Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

by Bill O'Reilly

Lincoln takes advantage of the privacy, reaching out for Mary’s hand and holding it lovingly. She blushes at such scandalous behavior. “What will Miss Harris make of my hanging on to you so?” she giggles to her husband.

  “She will think nothing about it,” he replies, squeezing her hand but not letting go.

  Behind Lincoln, a single door leads into the state box. On the other side of the door is a narrow unlit hallway. At the end of the hallway is yet another door. This is the only route to and from the state box, and it is John Parker’s job to pull up a chair and sit in front of this door, making sure that no one goes in or out.

  But on the night of April 14, 1865, as Abraham Lincoln relaxes in his rocking chair and laughs out loud for the first time in months, John Parker gets thirsty. He is bored, and he can’t see the play. Taltavul’s saloon calls to him. Pushing his chair against the wall, he leaves the door to the state box unguarded and wanders outside. Footman Charles Forbes is taking a nap in the driver’s seat of Lincoln’s carriage, oblivious to the fog and drizzle.

  “How about a little ale?” Parker asks, knowing that Forbes will be an eager drinking buddy. The two walk into Taltavul’s and make themselves comfortable. The show won’t be over for two more hours—plenty of time to have a couple beers and appear perfectly sober when the Lincolns need them again.

  President Abraham Lincoln’s only bodyguard, a man with a career-long history of inappropriate and negligent behavior, has left his post for the last time. Incredibly, he will never be punished for this gross dereliction of duty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  8:45 P.M.

  Less than two hours to go.

  John Wilkes Booth summarizes the final details with his co-conspirators as the Lincolns settle into their seats. Though Lewis Powell checked out of his hotel room hours earlier, the four men meet outside the Herndon House because of its close proximity to Ford’s. With the exception of Atzerodt, each man is on horseback. Though he has been drinking steadily on and off all day, Booth is thinking and acting clearly. None of the co-conspirators has any cause to doubt him.

  First, and most important, Booth tells them, the precise time of the president’s assassination will be ten-fifteen P.M. Unlike the night before, when the assassination plans had a haphazard quality, tonight’s events are timed to the minute. Shows at Ford’s usually start promptly. If that’s the case, then Harry Hawk will be alone onstage, delivering his punch line, at precisely ten-fifteen.

  Second, Booth tells them, the murders of Seward and Johnson must also take place at ten-fifteen. The precision is vital. There can be no advance warning or alarm to the intended targets. The attacks must be a complete surprise. Booth hopes to create the illusion that Washington, D.C., is a hotbed of assassins, resulting in the sort of mass chaos that will make it easier for him and his men to escape. With officials looking everywhere for the killers, on streets filled with bonfires and spontaneous parades and hordes of drunken revelers, blending in to the bedlam should be as simple as staying calm.

  Next comes the list of assignments. The job of murdering of Secretary of State Seward will be a two-man affair, with Lewis Powell and David Herold now working together. Powell will be the man who actually walks up to the door, finds a way to enter the house, and commits the crime. The ruse that will get him in the door is a fake bottle of medication, which Powell will claim was sent by Seward’s physician.

  Herold’s role is to assist in the getaway. He knows Washington’s back alleys and shortcuts and will guide Powell, who knows little about the city, to safety. During the murder, Herold must wait outside and hold their horses. Once Powell exits the house, the two men will gallop across town by a roundabout method in order to confuse anyone trying to give chase. Then they will leave town via the Navy Yard Bridge and rendezvous in the Maryland countryside.

  As for George Atzerodt, he will act alone. Killing Vice President Andrew Johnson does not look to be a difficult task. Though Johnson is a vigorous man, he is known to be unguarded and alone most of the time. Atzerodt is to knock on the door of his hotel room and shoot him when he answers. Atzerodt will also escape Washington via the Navy Yard Bridge, then gallop into Maryland to meet up with the others. From there, Atzerodt’s familiarity with smugglers’ trails will allow him to guide the men into the Deep South.

