Blood on the Moon

by Edward , Jr. Steers

  As the crowd made its way into the orchestra area it began filling up the rows of seats closest to the stage. Standing at center stage, a man dressed in the green and grey uniform of a park ranger patiently waited for the people to settle down. Like a fussy schoolteacher standing before his class, the ranger stood motionless waiting for his chatty students to give him their undivided attention. After a few minutes a hush fell over the crowd. The ranger continued to wait, allowing the anticipation to slowly build as he surveyed the faces spread out before him. Satisfied that his audience was properly attentive, the ranger spoke: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Ford’s Theatre. This afternoon I want to tell you what happened in this special place on the night of April 14, 1865.”

  Turning slightly to his left, he motioned to a point twelve feet above the stage to the special box reserved for the president on his visits to the theater. A pair of white lacy curtains elegantly framed two large openings in the box. A pair of American flags were draped over the balustrade as if they had been hurriedly placed with little attention to symmetry. A large engraving of George Washington separated the flags. Over the engraving a blue flag hung loosely from a pole fastened to the column just above the picture. Not visible to the audience, but tucked behind one of the lace curtains, was the red upholstered rocking chair that Lincoln sat in the night of his murder. In reality, the rocker was a reproduction of the original rocker that was on display in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In fact, the presidential box and all of the theater, except for its outer skin of bricks, was a reproduction, or as the Park Service would say, an authentic restoration.

  Looking back at his audience, the ranger continued, “At approximately twenty minutes past ten o’clock on that fateful night of April 14, 1865, the famous actor John Wilkes Booth entered the box above you and fired a bullet from a small derringer pistol into the brain of Abraham Lincoln.”1

  The ranger paused and looked down into the faces that were staring up at the box where the president had been seated. For twelve years he had stood on this stage, and for twelve years he had delivered his little speech. And for twelve years he listened patiently to their questions. They were always the same: “Why was Booth allowed in the box?” “Why wasn’t Lincoln guarded that night?” “Was it true that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was behind Lincoln’s murder?” “Why did the telegraph mysteriously go dead minutes after Lincoln was shot?” “Didn’t Booth really escape and live for many years afterward?”

  America’s fascination with conspiracy has remained unquenchable. No amount of facts could persuade the multitude that the bodyguard didn’t abandon his post, or that Edwin Stanton loved Abraham Lincoln and would never act to harm him, or that Booth was really killed in a barn located on a small Virginia farm twelve days after shooting Lincoln, or that the military telegraph never went dead at any time during the night.

  The ranger, sensing he had captured his audience’s undivided attention, continued his story. He described how several soldiers cradled the dying president in their arms as they carried him from the box across the rear of the balcony and down the steps to the lobby. Emerging onto the sidewalk in front of the theater, the men were not sure what to do. Suddenly they were beckoned by a flickering light from across the street. The ranger raised his arm high over his head as if he were holding a candle. The audience’s eyes looked up at the ranger’s hand. “‘Bring him in here,’ a voice called out from across the street.”2 The ranger repeated the command: “Bring him in here.” The audience listened spellbound as the ranger conjured up the image of the mortally wounded president being gently borne to the house of a simple tailor. Staring into the faces below, the ranger slowly repeated the words heard that sorrowful night, “Bring him in here.”

  Across the street from the theater a young man stood on the steps of the house where he rented a small room on the second floor. Henry Safford was exhausted from several nights of celebrating Robert E. Lee’s surrender. He decided to stay in his room this night and rest. Hearing the commotion in the street, he picked up a candle and walked out onto the stoop. In the street below he saw several soldiers carrying the body of an injured man. “Bring him in here,” he instinctively called out to the men. “Bring him in here.”

