The Day Lincoln Was Shot (2 page)

It was a busy town, but compared to New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, or even compared to its neighbor to the north, Baltimore, it was small and pompous. Below Gravelly Point, ships under sail were standing in to port, passing paddle-wheel steamers, new in white paint and gold-leaf trimming, squatting low in their own lace train.

It was a Currier and Ives print come to life, and more. It was a city of individual persons with unique passions and ambitions. The popular song was “When This Cruel War Is Over.” Women bought the freshest editions of the newspapers to study the columns of war dead, which started on the left side of page 1, and then jumped to an inside page. Each day they performed the simple, breathless duty of looking. With a finger on type, they moved from column to column until they found a heading marked “Ord's Corps” or “Sheridan's Army,” and then Mrs. Jones moved her finger down to the
J
's, expelled a big breath, and began to read the news.

The people, by later standards, were adolescent and did much of their thinking with their hearts. They were emotional and gullible, and morbidly concerned with the imminence of death. The latest intelligence from abroad, which came aboard a packet boat just landed at Castle Garden in New York, was that the Duke of Northumberland had died and Cardinal Wiseman was not expected to live. Anyone who had consumption could hardly do better than to buy Dr. Wishart's Pine Tree Tar Cordial, and Dr. Morris advertised “a secret worth knowing to married females.” Another reputable doctor offered to cure “Cancer for $2 a visit—no cure no pay.” A tooth could now be extracted “without pain, with nitrous gas, ether, or chloroform” for 50 cents. The Baltimore Lock Hospital advertised itself as a “refuge from quackery; the only place where a cure can be obtained.” Among the ills corrected were “weakness in back or limb, involving discharges, impotency, confusion of ideas, trembling, timidity—those terrible disorders arising from the solitary habits of youth.” The hospital's boast was: “The doctor's diploma hangs in his office.”

Most grocery stores were really general stores. They sold groceries, meats, wines, liquor and hardware. Fresh geese and hares hung from barrels in the doorway. Prices were a wartime outrage. Firkin butter was 30 cents a pound, coffee was hard to get at 21 cents, salt cost 50 cents a bushel, corsets cost $1.50 (extra strong ones $1.75). Hoop skirts wholesaled for $1 apiece and figured prints retailed for 15 cents a yard.

The anguish of housewives was met by the complacent shrugs of the merchants, who denied that outrageous profiteering was ruining the American dollar. They now had plenty of merchandise, the bins, barrels and jars were filled to brimming with flour, crushed meal, brown sugar, green and black tea, spices, sauces, jellies, starch and yeast, tobacco, cigars and snuff, oil of coal, sperm and ethereal, kerosene lamps, marble tabletops and foot warmers. The favorite whiskeys were Baker 1851, Overholtz 1855, Ziegler 1855 and Finale 1853. Holland gin was sold loose from barrels. The highest-priced meats were ham, at 28 cents a pound, and turkey at 30. A barrel of Boston crackers, enough to last a season, cost $6.50.

Bricklayers were getting $2.50 for a day's work, and demanding $3.50. Freed slaves were paid $11 a month and keep for field work. A stranger walking through Washington City would believe, from what he saw, that the main businesses of the town were livery stables and wood yards. There seemed to be one of each to each block, plus a tavern on the corner. The smell of wood smoke was the cologne of the streets. Ducks and chickens picked along Pennsylvania Avenue, edging without panic around the horses, and pigs wallowed and grunted in the street puddles.

The White House was big and shabby. Successive Congresses had refused to repair it. The rugs were patchy and thin from traffic and mud. The drapes were ornate, but souvenir hunters had cut swatches from them and had stolen silverware and even snuff boxes. In good weather, the odor from the canal on the south was sickening and the malarial mosquitoes were belligerent.

The building faced Pennsylvania Avenue, its white columns glinting gold in an afternoon's sun. An iron paling fence kept the curious out, but paths to various government departments transversed the lawns. The south grounds, facing the Potomac River, had stables, outhouses and work buildings. Squatters tented on these grounds, and little Tad Lincoln kept goats. The building was flanked by the State Department, the Treasury Department, the War Department and the Navy Department, all on ground marked “The President's Park.”

