Bloody Crimes (9 page)

It was the hot season, when the mosquitoes reigned over the plantation fields of the Deep South. They spread a dangerous form of malaria that the first generations of slaves had brought over from Africa almost two centuries earlier. Jeff and Knox contracted the disease. He almost died, but then, after suffering days of fever, chills, delirium, and nausea, he rallied to live. But Knox, her new husband beside her, succumbed. On September 15, 1835, Jefferson Davis surrendered to the grave the body of his twenty-one-year-old bride of twelve weeks. He was a lost man. When she died, something in him died too. He retreated into a private inner world, a “great seclusion,” he once called it, with slaves and crops and books and his protective mentor Joseph. When Jefferson Davis emerged from that selfimposed isolation several years later, he was a different, reserved, harder, more mysterious man. Knox survives in a single letter to her family, in one to her from Jefferson, and in a lone image, a portrait painted in oils. She was a gorgeous, spirited girl with dark hair and generous eyes. Jefferson Davis cherished the memory of her for the rest of his life.

Abraham Lincoln met Ann Rutledge, four years his junior, in 1831 in the small village of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a surveyor, storekeeper, and postmaster. Ann, engaged to a ne’er-do-well sharp operator who left town and never returned to claim her, grew close to the awkward but interesting Lincoln. He exhibited little of the confidence and extraordinary powers that would reveal themselves later, but the core of his character had already formed. What happened next has been mostly suppressed by historians and belittled by Mary Lincoln apologists for the past one hundred and
seventy-five years, but its truth can no longer be denied. In that tiny, isolated village on the Illinois frontier, Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge formed a deep emotional bond. “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar,” reads Lincoln’s affectionate handwritten inscription in an ancient, tattered book on that subject. Family and neighbors noticed the connection, heard the talk, and observed, by 1834 and early 1835, the familiar, age-old rituals of courtship. No documents survive to prove their love. No letters between them exist. But decades later, after Lincoln’s assassination, his last law partner, William Herndon, collected evidence of Lincoln’s early life from people who knew him, including the old villagers from the New Salem ghost town. They remembered everything.

They told Herndon that it was common knowledge that Abraham and Ann were in love, and that friends and family had expected them to marry until Ann became ill, probably from typhoid fever, and died on August 25, 1835. They could not forget how her death shattered Lincoln, how he visited her grave during thunderstorms and collapsed upon it, embracing her in death, how they feared for his mind and suspected that he might take his own life. In time, he walked in the world again. But after he left New Salem, he never, as far as anyone can tell, spoke or wrote of their bond or her death. Three decades later, when he was president of the United States, no one heard him mention her name. He possessed no portrait of her but for the one locked in his memory. Her death predated the introduction of photography, and anyway who would have thought to make a photograph or paint a portrait of a simple, poor young girl who lived in a little river town on the Illinois frontier? A physical description of her survives. Years later, one of her brothers described to William Herndon the girl Lincoln once knew: “She had light hair, and blue eyes.”

Lincoln served as a volunteer captain in the Black Hawk Indian war in Illinois and Wisconsin in the early 1830s but never faced the enemy. Still, his election by the men of his company as their leader
gave him immense pleasure. Later, while serving in Congress, Lincoln made light of his brief military career, joking that he had fought many bloody battles with the mosquitoes. This was to be Lincoln’s only military experience—until nineteen years later, when he commanded great armies and navies.

Davis also served in the Black Hawk War, holding a superior and more prestigious rank as an officer in the regular army. He earned a singular honor. On a journey from Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, to St. Louis, he was placed in charge of the captured Native American warrior Black Hawk. When a group of white visitors taunted the shackled captive in his cell, Davis rebuked their lack of respect toward his prisoner. Impressed, Black Hawk praised Jefferson Davis as a great warrior and man of honor.

Davis and Lincoln each revered the federal union, but Davis, who had traveled the country and territories more extensively than had Lincoln, possessed far more personal knowledge of its varied geography and vast territorial expanse. Both honored the law, Lincoln pursued it as a calling and Davis thought of doing the same. He wrote a letter saying that he might purchase the books, read law, and become an attorney. Law was a well-established route to political advancement. As young men, each feared that he might amount to nothing. Lincoln wrote that if he failed to make something of himself, it would be as though he had never lived. Davis, on his twenty-second birthday, expressed similar fears. Both yearned to be remembered.

