Bloody Times: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Manhunt for Jefferson Davis

by James L. Swanson

  The buildings of Washington glowed with candles, lamps, and decorations. One observer described what he saw: “The Capitol made a magnificent display—as did the whole city. After lighting up my own house and seeing the Capitol lighted, I rode up to the upper end of the City and saw the whole display. It was indeed glorious . . . all of Washington was in the streets. I never saw such a crowd out-of-doors in my life.”

  Not everyone in Washington enjoyed the illumination. In his room at the National Hotel at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, the twenty-six-year-old actor John Wilkes Booth wrote a letter to his mother. “Everything was bright and splendid,” he said. But, he lamented, “more so in my eyes if it had been a display in a nobler cause.”

  Chapter Six

  On April 14, Jefferson Davis sent a hurried note to Varina.

  Greensboro N.C.

  14 April 65

  Dear Winnie

  I will come to you if I can. Every thing is dark.—you should prepare for the worst by dividing your baggage so as to move in wagons. If you can go to Abbeville it seems best as I am now advised—If you can send every thing there do so—I have lingered on the road and labored to little purpose—My love to the children and Maggie—God bless and preserve you ever prays your most affectionate

  Banny —

  I sent you a telegram but fear it was stopped on the road. Genl. Bonham bears this and will [tell] you more than I can write as his horse is at the door and he waits for me to write this again and ever your’s—

  Then he spent a quiet night wondering what events the coming days might bring. His journey, although difficult, had not been a complete failure. Yes, he had fled Richmond, lost Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, and abandoned the state of Virginia to the enemy. But the situation was not all bad. During his twelve days on the run, he had escaped capture, kept his government together, and protected his family. And he had kept his dignity. He had not fled Richmond like a thief in the night, but as a head of state.

  Abraham Lincoln began another busy day on April 14 with breakfast with his son Robert, an army officer on Grant’s staff and just back from Lee’s surrender. The president spent the day in meetings and writing letters. He agreed to go with his wife to Ford’s Theatre that night to see the comedy Our American Cousin. In the afternoon Abraham and Mary Lincoln went on a carriage ride to the Navy Yard. He told her that today he considered the war to be over. Abraham Lincoln wanted to laugh tonight.

  Around 8:30 P.M. the President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with their companions, Major Henry Rathbone, an army officer, and his fiancée, Clara Harris, daughter of a United States senator, got out of their carriage, walked several yards to the front door of Ford’s Theatre, and disappeared inside.

  Abraham Lincoln loved the theater, and during the Civil War he had gone to many plays. Tonight, while his parents attended Our American Cousin, twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln enjoyed Aladdin at Grover’s Theatre, a few blocks away. Lincoln’s other son, twenty-one-year-old Robert, chose to stay at the White House to read.

  At the Star Saloon, the brick building just south of Ford’s, customers gulped their whiskeys and brandies and tossed their coins on the bar in payment. One of them—a handsome, pale-skinned, black-eyed, raven-haired young man with a mustache—swallowed his drink and left the bar without speaking a word. If anyone had been watching the front door of the Star Saloon between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M., he might have recognized John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous stage stars in America, as he left wearing a black frock coat, black pants, thigh-high black leather riding boots, and a black hat.

  Booth turned north up Tenth Street, saw the president’s carriage parked several yards in front of him, and then turned right, toward the theater, passing through Ford’s main door, the same one through which the president had entered about an hour earlier. If he intended to see the play, John Wilkes Booth was impossibly late.

  It was ten o’clock. By eleven, quiet Tenth Street would be filled with a screaming mob of thousands of people.

  It began between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. At one moment the street was quiet. At the next dozens of playgoers rushed out the doors from Ford’s Theatre onto Tenth Street. People pushed one another aside and knocked one another down to squeeze through the exits.

