Bloody Crimes (34 page)

Thomas forwarded the telegram the same day to Union cavalry major general George Stoneman: “I want you to carry out these instructions as thoroughly as possible.”

Thomas dispatched a second telegram to Stoneman with additional orders:

If you can possibly get three brigades of cavalry together, send them across the mountains into South Carolina to the westward of Charlotte and toward Anderson. They may possibly catch Jeff. Davis, or some of his treasure. They say he is making off with from $2,000,000 to $5,000,000 in gold. You can send Tillson to take Asheville, and I think the railroad will be safe during his absence. Give orders to your troops to take no orders except those from you, from me, and from General Grant.

When Stoneman received these telegrams, he ordered troops to pursue Jefferson Davis, and on April 27 he telegraphed orders to General Tillson:

I want the Eighth and Thirteenth Tennessee, Miller’s brigade, all sent to Ashevile, and as soon as they are concentrated at that point I wish the following instructions carried out by General Brown, commanding the Second Brigade: Move via Flat Rock or some other adjacent gap to the headwaters of the Saluda River; follow down this river to Belton or Anderson. From that point scout in the direction of Augusta, Ga. The object of sending you to this point is to intercept Jeff. Davis and his party, who are on their way west with $5,000,000 to $6,000,000 of treasure, specie, loaded in wagons…If you can hear of Davis, follow him to the ends of the earth, if possible, and never give him up.

A
s the Union prepared to cast a wide net to snare its prey, Lincoln rode through New York State, into the darkness of the night. Edward Townsend sensed that the train had begun to leave behind waves of
emotion that swelled by the hour: “As the President’s remains went farther westward, where the people more especially claimed him as their own, the intensity of feeling seemed if possible to grow deeper. The night journey of the 27th and 28th was all through torches, bonfires, mourning drapery, mottoes, and solemn music.”

The engine pushed on through New Hamburg, North Evans, Lakeview, Angola, and Silver Creek. At 12:10 a.m., Friday, April 28, the train passed through Dunkirk on the shore of Lake Erie. There, thirty-six young women representing the states of the Union appeared on the railway platform. They were dressed in white, and each wore a broad, black scarf resting across the shoulder and held a national flag in her right hand. This tableau proved so irresistible that when officials in other cities read about it in the newspapers, they copied the idea for their local tributes.

The train passed through Brocton, stopping at 1:00 a.m. in Westfield where, during Lincoln’s inaugural journey, he spoke to Grace Bedell, a little girl who had during the campaign of 1860 written him a letter encouraging him to grow a beard to make him more appealing to women, who would then, the child promised, make their husbands and brothers vote for him. Lincoln grew the beard and won the election. Now, four years later, a delegation of five women led by a Mrs. Drake, whose husband, an army colonel, had been killed the previous year in Grant’s futile frontal assault at Cold Harbor, came aboard bearing a wreath of flowers and a cross. The cross bore the motto “Ours the Cross; Thine the Crown.” Sobbing, they approached Lincoln’s closed casket and were allowed, as a special military courtesy to the war widow, to touch it. They “considered it a rare privilege to kiss the coffin.”

At North East, Pennsylvania, the funeral train stopped to allow General Dix and his staff to disembark. He had traveled with the remains since Philadelphia. Before Dix began his return to New York City, he sent a telegram to Stanton, telling him, “Everything has been most satisfactory.”

The train crossed the Ohio state line and passed through Conneaut, Kingsville, Ashtabula, Geneva, Madison, Perry, Painesville, Mentor, Willoughby, and Wickliffe, where Governor John Brough received the funeral party. Major General Joseph Hooker, now commanding the Northern Department of Ohio, also boarded there.

Abraham Lincoln had once given the command of the Army of the Potomac to the boastful general. “You have confidence in yourself,” the president had written to Hooker, “which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality…But…I have heard…of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government need a Dictator.” Lincoln put Hooker in his place: “Of course it was not
for
this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship…And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”

Hooker failed, and after the disaster at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lincoln fired him. When the funeral train crossed the Ohio line into Indiana, Hooker did not disembark. He rode it all the way to Springfield. What must he have thought as he contemplated the flag-draped coffin of the man who had placed in his hands the power to win the war? The train stopped again at Euclid, Ohio, to pick up some of Cleveland’s leading citizens, who had requested the honor of escorting Lincoln’s remains into their city.

