Nor did he know that on this night, and the next morning, Union general William T. Sherman contemplated what should be done about Davis’s future. On the seventeenth, Sherman met with most of his generals to discuss Confederate general Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina and to analyze the meeting Sherman had attended the day before with Johnston at the Bennett house to discuss that army’s possible surrender. But Sherman and his staff also talked about the Confederate president.
“We discussed…whether, if Johnston made a point of it, I should assent to the escape from the country of Jeff. Davis and his fugitive cabinet; and some one of my general officers, either Logan or Blair, insisted that, if asked for, we should even provide a vessel to carry them to Nassau from Charleston.”
Like Abraham Lincoln, Sherman would not have been disappointed if Jefferson Davis escaped the Union’s pursuit and fled the country.
In Salisbury, Davis received a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to disband their command and send their men home. They wanted to quit the war. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread like a contagion and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to go home, and the South would lose the war. The Confederate president replied: “Our necessities exclude the idea of disbanding any portion of the force which remains to us and constitutes our best hope of recovery from the reverses and disasters to which you refer. The considerations which move you to the request are such, if generally acted on, would reduce the Confederate power to the force which each State might raise for its own protection. On the many battle-fields within the limits of your State the sons of other States have freely bled…”
Didn’t these men know that Davis also worried about his own wife and children? Moreover, the Confederacy’s survival was at stake. He continued writing. “My personal experience enables me fully to sympathize with your anxieties for your homes and for your families, but I hope I have said enough to satisfy you that I cannot consistently comply with your request, and that you will agree that duty to the country must take precedence of any personal desire.”
Davis’s morale remained high. Burton Harrison witnessed it firsthand: “During all this march Mr. Davis was singularly equable and cheerful; 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. His familiarity with, and correct taste in, the English literature of the last generation, his varied experiences in life, his habits of close observation, and his extraordinary memory, made him a charming companion when disposed to talk.”
Although they had evacuated Richmond more than two weeks earlier, Harrison observed that Davis’s entourage shared his optimism: “Indeed…we were all in good spirits under adverse circumstances.”
On the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to admit the throng that had waited all night to file into the East Room to view the president’s remains. Upstairs, Mary Lincoln and Tad remained in seclusion in her room. He would have liked to have seen the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the consoling company of these loving strangers than in the secluded and unwholesome bedchamber of his unstable mother.
For the past three days the newspapers had been saturated with accounts of the president’s assassination and death. Today was the people’s first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse. While the public viewing was under way, as thousands of people walked past the coffin, with the White House funeral less than twenty-four hours away, George Harrington was trying to locate Bishop Matthew Simpson, who was in Philadelphia, to let him know he was expected to speak tomorrow at the president’s funeral.
The Philadelphia Telegraph Office responded to Harrington’s telegraph: “Bishop Simpson was not at home and his daughter says she cannot answer it. She says he is going to Washington tonight? Respectfully / H.B. Berry / Manager / American Telegraph Office.”
Eventually the divine’s family dispatched a telegram from Philadelphia to Harrington: “Bishop Simpson is absent from home he will be in Washington City tomorrow morning. E M Simpson.” Then another telegram arrived, this one from Simpson: “Just received your invitation. Am willing to assist. What part of the services am I expected to take. M. Simpson.” If his train was not delayed, he would arrive the next day, just in time. He would prepare his text through the night and during his train ride. There would be no time once he arrived in Washington.
By this point, Harrington was becoming overwhelmed by a last-minute deluge of requests for funeral tickets, press passes to the White House, and permission to march in the procession. For every request Harrington disposed of, another came in the door.
Not all of Harrington’s correspondents demanded special favors. Some offered helpful advice. “Pardon me for suggesting that as few carriages as possible ought to be allowed in the funeral cortege of the President. There are one hundred thousand aching hearts that will be following his remains to the grave. This cannot be done if long lines of vehicles occupy the space, without adding to the volume of humanity desirous of participating.” The anonymous letter was signed “Affectionately.” The same writer also sent a note to Stanton on April 18 suggesting that streetcar noise might disturb the next day’s funeral events: “The running of cars upon the street railroads, between 17th Street and the Congressional Cemetery, should cease tomorrow between 11 a.m., and 4 p.m. The rolling of cars, and the jingle of bells will contrast strangely with the solemnity of those sacred hours.”
As the final visitors filed past the coffin, carpenters loitered nearby, impatient to start work the moment the last citizen exited the White House and the doors were shut and locked behind them. If the public had its way, the viewing would have continued through the night. Thousands of people were turned away so the crews could begin preparing the East Room for the funeral. Disappointed mourners would have one more chance to view the remains, after they were transferred to the Capitol.
