The Darkest Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  “In looking back over the occurrences,” recalled Ford’s doorkeeper, John Buckingham, “I can see that Booth must have been under great stress of excitement, although his actions did not seem to me at the time to be at all strange. He was naturally a nervous man and restless in his movements.”2

  Some of Booth’s actions were unusual, however, even for him. Wrote one Washington reporter:

  At about 4 P. M., he . . . made his appearance at the counter [of the National Hotel]. . . . and with a nervous air called for a sheet of paper and an envelope. He was about to write when the thought seemed to strike him that someone around him might overlook his letter, and, approaching the door of the office, he requested admittance. On reaching the inside of the office, he immediately commenced his letter. He had written but a few words when he said earnestly, “Merrick, is this year 1864 or 65?” “You are surely joking, John,” replied Mr. M., “you certainly know what year it is.” “Sincerely, I am not,” he rejoined, and on being told, resumed writing. It was then that Mr. M. noticed something troubled and agitated in Booth’s appearance, which was entirely at variance with his usual quiet deportment. Sealing the letter, he placed it in his pocket and left the hotel.3

  But generally, Booth’s actions seemed normal to those who met him, and his words were in keeping with his character. Young Joseph Hazelton, a program boy, saw Booth as he stepped from Ford’s Theater:

  He smiled at me, patted my shoulder, and said, “Well, Joseph, have you made up your mind yet to become an actor?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Booth,” I answered. “Perhaps I wouldn’t do for the stage.”

  He held me at arm’s length and studied my face for some moments.

  “Try it, Joseph, when the time comes,” he said. “Try it. You have the face of an actor—the features of the young Byron. The world will think better of the actor some day and treat him more liberally.”

  He seemed about to say something more, but turned away, then looked back. “We have been good friends, Joseph, eh?” he said. “Well, try to think well of me. And this will buy a stick of candy.”

  He handed me a ten-cent “shinplaster” and walked quickly down Tenth Street.4

  Once again, Booth pursued his frantic course, not sure where the trail would ultimately lead. As he well knew, it was a desperate, perhaps mad, bid to retrieve what may already have been irretrievable. And yet, it had to be done—John Wilkes Booth and his associates had to follow their fate to the end. If all did their duty and did not flinch, before another sun set the U.S. government would be decapitated, leaving only anarchy and confusion in its place.5

  Shortly after 5 P.M., in a “cold, rainy twilight,” a happy but tired Abraham and Mary Lincoln returned from their carriage ride around the town. As they entered the White House grounds, the president spied two old friends from Illinois leaving, and, though weary, he shouted for the men to return and visit. Once in the reception room of the mansion, the revitalized president shared passages from a favorite book of humor. Several times during the visit, Lincoln was called to supper, but each time, though he promised to obey, he found new cause to linger and laugh with his friends. At length, the husband received a sharp summons from Mary to come to the table “at once.” Sadly, the president arose and bid his friends adieu.6

  “I’d much rather swap stories than eat,” he said regretfully.7

  At dinner, the exhausted president insisted that the couple keep their commitment to attend Ford’s Theater that night. To remain at home, Lincoln knew, would give him no rest, for he would be compelled to receive guests all evening, as usual.8 Despite a headache and a less than promising night at the theater, Mary agreed.

  Throughout the day, and despite all reason and logic, Mary Lincoln had assumed not only that General and Julia Grant would attend the theater with her and the president, but that both would be flattered to do so. When Grant nervously informed Lincoln that he and his wife were leaving for New Jersey on the afternoon train, Mary quickly sought replacements. One by one, others understandably begged off.9 Finally, the invitation was accepted by Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, daughter of a U.S. senator from New York—young and respectable, but obscure, and hardly glittering company for a victorious two-term president and his lady.

  Despite the opprobrium of religious zealots and their condemnation of the theater as the devil’s workshop, the Lincolns were the first presidential couple to make the stage steady fare. While Mary preferred opera, her husband most enjoyed Shakespeare and simple comedy.10 “With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day,” Lincoln earlier admitted, “if I did not laugh occasionally I should die.”11

  Not a few who had seen the president at stage-side over the years noted the irony. “I remember thinking,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman, “how funny it was that . . . the leading actor in the greatest and stormiest drama known to real history’s stage . . . should sit there and be so completely interested and absorb’d in those human jack-straws, moving about with their silly little gestures, foreign spirit, and flatulent text.”12

  The fare this night, Our American Cousin, promised little more than light distraction. Although wildly popular in its heyday years back, the farce was now one of the most well-worn and threadbare comedies still standing, and many Americans knew the lines by heart.13

  He stood impatiently at the bar, rapping the counter to gain the waiter’s attention. “Brandy, brandy, brandy!” he cried, as if it were his lifeblood. A short time before, at 7 P.M., as Booth came down from his room at the National Hotel, those in the lobby noted aloud the unnatural paleness in a face already naturally pale. Waving the comments aside, the actor tossed his keys on the front desk.

