Lincoln's Last Days Read online

  * * *

  Edwin Stanton did not live long after the death of Abraham Lincoln, and those years he did live were fraught with controversy. Stanton clashed repeatedly with President Andrew Johnson over the process of reconstruction. Tensions between Stanton and Johnson got so bad that in 1868 the president fired Stanton. Stanton refused to leave the office. The Senate, which had openly clashed with Johnson over other key issues, began impeachment hearings, stating that Johnson did not have the authority to remove the secretary of war. Though Johnson escaped removal from office by one vote in the Senate, Stanton was the clear winner in the case. He retired soon after the vote, only to be nominated as a justice to the Supreme Court by the newly elected president, Ulysses S. Grant. Edwin Stanton died before he could be sworn in. The end came on Christmas Eve 1869; at the age of fifty-five, Stanton died from a sudden and very severe asthma attack.

  * * *

  Few men could have successfully followed Abraham Lincoln as president, but Andrew Johnson proved particularly inept. His Reconstruction policies were bitterly divisive, to the point that he warred openly with Congress. He dodged impeachment but was not elected to office in 1868. Later in life, Johnson was reelected to the Senate, but soon afterward he died from a stroke, on July 31, 1875.

  * * *

  William Seward would live just seven more years after being attacked in his own bed on the night of Lincoln’s assassination, but in that time he would undertake an activity that would leave an even longer-lasting legacy than the heinous attack. In 1867, while still serving as secretary of state and still bearing the disfiguring facial scars of the knife attack, he purchased Alaska for the United States. What soon became known as “Seward’s Folly” would later be seen as a huge asset when silver and gold and oil were discovered in the new territory. Seward died on October 10, 1872. He was seventy-one.

  * * *

  Lafayette Baker became an instant celebrity for finding Lincoln’s killer. The detective wrote a bestselling memoir in 1867, History of the United States Secret Service. In the book, he detailed his role in finding John Wilkes Booth. Several of his claims, including that he’d handed Booth’s diary to Edwin Stanton, led to a congressional investigation into Stanton’s role in the disappearance of the diary. Soldiers had given Baker the diary upon returning to Washington with Booth’s body. Baker then gave it to Stanton, who locked it in a safe for almost two years, never telling investigators that he had the important historical document in his possession. The publication of Baker’s memoir provoked a great public demand for Stanton to produce the diary. He did so reluctantly.

  Baker became increasingly paranoid after the congressional investigation, certain that he would be murdered. And he was right! Just eighteen months after the investigation, he was found dead in his home in Philadelphia.

  John Wilkes Booth’s diary.

  * * *

  Abraham Lincoln’s irresponsible bodyguard John Parker never presented himself for duty or tried to help in any way on the night of the assassination. Incredibly, Parker was not held accountable for shirking his duties. In fact, the first time he was seen after the assassination was when he showed up at a Washington police station the next morning. Formal police charges of dereliction of duty were brought against Parker, but once again he was acquitted. Three years later, after many attempts to remove him from the police department failed, Parker was finally removed for “gross neglect of duty.” He went on to work as a carpenter and machinist. He died of pneumonia on June 28, 1890, at the age of sixty.

  Brass knuckles carried by Lincoln’s bodyguards. No photo of John Parker available.

  * * *

  Lincoln’s responsible bodyguard William Crook had a more esteemed career, working in the White House for more than fifty years—a time that spanned the administrations of Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson. However, it was his relationship with Lincoln that he treasured most, and his 1910 memoir provides a vivid insight into the journey to Richmond and the events of April 14. William Crook died in 1915 from pneumonia, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, in a service attended by President Wilson.

  William Crook at his desk in the White House in the 1890s.

  * * *

  After the war, Robert E. Lee applied for a pardon for his acts against the United States. Secretary of State William H. Seward did not file the pardon but instead gave it to a friend as a souvenir. The document wasn’t discovered for more than one hundred years. President Gerald R. Ford officially reinstated Lee as a U.S. citizen in 1975.

  After the war, Lee became president of Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. He died on Columbus Day 1870, at the age of sixty-three. Lee was not buried at his beloved Virginia home, Arlington, which had been confiscated during the war and redesignated as a U.S. military cemetery. Instead, he was buried at the university, which was renamed Washington and Lee University, in his honor.

  * * *

  Lee’s counterpart on the Union side, Ulysses S. Grant, had an admirable career after the war ended. He remained in the army, helping to implement Reconstruction policies that guaranteed the black vote. He saw his popularity soar in the North. Elected president in 1868, he served two terms in office.

  Grant’s later years were filled with travel and, later, financial upheaval. After losing his entire fortune to bad investments in the early 1880s, he wrote his memoirs with the help of editor Mark Twain. Considered by many to be one of the best military autobiographies in history, Grant’s life story was a bestseller. Royalties from the book guaranteed his family a comfortable life long after he died of throat cancer, on July 23, 1885. Julia Grant died on December 14, 1902, at the age of seventy-six, and lies alongside her husband in a tomb in New York City.

