The Day Lincoln Was Shot Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated to My Dearest Friend

  John M. Bishop

  Who Is Also My Father

  Epigraph

  Good Friday was the day

  Of the prodigy and crime,

  When they killed him in his pity,

  When they killed him in his prime. . . .

  . . . They killed him in his kindness,

  In their madness in their blindness,

  And they killed him from behind. . . .

  He lieth in his blood—

  The Father in his face;

  They have killed him, the forgiver—

  The Avenger takes his place. . . .

  There is sobbing of the strong,

  And a pall upon the land;

  But the People in their weeping

  Bare the iron hand:

  Beware the People weeping

  When they bare the iron hand.

  —Herman Melville

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  For the Record

  Daybreak

  7 a.m.

  8 a.m.

  The Days Before

  The President

  The Conspiracy

  The Morning Hours

  9 a.m.

  10 a.m.

  11 a.m.

  The Afternoon Hours

  12 noon

  1 p.m.

  2 p.m.

  3 p.m.

  4 p.m.

  5 p.m.

  6 p.m.

  The Night Hours

  7 p.m.

  8 p.m.

  9 p.m.

  10 p.m

  11 p.m.

  The Final Hours

  12 midnight

  1 a.m.

  2 a.m.

  3 a.m.

  4 a.m.

  5 a.m.

  6 a.m.

  7 a.m.

  Postscript

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Also by Jim Bishop

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Footnotes

  For the Record

  This is a book about a day, a place and a murder—and about a wide variety of men and women. It begins with the casual and somewhat late good morning of President Abraham Lincoln outside his bedroom door at 7 A.M. on Friday, April 14, 1865, and it ends at 7:22 A.M. the following morning when, as Surgeon General Barnes pressed silver coins to the President’s eyelids, Mrs. Lincoln moaned: “Oh, why did you not tell me he was dying!”

  The elapsed time is twenty-four hours, twenty-two minutes. To many people, this is the single most dramatic day in the life of the Republic. It has been written about before, as a chapter of a book, or a part of a chapter and once in a terse volume written by John W. Starr—a volume which ended at 8 P.M. Some of these passages have been beautiful and moving and some have been skimpy and vague and laden with unsupported suspicion. Some of the lurid journalists, feeling that there was not sufficient natural drama in the violent death of Lincoln, filled in the blank spots of this day with imaginings, and the story of the assassination, in time, became so interlarded with fiction that the principal assassin, John Wilkes Booth, became a minor character.

  In addition to the chapters dealing with specific hours of the day and night, I have included here two chapters of background in a section entitled The Days Before. I have been reluctant to interrupt the narrative with the insertion of this background section, but have been persuaded that this is necessary and useful in placing the events of the day in context.

  As a student of President Lincoln and his times, I began, in 1930, to keep notes on the events of this day. The best, and simplest way, I felt, was to keep notebooks labeled 7 A.M. Friday, 8 A.M. Friday, 9 A.M. Friday and so on through 7 A.M. Saturday. That made twenty-five notebooks. In addition, I kept one marked “Lincoln and Family,” one labeled “The Conspirators,” one called “Washington—Era,” and one marked “Bibliography.” This must be of small interest to any reader except to point out that, after years of reading and making notes, I found that I had as many as three or four versions—each at variance with the others—of what had happened in any one hour. Two years ago, when I intensified the research and started to read seven million words of government documents, the pieces of the puzzle began to orient themselves. There were still conflicts of time and place and event, and these were eventually reconciled by (1) the preponderance of evidence tending toward one version: (2) the testimony of more than one supporting witness at the trial of the conspirators: (3) the relationship of the event in question with an event that occurred prior to it or immediately after.

