Complete Works of Howard Pyle

by Howard Pyle

  It was the custom for the guard who accompanied the President to the theatre to remain in the little passageway outside the box — that passageway through which Booth entered. Mr. Buckingham, who was the doorkeeper at Lord’s Theatre, remembers that a chair was placed there for the guard on the evening of the 14th. Whether Parker occupied it at all I do not know — Mr. Buckingham is of the impression that he did. If he did, he left it almost immediately; for he confessed to me the next day that he went to a seat at the front of the first gallery so that he could see the play. The door of the President’s box was shut; probably Mr. Lincoln never knew that the guard had left his post.

  Mr. Buckingham tells that Booth was in and out of the house five times before he finally shot the President. Each time he looked about the theatre in a restless, excited manner. I think there can be no doubt that he was studying the scene of his intended crime, and that he observed that Parker, whom he must have been watching, was not at his post. To me it is very probable that the fact that there was no one on guard may have determined the time of his attack. Booth had found it necessary to stimulate himself with whiskey in order to reach the proper pitch of fanaticism. Had he found a man at the door of the President’s box armed with a Colt’s revolver, his alcohol courage might have evaporated.

  However that may be, Parker’s absence had much to do with the success of Booth’s purpose. The assassin was armed with a dagger and a pistol. The story used to be that the dagger was intended for General Grant when the President had been despatched. That is absurd. While it had been announced that General and Mrs. Grant would be in the box, Booth, during one of his five visits of inspection, had certainly had an opportunity to observe that the General was absent. The dagger, which was noiseless, was intended for any one who might intercept him before he could fire. The pistol, which was noisy and would arouse pursuit, was for the President. As it happened, since the attack was a complete surprise, Major Rathbone, who, the President having been shot, attempted to prevent Booth’s escape, received the dagger in his arm.

  Had Parker been at his post at the back of the box — Booth still being determined to make the attempt that night — he would have been stabbed, probably killed. The noise of the struggle — Parker could surely have managed to make some outcry — would have given the alarm. Major Rathbone was a brave man, and the President was a brave man and of enormous muscular strength. It would have been an easy thing for the two men to have disarmed Booth, who was not a man of great physical strength. It was the suddenness of his attack on the President that made it so devilishly successful. It makes me feel rather bitter when I remember that the President had said, just a few hours before, that he knew he could trust all his guards. And then to think that in that one moment of test one of us should have utterly failed him! Parker knew that he had failed in duty. He looked like a convicted criminal the next day. He was never the same man afterward.

  The other fact that I think people should know has been stated before in the President’s own words: President Lincoln believed that it was probable he would be assassinated.

  The conversation that I had with him on the 14th was not the only one we had on that same subject. Any one can see how natural it was that the matter should have come up between us — my very presence beside him was a reminder that there was danger of assassination. In his general kindliness he wanted to talk about the thing that constituted my own particular occupation. He often spoke of the possibility of an attempt being made on his life. With the exception of that last time, however, he never treated it very seriously. He merely expressed the general idea that, I afterwards learned, he had expressed to Marshal Lamon and other men: if any one was willing to give his own life in the attempt to murder the President, it would be impossible to prevent him.

  On that last evening he went further. He said with conviction that he believed that the men who wanted to take his life would do it.. As far as I know, I am the only person to whom President Lincoln made such a statement. He may possibly have spoken about it to the other guards, but I never heard of it, and I am sure that had he done so I would have known of it.

  More than this, I believe that he had some vague sort of a warning that the attempt would be made on the night of the 14th. I know that this is an extraordinary statement to make, and that it is late in the day to make it. I have been waiting for just the proper opportunity to say this thing; I did not care to talk idly about it. I would like to give my reasons for feeling as I do. The chain of circumstances is at least an interesting thing to consider.

