The Day Lincoln Was Shot Read online

Booth reasoned that, if there was going to be a theater party, it would be held at Ford’s or at Grover’s. These drew most of the presidential patronage. The actor looked over the bills for the week, and counted on Grover’s Theatre because they were opening with Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp, a new and dramatic vehicle, whereas Ford’s had scheduled the old Laura Keene comedy, Our American Cousin. This play, he recollected, had not been well received even when it was new.

  Booth walked up the Avenue to Grover’s Theatre and, when he got inside, the theater was in cool darkness except the stage, where overhead lamps were lit. Onstage, Mr. C. Dwight Hess, manager, sat marking cue lines on a script with the prompter. In most circumstances, Booth had enormous respect for the theatrical proprieties and would not intrude on a script reading, but, on this occasion, he got up onstage and drew a chair.

  The actor asked if Hess planned to join the city illumination tonight. The manager marked a place on the script with his finger, looked up, and said yes, to a degree, but that tomorrow night would be the big one as far as Grover’s was concerned.

  “Tomorrow?” said Booth.

  “Yes. It is the fourth anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter and tomorrow they’re going to raise the flag over the fort again.”

  “Are you going to invite the President?” said Booth.

  “Yes,” said Hess. He shook his head. “That reminds me. I must send an invitation.” (It was sent within the hour and was addressed to Mrs. Lincoln.)

  Booth left and went upstairs to Deery’s place. This time he was friendly and conversational. He said that he had seen Hess and that Grover’s was going to stage a special celebration tomorrow in honor of Fort Sumter. Would Deery reserve the front right-hand box for Booth?

  Deery chuckled. Why would one of the country’s leading actors need a tavernkeeper to get box seats for him?

  Because, said Booth, if I ask for it at the box office, Hess will feel impelled to extend the courtesy of the house, and I want to pay for this.

  Oh, said Deery, in that case I can get them for you. He didn’t blame Booth for not wanting to miss the show because, as he understood it, Hess planned to have a display of fireworks out front before curtain time, plus a Grand Oriental Spectacle, and a reading of Major French’s new poem, “The Flag of Sumter.” This, in addition to a performance of Aladdin, would make it a great evening.

  The night before April 14 was cool and starry. John Wilkes Booth was on a rented horse, riding around town contacting Lewis Paine, David Herold and George Atzerodt. These were all that was left of the band. The carriage maker, weakest of the group, was at Pennsylvania House, a four-and-five-men-to-a-room hotel on C Street near Sixth. Wilkes ordered him to take a room at Kirkwood House, on the Avenue, and to spy on Vice President Andrew Johnson, who had a two-room suite in the first corridor behind the lobby. To each of his three men, Booth said that the time for action was at hand, and that this time there would be no failure because he planned to eliminate the President entirely.

  Atzerodt was the only one who showed shock. Paine’s reaction was casual. Herold was thrilled to be a part of such a shattering event.

  By 8 P.M. the temporary gas jets in the windows of City Hall were blazing, and crowds were attracted to the big candlelit sign before the YMCA:

  GOD, GRANT, OUR COUNTRY, PEACE

  At midnight, Secretary of War Stanton was recopying his draft for peace and, a little more than a mile to the east, Booth sat in Room 228 at the National Hotel, also with pen in hand, and wrote a final note to his mother:

  Dearest Mother—

  I know you expect a letter from me and am sure you will hardly forgive me. But indeed I have had nothing to write about. Everything is dull, that is, has been until last night. Everything was bright and splendid. More so in my eyes if it had been a display in a nobler cause. But so goes the world. Might makes right. I only drop you these few lines to let you know that I am well and to say I have not heard from you. Excuse brevity; am in haste. Had one from Rose. With best love to you all.

  I am your affectionate son, ever

  John

  Booth sealed it and prepared for the last good night’s rest he would have.

  The Morning Hours

  * * *

  9 a.m.

