Lincoln, the unknown

by Tom Clancy

  The night before, he had had a strange dream. He had told the members of his Cabinet about it that morning: "I seemed to be in a singular and indescribable vessel," he said, "that was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore. I have had this extraordinary dream before great events, before victories. I had it preceding Antietam, Stone River, Gettysburg, Vicksburg."

  He believed that this dream was a good omen, that it foretold good news, that something beautiful was going to happen.

  At ten minutes past ten Booth, inflamed with whisky, and dressed in dark riding-breeches, boots, and spurs, entered the theater for the last time in his life—and noted the position of the President. With a black slouch hat in his hand, he mounted the stairs leading to the dress-circle, and edged his way down an aisle choked with chairs, until he came to the corridor leading to the boxes.

  Halted by one of the President's guards, Booth handed him his personal card with confidence and bravado, saying that the President wished to see him; and, without waiting for permission, pushed in and closed the corridor door behind him, wedging it shut with a wooden upright from a music-stand.

  Peeping through the gimlet-hole that he had bored in the door behind the President, he gaged the distance, and quietly swung the door open. Shoving the muzzle of his high-calibered derringer close to his victim's head, he pulled the trigger and quickly leaped to the stage below.

  Lincoln's head fell forward and then sidewise as he slumped in his chair.

  He uttered no sound whatever.

  For an instant the audience thought that the pistol-shot and the leap to the stage were a part of the play. No one, not even the actors themselves, suspected that the President had been harmed.

  Then a woman's shriek pierced the theater and all eyes turned to the draped box. Major Rathbone, blood gushing from one arm, shouted: "Stop that man! Stop him! He has killed the President!"

  A moment of silence. A wisp of smoke floating out of the Presidential box. Then the suspense broke. Terror and mad excitement seized the audience. They burst through the seats, wrenching the chairs from the floor, broke over railings, and, trying to clamber upon the stage, tore one another down and trampled upon the old and feeble. Bones were broken in the crush, women screamed and fainted, and shrieks of agony mingled with fierce yells of "Hang him!" . . . "Shoot him!" . . . "Burn the theater!"

  Some one shouted that the playhouse itself was to be bombed. The fury of the panic doubled and trebled. A company of frantic soldiers dashed into the theater at double-quick, and charged the audience with muskets and fixed bayonets, shouting: "Get out of here! Damn you, get out!"

  Physicians from the audience examined the President's wound; and, knowing it to be fatal, refused to have the dying man jolted over the cobblestones back to the White House. So four soldiers lifted him up—two at his shoulders and two at his feet—and carried his long, sagging body out of the theater and into the street, where blood dripping from his wound reddened the pavement. Men knelt to stain their handkerchiefs with it—handkerchiefs which they would treasure a lifetime, and, dying, bequeath as priceless legacies to their children.

  With flashing sabers and rearing horses, the cavalry cleared a space; and loving hands bore the stricken President across the street to a cheap lodging-house owned by a tailor, stretched his long frame diagonally across a sagging bed far too short for him, and pulled the bed over to a dismal gas-jet that flickered yellow light.

  It was a hall room nine by seventeen feet in size, with a cheap reproduction of Rosa Bonheur's painting of "The Horse Fair" hanging above the bed.

  The news of the tragedy swept over Washington like a tornado; and, racing in its wake, came the impact of another disaster: at the same hour of the attack on Lincoln, Secretary Seward had been stabbed in bed and was not expected to live. Out of these black facts, fearsome rumors shot through the night like chain-lightning: Vice-President Johnson had been slain.

  Stanton had been assassinated. Grant shot. So ran the wild tales.

  People were sure now that Lee's surrender had been a ruse, that the Confederates had treacherously crept into Washington and were trying to wipe out the Government with one blow, that the Southern legions had sprung to arms again, that the war, bloodier than ever, was starting once more.

  Mysterious messengers dashed through the residence districts, striking the pavement two short staccato raps, thrice repeated—the danger-call of a secret society, the Union League. Awakened by the summons, members grasped their rifles and rushed wildly into the street.

