The Darkest Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  As the terrible life-and-death drama unfolded above, pandemonium reigned below. A hideous jumble of emotions—anger, fear, horror, sadness, hatred, confusion—all found an outlet in the most primitive way possible—violence. Chairs were smashed to splinters. Rails were ripped off and broken. Curtains were torn to shreds. Like a herd of terrified beasts, the crowd ran back and forth, crushing the smaller and weaker, heedless in their agony of the damage they wrought. Several times there were cries to clear the theater, including one from the former mayor of Washington. Although many at first obeyed the summons and moved toward the exits, a new explosion of grief, horror, and “white-faced wrath” swept the building, and again the mob surged toward the stage. In an attempt to control the situation, the theater management rung down the curtain, then dimmed and brightened the lights alternately, all to no effect.46

  Then, when the madness was reaching its peak, hundreds of blue-clad soldiers burst through the doors. “They storm the house,” wrote Walt Whitman, “through all the tiers, especially the upper ones, inflamed with fury, literally charging the audience with fix’d bayonets, muskets and pistols, shouting Clear out! clear out! you sons of bitches. . . .”47 As the terrified and cowed rioters stampeded through the exits, order was quickly restored at Ford’s.

  In the box, however, chaos continued. When Mary Lincoln was not screaming hysterically, she sat stunned and silent, her arms uplifted for unseen help. To one side, Henry Rathbone stood holding his arm, pale as chalk from blood loss. Laura Keene, though a rock of sanity, was perhaps the most horrifying sight of all. With Lincoln’s head in her lap, the actress sat mute, her dress, hands, and arms bathed in blood. Even the woman’s face was streaked in red where her fingers had passed.48

  Herself drenched in the blood of the man she hoped to marry, Clara Harris sat as if in a trance. “Poor Mrs. Lincoln,” Clara remembered, “would look at me in horror and scream, ‘Oh! My husband’s blood,—My dear husband’s blood.’”49

  Finally, fifteen minutes or so after the bullet was fired, someone suggested that the president be carried back to the White House. Others protested, insisting that such a move would prove fatal. “It seemed, for a few moments, as if we were all paralyzed,” Oliver Gatch admitted. “Then my brother broke the silence in our little group around the dying President.”50 Gatch’s brother, Charles, quietly proposed that they carefully remove Lincoln to a nearby home, “or some more fitting place,” rather than allow an American president to die in a mere opera house.51 To this the others agreed.

  “Accordingly,” Oliver continued, “we two—my brother and I—with the aid of a couple of others, raised the President from the floor and carried him through the passage-way.”52

  Because of the dense, roiling crowds still on the stairway and in the lobby, a young lieutenant drew his sword and led the way. Although those in front were willing to give way and allow the procession to pass, the officer was forced to threaten and actually use the flat of his sword on others who were pressing forward.53 Following behind the long column as it wound down from the dress circle, men and women sobbed like children. Horribly, on the stairs and across the lobby, a trail of blood clearly marked the president’s passage. “It seemed sacrilege to step near,” admitted a weeping Julia Shepard.54

  Outside, when the head of the procession halted momentarily in the street to force back the crowd, it seemed to saloonkeeper Peter Taltavull as if those in charge were contemplating laying Lincoln in his establishment, the Star, only one door down from Ford’s. “Don’t bring him in here,” shouted the bartender. “It shouldn’t be said that the President of the United States died in a saloon.”55

  Spotting a young man beckoning from across the street, the column worked slowly through the crowd toward the three-story brick boarding house of William Petersen. A short distance behind and nearly lost in the jam was the diminutive first lady. “Mrs. Lincoln was frantic,” recalled Charles Sanford. “She passed right by my side. . . . She was throwing her hands and arms about in terrible agony.”56

  As Lincoln was carried toward the home, the huge crowd watched in stunned disbelief. “There was silence as we passed,” Oliver Gatch remembered. “No one spoke. As we moved slowly across the street, the only sound that was heard above the sobbing of the people was the hoof-beats of cavalry already approaching.”57