  Mr. Lincoln folded the newspapers and put them to one side for further search, if time permitted. He signed two documents. Then he nodded to the soldier, now standing inside the double door, to admit the first visitor.

  Watching him, on this final morning, a person with prescience and a sense of history would have recalled a lot of things that Lincoln had said which would make it look as though the President had known this day was coming.

  “I do not consider that I have ever accomplished anything without God,” he had said, “and if it is His will that I must die by the hand of an assassin, I must be resigned. I must do my duty as I see it, and leave the rest to God.”

  In an aside to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he had said: “Whichever way the war ends, I have the impression that I shall not last long after it is over.”

  No one who heard him could doubt that he was philosophical about being killed, when he said: “If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it is to die over and over again.” To reinforce this point, one of the pigeonholes in his desk had a bulky envelope. It was labeled “Assassination” and it contained eighty threats on his life.

  Nor did he worry about whether he was held in high esteem or low when he died. “I’ll do the very best I know how,” he had said, “the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference.”

  They had called him, among many other things, a nigger lover and, in a merciful fatherly way, he was. And he was the man to write: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” But once, long ago, in the dancing heat of an Illinois summer, he had brought the same thought home to the heart: “When I see strong hands sowing, reaping and threshing wheat into bread, I cannot refrain from wishing and believing that those hands, some day, in God’s good time, shall own the mouth they feed.”

  He had had his say on many subjects, and once, when a Christian minister had written that it was not right for the President of the United States to attend a theater when the nation was drenched in blood, Mr. Lincoln had written:

  “Some think I do wrong to go to the opera and the theater, but it rests me. I love to be alone and yet to be with other people. I want to get this burden off; to change the current of my thoughts. A hearty laugh relieves me, and I seem better able after it to bear my cross.”

  The previous June, in Philadelphia, he had noted that many of the nation’s newspapers were demanding Peace Now. And he had said, at a public gathering:

  “War, at its best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible. It has deranged business. . . . It has destroyed property, and ruined homes; it has produced a national debt and taxation unprecedented. . . . It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’. . . We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when the object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will end until that time. . . .”

  The pale-eyed Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, came in. He was a good-looking, brown-bearded man who was partial to long black coats and sleeves which exposed only his fingertips. He had the overly cordial manner and perpetual smile of the salesman. And what Mr. Colfax had to sell was always the same: himself.

  They shook hands and Colfax sat. Lincoln liked him, not so much because no President can afford the enmity of the House Speaker, but rather because the President understood Mr. Colfax and appreciated him for what he was. Seven years before, Colfax had favored Douglas over Lincoln, but that had been forgotten. As a le
gislative leader, the man had worked fairly easily in harness with the executive and, even though the President knew that this man favored promotion over principles, and money over morals, he still looked upon him as a friendly rascal.

  No notes were kept of this morning’s discussion, but it is probable that they talked about Mr. Colfax’s ambition to become a member of the Lincoln Cabinet. The President was not unstained in this situation. He had nourished the ambition in the Speaker’s breast, and the conversation had reached the ways and means stage.

  Everyone knew that Stanton had tried to quit as Secretary of War—a theatrical gesture, perhaps—and that Lincoln had thrown his arms around his favorite strong man and had begged him to stay on. But Stanton wanted to be appointed to the Supreme Court and, if the vacancy arose, there is no doubt that Lincoln would have presented his name to the Congress. This would leave the War Department open, and in a postwar period of demobilization and peace there would be no safer place to put Mr. Schuyler Colfax.

  Another matter discussed was a growing congressional worry that Mr. Lincoln was about to undertake the reconstruction of the South without consulting the legislative branch of the government. Colfax tried to exact a presidential promise that postwar policy would not be laid down without calling a special session of Congress, but the best he could get from Mr. Lincoln was “I have no intention, at the moment,” of calling a special session, but “if I change my mind, I will give the due sixty days notice.”

