Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [485]
Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,” Elizabeth Blair remarked to her husband in a letter later that day. “Their grief is as honest as that of any one of our side.” An editorial in the Richmond Whig expressed similar sentiments, observing that with Lincoln’s death, “the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has descended.”
In distant St. Louis, where his son Barton had found him a new house with a large garden and a comfortable study, Edward Bates was shaken by “the astounding news” that reached him by telegram. In his diary, he remarked that beyond the “calamity which the nation has sustained, my private feelings are deeply moved by the sudden murder of my chief, with and under whom I have served the country, through many difficult and trying scenes, and always with mutual sentiments of respect and friendship. I mourn his fall, both for the country and for myself.”
News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. “He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.
“The history of governments,” John Hay later observed, “affords few instances of an official connection hallowed by a friendship so absolute and sincere as that which existed between these two magnanimous spirits. Lincoln had snatched away from Seward at Chicago the prize of a laborious life-time, when it seemed within his grasp. Yet Seward was the first man named in his Cabinet and the first who acknowledged his personal preeminence…. From the beginning of the Administration to that dark and terrible hour when they were both struck down by the hand of murderous treason, there was no shadow of jealousy or doubt ever disturbed their mutual confidence and regard.”
FLAGS REMAINED AT HALF-MAST in the nation’s capital until the last week of May, when citizens from all over the country came to Washington to witness “the farewell march” of nearly two hundred thousand Union soldiers who would soon disband and return to their homes. Stanton had orchestrated the two-day pageant as a final tribute to the brave men who had fought on battlefields from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Gettysburg to Vicksburg, Atlanta to the sea. “Never in the history of Washington,” reported Noah Brooks, “had there been such an enormous influx of visitors as at that time. For weeks there had been so vast a volume of applications for accommodations at the hotels and boarding-houses that every available nook and corner had been taken.”
Schools and government buildings were closed for the occasion. Reviewing stands had been built all along Pennsylvania Avenue, “from the Capitol to the White House.” A covered platform had been erected to seat President Andrew Johnson, General Grant, and an assortment of dignitaries. The weather was beautiful on both days: “The air was bright, clear, and invigorating.”
The first day was dedicated to the Army of