Killing Lincoln: Part One

But Marse Robert—“master” as rendered in southern parlance—has proven himself a formidable opponent time and again.

Lincoln’s strength, however, is still there, manifested in his passionate belief that the nation must and can be healed.

Lincoln next dons his trademark black suit and scarfs a quick breakfast of hot coffee and a single hard-boiled egg, which he eats while reading a thicket of telegrams from his commanders, including Grant, and from politicians back in Washington.

The men on both sides of the trenches live in squalor and mud, enduring rats and deprivation.

The first rays of morning sunshine have not even settled upon the Virginia countryside when, lacking leadership and orders, Wright’s army is stymied because no other Union divisions have stepped up to assist him.

The Confederate army is a nimble fighting force, at its best on open ground, able to feint and parry.

The Union scouts can clearly see the small artillery battery outside Lee’s headquarters, the Turnbull house, and assume that it is part of a much larger rebel force hiding out of sight. Too many times, on too many battlefields, soldiers who failed to observe such discretion have been shot through like Swiss cheese.

The regal Lee, Virginian gentleman, was appalled when he caught sight of Grant and loudly chastised him for his appearance.

One is a politician; the other thinks that politics is a sordid form of show business.

Booth’s hatred for Lincoln, and his deep belief in the institution of slavery, coalesced into a silent rage after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Booth’s betrothed, Lucy Lambert Hale, is the daughter of John Parker Hale, a staunchly pro-war senator from New Hampshire.

She doesn’t know that his hiatus from the stage was extended by his maniacal commitment to kidnapping Lincoln.

Perhaps, with all of Booth’s subterfuge, it is not surprising that their lovers’ getaway to Newport is turning into a fiasco.

Instead, he rambles on about the fate of the Confederacy and about Lincoln, the despot.

Lincoln can clearly see that Richmond—or what’s left of it—hardly resembles a genteel southern bastion.

Perfectly respectable men and women, in a moment of amazing distress, found a salve for their woes by falling to their knees and quenching their thirst with alcohol flowing in the gutter.

Everyone from escaped prisoners to indigent laborers and war deserters drank their share.

It could even be said that the United States of America was born in Richmond, for it was there, in 1775, in Richmond’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, that Patrick Henry looked out on a congregation that included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and delivered the famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, which fomented American rebellion, the Revolutionary War, and independence itself.

“The barbarous south had consigned it to flames,” one Union officer wrote of Richmond.

Instead, Lincoln receives the jubilant welcome of former slaves reveling in their first moments of freedom.

As for the people of Richmond, many of whom actively conspired against Lincoln and the United States, Lincoln has ordered that the Union army command the citizenry with a gentle hand. Or, in Lincoln’s typically folksy parlance: “Let ’em up easy.”

“But his carriage was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to seeing it. The troubles of these last days had already plowed great furrows in his forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping, his cheeks sunken and haggard, his face colorless. No one who looked upon him then, as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget the intense agony written on his features.”

That’s the way it is with those cavalry bucks: they bother and howl about infantry not being up to support them, and they are precisely the people who are always blocking the way...they are arrant boasters.

But his broad gray hat remains firmly in place as he acknowledges the adulation of his suffering men.

The roads of central Virginia are now littered with the detritus of Lee’s retreating army: guns, blankets, broken wagons, artillery limbers, dead horses, and dead men.

General Thomas Lafayette Rosser, a gregarious twenty-eight-year-old Texan, gallops his cavalry into Rice’s Station.

Rosser’s classmate at West Point was the equally audacious George Armstrong Custer, now a Union general involved on the other side of this very fight.

Rosser salutes, his face stolid.

Another concern is that the ground between the Chatham plateau and High Bridge is a swampy morass of small creeks, sand, and hills, taking away any advantage of speed—and adding the very real potential of getting caught in a kill zone.

In 1865, the Sayler’s Creek area of central Virginia is a place of outstanding beauty. Verdant rolling hills compete with virgin forest to present a countryside that is uniquely American, a place where families can grow amid the splendors of nature.

Near a bucolic estate called Lockett’s Farm, the Jamestown Road crosses over Big Sayler’s Creek and Little Sayler’s Creek at a place called Double Bridges.

Horses and mules balk in their traces, confused by the noise and smelling the panic.

This is Grant’s vaunted army, a force better rested, better fed, and better equipped than the half-dressed Confederates.

Custer is impervious to personal injury, his savagery today adding to his growing legend for fearlessness.

Mary Lincoln has joined her husband at City Point, bringing with her a small complement of guests from Washington.

Not even his eyes give away his mourning, nor the dilemma that he has endured since Sayler’s Creek, when it became clear that his army was no longer able to acquit itself.

Grant well recalled how Lee had scolded him because of his slovenly appearance.

So while Lee sits before him, proud but fallen, resplendent in his spotless uniform, Grant looks and smells like a soldier who could not care less about appearance or ceremony.

Let’s rebuild the nation together. This was President Lincoln’s vision, to which Grant subscribed. As if to underscore this point, members of Grant’s staff tentatively ask Robert E. Lee for permission to go behind Confederate lines.

“They went over, had a pleasant time with their old friends, and brought some of them back with them when they returned,” Grant will write twenty years later, recalling that the McLean household became their de facto meeting place that night.