SHERMAN’S SPECIAL FIELD Order announcing that General Lee had surrendered his entire army to General Grant on the 9th instant, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, did not mean that there wasn’t still work to be done. It remained to be seen if Joe Johnston would scatter his forces and bring on a protracted campaign—an endless march, as it were, to make this of Georgia and the Carolinas a mere prelude, with more and more of the country to be ravaged and left desolate. Glory to God and our country, Sherman had said in his message to the troops, and all honor to our comrades in arms. But he ordered Kilpatrick’s cavalry to advance on Raleigh, and planned a southerly course for his infantry corps to prevent Johnston’s run in that direction. While still in Smithfield, he received a trepidatious civilian delegation entrained from Raleigh to ask for the protection of their city. They were four shaken city fathers who had had to endure the brute obstructionism of Kilpatrick before he let them through. It was left to Sherman to comfort them and assure them that, as the war was all but over, the occupation of their city would be peaceful and the civil government would continue to discharge its duties. What the deuce is the matter with Kilpatrick? Sherman said afterward to his adjutant, Major Dayton. You’d think Kil doesn’t want the war to end. But he laughed and rubbed his hands. And if the city fathers come out under a white flag, can Joe Johnston be far behind?
ON APRIL 13TH, Sherman entered Raleigh and, moving into the Governor’s Mansion, wrote orders for column movements toward Asheville via Salisbury and Charlotte. Then he sat back and waited. Sure enough, the next day he received via Kilpatrick, encamped twenty-five miles to the west, a letter from General Johnston delivered under a flag of truce. Johnston wanted to discuss a cessation of hostilities. Sherman asked Moses Brown for a schooner of brandy, lit a cigar, and dictated a reply to Major Dayton that gave him what he later said was the most pleasurable letter-writing experience of his life.
The agreement was to suspend all military movements, the armies to remain in place, while the two generals met on the road between the Union advance at Durham and the Confederate rear at Hillsboro. Sherman undertook to spiff up for the occasion, brushing himself off and allowing Moses Brown to polish his boots and supply him with a fresh shirt. On April 17th, at eight o’clock in the morning, as he was about to board his private train to Durham, the telegraph operator ran down from his office above the depot with a wire from Secretary Stanton, in Washington. It was still nothing but dots and dashes, but if the General held the train for a few minutes he could have it in English.
Sherman paced back and forth in the waiting room, his elation waning with every passing moment. He hadn’t liked the look on the operator’s face. By the time the telegram was handed to him, his mood had darkened into a presentiment. I somehow knew, he later wrote his wife. Stanton was always the bearer of bad tidings.
President Lincoln had been murdered. An assassin had come up behind him in his box at the theater and fired a pistol ball into his brain. Secretary of State Seward had been badly injured in a separate attack. The conspirators were of unknown number, and presumably General Grant and himself were also designated for assassination. I beseech you, Stanton wrote, to be more heedful than Mr. Lincoln of such knowledge.
Sherman folded the pages and slipped them into his pocket. Too late, Stanton, he thought. They’ve already made their attempt on me. They missed. Better if they hadn’t. Better if they had missed the President and gotten Sherman.
THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR was still standing there. Sherman said, Has anyone seen this besides yourself? No, sir, the man said. On no account, said Sherman, are you to speak of this or allude to it or even look as if you knew of its contents—to anyone, do you understand? I do, yes, the operator said. You are a resident of this city, are you not? If the word gets out before I get back, if the army learns of it, the consequences to this city are not to be imagined. I understand, General, the operator said. You don’t have to draw a picture.
At Durham Station Sherman was met by Kilpatrick, given a horse, and with a platoon of cavalry in escort, and following a single rider with a white flag, he proceeded down the road toward Hillsboro. It had rained the night before and the fields were fresh-smelling and the roadside grass was dappled with raindrops that shone and sparkled in the sun. Lilacs were in bloom, and the scent of pine trees proposed a land cleansed of blood and war. Sherman saw approaching down the road a mirror image of his own party, the two white flags bobbing toward each other. And there was Joe Johnston, lifting his hat, and so I will as well.
