by Jim Bishop
THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT IN A THEATER TONIGHT AND PERHAPS MORTALLY WOUNDED.
Fifteen minutes later, all commercial telegraph lines out of Washington were dead and no further news got out of the city until 1 A.M.
In the home of Senator Conness, colleague Charles Sumner was chatting when a young man burst in and said, all in one breath: “Mr. Lincoln is assassinated Mr. Seward was murdered in his bed there’s murder in the streets.”
Sumner’s reaction was: “Young man, be moderate in your statements. What has happened? Tell us.” And when he heard it again, he did not believe it and he put on his cape and walked the short distance to the White House and said to the sentry: “Has Mr. Lincoln returned?”
“No, sir. We have heard nothing from him.” Sumner went home.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, heard the news at home and believed that it was mistaken. When he heard the same news from another source, Mr. Chase decided that he could not be of service to Lincoln, and stayed home and went to bed.
The Navy Secretary, Mr. Welles, was sleeping when Mrs. Welles awakened him with the news that Mr. Seward was dead. He dressed, hurried over to The Old Clubhouse. Stanton arrived at almost the same moment. They saw Frederick unconscious with two fractures of the skull; they saw blood and hysteria and anguish.
On the way downstairs, Welles admitted to the Secretary of War that he had not believed the news about Seward, but now he had seen it with his own eyes. He had heard that the President had been shot, but he did not believe that either.
“It is true,” said Stanton. “I had a talk with a man who had just left Ford’s Theatre.”
“Then I will go at once to the White House.”
“The President is still at the theater,” said Stanton.
They had reached the downstairs reception hall and, as they talked, they noted the presence of many of Washington City’s distinguished citizens.
“Then let us go immediately there.”
“That is my intention. If you haven’t a carriage, come with me.”
Stanton ordered Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs—the man who had built the Capitol dome—to take charge of the house and to clear it. General Meigs begged Stanton not to go to the theater. He said that there was murder in the streets. Others took up the plea. Mr. Stanton, on one of the rare occasions of his life, hesitated.
Welles continued ahead and said: “I am going at once and I think it is your duty to go.”
“Yes,” said Stanton vaguely, “I shall go.” But men hung on to his arms and Welles said he was wasting time and he went out and got into a carriage. Stanton followed and had one foot in the carriage when Major Thomas Eckert, on horseback, leaned down and begged him not to go. When Meigs saw that Stanton would go, he jumped into the carriage too, and yelled for a cavalry escort. The party started and Stanton jumped up in alarm and said: “This is not my carriage.” Mr. Welles said that it was no time to argue about the ownership of a carriage. Stanton leaned out the window and invited Chief Justice David K. Cartter of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to join them. The judge climbed up on the box beside the driver.
“The streets,” said Welles, “were full of people. Not only the sidewalks but the carriage ways were to some extent occupied, all, or nearly all, hurrying toward Tenth Street.”
The news had reached George Atzerodt and, when he heard it, the carriage maker was lost in panic. He galloped up F Street and, when a pedestrian yelled to him, Atzerodt hurried back to the stable where he had rented his horse and gave it up. On foot, he could not hope to join Booth in Surrattsville. He did not dare return to Kirkwood House. So he took a horse car for the Navy Yard. There he had a friend who owned a store. He would sleep on the floor of the shop.
A block away from Ford’s, in a little hideaway saloon, John Matthews was drinking. The actor “who did not deserve to live” had finished his work at Ford’s Theatre. He drank quietly, without conversation, until the news of the night slapped against the doors. Then his cloistered little world crumbled.
“What did he say?” John Matthews said to the bartender.
“He said the President was killed.”
“I just left Ford’s. The President was sitting in a box seat.”
Matthews stood for a moment, mulling the word “killed,” because that word would lead one to guess that there had to be a killer. John Matthews paid for his drinks and hurried out. The corner was full of people. A troop of cavalry, at dead gallop, ran through the crowd headed toward the theater. Matthews said to a man: “Who—who did it?”
