Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

by James L. Swanson

  Congress went one step further and proffered a generous and more conventional award: a gold medal was struck in Robinson’s honor, and he was given $5,000 in cash. The obverse of the medal included a bust portrait of Robinson’s profile in high relief, and the legend: “For his Heroic Conduct on the 14 Day of April 1865. In Saving the Life of Wm. H. Seward.” On the reverse, the engraver froze Robinson and Powell in perpetual combat, the assassin raising the knife high in the air while the sergeant held the striking arm at bay. Behind them, Seward lay helpless in bed, and Powell’s revolver lay broken on the floor.

  THE PRESIDENT’S BOX AT FORD’S THEATRE WAS ALSO DRENCHED. in blood

  After Booth’s leap to the stage, the women attended to their men. Mary Lincoln turned to her left and stared at the president. He was motionless in the rocker, his head hung low, eyes shut, his chin resting on his chest. He did not return her imploring gaze. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. She touched him; he did not stir. “Father … father!” she shouted into his right ear from just a few inches away. Lincoln did not react. Now frantic, Mary moved closer and tried to push his body into a more upright position. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, chest, and arms, all limp, offered no resistance. Lincoln had no visible wounds. There was no blood on his face or neck. His white linen shirt was unstained. Her touch left no wet, red spots upon her hands. But her loving hands had overlooked the back of his head. Mary Lincoln, terrified, uncomprehending, and by now nearly hysterical, clutched her husband’s body and supported it in a sitting position in the chair.

  Clara Harris lifted her eyes from the stage below and looked back into the box. She beheld Rathbone, wild-eyed, staggering, and clutching his upper left arm with his right hand. He could not suppress the copious flow of blood that flooded over his hand, and dripped on the luxurious Turkish carpet. Booth had struck him hard, and the knife had penetrated deep. Clara, who had seen the whole thing, never forgot the forceful swing of Booth’s “practiced and powerful arm.” Superficially, Rathbone’s wound appeared small—just a narrow puncture of the skin near the elbow, no more than about one and a half inches wide, mimicking the dimensions of the blade. But the knife had sliced deep inside the major’s raised, parrying arm, parallel to the bone, and nearly to the shoulder, cutting an artery, nerves, and veins. Most of the damage was beneath the skin. Clara rushed to attend to her fiance’s wound.

  Down in the audience, more than fifteen hundred people went wild. Some playgoers climbed to the stage, looked up to the box, and shouted desperate queries to its occupants. “What has happened?” “Is the president alive?” Throughout the theatre hundreds of people turned to friends, spouses, and total strangers, all repeating the same questions: “Has the president been shot?” “Who was that man onstage?” “Was that a knife?” “What did he say?” Some women fainted. Innumerable, half-crazed voices cried out from all corners of the theatre in a frightening chorus of vengeance: “Kill the murderer!”; “Hang him!”; “Shoot him!”; Cut his heart out!”; “Catch him!”; “Don’t let him escape!” None of them realized that the assassin was already out the back door, safe from the reach of their vigilante howls. Like a violent spring storm, the climate inside Ford’s became dark, ugly, and menacing. Under the dim glow of the hissing gaslights, people pushed one another to get to the stage. Others, in a panic to flee, shoved men, women, and children out of the aisles. The voices grew louder until nearly all fifteen hundred of them came together to create an angry roar. This was a mob.

  Other voices, these pleading for assistance, not roaring for vengeance, arose from the mob. “Water!” “Has anyone any stimulants?” “Stand back!” “Give him air!” “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  In the dress circle, sitting just a few yards from the door to the president’s box, Charles Leale jumped up from his seat. Disregarding the aisles and customary route to the box, he raced there in a direct line, and, like a hurdler gone haywire, staggered and half vaulted over the cane-bottomed chairs obstructing his path as he shouldered his way past dazed playgoers. He joined a number of other men who were trying to get inside the box. But the door was locked.

