It was providential, he observed, that the administration could settle on a plan for reconstruction without interference from “the disturbing elements” of Congress, which was in recess. “If we were wise and discreet,” the President told his cabinet, “we should reanimate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union reestablished, before Congress came together in December.” “We could do better,” he assured his advisers; “accomplish more without than with them.” “There were men in Congress,” he observed, “who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate.”
The discussion then drifted to the military situation, and everybody wanted to hear Grant’s account of the surrender at Appomattox. Asking what terms had been extended to the common soldiers in the rebel army, Lincoln beamed when Grant said, “I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.” Cabinet members wanted to know whether there was any news from Sherman in North Carolina. Grant replied that he was expecting word momentarily. Lincoln remarked that he was confident that there soon would be good news, since the previous night he had had the recurrence of a dream: he was on the water, and “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and... he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.” This dream, he said, had come to him before nearly every important Union victory—Antietam, Gettysburg, Stones River, Vicksburg, Fort Fisher, and so on.
Grant, who had no faith in superstitions and dreams, interjected that Stones River was certainly no Northern victory. Looking at the general curiously, Lincoln continued that, judging from the past, the dream meant that there would be good news soon. “I think it must be from Sherman,” he said. “My thoughts are in that direction as are most of yours.”
V
Absorbing as were the prospects for victory and peace, they did not occupy all the President’s time even on so eventful a day. He had been up since seven o’clock, dealing with routine business, such as the appointment of one William T. Howell as Indian agent in Michigan. After breakfast, where he heard details of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox from Robert, who was just back from Grant’s army, the President went back to his office to face the endless line of visitors and petitioners who were waiting for him. In the next two hours he had a conversation with Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and Representative Cornelius Cole about California and the Western territories; a brief talk with William A. Howard, the postmaster of Detroit; a conference with Senator J. A. J. Creswell of Maryland, about patronage; an audience with John P. Hale, whom he had recently appointed minister to Spain; and an interview with Charles M. Scott, a Mississippi riverboat pilot whose cotton had been confiscated by the Confederates. After slipping away for a brief visit to the War Department in the hope of receiving more news from the armies, Lincoln returned to the White House in time for the cabinet meeting at eleven. After the cabinet meeting, too busy to have lunch, the President ate an apple as he went back to his office. There he held more interviews, read more petitions, signed more papers.
This was proving to be the usual exhausting day of a busy Chief Executive, but Lincoln, now that the long ordeal of war was over, handled his duties expeditiously and efficiently. Indeed, since the news of Lee’s surrender, his associates found he acted like a different man. “His whole appearance, poise, and bearing had marvelously changed,” Senator Harlan recalled. “He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction. His conversation was, of course, correspondingly exhilarating.”
At three o’clock he broke away from his desk to take a ride with Mary in an open carriage. As they started out, she asked whether he wanted any guests to accompany them, but he said, “No—I prefer to ride by ourselves to day.” They drove about the city and went out to the Navy Yard, in southeastern Washington, where the President chatted with several of the sailors and went aboard the Montauk, a monitor that had been hit forty-seven times during the assault on Charleston harbor. Throughout the afternoon he was “cheerful—almost joyous,” his wife recalled, and his spirits were so high that she said to him, laughing, “Dear Husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.”
“And well I may feel so, Mary,” he responded, “I consider this day, the war, has come to a close.” He then added, in what was as close to a reprimand as he ever offered to his wife, “We must both, be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”
Back at the White House, Lincoln found still more visitors, and he had a long chat with Governor Richard J. Oglesby and General Isham Haynie, both of Illinois, to whom he read so many chapters of the Nasby Letters that he had to be summoned several times to dinner. The meal was served early, because the Lincolns had promised to attend a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. By this time Mary had developed a headache and was inclined to stay at home, but her husband said that he must attend. The evening newspapers had carried an announcement that he would be present and tickets had been sold on the basis of that expectation. Anyway, he added, if he remained at the White House, he would have to receive company all evening and would get no rest. Even as the Lincolns prepared to get in their carriage, he had to deal with yet more callers. Just as they were leaving, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold walked up. “Excuse me now,” Lincoln said. “I am going to the theatre. Come and see me in the morning.”
VI
Lincoln’s advisers urged him not to go to the theater. Before leaving on a mission to Richmond, Lamon, who often served as a presidential bodyguard, begged him, “Promise me you will not go out at night while I am gone, particularly to the theater.” But the President had so often heard the marshal on this subject that, as Lamon said later, he “thought me insane upon the subject of his safety,” and he would only pledge, “Well, I promise to do the best I can toward it.” Stanton, too, repeatedly warned Lincoln against mingling with promiscuous crowds at the theater. The occasion this evening was more dangerous than most, because it had been widely advertised that General Grant, fresh from his victories in Virginia, would join the President in the state box at Ford’s Theatre.
