Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  14. Chase to Lincoln, Washington, 4 Apr. 1865, AL MSS DLC.

  15. Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [hereafter CWL] (8 vols. plus index; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 8:393.

  16. Noah Brooks, Statesmen (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 214.

  17. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 176.

  18. Brooks, Statesmen 214.

  19. Brooks, “Some Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (1878): 567.

  20. Boston Daily Advertiser, 7 Oct. 1867.

  21. Manuscript of a speech, [ca. Dec. 1865], Douglass Papers, DLC.

  22. Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004), 210.

  23. Lewis Powell told this to Thomas T. Eckert. “Impeachment of the President,” House Report no. 7, 40th Congress, 1st Session (1867): 674.

  24. Eaton to Lincoln, 13 June 1864, in LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), 29.

  25. Charles H. Ambler, Francis H. Pierpont: Union War Governor of Virginia and Father of West Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 254–258.

  26. “Impeachment of the President,” 401, 403–404.

  27. CWL, 8:399–405.

  28. John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers (5 vols.; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993–1998), 1:530 (diary entry for 15 Apr. 1865); Howard K. Beale and Alan W. Brownsword, eds., Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson (3 vols.; New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 2:279–280 (entry for 13 Apr. 1865).

  29. Colfax to Isaac Arnold, 1 May 1867, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Lincoln, 114.

  30. Niven, ed., Chase Papers, 1:530 (diary entry for 15 Apr. 1865).

  31. Douglass, draft of a speech, ca. Dec. 1865, Douglass Papers, DLC.

  32. Welles, “Lincoln and Johnson: Their Plan of Reconstruction and the Resumption of National Authority,” Galaxy 13 (Apr. 1872): 522.

  33. Frederick W. Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, 1830–1915 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 255.

  34. Chambrun. “Personal Recollections,” 33; Lloyd Lewis, Myths after Lincoln (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 38–39.

  35. Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War: With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties (New York: D. Appleton, 1898), 274.

  36. Colfax to Isaac Arnold, 1 May 1867, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Lincoln, 114.

  37. Washington correspondence, 12 Apr., Sacramento Daily Union, 8 May 1865, Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 185.

  38. Welles, “Lincoln and Johnson,” 526.

  39. Stanton to John A. Dix, Washington, 15 Apr. 1865, and Stanton to Charles Francis Adams, Washington, 15 Apr. 1865, OR, I, 46, 3:780, 785.

  40. David Homer Bates, “Lincoln and Charles A. Dana,” in William Hayes Ward, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Tributes from his Associates (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1895), 229.

  41. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:281 (entry for 14 Apr. 1865).

  42. Welles quoted in The Works of Charles Sumner (15 vols.; Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870–1883), 9:479.

  43. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:282 (entry for 14 Apr. 1865); Welles to Andrew Johnson, Hartford, 27 July 1869, Johnson Papers, DLC.

  44. Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman, 256.

  45. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:282–283 (entry for 14 Apr. 1865).

  46. Stanton to John A. Dix, Washington, 15 Apr. 1865, OR, I, 46, 3:780; W. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln, His Last 24 Hours (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987), 40.

  47. Stanton’s reminiscences in a memorandum by Moorfield Storey, 2 Feb. 1868, in Storey, “Dickens, Stanton, Sumner, and Storey,” Atlantic Monthly 145 (1930):464.

  48. Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman, 254.

  49. Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half of a Century: Sketches and Comments (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 222.

  50. Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (2 vols.; New York: McClure, Phillips, 1900), 2:232.

  51. Mary Lincoln to Francis B. Carpenter, Chicago, 15 Nov. 1865, in Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, 284–285.

  52. Hamilton Fish diary, entry for 12 Nov. 1869, Fish Papers, DLC.

  53. Reminiscences of Susan Man Mc-Culloch, privately owned, in Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 395.

  54. Adam Badeau, Grant in Peace, from Appomattox to Mount McGregor: A Personal Memoir (Hartford: S. S. Scranton, 1887), 362.

  55. Carpenter, Inner Life of Lincoln, 62–63.

  56. Ibid., 65–67.

  57. Brooks, Washington, in Lincoln’s Time, 38.

  58. Nicolay interview, Chicago Herald, 4 Dec. 1887; Leonard Swett, “Conspiracies of the Rebellion,” North American Review (Feb. 1887):187.

