Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever Page 4

  Out came the axes. Teams of men roamed through the city, hacking open barrel after barrel of fine sour mash. Thousands of gallons of spirits were poured into the gutters. But the citizens of Richmond were not about to see all that whiskey go to waste. Some got down on their hands and knees and lapped it from the gutter. Others filled their hats and boots. The streetlamps were black, because Richmond’s gas lines had been shut off to prevent explosions. Perfectly respectable men and women, in a moment of amazing distress, found a salve for their woes by falling to their knees and quenching their thirst with alcohol flowing in the gutter.

  Many took more than just a drink. Everyone from escaped prisoners to indigent laborers and war deserters drank their share. Great drunken mobs soon roamed the city. Just as in Amelia Court House, food was first and foremost on everyone’s minds. The city had suffered such scarcity that “starvation balls” had replaced the standard debutante and charity galas. But black market profiteers had filled entire warehouses with staples like flour, coffee, sugar, and delicious smoked meats. And, of course, there were Robert E. Lee’s 350,000 missing rations, neatly stacked in a Richmond railway siding instead of being packed on the train that Lee expected in Amelia Court House.

  Little did the general know that Confederate looters had stolen all the food.

  The worst was still to come. Having destroyed and consumed a potential supply of alcohol for the Union army, Richmond’s city fathers now turned their attention to their most profitable commodity: tobacco. The rebel leadership knew that President Lincoln wanted to capture tobacco stores in order to sell them to England, thereby raising much-needed money for the nearly bankrupt U.S. Treasury.

  In their panic, the city fathers ignored an obvious problem: lighting tinder-dry bales of tobacco on fire would also burn the great old wooden warehouses in which they were stacked.

  Soon, spires of flame illuminated the entire city of Richmond. The warehouse flames spread to other buildings. The rivers of whiskey caught fire and inferno ensued.

  The true nature of a firestorm involves not only flame but also wind and heat and crackling and popping and explosion, just like war. Soon residents mistakenly believed the Yankees were laying Richmond to waste with an artillery barrage.

  And still things got worse.

  The Confederate navy chose this moment to set the entire James River arsenal ablaze, preferring to destroy their ships and ammunition rather than see them fall into Union hands.

  But the effect of this impulsive tactical decision was far worse than anything the northerners would have inflicted. Flaming steel particles were launched into the air as more than 100,000 artillery rounds exploded over the next four hours. Everything burned. Even the most respectable citizens were now penniless refugees, their homes smoldering ruins and Confederate money now mere scraps of paper. The dead and dying were everywhere, felled by the random whistling shells. The air smelled of wood smoke, gunpowder, and burning flesh. Hundreds of citizens lost their lives on that terrible night.

  Richmond was a proud city and perhaps more distinctly American than even Washington, D.C. It could even be said that the United States of America was born in Richmond, for it was there, in 1775, in Richmond’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, that Patrick Henry looked out on a congregation that included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and delivered the famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, which fomented American rebellion, the Revolutionary War, and independence itself. As the capital of Virginia since 1780, it was where Jefferson had served as governor; he’d also designed its capitol building. It was in Richmond that Jefferson and James Madison crafted the statute separating church and state that would later inform the First Amendment of the Constitution.

  And now it was devastated by its own sons.

  Soldiers of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia sowed land mines in their wake as they abandoned the city. Such was their haste that they forgot to remove the small rows of red flags denoting the narrow but safe path through the minefields, a mistake that saved hundreds of Union lives as soldiers entered the city.

  Richmond was still in flames on the morning of April 3 when the Union troops, following those red flags, arrived. Brick facades and chimneys still stood, but wooden frames and roofs had been incinerated. “The barbarous south had consigned it to flames,” one Union officer wrote of Richmond. And even after a night of explosions, “the roar of bursting shells was terrific.” Smoldering ruins and the sporadic whistle of artillery greeted the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Regiments of the Union army.

  The instant the long blue line marched into town, the slaves of Richmond were free. They were stunned to see that the Twenty-fifth contained black soldiers from a new branch of the army known as the USCT—the United States Colored Troops.

  Lieutenant Johnston Livingston de Peyster, a member of General Wetzel’s staff, galloped his horse straight to the capitol building. “I sprang from my horse,” he wrote proudly, and “rushed up to the roof.” In his hand was an American flag. Dashing to the flagpole, he hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Richmond. The capital was Confederate no more.

  That particular flag was poignant for two reasons. It had thirty-six stars, a new number owing to Nevada’s recent admission to the Union. Per tradition, this new flag would not become official until the Fourth of July. It was the flag of the America to come—the postwar America, united and expanding. It was, in other words, the flag of Abraham Lincoln’s dreams.

  So it is fitting when, eleven short days later, a thirty-six-star flag will be folded into a pillow and placed beneath Abraham Lincoln’s head after a gunman puts a bullet in his brain. But for now President Lincoln is alive and well, walking the ruined streets of the conquered Confederate capital.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 1865

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

  Abraham Lincoln has never fought in battle. During his short three-month enlistment during the Black Hawk War in 1832, he was, somewhat oddly, both a captain and a private—but never a fighter. He is a politician, and politicians are seldom given the chance to play the role of conquering hero. It could be said that General Grant deserved the honor more than President Lincoln, for it was his strategy and concentrated movements of manpower that brought down the Confederate government. But it is Lincoln’s war. It always has been. To Lincoln goes the honor of conquering hero—and the hatred of those who have been conquered.

