The World полностью

At the White House, on 14 April, Grant recounted the surrender to Lincoln and his cabinet, after which the president invited the Grants to Ford’s Theatre that evening to watch Our American Cousin. When Booth visited the theatre, he learned that the Lincolns and Grants would attend that night; he and his cohorts planned to save the Confederacy – which still had one active army in the field – by decapitating the Union. But Julia Grant, who did not get on with Mary Lincoln, vetoed the invitation. ‘Dear Husband,’ said Mary Lincoln to Abraham that afternoon, ‘you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.’

‘And well I may feel so, Mary,’ said Lincoln. ‘I consider this day the war has come to a close.’ Mary Lincoln was unwise, inconsistent, unstable and possibly bipolar, a trial for her husband, but they had lost one son aged three, and another, Willie, aged eleven, died of typhoid; during the war, they had endured appalling stress. The president added, ‘We must both be more cheerful in the future – between the war and the loss of our darling Willie – we have both been very miserable.’

As the Lincolns prepared for the theatre, the Grants headed to the station. On the way, a horseman – Booth – galloped alongside and peered into their carriage, confirming that they would not be at the theatre. At 10.13 p.m., at Ford’s Theatre, Booth sneaked into the president’s box and shot him in the back of the head with a Deringer pistol, then jumped out of the box on to the stage, shouting ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ before fleeing. One other conspirator ambushed the secretary of state, William Seward, who was sick in bed, and stabbed him, while the third failed to find Vice-President Johnson – and got drunk. Lincoln died next morning. Booth was killed in a shoot-out; the other conspirators were hanged.

Johnson, a long-haired, hard-drinking and pugnacious mediocrity, was sworn in. As the only southern senator to support the Union, he had been selected for the vice-presidency by Lincoln as a sign of reconciliation, but he was a diehard racist: ‘This is a country for white men, and by God, as long I’m president, it’ll be a government for white men.’ The Civil Rights Act of 1866 promised the vote for all citizens ‘without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery’; Johnson vetoed it, but his veto was overridden. Amendments to the constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all ex-slaves. African-Americans delighted in their ability to vote. As Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which detailed the terms under which the rebel states would be readmitted, Union armies occupied the south and Grant ordered his generals to enforce the new laws. The Union had won the war, but it would lose the peace.

The fightback by white supremacism started at once. Southerners passed Black Codes to stop the freedmen voting. In Memphis and New Orleans white mobs murdered black people. In Pulaski (Tennessee), Confederate veterans founded a clandestine militia, named Ku Klux Klan after the Greek kuklos (circle), sporting white hoods to represent the ghosts of dead comrades.

As President Johnson tainted Lincoln’s legacy,^* his paladin Grant announced, ‘Now for Mexico,’ since he regarded Napoleon ‘as an active part of the rebellion’ and Emperor Maximilian as a ‘foothold’ of ‘European monarchy … a direct act of war’. His Mexican war would be ‘short, quick, decisive’ but his plan was derailed by his deteriorating relationship with the egregious President Johnson.

Grant did not need to fight Napoleon in Mexico: Napoleon lost his nerve as his position in Europe deteriorated. ‘The French army is full of enthusiasm for Max,’ Empress Charlotte told her father, but in February 1866 Napoleon, agonized by the successful insurgency against his puppet, exposed by Union victory, started to withdraw – a move which, he wrote to Maximilian, ‘may cause Your Majesty temporary embarrassment’. Emperor Maximilian planned to abdicate, but Charlotte sailed for Europe to appeal to Napoleon, who received her on three tearful but painful encounters: ‘We’ve done our best by Maximilian but all we can do now is help him escape.’ Charlotte, proudly half Bourbon, half Coburg, shrieked, ‘Bourbon blood flows in my veins … I ought not have dishonoured my forebears and myself by treating with a Bonaparte.’ But no one would help. ‘All is useless,’ she cabled Maximilian, then sank into madness, hiding in the Vatican and claiming that she was being poisoned. She was later locked up in a Belgian castle, where she came to believe she was empress not just of Mexico but of many other places too. Maximilian refused to flee as Mexican forces closed in.