The Darkest Dawn Read online

  Perhaps in no section of the country were the glad tidings more warmly received than in New England. In a region that rightly felt it had played a leading role in starting the war to end slavery, news of Lee’s surrender was doubly satisfying. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, while bells rang madly and guns boomed, students and faculty crowded the Green and held a euphoric celebration.15 In Boston, Hartford, and Burlington, those who had displayed little outward joy over the past week’s news now exploded in an orgy of emotion. Explained the editor of the Providence Daily Journal:

  It is not often that the staid, earnest, substantial nature of our New England people is stirred to exhibit such manifestations of delirious joy. . . . When the news of the evacuation of Richmond came, gladness was depicted on every countenance, but there was no outburst of enthusiasm. The people asked eagerly, “What about Lee and his army?” . . . But on Sunday night, as soon as it was fully understood that Lee had really surrendered his army, the last demand of that careful, reserved New England mind was met. There palpably was the downfall of the rebellion. . . . And if any had supposed that the New England heart was cold as a glacier, they should have seen it melt down almost in an instant, and pour its full, swelling tide of joy, jollity, and jubilation. . . .

  We never saw anything like it before here. It was . . . delirium. It was joyous frenzy. . . . The moment any one shouted, everybody within hearing responded. If one struck up a song, everybody sang. If one started “John Brown,” all were ready to declare that “his soul’s marching on.” . . . Some one shouts that the recruiting booths are no longer needed, and they straightaway are turned over into the fire to “recruit” the flame.16

  As was the case in Providence, in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and numerous other cities in the North, those stay-at-homes who had lived in daily dread of the draft now vented their anger by destroying recruiting booths and setting them alight.17

  “No more drafting!” exclaimed a relieved man in New York. “No more quotas! No more terror of ‘notices’ from provost marshals, and no more breaking of one’s neck to hunt up a substitute.”18

  In much the same spirit, others released their pent-up stress of the past four years by engaging in violent acts. In countless towns and cities, effigies of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders were hanged and burned while watching crowds roared their approval. Additionally, with virtually every loyal home and shop in the North now displaying the Stars and Stripes, those without flags came under immediate suspicion. With seeming impunity, drunken hooligans roamed the streets wreaking vengeance on those they considered disloyal.

  At Wilmington, Delaware, a menacing mob stalked the city, forcing Democrats and suspected dis-loyalists to display the U.S. flag. When one physician refused, he was seized by his hair and beaten. Another doctor in the same town balked and was chased into a building. Fortunately for the man, soldiers soon appeared and escorted him to the guard house.19

  When a rumor raced through Portland, Maine, that a railroad superintendent had torn down a flag placed on one of his trains by a mob, the man was instantly seized, stripped of his clothing, dressed in a blue soldier’s uniform, then paraded through the streets waving a U.S. flag. After being compelled to make patriotic speeches and salute the flag, the victim was finally released.20 A short distance south, in rainy Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a loud and savage crowd of two thousand surrounded a democratic newspaper office. When the shaken editor thereupon displayed a flag from his window as demanded, the mob was not satisfied. With shouts of “Hang him!” and “String him up!” the surging mass burst through the doors and windows of the building. Although the journalist miraculously escaped, his office was totally destroyed. Passing by the ruins later that day, the editor of a rival Portsmouth newspaper gloated over the demise of the “miserable dirty sheet.”21

  And although the vast majority of federal soldiers were content to have merely survived the war and were more than willing to bury the hatchet with their old foe, others seemed determined to rub salt in the wounds. At Winchester, Virginia, Winfield Scott Hancock ordered the entire town illuminated to celebrate Lee’s surrender. That there might be no excuses, the Union general announced that his commissary would supply candles to all who had none. “Imagine,” said one heartbroken citizen, “a town full of Southern people whose hearts were bleeding and torn by the sad news . . . being compelled by military force to illuminate in token of their rejoicing over our condition.”22

