Abraham Lincoln - Ford’s
Theater, Washington, DC; Lincoln’s Cottage, Washington, DC; Beauvoir, Biloxi, MS
April 13, May 24, July
9, 2014
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| Presidential Box at Ford's Theater |
Cathy and I toured Ford’s Theatre one day shy of
149 years later to begin at the end of the life of one of the greatest
Americans who ever lived. Since it was
cherry blossom season, we had to contend with armies of tourists. But the staff of the theater admitted people
according to tickets with assigned times, so it was easy. Once our allotted time arrived, our group
piled into the theater — both the balcony and orchestra sections were available. And then, out onto the stage ambled, not an
actor, but a National Park Service ranger who discussed the last days of
Lincoln’s life.
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| The Playbill |
Booth is from a famous family of well-respected
actors. All of the Booths are pro-Union…except for John Wilkes who once said
"slavery is the white man's gift from God." And Booth has the malicious intent to strike
a blow for the defeated South.
Booth nimbly devises a plan to assassinate, not
only Lincoln, but members of his Cabinet as well. He shares the plan with his confederates, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell and David Herold. This is the same bunch who tried to kidnap Lincoln
earlier that year during his commute between the White House and his summer
residence at the Soldiers’ Home three miles away. But the plot was frustrated when Lincoln
didn't show up. George Atzerodt is supposed to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson while Lewis
Powell and David Herold are assigned to slay Secretary of State William H. Seward.
The security at the theater is spotty. Soldiers are stationed outside, and everybody
has to exhibit passes to get in. There is no reason to think anybody inside
would do the President harm. The play
starts at 8 p.m., but Lincoln arrives at 8:30 — without Grant, who is heading
to New Jersey to see his daughter for Easter. Instead, Major Henry Rathbone and
his fiancé, Clara Harris, accompany the President and his wife, Mary.
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| A Most Heinous Act |
Booth skulks along the balcony to the to the
yellow door where the presidential valet is sitting. Booth gives him his card
and says he wants to pay respects to the President. Since the Lincolns are fans
of the Booth family, the valet admits him.
(Another security breach.) Booth
waits in the hallway for the climax. Then
he enters the box and barricades the door.
As the climatic line approaches, Booth creeps toward Lincoln with a Derringer
steady in his hand. He positions the gun
four inches from the left side of Lincoln's head. As the punch line hangs in
the air, he pulls the trigger. But
everybody is laughing, so few in the audience notice. Major Rathbone grabs Booth; Booth pulls out a
knife and hacks him. Booth then flings
himself onto the stage, landing badly, and fracturing a small bone in his leg. He displays his knife on stage and screams "Sic Semper Tyrannous": "Thus always to tyrants." Allegedly, Brutus said this when he killed
Julius Caesar. Booth scuttles out the
door, vaults onto his horse and is gone.
Lincoln, unconscious, is cascading blood. Major Rathbone is in shock, Mary Todd Lincoln
and Clare are trying to help Lincoln, but the whole theater is in
pandemonium. The first doctor on the
scene is a 23-year-old who graduated six months earlier and had been a military
field doctor. He and Dr. Charles Taft, who arrives later, realize Lincoln won't
live, so they order him carried across the street to the Petersen Boarding House.
It takes 45 minutes to transport him.
(Modern medicine might have saved his life, but
he wouldn't have been able to talk and his brain functions might have been
limited. He could not have served out his presidency, the guide said.)
At about the same time across town, Lewis Powell
is slashing Seward with a knife, severely wounding him. But George Atzerodt loses his nerve and gets
drunk instead of attacking Vice President Johnson.
The city is obviously in chaos with nobody sure
what is really happening.
The
aftermath is that President Abraham Lincoln never regains consciousness and
dies the next morning propped up in a bloody bed too small for his long
frame. John Wilkes Booth is hunted for
12 days and is finally cornered in a Virginia barn. He is shot in the neck and dies 12 hours
later. His co-conspirators are all
hanged together on a sweltering July day, even George Atzerodt who spent the night of violence in an
ineffectual drunken stupor. Major Rathbone
recovers from his wounds but never forgives himself for not protecting the
president. He does marry Clara Harris,
but in 1883 he fatally shoots and stabs her and is sentenced to an insane
asylum. John Ford is threatened and elects
not to reopen the theater. He sells it
to the government. In 1968, the theater is established by LBJ as a living
memorial to Lincoln.
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| The Murder Weapon |
As we concluded our tour of the museum Cathy
discovered a little theater. “Dark and the seats have a back. Does it get any better than this?” she said
as she flopped on a bench and fell asleep.
