The Day Lincoln Was Shot

by Jim Bishop

  Every avenue of escape out of Washington was closed except the Navy Yard Bridge leading to southern Maryland, and no orders were issued about that one because, for a long time past, it had been closed every night at 9, and the attacks did not occur until 10:15. No one could have left the city that way.

  At 11:55 P.M. Sergeant Silas Cobb, in charge of the bridge detail, was surprised to find that his night relief man was early. They swapped news and the relief sergeant said that he had nothing to tell because, until a few minutes ago, he had been sleeping in barracks. Cobb said that matters were quiet on the bridge. A few Marylanders, after a night of fun in Washington City, had been permitted to cross. That was all.

  Sergeant Cobb went to bed.

  At the commercial telegraph office, Mr. Dwight Hess, manager of Grover’s Theatre, left a telegram to be sent to Mr. Grover in New York when service was resumed:

  PRESIDENT LINCOLN SHOT TONIGHT IN FORD’S

  THEATRE. THANK GOD IT WASN’T OURS.

  The Final Hours

  * * *

  12 midnight

  Among the small figures of history, John Fletcher stands as a man of tenacity. At this hour, he was still trying to find a horse. He went to the police station on Tenth Street to register a complaint against David Herold and, in the light of his own exasperating problem, could not understand why, at midnight, the precinct station was so full of fashionably attired ladies and gentlemen. He knew that the President had been shot, but Fletcher had given no further thought to it.

  Now he spoke to Detective Charles Stone and asked if a roan horse had been picked up. Stone said: “Who are you?” Fletcher told him, and now, in a flash of revelation, the stable foreman began to wonder why Atzerodt wanted his horse made ready as late as 10 P.M. and why Herold had panicked and run off twenty-five minutes later when Fletcher asked him to get off the horse.

  Stone said that a horse had been picked up, and that he would accompany Fletcher down to General Augur’s headquarters, where they were trying to identify it.

  Augur had returned from another conference with Stanton, and sat at his desk. Witnesses were waiting in an anteroom. Stone said that the stableman had rented a roan and the general asked if Fletcher remembered the name of the renter.

  “I do,” said Fletcher. “His name is Herold and he is young, not more than twenty-one or -two, he looks like a boy, and I can tell you that I followed him to the Navy Yard Bridge before I lost him.”

  There Augur had the key to the conspiracy. But he shook his head sadly. The description did not fit John Wilkes Booth, and Booth was the man that Augur wanted. Besides, the general agreed with Mr. Stanton that the attempts on the lives of Seward and Lincoln were probably executed by the same man. There was no room in Augur’s mind for a boyish-looking assassin.

  The general nodded toward a flat saddle and bridle lying on a chair.

  “Do you know anything about that?” he said.

  Fletcher, an expert in such matters, walked over and fingered the leather. He turned the bridle over in his hand.

  “I do,” he said.

  “What kind of a horse had that saddle and bridle on?”

  “A big brown horse, blind of one eye; a heavy horse with a heavy tail; a kind of pacing horse.”

  Augur was now interested. An hour ago, a big brown blind horse had been picked up in East Capitol near Fifteenth Street in a farm district. He did not know whether this horse figured in the assassinations, and his best thinking was that there was no connection. He could not imagine desperate killers on brewery horses.

  “Who rode this horse?”

  Fletcher said he could not remember the name, but he could get the name from his stable records. He had stabled the horse that wore these trappings. And he knew the little man with the funny name. But he pointed out that this man had used the horse until recently. Who had him tonight Fletcher had no idea. The detective accompanied him back to the stable and the Irishman returned with the name of George Atzerodt. This meant nothing to Augur. He was even less interested when Fletcher said that Atzerodt claimed that he had sold the horse and equipment in southern Maryland.

