Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (88 page)

Another two hundred miles south, in Charleston harbor, an immense crowd of Federal soldiers and New York celebrities had gathered in the ruins of Fort Sumter to watch Major General Robert Anderson once more raise the same flag he had taken down four years before, to the day. Everywhere, the red slashed banners of the Confederacy were coming down, the old flag was going up again, and the war would be over.
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But there was one last act in the drama to be played out, and with cunning appropriateness, it would be played out in a theater, almost onstage. On Good Friday, April 14, President Lincoln met his cabinet in a rare mood of relaxation and good humor, and told them of the dream he had had, the dream that always promised good tidings. In the evening he and Mary were joined by the only couple they could persuade to spend Good Friday with them at the theater, Clara Harris (the daughter of New York senator Ira Harris) and her fiancé, Major Henry R. Rathbone. Together they set out in the presidential carriage for Ford’s Theatre, only a short distance from the White House, to watch Laura Keene and the lead actors from her New York City theatre company in her 1,000th performance in a popular comedy of manners called
Our American Cousin
. The theatre’s owner, John Ford, had beseeched the Lincolns to attend that night in order to boost gate receipts. Sure enough, when the Lincolns arrived shortly after curtain time, the theatre was packed to its capacity, and the little orchestra in the pit struck up a rousing “Hail to the Chief” as the Lincolns made their way to a private box overlooking stage left. The cast cheerfully ad-libbed “many pleasant allusions” to the president into their lines, recalled War Department clerk James Knox, who was sitting in the audience, “to which the audience gave deafening responses, while Mr. Lincoln laughed heartily and bowed frequently to the grateful people.”
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Somewhere in the confusion of the surrender celebrations and the hectic gaiety of the theatre, the security net Lamon and Stanton had drawn around Lincoln
fell down: Lamon was in Richmond on government business, and John Parker, the District of Columbia policeman Stanton had detailed to guard the president, sauntered casually away from the door of the box to get a better view of the play. At approximately 10:00
PM
, a twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth, slipped up a stairway to the outer door of the president’s box. He was stopped there by someone, possibly by Lincoln’s footman, Charles Forbes, but Booth merely showed him his card and assured him that the president, who was known to be fond of actors, had asked to see him.
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This was not at all implausible. Lincoln loved the theater, especially Shakespeare, and invited the English Shakespearean James Hackett for a private performance at the White House. And Booth was a member of one of the greatest acting families of the day—his brother Edwin was an outstanding Shakespearean whom Lincoln greatly admired. But John Wilkes Booth was also a rabid Confederate sympathizer. He had gathered around him a weird little coterie of conspirators—a Confederate deserter named Paine, a half-wit named David Herold, and a few others of even lower mental visibility—who were pledged to take personal revenge on Lincoln and his administration. Booth had originally planned, with the help of the Confederate secret service, to kidnap Lincoln and deliver him to Richmond. But the collapse of the Confederate armies convinced Booth that a more dramatic step was needed. Instead of kidnapping Lincoln, he would murder him in public, while his co-conspirators simultaneously assassinated the vice president, the secretary of state, and General Grant. Booth only learned about the special performance of
Our American Cousin
and Lincoln’s agreement to attend on the morning of the fourteenth, when he stopped at Ford’s Theatre to pick up some mail. But the plan formed at once in his mind, and that night he and his peculiar gaggle of friends were ready to strike. Using his familiarity with the building and staff at Ford’s Theatre, Booth was able to walk unnoticed into the theatre, ascend to the packed galleries, pass by the footman, and quietly open the outer door to the passageway leading to the president’s box.
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Once inside the narrow passageway, Booth wedged the outer door shut to ensure he would not be discovered and waited until the one point in the play when (as he well knew, from his familiarity with the play) all but one of the actors, Harry Hawk (playing Asa Trenchard), had left the stage. Then, drawing a small, single-shot derringer, he opened the inner door of the presidential box, stepped up behind Lincoln, and shot him behind the left ear. For a second no one in the house moved. Major Rathbone sprang up to seize Booth, but Booth had a long-bladed hunting knife in his other hand that he used to slash Rathbone’s arm, cutting an artery. Then Booth vaulted over the rail of the box and onto the stage, ran past the dazed stagehands to
the theater’s backstage door, where a horse was tied for him, and galloped off into the dark of the Washington streets. At the same instant, Lincoln slumped forward in the rocking chair provided for him in the box, while Mary, “on her knees uttered shriek after shriek at the feet of the dying president.”
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Soldiers and civilians began smashing on the door of the box and were finally let in by the bloodied Major Rathbone. An army surgeon, Dr. Charles A. Leale, who had been sitting in the audience only forty feet from the box, was beside Lincoln in minutes and helped to lay him out prostrate on the floor; another surgeon, Charles Sabine Taft, was sitting down with the orchestra and was quickly boosted up to the box from the stage. Leale, whose specialty was gunshot wounds, could see at once that Lincoln’s wound was mortal. But he managed to keep Lincoln’s uneven breathing going, and the unconscious president was moved across the street to a room in a boardinghouse. There, at 7:22
AM
the next morning, with members of his cabinet around his deathbed and his wife sobbing insanely in the front parlor, Abraham Lincoln died. “Now,” said Edwin Stanton, as tears streamed freely down his cheeks, “he belongs to the ages.”
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Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase remembered the night of Lincoln’s assassination as “a night of horrors.” Or so it seemed to Chase, not only because of the shame and brutality of Lincoln’s murder and the possibility that Chase “was one of the destined victims,” but also because of what Lincoln’s death meant for a peace process that had only just begun. Chase arose early the next morning— “a heavy rain was falling, and the sky was black”—and met with Attorney General James Speed to discuss the procedures earlier chief justices had used for swearing in vice presidents as the new president. But the conversation lingered over “the late president,” and Speed mournfully shook his head over the impact Lincoln’s murder would have on the plans for Reconstruction. “He never seemed so near our views,” Speed remarked. “At the [cabinet] meeting he said he thought [he] had made a mistake at Richmond in sanctioning the assembling of the Virginia Legislature and had perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.”
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Lincoln’s uncertainty about the speed of the Reconstruction process as the war came to an end is not surprising. It was still not clear what freedom actually meant for the newly free slaves, or even (until the Thirteenth Amendment was formally ratified in December) whether freedom was a fact for all the slaves. As the Federal armies rolled over large parts of the South, Southern white Unionists sprang up to seize political control of Southern state capitals, but their attentions were mostly preoccupied with evening up political scores with the secessionists who had plunged them into the war rather than with the civil rights of the newly freed slaves. Even in Louisiana, where Lincoln had taken more than a presidential interest in the structure of a new Louisiana government, all the personal pressure in the world had been unable to persuade the new white Unionist government to make any provision for black civil rights.

