The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (USA) Senior Historian and frequent PN Review/Carcanet contributor David C. Ward, has been writing about the 150thanniversary of the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The juxtaposition of Lincoln’s triumph in winning the Civil War, preserving the Union, and setting the stage for civil rights for the African American with his death a week later stunned the nation and continues to resonate today. In this blogpost, originally published in the Portrait Gallery’s blog face2faceblog at NPG.SI.edu, Ward details the events of Lincoln’s last days.
When Abraham Lincoln posed for photographer Alexander Gardner on February 5, 1865, he was a month before his second inauguration as president and two months before Appomattox. Gardner’s portraits from that session reveal the president as careworn and tired, his face lined and grooved with the strain of war and four years in the White House. Yet he also has a nearly imperceptible smile: he knows the war is nearly won, and his thoughts are turning to Reconstruction and to “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds,” as he would put it in the conclusion of his second inaugural address.
He was also, as we know and he could not, two months from his death. Lincoln thought he might not survive his second term, anticipating that he might die of fatigue, disease, or just the morbidity that plagued his personality. But it is doubtful that he feared assassination. No president had ever been assassinated (there had been an attempt on Andrew Jackson), and if there had always been general fears for the president’s safety during wartime, no specific threat could be pinpointed. (The president-elect’s dawn arrival in Washington in 1861 to avoid a purported assault on the way from Baltimore had led to widespread ridicule.) Anyway, Lincoln was always cheerfully fatalistic about himself even as he absorbed the pain of others. After the Confederacy had evacuated Richmond on April 2, Lincoln made a surprise visit to the city two days later, against the advice of everyone who feared his appearance might spark a reaction from vengeful residents; the city was in chaos, having suffered a massive fire on the night of April 2 and 3. Lincoln, in a spectacular example of bad parenting, took his son Tad, whose twelfth birthday it was, along for the trip. The two of them, accompanied by a troop of very nervous soldiers, toured the city, walking from the wharf where they had landed to the Virginia statehouse and Confederate “White House.” The highlight of the trip was the reception Lincoln received from the African Americans who spotted his arrival and flocked to the president, cheering loudly and celebrating not just the end of the war and the preservation of the Union but also their freedom. The moment was documented by artist Lambert Hollis, who had accompanied the presidential party and captured the jubilation of the moment.
The reception by the now-freed African Americans may have been on Lincoln’s mind as he turned his attention from the end of the war to the beginnings of Reconstruction. With the fall of Richmond, the president had been serenaded at the White House, but he disappointed the crowd that had gathered by speaking flatly and saying little. On April 11, a large crowd gathered again at the White House to celebrate Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Lincoln had prepared an address, but again it was not triumphant but contained an earnest appeal for a “righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained.” He closed by broaching the issue of civil rights for the freedmen, declaring his support for at least a qualified suffrage for freedmen. John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd, and at these words he seethed in anger that this meant citizenship for blacks: “now, by God, I’ll put him through.” In the last year of the war, Booth had been hatching vague plots about kidnapping the president, although the purpose and impact of that act was never really clear. Now, having gathered a motley crew of misfits and disaffected Confederates, he decided to kill the president.
On April 14, Lincoln had a round of political meetings; General Ulysses S. Grant attended one meeting but afterward declined the president’s invitation to the theater, saying that he was leaving for Philadelphia to be reunited with his family. It was Good Friday, and after the assassination, it would be remarked upon that the president had attended the theater on such a sacred day. Although deeply religious, Lincoln was not a member of any church and probably did not give the religious calendar any thought: as always, he would use the theater—he enjoyed all manner of productions from knock-about farces to Shakespearean tragedy—as an escape from himself and his daily life. As he and Mary prepared to go to Ford’s Theatre, he spoke to her affectionately, “We must both, be more cheerful in the future. . . . Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.” On the bill that night was Our American Cousin, a comedy starring English actress Laura Keane. The Lincolns left for the theater at about 8:30, arriving after the play had begun. The production was halted when Lincoln was spotted entering the presidential box, the band played Hail to the Chief, and the crowd delivered a long and prolonged ovation. The drama then resumed.