A few people turned to look at him. The man shrugged. Another man said he had heard that an actor did it, somebody named Booth. John Matthews felt ill. He held his right hand against his chest, where the letter to the editor of the National Intelligencer reposed.
Matthews said that he did not know how he got back to his hotel, but he got there and he started a fire in the grate and then he sat and ripped open the letter and read it. What it had to say about the plot on Mr. Lincoln’s life made him sick to his stomach. It was signed with the names of the men who were part of the plot, and Matthews felt that, by having possession of this incriminating letter, he too was a conspirator. He burned the letter in the grate, holding on to the flaming end of it until he had to let go.
A few of the words burned in his mind forever: “The moment has at last arrived when my plans must be changed. The world may censure me for what I am about to do, but I am sure that posterity will justify me. . . . John Wilkes Booth— Paine—Atzerodt—Herold.”
On E Street, the celebration at Grover’s Theatre was almost concluded when a man came into the theater and, standing behind the audience, shouted: “President Lincoln has been shot in his private box at Ford’s. Turn out!” The audience buzzed. The actors paused. Corporal James Tanner, a bright young man who had mastered shorthand, stood and yelled: “Sit down! It’s a ruse of the pickpockets!” His reasoning was that pickpockets were sitting in the audience and had arranged with one of their number to shout alarming news. Thus, in the rush to the exits, the pickpockets would fleece the crowd. The people listened to Corporal Tanner. They sat. Onstage, a young boy who had, a moment before, finished reciting a patriotic poem, came back and, his voice choking, announced that the news about President Lincoln was true.
There was no panic. Tanner and six hundred others were dazed. They went out onto E Street trying to convince themselves that Lincoln might be dead. There they learned that Seward had been murdered in his bed. Tanner and another soldier hurried to Willard’s Hotel to get more details. They found a muttering mob of men who, in helpless rage, were ready to visit vengeance on anyone who said a disagreeable word. Tanner decided to go home. He had a room on the second floor of a house across the street from Ford’s Theatre— next door to a family named Petersen.
Earlier, John Fletcher, still worried about Herold and the horse, stood in front of Willard’s Hotel watching horsemen come and go. He saw a roan coming down in the darkness out of Fifteenth Street onto the Avenue. The horse was going fast but, as the rider approached the well-lighted hotel, he slowed to a trot. Fletcher assured himself that it was David Herold and he ran out into the street shouting:
“You get off that horse now! You’ve had that horse long enough!”
Herold, who was coming from Seward’s home and was trying not to excite suspicion, pulled the horse away from Fletcher’s outstretched hand and swung up Fourteenth Street toward F. When Fletcher saw the boy gallop off, he was certain that thievery was the object, so he ran back to the stable, saddled a dark horse, and hurried down E to Thirteenth, up Thirteenth to F, found that he had not headed the boy off, and could not see him ahead on F Street, and so he turned right again and went back to Pennsylvania Avenue. If Herold was going to steal the horse, he would head down to the Navy Yard Bridge and take the horse into southern Maryland. This constituted the first real pursuit of the conspirators. Mr. Fletcher was, at this time, about a mile and a
half behind Booth and a half mile behind Herold.
At Third Street, the stable foreman turned around the south side of the Capitol and here he met a horseman coming the other way.
“Have you seen any horsemen going this way?” said Fletcher.
“Two,” the stranger said. “Both very fast.”
Fletcher spurred his horse. He was convinced that Atzerodt was the first man; Herold the second. They would take the stage road, down New Jersey Avenue to Virginia Avenue, then diagonally left to Eleventh Street, and then onto the bridge. It was dark and Fletcher was slow and careful. In retrieving a horse, he did not want to break the leg of another.
At the Navy Yard Bridge, Sergeant Silas T. Cobb was near the end of his tour of duty. Another hour and fifteen minutes, and he’d be headed back to the barracks, a few yards away. It was soft, safe duty, but it was also deadly dull. Cobb and two sentries patrolled the Washington City end of the long wooden bridge. They challenged all suspicious parties entering or leaving the city. At 9 P.M. every night, the bridge was closed. No one could leave Washington, and no one could come in. Of course, now that the war was over, no sergeant wanted to be severe on citizens, but a soldier had to be careful.
