by Alan Axelrod
On December 2, 1859, as a volunteer with the Richmond militia, Booth attended the hanging of radical abolitionist John Brown. Although Booth never formally took up arms on behalf of the Confederacy, some historians believe the Confederacy covertly employed him as a “courier” (for which, read spy). Whether a Confederate agent or not, during the fall of 1864, Booth hatched the first of several bizarre plots to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners of war. He wrote a letter justifying the planned kidnapping and entrusted it, sealed, to his sister’s husband, the actor John Sleeper Clarke. The document was signed, “A Confederate doing duty upon his own responsibility. J. Wilkes Booth.” Some scholars take this as proof that Booth was a lone wolf. Others believe the signature was a ploy to save the Confederate government from implication in an unseemly plot. In either case, after the abduction plots fizzled during the winter of 1864–65, Booth was left with just three active conspirators. George A. Atzerodt was a dipsomaniac Maryland carriage maker. David Herold, a twenty-three-year-old drugstore clerk, had an infantile intellect and a puppy-like desire to please Booth. Added to this pair was a large, square, powerfully built former Confederate soldier who called himself Lewis Paine, but whose real name was Louis Thornton Powell. Abandoning the kidnapping plot, Booth proposed to use the trio in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
As a prominent actor, Booth was well known at both Grover’s Theatre and at Ford’s. In conversation, he learned that Lincoln and Grant would be Ford’s. He decided to kill both of them while Atzerodt would do in Vice President Andrew Johnson and Paine and Herold would murder Secretary of State Seward. Intimately acquainted with the layout of Ford’s Theatre, Booth inspected the State Box during the afternoon of April 14. He noted the broken lock on the inner door to Box 7 and also a bore hole drilled into that door. (For years after the assassination, it was assumed that Booth himself had drilled the hole, but in 1962, Frank Ford, son of Harry Clay Ford, one of the theater’s owners, revealed that it had been drilled on his father’s orders, so that Lincoln’s guard could look into the box without disturbing the occupants.) Finally, Booth also obtained a piece of wood from a music stand backstage. He would use it to wedge shut the outer door of the State Box.
Booth armed himself lightly, with a bowie knife and a diminutive single-shot derringer. He planned to use the knife on Lincoln’s guard and on the president, reserving the derringer to dispatch Grant. With the outer door wedged shut behind him, he would then leap over the railing of the box, onto the stage, cross it to the north wing, and make his way to a backstage exit onto a driveway called Baptist Alley, where a horse would be waiting for him.
Before evening, Booth learned that Grant would not be with Lincoln. Now he could use the derringer on the president. He knew exactly when to fire his single shot. Well versed in the script of Our American Cousin, he knew when the play’s biggest, loudest laugh could come. The pretentious English mother, Mrs. Mountchessington, declares to Harry Hawk’s character, Asa Trenchard, “I am aware, Mr. Trenchard, that you are not used to the manners of good society, and that alone will excuse the impertinence of which you have been guilty.” Trenchard, the backwoods American, drawls in reply, “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old mantrap.” With the audience erupting, no one would hear the fatal shot—until he had made his escape. Booth calculated the line would be delivered at about 10:15 p.m.
* * *
But things went wrong from the start. Atzerodt got cold feet and never even attempted to kill Vice President Johnson. Herold held Paine’s horse while the latter proceeded to make a bloody mess of the Seward assassination. In the course of the attempt on the secretary’s life, Paine fractured the skull of Seward’s son, Frederick, slashed the forehead of a male army nurse, knocked unconscious Seward’s young daughter, then repeatedly stabbed Seward himself—an old man recovering from a carriage accident—tearing a gaping hole in his cheek before the secretary saved himself by rolling off and under the bed. In the meantime, the nurse revived sufficiently to attack Paine, who stabbed him just as another of Seward’s sons, Major Augustus Seward, entered the bedroom. Paine slashed his forehead and hand before running down the stairs, where he encountered a State Department messenger, whom he also slashed. Bounding out the front door of the Seward house, Paine screamed “I am mad! I am mad!” (The mayhem notwithstanding, all survived and recovered from the assassination attempt.)
