As best they could, physicians went to work. Charles Leale:
While holding his face upward and keeping his head from rolling to either side, I looked at his elevated knees caused by his great height. This uncomfortable position grieved me and I ordered the foot of the bed to be removed. . . . [A]s I found this could not satisfactorily be done, I had the President placed diagonally on the bed and called for extra pillows, and with them formed a gentle inclined plane on which to rest his head and shoulders. His position was then one of repose. . . . I called the officer and asked him to open a window and . . . as I wished to see if he had been wounded in any other part of the body I requested all except the surgeons to leave the room. The Captain reported that my order had been carried out with the exception of Mrs. Lincoln, to whom he said he did not like to speak. I addressed Mrs. Lincoln, explaining my desire, and she immediately left the room.38
After the president was stripped of his remaining clothes, a search was made for other wounds. Finding none, Charles Taft turned his attention to the hole behind Lincoln’s left ear.
The wound was there examined, the finger being used as a probe, and the ball found to have passed beyond the reach of the finger into the brain. I put a teaspoonful of diluted brandy between his lips, which was swallowed with much difficulty; a half-teaspoonful administered ten minutes afterward, was retained in the throat, without any effort being made to swallow it. The respiration now became labored; pulse 44, feeble, eyes entirely closed, the left pupil much contracted, the right widely dilated; total insensibility to light in both.39
Meanwhile, as attention was focused on the president, and while the shrill screams of his wife sent shattered nerves to the breaking point, Henry Rathbone was swiftly bleeding to death, almost unnoticed. After ensuring that Mary Lincoln reached the Petersen home safely, the major stopped in the hallway, clutching his arm. “The wound which I had received had been bleeding very profusely,” Rathbone later said.40 Hardly had the young man seated himself when he fainted and fell to the floor, “pale as a corpse.”41 Fortunately, Rathbone’s fiancée, Clara Harris, was nearby. Although bathed in blood and numbed by the nightmare all about her, the woman nevertheless had the presence of mind to quickly tie a handkerchief over the terrible wound and thus stop the bleeding.42 As Rathbone was carried down the hall toward a waiting carriage, Mary Lincoln filled the building with unearthly shrieks and groans.43
“She was not weeping,” wrote a witness, “but appeared hysterical, and exclaimed in rapid succession, over and over again: ‘Oh! why didn’t he kill me? why didn’t he kill me?’”44
The screams piercing the walls of the house to the street beyond only added to the horror of the anxious crowd outside.45 Standing in the cold mist with thousands of others, Julia Shepard vividly conveys the uncertainty, shock, and terror of the moment:
We are in the street now. They have taken the President into the house opposite. He is alive, but mortally wounded. What are those people saying. “Secretary Seward and his son have had their throats cut in their own house.” Is it so? Yes, and the murderer of our President has escaped through a back alley where a swift horse stood awaiting him. Cavalry come dashing up the street and stand with drawn swords before yon house. Too late! too late! What mockery armed men are now. Weary with the weight of woe the moments drag along and . . . delicate women stand clinging to the arms of their protectors, and strong men throw their arms around each other’s necks and cry like children, and passing up and down enquire in low agonized voices, “Can he live? Is there no hope?”46
Another person standing outside the Petersen home was Adolphe de Chambrun. In contrast to the sad, stunned mood that had characterized the crowd earlier, the French traveler soon noted that with each spine-chilling scream and each terrible report, the people began to rouse from their stupor. “[S]uddenly,” said de Chambrun, “ there was a change. . . . The city came alive; the spirit of vengeance awoke and spread like a flame. Cries, shouts, [and] passionate exhortations rent the air.”47
Although the Frenchman did not realize it at the time, he was witnessing the initial spark to a bloody rampage that would indeed spread over the land like a devouring flame. In many ways, the American terror was remarkably similar to that which had shamed de Chambrun’s own country over a half-century earlier.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A SPIRIT SO
HORRIBLE
A stroke from Heaven laying the whole of the city in instant ruins could not have startled us as did the word that broke from Ford’s Theater a half hour ago.1
THUS WROTE A DAZED NEW YORK REPORTER, trying to describe the devastation the human mind suffered when it was forced to shift from happiness and hope to darkness and despair in only a heartbeat. With thousands of candles, lamps, and gas jets still glowing fiercely from the earlier celebration, the murky conditions threw a surreal and sinister shroud over the whole of Washington.
