Chasing Lincoln's Killer

by James L. Swanson

  He used his fingers to pull the blood clot from the bullet hole. That would relieve the pressure on Lincoln’s brain. He dropped to his knees, straddled the president, opened his mouth, stuck two fingers down Lincoln’s throat, and opened an airway. To draw life-sustaining oxygen into the lungs, Leale pressed Lincoln’s chest and ordered two men to manipulate Lincoln’s arms like levers on a water pump. He massaged the president’s heart by pressing hard under the ribs. To everyone in the box, the situation seemed hopeless.

  Then the president’s heart began to beat and his lungs sucked in a breath. The heartbeat was weak, the breathing irregular, but Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Nevertheless, unless Dr. Leale could stabilize him immediately, Lincoln would die within a few minutes.

  Leale leaned forward and breathed air from his own lungs directly into Lincoln’s mouth and nostrils. Lincoln’s breathing improved. Leale paused, studied his patient’s face for a moment, and placed his ear over Lincoln’s chest. Amid the shrieks, moans, cries, and Mary Todd Lincoln’s deep sobs, he listened. The doctor leaned back and saw the president’s lungs filling on their own. Quick action had saved the president from immediate death, on the floor of Ford’s Theatre.

  Still down on his knees, with all eyes fixed upon him, Dr. Leale announced his diagnosis and prediction: “His wound is mortal; it is impossible for him to recover.”

  Like Powell, on the night of April 14, George Atzerodt was armed with a knife and pistol — a six-shot revolver. His room at the Kirkwood House was one floor above Vice President Johnson’s. Alone and unguarded, Johnson had gone to his room for the night. All Atzerodt had to do was knock on his door and the moment Johnson opened it, plunge the knife into his chest or shoot him dead. Compared with the challenges that faced Booth and Powell, Atzerodt had the easiest job of all.

  But that night, Johnson escaped death. Atzerodt could not do it. He drank in the hotel lobby, and the more he drank, the worse the plan sounded. He did not knock on Andrew Johnson’s door. He left the bar and walked out. Abandoning his mission, Atzerodt got on his horse and rode away. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He was about to go on a rambling and error-filled escape journey.

  In the saddle, a few blocks from Ford’s, David Herold celebrated his escape from the Seward house disaster. He had gotten away just in time. No one in the house knew that Powell had an accomplice waiting in the wings. No one pursued him when he fled the scene and no one at the Seward house saw or could identify him.

  He was safe for the moment. He was just another man on a horse on this night in Washington. He regretted abandoning his accomplice, but when he heard the screaming girl at the window, Herold decided to save himself.

  Following Booth’s escape route, Herold headed toward Maryland. He approached the bridge at Eleventh Street. Sergeant Cobb and his guards did not want to let another man pass. Cobb challenged him and asked where he was going.

  “Home,” Herold answered.

  Cobb and Herold argued about whether he would be allowed to pass, in violation of the 9:00 P.M. curfew. Finally, without explanation, Sergeant Cobb waved Herold across the bridge.

  Somewhere east of the Capitol building, Lewis Powell was not having as easy a time as Booth and Herold in fleeing the city. He had escaped Seward’s servant and the others, and no one was chasing him now. But he did not know the city well. It got worse. He somehow lost or abandoned his surest and quickest means of escape from the city: the one-eyed horse Booth had bought. As midnight approached on the night of April 14, Lewis Powell was in trouble. He was a lone figure standing in the moonlight, lost, unarmed, and wearing a coat stained with blood. He did not know where he was, what to do, or where to go. For the next two nights, he slept in a tree. He began thinking of some of the places in Washington that Booth had taken him before. There was a boardinghouse, he recalled. He might be safe there — if he could just remember the address.

  Thirteen miles southeast of Washington, John Lloyd, the proprietor of Surratt’s tavern, went to bed. Although Mary Surratt had told him that afternoon to expect some nighttime callers, they had never shown up.