The Lincolns had trouble making up a theater party on April 14, perhaps because it was Good Friday. They invited the Stantons, but the Secretary of War refused because, he said, “Mr. Lincoln ought not to go—it was too great an exposure.” Anyway, Mrs. Stanton disliked Mrs. Lincoln. After initially accepting a verbal invitation, Grant also declined. Julia Grant, who remembered all too well Mary Lincoln’s behavior during her visit to City Point, was unwilling to be confined for hours in a box at the theater with a woman of such uncertain temper. She decided to visit her children in Burlington, New Jersey, and the general, always glad of an excuse to escape the limelight, asked to be excused so that he could join her. Governor Oglesby and General Haynie were asked, but they had a meeting to attend. Lincoln invited Howard, the Detroit postmaster, but he was leaving Washington that evening. William H. Wallace, governor of Idaho Territory, and his wife also declined.
On one of his visits to the War Department, Lincoln asked Stanton if Major Thomas T. Eckert, chief of the telegraph bureau, could accompany him to the theater. Eckert was a man of exceptional strength, who once, in order to demonstrate the poor quality of the cast-iron pokers that were supplied for use at the War Department grates, broke five of them by striking them across his left arm. Here surely was a man who could defend the President against whatever danger Stanton feared. But the Secretary said that Eckert was needed for important work. Going over Stanton’s head, the President approached Eckert directly. “Now, Major,” he cajoled, “come along. You can do Stanton’s work to-morrow, and Mrs. Lincoln and I want you with us.” But Eckert, in deference to the Secretary’s wishes, declined.
The Lincolns next turned to a young couple of whom they were fond: Cl
ara Harris, the daughter of the senator from New York, and her stepbrother (who was also her fiancé) Major Henry R. Rathbone, who had served with distinction in the war and could presumably offer the President protection. After picking up their guests, the Lincolns drove to Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street through streets still illuminated in celebration of the recent victory.
By the time they arrived, at about eight-thirty, the performance had already begun, though the spectators kept glancing at the empty presidential box. There had been some grumbling because, in anticipation that both Lincoln and Grant would attend, scalpers bought up most of the tickets, which regularly cost $.75 or $1.00, and resold them for $2.50 each. But when the President and his party entered, the orchestra, led by William Withers, interrupted the actors and played “Hail to the Chief,” and the audience rose and cheered. As he climbed the stairs to the dress circle, the President walked slowly, and his shoulders seemed noticeably stooped. Carrying his high silk hat in his left hand, he led the way along a narrow corridor to the presidential box. (Actually it was two boxes, but the management had removed the partition between them to give more room for the presidential party.) The audience continued wildly cheering, and, one witness remembered, “the President stepped to the box rail and acknowledged the applause with dignified bows and never-to-be-forgotten smiles.” Knowing that the President preferred a rocking chair, Harry C. Ford, brother of the owner of the theater, had thoughtfully provided one from his private quarters, and there were also comfortable chairs and a small sofa for the other guests. The velvet balustrade in front of the box, eleven feet and six inches above the stage, had been decorated with patriotic colors, and the blue regimental flag of the Treasury Guard flew above a gilt-framed portrait of George Washington on the center pillar. The occupants of the box could not be seen by most of the audience.
The play, which starred Laura Keene, was a creaky farce about an American bumpkin, Asa Trenchard, who goes to England to claim a fortune he has inherited from a noble relative. He is pursued by a fortune-hunting Englishwoman, Mrs. Mountchessington, who wants to marry him to her daughter, Augusta. The play had been a hit for five years, and the lines were familiar enough to allow the actors a little improvisation for special occasions like this one. So when the frail heroine asked for a seat protected from the draft, Lord Dundreary, instead of saying “Well, you’re not the only one that wants to escape the draft,” replied: “You are mistaken. The draft has already been stopped by order of the President!”
Though the draperies concealed the President so that he could only be seen when he leaned forward, the Lincolns appeared to enjoy the play. When the actors scored hits, Mary applauded, but her husband simply laughed heartily. A man seated in the orchestra observed that Mrs. Lincoln often called the President’s attention to actions on the stage and “seemed to take great pleasure in witnessing his enjoyment.” Seated so close to her husband that she was nestled against him, she whispered: “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” With a smile he replied: “She wont think any thing about it.”
One of the most predictable crowd-pleasers in the play came during the second scene of the third act, when Mrs. Mountchessington, learning that Asa Trenchard has given away his inheritance, denounces him for not knowing how to behave and makes a haughty exit. Asa’s lines read: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.” The laughter and burst of applause almost covered the sound of a shot in the presidential box.
VII
John Wilkes Booth had been busy since the night of April 11. “Our cause being almost lost,” he concluded, “something decisive and great must be done.” Remembering that Jefferson Davis was still at large and that Johnston’s army in North Carolina was still under arms, he devised a plan to give the Confederacy one last chance by decapitating the Union government at Washington. Both Lincoln and Andrew Johnson would be killed. Seward would also be murdered, since, as Secretary of State, he would have the responsibility for holding new elections in the North. In the demoralization and disorder that would surely follow, the South might still gain its independence.
