Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis

by James L. Swanson

  But no one fleeing Ford’s shouted the terrifying word “fire!” Instead they screamed out other strange words such as “murder,” “assassin,” “president,” and “dead” that pierced the din and could be heard above the general roar. 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.”

  On Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street, two blocks south of Ford’s, Seaton Munroe, a treasury department employee, was walking with a friend when “a man running down 10th Street approached…wildly exclaiming: ‘My God, the President is killed at Ford’s Theatre!’” Monroe ran to Ford’s, where he found “evidences of the wildest excitement.”

  In the Petersen house, Henry Safford, one of the renters, who shared a second-floor room facing Tenth Street, heard the disturbance outside. He was still awake, reading a book. From his window he had an unobstructed view of Ford’s Theatre and the street below. He saw the crowd and heard its anger and fear. Something was wrong. He raced downstairs, unlocked the front door, and descended the curving staircase that led from the door to the street. He walked past the tall gaslight lamp in front of his house, stepped into the dirt street and tried to push through the crowd. Halfway across, the mob blocked his progress to Ford’s. He could not take another step. He dared not fight his way through them. This crowd was angry, volatile, and potentially 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.” Before he disentangled himself from the mob, he heard their 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.

  An eyewitness from Ford’s reached nearby Grover’s Theatre by 10:40 P.M. In the audience was an employee from the War Department hardware shop, Mose Sandford:

  I was at Grover’s…They were playing Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp and had just commenced the fourth act…Miss German had just finished a song called “Sherman’s March Down to the Sea” and was about to repeat it 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.” He then rushed out. Everybody seemed glued to the spot I for one and I think I was one of the first who attempted to move…Everybody followed. I made straight for Ford’s and such another excited crowd I never before witnessed. I asked who did it and was informed Wilkes Booth. They were just bringing the President out when I arrived on the spot. The city was in one continued whirl of excitement. Crowds on every corner and 10th Street was one solid mass of excited men flourishing knives and revolvers and yelling “down with the traitors” instead of hunting for them.

  Soon other boarders at Petersen’s were aroused by the disturbance. George Francis and his wife 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.”

  Perhaps it was nothing more than an intoxicated reveler celebrating the end of the war, they thought. George had seen a lot of that: “For a week before the whole city had been crazy over the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army. Only the night before, the city was illuminated, and though it had been illuminated several times just before this time, it was more general, and was the grandest affair of the kind that ever took place in Washington.” But tonight was different. They looked out their windows: “We saw a great commotion—in the Theater—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, Mose Sandford, and more than a thousand other people loitered in the street, Henry Safford had returned to the Petersen house. He climbed the stairs and, at this moment, elevated above the heads of the people going mad in the streets, he observed from the first-floor porch the confusing scene. He noticed a knot of people at one of the theater doors and then watched as they pushed their way into the street. An army officer waved his unsheathed sword in the air, bellowing at people to step back and clear the way.

  Someone suggested bringing Lincoln next door to Taltavul’s. No, the owner pleaded, don’t bring him in here. It must not be said later that the president of the United States died in a saloon. Someone else ran across the street and pounded on the door of a house to the south of Petersen’s. No one answered. In command of that little group was Dr. Charles A. Leale, a U.S. Army surgeon attending the play who was the first doctor to enter the president’s theater box.

  Leale described the scene: “When we arrived to the street, 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, there being a barrier of men on each side of an open passage towards the house. Those who went ahead of us reported that the house directly opposite was closed.”

  Safford watched the little group that was carrying the body of Abraham Lincoln. They were not going to the president’s carriage. It looked like they wanted to bring him somewhere else, into a house on Tenth Street. “Where can we take him?” Safford heard one of the men shout.

  Henry Safford seized a candle and held it up so the men 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.”

  George Francis, still outside, watched in amazement: “They carried him on out into the street and towards our steps…The door was open and a young man belonging to the house standing on the steps told them to bring him in there.”

  Lincoln’s bearers changed direction and, turning slightly to their right, walked northwest from Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen House. Huldah Francis watched them get closer and closer until they were right below her window. Transfixed by what she saw, “Huldah,” George Francis explained, “remained looking out of the window” to the last possible moment, “until she saw them bringing him up our steps when she ran to get on her clothes.” As she hurried to pull off her nightclothes and get dressed for the surprise visitors, the men, struggling to support Lincoln’s limp body in a prone position, carried him up the curving staircase. George Francis raced back to the house to rejoin his wife. When

  THE PETERSEN HOUSE, WHERE LINCOLN DIED.

  he got there, he expected to find Abraham Lincoln lying in his bed.

