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

by James L. Swanson

  Luckily, Atzerodt did not return to the Kirkwood House. By late Saturday morning, John Lee, a member of the military police force, was breaking down the door to room 126. After the assassination, Major James O’Beirne, provost marshal of Washington, ordered Lee to rush to the vice president’s hotel. He, too, might be a target. When Lee got there, a bartender, Michael Henry, informed him that a suspicious-looking man had rented a room the previous day. Lee scanned the hotel register until he spotted it: “a name written very badly—G. A. Atzerodt.” Desk clerks Robert R. Jones and Lyman Sprague could not find the room key. Sprague escorted Lee upstairs. Atzerodt’s door was locked. Lee broke it open and searched the room. Under the pillow he found a revolver, loaded and capped; between the sheets and mattress he discovered a large Bowie knife.

  The room was filled with clues: a brass spur, a pair of socks, two shirt collars, a pair of new gauntlets, three boxes of cartridges, a piece of licorice, and a toothbrush. A black coat hung from a hook on the wall. Lee searched it and found a map of Virginia and three handkerchiefs. One was embroidered with the name “Mary R. Booth.” Lee found a bankbook from the Ontario Bank in Montreal, showing a credit of $455.00. The name of the account holder was “Mr. J. Wilkes Booth.”

  DR. LEALE KNEW THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF REASONS HE couldn’t leave Abraham Lincoln to die on a theatre floor. The president was going to die—it was just a matter of time—and Leale had never seen a man with such a wound survive more than an hour. He was helpless to save Lincoln’s life, but, now that he had stabilized him, he did have power over the place and manner of the president’s passing. George Washington, the nation’s first president, and the first former one to die, and William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, the only presidents who had died in office, did not expire under tawdry circumstances, in shredded clothes on a boot-tracked, soiled floor, and neither would Abraham Lincoln. Leale’s instincts issued another silent command: “Remove to safety.” The president of the United States would die with dignity, in a proper bed. “Take him to the White House,” someone in the box implored. Yes, take him home. Impossible, Leale explained, and the other two doctors who had joined him in the box, Charles Sabin Taft and the improbably named Albert Freeman Africanus King, who had arrived just after Taft, concurred. Even the brief carriage trip between Ford’s and the Executive Mansion over unpaved, muddy streets, gouged deeply with ruts and tracks from hundreds of carriage wheels, would be too much for Lincoln to endure. The bumpy ride would jostle the head wound and instantly kill him. No, they must take him someplace closer. Another voice suggested Peter Taltavul’s saloon next door, where Booth enjoyed his last drink. Others vetoed that suggestion at once: it was bad enough that Lincoln might die in a theatre, but a tavern? Unthinkable. Even obscene.

  They prepared to lift Lincoln’s body without knowing where they would take him. First Dr. Leale closed the curtain on Laura Keene’s maudlin, private drama. Her fame guaranteed, her dress sanctified by gore, she released her hold on the martyr, rose from the floor, and stepped back. Leale told Dr. Taft to support Lincoln’s right shoulder and Dr. King the left. Leale ordered other men in the box to place their hands under the torso, the pelvis, the legs. Leale bent down and cradled the head. On his order, their hands worked in unison and lifted the president from the floor. They inched toward the vestibule. Clara Harris and Major Rathbone got Mary Lincoln on her feet and supported her unsteady gait. The trio, accompanied by Keene, followed the body. They carried Lincoln through the vestibule headfirst. Creeping backward and looking over his shoulder at the door leading to the dress circle, Leale observed a crush of humanity blocking the way and straining to get a glimpse of the president. Leale’s voice blasted at them twice like a battlefield trumpet: “Guards, clear the passage! Guards, clear the passage!”

