The Day Lincoln Was Shot Read online

  Robert, the firstborn, was now twenty-one, a good-looking youth with brown hair plastered flat, and a mustache. He had graduated from Harvard University and he wanted to “join the colors,” but Mrs. Lincoln was opposed to the idea, having lost enough sons to natural causes without risking a death in action. After much family discussion, the President did something that, for him, was mean. He asked General Grant to give the boy a commission and to place him on his personal staff, the inference being that he did not want Robert to be in danger.

  Now the boy was home and he bubbled with stories about the siege of Petersburg and the gallantry of General Sheridan. His mother asked if he would not like to have the tickets to Graver’s Theatre and he said he could use them, or give them to friends.

  Mrs. Lincoln asked if the Grants would join them at the theater and the President said that he guessed they would, that Grant was a great hero and that the people were entitled to a look at him. His wife, who had a facility for cutting across conversational lines, asked if he would have time today for an afternoon drive. The President said that he did not know; that he would see. She said she wished that he would get out in the sun more often.

  This was, at the moment, a happy family at breakfast. It wasn’t always like this; in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that it was seldom like this. With the exception of Robert, it was a tragic group. Two of the boys were dead; the father would be dead by this time tomorrow; Tad would live six years; in ten years the mother would be certified as a “lunatic.” In the family circle, there was often an aura of tension.

  The mainspring of the family was not the President. It was Mary Todd Lincoln. She ruled by negation, and by fear. She was ten years younger than the President—he was fifty-six; she was forty-six. She was extravagant, economically and emotionally. Her inaugural dress of 1865 cost $2,000: In four months’ time, she had bought three hundred pairs of gloves.

  As a child, she was proud and haughty. Like John Wilkes Booth, she had an astonishing memory for long classical poems. She had a passion for sewing and her admiration in the early years went to her maternal grandmother, who ruled in chilly hauteur. When something was mildly funny, Mary laughed hysterically. When something was mildly sad, she wept hysterically.

  When she came to the White House for the first time in 1861, she was short, plump, had a broad round forehead, light brown hair with iridescent lights of bronze, and a full figure. She wore her hair cleaved straight down the middle. When she stepped into the Blue Room for the first time, she said: “It’s mine! My very own! At last it is mine!”

  At once she changed the established order, fired the veteran White House steward, rearranged the furniture, put famous paintings in storage, hid heirlooms, ordered new décor, raged over food bills, accused servants of stealing, stalked through the corridors, not realizing that her taffeta whispered and warned servants that she was coming, refused to appear at state functions if she was piqued, excoriated Congress publicly for not giving the President enough money for state dinners, referred to General McClellan as “humbug” and called General Grant a “butcher.”

  She wanted to be addressed as “Madame President.” The best the President could do was call her “Mother.” Her funds were almost always low, or nonexistent. When bills for gowns were delivered to her, she often went into a frenzy of despair. At the back door of the White House, she berated butchers and grocers for their charges and she would clamor like the lid of a simmering saucepan until her eyes bugged and her voice failed. Afterward, she would sit shaking and palsied, exhausted.

  One tradesman reached a point where he complained to Mr. Lincoln. The President is said to have eyed him sadly, put a strong hand on his shoulder, and said: “You ought to be able to stand, for fifteen minutes, what I have stood for fifteen years.” This was in the early years, and once, at home in Springfield, her nagging reached a point where legend says that Lincoln lost control, laid violent hands on her, shoved her out the front door, and said: “You make the house intolerable! Damn you, get out!”

  After that, he surrendered. Never again did he fight for reason. He did things against his will because they would please her. When he was in his office, and heard the first far-off peal of thunder, he ran from behind his desk to her side, because he knew that she would be terrified. A tree surgeon once approached him, perplexed, and said that Mrs. Lincoln insisted that a particularly fine White House tree be cut down. Lincoln didn’t ask, “What tree?” He said: “Then, for God’s sake, let it be cut down.”

  On the evenings of state balls, the President, dressed in somber tails and pulling on white gloves, always stopped in his wife’s dressing room and said, almost cheerily: “Mother, which women may I speak to tonight?”

  The mulatto seamstress, Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley, said that Mrs. Lincoln would tell him.

  As she grew older, her rages became more violent, more enduring, and with them came dark hallucinations. Once he led her gently to a White House window and pointed to a big white building in the morning sun. “Mother,” he said gently, “if you don’t stop it you will spend the rest of your days there.” The white building was the insane asylum.

  She had terrifying dreams and often, when she awakened crying, he would hear her and get out of his bed and hurry to her and put his arms around her and comfort her. A friend asked what he thought of marriage, and Lincoln said quietly: “My father always said, when you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.”

  Mary Todd Lincoln felt that she was a shrewd politician. There were few vacancies of offices for which she did not have a candidate. Sometimes, to appease her, the President made the appointment. At other times, he ignored her recommendations. When he turned her down on a Secretary of State, and appointed Mr. Seward, she said, “That dirty abolition sneak!”