  Inside, Major Rathbone walked toward the sound of the beating fists. The men were pounding on the door like it was a drumhead, but their fists and shoulders could not break it open. They shouted to the occupants, if any of them were still alive, to unlock the door. Rathbone staggered forward, already feeling the effects of blood loss and shock. He cupped the hand of his good arm under the wooden music stand that Booth used to bar the door, and tried to pull it up. It wouldn’t budge. He tried harder, then realized that the harder the men on the other side pushed, the more effective Booth’s device became. It was too thick to snap, so every push created a tighter seal between the door panel and the head of the bar. “For God’s sake open the door,” the voices pleaded. Rathbone shouted through the door to stop pushing—the door was barred. The men obeyed Rathbone’s order and stepped back. Weakening rapidly, Rathbone pulled up with his remaining strength. The music stand popped free and nearly a dozen men rushed inside.

  Dr. Leale, not in uniform, announced his rank and profession and stepped ahead of them. Immediately he saw all four occupants. Like an officer under enemy fire, he needed to regain his composure. “Halt!” he commanded himself silently. Do not panic. “Be calm,” he chided himself. Do your duty. Major Rathbone, standing between Leale and Lincoln, beseeched the doctor to treat him first, and as proof of his injury, he ostentatiously used his right hand to hold up his wounded left arm. Leale lifted Rathbone’s chin, peered into his eyes, and, when “an almost instantaneous glance revealed the fact that he was in no immediate danger,” ignored the emotional major and rushed to the president’s side.

  Leale approached Mary Lincoln and introduced himself as a United States Army surgeon. Wordlessly, she thrust out her hand, and he grasped it tightly. Then she unleashed a torrent of pitiful pleas: “Oh, Doctor, is he dead? Can he recover? Will you take charge of him? Do what you can for him. Oh, my dear husband.” The doctor assured the first lady that he would do everything possible for her husband. As Mary wept bitterly, Leale released her hand and began his examination.

  Lincoln looked dead. His eyes were closed, he was unconscious, and his head had fallen forward. Leale concluded, from Lincoln’s “crouched-down sitting posture,” that if Mary had not held his body upright in the rocking chair, the president would have already tumbled to the floor. Leale took Lincoln’s right radial pulse, but felt no movement of the artery. Just to be sure, Leale and others lifted Lincoln from the rocker and laid him in a recumbent position on the floor. While Leale held the president’s head and shoulders, one of his hands felt a wet spot, invisible to the eye, on the left shoulder of Lincoln’s black frock coat. It was a clot of blood. Leale, remembering Booth’s flashing dagger onstage and noting Rathbone’s severely bleeding wound, assumed that Lincoln had been stabbed. Leale called for a knife. He brought no surgeon’s tools to a social night at the theatre. If Lincoln had been stabbed, how could he suture the wounds without needles and thread? By now several men had joined Rathbone in the box, and hands began fishing wildly in pants pockets until William Kent, a government employee, produced a pocketknife. Leale removed Lincoln’s custom-made, black wool frock coat, trimmed at the collar, lapels, and cuffs with grosgrain piping. The box was too dimly lit to read the tailor’s label sewn inside the collar—Brooks Brothers, New York—or to admire the black silk lining embossed with a large American eagle, a shield of stars and stripes, and the motto “One Country, One Destiny.” Leale cut open Lincoln’s collar, shirt, and coat to examine him for knife wounds. There were none. Then Leale lifted each of the president’s eyelids, studied the pupils, and reeled in dismay: it was a brain injury. Leale separated his fingers, weaved both of his hands gently through Lincoln’s hair, and as he worked them thoroughly around the head, he discovered that the hair was matted with blood. Leale’s fingers probed rapidly for its source and found it within seconds, behind the left
ear. A neat, round hole, about the diameter of a man’s fingertip, clotted with a plug of wine-red, coagulated blood. Leale’s heart sank.

