Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories

by C. Brian Kelly

  While at City Point the Lincolns took a carriage ride by the side of the James River and came upon an old tree-studded graveyard. According to Simmons, the couple walked hand in hand among the peaceful graves. “Suddenly the President, overcome with emotion, said, ‘Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me.’” The next few words he uttered were startlingly prophetic: “When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.”

  The Lincolns’ visit to City Point (today’s Hopewell, Virginia) unfortunately was marred by embarrassing emotional outbursts on the part of the overly possessive first lady. Mary had always been jealous of the attention showered on the president by other ladies. When she learned that the wife of a young officer had been granted permission to remain at the front, she could not restrain herself. She flew into a rage…but that was just her first display of uncontrolled jealousy.

  Due to review the troops with the commander in chief and arriving in a carriage with Julia Dent Grant, she was shocked and dismayed to find post commander Edward Ord’s beautiful wife riding a handsome mount beside the president. The first lady screamed at Mrs. Grant, “What does this woman mean by riding by the side of the President? Does she suppose that he wants her by the side of him?”

  According to biographer Simmons, Mrs. Grant tried to quiet the outraged Mrs. Lincoln, but Mary only retorted to the general’s kind wife, “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” Mrs. Grant (a slave owner’s daughter who later did get to the White House as a first lady herself) was stunned and said nothing.

  As if the altercation were not yet enough of a scene, Mary Lincoln then dressed down the patient president in front of his officers and men. He tried to calm her by gently calling her by the pet name he often used, “Mother.” The next day the president made excuses for his wife, saying she was not well.

  The Lincolns returned to Washington on April 9, the very day that Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox. On Tuesday evening all government buildings in the Federal capital were ablaze with lights to mark the beginning of peace. From a window of the White House the exultant president addressed a jubilant crowd and magnanimously ordered the musicians to play “Dixie.”

  Just ahead, obviously, would be heady days for the first family. The war was just about over, the family was safe, and Robert had just arrived from Virginia in his Union army uniform. One night that week, however, Lincoln, awoke from a terrible dream. In it, he had wandered into the East Room and saw a coffin with a corpse inside. “Who is dead in the White House?” he asked the soldier in attendance, and the chilling answer was: “the president.”

  Perhaps it was to shirk the gloomy remembrance of the dream (if he told her about it), that the first lady on Friday evening—Good Friday, it was—planned an outing for her tired husband. Knowing how much he enjoyed the theater, she decided on a party at Ford’s Theatre, where the renowned Laura Keene was appearing in Our American Cousin. Mary invited the Grants to join them, but Julia Grant, still smarting from the recent outburst at City Point, sent her regrets. Maj. Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, accepted Mary’s last-minute invitation.

  Earlier that day the president and his lady took their usual afternoon drive in their carriage, just the two of them. “I have never seen you so happy since before Willie’s death,” she said.

  His answer: “Mary, we have had a hard time of it since we came to Washington, but the war is over, and with God’s blessing we may hope for four years of peace and happiness, then we will go back to Illinois and pass the rest of our lives in quiet.”

  It was not to be.

  The lights were already dimmed when the Lincolns arrived at the theater. He seated himself in the red upholstered rocking chair that Harry Ford had placed in the presidential box and had once used in his own bedroom. A guard, John F. Parker, was assigned to protect the president. The Lincolns should be snug and secure in their box. Between acts the president and his wife chatted.

  In these last few happy moments together, Mary drew closer to her beloved Abraham and took his hand in hers. “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” she whispered.

  “She won’t think anything about it,” her husband the president answered.

  His last words.

  The assassin’s bullet entered the back of Lincoln’s head. He would never regain consciousness.

  Mary Lincoln began screaming. “Why didn’t he kill me? Why wasn’t I the one?”

  And so it all ended. Many of Mary’s hopes and ambitions had been granted and many taken away. As she herself described her plight to a friend after the assassination, “My own life has been so chequered; naturally so gay and hopeful—my prominent desires, all granted to me—my noble husband, who was my ‘light and my life,’ and my highest ambition gratified—and that was, the great weakness of my life. My husband—became distinguished above all. And yet owing to that fact, I firmly believe he lost his life and I am bowed to the earth with Sorrow.”

