Shenandoah; here the wavy line of the James and the sinuous peninsula.
The wide campagna of the gulf country sways in the Potomac breeze that
filters in at the window, and the Mississippi climbs up the wall, with
blotches of blue and red to show where blood gushed at the bursting of
deadly bombs. So, in the half-gloomy, half-grand apartment, roamed the
tall and wrinkled figure whom the country had summoned from his plain
home into mighty history, with the geography of the republic drawn into
a narrow compass so that he might lay his great brown hand upon it
everywhere. And walking to and fro, to and fro, to measure the destinies
of arms, he often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to
ask if his life were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous
issues, or whether it was not all a fever-dream, snatched from his sofa
in the routine office of the Prairie state.
There is but one picture on the marble mantel over the cold grate--John
Bright, a photograph.
I can well imagine how the mind of Mr. Lincoln often went afar to the
face of Bright, who said so kindly things of him when Europe was mocking
his homely guise and provincial phraseology. To Mr. Lincoln, John Bright
was the standard-bearer of America and democracy in the old world. He
thrilled over Bright's bold denunciations of peer and "Privilege," and
stretched his long arm across the Atlantic to take that daring Quaker
innovator by the hand.
I see some books on the table; perhaps they have lain there undisturbed
since the reader's dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual,
a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, "Orpheus C. Kerr," and "Artemus
Ward." These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard
day's labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his
partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of
Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken
shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped
Heights of Arlington, reaching down to the shining river side. These
scenes he looked at often to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and
often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation
abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this
room and its close applications in the _abandon_ of the theater.
I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes--to slay this public
servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We
worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.
Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat--a
room more narrow but as long--and opposite this adjacent office, a
second door, directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private
passage to his family quarters. This passage is his only monument in the
building; he added nor subtracted nothing else; it tells a long story of
duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions,
garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers
without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door
opposite his window, and hat in hand, come courtsying to his chair, with
an obsequious "Mr. President!"
If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and
navy, to go out of the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with
their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could
not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them
had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a
strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of
it after with much merriment.
Here should be written the biography of his official life--in the room
where have concentrated all the wires of action, and where have
proceeded the resolves which vitalized in historic deeds. But only the
great measures, however carried out, were conceived in this office. The
little ones proceeded from other places..
Here once came Mr. Stanton, saying in his hard and positive way:
"Mr. Lincoln, I have found it expedient to disgrace and arrest General
Stone."
"Stanton," said Mr. Lincoln, with an emotion of pain, "when you
considered it necessary to imprison General Stone, I am glad you did not
consult me about it."
And for lack of such consultation, General Stone, I learn, now lies a
maniac in the asylum. The groundless pretext, upon which he suffered the
reputation of treason, issued from the Department of War--not from this
office.
But as to his biography, it is to be written by Colonel Nicolay and
Major Hay. They are to go to Paris together, one as attache of legation,
the other as consul, and while there, will undertake the labor. They are
the only men who know his life well enough to exhaust it, having
followed his official tasks as closely as they shared his social hours.
Major Hay is a gentleman of literary force. Colonel Nicolay has a fine
judgment of character and public measures. Together they should satisfy
both curiosity and history.
As I hear from my acquaintances here these episodes of the President's
life, I recall many reminiscences of his ride from Springfield to
Harrisburg, over much of which I passed. Then he left home and became an
inhabitant of history. His face was solid and healthy, his step young,
his speech and manner bold and kindly. I saw him at Trenton stand in the
Legislature, and say, in his conversational intonation:
"We may have to put the foot down firm."
How should we have hung upon his accents then had we anticipated his
virtues and his fate.
Death is requisite to make opinion grave. We looked upon Mr. Lincoln
then as an amusing sensation, and there was much guffaw as he was
regarded by the populace; he had not passed out of partisan ownership.
Little by little, afterward, he won esteem, and often admiration, until
the measure of his life was full, and the victories he had achieved made
the world applaud him. Yet, at this date, the President was sadly
changed. Four years of perplexity and devotion had wrinkled his face,
and stooped his shoulders, and the failing eyes that glared upon the
play closed as his mission was completed, and the world had been
educated enough to comprehend him.
The White House has been more of a Republican mansion under his control
than for many administrations. Uncouth guests came to it often, typical
of the simple western civilization of which he was a graduate, and while
no coarse altercation has ever ensued, the portal has swung wide for
five years.