  In the theatre below, the audience would soon be past control. In a valiant attempt to calm them, the actress Laura Keene marched to the front of the stage, close to the footlights, and begged the crowd to remain calm. “For God’s sake, have presence of mind and keep your places, and all will be well.” The president was not dead, she assured them, without knowing whether that was really true. Then the mayor of the District of Columbia took to the stage to try to keep the crowd under control. An angry voice shouted, “Burn the theatre!” and others echoed him. Yes, burn it down. Others remembered that on Capitol Hill, not more than a fifteen-minute march from Ford’s, the Old Capitol prison was filled with disloyal rebel prisoners. The assassin may have escaped, but they could take their revenge there. And walking in the very streets of Washington this night were ex-Confederate soldiers and officers, some of them still wearing their rebel uniforms. This would be a dangerous night for anyone who came into the proximity of the mob. In a few hours, when the telegraph spread the horrible news to the other great cities of the North, dangerous mobs would take to the streets across the country.

  Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, an army doctor seated on the main floor near the orchestra pit, heard voices shout for “a doctor!” He rose and headed for the stage. His wife begged him to stay: “You sha’n’t go! They’ll kill you too—I know they will!” He got onstage in moments and stood helplessly below the president’s box. The distance from the stage to the balustrade overhead was too far—eleven feet six inches—to jump. It was one thing to leap down from the box—not an easy move even for an athlete like John Wilkes Booth—but it was impossible to jump up to it. There had to be another way up there. Perhaps other men could lift him and launch him into the box. Taft corralled a few of the men standing onstage to form a human catapult. Men bent low and shaped their interlocked fingers into improvised stirrups. Taft dug his boot heels into their cupped palms and fastened his hands to their shoulders for balance. Then, with one rapid, fluid motion the men’s twitching leg, arm, and shoulder muscles exploded in a burst of strength and propelled Taft skyward. On the way up, he shot his arms above his head as high as they could reach, ready to grab anything he could get his hands on. The catapult launched him just high enough. His fingertips grasped wildly for the balustrade, for the framed engraving of George Washington hanging from a thin wire, for the flags, for the bunting—anything that would save him from a plummet to the polished, hardwood stage. His blue army officer’s cape unraveled from his neck and floated back to the stage. Taft swung momentarily from a piece of bunting until others who followed Dr. Leale into the box reached over the side and pulled him up and into the box. But by now Dr. Leale was already attending the president. Under customary medical tradition, Lincoln was Leale’s patient.

  Although Leale feared that Lincoln might already be dead, he made a split-second decision to revive him. To relieve pressure on the brain, he used his fingers to pull the clot from the bullet hole. Then he dropped to his knees, straddled Lincoln, opened the president’s mouth, stuck two fingers down his throat, pressed hard on the base of his paralyzed tongue, and opened the larynx. Air could now reach Lincoln’s lungs, and to draw life-sustaining oxygen into them, Leale pressed the diaphragm upward and ordered two men to manipulate Lincoln’s arms like levers on a water pump. Then Leale stimulated the apex of the heart by pressing hard under the ribs. To everyone in the box, including Dr. Leale, the situation seemed hopeless. Then the president’s reluctant heart began to beat and his lungs sucked in a breath. The heartbeat was feeble, the breathing irregular, but Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Barely. However, unless Leale could stabilize him immediately, Lincoln would expire within a few minutes. The doctor raced against the clock. Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams.

  Leale leaned forward until his chest met Lincoln’s and their faces nearly touched. Leale sucked in as much air as his lungs could hold, until he felt like they would burst, and then he breathed air directly into Lincoln’s mouth and nostrils. Lincoln’s lungs expanded and his respiration improved. After forcing several more lungfuls of air into the president, Leale paused, studied his patient’s face for a moment, placed his ear over Lincoln’s thorax, and, amid the cacophony of shrieks, moans, cries, and threats that filled the theatre, along with Mary’s deep sobs a few feet way, he listened keenly. Then he heard it, almost inaudible at first, then louder: Lincoln’s heart, stronger, sustaining a regular beat. Leale leaned back and monitored Lincoln’s mouth and rising chest. The president’s lungs started filling on their own. Leale’s quick thinking saved the president from immediate death.

