The Lincoln Assassination: Crime & Punishment, Myth & Memory

By Harold Holzer, Craig L. Symonds, Frank J. Williams and 7 more

Diverse perspectives on Lincoln’s assassination, its aftermath, and its place in national memory from some of today’s leading Lincoln scholars.
 
The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most significant events in US history. It continues to attract the interest of scholars, writers, and armchair historians, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation. Now leading scholars of Lincoln and his murder offer in one volume their most salient studies and arguments about the assassination, its aftermath, the extraordinary—and complicated—public reaction, and the iconography that Lincoln’s murder and deification inspired.
 
Contributors also offer the latest accounts of the pursuit, prosecution, and punishment of the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the nation’s city streets, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis.
 
Contributing to this volume are some of the finest scholars specializing in Lincoln’s assassination. All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their originality, and their writing. In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas R. Turner, Edward Steers Jr., Michael W. Kauffman, Thomas P. Lowry, Richard E. Sloan, Elizabeth D. Leonard, and Richard Nelson Current.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823263943

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Lincoln’s Deathbed in Art and Memory

The Rubber Room Phenomenon

Harold Holzer and Frank J. Williams

Introduction

MODERN RESEARCH INTO THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY SUGGESTS that the death of a sitting chief executive invariably generates a deep and enduring impact on the citizenry. Personal shock quickly gives way to public anxiety, fueled by a bombardment of news and images of the tragedy that keep nightmarish memories vividly and profoundly alive. Americans who live through such traumas are virtually lurched from the abyss of political apathy. By contrast, deaths of other leaders, political and national alike, seem to inspire only momentary ripples in the public consciousness.¹

The pervasive mourning triggered by the violent deaths of incumbent U.S. presidents—from Lincoln to Garfield to McKinley to Kennedy—proves that the resident of the White House occupies a unique place in the collective American psyche. Presidents are more than authority figures; they are the living fathers of their country.² Sometimes the separation between family and state blurs. After all, when would-be assassin Lynette Squeaky Fromme pointed her pistol at Gerald Ford in 1975, Americans learned after her attack, she may have been taking aim not only at a president, but at a middle-class father who had ousted her from her family home.³

The death of a president can stimulate a uniquely potent rite of passage for a polity. John F. Kennedy’s murder in 1963 froze the chief executive in national memory as an eternal youth and compelled Americans who lived through his death to leave their own youth and innocence behind. The aching sense of loss generated by that assassination may help explain why Kennedy’s brief time in office has been so treasured, for so long, by so much of the American public, a reverence that many historians judge to be out of proportion to Kennedy’s accomplishments.⁴

The first—and still the most wrenching—of these national calamities was the murder of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, only days after the Union had achieved victory in the long and bloody Civil War.

Lincoln died at the successful conclusion of an Armageddon that finally reconciled the living nation’s values with those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, so mass shock and mourning were surely not surprising. But Lincoln also died generations before the age of live television, years before photographs could even be reproduced in newspapers. The vast majority of his constituents never saw Lincoln in the flesh and was totally unfamiliar with the theater where he was shot or the house where he died. Yet his assassination made mourners out of countless Americans who were able to visualize the scenes of his martyrdom and death. They did so through the vastly under-appreciated medium of popular art.

The seemingly primitive depictions of Abraham Lincoln’s final moments that have so often been dismissed by modern observers assumed in their own day the status of holy icons. That is not to say that they were all dependably researched, skillfully crafted, or free of commercial motivation. In fact, few could claim such status. The somber death scene that ended Abraham Lincoln’s life offered to visual artists the same transcendent opportunity to preserve a defining historical moment that peace and re-union had afforded Lincoln himself in life. Many of the artists failed where Lincoln had succeeded.

But even if most pictorial representations of Lincoln’s death lacked realism and good draftsmanship, all of them—paintings, popular prints, and photomontages—deserve renewed historical attention today because of their staggering popularity at the time they were issued, and their decisive impact on popular culture and American collective memory. Their original power may be hard to re-imagine in an era of twenty-four-hour-television news, streaming video, and the World Wide Web, but in an era in which pictures were still precious, not ubiquitous, these seemingly primitive and static images were wildly popular and deeply influential.

Then, as now, image makers—in Lincoln’s era this meant artists, engravers, lithographers, and photographers—produced their array of pictures in response to commercial demand. But their results confirmed, and may have influenced, Lincoln’s status as the martyr of liberty. Through these pictures, today’s Americans can open a window into the way nineteenth-century Americans learned about Abraham Lincoln’s death and came to respond to it as the defining event of their age.

From Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen House

At one time, every schoolchild knew the story. After John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot in a crowded Ford’s Theatre, all was confusion. Forcing his way into the president’s box, a twenty-three-year-old assistant Army surgeon named Charles Leale ordered the president placed on the floor and then examined the wounded chief executive. Finding blood on the back of Lincoln’s head, Dr. Leale searched for and found the hole made by Booth’s attack. Realizing that the bullet was still lodged in the president’s brain, Dr. Leale concluded that Lincoln had been mortally wounded. Quickly, he put his own mouth over the president’s and forced his own breath into his lungs. The president’s labored breathing began again.

As a group of onlookers carefully carried Lincoln out of the theater and outside onto Tenth Street, some on the scene urged that he be taken back to the White House. But Dr. Leale insisted that he would not survive the trip. It was then decided to move Lincoln to a dwelling nearby. At virtually the same moment, young Henry Safford, a tenant in William Petersen’s house across from Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street (Figure 1), heard noises from the street, opened his window and shouted, What’s the matter?⁵

The president has been shot, came the frenzied answer. Rushing to the front door, Safford heard a voice call out, Where shall we take him? Safford cried, Bring him in here. Then he watched in horror as the men bearing Lincoln struggled with the right angle of the steep front steps. Commanded to take me to your best room, Safford led the way to a modest sleeping chamber, only 9½ by 17 feet in dimensions, at the back of the first floor hall. It was rented at the time to one William T. Clark, a soldier on leave who was not at home at the time Lincoln arrived.⁶

At 6’4", the president’s frame required that he be laid diagonally across Clark’s spool bed. Lincoln’s head was propped up so he could breathe more easily. His feet protruded from beneath the covers, as vividly described later to an artist named Albert Berghaus (Figure 2) by Clark, the displaced boarder.⁷ Officials began gathering around the bedside, beginning a vigil later described to another artist, Hermann Faber, who sketched the scene only a few hours after Lincoln’s death (Figure 3).

By this time, Dr. Joseph K. Barnes, the Surgeon General of the Army, had joined several other doctors at the scene. All they could do, however, was try to keep Lincoln warm, administer occasional stimulants, apply the then-popular mustard plaster to his chest, and keep the wound open and free of blood clots to prevent pressure from building up inside his brain. In this condition, Lincoln lingered for almost nine excruciating hours before he drew his last breath at 7:22 the next morning, Saturday, April 15, 1865.⁸

Figure 1. The Petersen House—the boarding house where Abraham Lincoln died—as seen in a late-nineteenth-century cabinet photograph by an unknown photographer. The house became a tourist attraction under the stewardship of one of the first great Lincoln collectors, Osborn H. Oldroyd, a Union veteran who moved his trove of Lincolniana—and himself—into the shrine in 1893, offering tours to the public. (Photograph courtesy Harold Holzer)

Figure 2. Albert Berghaus, [Lincoln’s feet protruding from deathbed coverlet], Washington, 1865. This sketch was based on a description of the death scene by Petersen House boarder Willie Clark, who lived in the room where Lincoln died. (Ford’s Theatre Collection)

Figure 3. Hermann Faber, [The death of Lincoln], Washington, 1865. This and a companion sketch owned by the Armed Forces Medical Museum were made on the scene not long after the president’s body was returned to the White House. The onlookers, added later, were sketched from period photographs. Faber’s raw and powerful drawing was the first—and last—to suggest that doctors had bandaged the president’s head. (Meserve-Kunhardt Collection)

Several times during the night, a distraught Mary Lincoln entered the death room for brief periods. Once, she threw herself on the bed beside her husband, imploring him to live. On her final visit, she wailed and fainted. Summoned from the White House, her eldest son, Robert, either stood by his father’s side weeping or struggled to soothe his mother while Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, in turn, comforted Robert. All manner of governmental personnel came and went throughout the night. In all, some fifty-five individuals visited the dying president’s bedside—but not all at the same time, as some artists would later suggest in their interpretations of the scene.

Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton took charge. No one questioned his authority, even though Vice President Andrew Johnson, next in line for the presidency, made a brief call during the vigil. From the Petersen House parlor, Stanton directed the search for Booth and his co-conspirators after the actor had been identified as the assailant.⁹

At least that is what Americans read in the first editions of their morning newspapers. Beyond these sketchy details, almost any embellishment was deemed possible and, judging by the artistic results, believable to a gullible public hungry for visualizations of the tragic scene.

