Authors: Martha Hodes
Mourning Lincoln
Mourning Lincoln
Martha Hodes
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2015 by Martha Hodes.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Linda
and
As ever, for Bruce
Mourning Lincoln
Good Friday, 1865THE PLAY HAD ALREADY STARTED
when the Lincolns arrived. As the honored guests made their way up the stairway to the dress circle, the actors stopped and the audience cheered. As the band struck up “Hail to the Chief,” the president took an impromptu bow. It was Good Friday, April 14, 1865.
The
Washington Evening Star
had carried a front-page advertisement for Laura Keene’s appearance at Ford’s Theatre in the lighthearted comedy
Our American Cousin
, and an announcement inside indicated that the president and Mrs. Lincoln would be attending that night. The Lincolns had extended an invitation to General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, and when they declined, to Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Eckert, who declined as well. Next down the list were Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone, who happily accepted. She was the daughter of a New York senator, and he, Clara’s stepbrother and fiancé. It was an evening that would ruin their lives.
The presidential box, personally decorated by one of the Ford brothers for the occasion, hovered above stage left. Lincoln lowered himself into the walnut rocking chair, with Mary seated to his right. At perhaps a quarter past ten, the audience roared with laughter as the actor Harry Hawk, in the role of the backwoods American cousin of British relatives, uttered the
line, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap!” Then came a pistol crack. Was it part of the play? An accidental firing by a soldier in the audience? Now a man leapt to the stage—was
that
part of the script? But he’d jumped from the president’s box and caught one foot in the decorative swags, waving a knife. Some heard him shout, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—
Thus always to tyrants
. Some heard, “The South is avenged,” and others heard nothing at all. It didn’t seem like a play anymore, and for a split second everything froze. By the time the audience jolted from their seats, the gunman had vanished.
John Wilkes Booth fires into the back of Lincoln’s head. This 1865 lithograph shows Clara Harris seated next to Mary Lincoln while Henry Rathbone attempts to stop the assassin. Lincoln’s hand is grasping the drapery fashioned from an American flag.
LC-USZ62-2073, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
.
Up in the presidential box, Clara Harris’s hands and face were covered with blood, her clothes saturated. Henry Rathbone hadn’t seen or heard a thing until the shot rang out. He had tried to prevent the assailant from vaulting to the stage, provoking the man to slash his arm from elbow nearly to shoulder. After that, Rathbone could only shout, “Stop that man!” Then Mary Lincoln thought that the blood all over Harris was her husband’s and kept screaming, “My husband’s blood, my dear husband’s blood!” Now came shouts from the audience about murder and calls for doctors. People rushed the stage. Women fainted. Soldiers hurried in with bayonets.
John Wilkes Booth lands on the stage at Ford’s Theatre after jumping from the presidential box. In this engraving, Mary Lincoln and Clara Harris assist the wounded president while men in the audience jump to their feet, pointing at the assassin.
McLellan Lincoln Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University
.
At 10:30 p.m., from Tenth Street outside Ford’s Theatre, the news traveled through the darkness, people shouting, rapping on windows, pounding on doors. Mounted patrols galloped through throngs of frightened people, with soldiers, sailors, and policemen everywhere. Members of the audience had recognized the intruder as the well-known Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, and his name spread rapidly. Word came as well about Secretary of State William Seward: another man had knocked on the door of his Washington home at about 10:00 p.m., forced his way upstairs, and assaulted Seward right in his bed, where he was recuperating from a recent carriage accident. As the city embarked on a manhunt for the killer and his accomplices, trains and ferries were ordered halted, and guards stood posted at all roads leading out of the capital.
Booth and his recruited conspirators had at first planned to abduct the president and hold him hostage in exchange for wartime prisoners, but after Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, they changed the scheme from kidnapping to murder. Simultaneous with Booth’s deed, three other men were set to carry out two related
missions. George Atzerodt would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his suite at the Kirkwood House Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, and Lewis Powell would kill Seward while David Herold, on horseback, held Powell’s waiting horse for the escape. Atzerodt lost his nerve at the last minute, and Powell’s plan went awry when his ruse of delivering medicine to the ailing secretary of state failed. Instead, Powell violently fought his way into the Seward residence, where he shot Seward’s grown son (he would recover), then stabbed the intended victim in his bed (he too would recover) before another son intervened. Powell managed to break free, but Herold, flustered by the screams coming from inside the house, had already galloped off on his own horse. Later that night, Herold would meet up with Booth, the two disappearing together into the surrounding countryside. Among the other conspirators were a carpenter at Ford’s Theatre, who briefly held on to Booth’s horse in the back alley; Dr. Samuel Mudd, who later that night would treat the broken bone Booth had sustained from his leap to the stage; and Mary Surratt, a widow who ran a Washington boardinghouse near the theater and owned a Maryland tavern, both of which were implicated in the conspiracy.
Unlike his collaborators, John Wilkes Booth had executed his portion of the plot nearly flawlessly. Three days earlier, on Tuesday, April 11, the twenty-six-year-old actor had stood among a crowd gathered outside the White House, listening to Lincoln deliver a victory speech about reconstructing the nation. When the president spoke of voting rights for black men, Booth was roused to fury. “That means nigger citizenship,” he uttered, according to a companion. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” When Booth entered the box at Ford’s Theatre, he stood directly behind the president, aimed his derringer, and fired one shot into the back of Lincoln’s head.
When the audience’s moment of motionless shock passed, and after people raced outside to tell the world what had happened, three doctors and four soldiers took charge of the unconscious president. With no stretcher available, and the half-mile to the White House too far to travel, they crossed the street to a boardinghouse run by a German tailor named William Petersen. (In years to come, an impossible number of men would claim to have carried the president’s body out of the theater that night.) At Petersen’s, the men maneuvered Lincoln’s gangly frame into a first-floor
chamber, placing him diagonally across the small bed. The president’s eldest son, twenty-one-year-old Captain Robert Lincoln, soon arrived, as did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who right there in the back parlor directed the search for Booth and his conspirators. Mary Lincoln had followed, but eventually those in charge could no longer withstand the sounds of her torment and insisted that she move from the back bedroom into the front parlor. All through the night and past dawn, the cramped space hosted a somber parade of statesmen and friends, lingering, departing, and returning, alongside the doctors trying to save the president’s life, even as his head wound bled on. Death came at twenty-two minutes past seven o’clock in the morning. At that moment, Edwin Stanton said something. Some heard the words, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Others heard, “Now he belongs to the angels.” Ages or angels, history or heaven, Lincoln belonged to both.