  Now the general had the names Booth—Herold—Atzerodt. He needed only the name of Lewis Paine, who had ridden and abandoned the blind horse tonight, to complete the roster of all the conspirators. Augur felt that he was wasting too much time with the stableman. He had important eyewitnesses waiting outside. He excused Fletcher. Had he chatted with the irritated Irishman a little longer, he would have learned that Atzerodt and Herold had a friend named Booth, and that Booth was accustomed to lending his horses to a man on H Street named Surratt, and that, quite often, these men rode to Surrattsville. Fletcher even knew that John Surratt’s father had owned a tavern in Surrattsville.

  A horse car lit up the East Capitol section as it moved slowly down Sixth Street to the Navy Yard. Some of the night-shift men were on their way to work. A few late revelers dozed in the seats. The car stopped at A Street and George Atzerodt got aboard. Most of the men in the car saw him as an apologetic little man in a round hat, a man who excused himself as he pushed toward the back.

  Atzerodt had to find his friend who owned the store. He was drunk and apprehensive, and he needed rest. He would sleep on the floor of the store. He was still pushing toward the back, and the horse in front was walking slowly between the undulating rails when someone tapped him on the back. It was Washington Briscoe, the man he was looking for.

  “Have you heard the news?” said Briscoe.

  “Yes,” said Atzerodt. He asked Briscoe if he could have permission to sleep in front of the store.

  “No,” said Briscoe. “I cannot do that, George.”

  “I will make no noise,” said Atzerodt.

  “I am very sorry, George. The owner is at my place and I won’t have any guests tonight.”

  “As a favor.”

  “No.”

  Both got off at the Navy Yard. George Atzerodt asked once more. The answer was no. The conspirator looked sad.

  “I will go back to the Kimmel House,” he said. This was a neighborhood nickname for Pennsylvania House, a four-and-five-men-to-a-room hotel on C Street near Fourth. He waited for the horse car to turn around. George Atzerodt, right now, was within a few streets of the Navy Yard Bridge, but he had no desire to join the other conspirators.

  It was a night of frustrations and heartache. In Augur’s quarters, a young captain walked in, saluted, and asked for permission to lead a mounted squad to the conspirators and capture them tonight. The general had little sympathy with inspirational heroes.

  “No,” he said. “Permission is denied. Instead, you will remain here, Captain, for whatever emergency duty may be assigned to you.”

  The captain remained. All night long at headquarters, he waited for someone to give him something to do, but Augur’s staff did not know him and did not need him. Thus another opportunity was lost, for this was Captain D. H. L. Gleason, the man who worked with Louis Wiechman and who reported that a plot was being devised against the President at a boardinghouse called Surratt’s, 541 H Street. Gleason knew that Booth and the other conspirators sometimes met at a tavern in Surrattsville, and that one or more of them came from Port Tobacco.

  Augur wouldn’t give him the men to make the capture. And Gleason volunteered no information.

  At 12:30 A.M. telegraph service was restored. The wires, it was learned, had not been cut. Two wires in the main battery had been crossed and all service had been shorted. Government officials tried to make this look like a planned Confederate move, but the Washington City manager of the office was a prosaic businessman who insisted that wires are sometimes crossed and, when they are, service is temporarily suspended until they are located.

  It was a few minutes past midnight when Booth and Herold passed the crossroads at Surrattsville. They were now more than eleven miles south of Ford’s Theatre in rich farm country. The air was chill, the moon bright, as they looked at the tavern on the left. It sits back on
e hundred or more feet from the road on a raised biscuit of land. A long porch, with rockers, spread across the face of the building. At the far right a small farm road was cut into the land and led up to a drafty barn and a well pump. A single light burned in the barroom.

  The two swung up the dirt road and stopped abreast of the porch. Herold dismounted. Booth did not talk. He was in pain and he shifted this way and that in the saddle to try for small comfort. The horses panted and foraged in the dead grass as Davey bounded up on the porch and went inside.

  Mr. Lloyd was on a couch, sleeping. The bar was empty and the bartender had gone home.

  “Mr. Lloyd,” Herold said, shaking him, “for God’s sake make haste and get those things.”

