The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman

Author:Joanne B. Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EPILOGUE

“I WITNESSED IT ALL”

French’s life during the secession crisis echoed the state of the nation. For months, his diary entries were divided between his fears for the Union and his fears for his wife, and all of his worst fears came true. Between December 1860 and June 1861, eleven states left the Union. And on May 6, 1861, Bess died. Although friends flocked to his side that day, he spent most of its long, lingering hours by her side or with his diary. He wrote in it more than once that afternoon, concluding his last entry with a moan: “Oh how lonely—lonely—lonely.”1

His workday offered no escape. Appointed clerk of the House Committee of Claims in 1860, French was charged with evaluating 487 claims for damages by citizens of Kansas. For two months, he reviewed a veritable litany of destruction: homes and stores plundered and burned, crops destroyed, horses stolen. Pressman that he was, he took special note of the destruction of the Lawrence Herald of Freedom; witnesses described a band of roughly seventy armed men riding from the scene waving bayoneted books above their heads as war trophies. He was particularly generous to the free-state governor Charles Robinson, who claimed to have lost a six-hundred-page manuscript history of California when his house burned down. French granted Robinson damages for his lost work as well as his home, assigning him almost $24,000 out of a grand total of roughly $450,000.2

The one ray of hope in French’s diary throughout this period was Abraham Lincoln. French liked the unassuming president virtually from the moment that he met him. When Lincoln—drafting a letter in a room full of visitors—asked aloud how to spell the word missile, French was charmed. “Is there another man in this whole union who, being President, would have done that? It shows his perfect honesty and simplicity, & that he is truly a great man.”3 The liking seems to have gone both ways. Lincoln reappointed French commissioner of public buildings in September 1861, a position that ensured French close and frequent contact with the president, particularly given the city’s wartime disruptions.4

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