  Some of the first men to escape the theater headed toward E and F Streets, shouting as they ran. Within seconds they turned the corners and vanished from sight. Then hundreds of men, women, and children fled Ford’s and gathered in the street. Many screamed. Others wept. Soon their voices combined into a loud and fearful roar. They shouted strange words which pierced the din: “Murder.” “Assassin.” “President.” “Dead.”

  Then random words formed into sentences: “Don’t let him escape.” “Catch him.” “It was John Wilkes Booth!” “Burn the theater!” “The president has been shot.” “President Lincoln is dead.” “No, he’s alive.”

  In the Petersen house, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theatre, Henry Safford, who shared a second-floor rented room, heard the noise outside. He had not gone to bed and was still awake, reading a book. From his window he saw the crowd. Something was wrong. He raced downstairs, unlocked the door, and hurried into the street. He pushed through the crowd. Halfway across, the mob blocked his progress. He could not take another step. There were too many people. He saw that this crowd was angry, perhaps dangerous. But why?

  Safford decided to return to the safety of the Petersen house. “Finding it impossible to go further, as everyone acted crazy or mad, I retreated to the steps of my house,” he wrote later. Before he got out of the mob, he heard its news: Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated in Ford’s Theatre. He had been shot, the murderer had escaped, and the president was still inside.

  Other boarders at Petersen’s heard the noise outside. George Francis and his wife, Huldah, lived on the first floor, and their two big front parlor windows faced the theater. “We were about getting into bed,” Francis recalled. “Huldah had got into bed. I had changed my clothes and shut off the gas, when we heard such a terrible scream that we ran to the front window to see what it could mean.” Looking out into the street, they saw “a great commotion—in the Theatre—some running in, others hurrying out, and we could hear hundreds of voices mingled in the greatest confusion. Presently we heard some one say ‘the President is shot,’ when I hurried on my clothes and ran out, across the street, as they brought him out of the Theatre—Poor man! I could see as the gas light fell upon his face, that it was deathly pale, and that his eyes were closed.”

  While George Francis stayed in the street, Henry Safford had returned to the Petersen house. From the first-floor porch, he noticed a commotion at one of the theater doors, and then watched a small knot of people push their way into the street. An army officer waved his sword in the air, bellowing at people to step back and clear the way. Someone else ran from Ford’s across the street and pounded on the door of the house next to the Petersen house. No one answered.

  In command of that little group was Dr. Charles A. Leale, a U.S. army surgeon who had been watching the play and who was the first doctor to see Lincoln after the shooting. “When we arrived to the street,” he remembered, “I was asked to place him in a carriage and remove him to the White House. This I refused to do fearing that he would die as soon as he would be placed in an upright position. I said that I wished to take him to the nearest house, and, place him comfortably in bed. We slowly crossed the street.”

  Safford watched the little group of several men inch through the mob. They were carrying something. It was a man. It was the body of Abraham Lincoln. “Where can we take him?” Safford heard one of the men shout.

  Henry Safford seized a candle and held it up so that the men carrying the president could see it. “Bring him in here!” he yelled. He waved the light. “Bring him in here!” He caught their attention. “I saw a man,” said Dr. Leale, “standing at the door of Mr. Petersen’s house holding a candle in his hand and beckoning us to enter.�
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  The Petersen House, where Lincoln died.

  Lincoln’s bearers walked from Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen house. From the safety of her front parlor, Huldah Francis watched them get closer and closer. Soon they were right below her window. When she saw the men carrying Lincoln up the steps, she hurried to put on her clothes. George Francis raced back to the house to join his wife.

  Henry Safford invited the men inside. “Take us to your best room,” Dr. Leale commanded. Safford led Dr. Leale and the men carrying Lincoln into the front hall. On the right, a narrow staircase led up to the second floor. On the left was a closed door.

  Leale had asked for the “best room.” That would be the one where George and Huldah Francis lived. Safford took the handle of the door to their parlor and turned it. Locked! Safford headed deeper into the dim hallway and stopped at a second door on the left, the one to the Francises’ bedroom. Also locked! Behind that door, Huldah Francis was dressing.

