Bloody Crimes (46 page)

T
he May 29 issue of the
Richmond Times
shocked loyal Confederates who had remained in the city. “Mr. Davis Manacled,” announced the headline. The news was several days old, but Davis’s humiliation was still raw:

[He] has manacles on both ankles, with a chain connecting about three feet long. He stoutly resisted the process of manacling. Rather than submit, he wanted the guards to shoot him. It became necessary to throw him on his back and hold him until the irons were clinched by a son of Vulcan. He exhibited intense scorn, but finally caved in and wept. No knives

WEEKS AFTER THE FUNERAL, THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN’S SPRINGFIELD HOME DRAPED IN MOURNING, MAY 24,1865.

and forks are allowed in his cell; nothing more destructive than a soup spoon. Two guards are in his casements continually. The clanking chains give him intense horror.

The
Times
did not know that by the time it published its report, public outrage, including in the North, had compelled Stanton to telegraph orders to Fort Monroe to have the shackles taken off on May 27 or 28.

The newspaper report described other details of Davis’s imprisonment: “The windows are heavily barred, and the doors securely bolted and ironed. Two guards constantly occupy the room with him, while in the other room are constantly stationed a commis
sioned officer and a guard, all charged with the duty of seeing that the accused does not escape. Davis is not permitted to speak a word to any one, neither is any one permitted to speak a word to him. He is literally living in a tomb.”

Feeling in the North was mixed about what should be done with the Confederate president. Some people favored execution. Others suggested mercy, if not for Davis’s sake, then the country’s. On May 29, the
Richmond Times
reprinted an article from the Springfield, Massachusetts,
Republican
that warned Northerners of the danger of persecuting Jefferson Davis.

Do we wish to finish the rebellion, to turn out its very ashes? Then make no martyrs. The wounds inflicted in cold blood are what keep animosities alive. At this moment there are a million women in the South who would give all they had to save Jeff. Davis’s life, who would conduct and shelter him…If his life is taken they are ready to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood, to beg locks of his hair, and to perpetuate for a hundred years the sentiment of vengeance. Unless we present them their grievance, in five years he will be remembered only as the author of innumerable woes.

O
n June 1, the North held a national day of mourning for Abraham Lincoln. Across the nation on the same day, communities remembered their fallen chief and the funeral pageant. Frederick Douglass praised Lincoln as “the black man’s president” in New York City at Cooper Union, and in Providence, Rhode Island, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison honored the Great Emancipator. The timing was not auspicious for Jefferson Davis. Given the bereaved and vengeful mood of the North, Davis was lucky not to find himself on trial before a military tribunal with the eight assassination conspirators
locked up at the Old Arsenal. Although Davis did not sit in the prisoner’s dock beside Lewis Powell, David Herold, Mary Surratt, and the others, his reputation did.

But zealous efforts by the government to implicate the Confederate president failed. Indeed, several witnesses who during the trial of the conspirators would give harmful testimony against Davis were exposed as imposters and perjurers. This was the first hint that it might not be so easy to prosecute Jefferson Davis for bloody crimes against the United States. But that did not prevent people from opining on what should be done with him. Through the spring and summer, President Andrew Johnson received many letters advising him to hang Davis or to torture him to death. Few correspondents urged mercy. Hate mail poured in to the Confederate president, taunting him about the terrible doom that must await him.

Two men, one his jailer, the other his doctor, figured prominently in Davis’s imprisonment at Fort Monroe. The War Department appointed a Civil War hero, Major General Nelson A. Miles, to take charge of the state prisoner. Miles, only twenty-six, had fought in the battles of Seven Pines, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, had been wounded in each engagement, and would receive the Medal of Honor for his valor at Chancellorsville. He was not awed by or sympathetic to the rebel president, and he became Davis’s principal antagonist. It was Miles, acting under the discretionary authority granted him by Stanton, who ordered that Davis be shackled. He would regret that decision.

The chief medical officer of the fort, forty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John J. Craven, was a self-made physician, inventor, and businessman, and he immediately empathized with Davis’s plight. He requested an extra mattress and pillow for Davis’s iron bed frame, provided tobacco, and objected to the shackles. Craven saw his patient every day, and Davis charmed—even mesmerized—him. Soon they fell into the easy habit of conducting long conversations
on a variety of subjects. They became friends, and Craven tried to improve the harsh conditions of Davis’s imprisonment in every possible way.