  59. J. H. Van Alen to the editors of the New York Evening Post, New York, 22 Apr., New York Evening Post, 11 May 1865.

  60. Seward to John Bigelow, Washington, 15 July 1862, in Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life (5 vols.; New York: Baker & Taylor, 1909–1913), 2:548.

  61. Carpenter, Inner Life of Lincoln, 67.

  62. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 246 (entry for 8 Nov. 1864).

  63. Dr. G. B. Todd to his brother, 30 Apr. 1865, in Timothy S. Good, ed., We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 71.

  64. Osborn H. Oldroyd, ed, Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles (New York; Carleton, 1882), 374–375.

  65. Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours, 57.

  66. Colfax, Life and Principles of Abraham Lincoln: Address Delivered at the Court House Square, at South Bend, April 24, 1865 (Philadelphia: J. B. Rodgers, 1865), 10.

  67. Mary Lincoln to J. B. Gould, Avignon, France, 22 Apr. 1880, in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 697.

  68. Dr. Charles A. Leale to Benjamin Butler, 20 July 1867, in Good, ed., We Saw Lincoln Shot, 60.

  69. Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938), 139.

  70. James Tanner to Henry F. Walch, Washington, 17 Apr. 1865, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  71. Langdon interview with George Alfred Townsend, 1883, in Terry Alford, “Why Booth Shot Lincoln,” in Charles M. Hubbard, ed., Lincoln and His Contemporaries (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 133.

  72. John Deery, co-proprietor of a billiard parlor frequented by Booth, New York Sunday Telegraph, 23 May 1909.

  73. Alfred W. Smiley in an interview with Louis J. Mackey, 1894, in Ernest C. Mitchell, John Wilkes Booth in the Pennsylvania Oil Region (Meadville, PA: Crawford County Historical Society, 1987), 72.

  74. Booth to Mary Ann Holmes Booth, [Philadelphia, Nov. 1864], in John Rhode-hamel, ed., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 130.

  75. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 115.

  76. Harry Ford in Kauffman, American Brutus, 218.

  77. James Lawson, the barber, interviewed in 1894 by Louis J. Mackey, in Miller, Booth in the Pennsylvania Oil Region, 70.

  78. Rhodehamel, ed., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, 125.

  79. Ibid., 62–64, 56–58.

  80. Booth to the editors of the Washington National Intelligencer, Washington, 14 Apr. 1865, ibid., 149.

  81. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 124–125.

  82. Edwin Booth to Nahum Capen, Windsor Hotel, 28
July 1881, ibid., 202–203.

  83. Kauffman, American Brutus, 124.

  84. New York Copperhead, 11 July 1863, in George S. Bryan, Great American Myth (New York: Carrick & Evans, 1940), 39.

  85. New York Herald, 19 May 1863, in Kauffman, American Brutus, 200.

  86. Ibid., 121.

  87. Baltimore South, 7 June 1861, in Bryan, Great American Myth, 391.

  88. Cheesebrough, No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow, 42–43.

  89. San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle, 17 Apr. 1865, in Kauffman, American Brutus, 80.

  90. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 124–125, 63–65, 124.

  91. Draft of an undelivered speech, Philadelphia, late Dec. 1860; Booth “to whom it may concern,” [Philadelphia, Nov. 1864], Rhodehamel, ed., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, 59–60, 126.

  92. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 115.

  93. Rhodehamel, ed., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, 130–131.

  94. Ann Hartley Gilbert, The Stage Reminiscences of Mrs. Gilbert, ed. Charlotte M. Martin (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 57–58.

  95. Letter of 28 Mar. 1865 in Kauffman, American Brutus, 199.

  96. Edwin Booth to Nahum Capen, Windsor Hotel, 28 July 1881, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 203.

  97. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 152, 155–158.

  98. Stanley Kimmel, The Mad Booths of Maryland (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940), 150, 175.

  99. Samuel Knapp Chester testimony, 12 May 1865, Benn Pitman, comp., The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators David E. Herold, Mary E. Surratt, Lewis Payne, George A. Atzerodt, Edward Spangler, Samuel A. Mudd, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1865), 45.

