Bloody Times (20 page)

Other vivid and more venerated evidence of the death pageant survives; namely, the blood relics—locks of Lincoln’s hair, tiny pieces of his skull, the probe and other medical instruments, bloodstained pillows and towels, the physicians’ bloody shirt cuffs; the fatal bullet, of course; and still more death relics, lurid and macabre ones, best not spoken of. Many of them repose in the Army Medical Museum or in private collections, handed down from generation to generation or sold off by the descendants of the ancestors who had once cherished them.

More common than blood relics are the ribbons, timetables, badges, song sheets, broadsides, prints, and photographs that were produced and sold commercially to millions of mourners of April and May 1865. Even today, it is not unheard of for a silk mourning ribbon, a printed railroad timetable, or an original carte de visite of one of the hearses to turn up at an out-of-print bookstore, antique shop, or estate sale located along the old route of the funeral train.

George Harrington could not have foreseen it, but when he planned the state funeral for Abraham Lincoln, he was planning the funeral for a future president, too—one destined to be elevated to that office a century after Lincoln’s election, and who, like Father Abraham, would die by an assassin’s hand. On November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy’s body was flown from Dallas, Texas, to Washington, D.C., Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing the bright pink suit stained with her husband’s blood, stepped off the presidential jet. The chief of protocol asked how he might serve her. She asked that her husband’s funeral be modeled on Abraham Lincoln’s.

A few nights later, after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, as the motorcade headed back to the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy’s car broke away from the others. After her vehicle crossed Memorial Bridge, it turned left. Ahead, the thirty-six huge, snowy, marble columns glowed like a classical Greek temple. Mrs. Kennedy’s car braked to a stop on the plaza, and she gazed up at the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln enshrined in his memorial. Like Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis became a greater legend in death than he had been in life. After he fell from power, his stock rose in the South—“He suffered for us”—and he became not only the defeated Confederacy’s representative man, but also the living catalyst for a new movement, the Lost Cause. He symbolized this movement’s collective dream: The South may have lost the war, but it was not wrong, and even in defeat it shone with honor and remained the superior civilization. During Davis’s 1886–87 speaking tour, he soared to new heights of glory, surpassing the prestige and fame he once possessed as president of the Confederate States of America. In his old age, it seemed, the South could not have loved him more. Until he died, that is.

The death of Jefferson Davis in 1889 caused a convulsion of emotion and memory. His funeral, like Lincoln’s, represented not just the passing of one man but of an era. Four years after Davis died, the funeral train that carried his body from New Orleans to Richmond roused the South and stunned the North. Once more, Americans stood beside railroad tracks, holding signs, bearing torches, and igniting bonfires, waiting for a train to pass by. A tumultuous response welcomed him back to the old capital, where he would reign forever over the dreams of a lost cause. In the 1890s, the White House of the Confederacy was transformed into the Museum of the Confederacy, a shrinelike repository for treasured battle flags, war artifacts, and memories. In 1907, when three hundred and twenty-five thousand people turned out for the dedication of his monument in Richmond, Davis was at the apex of his fame. On that day, his partisans were sure that his name would endure forever and that history would honor him, no less than Lincoln, as a great American.

They were wrong. The twentieth century came to belong to Abraham Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis. His eclipse began as early as 1922, with the completion of the Lincoln Memorial. Before then, two monuments had been erected for Davis in Richmond, one at his gravesite in Hollywood Cemetery and the other on Monument Avenue.

But the Lincoln Memorial overshadowed these Richmond monuments in physical scale and symbolism. It represented the growing power of the Lincoln legend and the Northern interpretation of the War of the Rebellion. It would not have surprised Davis to know that on the day former president William Howard Taft presented the memorial to President Warren G. Harding, with Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert looking on, blacks in attendance were forced to sit in segregated seating. Davis had been dubious of how blacks would fare in postwar America. He believed that once the Union freed the slaves, the North would not welcome them as neighbors or equal citizens. Instead, Davis suspected, Northerners viewed blacks as an abstraction, as a convenient cause they would abandon after the war. Racism and hatred, Davis suggested, were not exclusively Southern phenomena. It took a different kind of Southern senator and president—Lyndon B. Johnson—to redeem Lincoln’s promise that had been denied during dedication day, on the steps of his own memorial.

Southerners continued to memorialize Jefferson Davis. His capture site languished in obscurity for years and was, in time, overgrown by pines and brush. It was a quiet, forgotten place. This was no landmark of Confederate glory, and few Southerners cared to visit the spot where Davis’s presidency and their last hope for independence had died. At some point, Davis loyalists marked the place when they hammered into the ground a wooden stake nailed to a crude, handmade sign that said:
SITE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS’ CAMP AT THE TIME OF CAPTURE, MAY
10, 1865.

On June 3, 1936, seventy-one years after the end of the Civil War, and the 128th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s birthday, the ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Ocilla, Georgia Chapter, dedicated a handsome monument at the site. Consisting of a large concrete slab bearing a concrete plaque sculpted in bas relief, with a bronze bust of Davis, the main text of the memorial reads: “Jefferson Davis—President of the Confederate States of America. 1861–1865.” This monument was meant to celebrate not capture, defeat, or imprisonment, but the “unconquerable heart” of the man who, in enduring those trials, became a beloved symbol to his people.

Other monuments to Davis mark the landscape near his birthplace in Kentucky, and in his home state of Mississippi. At the U.S. Capitol, a larger-than-life bronze sculpture of Davis stands in National Statuary Hall, its presence a tribute to two things: his service as a U.S. senator and his significant influence on the architecture and modern-day appearance of the Capitol building.

