The Darkest Dawn

by Thomas Goodrich

  15. Ibid., April 3, 1865.

  2. The White City

  1. Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 321; “Recollection of Lincoln,” George Andrew Huron Collection, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.

  2. “Recollection of Lincoln,” Huron Collection.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Rosenblatt, Private Wilbur Fisk, 322.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Henrietta Stratton Jaquette, South after Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock, 1863–1868 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1956), 179.

  7. Adolphe de Chambrun, Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War: A Foreigner’s Account (New York: Random House, 1952), 79.

  8. Rosenblatt, Private William Fisk, 322.

  9. Victor Searcher, The Farewell to Lincoln (New York: Abingdon, 1965), 133.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Jaquette, South after Gettysburg, 179.

  12. Rosenblatt, Private William Fisk, 323.

  3. The Last Man

  1. Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1865.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1865.

  4. Harold Earl Hammond, ed. Diary of a Union Lady, 1861–1865 (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1962), 351; New York Times, April 10, 1865; Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1865.

  5. Ida M. Tarbell, “The Death of Abraham Lincoln,” McClure’s, December 1896, 375.

  6. Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1865.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 182.

  9. Denver Daily Rocky Mountain News, April 11, 1865.

  10. Ibid., April 15, 1865.

  11. Virginia (Nev.) Daily Territorial Enterprise, April 18, 1865.

  12. Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, April 11, 1865.

  13. Portsmouth (N.H.) Journal, April 15, 1865.

  14. Granniss letter, Sarah to Charlie, Jr., April 11, 1865, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield.

  15. Concord New Hampshire Statesman, April 21, 1865.

  16. Providence Daily Journal, April 11, 1865.

  17. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 1865.

  18. Ibid., April 15, 1865.

  19. Wilmington Delaware Republican, April 13, 1865.

  20. New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 21, 1865.

  21. Portsmouth (N.H.) Journal, April 15, 1865.

  22. Laura Virginia Hale, Four Valiant Years in the Lower Shenandoah Valley, 1861–1865 (Front Royal, Va.: Hathaway, 1986), 516.

  23. New York Times, April 8, 1865; Thomas and Debra Goodrich, The Day Dixie Died: Southern Occupation, 1865–1866 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 2001), 7.

  24. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 5, 8, 1865.

  25. Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 20.

  26. Letter dated April 10, 1865, Bell Collection, Delaware Public Archives, Dover.

  27. New York Times, April 10, 1865.

  4. Star of Glory

  1. George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (New York: Carrick and Evans, 1940), 6; Tee Loftin, Stranger’s Guided Tour to Washington, D. C.: 1865—The Civil War City As Mr. Lincoln Knew It (Washington, D.C., 1967), 3.

  2. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 294.

  3. Ibid., 295.

  4. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 6.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid., 7.

  7. W. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln: His Last 24 Hours (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1987), 7; John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, eds., Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997), n. 145; Justin G. Turner, ed., “April 14, 1865: A Soldier’s View,” Lincoln Herald, Winter 1964, 179.

  8. Wilmington Delaware Republican, May 4, 1865.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Julia Adelaide Shepard, “Lincoln’s Assassination Told by an Eyewitness,” Century Magazine, April 1909, 918.

  11. David Allen Richards, “Civil War Diary of a Male Nurse behind the Lines, September 2, 1864–July 1, 1865,” Michigan History 39 (1955): 213.

  12. Henry Colyer Letter, April 15, 1865, Ford’s Theater Archive.

  13. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 145.

  14. Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 372–73; John Y. Simon, ed., The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 146–47.

  15. Ishbel Ross, The President’s Wife: Mary Todd Lincoln—A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 227.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Simon, Julia Dent Grant, 154; Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 219; Bryan, The Great American Myth, 160.

  18. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, n. 145; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper’s Brothers, 1941), 385; Hamilton Fish Diary, November 12, 1869, Library of Congress.

  19. “The Assassination of President Lincoln: Recollections of Harry Hawks,” Boston Herald, April 11, 1897, clipping, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; Hamilton Fish Diary, November 12, 1869, Library of Congress.

  20. Allan Peskin, “Putting the ‘Baboon’ to Rest: Observations of a Radical Republican on Lincoln’s Funeral Train,” Lincoln Herald, Spring 1977, 27.

  21. Ross, President’s Wife, 197.

  22. Ibid., 210.

  23. Wade Hall and Debra C. Reynolds, “Mary Todd Lincoln: A Life of Loss,” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal Magazine, July 11, 1982.

