There was an early spring on the Potomac in 1865. While April was still young, the Judas trees became spheres of purply, pinkish bloom. The Washington parks grew softly bright as the lilacs opened. Pendulous willows veiled with green laces afloat in air the changing brown that was winter's final shadow; in the Virginia woods the white blossoms of the dogwood seemed to float and flicker among the windy trees like enormous flocks of alighting butterflies. And over head such a glitter of turquoise blue! As lovely in a different way as on that fateful Sun-day morning when Russell drove through the same woods toward Bull Run so long, long ago. Such was the background of the last few days of Lincoln's life.
Though tranquil, his thoughts dwelt much on death. While at City Point, he drove one day with Mrs. Lincoln along the banks of the James. They passed a country graveyard. "It was a retired place," said Mrs. Lincoln long afterward, "shaded by trees, and early spring flowers were opening on nearly every grave. It was so quiet and attractive that we stopped the carriage and walked through it. Mr. Lincoln seemed thoughtful and impressed. He said: 'Mary, you are younger than I; you will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.'"[1]
His mood underwent a mysterious change. It was serene and yet charged with a peculiar grave loftiness not quite like any phase of him his friends had known hitherto. As always, his thoughts turned for their reflection to Shakespeare. Sumner who was one of the party at City Point, was deeply impressed by his reading aloud, a few days before his death, that passage in Macbeth which describes the ultimate security of Duncan where nothing evil "can touch him farther."[2]
There was something a little startling, as if it were not quite of this world, in the tender lightness that seemed to come into his heart. "His whole appearance, poise and bearing," says one of his observers, "had marvelously changed. He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being, had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved."[3]
It was as if the seer in the trance had finally passed beyond his trance; and had faced smiling toward his earthly comrades, imagining he was to return to them; unaware that somehow his emergence was not in the ordinary course of nature; that in it was an accent of the inexplicable, something which the others caught and at which they trembled; though they knew not why. And he, so beautifully at peace, and yet thrilled as never before by the vision of the murdered Duncan at the end of life's fitful fever--what was his real feeling, his real vision of himself? Was it something of what the great modern poet strove so bravely to express-–
And yet Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew: Childe Roland to the dark tower came."
Shortly before the end, he had a strange dream. Though he spoke of it almost with levity, it would not leave his thoughts. He dreamed he was wandering through the White House at night; all the rooms were brilliantly lighted; but they were empty. However, through that unreal solitude floated a sound of weeping. When he came to the East Room, it was explained; there was a catafalque, the pomp of a military funeral, crowds of people in tears; and a voice said to him, "The President has been assassinated."
He told this dream to Lamon and to Mrs. Lincoln. He added that after it had occurred, "the first time I opened the Bible, strange as it may appear, it was at the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis which relates the wonderful dream Jacob had. I turned to other passages and seemed to encounter a dream or a vision wherever I looked. I kept on turning the leaves of the Old Book, and everywhere my eye fell upon passages recording matters strangely in keeping with my own thoughts--supernatural visitations, dreams, visions, etc."
But when Lamon seized upon this as text for his recurrent sermon on precautions against assassination, Lincoln turned the matter into a joke. He did not appear to interpret the dream as foreshadowing his own death. He called Lamon's alarm "downright foolishness."[4]
Another dream in the last night of his life was a consolation. He narrated it to the Cabinet when they met on April fourteenth, which happened to be Good Friday. There was some anxiety with regard to Sherman's movements in North Carolina. Lincoln bade the Cabinet set their minds at rest. His dream of the night before was one that he had often had. It was a presage of great events. In this dream he saw himself "in a singular and indescribable vessel, but always the same . . . moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore." This dream had preceded all the great events of the war. He believed it was a good omen.[5]
At this last Cabinet meeting, he talked freely of the one matter which in his mind overshadowed all others. He urged his Ministers to put aside all thoughts of hatred and revenge. "He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over. None need expect him to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. 'Frighten them out of the country, let down the bars, scare them off,' said he, throwing up his hands as if scaring sheep. Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union. There was too much desire on the part of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there was too little respect for their rights. He didn't sympathize in these feelings."[6]
There was a touch of irony in his phase "our very good friends." Before the end of the next day, the men he had in mind, the inner group of the relentless Vindictives, were to meet in council, scarcely able to conceal their inspiring conviction that Providence had intervened, had judged between him and them.[7] And that allusion to the "rights" of the vanquished! How abominable it was in the ears of the grim Chandler, the inexorable Wade. Desperate these men and their followers were on the fourteenth of April, but defiant. To the full measure of their power they would fight the President to the last ditch. And always in their minds, the tormenting thought-if only positions could be reversed, if only Johnson, whom they believed to be one of them at heart, were in the first instead of the second place!
While these unsparing sons of thunder were growling among themselves, the lions that were being cheated of their prey, Lincoln was putting his merciful temper into a playful form. General Creswell applied to him for pardon for an old friend of his who had joined the Confederate Army.