  Still, I do not believe that this book presents all of the facts, nor anywhere near all of the facts. In the little notebooks today, hundreds of pages are marked “void.” In the multitude of trial records, documents and books, there are many blank places although, to compensate for this, I must acknowledge that many of the witnesses supplied sufficient material so that conversations could be reconstructed in dialogue without straining the quotation marks. In fact, the only liberties I have taken are in describing facial expressions (“he scowled”; “Booth looked tired,” etc.) and in describing what certain characters thought, although in each case the thought is based on knowledge of facts then in the possession of the character. Other than that, this book is pretty much a journalistic job.

  To insure that the book should be factually sound, galleys were sent to such Lincoln scholars as Bruce Catton, Stefan Lorant, and Harry E. Pratt, Historian of the Illinois State Historical Library. I hope that their suggestions and their challenges have been met and that the book is better, smoother and more sure of itself because of their ministrations.

  Sometimes, small facts become elusive. For example, I assumed all along that Lincoln’s office was on the ground floor of the White House. It did not occur to me to challenge this until I read in a Carl Sandburg book that the President was informed, in his office, that people “were waiting downstairs.” The book was nearly complete when, through the kind offices of Congressman Frank Osmers (N.J.), it was put beyond dispute that Lincoln worked upstairs, not down. Another “small” fact is that most writers assumed that Booth, in his escape from the alley behind Ford’s Theatre, spurred his mare up the alley to F Street, and turned right. It did not occur to me to question this until I learned, in an old document, that a wooden gate, used as a billboard, closed the F Street exit and that the assassin would have had to ride up the alley, halt, dismount, open the gate, and then flee. In Ford’s Theatre, a National Parks guard told me that the alley, in 1865, formed a T, and that John Wilkes Booth was aware of the gate at F Street and had not used it, turning instead down the other leg of the alley to Ninth Street, and thence right to Pennsylvania Avenue. In the library at the back of Ford’s Theatre, this guard had an old government pamphlet which proved the point.

  For help in amassing the material for this book, I am indebted to Mr. Evan Thomas, Managing Editor of Harper & Brothers; Mrs. Phyllis Jackson of Music Corporation of America; Miss Olive Tambourelle of the Teaneck, New Jersey, library; Mr. Robert Hug of the New York Public Library; the Illinois State Historical Society; to the Esso people for a fine street map of Washington; to Gayle Peggy Bishop, age ten, for facing thousands of pieces of carbon paper in one direction; to Virginia Lee Bishop, seventeen, for believing that no one but her father could have written this particular book.

  Jim Bishop

  Teaneck, New Jersey

  Daybreak

  * * *

  7 a.m.

  The polished rosewood door swung back and the President of the United States came from his
bedroom. He nodded to the nightman in the hall and said “Good morning.” He fingered his big gold watch, anchored to the chain across his vest, but he did not look at it. The hour of seven was late for Lincoln. Many a time, the guard remembered, the President was downstairs working at six.

  The big man started down the hall slowly, like a person older in years, the legs perpetually bent at the knees, the black suit flapping about the frame. He looked like a man who did not feel well. The circles under his tired eyes were pouched; the skin of his face was almost saffron; the scraggly black beard thinned and died as it approached the hairline; the hair itself was almost combed; the feet moved with conscious effort, barely lifting off the red pile rug before being set down again; the thick lips, more brown than red, were pulled back in a semi-smile.

  He saw the men ahead. There was no way to avoid them. The guards could not seem to keep them out, and many of them slept in the White House hall. The word had passed that he was coming, and so they were on their feet and smiling. Each of these wanted a favor. As he passed, hardly pausing, they asked for jobs or passes to Richmond or the commutation of a military sentence or presidential approval of an illegal business deal. In four years of living in the White House, Mr. Lincoln had become accustomed to the morning vultures. He could do little to be rid of them, and he had no desire to help them because, if their claims were just, they would have had satisfaction at the proper agency.

  There was no way around them. His bedroom was in the southwest corner of the White House, on the second floor, and his office was in the southeast corner, on the same floor. Some men, desperate or arrogant, grabbed the crook of his arm and held him until the President pulled himself loose and said: “I am sorry. I cannot be of help to you.” Some spoke quietly and swiftly, their heads swinging to follow him as he kept walking. Some wept. A few muttered threats and departed.