  24. Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 67.

  25. Ibid., 203.

  26. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 144.

  27. Statement of Mr. Henry B. Philips, Ford’s Theater Archives.

  28. Jesse W. Weik, “A New Story of Lincoln’s Assassination: An Unpublished Record of an Eyewitness,” Century, February 1903, 561.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Reinhard H. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Complete One Volume History of His Life and Times (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1960), 618.

  31. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 144.

  5. The President and the Player

  1. Goodrich, The Day Dixie Died, 18.

  2. John Hope Franklin, ed., The Diary of James T. Ayers, Civil War Recruiter (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1947), 93.

  3. Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 130.

  4. New York Times, April 18, 1865.

  5. Lafayette (Ind.) Daily Courier, April 14, 1865.

  6. Schwartz, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War, 131.

  7. New York Times, April 18, 1865.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Goodrich, The Day Dixie Died, 18.

  10. New York Times, April 18, 1865; Schwartz, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War, 131; Noah Andre Trudeau, Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April–June 1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 221.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Lattimer and Alford, “Newton Ferree,” 95; Bryan, The Great American Myth, 149.

  13. “The President’s Office,” Lincoln Lore, June 12, 1939, 1.

  14. Champ Clark, The Assassination: Death of the President (Alexandria, Va.: Time/ Life, 1987), 65; Tarbell, Death of Abraham Lincoln, 378.

  15. Edwin Stanton Letter, transcript, April 15, 1865, Ford’s Theater Archives; Tarbell, 374.

  16. Tarbell, Death of Abraham Lincoln, 375.

  17. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), Series 1, XLVI, pt. 3, 780.

  18. Diary of Gideon We
lles, vol. 2, 296.

  19. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: Century, 1890), 283–84.

  20. Ross, President’s Wife, 185.

  21. Randall, Mary Lincoln, 341–42; Reck, A. Lincoln, 33.

  22. Harold Hyman and Benjamin Platt Thomas, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 395.

  23. John T. Ford, “Behind the Curtain of a Conspiracy,” North American Review, April 1889, 488; Bryan, The Great American Myth, 106.

  24. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 90.

  25. Edward M. Alfriend, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” The Era, October 1901, 604.

  26. Clara Morris, “Some Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1901, 302.

  27. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 91.

  28. Ibid., 98.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln, 609.

  31. W. J. Ferguson, I Saw Booth Shoot Lincoln (Austin, Tex.: Pemberton, 1969), 16; Bryan, The Great American Myth, 216.

  32. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln, 608.

  33. William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 138

  34. Alfriend, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” 604.

  35. Morris, “Some Recollections,” 299.

  36. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 6.

  37. Alfriend, “Recollections of John Wilkes Booth,” 604.

  38. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination, 40.

  39. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln, 609.

  40. Cincinnati Commercial, October 20, 1868, clipping at Ford’s Theater archive.

  41. Untitled article, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 51 (Autumn 1958): 324.

  42. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 107.

  43. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 138.

  44. Letter, Asia Booth Clarke to Jean Anderson, May 22, 1865, photocopy, Ford’s Theater Archives.

  45. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 99.

  46. Goodrich, The Day Dixie Died, 29.

  47. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination, 136.

  48. George Alfred Townsend, The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1865), 27; Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination, 136.

  49. Cincinnati Commercial, October 20, 1868, photocopy of article, Ford’s Theater archive.

  50. Simon, Julia Dent Grant, 155.

  51. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 160; Simon, Julia Dent Grant, 155.

  52. Bryan, The Great American Myth, 161.

  6. Sic Semper Tyrannis

  1. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 15, 1865; George A. Woodward, “The Night of Lincoln’s Assassination,” United Service, May 1889, 472, photocopy at Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield.

  2. Woodward, “The Night of Lincoln’s Assassination,” 472.

  3. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 151.

  4. Edward Steers, Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 86–87.

  5. Michael Maione and James O. Hall, “Why Seward? The Attack on the Night of April 14, 1865,” Lincoln Herald, Spring 1998, 32.

  6. Mark E. Neely, Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8, 15.

  7. Theodore Roscoe, The Web of Conspiracy: The Complete Story of the Men Who Murdered Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959), 272; Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 131.

  8. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 131.

  9. John A. Marshall, American Bastille: A History of the Illegal Arrests and Imprisonment of American Citizens during the Late Civil War (Philadelphia: Thomas W. Hartley, 1870), 645–46.