  The bearers emerged from the vestibule with their precious, fragile cargo and walked north to the curved staircase that, two and a half hours before, the president had ascended. A small force of officers and soldiers shoved the gawkers aside. Leale reversed course at the landing and choreographed Lincoln’s descent feetfirst, to avoid tilting Lincoln’s head down and increasing the pressure on the brain. The descent seemed to take forever. But Lincoln was barely alive and Leale wanted no sudden movements that might jostle the president and disrupt the heartbeat or respiration. Seaton Munroe, an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, rushed from his seat to find out what had happened to Lincoln. “I now made my way towards the box exit to await the descent of Miss Keene, hoping to learn from her the President’s condition.” Munroe intercepted her, dress in disarray, hair disheveled, and stage makeup smeared, at the foot of the staircase leading from the box. “I begged her to tell me if Mr. Lincoln was still alive.”

  “God only knows,” she shrieked.

  The actress who began the night in a light comic role now looked to Munroe like an apparition from a nightmare. “Attired, as I had so often seen her, in the costume of her part in ‘Our American Cousin,’ her hair and dress were in disorder, and not only was her gown soaked in Lincoin’s blood, but her hands, and even her cheeks where her fingers had strayed, were bedaubed with the sorry stains.”

  Outside Ford’s on Tenth Street, an anxious crowd of theatre patrons, swelled by bewildered passersby, hovered near the front doors and awaited the president. Leale’s team carried Lincoln through the lobby, out the doors, and across the top stone step where, just eleven hours earlier, John Wilkes Booth sat under the midday sun laughing and reading his letter, and calculating if he had enough time. The crowd gasped at the sight of the prostrate figure and pushed forward. Some men darted forward and dared to lay their hands upon Lincoln. In a few seconds they would swarm and surround the president. Leale, dismayed, searched for an open seam through the hundreds of pressing bodies that blocked his way. Paralyzed, Leale and the doctors and soldiers assisting him froze at the threshold of Ford’s, cradling the body of the dying president in their arms.

  Nearby, just a few yards to the right, Lincoln’s carriage, its polished, black enameled surface glinting under the light of the big gas lantern atop the tall iron pole anchored in front of Ford’s, offered sanctuary from the mob and safe transport to the Executive Mansion. The president’s coachman Burke grasped the reins and tensed at the ready atop the carriage box, expecting in another moment to crack his whip for the mad dash up Tenth Street and then the quick turn west to the mansion. “For God’s sake, take him home to the White House to die,” an anonymous voice from the crowd cried, echoing the plea first voiced in the theatre. “To the White House,” other voices begged. A reporter who went to the White House found citizens assembling there: “An immense crowd was gathered in front of the President’s house, and a strong guard was also stationed there, many persons evidently supposing that he would be brought to his home.”

  No, Dr. Leale ordered again, the president would never survive the trip. At that moment an army officer pushed through the half-insane crowd, faced Leale with steely resolve in his eyes, and drew his sword from its scabbard: “Surgeon, give me your commands and I will see that they are obeyed,” he bellowed.

  The officer fought his way forward, cut a seam through the mob, and led Lincoln’s bearers into the dirt street. Leale’s eyes raced from side to side, scanning across Tenth Street for refuge. Straining his voice to communicate above the din to the sword-bearing officer, he shouted a succinct command. Take the president straight across the street and into the nearest house. A soldier sprinted ahead and pounded on the door, demanding entry. Then, incredibly, Leale halted the procession in the middle of the muddy street, and in full view of the horrified mob, yanked a blood clot from the hole in Lincoln’s head to relieve the pressure on the brain, and tossed the gooey mass into the street. Fresh blood and brain matter oozed through Leale’s fingers. The procession continued several more feet. Another clot. Then the same process all over again. When Leale was halfway across the street, soldiers on the far side made a beeline straight at him and yelled that the hou
se was locked and no one answered the door. The scene was incredible, impossible. Shipwrecked, stranded in the middle of a muddy street with no place to go, the president of the United States was dying in the presence of hundreds, if not by now more than a thousand, frenzied witnesses.

  From an upper window on the far side of Tenth Street, Carl Bersch, an artist, looked down on the drama playing out in the street below. His practiced observer’s eyes captured, like a camera, every detail—the big, glowing gaslight, the prostrate president borne by many hands, the swarming crowd. What a fine subject this scene would make for an oil painting, he mused.