  No one knows this more than the freed slaves of Richmond. They throng to Lincoln’s side, so alarming the sailors who rowed him ashore that they form a protective ring around the president, using their bayonets to push the slaves away. The sailors maintain this ring around Lincoln as he marches through the city, even as his admiring entourage grows from mere dozens to hundreds.

  The white citizens of Richmond, tight-lipped and hollow-eyed, take it all in. Abraham Lincoln is their enemy no more. As the citizens of Petersburg came to realize yesterday, he is something even more despicable: their president. These people never thought they’d see the day Abraham Lincoln would be strolling down the streets of Richmond as if it were his home. They make no move, no gesture, no cry, no sound to welcome him. “Every window was crowded with heads,” one sailor will remember. “But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers without a sound, either of welcome or hatred. I think we would have welcomed a yell of defiance.”

  Lincoln’s extraordinary height means that he towers over the crowd, providing an ideal moment for an outraged southerner to make an attempt on his life.

  But no one takes a shot. No drunken, saddened, addled, enraged citizens of Richmond so much as attacks Lincoln with their fists. Instead, Lincoln receives the jubilant welcome of former slaves reveling in their first moments of freedom.

  The president keeps walking until he is a mile from the wharf. Soon Lincoln finds himself on the corner of Twelfth and Clay Streets, staring at the former home of Jefferson Davis.

  When fi
rst built, in 1818, the house was owned by the president of the Bank of Virginia, John Brockenbrough. But Brockenbrough is now long dead. A merchant by the name of Lewis Crenshaw owned the property when war broke out, and he had just added a third floor and redecorated the interior with all the “modern conveniences,” including gaslights and a flush toilet, when he was persuaded to sell it, furnished, to Richmond authorities for the generous sum of $43,000—in Confederate dollars, of course.

  The authorities, in turn, rented it to the Confederate government, which was in need of an executive mansion. It was August 1861 when Jefferson Davis, his much younger second wife, Varina, and their three young children moved in. Now they have all fled, and Lincoln steps past the sentry boxes, grasps the wrought iron railing, and marches up the steps into the Confederate White House.

  He is shown into a small room with floor-to-ceiling windows and crossed cavalry swords over the door. “This was President Davis’s office,” a housekeeper says respectfully.

  Lincoln’s eyes roam over the elegant dark wood desk, which Davis had so thoughtfully tidied before running off two days earlier. “Then this must be President Davis’s chair,” he says with a grin, sinking into its burgundy padding. He crosses his legs and leans back.

  That’s when the weight of the moment hits him. Lincoln asks for a glass of water, which is promptly delivered by Davis’s former butler—a slave—along with a bottle of whiskey.

  Where Davis has gone, Lincoln does not know. He has no plans to hunt him down. Reunification, however painful it might be to southerners, is within Lincoln’s grasp. There will be no manhunt for the Confederate president, nor a trial for war crimes. As for the people of Richmond, many of whom actively conspired against Lincoln and the United States, Lincoln has ordered that the Union army command the citizenry with a gentle hand. Or, in Lincoln’s typically folksy parlance: “Let ’em up easy.”

  He can afford to relax. Lincoln has Richmond. The Confederacy is doomed. All the president needs now is for Grant to finish the rest of the job, and then he can get to work. Lincoln still has miles to go before he sleeps.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 1865

  AMELIA COURT HOUSE, VIRGINIA

  NOON TO MIDNIGHT

  Wave after wave of retreating Confederate soldiers arrive in Amelia Court House throughout the day of April 4. They have marched long and hard, yanked forward on an invisible rope by the promise of a long sleep and a full belly. But it was a lie, a broken promise, and a nightmare, all at once. Without food they have no hope. Like the sailors who quit the march from Richmond because their feet hurt, many Confederate soldiers now find their own way to surrender. Saying they are going into the woods to hunt for dinner, they simply walk away from the war. And they keep on walking until they reach their homes weeks and months later—or lie down to die as they desert, too weak to take another step.

  Lee’s optimism has been replaced by the heavy pall of defeat. “His face was still calm, as it always was,” wrote one enlisted man. “But his carriage was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to seeing it. The troubles of these last days had already plowed great furrows in his forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping, his cheeks sunken and haggard, his face colorless. No one who looked upon him then, as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget the intense agony written on his features.”

  His hope rests on forage wagons now out scouring the countryside in search of food. He anxiously awaits their return, praying they will be overflowing with grains and smoked meats and leading calves and pigs to be slaughtered.

  The wagons come back empty.

  The countryside is bare. There are no rations for Lee and his men. The soldiers become frantic, eating anything they can find: cow hooves, tree bark, rancid raw bacon, and hog and cattle feed. Some have taken to secreting packhorses or mules away from the main group, then quietly slaughtering and eating them. Making matters worse, word now reaches Lee that Union cavalry intercepted a column of supply wagons that raced out of Richmond just before the fall. The wagons were burned and the teamsters taken prisoner.