  Once the plans are finalized, Booth will head for Ford’s. There he will bide his time, making sure the theater’s entries and exits are unguarded, that the secret backstage passageways are clear, and that his horse is ready and waiting.

  Booth clears his throat just before they ride off in their different directions. He tells them about the letter he wrote to the National Intelligencer, implicating all of them in this grand triple assassination. The message is clear: there is no going back. If the men object to Booth outing them, there is no historical record to show it.

  Booth looks over his gang. These four unlikely men are about to change the course of history, just as surely as Grant or Lincoln or Lee or any of the hundreds of thousands of men who died during the Civil War. They are now ninety minutes away from becoming the most wanted men in all of the world.

  He wishes them good luck, then spurs his horse and trots off to Ford’s.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  9:30 P.M.

  Booth guides his mare into the alley behind Ford’s. The night is quiet, save for the peals of laughter coming from inside the theater. He dismounts and shouts for Ned Spangler to come hold his horse. The sceneshifter appears at the back door, visibly distressed about the possibility of missing an all-important stage cue. Booth doesn’t care. He demands that Spangler come outside and secure the animal. The last thing Booth needs is for his escape to be thwarted by a runaway mare.

  Spangler, completely unaware of the assassination plot, insists that he can’t do the job. Booth, ever persuasive, insists. The unshaven, heavy-lidded stagehand weakens but does not capitulate. His employment is contingent on moving the right scenes at the right time. He is willing to do anything for a great actor such as Booth—anything but lose his job. Leaving Booth in the alley, Spangler dashes back into the theater and returns with Joseph Burroughs, a young boy who does odd jobs at Ford’s and goes by the nickname “Peanut John.” Booth hands Peanut John the reins and demands that he remain at the back door, holding the horse, until he returns. The boy must not leave that spot for any reason.

  Peanut John, hoping that Booth will give him a little something for the effort, agrees. He sits on the stone step and shivers in the damp night air, his fist clutched tightly around those reins.

  Booth slides into the theater. The sound of the onstage actors speaking their lines fills the darkened backstage area. He speaks in a hush as he removes his riding gloves, making a show of saying hello to the cast and crew, most of whom he knows well. His eyes scrutinize the layout, memorizing the location of every stagehand and prop, not wanting anything to get in the way of his exit.

  There is a tunnel beneath the stage, crossing from one side to the other. Booth checks to make sure that nothing clutters the passage. Nobody guesses for an instant that he is checking out escape routes. When he reaches the far side, Booth exits Ford’s through yet another backstage door. This one leads to an alley, which funnels down onto Tenth Street.

  There’s no one there.

  In one short dash through Ford’s Theatre, Booth has learned that his escape route is not blocked, that nobody is loitering in the alley who could potentially tackle him or otherwise stop him from getting away, and that the cast and crew think it’s the most normal thing in the world for him to stroll into and out of the theater.

  And, indeed, no one questions why he’s there nor finds it even remotely suspicious.

  Feeling very pleased with himself, Booth pops in Taltavul’s for a whiskey. He orders a whole bottle, then sits down at the bar. Incredibly, Lincol
n’s bodyguard is sipping a large tankard of ale just a few feet away.

  Booth smiles as he pours water into his whiskey, then raises the glass in a toast to himself.

  What am I about to do? Can I really go through with this?

  He pushes the doubts from his head. We are at war. This is not murder. You will become immortal.

  At ten P.M. Booth double-checks to make sure John Parker is still drinking at the other end of the bar. Then, leaving the nearly full whiskey bottle on the bar, he softly lowers his glass and walks back to Ford’s.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  10:00 P.M.