  Up until this moment no one had paid attention to William Petersen’s neat, three-story brick row house next door to the home that denied entry to the president. Inside, one of Petersen’s boarders, Henry Safford, sat quietly reading a book in the front first-floor parlor. Dr. Leale was trying to figure out what to do next when he saw somebody open the front door of 454 Tenth Street. Safford had heard the shouting mob and ventured outside to see what was happening. He stepped out onto the top step of the high, curved staircase, and raised high a sole candle. “Bring him in here!” he shouted above the human sea that coursed between him and the president. “Bring him in here!”

  Leale changed course. He’d found a safe house, at last.

  Chapter Four

  “We Have Assassinated the President”

  RIDING IN OPEN COUNTRY ABOUT TEN MILES SOUTH FROM Washington, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold had not yet reached their safe house. Surrattsville was almost an hour’s ride away, but they didn’t expect any trouble along the route. Just as Booth hoped, the assassination had thrown Washington into chaos. As they pressed on, Booth and Herold didn’t encounter any soldiers on the road ahead, and even if they had, there was no danger because they were riding in advance of the news. At this moment the assassin could ride unmolested past an entire regiment of Union cavalry. Not a soul in Maryland knew that Abraham Lincoln had been shot.

  Within a few minutes of the assassination, however, the news began spreading from Ford’s by word of mouth, but it went no faster than a man could run on foot or ride on horseback. Between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M. more than fifteen hundred mouths poured from the theatre onto Tenth Street. Some maintained a vigil in front of Ford’s or the Petersen house, but many fanned out in all directions, like an unpaid army of newsboys shouting “Extra!” House by house, block by block, they spread the news. Men ran or galloped to the White House, the War Department, the homes of cabinet officers, Pennsylvania Avenue, and newspaper row. They invaded the lobbies of the Willard, Kirkwood, and National hotels, and threw open the doors of oyster houses, saloons, and houses of ill repute. They rushed home and roused families and boarders, knocked on neighbors’ doors, roused children from their beds.

  Washingtonians were used to getting important news this way. When the telegraph arrived at the War Department announcing that the Union had taken Richmond on April 3, War Department clerks, without permission or command, exploded into the street and ran in every direction shouting tidings of joy. Again on April 9, they rocketed from their desks to spread the news of Appomattox. Tonight, like a terrible inferno burning outward in all directions from a single flashpoint of origin, the news spread from Ford’s in ever-widening concentric circles. At Grover’s Theatre the manager interrupted the performance of Aladdin and told the audience that Abraham Lincoln had just been shot. A frightened twelve-year-old boy screamed in horror. Tad Lincoln, the president’s youngest boy, was rushed home to the White House by his chaperon, the president’s doorman, Alphonso Donn.

  Simultaneously, word of another assassination spread from the Seward mansion and into the streets. Neighbors, soldiers, State Department employees, and even a few fleet-footed reporters tried to gain entry to the house. Messengers—some self-appointed—fanned out in all directions barking word of the Seward assassination just as their counterparts from Ford’s proclaimed the president’s. It was only a matter of time before two armies of town criers, bearing word of separate attacks, collided in the streets. The same exchange happened countless times that night: No, I tell you, it was Lincoln who was assassinated. Impossible, it was Seward. I just came from his house. And I just came from Ford’s. It was Lincoln. It was Seward. Then the terrible truth emerged—it was both.

  At 1325 K Street someone rang the bell at the home of the most powerful man in Washington, aside from the president: Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “Mars,” Lincoln’s god of war. A brilliant lawyer with a distinguished record of public service, Stanton did not suffer fools. He couldn’t. The president placed in his hands the most awesome task of the war: raising, training, equipping, and sending into battle the army of the Union. Creating that army was the most monumental logistical achievement in American history up to that time. Stanton weeded out incompetent, unfit, or scoundrel officers; battled fraudulent government contractors who foisted shoddy uniforms, rotting equipment, and defective weapons upon the troops; and suffered along with Lincoln an epidemic of general officers who would not fight. If any man sat at Lincoln’s right hand during the war of the rebellion, it was Edwin McMasters Stanton.

