by Gore Vidal
A long row of carriages blocked the entire east side of Tenth Street, except for the main entrance to the brightly illuminated theater where Mr. Ford’s young brother was waiting. The play had already begun.
As young Mr. Ford led the presidential party up the stairs to the dress circle, where a box had been prepared for them at stage-left, the sharp-eyed actors onstage recognized the President and they began to interpolate lines of dialogue. A heavy play on the word “draught” was being made, which allowed the irrepressible Laura Keene to look up at the Presidential box and exclaim, “The draft has been suspended!” Then she shook her head vigorously until her much-admired ringlets threatened to detach themselves from her cap.
Thus cued, the audience began to cheer the President and General Grant. But it was only the President who showed himself, for a moment, in the box. Then Lincoln sat back in a large rocking chair; and a curtain screened him from the audience.
At ten o’clock, mounted and armed, Booth, Herold and Payne were in the street. At a gesture from Booth, David and Payne set out for Seward’s house, while Booth rode up the back alley to Ford’s Theater, where a stagehand helped him tie up his bay mare. Booth then walked around to the front of the theater, and entered the lobby. He waved at the doorkeeper. “I hope you don’t want me to buy a ticket?”
The man said, no; and continued to count ticket receipts, while several cronies stared at Booth until the doorkeeper introduced them to the youngest star, who asked for a chew of tobacco. Then, as Booth made his way up the stairs to the dress circle, he saw that there was an empty chair to the presidential box. The policeman was not at his post. This was an unexpected bit of good luck.
In the half-light from the proscenium arch, Booth opened the door and stepped inside the vestibule to the box. The President was only a few feet in front of him, silhouetted by calcium light. To the President’s right sat Mrs. Lincoln and to their right a young couple occupied a sofa.
As the audience laughed, Booth removed from his right-hand pocket a brass derringer; and from his left-hand pocket a long, highly sharpened dagger.
Mary had been resting her elbow, casually, on Lincoln’s forearm; but then, aware that this was a most unladylike thing to do, she sat up straight and whispered into Lincoln’s ear, “What will Miss Harris think of my lolling up against you like this?”
Lincoln murmured, “Why, Mother, she won’t think anything about it.”
At that moment, from a distance of five feet, Booth fired a single shot into the back of the President’s head. Without a sound, Lincoln leaned back in the chair; and his head slumped to the left until it was stopped by the wooden partition. Mary turned not to Booth but to her husband, while in the wings, an actor stared, wide-eyed, at the box. He had seen everything.
Major Rathbone threw himself upon Booth, who promptly drove his dagger straight at the young man’s heart. But Rathbone’s arm deflected the blade. Miss Harris shrieked, as Booth shoved past her and jumped onto the railing of the box. Then, with the sort of athletic gesture that had so delighted his admirers in this same theater, he leapt the twelve feet from box to stage. But, as on several other occasions when Booth’s effects proved to be more athletic and improvised than dramatic and calculated, he had not taken into account the silken bunting that decorated the front of the box. The spur of one boot got entangled in the silk, causing him to fall, off-balance, to the stage, where a bone in his ankle snapped.
Rathbone shouted from the box, “Stop that man!” Booth shouted something unintelligible at the audience; and hurried off stage.
In the box, Mary now stood, screaming. Miss Harris tried to comfort her. Laura Keene herself came; and she held the unconscious President’s head in her lap until a doctor arrived to examine the wound. The bullet had gone into the back of Lincoln’s head above the left ear and then downward and to the right, stopping just below the right eye.
At the White House, Hay and Robert Lincoln were sitting comfortably in the upstairs parlor, drinking whiskey, when the new doorkeeper, Tom Pendel, broke in on them. “The President’s been shot!”
As Hay hurried after Robert to the waiting carriage, he had a dreamlike sense that he had already lived through this moment before. Pendel was hysterical. “Mr. Seward’s been murdered, too. The whole Cabinet’s been murdered!”
“Who?” asked the stunned Robert as they drove through the crowd that had begun to fill up Tenth Street. “Who has done this?”
“Rebels?” Hay could not think.
