Free Bloody Times by James L. Swanson Page A

downstairs with the White House staff making final arrangements for serving Christmas Day dinner to wounded soldiers, the president thought of another child and wrote a condolence letter to Fanny McCullough.
    In one of the most moving and revealing letters he ever wrote, Lincoln set down for her his hard-earned knowledge of life and death. It was as if Lincoln had composed the letter not to one sad girl, but to the American people. His words to Fanny might have comforted Jefferson Davis when he grieved over Joseph, or Lincoln’s own sons Tad and Robert when they suffered through their father’s death.
    Washington, December 23, 1862
    Dear Fanny
    It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. . . . You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.
    Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
    Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln
    On April 17 Jefferson Davis was still on his way to Charlotte. Seventy-two hours after Lincoln’s assassination, he still had no idea that Lincoln had been murdered.
    On the morning of April 18, the White House gates opened to let the people who had waited all night file into the East Room to see the president’s body. Upstairs Mary Lincoln hid in her room with Tad. He would have liked to see the people who came to honor his father. He would, perhaps, have found more comfort in the company of these strangers than alone with his grieving mother.
    Jefferson Davis had reached Salisbury, North Carolina. There he read a letter signed by several Confederate officers begging his permission to let their soldiers go home to their families. They wanted to quit the war. Didn’t these men know that, like them, Davis worried about his wife and children? But the Confederacy’s survival was at stake. If Davis agreed, news of it would spread and infect the whole army. Soon every man would want to leave, and the South would lose. Davis wrote back and refused to give his permission.
    As he continued on the road to Charlotte, Jefferson Davis remained cheerful. Burton Harrison described him: “He seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was bright and agreeable. He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of trees and many plants; of roads, and how to make them; of the habits of birds, and of a variety of other topics.”
    The mood in Washington was sad. For the past three days the people had read newspaper stories of the president’s assassination and death. Today was their first chance to come face-to-face with his corpse.
    Thousands of people walked past the coffin. The viewing of Lincoln’s body could have continued all night. But there was work to be done. Thousands more were turned away when it was time to prepare the East Room for the funeral. George Harrington had decided that six hundred people needed to attend—but it would be impossible to squeeze six hundred chairs into the East Room. Only a few of the most important guests, including the Lincoln family, would have their own chairs. Carpenters could build risers, or bleachers, for the rest, if they worked through the night.
    While men carried stacks of fresh lumber into the East Room