The Darkest Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  And for most Americans, Booth remained just that—a fascinating villain, both evil and mad. For the vast majority of Northerners, it was an easy and simple step to transform a handsome, generous, kind man, a genius who many believed would have become the greatest actor of the age had he lived, into a diabolical monster who not only murdered Father Abraham, the savior of the nation, but also robbed the victors of their supreme triumph.31 And for many in the South, it was almost as easy to despise and curse the man who had so rashly brought down the wrath of those same victors upon themselves, adding years of untold suffering and misery to their homeland.

  Eventually, as time passed, a few, and then a few more, would come to view John Booth in simpler, softer terms. Instead of a crazed, hate-filled maniac, Booth was increasingly seen as simply a passionate man whose love of liberty and the South, along with a quest for eternal fame, drove him to do desperate deeds; a pure, if miscalculating, patriot who believed so strongly in his cause that he was willing to give up everything—his fame, his fortune, his future, even his life—that others might be free. For those who carefully, cautiously, and impartially study his actions, the worst that might be said of John Wilkes Booth is that he was ruled by a fiery passion so intense that it caused him to tragically and fatally misjudge his life and times.

  To the day he died, Edwin Booth never again set foot in Washington, D.C.32 Strangely, the morning Edwin was buried in New York in 1893, the interior of Ford’s Theater collapsed without warning, killing twenty-two government employees and injuring dozens more.33

  Two more people who were haunted to their graves by that fateful night at Ford’s were Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris. Prior to the night of April 14, 1865, the couple had had their future before them, wrote former Lincoln secretary John Hay, “with all the promise of felicity that youth, social position, and wealth could give them.”34 After that night. . . .

  As planned, the two were eventually married in 1867, and for the next several years the couple led an outwardly normal life. That their souls had been altered irrevocably by the fatal night soon became abundantly clear to those who knew them, however. It was, said a friend, as if “there was a cloud always hanging over the spirit of Rathbone.”35 Haunted daily, even hourly, by the ear-splitting screams and shrieks and the vision of herself drenched in blood, there was no escape for Clara. And Rathbone, a military man and officer, never forgave himself for failing to protect the president.36

  In addition to depression, chronic indigestion, and severe headaches, Major Rathbone began suffering from bouts of paranoia. And although he was considered by many to be a model husband and father, by 1882 Rathbone had become pathologically obsessed over his wife’s affection, convinced that she was unfaithful. So great grew the husband’s irrational jealousy that he became physically violent when any man, including relatives, approached the woman. He even went so far as to forbid Clara the simple pleasure of sitting at their apartment window. When her husband’s action became even more menacing, Clara considered divorce. Because of the three children, she decided to wait.37

  On Christmas morning 1883, while the family was living temporarily in Germany, Henry Rathbone completely snapped. After a bitter argument over the children, the demented man reached for a gun and shot his wife twice. To make absolutely certain, Rathbone then plunged a knife into her heart. Turning the blade on himself, the murderer attempted suicide but was unsuccessful.38

  Although German courts initially placed Rathbone on trial for homicide, he was soon committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. There he lived out his last wretched days as a “raving maniac.”39

  Already considered by many to be unbalanced before April 14, Mary Lincoln dropped over the edge after her husband’s death. Time, if a balm to some, only intensified the former first lady’s grief and despair. “I am realizing, day by day, hour by hour, how insupportable life is, without, the presence of the One, who loved me & my sons so dearly,” the woman wrote Elizabeth Blair Lee from her new home in Chicago. “[H]ow can, I live, without my Husband, any longer? This is my first awakening thought, each morning & as I watch the waves of the turbulent lake, under our windows, I sometimes feel I should like to go under them.”40

  Exacerbating her dementia was Mary’s penury. Just days after the assassination, numerous American cities from St. Louis to Boston launched ambitious subscription campaigns to ease the widow’s financial load. Well-intentioned as the efforts were, little or nothing came of them. Few individuals, including former “friends” and flatterers, were willing to extend charity to someone who herself had exhibited so little of it. Mary’s well-known extravagance and pathological shopping sprees also did little to engender sympathy or loosen purse strings. Additionally, dark rumors hinted that she had looted the White House before she left, taking with her two full boxcars loaded with china, furniture, paintings, statuary, silverware, and other public property. Given her past performance, the charge seemed to many not only credible, but likely.41 Although the federal government extended the remainder of her husband’s salary and later provided an annual stipend, in no way did it support the widow on the level of her former lavish lifestyle. And thus, Mary Lincoln’s lifelong dread of want and loneliness were now her daily realities.42

  “What a dreary place, Lizzie!” cried Mary to her servant while she lay sobbing on the bed of her small, three-room apartment. “[A]nd to think that I should be compelled to live here.”43

  Outraged that all the eulogies, acclaim, and honors bestowed on the slain president did not translate into her own largesse, furious that Julia Grant and other wives of famous generals were being liberally rewarded by a grateful public, the widow launched into a raucous campaign designed to highlight her poverty by elevating her late husband.

