Monday, April 6, 2015

April 11, 1865---"I'll put him through!"


APRIL 11, 1865:        

“I’ll put him through!” --- John Wilkes Booth



I



The Battle of Mount Pleasant, Alabama: In a hot skirmish near the town of Mount Pleasant, five Union cavalrymen are wounded and killed.







On this same day, Mobile, Alabama is abandoned to its fate by Confederate forces.



In central Alabama, General James H. Wilson U.S.A.’s cavalry moves on from Selma after “completing the destruction of the immense workshops, arsenals, and foundries, and waiting for Croxton to rejoin from his expedition to Tuscaloosa, it having been ascertained, through the enemy, that he captured Tuscaloosa and was moving to Selma via Eutaw. [ ] General Wilson crossed the Alabama River and moved toward Montgomery . . .”



In Pikeville, North Carolina, a group of unarmed Union medical orderlies are bushwhacked by Confederate irregulars. Some manage to flee. Others are captured or killed.







General George Stoneman U.S.A.’s cavalry burns Jonesville, North Carolina, and turns toward the town of Salisbury.







II



Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet leave Danville, Virginia. The overall mood, glum and depressed, is not helped at all when a courier rides up just as the Government train is pulling away and delivers Robert E. Lee’s correspondence counseling an end to hostilities.  The train makes its way toward Goldsboro, N.C., where Davis is expecting to confer with Generals Johnston and Beauregard.







The trip is interminable. The train, in its need to avoid Yankee patrols, is herky-jerky backing and switching, and stopping and going forward all day long. The Yankees have already taken the towns of Winston and Salem, but nevertheless Davis is forced to detour through Greensboro, only 30 miles away. He uses loose specie to pay Confederate troops in the town (about $40,000.00) and pays his Presidential Bodyguard as well (about $39,000.00). Having received payment in gold, many of the troops simply melt away.







Unlike his Richmond-to-Danville trip only ten days before, no cheering crowds greet him, and the rolling Cabinet revisits the idea of escaping to Havana or traveling to the Trans-Mississippi, where, Davis has convinced himself, 40,000 troops are available to hold the western half of the Confederacy.





III



Davis is deluded about conditions west of the Mississippi River. The mood in the Trans-Mississippi is, in fact, wildly varied. General Kirby Smith C.S.A., the Departmental Commander has 40,000 men in an area stretching from Shreveport, Louisiana to El Paso, Texas and from Brownsville, Texas in the south to the border of the Union’s Nebraska Territory in the north  --- or at least he has them on paper.







In reality, he has only a few thousand effectives under arms in and around his Shreveport headquarters, and he entertains no illusions that the Union Army will not crush him like a bug when Grant has time to turn his attention west.



The Trans-Mississippi, long cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, and ignored by the North, is a chaotic mélange of men with guns and personal agendas, a vaster sun-baked Missouri-in-the-making.







Most of the Confederates in the Trans-Mississippi are local Texans who are ignoring the few Federals in the region and are concentrating on fighting the Comanches, the Kiowas and the other hostile Indian tribes who occupy the western third of that vast State.



In the Indian Territory to the north of Texas are ill-equipped and isolated bands of displaced Cherokees who allied themselves with the South in the early days of the war and have now found themselves both abandoned and forgotten by the white men in Virginia.







There are a handful of Hispanic home guards wearing gray in southern Texas. They are men who are dedicated to keeping the French Mexican Empire from reaching the north bank of the Rio Grande. Although they fight under the Cross-and-Stars they have little real interest in the brothers’ war between the Anglos. When they do fight Unionists, their enemies are usually Hispanics in blue. Sometimes they side with each other against the Mexican Imperial Army.  



There are some Cajun Louisianans and swamp folk of indeterminate origins fighting for the sake of fighting, and a bare handful of planters’ sons in Confederate-held areas of Arkansas, closer to the big river. 

 


And there are uncounted leaderless men who claim to support The Cause but are robbing banks and stagecoaches, burning homes, killing men and raping women with impunity. 