A friend, connected with a Washington newspaper, told me that he had
occasion to see Mr. Lincoln one evening, and found that the latter had
gone to bed. But he was told to sit down in the office, and directly the
President entered. He wore only a night shirt, and his long, lank
hirsute limbs, as he sat down, inclined the guest to laughter. Mr.
Lincoln disposed of his request at once, and manifested a desire to
talk. So he reached for the cane which my friend carried and conversed
in this manner:
"I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My
favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself.
There's a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don't you think so? You
have seen these fishing poles that fit into a cane? Well, that was an
old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I
'spose they use'em yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a
young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one's hand will
change his appearance? Old women and witches would'nt look so without
sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that."
In this way my friend, who is a clerk, in a newspaper office, heard the
President talk for an hour. The undress of the man and the witness of
his subject would be staples for merriment if we did not reflect that
his greatness was of no conventional cast, that the playfulness of his
nature and the simplicity of his illustration lightened public business
but never arrested it.
Another gentleman, whom I know, visited the President in high dudgeon
one night. He was a newspaper proprietor and one of his editors had been
arrested.
"Mr. Lincoln," he said, "I have been off electioneering for your
re-election, and in my absence you have had my editor arrested. I won't
stand it, sir. I have fought better administrations than yours."
"Why, John," said the President, "I don't know much about it. I suppose
your boys have been too enterprizing. The fact is, I don't interfere
with the press much, but I suppose I am responsible."
"I want you to order the man's release to-night," said the applicant. "I
shan't leave here till I get it. In fact, I am the man who should be
arrested. Why don't you send me to Capitol Hill?"
This idea pleased the President exceedingly. He laughed the other into
good humor.
"In fact," he said, "I am under restraint here, and glad of any pretext
to release a journalist."
So he wrote the order, and the writer got his liberty.
It must not be inferred from this, however, that the President was a
devotee to literature. He had no professional enthusiasm for it. The
literary coterie of the White House got little flattery but its members
were treated as agreeable citizens and not as the architects of any
body's fortune.
Willis went there much for awhile, but yielded to his old habit of
gossiping about the hall paper and the teapots. Emerson went there once,
and was deferred to us if he were anything but a philosopher. Yet he so
far grasped the character of his host as to indite that noble
humanitarian eulogy upon him, delivered at Concord, and printed in the
WORLD. It will not do to say definitely In this notice how several
occasional writers visited the White House, heard the President's views
and assented to them and afterward abused him. But these attained no
remembrance nor tart reproach from that least retaliatory of men. He
harbored no malice, and is said to have often placed himself on the
stand-point of Davis and Lee, and accounted for their defection while he
could not excuse it.
He was a good reader, and took all the leading NEW YORK dailies every
day. His secretaries perused them and selected all the items which would
interest the President; these were read to him and considered. He bought
few new books, but seemed ever alive to works of comic value; the vein
of humor in him was not boisterous in its manifestations, but touched
the geniality of his nature, and he reproduced all that he absorbed, to
elucidate some new issue, or turn away argument by a laugh.
As a jester, Mr. Lincoln's tendency was caricatured by the prints, but
not exaggerated. He probably told as many stories as are attributed to
him. Nor did he, as is averred, indulge in these jests on solemn
occasions. No man felt with such personal intensity the extent of the
casualties of his time, and he often gravely reasoned whether he could
be in any way responsible for the bloodshed and devastation over which
it was his duty to preside.
An acquaintance of mine--a private--once went to him to plead for a
man's life. He had never seen the man for whom he pleaded, and had no
acquaintance with the man's family. Mr. Lincoln was touched by his
disinterestedness, and said to him:
"If I were anything but the President, I would be constantly working as
you have done."
Whenever a doubt of one's guilt lay on his mind, the man was spared by
his direct interference..
There was an entire absence in the President's character of the heroic
element. He would do a great deed in _deshabille_ as promptly as in full
dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that
a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and
synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For
that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point
was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect,
regardless of the route to it.
He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no
patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness
rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often
reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course,
while they only argued it out.
His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no
prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a
practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but
Moreau--not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin.
His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal
grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him
upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father
as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last
day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture
of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the
President.