“It was so light that one could see for blocks,” recalled Helen Moss as her escort hurried her home to escape the rising horror.2 Many of those the couple met moved slowly through the mist like sleepwalkers. Others sped silently along as though they were ghosts. Some were seen to stagger, as if intoxicated.3 Words were inadequate to describe one’s emotions.
“It was one of stifling, as though someone had gripped my throat,” Albert Boggs admitted when the full weight of the news finally sank in.4
By midnight, it seemed to many as if the entire population of Washington was in the streets, boiling and surging about aimlessly. Indeed, noted a newspaper correspondent on the scene, the city was “overwhelmed” with terror.5 Fueling the panic, of course, was the want of reliable information. “Ten thousand rumors are afloat,” stated a writer for the New York Tribune.6
Not only were Lincoln, Seward, and their entire families reportedly butchered, but as the rumors gained momentum, all the president’s cabinet had been slaughtered as well.7 “It was then reported that Gen. Grant had been killed in Philadelphia, and in a short time, they had everybody of any consequence in the city assassinated, until I almost began to doubt the fact of my own existence,” added another confused man.8
And so, from mouth to mouth the panic grew. When a rumor raced through the city that the telegraph lines leading to Washington had been cut, men and women ran through the streets screaming that the capital was about to be attacked. John Mosby’s Confederate guerrillas were infiltrating the town—Robert E. Lee had torn up the terms of Appomattox and was marching north with his army—Washington would be bombarded—thousands would be killed—the war would continue! The actions of the federal garrison seemed to confirm the reports. Files of infantry double-quicked through the streets, often passing other noisy columns marching in the opposite direction. Squadrons of cavalry, sabers clattering, dashed about the city at breakneck speed. Policemen raced across streets. Bells rang, drums rolled, carriages and ambulances tore helter-skelter through the night.9
Every terrifying scene seemed not only to confirm one’s worst fears but to magnify them. Now at home, Helen Moss graphically conveyed her feeling of horror:
In our eagerness to catch every sound, we huddled about the windows, not daring to have a light, lest we be made targets of by “the Rebels.” A horseman would go dashing past, and down our heads would duck until we thought the danger past. Then we leaned far out to catch the first sound of news from the passers-by. Some man of the household would come dashing in to add to our terror with “The Rebels are upon us.” “They have surrounded the city.” “They have begun their raid.” “We are in danger of being shot or made prisoners.” “The President shot, and all of his cabinet.” . . . [W]e were simply wild with fright.10
And still the rumors flew.
