A Night of Horrors: A Historical Thriller about the 24 Hours of Lincoln's Assassination

by Berry, John C.

  A Night of Horrors

  by

  John Charles Berry

  This book is a work of historic fiction. While the names, places and incidents are based on real events, the exact dialog and actions of characters involved are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual conversations, events or locales other than what is noted in the Bibliography is entirely coincidental.

  A Night of Horrors

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  Copyright © 2011 by John Charles Berry. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover designed by Telemachus Press, LLC

  Cover art:

  Copyright © Picture History - MES13968 Lincoln's Death Bed

  Published by Telemachus Press, LLC

  http://www.telemachuspress.com

  Visit the author website

  http://www.johnberrynovels.com

  ISBN 978-1-937387-01-3 (eBook)

  Version 2011.07.15

  For Melanie…my one and only

  …It was a night of horrors.

  Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court describing the night of April 14, 1865

  My dear Sir: I intend to adopt the advice of my friends and use due precaution…

  Abraham Lincoln responding to General James Van Alen on April 14, 1865, who had urged him ‘to guard his life and not expose it to assassination’

  Foreword

  My goal in writing about the events in the twenty-four hours leading to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the attempted assassination of William Seward, and the aborted assassination of Andrew Johnson was to simultaneously capture the veracity of the events as they unfolded and the drama that played out on April 14th, 1865. While this novel is the fictional retelling of the twenty-four hours that terrorized a nation and forever altered its history, it is historical fiction. This novel is the first to fictionally recreate the twenty-fours leading up to Lincoln’s death as well as to capture the original intent of Booth’s conspiracy: to kill Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson at 10:15 PM that Friday night. I have utilized my training as a Ph.D. in English to research the events surrounding the assassination and then to represent them to the best of my ability in their proper sequence and occurrence. But, as all novelists do, I have relied upon my imagination to fill in the gaps that haven’t been documented by historical records or by the many historians who have studied and written about this singular event in United States history.

  In order to maintain the narrative flow and not to impede the enjoyment of the read, I have provided a shortened bibliography in an Author’s Note after the novel. I have also provided a limited set of footnotes to show where I have used the original writing of these historical figures for their dialogue in my fictional retelling.

  To see a comprehensive bibliography of my research, a timeline of the events of the twenty-four hours from 7:00 AM April 14th to 7:00 AM April 15th, as well as other information about the Lincoln assassination, please go to www.johnberrynovels.com. My greatest hope is that you enjoy this story and are inspired to learn more about the crucible of history that is the Civil War of the United States and that fateful day of April 14th, 1865.

  I also want to formally thank my wife and two children, whose patience during the research and writing of the novel as well as their support in each step of this project has made it possible. They are the loves of my life and my greatest joy and success.

  A Night of Horrors

  Prologue

  It was exactly four years before April 14th, 1865, that the Federal government surrendered Fort Sumter to the newly formed Confederacy. That April was the inception of the unending war. With each succeeding spring, the only colors that seemed to matter were the reds and browns of warfare rather than the pinks, whites, reds, and yellows of the blooming trees and flowers. The red blood of more than 400,000 men who were injured and the 620,000 men who died was mixed with the brown mud and muck that enveloped each battlefield, left to be cleaned up by the unlucky citizenry who happened to live near by.

  In the previous spring and summer of 1864, the entire nation awaited the latest news, transmitted over the telegraph lines, of the pitched battles between Grant and Lee as they fought their way south through Virginia. Lee parried Grant’s moves and fired blistering salvoes into the charging Union forces. Grant sent his men on in a relentless and heartless drive towards the Confederate Capital, Richmond, Virginia. In early May, the two armies fought in the woods and dense underbrush of Virginia just south of the Rapidan River. It was a brutal engagement where the sparks discharged from the rifles ignited fires that caught and spread adding a new white smoke to the clouds of gray smoke already present from the gunpowder and cannon fire. Many of the men who lay injured from the relentless fighting were consumed alive in the conflagrations. Men screamed in agony and cried for friend or foe to put an end to the misery. The limbs of both men and trees shriveled in the fires. Grant, sensing that he was not going to find victory in “The Wilderness,” as the battle came to be called, disengaged from Lee’s army and turned south. News arrived in Washington City of the extensive casualties and the brutality of the fighting just ahead of the wagon trains that rolled into the city bearing the grim evidence of how primal the fighting had become. Men—burned, shot, stabbed, maimed, and missing limbs—quickly began to fill the Army hospitals. The President and Secretary of War paced the floor of the Telegraph Office, stunned at the losses reported by Grant.

