Killing President Lincoln was just part of John Wilkes Booth’s larger plan to destroy the U.S. government, and, in his twisted mind, avenge his beloved Confederacy. While Booth was shooting Lincoln, Booth’s friend Lewis Powell charged into the home of the secretary of state, William Seward, and stabbed him in the face and neck. Seward recovered; Powell was captured and hanged. A third member of Booth’s gang was supposed to murder Vice President Andrew Johnson. But he chickened out and got drunk instead. He was hanged too.
Booth, meanwhile, escaped from Ford’s Theatre on horseback and raced to the home of his friend Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated his broken leg. Over the next two weeks, Union soldiers chased Booth through Maryland and into Virginia, where they finally trapped him in a barn. When Booth refused to come out, soldiers set the barn on fire and shot into the burning building. A bullet sliced open Booth’s neck, and he died muttering, “Useless, useless …”
After serving time in a Northern prison for spying, Belle Boyd sailed for Britain in 1864. And when her ship was captured by the Union navy, her story took another amazing turn—she and the Union sailor in charge of guarding her fell in love. Boyd convinced him to run away with her, and their marriage, in London, was headline news across Europe and in America. Boyd began an acting career in Britain, returned to the United States after the war, and continued performing on stage until her death in 1900.
Defending his beating of Senator Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks insisted that he had gone easy on Sumner. “If I desired to kill the Senator, why did not I do it?” Brooks asked. “You all admit that I had him in my power.” Facing possible punishment from Congress, Brooks resigned from the House—but was immediately reelected by South Carolina voters. He triumphantly returned to Washington and served until his death in 1857. He was thirty-eight years old.
John Burns recovered from the wounds he got at the battle of Gettysburg. Soon newspaper reporters and photographers started showing up at his house, eager to tell the storv of the seventv-vear-old soldier. When Abraham Lincoln came to town to give the Gettysburg Address, he met the famous Burns, and the two men chatted as they walked down the street. Burns refused to make a big deal of his role in the battle, though. When asked about it, he simply said, “Oh, I pitched in with them Wisconsin fellers.”
Still recovering from his Fort Wagner battle wounds, William Carney moved back to Massachusetts, found work as a mail carrier, and married a woman named Susannah. He was the first African American to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, but it took a while—he didn’t actually get the award until 1900. When he died eight years later, flags across Massachusetts were lowered to half-mast, the first time this honor had been given to an African American citizen.
The young drummer boy Johnny Clem served with the Union army through the end of the war. Then Ulysses S. Grant tried to help get Clem into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but Clem kept failing the entrance exam. So Clem returned to the army and stayed there his entire career, gradually rising to the rank of general. When he finally decided to retire in 1915, he was the only Civil War veteran still left in the army.
Jefferson Davis did not agree that the South had lost the Civil War. Determined to carry on the fight for Southern independence, Davis was hoping to slip into the mountains of the South and continue leading the war from there. A month after Lee’s surrender, however, Davis was surrounded and grabbed by Union soldiers in Georgia. A rumor soon spread that he had been trying to escape disguised as a woman: “Jeff Davis Captured in Hoop Skirts” announced one Northern newspaper. But this wasn’t quite accurate. What probably happened was that as Union soldiers closed in, Jefferson’s wife, Varina, threw her shawl over her husband, hoping to hide his famous head. So he was captured wearing her shawl, not her dress.
Davis spent the next two years in prison, charged with treason against the United States. He was never actually put on trial, though, and was released in 1867. Right up until his death in 1889, Davis continued to proudly insist that the South had been justified in seceding from the Union.
After her husband’s death, Varina Davis shocked her Southern friends by moving to New York City and supporting herself by writing newspaper articles. One day there was a knock on Varina’s hotel room door. She opened the door and the woman in the doorway said:
“Hello, I am Mrs. Grant.”
“I am very glad to meet you,” Varina said to Julia Grant. “Come in.”
Varina Davis and Julia Grant became close friends and were often seen around town together. Both women hoped their visible friendship would help heal the deep wounds left by the Civil War. Varina lived well into the twentieth century—she even rode in a car in 1906 (she didn’t like it). She died in New York, but was buried beside her husband in Richmond.
After the war Frederick Douglass continued his nonstop travels, speaking and writing in defense of the rights of African Americans. While traveling in Maryland in 1877, Douglass was surprised to get a note from Thomas Auld, the man who had owned him nearly forty years before. Auld was dying and wanted to see Douglass one last time. Douglass entered the house and stepped up to Auld’s bedside. Auld reached out a trembling hand, and Douglass took it in his own. Then Auld began to weep. Douglass sat down and the two men talked over old times. Then Douglass got back to work. “Forty years of my life have been given to the cause of my people,” he wrote in his autobiography. “And if I had forty years more they should all be sacredly given to the great cause.”
