For the previous three weeks, the newspapers had obsessed over the minutiae of the funeral obsequies. No insignificant detail was too obscure to observe and print. They reported it all by naming, in each city, hundreds of people who had participated in the local procession; by identifying every military unit—and its roster of officers—that marched or rode in the cortege; by identifying every public official and dignitary in the parade, down to specifying in which carriages they rode; by identifying every local civic organization in the procession, including descriptions of the costumes worn by their members; by naming every band and every tune played; and by naming every weeping woman who had laid flowers upon the coffin.
The papers took particular interest in the hearses constructed in each city for the president; they described these vehicles with admiring, exacting, and even maniacal detail. The published description of each hearse was so precise it could have served as a verbal blueprint for the construction of an identical replica without the aid of drawings, plans, or photographs. Newspapers in New York and Chicago gave special credit to the local hearse makers who dreamed up these impossible, extravagant vehicles. Lincoln, who ridiculed decorative excess, would likely have laughed at the sight of them, and been embarrassed that his remains were carted about in vehicles so costly in labor and materials. Some of them looked like small houses, not hearses, and they were as big as the log cabin where Lincoln was born, or the one he occupied as a young man.
Reporters had taken note of every sign, banner, floral arch, or bonfire they saw along the railroad tracks, and they copied down mottoes they saw along the procession routes. In New York City, a book published after the obsequies preserved the texts of hundreds of signs and banners, even revealing where each one was observed. A century and a half after Lincoln’s funeral procession passed through old Gotham, one can stand at 356 Broadway and know that on April 25, 1865, a sign in the window read “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform”;” or at 555 Broadway, where the sign read “A nation bowed in grief will rise in might to exterminate the leaders of this accursed Rebellion”;” or at 759 Broadway, where it read “He was a man, take him for all in all.”
Newspapers published every word of every sermon, every prayer, every oration, and every impromptu speech uttered. Moreover, several hundred ministers printed pamphlets that preserved for posterity the sermons they preached on Black Easter, Sunday morning, April 16, and on the next several Sundays.
Whenever the president’s corpse was carried off the train for public viewing, newspaper stories swooned with lavish testimonials supplied by awestruck journalists. Their accounts of richly designed catafalques lying amid their exquisitely morbid surroundings sound more like the enthusiasms of florists and interior decorators than observations by seasoned war reporters. These death chambers resembled voluminous Arabian tents erected indoors, fashioned from hundreds of yards of black fabric, accented with silver highlights. Newspapers singled out the visionaries who created these fantastic settings. Those lucky enough to view Lincoln’s corpse loved it—they had never witnessed anything as impressive.
Every story mentioned the floral arrangements—their appearance, preciousness, and scent; crosses, anchors, and wreaths of only the choicest japonicas, roses, jet blacks, and other types, either suspended in midair, presented in Greek vases, laid on the coffin, or placed near it on floors carpeted with evergreens.
The combined effect of these black chambers of death, the heaps of beautiful flowers and their overpowering sickly sweet odor, the coffin open to view, and the face of the martyred president, frozen and ghostly pale, must have overwhelmed the senses of the more than one million Americans who experienced it. Jeremiah Gurney’s controversial and long-lost New York City photograph, the sole surviving image taken of Lincoln in death, can only hint at the awesome majesty of the scene.
These stories carried every American who read them to Lincoln’s side and allowed people to imagine what it must have been like to behold his face, or to watch his coffin pass by. And not just in the cities and states closest to them. Journalists made it possible for the American people to ride aboard that train, and to imagine they had marched in every procession, joined every torchlight parade, heeded every prayer, inhaled the scent of every flower, and wept at the coffin’s every opening.
For the one million Americans who had viewed Lincoln in death, the stories reminded them of the wonders they had seen. For the seven million who kept vigil along the route of the passing train, the stories told of places where it had been, and where it had gone.
In the Old Testament, David’s child is struck down by an angry God. “Now he is dead, wherefore should I fast?” David asked. “Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). The Lincoln funeral train fulfilled and simultaneously dethroned the truth of this biblical lament. Yes, he was dead, and the people went to him. But not all of his people could make that journey. So, although dead, Lincoln did return. He returned to the people of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio who voted for him in the presidential elections of 1860 and 1864, and to the well-wishers he met during his inaugural journey east in 1861; he returned to Indiana, site of early boyhood memories; he returned to Chicago, city of his political destiny; he returned to the prairies of Illinois and his old clients; and he returned to Springfield, his home for a quarter century.
Lincoln’s coffin became a kind of ark of the American Covenant, possessing hidden meanings and mysterious powers. The death pageant was both a civic and a religious event. Through the national funeral obsequies, Americans mourned the death of their president and elevated him to the pantheon of American political sainthood, equaled only by George Washington. They honored his achievements: He had won the war, saved the Union, and set men free. They united behind his principles and vowed to bear the burden of his “unfinished work.” And they reaffirmed, by the tributes they paid to him, that his great cause was worth fighting and dying for.