"Creswell," said Lincoln, "you make me think of a lot of young folks who once started out Maying. To reach their destination, they had to cross a shallow stream and did so by means of an old flat boat when the time came to return, they found to their dismay that the old scow had disappeared. They were in sore trouble and thought over all manner of devices for getting over the water, but without avail. After a time, one of the boys proposed that each fellow should pick up the girl he liked best and wade over with her. The masterly proposition was carried out until all that were left upon the island was a little short chap and a great, long, gothic-built, elderly lady. Now, Creswell, you are trying to leave me in the same predicament. You fellows are all getting your own friends out of this scrape, and you will succeed in carrying off one after another until nobody but Jeff Davis and myself will be left on the island, and then I won't know what to do--How should I feel? How should I look lugging him over? I guess the way to avoid such an embarrassing situation is to let all out at once."[8]
The President refused, this day, to open his doors to the throng of visitors that sought admission. His eldest son, Robert, an officer in Grant's army, had returned from the front unharmed. Lincoln wished to reserve the day for his family and intimate friends. In the afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln asked him if he cared to have company on their usual drive. "No, Mary," said he, "I prefer that we ride by ourselves to-day."[9] They took a long drive. His mood, as it had been all day, was singularly happy and tender.[10] He talked much of the past and the future. It seemed to Mrs. Lincoln that he never had appeared happier than during the drive. He referred to past sorrows, to the anxieties of the war, to Willie's death, and spoke of the necessity to be cheerful and happy in the days to come. As Mrs. Lincoln remembered his words: "We have had a hard time since we came to Washington; but the war is over, and with God's blessings, we may hope for four years of peace and happiness, and then we will go back to Illinois and pass the rest of our lives in quiet. We have laid by some money, and during this time, we will save up more, but shall not have enough to support us. We will go back to Illinois; I will open a law office at Springfield or Chicago and practise law, and at least do enough to help give us a livelihood."[11]
They returned from their drive and prepared for a theatre party which had been fixed for that night. The management of the Ford's Theatre, where Laura Keene was to close her season with a benefit performance of Our American Cousin, had announced in the afternoon paper that "the President and his lady" would attend. The President's box had been draped with flags. The rest is a twice told tale--a thousandth told tale.
An actor, very handsome, a Byronic sort, both in beauty and temperament, with a dash perhaps of insanity, John Wilkes Booth, had long meditated killing the President. A violent secessionist, his morbid imagination had made of Lincoln another Caesar. The occasion called for a Brutus. While Lincoln was planning his peaceful war with the Vindictives, scheming how to keep them from grinding the prostrate South beneath their heels, devising modes of restoring happiness to the conquered region, Booth, at an obscure boarding-house in Washington, was gathering about him a band of adventurers, some of whom at least, like himself, were unbalanced. They meditated a general assassination of the Cabinet. The unexpected theatre party on the fourteenth gave Booth a sudden opportunity. He knew every passage of Ford's Theatre. He knew, also, that Lincoln seldom surrounded himself with guards. During the afternoon, he made his way unobserved into the theatre and bored a hole in the door of the presidential box, so that he might fire through it should there be any difficulty in getting the door open.
About ten o'clock that night, the audience was laughing at the absurd play; the President's party were as much amused as any. Suddenly, there was a pistol shot. A moment more and a woman's voice rang out in a sharp cry. An instant sense of disaster brought the audience startled to their feet. Two men were glimpsed struggling toward the front of the President's box. One broke away, leaped down on to the stage, flourished a knife and shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!" Then he vanished through the flies. It was Booth, whose plans had been completely successful. He had made his way without interruption to within a few feet of Lincoln. At point-blank distance, he had shot him from behind, through the head. In the confusion which ensued, he escaped from the theatre; fled from the city; was pursued; and was himself shot and killed a few days later.
The bullet of the assassin had entered the brain, causing instant unconsciousness. The dying President was removed to a house on Tenth Street, No. 453, where he was laid on a bed in a small room at the rear of the hall on the ground floor.[12]
Swift panic took possession of the city. "A crowd of people rushed instinctively to the White House, and bursting through the doors, shouted the dreadful news to Robert Lincoln and Major Hay who sat gossiping in an upper room. . . . They ran down-stairs. Finding a carriage at the door, they entered it and drove to Tenth Street."[13]
To right and left eddied whirls of excited figures, men and women questioning, threatening, crying out for vengeance. Overhead amid driving clouds, the moon, through successive mantlings of darkness, broke periodically into sudden blazes of light; among the startled people below, raced a witches' dance of the rapidly changing shadows.[14]
Lincoln did not regain consciousness. About dawn his pulse began to fail. A little later, "a look of unspeakable peace came over his worn features"[15], and at twenty-two minutes after seven on the morning of the fifteenth of April, he died.
THE END