Our One Common Country (41 page)

At a little past eight, the president and Mrs. Lincoln got into a closed coach beneath the White House portico. Charlie Forbes, the president's Irish valet, his traveling companion to Hampton Roads, gave a hand to Mrs. Lincoln, who called him “my friend Charles.” Then Charlie climbed up on the box, folded the president's plaid shawl over his arm, and nodded to the coachman. Two cavalrymen followed. They stopped on the way for the Lincolns' guests, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris, a senator's daughter. General and Mrs. Grant had declined the honor. Julia could not abide Mary Lincoln for an evening.

When the carriage arrived at Ford's Theatre, Charlie handed the passengers down with a smile and a friendly word. After they were seated in the presidential box, he closed the door to its passageway and sat down outside it in a wooden chair. Charlie was unarmed.

Lincoln's friend Simon P. Hanscom, the
National Republican
's editor, had been lounging around the White House, consistent with his habit, when a sergeant came over from the War Department with a sealed telegram. It might be news of Johnston's surrender. Hanscom volunteered to walk it over to the president. Charlie Forbes knew him and waved him into the box. When Hanscom opened the door, Clara Harris turned
around in alarm, then settled back in her chair. The telegram was from General Ord. Mr. Hunter had arrived in Richmond, it said. “He and Judge Campbell wish a permit for their visit to you at Washington, I think, with important communication.” Lincoln read it and put it aside. He would deal with it tomorrow.

At about the same time, Lewis Powell, the burly thug in the thrall of John Wilkes Booth, talked his way into Seward's house, tried to shoot his son Fred, pistol-whipped him when the gun misfired, pushed his screaming sister aside, burst into Seward's room when a male nurse opened the door, slashed the nurse with a Bowie knife, knocked him to the floor, and hacked at the governor's face and throat as he lay there helpless in bed. Oddly aware that the blade was cold, Seward was engulfed in a “rainfall” of blood. His neck brace saved his life—that, and his presence of mind. He rolled off the bed in agony with his shattered jaw and arm while his nurse and another son struggled with the assassin, enduring his slashing knife until he broke away. He stabbed a State Department messenger on his way out to Lafayette Square.

A few minutes later at Ford's Theatre, John Wilkes Booth strolled casually down the dress-circle aisle to the presidential box and presented his card to Charlie Forbes, who knew his famous name. It was Charlie who let him in.

Gideon Welles wrote a passage in his diary. “At the White House all was silent and sad.” His wife had stayed with Mary Lincoln all night, exhausted and hysterical as she was. Mary's friend Eliza Blair Lee would all but live in the White House for days. When Welles and his wife went down the central staircase with Attorney General Speed, Lincoln's boy Tad had been looking out a window at the foot of the stairs.

“Oh, Mr. Welles,” he said, “who killed my father?”

“Neither Speed nor myself could restrain our tears,” Uncle Gideon says, “nor give the poor boy any satisfactory answer.”

The new president met with his Cabinet that day. “President Johnson is not disposed to treat treason lightly,” Welles told his diary, “and the chief
Rebels he would punish with extreme severity.” The Jacobin senator Benjamin Wade proposed to exile or hang “a baker's dozen.” Johnson wanted to hang many more.

On the day Johnson met with his Cabinet, the Confederate Secretary of War John Breckinridge, in Charlotte with Davis's traveling entourage, on the run from federal cavalry, informed him of Lincoln's assassination. Davis spoke to some Rebel troopers who had ridden into town. He made no mention of Lincoln's murder. He would not despair of the cause, he said, but “remain with the last organized band upholding the flag.” He would later say of Lincoln that for “an enemy so relentless in the war for our subjugation, we could not be expected to mourn,” yet his death was “a great misfortune to the South.” He had power over the Northern people and no “personal malignity toward the people of the South.” His successor “was without power in the North, and the embodiment of malignity toward the Southern people, perhaps the more so because he had betrayed and deserted them in the hour of need.” His crime had been staying loyal when his home state of Tennessee seceded.

