At North East, Pennsylvania, the funeral train stopped to allow General Dix and his staff to disembark. He had traveled with the remains since Philadelphia. Before Dix began his return to New York City, he sent a telegram to Stanton, telling him, “Everything has been most satisfactory.”
The train crossed the Ohio state line and passed through Conneaut, Kingsville, Ashtabula, Geneva, Madison, Perry, Painesville, Mentor, Willoughby, and Wickliffe, where Governor John Brough received the funeral party. Major General Joseph Hooker, now commanding the Northern Department of Ohio, also boarded there.
Abraham Lincoln had once given the command of the Army of the Potomac to the boastful general. “You have confidence in yourself,” the president had written to Hooker, “which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality…But…I have heard…of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government need a Dictator.” Lincoln put Hooker in his place: “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship…And now, beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”
Hooker failed, and after the disaster at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lincoln fired him. When the funeral train crossed the Ohio line into Indiana, Hooker did not disembark. He rode it all the way to Springfield. What must he have thought as he contemplated the flag-draped coffin of the man who had placed in his hands the power to win the war? The train stopped again at Euclid, Ohio, to pick up some of Cleveland’s leading citizens, who had requested the honor of escorting Lincoln’s remains into their city.
On April 28, Davis and his entourage stopped at Broad River, South Carolina, to rest and enjoy a lunch they brought with them. The conversation turned to the subject of how the war had ruined them. John Reagan’s home in Texas had been wrecked and partly burned, Judah Benjamin’s property in Louisiana had been seized by the federals, as had John C. Breckinridge’s property in Kentucky. Stephen Mallory’s home in Pensacola, Florida, had been burned by Union soldiers. Reagan remembered them using dark humor to lift their spirits. “After we had joked with each other about our fallen fortunes the President took out his pocket-book and showed a few Confederate bills, stating that they constituted his entire wealth.” Davis told his cabinet he was pleased that none of them had profited from his service.
Reagan had seen Davis’s scrupulous principles in action two years earlier in 1863, when an officer brought word to Davis that his beloved plantation, Brierfield, situated on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, would fall into the hands of Grant’s forces within a few days. Losing Brierfield would be a financial catastrophe. Friends urged Davis to order Confederate forces to rush to his plantation to rescue his slaves and other property and move them to a safe location. Although he hated to lose his valuables, he bristled at the suggestion: “The President of the Confederacy cannot employ men to take care of his property.”
Later, when Union forces threatened his hill house in Jackson, Mississippi, the location of his fine and extensive library, Davis again refused to use his official position to protect his private property. “Thus,” testified Reagan, “in his unselfish and patriotic devotion to the cause so dear to his heart he permitted his entire property to be swept away.”
Lincoln’s train arrived at Cleveland’s Euclid Street Station on Friday morning, April 28. Edward Townsend sent word to Washington: “The funeral train arrived here safely at 7 o’clock this morning.” Ever since Stanton’s scathing rebuke for the Lincoln corpse photography episode, Townsend made no more comments in his dispatches to the secretary of war. From that point on, he was all business, stating only what time the train arrived and departed from the remaining cities on the route.
Thirty-six cannons fired a national salute to the president. At that moment, if General Townsend was looking out the window of his car, he witnessed a bizarre display, perhaps the strangest sight of their journey so far. A woman, identified by the press only as “Miss Fields, of Wilson Street,” had erected an arch of evergreens near the tracks, on the bank of Lake Erie. As the train passed, Miss Fields, attired in a costume, stood under her arch and struck poses and attitudes of the Goddess of Liberty in mourning.