The death rites also had religious significance. Millions of the faithful pondered why God had allowed Abraham Lincoln to be murdered at the height of his accomplishments and glory. Across the country, ministers compared Lincoln’s Good Friday assassination to the passion of Christ. Their sermons suggested a divine purpose overshadowing Lincoln’s death. God had called him home, some suggested, because his work was done. God took him now, others warned, because he would have been too merciful to rebel traitors. Now was not the time not for Lincoln’s mercy, but for justice and vengeance. Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, sensed this mood. “Beware the people weeping,” he wrote, “when they bare the iron hand.” Soon, the fates of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leadership, and John Wilkes Booth’s conspirators would be decided by some of the very people now weeping for their martyred hero.
The twenty-day death pageant transfigured Abraham Lincoln from man to myth. On the day he was murdered, he was not universally loved—even in the North. His traveling corpse became a touchstone that offered catharsis for all the pain the American people had suffered and stored up over four bloody years of civil war. For whom did they mourn? For their slain president, of course. But this outpouring of national sorrow could not be for just one man. “Not for you, for one alone; / Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,” wrote Walt Whitman. And so they mourned, not for this one man alone but for all of the men; for every son, every brother, every lover, and every husband, and every father lost in that war. It was as though, on that train, in that coffin, they were all coming home. Lincoln’s death pageant for Abraham Lincoln was a glorious farewell to him and to the three hundred and sixty thousand men of the Union who, like their Father Abraham, had perished for cause and country.
Years later, General Edward Townsend reflected upon what had been, for him, the journey of a lifetime:
Mr. Lincoln, on his way from Springfield to Washington in 1861, had passed through all the cities where now his mortal remains had rested for a few hours on
their way home. At the principal places he had had enthusiastic public receptions. There could not now be wanting many sad contrasts in the memories of those who had participated in the first ovations to the new President, and who now remained to behold the last of him on earth. Can there be imagined one item wanting to perfect this grandest of human dramas? It is entire; it is sublime!
It took a poet, Walt Whitman, to summarize in a few lines the meaning of it all:
When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, With the tolling bells’ perpetual clang, Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.
Not for you, for one alone; Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring.
After Lincoln was in his tomb, the funeral train party broke up. Not all of the travelers would return to Washington together on that train. Yes, the military officers and the escort would ride back as a group and, once they emptied the compartment of armfuls of decaying flowers, they would take the vacant presidential car back to Washington. The train, which departed Springfield on May 5, would not retrace the identical route by which it had come. Torches and bonfires would not light the way home. No crowds bid the funeral train farewell when it left Springfield for its anticlimactic, homeward-bound journey. Curious eyes might have noticed the train as it chugged east, but huge crowds no longer gathered at the depots to watch it pass, and no one fired cannons.
The elected officials, government appointees, and other special passengers who had ridden the train from Washington to Springfield made their own way back. Their special War Department pass entitling them to free, round-trip travel did not restrict them to the presidential train. Many, including members of the Illinois delegation, tarried in Springfield or visited other local points. Some made stops in other states before they returned to Washington.
In late April, Major General James Wilson, the twenty-seven-year-old Union cavalry prodigy, heard rumors that Davis had left Charlotte and was traveling south through the Carolinas, heading for Georgia. The chase for Jefferson Davis was not like the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. On April 2, the night Davis fled Richmond, Abraham Lincoln still had a war to win. Victory occupied his mind, not the whereabouts of the Confederate president. Once Davis abandoned his capital, Lincoln considered him irrelevant, and certainly not a serious threat to Union military operations. The danger came from the armies of Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. To Lincoln, the fleeing Davis was of little tactical or strategic importance. For other reasons, Lincoln did not want to capture Davis at all. To help heal the rift between North and South, Lincoln wanted no treason trials or prison sentences, and certainly no public hangings. He cued his cabinet and several of his generals on his desires. Between April 2 and April 14, Lincoln issued no orders to hunt down Davis. Instead, Lincoln had issued him an unwritten, unofficial free pass to escape.
That changed with the assassination. Now the federal government wanted Davis not only as a traitor but as a suspect in the murder of the president. As Stanton and the War Department began the pursuit of Booth, the Bureau of Military Justice began building a legal case against Davis. But the capture of Booth, not Davis, was the first priority. Within hours of the assassination, the first cavalry units rode out in pursuit of the assassin. His trail was still hot, he could not have ridden far from Washington, and, as far as Stanton knew, he was alone. Small units of soldiers and detectives could be employed effectively to search Maryland and northern Virginia.