  The gas streetlamp in front of the house, just a few feet from the stairs, allowed the whole crowd to see what was happening. One man, an artist named Carl Bersch who lived one house north of Petersen’s, watched from his room. “My balcony being twelve or fourteen feet above the sidewalk and street, I had a clear view of the scene, above the heads of the crowd. I recognized the lengthy form of the President by the flickering of the torches, and one large gas lamp post on the sidewalk. The tarrying at the curb and the slow, careful manner in which he was carried across the street, gave me ample time to make an accurate sketch of that particular scene.”

  From his all-seeing perch, Bersch watched and drew while Henry Safford invited Leale’s party across the threshold.

  “Take us to your best room,” Dr. Leale commanded. All eyes in the street looked up to that doo
rway as the president’s wounded, apparently unconscious body disappeared from sight, into William Petersen’s boardinghouse. The time was 11:00 P.M.

  Safford led Dr. Leale and the men carrying Lincoln into the front hall. The confined space could barely accommodate the horizontal president and his bearers. 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.” Obeying this criterion, Safford should have opened that door and burst into the two-room suite occupied by George and Huldah Francis. Their front parlor faced Tenth Street, and behind that room, separated from the parlor by folding wood doors, was a spacious bedroom. Safford clasped the handle, tried to turn it, but the door was locked. He then headed deeper into the dim hallway and stopped at a second door on the left, the one to the Francis’s bedroom. Also locked! Behind that door, Huldah Francis was dressing.

  Just one room was left, the smallest one on the first floor. If it was locked, they would have to carry the president up the cramped staircase to the second floor. When Stafford reached the door, he rotated the knob. It was unlocked and the room was unoccupied. The boarder, Private William Clarke, had gone out for the evening to celebrate the end of the war. Leale ordered the bearers to carry Lincoln into the room and lay him on the bed.

  Lincoln’s eyes betrayed the severity of his wound. Dr. Leale noticed it before they had undressed him: “When the President was first laid in bed a slight ecchymosis of blood was noticed on his left eye lid and the pupil of that eye was dilated, while the pupil of the right eye was contracted.”

  A few minutes after the president was laid in Willie Clarke’s vacant bed, Mary Lincoln appeared in the doorway of the Petersen house. Her companions, Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, had pried her out of the theater box, helped her descend the same winding staircase that her husband had just been carried down, and escorted her through the wailing mob in the street and into the house. George Francis, now back home, witnessed her arrival: “She was perfectly frantic. ‘Where is my husband! Where is my husband!’ she cried, wringing her hands in the greatest anguish.”

  As Mary Lincoln scurried down the hall, the billowing skirt of her silk dress swished against the banister post and the narrowly spaced walls. Moments later, she reached the back room where her husband was lying prone on a bed. Dr. Leale and two other physicians, Dr. Charles Sabin Taft and Dr. Albert F. Africanus King, who were also in the audience at Ford’s and who had rushed to the president’s box, were bent over Lincoln, preparing to strip him of his clothes and conduct the kind of thorough examination impossible on the floor of a theater.

  George Francis recalled the moment when Mary entered the room: “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 was reluctant to examine Lincoln in his wife’s presence: “I went to Mrs. Lincoln and asked her if she would have the kindness to step into the next room for a few minutes while we examined him, removed his clothes, and placed him more comfortably on the bed. Mrs. Lincoln readily assented.”

  Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris escorted Mary to the front parlor and seated her on a large, wood-framed Victorian sofa upholstered with slick, shiny black horsehair. Rathbone felt light-headed. Moments after Booth shot the president, he stabbed the major in the arm. The wound was deep, and the cut would not stop bleeding. Rathbone sat down in the hall, and then he fainted. The alarming sight of his unconscious form lying faceup in the front hall of the Petersen house greeted the first visitors to the scene. He was in the way, and when he regained consciousness, he was picked up from the floor and delivered to his house. He would live.

  The bed Lincoln was in was positioned in an awkward way, behind the door, shoved into the room’s northeast corner. The doctors dragged the bed away from the walls to create space for them to surround the president. Then they pushed all the chairs close to the bed. The lone gas jet protruding from the south wall cast weird, moody shadows and exaggerated the pained countenances of the men in the room. It was like a theatrical light raking across the stage to emphasize the drama. But this tableau, like Booth’s flamboyant scene at Ford’s less than half an hour earlier, was real. Leale ordered everyone except his two medical colleagues to leave the room. Then they stripped their patient and searched his body for additional 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 it was Henry Rathbone’s blood, not the president’s. The major’s wound had stained his fiancée’s frock. If Mary had examined her own dress, she would have been more horrified, because it did bear the stains of her husband’s blood.