In the days leading up to the arrival of Lincoln’s remains, Cleveland’s public officials and leading citizens had engaged in an orgy of bureaucratic busyness. It began simply enough. First, the city council created a committee of five men—the mayor, the city council president, and three others—that met on April 19, the day of the White House funeral, to prepare for the train’s arrival. Then the Board of Trade created its own committee to “cooperate” with the city council’s General Committee of Arrangements, which responded by increasing the size of its committee from five to twenty-three men. That committee met on April 22 and created nine subcommittees: “On Location of Remains”; “On Reception”; “On Procession”; “On Military”; “On Entertainment”; “On Music”; “On Decoration”; “On Carriages”; “To Meet the Remains.”
At its next meeting, the General Committee of Arrangements established a “Civic Guard of Honor,” then divided that group of dozens of men into six “squads.” Every leading gentleman in town craved the honor of serving on one of these committees. In just a few days, Cleveland had created more levels of bureaucracy to receive the remains in one city than the War Department needed to plan and staff the entire thirteen-day trip of the funeral train halfway across America.
The good citizens were so busy forming committees, subcommittees, and lesser divisions they failed to realize that, until the subcommittee of “Location of Remains” pointed it out, they did not have one public building or hall in all of Cleveland big enough to accommodate the viewing of the president’s remains. They would have to construct a new building in little more than a week. How was it possible? Saner heads prevailed, and somebody suggested a temporary outdoor pavilion. They could make it look like a Chinese pagoda. No one would forget that.
The committee members were also so distracted that they failed to set aside hotel rooms for the elected officials and members of the U.S. military escort traveling aboard the train. The passengers did not live on the train, which had no sleeping cars. Such cars joined the train from time to time but did not eliminate the need for proper accommodations. The escorts stayed in hotels and dined in restaurants along the route. The Cleveland hotels were so overbooked that even the commanding general of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train could not find a room. Townsend recalled the episode: “To a gentleman, a stranger to me, who kindly lent me his room at a hotel, I was indebted for fifteen hours’ unbroken sleep, to bring up arrears.”
In South Carolina, Jefferson Davis crossed the Broad River at Scaife’s Ferry, and then the Tyger River at Gist’s Ferry. That day, in a letter dated April 28, Varina Davis, then in Abbeville, replied to Jefferson’s letter of April 23, in which he had chastised himself for bringing her to ruin. She dismissed his apology, reminding him that she had never expected a life of privilege and ease: “It is surely not the fate to which you invited me in brighter days, but you must remember that you did not invite me to a great Hero’s home, but to that of a plain farmer. I have shared all your triumphs, been the only beneficiary of them, now I am but claiming the privilege for the first time of being all to you now these pleasures have past for me…I know there is a future for you.” But not, she thought, in South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida. Varina advised him to give up the cause east of the Mississippi River. “I have seen a great many men who have gone through [Abbeville]—not one has talked fight—A Stand cannot be made in this country. Do not be induced to try it—As to the trans Mississippi, I doubt if at first things will be straight, but the spirit is there, and the daily accretions will be great when the deluded of this side are crushed out between the upper, and nether millstone.”
Federal officials may have fantasized that
the Confederate president was fleeing with millions of dollars in looted gold, but Davis was down to his last gold coin—and even then he gave it away. John Reagan watched him do it:
On our way to Abbeville, South Carolina, President Davis and I, traveling in advance of the others, passed a cabin on the roadside, where a lady was standing in the door. He turned aside and requested a drink of water, which she brought. While he was drinking, a little baby hardly old enough to walk crawled down the steps. The lady asked whether this was not president Davis; and on his answering in the affirmative, she pointed to the little boy and said, “He is named for you.” Mr. Davis took a gold coin from his pocket and asked her to keep it for his namesake. It was a foreign piece, and from its size I supposed it to be worth three or four dollars. As we rode off he told me that it was the last coin he had, and that he would not have had it but for the fact that he had never seen another like it and that he had kept it as a pocket-piece.
