Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis

by James L. Swanson

  To the Davises and their loyal aides, these rude, uncouth, ungentlemanly, thieving Yankee troops confirmed the depravity of the North. Davis and his men refused to show fear and conducted themselves as members of the Southern elite. Their hauteur infuriated their captors. The cavalrymen would find a way to settle the score, not with violence but by degrading Jefferson Davis’s most precious possession—his reputation. Thus, within a few days, began the myth that Jefferson Davis was captured in women’s clothing. If Davis would not behave like a beaten man, then his captors could humiliate and emasculate him.

  POPULAR IMAGES LAMPOONED DAVIS FOR ALLEGEDLY ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE CAPTURE DRESSED AS A WOMAN.

  John Reagan remembered: “As one of the means of making the Confederate cause odious, the foolish and wicked charge was made that he was captured in women’s clothes; and his portrait, showing him in petticoats, was afterward placarded generally in showcases and public places in the North. He was also pictured as having bags of gold on him when captured…I saw him a few minutes after his surrender, wearing his accustomed suit of Confederate gray, with his boots and hat on…and he had no money.”

  Davis was taken from Macon to Atlanta by train on May 14, and then he traveled to Augusta, from where he departed for Savannah.

  On Sunday, May 14, the stupendous news of Davis’s capture appeared in the morning papers in Washington. Benjamin Brown French left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he recalled, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got the arch traitor at last. I hope he will not be suffered to escape or commit suicide. Hanging will be too good for him, double-dyed Traitor and Murderer that he is.” Gideon Welles noted the Confederate president’s capture in his diary: “Intelligence was received this morning of the capture of Jefferson Davis in southern Georgia. I met Stanton this Sunday P.M. at Seward’s, who says Davis was taken disguised in women’s clothes. A tame and ignoble letting-down of the traitor.”

  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, journalist George Alfred Townsend wandered around the White House. He wanted to see, one month after the assassination, what signs of Lincoln remained there. Mary Lincoln had still not moved out, forcing President Andrew Johnson to continue living in his hotel room at the Kirkwood House. Townsend went to the second floor, up the same staircase that Lincoln’s body descended the night of April 18. It was as though Lincoln had never left.

  “I am sitting in the President’s Office,” Townsend reported. “He was here very lately, but he will not return to dispossess me of this high-backed chair he filled so long, nor resume his daily work at the table where I am writing.

  “There are here only Major Hay and the friend who accompanies me. A bright-faced boy runs in and out, darkly attired, so that his fob-chain of gold is the only relief to his mourning garb. This is little Tad, the pet of the White House. That great death…has made upon him only the light impression which all things make upon childhood. He will live to be a man pointed out everywhere, for his father’s sake; and as folks look at him, the tableau of the murder will seem to encircle him.”

  Townsend’s eyes scanned the room. His description of Lincoln’s empty office was as eloquent as anything that had been uttered downstairs in the East Room, or during the thirteen-day journey of the funeral train: “The room is long and high, and so thickly hung with maps that the color of the wall cannot be discerned. The President’s table at which I am seated, adjoins a window at the farthest corner; and to the left of my chair as I recline in it, there is a large table before an empty grate, around which there are many chairs, where the cabinet used to assemble. The carpet is trodden thin, and the brilliance of its dyes lost. The furniture is of the formal cabinet class, stately and semi-comfortable; there are oak book cases, sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer.”

  Townsend watched while the staff cleared out the office: “They are taking away Mr. Lincoln’s private effects, to deposit them wherever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the maps…[they] exhibit all the contested grounds of the war; there are pencil lines upon them where some one has traced the route of armies…was it the dead President…?”

  Townsend walked over to Lincoln’s worktable and saw some books there.

  Perhaps they have lain there undisturbed since the reader’s dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual, a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, “Orpheus C. Kerr,” and “Artemus Ward.” These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard day’s labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped Heights of Arlington, to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this room and its close application in the abandon of the theater.

  I wonder if that were the least of Booth’s crimes—to slay this public servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked for a holiday.

  I am glad to sit here in his chair…

  On May 15, the New York Tribune touted “Our Special Dispatch” received from Washington the previous day: “The public here manifest the utmost enthusiasm over the capture of Jeff. Davis. Some timid politicians, however, express a wish that he had been shot as Booth was, for fear his possession may be embarrassing to the Government.” The editors suggested that he be rushed to Washington for trial with Booth’s conspirators. “If he is placed in the prisoner’s dock at the court, by the side of Harrold and Payne he will certainly be convicted of complicity in the assassination of Mr. Lincoln.” Or, speculated the paper, Davis could be tried for treason. “It is urged strenuously, however, by some in high position, that the dignity of the nation demands that on his arrival here the assassination charge ought to be waived, and he be arraigned and tried for treason, the highest crime known to our laws, and, on conviction, hanged. Secretary Stanton will order Jeff. Davis to be put on a gunboat and forwarded direct to Washington.”

