Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [470]
That evening Julia Grant, accompanied by Lincoln’s old friend E. B. Washburne, joined the Lincoln party on the River Queen. The conversation turned on what should be done with Jefferson Davis if he were apprehended. “Don’t allow him to escape the law,” one of the group said, “he must be hung.” At once Lincoln interjected: “Let us judge not, that we be not judged.”
On Saturday morning, Lincoln and his guests visited Petersburg. At a certain spot, the marquis recalled, “he gave orders to stop the carriage.” On his previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a “very tall and beautiful” oak tree that he wanted to examine more closely. “He admired the strength of its trunk, the vigorous development of branches,” which reminded him of “the great oaks” in the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed “an old country graveyard” where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” On the train ride back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle “basking in the warm sunshine on the wayside.” He asked that the train be stopped so that the turtle could be brought into the car. “The movements of the ungainly little animal seemed to delight him,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared “a happy laugh” all the way back to the wharf.
Such distractions could not forestall the afternoon’s grim task. Lincoln visited injured soldiers at City Point, moving “from one bed to another,” the marquis recalled, “saying a friendly word to each wounded man, or at least giving him a handshake.” At one bed, he held the hand of a twenty-four-year-old captain who had been cited for bravery. “The dying man half-opened his eyes; a faint smile passed over his lips. It was then that his pulse ceased beating.” Lincoln remained among the wounded for five hours and returned to the steamer depleted. “There has been war enough,” he said when the marquis inquired about troubles with France over Mexico, “during my second term there will be no more fighting.”
That evening, as the River Queen prepared to return to Washington, Grant’s officers and staff came to say farewell. Lincoln had hoped to remain at City Point until Lee’s surrender, but he felt he should visit Seward. “As the twilight shadows deepened the lamps were lighted, and the boat was brilliantly illuminated,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled, “it looked like an enchanted floating palace.” When the military band came aboard, Lincoln asked them to play “La Marseillaise” in honor of the Marquis de Chambrun.
As the River Queen steamed toward Washington on Sunday, “the conversation,” Chambrun recalled, “dwelt upon literary subjects.” Holding “a beautiful quarto copy of Shakespeare in his hands,” Lincoln read several passages from Macbeth, including the king’s pained tribute to the murdered Duncan:
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.
Lincoln read the lines slowly, marveling “how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim,” and when he finished, “he read over again the same scene.” Lincoln’s ominous selection prompted James Speed to deliver Seward’s warning about the increased threat upon his life. “He stopped me at once,” Speed recalled, “saying, he had rather be dead than to live in continual dread.” Moreover, he considered it essential “that the people know I come among them without