  Standing in the misty glare of the gas lamps and torches, most onlookers were horrified by the surreal scene. Although someone had thrown an overcoat across his body, Lincoln was bare from the waist up. “Pale as death,” some described his face; others thought the president looked “very black.” Also, as careful as those who carried him were, with every step a trail of blood and brains was left on the street.58 To the rear, the silence was shattered by the shrill screams of Mary Lincoln. Cut off by a dense, almost impenetrable human wall, the woman cried out again and again, “Where is my husband? Where is my husband?”59

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MURDER IN THE

  STREETS

  ALTHOUGH WORD OF THE HORRIBLE DEED spread from Ford’s moments after it occurred, it was only when the soldiers forced the frenzied, wild-eyed audience from the building that the city felt the full, chilling impact of the assassination.

  “Every man and woman in the theater rushed forth to tell it,” wrote a chronicler. “Some ran wildly down the streets, exclaiming to those they met, ‘The President is killed! The President is killed!’ One rushed into a ball-room, and told it to the dancers; another bursting into a room where a party of eminent public men were playing cards, cried, ‘Lincoln is shot!’”1

  As one vast crowd surged up Pennsylvania Avenue shouting “The President is shot!” they were met by another sweeping down the street yelling “Secretary Seward has been assassinated in bed.”2

  At Grover’s Theater, while the stage crew was behind the scenes preparing for the fourth and final act of Alladin, a special interlude of the new patriotic song “When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea” had just ended. The applause was so great that the young songstress was about to offer an encore.3 In addition to the Lincolns’ little boy, Tad, young James Tanner, a soldier who had lost both legs in the war, was also in the audience. Despite boarding just across the street from Ford’s, Tanner had made what was for him a long and difficult trip to the theater on Pennsylvania Avenue.4 Just as the singer was about to begin, from the rear of the theater the door burst open with a crash.

  “[A] man rushed in from the lobby and cried out, ‘President Lincoln has been shot in Ford’s Theater,’” Tanner recalled. “There was great confusion at once, most of the audience rising to their feet. Some one cried out, ‘It is a ruse of the pickpockets; look out.’ Almost everybody resumed his seat.”5 The lone exception was Tad Lincoln. When the boy heard the horrible words, he became hysterical.6 Tearing from his seat and his tutor “like a wounded deer,” the child ran screaming out the door.7

  Staring in startled silence like everyone else, Helen Moss, sister-in-law to Grover’s manager, watched as her brother stepped to the front of the lighted stage:

  [He] said he had a very grave announcement to make. ‘President Lincoln has been shot in his private box at Ford’s Theater. The audience will be dismissed at once, and the house closed, but every one must move out quietly and orderly without excitement.” The house was as still as death. One could have heard a pin drop. The dazed look upon the faces! All were simply stunned for a moment. Then they rose as one body, and passed out toward the door, as if in the presence of death. The doors were thrown open. Sentries were stationed there with crossed bayonets to prevent a rush, but there was no rush. We stood in awe and watched the people file out one by one.8

  As a friend helped him along, James Tanner turned up the avenue on his artificial legs, determined to learn more.9

  With the speed of sound, the horrible word from Ford’s raced over the city. In every street and alley, terrified people ran through the night screaming the awful news: “My God! The President is killed at Ford’s Th
eater!” “Lincoln has been murdered!” “The President has been shot!”

  Edwin Stanton had already locked his door for the night. Following a full day and the speech just delivered to the torchlight crowd, the secretary of war was weary and preparing for bed.10 When he was nearly undressed, Stanton heard his wife Ellen go downstairs to answer the door. A moment later, she yelled out in a terror-filled voice, “Mr. Seward is murdered.”

  Startled by the words, the secretary soon collected himself. “Humbug!” he shouted back. “I left him only an hour ago.”

  Stomping down the stairs half-dressed—determined to deal with the prankster in person—Stanton found his hallway filling with people. “What’s this story you’re telling?” glared the grim secretary. Seeing in the messenger’s terrified eyes that it was no hoax, Stanton quickly threw on some clothes and started for the door.

