April 16, 1865---". . . It is some dream that on the deck you've fallen cold and dead . . . "

APRIL 16, 1865:        

“It is some dream that on the deck / You've fallen cold and dead” --- Walt Whitman

  

I

Union and Confederate troops belonging to Sherman and Johnston, not having heard of the cease-fire as of yet, skirmish near West Point, North Carolina.

Stoneman’s Raid enters Lincolnton, North Carolina. Just as they do so, Jefferson Davis crosses the Yadkin River and comes to ruined Salisbury. The remnant Confederate government and Stoneman’s Union troops are less than 50 miles apart. Davis is still exhorting local Confederates to pick up their guns. In places along his route he is jeered.

The Battle of Columbus, Georgia (The Battle of Girard, Alabama; The Battle of Phenix City, Alabama):  

Yet another “Last Battle of The Civil War” takes place when Wilson’s Raid reaches the Confederate manufacturing town of Columbus, Georgia, the stated goal of their campaign. The Union force, 13,500 men strong, is faced by a Confederate force of 3,500, who are determined to hold the two bridges over the Chattahootchee River. By disassembling part of the lower bridge, the Confederate commander attempts to bottleneck the Union troops onto the upper bridge, which everyone expects will be burned. The Union force is effectively stopped from crossing the river for most of the day.

General Howell Cobb C.S.A. errs, however, in believing there will not be a night attack, and the defending Confederates, standing down after dusk, are overwhelmed. The bridge, and then the city, are taken.  

In a last attempt at defiance, the C.S.S. MUSCOGEE and C.S.S. CHATTAHOOTCHEE are both scuttled. Confederate Colonel C.A.L. Lamar, one of the wealthiest international slave traders in the world, is killed when he refuses quarter.  He is listed (erroneously) as the last Confederate to die in the Civil War.

At Columbus, a Confederate Lieutenant Colonel by the name of John Stith Pemberton is slashed by a cavalry sabre. Still seeking a pleasant nostrum for the pain years later, in 1886 the Georgia veteran invents a patent medicine he calls Coca-Cola. The original mixture is a combination of wine, cocaine, carbonated water, sugar, and caramel. It is later reimagined as a soft drink.

 

II

In the early hours of April 16^th (or possibly the late hours of April 15^th) John Wilkes Booth and David Herold leave Dr. Samuel Mudd’s residence, rested and resupplied. Mudd directs them to the next stop on the Confederate courier route that has become their own personal Underground Railroad, the home of Confederate sympathizer Samuel Cox at Rich Hill.

The Samuel Mudd house is now a privately-maintained museum

The road between the Mudd and Cox houses. The land in lower Maryland is largely unchanged from 1865

The Samuel Cox house

The piney woods where Booth and Herold hid still stands, though much reduced and thinned-out

Cox wants nothing to do with them. Federal patrols have been scouring the area all day searching for “a lame man” known to be Booth and promising to burn down any house that gives him refuge (with its occupants inside). As soon as Cox sees Booth he knows he is the President’s killer. Cox won’t even let Booth and Herold on his property. He meets them in the road.

Perhaps Cox tells Booth that he has graduated from shooter to murderer. He shows Booth some newspapers. When Booth reads the editorials he is stunned. While he expects the Northern press to excoriate him, the Southern press is just as bad if not worse:

The Montgomery Daily Mail calls Booth’s act, “a dark and bloody deed.”

The Alabama Beacon describes the assassination as an “[act] of infamous diabolism revolting to every upright and honest heart.”

The editor of the Meridian [Mississippi] Clarion proclaims: “Such deeds could never do honor to the cause we espoused.” [Note the use of the past tense].

Even the toxically unsympathetic Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, writing from the unconquered Confederate Trans-Mississippi on April 24, 1865, opines (in pertinent part):

We publish to-day the most astounding intelligence it has ever been our lot to place before our readers — intelligence of events which may decide the fate of empires, and change the complexion of an age . . .

With the perpetration of these deeds we can have no sympathy, nor for them can the Southern people be held any way responsible. While Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward had by their malignity created only feelings of detestation and horror for them in the minds of our people, and while in their death the finger of God’s providence is manifest, it is still impossible to look upon an assassin with complacency . . .

