WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Benjamin Brown French was a creature of this town, a kind of 19th-century Zelig, a deep state bureaucrat always popping up on the fringes of important political and historical events. Born in 1800, he knew every president from John Quincy Adams to Ulysses S. Grant.
He was also a reporter of sorts, a witness, an inveterate scribbler of diary entries, letters, articles and poems. An American Samuel Pepys.
He was here when Lincoln was dying, in this house I'm standing before, across the street from Ford's Theatre. My friend, who has thoroughly researched Lincoln, tells me I should take the tour, see how the blood has gone to brown. I won't, we've traveled too far in time and space from that bloody event for it to feel like anything for me. I have French to tell me it was like a circus, with Lincoln "surrounded by the members of his cabinet, physicians, Generals, members of Congress, etc." There were women there French didn't know, as well as a moaning Mary Todd Lincoln.
"I stood at his bedside for a short time. He was breathing very heavily, and I was told, what I could myself see, that there was no hope for him."
French had been a rebel; he'd defied his family's wishes and resisted Harvard. He wanted to go to sea. But with no sailing experience he ended up joining the Army, where he served for four months before family and friends arranged for a substitute to serve the rest of his obligation. Imagine him chastened as he returned home to read the law.
He joined the bar and served as a Jacksonian Democrat in the New Hampshire legislature before coming here in 1833 to be an assistant clerk in the House of Representatives. His father warned him; he said Washington was "a land of trials and temptations" where he would have to deal with "theaters, balls, gambling tables, riots, rants and unlawful assemblies" liable to cause him to "fall into error."
French went anyway and established himself as a substantial member of the community. He was active in the Freemasons, becoming a Grand Master of the Grand Encampment. He moved his wife and two sons into a house a block away from the Capitol, a site now occupied by the Library of Congress.
From 1845 to 1847, he was Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. When the Whigs assumed control of the House, he took his friend Samuel Morse's offer to serve as president of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, overseeing expansion of telegraph lines. He returned to public service in 1853 when Democrat Franklin Pierce named him Commissioner of Public Buildings, which put him in charge of all federal buildings, including the Capitol.
But in 1855, Pierce fell out with French. So French resigned and went into private practice, with suits against the federal government his specialty. Deeply disillusioned by the Democrats' pro-slavery stance, he changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican.
It was a difficult time for French. His wife Bess was dying of cancer, and while his older son Frank was establishing himself as an attorney in New York, he worried that his youngest son Benny was a teenager "given to fine dressing and rowdyism."
"He hates to study or to do anything useful," French wrote.
In 1860, the Republican-controlled House put French back on the federal payroll as Clerk of the Committee of Claims. When Lincoln was elected in November, French wrote "Lincoln is President-elect of these United States. My political hopes so far are realized, but my fears that the threats of the South are really to bring trouble upon the whole Union, by being carried into stern action, almost render me joyless at the grand result."
French was appointed Marshal-in-Chief for Lincoln's inaugural parade, charged with organizing the procession. He wanted a relatively low-key affair, prescribing "common black hats, black frock coats, black pantaloons over boots, and white or light-yellow buckskin gauntlet gloves" for dignitaries marching in the parade.
Lincoln re-appointed him Commissioner of Public Buildings, Bess died, the country was ripped asunder, and French oversaw the expansion of the Capitol building, which was in the process of being fitted with a second dome.
He was present for the Gettysburg address and described the reaction to it as "no cold, faint, shadow of a kind reception--it was a tumultuous outpouring of exultation, from true and loving hearts, at the sight of a man whom everyone knew to be honest and true and sincere in every act of his life, and every pulsation of his heart ... the spontaneous outburst of heartfelt confidence in their own President."
He worked closely with the First Lady--"a bundle of vanity and folly." He made funeral arrangements for 11-year-old Willie Lincoln in 1862. He handled Lincoln's funeral too.
He had Benny, the son he worried would amount to nothing, design and build the pine catafalque that supported Lincoln's coffin in the Capitol Rotunda; it is still used for most of the memorial services conducted in the Rotunda.
French believed he'd thwarted John Wilkes Booth once before; a man jumped into the procession at Lincoln's second inauguration in March 1865. French saw it happen and sent a police officer to pull the offender out of line. Then French went to personally confront him.
"I went up to him face to face, and told him he must go back," French wrote in a letter to his son Frank. "He said he had a right there, and looked very fierce and angry that we would not let him go on, and asserted his right so strenuously, that I thought he was a new member of the House whom I did not know and I said to 'let him go.'"
After the assassination, French was shown a photograph of Booth.
"I recognized it at once as the face of the man with whom we had the trouble. He gave me such a fiendish stare as I was pushing him back, that I took particular notice of him and fixed his face in my mind, and I think I cannot be mistaken. My theory is that he meant to rush up behind the President and assassinate him, and in the confusion escape into the crowd . . . But, by stopping him as we did, the President got out of his reach. All this is mere surmise, but the man was in earnest, and had some errand, or he would not have so energetically sought to go forward."
That is how we get our history: Someone becomes obsessed, someone does his job well, or not so well, coincidences occur. We bump into one another. We fade back into the crowd and are covered by confusion.
And maybe a bureaucrat notices and writes something down.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 10/29/2019