The two generals sat alone in a small farmhouse while their officers remained outside and the owner retreated to his barn, assuring his anxious wife and their four small children that someday their house would be a museum and tourists would flock in to see where the end of the war was negotiated.
Johnston, an older man with a silver-white mustache and goatee and an impeccably fitted smart gray uniform, was clearly shocked when Sherman handed him the telegram. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Surely, he muttered, you do not charge this heinous crime to the Confederate government. Never to you, sir, Sherman said, nor to General Lee. But of Jefferson Davis, and men of that stripe, I would not say as much. This is a disgrace to the age, Johnston said. I have always recognized in President Lincoln a man of compassion and forbearance. That if the war ended badly for us, he would mete out terms that were just and charitable.
The two generals sat for a while in silence. This makes everything so much more difficult for you, Johnston said. For both of us, Sherman replied. At that moment he recognized in Joe Johnston the West Point training that he felt as well brimming in himself, and that had been in him all along after these many years in the army without his having given it a thought. The way the man sat a chair, his diction, the gravity of bearing instilled only in those whose responsibilities will be of a general officer—all of it harked back to the lectures, the precision marching, the courses in tactics, the studies of foreign wars, and the memorization of Homeric verses. Suddenly, Sherman felt a great sympathy for his enemy, this wily old bird with the small bright eyes and a nose like a grosbeak’s. There was a bond of recognition here, they were of the same school. They were both damned fine soldiers. He felt more trusting of this general, an enemy, than he was of his superiors in Washington—Stanton, Andrew Johnson the presumed new president, the whole cabal of Washington politicians who aroused in him, at best, a wariness of their intentions.
Now that Lee has surrendered, Sherman said with as much gentleness as he could muster, you can do the same with honor and propriety. The other course is not feasible, is it? You do not have that much left with which to oppose my army.
Johnston passed his hand over his eyes. Yes, he said, to continue would be not war but murder.
They were still to get down to business. But Sherman was exultant, full of the generosity of the victor. He took up the late President’s charity and forbearance as if it had been deeded in a will. He’d always said that as relentless as he had to be in war, he would be that assiduous a friend when the South laid down its arms. And so, little by little, during this conversation and the ones that followed, he would be not quite aware, in his exhilaration, of giving more to Johnston than Grant had given to Lee. The agreement hashed out would be angrily rescinded in Washington, and Grant himself would have to come to North Carolina to put things right. Now, however, Sherman was made only rapt by the negotiations. The issues were many. What other Southern armies deployed in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas could be included in Johnston’s surrender? What weapons would officers and men be allowed to keep? What warranties were required for the restoration of citizenship? What would be the legal property rights of the surrendering insurgents? What rations could be offered the Confederate veterans so that they would not ravage the countryside on their way home? And Jefferson Davis and his cabinet? Would they be given amnesty?
And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across a table. It was contested in sentences. Entren
chments and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs. It is all turned very quiet, Sherman said to Johnston, who, not quite understanding, lifted his head to listen.
No cannonball or canister but has become the language here spoken, the words written down, Sherman thought. Language is war by other means.
ONLY AFTERWARD, IN the late night, as Sherman sat by the hearth in the billet provided him, did he feel a peculiar envy for Joe Johnston and the South he represented. How unsettling. In one hand Sherman held his cigar, in the other his schooner of brandy. He stared into the fire. There was this about the end of a war, that once the cheering was over, you were of two minds. Yes, your cause was just. Yes, you could drink your flagon of pride. But victory was a shadowed, ambiguous thing. I will go on wondering about my actions. Whereas General Johnston and his colleagues of the unjust cause, now embittered and awash in defeat, will have sublimed to a righteously aggrieved state that would empower them for a century.