  In the last campaign, she told Lizzie Keckley that Lincoln had to be reelected because she owed bills totaling at least $27,000 and there was no other way in which they could be paid.

  She was generous too. When gifts of fruits and wines and liquors reached the White House, she loaded them in a carriage and drove out to the Soldiers’ Home on Seventh Street and gave them to the wounded. She was never too weary to make the trip out, and nothing could make her hurry away from the bedsides. On afternoons when she noted that her husband looked tired, she often dropped her own plans and suggested that he come with her for an afternoon drive. At other times, unknown to him, she invited old Illinois friends to breakfast so that his mood might be brightened.

  They were still chatting around the breakfast table when, far to the south, Jefferson Davis penned a note, in Greensboro, North Carolina, to his wife. He had no taste for breakfast this morning. The Confederacy was crushed and dead. He did not know whether the North would demand his life. And so his lean face was hard and expressionless as he penned:

  Dear Winnie,

  I will come to you if I can. Everything is dark. You should prepare for the worst. . . . My love to the children.

  The letter had to be written early. Later in the day, there would be no time, because the President of the Confederate States of America had scheduled a conference with the leader of the last complete army in the field: General Joseph Johnston. And the bitterness that each of these men felt for the other would, on this day at least, be buried and Johnston would say: “My views are, sir, that our people are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight.” At which point Jefferson Davis would write another letter, one to General William Tecumseh Sherman, asking for terms.

  Across town from the White House, Noah Brooks was also writing. He was a newspaperman and, quite regularly, he wrote articles for newspapers in distant cities. The weakness in what Mr. Brooks wrote was the knowledge that he was a particular friend to the President. So particular, in fact, that in this coming June, Noah Brooks was scheduled to replace John G. Nicolay as one of Lincoln’s secretaries.

  Across the top of the first page, he wrote “News letter” in longhand. Underneath, he wrote: “April
14, 1865.” The young man thought for a while, pen off paper, eyes vacantly staring through the window of his room, then the pen began to skate lightly over the paper, describing the elegant maneuvers which made the words which made the sense of his thinking. He had heard the President’s speech of Tuesday, in which Lincoln had noted that elections were held in Louisiana and, as a sop to the radicals of his own party who wanted a harsh peace for the conquered South, he had said that he hoped the vote would be given to the intelligent Negro and the Negro who had fought in uniform.

  “The radicals,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “are as virulent and bitter as ever.” He named some names, but he mitigated the sting of the high-sounding names by adding that the President’s enemies “form but an inconsiderable portion of the great mass of the loyal people.” The people, Brooks found, “have an implicit and truthful faith in Lincoln, which is almost unreasonable and unreasoning.”

  The reporter was exaggerating. The people of the South had no faith in Lincoln. The people of the North felt, in the main, that he was a stumbling, homely man whose “wrong” guesses, comically enough, were always justified in the end. “Old Abe will come out all right,” they said, and, in this, one can read the chuckling affection one would have for a backward neighbor who always bests the pompous banker. Lincoln was lonely in a sense, but his isolation, such as it was, was created more by the politicians than by the people.

  What Mr. Brooks was trying to say was that, on this Good Friday, the Republican Party was cracking under the President’s feet in much the same manner that it had split under him four years before. The Butlers, the Wades, the Greeleys and the Sumners, added to the Democrats who despised him, would undo Lincoln. To them, the President stood for a soft peace; a let’s-bind-the-wounds-and-get-back-to-work peace. Many of the ranking Republicans in the Senate and House wanted peace with a whip. The South was on her knees and, to them, it was not enough. They wanted to see her bleed. That proud trembling chin must be brought down.

  The President got up from the breakfast table and said that he must be off to work. He walked back to his office, nodding to those who waited outside, and sat down at his big desk.

  His office was a big square one in the southeast corner of the White House. In the center was a round oak table where Cabinet meetings were held. It was covered with a heavy green tasseled cloth. Around the room were chairs and two horsehair sofas. At the south end of the room—where he had sat reading earlier—were his pigeonhole desk and the small window table and a worn old chair. Along the north wall, near the entrance to the office, was a small door inside which was a basin, a mirror, a wall-bracket gas lamp, some soap, a towel and a comb.

  Books in the room were few: a Bible, the Statutes of the United States of America, and a complete set of Shakespeare’s works. Over a mantel hung a black-and-white engraving of President Andrew Jackson. Behind Mr. Lincoln’s chair was a velvet bell cord for summoning secretaries. A soldier outside the office door brought the cards of guests.

  The President sat, and, before admitting the first visitor, scanned the morning newspapers. He often said that he seldom read them.

  At the same time, Mrs. Lincoln and her sons left the breakfast table and walked into the Red Room for a chat. The Lincolns had found this room cozier and more to their liking than any of the big rooms in the house, and it had become a family sitting room.