In time, both men rediscovered love. Ten years after the death of Sarah Knox Taylor, Jefferson Davis, thirty-seven years old, married Varina Howell, an eighteen-year-old, educated, savvy, and independent daughter of a fine Mississippi family. When Joseph Davis decided that his long-mourning brother should end his brooding and rejoin society, he introduced Jefferson to Varina. Their first meeting did not go well. She wrote a letter to her mother about it the next day. Mr. Davis, she confided, had an “uncertain temper, and…a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an
opinion, which offends me.” And then there was the age difference: “He is old, from what I hear he is only two years younger than you are.” But Varina also recognized his qualities and was intrigued. Jefferson had an “agreeable manner” and possessed “a peculiarly sweet voice and winning manner of asserting himself.” Her parents did not favor the match, knowing how deeply Knox’s death had hurt—and changed—him. They feared that he would never recover from the loss and that no woman, even their daughter, could win his love. But Jefferson made peace with Knox Taylor’s ghost and married Varina Howell on February 26, 1845. Theirs was an adoring marriage, a passionate and intellectual union that produced six children. For the rest of his life Jefferson depended upon Varina’s love, advice, support, and loyalty. Indeed, two decades later, during his greatest trial and most profound despair, Varina rallied to save her husband, and she rose to the historic occasion.

Abraham Lincoln was not as lucky in marriage. After a few bungled attempts at courting other women, he married Mary Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, on November 4, 1842. They had met in Springfield, Illinois, when Lincoln was a young, hungry lawyer on the rise and Mary was a well-educated, politically savvy woman searching for a husband. It was an ill-starred union that plagued Abraham’s peace of mind and domestic happiness for much of his life, and it climaxed finally in epic conflicts during his presidency.

Mary possessed few of the qualities that defined Varina Davis, who was everything—honest, dignified, courteous, and brave—that Mary Lincoln was not. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was a dressmaker, a free black woman, Elizabeth Keckly, who made frocks for Varina in antebellum Washington and later for Mary during her White House years, and who went on to write a controversial book about her strange wartime role as Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante.

During the war Varina sold many of her fine garments for the sake of the cause, while Mary’s extravagant purchases, the trademark of a compulsive shopper, failed to satisfy her unquenchable taste for
luxury. The real Mary Lincoln was mercurial, jealous, insulting, rude, selfish, deceitful, paranoid, financially dishonest, and, without doubt, mentally unbalanced. During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis’s White House was a sanctuary for the beleaguered president. For Abraham Lincoln, his White House was often a place of unrest and unpredictable marital discord.

During the Civil War both presidents had trouble with several of their general officers who sought to embarrass, defy, and undermine them. Both men mourned their losses in battle, and each experienced death in his White House. Jefferson Davis had lost one son in infancy, and in 1864, another son fell to his death at the Richmond White House. Lincoln too lost a young son long before the war, and his favorite boy, Willie, had succumbed to illness in the Washington White House in 1862.

Neither president enjoyed the universal love and support of his people. Both Davis and Lincoln experienced savage attacks by opponents who criticized their every decision. Mocked, lampooned, caricatured, second-guessed, and despised by segments of their own electorate throughout the war, Davis and Lincoln persevered for four years, each seeking to win his war.

Both men loved books. Davis enjoyed the privilege of a man of his class and built an extensive library. Better educated than Lincoln, he read politics, history, literature, and science, and after Knox’s death it was the companionship of his brother—and a rigorous reading program—that kept him sane. Books were rare in the world of Lincoln’s youth. He did not come from a family of readers—he once wrote that his father could only “bunglingly” sign his own name. Lincoln treasured the few he could obtain. As an adult, he never read as widely as Davis, but he read his favorite texts—Shakespeare, the Bible, and others—deeply and many times to enjoy their language and decode their meaning.

On the nature of man, Lincoln and Davis would never agree. Davis believed that one race of people was fitted by nature for slav
ery and was destined to remain the inferior race for all future time. Blacks would never enjoy the same legal rights as white men. Lincoln rejected that cruel fatalism and came to believe that the institution of bondage itself, and not nature, had temporarily “clouded” the minds of its victims. Once freed, the former slaves, Lincoln believed, would rise through work, ambition, and talent as they enjoyed equal rights under the law.

