April 20, 1865---"It is my hope that I should die bravely."

APRIL 20, 1865:       

“It is my hope that I should die bravely.” --- John Wilkes Booth

I

Edwin Stanton posts a reward for John Wilkes Booth. At $100,000.00 (1865) it would be worth over $1.5 million today. 

II

John Surratt, who is in Elmira, New York doing Intelligence work for the Confederacy as a contact for the Confederate Underground at the P.O.W. Camp in that city, flees to Canada upon learning of his mother’s arrest and the price put on his head by the U.S. Government. He seeks asylum at the home of Jacob Thompson, the Confederate Commissioner-cum-spymaster in Montreal.

III

The revenant Army of Tennessee was a grab-bag force. Since Joseph E. Johnston C.S.A. reconstituted it in late February, it was made up of numerous separate commands --- Hardee’s, Bragg’s, Hampton’s, Hoke’s, and Forrest’s among them --- and Johnston had to be as much of a diplomat as a warrior to keep his unruly and often mutually-antagonistic subordinates operating in concert.

After the Battle of Averasboro and the Battle of Bentonville, Johnston watched in frustration as his forces began a slow and fatal loss of men not to battle wounds and disease only, but to desertion. The massiveness of the Union field convinced many men that death in the cause of the Confederacy was meaningless, tantamount to suicide. Scores deserted daily. Since Johnston’s soundings on a cease-fire on the 14^th and his meetings with Sherman on the 17^th and the 18^th, most of his remaining men became certain that the war was effectively over. Hundreds deserted nightly.

Word of Lincoln’s assassination further disheartened most of Johnston’s men, not emboldened them. Few of them looked forward to crossing swords with a huge, well-equipped Union Army of The Tennessee that was lusting for payment of a blood debt. The Army of Tennessee lost more than 1000 men in a single night.

Complicating matters, North Carolinian and deep South parolees of The Army of Northern Virginia began to enter Johnston’s lines at the same time. When they told Johnston’s men of the impressive surrender ceremony at Appomattox and of the liberal terms Grant granted Lee, Johnston’s men became convinced --- or wanted to be convinced --- that the war was well and truly over. The equivalent of entire units disappeared from Johnston’s scattered camps overnight on the 20^th and the 21^st. By dawn on the 22nd, The Army of Tennessee was down to perhaps 12,000 men.   

IV

The brilliant sunshine of April 19^th has been replaced by a driving rainstorm that soaks and chills everyone in Washington D.C. to the bone. Thus, the crowds waiting at the Capitol Rotunda to view Abraham Lincoln’s body are smaller than they have been. “Only” 30,000 mourners pass through the great bronze doors this day. 

V

 

The same rain that is drenching mourners in Washington D.C. is drenching the most wanted man in America. After reading news article after news article and editorial after editorial about describing him as a “monster” and an “accursed devil” John Wilkes Booth is beginning to lose heart that anyone will understand what he still perceives as an act of heroism. “It is my hope that I should die bravely” he scrawls in his wet little pocket diary. “Right or wrong, God judge me,” he adds.

Every day, he hobbles down to the banks of the Potomac with David Herold, hoping to find a way across the river into “safe” Virginia. On this day, Booth is nearly captured when Union troops begin entering the piney woods. They are so close that Booth and Herold can hear them. The miserable weather spares them when the flooded, mucky, and swamplike ground conditions keep the soldiers from penetrating too deep into the woods. 

Very late that night, increasingly concerned about the risk of Federal troops, the Confederate agent Thomas A. Jones leads Booth and Herold down to the shore of the Potomac, lends them a boat, and directs them to row across the river to the home of Elizabeth Quisenberry at Machoda Creek, Virginia. Quisenberry is another Stationmaster on the Confederate Underground Railroad.  

Booth and Herold set out, but are spotted by a patrolling Union gunboat that hails them. Fortunately for Booth and Herold, they are low to the water and get easily lost from view in the darkness and rain. Unfortunately for Booth and Herold, when they do make landfall, they have gotten turned around. What they think is Virginia is still Maryland, a fact they do not discover until after daybreak.

 

VI

Having struck the village of Carson House on the 19^th Stoneman’s Raid comes to Swannanoa Gap in western North Carolina.

  

Wilson’s Raid takes Macon, Georgia without firing a shot after General Howell Cobb C.S.A.’s men desert or surrender en masse.

In Tennessee, Brigadier General William Whipple U.S.A. reports to Sherman that “Bushwhackers are investing the . . . upper end of Williamson County . . . committing all kinds of depredations.”

Confederate forces skirmish with Union pickets at Montpelier Springs, Alabama.

 

VII

A messenger from Colonel John Mosby’s command visited Robert E. Lee in Richmond this day with a request for Orders from the General. Lee’s message to  Mosby is to “Go home.”

VIII

Jefferson Davis, still in Charlotte, North Carolina, receives a letter from Robert E. Lee. The letter reads in part:

The apprehensions I expressed . . . of the moral[e?] condition of the Army of Northern Virginia, have been realized . . . At the commencement of the withdrawal of the army from the lines on the night of the 2d, it began to disintegrate, and straggling from the ranks increased up to the surrender on the 9th.   On that day, as previously reported, there were only seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-two (7892) effective infantry.   During the night, when the surrender became known, more than ten thousand men came in, as reported to me by the Chief Commissary of the Army.   During the succeeding days stragglers continued to give themselves up, so that on the 12th April, according to the rolls of those paroled, twenty-six thousand and eighteen (26,018) officers and men had surrendered.   Men who had left the ranks on the march, and crossed James River, returned and gave themselves up, and many have since come to Richmond and surrendered . . .  

. . . [A]n army cannot be organized or supported in Virginia, and as far as I know the condition of affairs, the country east of the Mississippi is morally and physically unable to maintain the contest . . .  A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence . . .    

Lee, who has largely been silent since Appomattox except for his statements on the killing of President Lincoln, takes the extraordinary step of granting an interview to The New York Herald in which he promised

"[T]o make any sacrifice or perform any honorable act that would tend to the restoration of peace."

In almost equal numbers fellow citizens will be elated and dejected.  Some will be angry; others boastful.  Let it not be so with us.  There are merits and glaring inadequacies in the arguments on both sides . . . yet the challenges are enormous.  I ask you to witness the way of grace, reconciliation and peace.  I ask you to speak for the voiceless and to be catalysts of inclusion.

Whatever the result, I believe the country needs the best all of us have to offer and, as Christians, we are called not only to be strong advocates for justice and compassion, but also people of peace and mercy. 

When published, Lee’s interview enraged Jefferson Davis, but many Confederates followed their honored General’s lead. It would, however, be absurd to believe that all good Southerners meekly put down their guns, went home, freed their slaves, and lived utterly peaceable lives merely at Lee’s direction.

In later years, though Lee never ascribed to the mythology of the Lost Cause, Lee retreated a little from his conciliatory tone of late April 1865. In the late 1860s, Lee would publicly assert that the Union victory had been won merely by overwhelming military force and not by moral rightness; he also stepped back from his “rejoic[ing] that slavery is dead!”  and did nothing to foster racial amity between southern whites and southern blacks. These prevarications caused President Ulysses S. Grant to castigate Lee in private, though he wisely did not antagonize former Confederates by publishing his remarks.