Although they are all supposedly fighting against the Union under the Blood Stained Banner, they are a heterogeneous group with divergent and often conflicting goals.  Frequently they fight each other. Less frequently, they will ally themselves with Union horse soldiers when it serves their immediate purposes.



The Texas Hill Country is the haunt of Unionists.







The Governor in Austin wants to withdraw his State’s troops from the Confederate armies in the east ostensibly to encourage “recruitment” in the west. In fact, he needs the trained troops to restore order in Texas.   







The citizenry of Shreveport, is, however, bellicosely Confederate, and news of Lee’s surrender is answered by a mass rally and the burning of Lee in effigy.











IV



Abraham Lincoln has been awake since the middle watch of the night. Unable to sleep, he wanders the halls of the White House until finally dawn finds him working behind his desk. He has a busy day ahead. Aside from his scheduled appointments, he is constantly interrupted by well-wishers as the day goes on, who seem intent on congratulating him on the end of the war and shaking his hand. Minor Government clerks, Undersecretaries of various Departments, and even members of the general public find their way into the White House.







Lincoln is glad of the constant interruptions when he is visited by a group of Radical Republican Congressmen who spend their time with Lincoln berating him about his tolerant approach to the South.  “There will be blood!” one tells him. “The people want hangings!” says another. “That is not the Reconstruction I want.” Lincoln says tiredly. He is glad when they go.



He is even more glad when Ulysses S. Grant comes into the office. The stream of visitors doesn’t slacken, and most seem amazed to find the President and the General-in-Chief together. To everyone who congratulates Grant on the surrender of The Army of Northern Virginia, Grant replies, “The war is not over yet.”   



When they manage to speak without interruptions, President Lincoln asks Grant what he thinks will happen next on the battlefield. Grant assures Lincoln that he believes that Johnston will give up easily, and that the other Confederate armies will fall in line. However, Grant cannot guess how long the process will take, whether one month or one year. Grant is also concerned about those Confederates who will refuse to follow Lee’s lead. Names like Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Mosby come to his lips. It may take months to run the holdouts to ground, Grant admits, though he says he believes that the number of holdouts will be far smaller than he at first believed.







Lincoln sits enthralled as Grant describes in detail the surrender scene at Appomattox. Lincoln repeats what he has said before, that Lee is a good and noble man.



As Grant gets up to take his leave of the President, Lincoln has a personal request to make:  Would the General and Mrs. Grant care to join the President and the First Lady on Friday evening for a show at Ford’s Theatre, and dinner afterward?  Lincoln explains that Our American Cousin, a comedy starring Laura Keene, will be having its 1000th performance that evening. The President admits to Grant that he can use a good laugh.



Grant agrees to the plan. He takes his leave of Lincoln, gravely concerned. The President, to his mind, looks quite sickly. All the ground Lincoln seemed to have regained at City Point seems to have evaporated after only 48 hours in Washington.



After Grant leaves, Lincoln is convinced by Alexander Gardner to sit for a portrait photograph. Gardner tells Lincoln that he wants a photograph of “our victorious President.”







Lincoln’s tie is askew in the photograph, his jacket is rumpled, and his hair is messily uncombed and thick with gray along the sides of his head. His face is deeply graven with care. What is most arresting in Gardner’s photograph are the President’s sunken eyes, which burn with the fevered light of a man driven by overexertion to the point of collapse. He looks like a man on the verge of death --- which is, ironically, what he is, though the manner and time of his end are going to be completely unexpected.  



After the sitting, Lincoln changes for dinner. A group of well-wishers are coming to the White House to celebrate the Union’s victory.



Lincoln is unaccountably subdued at dinner, telling not one of the funny stories his table-talk audiences have come to expect.



During the dinner, Lincoln begins to tell of a dream he had:







I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. . . . Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.



Lincoln has had this dream before, though not with such detail. He has always previously awakened before his dream-self has entered the East Room.



