The Day Lincoln Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

Harry Hawk was still talking: “Well now, when I think of what I’ve thrown away in hard cash . . .”

  John Wilkes Booth was not listening. He was thinking. And what he was thinking of—if one can hazard a guess— was that if the curtain rose at 8 P.M. (and it usually did) then this particular scene should be on in about two hours or a little bit more; 10:15 perhaps.

  The actor had seen enough of the rehearsal. He looked at the partition between the boxes, as yet unremoved, and he walked out into the little corridor, examining the doors, and left the theater.

  There was a lot to be done, and precious little time in which to do it. Tonight, he would pull down the Colossus of Rhodes.

  The Afternoon Hours

  * * *

  12 noon

  At noon Washington City was quiet. The sun was obscured and the view was heavy with haze. Many of the government employees had taken advantage of Stanton’s order, and similar orders in other departments, and had gone home. No church bells sounded. Few pedestrians were on the streets. It was twelve o’clock on Good Friday and this was the hour that Christ had been nailed to the cross.

  It was an unnatural quiet, an uneasy quiet. The men at the long produce market on the south side of the Avenue worked at empty stalls, gutting shad, shucking oysters, butchers turned slabs of beef over in brine barrels, and all of them looked up and down the street and wondered what had become of the people.

  The people were in church, or at home. They knelt, or they dozed. Even the bars were held erect by the very few and the very strong. Some honeymooners stopped at Gardner’s studio to pose—he sitting, she standing—for a lifetime memento. At the foot of Fourteenth Street, the daily thunder of army wagons could be heard on the loose planking of Long Bridge, coming home from war.

  James R. Ford, in a buggy, was returning from the Treasury Department, laden with flags for decorating the President’s Box. He was walking his horse along E Street, and was turning off onto Tenth when he saw Booth. Ford pulled the horse up, and they chatted. It was a dull day, Ford admitted, but, with Grant and Lincoln present, the house was sure to be a sellout. Booth asked him if he had got all the flags he wanted and Ford said no, that he had asked Jones for a thirty-six-foot American flag that the Treasury used on special occasions, but that Captain Jones had told him that the flag had been on loan for the illumination and wasn’t back. Ford wanted it to drape down the upper floors of the front of the theater.

  The two men parted, Booth saying that he would try to attend if he could, but not promising. James got back to Ford’s and, after getting his bunting indoors, asked an actor to write a special notice for the Washington Star and the National Republican announcing the presence of Grant and Lincoln as honored guests tonight. The actor said that it would have to wait; he was busy writing the regular advertisements.

  James wrote the announcements himself, and then he worried about the propriety of it. Until it was on paper, it had seemed all right to capitalize on the presence of two great men. Now, as he read it back, it seemed cheap. He called young Harry and asked for an opinion. They read it aloud together and it seemed all right. They agreed that such an announcement could harm no one, and, at the same time, it was bound to draw the patronage of transients.

  A colored boy delivered both by hand.

  Wilkes Booth walked up to G Street, and across G to Seventh, and stepped into Howard’s Stable. The stableman knew him, and Booth asked that his big one-eyed roan be delivered to the little stable behind Ford’s Theatre and tethered there. He paid the feed bill for the horse, and left. Then he took the long walk down across the Mall to Pumphrey’s Stable, and asked for a sorrel which he had been renting for six weeks past. The stableman said that the sorrel was out and Mr. Booth could not have him. Instead, he said, he had a fine, fast roan mare for hire, a little nervous perhaps, but a good fast riding horse.

  The stableman brought her out and turned her around inside the door. Booth studied the animal. She was young, about fourteen hands high, and she had croup chafes on her quarters. Her mane and tail were black. She had one white sock and a star on her forehead. Booth liked her skittish bearing.

  “Have her saddled at four o’clock,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  George Atzerodt, new resident at Kirkwood House, Twelfth Street at the Avenue, was in and out of the hotel in the manner of a baggy-pants comic who knows that if he does something ridiculous three times it will induce laughter. On the hotel register, he had scrawled his right name: “G. A. Atzerodt” and, although he had not been in his room on the second floor since early morning, David Herold had been in it to leave clothes and weapons.

  Atzerodt spent most of his time drinking at the bar and trying to be disarming. He asked so many questions of the bartender and the few customers that he excited suspicion. Where exactly, he wanted to know, is the Vice President’s room? Does he have a guard? Could any citizen knock on the door and have a chat with him? A man in his position doesn’t carry firearms, does he? How about the nigger who stands behind him when he eats—where does he go when Johnson goes back to his quarters? Does the Vice President stay home at night or does he go out? Would you say that he was a brave man or a coward? Ever see any soldiers around him?

  The men at the bar studied Atzerodt, and the stupid face squeezed into a smile, and they relaxed. The glances around the bar were a shrug—this man was a drunken outlander.

  Booth went back to the National Hotel to dress. He wanted calf boots and new spurs and a black suit with tight trousers, for riding. He wanted a good black hat too, and his wallet with the pictures of his girls, and the diary which had been bare of words. He wanted a small pocket compass, his gold timepiece, a small brass derringer, a gimlet and a long sheathed knife which could be stuck inside the trousers along the left side.

  There would be no more failures; he knew that. Lincoln would die tonight, or Booth would. Or perhaps both. The last possibility did not frighten him. The actor was aware that the chances were that he would not get away, rather than that he would. Pulling the huge statue down with him was the important thing. The only thing.

  If he worried, it was over his fellow conspirators. No one knew better than he that these men—his band of irregulars— were ciphers; nothings; buffoon assassins. A sniveling alcoholic, a giggling boy, and a brainless automaton. Atzerodt would be assigned to kill Vice President Johnson and Wilkes would be surprised if George approached the man at all. However, Johnson was the least important of the men he wanted to kill—a white trash tailor—and that’s why Atzerodt was assigned to him.* Seward was more important, and Paine would really kill the man if . . . if . . . if Paine could find him.

  In the past several weeks, Booth had tried to make Washington City comprehensible to Lewis Paine, but the ex-soldier became more confused. He could not understand uptown from downtown, north from south, or right from left. Like a hound dog, he would have to be taken to the bush the bird nested in, and pointed. Davey Herold would do that. So, in substance, he had to use two men to get one sick man killed, and a third man to get nothing done. Only he, John Wilkes Booth, had the courage, the intelligence, and the patriotism to walk in “among a thousand of his friends” and slay the Despot Himself.

  The plan called for meeting afterward on the road to Surrattsville. And this too, the actor must have known, was a dream. Each of them would bungle and fail, and each would bring sudden death on himself. In cool assessment, Booth was pretty sure that he would not be on the road to Surrattsville tonight. Getting into the State Box was a formidable problem; getting out of the theater and away was going to be almost impossible.

  For a while, he toyed with the idea of taking Paine with him to Ford’s Theatre. Paine could be assigned to kill General Grant while Booth was dispatching President Lincoln. But the actor dropped the plan quickly. It would be infinitely more difficult to get two persons into that box tonight than one; and it would be more than twice as hard to get two people out of that theater, than one. Besides, if Paine assassinated Grant, an
d Booth failed to kill Lincoln, the actor would be a fool in history. His theatrical sense warned him not to share billing with anyone. He would do it himself—Lincoln with the gun; Grant with the knife.

  Mrs. Surratt and Miss Honora Fitzpatrick left the boardinghouse and walked over to St. Patrick’s Church, on Tenth Street between E and F, to pray during a part of the Three Hours Agony. The church was dim and cool. The Crucifix was covered with purple cloth; so were the statues of the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph. And the Stations of the Cross which lined the walls of the church. Communicants knelt in pews and their lips moved in sibilant whispers. Their eyes blinked toward the now empty repository of the Holy Eucharist.

  Others, seeking salvation, knelt in the Baptist Church, in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in the Methodist churches, the Episcopal. In Georgia, by the clock, He was dying; in Rome He was already dead; in California He was not yet on the cross.

  1 p.m.

  Young Mr. Harry Ford stopped next door at Ferguson’s Restaurant for lunch. He saw big, ham-handed James P. Ferguson behind the cigar counter and he said: “Your favorite, General Grant, is going to be in the theater tonight. If you want to see him, you had better go get a seat.”

  Ferguson thanked him, asked a question or two, took off his white apron and ran next door to get a seat. In fact, he wanted two. There was a little girl who lived next door to him, and she showered a shy adoration on big Jim, and now, with her mother’s permission, Ferguson would take her with him.

  This man was sensitive to history and to historical personages. He had seen Mr. Lincoln many times, but he would still run out of his restaurant to watch him pass by in a carriage. However, he had never seen the Little Giant and tonight would be his opportunity. Mr. Maddox was in the box office and he tried to sell Ferguson two good seats downstairs, but the restaurateur told him that he wasn’t going to see Our American Cousin; in fact, he wouldn’t care if he never saw it. What he wanted to know was, will the President use the usual boxes—7 and 8? Maddox said he would. Then, said Ferguson, I want two front-row seats on the left-hand side of the dress circle, because that’s the only place in the house with a view into the Presidential Box.

  He got them.

  In President Lincoln’s office, the Cabinet meeting continued. It had passed its second hour, and the President was pleased to note that, except for minor differences of opinion his Cabinet seemed to be agreed that, if the South were helped to get on its economic feet, the effect would be to enhance the welfare of the North. No one, including Lincoln, desired to spoon-feed the South and, by the same token, no one wanted to heap additional punishment on the defeated states. Stanton was for a sterner peace than the President, but the difference between the men was not beyond bridging.

  In and out of Congress and the newspapers there were varying shades of public opinion about this matter, ranging all the way from those who desired to re-embrace the South and start anew, to the bitterness of Senator Ben Wade, who hoped that the Negroes of the South would be goaded to insurrection, feeling that, “if they could contrive to slay one half of their oppressors, the other half would hold them in the highest respect and no doubt treat them with justice.”

  Horace Greeley, an editorial flirt, had been Lincoln’s friend and was now his enemy. A year ago, he had parted politically from Lincoln when, in the New York Tribune, he had begged for peace at almost any price. Now he opposed Lincoln politically and personally.

  After lunch, in New York, he went to the office of his managing editor, Sidney Howard Gray, and handed to him a sheaf of papers written in longhand. It was an editorial for tomorrow’s paper and would be off the composing room floor at 2 A.M. Gray, accustomed to Greeley’s attacks on the President, read it after the boss left and found it to be so “brutal, bitter, sarcastic and personal” that, though he had it set in type, he hid the galley.

  The President was aware, on this day and at this meeting, that, in America, he was now a minority political leader. The entire South, temporarily disenfranchised, opposed him. The Democratic party of the North opposed him. The radicals in his own Republican party opposed him. Most of the influential newspapers opposed him. Even the mild Senator Morrill of Maine found it “truly most difficult to speak of the elements of Lincoln’s character without offending public sense.” He was scorned, maligned, spat upon as a person lacking decision, character, intelligence and honor. He was an ape, a buffoon, a rascal of dirty mind and dirty jokes. He was held in low esteem by politicians and molders of public opinion. The only persons who loved him were the people, and they would not fully realize it until tomorrow.

  To all of which Mr. Lincoln said: “As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer. . . .”

  That is why, at this meeting, he was determined to block out the form of the peace no matter how long he had to hold the Cabinet together. He did not expect it to be formalized by signed documents; he wanted basic agreements. If that could be achieved, and the machinery to implement it were set in motion, then he would consider that what he had started out to achieve in 1861 had been, in the main, realized.

  He noted with satisfaction that when Secretary of the Navy Welles offered his views about the course to be followed in Virginia, Secretaries Stanton and Dennison agreed, and the others said nothing in opposition. Thus, even among men who distrusted each other, Lincoln had harmony on this one day.

  Frederick Seward saw “visible relief and content” on the face of the President and said that, in the regular order of business, none could refrain from chatting about “the great news” of the war’s sudden end. Like boys who had recovered from an interminable illness, they tried to stick to their schoolwork, but they could not refrain from looking out the window at the sunshine and the lush grass and the dizzying atmosphere of feeling good.

  The President asked General Grant to tell the Cabinet the details of General Lee’s surrender, and Grant did, detracting from his own role and saying nothing to lessen the figure of Lee. When he had finished, Mr. Lincoln spoke.

  “What terms did you make for the common soldiers?”

  Grant fingered his beard and said: “I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.”

  In front of Kirkwood House, Vice President Johnson, hands thrust in pockets, scowled at the unnatural quiet of the city and walked back into the hotel. He went to his rooms, closed the door, and sat reading.

  A short time later, George Atzerodt came in with a bundle and walked up the curving staircase to his room. If he made any noise in his alcoholic anxiety, it is not recorded that the Vice President, in a room almost directly below, made any complaint. He deposited huge pistols under the pillow on his bed and a knife under the sheet. He gave passing glances at the coat and materials left by Herold, and then he went back downstairs, where he asked the room clerk to point out the Vice President’s room, and asked where Johnson was right now.

  The room was pointed out to him, and he was told that the Vice President had just come in. George Atzerodt’s reaction was to straighten up in shocked surprise, and to step into the bar. He was there only a short time when he paid for his drinks and walked out.

  A few minutes later, the Vice President, having scanned a newspaper, glanced at his timepiece and got up and put his coat on and left. He had an appointment, an after-lunch appointment, with the President. Neither of them had been sure how long the Cabinet meeting would take, so Lincoln had suggested that Johnson “drop over” early in the afternoon.

  Johnson walked up Pennsylvania Avenue, across Fifteenth at the Treasury Building, and around the corner to the White House. At the gate, two soldier guards recognized him and snapped to attention. He nodded without smiling and walked on in. At the front door, he was met by a colored doorman, a soldier with carbine and bayonet, and the President’s personal guard, Crook.

  They held the door for him a
nd he walked inside, down the corridor and up the staircase until he reached the big doors of the President’s office. The soldier at that door said that he was sorry, but that the Cabinet meeting was still going on, and the President had not had his lunch. Mr. Johnson said that he would stroll around until the President was ready.

  2 p.m.

  The early editions of the afternoon newspapers were being hawked on the streets and, on page 1 of the National Intelligencer, the top half of column four was taken up with an advertisement from Grover’s Theatre, which announced

  THE

  THE

  THE

  THE

  GORGEOUS PLAY

  GORGEOUS PLAY

  GORGEOUS PLAY

  GORGEOUS PLAY

  OF

  OF

  OF

  OF

  ALADDIN

  ALADDIN

  ALADDIN

  ALADDIN

  OR

  OR

  OR

  OR

  THE WONDERFUL LAMP

  THE WONDERFUL LAMP

  THE WONDERFUL LAMP

  THE WONDERFUL LAMP

  Underneath this, in a small advertisement, Ford’s Theatre announced the “Benefit and last appearance of Miss Laura Keene in her celebrated comedy of Our American Cousin.” The Washington Evening Star was on the street with three small announcements, spread through the newspaper, which announced the presence of General Grant and Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre this evening.

  Under “City Items,” the announcement said:

  Ford’s Theatre—“Honor To Our Soldiers.” A new and patriotic song and chorus has been written by Mr. H. B. Phillips, and will be sung this evening by the Entire Company to do honor to Lieutenant General Grant and President Lincoln and Lady, who visit the Theatre in compliment to Miss Laura Keene, whose benefit and last appearance is announced in the bills of the day. The music of the above song is composed by Prof. W. Withers Jr.