  “You must’nt go out,” begged a friend. “They have killed Lincoln and they will kill you if you go out. As I came up to the house I saw a man behind the tree-box, but he ran away. . . .”

  Brushing the advice aside, Stanton rushed straightaway toward the home on Lafayette Park.11

  Gideon Welles, the white-bearded secretary of the navy, had just slipped off into sleep when his wife, Mary Jane, woke him. Someone was at the door, she said. Raising a window to see what was wanted below, Welles soon heard the horrifying news.

  “Damn the Rebels, this is their work!” the naval secretary cursed, something he never did in Mary’s presence.

  Pulling on his shirt and trousers, Welles also started in haste for Seward’s home.12

  Charles Sumner, the abolitionist courtier and confidant of Mary Lincoln, was enjoying conversation and wine with two other senators when a black servant, “his hair almost on end,” burst through the door. “Mr. Lincoln is assassinated in the theater. Mr. Seward is murdered in his bed. There’s murder in the streets,” the frightened employee blurted out.

  “Young man, be moderate in your statements. Tell us what has happened,” said the startled senator.

  “I have told you what has happened,” insisted the servant.

  Grabbing his coat, Sumner hurried toward the White House to learn for himself if there was any truth in the horrible words.13

  As a policeman in the District of Columbia, Tom Pendel was one of several men selected for duty at the White House. With the Lincolns absent this night, the home was quiet, and there was little for Pendel to do. Even the two young men, Robert Lincoln and John Hay, had tired of their Spanish repartee and “gossiping” and had retreated to their respective rooms for the night.14 Tom Pendel:

  I was sitting in one of the big chairs in the alcove window facing the lower part of the city, waiting to open the door for President and Mrs. Lincoln when they should arrive from the theater, when I saw a confused mass of hurrying lights approaching the White House from the direction of the theater. They came straggling up the avenue to the White House and then there came a sharp ring at the bell. I bounded out of my chair . . . and quickly opened the door. To my surprise the caller was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, whom I knew well enough by sight, and he looked pale and worried as he asked me in a rather sharp tone of voice whether the President had yet returned, and when I said that he had not, whether I had heard that anything had happened to him. He looked mighty relieved and pleased when I told him that I had heard nothing, and he said he had heard some vague rumor that something had befallen Mr. Lincoln.

  I closed the door, and went back to my seat by the window more anxious and nervous than ever. There seemed to be a feeling of some impending calamity hanging over me, and when I heard quick footsteps approaching up the walk and then a violent ring at the bell I ran to the door, feeling sure that something had happened. The late caller was Isaac Newton, Commissioner of Agriculture. He was deathly pale, and his eyes glittered as though he had fever. His voice had a sort of strained and hoarse sound in it as he blurted out: “O, my God, they’ve shot the President!” For a few moments I could say and do nothing. I was so absolutely horror-stricken at the news that I was unable to think or realize the situation, or even to make a move. Mr. Newton stood against the door with his hand over his eyes, and he was shaking and quivering with excitement and grief. It must have been nearly a minute before either of us said anything. Then, all at once, it occurred to me that the other occupants of the house should be made acquainted with the terrible news.

  I left Mr. Newton standing at the door, and sprang up the front stairs, skipping two or three of them at a time in my excitement. Hastening along the upper corridor, I came to Capt. Robert Lincoln’s room. . . . He had not gone to bed, and I remember that he had a medicine bottle in one hand and a spoon in the other, as though he were measuring out some medicine. . . . I shall never forget . . . the expression that overspread his face as I shrieked out my fearful news. He had looked up in surprise as I burst into his room, and as I told my errand he unconsciously let the bottle drop from one hand and then the spoon from the other. I could say nothing more, but gazed in a sort of fascination as the medicine slowly gurgled out over the carpet. I could only think how thick and black it was—my mind refused to take cognizance of anything else. But the words kept ringing through my mind in a low, monotonous song: “The President is shot—the President is shot!”15

  Recovering his senses, Robert ordered Pendel to inform John Hay, whose room was just down the hall. Locating the president’s secretary, the guard yelled out the news.