The table falls silent at the words President and assassin. He finds his guests looking at him with fearful eyes.



“How horrid!  What a terrible dream!” Mary cries out. “Oh, how I wish you hadn’t told me that!”



Realizing that he has frightened his wife badly, and his guests, and not least of all himself, Lincoln tries to make a weak joke of it. “It’s all right, Molly. Why, I sure do feel sorry for that other feller,” he says.



“What other fellow?” someone asks in a whisper.







“Why, the other President. It can’t be me that’s dead, you see, because how could they tell me that I was dead? It must be the next President. Poor feller. I wouldn’t want to be him.” Lincoln forces a hollow crack of laughter to show that it’s all a joke, but for once in his life, his sense of humor fails him. Finally, muttering, “There is nothing to be done for it anyway,” he turns back to his plate.





V



The tidings were spread over the country during the night, and the nation seems delirious with joy. Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering; all, all are jubilant. This surrender of the great Rebel captain and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the Rebellion. There may be some marauding, and robbing and murder by desperadoes, but no great battle, no conflict of armies, after the news of yesterday reaches the different sections. Possibly there may be some stand in Texas or at remote points beyond the Mississippi.







So wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles as word of Lee’s surrender reached into every home in every major town and city in the United States. Throughout the nation cannon salutes were offered, and Edwin Stanton ordered every light in Washington D.C. lit. 



The Mayors of other northern cities followed suit. Brass bands played, and spontaneous parades and demonstrations were held throughout the land.

















 

VI



After dinner, President Lincoln retires to his room to work on the victory speech he is planning to give to commemorate the end of the war --- or at least Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. He is hoping to give the speech to Congress (and to the newspapers) on April 12th, that is, tomorrow, the fourth anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter. There is a poetic justice in this, Lincoln thinks, the hand of Providence.



But the tired President is having trouble concentrating. Adding to his distraction is all the joyful noise pouring in from outside, as people cheer, brass instruments crump, and firecrackers sizzle and pop.  He finally puts his scribblings aside when a persistent call goes up right outside his second story window in the White House ---



“Speech! Speech! Speech!”







The President puts his head out the window and is surprised to see a large crowd, complete with a small brass band, directly below him. Although most people are yelling, “Speech! Speech!” the bandleader asks Lincoln if they can serenade him with a favorite song.



Lincoln smiles. “I’ve always thought Dixie was a corking tune!”




The band launches into Dixie, and the crowd sings along: 




I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten;

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



In Dixie’s Land where I was born in,

Early on one frosty mornin’,

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray!  Hooray!

In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand

to live and die in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Old Missus marry “Will the weaver,”

Willium was a gay deceiver;

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



And when he put his arm around ‘er,

He smiled as fierce as a forty-pounder,

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray!  Hooray!

In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand

to live and die in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



His face was sharp as a butcher’s cleaver

But that did not seem to grieve ‘er

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



Ole Missus acted the foolish part

She died for a man that broke her heart

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray!  Hooray!

In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand

to live and die in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Now here’s to the health to the next ole Missus

An’ all the gals that want to kiss us;

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land



And if you want to drive away sorrow



Come and hear our song tomorrow

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray!  Hooray!

In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand

to live and die in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Dar’s buckwheat cakes an Injun batter,

Makes your fat a little fatter;

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.

Then hoe it down and scratch your gravel,



To Dixie’s Land I’m bound to travel.

Look away!  Look away!  Look away!  Dixie Land.



I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray!  Hooray!

In Dixie’s Land I’ll take my stand

to live and die in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.



Away, away, away down south in Dixie.







“And may that be all we claim by right of conquest from the South!”* Lincoln tells the laughing crowd. “And now, I wish you a good night.”



*Dixie or Dixie’s Land was actually written and first performed in 1859 by a New York City-based minstrel show in which the actors appeared in blackface. Given New York City’s close ties to the cotton economy, the song traveled south along with the commodities factors, eventually becoming the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. God Save The South was the official National Anthem of the C.S.A.