  He walked down the carpeted hall slowly, and through the door to his office. A soldier came to attention, and Lincoln nodded pleasantly and walked inside. It was a big office, bigger than two farm kitchens, and he walked over to the far side from the door and looked in the pigeonholes of the old desk and then sat at the small table near the south windows. He picked up a paper, crossed his legs and leaned back in the high chair. The light from the windows was not good; this was a misty morning and a chill breeze leaned against the newborn buds in Washington City. This would be a day for a coat in the morning hours and the evening hours. Down behind the Capitol, with its new dome looking like a marble breast, the sun was fighting a patient battle with gray clouds.

  The streets, at this hour, were full of people. Unofficial Washington was on its way to work. In offices and shops, the business day began at 7:30 and the flagstone and wooden walks rang with the tempo of heavy boots. In the gray clay, teams of horses steamed as they pulled heavy brewery wagons and loads of produce to the taverns and markets of a gluttonous town. The drivers, in open vests and black peaked caps, bounced as they drove through brown puddles and kept an eye on the meticulous ladies who dipped brooms in hot water to sweep mud from the steps of the houses.

  Washington City was a place of cobblestones and iron wheels, of hoop skirts and gaslight, of bayonets and bonnets, of livery stables and taverns. It was a city of high stoops and two-story brick houses with attics. From almost any point in the city, the dominating features were the Capitol and the Washington Monument. With a thumb on the dome of the Capitol, and a middle finger on the Monument, a circular span would embrace practically all of Washington City.

  The town was Southern in character and habit, leisurely enough so that individual noises could still be heard. On Sunday mornings, no matter how deeply one huddled in blankets, bells from at least two churches could be heard tolling. A train leaving the Baltimore and Ohio terminal would shriek once, and a hundred shrieks would come back from the streets. A lounger at Pennsylvania Avenue and Third Street could watch a truck pass by, meet a friend, have a conversation, stop for a drink, and still return to the corner in time to see the same truck far up Pennsylvania Avenue, perhaps at Thirteenth Street.

  It was a busy town, but compared to New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, or even compared to its neighbor to the north, Baltimore, it was small and pompous. Below Gravelly Point, ships under sail were standing in to port, passing paddle-wheel steamers, new in white paint and gold-leaf trimming, squatting low in their own lace train.

  It was a Currier and Ives print come to life, and more. It was a city of individual persons with unique passions and ambitions. The popular song was “When This Cruel War Is Over.” Women bought the freshest editions of the newspapers to study the columns of war dead, which started on the left side of page 1, and then jumped to an inside page. Each day they performed the simple, breathless duty of looking. With a finger on type, they moved from column to column until they found a heading marked “Ord’s Corps” or “Sheridan’s Army,” and then Mrs. Jones moved her finger down to the J’s, expelled a big breath, and began to read the news.

  The people, by later standards, were adolescent and did much of their thinking with their hearts. They were emotional and gullible, and morbidly concerned with the imminence of death. The latest intelligence from abroad, which came aboard a packet boat just landed at Castle Garden in New York, was that the Duke of Northumberland had died and Cardinal Wiseman was not expected to live. Anyone who had consumption could hardly do better than to buy Dr. Wishart’s Pine Tree Tar Cordial, and Dr. Morris advertised “a secret worth knowing to married females.” Another reputable doctor offered to cure “Cancer for $2 a visit—no cure no pay.” A tooth could now be extracted “without pain, with nitrous gas, ether, or chloroform” for 50 cents. The Baltimore Lock Hospital advertised itself as a “refuge from quackery; the only place where a cure can be obtained.” Among the ills corrected were “weakness in back or limb, involving discharges, impotency, confusion of ideas, trembling, timidity—those terrible disorders arising from the solitary habits of youth.” The hospital’s boast was: “The doctor’s diploma hangs in his office.”

