The Day Lincoln Was Shot (31 page)

Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes examined the injured at the Seward home. He bound the secretary's wounds and said
that there was “severe loss of blood, and shock. If the patient recovers from the shock, he will probably live.” He examined Frederick Seward and found a “double fracture of the cranium, profuse bleeding, no pulse, inability to speak.” Frederick, he thought, might die.

At Ford's Theatre, William T. Kent talked his way back into the President's Box. He told the officer in charge that he was the one who had given a penknife to Surgeon Leale and, when he got home, he found that he had lost his house key. He was searching the box when his foot kicked against something loose and he picked it up.

“I have found the pistol!” said Kent.

A man came into the box, introduced himself as Mr. Gobright of the Associated Press, and said that he would give it to the police. Mr. Kent gave him the gun.

A few minutes before this, the police had been clearing the theater of curiosity seekers, yelling “All out! All out!” when Isaac Jaquette hurried out of Box 7 and, in the corridor, tripped over the wooden bar which had been used to hold the white door closed. Jaquette got out of the theater with it, took it home to his boardinghouse, and pointed to the drying blood on the bar. A Union officer asked for a piece of the bar as a souvenir, and Jaquette got a saw and cut it off. The officer studied the piece of wood, looked at the blood, and said that he did not want it.

The blood was not Lincoln's. It was Major Rathbone's.

The major, who sat in the Petersen parlor with Mrs. Lincoln and Robert, and the Misses Harris and Laura Keene, suddenly fell unconscious from loss of blood and was taken home. For the rest of the night, Robert either sat with his mother, or stood behind the head of the bed looking down at his father's face. The narrow hall was heavy with the tramp of boots, inbound and out, and from out in the street the roars of the crowds could be heard and the cursing of cavalry officers who rode through the people trying to clear the street.

In the dimness of the parlor, Mrs. Lincoln sat staring at the ruddy coals in the grate across the room. She said little. Now and then, she looked for assurance to the two women who flanked her. But, when the assurance had been given and received, men walked in and gravely offered their condolences, as though the President was already dead. This led to wild outbursts of grief, and repeated requests to “take me inside to my husband.” When she got in the small bedroom, she looked, screamed, and fainted. The Rev. Dr. Phineas Gurley, with muttonchop whiskers quivering, uttered words of encouragement which he did not feel. Each time that Mrs. Lincoln made the trip to the sickroom, the doctors were warned ahead of time and placed fresh napkins under the President's head. Once, she stood looking down at him, supported on both sides, and the tears had made dry furrows in her face powder.

“Live!” she cried. “You must live!” She turned to the doctors. “Bring Tad. He will speak to Tad. He loves him so.”

Back in the parlor, she sat looking at the coals, and she spoke aloud to herself: “Why did he not shoot me instead of my husband? I have tried to be so careful of him, fearing something would happen, and his life seemed to be more precious now than ever.” Her tone changed and she spoke imperiously: “I must go with him!” Then silence and a loud demand: “How can it be so!” Robert crouched before her, rubbing her hand in his and murmuring: “Mother, please put your trust in God and all will be well.”

Dr. Robert King Stone, the Lincoln family physician, arrived. He was a tall man in a stovepipe hat and he removed his gloves and coat while looking at the President and listening to the doctors tell of their findings. He asked for a basin of warm water and washed his hands. Then, sitting on the bed facing Lincoln, he lifted the head with his left hand around the neck and stuck the small finger of his right
hand into the bullet hole. He probed a moment, withdrew the finger, studied the eyes now bloodshot, and pinched the cheek lightly.

“This case,” he said, “is hopeless. The President will die. There is no positive limit to the duration of his life; he is tenacious and he will resist.” He arose and walked back to the basin. “But death will close the scene,” he said.

Technically, Leale was still in charge of the case and, when Dr. Charles Sabin Taft returned to the bedroom and asked permission to give a mixture of brandy and water to the patient, Leale said no. It might induce strangulation. Doctors Stone and Barnes were in the back parlor, and Taft went to them to get an opinion. He came back and said that it was their opinion that it might help the patient.

“I will grant the request,” said Leale, “if you will please at first try by pouring only a very small quantity into the President's mouth.”