VII



But the crowd outside the President’s window kept shouting, “Speech! Speech!” and so Lincoln said a few words, most of which he had planned to say in his “victory” speech.  The tone of Lincoln’s words to the crowd that night was not lighthearted and gay. His thoughts of that moment were utterly not in keeping with the mood of his audience. His utterances were somber and serious, and reflected his preoccupation with the looming task of Reconstruction. Lincoln said:







We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained. In the midst of this, however, He from whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated. Nor must those whose harder part gives us the cause of rejoicing, be overlooked. Their honors must not be parcelled out with others. I myself was near the front, and had the high pleasure of transmitting much of the good news to you; but no part of the honor, for plan or execution, is mine. To Gen. Grant, his skilful officers, and brave men, all belongs. The gallant Navy stood ready, but was not in reach to take active part.



By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority -- reconstruction -- which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike a case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.



As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I can not properly offer an answer. In spite of this precaution, however, it comes to my knowledge that I am much censured for some supposed agency in setting up, and seeking to sustain, the new State government of Louisiana. In this I have done just so much as, and no more than, the public knows. In the Annual Message of Dec. 1863 and accompanying Proclamation, I presented a plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes) which, I promised, if adopted by any State, should be acceptable to, and sustained by, the Executive government of the nation. I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable; and I also distinctly protested that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States. This plan was, in advance, submitted to the then Cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of it. One of them suggested that I should then, and in that connection, apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the theretofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana; that I should drop the suggestion about apprenticeship for freed-people, and that I should omit the protest against my own power, in regard to the admission of members to Congress; but even he approved every part and parcel of the plan which has since been employed or touched by the action of Louisiana. The new constitution of Louisiana, declaring emancipation for the whole State, practically applies the Proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed-people; and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal; and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist, came to my knowledge, until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons, supposed to be interested, seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana. When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New-Orleans, Gen. Banks wrote me that he was confident the people, with his military co-operation, would reconstruct, substantially on that plan. I wrote him, and some of them to try it; they tried it, and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in getting up the Louisiana government. As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated. But, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest. But I have not yet been so convinced.



I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed to be an able one, in which the writer expresses regret that my mind has not seemed to be definitely fixed on the question whether the seceding States, so called, are in the Union or out of it. It would perhaps, add astonishment to his regret, were he to learn that since I have found professed Union men endeavoring to make that question, I have purposely forborne any public expression upon it. As appears to me that question has not been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and that any discussion of it, while it thus remains practically immaterial, could have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet, whatever it may hereafter become, that question is bad, as the basis of a controversy, and good for nothing at all--a merely pernicious abstraction.



We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.



The amount of constituency, so to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, "Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?" "Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State government?"



Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state--committed to the very things, and nearly all the things the nation wants--and they ask the nations recognition and it's assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men "You are worthless, or worse--we will neither help you, nor be helped by you." To the blacks we say "This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how." If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize, and sustain the new government of Louisiana the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts, and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it? Again, if we reject Louisiana, we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution. To meet this proposition, it has been argued that no more than three fourths of those States which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I do not commit myself against this, further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned; while a ratification by three-fourths of all the States would be unquestioned and unquestionable.



I repeat the question, "Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State Government?



What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can be safely prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic]. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.



In the present "situation" as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.






And with that the crowd dispersed, with some deep in thought and some disappointed with the President’s dark tone. At least one was fulminating with barely-checked rage at the President for even mentioning African-American suffrage ---



John Wilkes Booth stalked away from the White House even while telling a friend that “This means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make. By God, I’ll put him through!”



Lincoln, for his part, lowered the window and sighing, got ready for bed. He slept poorly again that night and for only a few hours . . .   



. . . for once again in his sleep he visited the East Room, to stand and wonder at the identity of the faceless man on the catafalque.