  “I looked at him curiously as he listened,” said the policeman, “and I remember that his brilliant color—which I had often admired, it was so curiously like a beautiful woman’s—faded out so quickly that it seemed as though some one had then and there painted his cheek a deathly white.”16

  Racing down the stairs, Lincoln and Hay discovered a crowd at the door, including Charles Sumner. Following the shaken senator, the two young men climbed into a waiting carriage and lashed the horses toward Ford’s.17

  When the naval secretary finally reached William Seward’s home, he found the street outside packed with people. Pushing his way through the crowd, Gideon Welles entered the home and encountered Frances Seward at the top of the stairs. The woman, noted Welles, “was scarcely able to speak.”18 Indeed, a New York reporter on the scene recalled that such was the terror and confusion that scarcely an intelligible word could be gathered from anyone.19

  As Welles went up the stairs, what he saw was staggering.20 The home, according to one account, looked “like a field hospital.”21

  “It was a terrible sight—there was so much blood every where,” young Fanny Seward remembered. “The stairs was sprinkled with it all the way down to the floor below.”22 Wherever one looked, one saw a “scene of horrors,” said Frances Seward. On a lounge lay her frail son Fred with blood streaming over his face.23

  “His eyes were open,” Gideon Welles observed, “but he did not move them, nor a limb, nor did he speak.”24

  Elsewhere, three other men stood covered in blood, including another Seward son, Augustus, whose head had been slashed to the bone in several places.25 It was, of course, in Secretary Seward’s room where the carnival of horrors was worst. The bed, floor, walls, doors—all were awash in gore.26

  “Where we found my father,” wrote Fanny, “there was such a great pool of blood that my feet slipped in it. Some of us had our dresses drabbled in it several inches deep.”27

  When the navy secretary, now joined by Edwin Stanton, finally entered the room, he was horrified. “The bed was saturated with blood,” Welles wrote. “The Secretary was lying on his back, the upper part of his head covered by a cloth, which extended down over his eyes. His mouth was open, the lower jaw dropping down.”28 Welles could also see that Seward’s throat was slashed on both sides, and his right cheek had been nearly severed from his head.29 Because he was so hacked and mangled, noted a doctor, the secretary’s face was the only one in the room not stamped with terror.30 When the horrified Edwin Stanton began
chattering nervously to those around him, the physician sternly ordered him to be quiet.31

  In suite 68 at the Kirkwood House on Pennsylvania Avenue, a troubled Andrew Johnson was awakened by a sharp knock on the door. Outside, Leonard Farwell, former governor of Wisconsin, was frantic to awaken the vice president. “I rapped,” remembered Farwell, “but receiving no answer, I rapped again and said in a loud voice, ‘Governor Johnson, if you are in the room, I must see you!’”32

  “Farwell? Is that you?” asked Johnson groggily.

  “Yes, let me in,” came the reply.33

  Even if the still-addled vice president could not clearly see his friend’s face, there was no confusing the terror in his voice.

  Like a mighty river fed by raging tributaries, gaining force as it swept along, a flood of stunned humanity poured from the alleys and streets of Washington and emptied into the avenues that led to Ford’s Theater.34 Around the building itself, an enormous crowd had already gathered.35 For a brief time, the crush of people was so great that many were able to edge their way into the Petersen home on the heels of government officials. After removing these trespassers, guards eventually forced the crowd back from the house.36 Even at that distance, however, the shrieks of Mary Lincoln were clearly heard.

  “Where is my dear husband? Where is he?” cried the woman when she finally burst through the door of the Petersen home. After becoming separated from her mate by the mob outside, Mary was frantic to find him again. Spurning the arms that reached to aid her, the frenzied first lady rushed through the house until she reached a small room to the rear. Throwing herself across her husband’s body, she hugged and kissed his unresponsive face. Horrified by what she saw in the light, Mary let out a startled, high-pitched scream. “Why didn’t he kill me? Why didn’t he kill me?” she sobbed.37