But already three major questions were beginning to emerge from the thinning battle smoke of the war, and in Lincoln’s absence, these would not become the ruling problems of the next dozen years. The first of these questions was a holdover from Lincoln’s wartime disagreements with the Radicals: what was the constitutional status of the Confederate states? If Lincoln was right in maintaining that secession was a nullity, then were the Confederate states to be restored at once to their
status quo
of 1860? Or if, as the Radicals insisted, they were “conquered provinces” that had lost their statehood privileges, were they to be reorganized by Congress or by the president and the military? The second question concerned the freed slaves: what was their legal status? True, they were no longer slaves; but did that automatically promote them to the place of citizens, with all the civil rights of citizens? And what was a citizen, exactly? The implication of the Constitution, based on the requirement that the president be a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States,” was that citizenship was a matter of
jus soli
, of being born on the national land or soil. But
Dred Scott
inserted a different requirement for citizenship, that of
jus sanguinis
— citizenship by specific birthright—which the court then used to deny Scott, as a man of “African descent,” any civil standing in the federal courts.
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Did this mean that emancipated slaves were to be left in legal limbo, while white Confederates returned to all the privileges of citizenship they had repudiated?

That introduced the third and most practical question of Reconstruction: who would now be in power, not only in the old Confederacy, but in Washington itself? The end of slavery meant, practically, an end to the three-fifths clause—there would be no more slaves to count in that fashion. But this only created another nightmare: if the Southern states could now return to Congress, they would be able to demand that their delegations be increased by counting their black populations in full, rather than by the three-fifths rule—yet without actually giving those blacks the right to vote for the increased number of representatives the South would be entitled to. With those added numbers, the result would be the rollback of every initiative
the Republicans had achieved in their brief dominance of the wartime Congress—protective tariffs, government assistance to the railroads, the Homestead Act, the national banking system—as well as assumption of the Confederate war debt.

The way for Republicans in Congress to head off this unintended consequence of emancipation would be to seize control of the Reconstruction process as a congressional prerogative so as to prevent a too-hasty return of the Confederate states to the Union, to correct the Constitution’s fatal ambiguity over citizenship in order to qualify the freedpeople for it, and to ensure that, as citizens, the freedpeople would be able to exercise all the rights—to vote, to hold public office, to access the court system, to own property—that went with citizenship. The freedman would then (promised Frederick Douglass) “raise up a party in the Southern States among the poor,” and establish a long-term Republican political hegemony in the formerly Democratic South.
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With political power in hand, the freedpeople would also become the foot soldiers of a re-creation of the defeated South in the image of free-labor liberalism. “In my view, the war has just begun,” announced the veteran abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. Merely subtracting slavery from the Southern social equation was not enough. “You do not annihilate a social system when you decree its death,” Phillips explained. “You only annihilate it when you fill its place with another”—another, in this case, meaning a regime based on free labor, universal education, and manufacturing. “The whole fabric of southern society
must
be changed,” urged Thaddeus Stevens, “and never can be done if this opportunity is lost. How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? … If the South is ever to be made a safe Republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners, or the free labor of intelligent citizens.” A few even advocated, as “the only certain road to Unionizing the South, to plant in it colonies of Northern men.” The South thus would be remade into the image of a New England landscape, with small factories, free enterprise, banks, schools, and wages. “I look to a popular education so advanced that under … impartial law all creeds and all tongues and all races shall be gathered with an equal protection,” Phillips explained. “The great trouble of the South lies in its ignorance. Awake it to enterprise.”
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These advocates could not have had more willing recruits than the freedpeople, who at once began to organize Loyal Leagues, Equal Rights Leagues, and Union Leagues in the South to demand full citizenship rights. The slave, wrote Frederick Douglass, had wanted “no war but an Abolition war,” and as freedmen, they now wanted “no peace but an Abolition peace; liberty for all, chains for none; the black man a soldier in war; a laborer in peace; a voter at the South as well as the North; America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow-countrymen.” Alongside the freed slave, helping to inch along the progress toward a New Englandized, free-market South, was the Freedmen’s Bureau. Created in March 1865, the bureau’s mandate was “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen” in those “declared to be in insurrection.” Although the bureau was originally conceived as a relief agency, “for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen,” it had within it the germ of radicalism, since the bill that created the bureau authorized it to divide up plantation lands that had been seized from Southern whites for nonpayment of taxes or confiscated as retribution for rebel war service, and assign “not more than forty acres” of these lands to black applicants as their own farms.
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