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As Lincoln spoke, Elizabeth Keckley, standing a few steps from him, observed that the lamplight made him “stand out boldly in the darkness.” She feared he was the perfect target.
Twenty-six years old, impossibly vain, preening, emotionally flamboyant, possessed of raw talent and splendid élan, and a star member of this celebrated theatrical family—the Barrymores of their day—John
Later, witnesses remembered seeing Booth at several places in the city that day, but none of his movements created suspicion. Why should they? Nothing Booth did seemed out of the ordinary that afternoon.
Booth was a thrill seeker, and perhaps he wanted to enhance his excitement by risking the use of a single-shot pistol.
Booth and his gang of acolytes—Lewis Powell, David Herold, John H. Surratt Jr., Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and George Atzerodt, plus others lost to history who drifted in and out of his orbit—would change that by kidnapping the president.
On March 17, 1865, Booth and his coconspirators planned to, like eighteenth-century British highwaymen, ambush Lincoln’s carriage on a deserted road as he rode back to the Executive Mansion after attending a performance of the play Still Waters Run Deep at Campbell Military Hospital.
“What an excellent chance I had, if I wished, to kill the President on Inauguration day!” he boasted later to a friend.
Incredibly, presidential security was lax in that era, even during the Civil War, and almost anyone could walk into the Executive Mansion without being searched and request a brief audience with the president.
They would target not only President Lincoln, but also Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
Booth probably told his gang that he had spotted the Grants in their carriage earlier that afternoon, heading toward the train station.
Tonight, at exactly 10:00 P.M., they would strike simultaneously and murder Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward.
In his letter to the National Intelligencer, not only did Booth justify the triple assassination, he signed his cocon-spirators’ names to the document:
“Down the Potomac, he was almost boyish, in his mirth and reminded me, of his original nature, what I have always remembered of him, in our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well and by whom, he was so idolized.”
Abraham Lincoln’s entry to Ford’s Theatre at 8:30 P.M. on April 14, 1865, was majestic in its simplicity. He arrived with no entourage, no armed guards, and no announcement to the crowd.
Was it a letter? Or merely the actor’s calling card? A card with Booth’s name on it would open almost any door in Washington. Forbes did not attempt to stop him.
Lincoln’s beard, his slow, ambling gait, and his careworn face, captured so movingly in the last photographs by Alexander Gardner in February 1865 and by Henry Warren in March 1865, gave credence to the myth of Father Abraham, the ancient, Moses-like figure leading his people.
“Sic semper tyrannis,” he thundered. It was the state motto of Virginia—“Thus always to tyrants.” Then Booth shouted, “The South is avenged.”
BOOTH AND LEWIS POWELL HAD LEFT BEHIND SO MUCH blood. Sergeant Robinson and Fanny Seward worked feverishly to save the secretary of state’s life.
The great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend spoke for many when he wrote, “The Chief Magistrate of thirty millions of people—beloved, honored, revered,—lay in the pent up closet of a play-house, dabbling with his sacred blood the robes of an actress.”
Lloyd offered the second Spencer to Booth but he declined it. With his broken leg, he didn’t want to carry any more. He needed his hands to hold on to the saddle. His pistols would have to do. He would pick them up at his next stop.
Field entered the parlor and found Mary “in a state of indescribable agitation.” He heard her ask the same question “over and over again”: “Why didn’t he kill me? Why didn’t he kill me?”
Edwin Stanton assumed that the Lincoln and Seward assassinations had exposed the existence of a devilish Confederate plot to kill the leadership of the national government, reverse the verdict of the battlefield, and, in one last desperate assault, win the Civil War.
Stanton rushed guards to the homes of all the cabinet secretaries to protect them from imminent assassination, if they were not dead already.
Later, when Vice President Johnson arrived at the deathbed, he remained in the background and chose not to assert himself. In the days ahead the new president left it to Stanton to bring Lincoln’s killer and his accomplices to justice.
One witness after another swore that it was Booth, John Wilkes Booth. Stanton barked orders by telegraph—his operators could wire news and orders all over the country—and soon telegraph lines across the nation were singing the same frequency: the president and the secretary of state have been assassinated.