It was about 10:45 P.M. when Cobb heard hoofbeats in the darkness, approaching. A dark man with a black mustache came into the cone of light around the sentry box and one of the sentries put a hand on the rein and held the horse.
“Who are you, sir?” said Sergeant Cobb.
“My name is Booth.”
“Where are you from?”
“The city.”
“Where are you going?”
“I am going home.”
Cobb looked the man over and walked around the horse. The man in the saddle had a fine smile.
“And where would that be?”
“Charles.”
“What town?”
“No town.”
“Come now.”
“Close to Beantown, but I do not live in the town.”
“Why are you out so late? You know the rules. No one is allowed past this point after nine o’clock. “
“That is new to me. You see, I had to go somewhere first, and I thought that I would have the moon to go home by.”
Sergeant Silas T. Cobb studied the rider once more, and rubbed his chin.
“Go ahead,” he said.
He stood in the light and watched the little mare pick her dainty way over the planks until he could no longer see her, but, far off in the middle of the span, he could hear the boom of the planking.
A few minutes later, Cobb heard a second horse. The sergeant came out of the sentry box and saw a young boy. The horse looked abused.
“Who are you?” said Cobb.
“My name is Smith.”
“Ah, yes. Where are you bound for?”
“Home.”
“What town?”
“White Plains.”
“How is it that you are out so late?”
Herold gave a ribald reply.
Cobb brought him up close to the sentry box, took a good look, and told him to be off. Two conspirators were now reasonably safe in Maryland.
A few minutes later, a third horseman came into view. The sentry grinned at the sergeant.
“We’re doing a good business tonight.”
Before Cobb had a chance to ask questions, the third rider asked one.
“Tell me,” said John Fletcher. “Did a man on a roan horse cross a few minutes ago? He had an English saddle and metal stirrups.”
Cobb nodded. “Yes,” he said. “He has gone across.”
“Did he tell you his name?”
“Yes, Smith.”
“Smith? Can I cross?”
“You can cross, but you cannot return back.”
Fletcher thought it over. “If that is so,” he said, “I will not go.” He turned his horse and headed back into Washington City. The foreman was angry. He stopped at Murphy’s Stable on the slight chance that his horse had been stabled there. It wasn’t, but the stableman said that Fletcher ought to go back to his stable and remain there because the President had been killed and Seward was dying.
John Fletcher felt little interest in the news. He had lost a horse and he knew from past experience that old man Naylor would blame him. Fletcher resolved to get back to his stable, unsaddle his horse, and then walk up to police headquarters and register a complaint.
11 p.m.
Forty-five minutes had passed. From 10:15 P.M.—when it happened—until 11 P.M. nothing had been done. Official Washington was in a state of inert panic. The responsible men of government were much more concerned with preventing additional assassinations than they were with hunting and apprehending the perpetrators of the old ones. General Christopher C. Augur, in command of all the troops in the District, had sent mounted patrols out, but they were running helter-skelter. No one had sealed off the bridges and roads leading out of Washington. No one, in spite of the fact that John Wilkes Booth had been identified by dozens of persons in the theater as the murderer, sent a policeman to his room at the National Hotel.
Augur was willing to move, but he was afraid to do anything without instructions from Secretary Stanton. And the Secretary of War, for the moment, was frozen with fright. In his mind, he had the fixed notion that the South was making a last desperate bid for victory by instituting terror in the capital of the North. He saw this thing, not as the product of a pathetic band of four men, but as a broad Confederate plot which had only begun to unfold. In the light of his experience, Stanton was eminently justified. His department had contended, throughout the war, with real plots—high-level Confederate plots, if you please—and these included the Sons of Liberty in the Midwest, the attempt to burn New York City, the raid on St. Albans, Vermont. The mind of the Secretary of War had been conditioned to accept the fantastic in plots.