  * * *

  Major Henry Reed Rathbone, present in the box on the night Lincoln was shot, later married Clara Harris. In 1882, Rathbone was appointed as a U.S. diplomat to Germany. The following year, he went insane and killed his wife with a knife. He was institutionalized for the remainder of his life.

  The fan Clara Harris carried the night President Lincoln was assassinated.

  * * *

  Boston Corbett, the man who shot John Wilkes Booth, received a handsome reward for the killing. He left the military soon afterward, first working as a hatter, then as assistant doorman for the Kansas state legislature. It appears that the mercury used in making hats, which was well known for causing insanity (giving rise to the expression “mad as a hatter”), caused him to become mentally unstable. In 1887, he was sent to an insane asylum after brandishing a revolver in the legislature. He escaped, then moved north to Minnesota, where he died in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894. He was sixty-two years old.

  * * *

  Dr. Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen were all given life sentences for their roles in the assassination conspiracy. Ned Spangler (not shown) received a six-year sentence. All were sent to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a baking-hot group of islands about eighty miles west of the Florida Keys. Their jailers, black Union soldiers, had complete power over their daily movements. O’Laughlen died of fever while in prison, at the age of twenty-seven. Spangler, Mudd, and Arnold were pardoned by Andrew Johnson in 1869 and lived out their days as law-abiding citizens.

  * * *

  Thomas Jones, the man who helped John Wilkes Booth and David Herold escape into Virginia, was circumspect about his role in the assassination for many years. He was taken into custody shortly after Booth was killed and spent seven weeks in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., before being released. Even though he became a justice of the peace after the war, the tight-lipped former member of the Confederate Secret Service was ever after wary of persecution for aiding the conspirators. That changed in 1893, when he wrote a book telling his side of the events. Jones died on March 5, 1895, at the age of seventy-four.

  * * *

  Perhaps the most shadowy figure in the Lincoln conspiracy, John Surratt could have be
en instrumental in reducing Mary Surratt’s sentence by showing that his mother’s part in the assassination was that of passive support instead of active participation. But rather than give the testimony that might have spared her life, he fled to Canada after the assassination, where he followed the news of his mother’s trial and execution. Surratt then went to England under an assumed name and later continued on to the Vatican, where he served in the Papal Zouaves, the pope’s infantry unit. He was discovered and arrested but escaped. Another international search for Surratt soon found him in Alexandria, Egypt. Arrested again, he was brought back to the United States to appear before a judge. Amazingly, the jury deadlocked on his involvement. John Surratt was free to go. He died in 1916 at the age of seventy-two.

  * * *

  Mary Surratt was reburied in the Catholic cemetery at Mount Olivet in Washington, D.C. The petition to spare her life never got to President Andrew Johnson; his assistant, Preston King, kept the information away from Johnson. Apparently that action preyed on King’s conscience. A few months later, King tied a bag of bullets around his neck and leapt from a ferryboat in New York Harbor; he was never seen again. He was fifty-nine years old.

  Mary Surratt’s grave.

  Lincoln’s World

  A Walk Through Washington, D. C., in the 1860s

  HOW A VISITOR FELT about a visit to Washington, D.C., in the 1860s depended entirely on the season. The best times were spring and fall. In May of 1864, the businessman George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary:

  Loveliest weather. Spring manifested in ideal perfection. Genial warmth and bracing wind.… Trees budding and visibly developing from hour to hour. The air full of little cottony pellets thrown off from the American poplar, copious as the flakes of a January snowstorm.

  In summer, the city became unbearable. Everyone who could departed for the country. Abraham Lincoln and his family went to a cottage in northern Washington. On July 16, 1861, Strong wrote:

  For of all the detestable places, Washington is the first in July. Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fare, bad smells, mosquitoes, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience. They blackened the tablecloths and absolutely flew into one’s mouth at dinner.

  Fall brought relief from the summer heat. But winter was on the way. And winter in Washington, D.C., could be awful. The roads were dirt and heavily traveled by horses and wagons. Winter meant cold rain and streets filled with thick mud.

  Washington, D.C., was experiencing growing pains. The war brought thousands of people to the city. Some came to volunteer to fight. Others established factories and warehouses to make and store supplies for the Union army. Some of the Union troops were camped out in fields around the city, and tent hospitals were built there to treat the many returning war wounded. The population of Washington almost doubled between 1860 and 1870, going from 75,800 to 132,000.

  Along the dusty or muddy streets you would see small two-story wooden homes next to six-story brick office buildings. At one end of what would become the National Mall, the Washington Monument was one-third built. At the other end, the Capitol was under construction, with scaffolding bracing the inside of its famous dome.

