The Day Lincoln Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  The city was quiet on Tuesday. The people husbanded their strength for the evening and, shortly after 6 P.M. when the sun set, the festivities began. It was as spectacular as the earlier illumination and, when darkness had dusted the final alley, the Lee mansion in the hills across the river was aglow with lights, and freed slaves danced on the lawns before it, humming “The Year of Jubilee.” The city swam in light and the people were as festive as though there had been no celebration like this in years.

  The weather was warm and misty. The crowd before the White House had changed personnel two or three times and was now much larger. The people filled Pennsylvania Avenue and trampled the shrubs of the grounds. Small sections of the people were coned by the gas lamps and an observant reporter wrote: “There is something terrible in their enthusiasm.”

  A hanging mob had come to listen to a man of mercy.

  The Marine band played marches. The crowd chanted “Lincoln! Lincoln!” The people undulated, those in back pressing forward, those in front holding the line. Two who pressed forward and managed to achieve a good position beside a tall tree were John Wilkes Booth and his friend Lewis Paine. Booth was impelled to hear the man he hated.

  The people were becoming impatient when a French window was opened and the curtains pulled back on both sides. In silhouette, the President could be seen, waving both hands over his head. The cheers were frenzied. It was as though the people had not believed, until now, that this man could win. He waited gravely until he had near silence and then he unrolled a sheaf of foolscap and then rolled it in the opposite direction so that, as he held the pages, they would lie flat.

  An arm appeared beside him, holding a lamp with a china shade. Mr. Lincoln adjusted his metal-rimmed spectacles and then began to read, so softly at first that the crowd heard but a whispering sound, then louder as he sensed the need for it until, after a few minutes, his voice was plain to all except those on the far side of the street.

  They listened for exultation, and there was none. They strained for eloquence, and there was none. They waited patiently for vengeance, and there was none.

  The President talked about Reconstruction. He talked soberly about postwar problems, as he saw them. He told them about the voting situation in Louisiana, where the lists were down from forty thousand to twelve thousand, arithmetic which only proved that Southerners would stay home from Yankee-sponsored elections. To cure this, Lincoln prescribed strong medicine.

  “It is also unsatisfactory to some,” he said slowly, “that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man.” The crowd was quiet. “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who served our cause as soldiers. . . .”

  John Wilkes Booth sucked in a long breath. He tapped Lewis Paine on the arm. “That’s the last speech he will ever make,” the actor said. The two men edged out of the crowd.

  Lincoln finished his talk and the applause was restrained and respectful. He bowed and stepped back from the window. The second speaker was Senator James Harlan of Iowa, now Secretary-designate of the Department of the Interior. One day in the future, his daughter would marry Robert Lincoln.

  Mr. Harlan had excellent intentions, but he did not know that a good speaker never asks an explosive mob a question.

  “What,” he said with arms outstretched, with silvery syllables echoing in the trees, “shall be done with these brethren of ours?”

  As one, the crowd roared, “Hang’ em!”

  The Senator smiled in the face of thunder and said that, after all, the President might exercise the power to pardon.

  “Never!” the crowd screamed.

  The Senator tried to educate and inform by suggesting that the great mass of Southern people were not guilty. He got silence. The Senator was not equal to further effort. He finished haltingly by proclaiming that he, for one, was willing to trust the future to the President of the United States. He left the window and the people gave him an enthusiastic hand. The Marine band struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and, in a soft drizzle, the crowd broke up.

  No one had, on this night of victory, counted the dead. The United States would never officially count the Confederate dead, would never even keep records of the Confederate wounded. Still, the North paid more in blood and treasure than the South. About 110,000 men, largely young and fair, died in battle or died of wounds. About a quarter of a million more died of diseases attributable to war. The South’s losses, in battle and by disease, were about 133,000. Both sides paid in dead a little more than one and a half percent of the population of 31,000,000 people.

  Inside the Executive Mansion, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln entertained a few friends. In the Red Room, he sat beside her on a sofa and listened to her birdy chatter. At ten, tea and cakes were served and, shortly afterward, the friends began to make their adieux. That is, all except Ward Hill Lamon, Senator Harlan and his daughter, and one or two others. The dominant emotion seemed to be relief rather than happiness. It was difficult to talk in an evening of no tensions.

  To make conversation, Mrs. Lincoln said that, in the midst of joy, her husband’s face looked long and solemn. The President said that his mind had been heavy. The faces turned toward him.

  “It seems strange,” he said slowly, as though feeling for the words, “how much there is in the Bible about dreams. There are, I think, some sixteen chapters in the Old Testament and four or five in the New in which dreams are mentioned; and there are many other passages scattered throughout the book which refer to visions. If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.”