Lincoln’s
Presidency
When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election
on November 6, 1860, the South knew that its “Peculiar Institution” was finally
ending. In an attempt to hold the nation
together, he told the slave-holding states that he would not terminate slavery
but he also would not support its expansion.
Nevertheless,
the Southern states began to secede. On
December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that “the union now subsisting
between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the ‘United States
of America,’ is hereby dissolved.” Six
other Southern states followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana and Texas. They promptly
formed their own government and called it the Confederate States of
America. The capital was established in
Montgomery, Alabama; it was later moved
to Richmond once Virginia joined the Confederacy.
On
March 4, 1861, Lincoln was sworn in. On April 22, South Carolina shelled Ft.
Sumter, igniting the first military action of what was to become the Civil War. On July 21, 1861, the first great land battle
was fought, not 30 miles from the White House in Manassas, Virginia. The war would stretch four years and cost
more than 600,000 lives.
But throughout the bloody years of fighting,
Lincoln knew that abolishing slavery needed to happen at a measured pace. In a 1862 letter to New York Times editor, Horace
Greeley, he wrote "What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do
because I believe it helps to save the Union" (Wilson, 2013). So when he began to form the Emancipation
Proclamation, it was to support the Union cause. The Proclamation announced the freedom of “all
persons held as slaves” only in those states that were in rebellion. He spared slave-holding states that remained
loyal to the Union (i.e.. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri) or that
had already surrendered. Maryland was especially
important because it surrounded Washington on three sides. Secretary of State Seward counseled Lincoln to
delay the Emancipation Proclamation until after a Union victory or public images
purposes. So when the North seemingly prevailed in the battle of Antietam in September
1862, Lincoln knew he could make his announcement.
The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect
on January 1, 1863.
The South accused Lincoln of employing the
Proclamation to incite the enslaved. In fact, Lincoln did want the enslaved to
come north and fight, or at least stop working — that would take resources away
from the South. Many did come north, and
the U.S. Colored Troops were established for the first time. They could fight
for their cause and they were thrilled.
But Lincoln knew that when the war ended, the
Emancipation Proclamation might not hold. (This was because, once the war
ended, the states would no longer be in rebellion.) He needed something stronger. He needed the Constitution to actually abolish
slavery and establish that people were not property. So he pushed for the passage of a new
amendment to the Constitution. He began
to work on it in the summer of 1862 at
the Returned Soldiers’ Home in Northwest D.C.
It would become the 13th Amendment.
Lincoln’s
Cottage
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| Lincoln's Cottage |
On
Memorial Day weekend we visited the site where Lincoln developed both the
Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment; the location is now known as Lincoln’s
Cottage and is at the campus of the Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH). When we arrived, we learned that you need to purchase
tickets ahead of time, something we had overlooked. The final two tours at 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.
tours were overbooked — Memorial Day may have had something to do with that. But somehow they managed to squeeze us into
the 2 p.m. tour led by Kelsey. (We believe
our notebooks made us appear to be serious presidential scholars, so they made
an effort to squash us in.)
Kelsey
launched the tour by revealing that there is not much furniture in the cottage. “It is a museum of ideas not things,” she explained. Cathy’s response was, “No teacups, woohoo!” (Too many of our visits have been about
furniture and tableware and iron pots rather than the presidents.) The Gothic Revival house does have some
period furniture, but the focus is on Lincoln’s influences and the way he
thought. The house is as close to the Lincoln era as possible, but it's mostly
empty.
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| A Towering Man |
Presidents
were invited to the Soldiers Home as a way to curry favor (read: funding) for
the Soldiers’ Home from them.
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| Lincoln's Briefcase |
Within
sight of the Cottage is the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery,
which
was established after the First Battle of Bull Run in 1862. As the carnage increased, the bodies of 30-40
young Union soldiers were being buried every day. (According to eminent Civil War historian
Shelby Foote, the slaughter was so vast because the military tactics did not
keep up with the deadly technology.) Lincoln
witnessed many of the burials from the front of the Cottage perhaps 300 yards distant. He was witnessing the embodiment of his war
policies and it weighed heavily on him, according to another tour guide, Jimmie
Cooper. Sometimes when he couldn’t
sleep, Lincoln would repair to the cemetery and pace the graves. Once he saw a woman visiting a grave in the
middle of the night and he recited a short poem to her. (Side note: Lincoln composed poetry and there
is a book of his collected poems in the giftshop.)
