The Day Lincoln Was Shot (5 page)

The President trusted Lamon as he trusted few men, but he could not share his fears because Mr. Lincoln's philosophy was that he could be killed at any time by anyone who was willing to give his own life in return. Now and then, the President discussed a violent death, and, in this, his attitude was one of sadness and resignation rather than fright.

Still, the days of March were shiny with victory and short-term promise. The dusty banners of the Union snapped southward out of Fredericksburg, westward out of Old Point, northward out of Savannah, eastward out of Lynchburg. The noose tightened, hour by hour. The city to watch was Petersburg. When that fell, the final kill would occur at Richmond.

The South fought with valiance and empty bellies. The remainders of the great commands had pride and a little ammunition. The weaker Lee grew, the more craftily he planned. His men fought as though they could still win, and, man for man, perhaps they were the better soldiers.

General Ulysses S. Grant, a modest tenacious man who understood the value of numbers, repeatedly curled the whip of his Army of the Potomac around Lee's legs, and waited for his adversary to ask for mercy. Each day, Lee was a little bit weaker than yesterday. Each day, Grant snapped the whip a little harder.

The people of the North understood this. The news of victory in battle did not excite them, because they had waited an eternal four years for this. What excited them was the feeling that the war was in the twilight stage and soon it must end. They sensed this, and hungered for it.

They celebrated Lincoln's second inaugural as they had not celebrated the secretive first one. They came into Washington on excursion trains and in stagecoaches and carryalls and farm wagons, and they jammed the hotels and the boarding houses and the outlying farms until mattresses were stretched in the corridors of Willard's Hotel and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad begged the people either to stay home, or to stop off at the City of Baltimore before inauguration day.

On the night before the inauguration, Lincoln worked in his office—perhaps on his “With Malice Toward None” speech, and Vice President Andrew Johnson, a one-time tailor and professional common man from Tennessee, attended a party tendered by Colonel John Forney, clerk to the United States Senate. The Vice President had been ill. He was also a poor drinker. That night, he got drunk. Sick drunk.

The day of March 4 was rainy. The mud on Pennsylvania Avenue was viscous. Below the inauguration platform, on the east plaza of the Capitol, the crowd looked like a vast bed of dark mushrooms. Under the umbrellas, they were jubilant. In the rain, the women preened in their best gowns and the men set up yells for Lincoln, Grant, Sheridan, Meade, Admiral Porter, and even McClellan.

In the Senate gallery, Mrs. Lincoln was attended by the courtly Senator Anthony. Admiral Farragut and General Hooker arrived at almost the same moment. The diplomatic corps, in dazzling uniforms and cocked hats, came to rest in the gallery as the justices of the United States Supreme Court came into the well below. The President sat in the front row on a low seat, his knees high, his ancient face lighted briefly by recognition and a slow nod of the head. Seward sat at his left, followed by Stanton, Welles, Speed and Dennison.

The Vice President would be sworn in here. Afterward, Mr. Lincoln would be sworn in, for his second term, outside. Johnson arrived on the arm of the outgoing Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin. Mr. Hamlin sang a short swan song, full of the rich sentimentality of the times, and introduced Andrew Johnson, who stood, red-faced and nervous and intoxicated, and who, in a few minutes, disgraced himself.

Mr. Johnson's theme was “the people.” His effort was to demean himself before these high personages but, having done it, he did it again. And again.

“. . . for today,” he shouted belligerently, as his audience glanced at neighboring faces, “one who claims no high descent, one who comes from the ranks of the people, stands, by the choice of a free constituency, in the second place in this government. . . .

“You, Mr. Secretary Seward, Mr. Secretary Stanton, the Secretary of the Navy, and the others who are your associates, you know that you have my respect and my confidence— derive not your greatness and your power alone from President Lincoln. . . . Humble as I am, plebeian as I may be deemed, permit me in the presence of this brilliant assemblage to enunciate the truth that courts and cabinets, the President and his advisers, derive their power and their greatness from the people.”

The “brilliant assemblage” was shocked. The little man was drunk, obviously drunk. No one knew that Johnson, depressed by a hangover and his consciousness of his own tailor shop peasantry, had pleaded nervousness and had asked Mr. Hamlin for a drink. He felt sick, he said. So Hamlin had got a bottle, and handed it to Mr. Johnson, who was not in any stronger condition to fight the effects of whiskey today than he had been last night.

Hamlin pulled at Johnson's coattails. Forney whispered loudly to please sit down. Out front, the faces were frozen.
Lincoln alone looked sad and composed. Stanton was popeyed. Speed closed his eyes and held a hand over them. Justice Nelson's mouth hung open in horror. The gallery whispered. At last, after what might be called a Tennessee stump speech, Andrew Johnson took the Bible in both hands, kissed it loudly, and said: “I kiss this book in the face of my nation of the United States.”

There was disgust in the crowd, a disgust resistant to wear, and Johnson would feel it the rest of his days. The whole party moved out to the plaza and President Lincoln was sworn in. His address amounted to less than four pages of copy:

“Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. . . .

“Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invoked His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but, let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. . . .”

Within five minutes, he had closed his address with the words: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on 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.”

He turned to leave. As he saw the faces of his distinguished friends nodding and applauding behind him, he smiled. Is it too much to say that, close by, in the inauguration stand, his eyes may have paused for a part of a second on a handsome young stranger—John Wilkes Booth?

Mr. Lincoln rode back to the White House with Tad at his side. The parade was a big one and a noisy one. At forts, the guns boomed, on the Avenue mounted patrols sat their horses at every crossing. The bands played. The President gravely raised his top hat to the people.

The handsome stranger left the inauguration stand with Walter Burton, the night clerk at the National Hotel. They walked back to the hotel bar for a celebratory drink. Booth had little to say, except that he had got his inauguration stand passes from the daughter of Senator Hale of New Hampshire.