AFTER INFORMING HIS generals of the death of the President, and ordering certain precautionary measures, Sherman let the word out in a Special Field Order to the troops: The general commanding announces with pain and sorrow that on the evening of the 14th instant, at the theater in Washington City, his Excellency the President of the United States, Mr. Lincoln, was assassinated by one who uttered the state motto of Virginia. As he had anticipated, a great cry of grief and anger arose in their camps. Soon thousands of men, undirected, and raging in their disorder, not an army now but in the technical state of an uprising, advanced on Raleigh with the intent of burning it to the ground. They found themselves a rabble confronted by the lines of the Fifteenth Corps under General John Logan, the streets blocked with artillery, and the rows of bayonets of their own comrades fixed and pointing at them. Logan himself, riding a great stallion, roamed in front of the lines. Again and again, he ordered the men to return to their camps. He was not killed in Raleigh, Logan shouted. Our President was not murdered by anyone living in this city. No one here did this, return now to camp! Turn around, turn around, I say!
As quickly as the mass mind had changed from jubilation at Lee’s surrender to grief and a roaring anger, it now dissolved almost as quickly into a muttering and shamed calm, as the men slowly dispersed and turned back. The situation still tense, Sherman had guards posted about the camps and patrolling the streets of the city.
WHEN HE REACHED Washington, Wrede Sartorius had reported to the Surgeon General’s office and was assigned to the U.S. Army General Hospital. Installed in his own operating room and ward, with an assistant surgeon and a staff of army nurses, he was soon engaged in the same work he’d performed as a regimental surgeon in the field. Here, though, a greater number of the crises were postoperative, where additional surgery had to be performed in the cutting away of gangrenous tissue, or the removal of limbs that had failed of resection. And proportionately more of the patients, veterans of Grant’s Army of the Potomac, were suffering miasmatic disorders, eruptive fevers, or degenerative social diseases than he had seen in Sherman’s army.
For almost two weeks Sartorius did not hear a word from the White House, and he was rather relieved. Then, in the early evening of April 14th, he received a visit from a White House aide: Would Colonel Sartorius join the President and Mrs. Lincoln at the theater this evening. That very afternoon there had been an influx of patients transferred from one of Grant’s field hospitals. These were men wounded, sadly, in the last skirmishes with Lee’s army. Many of them had been ill served in the field hospitals and Sartorius, overwhelmed with work, and standing before the aide in his rubber apron smeared with blood, declined the invitation. The aide, a young lieutenant, confided that several people had already turned the President down, including the Grants, Secretary Stanton and his wife, and two or three other couples. I’m sorry, Sartorius said. Perhaps because it is Good Friday, the aide said as he left.
Later that night, while Sartorius was still at work, word came that the President had been shot. Sartorius and another doctor on duty quickly found a hansom and rushed to the scene. The President had been removed to a house across the street from the theater. He was lying diagonally across a bed that was too short for him, in a small bedroom and with several doctors, including the Surgeon General, already in attendance. One flickering gas lamp was all the light. Sartorius pushed his way in somewhat rudely and knelt to examine the wound, a small hole behind the left ear. Mrs. Lincoln sat at the side of the bed, holding the President’s hands and weeping. A hand reached past Sartorius and lifted away a blood clot, not the first, that had formed at the wound. This and the mistaken application of brandy to the President’s lips, causing him almost to choke, and the placing of hot-water bottles at his feet, and the keeping of charts recording his vital signs, were all that these many doctors in attendance were able to do.