  Mobs with torches and ropes boiled through the town, howling: "Burn the theater!" . . . "Hang the traitor!" . . . "Kill the rebels!"

  It was one of the maddest nights this nation has ever known!

  The telegraph flashed the news, setting the nation on fire. Southern sympathizers and copperheads were ridden on rails and tarred and feathered; the skulls of some were crushed with paving-stones. Photograph galleries in Baltimore were stormed and wrecked because they were believed to contain pictures of Booth; and a Maryland editor was shot because he had published some scurrilous abuse of Lincoln.

  With the President dying; with Johnson, the Vice-President, sprawled on his bed stone-drunk and his hair matted with mud; with Seward, Secretary of State, stabbed to the verge of death, the reins of power were grasped immediately by Edward M. Stanton, the gruff, erratic, and tempestuous Secretary of War.

  Believing that all high officers of the Government were marked for slaughter, Stanton, in wild excitement, dashed off order after order, writing them on the top of his silk hat as he sat by the bedside of his dying chief. He commanded guards to protect his house and the residences of his colleagues; he confiscated Ford's Theater and arrested every one connected with it; he declared Washington to be in a state of siege; he called out the entire military and police force of the District of Columbia, all the soldiers in the surrounding camps, barracks, and fortifications, the Secret Service men of the United States, the spies attached to the Bureau of Military Justice; he threw pickets around the entire city, fifty feet apart; he set a watch at every ferry, and ordered tugs, steamers, and gunboats to patrol the Potomac.

  Stanton wired the chief of police in New York to rush him

  his best detectives, telegraphed orders to watch the Canadian border, and commanded the President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway to intercept General Grant in Philadelphia and bring him back to Washington at once, running a pilot locomotive ahead of his train.

  He poured a brigade of infantry into lower Maryland, and sent a thousand cavalrymen galloping after the assassin, saying over and over: "He will try to get South. Guard the Potomac from the city down."

  The bullet that Booth fired pierced Lincoln's head below the left ear, plowed diagonally through the brain, and lodged within half an inch of the right eye. A man of lesser vitality would have been cut down instantly; but for nine hours Lincoln lived, groaning heavily.

  Mrs. Lincoln was kept in an adjoining room; but every hour she would insist on being brought to his bedside, weeping and shrieking, "O my God, have I given my husband to die?"

  Once as she was caressing his face and pressing her wet cheek against his, he suddenly began groaning and breathing louder than ever. Screaming, the distraught wife sprang back and fell to the floor in a faint.

  Stanton, hearing the commotion, rushed into the room, shouting, "Take that woman away, and don't let her in here again."

  Shortly after seven o'clock the groaning ceased and Lincoln's breathing became quiet. "A look of unspeakable peace," wrote one of his secretaries who was there, "came over his worn features."

  Sometimes recognition and understanding flash back into the secret chambers of consciousness immediately before dissolution.

  In those last peaceful moments broken fragments of happy memories may have floated brightly through the deep hidden caverns of his mind—vanished visions of the long ago: a log fire blazing at night in front of the open shed in the Buckhorn Valley of Indiana;
the roar of the Sangamon plunging over the mill-dam at New Salem; Ann Rutledge singing at the spinning-wheel; Old Buck nickering for his corn; Orlando Kellogg telling the story of the stuttering justice; and the law office at Springfield with the ink-stain on the wall and garden seeds sprouting on top of the bookcase. . . .

  Throughout the long hours of the death-struggle Dr. Leale,

  an army surgeon, sat by the President's bedside holding his hand. At twenty-two minutes past seven the doctor folded Lincoln's pulseless arms, put half-dollars on his eyelids to hold them shut, and tied up his jaw with a pocket handkerchief. A clergyman offered a prayer. Cold rain pattered down on the roof. General Barnes drew a sheet over the face of the dead President; and Stanton, weeping and pulling down the window-shades to shut out the light of the dawn, uttered the only memorable sentence of that night: "Now he belongs to the ages."