O
n April 28, Davis and his entourage stopped at Broad River, South Carolina, to rest and enjoy a lunch they brought with them. The conversation turned to the subject of how the war had ruined them. John Reagan’s home in Texas had been wrecked and partly burned, Judah Benjamin’s property in Louisiana had been seized by the federals, as had John C. Breckinridge’s property in Kentucky. Stephen Mallory’s home in Pensacola, Florida, had been burned by Union soldiers. Rea
gan remembered them using dark humor to lift their spirits. “After we had joked with each other about our fallen fortunes the President took out his pocket-book and showed a few Confederate bills, stating that they constituted his entire wealth.” Davis told his cabinet he was pleased that none of them had profited from his service.

Reagan had seen Davis’s scrupulous principles in action two years earlier in 1863, when an officer brought word to Davis that his beloved plantation, Brierfield, situated on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, would fall into the hands of Grant’s forces within a few days. Losing Brierfield would be a financial catastrophe. Friends urged Davis to order Confederate forces to rush to his plantation to rescue his slaves and other property and move them to a safe location. Although he hated to lose his valuables, he bristled at the suggestion: “The President of the Confederacy cannot employ men to take care of his property.”

Later, when Union forces threatened his hill house in Jackson, Mississippi, the location of his fine and extensive library, Davis again refused to use his official position to protect his private property. “Thus,” testified Reagan, “in his unselfish and patriotic devotion to the cause so dear to his heart he permitted his entire property to be swept away.”

L
incoln’s train arrived at Cleveland’s Euclid Street Station on Friday morning, April 28. Edward Townsend sent word to Washington: “The funeral train arrived here safely at 7 o’clock this morning.” Ever since Stanton’s scathing rebuke for the Lincoln corpse photography episode, Townsend made no more comments in his dispatches to the secretary of war. From that point on, he was all business, stating only what time the train arrived and departed from the remaining cities on the route.

Thirty-six cannons fired a national salute to the president. At that moment, if General Townsend was looking out the window of his car,
he witnessed a bizarre display, perhaps the strangest sight of their journey so far. A woman, identified by the press only as “Miss Fields, of Wilson Street,” had erected an arch of evergreens near the tracks, on the bank of Lake Erie. As the train passed, Miss Fields, attired in a costume, stood under her arch and struck poses and attitudes of the Goddess of Liberty in mourning.

In the days leading up to the arrival of Lincoln’s remains, Cleveland’s public officials and leading citizens had engaged in an orgy of bureaucratic busyness. It began simply enough. First, the city council created a committee of five men—the mayor, the city council president, and three others—that met on April 19, the day of the White House funeral, to prepare for the train’s arrival. Then the Board of Trade created its own committee to “cooperate” with the city council’s General Committee of Arrangements, which responded by increasing the size of its committee from five to twenty-three men. That committee met on April 22 and created nine subcommittees: “On Location of Remains”; “On Reception”; “On Procession”; “On Military”; “On Entertainment”; “On Music”; “On Decoration”; “On Carriages”; “To Meet the Remains.”

At its next meeting, the General Committee of Arrangements established a “Civic Guard of Honor,” then divided that group of dozens of men into six “squads.” Every leading gentleman in town craved the honor of serving on one of these committees. In just a few days, Cleveland had created more levels of bureaucracy to receive the remains in one city than the War Department needed to plan and staff the entire thirteen-day trip of the funeral train halfway across America.

The good citizens were so busy forming committees, subcommittees, and lesser divisions they failed to realize that, until the subcommittee of “Location of Remains” pointed it out, they did not have one public building or hall in all of Cleveland big enough to accommodate the viewing of the president’s remains. They would have to construct a new building in little more than a week. How was it pos
sible? Saner heads prevailed, and somebody suggested a temporary outdoor pavilion. They could make it look like a Chinese pagoda. No one would forget
that.