  Lloyd sat up slowly. He looked at Herold. He was drunk. “All right,” he said. “All right.” He shuffled off upstairs and got two carbines, the field glasses, one cartridge box and he stopped behind the bar and drew a quart of whiskey. He did not bring the rope or the monkey wrench.

  Outside, Herold said: “He has no brandy. Only whiskey.”

  John Wilkes Booth drank deeply, looked around at the silvery farmland, took another, and gave the bottle to Herold. Booth took the field glasses and ordered Herold to leave the carbines.

  “It’s a good gun,” Herold said. “We ought to have something.”

  “Government issue,” said Booth. “They will slow us up.”

  Lloyd was wavering on the lawn and, by standing with his legs spread, kept from falling.

  “Is there a doctor in this country?” Booth said. “I have broken my leg.”

  Lloyd looked up at the rider. “Doc Hoxton is down the road,” he said. “About a half a mile, I guess. But he don’t practice. Told me so himself.”

  Booth nodded to Herold, who took the equipment back into the tavern but kept one of the carbines and some of the cartridges. Davey got on his horse.

  “We killed the President,” Booth said, “and Seward.”

  If Booth looked for applause, or incredulousness, or awe, there was none of it. Lloyd kept looking up at him stupidly.

  “Don’t you want to hear the news?” the assassin said.

  “Use your own pleasure about that,” Lloyd mumbled.

  Herold handed Lloyd a silver dollar. The horses swung and were gone.

  The pain forced Booth to change his plans. Instead of riding eighteen miles straight south to Port Tobacco, and escaping across the broad bend of the Potomac to the state of Virginia, he had to find medical assistance. The leg would not wait. The only doctor he knew in the whole area was Dr. Samuel Mudd, the humorless farmer at Bryantown.

  Booth did not trust him, but he had to find a doctor. Mudd’s place was about seventeen miles from the tavern, down past Waldorf and then to the southeast. It would have to be done before daylight, and that meant that a lot of hard riding lay ahead. Because he did not trust Mudd, John Wilkes Booth determined to wear the whisker disguise he had brought along, and the big muffler. He told Herold that they would say that the horse had stumbled on the road and Booth had been pitched off and had broken his leg. Once the leg was treated, they would ask for cross-country farm roads to take them to Port Tobacco. The delay should not cost them more than an hour.

  They headed down through T.B. and kept the horses moving.

  In Washington, Major James O’Beirne of the District Board of Enrollment had heard the name of Booth so many times that he asked the theater people where Mr. Booth lived. They told him the National Hotel, at Sixth and the Avenue. The major called Detective William Eaton and ordered him to go there at once, find Booth’s room, and take charge of it and everything in it in the name of the War Department of the United States.

  In forty-five minutes, Eaton was back with the news that no one at the hotel had seen the actor since early last evening. However, the detective had brought back with him a trunk, a lot of papers, some letters and effects. O’Beirne ordered these turned over to Lieutenant William H. Terry to assess. The only item of importance turned up was a letter from one Samuel Arnold begging Booth to desist from a complicated plot.

  It was well past midnight when Stanton ordered his enforcement subordinates to Petersen House for a conference. Major Richards of the Washington police attended. So did General Augur for the military and Major O’Beirne of the United States Marshal’s office. Chief Justice Cartter was there, and Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana arrived, and remained to write dispatches for Stanton. Captain William Williams, who had invited John Wilkes Booth to have a drink with him, was also there.

  Corporal Tanner was ordered not to take any notes. Decisions good and bad were made at this meeting. Stanton announced to those present that he had indisputable proof that Booth fired the shot from outside the box door. The proof was that an investigating officer had located the bullet hole in a panel of the door. It was pretty definite, he admitted, that the assassin was John Wilkes Booth, but he wanted no public announcement of this yet. Stanton gave no reason for not announcing at once the shooting of the President, but those around him felt that he expected momentarily to arrest the assassins and that he wanted to announce the shooting and arrest at the same time.

