Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Others also declined the president’s invitation, including Colfax, Stanton, and Stanton’s assistant, Thomas T. Eckert. When Mrs. Stanton heard that Mrs. Grant had declined, she said to the general-in-chief’s wife that she too would refuse: “I will not sit without you in the box with Mrs. Lincoln.”54 The secretary of war had sought to discourage Lincoln from theater-going, for he worried about his safety.

  After learning that the Grants would not attend the performance at Ford’s Theatre, Lincoln felt inclined to follow suit, but the First Lady insisted that they go. The press had announced that he and the general would be in attendance, and the audience would be terribly disappointed if neither man appeared.

  The president had no adequate security detail that night. This was not unusual, for at his request bodyguards did not accompany him to theatrical performances. John F. Parker, one of four Metropolitan Police patrolmen who had been detailed to the Interior Department to protect the White House and its furnishings, not its occupants, was part of the entourage that night, as was Charles Forbes, a White House messenger. (The Executive Mansion needed guarding, for vandals purloined from it valuable ornaments and cut souvenir swatches from rugs and curtains.) Neither Parker nor Forbes was a true bodyguard, nor were they asked to protect Lincoln. The man who had been performing that duty zealously, Ward Hill Lamon, was in Richmond on a presidential mission. When John Wilkes Booth made his fatal way to the presidential box, Parker was either at an adjacent tavern or watching the play, which Lincoln may have urged him to do. (Parker had a dismal record as a Metropolitan Police patrolman before 1865, and three years later was dismissed for neglecting his duty. He was not, however, disciplined for his conduct on April 14, 1865. A board of the Metropolitan Police conducted an investigation but took no action against him.)

  Lincoln’s Insouciance Regarding Security

  Lincoln was notoriously indifferent about his safety, even though he had read many death threats. “Soon after I was nominated at Chicago, I began to receive letters threatening my life,” he remarked to the painter Francis B. Carpenter in 1864. “The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable, but I came at length to look for a regular installment of this kind of correspondence in every week’s mail, and up to inauguration day I was in constant receipt of such letters. It is no uncommon thing to receive them now; but they have ceased to give me apprehension.” When Carpenter expressed surprise at such a casual disregard of serious danger, Lincoln replied: “Oh, there is nothing like getting used to things!”55 He placed threatening missives in a file marked “assassination letters.”

  To Colonel Charles G. Halpine, who one day in 1863 asked Lincoln why he did not have his White House visitors screened as military commanders did, he explained that it “would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or assuming to be, an emperor.” To surround himself thus “would only be to put the idea” of assassination into the minds of adversaries and thus “lead to the very result it was intended to prevent.”56

  That same year, Lincoln told Noah Brooks: “I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it. If I wore a shirt of mail, and kept myself surrounded by a body-guard, it would be all the same. There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desirable that he should be killed. Besides, in this case, it seems to me the man who would come after me [Hamlin] would be just as objectionable to my enemies—if I have any.”57 He thought it impossible to obtain foolproof protection. To well-wishers concerned about assassins, he commented, “I should have to lock myself up in a box” and that he simply could not “be shut up in an iron cage and guarded.”58 Because he was so good-natured himself, he found it hard to believe that anyone would do him harm. When General James H. Van Alen warned him that ill-disposed folk might attack him as he walked alone from the White House to the War Department along a tree-lined path, he trustfully replied: “Oh, they wouldn’t hurt me.”59

  Lincoln’s insouciance about his safety was widely shared. With the exception of a crazed Briton who pulled the triggers of two guns in a miraculously unsuccessful attempt to kill to Andrew Jackson, no leading American public official had been the target of a murderer. In 1862, Seward asserted that “[a]ssassination is not an American practice or habit” and inaccurately predicted that “one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system. This conviction of mine has steadily gained strength since the Civil War began. Every day’s experience confirms it. The President, during the heated season, occupies a country house near the Soldiers’ Home, two or three miles from the city. He goes to and from that place on horseback, night and morning, unguarded. I go there unattended at all hours, by daylight and moonlight, by starlight and without any light.”60

  Starting in 1862, Lincoln did have military escorts when he rode to and from the Soldiers’ Home. At first he protested, saying half in jest that he and his wife could barely hear themselves talk above the racket made by spurs and sabers, and that some of the cavalry escort appeared to be such “new hands and very awkward” that he was “more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of one of their carbines or revolvers, than of any attempt upon his life, or for his capture by the roving squads of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry.”61 A Pennsylvania infantry company was assigned to guard the cottage where he and his family stayed, and a New York cavalry unit usually accompanied him on his daily commute. The following year, an Ohio squad replaced the New Yorkers. One August night in 1864, while Lincoln was riding alone from the White House back to the Soldiers’ Home, a would-be assassin shot his hat off. Thereafter, security precautions became more stringent. Lamon, who claimed that he had good reason to be frightened about the president’s safety, started to sleep at the White House. There John Hay observed him one night as he slumbered before the door to the president’s bedroom in an “attitude of touching and dumb fidelity with a small arsenal of pistols & Bowie knives around him.”62

  The Final Day

  Around 3 o’clock on April 14, the Lincolns visited the navy yard and toured the monitor Montauk. The ship’s doctor reported that they “seemed very happy, and so expressed themselves.”63 Later that afternoon, Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby called at the White House with his state’s adjutant general, Isham Nicholas Haynie of Springfield. Delighted to see old friends, the president chatted with them for a while, then read aloud from the latest book by humorist Petroleum V. Nasby (pen name for David Ross Locke). Ignoring repeated summonses to dinner, Lincoln continued to read, laughing and commenting as he went along.