“A plot, a plot!” screamed a horseman as he galloped through the city. “Secretary Seward’s throat is cut from ear to ear; Secretary Stanton is killed in his residence; General Grant is shot at Baltimore, and Vice President Johnson is killed at the Kirkwood House.”11
Understandably, many individuals were paralyzed with fear. “We saw a colored man,” said a reporter, “blanched with terror and trembling in every limb, his teeth chattering like one with the ague.” The frightened black was not alone, as the journalist admitted: “The hair on my head stood up.”12 Others became perfectly unhinged. Overcome with excitement and fear, an army captain went “raving mad” and was placed under arrest by a lieutenant.13
“Rumors are so thick, the excitement of this hour is so intense,” recorded a tension-filled Washington editor in the early morning hours of April 15. “Evidently conspirators are among us. To what extent does the conspiracy exist? This is a terrible question. When a spirit so horrible as this is abroad, what man is safe?”14
Given the fear, anger, and uncertainty, passions quickly became uncontrollable. On the streets and in hotels, huge mobs brandishing knives and pistols vowed to kill on the spot every rebel that fell into their hands.15 According to one soldier, patrols darting about the city were not only encouraged but ordered to shoot down any who now displayed even a trace of disloyalty.16 At such a turbulent time, many soldiers were quick to obey. Soon after entering a local hotel, Melville Stone of the Associated Press was startled by the sound of a gunshot. Running into a nearby room, the reporter saw a man lying dead on the floor. “The assailant,” said Stone, “stood perfectly composed with a smoking revolver in his hand, and justified his action by saying: ‘He said it served Lincoln right.’ There was no arrest, no one would have dared arrest the man. He walked out a hero.”17
Elsewhere, a federal trooper overheard a man exult over the shooting of Lincoln by exclaiming, “it was good enough for the black rascal.” Without a word, the soldier immediately turned around, looked the man straight in the eye, drew a pistol, then blew his brains out.18
Frank Myers and his comrades were marching through the streets at the double-quick when a bystander was heard celebrating. Grabbing a musket from a private, an angry sergeant promptly ran over to the man and speared him with the bayonet. Not content with his bloody work, the enraged soldier again plunged the long blade into his victim as he lay writhing on the ground.19
Around the stricken city, as the mob spirit grew, others were treated similarly.20 When someone shouted that hundreds of rebel soldiers were being held at the Old Capitol Prison, a cry of vengeance erupted. Another in the mob yelled that the prisoners were breaking out of jail at that very moment. With a roar of anger, the snarling crowd set off at a run. As the enraged mob raced forward, hundreds along the way joined. When the screaming crowd of two thousand finally reached the prison, shouts were immediately raised to burn the “Trojan wooden horse” in their midst.21
“‘Hang ’em,’ ‘shoot ’em, ‘burn ’em,’ became the cry, and to carry this threat into execution preparations were made,” recalled one of the frightened prisoners inside, Captain C. T. Allen. “Ropes were procured, knots were made, every thing ready for a general massacre of the helpless Confederate prisoners who knew nothing on earth of the occurrences of the night.”22
Horrified by what was about to happen, Green Clay Smith, a congressman from Kentucky, and several friends rushed to place themselves between the mob and the prison. When Smith had halted the excited crowd with pleas, he left his companions and dashed off for help.23 Continues Captain Allen:
His friends—God bless them, whoever they were . . . responded promptly, mounted a box on the streets, and addressed the mob. When one had said all he could say, another followed him, and so on, occupying half an hour. . . . [Congressman Smith] soon found a battalion of troops on the streets, took charge of them, rushed them to the old capitol, arriving just in time . . . to save from a terrible death some three or four hundred helpless Confederate prisoners.24
A few others in the city—risking life and limb—kept their wits and resisted the almost irresistible tide of raging emotions.25 Because many felt that Ford’s Theater and thespians in general had played some role in the disaster, a howling mob soon surrounded the building. When a nearby storekeeper attempted to reason with the rioters, he quickly found a rope around his neck. Only the swift action of authorities saved the man’s life.26
Walt Whitman describes another incident:
The infuriated crowd, through some chance, got started against one man, either for words he utter’d, or perhaps without any cause at all, and were proceeding at once to actually hang him on a neighboring lamp post, when he was rescued by a few heroic policemen, who placed him in their midst and fought their way slowly and amid great peril toward the Station House. . . . [T]he attack’d man, not yet freed from the jaws of death, looking like a corpse—the silent resolute half-dozen policemen, with no weapons but their little clubs, yet stern and steady through all those eddying swarms—made indeed a fitting side-scene to the grand tragedy.27
While shouting mobs combed the streets searching for more victims, and while federal soldiers murdered in cold blood whomsoever they desired, many citizens looked from their windows, quaking in terror.