  Lee and his army are in the great noose of Grant’s making, which is squeezing tighter and tighter with every passing hour.

  Lee must move before Grant finds him. His fallback plan is yet another forced march, this one to the city of Danville, where more than a million rations allegedly await. Danville, however, is a hundred miles south. As impossible as it is to think of marching an army that far on empty stomachs, it is Lee’s only hope.

  Lee could surrender right then and there. But it isn’t in his character. He is willing to demand incredible sacrifice to avoid the disgrace of defeat.

  A cold rain falls on the morning of April 5. Lee gives the order to move out. It is, in the minds of one Confederate, “the cruelest marching order the commanders had ever given the men in four years of fighting.” Units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery begin slogging down the road. Danville is a four-day march—if they have the energy to make it. “It is now,” one soldier writes in his diary, “a race of life or death.”

  They get only seven miles before coming to a dead halt at a Union roadblock outside Jetersville. At first it appears to be no more than a small cavalry force. But a quick look through Lee’s field glasses tells him differently. Soldiers are digging trenches and fortifications along the road, building the berms and breastworks that will protect them from rebel bullets, and then fortifying them with fallen trees and fence rails.

  Lee gallops Traveller to the front and assesses the situation. Part of him wants to make a bold statement by charging into the Union works in a last grand suicidal hurrah, but Lee’s army has followed him so loyally because of not only his brilliance but also his discretion. Sometimes knowing when not to fight is just as important to a general’s success as knowing how to fight.

  And this is not a time to engage.

  Lee quickly swings his army west in a grand loop toward the town of Paineville. The men don’t travel down one single road but follow a series of parallel arteries connecting the hamlets and burgs of rural Virginia. The countryside is rolling and open in some places, in some forested and in others swampy. Creeks and rivers overflowing their banks from the recent rains drench the troops at every crossing. On any other day, the Army of Northern Virginia might not have minded. But with so many miles to march, soaking shoes and socks will eventually mean the further agony of walking on blistered, frozen feet.

  The topography favors an army lying in wait, ready to spring a surprise attack. But they are an army in flight, at the mercy of any force hidden in the woods. And, indeed, Union cavalry repeatedly harass the rear of Lee’s exhausted column. The horsemen are not bold or dumb enough to attack Lee’s main force, which outnumbers them by thousands. Instead they attack the defenseless supply wagons in a series of lightning-quick charges. On narrow, swampy roads, the Union cavalry burn more than 200 Confederate supply wagons, capture eleven battle flags, and take more than 600 prisoners, spreading confusion and panic.

  Sensing disaster, Lee springs to the offensive, ordering cavalry under the command of his nephew Major General Fitzhugh Lee and Major General Thomas Rosser to catch and kill the Union cavalry before they can gallop back to the safety of their Jetersville line. In the running battle that follows, rebel cavalry kill 30 and wound another 150 near the resort town of Amelia Springs. If the Union needs proof that there is still fight in Lee’s army, it now has it.

  Lee marches his men all day, and then all night. At a time when every fiber of their beings cries out for sleep and food, they press forward over muddy rutted roads, enduring rain and chill and the constant harassment of Union cavalry. The roads are shoulder to shoulder with exhausted men, starving pack animals, and wagons sinking up to their axles in the thick Virginia mud. Dead and dying mules and horses are shoved to the side of the road so as not to slow the march. Dead men litter the ground, too, and are just as quickly tossed to the shoulder—or merely st
epped over. There is no time for proper burials. Nothing can slow the march to Danville.

  Men drop their bedrolls because they lack the strength to carry them. Many more thrust their guns bayonet-first into the earth and leave them behind. On the rare occasions when the army stops to rest, men simply crumple to the ground and sleep. When it is time to march again, officers move from man to man, shaking them awake and ordering them to their feet. Some men refuse to rise and are left sleeping, soon to become Union prisoners. Others can’t rise because they’re simply too weak, in the early phases of dying from starvation. These men, too, are left behind. In this way, Lee’s army dwindles. The 30,000 who retreated from Petersburg just three days ago have been reduced by half. As the long night march takes a greater toll, even those hardy men stagger like drunks, and some lose the power of speech. And yet, when it comes time to fight, they will find a way to lift their rifle to their shoulder, aim at their target, and squeeze the trigger.

  “My shoes are gone,” a veteran soldier laments during the march. “My clothes are almost gone. I’m weary, I’m sick, I’m hungry. My family has been killed or scattered, and may be wandering helpless and unprotected. I would die, yes I would die willingly, because I love my country. But if this war is ever over, I’ll be damned if I ever love another country.”

  His is the voice of a South that wants no part of Lincoln and the United States of America—and for whom there can be no country but the Confederacy. Just as the Union officer in Richmond spoke of the “barbarous south,” so these soldiers and men like John Wilkes Booth view the North as an evil empire. This is the divisiveness Lincoln will face if he manages to win the war.