The man who moved first was Major A. C. Richards, Superintendent of the metropolitan Washington police. He had been in the audience at Ford’s Theatre, an austere cop of military bearing, and he had seen and identified Booth as the man who had jumped from the President’s Box. The major had left the theater, tried to locate the guard John F. Parker (who could not have been assigned to the White House without Richards’s assent) and, not finding him, hurried back to police headquarters. He assembled the night detective squad, told them what had happened, and ordered them out at once to locate and bring in witnesses to the assassination. He reminded them that the Federal authorities would also be out on the same mission and, as the Federals took precedence over the locals, not to interfere with Augur’s men. His next step was to send a message to Augur, explaining what his men were doing, and assuring the general that any witnesses at police headquarters who had any pertinent information would be sent on, at once, to Augur himself. There is nothing to show that Richards told Augur that he recognized the actor, Booth, as the assassin, but, on the other hand, it is not possible that Richards would have withheld the identity of the self-advertised killer of the century. Then too, the name of Booth could hardly have been news to Augur, because that was the only name being bandied on the streets.
At Rullman’s Hotel, 456 Pennsylvania Avenue, the gaiety at the bar was silenced. Bartender John R. Giles had just announced the news. Most of the drinkers left at once. Over in a corner, at a table, Mike O’Laughlin and his three companions from Baltimore shook their heads in a drunken daze. Three of them could not believe the news. Mike could. And he could even guess the name of the assassin.
Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes examined the injured at the Seward home. He bound the secretary’s wounds and said that there was “severe loss of blood, and shock. If the patient recovers from the shock, he will probably live.” He examined Frederick Seward and found a “double fracture of the cranium, profuse bleeding, no pulse, inability to speak.” Frederick, he thought, might die.
At Ford’s Theatre, William T. Kent talked his way back into the President’s Box. He told the officer in charge th
at he was the one who had given a penknife to Surgeon Leale and, when he got home, he found that he had lost his house key. He was searching the box when his foot kicked against something loose and he picked it up.
“I have found the pistol!” said Kent.
A man came into the box, introduced himself as Mr. Gobright of the Associated Press, and said that he would give it to the police. Mr. Kent gave him the gun.
A few minutes before this, the police had been clearing the theater of curiosity seekers, yelling “All out! All out!” when Isaac Jaquette hurried out of Box 7 and, in the corridor, tripped over the wooden bar which had been used to hold the white door closed. Jaquette got out of the theater with it, took it home to his boardinghouse, and pointed to the drying blood on the bar. A Union officer asked for a piece of the bar as a souvenir, and Jaquette got a saw and cut it off. The officer studied the piece of wood, looked at the blood, and said that he did not want it.
The blood was not Lincoln’s. It was Major Rathbone’s.
The major, who sat in the Petersen parlor with Mrs. Lincoln and Robert, and the Misses Harris and Laura Keene, suddenly fell unconscious from loss of blood and was taken home. For the rest of the night, Robert either sat with his mother, or stood behind the head of the bed looking down at his father’s face. The narrow hall was heavy with the tramp of boots, inbound and out, and from out in the street the roars of the crowds could be heard and the cursing of cavalry officers who rode through the people trying to clear the street.
In the dimness of the parlor, Mrs. Lincoln sat staring at the ruddy coals in the grate across the room. She said little. Now and then, she looked for assurance to the two women who flanked her. But, when the assurance had been given and received, men walked in and gravely offered their condolences, as though the President was already dead. This led to wild outbursts of grief, and repeated requests to “take me inside to my husband.” When she got in the small bedroom, she looked, screamed, and fainted. The Rev. Dr. Phineas Gurley, with muttonchop whiskers quivering, uttered words of encouragement which he did not feel. Each time that Mrs. Lincoln made the trip to the sickroom, the doctors were warned ahead of time and placed fresh napkins under the President’s head. Once, she stood looking down at him, supported on both sides, and the tears had made dry furrows in her face powder.