APRIL 27, 1865:
“We are going all to pieces.” --- Jefferson
Davis
I
Jefferson
Davis and his entourage enter South Carolina, where they are greeted as
conquering heroes. Southern belles even strew flowers in the Confederate
President’s path. The response of these ardent Confederates convinces Davis
that the right thing to do is to carry on the war. In what one observer calls
“curbside government” Davis and his Cabinet hold meetings in taverns, in
woodlots, and along the swales of country roads. This isolated area of the Confederacy
is unbattered by war, the people have not heard of Lee’s surrender, the news of
Lincoln’s death is met by cheers, and Davis tells them, smilingly, to hold
fast.
Stoneman’s
cavalry in Asheville is retasked to capture Jefferson Davis. Stanton orders
that the Confederate President be given “a noose and a halter”. Stoneman’s men,
who have just raided western North Carolina nonstop for a month are angry at
Davis for denying them R & R, and are enraged over the death of President
Lincoln. Each man is also spurred on by the thought of the $100,000.00 reward
for the Rebel President’s person.
Davis
seems to have no idea he is a wanted man with a price on his head. He is
likewise strangely blithe about the fact that the Federal Government blames him
for Lincoln’s death. Even though he has been given all this information, he
dismisses it. Even after a local
Minister chastises him for heading a nation in which such a terrible thing
could happen Davis seems nonplussed. “You’d think that man meant to blame me.”
His
Cabinet is thunderstruck at Davis’ seeming obtuseness. One by one they begin to
leave the Presidential caravan.
His
strange idyll lasts all day until a courier reaches him late at night with word
of Johnston’s surrender. Calling it, “a disgusting betrayal” he
uncharacteristically rages for hours. Afterward, he writes Varina a
letter: “We are going all to pieces.”
II
The
sidewheeler S.S. SULTANA, plying the Mississippi River northbound from New
Orleans to St. Louis, explodes spectacularly just north of Memphis, Tennessee.
She is carrying 2,427 passengers when she goes, almost ten times her usual full
capacity, and mostly recently released Union Prisoners of War.
Over
1800 people die, and only 500 or so survive making the SULTANA disaster a
greater loss of life than the TITANIC, 47 years in the future (1517 lost, 705
survivors). The official reason for the SULTANA’s loss is ascribed to
overpressuring the boilers in order to allow the dangerously overloaded ship to
fight the strong Spring flood of the Mississippi. However, in 1888, Robert
Louden, a former Confederate spy, made a deathbed confession that he had placed
several coal torpedoes in SULTANA’s bunkers during her stop at Memphis. Coal
torpedoes were hollowed-out blobs of iron, painted black, and filled with
explosives. One could certainly have sunk the ship. Although the official
reason for the SULTANA’s loss remains boiler failure, Louden’s story casts
light on the desperation of hard-core Confederates who were still fighting the
war as April turned to May.
III
The Lincoln Funeral Train
arrived at Buffalo, New York, at 7:00 A.M. The trip from Albany had taken a
full fifteen hours because in places crowds blocked the tracks forcing the
train to slow so that they could kneel and pray for the fallen President.
25,000 people waited at Utica’s depot in pouring rain just to see the train
pass by. In Syracuse, thirty-five thousand citizens stood saluting as the train
passed through. Former President Millard Fillmore, whose house had been stained
with India Ink for not displaying black crepe, boarded the train in Batavia and
traveled to Buffalo for the next funeral.
The Buffalo funeral held on
April 27, 1865 was the second one the city staged. The city had held a funeral in absentia for Lincoln on April 19th,
the day of his Washington funeral.
After the ornate service, Lincoln's
casket was placed in St. James Hall, tilted at an angle so people could better
view his face. Nearly 100,000 mourners, including future President Grover
Cleveland, then an unknown young man, filed past the coffin until 8:00 P.M. when
the doors were closed. The train
departed near midnight for Cleveland, Ohio.
IV
Lewis Powell, the would-be
assassin of William H. Seward, shackled and hooded in the brig aboard the U.S.S.
SAUGUS, attempts to commit suicide (or perhaps simply goes a little crazy) when
he slams his head repeatedly into a bulkhead. To forestall any such future
attempts, Powell is forced to wear a special padded hood that is even more
claustrophobic and suffocating than the plain black silk hood he has been
wearing. Powell cries when it is slipped over his head.
Living conditions for the
conspirators were terrible. Locked in hot, airless tiny cells ‘tween decks on
the SAUGUS and the U.S.S. MONTAUK, they were shackled and hooded 24 hours a day.
Meals were of bread and coffee, served four times a day, randomly. They were
not allowed on deck, nor were they allowed to bathe or change their clothes. In
total darkness, and essentially unable to move, they were forced to soil
themselves. Powell, for one, began to show lapses of memory so severe that he
was questioned for four hours by Federal authorities and a doctor in order to
test his sanity. During this lengthy interrogation he further implicated the
Confederate Government in the assassination plot. “I am dead, and I am going to die,” Powell
told his captors enigmatically.
The conspirators had rare
visitors --- their jailors, various interrogators, and Alexander Gardner, who
took the pictures of them seen in these daily entries. Lawyers were not permitted. Nor were spiritual
counselors. Edwin Stanton had determined to break them all.
Only Dr. Samuel Mudd and Mary
Surratt, incarcerated in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, were not
subjected to these dehumanizing conditions.
V
In North Carolina, the Army of
Tennessee begins to dissolve. United States Military Railroad trains begin
chugging away from Greensboro loaded with paroled Confederates happy to go
home. As the trains make their various stops, word of the surrenders of Lee and
Johnston begin to spread through the south (or are confirmed) along with news
of Lincoln’s death. In eastern Kentucky, a small isolated force of 1,500 in and
around Salyersville begins negotiating with the local Union commander regarding
surrender terms. This negotiation takes three days. At Salyersville, the delay
concerns the taking of the Oath of Allegiance to the United States
(outnumbered, the Confederates eventually concede this point); it is a fairly
typical surrender but for its length. In other places, delays are occasioned by
the terms of parole --- is a given man a soldier free to go or a bushwhacker
subject to arrest? In other places surrendering units demand to keep their
combat flags. But in most locales, Lee and Grant’s “Gentleman’s Agreement”
rules the day. Slowly, the Blood-Stained Banner and the Cross-and-Stars begin
to fade into history.
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