  The third act is under way. Soon the play will be over, and Lincoln can get back to the White House. Meanwhile, the unheated state box has gotten chilly. Abraham Lincoln drops Mary’s hand as he rises to put on his overcoat, tailored in a black wool specially for his oversized frame by Brooks Brothers. The silk lining is decorated with an eagle clutching a banner in its beak. The words on the streamer are Lincoln’s unspoken manifesto, and every time he slips on the coat he is reminded of his mission. “One country, one destiny,” it reads, quite simply.

  Sitting back down in the horsehair rocker, Lincoln shifts his gaze from the performers directly below him. He pushes back the privacy curtain, then leans forward over the railing to look down and to the left, at the audience.

  Lincoln lets go of the curtain and returns his attention to Our American Cousin.

  It is seven minutes after ten. At the exact same moment, John Wilkes Booth strolls through the front door of Ford’s—heart racing, whiskey on his breath, skin clammy to the touch. He is desperately trying to appear calm and cool. Always a man of manners, Booth takes off his hat and holds it with one hand. When ticket taker John Buckingham makes a joke of letting him in for free, “courtesy of the house,” Booth notices the bulge in Buckingham’s lip and asks if he has any extra tobacco. Like so many other minor theater employees, Buckingham is in awe of Booth’s celebrity. Not only does he hand over a small plug of tobacco, he also summons the courage to ask if he might introduce Booth to some close friends who happen to be at the show. “Later,” Booth promises with a wink.

  Buckingham notes the deathly pallor on Booth’s face and how incredibly nervous the normally nonchalant actor seems to be. As Booth walks off, Buckingham’s fellow Ford’s employee John Sessford points out that Booth has been in and out of the theater all day. “Wonder what he’s up to?” Sessford mutters to Buckingham. They watch as Booth climbs the staircase to the dress circle, which accesses the hallway to the state box. But neither man thinks Booth’s unusual behavior merits closer scrutiny. They watch him disappear up the stairs and then once again return their attention to the front door and to the patrons late in returning from intermission.

  At the top of the stairs, Booth enters the dress circle lobby. He is now inside the darkened theater, standing directly behind the seats of the second-level audience. He hums softly to himself to calm his nerves. In hopes of increasing the theater’s capacity for this special performance, Ford’s management has placed extra chairs in this corridor, and now Booth walks past two Union officers sitting in those seats. They recognize the famous actor and then turn their focus back to the play. They make no move to stop him, because they have no reason to.

  Booth approaches the door leading into the state box. It is attended by a White House messenger but not a pistol-packing bodyguard. He sees the chair where John Parker should be sitting and breathes a sigh of relief that the bodyguard is still in the saloon. Handing the messenger one of his calling cards, Booth steps through the doorway without a question.

  In the theater below, a young girl who came to the theater hoping to see Lincoln has spent the night staring up at the state box, waiting for him to show his face. Now she is awed by the sight of John Wilkes Booth, the famous and dashing actor, standing in the shadows above her. At the same time, her heart leaps as Lincoln moves his gaze from the stage to the audience, once again poking his head out over the railing. Finally, with the play almost over, she has seen the president! She turns to the man next to her, Taltavul’s owner, Jim Ferguson, and grins at her good fortune.

  She turns to get another glimpse of Booth, but by then he has already pushed through the door and now stands in the darkened hallway leading into the state box. He is completely alone. If he wants, he can go back out the door and get on with his life as if nothing has happened. The letter boasting of his deed has not yet been sent. Other than the other members of the conspiracy, no one will be the wiser. But if he walks forward down the hallway, then through the rear door of Lincoln’s box, his life will change forever.

  Booth has a head full of whiskey and a heart full of hate. He thinks of the Confederate cause and Lincoln’s promise to give slaves the vote. And then Booth remembers that no one can put a stop to it but him. He is the one man who can, and will, make a difference. There will be no going back.