South and east of the White House and the Capitol were acres of Negro shanties. These people, newly freed, had come north to be treated as people; there were too many of them and the labor market was so depressed that Negro women often went from house to house offering to work for anything, for food for their children.

North of Rhode Island Avenue were stands of timber and farms. Georgetown, except for its university, was largely farm land and suburban dwellings. The city—the real city—lay between Capitol and White House and across a few streets to the north. Pennsylvania Avenue was called “the Avenue” and it had one sidewalk, on the west side. On the other side were open markets and a drainage ditch. The main buildings, excepting the White House and the Capitol, were the Post Office, the Patent Office, the Treasury and the Smithsonian Institution.

Horse cars swayed slowly down the Avenue, and connected with the Sixth Street cars at East Capitol for the Navy Yard. Convalescent soldiers slept in the basement of the Capitol, vying for space with nearly ten thousand tons of flour which had been cached in case of siege. The railroad terminal, an ornate wooden station with tracks on the street level, stood three blocks north of the Capitol and the pride of the Baltimore and Ohio was that it could whisk a statesman to Baltimore (forty miles away) in an hour and three quarters, or get him to New York City in nine hours.

Hotels were an innovation to the city, which had been accustomed to boardinghouses and taverns as homes-away-from-home. The lobbies and sitting rooms were alive with traffic. Ornate chandeliers hissed with gaslight, and the doormen and servants, in uniforms black and maroon, eased the lives of legislators and their wives. Official Washington liked the hotels at once. The bars were crowded, the carpeting rich, the toilets were indoors and the spittoons glittered.

The Willard, at Fourteenth and E, was considered by the fashionable set as
the
place to be seen. The National, at Sixth and Pennsylvania Avenue, catered to Southerners although not exclusively so because, on this morning of April 14, the hotel registry showed that among the guests were ex-Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and his family; John Wilkes Booth, an actor, of Bel Air, Maryland; and Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, who favored a harsh peace for the South. Negro servants leaned against these buildings in giggling chatter while their masters, in long fawn-colored coats and umbrella-brimmed hats, transacted their business inside over a mahogany bar.

Brown's, across the street from the National, was another good hotel. So was the Kirkwood, where Vice President Johnson stayed, and Herndon House.

Among the more permanent institutions were a penitentiary, twenty-four military hospitals, an insane asylum, a huge poorhouse, an assortment of low- and medium-priced houses of prostitution and a score of publicly acknowledged gambling houses.

The Washington police force consisted of fifty policemen who worked by day and were paid by Washington City, and a night force of fifty more who were paid by the Federal Government. The night men were not paid to protect citizens; their job was to protect public buildings. The Fire Department was paid by the city, but it was controlled by politicians and often refused to go out to fight fires. The criminal code of the District of Columbia was archaic and was enforced largely on political grounds. Crimes punishable by death were murder, treason, burglary, and rape if committed by Negroes. Only a few years before this day, many of the politicians who fought for the abolition of slavery made extra money by selling freedmen back into slavery. Until the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed in 1863, a weekly auction of Negroes was held in the backyard of the Decatur House, a block from the White House.

There was a great difference between “permanent” Washington and political Washington. A clerk earning $1,500 a year in the new Treasury Building found it difficult to feed a wife and children and his quarters were little better than what the Negroes had. He was at his desk at 7:30
A.M.
and, in the evening, he left it after 4. Political Washington functioned between November and June, when Congress was in session. It convened late and it did not convene every day.

The hotels, which understood the legislators, served breakfast between 8
A.M.
and 11. A good breakfast consisted of steak, oysters, ham and eggs, hominy grits, and whiskey. Dinner was served at noon and ran to six or eight courses. Supper was disposed of between 4
P.M.
and 5. Teas were common at 7:30
P.M.
and cold supper was eaten between 9 and 10
P.M.