The President's speech got perfunctory attention from the press, which labeled it “conciliatory” toward the South. The big news was not published; it was whispered. Andy Johnson had been drunk. Within two days, it had been whispered across the final dining-room table, the last bar, the ultimate alley, and Johnson, in anguish over it, left Washington for the home of Frank Blair in Silver Spring, Maryland. The gossipy United States Senate, which wanted to give the matter attention without being called guilty of bad manners, permitted a resolution to be offered prohibiting the sale of spirituous liquors in Capitol restaurants. In caucus, some Senators said that Johnson should resign.

Lincoln had seen this thing, and now he heard about it from all sides. He put it in its proper perspective when he said to Secretary McCulloch: “Oh well. Don't you bother about Andy Johnson's drinking. He made a bad slip the other day, but I have known Andy a great many years and he is no drunkard.”

He defended Johnson, and yet the President was irritated because, after that, he would not see the Vice President although Johnson remained in and around Washington, waiting for an interview. Mr. Lincoln might have been hospitable and invited him to a Cabinet meeting or two, but he did not. The next time that the President expressed a desire to see “Andy”
was on the one unique day when a clairvoyant chief executive would feel the need of a Vice President—April 14, 1865—
the
day.

Mr. Lincoln was thirty-five pounds underweight. He walked like a man whose feet hurt. Now and then, in the spring of 1865, he permitted a coachman to assist him in or out of his carriage. Lincoln was fifty-six; he looked old and sick. He had fought as hard as any soldier in the field to reunite the states. Now, in the closing days of the war, his spirit seemed to flag. The Surgeon General, Doctor Barnes, was worried about a nervous breakdown. The official family began to speculate, for the first time, about what would happen to them and to the nation if he died.

For a while, everyone including Mrs. Lincoln became solicitous of his health and his time. The police guards cleared the upstairs corridor of office seekers and favor seekers. His secretaries tried to hold the appointment calendar down, and his wife tried to coax him to take afternoon drives on sunny days. The attention was so pointed that even the President noticed it.

On March 14—a Tuesday—Mr. Lincoln tried to arise from his bed and fell back. He could not summon the strength to get on his feet and Mrs. Lincoln, called from her bedroom, sent for Dr. Robert K. Stone, the family physician. He examined the President and came out of the bedroom announcing that the case was one of “exhaustion, complete exhaustion.”

Three hours later, the President held a Cabinet meeting in the bedroom. Word went out that his illness was influenza, and it was so reported in the press. By Wednesday morning, he was out of bed and in his office. He looked jaundiced and sick, and no appointments were made that day, but he worked at his desk. In the afternoon, Mrs. Lincoln told him that she could be made to be very happy if he felt strong enough to attend Grover's Theatre with her. The President consented. They saw the German Opera Company perform
The Magic Flute.

The newspapers began to worry about the state of Lincoln's health.
The National Republican
proclaimed that he was physically exhausted as a result of prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion and that, in addition, he was badgered by swarms of office seekers who infested the halls of the Executive Mansion. The writer recommended that these people be driven from Washington at once, or else the nation would run the risk of a presidential breakdown. The New York
Tribune
went a step further. The President's energies, said a lead editorial, would have to be spared if Lincoln was to live through his second term. Unless something is done promptly, the Union will mourn a dead President “killed by the greed and impudence of bores.”

In the third week of March, General Grant felt that the end of the war was a matter of time—a few weeks at most. By army telegraph, he invited the President to come down to City Point, Virginia, to see the end. Petersburg was under siege and Grant was encamped before it. Philip Sheridan had traversed the Shenandoah Valley, destroying and requisitioning as he went, and Lee no longer had enough food for horses and men. William Tecumseh Sherman had finished with Savannah and swung north toward Virginia to hammer Lee and Johnston against the anvil of the Army of the Potomac. Sheridan rejoined Grant, and his mobile force was used, like an oversized hound dog, to keep the Confederate rabbit from running out of the pen.

Lincoln left Washington aboard the steamer
River Queen
on Thursday, March 23. With him were Mrs. Lincoln, her maid, Tad, bodyguard William H. Crook, and Captain Charles B. Penrose. The boat sailed at 1
P.M.
and, as the heavy lines were cast off, the President seemed to cast off the heavy shackles of office. He romped in the forward salon with Tad, and took him up to the wheelhouse to show him how a steamer operated. He radiated relief and suppressed excitement and, to Mrs. Lincoln, seemed full of mischief. The First Lady brought several trunks of finery with her and told the President that she had heard that General Grant had ordered all the generals' ladies to the rear and she supposed that she would be the only female at the front. Mr. Lincoln said that he had heard no such thing.

The
River Queen
made port at City Point the following day. The quayside was choked with the appurtenances of war—guns, cannon, barrels of pitch, ammunition, lumber, foodstuffs and a private railroad for the Army of the Potomac. In the President's honor, the ranking generals were present, and came aboard for two conferences within a few days. Grant, Sherman and Sheridan were there (Meade was at the front), and Grant, assisted by the other two, spread the war maps in the dining salon and rendered a firsthand account of the final operations of the war.

Grant told Lincoln that the war had now been reduced to a matter of arithmetic. Lee and Johnston were losing a regiment a day through desertion, illness and wounds. They had no manpower to replace such losses. The longer Lee held out, the weaker he became. If he elected to fight battles, he would hasten the end—even if he won the battles—because his losses would increase. The end, the President was told, would come within a month.

On the maps, Grant showed the President that the one move left to the Army of Northern Virginia was to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and try to consolidate forces with Johnston on the Virginia-North Carolina line. Grant proposed to devote his time to preventing that move.