  “Are you going to the theater tonight?” he asked the clerk, George Bunker. “You should. There will be some fine acting there tonight.”14

  “Fine acting” first needed steady nerves. Well might the actor’s courage flag and need fortifying. For years, Booth had made an anonymous contribution to the cause of the Confederacy, confined to the shadows as a spy and courier. Now, only hours away from stepping onto the lighted political stage, not only cast in the most spectacular and dramatic role of his career, but starring in the singular event of the war, Booth threw down the hot liquid to steel a shaky hand. Most men would have blanched at the thought. Most men would have crumbled like chalk at the dread specter ahead, and no amount of brandy would have sufficed. But John Wilkes Booth, ninth child of the world-renowned Junius Brutus Booth, was quite unlike most men.

  From the day he first became conscious of his own existence, the boy felt he was destined to accomplish some great feat. “Fame, I must have fame!” the child once proclaimed in a fit of exuberance. And to gain the glory and immortality he craved, young Wilkes confided to a friend that he was willing to do almost anything, even pull down the Colossus of Rhodes.

  During the secession crisis of 1859–1860, the fire of Southern nationalism burned white-hot in Booth’s breast. As was the case with other border slave states, the close proximity of Maryland to the abolitionist element in the North created a violent reaction greater perhaps than in her sister slave states farther south. But, as was also the case in other border states, never had families been more divided. Although Wilkes was an outspoken advocate of Southern rights, other siblings in the Booth family were either neutral or, as was the case with older brother Edwin, strongly pro-Union.

  In 1859, when the startling news from Harpers Ferry arrived, John Booth was performing in Richmond. Begging officers to take him along, the actor joined a Virginia militia unit as it rushed north to quell the attempted slave revolt led by the abolitionist John Brown.15 Although diametrically opposed to Brown’s beliefs, Booth nevertheless came to understand and respect the grit and determination of the white-bearded Kansan. After his capture and trial, Booth was also present at Brown’s execution. More than his life, it was John Brown’s death that stirred the actor’s greatest admiration. The image of the “rugged old hero” stand
ing alone on the scaffold unflinchingly, moments from eternity, without a friend or rescuer in sight, was one that Booth never forgot.16

  “He was a brave old man,” the actor mused sadly. “[H]is heart must have broken when he felt himself deserted.”17

  One of the lessons Booth learned from Brown was that even in utter defeat, millions of souls might still be stirred; that one bold man with a will of iron and a heart of steel could make a difference and change the course of history. “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of this century!” praised Booth.18

  When the Southern states seceded and war began, Wilkes Booth, like many other Maryland hot-bloods, bristled to join the army and fight Yankee aggression. “So help me holy God!” he confessed to his sister, Asia, “my soul, life, and possessions are for the South.”19

  A mother’s dread for the safety of her favorite child stopped young Wilkes in his tracks. Promising the woman he worshiped that he would not risk his life in the army, Booth instead continued performing, then entered the Confederate Secret Service, carrying dispatches and medicine across the lines.20

  “He was a man so single in his devotion, so unswerving in his principles, that he would yield everything for the cause he espoused,” reminisced Asia. “I knew that if he had twenty lives they would be sacrificed freely for that cause.”21

  Even twenty lives lost could not retrieve the fortunes of the South, however. As the embittered young actor watched his cause go down in defeat, he realized that all the blood of others had been for naught, and that his own pathetically small contribution amounted to nothing. As the pain deepened, the stress on the Booth family increased. Arguments, especially between Wilkes and Edwin, became heated.22

  “That he was insane on that one point no one who knew him well can doubt,” Edwin later wrote. “When I told him I had voted for Lincoln’s re-election, he expressed deep regret, and declared his belief that Lincoln would be made King of America, and this, I believe, drove him beyond the limits of reason.”23

  Like millions more, young Booth felt that the country’s woes, North and South, were caused by Abraham Lincoln. The war, the annulment of the Constitution, the imprisonment of free men everywhere, these were the handiwork of “King Ape the First.” Explained Booth earlier:

  This man’s appearance, his pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity, are a disgrace to the seat he holds. Other brains rule the country. He is made the tool of the North, to crush out, or try to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies. He is walking in the footprints of old John Brown, but . . . [not] fit to stand with [him].24

  As the end approached, in his desperation Booth sought ways to alter the outcome. At length, with a small group of conspirators, the actor hatched several plans to kidnap Lincoln and hurry him south to Richmond. Although at least one legitimate attempt was made to capture the president, nothing further came of it, and the plot was finally dropped.25 But then the terrible news of April arrived. Already desperate to aid the dying Confederacy, the actor now became frantic.