Just as Paine was beginning his bloody work, Booth made his way to the State Box. He approached the outer door, prepared to dispatch the president’s bodyguard with his bowie knife. But Officer John F. Parker was not there. Tradition has it that, bored with sitting outside of the president’s box, he nipped off to Taltavull’s Saloon, next door to the theater. All that is known for certain, however, is that Parker was not at his post when Booth approached, entered the little blind corridor leading to the box, wedged closed the outer door, and peered through the bore hole in the inner door to Box 7.
He saw the rocker, Lincoln’s head resting against its high back. At about 10:15, as Harry Hawk’s anticipated line produced the anticipated laughter, Booth eased the inner door open, entered the box, leveled his derringer between Lincoln’s left ear and spine, squeezed the trigger, and discharged from a distance of two feet the weapon’s half-inch diameter ball.
Propelled by the derringer’s small charge, the projectile entered Lincoln’s skull at its base, traveled through the brain diagonally from left to right, and lodged behind the right eye, fracturing the orbital socket. In timing his shot, Booth had planned well indeed. No one in the audience heard the report of the diminutive weapon. Even Mrs. Lincoln (seated next to her husband), Rathbone, and Clara Harris were barely startled by the dull pop. But soon a blue cloud of smoke drifted above the balcony and over the stage. A shriek shrilled from the State Box, then the sounds of a scuffle as Major Rathbone tangled with Booth, who, stabbing him in the arm and tearing a deep gash that ran from shoulder to elbow, broke free. The assassin swung his legs over the balustrade, which was festooned with a pair of flags, the Stars and Stripes below Box 8 and the banner of the Treasury Regiment below Box 7. Dressed in a stylish black suit, his tightly tailored trousers tucked into highly polished tan calf-length boots, the actor caught his right spur in the Treasury Regiment flag. As he leapt to the stage below, this caused his left foot to take the full weight of his fall. The small bone in that leg snapped on impact a few inches above the ankle.
As a dazed Harry Hawk stood, frozen, center stage, Booth raised himself from a crouch, theatrically thrust his arms into the air, and declaimed “Sic semper tyrannis!” The state motto of Virginia, it translates as, Thus ever to tyrants.
The shouting began. “Stop that man!” “It’s Booth!” “Stop that man!” But no one did. Booth lurched, limping across the stage, and made his way to the stage door opening onto Baptist Alley. His horse was held by a dim-witted peanut vendor and Ford’s Theatre factotum named Joseph “Johnny Peanuts” Burroughs, who dozed on a carpenter’s bench as he held the reins. Booth struck him hard on the head with the handle of his bowie knife, snatched the reins, mounted, and rode off.
Twenty-three-year-old army surgeon Charles Augustus Leale had been seated in the first balcony, not far from the State Box. Plowing his way through a gathering crowd, he reached the wedged outer door. He was unable to force it, but the wounded Rathbone managed to remove the wedge from the other side. Leale identified himself as a surgeon and was quickly joined by a civilian physician, Dr. Albert F. A. King, and a government employee, William Kent.
Badly bleeding, Rathbone asked Leale to attend to his torn arm. The physician turned first to the president. Rathbone’s blood soaked his fiancée’s clothing, but Lincoln hardly bled. Leale had trouble finding the wound. He and the others gently laid the president on the floor, Leale supporting the head. When his hand came away slightly bloody, his first thought was that he had been stabbed in the back or the neck. At this point, audience member Thomas Brad
ford Sanders boosted Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, another army surgeon, from the orchestra level up over the balustrade and into the president’s box. Behind him was Lieutenant James Bolton of the DC provost marshal’s guard. Although senior in rank to Leale, Taft offered to assist him in locating the wound. Leale borrowed a penknife to cut away Lincoln’s collar and split open his shirt and coat. Both doctors now frantically peered and felt. They found nothing.