  Several miles farther south, on an isolated farm near Bryantown, Maryland, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, his wife, and their four young children were also in bed.

  Abraham Lincoln slept, too. More than fifteen minutes after he was shot, he was still on the floor of the theater box at Ford’s Theatre. Dr. Leale could not leave Lincoln to die on the floor of a theater, a place of amusement. As Leale considered his next move, a woman rushed through Ford’s to get to the president. She knew history was being made in the presidential box and had convinced herself that she must be a part of it.

  Actress Laura Keene’s knowledge of the theater’s layout enabled her to bypass the audience and crowds that stood between her and Abraham Lincoln. Still wearing her costume and carrying a pitcher of water that would serve as her passport to the president’s box, she made her way up a hidden staircase that took her to a private office near the box. In less than a minute, she had crossed the theater and emerged on the second floor on the same side as Lincoln’s box. She talked her way to the door, through the vestibule, and into the box. No one thought to prevent the great Laura Keene from entering the box.

  The scene fascinated Laura Keene and stimulated her theatrical instincts. Hypnotized by the image of the fallen president, Keene imagined a scene with herself at the center of it. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, impossible for her to resist. Could she, the actress asked Dr. Leale, cradle the dying president’s head in her lap? It was a shocking request and of no possible physical comfort or medical benefit to Lincoln, but Dr. Leale allowed it.

  Laura Keene knelt beside Lincoln, lifted his head, and rested it in her lap. Bloodstains and tiny bits of gray matter from Lincoln’s brain oozed on to the cream-colored silk fabric, spreading and adding color to the frock’s bright and festive red, yellow, green, and blue floral pattern.

  Laura Keene cherished the blood-and-brain speckled dress she wore this terrible night. In the days ahead, people begged to see the dress, to handle it and marvel at the stains on it. The dress vanished long ago, but miraculously a few small pieces — five treasured swatches — survived. Long ago the stains, once red, faded to a rust-colored pale brown. She is remembered, not for her talent as an accomplished actress or her lifetime of performances onstage, but for the scene she staged in the president’s box. Other great actresses from the nineteenth-century American theater have faded into oblivion while Laura Keene is remembered for a single unscripted act that took place over a few minutes in the box at Ford’s on April 14, 1865.

  The president of the United States could not die in a theater. Dr. Leale would see to it that Lincoln would die with dignity, in a proper bed. “Take him to the White House,” someone begged. Impossible, Leale explained. Even the brief carriage ride between Ford’s and the White House over unpaved, muddy streets, gouged with ruts and tracks from hundreds of carriage wheels, would be too much for Lincoln to endure. The bumpy ride would jostle the head wound and instantly kill him.

  Leale and the others in the box prepared to move Lincoln’s body without knowing where they would take him, just knowing that they must take him from that place.

  Laura Keene’s presence in the box brought attention to an uncomfortable fact. She was an actress, this was a theater, and it was Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. But the president of the United States was not worshiping in a church. Instead, he was dying on the floor of a theater, a place of entertainment.

  Booth, now safely across the Navy Yard Bridge, rode into the dark. Of his three accomplices, he needed David Herold the most. More than Powell or Atzerodt. Booth was a creature of the city and its fancy hotel lobbies, saloons, oyster bars, and gaslit shadows. He did not have the skills he would need to survive in the coming days, those of outdoorsman, hunter, or river boatman. But Herold was all of those things, and t
hat’s why Booth chose him, above all others, to be his guide.

  Once Booth crossed the river into Maryland, he rode through a darkened and quiet countryside. Few travelers were using the empty roads. He trotted over the route he had rehearsed the previous year in preparing for the kidnapping plot. As Booth rode on, he searched the horizon for Soper’s Hill, the chosen meeting place with Herold. In daylight, it was simple to find the place, but nightfall had obscured the hills. Alone in the country, he was out of his element.