Even the circumstances surrounding Lincoln’s removal from the theater to his deathbed across the street were suffused with controversy and eventually pictured differently by artists. Confusion begins with how Lincoln was borne by loving hands,¹⁰ in the words of the title of one painting of that frenzied scene. Some speculated that he was carried on a theater box partition. Others claimed men holding him in their arms carried him. Many accounts suggest that the president was transported on a flat board of some type. Who carried Lincoln from the theater? Surely the number was fewer than the dozen eyewitnesses who later claimed the honor of removing the president.¹¹

The artist Albert Berghaus later described the tiny room where Lincoln died:

The walls are covered with a brownish paper, figured with a white design. Its dimensions are about ten by fifteen feet. Some engravings and a photograph hang upon the walls. . . . The only furniture in the room was a bureau covered with crochet, a table, eight or nine plain chairs, and the bed upon which Mr. Lincoln lay when his spirit took its flight. The bedstead was a low walnut, with headboard from two to three feet high. The floor was carpeted with Brussels, considerably worn. Everything on the bed was stained with . . . blood. . . .¹²

Here was a simple scene in a middle-class home—perhaps a fitting place in which a man of modest birth should breathe his last, but hardly the setting artists believed worthy of the much-mourned victim and the history-altering conspiracy that had claimed him. They would take huge artistic license to make the setting worthy of the dying hero—reality notwithstanding.

The real Lincoln death vigil centered, of course, on the deathbed itself. To an almost unnerving degree, the imagination, the emotion, and the memory of ordinary Americans hovered over what its citizens came to transform into a sacred spot. For its news value alone, it is small wonder that printmakers ultimately gravitated to it and made it the center of their scenes (even though Willie Clark’s bed actually stood against an inside wall). The deathbed would serve almost as a sacred altar in period pictures of Lincoln’s dying moments, in the same way George Washington’s deathbed occupied the center of the scenes of the final moments of the Father of His Country (Figure 4).¹³

Figure 4. N[athaniel]. Currier, Death of Washington, Dec: 14. A.D. 1799. Lithograph, New York, 1846. Published before Currier began his productive partnership with James Merritt Ives, this simple print set the standard for death scenes of American heroes. Note the family slaves weeping in the doorway—an artistic device the lithographer would employ again to depict Mary and Tad Lincoln in the third and final version of the firm’s Lincoln deathbed print. (Library of Congress)

Lincoln’s path to sainthood was further assured because he was assassinated on Good Friday, dying suddenly and violently, and not at home in bed as George Washington had in 1799. Printmakers seemed to believe that the public preferred its fallen leaders to die in places worthy of their exalted positions, and this perception encouraged them to enhance and embellish the place where Lincoln expired. They ignored, in large part, what the people recognized and appreciated: the symmetry and humility consistent with greatness in a president who was born in a log cabin and who died in a simple boarding house.

The Artists’ Rubber Room

It was the New York print-publishing firm of Currier & Ives that set the pace, if not the standard, with a Lincoln deathbed lithograph copyrighted on April 26, 1865 (Figure 5).¹⁴ While it ordinarily took at least three weeks to produce a Civil War–era print, Currier & Ives assassination and deathbed scenes were produced in only eleven days—lightning speed at the time—comparable to today’s instantaneous television coverage of breaking news events and reflective of both the keen interest of the Civil War–era public and the marketing skills of the printmakers. First an artist had to sketch such a scene on paper, then produce a lithograph on stone. Once printed, Currier & Ives prints were hand-colored, with a separate artist assigned to apply each tint. The prints were then placed on a clothesline to dry.¹⁵

Figure 5. Currier & Ives, Death of President Lincoln./At Washington, D.C., April 15th, 1865./The Nation’s Martyr. Lithograph, New York, 1865. The first of three versions of the death room by America’s best-known printmakers, this hand-colored lithograph included portraits of twelve eyewitnesses, including young Tad Lincoln (crying on his mother’s lap), even though he was not present that night. (Photograph courtesy Harold Holzer)

Like most of the prints that soon flooded the marketplace, theirs showed a stoic and sterile Lincoln free of even a trace of pain or discomfort. Albert Berghaus may have seen bloodstains at the scene, but Americans would not: There was no blood in these prints, and certainly no evidence of the swelling and blackening of Lincoln’s eye so clearly visible by the morning of his death. His surgeons typically were depicted sitting stoically by his bedside, not at work—as they really were—periodically removing blood clots from his wound and keeping him warm.¹⁶

Nor was Lincoln’s wife depicted in the hysterical frenzy that in reality overtook her that night. Instead she was typically portrayed as a calm, resolute woman moving almost gracefully through the event, gowned as if for an inaugural ball. Lincoln was almost always shown in a discreetly opened dress shirt or full nightgown, when in fact his doctors had stripped him, immediately upon his arrival in the Clark bedroom, to search for other wounds. The dying president lay naked beneath the covers for the last few hours of his life.