  Mr. Lincoln studied the suddenly solemn faces of his friends. He sat forward, elbows on knees, the veined hands describing small gestures.

  “Nowadays,” he said apologetically, “dreams are regarded as very foolish, and are seldom told, except by old women and by young men and maidens in love.”

  Mrs. Lincoln looked worried. “Why?” she said. “Do you believe in dreams?”

  “I can’t say that I do,” he said, hedging against the nightmares she had suffered for many years, “but I had one the other night which has haunted me ever since. After it occurred, the first time I opened the Bible, strange as it may appear, it was at the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis, which relates the wonderful dream Jacob had. I turned to other passages, and seemed to encounter a dream or a vision wherever I looked. I kept on turning the leaves of the old book, and everywhere my eyes fell upon passages recording matters strangely in keeping with my own thoughts—supernatural visitations, dreams, visions, and so forth.”

  Mrs. Lincoln clutched her bosom. “You frighten me,” she breathed. “What is the matter?”

  At once the President tried to dismiss it. “I am afraid,” he said, “that I have done wrong to mention the subject at all. But somehow, the thing has gotten possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.”

  He tried to talk of other things. Mrs. Lincoln would not be put off. She asked about the dream. Mr. Lincoln’s face settled again in melancholy and he agreed to tell about it.

  “About ten days ago,* I retired very late. I had been waiting up for important dispatches. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.

  “There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

  “I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arri
ved in the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.

  “‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers.

  “‘The President,’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin.’

  “Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night, and, although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”

  Mr. Lincoln fell silent. The story was over. Ward Hill Lamon looked at the faces in the room. No one spoke. Mrs. Lincoln looked frightened.

  “That is horrid,” she said. “I wish you had not told it. I am glad I don’t believe in dreams, or I should be in terror from this time forth.”

  The President smiled. “It was only a dream, Mother. Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”

  Senator Harlan arose to say good night. Secretary of the Interior Usher elected to stay a moment longer. So did Ward Hill Lamon. The President had asked Lamon, as a favor, to go to Richmond as his personal representative, and to see that certain anticipated complications at a state convention were smoothed. “Hill” had already agreed to go. Now, when the others had departed, and Mrs. Lincoln had said her good nights, Usher and Lamon tried to persuade the President not to go out anymore after nightfall. Ward Hill Lamon practically begged the President not to go out until he returned from Richmond.

  “Usher,” Mr. Lincoln said banteringly, “this boy is a monomaniac on the subject of my safety. I can hear him, or hear of his being around, at all times of the night, to prevent somebody from murdering me. He thinks I shall be killed, and we think he is going crazy.” He grasped Hill’s shoulders in his big hands and shook gently. “What does anybody want to assassinate me for? If anyone wants to do so, he can do it any day or night, if he is ready to give his life for mine. It is nonsense.”

  The Secretary of the Interior shook his head in disagreement. “Mr. Lincoln,” he said, “it is well to listen and give heed to Lamon. He is thrown among people that give him opportunities to know more about such matters than we can know.”

  Lamon brought up the subject of the dream, and the President chided him, saying: “Don’t you see how it will turn out? In this dream it was not me but some other fellow that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on someone else.” Mr. Lincoln was trying hard to laugh. His friends stared at him. “And that reminds me,” he said, “of an old farmer in Illinois whose family was made sick by eating greens. Some poisonous herb had got into the mess, and members of the family were in danger of dying. There was a half-witted boy in the family called Jake, and always afterward when they had greens the old man would say: ‘Now, afore we risk these greens, let’s try them on Jake. If he stands them, we’re all right.’

  “Just so with me. As long as this imaginary assassin continues to exercise himself on others, I can stand it.” The President laughed alone. “Well,” he said sobering and pulling his watch, “let it go. I think the Lord in His own good time and way will work this out all right. God knows what is best.”

  Lamon again asked for a promise that the President would not go out after dark while the marshal was in Richmond. Usher shook hands with his old friend and turned to leave.

  “Well,” said Lincoln, “I promise to do the best I can toward it. Good-by. God bless you, Hill.”*

  On the subject of dreams, the guard Crook later recalled his midnight patrols outside the President’s bedroom. In the stillness, with only the squeak of floorboards to punctuate his pacing, Crook often heard Lincoln moan in his sleep. “I would stand there and listen,” the guard said, “until a sort of panic stole over me. At last I would walk softly away, feeling as if I had been listening at a keyhole.”

  On the day before Mr. Lincoln’s appointment with destiny, General and Mrs. Grant arrived in Washington. This was on Thursday, April 13. The hero of the war wanted to go up to Burlington, New Jersey, to see his two children and, with Lee out of the way, Grant felt that Sherman and Meade could handle Joe Johnston. He stopped off in Washington only because Stanton wanted him to advise how to cut army personnel and to cancel certain army contracts. The general figured that he could do this chore in a day—or two at most.