Booth had trouble getting his fellow conspirators to go along with his plan. John Surratt, the ablest of his associates, went off on a trip to Canada for his Confederate employers. Accusing Booth of mismanagement and fearing that “the G[overnmen]t suspicions something is going on,” Arnold favored postponing action until someone could “go and see how it will be taken at R[ichmon]d.” Later he decided to cut loose from Booth’s scheme and took a job as a clerk at Old Point. O’Laughlin, too, was disillusioned; willing enough to take part in a kidnapping, he wanted no part of a murder. But Booth still had three devoted followers: Atzerodt, Herold, and Paine.
It was not until midday on April 14, when he learned that Lincoln would be attending Ford’s Theatre, that Booth decided to implement his plan. At about eight o’clock he summoned Atzerodt to meet him and Paine at the Herndon House, where he gave them their marching orders. Atzerodt was told to murder Andrew Johnson, who was staying at the Kirkland House. “I won’t do it!” the German said in terror. “I enlisted to abduct the President of the United States, not to kill.” But under Booth’s threats and curses he agreed to consider the assignment. Paine willingly accepted the order to kill Seward. Calling Booth “Captain,” he thought of himself as a soldier obeying the commands of a superior officer. Because Paine was not familiar with the streets of Washington, Booth directed Herold to show him the way to the house of the Secretary of State. The assassination of the President was left for Booth himself, who expected to have some assistance in making his getaway from Edman Spangler and other stagehands at Ford’s Theatre. All three assaults were to take place simultaneously, at 10:15 P.M.
In anticipation of the slaughter, Booth prepared a letter for publication in the National Intelligencer, explaining and defending his motives. The friend to whom he entrusted the letter destroyed it and remembered only its closing words: “The world may censure me for what I am about to do, but I am sure that posterity will justify me.” The communication probably contained the same ideas that Booth later jotted down in his diary, where he recorded that the country owed all its troubles to Lincoln, “and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” He was a modern Brutus or William Tell, though his action would be seen as purer than that of either. They had private motives, but “I struck for my country and that alone. A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end.”
As Atzerodt and Paine fanned out to seek their targets, Booth, a celebrated actor, familiar to everybody who worked at Ford’s Theatre, had no trouble in slipping upstairs during the performance of Our American Cousin. Moving quietly down the aisle behind the dress circle, he stood for a few moments near the President’s box. A member of the audience, seeing him there, thought him “the handsomest man I had ever seen.” John Parker, the Metropolitan policeman assigned to protect the President, had left his post in the passageway, and the box was guarded only by Charles Forbes, a White House footman. When Booth showed Forbes his calling card, he was admitted to the presidential box. Barring the door behind him, so as not to be disturbed, he noiselessly moved behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward, with his chin in his right hand and his arm on the balustrade. At a distance of about two feet, the actor pointed his derringer at the back of the President’s head on the left side and pulled the trigger. It was about 10:13 P.M.
When Major Rathbone tried to seize the intruder, Booth lunged at him with his razor-sharp hunting knife, which had a 7¼-inch blade. “The Knife,” Clara Harris reported, “went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside,—cutting an artery, nerves and veins—he bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” Shoving his victim aside, Booth placed his hands on the balustrade and vaulted toward the stage. It was an easy leap for the gymnastic actor, but the spur on his heel caught in the flags decorating the box and he fell heavily on one foo
t, breaking the bone just above the ankle. Waving his dagger, he shouted in a loud, melodramatic voice: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”—the motto of the state of Virginia). Some in the audience thought he added, “The South is avenged.” Quickly he limped across the stage, with what one witness called “a motion ... like the hopping of a bull frog,” and made his escape through the rear of the theater.
Up to this point the audience was not sure what had happened. Perhaps most thought the whole disturbance was part of the play. But as the blue-white smoke from the pistol drifted out of the presidential box, Mary Lincoln gave a heart-rending shriek and screamed, “They have shot the President! They have shot the President!”
The first doctor to reach the box, army surgeon Charles A. Leale, initially thought the President was dead. With his eyes closed and his head fallen forward on his breast, he was being held upright in his chair by Mrs. Lincoln, who was weeping bitterly. Detecting a slight pulse, the physician ordered the President to be stretched on the floor so that he could determine the extent of his injuries. Finding his major wound was at the back of his head, he removed the clot of blood that had accumulated there and relieved the pressure on his brain. Then, by giving artificial respiration, he was able to induce a feeble action of the heart, and irregular breathing followed.
As soon as it was clear that instant death would not occur, the President was moved from the crowded theater. Some wanted to take him to the White House, but Dr. Leale warned that he would die if jostled on the rough streets of Washington. They decided to carry him across Tenth Street to a house owned by William Petersen, a merchant-tailor. There he was taken to a small, narrow room at the rear of the first floor. Because Lincoln was so tall, his body could not fit on the bed unless his knees were elevated. Finding that the foot of the bedstead could not be removed or broken off, the doctors placed him diagonally across the mattress, resting his head and shoulders on extra pillows. Though he was covered by an army blanket and a colored wool coverlet, his extremities grew very cold, and the physicians ordered hot-water bottles.
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