  Notwithstanding my great & good husband’s life, was sacrificed for his country, we are left to struggle, in a manner entirely new to us—and a noble people would pronounce our manner of life, undeserved. Roving Generals have elegant mansions showered upon them, and the American people—leave the family of the Martyred President, to struggle as best they may! Strange justice this.44

  Seldom referring to her husband except as the “sainted,” “immortal,” “martyred,” “worshiped” “savior” whose image approached, and even surpassed, that of Christ, the widow flew into a rage when the slain president was not the great and all-absorbing focus of everyone’s life, as he was hers.45 Unfortunately for Mary, few now heard her words and opinions, and fewer still cared. For those who had witnessed her ridiculous, imperious pretension, for those who had stood self-conscious and embarrassed during her shrill tirades and violent temper tantrums, for those who had silently submitted to her legendary tongue-lashings, for all those who despised the woman utterly and now no longer lived in fear of her wrath, Mary’s enforced exile into oblivion was welcome and long overdue.

  “If I had committed murder in every city in this blessed Union,” wrote the miserable woman, “I could not be more traduced.”46

  As her anger and insanity increased over the years, Robert Lincoln finally drew up the papers, and, on May 19, 1875, he had his mother committed to a mental institution.

  Mary Lincoln’s self-serving attempt to vault her dead husband to immortality was unnecessary; the American pubic had already done as much, not because of Mary, but in spite of her.

  “His death has made him immortal,” said one admirer.47

  “[W]hile he possessed all virtues he was free from all vices,” announced a clergyman.48

  Added an admiring poet:

  A martyr to the cause of man,

  His blood is freedom’s eucharist,

  And in the World’s great hero-list

  His name shall lead the van.49

  A few sober-minded individuals were aghast at the deification of Lincoln, not because they hated him but because they preferred the plain, simple, more accurate man, with all his strengths and weaknesses—a man who achieved greatness through will and ability alone, not through di
vine intercession or the mysterious movement of planets. While conceding that Lincoln was a good, even great, man who would easily outstrip his contemporaries, editor Horace Greeley, for one, refused “to join in the race of heaping extravagant and preposterous laudations on our dead president as the wisest and greatest man who ever lived.”50

  The “race” to exalt that Greeley spoke of was far too advanced for any objective analysis to slow it, however. In the stampede to elevate the slain president, his virtues were magnified and his vices diminished until the one became a caricature and the other all but forgotten.

  His heart was so tender that he would dismount from his horse in a forest to replace in their nest young birds which had fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night if he knew that a soldier-boy was under sentence of death. . . . Children instinctively loved him . . . his sympathies were quick and seemingly unlimited. He was absolutely without prejudice of class or condition. . . . [H]e was as just and generous to the rich and well born as to the poor and humble. . . . He was tolerant even of evil.51

  This need to praise Lincoln and raise him to sainthood was understandable. Unable or unwilling to laud him in life, many were determined to do so with his death. In no one person is this sentiment better expressed than in her who most deeply felt his loss.

  “If . . . I had been permitted to watch over and minister, to my idolized husband,” lamented Mary Lincoln, “I could have thanked him for his lifelong . . . devotion to me & mine, and I could have asked forgiveness, for any inadvertent moment of pain, I may have caused him. . . . [Then] perhaps, time, could partially assuage my grief.”52

  Ridiculed and reviled during adversity by a fickle public, shamed and insulted by an ungrateful wife during his marriage, Lincoln would now be transformed into something larger than life by an unworthy people and an unworthy wife.

  For millions of Americans, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the pivotal point in their life. No one ever forgot where they were or what they were doing when they heard the startling news. Coming as it did when Northerners were at the pinnacle of joy over victory, the plunge to the depths of despair was simply too swift and too great for the mind to comprehend.

  “The sorrow and sadness caused . . . cannot be written; no pen can tell it,” recalled one woman “[O]nly those who lived in those dreadful days can appreciate the pain we suffered.”

  In such a stunned state, it was the subtle and mundane that stood out most in the minds of many, like flashes of clarity in a night of black gloom—a sudden gust of wind on a curtain that toppled a candle; the merry notes of a mockingbird celebrating spring and life when all the world seemed sad and sobbing; or, when all appeared to be death and decay, the sweet smell of lilacs wafting on a breeze through the open window.