So dwelt the citizen who is gone--a model in character if not in
ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White
House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought
worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he
has bent so often,--in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in
the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing
upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and
close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations,
of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table
the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory.
LETTER VIII.
THE TRIAL.
Washington, May 26.
The most exciting trial of our times has obtained a very meager
commemoration in all but its literal features. The evidence adduced in
the course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its
far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the
extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of
the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the
artists.
Now that the evidence is growing vapid, and the obstinacy of the
military commission has lost its coarse zest, we may find enough readers
to warrant a fuller sketch of the conspirators' prison.
About a mile below Washington, where the high Potomac Bluffs meet the
marshy border of the Eastern branch, stands the United States arsenal, a
series of long, mathematically uninteresting brick buildings, with a
broad lawn behind them, open to the water, and level military plazas, on
which are piled pyramids of shell and ball, among acres of cannon and
cannon-carriages, and caissons. A high wall, reaching circularly around
these buildings, shows above it, as one looks from Washington, the
barred windows of an older and more gloomy structure than the rest,
which forms the city front of the group of which it is the principal.
This was a penitentiary, but, long ago added to the arsenal, it has been
re-transformed to a court-room and jail, and in its third, or uppermost
story, the Military Commission is sitting.
The main road to the arsenal is by a wide and vacant avenue, which abuts
against a gate where automaton sentries walk, but the same gate can best
be reached on foot by the shores of the Potomac, in the sight, of the
forts, the shipping, and Alexandria.
The scene at the arsenal in time of peace is common-place enough, except
that across the Eastern Branch the towers of the lunatic asylum, perched
upon a height, look down baronially; but this trial of murderers has
made the spot a fair.
A whole company of volunteers keeps the gate, through which are passing
cabs, barouches, officers' ambulances, and a stream of folks on foot;
while farther along almost a regiment crosses the drive, their huddled
shelter tents extending entirely across the peninsula. These are playing
cards on the ground, and tossing quoits, and sleeping on their faces,
while a gunboat watches the river front, and under a circular wall a
line of patrols, ten yards apart, go to and fro perpetually.
It is 10 o'clock, and the court is soon to sit. Its members ride down in
superb ambulances and bring their friends along to show them the majesty
of justice. A perfect park of carriages stands by the door to the left,
and from these dismount major-generals' wives, in rustling silks;
daughters of congressmen, attired like the lilies of the milliner;
little girls who hope to be young ladies and have come with "Pa," to
look at the assassins; even brides are here, in the fresh blush of their
nuptials, and they consider the late spectacle of the review as good as
lost, if the court-scene be not added to it. These tender creatures have
a weakness for the ring of manacles, the sight of folks to be suspended
in the air, the face of a woman confederate in blood.
They chat with their polite guides, many of whom are gallant captains,
and go one after another up the little flight of steps which leads to
the room of the officer of the day.
He passes them, if he pleases, up the crooked stairways, and when they
have climbed three of these, they enter a sort of garret-room, oblong,
and plastered white, and about as large as an ordinary town-house
parlor.
Four doors open into it--that by which we have entered, two from the
left, where the witnesses wait, and one at the end, near the left far
corner, which is the outlet from the cells.
A railing, close up to the stairway door, gives a little space in the
foreground for witnesses; two tables, transverse to this rail, are for
the commission and the press, the first-named being to the right;
between these are a raised platform and pivot arm-chair for the witness;
below are the sworn phonographers and the counsel for the accused, and
then another rail like that separating the crowd from the court, holds
behind it the accused and their guards.
These are they who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths.
They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench
with their backs against the wall,--ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and
the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a
moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the
reporters, introduced there by a fussy usher, and through four windows
filters the imperfect daylight, making all things distinguishable, yet
shadowy. The _coup d'oeil_ of this small and crowded scene is lively as
a popular funeral.
There is the witness with raised hand, pointing toward heaven, and
looking at Judge Holt. The gilt stars, bars, and orange-colored sashes
of the commission; the women's brilliant silks and bonnets; the crowding
spectators, with their brains in their eyes; the blue coats of the
guards; the working scribes; and last of all the line of culprits, whose
suspected guilt has made them worthy of all illustration.