In the small bedroom of a cabbage-scented boardinghouse, the Ancient lay at an angle on a bed that was, needless to say, too short for him. This is the last time, Hay thought inanely, that he will be so inconvenienced.
Lincoln lay on his back, breathing heavily, as a doctor tried with cotton to staunch the ooze of blood from the shattered skull. Lincoln’s right eye was swollen shut; and the skin of the right cheek was turning black. Hay noted that the long bare arms on the coverlet were surprisingly muscular. Lately, he had tended to think of the Ancient as mere skin and bone. In the next room, he could hear the sobbing of Mrs. Lincoln. In the bedroom itself, he could hear, as well as witness, the sobbing of Senator Sumner, posed like a widow at the head of the bed. Where was his bodyguard? wondered Hay, who had never despised Sumner more than now. In a corner sat Welles, old and frowzy beneath his wig.
Members of the Cabinet came and went. Only Stanton remained; in total charge. When Robert asked, “Is there any hope at all?” Stanton had answered for the doctor, “There is none. He will simply sink. The brain is destroyed. The wound is mortal.” Then Stanton turned to an aide. “Telegraph the news to General Grant in Philadelphia. He is to return immediately. But with a full complement of guards.” To another, he said, “Go to the Chief Justice. Tell him what has happened. We will need him to swear in the new president.”
An official from the State Department arrived to report: “A man broke into the Old Club House. The servant says he sounded like a dyed-in-the-wool rebel. He went upstairs and stabbed Mr. Seward, but that iron contraption on his jaw saved him. He’s not hurt at all. But Fred Seward’s head is broken; he is unconscious.”
“I was with both of them less than an hour ago,” said Stanton, bemused. “The man escaped?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mary Lincoln entered the room. “Oh, Robert!” she cried. “What is to happen to us?” She looked down at her husband. “Father, speak to us! You can’t die like this, not now. It is unthinkable. Robert, fetch Taddie! He’ll speak to Taddie. He won’t let himself die if Taddie’s here.”
Robert looked at Stanton, who shook his head. Then Mary gave a great shriek and threw herself on Lincoln’s body. “Don’t leave us!”
“Get that woman out of here,” said Stanton, suddenly brutal to a lady whom he had for so long done his best to charm. He need never charm her again, thought Hay. “Don’t let her back in.”
Sumner and the man from the State Department led Mary out of the room, just as the Vice-President made his awkward entrance.
“Sir,” said Stanton, suddenly deferential. “I wish you to remain under constant guard—the soldiers that I just assigned to you are at the Kirkwood House—until we know who the enemy is. I am sure that they meant to kill you, too.”
“He … will die?” Johnson stared with wonder at the figure on the bed.
“Yes, sir. I have already made the necessary preparations. Mr. Chase has been notified. When the time arrives, he will come to your hotel, and administer the oath of office.”
“We have been struck,” said Johnson, with no great emphasis or—for him—grandiloquent flourish, “a mighty blow.”
“Yes, sir. But he is lucky. He will belong to the ages, while we are obliged to live on in the wreckage.”
As night became morning, Stanton sat next to Robert, beside the bed. Stanton’s right hand, in which he still held his hat, supported his left elbow.
Shortly after seven o’clock Abraham Lincoln took a deep breath; exhaled it slow
ly; and died. Like an automaton, Stanton raised his right arm high in the air; then, precisely, he set his hat squarely on his head and then, as precisely, he removed it. He got to his feet. “The Cabinet will now meet,” he said, “to discuss the notification and the swearing-in of President Johnson, and the orderly continuance of this government.”
Mary was led into the room. Moaning softly, she lay across the still body; then, finally, of her own accord, she stood up, dry-eyed from so much weeping, and said, to no one in particular, “Oh, my God! And I have given my husband to die.” Robert led her from the room.
Hay stared at the Ancient, who seemed to be smiling, as the doctor tied a cloth under the chin to keep the mouth from falling ajar. He looked exactly as if his own death had just reminded him of a story. But then Hay realized that never again would the Ancient be reminded of a story. He had become what others would be reminded of.