Leale lifted Lincoln’s eyelids. Noting that the pupil of the left eye was fixed and dilated, he quickly diagnosed brain injury. Running his fingers through Lincoln’s hair, he at last encountered the entry wound at the back of the head. It was clotted. The surgeon removed the clot, and the comatose president, who had been struggling for breath, began to breathe more easily. But Leale turned to Taft: “I can’t save him. His wound is mortal. It is impossible for him to recover.”
By now Miss Laura Keene herself appeared in the box. She had responded to a call for water, and, grabbing a pitcher from the backstage green room, she made her way up a set of back stairs. She appealed to Dr. Leale for permission to hold the president’s head. “I granted the request,” Leale later wrote, “and she sat on the floor of the box and held his head in her lap.” (She would preserve, lifelong, the dress stained with Lincoln’s blood.)
Should Lincoln be taken to the White House? No, the doctors agreed. The seven-block trip would kill him. Leale proposed instead taking his patient to the nearest available house. Assigning Dr. Taft to carry his right shoulder, Dr. King his left, and commandeering four soldiers from Thompson’s Battery C, Independent Pennsylvania Artillery to assist in carrying the body, Leale cradled the head. Emerging onto Tenth Street, the desperate cortège scanned for an available house. Suddenly, one Henry S. Safford appeared, candle in hand, at the front door of number 453 (now 516) Tenth Street, the house of William Petersen, tailor.
“Bring him in here! Bring him in here!” he shouted, lifting the candle.
Safford, one of nine paying boarders who lived with the nine members of the Petersen family, led the way to a bedroom nine and a half feet wide by seventeen feet long, furnished with a dresser and two chairs in addition to the bed. It was much too short for the six-foot-four Lincoln, who was laid diagonally across it.
The doctors set about doing what little they could. Noting that the president’s hands and feet were like ice, Leale ordered hot water bottles, hot blankets, and, for placement on the chest, a mustard plaster. He then summoned Mrs. Lincoln, who sat by her husband’s head, kissing him, imploring him to say just one word to her. A messenger was sent to son Robert, who brought back with him Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Senator James Dixon of Connecticut. She stayed by Mary Lincoln’s side throughout the long night.
The president was doomed, but when he at last appeared more comfortable, Dr. Leale wrote a note summoning Lincoln’s pastor, the Reverend Phineas T. Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. He also wrote to US Army Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes, Dr. Willard Bliss (Leale’s commanding officer at the Armory Square Hospital), and Dr. Robert K. Stone (the Lincoln family physician). Then he sent word to every member of the cabinet, beginning with Edwin Stanton.
Just before Leale’s messenger reached Stanton, the secretary of war was preparing for bed. He was startled by a scream from his wife downstairs: “My God! Mr. Seward has been murdered!” The news had come from another messenger, who then led the secretary of war to a waiting carriage. Arriving at Seward’s house, Stanton met Navy secretary Gideon Welles, who had already heard about the events at Ford’s Theatre and informed Stanton that Lincoln had been shot. Stanton and Welles entered the Seward house, gasped at the carnage, but decided that Seward could recover without them and drove off to the Petersen house. There, Stanton set up the government of the United States in the rear parlor, effectively appointing himself acting president—without a thought to summoning Vice President Andrew Johnson. His first order of business was to take testimony from witnesses and to dispatch police officers and soldiers to hunt down the guilty. In fifteen minutes, he “had testimony enough down to hang John Wilkes Booth.”
As Stanton coordinated the manhunt, the doctors waited and watched through the long night. Shortly before seven in the morning, Leale told Mrs. Lincoln that the end was near. She fainted at the news. Leale revived her, and recorded the words she spoke to her husband: “Love, live but one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.”
With that, she was led back to the front parlor as Leale, Surgeon General Barnes, Dr. Stone, and Robert Lincoln—around whose shoulders Senator Charles Sumner put his arm—looked on. Leale held the president’s hand, his forefinger over the pulse. When he could no longer feel a beat or detect signs of respiration, he looked toward Barnes. Barnes rose, peeled back one of Lincoln’s eyelids, then put his ear to the president’s chest.
“He is gone.”
It was twenty-two minutes and ten seconds after seven o’clock in the morning of April 15, 1865.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton turned to Reverend Gurley: “Doctor, will you say anything?”