General Sherman, the curse of the South, sat down with General Johnston that day at a farmhouse west of Durham. They liked each other immediately. Months earlier, Sherman had told the mayor of Atlanta and two of his city councilmen that peace would be won by unrelenting war, but “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.” Now he granted Johnston breathtaking terms.

Rejecting Johnston's proposal of a peace negotiation between two countries, for the Confederacy
was
no country, Sherman offered him the same terms Grant had given Lee; but Johnston said the generals could make a broader peace, “as other generals had done” (none of them American). When they met again the next day, Breckinridge was there, having ridden out to join them from Davis's side. Sherman invoked the generous sentiments that Lincoln had expressed to him and Grant and Porter on the
River Queen,
and went much further than Grant had gone to implement
them, further than a general could go. Invoking the
executive
authority, albeit conditioned on the executive's approval, he allowed Johnston's army to return their arms to their state arsenals, guaranteed the Southern people's political rights, recognized their state governments, gave them a general amnesty, and effectively restored them to the Union, which Alec Stephens would later call “the whole professed object of the war.”
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Then Sherman produced a bottle and shared it with his new Southern friends.

When the news arrived in Washington on the day Lincoln's funeral train left, Stanton was appalled, and Stanton was not alone. With his Cabinet's unanimous support, the new president nullified what Sherman had done. Grant brought the word to Sherman himself. When General Johnston was told, he wired the news to Breckinridge and proposed to disband his army, “to prevent devastation to the country.” On Davis's behalf, Breckinridge replied that if it came to that, Johnston should escape and come to Davis's rescue with whatever mounted forces he could bring, while the infantry slipped away with their weapons. Johnston wired back. Escape was “impracticable,” he said. “We have to save the people, spare the blood of the army, and save the high civil functionaries. Your plan, I think, can only do the last.” And then he surrendered all over again, on terms such as Grant gave Lee. Only disconnected remnants of Rebel forces remained, in Texas, Alabama, and pockets of senseless rage.

On May 2, Davis met with Breckinridge, General Braxton Bragg, and five cavalry commanders in Abbeville, South Carolina. Once the panic had passed, he said, the three thousand men they could muster would be enough for the people to rally around until the country recovered its will. The officers looked at each other. It was not possible, they said. There was nothing left to fight with. They would risk his modest escort to defend his personal safety but would not put a single man in jeopardy or “fire another shot” to keep the war going. The truth hit Davis then. He stood up to leave, so ashen that Breckinridge offered him his arm. “Then all is indeed lost.”

Davis would later say that if Johnston had refused to surrender, he could have reached his commander in chief with his cavalry, light artillery, and many mounted infantry. Together they could have cut their way to the Mississippi, gathered men who had deserted “to escape surrender,” and revived “the drooping spirits of the country.” Once they had crossed the great river (how, he does not say, controlled as it was by Union gunboats), they could have joined with men who had the means, the will, and the space to fight. And then, Davis said, the foiled Yankee nation should have agreed, “on the basis of a return to the Union, to acknowledge the Constitutional rights of the States, and by a convention, or quasi-treaty, to guarantee security of person and property. To this hope I persistently clung, and, if our independence could not be achieved, so much, at least, I trusted might be gained.”

On the
Malvern,
Lincoln had offered to negotiate more than that, with whomever could speak for the South, “even on condition to be named by themselves,” and had put it in writing in his own hand. Had he done it at Hampton Roads—given it to the peace commissioners to publish, staked his presidency on the South's return to the Union with compensated emancipation and its Constitutional rights, taken the issue to the people over the heads of the Jacobins—history might have been different. Tens of thousands of young Americans had died since then. Many thousands more had been crippled, physically or emotionally. They would suffer for decades to come.

In lieu of Lincoln's lenient reconstruction plan, the essence of Stanton's was adopted. As Judge Campbell would later say, the defeated states were converted into military departments, “designated by Arabic numerals. Under such rule the most dishonest, despicable, and debased governments were established that ever existed on this continent.” Due in large part to defiant Southern racism, all but one of the seceded states (President Johnson's Tennessee was readmitted in 1866) were excluded from the Union for three to five years. A century of bitterness followed.