What is surprising about the Currier & Ives print is not its errors—some attributable to artistic conventions, some to artistic license like the insertion of little Tad Lincoln crying on his mother’s lap. Tad was in fact never brought to his father’s bedside that night, even though Mary more than once expressed the irrational belief that her husband would awake if only he could hear Tad speak. What should surprise the modern viewer even more is how many details the artist got right: particularly the print within the print on the wall behind the deathbed. Many printmakers not only knew that an engraving of the English painting The Village Blacksmith (Figure 6) hung in Lincoln’s death room but took pains to draw it into their scenes as well. At least Currier & Ives did not attempt to cram the death room with celebrity visitors—at least not at first. Most printmakers would prove unaware of—or unwilling to accept—the modest size of the death chamber itself, giving rise in popular art to what assassination expert Lesley A. Leonard has aptly termed the rubber room phenomenon.¹⁷ In successive prints, the modest Petersen House chamber grew larger and larger to accommodate the number of people who propriety-driven publishers believed must be portrayed in it. The death chamber expanded exponentially with the artists’ evident desire to aggrandize the circumstances surrounding a great man’s death.¹⁸

Figure 6. George Patterson, after John Frederick Herring Sr., The Village Blacksmith. Engraving, n.d., printed by W. H. Dunbar for members of the Cosmopolitan Art Association. This is a copy of the print that hung over the bed where Lincoln died. Many printmakers included it in their depictions of the president’s final moments. Coincidentally, the British artist who painted the original died the same year as Lincoln. (Photograph courtesy Harold Holzer)

Though first, fast, and fairly accurate with its timely print, Currier & Ives was not yet satisfied. Within days the firm had second thoughts about one major omission from its initial group portrait: The new president, Andrew Johnson, had not been portrayed in their original deathbed scene. Reconsidering, they deemed General Henry W. Halleck (at left in Figure 5, holding a handkerchief) expendable and removed him from a revised second version of the lithograph, replacing him with Lincoln’s successor (Figure 7). With Johnson included, a print of the last moments of President Lincoln thus became as well a print of the first moments of President Johnson, symbolizing peaceful succession and national continuity in the face of crisis.

Perhaps that is why a third and final interpretation of Lincoln’s death by Currier & Ives proved the most politically correct of all three (Figure 8). Here, Johnson (fourth from the left) advanced even farther toward the bedside. Mary Lincoln, on the other hand, by then losing public sympathy for failing to leave the White House and refusing to attend any of her husband’s funerals, was banished to the doorway, weeping alone as her husband expires inside. Johnson is shown weeping, too, holding a handkerchief to his eyes. To demonstrate a final reconciliation by Lincoln’s political adversaries, the scene also included former Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase (fifth from the right), even though he had unsuccessfully challenged Lincoln for the presidential nomination the year before. Yet Lincoln had only recently named Chase Chief Justice of the United States. In reality, Chase never visited Lincoln’s bedside that fateful night. But Currier & Ives might have included him so that all aspects of private and public grief—the family, the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch—might be represented, even if that representation meant diminishing the traditional role of the bereft widow.

Most printmakers preferred to keep Mrs. Lincoln in their scenes. For example, Currier & Ives’ New York neighbor, the engraver H. H. Lloyd, exercised considerable artistic latitude by depicting Mary sprawled across the bed, Tad kneeling beside her in prayer, and Secretary Stanton (the bearded figure at center with his hand to his cheek) so squashed by fellow witnesses that he seems to find it difficult to raise his right arm to wipe away a tear (Figure 9). The deceptions—and the fantasy—were only beginning. But there were some exceptions to the rule publish first, research later.

One simple but affecting last moments scene by an unknown printmaker, for example, actually showed blood, however discreetly, on the pillow (Figure 10), a rare concession to the reality of the assassination, and featured the attending doctor realistically checking the dying man for a pulse. Even more blood appeared in the print that probably inspired it (Figure 11), an otherwise routine offering from the Boston firm of J. H. Bufford, which in 1860, just five years earlier, had issued one of the first print portraits of Lincoln based on a painting done from life.¹⁹

A surprisingly rigorous German print, one of several foreign-made deathbed scenes, featured a chillingly accurate spool bed much like the one in which Lincoln had died (Figure 12). Issued by Gustave May of Frankfurt and modeled after an American print by John Henry Bufford of Boston, it managed to convey the impression of the dying moment with considerable power, except perhaps for Andrew Johnson’s pose (at the right) of casual