  The Tribune’s editorial page implied that Davis must be hanged, but it opposed a vigilante-style lynching. Let things be done according to the law, the paper cautioned:

  Jefferson Davis is a prisoner of the Government. He surrendered under no capitulation but his own,—which—he being isolated, disguised in one of his wife’s dresses, and directly within range of several troopers’ revolvers—was too sudden to be otherwise than unconditional. Being a prisoner, we trust that he will be treated as a prisoner, under the protection of the dignity and honor of a self-respecting people.

  As we are officially assured that he is proved to be inculpated in the plot which culminated in the murder of President Lincoln, we trust he is to be indicted, arraigned and tried for that horrid crime against our country and every part of it. We hope he may have a fair, open, searching trial, like any other malefactor, and, if convicted we trust he will be treated just like any other. We have no faith in killing men in cold blood, or in hot blood either, unless when (as in battle) they obstinately refuse to get out of the way; but we neither expect nor desire that the execution or non-execution of the laws shall depend on their accordance or disagreement with our convictions of sound policy. But let all things be done decently and in order.

  As soon as the “Davis in a dress” story began to spread, the great showman P. T. Barnum knew at once the garment would make a sensational exhibit for his fabled “American Museum” of spectacular treasures and curiosities in downtown New York City. He wanted that hoopskirt and was prepared to pay a formidable sum to get it.
Barnum wrote to Edwin Stanton, offering to make a donation to one of two worthy wartime causes, the care of wounded soldiers or the care of freed slaves.

  Bridgeport,

  May 15, 1865

  Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War:

  I will give $500 to Sanitary Commission or Freedman’s Association for the petticoats in which Jeff. Davis was caught.

  P. T. Barnum

  It was a hefty sum—a Union army private’s pay was $16 a month—and that $500 could have fed and clothed a lot of soldiers and slaves. Still, Stanton declined the offer. Perhaps Barnum should

  TRUTH VS. MYTH. LEFT: THE RAGLAN COAT JEFFERSON DAVIS ACTUALLY WORE THE MORNING OF HIS CAPTURE. RIGHT: THE SHAWL AND SPURS DAVIS WORE THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1865.

  have offered more money. George Templeton Strong, a New Yorker who kept a celebrated diary chronicling life in wartime Gotham, wrote that “Barnum is a shrewd businessman. He could make money out of those petticoats if he paid ten thousand dollars for the privilege of exhibiting them.”

  But the secretary of war had other plans for these treasures. He earmarked the capture garments for his own collection, and had ordered that they be brought to his office, where he was keeping them in his personal safe along with other historical curiosities from Lincoln’s autopsy, Booth’s death, and Davis’s capture. But the arrival in Washington of the so-called petticoats or dress proved to be a big letdown. When Stanton saw the clothes, he knew instantly that Davis had not disguised himself in a woman’s hoopskirt and bonnet. The “dress” was nothing more than a loose-fitting, waterproof “raglan,” or overcoat, a garment as suited for a man as a woman. The “bonnet” was a rectangular shawl, a type of wrap President Lincoln had worn on chilly evenings. Stanton dared not allow Barnum to exhibit these relics in his museum. Public viewing would expose the lie that Davis had worn one of his wife’s dresses. Instead, Stanton sequestered the disappointing textiles to perpetuate the myth that the cowardly rebel chief had tried to run away in his wife’s clothes.

  Barnum’s failure to obtain the actual clothing did not deter artists from using their imaginations to depict Jefferson Davis in the coveted petticoats. Printmakers published more than twenty different lithographs of merciless caricatures depicting Davis in a frilly bonnet and voluminous skirt, clutching a knife and bags of gold as he fled Union troopers. These cartoons were captioned with mocking captions, many of them delighting in sexual puns and innuendoes, and many putting shameful words in Davis’s mouth. Ingenious photographers doctored images of Davis by adding a skirt and bonnet.

  On May 16, Davis arrived in Savannah, one of the loveliest cities in the South. General Sherman had announced its capture in a famous telegram to Lincoln on December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25000 bales of cotton.” Now a captive in a captive city, Davis did not know it when he left Savannah, but he would return there someday, in an unexpected, triumphant, even miraculous reversal of fortune. The citizens of Savannah would see him again. Davis was put aboard a vessel bound for Fort Monroe, Virginia.

  Now that Davis and all the Confederate armies east of the Mississippi River had surrendered, the Union was ready to celebrate the end of the war in style. On May 18, Grant issued General Order No. 239, announcing that a “Grand Review” of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s Army of the West would take place over two days in Washington, on Tuesday, May 23, and Wednesday, May 24. This extravaganza was rumored to be bigger than even the April 19 Lincoln funeral procession.

  On May 19, Davis, aboard the William P. Clyde, neared Fort Monroe.