  Just a day after disengaging from Lee’s army, the Union soldiers found the Confederates entrenched near a small Virginia town called Spotsylvania. The nation held its breath for twelve long days as the wires brought news of Grant’s determined and unyielding assaults on the Confederate troops. Grant, finding his nemesis too well established to be defeated, disengaged once more and moved again further south. During the last week of May in 1864, the two armies moved, set up fortifications, and then moved again as they attempted to gain a stronger position and some advantage over their enemy. Then, on June 1st, Washington City began to hear dribs and drabs of another major conflict. Over the next few days it became astonishingly clear that Grant had sent wave after wave of Union men against Lee’s impregnable position at Cold Harbor, Virginia. Sixty thousand Union soldiers attacked the Army of Virginia in the initial advance. In one of the most brutal sixty minutes of the war, 7,000 Union soldiers were
killed in just the first hour alone. The fighting continued for a few days, while the men lay dead and dying between the lines—almost all of them in blue uniforms. Then it became a stand off of wills between the two generals: Grant and Lee. After a week of considering his options, Grant, again, moved the Army of the Potomac south, ever closer to Richmond. He left behind some 50,000 casualties, but he was also within ten miles of Richmond, the Confederate Capital. The toll on the Army of the Potomac continued to mount, as did the calls for President Lincoln to remove Grant from his position as General of all Union forces. The General was now known as “The Butcher” across the northern states. After more skirmishing and feints, Grant moved his army across the James River and set up siege-works at Petersburg, just south of Richmond, a position that allowed him to cut off supplies to Lee’s Army of Virginia, hunkered down in Richmond.

  Grant’s determination to grind away at Lee had been met with disbelief, then outrage, and finally sheer heartbreak by the populace at large across the Northern states. Governors sent telegrams to Abraham Lincoln, telling him their cities were nothing but one long funeral train. Indeed, in the space of just forty days, the Army of the Potomac, under Grant’s leadership, had suffered half as many casualties as in the previous three years of the war combined. In the Capital, Washington City, the hospitals were overrun. Lincoln paced the floor of the telegraph office in the War Department, just across the west lawn of the Executive Mansion, shaking his head as the news came in. But even in the midst of the carnage, Lincoln was encouraged by Grant’s progress towards the Southern Capital. He alone of his generals attacked and fought the enemy.

  “He moves south. He moves south,” he would say to Edwin Stanton, his bearded Secretary of War. Lincoln had realized early on that the North had superior resources to the South, both human and industrial. He had impressed on the previous generals of the Army of the Potomac—McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker—that there was a calculus to the North’s victory. He called it “the awful math.” Union armies could sustain more casualties than the Confederate armies and bleed the South into defeat. But it was to no avail with them. Grant, though, did not fear Lee and his reputation. So Lincoln sustained Grant in those dark days of the spring and summer of 1864, because the General pressed on and fought Lee at every opportunity. He sustained his General in the same way that he sustained himself. There was one principle that had shone bright and clear to him through the dark days of the war, like a white full moon in the deepest hour of the night: the Union must be preserved. Lincoln believed with a fervor, which never waned, that the United States of America must emerge from the end of the war intact as one country. For if the South were to win and break the country into two, then the very democratic principles on which the country was founded would vanish from the earth like the mists of the morning. Lincoln was a pragmatist in politics and in war. Though he might change his tactics based on the most recent facts before him, he never swerved from that single principle that had become the great crusade of his life: preserving the Union. And for his inspiration, he did not go to the United States Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence. That singular document meant more to him and it was there that he found the inspiration of the shining principles on which the nation was founded and for which it must be preserved.

  As the hot days of the summer of 1864 lingered, the dread of those brutal battles in May and June gave way to the torpor of a siege. Once ensconced at Petersburg, Grant and Lee skirmished, with no real battles for endless weeks and months, through the rest of 1864. Meanwhile, Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2nd, 1864, and then proceeded to cut and burn a swathe across Georgia until he arrived in Savannah at Christmas time. As the new year of 1865 turned warm, Sherman resumed his march and burned a broad path through South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union. As spring softened the ground, Grant began to tighten his grip on Petersburg and Richmond. During the cold winter of 1864 to 1865, Grant’s army had effectively cut all supply lines to Lee’s army entrenched at Petersburg. The soldiers of Lee’s Army of Virginia were clothed in rags and many were shoeless. Lee’s demands for food and clothes had gone unanswered by the Confederacy. Not because Confederate President Jefferson Davis was unsympathetic; he was simply unable to give what he did not have. As Grant began to move his men closer for the inevitable battle in the spring of 1865, Robert Lee knew his army could not sustain the losses of a fight. Feeling his desperate plight, Lee decided to flee south to try and join with Johnston and his army of 30,000 in North Carolina. So the Confederate troops abandoned Richmond and Petersburg and made a run for it. The Union army took possession of Richmond on Monday, April 3rd, and Grant pursued Lee and his army across southern Virginia, blocking his path to North Carolina. The City of Washington came to life with celebration. For the first time in four long years of fighting, the people began to hope that the end was nearing. Then, just six days later, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant on Sunday, April 9th. It was Palm Sunday.

  Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, ordered a five hundred-gun salute that rattled doors and broke windows in the houses surrounding the War Department. On Thursday, April 13th, Washington City celebrated with a great Illumination. As darkness began to settle over the Capital, throngs of people walked, rode their horses, and drove their carriages through the city. Everywhere you looked, candles burned in the windows. The Executive Mansion, the Treasury building, the War Department building, and the State Department building each had several candles in each of their windows. But none could outdo the Patent Building which seemed to light the very night sky with more than 5,000 candles burning in celebration of the end of the war. Great-sized eagles were illuminated and sent out bright garish light against the night sky. At the Willard Hotel there were gas jets arranged to form the word “Union” on the roof. As celebrating crowds passed along Pennsylvania Avenue, heading south and east, there were great bonfires with men and women standing and cheering. Songs would spontaneously erupt and all along the way, total strangers would join into the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Men and women drank themselves to stumbling incoherence and openly embraced one another. Above the city, the new dome of the Capitol Building glowed fiercely in the night when it was lit for the first time in its history. The white dome glittered against the black velvet of the night sky in a tremendous display of National zeal. The gardens around the Capitol were alive with the constant movement of people as they milled about in one endless river of human happiness.

  “Robert Lee has surrendered!” People yelled.

  “Three cheers for Unconditional Surrender Grant! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

  “Long live Abraham Lincoln!” And so it went. The relief in the North was universal and it was deep. There was not a single household that had not been touched by the war. Above the boisterous crowds, fireworks exploded, taking the celebration into the heavens. The bright blues, reds, and whites glowed on the upturned faces, full of smiles and tears. The war was finally over. The shooting and the stabbing and the wounding and the killing would now come to an end. The binding up of the wounds, which Abraham Lincoln called for in his second inaugural address just weeks earlier, was beginning.

  Lincoln’s visage displayed both the relief and the searing pain the long and terrible war had wrought on the nation. In the days of March and April 1865, his countenance went from joy to sadness in the same hour as he rode the peaks and valleys of hope and disappointment. Now in mid April, he realized that he had saved the Union, but it had cost almost a generation of men. Six hundred thousand had perished, nearly two percent of the entire population. There were more than four hundred thousand more who survived, but they would go through the rest of their lives lacking eyes, hands, arms, legs, or feet. Lincoln had bet on the endless resources of the United States and won the wager, but he had nearly sapped his own inner resources in the process. In mid April 1865, he turned his full attention to reconstructing the Union he so pri
zed and cherished.

  In the midst of the joyous celebration, however, were pockets of citizens in Washington City who were not as sanguine about the Union victory. While northerners toasted Lincoln and Grant in celebration, Southern sympathizers drank to forget their loss and to try and extinguish their anger.

  On April 14th and 15th, 1865, the following events occurred over a twenty-four hour period….

  An Oath and a Pledge

  Booth blinked open bleary eyes, shot through with blood from too much brandy the night before. He closed them against the bright sun streaming in from behind the heavy drape of the hotel room. Dust motes danced like gnats in the streaming light. He strained his eyes open and brought the blurry outline of the dresser bureau into focus. He rubbed the knuckles of his forefingers into his eyes and yawned at the ceiling. His tongue was pasty and thick as if he had held sand in his mouth while he slept. He took the fingertips from both of his hands and rubbed them back and forth across his scalp. The tingling sensation always helped to awaken him after a night of heavy drinking. Now, he could feel his thick black hair sticking up and pointing in various directions. He would definitely have to head over to Booker’s barbershop for a morning’s grooming.

  Booth sighed and scratched himself under the covers and squeezed his eyelids tightly closed, hoping it would help his eyes to focus. As he lay there, eyes closed, the sounds of the street slowly filled the room. And though the window and drape muted them, Wilkes Booth could hear the morning sounds of the nation’s Capital coming to life. Carriages rumbled noisily past the National Hotel on the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue. Horses clopped by, some with riders, others pulling wagons to market. Though he did not want to, he could make out the sounds of the voices and the occasional cheers. The celebrations would continue today as they had every day for the past week and a half.