The President’s shirt had been removed. As Wrede knelt there, he observed spasmodic pectoral contractions causing pronation of the forearms, a cessation of breath, and then a forcible expiration immediately after. One pupil was concised to a pinpoint, the other widely dilated. Wrede stood and was suddenly enraged at the numbers of doctors in the small room. The President’s breathing was becoming more labored. Mrs. Lincoln, hearing the rasp, screamed, Oh Abe, Abe, and she fell across the bed. Wrede said loudly to the hushed assemblage, He is finished, he will not last the hour. Your medicine is useless. You should all get out. Leave him alone—he does not need an audience for his death. And, unhearing of the shocked responses of his colleagues, Wrede pushed his way past them down the hall to the front door, and strode off down the street. He had no idea where he was going. The night air was wet, the gas lamps flaring and dimming in the fog.
WHEN COLONEL TEACK learned of the death of the President, he decided it could be nothing less than a conspiracy if both Mr. Lincoln and General Sherman were in the same brief time tracked for assassination. The Reb had not been interrogated before he was put before a firing squad, and that was another mistake of the General’s. You find out everything you can when something like that happens. You want to know if it’s just some Rebel maniac or if there are orders behind him. It had been a shrewd thing, his coming in as a certified photographer.
Teack got up out of his bed, and though still in pain, and with a late-developing weakness in one of his arms, he met with the captain of the provost guard and ordered the darkie who worked for the photographer to be brought before him.
We don’t know where the darkie is, the provost captain said. We never had our hands on him. He was given to Medical.
Why?
His own man shot him, sir. The doctor has to release him before we can put him before a board.
Well, find the doctor!
I wish we could. Colonel Sartorius is gone. His surgery is reassigned.
I don’t like this, Teack said. I don’t like this at all. The darkie has to be somewhere. And they had a damn wagon—where’s that at?
Sir, in all the confusion—
He said something to me, he knew what was happening, Colonel Teack said. I’ll find him. You say he’s wounded. How far could he have gotten? I’ll ride out myself if I have to.
AS THE NEGOTIATIONS went on, with General Grant now quietly arrived in Raleigh to redraft the too generous terms Sherman had written up—there was nothing, for example, requiring the Rebs to abide by Emancipation—it was apparent that the truce might expire before an agreement could be hammered out, and so the troops of both sides drifted into a peace of their own making. Nobody wanted to march back into the South, and the Confederate rank and file had long since been aware that their cause was lost. Discipline became slack, and in some of the camps between Raleigh and Durham Station the combatants actually began to fraternize, ragged Reb soldiers drifting in, unarmed, and sitting about the campfires with their Union counterparts. Rations were meager in the Johnston army and the Reb boys were hungry, and many of the Union soldiers shared the
ir dinners. It was possible also for blue and gray to talk about the battles they had fought as something they had done together, something shared.
Stephen Walsh saw all this as advantageous to the plan he and Pearl and Calvin had worked out. In preparation for their trip north, he’d become something of a forager, riding the new mule bareback every day the miles into the advance camps and drawing rations, as if entitled, from the various commissary tents. Nobody asked questions, such was the mass state of mind as it was slowly losing its military pinnings. The warm weather helped, too. Desertion was casual and out in the open on the Confederate side, where the boys were not that far from home. There was a constant trickle of them along the roads. Some Unions, too, in anticipation of a glorious, triumphal march in the nation’s capital, had taken it upon themselves quietly to begin the trek there, the word having gotten out which corps were to be so honored and which were to stay to garrison what was now called the Department of North Carolina. All of this seemed to be almost complicit with the ordinary daily routines of parade and drill, even the field officers yawning at the habitual duties. There was, overall, a lassitude creeping up from the bottom ranks—though it had not yet reached the level of the general officers or their staffs, where the planning continued as if the war would, and the back-and-forth between the ungrateful sentiments of Washington and the put-upon feelings of Sherman loyalists were a source of tension not unlike that of actual combat.
Over several days Stephen was able to bring back to the wagon sacks of cornmeal, rice, coffee, dried peas, boxes of hardtack, cans of sorghum, and packs of salt pork, but also the trash he found on the road that he thought would be useful—discarded tent sides, a shovel, eating utensils, blankets, and even an old Springfield rifle that he found half buried in a ditch.