  Their relationship got off to a rocky start. Before the war the two had crossed paths in an important lawsuit. Stanton, a nationally known attorney, scoffed at Lincoln and dismissed him as an uncouth, country idiot. Lincoln never held a man’s high opinion of himself against him, as he had proven by appointing William Henry Seward, his great rival for the presidency, secretary of state. So, too, when he made Stanton his secretary of war in 1862. The business of the war brought them into intimate, daily contact at the Executive Mansion, the War Department, the telegraph office, or the Soldiers’ Home, a summer refuge for the Lincoln and Stanton families. They grew close, and each developed a profound respect for the other’s talents. And both knew that when they gave orders, men died. In their private lives, both had suffered tragedies that affected them more deeply than they would care to let most men know. By April 1865 the butcher’s bill was high: more than three hundred thousand Union dead. Lincoln once bestowed on Stanton the highest compliment he paid to any cabinet officer during the entire war: Stanton, he said, was the great rock upon which the mighty waves of the rebellion crashed and were broken.

  Stanton had looked forward to a low-key evening at home on April 14. After the grand celebrations on April 3 and 9, and the previous evening’s astonishing illumination of the capital city, Stanton sought quiet relief. He turned down the president’s invitation to join him and Mary at Ford’s Theatre tonight. Instead, he left his office at the War Department and went home for dinner with his wife, Ellen. Around 8:00 P.M., not long before the curtain rose on Our American Cousin at Ford’s, Stanton left his house to visit William H. Seward’s sickbed again. Ever since the carriage accident, the secretary of war had been a faithful bedside presence, a kindness that touched Seward’s daughter, Fanny. Stanton returned home a little before 9:00 P.M. to keep an unusual appointment, a patriotic custom that augmented the effervescence of victory week: the serenade.

  Since the fall of Richmond, and more so since Lee’s surrender, bands of citizens intoxicated with joy—and often more—would roam the streets at night bearing torches, waving flags and banners, playing musical instruments, and singing songs. Wandering from place to place, they visited the White House, where, to their delight, the president appeared and addressed them. They visited hotels, theatres, and public houses, and sometimes they wandered aimlessly. Some serenades came together spontaneously, pulled together, it seems, by random gravitational forces. Others were organized in advance with military precision by government workers. Tonight the War Department clerks, the first men in Washington privileged to learn the news of Richmond and Appomattox, would, by prior arrangement, call upon their boss. By the time Stanton got home, he could already see the approaching torches bobbing in the street. “Mars” played his part and welcomed them graciously. After he addressed the crowd a little after 9:00 P.M., it marched to
its next destination: Ford’s Theatre. The serenaders wanted to surprise President Lincoln after the play, when he stepped out onto Tenth Street.

  After Stanton bid some army officers good night, he closed his front door and locked it. It was 10:00 P.M., and he walked upstairs and began undressing for bed. Not long after the doorbell rang. His wife, Ellen, still downstairs, unlocked and opened the door. If Ellen Stanton had known that murder was afoot in Washington that night, she most likely would not have answered the door. When Ellen heard the news from the messenger, she screamed, “Mr. Seward is murdered!”

  Her piercing cry echoed upstairs to her husband, who scoffed at the tale. “Humbug,” he shouted down, “I left him only an hour ago.”

  When a dubious Stanton came downstairs, he found not only the excited messenger but several other highly agitated men. Alarmed by the insistence and vividness of their accounts, he decided to investigate the rumor personally. Within a few minutes, he was racing in a carriage to the Seward home. It could not be true, Stanton tried to convince himself. In four years of Civil War, countless incredible—and false—rumors swept in and out of Washington as predictably as the tide and the phases of the moon. But assassination? Impossible. Yes, Stanton had scolded the president regularly for his inattention to his own safety. But perhaps he was an alarmist. After all, as William Seward himself had written in 1862, political murder was alien to our customs: “Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system. This conviction of mine has steadily gained strength since the civil war began. Every day’s experience confirms it.”