“Now he belongs to the ages”: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
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| 'Assassination of President Lincoln', Currier & Ives Lithography Company, 1865 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution |
Is there a more famous bad play than Our American Cousin, the comedy that Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theatre when John Wilkes Booth assassinated him? Written in 1858, it was a creaky farce that followed a time-honored script: the awkward but honest American amongst bumbling English aristocrats. The real attraction on the night was English actress and star Laura Keene. Booth, himself a fine actor from a famous family of actors, knew the play, as he knew the layout of Ford’s Theatre. Whatever one must say about the evil malignancy of Booth’s intention to commit murder, his obsessive hatreds, and the consequences of his act, on the night he performed superbly, both stage-managing and acting in the drama of his own making. Having decided to kill Lincoln, probably after hearing the president speak on April 11, he galvanized his co-conspirators into action. His intention was to decapitate the government: he would kill Lincoln while others killed both Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Booth reconnoitered the theater, drilling a spy hole in the door to the presidential box, fashioning a block to hold the door shut once he had entered the box, and arranging to have his horse held in an alley next to the theater. Booth had every intention of escaping southward after the murder.
Armed with a knife and a single-shot derringer that fired a large ball, Booth crept into the
presidential box after the play had resumed following the celebration of the presidential party’s arrival. He timed his shot to perfection, shooting the president in the back of the head just as laughter—which covered the sound of his pistol—erupted following one of the play’s biggest laugh lines: “Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.” Having fired, Booth slashed his knife at Colonel Henry Rathbone, a guest in the box with his wife, and leapt down to the stage shouting as he jumped. Opinions differed, but the consensus is that he uttered the Virginia state motto, Sic semper tyrannis (Thus Always to Tyrants). A bone snapped in his leg when he landed, but he scrambled out of the theater, retrieved his horse, and headed to the southeast, escaping into Maryland.
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| 'John Wilkes Booth' by Charles DeForest Fredricks c.1863 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution |
Chaos erupted at the theater once everyone realized what had happened. Amid the hysteria and confusion, several doctors pushed their way into the presidential box and attempted to minister to the mortally wounded president. As he lay dying, events took a turn for the macabre: Laura Keene forced her way into the box and insisted that she cradle the president in her arms. Incredibly, this was allowed, and for several minutes she rocked the president in her arms, creating a bizarre pieta on the floor of the box; she would later display her blood-spattered dress as an attraction. The doctors and hangers-on behaved little better: already relic- and souvenir-hunters were sniffing around the presidential body. One of the doctors preserved small fragments of the president’s skull, hair was snipped from the presidential head, and bits were taken of his clothing and bedclothes from the room where Lincoln died, across the street from the theater. Already Lincoln, still living, was becoming the object of veneration and remembrance, some of it tasteless by any standard.
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| 'One Hundred Thousand Dollar Reward', Unidentified Artist, 1865 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution |
Lincoln finally expired at 7:21 on the morning of April 15. Mary was disconsolate and overwrought; she had been kept away from the dying president by the doctors, who found her out of control. She sequestered herself in her bedroom at the White House, absenting herself from the funeral arrangements except to insist that her husband be buried in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington. The transport of Lincoln’s body to Springfield became a national ritual of grief as the coffin was unloaded and displayed in major cities along the way. Thousands lined up for hours to view the carefully embalmed body of the president, an act of secular grief that had religious overtones. As with the relic-taking, Lincoln was already being transformed from a living, historical figure to an American saint. As Seward said, “Now he belongs to the ages” or alternatively, “Now he belongs to the angels.”
History was giving way to myth through the presentation of the body and his martyrdom—a martyrdom that occurred at the very moment of his triumph. African Americans, who were grateful for Lincoln’s evolution on the issue of freedom and citizenship and rightly feared that the loss of Lincoln boded badly for them, were vocal in their sense of loss. The South worried that the assassination would bring down renewed violence on it out of vengeance and retribution. Lincoln was not universally mourned in both the South and the North, although individuals who applauded Booth’s actions generally had the good sense to keep quiet. Most interestingly, among the most radical abolitionists, including many Republican officeholders, there evolved a curious justification of the assassination. Distrusting Lincoln’s commitment to abolition, they came close to justifying the act as the closing of one chapter and the opening of another. Lincoln, in other words, had done his work to win the war and preserve the Union. Fate had now intervened to remove him from history’s stage to be replaced by a leader who would give full civic and social equality to the freemen. As the presidency of Andrew Johnson and the course of Reconstruction would demonstrate, they would be proved spectacularly wrong, as they had been consistently wrong about the character and abilities of Abraham Lincoln.
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The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off David C. Ward's Call Waiting
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOGWARD (case-sensitive). Happy reading!