  A light rain had fallen throughout most of the night. Outside the tailor’s house a crowd stood in silent vigil indifferent to their personal discomfort. They had gathered soon after word spread that the president had been shot and taken to the house opposite the theater. Inside, twelve men gathered around a small bed staring at the long figure that lay diagonally across its surface seemingly deep in sleep. The soft sizzle of a gas jet mingled with the rasping sounds of the man’s breathing. Among those keeping vigil at the bedside was Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the man Abraham Lincoln affectionately called his “Father Neptune.”

  Welles had hurried to the president’s side as soon as he had heard the tragic news. The message that the president had been attacked and Secretary of State William Seward had been assassinated reached Welles just as he was preparing to retire for the night. Welles had gone up to his room and was in the process of undressing when a messenger arrived with the shocking news. Hurrying on foot the few blocks to Seward’s house, Welles met Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who had just arrived in a carriage. The two men rushed up the stairs and into the bedroom where Seward lay still wrapped in bloody sheets. There seemed to be blood everywhere. The scene appeared more horrific than it actually was. Reassured that Seward would live, the two men next hurried to the house where the president had been taken.3 They arrived a few minutes past eleven o’clock. At the same time, a few miles to the east, a lone rider spurred his horse as he raced up a long incline making his way between two military forts. Passing the forts, the rider turned south and headed into Maryland.

  For the next seven hours Welles maintained a bedside vigil while Stanton, who sat in an adjoining room, assumed control of the government. Throughout the night the war secretary, with Chief Justice David Kellogg Cartter of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia at his side, began issuing directives and taking testimony from those who had information to give. Stanton assumed absolute control, and although well down the line of succession or authority in the civil government, he functioned as if the attack on the president had been a military action.4 It was a moment of grave national danger, not a time for indecision or faint-hearted action. Stanton was up to the challenge. He would maintain this position for the next three months.

  For seven hours the men had kept their vigil, helpless to do anything except wait. Time slipped slowly past, each tick of the clock measured against the failing pulse of the president. A sense of grief weighed heavily on all who were present. The emotional wailing of Mary Lincoln was distressing to even the most hardened heart. Finally, Stanton could stand no more and told an aide to take her from the room and see that she remained in the front parlor. The close atmosphere of the small room had become heavy with the odor of mustard balm and camphor. Welles began to feel light-headed and nauseous. He needed to escape the dreary room if only for a few moments. Shortly before dawn he slipped out the front door of the house and took a short walk. As he walked past the large groups of people gathered outside he was asked what news there was of the president. “Tell us of Father Abraham, of Massa Linkum. Is there any hope, any at all?” Welles simply shook his head, too emotionally drained to speak. The crowds seemed overwhelmed with grief, especially the Black mourners who seemed to outnumber the White.

  Returning to the house, Welles resumed his place near the president. It was a little past seven o’clock, and Lincoln’s breathing had slowed considerably. The deathwatch was drawing to an end. Sitting at the president’s side was Assistant Army Surgeon Charles Leale, the doctor who had arrived first at the box in Ford’s Theatre and had taken charge of the president. Leale now held the comatose president’s hand with a firm grip to “let him know that he was in touch with humanity and had a friend.”5
The hand was cold and stiff. There was no movement, not even the slightest twitch to say, “I hear, I feel, I know.”

  At twenty-two minutes past seven o’clock the end came. Placing a finger against the president’s neck, Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes felt for some sign of a pulse. There was none. Carefully folding the president’s arms across his breast the surgeon general declared in a voice choked with emotion, “He is gone.”6 A somber silence ensued as each person in the room seemed transfixed by the awful moment. It cannot be true. He cannot be gone. After what seemed to Welles to be several minutes Stanton broke the silence by asking Lincoln’s pastor, Dr. Phineas Gurley, if he would say a prayer. Gurley, minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, knelt by the bedside and waited as each man in the room sank to his knees. Gurley prayed for the nation, beseeching God to heal the wounds and restore a united country. He asked that God accept his humble servant Abraham Lincoln into His glorious Kingdom. When he finished, the men rose to their feet with a fervent and spontaneous “Amen.” Then Stanton, with tears streaming down his cheeks, uttered his immortal words, “Now he belongs to the ages.”7