  Even in victory, many in the North, high and low, were now advocating a draconian policy toward the defeated Confederacy, including wholesale executions of civil and military leaders. One of the most strident voices in support of such measures was Andrew Johnson. “Death is too easy a punishment,” shouted the vice president to a crowd in Washington. Had he the power, Johnson growled, he would hang rebel leaders “twenty times higher than Haman.”23

  Viewing the violence around them, horrified by the menacing cries of summary executions, better spirits urged peace. “In mercy’s name, has there not been suffering enough?” asked renowned clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, after a New York mob threatened a wealthy banker, not for failure to show a flag but because the one displayed was too small.24 The Union, insisted Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, must now demonstrate to the world its greatness by exhibiting “magnanimity in triumph.”25

  All such pleas might have gone for nothing had not the leading man in the nation agreed with Beecher and Greeley. His guidance, wisdom, patience, and, above all, his charity ensured that as long as he lived, vengeance and retribution would never find a safe haven in America. Fortunately, enough men of goodwill gratefully followed Lincoln’s lead, happy to get beyond the horrors of the past.

  “Glory to God, the End of bloodshed has come at last,” said one government official.26

  The New York Times agreed:

  The great struggle is over. . . . The history of blood—the four years of war, are brought to a close. The fratricidal slaughter is all over. The gigantic battles have all been fought. The last man, we trust, has been slain. The last shot has been fired.27

  CHAPTER FOUR

  STAR OF GLORY

  ALTHOUGH MANY OF THE MONUMENTS, statues, and buildings would have been ornaments in any European capital, and although the promise of its future now seemed secure, by the spring of 1865 Washington, D.C., still remained a backward, rambling, shameless embarrassment on the world political map. Like a bejeweled but besotted harlot, the nation’s capital was at once both beautiful and ugly—desirable, yet repellent. From a pre-war population of sixty thousand, Washington had burst its seams in four years of war, nearly doubling in size to over one hundred thousand souls. Far from keeping pace with growth, city services had fallen well behind. The hideous smells from rotting animal carcasses, as well as the festering remains from the municipal and military slaughter yards, mingled day and night with the smoke from thousands of fires and furnaces. Stagnant, motionless canals and the sluggish Potomac served as sewage dumps where all manner of offal and filth fed the stench. Hogs wandered and wallowed in the city “as freely as dogs.” In the malignant Washington air, said one of those with a sensitive nose, there were “70 separate and distinct stinks.”1

  “The capital of the nation, is probably the dirtiest and most ill-kept borough in the United States,” commented the well-traveled newsman Noah Brooks.2

  Into this stifling, stinking stew were tossed some of the best, and many of the worst, people in America. Lobbyists, lawyers, clergymen, foreign ambassadors, and well-bred wives of politicians and military men jostled and elbowed for the same bit of sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue as prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, thieves, thugs, thimbleriggers, drunkards, and deserters. Hundreds of saloons, bordellos, and other “dens of infamy” fed the public demand.

  “Everybody has heard of the great corruption of the city of Washington,” continued Noah Brooks, “but I will venture to say that its moral corruption is far exceeded by the physical rottenness
of its streets.”3

  During the dry season, the byways of the capital were swirling storms of blinding, choking dust; in wet weather, they were almost bottomless quagmires. When it rained, said one man, Washington streets were “literally nothing but canals in which earth and water were mixed together for depths varying from six inches to three feet.”4 Any vehicle that foundered and sank in the yellow ooze was said to be “shipwrecked.”5 All in all, John Hay could only laugh at those smug individuals in the capital who somehow felt sophisticated and superior simply because they resided in a populous city that was the seat of power. “This miserable sprawling village imagines itself a city because it is wicked, as a boy thinks he is a man when he smokes and swears,” sneered Lincoln’s proper secretary.6