After losing the presidential election of 1860 to Abraham Lincoln, Stephen “the Little Giant” Douglas truly acted like a giant. Putting aside his bitter rivalry with Lincoln, Douglas promised to do everything in his power to help the new president save the Union. As the two men shook hands, tears came to Lincoln’s eyes and he said, “God bless you, Douglas.” Douglas used every ounce of energy in his body trying to persuade Southerners to give President Lincoln a chance. Weakened, exhausted, and disappointed, he died of a fever in June 1861, two months after the war began.
Sarah Emma Edmonds, or “Frank Thompson” as she was known to her fellow Union soldiers, served in the Union army as a nurse and spy—and her secret identity was never discovered. She volunteered for several dangerous spying missions, sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as characters including an escaped slave and an overweight Irish peddler named “Bridget O’Shea.” Edmonds married after the war and had three sons. “I am naturally fond of adventure,” she said. “But patriotism was the true secret of my success.”
Ulysses S. Grant always regretted not going to the play with Lincoln that famous night. Had he been there, he wondered, would he have heard Booth opening the door to Lincoln’s box? Could he have grabbed Booth before the killer had a chance to pull the trigger?
Just forty-three years old when the war ended, Grant decided to start a new career in politics. And he got off to a good start, winning the presidential election of 1868. But it turned out he was a much better soldier than politician. He had the embarrassing habit of giving key government jobs to old army friends who were completely unqualified.
After two terms in the White House, Ulysses and Julia Grant moved to New York City, where Ulysses immediately lost all their money in bad investments. Then his doctor told him he had throat cancer and had only a few months to live. Displaying his famously fierce determination, Grant raced against death to finish an autobiography, which he hoped would earn some money for his family. Wrapped in blankets, suffering from soaring fevers and piercing pain, Grant finished the book just days before he died. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant was a huge success. Later that year the publishers handed Julia Grant a check for $200,000.
“Wild Rose” O’Neal Greenhow spied for the Confederacy until Union police kicked her out of Washington, D.C., in 1862. Next, at Jefferson Davis’s request, she traveled to Europe and tried to persuade big shots there to support the South. Sailing back to the Confederacy in 1864, her ship was chased by a Union gunboat and slammed into a sandbar off th
e coast of North Carolina. Determined to avoid capture, Greenhow jumped onto a lifeboat and rowed toward land. The boat tipped over in a storm and she drowned.
Exhausted and broke after the war, Robert E. Lee took the job of president of Washington College in Virginia (now Washington and Lee University). Lee needed the income, but he also wanted to set an example for his fellow Southerners; he urged them to put the war behind them and help prepare the country for a better future. “We wish now for good feeling to grow up between North and South,” he said.
Lee’s health never fully recovered from four years of war, and his body weakened quickly in the fall of 1870. One afternoon as Lee was leaving his office, a student showed up with Lee’s picture, hoping the general would sign it for a girl he knew back home. But Lee looked very tired,.so the student said he’d come back some other time. “No,” Lee said, “I will go right back and do it now.” It was the last time Lee signed his name. He died at home two weeks later.
“There was a cheerless cold rain and everything seemed gloomy.” That’s how the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, described the morning of April 15, the morning Abraham Lincoln died. Welles watched Lincoln breathe his last breath, then walked to the White House, where he saw hundreds of African American women and children standing in front of the building, crying in the rain.
The shocking news of Lincoln’s death spread across the nation that morning.
People in Philadelphia read the news on their way to work, and the city’s streetcars were soon filled with weeping men. In Boston a thousand people started marching together through the street—not knowing why, just silently marching. Church bells tolled all over the North, and colorful flags celebrating the Union victory were taken down. Teachers told their students to go home, there would be no school that day.
White Southerners were stunned too, for a different reason. Mary Chesnut spoke for many when she said, “I know this foul murder will bring upon us worse miseries.” She may not have liked Lincoln, but she feared that without his strong leadership and sense of justice, the process of Reconstruction was going to be much harder on the South. She was right.
Lincoln’s body, meanwhile, was taken by train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois—the same route Lincoln had taken from Springfield to Washington just over four years before. After facing fierce criticism every day of his presidency, Lincoln would probably be amazed to find out that these days historians usually rank him as the greatest president in American history.
Life never got any easier for Mary Lincoln. Never really recovered from the death of her son Willie, she was shattered by the shock of seeing her husband murdered. After selling her jewelry and clothes to pay off family debts, Mary sailed to Europe with her son Tad. Just as they were becoming best friends, she watched him get sick and die at the age of eighteen. “Now in this world,” she said, “there is nothing left for me but the deepest anguish and desolation.” Mary began showing signs of mental illness, often sitting alone in the dark and mumbling about people who were trying to kill her. Her only remaining son, Robert, actually had her declared insane. After being confined in a nursing home for a few months, Mary moved into her sister’s house in Springfield, Illinois. She died there in 1882 and was buried beside her husband.