  After supper, Lincoln met with Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax. Earlier in the day, when the congressman mentioned to him that he was about to visit California, the president said he wished that he could go too: “I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced. During the war, when we were adding a couple of millions of dollars every day to our national debt, I did not care about encouraging the increase in the volume of our precious metals. We had the country to save first. But, now that the rebellion is overthrown, and we know pretty nearly the amount of our national debt, the more gold and silver we mine makes the payment of that debt so much the easier. Now, I am going to encourage that in every possible way. We shall have hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers, and many have feared that their return home in such great numbers might paralyze industry by furnishing suddenly a greater supply of labor than there will be a demand for. I am going to try and attract them to the hidden wealth of our mountain ranges, where there is room enough for all. Immigration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundreds of thousands more per year from over-crowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that waits for them in the West. Tell the miners from me that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability, bec
ause their prosperity is the prosperity of the nation; and we shall prove, in a very few years, that we are, indeed, the treasury of the world.”64 That evening Lincoln admonished the speaker: “Don’t forget, Colfax, to tell those miners that that’s my speech to them, which I send by you.”65

  When Colfax told Lincoln that many people had feared for his safety while he was visiting the Virginia capital, he smilingly replied: “Why, if any one else had been President, and had gone to Richmond, I would have been alarmed too; but I was not scared about myself a bit.”66

  Around 8:30, as Lincoln prepared to leave the White House, he asked his elder son if he would like to come along. Robert declined, citing fatigue. So his parents climbed into their carriage and proceeded to pick up Major Henry R. Rathbone and his step-sister (who was also his fiancée), Clara Harris. When the Grants announced that they could not join the presidential party, Mrs. Lincoln had invited the young couple to take their place. The First Lady called Miss Harris a “dear friend.”67 Together the two women often took carriage rides, and Miss Harris regularly attended plays with the Lincolns. The party reached Ford’s Theatre about half an hour after the curtain had risen on Tom Taylor’s light comedy, Our American Cousin. As they entered, the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief,” and the audience rose to greet them with vociferous applause, which Lincoln acknowledged with a smile and bow. As he moved toward the box, he looked to one observer “mournful and sad.”68

  John Wilkes Booth: Mad Racist

  John Wilkes Booth had spent the day plotting to assassinate Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward. The previous autumn, Booth had begun hatching a scheme to kidnap the president, spirit him off to Richmond, and exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war. That enterprise fizzled in mid-March when the conspirators planned to intercept Lincoln on his way to a hospital. With the failure of the capture plot, some of the conspirators quit Booth’s team.

  Weeks later, when Lincoln toured Richmond, Booth was outraged. According to Booth’s sister, the president’s “triumphant entry into the fallen city (which was not magnanimous), breathed fresh air upon the fire which consumed him.”69 (Richmond was the city where Booth had first won acclaim as an actor.) He had been sleeping badly and was experiencing difficulties with his fiancée. Depressed, Booth began drinking more heavily than usual, consuming as much as a quart of brandy in less than two hours. When a friend offered him a drink, he said: “Yes, anything to drive away the blues.”70 Booth’s good friend Harry Langdon believed that “[w]hiskey had a great deal to do with the murder.”71 John Deery concurred, speculating that “Booth was as much crazed by the liquor he drank as by any motive when he shot Lincoln.”72 He was known as “a hard drinker of the strongest brandy.”73

  Booth was even more disconsolate at the news of Lee’s surrender on April 9, for he was feeling guilty about his failure to strike a blow for the Confederacy. He had promised his mother not to join the Confederate army. In late 1864, he wrote her saying he had started “to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence.”74 His loving sister Asia asked him pointedly after he declared his undying devotion to the South: “Why not fight for her, then? Every Marylander worthy of the name is fighting her battles.”75 When he expressed to Harry C. Ford, treasurer of Ford’s Theatre, disappointment that Lee had surrendered his sword after having promised never to do so, Ford pointedly asked what the young actor had done compared to Lee. Defensively, Booth replied that he was as brave as Lee. “Well,” Ford sneered, “you have not got three stars yet to show it.”76 With the war virtually over, what could he do to redeem himself in his own eyes? Killing Lincoln might salve his troubled conscience. On April 14 (Good Friday), when he heard that Grant and the president would attend Ford’s Theatre that night, he impulsively decided to seize the opportunity to kill Lincoln, which three days before he had resolved to do. Earlier he had mentioned the possibility of murdering the president, but not to his colleagues in the capture plot. At Lincoln’s inauguration, he had apparently tried to break through the line of guards protecting the president.