During
our tour, Kelsey related an anecdote
that was revealing of Lincoln’s character. In August 1862, the first summer at the
cottage, Charles Scott, a colonel in the Union army, showed up to see
Lincoln. He and his family had been on a
ship that collided with another ship.
His wife drowned. He wanted to take her body back home to New Hampshire,
but it had already been removed to Virginia. Kelsey said it was "almost
impossible to get her body back from the South" during the war. Scott asked Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to
help but was refused. So Scott hunted down Lincoln at the cottage and gained an
audience. Lincoln was displeased with
the intrusion and asked, “Why do you come here?” He told Scott that death was pervasive in
this time of war and that Scott should have gone to the War Department for
help. When Scott told Lincoln that Stanton had refused to assist, Lincoln told
him that Stanton knew what he was doing.
Overnight,
Lincoln had a change of heart and found Scott in D.C. Lincoln directed Stanton to arrange for the
recovery of her body and apologized to Scott, saying there was “no excuse for
my conduct.” He also asked Scott not to
"tell your children about my conduct last night."
After the tour, we strolled to the nearby
National Cemetery across the street from the Soldiers’ Home campus. At the cemetery are planted neat rows of
small white grave markers, 14,000 in all, reminiscent of those at Arlington
National Cemetery. It was at this
cemetery, established before Arlington, that Major General John A. Logan — who
is also buried there — declared the first Declaration Day on May 30, 1868, to
be held every year at that time. This
became known as Memorial Day.
A
Detour into the Dark Heart of the Confederacy
In July 2014, Tom journeyed to the
retirement home of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate
States of America. The white mansion with fading green shutters, known as Beauvoir, is in Biloxi, Mississippi. An
expansive porch with rocking chairs looks out on the Gulf of Mexico.
Our tour guide held forth on Davis’
time at the house, his family, the furnishings (yes, even the tea cups!), the
use of the house as a retirement home for 2,000 Confederate veterans and their widows
— 800 of them are buried in a cemetery on the property. But not a peep about Davis’ role in the Civil
War.
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| Beauvoir |
I asked the guide if African
Americans ever visited the home (which is owned and operated by the Sons of the
Confederacy) and was told that yes and, by the way, there were black Confederate
soldiers who had lived at the retirement home. I did a double take.
“Black Confederate soldiers?” After the
tour, I visited the library in the visitor’s center and asked the librarian
about that statement. She assured me that
was indeed true and handed me two books on the subject.
The story is this. As the war dragged on, the Confederacy was
running short of soldiers. By 1864, some
in the Confederacy were seriously advocating the use of their enslaved
population. Gallagher (1997) reprints a Harper’s Weekly cartoon from December10,
1864 showing a Southerner trying to convince a confused enslaved person to take
a rifle. The caption reads: “Here! You mean, inferior, degraded Chattel,
jest kitch holt of one of them ‘ere muskits, and conquer my freedom for me!” In March 1865, a desperate Confederate
Congress approved the use of the enslaved as troops, but only a few thousand
were mustered (www.history.com). The
South surrendered the next month.
And
Back to the Bright Light of the Union
In November 1863—a year and a half before
his death—Lincoln made a short trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to participate
in the dedication of a national cemetery at the site of that July’s Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker but he had
prepared a few words. They went like
this:
Four score
and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.
Now we are
engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield
of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final
resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a
larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
How
to Get There
Ford’s Theater
Ford’s Theater is located in downtown Washington
D.C. easily accessible by Metro.
Tours of the theater are free but you must pick
up tickets admitting you at certain times.
Tickets are required for the museum as
well. More information can be found at
Lincoln’s Cottage
The visitors center is free but tickets are
required to tour the cottage. We
strongly recommend a tour of the cottage and strongly recommend that you buy
advance tickets ($15 adult, $5 children).
Don’t be caught short like us! More information is at http://lincolncottage.org/
Jefferson Davis Home
Beavoir is located on the Gulf of Mexico, 2244
Beach Blvd. Tickets are $12.50 for
adults and $7.50 for children. More
information is at http://www.beauvoir.org/
References
Burns, K.
1990. The Civil War, a film by Ken Burns.
Public Broadcasting System.
Gallagher, G.W.
1997. The Confederate War. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Keneally, T. 2003. Abraham Lincoln. Serpentine Publishing Co, Middlesex, England.
Wilson, R. 2013.
Lincoln at Petersburg. American History. October 2013.
pp. 32-37. Vol 48, No. 4.
history.com/this-day-in-history/confederacy-approves-black-soldiers
