Bloody Crimes (53 page)

A PHANTOM TRAIN
THE DEAD LINCOLN’S YEARLY TRIP OVER THE
NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILROAD

A correspondent in the Albany (N.Y.)
Evening Times
relates a conversation with a superstitious night watchman on the New York Central Railroad. Said the watchman: “I believe in spirits and ghosts. I know such things exist. If you will come up in April I will convince you.” He then told of the phantom train that every year comes up the road with the body of Abraham Lincoln. Regularly in the month of April, about midnight, the air on the track becomes very keen and cutting. On either side it is warm and still. Every watchman when he feels this air steps off the track and sits down to watch. Soon after the pilot engine, with long black streamers, and a band of black instruments, playing dirges, grinning skeletons sitting all about, will pass up noiselessly, and the very air grows black. If it is moonlight clouds always come over the moon, and the music seems to linger, as if frozen with horror. A few moments after and the phantom train glides by. Flags and streamers hang about. The
track ahead seems covered with black carpet, and the wheels are draped with the same. The coffin of the murdered Lincoln is seen lying on the centre of the car, and all about it in the air and the train behind are vast numbers of blue-coated men, some with coffins on their backs, others leaning on them.

Many spirits, claimed the storyteller, accompanied Lincoln:

It seems then that all the vast armies that died during the war are escorting the phantom train of the President. The wind, if blowing, dies away at once, and all over the earth a solemn hush, almost stifling, prevails. If a train were passing, its noise would be drowned in silence, and the phantom train would ride over it. Clocks and watches would always stop, and when looked at are found to be from five to eight minutes behind. Everywhere on the road, about the 27th of April, the time of watches and trains is found suddenly behind. This, said the leading watchman, was from the passage of the phantom train.

More tangible than any ghost trains are the railroad tracks. For the most part, the route followed by the Lincoln funeral train still exists, marked by ancient railroad beds and the villages, towns, and cities on the map when the train passed by. Yes, the aging iron rails forged by the Civil War were replaced long ago, but track locations rarely change, and many of the same railroad beds over which Lincoln’s coffin rode are still in the same place, a hundred and fifty years later. Few of the residents who live along the route today know about the torches, bonfires, arches, cannon fire, and huge crowds, or that Lincoln’s corpse once passed that way, and perhaps even stopped in their town.

New Yorkers who commute daily from their bedroom communities along the Hudson River, north of Manhattan, have no idea when they return home each night that they are traveling over the

AN EXCEPTIONAL SOUVENIR: A PORCELAIN MEMORIAL OBELISK.

same route taken by the Lincoln funeral train. The stops, Hastings-on-Hudson, Tarrytown, Ossining, Croton, and beyond, are the same ones called out by the conductor on Lincoln’s train. Every day in America, thousands of railroad passengers, unbeknownst to them, follow the route of the funeral train.

Other vivid and more venerated evidence of the death pageant survives: the blood relics—locks of Lincoln’s hair, tiny pieces of his skull, the probe and other medical instruments, bloodstained pillows and towels, the physicians’ bloody shirt cuffs; the fatal bullet, of course; and still more death relics, lurid and macabre ones, best not spoken of. Many of them repose in the Army Medical Museum, or in private collections, handed down from generation to genera
tion, or sold off by the descendants of the ancestors who had once cherished them.

More common than blood relics are the ribbons, timetables, badges, song sheets, broadsides, prints, and photographs produced and sold commercially to millions of mourners of April and May 1865. Even today, it is not unheard of for a silk mourning ribbon, a printed railroad timetable, or an original carte de visite of one of the hearses to turn up at an out-of-print bookstore, antique shop, or estate sale located along the old route of the funeral train.

G
eorge Harrington could not have foreseen it, but when he planned the state funeral for Abraham Lincoln, he was planning the funeral for a future president too, one destined to be elevated to that office a century after Lincoln’s election, and who, like Father Abraham, would die by an assassin’s hand. On November 22, 1963, when the president’s body was flown home from Dallas, Texas, to Washington, D.C., a man awaited the landing of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base that evening. It was Angier Biddle Duke, U.S. chief of protocol. When Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing the bright pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, stepped off the presidential jet, Duke approached her and spoke one sentence.

“Madam, how may I serve you?” he asked.

“Make it like Lincoln’s,” she said.

A few nights later, after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, as the motorcade headed back to the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy’s car broke away from the others. After her vehicle crossed Memorial Bridge, it turned left. Ahead, the thirty-six huge, snowy, marble columns glowed like a classical Greek Temple. Mrs. Kennedy’s car braked to a stop on the plaza, and she gazed up at the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln enshrined in his memorial.

L
ike Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis became a greater legend in death than he had been in life. After he fell from power, his stock rose in the South—”He suffered for us”—and he became not only the defeated Confederacy’s “representative man,” but also the living catalyst for a new movement, the Lost Cause. He symbolized a collective dream: The South may have lost the war, but it was not wrong, and even in defeat it shone with honor and remained the superior civilization. During Davis’s 1886-87 speaking tour, he soared to new heights of glory, surpassing the prestige and fame he once possessed as president of the Confederate States of America. In his old age, it seemed, the South could not have loved him more. Until he died.

