This Great Struggle (59 page)

Holding his loaded and cocked, single-shot .44-caliber Deringer pistol, Booth edged closer to Lincoln’s back, close enough to have reached out and touched the president, as actor Harry Hawk, in the role of Asa Trenchard, now held the stage alone and led up to his roundhouse denunciation of the avaricious Mrs. Mountchessington. “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?” bellowed Hawk. “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal, you sockdologizing old mantrap.”

As the house rang with laughter, few theatergoers noticed the muffled report of the pistol or the puff of white powder smoke in the presidential box. In the seconds that followed, however, more of them became aware of what appeared to be a scuffle in the presidential box. Major Rathbone stepped toward Booth, who slashed the officer’s arm with a large knife, then clambered over the rail and leaped to the stage. Catching one of his spurs on the bunting, he landed awkwardly and stumbled. Limping to center stage he waved his knife and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis”—so always to tyrants. It was the state motto of Virginia and supposedly what Brutus had said when he killed Julius Caesar. Booth may also have added, “The South is avenged.” Accounts vary. Then he turned and fled, slashing wildly and ineffectually at the terrified Hawk, who was only too eager to get out of his way. Offstage and out a back door of the theater went the assassin, then into the alley, where a horse was waiting for him. Hurriedly mounting despite the pain of what would turn out to be a broken bone in his lower leg, he was off for the Maryland countryside. The crowd, some of whom still thought that the whole bizarre spectacle was part of the evening’s entertainment, had been too stunned to react.

Into the shocked moment of silence that followed came Major Rathbone’s shout, “Stop that man!” and Clara Harris’s cry, “He has shot the President!” Another moment of speechless silence, and then pandemonium broke loose. Among the bedlam, three off-duty army surgeons made their way to the box to tend Lincoln’s wound. The bullet entered behind the president’s left ear and lodged behind his right eye. A brief examination was all that was needed to show these men, who shared vast experience in gunshot wounds, that the president could not live more than a few hours. Believing the half-mile carriage ride on Washington’s rutted streets might cause the president’s immediate death, they carried him out of the crowded theater and across the street to the boardinghouse of William Peterson. There at 7:22 the next morning Lincoln died without having regained consciousness since the shooting.

At about the same time that Booth shot Lincoln, his accomplice Powell bluffed his way into the Seward house with the false story of being a delivery-man for a pharmacy. The secretary of war had recently suffered severe injury in a carriage accident and was confined to bed. Forcing his way through the house and into Seward’s sickroom, Powell pistol-whipped the secretary’s grown son, Frederick, and attacked the helpless man in his bed, stabbing him several times but failing to kill him. The brave resistance of Seward’s male nurse, an army sergeant, as well as his other grown son, and the screams of Seward’s daughter, which threatened to bring rescuers to the house, finally persuaded the hulking Powell to flee. George Atzerodt, whom Booth had assigned to assassinate Vice President Johnson at his room at the Kirkwood House, instead spent the night in a bar getting drunk.

Lincoln’s death called forth a mighty wave of anger and grief throughout the North. Thousands filed past his casket as it lay in state under the rotunda of the Capitol. Hundreds of thousands more paid their respects at the many cities and towns where his funeral train paused in its twelve-day trip back to Springfield, retracing the roundabout route of Lincoln’s journey from the Prairie State to Washington for his first inauguration little more than four years before. On the way, Lincoln lay in state in Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago—eleven cities in all. And between cities, among the small towns and farmlands not meriting formal stops, additional thousands of Americans stood with bowed heads along the railroad right-of-way as the brightly polished funeral train, draped in mourning and decorated with U.S. flags and a portrait of Lincoln just below the headlight, rolled by at a stately twenty miles per hour.

The anger was directed toward anyone whom people saw as being behind the assassination or in some way responsible for it or potentially profiting from it. The feeling was most dangerous among the hardhanded midwestern soldiers who filled the ranks of Sherman’s armies, then encamped not far from Raleigh, North Carolina, while their commander negotiated for the surrender of Johnston’s Confederate army. The Army of the Tennessee, the most consistently successful of the Union armies, had more regiments from Lincoln’s home state of Illinois than from any other. On the night news arrived of the assassination, a large body of its troops set out in a blind rage with the purpose of laying the capital city of North Carolina in ashes. Even an appeal from John Logan, their favorite general, who had led them to victory at the Battle of Atlanta, went unheeded. Logan finally had to deploy a battery of artillery and threaten to blast his own men with canister before they would turn back. A number of soldiers wrote in diaries and letters that if the surrender negotiations should fall through and the war continue a few more weeks, the South would feel the hard hand of war to a degree not previously imagined. Fortunately, it never came to that. Many southerners also expressed sadness at Lincoln’s murder if for no other reason than that it would obviously lead to much harsher treatment for the conquered South.