“Are we living in the days of the French Revolution? Will peace never come again to our dear land?” one man asked his wife that night. “[A]re we to rush on to wild ruin? It seems all a dream, a wild dream. I cannot realize it though I know I saw it only an hour ago.”28
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE DARKEST DAWN
AS JAMES TANNER NEARED THE STREET his boarding house sat on, he found his steps increasingly slowed. Several hundred yards from the building itself, the twenty-one-year-old former soldier found his path blocked entirely. In contrast to the riotous mobs elsewhere, a ghostly silence pervaded the dense crowd that stood outside the Petersen house. Dismayed, yet determined to reach his room, Tanner edged and slid his way forward on his shaky artificial legs. At length, he reached the military cordon encircling the Petersen home. After some intense explanation, Tanner eventually convinced the officers in charge that his quarters were indeed in the adjoining boarding house, and he was permitted to enter the building. Upon reaching his room, however, the exhausted young man was in for another surprise.1
“There was a balcony in front,” he said, “and I found my rooms and the balcony thronged by other occupants of the house.”2
From this high vantage, Tanner and the others had a front row seat to the drama unfolding next door. Like everyone else around him, the young man was absorbed by the coming and going at the Petersen house. As the stunned spectators watched, Edwin Stanton, Charles Sumner, and Robert Lincoln hastened up the steps, as did numerous political and military men. None, though, was more instantly recognizable than Gideon Welles, the dour, white-bearded man with the ill-fitting wig. After Welles entered the home, he hurried down the hall to the room where his beloved chief lay. Wrote the secretary of navy in his diary:
The room was small and overcrowded. The surgeons and members of the Cabinet were as many as should have been in the room, but there were many more, and the hall and other rooms in the front or main house were full. . . . The excitement and bad atmosphere from the crowded rooms oppressed me physically.3
Indeed, the modest rooms were soon packed with scores of people, with no fewer than sixteen doctors alone.4 Around the fallen leader’s bed were arrayed his shaken Cabinet members, most of whom were crying uncontrollably.5 The normally stern and unbending Edwin Stanton, his body now convulsed with sorrow, sat stooped beside the bed, the tears trickling through his fingers to the floor.6 Senator Charles Sumner was particularly affected. “He was sobbing like a woman,” noted a reporter, “with his head bowed down almost in the pillow of the bed.”7
When Gideon Welles, his body shaking with emotion, finally asked a physician about Lincoln’s condition, the words were heartbreaking:
He replied the President was dead to all intents, although he might live three hours or perhaps longer. . . . He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms . . . were of a size which we would scarce have expected from his spare appearance. His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes with each breath th
at he took. His features were calm and striking.8
Indeed, the president’s great strength and stamina were astonishing to those who witnessed the struggle. Among the physicians present, all agreed that a normal man would have succumbed soon after receiving such a grievous injury.9 All the same, and except for some ineffectual probing of the wound, there was little that surgeons could do but keep the president’s body warm while they waited for inevitable death.10
“His face looked ghastly,” recalled fifteen-year-old Fred Petersen, son of the homeowner. “He lay with his head on [the] pillow, and his eyes, all bloodshot [were] almost protruding from their sockets. . . . [H]is jaw had fallen down upon his breast, showing his teeth.”11 Other visitors to the house were soon made aware that with each rise and fall of the president’s chest there issued “one of the most dismal, mournful, moaning noises ever heard.”12 Secretary of the Interior John Usher was startled by the sound the moment he entered the home. “[H]is breathing was deep[,] almost a snore . . . almost a moan,” said Usher.13
Heartrending as the sounds were to those who loved him, no one felt the impact more than his wife. Drawn from the front parlor by her husband’s suffering, her hair disheveled, her gown crumpled and bloody, Mary entered the tiny room on the verge of total collapse.14 Wrote John Usher:
She implored him to speak to her[.] she did not want to go to the theater that night but that he thought he must go because people would expect him. . . . She called for little Tad[.] said she knew he would speak to him because he loved him so well, and after indulging in dreadful incoherences for some time was finally persuaded to leave the room.15
The Darkest Dawn Page 11