  100. Kaufmann, American Brutus, 205.

  101. Richard III, act 3, scene 1; New York World, 25 Apr. 1865, in Kaufmann, American Brutus, 245.

  102. New York Clipper, 29 Apr. 1865, in Alford, “Why Booth Shot Lincoln,” 132.

  103. Kimmel, The Mad Booths, 219.

  104. Booth’s diary, Rhodehamel, Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, 154–155.

  105. Kimmel, Mad Booths, 249.

  106. Edwin Booth to Nahum Capen, Windsor Hotel, 28 July 1881, in Clarke, Unlocked Book, 202–203.

  107. John Deery, co-proprietor of a billiard parlor frequented by Booth, New York Sunday Telegraph, 23 May 1909.

  108. Stephen M. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth: Theatrical Prometheus (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 114.

  109. Kauffman, American Brutus, 84.

  110. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, 137, 136.

  111. Ibid., 323.

  112. Rhodehamel, ed., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, 154.

  113. Alfred W. Smiley in an interview with Louis J. Mackey, 1894; James Lawson in an interview with Louis J. Mackey, 1894, in Mitchell, Booth in the Pennsylvania Oil Region, 72–73, 70.

  114. Good, ed., We Saw Lincoln, 21.

  115. Clarke, Unlocked Book, 107–108, 140, 124, 59–60.

  116. Horatio Nelson Taft diary, 30 Apr. 1865, DLC.

  117. George Francis to his niece Josephine, Washington, 5 May 1865, Lincoln Collection, ICHi.

  118. John Palmer Usher to his wife, Washington, 15 Apr. 1865, copy, Usher Papers, DLC.

  119. Horatio Nelson Taft diary, 30 Apr. 1865, DLC.

  120. Thomas F. Pendel, Thirty-Six Years in the White House (Washington, DC: Neale Publishing Company, 1902), 44.

  121. Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours, 139.

  122. Clara Harris to “My dear Mary,” 25 Apr. 1865, Ira Harris Papers, New-York Historical Society, in Kauffman, American Brutus, 37–38.

  123. Maunsell B. Field, Memories of Many Men and of Some Women: Being Personal Recollections of Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, Presidents, Statesmen, Authors, and Artists, at Home and Abroad, during the Last Thirty Years (New York: Harper, 1874), 322.

  124. Charles S. Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,” Century Magazine, Feb. 1893, 635.

  125. Stanton’s reminiscences in a memorandum by Moorfield Storey, 2 Feb. 1868, in Storey, “Dickens, Stanton, Sumner, and Storey,” 463.

  126. Charles A. Leale, “Lincoln’s Last Hours” (pamphlet New York: n. p., 1909), 11.

  127. James Tanner to Henry F. Walch, Washington, 17 Apr. 1865, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  128. There are variations on this wording, but Stanton said either this or something very similar according to people present, including John Hay, James Tanner, and Charles Taft. Bryan, Great American Myth, 189.

  129. Horatio Nelson Taft diary, 30 Apr. 1865, DLC.

  130. Field, Memories of Many Men, 326.

  131. Horatio Nelson Taft diary, 30 Apr. 1865, DLC.

  132. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:290 (entry for 15 Apr. 1865); Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 192, 196.

  133. Carpenter, Inner Life of Lincoln, 293.

  134. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:290 (entry for 15 Apr. 1865).

  135. Washington correspondence, 17 Apr., St. Cloud Democrat, 27 Apr. 1865, Larsen, ed., Crusader and Feminist, 287–288.

  136. William T. Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial: The Journeys of Abraham Lincoln from Springfield to Washington, 1861, as President Elect, and from Washington to Springfield, 1865, as President Martyred (Columbus: Ohio State Journal, 1865), 127.

  137. Beale, ed., Welles Diary, 2:293 (entry for 19 Apr. 1865).

  138. B.F. Winslow to his grandfather, Washington, 18 Apr. 1865, S. Griswold Flagg Collection, Yale University; Carpenter, Inner Life of Lincoln, 207–208.

  139. George W. Julian, “George W. Julian’s Journal—The Assassination of Lincoln,” Indiana Magazine of History 11 (1915):335; George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884), 255.

