Dixie After the War. Myrta Lockett Avary
of the Confederacy, and of the establishment of the Government of Virginia.” Also, he spoke of the state government in Louisiana, and that which he had mapped out for North Carolina. General Grant was uneasy about Sherman and Johnston. The President said: “I have no doubt that favourable news will come. I had a dream last night, my usual dream which has preceded every important event of the war. I seemed to be on a singular and indescribable vessel, always the same, moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.”
He did not know that on that day Sherman was writing Johnston, “I am empowered to make terms of peace.” But he knew he had so empowered Sherman. I can imagine that through his heart the refrain was beating: “There will be no more bloodshed, no more devastation. There shall be no more humiliations for this Southern people, and God will give it into my hands to reunite my country.”
He went for a long, quiet drive with his wife. “Mary,” he said, “we have had a hard time of it since we came to Washington; but the war is over, and with God’s blessing we may hope for four years of peace and happiness. Then we will go back to Illinois and pass the rest of our days in quiet.” He longed for quiet. The Sabbath before, while driving along the banks of the James, he said: “Mary, when I die, I would like to lie in a quiet place like this,” and related a dream which he felt to be presage of death.
Sailing on the James, he read aloud twice, and in a manner that impressed Charles Sumner, who was present, this passage from Macbeth:
“‘Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.’”
He was going, safe and whole, from the land of “rebels” to Washington. “We have had a hard time in Washington, Mary.” Read Sherman’s “Memoirs,” and see what little liking great Federal generals had for journeys to Washington; how for peace and safety, they preferred their battle-fields to the place where politicians were wire-pulling and spreading nets.
The conclusion to his perfect day was a box in Ford’s Theatre, his wife and a pair of betrothed lovers for company; on the stage Laura Keene in “Our American Cousin.” The tragic sequel is indelibly impressed on the brain of every American – the people leaning forward, absorbed in the play, the handsome, slender figure of young Wilkes Booth moving with easy, assured grace towards the President’s box, the report of the pistol, the leap of Booth to the stage, falling as the flag caught his foot, rising, brandishing his weapon and crying: “Sic Semper Tyrannis!”, his escape with a broken ankle through the confused crowds; the dying President borne out to the boarding-house on Tenth Street.
Seward’s life was attempted the same evening by Booth’s confederate, Lewis Payne, who penetrated to the Secretary’s sick-room and wounded him and his son; Payne escaped. General Grant’s death was a part of the plot; he and Mrs. Grant had declined invitation to share the President’s box, and started west; Mr. Stanton’s murder was also intended; but he escaped, scathless of body but bitterer of soul than ever, bitterer than Mr. Seward, who was wounded.
In a letter which Matoaca wrote years afterward, she said: “I well remember the horror that thrilled our little circle when the news came. ‘Now, may God have mercy on us!’ Uncle exclaimed. He sat silent for a while and then asked: ‘Can it be possible that any of our own people could do this thing? Some misguided fanatic?’ And then, after a silence: ‘Can some enemy of the South have done it? Some enemy of the South who had a grudge against Lincoln, too?’ ‘What sort of secret service could they have had in Washington that this thing could happen? How was it that the crippled assassin was able to make his escape?’ he said when full accounts appeared. The explanations given never explained to him.
“I heard some speak who thought it no more than just retribution upon Mr. Lincoln for the havoc he had wrought in our country. But even the few who spoke thus were horrified when details came. We could not be expected to grieve, from any sense of personal affection, for Mr. Lincoln, whom we had seen only in the position of an implacable foe at the head of a power invading and devastating our land; but our reprobation of the crime of his taking off was none the less. Besides, we did not know what would be done to us. Already there had been talk of trying our officers for treason, of executing them, of exiling them, and in this talk Andrew Johnson had been loudest.
“I remember how one poor woman took the news. She was half-crazed by her losses and troubles; one son had been killed in battle, another had died in prison, of another she could not hear if he were living or dead; her house had been burned; her young daughter, turned out with her in the night, had died of fright and exposure. She ran in, crying: ‘Lincoln has been killed! thank God!’ Next day she came, still and pale: ‘I have prayed it all out of my heart,’ she said, ‘that is, I’m not glad. But, somehow, I can’t be sorry. I believe it was the vengeance of the Lord.’”
Jefferson Davis heard of Lincoln’s death in Charlotte. A tablet in that beautiful and historic city marks the spot where he stood. He had just arrived from Greensboro, was dismounting, citizens were welcoming him when the dispatch signed by Secretary of War Breckinridge was handed him by Major John Courtney. Mrs. Courtney, the Major’s widow, told me that her husband heard the President say: “Oh, the pity of it!” He passed it to a gentleman with the remark, “Here are sad tidings.” The Northern press reported that Jefferson Davis cheered when he heard of Lincoln’s death.
Mrs. Davis, at the Armistead Burt House, Abbeville, received a message from her husband announcing his arrival in Charlotte and telling of the assassination. Mrs. Davis “burst into tears, which flowed from sorrow and a thorough realization of the inevitable results to the Confederates,” – her own words.
General Johnston and General Sherman were in Mr. Bennett’s house near Raleigh. Just before starting to this meeting, General Sherman received a dispatch announcing Mr. Lincoln’s assassination. He placed it in his pocket, and, as soon as they were alone, handed it to General Johnston, watching him narrowly. “He did not attempt to conceal his distress,” General Sherman relates. “The perspiration came out in large drops on his forehead.” His horror and detestation of the deed broke forth; he earnestly hoped General Sherman would not charge this crime to the Confederacy. “I explained,” states General Sherman, “that I had not yet revealed the news to my own personal staff or to the army, and that I dreaded the effect when it was made known.” He feared that “a worse fate than that of Columbia would befall” Raleigh, particularly if some “foolish man or woman should say or do something that would madden his men.” He took pains when making the calamity known to assure his army that he did not consider the South responsible.
Mr. Davis, under arrest, and on the way to Macon, heard that Andrew Johnson had offered a reward of $100,000 for his arrest, charging him, Clement C. Clay and other prominent Southerners with “inciting, concerting, procuring” the “atrocious murder” of President Lincoln. Between threatening soldiery, displaying the proclamation and shouting over his capture, Mr. Davis and his family rode and walked.
At Macon, General Wilson received him with courtesy; when the proclamation was mentioned, Mr. Davis said one person at least in the United States knew the charge to be false, and that was the man who signed it, for Andrew Johnson knew that he preferred Lincoln to himself.
In Augusta, Colonel Randall (author of “Maryland, My Maryland”), meeting Clement C. Clay on the street, informed him of the proclamation. The old ex-Senator at once surrendered, asking trial.5
In Southern cities citizens held meetings condemning the murder and expressing sorrow and regret at the President’s death. Ex-Governor Aiken, known as the largest slave-owner in South Carolina, led the movement in Charleston, heading a petition to General Gillmore for use of the Hibernian Hall that the people might have a gathering-place in which to declare their sentiments.
Even the Confederates in prison were heard from. The officers confined at Fort Warren signed with General Ewell a letter to General Grant, expressing to “a soldier who will understand” their detestation of Booth’s
The account which I had from Colonel Randall at the home of Mr. John M. Graham, Atlanta, Ga., in the spring of 1905, does not quite coincide with that given by Mrs. Clay in “A Belle of the Fifties.” In years elapsing since the war, some confusion of facts in memory is to be expected.