Taft measured off about a third of a teaspoonful and parted the patient's lips and watched the liquid run into the mouth. The President did not swallow. At once there was a laryngeal obstruction and partial suffocation. Leale pushed Dr. Taft aside, opened the mouth and pushed his hand down as far as it would go and pulled at the base of the tongue. In thirty seconds, breathing resumed.

The doctors held a conference in the bedroom and they agreed that Surgeon General Barnes should take charge of the case. All decisions would be in his hands. Young Doctor Leale, dark, handsome, still youthful enough to have more heart than head, decided to sit with Mr. Lincoln until the end, and to render whatever help he might. As the doctors talked, Leale wrote a note: “Left side of patient's face begins to twitch. The mouth is pulled sharply to left in a jeer. After 15 minutes, it stops.” Another young and bright man, Corporal Tanner, reached home to find that his room, and his tiny balcony, situated next door to the Petersen house, were jammed with boarders. He had no privacy in his quarters, and no one seemed disposed to leave. So he accepted the situation with grace, and fought his way out on his balcony to look at the roaring black mass of humanity below.

He had just achieved a front-row view when the crowd hushed. Next door, General Augur had come out on the brownstone stoop and was waving his hands for quiet.

“Is there someone,” the general hollered, “who knows shorthand?”

Albert Daggett, a postal card contractor, was standing beside Tanner and he cupped his hands and yelled down: “There is. He lives here.”

The general looked up, and said: “Well, then. Send him down.”

Tanner fought his way off the porch and shouldered his way through his room. He picked up two pencils and a fat pad, put on his uniform cap, and squeezed through the mob outdoors with the help of soldiers. At the Petersen home, he was conducted to the rear parlor, passing the patient en route. He recognized Mr. Stanton and Chief Justice Cartter, both sitting at a small library table. General Augur said that this soldier could take shorthand, and Stanton nodded and Tanner took a seat at a small round marble-topped table. Augur told Tanner that the other people in the room were witnesses, and that more were in the hall, but that the taking of their testimony in longhand had proved impossible.

The man they wanted was riding his mare up Good Hope Hill on the Maryland shore. At the top of the hill, Mr. Polk Gardner, coming into Washington City and not at all sure that he would be permitted to cross the bridge, stopped his horse. In
the clear, low moonlight, Gardner saw a rider coming uphill. What interested him was that the rider was trying to prod the horse into running up the grade, and the horse would race a hundred feet, and lapse into a walk. The rider spurred the animal again. And again.

When he came abreast of Mr. Gardner, he stopped and said: “Good evening. Can you tell me if a horseman passed ahead of me?”

Gardner said no, that he had been on the road an hour, and had seen no one riding away from Washington City.

“Does not the road to Marlboro turn to the right a ways down here?”

“No,” said Gardner. “You keep to the straight road.”

“Thank you.” Booth pounded off into the darkness. He now knew that neither Paine, nor Atzerodt, nor Herold had got out of Washington before him. He also knew that, if he was being pursued, any information Mr. Gardner might give would send the Federal patrols running off in the direction of Marlboro, instead of toward Surrattsville.

Polk Gardner barely got down Good Hope Hill when he saw a second rider. A teamster with a load of vegetables for Washington drove a little ahead of Gardner and the second rider stopped and spoke to this man. Gardner did not hear the words but, in a moment, the second rider was off, less than half a mile behind the first.

Booth pressed on until he heard hoofbeats behind him. He moved the mare into a stand of trees and waited. The rider went by and Booth came out yelling “Halt!” It was David Herold, and for the rest of the ride into Surrattsville the two had a lot to tell each other. The actor was certain that he had killed Lincoln instantaneously, with the laughter of hundreds ringing in his ears.

He was not so certain about his leg—it was either a bad sprain or a break. He hoped that it was a sprain. Herold said
that he was sure that Paine had killed the Secretary of State because he was waiting below when a colored boy came running out yelling murder, and, with Augur's men only a few doors away, Herold couldn't afford to wait any longer. If the conspirators had lost any men, they would be Paine and Atzerodt.