  The same day, General James Wilson recommended that all of the officers and men of the First Wisconsin and Fourth Michigan cavalry regiments engaged in the pursuit of Davis below Abbeville receive medals of honor and that the reward be divided among all of the men actually engaged in the capture, with “ample provision being made for the families of the men killed and wounded in the unfortunate affair between the two regiments.”

  Stanton wanted his prisoners transported in secret, and he was alarmed when he intercepted telegrams sent to Gideon Welles by two naval officers. Commander Frailey and Acting-Rear-Admiral Radford sought to inform the navy secretary that the Tuscarora had convoyed to Hampton Roads the vessel William Clyde, with Davis on board. Welles recalled Stanton’s feeling that “the custody of these prisoners devolved on him a great responsibility, and until he had made disposition of them, or determined where they should be sent, he wished their arrival to be kept a secret…He wished me to…allow no communication with the prisoners except by order of General Halleck of the War Department…and again earnestly requested and enjoined that none but we three—himself, General Grant, and myself—should know of the arrival and disposition of these prisoners…not a word should pass.”

  Welles scoffed at Stanton’s obsession with secrecy: “I told him the papers would have the arrivals announced in their next issue.” But Welles indulged his military counterpart: “I, of course, under his request, shall make no mention of or allusion to the prisoner, for the present.”

  Stanton, Welles, and General Grant, who was also present, discussed what to do with Varina Davis and the other women in custody. Stanton exclaimed that they must be “sent off” because “we did not want them.” “They must go South,” Stanton declared, and he drafted an order dictating that course. When Stanton read the dispatch out loud, Welles could not resist toying with him: “The South is very indefinite, and you permit them to select the place. Mrs. Davis may designate Norfolk, or Richmond.”

  Or anywhere. Grant laughed and agreed—“True.”

  Stanton could not tolerate the former first lady of the Confederacy showing up wherever she wanted. “Stanton was annoyed,” Welles saw, and “I think, altered the telegram.” Stanton knew that if Varina returned to Washington, she could be an influential and dangerous political opponent.

  On Saturday, May 20, Davis was two days out from Fort Monroe. In Washington, the Lincoln funeral train, its work done and now back from the thirty-three-hundred-mile round-trip to Springfield, sat at the United States Military Railroad car shops in Alexandria, Virginia. The death pageant had been a spectacular success. Now, on the heels of the Lincoln funeral pageant, Stanton, Grant, and the War Department worked on the final details for the unprecedented Grand Review—the gigantic, two-day parade, the biggest in American history—of the victorious Union armies up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  In Richmond, the population labored to recover from the twin plagues of occupation and fire, not knowing that another calamity was about to befall the city. By 5:30 P.M. Saturday, “portentous clouds” had covered Richmond. Then, as the Richmond Times reported, they “burst forth with vivid lightning and stunning thunder.” This “sudden and extraordinary storm” poured rain until 4:00 A.M., Sunday, May 21, and then, after a brief respite, continued until 1:00 P.M. “Never within ‘the recollection of the oldest inhabitant,’” the Times testified, “has such a destructive rainstorm occurred in this city.” The wind and water seemed a plague of almost biblical proportions. Indeed, “the very floodgates of heaven seemed to open. And so great was its effect that the whole valley of the city was soon submerged in water, overflowing all the streams and washing from their banks a number of small houses, trees, & c.” Wagons, furniture, supplies, and all manner of stuff were swept away and destroyed by the flood. Some people believed the Confederate capital cursed: sacked by mobs, then burned, then occupied by Yankees, and now engulfed by a great deluge. What punishment would Richmond suffer next?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Living in a Tomb”

  On Monday, May 22, the night before the Grand Review, Jefferson Davis was incarcerated at Fort Monroe. He did not know whether he would ever see his wife and children again. When he parted with Varina, he told her not to cry. It would, he said, only make the Yankees gloat.

  In his captivity, the jailers refused to address him as “President
.” They called him “Jeffy,” “the rebel chieftain,” or “the state prisoner.” Soon, through insult, isolation, silence, shackling, constant surveillance, sleep deprivation, and dungeonlike conditions, they would seek to humiliate him and break his spirit. He was, in the words of some newspapers, the archcriminal of the age, a man “buried alive” who must never be set free.

  Lincoln had once spoken of this kind of imprisonment:

  They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and

  PRINTMAKERS CONTINUED TO RIDICULE DAVIS AFTER HIS IMPRISONMENT.

  now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

  But Lincoln was not, in these 1857 remarks on the Dred Scott decision, speaking of Jefferson Davis. He was, instead, speaking of the “bondage…universal and eternal” of the American slave. Now, the leader of the vanquished slave empire found himself locked in a “prison house” as secure as any built during the previous two and a half centuries of American slavery. Millions of his enemies in the North hoped he would never emerge from his dungeon alive.