In 2009, America celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday with great fanfare. President and Mrs. George W. Bush hosted several pre-bicentennial events, including the first black-tie White House dinner ever held in Lincoln’s honor. The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History mounted major exhibitions. The Ford’s Theatre Society raised fifty million dollars to renovate the theater and its museum in time for Lincoln’s birthday on February 12. The Newseum, located on a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue overlooking the route of the April 19, 1865, funeral procession, offered an exhibition on the assassination, mourning pageant, and manhunt for Lincoln’s killer. Museums in several other cities also put on exhibitions. Filmmakers produced several documentaries, and in 2008 and 2009, authors published nearly one hundred books on the sixteenth president. The U.S. Mint and Post Office produced commemorative coins and stamps.

On June 3, 2008, another bicentennial passed almost without notice. Not many Americans were aware of, let alone chose to celebrate, the two hundredth birthday of Jefferson Davis. There were no White House dinners, major exhibitions, shelves of new books, or coins and stamps. Few people know his story. Most have never read a book about him, and no one reads his memoirs anymore. Many people would not recognize his face, and some would not even remember his name. Jefferson Davis is the lost man of American history.

What explains the rise and fall of Davis in American popular memory? He lost, and history tends to reward winners, not losers. But there must be more to it than that. Perhaps it comes down to the slaves, the song, and the flag. The Confederate past is controversial. In the spring of 2010, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the governor of Virginia created a furor by proclaiming Confederate History Month, a celebration condemned by some as, at best, insensitive and, at worst, racist. A historical figure who owned slaves, wished he “was in the land of cotton,” and waved the Stars and Bars must today be rebuked and erased from popular memory, not studied. Better to forget. Perhaps, someday, someone will demand that his statue be banished from the U.S. Capitol. In Richmond, the Confederate White House and the Museum of the Confederacy, two of the finest Civil War sites in the country, are in trouble. Once central to that city’s identity, they now languish in semi-obscurity, overshadowed physically by an ugly complex of medical office buildings and challenged symbolically by a competing, sleek new Civil War museum at the Tredegar Iron Works, the former cannon manufactory. The Museum of the Confederacy has fallen on hard times and into local disfavor, dismissed by some as an antiquarian dinosaur, by others as an embarrassing reminder of the racial politics of the Lost Cause. Its very name angers some who insist that perpetuating these places of Confederate history is tantamount to a modern-day endorsement of secession, slavery, and racism. According to numerous newspaper stories, the Museum and the White House are barely hanging on, and have considered closing, or dividing the priceless collection among several institutions. Their failure would be a loss to American history. Unless a benefactor comes forward to save them, their long-term future remains uncertain.

There was one place where the legacy of Jefferson Davis was safe, at his beloved postwar sanctuary, Beauvoir. There, on the Mississippi Gulf, he had found the peace that had eluded him during his presidency and during his unsettled postwar wanderings. In an outbuilding, a three-room cottage he set up as his study, he shelved hundreds of books and piled more on tables. A photograph preserves the interior of this time capsule: books everywhere, his desk and chair where he sat and composed his letters and articles and where he wrote
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
.

After Davis’s death, Beauvoir lived on as a monument, and it became a retirement home for aged Confederate veterans who came to live there. When the last of them died off, Beauvoir became a Davis museum and library. The institution flourished for decades until one day in late August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast hard. The main house, a lovely, nine-room Gothic cottage set upon pillars, was gutted down to the walls and all seven of the outbuildings were destroyed. Countless artifacts were lost, including Davis’s Mexican War saddle, as well as the notorious raglan and shawl he wore on the morning he was captured.

His library did not escape the hurricane either. On that day, the sanctuary where Jefferson Davis labored to preserve for all time the memory of the Confederacy, its honored dead, and the Lost Cause was, by wind and water, all swept away.

The spring of 1865 remains the most remarkable season in American history. It was a time to mourn the Civil War’s 620,000 dead. The war was ending. It was a time to lay down arms, to count up plantations and cities laid to waste, and to plant new crops. It was a time of two presidents on their final journeys, of the hunt for Jefferson Davis and the funeral pageant for Abraham Lincoln.

The title of the adult version of this book,
Bloody Crimes
, was inspired by three sources. First, in October 1859, in an attempt to start a slave uprising,
abolitionist
John Brown launched a doomed raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was captured, tried, and sentenced to hang. While in jail he marked his favorite passages in a copy of the Bible, including this verse from Ezekiel 7:23: “Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.” On the morning he was hanged, he handed to one of his jailers the last note he would ever write, preceding the outbreak of the war by two years. “I, John Brown, am now quite
certain
that the crimes of this
guilty land
will never be purged away but with
blood.
”

Second, on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech to mark the start of his second term as president. Lincoln warned that slavery was a bloody crime that might not be wiped out without the shedding of more blood. “Fondly do we hope,” he declared, “fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue . . . until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”

Third, within days of Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, a Boston photographer published a remarkable image to honor the fallen president. A stern-faced woman, a symbol of the United States, along with an eagle about to take flight in pursuit of its prey, keeps a vigil over a portrait of the murdered president and proclaims John Brown’s old warning: “Make a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes.”

Northerners believed that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy had committed many bloody crimes, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the starvation, torture, and murder of Union prisoners of war, and the battlefield slaughter of soldiers. In the South Lincoln and his armies were seen as guilty of great crimes as well. The people of the Union and the Confederacy could agree about one thing. In the spring of 1865, an era of bloody times had reached its climax.