  The next day little Tad asked a caller at the White House if his father was in heaven.

  "I have no doubt of it," came the reply.

  "Then I am glad he has gone," said Tad, "for he was never happy after he came here. This was not a good place for him."

  PART FOUR

  *

  Jlhe funeral train bearing Lincoln's body back to Illinois crawled through vast crowds of mourning people. The train itself was smothered in crepe; and the engine, like a hearse-horse, was covered with a huge black blanket trimmed with silver stars.

  As it steamed northward faces began to appear beside the track—faces that rapidly multiplied in numbers and increased in sadness.

  For miles before the train reached the Philadelphia station it ran between solid walls of humanity, and when it rolled into the city thousands of people were milling and jamming through the streets. Mourners stood in lines three miles long, stretching away from Independence Hall. They edged forward, inch by inch, for ten hours in order to look down at last upon Lincoln's face for but one second. On Saturday at midnight the doors were closed, but the mourners, refusing to be dispersed, kept their places all night long and by three o'clock Sunday morning the crowds were greater than ever and boys were selling their places in line for ten dollars.

  Soldiers and mounted police fought to keep traffic lanes open, while hundreds of women fainted, and veterans who had fought at Gettysburg collapsed as they struggled to keep order.

  For twenty-four hours before the funeral services were scheduled to take place in New York excursion trains running day and night poured into that city the greatest crowds it had ever

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  known—crowds that filled the hotels and overflowed into private homes and backwashed across the parks and onto steamboat piers.

  The next day sixteen white horses, ridden by Negroes, pulled the hearse up Broadway, while women, frantic with grief, tossed flowers in its path. Behind came the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet—a hundred and sixty thousand mourners with swaying banners bearing quotations like these: "Ah, the pity of it, Iago—the pity of it!" . . . "Be still, and know that I am God."

  Half a million spectators fought and trampled upon one another in an effort to view the long procession. Second-story windows facing Broadway were rented for forty dollars each, and window-panes were removed in order that the openings might accommodate as many heads as possible.

  Choirs robed in white sang hymns on street corners, marching bands wailed their dirges, and at intervals of sixty seconds the roar of a hundred cannon reverberated over the town.

  As the crowds sobbed by the bier in City Hall, New York, many spoke to the dead man, some tried to touch his face; and, while the guard was not looking, one woman bent over and kissed the corpse.

  When the casket was closed in New York, at noon on Tuesday, thousands who had been unable to view the remains hurried to the trains and sped westward to other points where the funeral car was scheduled to stop. From now on until it reached Springfield the funeral train was seldom out of the sound of tolling bells and booming guns. By day it ran under arches of evergreens and flowers and past hillsides covered with children waving flags; by night its passing was illumined by countless torches and flaming bonfires stretching half-way across the continent.

  The country was in a frenzy of excitement. No such funeral had ever before been witnessed, in all history. Weak minds here and there snapped under the strain. A young man in New York slashed his throat with a razor, crying, "I am going to join Abraham Lincoln."

  Forty-eight hours after the assassination a committee from Springfield had hurried to Washington, pleading with Mrs. Lincoln to have her husband buried in his home town. At first, she was sharply opposed to the suggestion. She had hardly a friend left in Springfield, and she knew it. True, she had three sisters

  living there, but she thoroughly disliked two of them and despised the third one, and she felt nothing but contempt for the rest of the gossiping little village.

  "My God, Elizabeth!" she said to her colored dressmaker, "I can never go back to Springfield."

  So she planned to have Lincoln interred in Chicago or placed under the dome of the National Capitol, in the tomb originally constructed for George Washington.

  However, after seven days of pleading, she consented to have the body taken back to Springfield. The town raised a public fund, bought a beautiful tract of land consisting of four city blocks—now occupied by the State Capitol—and set men digging day and night.