DAVID HEROLD had waited outside Seward’s house as long as he dared. From the screams, it sounded as if Payne was killing everyone in the house. Finally, David could bear it no longer. He mounted his horse and rode into Pennsylvania Avenue, where, as luck would have it, a man from the stables shouted, “You’re late! You’ve had that horse too long. Turn him in.”
David’s response was to spur the horse into Fourteenth Street until he came to F Street, where he turned east. He had only one thought now. He must find Wilkes.
At the Navy Yard bridge, a sentry stopped David, and asked him his name. David answered, “Smith.” When asked his business, he said that he lived on the other side of Anacostia Creek at White Plains. The sentry let him pass; but told him that, henceforth, the bridge would be shut to everyone at nine o’clock. David thanked him; and rode on. Finally, on the Bryantown Road, David caught up with Wilkes, who had been riding hard; and all alone.
“Success?” asked Booth.
“Yes,” said David.
“I, too,” said Booth. That was all that they said to each other until they got to Surrattsville. Here David dismounted; and went into what had been the Surratt tavern but was now John Lloyd’s. As prearranged, Lloyd brought them a pair of carbines and a bottle of whiskey. David gave Wilkes the whiskey, which he drank, still seated on the horse. Wilkes refused the carbines. “I have broken my ankle,” he said, coolly.
“Anything else you need?” asked Lloyd.
Booth said, “Nothing more. But I will tell you some news, if you want to hear it.”
“I’m not particular,” said Lloyd.
“I am pretty certain,” said Booth, spurring his horse, “that we have assassinated the President and the Secretary of State.”
With that, Booth and David were gone. This was what David had dreamed of for as long as he could remember. To do some heroic deed, and then ride all through the night, his true brother at his side. Wilkes’s words to Lloyd kept reverberating in his head: “We have assassinated the President …” What greater work could a Confederate hero do?
At four-thirty in the morning they arrived at the house of a doctor friend, who attended to Wilkes’s ankle, which was broken in such a way that the bones were at a right angle to one another. Then Wilkes asked for a razor; and shaved off his moustache.
Later, when it was daylight, the nervous doctor said that they would have to move on. Word was beginning to spread through the area, not to mention the world, that John Wilkes Booth had murdered the President. There was no news, David was sorry to hear, of Mr. Seward. Anyway, all that mattered was that Wilkes thought that he, David Herold, had done as he was told, and that they were now, the two of them, friends and true brothers, immortal.
TWELVE
ALTHOUGH Eugénie, empress of the French, must have been about forty years of age, John Hay never ceased to find her as attractive as he found her husband, the Emperor Napoleon III, repellent. At the reception for the diplomatic corps on January 1, 1867, in the palace of the Tuileries, Hay kept to the splendid drawing room where Eugénie held court and avoided the statelier room where the emperor and his ministers stood, next to an elaborate, gilded throne in which the emperor never sat.
Eugénie’s hair had been naturally dark red, and was still red; while her complexion had always been pale, and was still pale. The sad eyes were gray. She wore a ruby-red dress of velvet, cut low to reveal an explosion of diamond necklaces. Hay did his best not to stare, and could not take his eyes off her. But then he had spent four years in Washington, watching women imitate Eugénie; now he was able to look with awe upon the original herself. As the Spanish-born empress stood beneath a life-size portrait of her predecessor Marie-Louise, the wife of the real Napoleon, she used an ivory fan subtly to communicate with others. Hay regarded her with all the pleasure that he might have found in watching a splendid sunrise or, perhaps, considering the chronic fragility of the French political system, sunset.
All around the gold-encrusted room, gold-encrusted diplomats stood while members of the palace staff in violet uniforms tried, without success, to make themselves useful. At regular intervals, members of the emperor’s personal guard were placed, at attention, like so many statues in blue and gold. Although it was still light outside, the chandeliers were ablaze; and wood fires burned in every marble fireplace. Hay was pleased to be conspicuous in plain black; but then he was more than ever a dedicated republican, not to mention implacable foe of despots, even a despot whose wife was a perfect sunset.