At 12:20 A.M., General James A. Hardie sent an order to the U.S. Military Railroad at Alexandria: “It is reported that the assassin of the President has gone out hence to Alexandria, thence on the train to Fairfax. Stop all trains in that direction. Apply to military commander at Alexandria for guard to arrest all persons on train or on the road not known. By order of the Secretary of War.”
aT 1:10 A.M., APRIL 15, STANTON SENT A HURRIED TELEGRAM to John Kennedy, New York City’s chief of police, asking him to rush detectives to Washington: “Send here immediately three or four of your best detectives to investigate the facts as to the assassination of the President and Secretary Seward. They are still alive, but the president’s case is hopeless, and that of Mr. Seward’s nearly the same.”
Halleck’s defense, if Booth was captured, the army would have to sequester him carefully to protect him from Lincoln’s avengers—rampaging mobs of vigilantes who might storm the Old Capitol prison—should they discover that the assassin was jailed there.
Halleck issued an order to General Augur: “Should either of the assassins of last night be caught put them in double irons and convey them, under a strong escort, to the commander of the navy-yard, who has orders to receive them and to confine them on a monitor to be anchored in the stream.”
Arrest everyone? a skeptical Ord wired back to Grant—even General Lee and his staff? That would be dangerous and unwise, Ord cautioned, and might incite a violent uprising in the former Confederate capital if rebel soldiers and the local citizenry feared that their hero Robert E. Lee was in danger: “Should I arrest them under the circumstances,” Ord continued, “I think the rebellion here would be reopened.” Grant relented: “On reflection I withdraw my dispatch.”
They deployed the Nelaton probe to locate the bullet for possible extraction, as if that would have helped Lincoln.
“For God’s sake! Let them come in. I expected the house to be searched.”
“Then I will tell you. John Wilkes Booth has shot the President and John Surratt has assassinated the Secretary of State.”
“Anna, come what will. I am resigned,” Mary replied. “I think that J. Wilkes Booth was only an instrument in the hands of the Almighty to punish this proud and licentious people.”
To pull off his daring plan to kidnap the president, Booth needed loyal Confederate agents and safe houses located at strategic points along the route.
To the Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family’s minister, it seemed that four or five minutes passed “without the slightest noise or movement” by anyone in the room. “We all stood transfixed in our positions, speechless, around the dead body of that great and good man.”
Lost in reverie, Lincoln’s god of war gazed down at his fallen chief and wept.
The box looked like a shipping crate, not a proper coffin for a head of state. Lincoln would not have minded. He was always a man of simple tastes. This was the plain, roughly hewn coffin of a rail-splitter.
During the war Lincoln insisted that the flag retain its full complement of stars, refusing to acknowledge that the seceded states had actually left the Union.
Her name was Isabel Sumner. The daughter of a respectable merchant family, she possessed an intelligent face, a slender frame, and ravishing beauty. She was sixteen years old, and Booth proposed that they become lovers.
But now, by offering Booth his hospitality, he had unwittingly implicated himself in the most shocking crime of the Civil War, indeed, in all of American history—the murder of the president of the United States.
hours since David Herold pounded on Mudd’s door and just over twenty-one hours since John Wilkes Booth shot the president.
But, vowed the actor, his aroused black eyes glowing with their signature brightness, “John Wilkes Booth will never be taken alive.” Thomas Jones was sure he meant it.
The best way for them to escape, Jones reasoned, was to stop running from their pursuers and to go into hiding.
Then the mighty Lewis Powell did something extraordinary. Inexplicably, meekly, without protest, he surrendered without a fight.
If Lewis Powell had not blundered into the government’s hands this night, he might have escaped Washington and vanished from history. Instead, the government celebrated his capture as the first major break in the manhunt.
On April 14, detectives had ransacked Booth’s room at the National, on Sixth and Pennsylvania, a short walk from Ford’s Theatre. The “Sam” letter, discovered within hours of the assassination, had, along with a detective’s tip, led to Arnold’s arrest.
The theatre building itself was “arrested” by the government—it was ordered closed and was eventually confiscated from the Fords. These were not the only arrests. The dragnet rounded up more than one hundred suspects: Junius Booth, one of the assassin’s brothers; a strange Portuguese sea captain named Celestino; various Confederate sympathizers and agents; and others who expressed disloyal sentiments.
Booth and Herold became less presentable to strangers, ruining a key element of Booth’s trademark, winning style—his elegant, beautifully dressed appearance.
“Booth then,” Herold recalled, “made the remark that he was very sorry for the sons, but he only wished to God that Seward was killed.”