The death of Jefferson Davis caused a convulsion of emotion and memory. His funeral, like Lincoln’s, represented not just the passing of one man but of an era. Four years after Davis died, the funeral train that carried him from New Orleans to Richmond roused the South and stunned the North. Once more, Americans stood beside railroad tracks, holding signs, bearing torches, and igniting bonfires, waiting for a train to pass by. A tumultuous response welcomed him back to the old capital, where he would reign forever over the dreams of a lost cause. In the 1890s, the White House of the Confederacy was transformed into the Museum of the Confederacy, a shrinelike repository for treasured battle flags, war artifacts, and memories. In 1907, when three hundred and twenty-five thousand people turned out for the dedication of his monument in Richmond, Davis was at the apex of his fame. On that day, his partisans were sure that his name would endure forever and that history would honor him, no less than Lincoln, as a great American.

They were wrong. The twentieth century came to belong to Abraham Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis. His eclipse began as early as 1922, with the completion of the Lincoln Memorial. A grandiose, overwrought monument had been proposed in 1865, not long after the assassination, but, fortunately for the nation, it was never built. The
model vanished long ago, but survives in a rare photograph buried in the files of the Library of Congress. Indecision and political squabbling delayed Lincoln’s national memorial for fifty-seven years. In the meantime, while Lincoln waited, two monuments had been erected for Davis in Richmond, one at his gravesite in Hollywood Cemetery and the other on Monument Avenue.

The Lincoln Memorial overshadowed these Richmond monuments in physical scale and symbolism. It represented the growing power of the Lincoln legend and the Northern interpretation of the War of the Rebellion. It would not have surprised Davis to know that on the day former president William Howard Taft presented the memorial to President Warren G. Harding, with Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert looking on, blacks in attendance were forced to sit in segregated seating. Davis had been dubious of how blacks would fare in postwar America. He believed that once the Union freed the slaves, the North would not welcome them as neighbors or equal citizens. Instead, Davis suspected, Northerners viewed blacks as an abstraction, as a convenient cause they would abandon after the war. Racism and hatred, Davis suggested, were not exclusively Southern phenomena. It took a different kind of Southern senator and president—Lyndon B. Johnson—to redeem Lincoln’s promise that had been denied during dedication day, on the steps of his own memorial.

Southerners continued to memorialize Jefferson Davis. His capture site languished in obscurity for years and was, in time, overgrown by pines and brush. It was a quiet, forgotten place. This was no landmark of Confederate glory, and few Southerners cared to visit the spot where Davis’s presidency and their last hope for independence had died. In 1894, a local photographer named J. H. Harris, from the town of Tifton in Berrien County, Georgia, went there twenty-nine years later to take, he boasted in his caption, the only photo in the world of the “exact spot” of Davis’s last camp. At some point, Davis loyalists marked the place when they hammered into the ground a wooden

JEFFERSON DAVIS CAPTURE SITE.

stake nailed to a crude, handmade sign:
SITE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS’ CAMP AT THE TIME OF CAPTURE, MAY
10, 1865.

On June 3, 1936, on a spring day seventy-one years after the end of the Civil War, and the 128th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s birthday, the ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Ocilla, Georgia Chapter, dedicated a handsome monument at the site. Consisting of a large concrete slab bearing a concrete plaque sculpted in bas relief, with a bronze bust of Davis, the main text of the memorial reads: “Jefferson Davis—President of the Confederate States of America. 1861-1865.” This monument was meant to celebrate not capture, defeat, or imprisonment, but the “unconquerable heart” of the man who, in enduring those trials, became a beloved symbol to his people. In a dedication-day photograph taken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration (a government
agency the very existence of which would have roused Davis’s skepticism of broad federal authority), the new monument dominates the image, but if you look several feet to its left, low in the frame, the old, handmade wooden sign still holds its ground.

Other monuments to Davis mark the landscape near his birthplace in Kentucky, and in his home state of Mississippi. At the U.S. Capitol, a larger than life bronze sculpture of Davis stands in National Statuary Hall, its presence a tribute to two things: his service as a U.S. senator, and his significant influence on the architecture and modern-day appearance of the Capitol building.

I
n 2009, America celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday with great fanfare. President and Mrs. George W. Bush hosted several pre-bicentennial events, including the first black-tie White House dinner ever held in Lincoln’s honor. The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History mounted major exhibitions. The Ford’s Theatre Society raised fifty million dollars to renovate the theater and its museum in time for Lincoln’s birthday on February 12. The Newseum, located on a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue overlooking the route of the April 19, 1865, funeral procession, offered an exhibition on the assassination, mourning pageant, and manhunt for Lincoln’s killer. Museums in several other cities put on exhibitions. Filmmakers produced several documentaries, and in 2008 and 2009, authors published nearly one hundred books on the sixteenth president. The U.S. Mint and Post Office produced commemorative coins and stamps.

On June 3, 2008, another bicentennial passed almost without notice. Not many Americans were aware of, let alone chose to celebrate, the two hundredth birthday of Jefferson Davis. There were no White House dinners, major exhibitions, shelves of new books, or coins and stamps. Few people know his story. Most have never read a
book about him, and no one reads his memoirs anymore. Many people would not recognize his face, and some would not even remember his name. Indeed, when he does make the news, it is more likely in connection with a fevered effort to change the name of some high school named after him a long time ago. Jefferson Davis is the Lost Man of American history.