  “I never smell lilacs without thinking of that day,” wrote one resident of Springfield long after the war.53 For millions more, including the old poet Walt Whitman, that beautiful, fragrant bloom became an eternal symbol of both the happiest and the saddest of times.54

  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d

  I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.55

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MANY GREAT FOLKS HAD A HAND IN THIS BOOK, some of whom went far beyond their job descriptions to help me. A special thank you goes out to Dr. John Sellers at the Library of Congress, not only for making available the heretofore unpublished Horatio Nelson Taft diary but also for his friendship and critical comments upon reading the manuscript; Suzanne Kelly and the late Mike Maione at Ford’s Theater, for allowing us to spend days sifting through their extensive archive; Thomas Swartz and Cheryl Schnirring, Illinois State Historic Society, Springfield; Dr. John and Ruth Ann Coski, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond; Dennis Northcott, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis; Gail Redmann, Washington, D.C., Historical Society; Wendy Nardi, Trentoniana Collection, Trenton (N.J.) Public Library; Randy Hackenburg, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; Nelson Lankford, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Fred Bauman and his superb staff in Manuscripts at the Library of Congress; Wilma Gibbs, Susan Sutton, and Michael Stauffer at the Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis; Nancy Sherbert and Nona Williams at the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka; Paul Plamann, Fort McHenry National Historic Site, Baltimore; Cindy Van Horn, The Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana; Mark Harvey, State Archives of Michigan, Lansing; and to the staffs at the West Virginia State Historical Society, Charleston; Western Historical Collection, Columbia, Missouri; Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia; Washburn University Library, Topeka, Kansas; Delaware State Archives, Dover; Washington, D.C., Public Library; Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort; the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; and to four selfless individuals: Roger Norton, William C. Davis, Edward Steers, Jr., and Judge Bryce Benedict, each of whom gave openly and freely of his time and incredible expertise.

  My greatest thanks, however, goes not to a person but to an entity. By protecting and preserving Ford’s Theater and the adjacent Petersen House, the National Park Service has guaranteed that these great American shrines will be available to future generations who can come and experience and perhaps walk away with emotions similar to those felt by Deb and me on that sunny day we first visited the theater. Although Ford’s, then and now, can seat a respectable fifteen hundred people, we both were stunned by how small and wonderfully intimate the theater seems. Everyone could see clearly the face of everyone else in the theater, and the stage appeared almost as if it was in your lap. Much the same might be said of the tiny room at the Petersen House where Lincoln breathed his last. Simply put, never could we have understood just how painfully personal and intimate events in these buildings were on that fateful night without being in the actual structures themselves. For the vision and will to preserve these historic treasures, my thanks again go out to the men and women of the U.S. National Park Service for a job well done.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, March 7, 1865.

  2. New York Herald, March 6, 1865; Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865.

  3. Dover Delawarean, March 11, 1865.

  4. Ibid.

  5. New York Herald, March 6, 1865.

  6. Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865.

  7. Noah Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 210; Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 165.

  8. Philip Van Doren Stern, “The President Came Forward and the Sun Burst through the Clouds,” American Heritage IX, no. 2 (February 1958): 15.

  9. Ibid., 11.

  10. William Owner Diary, March 6, 1865, Library of Congress; Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865; Diary of Gideon Welles—Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 252.

  11. Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865; Jeremiah T. Lockwood letter, March 4, 1865, Library of Congress; Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, March 7, 1865.

  12. Burlingame, Lincoln Observed, 168.

  13. Stern, “The President Came Forward,” 94.

  14. Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865.

  15. Benjamin Meyer Letter, March 8, 1865, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

  16. Robert W. McBride, “Lincoln’s Body Guard: The Union Light Guard of Ohio with Some Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Indiana Historical Society Publications 5, no. 1 (1911): 29.

  17. William Owner Diary, March 6, 1865; Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, March 7, 1865.

  18. Muriel Davies Mackenzie, “Maggie!”: Maggie Lindsley’s Journal (Southbury, Conn., 1977), March 4, 1865.

  19. Stern, “The President Came Forward,” 94.

  20. Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865.

  21. Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 301.

  22. Washington Evening Star, March 4, 1865.

  23. Burlin
game, Lincoln Observed, 169.

  24. Benjamin Meyer Letter, March 8, 1865.

  25. “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: A Gala Event in Washington Society,” Lincoln Lore, no. 1452 (February 1959): 2.

  26. Louis J. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Conspiracy of 1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 89.

  27. Washington Evening Star, April 17, 1865.

  1. Three Electric Words

  1. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 220.

  2. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 1865.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 219.

  5. John K. Lattimer and Terry Alford, “Eyewitness to History: Newton Ferree, the Lincoln Assassination and the Close of the Civil War in Washington,” 95, Ford’s Theater Archive.

  6. Washington Evening Star, April 3, 1865.

  7. New York Times, April 6, 1865.

  8. Washington Evening Star, April 3, 1865.

  9. Ibid.; Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 221.

  10. Gordon Arthur Willett Letter, April 4, 1865, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; Washington Daily Constitutional Union, April 8, 1865.

  11. Edmund Leicester Poole Letter, April 5, 1865, Library of Congress.

  12. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 221.

  13. Wilmington Delaware Republican, May 4, 1865.

  14. Washington Evening Star, April 4, 1865.