Between the angle of the wall and the studded door, under the heavy bar
of dressed stone which marks above the thickness of the gaol, sits all
alone a woman's figure, clothed in solemn black. Her shadowy skirt hides
her feet, so that we cannot see whether they are riveted; her sleeves of
sable sweep down to her wrist, and dark gloves cover the plumpness of
her hand, while a palm-leaf fan nods to and fro to assist the obscurity
of her vail of crape, descending from her widow's bonnet.
A solitary woman, beginning the line of coarse indicted men, shrinking
beneath the scornful eyes of her sex, and the as bold survey of men more
pitiful, may well excite, despite her guilt, a moment of sympathy.
Let men remember that she is the mother of a son who has fled to save
his forfeit life by deserting her to shame, and perhaps, to death. Let
women, who will not mention her in mercy, learn from her end, in all
succeeding wars, to make patriotism of their household duties and not
incite to blood.
Mrs. Surratt is a graduate of that seminary which spits in soldiers
faces, denounces brave generals upon the rostrum, and cries out for an
interminable scaffold when all the bells are ringing peace.
How far her wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder
rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from
mothers at large--to twist her own bow-string rather than build his
gibbet.
Beneath her shadowy bonnet, over her fan-tip, we see two large, sad
eyes, rising and falling, and now and then when the fan sways to and
fro, the hair just turning gray with trouble, and the round face growing
wan and seamed with terrible reflection, are seen a moment crouching
low, as if she would wish to grovel upon the floor and bury her forehead
in her hands.
Yet, sometimes, across Mrs. Surratt's face a stealthiness creeps--a sort
of furtive, feline flashing of the eye, like that of one which means to
leap sideways. At these times her face seems to grow hard and colorless,
as if that tiger expression which Pradier caught upon the face of
Brinvilliers and fastened into a masque, had been repeated here. Not to
grow mawkish while we must be kind, let us not forget that this woman is
an old plotter. If she did not devise the assassination, she was privy
to it long. She was an agent of contraband mails--a bold, crafty,
assured rebel--perhaps a spy--and in the event of her condemnation, let
those who would plead for her spend half their pity upon that victim
whose heart was like a woman's, and whose hand was merciful as a
mother's.
Before the door sits an officer, uncovered, who does not seem to labor
under any particular fear, chiefly because the captives are ironed to
immovability, and he stares and smiles alternately, as if he were
somewhat amiable and extremely bored.
Next to the officer is a shabby-looking boy, whose seat is by the right
jamb of the jail door. Of all boys just old enough to feel their oats,
this boy is the most commonplace. His parents would be likely to have no
sanguine hopes of his reaching the presidency; for his head indicates
latent dementia, and a slice or two from it would recommend him, without
exanimation, to the school for the feeble-minded. Better dressed, and
washed, and shaved, he might make a tolerable adornment to a hotel door,
or even reach the dignity of a bar-keeper or an usher at a theatre. But
that this fellow should occupy a leaf in history and be confounded with
a tragedy entering into the literature of the world, reverses manifest
destiny, and leaves neither phrenology nor physiognomy a place to stand
upon.
Come up! Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face,
attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which
means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is
sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his
ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with a moustache which does
not help his general contemptibleness. A dirty grayish shirt without a
linen collar, is seen between the lapels of the greasy and dusty cloth
coat, sloping at the shoulders; and under his worn brown trowsers, the
manacle of iron makes an ugly garter to his carpet clipper.
This is David Harold, who shared the wild night-ride of Booth, and
barely escaped that outlaw's death in the burning barn.
He stoops to the rail of the dock, now and then, to chat with his
attorney, and a sort of blank anxiety which he wears, as his head turns
here and there, shifts to a frolicking smile. But a woman of unusual
attractions enters the court, and Harold is much more interested in her
than in his acquittal.
Great Caesar's dust, which stopped a knot-hole, has in this play boy an
inverse parallel. He was at best hostler to a murderer, and failed in
that. His chief concern at present is to have somebody to talk to; and
he thinks upon the whole, that if an assassination is productive of so
little fun, he will have nothing to do with another one.
That Harold has slipped into history gives us as much surprise as that
he has yet to suffer death gives us almost contempt for the scaffold.
But if the scaffold must wait for only wise men to get upon it, it must
rot. Your wise man does no murder in the first place, and if so, in the
second, he dodges the penalty. In this world, Harold, idiotcy is oftener
punished than guilt.
That Booth should have used Harold is very naturally accounted for.
Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them.
Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an
eagle and be screamed at now and then.