God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place. His purpose in it as His purpose in the surrender of Lee’s army, remains to be seen . . . What this event will lead to no man can foresee . . .

Let us wait in patience for the next scene in this terrible drama.

Cox recommends that the two fugitives spend the night in the woods.

III

From a 21^st Century perspective it seems incredible that a breakaway nation still evincing resistance to the country from which it sprang would embrace that country’s fallen leader as the Southern Press seems to have done in the early Spring of 1865. However, it is important to note that many of the newspapers that wrote mournful editorials were in areas under Federal control. It was also quite evident that publishing anything anti-Lincoln might get an editor arrested or killed, a newspaper shut down or burned to the ground. Since most newspapers were small and privately owned enterprises in 1865, the publishers were readily identifiable targets for official and unofficial punishments.

But beyond that, many Southerners found the act of assassinating Lincoln utterly reprehensible even when they expressed hatred toward the man and his policies. Shooting an unarmed man at unawares from behind was seen as ungallant, the act of a cad and a coward, and violative of the sometimes feudal strictures of the unwritten Code of Southern Honor that most men and women in the region ascribed to (even when they did not live up to it).

The Civil War was in many ways a chivalric war, in which enemies were honored for their heroism and gallantry --- the surrender ceremony at Appomattox was living proof of that attitude. Enemies were not dehumanized as in later wars. They were instead generally seen as flesh and blood men who had families and emotional connections.

Also, in the days since Appomattox (few as they were) many Southerners had begun to realize that the North was not bent on vengeance. Lincoln was seen as the author of the North’s benign policy. But with the President killed, the future had suddenly become wilder and much darker. Mourning the loss of Lincoln, if not Lincoln himself, seemed an appropriate response to the fear engendered by the mad act of a self-proclaimed Southern “patriot.”     

Still, not everyone felt the same way.

IV

"Lincoln The Martyr Greeted By George Washington" was a popular image of the day

The churches are jammed to overflowing this Easter Sunday. Seeking solace, seeking the company of others, seeking to make sense of the President’s terrible death, most Americans seek out their own favored house of God this day. It escapes no one, northern or southern, that the President met his death on the same night as Jesus Christ. Most Easter sermons of 1865 reflect the belief that Lincoln was a sacrifice on the altar of American freedom, a man who gave up his life for the nation’s sins.

The Death of President Lincoln is preached at Grace Church in Orange, New Jersey; A Sermon on the Services and Death of Abraham Lincoln is preached at Christ Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Church bells are rung in Lincoln’s memory even in Richmond, Petersburg, and other southern cities.

Many of the Lincoln Easter sermons are later collected and published in book form, and are still available today.

Lincoln’s death comes however, not only on Good Friday, but on the night of the first Passover Seder; and during the next morning’s Sabbath services and for the next week, rabbis draw heavily upon the Book of Exodus and on the story of the freeing of the slaves from bondage for inspiration.

The transfiguration of Lincoln from an American man to an American myth has begun.

V

The Washington D.C. police visit Mary Surratt’s Boarding House. No one knows where John Surratt Jr. is, and Mary claims to know nothing of any plan to shoot the President.

   

The Surratt Boarding House in 1865 and in 2015

Federal soldiery visits Dr. Samuel Mudd’s house. Mudd makes himself inadvertently famous by responding, “My name is Mudd” when he is asked for his identity upon opening the door. When questioned, Mudd claims not to know John Wilkes Booth. He also claims to know nothing of the President’s assassination.

Troops (reenactors) at the Samuel Mudd house

The public is admitted into the East Room of the White House where President Lincoln’s body lies in state upon its catafalque. The line soon stretches to seven people abreast.

In what still remains the largest manhunt in U.S. history, ten thousand Federal troops are assigned to hunt down John Wilkes Booth. In addition, police forces are put on high alert all around the country in the search for Booth. Oddly, the famous actor’s photo is not distributed as first; only a description is given. Reports of “sightings” pour in from as far away as California (a physical impossibility in those days) and several men matching Booth’s general description are beaten or killed at various points around the country. A flavor of mob violence is in the air; in the meantime, Booth stays hidden in the piney woods near Samuel Cox’s house.