The committee members were also so distracted that they failed to set aside hotel rooms for the elected officials and members of the U.S. military escort traveling aboard the train. The passengers did not live on the train, which had no sleeping cars. Such cars joined the train from time to time but did not eliminate the need for proper accommodations. The escorts stayed in hotels and dined in restaurants along the route. The Cleveland hotels were so overbooked that even the commanding general of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train could not find a room. Townsend recalled the episode: “To a gentleman, a stranger to me, who kindly lent me his room at a hotel, I was indebted for fifteen hours’ unbroken sleep, to bring up arrears.”

I
n South Carolina, Jefferson Davis crossed the Broad River at Scaife’s Ferry, and then the Tyger River at Gist’s Ferry. That day, in a letter dated April 28, Varina Davis, then in Abbeville, replied to Jefferson’s letter of April 23, in which he had chastised himself for bringing her to ruin. She dismissed his apology, reminding him that she had never expected a life of privilege and ease: “It is surely not the fate to which you invited me in brighter days, but you must remember that you did not invite me to a great Hero’s home, but to that of a plain farmer. I have shared all your triumphs, been the only beneficiary of them, now I am but claiming the privilege for the first time of being all to you now these pleasures have past for me…I know there is a future for you.” But not, she thought, in South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida. Varina advised him to give up the cause east of the Mississippi River. “I have seen a great many men who have gone through [Abbeville]—not one has talked fight—A Stand cannot be made in this country. Do not be induced to try it—As to the trans Mississippi, I doubt if at first things will be straight, but the spirit is there, and the daily
accretions will be great when the deluded of this side are crushed out between the upper, and nether millstone.”

Federal officials may have fantasized that the Confederate president was fleeing with millions of dollars in looted gold, but Davis was down to his last gold coin—and even then he gave it away. John Reagan watched him do it:

On our way to Abbeville, South Carolina, President Davis and I, traveling in advance of the others, passed a cabin on the roadside, where a lady was standing in the door. He turned aside and requested a drink of water, which she brought. While he was drinking, a little baby hardly old enough to walk crawled down the steps. The lady asked whether this was not president Davis; and on his answering in the affirmative, she pointed to the little boy and said, “He is named for you.” Mr. Davis took a gold coin from his pocket and asked her to keep it for his namesake. It was a foreign piece, and from its size I supposed it to be worth three or four dollars. As we rode off he told me that it was the last coin he had, and that he would not have had it but for the fact that he had never seen another like it and that he had kept it as a pocket-piece.

Officially, the president of the Confederacy was now personally penniless, and that might possibly hinder his escape down the road. Davis might need to buy food, pay for lodgings, bribe a Yankee soldier or a Confederate guerilla, pay his way across the Mississippi River, or secure an ocean-bound vessel in Florida. Poverty jeopardized his chances of success. Bestowing his last gold piece to the infant was a symbolic gesture. It was the casting off of all worldly goods. Yes, his caravan traveled with several hundred thousand dollars in gold and silver—not the majority of the Confederacy’s funds—but Davis considered that treasure sacrosanct and unavailable for his personal use. That money belonged to the Confederate government, not its
president. Now the only riches he possessed were the residual love and goodwill of the people. He hoped that, in the days ahead, as he pushed deeper into the Southern interior, the people there would show him better hospitality than he had received in Greensboro and Charlotte. His aides assured him that it would be so. In South Carolina and Georgia, they promised, the people still loved him and believed in the cause.

I
n Cleveland, the hearse transported Lincoln’s coffin to the public square where the pagoda—the city fathers called it the Pavilion—had been erected. The wood structure, which measured twenty-four by thirty feet, and fourteen feet high, was an amazing confection of canvas, silk, cloth, festoons, rosettes, golden eagles bearing the national shield mounted at each end of the building, and “immense plumes of black crepe.” And, as at every other venue along the journey, the interior was stuffed with all manner of flowers. Evergreens covered the walls, and thick matting carpeted the floor to deaden into silence the sound of all footsteps. Over the roof, stretched between two flagpoles, was a streamer that bore a motto from Horace: “Extinctus amabitur idem” (Dead, he will be loved the same). And to set the somber mood, it was raining, “dripping like tears on the remains of the good man in whose honor the crowd had gathered,” according to a journalist’s account written at the time.