  Now Booth was more aware of the pain in his left leg. Near desperation after his hard ride, he glanced at the horizon. He was just beyond Washington’s city limits. David and the others might be a few minutes ahead or behind him. Booth saw nothing ahead of him. When he turned to look behind him, he heard a noise in the distance: horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Was it the first warning of a cavalry patrol in hot pursuit? As the noise grew louder, it sounded, to his relief, like one horse, not many. Then his pursuer came within sight — one small man on a gray horse. Relief trickled down the assassin’s spine as he recognized David Herold. The actor was happy to be on safe ground, and now he had his guide.

  Maryland, although it did not secede from the Union and join the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War, remained a hotbed of secessionists. Maryland was as Confederate as a state could be without actually seceding. If Maryland had seceded and become the twelfth star on the Confederate flag, the Union would have been in grave danger. The Union capital would have been completely surrounded by rebel states, isolated from the rest of the North.

  Booth and Herold spurred their horses, riding southeast to their first safe house a few miles away. Booth probably peppered Herold with questions: Why is he alone? Where is Lewis Powell? Did Powell kill Seward? Did Atzerodt murder the vice president? Herold would have answered that he had not seen Atzerodt since the conspirators parted earlier in the evening to carry out the three assassinations. He had no idea whether Vice President Johnson was dead. Herold told Booth the details he knew of what had happened at the Seward residence: The trick of claiming Powell was a messenger from a doctor had worked perfectly. Herold heard no gunshots. About ten minutes after Powell entered the Seward mansion, a servant ran out the front door into the street screaming, “Murder!” And then a girl threw open an upstairs window and started yelling, too.

  This news seemed to prove to Booth the faithful Powell had carried out his mission. But Booth must have been unhappy with Herold for abandoning Powell, whom he especially liked. And Powell would have come in handy if they had to do any fighting during their escape. Booth guessed that Powell, who had never learned his way around the capital city, was a lost man. Booth certainly told Herold of his success at Ford’s Theatre. This was the assassin’s first chance to describe his deed, and the actor in him probably made the most of the dramatic story.

  Outside Ford’s Theatre, bewildered pedestrians joined the crowd of theater patrons and hovered near the front doors awaiting the president. The public did not yet know whether Lincoln was still alive. Leale’s team carried Lincoln through the lobby, out the doors, and across the steps where, just eleven hours earlier, John Wilkes Booth had sat reading his letter, calculating whether he would have time to put an assassination plan into action.

  The crowd gasped when they saw Lincoln being carried out of the theater. They swarmed and surrounded the president. Leale, the doctors, and soldiers cradling the dying president halted. Where should they take Lincoln? Leale scanned the street for a refuge. Straining his voice to be heard by a sword-bearing officer, he shouted a command: Take the president straight across the street and into the nearest house. A soldier crossed ahead, pounding on the door, demanding entry.

  In view of the horrified mob in the street, Dr. Leale pulled another blood clot from the hole in Lincoln’s head to relieve the pressure on the brain and tossed the gooey mass into the street. Fresh blood and brain matter oozed through Leale’s fingers.

  When Leale was halfway across the street, soldiers on the other side yelled that the house was locked and no one answered the door. The scene was incredible, impossible! Stranded in the middle of the muddy street with no place to go, the president of the United States was dying in the presence of a mob of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, witnesses.

  Until this moment, no one had paid attention to William Petersen’s neat brick row house next door to the home that had been locked tight. It was a boardinghouse. Someone opened the front door of the house: A boarder had heard the shouting of the crowd and had gone outside to see what was happening. He stepped outside onto the top of the staircase and raised a candle. “Bring him in here!” he shouted above the sea of people. “Bring him in here!” Lincoln had found a safe house at last.

  Riding in open country about ten miles south of Washington, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold would soon reach their own safe house. They did not expect any trouble along the road. They did not meet any soldiers as they rode toward Surratt’s tavern. If they did, there was no danger because they were riding ahead of the news of the assassination. At this moment, Booth could safely ride past an entire regiment of Union cavalry. Not a soul in Maryland knew yet that Abraham Lincoln had been shot.