The assassination conspiracy trial continued through June, and its coverage dominated the headlines all month long. Every day, newspapers published transcripts of the previous day’s testimony, and the public devoured each new, sensational revelation. The trial of the century stole attention from other events in Washington, including the first anniversary of the funeral for the victims of the Arsenal explosion and fire. On June 17, 1865, a monument to the women was erected over their common grave. The white stone sculpture by artist Lot Flannery depicted a mourning girl with clasped hands and downturned head standing atop a tall pillar inscribed on three sides with the names of the dead. On the front side was a panel carved in deep bas-relief that froze in time the laboratory building at the moment of the explosion, with rays of blinding light, fire, and smoke. Winged hourglasses ringed the monument to remind all viewers that life is fleeting. But no one was present on June 17 to heed that warning. The monument was erected without a dedication ceremony. The dignitaries and crowds who had thronged there one year earlier were absent that day. No reporters wrote stories. Perhaps the national capital was spent, its emotions drained. Perhaps there were no more tears left to shed.

O
n July 6, the most thrilling news since the capture and death of John Wilkes Booth raced through Washington. All eight defendants in the conspiracy trial had been convicted, three had been sentenced to life in prison, and four would be put to death by hanging the next day. Many Americans, although disappointed that Davis was not the fifth criminal standing on the scaffold at the Old Arsenal on the blazing hot afternoon of July 7, relished the verdicts. By the end of the

THIS FANCIFUL PRINT DEPICTS DAVIS AS A CAGED HYENA WEARING A LADIES’ BONNET. THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION CONSPIRATORS PERCH ABOVE HIM ON GALLOWS, FORESHADOWING THEIR EXECUTION.

trial, sober government officials had to concede that no credible evidence linked Davis to Lincoln’s assassination. The Confederate president felt no empathy for his fallen foe, but would have considered it dishonorable to order his murder, and beneath his dignity to exult in it. If he was to be tried, it would be not for Lincoln’s murder but for treason and war crimes.

Nonetheless, the hanging of the conspirators was an ill omen for Jefferson Davis. It showed that the War Department was ready to impose postwar death sentences, even upon Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the federal government. Soon a Confederate officer, Captain Henry Wirz, would go on trial for crimes committed against Union prisoners of war confined at Andersonville where, allegedly, soldiers had been murdered, starved, and torn apart by vicious dogs. By now Davis had been given access to newspapers, and he must have read accounts of the gruesome hangings—the snap of the rope had not broken the necks of all the condemned and some of them strangled to death slowly—and speculated whether a similar fate awaited him.

On July 13, six days after the execution of the assassination conspirators, New Yorkers meted out symbolic punishment to the rebel chief when they hanged him in effigy. It began with P. T. Barnum. Back in May, when Stanton had refused to sell him the spurious “capture” dress, the brilliant entertainer was inspired to concoct a more exciting exhibit. He created a life-size wax figure of Jefferson Davis, dressed in a bonnet, hoopskirt, and boots, and displayed the mannequin in a tableau surrounded by other life-size figures dressed as Union cavalrymen in the act of apprehending the Confederate president.

This was not the only wax Jefferson Davis that entertained Americans in the summer of 1865. Professor Vignodi, an ambitious talent of the paraffin arts, created a life-size tableau of Lincoln and Booth in the box at Ford’s Theatre, a presidential funeral hearse, and, for the benefit of those who missed the opportunity to view the corpse, a replica of Lincoln’s coffin with a life-size figure of the dead president
resting inside it. He followed up these morbid, self-proclaimed masterpieces with a life-size wax figure of Davis. A third wax figure of the rebel president showed up at a Sanitary Fair in Chicago.

On July 13, a fire broke out at Barnum’s huge, four-story American Museum. While flames engulfed the entire building, thousands of New Yorkers rushed to the scene and watched as the live animal exhibits, injured by hideous burns, fled the museum and died agonizing deaths in the street. The
New York Times
described desperate efforts to save the exhibits. “On reaching the main salon, where the wax figures stood, [a performer] found great confusion existing. A man was endeavoring to save a Swiss animated landscape, while others tried to get out various other articles, including the wax figures…the crowd rushed to the front windows, and speedily emptied their arms of the gimcrack articles, throwing them indiscriminately into the street.” Somebody in the museum tried to rescue President Davis, which amused both the
Times
and the crowd in the streets.

One man had the JEFF. DAVIS effigy in his arms and fought vigorously to preserve the worthless thing, as though it were a gem of rare value. On reaching the balcony the man, perceiving that either the inanimate Jeff. or himself must go by the board, hurled the scarecrow to the iconoclasts in the street. As Jeff. made his perilous descent, his petticoats again played him false, and as the wind blew them about, the imposture of the figure was exposed. The flight of dummy Jeff. was the cause of great merriment among the multitude, who saluted the queer-looking thing with cheers and uncontrollable laughter. The figure was instantly seized, and bundled off to a lamp-post in Fulton Street, near St. Paul’s Church-yard, and there formally hanged, the actors in the mock tragedy shouting the threadbare refrain, commencing the “sour apple” tree.

WITHIN DAYS OF HIS CAPTURE, POPULAR PRINTS RIDICULED THE CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT.