by Jim Bishop
A small advertisement in the Star pointed up the fact that the name of Mrs. Grant was not omitted by accident or by typographical error:
Lieut. Gen’l Grant, President and Mrs. Lincoln have secured the State Box at Ford’s Theatre tonight, to witness Laura Keene’s American Cousin.
Two hundred and fifty miles to the north, the Whig Press of Middletown, New York, published the news that President Lincoln had been assassinated. No one found out the sources of this “news,” or why the editor published it without checking by telegraph with General John A. Dix, commandant in New York, who would be among the first to know any such momentous news, or with the President’s secretary, John G. Nicolay, at the White House.
In this time of poor communications, it is puzzling that, at the same hour, the people of Manchester, New Hampshire, were buzzing with rumors that President Lincoln had been shot. In far-off St. Joseph, Minnesota, forty miles from the nearest telegraph office, men met other men on the street and asked, in horrified tones, if they had heard the news that President Lincoln had been killed by an assassin.
The Cabinet meeting was drawing to a close. The interested parties were in basic agreement and the President said that he guessed they would all have to wait until later to hear from General Sherman. He got to his feet, and pulled his heavy gold watch from his vest. The other men arose and the meeting was adjourned.
The general, with Colonel Porter a pace behind him, walked over to the President and thanked him for the opportunity of attending a Cabinet session. Lincoln said it was a particularly amicable one and he was glad the general could be present. Grant then brought up the matter of the theater party. He fidgeted and seemed embarrassed and he said that Mrs. Grant would be sorely disappointed if their visit to the children was delayed any further. In fact, Mrs. Grant planned to take the evening train to Philadelphia.
Lincoln, looking down on his hero, joshed the commanding general and said that there would be plenty of time to see the children, and reminded him that the people would get great pleasure out of seeing at firsthand the man who had won the war. Grant subsided. He had not said “I will not go.” Nor had he followed Mr. Stanton’s suggestion and said: “You should not go. Your life may be in danger.”
The groups were still chatting in the room when Colonel Porter brought a note to Grant. It was from Mrs. Grant and it said that she hoped that the general would not delay their departure on the six o’clock train. This was exactly what Grant needed to face up to the President. He showed the note, and said that he must decide not to remain in Washington. The President understood that this was a final decision.
Contrary to report Stanton did not participate in this conversation and there is no record that he stood beside his general and said: “Neither of you should go to the theater tonight.” As the meeting broke up, the President shook hands with Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch and said: “We must look to you, Mr. Secretary, for the money to pay off the soldiers.”
“You should look to the people, Mr. President,” said McCulloch.
The President smiled. “They have not failed us thus far,” he said, “and I do not think they will now.”
Frederick Seward bowed gravely and made his farewell. He reminded the President that a new British Minister, Sir Frederick Bruce, was in Washington awaiting his presentation to the President.
“Would any time tomorrow be convenient?” Seward said.
The President clasped his hands behind his back and studied the ceiling.
“Tomorrow at two o’clock?” he said.
“Yes,” said Seward. “In the Blue Room?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said. “The Blue Room.”
He had a small boy’s scorn of the spurious expressions of esteem engendered in a formal meeting between ambassador and chief of state and he particularly winced at the florid speeches which the State Department made him read to newly arrived ambassadors.
“Don’t forget to send up the speech beforehand,” he said. “I like to look it over.”
As the men left the office, Grant asked Stanton if he might stop by at the office later and see him.
“I’ll be there until evening,” Stanton said.
Lincoln left the office at about 2:20 for lunch with Mrs. Lincoln. He did not see Vice President Johnson and, as the coquettish weather had become sunny and warm again, it may be that Johnson was walking around the grounds. There is no record of what conversation transpired at the lunch but it is almost certain that he told Mrs. Lincoln what he would say to others later in the day: Grant is not coming. I do not feel like going to the theater tonight and, if it were not for disappointing so many people, I wouldn’t.
On H Street, Wiechman was writing a letter in his room. There was a knock. It was Mrs. Surratt. She said that she was sorry to intrude on his time, but that she had just received a letter from Mr. Charles Calvert and that Mr. Calvert said that she would have to go to the country again if she expected to collect her $479 from Mr. Nothey.
Wiechman folded his letter and said that he would drive her. She gave him ten dollars and asked him to get a horse and buggy. Just as Louis Wiechman was leaving the house (this was 2:30 P.M.), John Wilkes Booth walked in. The inquisitive boarder was burning to remain and listen, but he had no excuse to do so, and, as he turned to close the front door behind him, he looked around and saw Booth with his back to the marble fireplace, one arm flung across it. Mrs. Surratt stood facing him.
The big fellow hurried around the corner to Howard’s Stable and got a horse and buggy as quickly as possible and trotted the horse back to the boardinghouse. He hitched the horse and started up the inverted V steps, just as Mrs. Surratt came out of the upstairs sitting room and said that, now that Booth had left, she was ready to go. He turned back to the buggy and she said: “Wait, Mr. Wiechman. I must get those things of Booth’s.”
“Those things of Booth’s” turned out to be a small package, about the size of a saucer, covered with brown paper and tied two ways with string. She got into the carriage and put the package on the floor between her feet.
“I must be careful,” she said, as Louis swung the horse out on H Street and started toward the Navy Yard Bridge. “It’s brittle. Glass. I do not want it to get wet.”
The government clerk waited to hear more, but the widow had nothing further to say. She talked about the uncertainty of the weather and of how a body hardly knew what to wear these days, with rain and chill and then a hot sun and no breeze, but that the nice time of year would be along in about a week and, down in the country, they had been plowing and planting for two weeks and they were lucky that there hadn’t been a frost because, when Mr. Surratt was alive, she had learned what one frost can do, if it is a proper freezing frost.
All Wiechman wanted to know was what was in the little package. Why did Booth stop by to give Mrs. Surratt a package? The widow did not say, and yet, if she had wanted to hide the package, she could have put it in one of her big carryall bags. Then too, if the contents were of any consequence, why was it that, a few moments after Booth had gone, Mrs. Surratt almost forgot the package and asked Wiechman to “Wait, Mr. Wiechman. I must get those things of Booth’s.”
They were on the far side of the Navy Yard Bridge when Mrs. Surratt asked Wiechman if he knew that her son John was away—far away—on a trip. Wiechman said that he had not seen John around the house in some time and assumed that he had left Washington City. The mother said that he would not be back for a while. Wiechman, without saying so, assumed that she meant he was in Canada because he had often heard John speak of Canada in conjunction with the Confederate Purchasing Commission.
In Washington, Mr. Booth walked five blocks to Herndon House and upstairs to the corner room where Lewis Paine lay open-eyed on the bed, hands clasped behind head. Booth conferred with him; told him the plan for tonight, and advised him to check out of the room. A horse would be in the little stable behind Ford’s Theatre. They set a time for meeting, and Booth left.
An acto
r came out front to the box office and told Harry Ford that the rehearsal was over, and he could start decorating the State Box. Mr. Ford asked someone to tell the ticket seller, Tom Raybold, to do it but word came back that Mr. Raybold was ill and might be in later. Ford dropped his work and went backstage and ordered Ned Spangler and Jake Ritterspaugh, a new employee, to help him. Unasked, Joseph Burrough came along too. Mr. Burrough was called Johnny Peanut because, when the theater first opened in 1863, that’s what he used to sell out front.
The partition was removed and again Boxes 7 and 8 were one. A cane chair was placed outside the little white door, facing the dress circle, for the President’s guard. Joe Simms, a colored boy, was sent upstairs to the Ford apartment to get the red upholstered rocker reserved for the President. He carried it through the alley upside down, on his head. Below the stage, in the subterranean passage, were two sofas which were also brought up and dusted and put in the box. Three good chairs were placed along the back of the double box.
The sofas were set in the front of the boxes, facing the stage. These were for the ladies. An upholstered chair was set between them, for one of the gentlemen. The President’s rocker was placed at the very rear of the second box—number 7, in a corner where the President would be hidden from the audience by a heavy contoured drape.
Ford got onstage and climbed a stage ladder to set the flags in place. He draped big American banners across the billowing façades of both boxes. He had a small jack staff and a socket between the boxes and here he set a Treasury Department regimental flag. The space over it was bare, and Captain Jones had given him a small steel engraving of President George Washington. He called for hammer and nail and hung this picture over the Treasury flag.
Then he stepped down, pulled the ladder away, and surveyed his work. He asked for comment from Spangler and the others and they said that it looked impressive. Mr. Ford had more bunting to hang, but, after reflection, he decided not to overdo the decorations. He wished that he had a lithograph of General Grant, or perhaps Grant’s first regimental flag, but he hadn’t. It would have to do, just the way it was.
Mr. Ford went back into the box and checked over every item of furniture, to be sure that they were clean and placed exactly right. Then he opened the door to 7, and closed it. He opened the door to 8, and closed it. Everything was in order. It didn’t occur to him that neither door locked.
Ford’s Theatre was ready.
3 p.m.
Lewis Paine walked into the sitting room at Herndon House. Mrs. Murray, the wife of the proprietor, was sitting at the desk. The gladiator said that he was leaving for Baltimore. He never wasted time on pleasantries or politeness, and expected neither in return. She asked if he wanted his bill. He said that was why he was here.
Mrs. Murray made it out, and Paine paid it. He turned to leave and the lady said that it was too early for the regular dinner, only three o’clock, but that she could have some cold beef and potatoes sent up to the dining room. Paine said all right.
He ate and left.
A man walked into the President’s office, at the White House, with a ready-made smile. He looked behind the desk and saw no one, and the smile died. This was Chaplain Edward D. Neill, of the First Minnesota Infantry. In the doorway behind him stood a colonel from Vermont. The chaplain was now a clerk at the White House, and had used his favorable position to have Lincoln brevet the colonel a Brigadier General.
Now, finding the office empty, he took the further liberty of examining the papers on the President’s desk, trying to find the signed commission. He was shuffling papers as quietly as possible when the President, as quietly as possible, approached the desk. Chaplain Neill looked up, startled. Mr. Lincoln was chewing on an apple.
Neill explained that he was looking for the signed commission, that he was sure that the President wouldn’t mind and, as he was talking, Mr. Lincoln pulled the bell cord.
“For whom are you ringing?” the chaplain said nervously.
There was a hint of humor in Lincoln’s eye as he grabbed the reverend by the lapel, leaned close, and, in a stage whisper, said: “Andrew Johnson!”
The chaplain said: “I will come in again,” and left.
The thing that irked Lincoln was Johnson’s acting like a one-man proletariat. Johnson never tired of telling of his humble beginnings, as though it were something exclusive to him. He acted like a swamp snob and, to Lincoln, the original rail splitter, the penniless log-cabin rustic, it was anathema.
The Vice President had sought interviews with the President and he worried when, on pretexts, they were denied. When Congress adjourned, he had stayed on in Washington City, hoping to heal whatever sore was on Lincoln’s mind. Now he had been sent for, and he was early and had paced the grounds outside waiting for the Cabinet meeting to be over.
Johnson felt relieved when the Chief Executive grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously and called him “Andy.” The two sat on opposite sides of the desk and talked for twenty minutes. Neither told what this conference was about, but the President was not a man to mention Inauguration Day. When the appointment was made, Lincoln had told his secretary, John Nicolay, that reconstruction was a brand-new problem and that the Vice President should be made acquainted with it and should understand the wishes of the President.