  It is a matter of record that on the morning of the 14th, at a cabinet meeting, the President spoke of the recurrence the night before of a dream which, he said, had always forerun something of moment in his life. In the dream a ship under full sail bore down upon him. At the time he spoke of it he felt that some good fortune was on its way to him. He was serene, even joyous, over it. Later in the day, while he was driving with his wife, his mind still seemed to be dwelling on the question of the future. It was their future together of which he spoke. He was almost impatient that his term should be over. He seemed eager for rest and peace. When I accompanied him to the War Department, he had become depressed and spoke of his belief that he would be assassinated. When we returned to the White House, he said that he did not want to go to the theatre that evening, but that he must go so as not to disappoint the people. In connection with this it is to be remembered that he was extremely fond of the theatre, and that the bill that evening, Our American Cousin, was a very popular one. When he was about to enter the White House he said “Good-by,” as I never remember to have heard him say before when I was leaving for the night.

  These things have a curious interest. President Lincoln was a man of entire sanity. But no one has ever sounded the spring of spiritual insight from which his nature was fed. To me it all means that he had, with his waking on that day, a strong prescience of coming change. As the day wore on, the feeling darkened into an impression of coming evil. The suggestion of the crude violence we witnessed on the street pointed to the direction from which that evil should come, he was human; he shrank from it. But he had what some men call fatalism; others, devotion to duty; still others, religious faith. Therefore he went open-eyed to the place where he met, at last, the blind fanatic. And in that meeting the President, who had dealt out justice with a tender heart, who had groaned in spirit over fallen Richmond, fell.

  More and more, people who have heard that I was with Mr. Lincoln come to me asking,

  “What was he like?”

  These last years, when, at a Lincoln birthday celebration or some other memorial gathering, they ask for a few words from the man who used to be Abraham Lincoln’s guard, the younger people look at me as if I were some strange spectacle — a man who lived by Lincoln’s side. It has made me feel as if the time had come when I ought to tell the world the little that I know about him. Soon there will be nothing of him but the things that have been written.

  Yet, when I try to say what sort of a man he seemed to me, I fail. I have no words. All I can do is to give little snatches of reminiscences — I cannot picture the man. I can say:

  He is the only man I ever knew the foundation of whose spirit was love. That love made him suffer. I saw him look at the ragged, hungry prisoners at City Point, I saw him ride over the battle-field at Petersburg, the man with the hole in his forehead and the man with both arms shot away lying accusing before his eyes. I saw him enter into Richmond, walking between lanes of silent men and women who had lost their battle. I remember his face. ... And yet my memory of him is not of an unhappy man. I hear so much to-day about the President’s melancholy. It is true no man could suffer more. But he was very easily amused. I have never seen a man who enjoyed more anything pleasant or funny that came his way. I think the balance between pain and pleasure was fairly struck, and in the last months when I knew him he was in love with life because he found it possible to do so much. ... I never saw evidence of faltering. I do not b
elieve any one ever did. Prom the moment he, who was all pity, pledged himself to war, he kept straight on.

  I can follow Secretary John Hay and say: He was the greatest man I have ever known — or shall ever know.

  That ought to be enough to say, and yet — nothing so merely of words seems to express him. Something that he did tells so much more.

  I remember one afternoon, not long before the President was shot, we were on our way to the War Department, when we passed a ragged, dirty man in army clothes, lounging just outside the White House enclosure. He had evidently been waiting to see the President, for he jumped up and went toward him with his story. He had been wounded, was just out of the hospital — he looked forlorn enough. There was something he wanted the President to do; he had papers with him. Mr. Lincoln was in a hurry, but he put out his hands for the papers. Then he sat down on the curbstone, the man beside him, and examined them. When he had satisfied himself about the matter, he smiled at the anxious fellow, reassuringly, and told him to come back the next day. Then he would arrange the matter for him. A thing like that says more than any man could express. If I could only make people see him as I did — see how simple he was with every one; how he could talk with a child so that the child could understand and smile up at him; how you would never know, from his manner to the plainest or poorest or meanest, that there was the least difference between that man and himself; how, from that man to the greatest, and all degrees between, the President could meet every man square on the plane where he stood and speak to him, man to man, from that plane — if I could do that, I would feel that I had told something of what he was. For no one to whom he spoke with his perfect simplicity ever presumed to answer him familiarly, and I never saw him stand beside any man — and I saw him with the greatest men of the day — that I did not feel there again President Lincoln was supreme. If I had only words to tell what he seemed to me!

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  Anton Chekhov

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mingway

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