“6:00 a.m., pulse failing, respiration 28.”
At 6:00 a.m., a fainting sickness overcame Secretary of the Navy Welles. He had been cooped up in the claustrophobic Petersen house all night. Welles rose from his bedside chair, where he had sat listening to the sound of Lincoln’s breathing. Welles needed fresh air and decided to go for a walk. When he got outside, stood on the top step, and looked down to the street, he witnessed a remarkable scene: thousands of citizens, keeping their all-night vigil for their dying president. Welles descended the turned staircase and walked among them. They recognized Lincoln’s bearded “Father Neptune,” and individual faces emerged from the crowd and spoke to him: “[They] stepped forward as I passed, to inquire into the condition of the President, and to ask if there was hope. Intense grief was on every countenance when I replied that the President could survive but a short time. The colored people especially—and there were at this time more of them, perhaps than of whites—were overwhelmed with grief.” After a while, Welles turned back: “It was a dark and gloomy morning, and rain set in before I returned to the house.” He wanted to be there at the end.
“6:30 a.m., still failing and labored breathing.”
“7:00 a.m., symptoms of immediate dissolution.”
In Maryland, at the same hour, Lieutenant Dana arrived in Piscat-away. Dana, although he held junior rank, had senior-level connections in Washington. His brother, Charles, was Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war and a confidant of Stanton. David Dana and his patrol from the Thirteenth New York Cavalry had left Washington two hours ago, at 5:00 a.m. As soon as he reached Piscataway, he telegraphed Washington to report the progress of his early-morning expedition. “I arrived at this place at 7 a.m., and at once sent a man to Chapel Point to notify the cavalry at that point of the murder of the President, with description of the parties who committed the deed. With the arrangements which have been made it is impossible for them to get across the river in this direction.” Dana had already gotten his first tip, and he relayed it to headquarters: “I have reliable information that the person who murdered Secretary Seward is Boyce or Boyd, the man who killed Captain Watkins in Maryland. I think it without doubt true.” Of course it wasn’t. Less than nine hours into the manhunt, Dana was pursuing the kind of false lead that would come to bedevil the manhunters in the days ahead.
•••
At the Petersen house, Abraham Lincoln began the death struggle.
The end was coming on fast. Surgeon General Barnes placed his finger on Lincoln’s carotid artery; Dr. Leale placed his finger on the president’s right radial pulse; and Dr. Taft placed his hand over the heart. The doctors and nearly every man in the room fished out pocket watches on gold chains. It was 7:20 a.m., April 15, 1865. More than once, they thought that Lincoln had passed away. But the strong body resisted death and rallied again, as it had so many times through the long night.
It was 7:21 a.m. Death was imminent.
At 7:21 and 55 seconds, Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath.
His heart stopped beating at 7:22 and 10 seconds. It was over.
“He is gone; he is dead,” one of the doctors said. To the Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family’s minister, it seemed that four or five minutes passed “without the slightest noise or movement” by anyone in the room. “We all stood transfixed in our positions, speechless, around the dead body of that great and good man.”
Edwin Stanton spoke first. He turned to his right and looked at Gurley. “Doctor, will you say anything?”
“I will speak to God,” replied the minister, “let us pray.” He summoned up such a stirring prayer that later no one, not even Gurley, could remember what he said. James Tanner tried to scribble down the words, but at this crucial moment the lead tip of his only pencil snapped and he wasn’t able to write any more.
Gurley finished and everyone murmured “Amen.” Then, no one dared to speak.
Again Stanton broke the silence. “Now he belongs to the angels.”
Edwin Stanton composed himself, reached for pen and paper, and wrote a single sentence. There was nothing else to say. It was the telegram that would, as soon as a messenger ran it over to the War Department for transmission, announce the sad news to the nation.
WASHINGTON CITY, April 15, 1865.
Major General Dix, New York:
Abraham Lincoln died this morning at 22 minutes after 7 o’clock.
EDWIN M. STANTON
One by one those who were there at the end quietly filed out of the little back bedroom. Reverend Dr. Gurley and Robert Lincoln told Mary. She would not go to the death chamber; she could not bear it. She never saw her husband’s face again. Around 9:00 a.m. she left the Petersen house. As she descended the stairs, coachman Francis Burke, who had waited all night to take the president home, readied to carry the widowed first lady there. Before she got in the carriage, she glared at Ford’s Theatre across the street: “That dreadful house . . . that dreadful house,” she moaned.