  She indeed became the epitome of mourning. She lived many lonely years and suffered more losses and abandonments. She buried her son Tad in 1871 and felt betrayed by her remaining son Robert when he had her committed for a short time to a mental institution. She exiled herself to Europe, then returned to her America. And in the end she returned to Springfield.

  Mary Todd Lincoln died on July 16, 1882, in the home of her sister Elizabeth Edwards. Forty years before, a gay young woman and her tall gangly husband had left this very house to begin their chequered life together.

  The Civil War—A Short Chronology

  1861

  First year: Confederate States of America formed, February. Inauguration of Lincoln, March 4. Firing on Fort Sumter, April 12. Philippi, in western Virginia, first real battle, June 3. Rich Mountain, also in western Virginia, July 11. First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), July 21. Confederates enter Kentucky, September 3–4. Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, October 21. Provisional Confederate President Jefferson Davis elected president for a sixyear term November 6.

  1862

  Second year : Fort Donelson falls to U. S. Grant, February 16. Battle of Valverde, future New Mexico, February 21. Jefferson Davis inaugurated in Richmond, no longer “Provisional President,” February 22. Ironclads Monitor vs. Virginia battle in Virginia’s Hampton Roads, March 9. Shiloh, April 6–7. Virginia’s Peninsular campaign, April–July. Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, April–June. Second Bull Run, August 28–30. South Mountain and Antietam, Maryland, September 14–17. Lincoln issues his Emancipation Proclamation, September 22 (to be effective January 1, 1863). Fredericksburg, December 13. Battle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, begins December 31.

  1863

  Third year : Chancellorsville, May 1–4, Stonewall Jackson mortally wounded by his own men. Vicksburg campaign under way. Cavalry battle of Brandy Station, Virginia, June 9. Gettysburg, July 1–3. Vicksburg falls to U. S. Grant, July 4. Draft riots in New York City, July 13–15. John Hunt Morgan captured in Ohio, July 26. Chickamauga, September 19–20. Chattanooga, November 23–25.

  1864

  Fourth year: The Wilderness, May 5–6, begins U. S. Grant’s sledgehammer campaign to wear down Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Spotsylvania, May 8–21. Jeb Stuart mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern, Virginia, May 11. Battle of New Market (with VMI Cadets), May 15. Cold Harbor, June 1, as Grant approaches Richmond. Petersburg battle and siege begin, June 9. Battle of Atlanta opens, July 22. Petersburg’s crater explosion, July 30. Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5. Winchester and Cedar Creek mark continuing struggle in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, September and October. Lincoln reelected, November 8. Sherman’s March to the Sea, November 16–December 21. Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30. Battle of Nashville, December 15–16.

  1865

  Fifth and last year : Second Union amphibious assault takes Fort Fisher, North Carolina, January 13–15. Lincoln reinaugurated, Ma
rch 4. Siege of Mobile, March 25–April 12. Lee abandons Petersburg, Richmond falls, Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, April 3–9. Lincoln assassinated, April 14. Confederates under Joseph Johnston surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman in North Carolina, April 26. More surrenders, May 4–26. Jefferson Davis captured, May 10. The Civil War is over.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE AUTHORS WISH TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE CONTRIBUTION TO THIS VOLUME OF several invaluable advisers, fact-checkers, and other helpers without whom we never would have been able to bring forth the foregoing. Thus, our thanks to Ron Pitkin and staff at Cumberland House Publishing, to Sara Kase, an editor at Sourcebooks, and to Shirley Burke Cunningham, our original production manager par excellence and editor (and husband, Jack, not only for enduring many interruptions to a once-tranquil home life, but also as our “Murfreesboro Connection”); to our original production assistant, Ruth Estep for faithful, often “hurry-up” service; and as fact-checkers, proofers, design-and-production mentors, etc., to the late Champ Clark and the Cowles History gang (Jon Guttman, Ken Phillips, Greg Lalire, Gregg Oehler, Lori Flemming).

  Equally important, but in most cases a faceless crowd not known to us except through their works, are all those whose careful, painstaking efforts before ours have produced the great body of literature available on the American Civil War. We thank and acknowledge them with due humility. Since we make no claim to present brand-new material unearthed from previously unknown primary sources, but instead rely upon the narrative nuggets to be mined from previously published material, we hasten to commend to our readers all those who have gone before us as authors in this field, whether as historians, participants who told their stories in print, or historical journalists like ourselves.

  —C. Brian Kelly

  Ingrid Smyer-Kelly

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