It was a city of handsome women too, and stout women were most admired. Congressmen's wives had more license in their behavior here than at home. They spent more for bonnets and gloves and they were equipped with cartes de visite and dropped them on trays in all manner of homes. They thronged the galleries of both Houses of Congress and, if a husband was busy, it was considered correct for the lady to choose an escort for the day. Even middle-aged women engaged in flirtations, or matters more serious than flirtations, and sometimes these ended tragically.

Dressed, the ladies looked like great Christmas bells, and their carriages, surreys, gigs and coaches were seen everywhere. They seemed always to be en route to or from a social call. From the moment that the season opened, on New Year's Day, with eggnog and hot punch and a presidential handshake at the White House, until Congress adjourned in the late spring, every family had an at-home night per week and spent all the other evenings visiting, or attending the opera or the plays. Under cut-glass chandeliers, they danced and drank and ate late suppers.

Their special pet was William, who made bonnets in an exclusive shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. He understood the exquisite agony of a lady who must have a narrow velvet ribbon of puce for a certain bonnet, and who desired that the remainder of the roll of that ribbon be destroyed.

This day was Good Friday, the day on which Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ died. In religion and in history, it was a solemn day and, from dawn onward, the churches were peopled. In the Catholic churches, such as St. Patrick's and St. Aloysius's, the statuary and the Stations of the Cross were hung in purple. It was the last full day of Lent, and the first day on which the Civil War would be referred to in the past tense. It was over, done with, finished, and Washington had been drunk for a week.

At bars, in clubs, at home, men fought and refought the whole war, and won it every time. Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg and Cold Harbor would now become pages in history books. Spotsylvania and Vicksburg and Chickamauga and Bull Run would become sites for monuments and markers and picnics. In some of these places the dead were still grinning, and, in others, the broken arms of bridges still held an awkward pose. For a long time, the walls of hospitals would hear the night cries of men in pain and, among women, black would be a fashionable color.

Over 600,000 men North and South were dead under hyacinth and weeds and swale grass and rock. Their congealed blood glued the shattered Union, and 29,000,000 persons were alive to enjoy the fruits of brotherhood. The national debt was high, $2,366,000,000, but the national economy was firm. Money wasn't scarce. On this very day, a man could get $1,000 bounty for enlisting for one year in Hancock's Corps. Many thousands of draftees paid from $300 to $450 to buy the services of a substitute soldier. In the matter of slavery, 384,884 persons had owned 3,953,742 other persons. Only one man in all the land had owned as many as a thousand slaves.

The death lists still came in daily, although the war was over, except for Confederate General Joseph Johnston's exhausted army and a few smaller units farther west.

Some people would die at home on this day. These were the unknowns, the unremembered. Louis Druscher, after a long and tiring fight, expired in his thirty-fourth year. Kate Anderson, aged twenty-five years and twenty-nine days, would die after a lingering illness which she “bore with Christian fortitude.” Olive Louise Brinkerhoff, ten months of age, strangled of diphtheria. Pretty Violetta, daughter of Major Thomas Landsdale of the Maryland Line, died suddenly.

Small stones dropped into small pools.

It was 7:30
A.M.
and official Washington, and lazy, unofficial Washington began to come alive. The President still sat at the small table in his office, reading official correspondence, one leg across the other, the free foot flexing slowly in the air.

A few streets to the north, on K St. opposite Franklin Square, Edwin McMasters Stanton spooned his soft-boiled eggs and asked Mrs. Stanton to please send regrets to Mrs. Lincoln. He was not a theatergoer and he was not going to be a party to a spectacle at Ford's Theatre tonight. Countless times he had advised the President to stay out of theaters and to cut all public appearances to a minimum, but, in social matters, he had found that a Secretary of War carries less weight than a First Lady. He asked Mrs. Stanton to get the handyman to fix the front doorbell. It was of the pull type, and it was broken. He was in a hurry; he wanted to visit poor Seward before reporting to the War Department. He would need the carriage.

Mr. Stanton all his life wanted to be a strong, efficient man, and he was. His strength lay in his will and his tongue. He was a short, paunchy person who affected square, gold-rimmed spectacles and gray, scented whiskers and the impatient, fluttery attitude of a man who is always trying to catch a mental train. He made and broke men mercilessly and he often appeared to bend Mr. Lincoln to his will.