The room was empty of all visitors now, save one. Edwin Stanton and the president were alone. The morning light streaming through the back windows raked across Lincoln’s still face. Stanton closed the blinds and approached the president’s body. He took from his pocket a small knife or pair of scissors and bent over Lincoln’s head. Gently he cut a generous lock of hair—more than one hundred strands—and sealed it in a plain, white envelope. Stanton signed his name in ink on the upper right corner, and then addressed the envelope: “ To Mrs. Welles.” The lock was not for him, but a gift for Mary Jane Welles, wife of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and one of Mary Lincoln’s few friends in Washington. In 1862, Mrs. Welles had helped nurse Willie Lincoln, ill with typhoid fever, until his death on February 20. Then, in the aftermath, Mary Jane did double duty, continuing to nurse Tad, also ill, while also caring for Mary Lincoln, helpless in her grief. Nine months later, in November 1863, the Welleses’ three-year-old son died of diphtheria. With that loss, Mary Jane Welles and Mary Lincoln shared a sadness that brought them even closer. Within an hour of the assassination, Mary Lincoln had dispatched messengers to summon Mary Jane to her side. Stanton knew that if any woman in Washington deserved a sacred lock of the martyr’s hair it was Mary Jane Welles. Later, Mrs. Welles framed the cherished relic with dried flowers that had adorned the president’s coffin at the White House funeral. Lost in reverie, Lincoln’s god of war gazed down at his fallen chief and wept. Abraham Lincoln was gone .“To the angels.”
It was time to take him home. Stanton ordered soldiers to go quickly and bring what was necessary to transport the body of the slain president. He ordered another soldier to guard the door to the death room and to allow no one to enter and disturb the president’s body. When the soldiers returned from their errand and turned down Tenth Street, the crowd began to wail. The men carried a plain, pine box, the final refutation of their hopes. They knew already, of course, that the president was dead. They had seen the cabinet secretaries leave the house, and then Mary Lincoln. But the sight of the crude, improvised coffin made it too real. It was finished. The box looked like a shipping crate, not a proper coffin for a head of state. Lincoln would not have minded. He was always a man of simple tastes. This was the plain, roughly hewn coffin of a rail-splitter.
The men carried the box up the curving stairs and down the narrow hallway. Stanton supervised them as they rested the box on the floor. They unfurled an American flag and approached the president’s naked body. They wrapped him in the cotton bunting, and, if they followed custom, were careful to position the canton’s thirty-six, five-pointed stars over his face. These were the national colors of the Union. During the war Lincoln insisted that the flag retain its full complement of stars, refusing to acknowledge that the seceded states had actually left the Union. They lifted the president from the bed, placed him in the box, and screwed down the lid. The only sound in the room was the squeaking of the screws being tightened in their holes.
Stanton nodded in assent. In unison, the
men bent down and inched their fingers under the bottom edges of the box; it had no pallbearers’ handles. They eased it up from the floor and began shuffling their feet down the narrow hallway to the front door. They carried the president into the street and loaded him onto the back of a simple, horse-drawn wagon. The driver snapped the reins and the modest procession, escorted by a small contingent of bareheaded officers on foot, took Abraham Lincoln home to the White House. There were no bands, drums, or trumpets, just the cadence of horses’ hooves and the footsteps of the officers. Lincoln would have liked the simplicity.
After Lincoln’s body was removed, Stanton and the other members of the cabinet—save Seward—met in the back parlor of the Petersen house. Andrew Johnson was not present when Lincoln died, so the cabinet sent to him an official, written notification of the president’s death and of his succession to the presidency. They urged that the new president be sworn in immediately, and Johnson sent back word that he would be pleased to take the oath of office at 11:00 a.m. in his room at the Kirkwood. In the late morning of April 15, Chief Justice Chase and the officials in attendance found a changed man. Six weeks ago, an intoxicated Johnson had embarrassed himself by giving a foolish, rambling speech on Inauguration Day. Lincoln forgave him and said no more about it. The morning of Lincoln’s death found Johnson sober, grave, dignified, and deeply moved. Given the tragic and unprecedented circumstances of his elevation to the presidency, it was decided collectively that it would not be appropriate for him to deliver a formal, public inaugural address.
Between the time Lincoln died and his body was removed from the Petersen house, the first newspaper account of the assassination hit the streets of Washington. The Daily Morning Chronicle announced the terrible news with a series of headlines: “MURDER OF President Lincoln. / ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE SECRETARY OF STATE. / MANNER OF ASSASSINATION / Safety of Other Members of the Cabinet. / Description of the Assassin / THE POLICE INVESTIGATION / THE SURGEONS’ LATEST REPORTS.”
Suspecting that the president’s entire cabinet had been marked for death, and hearing that a would-be assassin had been scared off from Stanton’s home, Chronicle reporters had rushed to all of their homes to discover whether they had been attacked, too:
It, therefore, is evident, that the aim of the plotters was to paralyze the country by at once striking down the head, the heart, and the arm of the country.
We went in search of the Vice-President, and found he was safe in his apartments at the Kirkwood. We called at Chief Justice Chase’s and learned there, that he too was safe. Secretaries Stanton, Welles, and Usher, and . . . the other members of the Cabinet, were with the President . . . and we are gratified to be able to announce that all the members of the Cabinet, save Mr. Seward, are unharmed.
This man Booth has played more than once at Ford’s theatre, and is, of course, acquainted with its exits and entrances, and the facility with which he escaped behind the scenes is well understood.. . . [Booth] has long been a man of intemperate habits and subject to temporary fits of great excitement. His capture is certain, but if he is true to his nature he will commit suicide, and thus appropriately end his career.