  10. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 9; Neely, The Fate of Liberty, 110–13; Roscoe, Web of Conspiracy, 268.

  11. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 10–11.

  12. Alton (Ill.) Telegraph, April 21, 1865.

  13. David Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 158.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 12.

  16. Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, 164; Alton (Ill.) Telegraph, April 21, 1865; Lynchburg Virginian, March 30, 1864.

  17. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 676.

  18. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 13.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 37.

  21. New York Times, April 18, 1865.

  22. Maione and Hall, “Why Seward?,” 32.

  23. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, 7, 8; Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister, Asia Booth Clarke (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 139, 156–57.

  24. Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865 (Washington, D.C.: Dorothy Lamon Teillard, 1911), 279.

  7. Towards an Indefinite Shore

  1. Reck, A. Lincoln, 47; Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 229.

  2. “Eye Witness Describes Lincoln Assassination in Letter to Brother,” Baltimore and Ohio Magazine, February 1926, 11; Margarita Spalding Gerry, “Lincoln’s Last Day: New Facts Now Told for the First Time by William H. Crook (His Personal Body-Guard),” Harpers Monthly Magazine, September 1907, 519.

  3. Randall, Mary Lincoln, 380–81.

  4. Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, 284–85.

  5. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 285–86.

  6. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 19.

  7. New York Times, July 4, 1865.

  8. Reck, A. Lincoln, 44.

  9. Ibid., 46.

  10. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 12.

  11. Randall, Mary Lincoln, 381.

  12. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868), 204; Mark E. Neely, Jr. and R. Gerald McMurtry, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 5.

  13. Neely and McMurtry, The Insanity File, 5.

  14. Ross, President’s Wife, 182–83; Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 66–67.

  15. Clark, The Assassination, 9–10.

  16. Randall, Mary Lincoln, 341.

  17. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 5; Steers, Blood on the Moon, 16; Harold Holzer, Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President (Reading, Mass.: Addison/Wesley, 1993), 342.

  18. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination, 57.

  19. Steers, Blood on the Moon, 16.

  20. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 286.

  21. Lafayette (Ind.) Daily Courier, April 28, 1865.

  22. Edward Noyes, “Wisconsin’s Reaction to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” 7–8, Rare Books Collection, Library of Congress.

  23. Lafayette (Ind.) Daily Courier, April 28, 1865.

  24. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 4; Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 44; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 288.

  25. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 4.

  26. Tarbell, Death of Abraham Lincoln, 378.

  8. The Clown and the Sphinx

  1. Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1865.

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

  3. Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 9.

  4. Ibid., 14.

  5. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 211.

  6. Ibid., 210–11.

  7. Stern, “The President Came Forward,” 15.

  8. Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson, 9–10.

  9. Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle, March 30, 1865.

  10. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 211–12.

  11. William Owner Diary, clipping from New Y
ork Herald.

  12. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 212.

  13. William Owner Diary, clipping from New York Herald.

  14. Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle, March 30, 1865.

  15. John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: An Autobiography (Chicago: Werner, 1895), 351.

  16. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 212.

  17. William Owner Diary, clipping from New York Herald.

  18. Ibid.; Stern, “The President Came Forward,” 15.

  19. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 168.

  20. Stern, “The President Came Forward,” 15; James G. Randall, ed., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 1865–1881, vol. 2 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1933), 9.

  21. Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle, March 30, 1865.

  22. Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, March 4, 1865.

  23. Council Bluffs (Iowa) Bugle, March 30, 1865.

  24. William Owner Diary, clipping from New York World; New York Herald, March 22, 1865.

  25. Louis Philip Fusz Diary, 72, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

  26. Brooks, Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, 36.

  27. New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 19, 1865.

  28. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 411; New York Times, April 6, 1865.

  29. Roscoe, Web of Conspiracy, 145.

  30. Van Deusen, Seward, 412.

  31. Ibid., 411.

  32. Ibid., 412.

  33. Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 52.

  9. One Bold Man

  1. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 54; New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 22, 1865.

  2. Reck, A. Lincoln, 94.

  3. Rhodehamel and Taper, Right or Wrong, n. 150.

  4. Campbell MacCulloch, “This Man Saw Lincoln Shot,” Good Housekeeping, February 1927, 115.

  5. Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies, 54.

  6. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln, 629.

  7. Reck, A. Lincoln, 52.

  8. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln, 630.

  9. Ibid., 629; Kunhardt and Kunhardt, Twenty Days, 26.