  Nevertheless, on the night of April 13, 1865, all the wrinkles and warts and flaws of the bedizened lady along the Potomac were hidden by her dazzling display of jewels. Although the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender were glorious, earthshaking events in Washington, the grand end-of-war jubilation was saved for this night. Soon after dark, the great celebration began. While cannons thundered from every part of the city and bands marched through the streets, steam fire engines, with bells clanging and whistles screaming, sent up a deafening din. Giant bonfires blazed on every corner. From virtually every home and building, candles—sometimes as many as sixty per window—sent a shower of light below, turning night into day. An estimated one million candles alone burned for the illumination.7

  “Every tower, turret, every window in the city, from the dizzy height of the dome of the capitol, all over the immense structure; from the stairs of the Smithsonian, from every house and hovel, flashed a flood of light,” wrote a reporter for the Wilmington Delaware Republican. “Tens of thousands of rockets were constantly mounting heavenward, with hissing sound and dazzling brightness and falling again like a rain of jewels.”8

  From the city parks, huge mortars fired enormous pyrotechnic shells into the darkness above, which, upon exploding in a grand burst, fell shimmering to earth in a shower of blue, green, and crimson stars.9

  Wrote a dazzled Julia Shepard to her father in upstate New York:

  All along our route the city was one blaze of glorious light. From the humble cabin of the contraband to the brilliant White House[,] light answered light down the broad avenue. The sky was ablaze with bursting rockets. Calcium lights shone from afar on the public buildings. Bonfires blazed in the streets and every device that human Yankee ingenuity could suggest in the way of mottoes and decoration made noon of midnight.10

  “It looks like a city of fire,” thought one spellbound spectator.11

  To the tens of thousands in the streets that night, the celebration was an awe-inspiring event worthy of a great nation in victory. It was, said a stunned soldier simply, “the most grand exhibition that ever was witnessed in America.”12

  Of all the many attractions this night—the parades, the bands, the fireworks, the illuminations—there was only one individual in all of Washington who could not only rival the display but upstage it. As the presidential carriage wended its way through the sea of flame, the crowds filling the streets sent up explosions of cheers and shouts.13 In the minds of most, the individual seated within was the man of the hour, the hero of the day, the leader whose dogged determination and iron will had gained final victory and ensured that the Union of their forefathers would continue. And Mary Lincoln was furious.

  This evening was supposed to be her supreme moment and hers alone. For the better part of four years, her husband, Abraham Lincoln, had been belittled and denigrated, vilified and ridiculed by a surly public unhappy with the course of a bloody, and seemingly unwinnable, war. But despite the critics and naysayers and the overwhelming odds, she and her husband had triumphed. It was her husband and his decisions, more than any other factor, that had held the nation together to witness this final triumph. And yet, it was not her husband upon whose head the laurel of victory had been placed; nor was it he who received the delirious cheers and applause from the frenzied, yet fickle, public this night. It was instead this otherwise unremarkable, cigar-smoking little man who shared her company.

  From the moment he stepped into the carriage, Ulysses Grant knew he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. What made the error doubly painful to the lieutenant general was that after the shameless spectacle of two weeks before, he should have known better.

  In late March, while the Lincolns were on a business and pleasure trip to City Point, Virginia, a review of troops was planned in the president’s honor. Because her husband was already on the field discussing military matters, Mary, along with Grant’s wife, Julia, was forced to ride to the ceremony over a bumpy, muddy road in a lumbering ambulance. Already enraged by the slow, undignified trip, when the notoriously jealous first lady arrived at the parade ground and discovered an attractive general’s wife riding next to the president, her mind became unhinged. As the unwitting young woman rode up to pay her respects, Mary unleashed a hysterical verbal assault that left those around her speechless and the startled victim in tears.14 When Julia Grant sought to mollify Mary, the first lady’s fury fell on her.