  There was just one room left, the smallest one on the first floor. Safford turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. And the room was empty. The boarder, Private William Clarke, had gone out for the evening to celebrate the end of the war.

  It was enough for Leale. He ordered the bearers to carry Lincoln into the room and lay him on the bed.

  A few minutes later Mary Lincoln appeared in the doorway of the Petersen house. Major Rathbone and Clara Harris had helped her through the wailing mob in the street and into the house. George Francis saw her arrival. “She was perfectly frantic,” he remembered. “‘Where is my husband! Where is my husband!’ she cried, wringing her hands.” Moments later she reached the back room, where she found Lincoln lying on a bed. Dr. Leale and two other doctors, who had also been in the audience at Ford’s, were bent over Lincoln. George Francis watched as Mary saw her husband. “As she approached his bedside she bent over him, kissing him again and again, exclaiming ‘How can it be so? Do speak to me!’”

  Leale asked Mary to go into the next room while the doctors examined her husband. She agreed. Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris brought Mary to the front parlor and seated her on a large sofa. Rathbone felt light-headed. Moments after John Wilkes Booth shot the president, the actor had stabbed Rathbone in the arm. The wound was deep, and the cut would not stop bleeding. He sat down in the hall and then fainted. When he awoke later, he was picked up from the floor and delivered to his house. He would live.

  The doctors dragged William Clarke’s bed away from the walls so that they could see Lincoln better. Then they pushed all the chairs close to the bed. Leale ordered everyone except the two other doctors to leave the room. They stripped their patient and searched his body for other wounds.

  In the front parlor Mary Lincoln was coming apart. When Clara Harris sat beside her on the sofa and tried to comfort her, Mary could not take her eyes off Clara’s bloodstained dress: “My husband’s blood!” she cried. “My husband’s blood.” The First Lady did not know that it was Henry Rathbone’s blood, not the president’s, on Clara’s dress. If Mary had examined her own dress, she would have been horrified, for it did bear the stains of her husband’s blood.

  Mary Lincoln needed help. Clara Harris would not do—Mary hardly knew her. The First Lady had few friends in Washington, and now she asked for them all: Mary Jane Welles, wife of navy secretary Gideon Welles; Elizabeth Keckly, her black dressmaker; and Elizabeth Dixon, wife of a United States senator. Messengers ran off in search of the women. While she waited for her friends to arrive at her side, Mary, in torment, sat on the sofa. The crowd was just outside the windows. She could hear their voices.

  Elizabeth Dixon was the first of Mary’s friends to arrive. She saw a gruesome scene that horrified her: “On a common bedstead covered with an army blanket and a colored woolen coverlid lay stretched the murdered President his life blood slowly ebbing away,” she remembered. “The officers of the government were there & no lady except Miss Harris whose dress was spattered with blood as was Mrs. Lincoln’s who was frantic with grief calling him to take her with him, to speak one word to her. . . . I held and supported her as well as I could & twice we persuaded her to go into another room.”

  Throughout the night Dr. Leale watched Mary Lincoln stagger from the front parlor into the bedroom. “Mrs. Lincoln accompanied by Mrs. Senator Dixon came into the room several times during the course of the night. Mrs. Lincoln at one time exclaiming, ‘Oh, that my Taddy might see his Father before he died’ and then she fainted and was carried from the room.”

  Tad was not at the Petersen house with his grieving mother and his dying father. Earlier one of the men who had rushed out of Ford’s had run to nearby Grover’s Theatre. Someone from the audience remembered what happened next. “Miss German had just finished a song called ‘Sherman’s March Down to the Sea’ and was about to repeat it,” he recalled, “when the door of the theatre was pushed violently open and a man rushed in exclaiming ‘turn out for Gods sake, the President has been shot in his private box at Ford’s Theatre.’” The theater manager also announced the news from the stage. This was how Tad Lincoln, watching the play, learned that his father had been shot.