  Upstairs, a maid began the task of straightening out the President’s bedroom. The bed was low and large and the sheets were smoothed and the comforter was folded across the bottom. Two extra large pillows were set standing at the head. Over the head of the bed was a dark velvet canopy with lace side panels.

  A plain cane chair beside the bed served for removing shoes and socks. A big brass ceiling fixture fed gas to white globes, although one was tapped with a hose which fed a small reading lamp on a round table. Two of the chairs near this table were cane; a third one was upholstered and had an antimacassar. A big chair was placed with its back to the western light. Two rosewood folding doors connected with Mrs. Lincoln’s bedroom.

  The Days Before

  * * *

  The President

  To see this one day clearly, it is necessary to see the President— and later, John Wilkes Booth—in the weeks prior to the event. Some of what happened on April 14, 1865, had earlier motivation. Some did not. Still, a certain pattern of events can be seen, in retrospect, and this pattern tends to increase, rather than diminish, the shame of the United States Government on April 14.

  It seems, from the testimony of many witnesses after the event, that the government in early 1865 had two main conversational functions: killing the Confederacy, and keeping Lincoln alive. When the officials weren’t talking about victory, and the means to victory, they were talking about the possibility of assassination. They talked about it, they worried about it and they counter-plotted against it. However, they were assuming that an assassination plot would involve the Confederate States of America versus the United States of America, and it seems not to have occurred to any ranking official that it might be a lonely band of fanatics versus the United States Government.

  The newspapers of late 1864 and 1865 published dramatic and fretful stories of the narrow escapes of President Lincoln. Stanton’s bureau of spies were uncovering plots in Richmond and in Washington almost weekly. The newspapers of the North, with or without the cooperation of the Secretary of War, published stories of the narrow escapes of the President. In the main, these plots probably did not exist, but, as the War Between the States moved toward its close, the stories made the people conscious of assassination and pressure was brought to bear on Stanton and on the President to be more and more careful.

  In the early part of 1865, four members of the Washington metropolitan police force were appointed to guard the President. Two were on duty daily from 8 A.M. until 4 P.M. A third came on duty at 4 P.M. and remained at Mr. Lincoln’s side until midnight. The fourth man arrived at midnight, and sat in the hall outside Mr. Lincoln’s bedroom until relieved at 8 A.M. These men were not in uniform. Each had been trained in the use of the .38 pistol. Their specific order was to remain within a few feet of the President at all times and, in public, to look for faces they could not vouch for.

  At about the same time, Stanton, not satisfied that four guards were enough, selected a troop of Ohio light cavalry, men who were mounted on fine black horses, and ordered them to act as presidential escort any time Lincoln left the Executive Mansion. This troop was quartered next door to the White House and, around the clock, they always had four horses saddled and bridled.

  The first reaction to all of this was relief on the part of the Cabinet, irritation on the part of Mr. Lincoln. He said that Stanton was going too far. Later, he was amused by all the fuss and furor whenever he left the White House for an afternoon drive and, on some days, he made a game of trying to evade the cavalry escort. He did not try to “lose” his four policemen and, in time, cultivated them and sometimes confided personal opinions to them.

  Withal, everyone worried about assassination and no one believed it would happen. Except one. Ward Hill Lamon not only feared it—he was certain that it would happen. In 1864, this fear overpowered him so much that, in stretches, he slept in the hall outside Lincoln’s bedroom. Assassination, to him, was an idée fixe.

  Lamon was a chunky-chested man with brown wavy hair and beard. He was the United States Marshal for the District of Columbia. He and Lincoln were old and dear friends, close enough to quarrel. On one occasion, when the President and two guests evaded the guards and attended the theater, Lamon, at 1:30 A.M., wrote in bitter sarcasm to his friend that neither of his guests “could defend himself against an assault by any able-bodied woman in this city.”

  The President trusted Lamon as he trusted few men, but he could not share his fears because Mr. Lincoln’s philosophy was that he could be killed at any time by anyone who was willing to give his own life in return. Now and then, the President discussed a violent death,
and, in this, his attitude was one of sadness and resignation rather than fright.

  Still, the days of March were shiny with victory and short-term promise. The dusty banners of the Union snapped southward out of Fredericksburg, westward out of Old Point, northward out of Savannah, eastward out of Lynchburg. The noose tightened, hour by hour. The city to watch was Petersburg. When that fell, the final kill would occur at Richmond.

  The South fought with valiance and empty bellies. The remainders of the great commands had pride and a little ammunition. The weaker Lee grew, the more craftily he planned. His men fought as though they could still win, and, man for man, perhaps they were the better soldiers.

  General Ulysses S. Grant, a modest tenacious man who understood the value of numbers, repeatedly curled the whip of his Army of the Potomac around Lee’s legs, and waited for his adversary to ask for mercy. Each day, Lee was a little bit weaker than yesterday. Each day, Grant snapped the whip a little harder.