May 16 Thursday – Sam spotted the ex-leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.
IT WAS just a lucky circumstance that I happened to be out late night before last, else I might never have been permitted to see the chief of the late Confederacy in life. I was standing in front of the New York Hotel at midnight, or thereabouts, talking with a clerk of the establishment, when the Davis party arrived, and I got a tolerably good look at the man who has been raising such a dust in this country for years. He is tall and spare—that was all I could make of him—and then he disappeared. There was no crowd around, no torchlight processions, no music, no welcoming cannon—and better than all, no infuriated mob, thirsting for blood and vengeance. The man whose arrival in New York a year or two ago would have set the city wild with excitement from its centre to its circumference, had ceased to rank as a sensation, and went to his hotel as unheralded and unobserved as any country merchant from the far West. He was a fallen Chief, he was an extinguished sun—we all know that—and yet it seemed strange that even an unsuccessful man, with such a limitless celebrity, could drop in our midst in that way, and go out as meekly as a farthing candle [Schmidt – Letter to the Alta datelined May 17, published June 16; date of incident given as “the night after his Irving Hall talk” by Powers, MT A Life 193].
Rasmussen gives May 15 of Sam seeing Jefferson Davis [106].