M., passing by Lincoln’s home, then heading to Oak Ridge Cemetery, about a mile and a half from town. Lincoln’s guards removed his coffin from the hearse, carried it into the limestone tomb, and laid it on a marble slab. Willie’s coffin rested near him.

  The Springfield tomb.

  Bishop Matthew Simpson, who had been at the White House funeral, was there to speak. He read the speech that Lincoln had given when he had been sworn in for his second term as president, with its famous lines calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Simpson called for forgiveness of the Southern people: “We will take them to our hearts,” he said. But the bishop scorned Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders. “Let every man who . . . aided in beginning this rebellion, and thus led to the slaughter of our sons and daughters, be brought to speedy and certain punishment. Let every officer . . . who . . . has turned his sword against . . . his country, be doomed to a felon’s death. This . . . is the will of the American people. . . . There shall be no peace to rebels,” he declared.

  This shocking, tomb-side lust for revenge would have horrified Lincoln.

  Lincoln’s pastor, the Reverend Dr. Gurley, gave a last prayer, which was followed by a funeral hymn. There was nothing more to say. They closed the iron gates and locked Abraham and Willie Lincoln in their tomb. Then everybody went home.

  In Washington, Georgia, a few hundred citizens honored Jefferson Davis on his second day with them. “Crowds of people flocked to see him,” wrote Eliza Andrews, “and nearly all were melted to tears.” Not only did the townspeople gather around Davis, but they put together an enormous feast. “The village sent so many good things for the President to eat,” recalled Eliza, “that an ogre couldn’t have devoured them all, and he left many little delicacies . . . to people who had been kind to him.”

  It was in Washington that Stephen Mallory, the secretary of the navy, left Jefferson Davis. Davis understood that it was time for Mallory to return to his family. He took time to compose a warm farewell letter. Davis did not know it, but it was the last letter he would write as president of the Confederate States of America.

  Davis then finally agreed to take the action he should have chosen days ago. He would start south with ten men, his officers, and his secretary, leaving Breckinridge to finish up any business of the War Department and John Reagan to handle anything dealing with the Post-office Department or the Treasury.

  Eliza Andrews watched Davis ride out the night of May 4. She had heard rumors that the Union army did not actually want to capture Davis: “The general belief is that Grant and the military men, even Sherman, are not anxious for the ugly job of hanging such a man as our president, and are quite willing to let him give them the slip, and get out of the country if he can. The military men, who do the hard and cruel things in war, seem to be more merciful in peace than the politicians who stay at home and do the talking.”

  For the past three weeks, the newspapers had told the story of Lincoln’s last journey. Every stop of the train, every city it passed through, every person who marched in the processions, every detail of the black drapery and silver trim and lavish flowers that decorated the hearses and the viewing chambers—no detail was too unimportant for the papers to print or for people to read.

  It was impossible for everyone in the country to hurry to Washington, D.C., for the procession, funeral, and viewing there or to go to the cities where the funeral train would stop. These stories carried every American who read them to Lincoln’s side and allowed them to imagine what it must have been like to behold his face or to watch his coffin pass by. Newspapers made it possible for the American people to ride aboard that train.

  As they viewed Lincoln’s corpse, watched his funeral train pass by, or eagerly read the newspaper stories, Americans mourned the death of their president. They honored his achievements: He had won the war, saved the Union, and set men free. They vowed to bear the burden of his unfinished work. And they declared, by the tributes they paid to him, that his great cause was worth fighting and dying for.

  Mourning ribbon worn in Washington by Post Office workers for the April 19, 1865, funeral procession.
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  For whom did all these people mourn? For their dead president, of course. But this outpouring of sorrow was not for just one man. They mourned for all the men—every son, every brother, every husband, and every father—lost in that war. It was as though, on that train, in that coffin, they were all coming home.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On the day that Lincoln was at last buried, more than sixteen hundred miles away in Washington, D.C., offices were closed, public buildings were still draped in black, and flags flew at half staff. Army officers wore black crepe ribbons around their coat sleeves. John Wilkes Booth lay in a secret, unmarked grave on the grounds of the United States Army penitentiary. Booth’s coconspirators awaited trial. Secretary of State Seward was recovering from his wounds.

  At the White House Abraham Lincoln’s office was still just as the president left it on the afternoon of April 14. His widow was still living there. She had refused to leave, which meant that the new president, Andrew Johnson, could not move in. It had become the subject of much talk. At the Petersen house Private William Clarke went to bed each night covered by the same quilt that had warmed the dying president.

  Now Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton could focus his attention on the capture of Jefferson Davis. Lincoln’s journey was over at last. But Jefferson Davis still had further to go.

  On May 5 Jefferson Davis and the small group of men still traveling with him made a camp near Sandersville, Georgia. The next day Burton Harrison directed Varina Davis and the train of wagons carrying her property to camp off the road near Dublin, Georgia. Around midnight Davis’s party stumbled upon her campsite. More than a month had gone by since Davis had seen his family. They traveled together on May 7.

  On May 7 Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Pritchard, commanding the Fourth Michigan Cavalry regiment, left Macon, Georgia, in pursuit of Jefferson Davis. His orders were to capture or kill him.

  On May 8 Davis separated from his family again. At dawn he rode on. By nightfall he had made little progress through heavy rains, and Varina’s train caught up with him. Before dawn on May 9 they were together once more.

  Lieutenant Colonel Pritchard and his men arrived at Abbeville, Georgia, at 3:00 P.M. on May 9. There he encountered the commander of the First Wisconsin Cavalry, who told Pritchard that a wagon train had crossed the Ocmulgee River the night before, a mile and a half north of Abbeville.