Officially, the president of the Confederacy was now personally penniless, and that might possibly hinder his escape down the road. Davis might need to buy food, pay for lodgings, bribe a Yankee soldier or a Confederate guerilla, pay his way across the Mississippi River, or secure an ocean-bound vessel in Florida. Poverty jeopardized his chances of success. Bestowing his last gold piece to the infant was a symbolic gesture. It was the casting off of all worldly goods. Yes, his caravan traveled with several hundred thousand dollars in gold and silver—not the majority of the Confederacy’s funds—but Davis considered that treasure sacrosanct and unavailable for his personal use. That money belonged to the Confederate government, not its president. Now the only riches he possessed were the residual love and goodwill of the people. He hoped that, in the days ahead, as he pushed deeper into the Southern interior, the people there would show him better hospitality than he had received in Greensboro and Charlotte. His aides assured him that it would be so. In South Carolina and Georgia, they promised, the people still loved him and believed in the cause.
In Cleveland, the hearse transported Lincoln’s coffin to the public square where the pagoda—the city fathers called it the Pavilion—had been erected. The wood structure, which measured twenty-four by thirty feet, and fourteen feet high, was an amazing confection of canvas, silk, cloth, festoons, rosettes, golden eagles bearing the national shield mounted at each end of the building, and “immense plumes of black crepe.” And, as at every other venue along the journey, the interior was stuffed with all manner of flowers. Evergreens covered the walls, and thick matting carpeted the floor to deaden into silence the sound of all footsteps. Over the roof, stretched between two flagpoles, was a streamer that bore a motto from Horace: “Extinctus amabitur idem” (Dead, he will be loved the same). And to set the somber mood, it was raining, “dripping like tears on the remains of the good man in whose honor the crowd had gathered,” according to a journalist’s account written at the time.
The embalmer opened the coffin and judged the body ready for viewing. According to one sympathetic chronicler of the ceremonies, “the features were but slightly changed from the appearance they bore when exposed in the Capitol at Washington.” But the journey had begun to take its toll on the corpse. Lincoln’s face turned darker by the day, and the embalmer tried to conceal this with fresh applications of chalk-white potions. All through the day and night the people came, one hundred thousand of them, before the gates to the
IN CLEVELAND, CROWDS WAIT TO VIEW LINCOLN’S CORPSE IN THE CELEBRATED “PAGODA” PAVILION.
square were shut at 10:00 p.m. The coffin was closed at 10:10 p.m., and one hour later it was carried to the hearse.
Just as Lincoln’s remains departed the scene the rain, which had been heavy throughout much of the day, turned into a torrential downpour. The water spoiled the decorations, and the mourning crepe cried streaks of black tears. From the railroad station Townsend telegraphed Washington at 11:30 p.m., Friday, April 28: “The funeral train is ready, and will start at midnight.” A New York Times correspondent confirmed Townsend’s earlier observation that something was happening as the train continued west: “Everywhere deep sorrow has been manifested, and the feeling seems, if possible, to deepen, as we move Westward with the remains to their final resting place.”
The downpour lasted for most of the night as the train steamed from Cleveland to the Ohio state capital, Columbus. But the foul weather could not deter the people from turning out along the tracks. According to one contemporary account, “Bonfires and torches were lit, the principal buildings draped in mourning, bells tolled, flags floated at half-mast, and the sorrowing inhabitants stood in groups, uncovered and with saddened faces gazing with awe and veneration upon the cortege as it moved slowly by.”
Five miles from Columbus, the passengers witnessed a pitiful tribute that stood out in stark contrast to all the elaborate, official processions and ponderous orations that had gone on before. Those who saw it were taken aback by its heartfelt simplicity: “An aged woman bare headed, her gray hairs disheveled, tears coming down her furrowed cheeks, holding in her right hand a sable scarf and in her left a bouquet of wild flowers, which she stretched imploringly toward the funeral car.” Her gesture was as eloquent as a cannonade of one hundred minute guns, the tramp of one hundred thousand mourners marching through the great cities of the North, and as richly decorated hearses and death chambers. Abraham Lincoln would have noticed her. She was an eerie reminder of his aged, pioneer stepmother, who had survived him and awaited his return to the prairies. “I knowed when he went away he’d never come back alive,” she’d said upon hearing of the assassination.