  He directed General Thomas M. Vincent to take charge of Petersen House and to be responsible for those persons who were admitted. He asked Dana to send a wire to General Grant, at the Philadelphia railroad terminal, telling him that Lincoln had been shot, and for Dana to contact the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and have a special train for Grant ready to leave Philadelphia for Washington. By telegraph, he asked Chief Kennedy of the New York police for some “good detectives.” He wrote a terse note to Chief Justice Salmon Chase that Lincoln was dying and to be ready to administer the oath of office to Vice President Johnson. He notified Johnson that Lincoln was dying, and sent one of O’Beirne’s men to protect him.

  John Lee was the man sent to Johnson’s hotel.* Like Richards, he was a policeman’s policeman. When he arrived at Kirkwood House, he made a perfunctory stop at the Vice President’s room, then called the assistant manager and asked to be taken to the roof. Lee examined the building from top to bottom. He found that the roof abutted other roofs and the building could be entered by a skylight. He also found a backyard fire escape which would permit any prowler to get into the hotel by the second floor.

  Lee sent for another man to guard the upper hotel levels and he went into the bar for a drink. A customer asked Lee if he was a policeman and, on being assured that he was, said that there had been a suspicious-looking man who had taken a room yesterday and who had been asking questions about the Vice President. Mr. Lee asked the night manager for the hotel registry and asked him to point out the names of persons he could not vouch for as regular customers. The man pointed to the name G. Atzerodt.

  The detective asked to see Mr. Atzerodt and was told that he wasn’t in. Lee said that he would like to see Mr. Atzerodt’s room, and insisted that the manager accompany him. They went up and knocked on the door twice. Lee called out the name Atzerodt. He said he wanted a key to the room and the manager, embarrassed, said that Atzerodt had the only one.

  “I do not like the appearance of things,” said Lee, “and I must get into this room.”

  He went back downstairs and asked permission of the proprietor to break down the door. The owner said that if the matter was important, all right. Lee said it was. He went back upstairs and, with the assistance of the night manager, broke the door.

  “Stand in the doorway,” Lee said. The detective lit the gas light and searched the room slowly and carefully. He took a black coat off a door and laid it on the iron bedstead. He was searching the pockets when he stopped, slipped his hand under a pillow, and came up with a huge pistol.

  “Now,” he said, “I will have to send for Major O’Beirne. You stand right where you are.”

  Lee went downstairs and almost bumped into O’Beirne in the lobby. The major had just delivered Stanton’s message to Johnson that the President was dying and to hold himself
in readiness to take the oath as President of the United States. The detective told his boss what he was doing and what he had found and O’Beirne ordered him to continue the search and to report later.

  Back in the room, Mr. Lee continued searching the black coat and found an Ontario, Canada, bankbook made out to J. Wilkes Booth in the sum of $455. A large-scale map of the state of Virginia was found. A white handkerchief came out of a pocket. Along one edge was stenciled “Mary R. E. Booth.” A second handkerchief was marked “F. M. Nelson.” A third was marked “H.” There was an empty envelope with the frank of Congressman John Conness on it, and a new pair of gauntlet gloves.

  In a bureau drawer were three boxes of Colt pistol cartridges. Also a stick of licorice, a toothbrush and an unmarked colored handkerchief. There was a single spur on the dresser, a pair of socks and two collars, one size sixteen, one size seventeen.

  Lee then turned up the carpet, section by section, and examined the floor underneath for saw marks. He examined the washstand and basin, the back of the chest of drawers and, when he reached the little wood stove in the corner, he squatted and sifted the cold ashes. Then he took the bedclothes, piece by piece, and studied them and ran them through his fingers. He tore the pillow open and felt inside. Between the bottom sheet and the mattress he made his last find: a large bowie knife.

  The Secretary of War now had an unmistakable cross reference between John Wilkes Booth and George Atzerodt. And, from Fletcher through General Augur, he had a cross reference between Atzerodt and David Herold. At 12:50 A.M., the only person he knew nothing about was the Seward assassin, Lewis Paine. Two hours and thirty-five minutes after the attacks, Mr. Stanton knew who was wanted.

  1 a.m.