  140. Chandler to his wife, Washington, 23 Apr. 1865, Chandler Papers, DLC.

  141. Julian, Political Recollections, 257.

  142. Undated manuscript in the Henry L. Dawes Papers, “The Reconstruction Period, 1865–1869,” in William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 227.

  143. Davis to Samuel F. Du Pont, n.p., 22 Apr. 1865, transcript, S. F. Du Pont Papers, Hagley Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

  144. Washington correspondence, 17, 25 Apr., St. Cloud Democrat, 27 Apr., 4 May 1865, Larsen, ed., Crusader and Feminist, 288, 290.

  145. William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., to Martha Wright, 16 Apr. 1865, Garrison Papers, Smith College, in James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 314.

  146. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 357.

  147. David B. Chesebrough, No Sorrow Like Our Sorrow: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), 69.

  148. T. H. Barr, A Discourse, Delivered by the Rev. T. H. Barr, at Canaan Center, April 19, 1865, on the Occasion of the Funeral Obsequies of Our Late President, Abraham Lincoln (Wooster, Ohio: Republican Steam Power Press, 1865), 10; Francis Le Baron Robbins, A Discourse on the Death of Abraham Lincoln (Philadelphia: H. B. Ashmead, 1865), 13; Gordon Hall, President Lincoln’s Death: Its Voice to the People (Northampton, MA: Trumbull & Gere, 1865), 10.

  149. Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial, 133.

  150. Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (2 vols.; Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925–1933), 2:22 (entry for 17 Apr. 1865).

  151. Shelby M. Cullom, Fifty Years of Public Service: Personal Recollections (Chicago: McClurg, 1911), 107.

  152. Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 April 1865, in Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial, 149–150, 156.

  153. Baltimore Sun, 22 April 1865, in Victor Searcher, Farewell to Lincoln (New York: Abingdon Press, 1965), 99.

  154. New York Evening Post, 26 Apr. 1865.

  155. Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of Abr
aham Lincoln (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1885), 437.

  156. Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial, 265, 222.

  157. New York Evening Post, 24 Apr. 1865.

  158. J. Sella Martin to the editors of the New York Evening Post, New York, 24 Apr., New York Evening Post, 24 Apr. 1865.

  159. Searcher, Farewell to Lincoln, 139.

  160. Ibid., 140.

  161. New York Tribune, 25 Apr. 1865.

  162. Coggeshall, Lincoln Memorial, 199.

  163. Cullom, Fifty Years of Public Service, 107.

  164. John Carroll Power, Abraham Lincoln (Springfield, IL: E. A. Wilson, 1875), 197–198.

  165. Chicago Tribune, 3 May 1865.

  166. Our Martyr President, 394, 401.

  167. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 199.

  168. Mark A. Plummer, Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 110.

  169. Robert Todd Lincoln to Oglesby, Washington, 1 May 1865, Robert Todd Lincoln Papers, IHi (courtesy of Jason Emerson).

  170. H. P. H. Bromwell to his parents, Springfield, 30 Apr. 1865, in Harry E. Pratt, ed., Concerning Mr. Lincoln: In Which Abraham Lincoln Is Pictured as He Appeared to Letter Writers of His Time (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1944), 129.

  171. Sarah Sleeper to her mother, Springfield, June, 1865 (no day of the month indicated), Sleeper Papers, Small Collection 1405, IHi.

  172. Gurley to E. Darwin Brooks, Washington, 22 May 1865, Gurley Papers, DLC.

  173. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 200.

  174. Mary Lincoln to Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, Washington, 29 Sept. 1861, Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, 105.

  175. Ibid., 241–245.

  176. Plummer, Oglesby, 112.

  177. Bayly Ellen Marks and Mark Norton Schatz, eds., Between North and South: A Maryland Journalist Views the Civil War: The Narrative of William Wilkins Glenn, 1861–1869 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 296 (entry for 4 Oct. 1867).

  178. Washington correspondence, 7 Jan., New York Daily News, 9 Jan. 1866.

  179. Ibid.

  180. Jefferson, Ohio, correspondence, Cincinnati Commercial, 2 Nov. 1867.

  181. David Davis statement in the Orville Hickman Browning diary, 3 July 1873, IHi.

  182. Ellery Sedgwick saw three such letters in the possession of W. K. Bixby of St. Louis, who refused to have them published. Ellery Sedgwick, The Happy Profession (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), 163.