  Lincoln’s death was followed by an outpouring of grief not seen before or since in the nation’s history. Easter Sunday heard hundreds of sermons preached in America’s churches. Bells rang and cannons boomed in a continuous toll underscoring the great sadness of the time. Stanton’s tears were soon mingled with those of millions of mourners who openly wept at the death of their great and good leader. In Boston’s Shawmut Congregational Church, Edwin B. Webb spoke to his stricken congregation in solemn words: “The sun is less bright than before, the very atmosphere seems to hold in it for the tearful eye a strange ethereal element of gloom. It is manly to weep today.”8 The majority of Northern preachers compared Lincoln to Moses. Henry Ward Beecher, the country’s most famous preacher, likened Lincoln to the biblical leader who after leading his people to the Promised Land was denied entry for himself. Beecher pointed out that the terrible tragedy would fall most heavily on the Black people: “There will be a wailing in places which no ministers shall be able to reach.”9 Others compared Lincoln to George Washington. Together, “they were both equally the vessels of Omnipotence; God chose them to do an unequalled work, not only for this land, but for all mankind.”10 The deification of the man who had once been reviled as “the original gorilla” and “Abraham Africanus the First” was being proclaimed from church pulpits all across the land. The great apotheosis had begun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  You Are in Danger

  I regret that you do not appreciate what I repeatedly said to you in regard to ... your own personal safety. You are in danger.

  Ward Hill Lamon

  The sadness over Lincoln’s death, like his election in 1860, was sectional. Not everyone agreed with Beecher’s and his fellow ministers’ pious view of the dead president. To many in the South, Lincoln’s death was nothing more than tyrannicide. “Hurrah! Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!” a South Carolina girl wrote in her diary on hearing the news.1 The editor of the Texas Republican echoed the views of his readers when he wrote: “It is certainly a matter of congratulations that Lincoln is dead because the world is rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity.”2 The Galveston Daily News saw the hand of God differently from those in the North: “God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place.”3

  Abraham Lincoln’s death was an increasingly popular want during the war years. While assassination was thought to be contrary to the American character, Lincoln’s election in 1860 would put it there. After his nomination at Chicago, Lincoln began receiving death threats in various forms. These threats continued after the election. On January 26, 1861, after visiting Lincoln in his temporary office set up in the Illinois state capitol building in Springfield, a man by the name of Joshua Allen wrote his mother: “He has got stacks of preserved fruit and all sorts of such trash which he is daily receiving from various parts of the South, sent him as presents. He had several packages opened and examined by medical men who found them all to be poisoned.”4

  Earlier that same week Lincoln had received a letter warning him of an assassination plot: “I have heard several persons in this place say that if you ever did take the President Chair that they would go to Washington City expressly to kill you.”5 Not all of the letters Lincoln received were from concerned citizens who wanted to forewarn him. Many were from deranged people who simply despised him and wanted to vent their hatred: “God damn your god damned old Hellfire god damned soul to hell god damn you and your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell.”6 Although lacking grammatical skill, the writer got his point across.

  Death threats to Lincoln continued unabated throughout his presidency. According to his young secretary, John Hay, Lincoln kept a select group of threatening letters in a “bulging folder in a special pigeonhole” in his White House desk.7 What was in these letters and why Lincoln chose to keep them is not known. As numerous as these threats were, Lincoln apparently treated them lightly. After all, anyone who seriously contemplated murdering the president wouldn’t be foolish enough to write a letter forewarning of his plan. Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and close friend, wrote in her postwar memoir that Lincoln rarely gave such threatening letters a second thought.8 While Lincoln downplayed anonymous threats to his life, there were serious forces at work plotting his assassination.