James Longstreet, the man General Lee called “My Old War Horse,” fought by Lee’s side until the surrender at Appomattox. But people always need someone to blame when they lose a war, and Southerners loved Lee too much to pick him. So they blamed Longstreet, claiming he had failed to follow Lee’s orders at key battles such as Gettysburg. Longstreet defended himself, suggesting that Lee’s poor strategy at Gettysburg had been the real cause of defeat. For this he was considered a traitor by many Southerners. Luckily, tempers have calmed a bit over 150 years, and Longstreet’s reputation as a soldier has been making a strong comeback.
George McClellan thought voters had made a poor choice in selecting Lincoln over him in the presidential election of 1864. Still, he was a bit relieved he would not have to run the country. “I feel that a great weight is removed from my mind,” he said. McClellan began writing a book about his experiences in the war, hoping, as he said, “to place my side of the story on the record.” His book was destroyed in a fire, though, and before he could finish rewriting it, he died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-eight. One of Mac’s friends finished the book for him, calling it McClellan’s Own Story and spicing it up by adding the general’s private letters—letters with nasty remarks about Abraham Lincoln that poor Mac had never intended to be made public. Said one harsh reviewer of McClellan’s Own Story: “It were better for his memory had he left his story untold.”
The Union soldier John Ransom survived fourteen months as a prisoner of war, watching many friends die of starvation and disease. He escaped, was captured, escaped again, and finally made it to freedom thanks to several enslaved men and women who fed him and guided him to a Union army camp. He was thrilled to see soldiers from his hometown, and he recalled they “could hardly believe it was myself that appeared to them.” With good reason—the Union army had reported Ransom dead a year before. But he was very much alive, and stayed that way until 1919.
“I am sick and tired of fighting,” William T. Sherman griped at the end of the war. But he was a soldier at heart, and he stayed in the army, taking over from Grant as top commander in 1869. This was a time when the army was battling several Native American tribes in the West. Sherman drove the tribes onto reservations using the same merciless fighting style he had used in the South. He retired in 1884 and spent the last few years of his life doing what he really loved: going to the theater and attending fancy dinner parties at least four nights a week. Wherever he went he was surrounded by former soldiers who wanted to shake his hand. They called him “Uncle Billy.” He called them “my boys.”
Just how important was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin? When Stowe visited the White House during the war, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to her: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!” Stowe’s long writing career included thirty much less famous books, none of which caused armed conflict. She and her family moved around a bit, finally settling in Hartford, Connecticut, where she lived next door to Mark Twain.
Suffering from headaches and nightmares, Charles Sumner did not return to the Senate until 1859, three years after being beaten by Preston Brooks. He resumed his role as a leading abolitionist, and after the war he tried to persuade Congress to pass a bill banning racial segregation in the United States. On his deathbed in 1874, surrounded by senators, his final words were: “Save my civil rights bill.” And Congress did pass a civil rights law banning segregation—ninety years later.
After cruising the Confederate ship Planter to freedom, Robert Smalls continued working as a naval pilot—only now he was a free man, fighting for the Union. He returned to South Carolina after the war and bought the house in which he and his family had lived as slaves. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1874, Smalls spoke out often against new laws in the South that were denying African Americans the rights they had won after the Civil War. “All they need,” Smalls said of his fellow African Americans, “is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
On her way back to New York after war, Harriet Tubman got a cruel preview of the rough road ahead for African Americans in both the North and South. As her train passed through New Jersey, a conductor told her that black passengers were not welcome in the main car. “Hustle out of here,” he said, telling her to go sit with the baggage. She refused. He tried to grab her, but she was too strong for him. Finally three men lifted Tubman and tossed her into the baggage car, breaking her arm in the process.
Tubman lived another forty-eight years, and she was busy the entire time. In addition to speaking at women’s voting rights meetings, she was dedicated to helping African Americans in her community. In 1908 she opened Harriet Tubman House, a home for poor and elderly African Americans.
She was eighty-five.
Under the name “Lieutenant Harry T. Buford,” Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in several major battles and was wounded at Shiloh while burying bodies near the battlefield. When the surgeon treating her discovered her secret, Velazquez quit the army and decided to become a spy instead. Now wearing women’s clothing, she somehow managed to sit in on strategy meetings with Abraham Lincoln. At least, that’s what she said in her 1876 autobiography, The Woman in Battle. To this day, historians disagree about how much of her book is true.
Confessions of a Textbook Writer
If you promise not to get too mad, I’ll tell you a secret. I used to write textbooks.
Yes, it’s true. I helped write those big books that break your back when you carry them and put you to sleep when you read them. But let me say one thing in my own defense: I never meant for them to be boring!
Two Miserable Presidents Page 15