The outgoing American minister, John Bigelow, came toward Hay Bigelow was accompanied by a stout, pink-cheeked old man and a beautiful young girl, definitely more sunrise than sunset. “Mr. Hay is my first secretary,” said Bigelow to the old man and young girl, who turned out to be the American historian Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his daughter Emma, the Princesse d’Agrigente, a lady celebrated for her salon at which one never found her husband, the heir to the great Napoleon’s marshal. Although Hay had never before met the splendid princess, he knew all about her unhappy marriage; and knew that absolutely no one was sorry for her in a city where unhappy marriages were the rule. The prince lived elsewhere with his mistress. The princess lived with her children, as if she were a wealthy widow; lived untouched by any scandal, which was not the rule in Paris.
But then Emma herself was rare, decided Hay, when she turned her dark eyes on him and said in softly accented English, “I am a true American, yet I have never set foot in the United States.”
“It is my fault,” said the amiable Mr. Schuyler. “I left New York in ’thirty-six, to be, like you, a diplomat. Only I went to Italy where I was married, and …”
“… and you never went home,” said Emma. “Well, I cannot wait to go.”
“Nor can I,” said Bigelow. “How I miss New York!”
“You will be missed here,” said Mr. Schuyler. “After all, if it hadn’t been for you, Mr. Seward would have had us at war with France by now.”
“Oh, now you exaggerate.” Bigelow was appropriately modest. But Hay knew that if Bigelow had not exactly averted a war with France over Mexico, he had certainly contained a crisis.
In November, Hay had personally decoded Seward’s ultimatum to Napoleon, calling upon him to withdraw his troops from Mexico, as previously agreed, even though it could mean the death of that unfortunate French puppet the Emperor Maximilian. Bigelow had decided to substitute for Seward’s harangue a polite note, highly acceptable to the French, who were duly appreciative. Mr. Schuyler himself had written of Bigelow’s diplomatic coup in the Atlantic Monthly. Now Bigelow was going home, his place to be taken not by His Satanic Majesty James Gordon Bennett, who had decided that he preferred to reign in New York’s hell than serve in diplomacy’s heaven, but by General John A. Dix, the same general who, at Stanton’s insistence, had dropped all charges against Senator Sprague and his fellow traitors.
The fact that Dix was quite aware that Hay knew all about the Sprague affair had cast a certain pall over their first meeting. At a second meeting, when Hay had offered his resignation, he had been disappointed when it was pr
omptly accepted. But Seward had come to the rescue; and Hay was to return to Washington as a special assistant to the Secretary of State. Nico remained relatively secure at the consulate, despite constant rumors that President Johnson wanted his own man to fill the magnificent rooms at number 47, Avenue des Champs-Elysées.
Bigelow moved away, leaving Hay with the splendid princess and her father. “You look so young,” she said, “to have been the President’s secretary.”
“I am … or I was at the time.” Hay was still quite used to being called young. On first being presented to the emperor, Napoleon had said to him in English, “Are you not young to be colonel?” Hay’s brevet-rank. Then the empress had gazed at him with eyes almost as beautiful as those of the princess and said, “Are you not young to be a colonel?” The imperial court was not noted for its wit, though the emperor could, when he chose, drop the devastating brick. Lately, he had taken an almost personal dislike to the buildings that were being constructed for the great world exhibition. Of the main hall he had said, “It looks like a gasometer!”
Both father and daughter questioned Hay at length about Lincoln. What sort of man had he been? They seemed surprised when Hay said, “He was always very sure of himself.” As Hay spoke, he thought of the highly unsure little emperor in the next room. “From the beginning, he knew that he was the first man in the country, and that he was bound to get his way, if he lived.”
“You surprise me,” said Schuyler. “One always thinks of him as being so … humble.”
“Humble men never rise so high nor do so much.”
“Who killed him?” asked the princess, with entirely American directness.
“The actor Booth,” said Hay, smoothly. “With the help of a group of fools that he had gathered around him. Then Booth was killed in a Virginia barn, and the fools were all hanged, including a lady called Mrs. Surratt, who was probably innocent. But at the time, Mr. Stanton was hanging everybody in sight. Anyway, Booth had already made a sort of confession in a letter to his brother-in-law.”