  The Grants were consciously unostentatious. They did not like the theater or parades or public appearances, and did not care much for dining out. At Appomattox Courthouse, Ulysses S. Grant expressly ordered that there be no victory celebration by the Army of the Potomac. Now this morning, he arrived at the Willard Hotel so quietly that the management was flustered. At the desk, he stood short and stocky and dusty, gray beard a little bit stained with brown, and explained that he wanted a sitting room and a bedroom for overnight. If he needed the suite for an extra night, he would let the management know. With the Grants were Colonel Horace Porter, the general’s aide, and two sergeants who carried luggage.

  In the rooms, Mrs. Grant unpacked and the general said that he and Colonel Porter would walk around the corner to the War Department and do some work. When the two stepped out on Pennsylvania Avenue, Grant was recognized and, in a trice, was surrounded by a hero-worshipping crowd. The people cheered. Porter, dismayed, tried to clear a passage for his chief. He found that he was helpless. Metropolitan policemen rescued the two officers and persuaded them to accept a carriage and a cavalry escort for the three-block trip.

  At the War Department, the general was given a desk and, after a round of handshaking and congratulations, began the work of cutting the expenses of a wartime army. He recommended that the draft be stopped at once; he marked down the numbers of certain divisions and brigades which could be mustered out of service without impairing the power of the army to enforce the peace; he labored over contracts for shovels and ambulances and ammunition and beds and blankets and bullets which, in his estimation, would not be needed.

  In the afternoon, Grant received an invitation from Mrs. Lincoln to take a drive around the city in the evening with her and her husband. The general did not want to go. He knew little about the social amenities—barely enough to make him fretful about his rights in such matters—and he went into Stanton’s office and told him about it. Stanton said that the general might refuse on the grounds of impending work. Grant followed this advice, although he might have wondered why his wife was not invited.

  In the late afternoon, Stanton was leaving the War Department when he stopped in to say good night and to remind the general that he and his wife were expected at an informal at-home with the Stantons. Grant said that he wanted to finish a few more items on his list of recommendations, and that he and his wife would be at the Stanton home later. He told the Secretary of War that, while he had successfully turned down the invitation for an evening drive with the Lincolns, he now had a second one—this from the President. Lincoln wanted him to attend the theater tomorrow night.

  Stanton was irritated. In the presence of telegrapher Bates, he urged Grant not to attend. He said that he and other Cabinet members had warned Lincoln about these public appearances many times, and that he, Stanton, had made it a rule to turn down all such invitations. Washington City, the Secretary of War said, was “Secesh” to the core, a place of wild-eyed plots and explosive Southern temperament. Stanton urged the general to refuse the invitation and asked him to use his good offices to keep Lincoln from attending the theater.

  What happened at this hour—6 P.M.—is not altogether clear, but it is important. The invitation to take the evening drive probably arrived from Mrs. Lincoln shortly after lunch-time. After it was declined (the White House record shows that Colonel Horace Porter visited the President’s office in mid-afternoon), it seems credible that Mrs. Lincoln pressed upon her husband the public adulation being accorded to the general, and asked him to
invite Grant to the theater as a means of giving the people a chance to look at the hero of the hour. The President told several friends on this day and again on Friday that he had no inclination to go to the theater himself, but felt that the public was entitled to see the general.

  Although there have been explanations of this matter, and Grant added to them years later, the weight of evidence would indicate that the general, courageous in battle, lacked the courage to decline the second invitation. At one point in the conversation with the Secretary of War, the general said that “it was embarrassing to accept” the invitation to the theater. The words “it was embarrassing to accept” sound as though he had already accepted.

  Still, Grant did not want to go. And neither did Lincoln.

  That night, the Grants were entertained by the Stantons and two soldiers stood guard outside the house opposite Franklin Square. Some strollers asked who was inside and the soldiers, with pride, said General Ulysses S. Grant. A crowd collected and set up a clamor for a speech. The Secretary of War came out, and uttered some appropriate words from the steps. The general waved to the crowd and said nothing.

  The social broke up early because both men had work to do. Grant said that he wanted to finish his task tomorrow, and be off for Burlington. Stanton said that he wanted to continue work tonight on a paper that the President had asked him to draw up in time for tomorrow’s Cabinet meeting.

  The secretary worked very late that night. The President retired early.

  The Conspiracy

  It is likely that John Wilkes Booth first decided to dispose of Abraham Lincoln the day after the presidential election of 1864. The actor despised the President before that; in the campaign that year Booth predicted that, if Lincoln was elected, he would set up a dynasty. Lincoln had been Booth’s emotional whipping boy for at least four years.