  As the crowd outside thickened and some in it approached the unguarded front door, Leale and company were in the back room, preoccupied with Lincoln. At that vulnerable moment, quick-thinking army junior officers and enlisted men, recognizing the danger, took the initiative and blocked the front doorway, commandeered the staircase, took positions in front of the house, and ordered the people back. Within fifteen minutes of his being carried into the Petersen house, the commander in chief was under the personal protection of the U.S. Army. All curiosity-seeking intermeddlers discovered in the house were ejected.

  As soon as Maunsell Field, assistant to the secretary of the Treasury, arrived, he came face-to-face with Clara Harris: “The first person I met in the hall was Miss Harris. She informed me the President was dying but desired me not to communicate the fact to Mrs. Lincoln. I then entered the front parlor, where I found Mrs. Lincoln in a state of indecipherable agitation. She repeated over and over again, ‘Why didn’t he kill me? Why didn’t he kill me?’”

  Mary Lincoln needed help fast. Clara Harris was not suited for that delicate psychological role—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 confidante; and Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Senator James Dixon. Messengers ran off in search of these women. While she waited for them to arrive at her side, Mary, in torment, sat on the sofa. The crowd was just outside the windows. She could hear their voices.

  What happened at the Petersen house over the next eight and a half hours was no less than the transfiguration of Abraham Lincoln from mortal man to martyred saint.

  Leale and the other physicians examined the president’s naked corpse: “After undressing him I found that his lower extremities were quite cold to a distance of several inches above his knees. I sent the Hospital Steward who had been of great assistance to us while removing him from the theatre, for bottles filled with hot water, hot blankets, etc. which we applied to his lower extremities.”

  Leale knew this case was too big for him so he sent messengers to locate his military superiors: “I asked again to have the Surgeon General and also sent a special messenger for Surgeon D.W. Bliss then in command of Armory Square Hospital.”

  Dr. Taft recalled that “about twenty-five minutes after the President was laid on the bed, Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes and Dr. Robert King Stone, the family physician, arrived and took charge of the case.” At once, Leale deferred to Stone: “I was introduced to Dr. Stone as having charge of him. I asked…if he would take charge of him [and] he said ‘I will.’ I then told Dr. Stone the nature of the wound and what had been done. The Surgeon General and Surgeon Crane arrived in a few minutes and made an examination of the wound.” Dr. Stone and Surgeon General Barnes approved of everything Leale had done. They agreed that Leale’s decisive actions had saved Lincoln from immediate death at Ford’s Theatre. As Charles S. Taft testified, “It was owing to Dr. Leale’s quick judgement in instantly placing the almost moribund President in a recumbent position the moment he saw him in the box, that Mr. Lincoln did not expire in the theater within ten min
utes from fatal syncope.”

  Leale recalled: “About 11p.m. the right eye began to protrude, which was rapidly followed by an increase of the ecchymosis until it encircled the orbit extending above the supra orbital ridge and below the infra orbital foramen…The wound was kept open by the Surgeon General by means of a silver probe and as the President was placed diagonally on the bed his head was held supported in its position by Surgeon Crane and Dr. Taft.”

  All the doctors agreed with Leale’s on-the-spot diagnosis at Ford’s Theatre. This was no longer a medical emergency. There were no remedies or treatments, and nothing could save Lincoln. By midnight, it had become a death watch. More doctors arrived. They were superfluous, but out of professional courtesy, they were given the privilege of playacting in a charade of treatment: examining the wound, taking the pulse, and making somber, redundant, and useless pronouncements that in future would permit them to boast, “Yes, I was there. I was one of the doctors at the Petersen house.” And for years after, many of them did.

  The death pageant for Lincoln had begun. It started while the president still lived, as soon as the doctors, in their collective wisdom, gave up all hope. There was nothing more they could do. An operation was impossible. Cranial surgery was in its infancy during the Civil War, and no doctor would risk removing a bullet embedded so deeply in the brain. Booth’s Deringer pistol had performed superbly. The wound was fatal, the damage irreversible. Dr. Leale had known this while his patient still lay on the floor of the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre. Now the diagnosis was unanimous. The president would die. Indeed, some were surprised he was not already dead.