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 14th and his meetings with Sherman on the 17th
and the 18th, 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 20th
and the 21st. By dawn on the 22nd, The Army of Tennessee was down to
perhaps 12,000 men.
IV
The
brilliant sunshine of April 19th has been replaced by a driving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 19th 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.
