She couldn’t communicate with Jeff, so she wrote letters to the old friends and acquaintances and dinner guests who still had influence in Washington. In letters to President Johnson, she begged for better treatment for her husband and to have her house arrest lifted. The president never responded directly but dismissed her to the press as an angry woman.
She read Our Mutual Friend, which she enjoyed, and then Anatomy of Melancholy, which she thought was scientifically filthy, but she copied a few words from it into her notebook—a ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse upon the road of night.
Around that time her mother took the children to Canada, hoping to find a safer place where they could go to school without being threatened. V wept when they left, of course, but for a while she wept whenever her body generated fresh tears. Every day offered its own calamity until she finally ran out of tears and became numb and then kept going.
Gradually, V’s travel restrictions were eased. First she could walk in four of Savannah’s beautiful squares closest to the hotel, and then eventually she could go anywhere in the city. Mostly she walked at night along the bluff over the river because it reminded her of childhood—moonlight on the water and lights from the boats and in the windows of houses on the far shore—except Federal detectives followed her and questioned anyone she spoke with beyond saying, Good evening.
EVENTUALLY THE RESTRICTIONS ALLOWED travel within the borders of the United States. But the children in Montreal remained off-limits, and she still couldn’t visit her husband, couldn’t even write Jeff a letter without government censors striking out every word not related to family matters, wifely concerns. Her mother had left her some money, and a few generous friends sent what they could spare. When a Federal officer gave her a small box of things they’d confiscated, V found her little pistol and nothing of value. She said to the officer, I’d much rather have the gold and silver coins you took from me in Irwinville.
Burton Harrison, though, had just been released from his imprisonment, and he took the loyalty oath and came straight south to meet her in Savannah. Burton had not quite reached thirty, and V still lacked a little of being forty—though the war had aged them both in unspeakable ways. When they first saw each other V held him tight and said over and over, My beautiful boy. Burton still coughed from the damp prison, and his chalky face seldom looked anything but blank. They traveled together for nearly two months, viewing the vast wreckage of the South.
They first went to New Orleans and stayed a couple or three weeks resting in their new freedom, breathing deep breaths, visiting old broke friends like General Wheeler, who had found work in a hardware store selling nails and nuts and bolts—the opposite trajectory to vile little Miles at Fortress Monroe who had risen from shop clerk to general.
The city retained its shabby beauty—spared the destruction of Atlanta and Columbia because it had fallen to the Federals early in the war. Bureaucrats and army still swarmed in great numbers, intent on reshaping New Orleans in the image of their beloved northern cities. Some days—though still beautiful—New Orleans felt like a corpse and other days like a ghost.
Every morning they walked through the French Quarter, enjoying Deep South December weather, stopping to drink strong black coffee at a place with outdoor tables and bougainvillea blooming rich against a south-facing wall—every day telling each other chapters of their stories since being parted on the Clyde at Old Point Comfort. Burton said, That first part—a very bad time.
He told her how they’d taken him up the Potomac to Old Capital Prison and then Fort McNair within sight of the Capitol dome. The Lincoln assassination conspirators faced trial there, and the Federals attempted to bribe and coerce Burton into confessing to having a part in the conspiracy. They offered him total clemency if he would testify that Jeff had been in contact with Booth and the others. The Federals even marched him into the courtroom to watch some of the trial and conviction of Atzerodt, Powell, Herold, and Mary Surratt.
At one point Burton found himself in a room with Surratt’s daughter, Anna. The Federals hoped the two might say something incriminating to each other. Burton described Anna as handsome and pitiful and terrified. She wore a white bandage around her forehead from having collapsed on the steps of the White House after President Johnson refused to listen even for a minute to her pleas not to hang her mother. Burton said Anna’s face looked like it belonged on a Roman coin and that her eyes welled with tears the entire time he sat with her. An older woman, clearly meant to provoke information, asked them leading questions for hours as if they knew each other, but Anna was too stunned to speak and Burton was too smart.
Burton said he didn’t see the simultaneous hangings, but he heard everything from his cell—the constant clatter of lumber and hammering for two or three days as the big four-person scaffold rose, and then on that hot day a murmuring crowd and solemn voices, a deep silence in the cells. Then a loud crack as all four traps opened at the same time. Next day, right in the middle of the path he usually walked in his few minutes of sunshine, a row of new graves spaced like beads on a string. He said the words twice—beads on a string.
Burton told how hard the Federals kept trying to hang him too before finally giving up—not so much convinced of his innocence as of the weakness of their evidence. They moved him to Fort Delaware, where he was