  “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?” snapped the woman.15

  And then, to cap the incident, Mary Lincoln turned her wrath on the president. To the utter pain and embarrassment of all, the maniacal display continued without letup, the husband meekly absorbing the punishment with a look of sadness and despair, as if he had suffered such tongue-lashings a thousand times before. Not repentant or shamed in the least by the outburst, that night at supper Mary all but demanded that Grant remove the general whose wife she had attacked.16 Understandably, and in no uncertain terms, Julia Grant later that evening informed her famous husband that she would never again under any circumstances accompany the first lady anywhere. The general understood. Indeed, had Grant not been “asked” by the president, and ordered by Mary—“I want you to drive around with us to see the illumination”—he would not be enduring the agony of a carriage ride through Washington with the shrill, temperamental first lady this very moment.17

  Hardly had the two begun their tour of the city when revelers discovered that it was the great general inside. They sent up shouts for “Grant, Grant, Grant!” Outraged that the hosannas were not for her and her husband, Mary ordered the vehicle to stop that she might get out. When the cheers from the crowd soon turned to “Lincoln, Lincoln!” the woman was appeased somewhat and allowed the carriage to continue. To Grant’s mortification, Mary’s tirade was repeated again and again around the city as celebrants shouted the general’s name and banners proclaimed him the nation’s savior—“Glory to God, who hath to U. S. Grant-d the Victory,” “God, Grant, our Country, Peace.”18

  When the carriage turned off E Street to Tenth Street and passed Ford’s Theater, where Laura Keene and the cast of Our American Cousin were giving a “rather dull” performance to a small audience, Grant’s heart sank. At the insistence of both the president and his wife, the general had accepted an invitation for himself and Julia to attend Ford’s Theater on the following night.19

  Away at war these past four years, Grant must have been shocked at the first lady’s insanity. The city that had endured it for years, however, was not. From her days as a poor congressman’s wife in Washington, when she had suffered slights, insults, and indifference, Mary Lincoln was now firmly on top, answering to no one, and treating all as if they were her miserable, fawning subjects. Viewing herself as royalty, Mary acted as she thought royalty acted. Given her shallow intellect and social shortcomings, there were many ludicrous incidents.

  “Her royal majesty,” some sneered in secret.20 Even one of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay, referred to Mary in private as “Her Satanic Majesty.”21

  The first lady’s shrill tirades and imperial posturing were revolting to common Americans. Similarly, her tasteless extravagance and styleless costumes were equally repellent to
well-bred Washington society. Pompous, pretentious, and plump, Mary Lincoln, said one disgusted editor, was a “coarse, vain, unamiable woman. . . . [a] sallow, fleshy, uninteresting woman in white laces, & wearing a band of white flowers about her forehead, like some overgrown Ophelia.”22

  “[T]he weak-minded Mrs. Lincoln,” added a shocked senator after attending a White House reception, “had her bosom on exhibition and a Flower pot on her head.”23

  Wrote part-time poet and full-time government functionary Benjamin French:

  [She] moved in all the insolence of pride

  as if the world beneath her feet she trod;

  Her vulgar bearing, jewels could not hide,

  And gold’s base glitter was her only god!24

  With twisted logic, Mary Lincoln felt that much of the praise showered lately on her husband was rightly hers. Little did the woman realize that the applause the president received was not because of her but in spite of her. Already pathologically jealous of her husband’s attention, Mary was also acutely alert to any threat to his power. Because Grant was obviously the most popular man in the land, the people must not be allowed to forget who had placed him in his current position in the first place. No matter how repugnant his presence might be to Mary Lincoln, any acclaim Grant received must be shared by the president and first lady.

  Perhaps Grant had heard of Mary’s jealousy and her hatred of him. “He is a butcher and is not fit to be at the head of an army,” the woman had hissed to her husband after the costly victories of the summer before. When Lincoln countered that the general was successful, Mary snapped back: “Yes, he generally manages to claim victory, but such a victory! He loses two men to the enemy’s one. . . . Grant, I repeat, is an obstinate fool and a butcher.”25