Nodding his assent, Gurley knelt. In silence, all placed their hands on the bed. The reverend began to pray aloud, asking God to accept Abraham Lincoln, His humble servant, into His glorious Kingdom.
Having with Lincoln directed the cruelest, costliest war the nation ever fought, Edwin Stanton sobbed. Through tears, he spoke the words history has accepted as the epitaph of the sixteenth president: “Now he belongs to the ages.”
* * *
For eleven days after Abraham Lincoln’s death, John Wilkes Booth eluded the thousands of soldiers, policemen, and detectives sent in pursuit of him—the biggest manhunt in American history to that point. After midnight on April 26, a detachment of Union cavalry ran the assassin to the ground at a tobacco farm near Port Royal, Virginia. He and David Herold huddled in a barn. Herold quickly surrendered, but Booth refused. Meaning to drive him out, the troopers set the barn ablaze. Through a window, the assassin appeared, a broken-legged man leaning on a crutch, silhouetted against the flames, and cradling a carbine in his free arm. Without orders (“Providence directed me,” he later said), Sergeant Boston Corbett, 16th New York Cavalry, fired his Colt .45 revolver once at the silhouette. The bullet passed through the actor’s neck.
The troopers dragged Booth out of the blazing barn. The bullet having severed his spinal cord, the assassin was paralyzed. Lieutenant Colonel Everton J. Conger knelt down and put his ear close to Booth’s lips. “Tell … my … Mother … I … die … for my country.”
Booth’s dying words were spoken at sunup on the day that General Kirby Smith, commanding the 50,000 men of the last Confederate army remaining in the field, surrendered to Union general Edward R. S. Canby.
Lewis Paine—who had made a bloody bungle of his attempt to stab and bludgeon Secretary Seward to death—David Herold, and George Atzerodt were each rounded up, tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang, along with Mary Surratt, mother of another accused Booth conspirator, John Surratt, and owner of the Washington boarding house in which the Booth conspirators had hatched the plot. All except John Surratt (who was tried and acquitted in 1867) were hanged on July 7, 1865. Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland physician who splinted Booth’s broken leg early in his eleven-day flight from justice, was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868 after he saved many lives during a virulent prison yellow fever epidemic.
Secretary of State William H. Seward recovered from his grievous wounds. He continued to serve in the cabinet of President Andrew Johnson and is best remembered for purchasing Alaska from the czar of Russia in 1867, an act derided at the time as “Seward’s folly.”
Secretary Stanton clashed with Johnson, who tried to remove him from office. This action gave a hostile Radical Republican Congress an excuse to impeach Johnson. A single Senate vote in 1868 saved him from removal, but he served out the remainder of his term virtually without authority, chief executive in name only
.
Officer John F. Parker, the Washington Metropolitan policeman who was absent from his post outside of the State Box at Ford’s Theatre, was neither investigated nor reprimanded. He continued to serve the citizens of the District.
Major Henry Rathbone married his fiancée, Clara Harris. In 1894, he murdered her because (he testified) he was jealous of her love for their children. Found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was committed to an asylum, where he died in 1911. His last words were: “The man with the knife! I can’t stop him! I can’t stop him!”
The sanity of Mary Todd Lincoln was repeatedly questioned in the years following her husband’s death, and in 1875 her only surviving son, Robert (her youngest, Tad, having died in 1871), persuaded a judge to commit her to a private sanatorium. Early the following year, another judge reversed the commitment. Released, the president’s widow never lived down the public humiliation. She died in 1882 and was buried beside her husband at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.
* * *
A few historians believe Booth had acted on secret Confederate orders. More likely, the assassination was a self-appointed mission to avenge the South. But it was the people of the South, white and black alike, who suffered most bitterly in consequence of the crime.
It was thanks to Lincoln that the North had fought the Civil War to its bloody, bitter end: the total surrender of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery forever. Yet it was also Lincoln who, in his Second Inaugural Address, admonished his fellow citizens to act with “malice toward none, with charity for all … to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