  Earlier that day Booth spied a wooden music stand in the state box. He now jams it into the side of the door leading to the corridor. The music stand has become a dead bolt, and Booth double-checks to make sure it is lodged firmly against the wooden door frame. This seals the door shut from the inside. When he is done, the door might as well be locked, so perfect is his blockade. It’s impossible to push open from the other side. No one in the theater can get in to stop him.

  Booth then creeps down the hallway. Booth’s second act of preparation that afternoon was using a pen knife to carve a very small peephole in the back wall of the state box. Now he looks through that hole to get a better view of the president.

  As Booth already knows, the state box is shaped like a parallelogram. The walls to the left and right of Lincoln slant inward. Booth sees that Clara Harris and Major Rathbone sit along the wall to his far right, at an angle to the stage, and the Lincolns sit along the railing. The Lincolns look out directly onto the stage, while Clara and her beau must turn their heads slightly to the right to see the show—if they look directly forward they will be gazing at Mary and Abraham Lincoln in profile.

  But it is not their view of Lincoln that matters. What matters is that Booth, through the peephole, is staring right at the back of Lincoln’s head. He can hear the players down below, knowing that in a few short lines Harry Hawk’s character Asa Trenchard will be alone, delivering his “sockdologizing old man-trap” line.

  That line is Booth’s cue—and just ten seconds away.

  Booth presses his black hat back down onto his head, then removes the loaded Deringer from his coat pocket and grasps it in his right fist. With his left hand, he slides the long, razor-sharp Bowie knife from its sheath.

  Booth takes a deep breath and softly pushes the door open with his knife hand. The box is dimly lit from the footlights down below. He can see only faces. No one knows he’s there. He presses his body against the wall, careful to stay in the shadows while awaiting his cue. Abraham Lincoln’s head pokes over the top of his rocking chair, just four short feet in front of Booth; then once again he looks down and to the left, at the audience.

  “You sockdologizing old man-trap” booms out through the theater.

  The audience explodes in laughter.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  10:15 P.M.

  A few blocks away, someone knocks hard on the front door of the “Old Clubhouse,” the home of Secretary of State William Seward. The three-story brick house facing Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, took that name from its day as the headquarters of the elite Washington Club. Tragedy paid a visit to the building in 1859, when a congressman shot his mistress’s husband on a nearby lawn. The husband, Philip Barton Key, was a United States attorney and the son of Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Key’s body was carried inside the club, where he passed away in a first-floor parlor.

  That tragedy, however
, will pale in comparison with what will happen in the next ten minutes.

  There is another sharp knock, even though it’s been only a few seconds since the first one. This time the pounding is more insistent. Secretary Seward does not hear it, for he is sleeping upstairs, his medication causing him to drift between consciousness and unconsciousness. William Bell, a young black servant in a pressed white coat, hurries to the entryway.

  “Yes, sir?” he asks, opening the door and seeing an unfamiliar face.

  A handsome young man with long, thick hair stares back from the porch. He wears an expensive slouch hat and stands a couple inches over six feet. His jaw is awry on the left, as if it was badly broken and then healed improperly. “I have medicine from Dr. Verdi,” he says in an Alabama drawl, holding up a small vial.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take it to him,” Bell says, reaching for the bottle.

  “It has to be delivered personally.”

  Bell looks at him curiously. Secretary Seward’s physician had visited just an hour ago. Before leaving, he’d administered a sedative and insisted that there be no more visitors tonight. “Sir, I can’t let you go upstairs. I have strict orders—”

  “You’re talking to a white man, boy. This medicine is for your master and, by God, you’re going to give it to him.”

  When Bell protests further, Lewis Powell pushes past him, saying, “Out of my way, nigger. I’m going up.”

  Bell simply doesn’t know how to stop the intruder.

  Powell starts climbing the steps from the foyer to the living area. Bell is a step behind at all times, pleading forgiveness and politely asking that Powell tread more softly. The sound of the southerner’s heavy work boots on the wooden steps echoes through the house. “I’m sorry I talked rough to you,” Bell says sheepishly.