Over the next few days, newspapers in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago published reams of unsubstantiated gossip. They tantalized readers by claiming that particular arrests were only days—even hours—away; readers assumed that high-level leaders of the Confederacy, including President Jefferson Davis, who was still at large, would be named as conspirators. One Washington paper boasted that more than one hundred criminals would face trial, and another wrote that certainly twenty-one and perhaps even twenty-three would hang. The public devoured every word and clamored for more.
The news reached Elmira, New York, on the morning of April 15. John Cass, proprietor of a clothing store on the corner of Walter and Baldwin streets, took his morning paper, the Elmira Advertiser, at home, and by 7:30 a.m. he had read that the president had been assassinated but was still alive. He walked to the telegraph office opposite his store but there was no additional news. Then it came, a little after 9:00 a.m.; the president was dead. Cass crossed the street, and told his clerks to close for the day. Then he noticed a man crossing the street, making a beeline for Cass’s store. The man, dressed in a fashionable jacket that bespoke foreign tailoring, stepped inside. Cass thought he looked Canadian. The stranger asked for white shirts of a particular style and manufacturer. Cass, having none in stock, tried to interest the customer in other shirts. The man demurred, Cass recalled: “He examined them, but said he would rather have those of the make which he had been accustomed to wearing.”
Cass said he had just received some “very bad news.”
“What?” the customer asked.
“Of the death of Abraham Lincoln,” Cass said.
With that, John Surratt walked out of the store.
The back bedroom of the Petersen house was empty for the first time in twelve hours. Stanton left the room unguarded. Unlike Ford’s Theatre, the house where Lincoln died was not a crime scene. No one collected the bloody sheets, pillowcases, pillows, and towels as evidence of the great crime. Soon one of the boarders, a photographer named Julius Ulke, set up his camera in the corner of the room, facing the bed. The bloodied linens, bathed in morning light, were still wet. Ulke’s haunting photograph of the death chamber, lost for nearly a century, preserved a scene that words cannot adequately describe.
William Clark returned to the Petersen house and found his room in shambles. That night he climbed into Lincoln’s deathbed and fell asleep under the same coverlet that warmed the body of the dying pres-
Morning, April 15, 1865. Lincoln’s deathbed shortly after his body was taken home to the White House.
ident. Four days later, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, he wrote a letter to his sister, Ida F. Clark, in Boston:
Since the death of our President hundreds daily call at the house to gain admission to my room.
I was engaged nearly all of Sunday with one of Frank Leslie’s Special Artists aiding him viz making a correct drawing of the last moments of Mr. Lincoln, as I knew the position of every one present he succeeded in executing a fine sketch, which will appear in their paper the last of this week. He intends, from this same drawing to have some fine large steel engravings executed. He also took a sketch of nearly every article in my room which will appear in their paper. He wished to mention the names of all in particularly of yourself, Clara and Nannie, but I told him he must not do that, as they were members of my family and I did not want them to be made so public. He also urged me to give him my picture or at least allow him to take my sketch, but I could not see that either.
Everybody has a great desire to obtain some memento from my room so that whoever comes in has to be closely watched for fear they will steal something.
I have a lock of his hair which I have had neatly framed, also a piece of linen with a portion of his brain, the pillow case upon which he lay when he died and nearly all his wearing apparel but the latter I intend to send to Robt Lincoln as soon as the funeral is over, as I consider him the one most justly entitled to them.
The same matrass is on my bed, and the same coverlit covers me nightly that covered him while dying.
Enclosed you will find a piece of lace that Mrs. Lincoln wore on her head during the evening and was dropped by her while entering my room to see her dying husband. It is worth keeping for its historical value.
William Petersen, the previous night merely the anonymous owner of one of several hundred equally anonymous boardinghouses scattered throughout the nation’s capital, had become, by early morning, proprietor of the famous “house where Lincoln died.” That unwelcome honor—and the rabid attention of newspaper reporters and curiosity seekers—displeased him. In particular Petersen resented the implication that the president had died dishonorably, not at the Executive Mansion, but in a shabby boardinghouse. Lincoln would not have complained. Eighteen years ago he began his Washington career
in another boarding-house not much different from the one where it ended. Elected to Congress in 1846, Lincoln came to Washington for the first time in 1847 and moved into Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse across the street from the Capitol, not far from First and East Capitol streets. There was no shame in it then. Lincoln would have felt no shame in dying in one now.
Little more than an hour before Lincoln died, George Atzerodt arose from his humble quarters at the Pennsylvania House and left the hotel. A servant just back from fetching a carriage to take a woman to the 6:15 a.m. train ran into him outside:
“What brings you out so early this morning?”
“Well,” Atzerodt replied, “I have got business.”
When Atzerodt walked past Creaser’s house on F Street, between Eighth and Ninth streets, opposite the Patent Office, and along Booth’s escape route just two blocks from Ford’s Theatre, he tossed his knife under a wood carriage step, into the gutter. A few minutes later, an eagle-eyed woman looking out a third-story window in the building next to Creaser’s shoe store saw it there and sent a black woman to get it. But the woman did not want the knife in her house so a passerby, William Clendenin, volunteered to take the clue, still in its sheath, to Almarin C. Richards, the chief of police.
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