The probability is that Lincoln timed the first interview immediately after the first peacetime Cabinet session so that he could not only tell Johnson what was in his mind about reconstruction, but also what the Cabinet had agreed upon. When the Vice President left, he looked less tense than when he entered the White House.
At the outer gate, a big-handed colored woman, sick with hunger, staggered up to the sentry box. A soldier stepped out, swung his rifle diagonally across his body, and said solemnly: “Business with the President?” The other guards laughed.
“Before God,” the woman whispered. “Yes.”
“Let her pass,” one of the guards said, still laughing. “They’ll stop her further on.”
The woman staggered through, and across the drive and on up to the White House porch and the big doors. There, a second soldier barred her.
“No further,” he said. “Against orders.”
With what seemed to be her final energy, the woman darted under his arm and ran straight through the long corridor and down the length of the carpet and upstairs, her cotton skirt billowing in back, her face a study in dark agony. The presidential office guard stood before the door with his rifle in both hands.
Breathing hard, and crying at the same time, she begged: “For God’s sake, please let me see Mr. Lincoln.”
“Madam,” the guard said. “The President is busy. He cannot see you.”
She may have screamed, or sobbed, because the noise she made caused the door to open and, through the iridescence of her own tears, she saw the wavering figure of the President of the United States.
He looked down at her, and he was smiling. In his deep tones, he said: “There is time for all who need me. Let the good woman come in.”
She was Mrs. Nancy Bushrod and, when he had seated her beside his desk, it took time for her to compose herself. She told him her name and how many babies she had and that her husband’s name was Tom Bushrod and that both of them had been slaves on the Harwood plantation outside of Richmond. When they had heard about the Emancipation Proclamation, they heard it said that it meant that they were free, and they had run away and come straight to Washington.
In thankfulness to Mr. Lincoln, Tom had forthwith enlisted in the Army of the Potomac, leaving Nancy in a little shack with twin boys and a baby girl. His pay kept coming regularly every month, then it stopped. Nancy had walked the streets of Washington City, looking for work. No one had any washing or sewing or cleaning to be done. All the colored people in the world seemed, to Nancy, to be looking for work in Washington City.
She started to cry again. Would the President please help her about Tom’s pay? She would not have come, but there was no other way.
>
“You are entitled to your husband’s pay,” Mr. Lincoln said. “Come this time tomorrow and the papers will be signed and ready for you.”
As Mrs. Bushrod told about it later, she said: “I couldn’t open my mouth to tell him that I was going to remember him forever and I couldn’t see because the tears were falling.”
When he had escorted her to the office door, he said: “My good woman” (in the tone of the stern lecturer), “perhaps you will see many a day when all the food in the house is a single loaf of bread. Even so, give every child a slice and send your children to school.”
Then, as Nancy Bushrod looked back at him, she said he bowed “like I was a natural-born lady.”
A little more than a hundred yards to the west, Mrs. Stanton, out shopping in her carriage, stopped at the War Department and asked her husband how she should decline the invitation of the Lincolns to the theater. The secretary must have assumed that the matter had been taken care of, because he looked, for a moment, as helpless as most husbands in similar situations and said: “Why, just send regrets.”
No snub was intended in the regrets. Stanton had an aversion to the theater. As a serious student of the Bible, he was sure that theaters and sin were kin. He had felt, all along, that Lincoln did not expect him to accept the invitations, but had sent them along for form’s sake. In all the time that Stanton had been in Washington, he had been to a theater once, and that occurred one night when he tiptoed into the State Box at Grover’s Theatre with a message for Lincoln and, delivering it and getting a reply, tiptoed out.
Then too, he knew that Mrs. Stanton felt tense in the presence of the First Lady, and this alone inclined him to turn down all but invitations to state functions, where the presence of the Secretary of War and his lady were required. Thirdly, Stanton’s repeated admonitions to the President to keep away from the theater, and from all public appearances, would have little validity if the man with the perfumed whiskers did not practice what he preached.