  As Speaker, Mr. Colfax was expected to protect the rights of Congress in this matter, but, as a Cabinet member persona-elect, he had to defend the position of the Chief Executive, who wanted to make a lenient peace with the South, with no outside help other than what he could expect from the Messrs. Seward, Welles and Stanton, and then only such help as he had to suffer.

  This viewpoint was not a secret. Everybody knew that Mr. Lincoln wanted to go it alone and few, even among his friends, felt any sympathy for his viewpoint. Even those of his own party who agreed with him that a soft peace would be the most permanent peace felt obligated to speak up solemnly and admit that Congress was “entitled” to a voice in the matter.

  Among the outspoken and bitter, Congressman George Julian said that Lincoln’s views on reconstruction were “as distasteful as possible to radical Republicans.” Wendell Phillips, still coining phrases, referred to Lincoln as a “first-rate second-rate man.” Others, who had heard Lincoln promise the vote to the intelligent Negro and the Negro who had fought, murmured sadly: “Only those?”

  When Colfax left, his step was springy and he beamed a greeting to those waiting outside the presidential office, so it could very well be that he felt he had lost the fight for Congress, but had a leg up on a Cabinet post for himself.

  The next visitor was Congressman Cornelius Cole of California. What his business was is not known, but he remained overly long and the President wanted to close his morning appointment list before eleven because he had called a Cabinet meeting for that time. Two more men waited outside.

  Upstairs, William H. Crook, the President’s day guard, had relieved the night man in the corridor outside the Lincoln bedroom. He was a forthright, observant young man who had a honed sense of duty. On the 8 A.M.—4 P.M. shift, he was seldom more than a few paces away from the man whose life he guarded. Now, he took the night guard’s hall chair and stuck it in a closet, and then turned off the gaslights in the hall.

  He came downstairs, observing that the vultures had left, and checked the position of the military guards at the front gate, the front door of the Executive Mansion, and the door leading to the Executive Office.

  The night guard, Alfonso Dunn, was standing on the front portico laughing at some of the victory celebrants who were reeling and roaring outside the White House fence. Crook joined him, half amused, and wrote later:

  “Everybody is celebrating. The kind of celebration depends on the kind of person. It is merely a question of whether the intoxication is mental or physical. A stream of callers comes to congratulate the President, to tell how loyal they have been, and how they have always been sure that he would be victorious. The city is disorderly with men who are celebrating too hilariously.” Later: “Those about the President lost somewhat of the feeling, usually present, that his life was not safe. It did not seem possible, now that the war was over . . . after President Lincoln had offered himself a target for Southern bullets in the streets of Richmond and had come out unscathed, there could be any danger.”

  John Wilkes Booth returned from the barbershop, smooth of skin and powdered. As he walked through the lobby of the National Hotel, the transients nudged each other and pointed him out. Sometimes people confused him with his brother Edwin, but this did not happen as often as it did in the early days. Wilkes was famous now; a star in his own right.

  As he passed the desk, the clerk looked perfunctorily for the Booth mail. There was none. The actor’s mail was usually delivered “c/o Ford’s Opera House, 10th Street, Washington City, D.C.” The Ford brothers could be trusted to hold all mail for him, no matter how long.

  No one, not even the careful Mr. William H. Crook, would call Booth a suspicious person. Anyone who might have pointed an accusing finger at the noted actor on this particular morning would have been branded hysterical or insane. Everyone, it seemed, knew John Wilkes Booth and everyone, it seemed, admired him. He was the recipient of sunny smiles from strangers and, in his presence, demure ladies became bold. His name on the street billboards and fences was enough to guarantee a respectably full house, and Mr. Hess, the manager at Grover’s Theatre, on E Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth, would have given a great deal to get him away from the Fords.

  Perhaps one person might have worried about Booth had he seen him this morning. His name was Oram, and years before he and Wilkes, as boys will, lay supinely in the grass at Bel Air and dreamed about the future.