The train pulled into the Union Depot at Columbus early on Saturday, April 29. It was as it had been in Cleveland: a reception committee of elected officials, military officers, and leading citizens; an escort to the capitol building by a massive military and civic procession; and lying in state in another death chamber bedecked with the now predictable and overflowing quantities of flowers and mourning decorations. Lincoln’s bearers removed his coffin and placed it in yet another fabulous hearse, this one topped with a canopy that resembled a Chinese pagoda. The organizers back in Cleveland must have taken that as a tribute to their unforgettable pavilion. The hearse drove off to the state capitol and at 9:30 a.m. Lincoln’s coffin was laid upon the catafalque. As usual, the president’s honor guard left behind on the train the smaller, second coffin that had accompanied Lincoln’s in the presidential car from Washington.
In the press accounts of the funeral pageant, little mention was made of Willie Lincoln. His coffin was never unloaded from the train. He did not ride in the hearse with his father in any of the funeral processions. His closed coffin—he had been dead for three years—did not lie next to the president’s at the public viewings. The national obsequies were for the head of state. But in Columbus, Willie Lincoln was not forgotten. General Townsend was the recipient of the gesture: “While at Columbus I received a note from a lady, wife of one of the principal citizens, accompanying a little cross made of wild violets. The note said that the writer’s little girls had gone to the woods in the early morning and gathered the flowers with which they had wrought the cross. They desired it might be laid on little Willie’s coffin, ‘they felt so sorry for him.’ ”
Of the dozens of mourning songs composed for Abraham Lincoln, only one of them, “The Savior of Our Country,” was dedicated to “little Willie.” The lyrics described an eerie, father-son reunion in heaven.
Father! When on earth you fell Father! Was my mother well?
When I fell your Mother cried! Then unconsciously I died.
Glory forms our sunlight here! Astral Lamps our Chandelier!
Rode you here among the stars, In a train of silver cars!
Willie! On the earth look back! Father! Tis a speck of black!
Robed in Mourning as you see! Mourns the Earth for you and me!
God is Father! God is dear! May I have two Fathers here?
Father! On our Golden pave Gingles
something from your grave!
Willie! Yes, Four Million Chains, Bring I here where Justice Reigns.
From the Land your Father saves! Chains that bound Four Million Slaves!
Willie! On the earth look back! Father! Tis a speck of black!
Robed in Mourning as you see! Mourns the Earth for you and me!
But the song was wrong. If Willie had looked down from heaven upon the earth, he would have seen, through the night sky, not only a dim “speck of black.” He would have seen a ribbon of flame unspooling across the land as torches and bonfires marked his and his father’s way home.
On April 29, Davis crossed the Saluda River at Swancey’s Ferry, South Carolina. Federal cavalry had a difficult time picking up his trail. Southerners tried to thwart the president’s pursuers. One Yankee cavalryman complained: “The white people seemed to be doing all they could to throw us off Davis’ trail and impart false information to their slaves, knowing the latter would lose no time in bringing it to us.” Later, reports by blacks to Henry Harnden, First Wisconsin Cavalry, and Benjamin D. Pritchard, Fourth Michigan Cavalry, led them directly to the Davises.
General James Wilson outlined his plan for the pursuit. He did not single out one particular unit to capture Davis. Instead, he planned to flood a whole region with manhunters to increase the chance that one unit among many might catch Davis in the net. “Soon after I heard that Johnston had surrendered to General Sherman…I received information that Davis, under an escort of a considerable force of cavalry, and with a large amount of treasure in wagons, was marching south from Charlotte, with the intention of going west of the Mississippi River,” Wilson reported. He set a number of units in motion with the hope of intercepting Davis at any point he might attempt to pass through Union lines.