  Summoning the remnants of the kidnapping team (David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Lewis Powell), Booth assigned them various tasks. Powell was to kill Seward, Atzerodt was to kill Andrew Johnson, and Herold was to assist Booth escape after he shot Lincoln. The murder of Johnson and Seward might well heighten the effect of the presidential assassination, throwing the government into chaos.

  Booth’s motives are not entirely clear, but he was an avid white supremacist whose racist rage formed an important part of his psyche. Indignation at the proposal that blacks would become citizen-voters prompted him to act. (As already noted, Booth responded to Lincoln’s call for black suffrage by vowing “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through!”) Thus Lincoln was a martyr to black civil rights, as much as Martin Luther King and other activists who fell victim to racist violence a century later. In September 1864, Booth nearly shot a black man who entered a barber shop where he had been waiting for a haircut. When the black expressed joy at a recent Union army victory, Booth asked peremptorily: “Is that the way you talk among gentlemen, and with your hat on too?”

  “When I go into a parlor among ladies, I take my hat off, but when I go into a bar-room or a barber shop or any other public place, I keep my hat on,” came the reply.

  Incensed, Booth reached for his gun and would have used it if another patron had not intervened.77

  In November 1864, Booth expressed his belief in white supremacy and hatred for Republicans: “This country was formed for the white not for the black man,” he wrote in a letter probably meant for his brother-in-law. “And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, as held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” As evidence to support that conclusion, he cited the “wealth and power” of the whites and the blacks’ “elevation in happiness and enlightenment above their race, elsewhere.” He had lived amid slavery for most of his life and had “seen less harsh treatment from Master to Man than I have beheld in the north from father to son.” All Republicans were traitors, he maintained, and “the entire party, deserved the fate of poor old [John] Brown.”78

  Booth spelled out his views on slavery, race, and abolitionism in a speech that he composed in December 1860 but did not deliver. Intended for an audience in Philadelphia, where he was visiting his mother, it defended slavery as “a happiness” for the slaves “and a social & political blessing” for whites. “I have been through the whole South and have marked the happiness of master & man. … I have seen the Black man w[h]ip[p]ed but only when he deserved much more than he received. And had an abolitionist used the lash, he would have got double.” Booth condemned abolitionists in the most bloodthirsty terms: “Such men I call tra[i]tors and treason should be stamped to death and not al[l]owed to stalk abroad in any land. So deep is my hatred for such men that I could wish I had them in my grasp And I [had] the power to crush [them]. I’d grind them into dust! … Now that we have found the serpent that mad[d]ens us, we should crush it in its, birth. … I tell you Sirs when treason weighs heavy in the scale, it is time for us to throw off all gentler feelings of our natures and summon resolution, pride, justice, Ay, and revenge.”79

  Although he did not mention Lincoln in this screed, Booth came to believe that the president deserved to be stamped to death, ground into powder, and crushed, for Lincoln was not only an abolitionist like John Brown, but also a tyrant like Julius Caesar. “When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people, Brutus arose and slew him,” Booth wrote as he planned to assassinate Lincoln.80 In the summer of 1864, he told his sister that the president’s advisors ruled him and that he was “made the tool of the North, to crush out, or try to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies.” Lincoln, he predicted,
would become a “Bonaparte in one great move, that is, by overturning this blind Republic and making himself a king. This man’s re-election … I tell you—will be a reign! … You’ll see, you’ll see, that reelection means succession. His kin and friends are in every place of office already.” Lincoln was “a false president,” a “Sectional Candidate” who had been elected by fraud and who was “yearning for a kingly succession as hotly as ever did [the Spartan monarch] Ariston.”81 Similarly, in late 1864 he told his brother Edwin “that Lincoln would be made King of America.” Edwin speculated that this conviction “drove him beyond the limits of reason.”82 When George P. Kane, the former police commissioner of Baltimore, was arrested on a well-founded suspicion of treason, Booth exclaimed: “the man who could drag him from the bosom of his family for no crime whatever, but a mere suspicion that he may commit one sometime, deserves a dog’s death!”83 The men responsible for Kane’s arrest and long incarceration, Booth thought, were Lincoln and Seward. Booth also blamed the president and secretary of state for the execution of his friend John Yates Beall in early 1865.

  Northern Democrats and some Radical Republicans had long been condemning Lincoln as a tyrant. During the 1864 election campaign, a few Northern newspapers, as noted above, called for the president’s assassination. Even before then, a New York editor had lectured the president: “Behave yourself in [the] future, boss, or we shall be obliged to make an island of your head and stick it on the end of a pole.”84 In May 1863, a speaker at Cooper Union paraphrased Patrick Henry’s famous “treason” speech: “Let us also remind Lincoln that Caesar had his Brutus and Charles the First his Cromwell. Let us also remind the George the Third of the present day that he, too, may have his Cromwell or his Brutus.”85