  “If Wilkes Booth was mad,” wrote Asia, “his mind lost its balance between the fall of Richmond and the terrific end.”26

  From that point, if the opportunity availed, assassination became the actor’s ambition. Booth’s best chance came during the second inauguration, as Lincoln stood starkly on the portico of the Capitol. While the event offered a “splendid” opportunity to kill the president, it, like the abduction schemes, passed without note.

  And then, on this day, April 14, when it was learned that Lincoln would attend Ford’s Theater in the evening, all the elements in Booth’s nature came together at once—his hatred of tyranny, his love of liberty, his passion for the stage, his sense of drama, his lifelong quest to become immortal. He would slay a tyrant, become an American hero, and if the rest did their duty, liberty might again reign supreme throughout the land, North and South.

  November, 1864

  Dearest beloved Mother,

  I have always endeavored to be a good and dutiful son, And even now would wish to die sooner than give you pain. But dearest Mother, though I owe you all, there is another duty. A noble duty for the sake of liberty and humanity due to my Country—For, four years I have. . . . cursed my wilful idleness, And begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence. For four years I have borne it mostly for your dear sake, And for you alone, have I also struggled to fight off this desire to begone, but it seems that uncontrollable fate, moving me for its ends, takes me from you, dear Mother, to do what work I can for a poor oppressed downtrodden people. . . . I have not a single selfish motive to spur me on to this, nothing save the sacred duty I feel I owe the cause I love, the cause of the South. The cause of liberty & justice. So should I meet the worst, dear Mother, in struggling for such holy rights, I can say “Gods’ will be done” and bless him in my heart for not permitting me, to outlive, our dear bought freedom. . . . So then dearest, dearest Mother, forgive and pray for me. I feel that I am right in the justness of my cause. . . . Come weal or woe, with never ending love and devotion you will find me ever your affectionate son

  John.27

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire; mob attacking newspaper after the fall of Richmond

  Courtesy Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Massachusetts Commandery and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

  Mary Todd Lincoln

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Andrew Johnson

  Courtesy Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Massachusetts Commandery and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

  William Henry Seward

  Courtesy Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Massachusetts Commandery and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

  John Wilkes Booth

  Courtesy Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library

  Last photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, April 10, 1865

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Laura Keene

  Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas

  Ford’s Theater with guards posted at entrance and funerary crape draped from windows

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  John Hay

  Courtesy Brown University Library

  Death of Abraham Lincoln

  Courtesy Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Massachusetts Commandery and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

  ”Assassin Sympathizers”: Federal Soldiers under Arrest

  Courtesy Bill Turner Collection

  Jacob Haas (left) and John Wilkes Booth (right)

  James F. Haas collection at U.S. Army Military History Institute

  Funeral ceremony, San Francisco

  Courtesy the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  Edwin Booth

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  The Old Capitol Prison

  Courtesy Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Massachusetts Commandery and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

  Boston Corbett

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Secretary of War Edwin Stanton

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Lincoln’s funeral procession in New York City, April 25, 1865

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Lewis Powell, Washington Navy Yard, D.C., April 1865

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  Execution of the conspirators, July 7, 1865

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  A NIGHT TO

  REMEMBER

  SHORTLY BEFORE 8:30 P.M., AS drizzle began to fall softly on Washington, a carriage halted outside the imposing facade of Ford’s Theater. Despite the weather, a large number of curious spectators were on hand, some to see the president, but most to view for themselves the man so much had been made of recently, Ulysses Grant. When the four occupants finally steppe
d down and into the light, however, the short, bearded general and his trademark cigar were nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless, the presidential party, in the “gayest spirits,” was imposing enough, and Lincoln himself was more than sufficient to write home about.1

  “I had never been so near to him before, and I remember remarking how much taller he appeared than I had previously imagined,” wrote a man who boarded just across the street from Ford’s. “He was engaged in animated conversation as he passed me, and I was struck with the peculiar softness of his voice. . . . As he passed through the crowd he towered a full head and shoulders above them.”2

  When the Lincolns and their guests—“young and lovely” Clara Harris and her handsome twenty-seven-year-old fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone—walked under the arched passageways and into the glittering building, they could hear the performance already in progress.3 Young Joseph Hazelton awaited them awkwardly in the lobby:

  I was in doubt whether to hand Mr. Lincoln a program or not, but he smiled at me, nodded, said something in an aside to Mrs. Lincoln, and held out his hand. I stepped forward and gave each member of the party one of my printed sheets. Mrs. Lincoln looked at me, too, and gave me a smile. They passed within the theater, and I followed them immediately.4