  The Wisconsin men went off down the main road while Pritchard’s soldiers planned to follow the river. Pritchard left Abbeville at 4:00 P.M., headed toward Irwinville.

  Toward the end of the day on May 9, Davis decided to make camp for the night with Varina’s wagon train near Irwinville. They pulled off the road, and pine trees helped conceal their position. The tents and wagons were scattered over an area of about one hundred yards. Any Yankee who rode into one part of the camp during the night would not be able to see to the other side of it. Davis, unless captured at once, could escape into the woods under the cover of darkness. The layout was perfect, except for one flaw. Despite two dangers—thieves looking for plunder and the Union cavalry hunting for Davis—they posted no guards to keep watch.

  When Jefferson Davis entered his wife’s tent late on the night of May 9, 1865, he was lucky to still be a free man. Davis’s advisers knew that it was too dangerous for the president to continue traveling with his wife’s slow-moving wagon train. Unless Davis left his family and moved fast on horseback, along with just three or four men, he had little chance of escape.

  Davis said that on the night of May 9 he would eat dinner, stay up late, and leave on horseback under cover of darkness. He was dressed for the road: dark felt, wide-brimmed hat; wool frock coat of Confederate gray; gray trousers; high, black leather riding boots and spurs. His horse was tied near Varina’s tent, already saddled, with his saddle holsters loaded with Davis’s pistols, ready to ride.

  Several of the men, including John Reagan, stayed up late talking, waiting for Davis to give the order to depart. It never came. The delay puzzled one of the men picked to accompany the president. “Time wore on, the afternoon was spent, night set in, and we were still in camp,” he wrote later. “Why the order ‘to horse’ was not given by the President I do not know.”

  Pritchard’s men arrived in Irwinville at 1:00 A.M. on May 10, but found no traces of Davis or his followers. Pritchard rode ahead with a few men and, posing as Confederate cavalrymen, they questioned some villagers. The locals told Pritchard that at sunset a party with wagons had camped a mile, or a mile and a half, from town out on the Abbeville road.

  Pritchard positioned his men about half a mile from the mysterious encampment. He sent twenty-five men, guided by a local black man and under the command of Lieutenant Alfred Purington, to circle around the camp and cut off any chance of escape from the rear. He waited for daylight. He didn’t want any of the Confederates to escape into the woods under cover of darkness.

  For the next hour and a half, they waited in the dark.

  At 3:30 A.M., at the first hint of dawn, Pritchard ordered his men into their saddles and to ride forward. After a quick dash, they succeeded in capturing the camp and everyone in it. Pritchard’s men had not fired a shot. “The surprise was so complete,” Pritchard wrote later, “that few of the enemy were enabled to make the slightest defense, or even arouse from their slumbers in time to grasp their weapons, which were lying at their sides, before they were wholly in our power.”

  But before Pritchard’s men could gain full control, and before the colonel was even sure that he had captured Jefferson Davis’s camp, gunfire broke out. It came from behind the camp, where Pritchard had sent Lieutenant Purington and his twenty-five men. It was a rebel counterattack, Pritchard assumed. He spurred his horse past the tents and wagons and rode to the sound of the fighting.

  Lieutenant Purington and the men under his command were in position behind Davis’s camp, waiting for Pritchard’s signal. As Purington faced Davis’s camp, he heard mounted men approaching him from his rear. They called out that they were “friends.” But they refused to identify themselves and would not ride forward when Purington ordered them to. One of them shouted, “By God, you are the men we are looking for,” and began to ride away. Purington ordered his men to open fire.

  In the dark the two groups of armed men could not see that they wore the same uniform, Union blue cavalry shell jackets decorated with bright yellow piping. The Fourth Michigan Cavalry was fighting the First Wisconsin.

  The gunfire woke the people in Jefferson Davis’s camp, and one man sounded the alarm. “I was awakened by the coachman, Jim Jones,” Burton Harrison remembered, “running to me about day-break with the announcement that the enemy was at hand!” Harrison drew his pistol and faced several men from the Fourth Michigan charging up the road from the south. He raised his weapon and took aim.

  “As soon as one of them came within range,” Harrison said, “I covered him with my revolver and was about to fire, but lowered the weapon when I perceived the attacking column was so strong as to make resistance useless, and reflected that, by killing the man, I should certainly not be helping ourselves. . . . We were taken by surprise, and not one of us exchanged a shot with the enemy.”

  John Reagan, the postmaster general, was there as well. “The major of the regiment reached the place where I and the members of the President’s staff were camped,” he said later. “When he approached me I was watching a struggle between two federal soldiers and Governor Lubbock. They were trying to get his horse and saddle bags away from him and he was holding on to them and refusing to give them up; they threatened to shoot him if he did not, and he replied . . . that they might shoot and be damned, but that they should not rob him while he was alive and looking on.”

  Jefferson Davis, still inside Varina’s tent, had received his coachman’s warning. He now heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp. He assumed that the riders were Confederate deserters, thieves planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train. “Those men have attacked us at las
t,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.” Upon going to the tent door, however, he saw the blue coats of the Union soldiers and turned to Varina. “The Federal cavalry are upon us,” he told her.

  Davis had not undressed during the night. He needed no time to get ready. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. If he could get to that horse, he could leap into the saddle and gallop for the woods. He was still a superb rider and must have felt that he could outride any Yankee cavalryman half his age. Seconds, not minutes, counted now, and if he hoped to escape he had to act at once.

  Before he left, Varina asked him to wear an overcoat, also known as a “waterproof.” It was cool and drizzling, and if he could escape the camp, he faced several hours of hard riding. The extra layer of warmth might help, and the coat might also conceal his identity. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina explained, “I plead with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat.” These two garments—the coat and shawl—would help create a myth that Davis had attempted to evade capture by wearing women’s clothing.