Lincoln accepted mankind with all its faults. His years as a lawyer had schooled him in the book of human behavior. He had sued—and defended—liars, cheats, thieves, deadbeats, adulterers, slanderers, and murderers. For nearly a quarter of a century, he had immersed himself in a world of vexatious disputes. Lincoln’s experiences had made him resigned and forgiving, not callous and bitter. He rarely held a grudge. He was a skeptic who believed that, with the possible exceptions of his heroes George Washington and Henry Clay, there were no perfect men. Of the first president, Lincoln had once said: “Let us believe, as in the days of our youth, that Washington was spotless. It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect—that human perfection is possible.” When Lincoln was president, he was willing to do business with imperfect men if they could serve his purpose. Lincoln employed and trusted men despite their high opinions of themselves.

Davis lived by a different code and judged men more harshly than Lincoln did. He defined himself as a man of integrity who had conducted himself in politics and on the battlefield in principled ways. Davis tried to be a courteous, loyal, honest man who never stole, accepted graft, or sold his office for personal gain. He was a gentleman proud of the fact that he had never raised the whip to or been cruel to a slave. He could not abide men who failed to live up to the standards he set for himself. As president of the Confederacy, his commitment to the cause was total. He sacrificed all he had—his mind, body, health, and wealth, and the life of one of his sons—to the South, and it was by those benchmarks that he judged others. Because
he acted without self-interest, so should others, he believed, including his generals, his cabinet officers, and the state governors. To disagree with him was to question his integrity and devotion and to risk his wrath. Often, to his disadvantage, Davis interpreted criticism or even helpful advice as an attack on his personal integrity, or as evidence of disloyalty. In turn, critics accused him of being remote, stubborn, and proud. He could be all of those things, but he also brought to his office many superb talents, and a total and relentless commitment to Southern independence. Many men criticized Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee once noted, but no man, he said, could have done better.

These, then, are the stories that made the two men who would, in the spring of 1865, preside over the destiny of two nations. Both were fifty-six years old—born ten months apart—and for most of the Civil War, they had laid their heads on their pillows each night in mansions less than one hundred miles apart, each dreaming of saving his cause and country.

A
braham Lincoln told Thomas Graves that he wanted to see the rest of Jefferson Davis’s mansion. “At length he asked me if the housekeeper was in the house. Upon learning that she had left he jumped up and said, with a boyish manner, ‘Come, let’s look at the house!’ We went pretty much over it; I retailed all that the housekeeper had told me, and he seemed interested in everything. As we came down the staircase General Weitzel came, in breathless haste, and at once President Lincoln’s face lost its boyish expression as he realized that
duty
must be resumed.”

Lincoln quickly put Davis’s home to official use and conducted a meeting there with John Archibald Campbell, a former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Joseph Reid Anderson, two leading Confederate citizens who arrived to see him.

Admiral Porter admired the mansion but judged it less grand than its Washington counterpart. It was “quite a small affair com
pared with the White House, and modest in all its appointments, showing that while President Davis was engaged heart and soul in endeavoring to effect the division of the States, he was not, at least, surrounding himself with regal style, but was living in a modest, comfortable way, like any other citizen.”

With the fall of the city, Richmond’s photographers had lost their prime business—portrait photographs of Confederate political leaders, government officials, generals, officers, and soldiers. Those customers had fled. But George O. Ennis, an enterprising photographer, figured out a way to make money under the Union occupation. Ennis set up his camera and photographed the White House of the Confederacy, and his publisher, Selden & Co., “news and book agents, dealers in photographic and stereoscopic views, fancy articles, & etc.,” located at no. 836 Main Street, packaged it as a carte de visite with a caption sure to attract Union buyers. Selden promoted the former home of Jefferson Davis as the new headquarters of the Yankee occupiers: “JEFF. DAVIS MANSION. This building is beautifully situated, on the corner of Clay and 12th streets, and is noted as being the residence of the late Chief Magistrate of the Confederate States. It is now, and has been since the evacuation, the residence and headquarters of the General commanding this Department.”