Harrington had come up with an ingenious solution to the seating dilemma. He would not seat the guests in chairs at all. He had calculated that, allowing for the space required for the catafalque and the aisles, it was impossible to squeeze six hundred chairs into the East Room. He decided that only a few of the most important guests, including the Lincoln family, needed to have individual chairs. But if he built risers, or bleachers, for the rest, he could pack slightly more than six hundred people into the East Room, the minimum number of important guests he needed to seat. The White House was abuzz with activity—men carried stacks of fresh lumber into the East Room, where carpenters sawed, hammered, and nailed them into bleachers.
On the morning of April 19, cities across the North prepared to hold memorial services at the same time as the Washington funeral. Military posts across the nation marked the hour. At the White House, journalist George Alfred Townsend was among the first guests to enter the East Room that morning. As one of the most celebrated members of the press, he was allowed to approach Lincoln’s corpse. His account of the event invited his readers to do the same:
Approach and look at the dead man. Death has fastened into his frozen face all the character and idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave, grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was always sallow. 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. The collar is short and awkward, turned over the stiff elastic cravat, and whatever energy or humor or tender gravity marked the living face is hardened into its pulseless outline. No corpse in the world is better prepared according to its ap
pearances. The white satin around it reflects sufficient light upon the face to show that death is really there; but 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…
Three years ago, when little Willie Lincoln died, Doctors Brown and Alexander, the embalmers or injectors, prepared his body so handsomely that the President had it twice disinterred to look upon it. The same men, in the same way, have made perpetual these beloved lineaments. There is now no blood in the body; it was drained by the jugular vein and sacredly preserved, and through a cutting on the inside of the thigh the empty blood-vessels were charged with a chemical preparation which soon hardened to the consistence of stone. The long and bony body is now hard and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any more than the arms or legs of a statue. It has undergone many changes. The scalp has been removed, the brain taken out, and the chest opened and the blood emptied. All that we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly calculated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that made this flesh vital, sentient, and affectionate is gone forever.
The morning of the funeral, requests were still being made by politicians and leading citizens hopeful that the funeral train would pass through their locale. C. W. Chapin, president of the Western Railroad Corporation, sent an urgent telegram to Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, one of the last men to see Lincoln alive at the White House the evening of April 14, pleading with him to use his influence to divert the funeral train to New England: “In no portion of our common country do the people mourn in deeper grief than in New England,” he wrote. “This slight divergence will take in the route the capital of Connecticut and also important points in Massachusetts.”
To thwart gate-crashers, funeral guests were not allowed direct entry to the Executive Mansion. Instead, guards directed the bearers of the six hundred coveted tickets, printed on heavy card stock, next door, to the Treasury Department. From there they crossed a narrow,
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVING INVITATIONS TO LINCOLN’S WHITE HOUSE FUNERAL.
elevated wooden footbridge, constructed just for the occasion, that led into the White House. A funeral pass became the hottest ticket in town, more precious than tickets to Lincoln’s first and second inaugural ceremonies or balls, and more desirable than an invitation to one of Mary Lincoln’s White House levees. The only ticket to surpass the rarity of a funeral invitation had not been printed yet and would be for an event not yet scheduled—the July 7, 1865, execution of Booth’s coconspirators, for which only two hundred tickets would be issued.
Just hours before the funeral, George Harrington was still receiving last-minute ticket requests: “Surgeon General’s Office / Washington City, D.C. / April 19. / Dear Sir / Please send me by [messenger] tickets for myself & Col. Crane my executive Officer. JW Barnes, Surgeon General.” Harrington could not deny tickets to the chief medical officer of the U.S. Army and senior doctor at the Petersen house, or to his deputy.
As the guests entered the Executive Mansion, none of them knew what to expect. The East Room overwhelmed them with its decorations and flowers and the catafalque. It was an unprecedented scene. Two presidents had died in office, William Henry Harrison in 1841 and Zachary Taylor in 1850, but their funerals were not as grand or elaborate as this. No president had been so honored in death, not even George Washington, who, after modest services, rested in a simple tomb at Mount Vernon.
The scene lives on only in the written accounts of those who were there, and in artists’ sketches and newspaper woodcuts. Somebody should have taken a photograph. Sadly, no photographs were made in the East Room before or during the funeral. It could have been done. Alexander Gardner had photographed more complex scenes than this, including the second inaugural, where he took crystalclear close-ups of the East Front platform and one of his operators had managed to take a long view of the Great Dome while Lincoln was reading his address. Edwin Stanton failed to invite Gardner or his rival Mathew Brady to preserve for history the majesty of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.