  A military hospital camp at Kendall Green, near Washington, D.C.

  A view of the Capitol building under construction as seen from the mall in 1861.

  The White House looked much as it does now, but there were no fences around it. Washingtonians could walk through the lawns and gardens as they wished and even approach the president if they saw him.

  Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Their Children

  AMONG THE GREATEST SORROWS in the married life of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were the deaths of two of their children. They had four boys, and only one lived to be an adult. Doctors in the 1860s did not know as much about diseases and their cures as they do now. Although there is some debate about what Edward and William died of, we know that today they would probably have been cured.

  A Currier & Ives lithograph of the Lincoln family. From left to right: Mary Todd, Robert Todd, Thomas, and Abraham.

  * * *

  Robert Todd Lincoln was born on August 1, 1843, in Springfield, Illinois. His parents had been married about one year. Robert was named after his mother’s father; his parents called him Bob. At the time, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and a novice politician. Robert went away to high school and college and then fought for the Union in the Civil War, although his mother didn’t want him to.

  Robert Lincoln served as secretary of war and minister to Great Britain and then worked as general counsel and president of the Pullman Company. He retired to Manchester, Vermont, where he pursued such hobbies as astronomy. His last public appearance was at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. He died in his sleep on July 26, 1926, at the age of eighty-two.

  Robert Todd Lincoln.

  * * *

  Edward Baker Lincoln was born on March 10, 1846, in Springfield, Illinois. His parents called him Eddie. He died just before his fourth birthday. At the time, it was said that he died of consumption. Today we call the disease tuberculosis.

  * * *

  William Wallace Lincoln was born on December 21, 1850, in Springfield, Illinois. Willie moved with his parents to Washington, D.C., but died in the White House of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862. He was eleven years old. His younger brother, Thomas, also had the disease but survived.

  William Wallace Lincoln.

  * * *

  Thomas Lincoln, known as Tad, was born on April 4, 1853, in Springfield, Illinois. He was very close to his older brother Willie and is said to have cried for a month when he died. Tad attended his father’s funeral with his oldest brother, Robert. After leaving the White House, he and his mother moved to Chicago, traveled to Europe, and then returned home. Tad died of a heart condition on July 15, 1871. He was eighteen years old.

  * * *

  Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Edward, William, and Thomas Lincoln are buried in the same tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. Robert Lincoln is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., an American military cemetery.

  Abraham Lincoln and Tad Lincoln.

  Did You Know?

  Twenty Important and Interesting Facts About the Civil War

  One of the reasons the Civil War continues to have an impact on the nation is that so many people died during the war. In 1860, the United States population was 31.4 million people. Originally, historians stated that roughly 620,000 soldiers and sailors, about 2 percent of the population, were killed in the Civil War. But in 2012, new research indicated that the death toll was higher, at least 750,000 men or almost 2.4 percent of the population. To put that number into perspective, if we took that new 2.4 percent figure and applied it to today’s population of 313.3 million, the result would be about 7.5 million soldiers and sailors killed. No one knows how many civilians died in the war.

  The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, was the single bloodiest day in the Civil War. A total of 22,726 soldiers were killed, missing, or wounded.

  A Currier & Ives lithograph of the Battle of Antietam.

  The Battle of Gettysburg, from July 1 to 3, 1863, was the bloodiest battle in the war. A total of 51,116 soldiers were killed, missing, or wounded.

  Though the song “Dixie” is considered the Confederacy’s anthem, it was never officially adopted as such.

  The South’s nickname “Dixie” may have come from the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, which was surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon between 1763 and 1767 and called the Mason and Dixon Line. As Pennsylvania was a free state and Maryland was a slave state, it came to be regarded as the border between the free North and slaveholding South.

  Several Civil War battles have two names. The reason for this is that the Confederacy usually named its battles after the town that served as the army general’s headquarters. The Union armies usually chose the landmark nearest to their own lines, like a river
or a stream. That is why, for instance, the Battle of Antietam, a name chosen by the North, is also called the Battle of Sharpsburg, a name chosen by the Confederacy.

  Lieutenant General Winfield Scott was the top officer in the U.S. army at the start of the Civil War. Because he was seventy-five years old, he knew he was too old to lead men into battle. Scott thought that Robert E. Lee, in 1861 a colonel in the U.S. army, was the best soldier for the job. Scott offered Lee command of the new army being formed to fight the Confederates, which also meant Lee would be promoted to brigadier general. Though Lee had no love for secession or slavery, his home state was Virginia, which had recently seceded from the Union, and he could not lead troops against his home state. Lee regretfully refused Scott’s offer, resigned from the U.S. army, and left for Virginia, where he became a general in the Confederate army.

  Robert E. Lee was one of the many people who had family members who fought for the other side. One of his cousins, Samuel Phillips Lee, was a rear admiral in the Union navy.