The chief conspirator was now in bad and steady pain and he asked Herold to switch mounts with him. The mare had a bouncy walk and a rocking-horse trot. They switched, and continued on their way. The road was straight now and it fell away into a small valley. At the bottom, it was chill enough to see the horses' breaths. They talked of the guns and whiskey and Surrattsville and they talked of using a ferry north of Port Tobacco in case Atzerodt did not escape alive. But most of all, they talked of how they had crippled the North, when all was almost lost. Booth regarded himself as a modest hero, one who would never be boastful but one who, at the same time, expected that every loyal Southerner would be eternally grateful to him. In this, too, he was sincere.

For the next eight hours, the United States was run by a dictator. In the back parlor of Petersen House, and, at times, in the sitting room behind the front parlor, Edwin McMasters Stanton sat with the country under his thumb. And he had the dictator's gift for quick, and sometimes erroneous, decisions. In all, he did as well as anyone could have—perhaps better.

He convened a special court of inquiry, with Justice Cartter administering the oath to witnesses, and Stanton doing the questioning and Corporal James Tanner taking the testimony. Generals and senior officers were his messengers. The Cabinet members either took orders or remained silent. The steady stream of witnesses to the crime almost matched the steady stream of soldiers coming and going. When Stanton moved, he moved fast.

He ordered guards placed around the homes of all Cabinet members and ranking officials. He ordered the confiscation of Ford's Theatre and the arrest of “every human being” in its service. He sent an officer to William Dixon, Chief Engineer of the Washington Fire Brigade, ordering that all engines and apparatus be kept in a state of readiness because Stanton expected mass arson after mass killing.

Mr. Stanton announced to General Augur that this plot had a broad base—that the actual assassins were hirelings of the Confederacy—and that hundreds of terrorists were in Washington City this night. He wanted 150 policemen, 500 military policemen, the United States Secret Service, the spies of the Bureau of Military Justice, and the 8,000 soldiers in encampments in and around Washington to be ordered out at once to seek out and arrest these terrorists. It did not occur to Stanton or Augur that these soldiers, at large with visions of rapid promotion and high cash rewards, could open a reign of terror in the city.

The Secretary of War, his vest open, peering over the tops of his glasses, sat in a corner of the room farthest from the door. When he used the sitting room near the front of the house, the folding doors between it and the front parlor were pulled together, but the angry voices of Stanton and Cartter could be heard by Mrs. Lincoln and by Robert. Two soldiers stood outside the door with bayoneted rifles.

The witnesses were terrified and many who had come into the dark hall sure of the facts answered whisperingly that they did not remember. Top-hatted statesmen brushed by the witnesses en route to the little bedroom, or en route home. Generals and admirals joined the shuffling queue. Stanton was busy and Stanton was impatient. He fired questions, listened to stammering answers, asked more questions, wrote telegrams, denied requests, ordered arrests, paced the floor, stroked his perfumed beard and brusquely ordered citizens to leave at once.

Some, in good faith, gave poor answers. Lieutenant Crawford, who had sat on the aisle in Row D with Captain Theodore McGowan, said that a man passed them twenty minutes before “this” occurred. McGowan said: “Sir, I remember that a man passed me and inquired of one sitting near who the President's messenger was, and learning, exhibited to him an envelope, apparently official, having a printed heading and superinscribed in a bold hand. I could not read the address and did not try. I think now it was meant for Lieutenant General Grant. The man went away.”

And Clara Harris, weeping, said: “Nearly one hour before the commission of the deed the assassin came to the door of the box and looked in to take a survey of the position of its occupants. It was supposed at the time that it was either a mistake or the exercise of an impertinent curiosity. The circumstances attracted no particular attention at the time. Upon his entering the box again, Major Rathbone arose and asked the intruder his business. He rushed past the major without making a reply, and fired. . . .”

Like scores of others, Harry Hawk said: “I believe to the best of my knowledge that it was John Wilkes Booth.” Then, like many others, he was shaken by the enormity of the crime and he said: “Still, I am not positive that it was him. I only had one glance at him as he was rushing towards me with a dagger and I turned and ran and after I ran up a flight of stairs, I turned and exclaimed: ‘My God! That's John Booth!' In my own mind, I do not have any doubt but that it was Booth.”