At exactly ten minutes past noon, a man arose from his chair, approached the coffin, and in a solitary voice broke the hush. The Reverend Mr. Hall intoned 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.”
Then Bishop Matthew Simpson, who had arrived on time, spoke. He was followed by Lincoln’s own minister, the Reverend Dr. Gurley, who delivered his sermon.
It was a cruel, cruel hand, that dark hand of the assassin, which smote our honored, wise, and noble President, and filled the land with sorrow. But above and beyond that hand, there is another, which we must see and acknowledge. It is the chastening hand of a wise and faithful Father. He gives us this bitter cup, and the cup that our Father has given us shall we not drink it?
He is dead! But the God whom he trusted lives and He can guide and strengthen his successor as He guided and strengthened him. He is dead! But the memory of his virtues; of his wise and patriotic counsels and labors; of his calm and steady faith in God, lives as precious, and will be a power for good in the country quite down to the end of time. He is dead! But the cause he so ardently loved…That cause survives his fall and will survive it…though the friends of liberty die, liberty itself is immortal. There is no assassin strong enough and no weapon deadly enough to quench its inexhaustible life…This is our confidence and this is our consolation, as we weep and mourn today; though our President is slain, 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 held forth for almost two hours, more than a hundred thousand people waited outside the White House for the funeral services inside to end. In the driveway of the Executive Mansion, six white horses were harnessed to the magnificent hearse that awaited their passenger. Nearby, more than fifty thousand marchers and riders had assembled in the sequence assigned to them by the War Department’s printed order of procession. Another fifty thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue between the Treasury building and the Capitol. According to the New York Times, “the throng of spectators was…by far the greatest that ever filled the streets of the city.”
MOURNING RIBBON WORN IN WASHINGTON BY POST OFFICE WORKERS FOR THE APRIL 19, 1865, FUNERAL PROCESSION.
Most of the people outside the White House wore symbols of mourning: black badges containing small photographs of Lincoln, white silk ribbons bordered in black and bearing his image, small American flags with sentiments of grief printed in black letters and superimposed over the stripes, or just simple strips of black crepe wrapped around coat sleeves. Some mourners had arrived by sunrise to stake out the best viewing positions. By 10:00 a.m. there were no more places left to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue.
THE HEARSE THAT CARRIED LINCOLN’S BODY DOWN PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE.
Faces filled every window, and children and young men climbed lampposts and trees for a better view. The city was so crowded with out-of-towners that the hotels were filled and many people had to sleep along the streets or in public parks.
By the time the White House funeral services ended and the procession to the Capitol got under way, the people had been waiting for hours. It was a beautiful day. Four years earlier, on inauguration day, March 4, 1861, General Winfield Scott had placed snipers on rooftops overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue to protect president-elect Lincoln, who had received many death threats from boastful would-be assassins. No marksmen were needed today. This afternoon the only men on rooftops were spectators seeking a clear view of Lincoln’s hearse.
At 2:00 p.m., soldiers in the East Room surrounded the coffin, lifted it from the catafalque, and carried Abraham Lin
coln out of the White House for the last time. They placed the coffin in the hearse. Funeral guests designated to join the procession took their places in the line of march. Everything was ready. Soon, for the first time since the morning of April 15, when the soldiers took him home, Lincoln was on the move again. This second procession on April 19 dwarfed the simple one that had escorted him from the Petersen house to the White House.
Cannon fire announced the start of the procession: Minute guns boomed near St. John’s Church, City Hall, and the Capitol. At churches and firehouses, every bell in Washington tolled. They tolled too in Georgetown and Alexandria. In later years, witnesses recalled the sound of the day as much as the sight of it. Tad Lincoln emerged from seclusion to join the procession, and he and his brother Robert rode in a carriage behind the hearse. The mile-and-a-half trip between the White House and the Capitol took Abraham Lincoln past familiar places—the Willard Hotel, where he had spent his first night in Washington as president-elect; Mathew Brady’s studio, where he had gone to pose for many photographs. His hearse also carried him past the National Hotel, where he had once spoken from the balcony to a regiment of Union soldiers, and where his assassin had spent his last night on the eve of the murder. The procession was immense and included every imaginable category of marcher: military officers from the army, navy, and Marine Corps; enlisted men; civil officials; judges; diplomats; and doctors—“physicians to the deceased,” read the printed program. One corps of marchers suggested the cost of the war: wounded and bandaged veterans, many of them amputees missing arms or legs, many on crutches. The procession was immense and took two hours to pass a given point. Indeed, when the front of the column reached the Capitol, the rear had still not cleared the Treasury Department.
Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis Page 19