Booth and his accomplices were the subjects of an unprecedented manhunt, with massive rewards offered for information leading to their apprehension. After his escape from Washington immediately after the crime, Booth joined fellow conspirator David Herold and made his way southeastward through a part of Maryland in which support for the Confederacy had been strong, receiving help at several points along the way from members of the former Confederate espionage network. Dr. Samuel Mudd set Booth’s broken leg early on the morning of April 15, while Lincoln still clung to life back at the Peterson House. Booth and Herold crossed the Potomac by boat on the night of April 23 and continued their journey south, still aided by members of the Confederate espionage ring of which Booth had been part. Tips from various sources led searching Union cavalry three nights later to the farm of Richard H. Garrett, south of the Rappahannock River in Caroline County, Virginia, where Booth and Herold were staying under aliases. Cornered in Garrett’s tobacco barn, Herold came out and surrendered, but Booth, brandishing a revolver and visible through the slats in the building’s semiopen sides, refused and was fatally shot by one of the cavalrymen.

In addition to Herold, seven more of Booth’s accomplices were rounded up in the days following the assassination and subsequently tried and convicted. Herold, Powell, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, whose Washington boardinghouse had been the headquarters for the espionage ring and for the Lincoln murder conspiracy, were hanged in Washington that summer. The others received prison sentences, all of which concluded with their pardon in 1869 by Andrew Johnson.

The final surrender of Confederate troops east of the Mississippi took place at Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, the same day Lincoln was buried up in Springfield. On May 10 Union cavalry captured Jefferson Davis, and President Johnson issued a proclamation stating that armed resistance was at an end, though the last skirmish between organized troops of the Union and Confederacy did not take place until May 12, at Brazos Santiago, Texas. On May 23 the Army of the Potomac paraded through the streets of Washington, between sidewalks packed with cheering citizens. The event was known as the Grand Review, and it continued the next day when Sherman’s western armies paraded through Washington to a similar heroes’ reception. The conventional war—the war of waving flags, marching armies, and thundering cannon—was over. But the conflict to shape the society that would emerge from the great struggle was only beginning.

14

RECONSTRUCTION

PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

E
ver since 1865, people who have taken an interest in Reconstruction have asked themselves and each other how the process and the period might have been different if Lincoln had lived to preside over its first four years. Of course, we can never know what Lincoln would have done, but we can take an educated guess or two based on his previous actions.

As president-elect, Lincoln had been willing to accept even a constitutional amendment stipulating that the Constitution could never be amended so as to ban slavery, if such an amendment would satisfy white southerners and persuade them to step back from secession. Southern leaders were not satisfied, and so the proposal went nowhere. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln had gone out of his way to reassure southerners of his peaceful intent. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine,” Lincoln had said, “is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’” But when the secessionists had become the aggressors, Lincoln had held firm to his oath and his purpose of preserving the Union and had accepted war. He had held to a conciliatory policy during the first year of the war, hoping the Rebels would not persevere in secession. When they proved intransigent, he took the further step of emancipation.

Throughout the deepening crisis, Lincoln had shown himself eager to conciliate but willing to be firm if pushed. At the heart of Lincoln’s greatness as a statesman was the fact that he kept a firm grip on a few very clear moral goals and pursued them unflinchingly, no matter where that led him. He was committed to securing freedom for the slaves, and for Lincoln freedom included the opportunity of bettering one’s lot in life. He was also on record that at least some of the slaves should vote. It is easy to imagine that had he lived, he would have shaped his course by those landmarks. Perhaps he would have met southern cooperation with generosity, but in the face of intransigence, he might well have shown as much firmness, determination, and willingness to take harsh measures as he had done during the war’s conventional phase. We can never know. One thing is certain, though, and that is that the process of Reconstruction was going to be much more difficult without Lincoln.

His successor, Andrew Johnson, had been born to poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. Apprenticed as a tailor, young Johnson had run away to Greeneville, Tennessee, several years later, where he married a wife who bore him five children and taught him to read and cipher. Elected alderman at age twenty-one, Johnson went on, through the usual ups and downs of politics, to be mayor, state legislator, congressman, governor, and finally U.S. senator. That was the office he held at the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnson saw himself as the champion of the poor and middling whites of the South, hostile to slaveholders but at best indifferent to their slaves. He was a Buchanan Democrat in the 1850s, but when secession came, Johnson, alone among U.S. senators from seceding states, remained loyal to the Union. In 1862 Lincoln appointed him military governor over the Union-occupied portion of the state, and two years later the Republicans, in their National Union Party guise, tapped him as Lincoln’s second-term vice president.

He got off to a bad start as vice president. Johnson, who did not have the reputation of a problem drinker, was sick with typhoid fever on inauguration day and had taken a drink or two of whiskey, which in those days was considered to have medicinal value. The Senate chamber, in which the vice-presidential inauguration took place, was stuffy, and the liquor seemed to affect Johnson more strongly than he anticipated. After taking the oath of office, he gave a rambling, incoherent speech that did nothing to enhance his standing in the capital city.