  “What I want,” said Booth then, “is not to be so fine an actor as my father, but rather to be a name in history.” He wanted, most of all, to be remembered. “I will make my name remembered by succeeding generations,” he said, and the two had chewed long blades of seed grass and had watched the fat white dumplings of clouds float across a clearing between hummocks, and had spat green.

  Another schoolmate joined them and he heard the story and he asked how it could be done. Wilkes had thought about the question and he had answered solemnly:

  “I’ll tell you what I mean. You have read about the Seven Wonders of the World? Well, we will take the Statue of Rhodes for an example. Suppose that statue was now standing and I should, by some means, overthrow it.” The boys nodded. “My name would descend to posterity and never be forgotten, for it would be in all the histories of the times, and be read thousands of years after we are dead, and no matter how smart and good men we may be, we would never get our names in so many histories.”

  His friend Oram thought about it. Then he said: “Suppose the falling statue took you down with it? What good would all your glory do you?” And Wilkes propped himself on an elbow in the grass and smiled forgivingly. “I should die,” he said, “with the satisfaction of knowing that I had done something never before accomplished by any other man, and something no other man would probably ever do.”

  There was no Oram around this morning. No one to feel other than envy at sight of Booth. As he walked back upstairs to his room, Michael O’Laughlin and his party of celebrants were coming down Pennsylvania Avenue. They had had breakfast, and some drinks, and hands and heads were steadier now. In fact, some of the gaiety of last night had been restored. The food at Welch’s had been good, and the drinks, tasting stronger than yesterday, had recolored the city and made it a memorable sight.

  There were four of them. Navy Ensign Henderson and Bernard J. Early were trying to agree on a mutual flat note with which to start a song. Mike O’Laughlin and Edward Murphy, leading the party, were silent. O’Laughlin was promising himself that he would not get drunk the second consecutiv
e day, but he couldn’t force himself to believe himself because he knew what a liar he was.

  They were passing the National when Bernie Early said that, if nobody minded too much, he would pause and use the men’s room. Nobody minded at all. Murphy, in fact, wondered if the hotel had a bar, and if not why not. They walked inside and O’Laughlin said that he had a friend in this hotel—John Wilkes Booth—and he would stop by and say hello to him in his room. Henderson and Murphy, while waiting, had cartes de visite made and, after forty-five minutes, sent two of them up by a hotel messenger to see if they could hurry Mike out of his friend’s room. The cards came back with no answer, so the three went off to Lichau House, where men could sober up on pickled pigs’ feet and big cold schooners of beer. Mike rejoined them there. He said that he had been trying to get some money that Booth owed him.

  Over on the other side of town—the north side—Anna Ward had been to the post office early. She was young and unpretty and overly modest and nearsighted. She admired John Surratt very much. What hurt Anna’s chances with John was that she already had the blessing of the boy’s mother. This, as many girls have learned, can slow a romance to a walk. Still, John seemed to display fondness for her more when he was away from home than when he was in the boardinghouse. As today, for instance. She had two letters from him, both postmarked “Montreal, Canada East.” Inside, in addition to the warm missives to her, were two enclosures for his mother.

  Anna hurried as fast as she could to get to the boarding-house on H Street to share her happiness with the widow Surratt. She had another letter for Mrs. Surratt postmarked Maryland, but Anna had no interest in it.

  The two women, both nearsighted, read the letters aloud and hugged themselves over the news that John was well. He did not say what he was doing in Canada, but it was pretty well known that the Confederate States of America had shipped much money through Montreal to and from Europe, and it was tacitly understood that John Surratt had run the blockade for the Rebels between Richmond and Montreal, with documents concealed in a hollowed heel of a boot and between the floorboards of a rig. He had been stopped and searched several times by roving Union patrols in southern Maryland, but no one had ever found anything incriminating.