  Most grocery stores were really general stores. They sold groceries, meats, wines, liquor and hardware. Fresh geese and hares hung from barrels in the doorway. Prices were a wartime outrage. Firkin butter was 30 cents a pound, coffee was hard to get at 21 cents, salt cost 50 cents a bushel, corsets cost $1.50 (extra strong ones $1.75). Hoop skirts wholesaled for $1 apiece and figured prints retailed for 15 cents a yard.

  The anguish of housewives was met by the complacent shrugs of the merchants, who denied that outrageous profiteering was ruining the American dollar. They now had plenty of merchandise, the bins, barrels and jars were filled to brimming with flour, crushed meal, brown sugar, green and black tea, spices, sauces, jellies, starch and yeast, tobacco, cigars and snuff, oil of coal, sperm and ethereal, kerosene lamps, marble tabletops and foot warmers. The favorite whiskeys were Baker 1851, Overholtz 1855, Ziegler 1855 and Finale 1853. Holland gin was sold loose from barrels. The highest-priced meats were ham, at 28 cents a pound, and turkey at 30. A barrel of Boston crackers, enough to last a season, cost $6.50.

  Bricklayers were getting $2.50 for a day’s work, and demanding $3.50. Freed slaves were paid $11 a month and keep for field work. A stranger walking through Washington City would believe, from what he saw, that the main businesses of the town were livery stables and wood yards. There seemed to be one of each to each block, plus a tavern on the corner. The smell of wood smoke was the cologne of the streets. Ducks and chickens picked along Pennsylvania Avenue, edging without panic around the horses, and pigs wallowed and grunted in the street puddles.

  The White House was big and shabby. Successive Congresses had refused to repair it. The rugs were patchy and thin from traffic and mud. The drapes were ornate, but souvenir hunters had cut swatches from them and had stolen silverware and even snuff boxes. In good weather, the odor from the canal on the south was sickening and the malarial mosquitoes were belligerent.

  The building faced Pennsylvania Ave
nue, its white columns glinting gold in an afternoon’s sun. An iron paling fence kept the curious out, but paths to various government departments transversed the lawns. The south grounds, facing the Potomac River, had stables, outhouses and work buildings. Squatters tented on these grounds, and little Tad Lincoln kept goats. The building was flanked by the State Department, the Treasury Department, the War Department and the Navy Department, all on ground marked “The President’s Park.”

  South and east of the White House and the Capitol were acres of Negro shanties. These people, newly freed, had come north to be treated as people; there were too many of them and the labor market was so depressed that Negro women often went from house to house offering to work for anything, for food for their children.

  North of Rhode Island Avenue were stands of timber and farms. Georgetown, except for its university, was largely farm land and suburban dwellings. The city—the real city—lay between Capitol and White House and across a few streets to the north. Pennsylvania Avenue was called “the Avenue” and it had one sidewalk, on the west side. On the other side were open markets and a drainage ditch. The main buildings, excepting the White House and the Capitol, were the Post Office, the Patent Office, the Treasury and the Smithsonian Institution.

  Horse cars swayed slowly down the Avenue, and connected with the Sixth Street cars at East Capitol for the Navy Yard. Convalescent soldiers slept in the basement of the Capitol, vying for space with nearly ten thousand tons of flour which had been cached in case of siege. The railroad terminal, an ornate wooden station with tracks on the street level, stood three blocks north of the Capitol and the pride of the Baltimore and Ohio was that it could whisk a statesman to Baltimore (forty miles away) in an hour and three quarters, or get him to New York City in nine hours.

  Hotels were an innovation to the city, which had been accustomed to boardinghouses and taverns as homes-away-from-home. The lobbies and sitting rooms were alive with traffic. Ornate chandeliers hissed with gaslight, and the doormen and servants, in uniforms black and maroon, eased the lives of legislators and their wives. Official Washington liked the hotels at once. The bars were crowded, the carpeting rich, the toilets were indoors and the spittoons glittered.