The Books: “April 1865: The Month That Saved America” (Jay Winik)

Next book in my American history section is April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik

I loved this book. Fun. I couldn’t put it down.

Here’s an excerpt about the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. Some incredible images here. The image of the farmers kneeling in their fields just … gets me right in the throat.

From April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik

In New York, on 550 Broadway, precisely at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, the clock at Tiffany % Co., held aloft by a huge wooden Atlas, had come to a halt. This was no doubt fitting, for, as was well known, Charles Lewis Tiffany greatly esteemed Lincoln.

Across town, in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman was at home when he heard the news. His mother prepared their breakfast, as usual, but it was left untouched and unnoticed, as were the rest of the day’s meals. He sipped a half cup of coffee, and after pushing his plate of food away, he scoured every newspaper, silently passing them back and forth with his mother. Then he crossed over to Manhattan and, to darkening skies and driving rain, trudged up Broadway, past shuttered stores hung with black. “Lincoln’s death,” he wrote in his notebook, ” — black, black, black — as you look toward the sky — long broad black, like great serpents.”

Four days later, farther north, in Concord, Massachusetts, all business and labor was suspended between eleven and two o’clock, as the townspeople moodily gathered in the local Unitarian church. Music was played and selections from the Scriptures and prayers were read. Then Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a somber address: “Rarely was [a] man so fitted to events,” he said of Lincoln, about whom he had often had severe reservations. “Only Washington can compare with him in the future.”

To the south, it would take a full seven days for Mary Chestnut to receive the news of the assassination, which arrived for her husband on April 22 in a sealed envelope, by secret dispatch. She opened it. “It is simply maddening, all this,” she wrote. A friend of hers saw it differently: “See if they don’t take vengeance on us,” she warned, “now that we are ruined and cannot repel them any longer.” Another friend quipped defiantly: “I call that a warning to tyrants!”

By then, though, Lincoln had been eulogized, his funeral had been held, and his remains had begun the long j ourney home to Springfield. On Wednesday, April 19, Lincoln’s casket spent its final hours lying in state in the East Room of the White House. Outside, the sun beamed, and a gentle breeze caressed the sky. Inside, black was everywhere: on the chandeliers, on the ornate gilt frames of the mirrors, in the adjoining rooms, even on the steps. The East Room itself was hushed, dim, somber. Lincoln’s coffin rested on a flower-covered catafalque, a bed of roses at his feet. Even in death, his gangly frame filled the open casket: his head rested on a white pillow, a queer smile fixed on his lips. At eleven that morning, the services began.

Six hundred people crowded into the room. All of official Washington was here: President Johnson and his cabinet, Senator Sumner and his congressional colleagues. Justice Chase and the Supreme Court, generals and the diplomatic corps, Lincoln’s personal cavalry and bodyguards, his personal aides and his sons, Robert and Tad, standing at the foot of the coffin, grief-stricken. At the other end, General Grant sat, alone, his numbed gaze fixed on a cross of lilies, a black mourning crepe wound around his arm. In full view, he wept, later maintaining that this was the saddest day of his life. For his part, President Johnson stood erect and qujet, facing the middle, his hands crossed on his breast. Four ministers spoke and delivered their prayers. Then the casket was closed.

With machinelike efficiency, twelve veteran corps sergeants lifted the coffin, carrying it out into the funeral car, into the sunlit day, into the dirge of bells tolling and bands playing for the dead. In slow time, the funeral procession started up Pennsylvania Avenue. With a detachment of black troops in the lead, it moved, in careful, measured, rhythmic steps. Lincoln’s empty boots sat eerily in the stirrups of his riderless horse, which followed behind, as though ready to join his master in the afterlife, while columns of mourners trudged to the steady, muffled roll of drums. Arms reversed, battalions and regiments were next. Soon the lines curved and swelled, like the great blue sky, with wounded soldiers, torn and bandaged men, marching along. Behind them came a cortege of black citizens, stretching from curb to curb in neatly ordered lines of forty — 4,000 of them all told, in dark coats and shiny white gloves, clasping hands and quiet, as they strode along. In their wake, heavy artillery rumbled.

When the procession reached the Capitol, the sergeants gently lifted Lincoln into the rotunda, where he lay in state on another catafalque. All the oil paintings and bright white statues were covered, except for the figure of George Washington, on which a simple black sash was tied. During that day, and the next, thousands of people filed through, to get one last glimpse and pay their last respects. Noah Brooks recorded: “Like black atoms moving over a sheet of gray, the slow moving mourners … crept silently in two dark lines across the pavement of the rotunda …”

The next day, April 21, a nine-car funeral train bore Lincoln from the capital. It would make a journey of fourteen days and 1,662 miles, back to Illinois, retracing the route that a freshly elected United States president had taken to Washington four years earlier.

The train crept forward, to ringing bells and through the soft, spring landscape. All along the route, people gathered, watching in stunned silence as the train rolled by under the velvety sky. In Philadelphia, Lincoln’s coffin was placed in Independence Hall, where a double line of mourners stretched three miles deep. Among them was former President Buchanan, just one day shy of his seventieth birthday; ignoring his advancing age, he had driven his buggy all the way from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to see the fallen president. In New York City, the procession continued for four hours. Eighty-five thousand mourners accompanied the funeral hearse through the streets beneath a thicket of signs. “Mankind has lost a friend and we a President,” one sign said. Another read: “In sorrowing tears the nation’s grief is spent.” A tearful Walt Whitman would never forget this moment: from that time on, every spring, with its lilacs blooming and the season blossoming, would remind him of the coffin passing in the street. Six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was there, too, leaning out of the second-floor window, watching the spectacle from his grandfather’s twon house on Broadway. In Albany, Lincoln rested in the statehouse, and people came all through the night to lay their eyes on his open coffin. Two presidents, one former and one future, would rush to Buffalo to join the long lines of mourners: Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. Then the train steamed west, past farmers kneeling in their planting fields, to Cleveland, where a special outdoor pavilion was set up — for no outdoor public building was large enough to accommodate the expected crowds — through which 10,000 mourners passed each hour, braving a cold, steady rain. In all, 150,000 came. Indianapolis followed, on the night run. It was lit up by bonfires, with attentive crowds standing in the rain, mute and still, as the train slowly glided by like a ghost. In Chicago, the hearse was shepherded by thirty-six young women, dressed in white, representing each state in the restored Union. There, too, were Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisians, silent columns of heartbroken colleagues and friends marching lockstep by his side in one subdued, final tribute.