  Within a few minutes of the assassination, the news began spreading, first by word of mouth from Ford’s, then by messenger. It traveled no faster than a man could run on foot or ride on horseback. Between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M., more than fifteen hundred people spilled out from the theater onto the streets. They fanned out in all directions, like an unpaid army of newsboys shouting, “Extra!”

  Block by block, they spread the news. Men ran or galloped to the White House, the War Department, and the homes of cabinet officers. They rushed home and wakened family members, knocked on neighbors’ doors, roused children from their beds, spreading the news. Washingtonians were used to getting important news this way. Tonight, like an inferno burning outward in all directions from a single ignition point, the news that Lincoln had been shot spread from Ford’s in an ever-widening circle.

  A few blocks from Ford’s, word of another apparent assassination spread from the Seward mansion and into the streets. Neighbors, soldiers, State Department employees, and even some reporters tried to enter the Seward house. Messengers fanned out in all directions shouting about the Seward assassination just as the news spread from Ford’s of the president’s assassination. It was only a matter of time before the two groups, bringing word of separate attacks, met in the streets. The same words were exchanged countless times that night: “No, I tell you it was Lincoln who was assassinated.”

  “Impossible, it was Seward. I just came from his house.”

  “And I just came from Ford’s. It was Lincoln!”

  “It was Seward!”

  Then the terrible truth emerged: It was both.

  Though unknown at the time, Seward still lived. Both men were attacked. The false information that Seward had been killed would continue to be spread through word of mouth.

  At Thirteenth and K streets, someone rang the bell at the home of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. A brilliant man with a long record of public service, the president placed in his capable hands the most demanding tasks of the war: raising, training, equipping, and sending into battle the army of the Union. Creating that army was the largest organizational achievement in American history up to that time. Stanton weeded out unfit and incompetent officers; battled dishonest government contractors who sold the army low-quality uniforms, rotting equipment, and defective weapons; and endured an epidemic of officers who would not fight. If any man sat at Lincoln’s right hand during the war, it was Edwin Stanton.

  Stanton had been among those to turn down the president’s invitation to join him and Mary at Ford’s Theatre tonight. Instead, he left his office at the War Department and went home to dinner with his wife. Around 8:00 P.M., not long before the curtain rose at Ford’s, Stanton left his house to vis
it his friend William H. Seward at his sickbed. Ever since the carriage accident Seward had suffered, Stanton had been a faithful visitor. He returned home about an hour later.

  After he bid some visiting army officers good night, he closed his front door and locked it. It was 10:00 P.M. He walked upstairs and began undressing for bed. Not long after, the doorbell rang. His wife, still downstairs, unlocked and opened the door. If she had known about the murderous events of the evening, she most likely would not have opened the door. When she heard the (as it turned out, incorrect) news from the messenger, she shouted, “Mr. Seward is murdered!”

  Her cry reached her husband upstairs, who did not believe what he heard. “Humbug,” he shouted down. “I left him only an hour ago.”

  Stanton, still doubting, came downstairs. He found the messenger and several other agitated men. Alarmed by their manner and their story, he decided to ride over to the Seward home to investigate the rumor of Seward’s death personally.

  The ride to the Seward house took only a few minutes, and the first sign was not good. People filled the street and crowded around Seward’s front door. An hour ago, when Stanton had left the Seward home, the street was deserted. Stanton arrived moments before Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles reached Seward’s house. A Navy Department messenger shouted unwelcome and, again, inaccurate news: President Lincoln has been shot, and Secretary Seward and his son Frederick have been assassinated.

  Where, asked Welles, “was the president shot?” At Ford’s Theatre, the messenger replied, adding that the Sewards had been attacked at home. “Damn the rebels,” Welles cursed, “this is their work.” He walked with the messenger to Seward’s house.