By April 14, Davis’s trail had gone cold. He had traveled far from Washington, and at some points during his escape, he enjoyed the protection of up to a few thousand armed and mounted men. Davis had traveled too far to enlist Washington detectives, or to send small
THE FIRST REWARD POSTER FOR JEFFERSON DAVIS.
cavalry units deep into Virginia and the Carolinas in pursuit. And if they located his position, Davis’s armed escort could outgun them. No, the chase for Davis would require more men, probing deeper south in a wide screen spread across a few hundred miles of territory. The War Department had to throw out a wide net, and hope that Davis stumbled into it. But because the war was not over, and because Booth remained at large until April 26, the hunt for Davis was postponed and did not begin in earnest until early May.
On May 7, Wilson ordered Colonel Robert Minty, commander of the Second Cavalry Division, to, as Minty stated later, “make immediate arrangements to prevent the escape of Jefferson Davis across the Ocmulgee and Flint Rivers, south of Macon.” Minty’s old unit, the Fourth Michigan Cavalry, was in Macon. Recruited in Detroit in 1862, the Fourth was an experienced, combat-seasoned, hard-riding regiment. He directed its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pritchard, to leave that evening in pursuit of Davis. Minty told him where to set up a screen of pickets, but that if he learned that Davis had already crossed the Ocmulgee, to follow and “capture or kill him.”
Pritchard and about four hundred men departed Macon at 8:00 P.M., intending to proceed down the south bank of the river for seventy-five to a hundred miles, scouting the country on both sides of the river “as far as the strength of my command would permit for the purpose of capturing Jeff. Davis.” After marching seventy-five miles, Pritchard arrived at Abbeville at 3:00 P.M. on May 9. There he encountered Lieutenant Colonel Harnden, commander of the First Wisconsin Cavalry, who told him that a wagon train had crossed the Ocmulgee the previous midnight at Brown’s Ferry a mile and a half north of Abbeville.
The Wisconsin men went off down the main road while Pritch-ard’s followed the river route. The two units did not know that they were on a collision course. Before leaving Abbeville, Pritchard divided his command, taking with him 128 of his best riders plus officers. He left Abbeville at 4:00 P.M. and headed toward Irwinville.
On May 5, Jefferson Davis and the few men still traveling with him made a camp near Sandersville, Georgia. The next day, Burton Harrison directed Varina’s wagon train 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, but now finally they were reunited. They traveled together on May 7 and that night camped between Dublin and Abbeville, Georgia.
The president took his eight-year-old son, Jefferson Davis Jr., shooting. Unlike the day in Richmond when Jefferson ordered pistol cartridges for Varina and taught her how to shoot a revolver in self-defense, this was for fun. The boy would have no need to defend himself with firearms. Colonel William Preston Johnston observed the target practice. The president “let little Jeff. shoot his Deringers at a mark, and then handed me one of the unloaded pistols, which he asked me to carry.” When Davis and Johnston turned their discussion to their escape route, the colonel “distinctly understood that we were going to Texas.” Johnston said that he did not think they could get there by going west through the state of Mississippi, suggesting it might be safer to make for the Florida coast and sail through the Gulf of Mexico to the Texas coast. “It is true,” Davis replied, “every negro in Mississippi knows me.” He guessed that it would be impossible to travel incognito through his home state without being recognized by at least one slave.
On May 8, Davis decided to part from his family and at dawn he rode on with his personal staff and a small military escort. By that night he had made little progress through heavy rains, and Varina’s train caught up with him in Abbeville, a speck of a town consisting of just a few buildings. When Harrison finally found Davis, he was sleeping on the floor of an abandoned house. Word of a Yankee cavalry patrol twenty-five miles a
way in Hawkinsville persuaded Davis that his wife’s party should drive on through the bad weather and not stop to rest. He was too tired to leave the house and come outside to see Varina. He would, he assured Harrison, catch up to them after he rested for a while in Abbeville. Later in the night, Jefferson’s party followed Varina’s, and they reunited before dawn on May 9. The two groups traveled twenty-eight miles together for the day, stopping at 5:00 P.M.
Davis decided to make camp for the night with Varina’s wagon train near Irwinville. They pulled off the road, and the pine trees helped conceal their position. President Davis’s escort did not set up a defensive camp, circling their wagons in a compact circle, picketing their horses and mules inside the ring, and pitching tents or laying out bedrolls within the perimeter. Davis was not camping on the western
plains of the frontier of his youth, and he expected no attack from Native Americans during the night. Forming a wagon train into a circle made sense on the wide open plains, but not in the Georgia pines.
If Union cavalry discovered his position and charged his camp in force, his small entourage could not outgun them, and if the federals were able to surround a small camp drawn up in a tight circle, it would be difficult for Davis to take advantage of the confusion of battle and escape. So, instead, Davis’s party pitched camp with an open plan, scattering the tents and wagons over an area of about one hundred yards. Now, 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. A small force of eight to twelve enemy cavalrymen could not gain control of the entire camp, and the men guarding the president had a decent chance of outfighting such a small patrol.
Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis Page 29