  These forces were organized and deadly serious about their mission. Among the earliest of the organized plots to assassinate Lincoln was one that occurred in Baltimore, Maryland, in February 1861. The Baltimore Plot, as it came to be known in later years, was important because of its potential for success. If it had remained undiscovered, Lincoln might never have been inaugurated. The threat came while he was en route to Washington for his inauguration scheduled for March 4, 1861. It involved a plot by members of a group known as the National Volunteers, a secretive paramilitary organization whose core leadership was also affiliated with the anti-Lincoln Knights of the Golden Circle. These two organizations had the overthrow of the government by violent force at the heart of their objectives.

  The National Volunteers had been organized by William Byrne, a Baltimore businessman, in the summer of 1860, and was originally designed to aid the presidential candidacy of John C. Breckinridge. After Lincoln’s election victory, it shifted its focus to preventing his inauguration by violent means.9 Members of the National Volunteers had developed a plan to intercept Lincoln in Baltimore and kill him. Baltimore, the last of thirteen stops before Lincoln reached Washington, was a hotbed of secession activity, making it an ideal place to carry out an assassination attempt.

  One of the principal meeting places for the anti-Lincoln forces in Baltimore was the bar of Barnum’s City Hotel. Members of the local organization met at Barnum’s where they fueled their hatred for Lincoln with whiskey and talk of assassination. One of the principal anti-Lincoln people to join the assassination plot was the head barber at Barnum’s Hotel, a Corsican immigrant named Cipriano Ferrandini. Ferrandini was a “captain” in the Knights of the Golden Circle and a staunch Confederate sympathizer. He was an advocate of assassination as a principle means to further political aims. When Ferrandini learned that Lincoln would stop over in Baltimore for a luncheon before changing trains, he and others of like mind hatched a plot to kill the president-elect as he passed by carriage through the streets of Baltimore.

  Lincoln’s train from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was scheduled to arrive at the Calvert Street Station in Baltimore shortly after noon on February 23. Lincoln would then travel by carriage to a luncheon appointment in the city before boarding another train that would take him on to Washington. Ferrandini and his band of assassins planned to start a disturbance and shoot Lincoln from the melee while en route to his luncheon engagement. The plan was reasonable and had a good chance of success. There was only one problem. When Lincoln’s train pulled into the Calvert Stree
t station on the morning of the twenty-third, Lincoln was not on it. He was already at the Willard Hotel in Washington safely having thwarted his would-be killers.

  Lincoln’s safe passage through Baltimore came about as the result of a brilliant detective effort. Working independently, teams of detectives from both the New York police force and Allan Pinkerton’s Chicago detective agency had infiltrated the core of the conspiracy. The plot had been discovered and Lincoln warned in advance of its execution. Once convinced that the plot to assassinate him was real, Lincoln secretly changed his travel plans and passed through Baltimore nine hours ahead of schedule.

  One cannot read the reports of Allan Pinkerton and his detectives or the accounts of the New York detectives assigned to Baltimore without concluding there was a real threat to Lincoln’s life if he kept to his planned schedule through Baltimore. But did the plotters have the nerve to carry out the assassination? Some historians have expressed doubt on this point. So did Lincoln in an 1864 interview with historian Benjamin J. Lossing. Lincoln repeated this doubt to his friend Isaac N. Arnold, then added, “But I thought it wise to run no risk where no risk was necessary.”10 By choosing caution, Lincoln may have averted his assassination.

  In January Samuel Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Rail Road, had received credible information that the pro-Confederate apparatus in Maryland planned to sabotage his rail lines and bridges north of Baltimore. Alarmed, Felton moved quickly to protect his property. He hired the famous Chicago detective Allan Pinkerton to investigate those plotting against his railroad. By February 3, Pinkerton, using the alias John H. Hutchinson, was in Baltimore with five of his best agents, including two women, Hattie Lawton and Kate Warne. Within days they discovered a well-developed plan to assassinate Lincoln when he came through Baltimore on February 23 en route to the capital.