  Time seemed to stop again, just as it did the moment after Booth fired his pistol. Mary Lincoln sank into the sofa and was comforted by Clara Harris, whose face, hair, hands, and dress were smeared with her fiance’s blood. Major Rathbone continued to apply pressure to his wound and tried to remain conscious. Sensing that Dr. Leale’s work was done, the occupants of the box hushed to a breathless silence. Still on his knees, with all eyes fixed upon him, Dr. Leale intoned his diagnosis and prognosis simultaneously: “His wound is mortal; it is impossible for him to recover.”

  aT THE KIRKWOOD HOUSE, GEORGE ATZERODT HAD YET TO inflict a mortal wound upon Vice President Johnson. Around 10:00 P.M., as Booth closed in on Lincoln and Powell on Seward, Atzerodt showed up at T. Naylor’s livery stable and talked to the foreman, John Fletcher. He wanted to pick up the horse that he and David Herold had dropped off there that afternoon. But first Atzerodt invited Fletcher to join him for a drink at the nearby Union Hotel, at 13½ and E streets. Fletcher ordered a glass of beer and Atzerodt had a whiskey. After they left the hotel, Atzerodt said a strange thing: “If this thing happens tonight, you will get a present.” Fletcher didn’t know what he was talking about and assumed that the German was drunk: “He seemed to be about half-tight, and was very excited-looking. I did not pay much attention to him.” When they got back to the stable and Atzerodt mounted the horse, Fletcher cautioned him that the mare seemed as nervous as he did.

  “I would not like to ride that mare through the city in the night, for she looks so skittish.”

  “Well,” Atzerodt replied, “she’s good upon a retreat.”

  Fletcher remembered that Atzerodt’s friend, David Herold, was overdue in returning the horse he had rented that day. “Your acquaintance is staying out very late with our horse.”

  “Oh, he’ll be back after a while,” Atzerodt assured him.

  Fletcher watched Atzerodt go down E Street, pass 13½ Street, and enter the Kirkwood House. Like Powell, Atzerodt was armed with a knife and a pistol—a six-shot revolver. Indeed, he was better armed than Powell, for he had in his room upstairs a second revolver and knife. His room, number 126, was one floor above Johnson’s. The vice president—alone and unguarded—had retired for the night. All Atzerodt had to do was knock on his door and, the moment Johnson opened it, plunge the knife into his chest or shoot him dead. Compared with the tasks that faced Booth and Powell, Atzerodt had the easiest job of all.

  Atzerodt hunkered down over the Kirkwood bar, hoping to drink enough courage to carry him up the stairs to Andrew Johnson’s room. John Fletcher had kept an eye on the Kirkwood ever since Atzerodt went inside. Perhaps something about the garrulous German’s behavior had aroused his curiosity, or his suspicion. Fletcher watched Atzerodt walk out of the Kirkwood a few minutes after he went in, mount his horse, and ride toward D and Tenth streets, near Ford’s Theatre. He did not appear to be in a hurry.

  John Fletcher could not stop fretting about his overdue horse. Herold knew that he wasn’t supposed to keep “Charlie” past 8:00 P.M.—9:00 at the latest. “At about 10 o’clock [I was] having a suspicion that Herold was going to take the horse away.” Fletcher feared the worst—the horse had
been stolen. He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He decided to search the streets of downtown Washington for the Naylor stables’ property.

  Andrew Johnson had escaped the reaper’s knock on his door. Atzerodt couldn’t do it. The more he drank, the worse the plan sounded. He did not call on Andrew Johnson. He left the bar and walked out. Abandoning his mission, Atzerodt got on the mare and rode away. He wasn’t sure what to do now. He didn’t know it yet, but he was about to undertake a comical escape journey.

  In the saddle, a few blocks from Ford’s, David Herold relished his escape from the Seward house disaster. He had gotten away just in time, before the fleeing Powell could rejoin him on the street or call out his name. No one in the house realized that Powell had an accomplice waiting in the wings. Fanny Seward possessed the right instincts in suspecting that Powell was not alone, but she feared a companion assassin lurking in the house, not on the street outside. For the moment, Davey was safe. No one pursued him when he fled the scene, and no one at the Seward house saw or could implicate him. At the moment he was just another man on a horse on a happy night in Washington. He regretted abandoning Powell, but when the titan botched his assignment, Herold decided to save himself.