  Tad was brought not to the Petersen house but to the White House by the doorkeeper. By the time he got home, his older brother, Robert Lincoln, had already left to join his parents. Without his mother or older brother to comfort Tad, or even explain to him what had happened to his father, the frightened boy spent the night with servants in the near-empty mansion.

  Shortly after 8:00 A.M. the next morning, Mary and Robert returned to the White House and informed Tad that his beloved “Pa” was dead. Tad felt again the fear and pain that he had suffered three years before when his brother Willie had died. During the long night, not once had Robert or Mary Lincoln gone to Tad. Nor had they ordered a messenger to bring him to the Petersen house and his dying father. It was the first troubling sign of how, in the days to come, Mary Lincoln’s grief caused her to neglect her miserable and lonely little boy.

  While Tad stayed alone at the White House through the night of April 14, Leale and the other doctors examined the president. More doctors arrived soon. But nothing could save Lincoln. By midnight it had become a death watch. All they would do now was observe and wait.

  A second assassin had struck in Washington the night of April 14. At 10:15 P.M., about the same time that John Wilkes Booth shot the president, another assailant had invaded the home of the secretary of state. William Seward, bedridden from a carriage accident, lay in his bed. The attacker stabbed and slashed him almost to death; wounded an army sergeant serving as Seward’s nurse; and stabbed a State Department messenger. He also struck Seward’s son with a pistol, crushing his victim’s skull and leaving him unconscious.

  Runners carried the news of the attack on Seward to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who were at their homes preparing for bed. Neither had yet heard about the assassination of the president. Each man raced by carriage to Seward’s mansion. There they first heard rumors of another attack, this one upon the president at Ford’s Theatre. Together Stanton and Welles drove a carriage to Tenth Street and arrived at the Petersen house before midnight.

  Stanton barreled his way though the crowded hallway. He knew quickly that Lincoln was a dead man. There was nothing he could do for him. Except work. There was much to do. Stanton prepared himself for the long night ahead. He would lead the investigation of the crime, interview witnesses, send telegrams, launch the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices, and take precautions to prevent more assassinations.

  As news of the assassination spread through Washington, many important public officials hurried to the Petersen house. Some came and went. Others stayed, sometimes for hours. Welles decided that at least one person should remain by Abraham Lincoln’s side until the end. He volunteered. And he would record in his diary what he saw. Lincoln was stretched out “diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him. He had been stripped of his clothes. His l
arge arms were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare form. His features were calm and striking. I have never seen them appear to better advantage, than for the first hour I was there. The room was small and overcrowded. The surgeons and members of the Cabinet were as many as should have been in the room, but there were many more, and the hall and other rooms in front were full.”

  The Petersen House deathbed vigil, sketched by an artist from the Army Medical Museum.

  Welles remembered that Lincoln, earlier that day, had told of a dream he’d had. In the dream Lincoln found himself aboard a ship sailing rapidly toward shore. The president said that he’d had this vision before many great battles of the Civil War. Had a warning of his own assassination come to Abraham Lincoln in the night? As Gideon Welles sat beside his dying leader, he did not know that, several days earlier, Lincoln had dreamed a far more vivid nightmare of death.

  A few days before the assassination, the president, Mary Lincoln, and two or three friends were gathered. One observed that Lincoln was in a “melancholy, meditative mood.” The president had talked about the meaning of dreams. Mary asked her husband if he believed in dreams. “‘I can’t say that I do,’” he replied, “‘but I had one the other night which has haunted me ever since.’” Lincoln told what his dream had been.

  “‘There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard . . . sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight. . . . It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? . . . I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque [a platform], on which rested a corpse. . . . Around it were soldiers who were acting as guards. . . . ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more than night . . .”