  Finally, on the morning of May 4, the funeral train was in town, the tomb was ready, and thousands of Lincoln's old friends had forgathered for the services, when Mrs. Lincoln, in a sudden rage of erratic temper, countermanded all plans and haughtily decreed that the body must be interred, not where the tomb had been built, but in the Oak Ridge Cemetery, two miles out in the woods.

  There were to be no ifs or ands or buts about it. If she did not have her way, she threatened to use "violent" means to carry the remains back to Washington. Why? For a very unlovely reason: the tomb that had been erected in the middle of Springfield stood on what was known as the "Mather block," and Mrs. Lincoln despised the Mather family. Years before, one of the Mathers had, in some way, aroused her fiery wrath; and now, even in the hushed presence of death, she still cherished her bitter resentment, and would not consent to let Lincoln's body lie for one single night on ground that had been contaminated by the Mathers.

  For a quarter of a century this woman had lived under the same roof with a husband who had had "malice toward none," and "charity for all." But like the Bourbon kings of France, she had learned nothing, she had forgotten nothing.

  Springfield had to bow to the widow's mandate; and so at eleven o'clock the remains were taken out to a public vault in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Fighting Joe Hooker rode ahead of the hearse; and behind it was led Old Buck, covered with a red, white, and blue blanket on which were embroidered the words, "Old Abe's Horse."

  By the time Old Buck got back to his stable, there was not a

  shred of the blanket left; souvenir-hunters had stripped him bare. And, like buzzards, they swooped down upon the empty hearse, snatching at the draperies and fighting over it until soldiers charged them with bayonets.

  For five weeks after the assassination Mrs. Lincoln lay weeping in the White House, refusing to leave her chamber night or day.

  Elizabeth Keckley, who was at her bedside during all this time, wrote:

  I shall never forget the scene. The wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul. I bathed Mrs. Lincoln's head with cold water, and soothed the terrible tornado as best I could.

  Tad's grief at his father's death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence. . . .

  Often at night, when Tad would hear her sobbing, he would get up, and come to her bed in his white sleeping-clothes: "Don't cry, Mamma; I can't sleep if you cry! Papa was good, and he has gone to Heaven. He is happy there. He is with God and brother Willie. Don't cry, Mamma, or I will cry too."
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br />   Xhe instant that Booth fired at Lincoln, Major Rathbone, who was sitting in the box with the President, leaped up and grabbed the assassin. But he couldn't hold him, for Booth slashed at him desperately with a bowie-knife, cutting deep gashes in the major's arm. Tearing himself from Major Rath-bone's grasp, Booth sprang over the railing of the box and leaped to the stage floor, twelve feet below. But, as he jumped, he caught his spur in the folds of the flag that draped the President's box, fell awkwardly, and broke the small bone in his left leg.

  A spasm of pain shot through him. He did not wince or hesitate. He was acting now the supreme role of his career: this was the scene that was to make his name immortal.

  Quickly recovering himself, he brandished his dagger, shouted the motto of Virginia, Sic semper tyrannis —"Thus ever to tyrants"—plunged across the stage, knifed a musician who accidentally got in his way, floored an actress, darted out at the back door, jumped upon his waiting horse, raised the butt of his revolver and knocked down the boy, "Peanut John," who was holding the animal, and spurred madly down the street, the steel shoes from his little horse striking fire from the cobblestones in the night.

  For two miles he raced on through the city, passing the Capitol grounds. As the moon rose above the tree-tops he galloped on to the Anacostia bridge. There Sergeant Cobb, the Union sentry, dashed out with rifle and bayonet, demanding:

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  "Who are you? And why are you out so late? Don't you know it is against the rules to let any one pass after nine o'clock?"

  Booth, strange to relate, confessed his real name, saying that he lived in Charles County, and, being in town on business, he had waited for the moon to come up and light him home.

  That sounded plausible enough; and, anyway, the war was over, so why make a fuss? Sergeant Cobb lowered his rifle and let the rider pass.