Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever (16 page)

Read Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever Online

Authors: Bill O'Reilly,Martin Dugard

Tags: #United States, #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #History

FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865
WASHINGTON, D.C.
9:00 A.M.
 
J
ohn Wilkes Booth walks slowly down the hotel corridor, momentarily at a loss for words. He has come to say good-bye to his beloved Lucy. He struggles to think of a way to break off their secret engagement and intimate that he might never see her again. Even though their relationship has been all but dead since Newport, of all the terrible things he must do today, what he is about to do next breaks his heart like no other.
The Hales are living in the National Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. Booth lives in the same hotel, room 228. Lucy does charity work for the Sanitation Committee and even rode to the front lines of nearby battlefields to visit the troops. It’s well known that her father wishes her to marry someone powerful and well connected. For Lucy to not only slink off to the room of an actor but also agree to marry him would enrage Senator Hale. So while the relationship has slowly become more public, she and Booth have kept their pending nuptials a secret.
It’s nine A.M. when Booth knocks on her door. He wears a ring she gave him as a keepsake. Booth has the eccentric habit of kissing the ring absentmindedly when out drinking with friends, and he does so now, as he nervously waits for her to answer. This will be the last
time he’ll see her for quite a while—perhaps forever. Lucy’s father has been appointed ambassador to Spain, and the entire family will accompany him abroad. Booth plans to escape to Mexico after shooting Lincoln and then perhaps sail to Spain for a clandestine visit with Lucy if all goes well.
But how to say good-bye? How to make the next few moments as touching and romantic as any farewell should be, while also not letting her know he’s leaving and why?
 
 
Their relationship began in 1862. Booth became enchanted after glimpsing her in a crowd and sent Lucy an anonymous Valentine’s Day love letter. This was followed shortly afterward by another missive, revealing his identity. If its intended effect was to make twenty-one-year-old Lucy swoon, it worked. Booth was at the height of his fame and good looks, delighting women across the country with his performance as the male lead in a traveling production of
Romeo and Juliet.
One actress even tried to kill herself after he rebuffed her advances.
But Lucy Lambert Hale was not in the habit of throwing herself at men. So while Booth might have had the upper hand at the start, she made him work hard for her affection. The relationship simmered for two years, starting with flirtation and then blossoming into something more. The pair became intimate. When he was on the road, Booth was as faithful as a traveling thespian could be, which is to say that he made love to other women but considered them second to Lucy in his heart.
Booth is not the sort of man to mean it when he says, “I love you.” For the most part, women are the objects of his own gratification. But Lucy has long treated men the same way, holding them at arm’s length emotionally, basking in their charms, and then discarding them when someone newer and better comes along. In each other, Booth and Lucy met their match.
But they are also opposites in many ways. She comes from a more elite level of society, one that does not consider acting a gentlemanly career. She is an abolitionist, and he is most certainly not. He professes a heartfelt belief in the southern cause, while she is the daughter of a ferociously partisan northern senator. The engagement is doomed.
 
 
Booth has not seen Lucy since their ill-fated getaway to Newport. They haven’t so much as exchanged letters or passed each other in the hallway, even though they live in the same hotel. He has no idea how she will react to his visit.
A servant answers the door and ushers him inside the suite. Lucy appears a moment later, the unfinished business of their argument hanging between them. They both know that it’s over. Nothing more needs to be said, much to Booth’s relief. They make small talk, skirting the obvious issue. And then it is time to say good-bye. Before leaving, Booth asks Lucy for a photograph so that he might have something to remember her by.
She steps out of the room and returns with a small portrait of her face in profile. Her hair is pulled back off her forehead and her lips are creased in a Mona Lisa smile. Booth thanks Lucy and gives her a long last look. He then turns and walks out of the Hales’ suite, explaining breezily that he is off to get a shave, wondering if he will ever make it to Spain to see Lucy again.
Lucy Hale in the photograph she gave John Wilkes Booth
As he walks back down the hallway, the sound of the closing door still echoing in the corridor, he admires the picture and slips it into his breast pocket, next to the pictures of four other women who have enjoyed his charms. The life of a narcissist is often cluttered.
The pictures will remain in Booth’s pocket for the rest of his short life.
FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865
WASHINGTON, D.C.
10:00 A.M.
 
M
ary Lincoln has tickets for a play—and what a spectacular performance it will be. Grover’s Theatre is not only staging a lavish production of
Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp
but is adding a grand finale for this night only, during which the cast and audience will rise as one to sing patriotic songs written especially for the occasion. Everyone is Washington is talking about it.
But Mary is torn. Word has come from James Ford, the manager of Ford’s Theatre, that he is staging the wildly popular farce Our American Cousin. Tonight the legendary actress Laura Keene is celebrating her one thousandth performance in her signature role as Florence Trenchard. This milestone, Ford has politely suggested to Mary, is something not to be missed.
Keene, thirty-eight, is not only one of America’s most famous actresses but also very successful as a theater manager. In fact, she is the first woman in America to manage her own high-profile career and purchase a theater. That theater will later be renamed the Winter Garden, and it is still in existence today at a different location in New York City. Offstage, Laura Keene’s life is not so tidy—she pretends to be married to her business manager, but in truth she is secretly married to a convicted felon who has run off to Australia. During an
extended tour of that faraway continent, Keene quarreled mightily with her costar, the equally vain Edwin Booth.
Laura Keene
But onstage Laura Keene is a force. The gimlet-eyed actress owes much of that success to Our American Cousin. At first she thought very little of the script, which places a country bumpkin in the upper class of British society. But then Keene changed her mind and bought worldwide rights. Debuting seven years earlier at Laura Keene’s Theatre on Broadway, it soon became the first blockbuster play in American history. It was performed in Chicago on the same night in May 1860 that Lincoln was confirmed as the Republican nominee for the presidency. Many of the play’s screwball terms, like “sockdologizing” and “Dundrearyisms” (named for the befuddled character Lord Dundreary), have become part of the cultural lexicon, and several spinoff plays featuring characters from the show have been written and performed.
Despite all that, ticket sales for this run of the play have been so sluggish that Ford’s will be nearly empty. But Mary Lincoln doesn’t mind. What matters most to her is that on this most patriotic of evenings, she and the president will celebrate their first visit to the theater since the war’s end by enjoying the quintessential American comedy, on a night that features one of America‘s—if not the world’s—most famous actresses.
The playbill for Our American Cousin from the night the Lincolns were in attendance, April 14, 1865
Aladdin
can wait.
 
 
With this sudden and impulsive decision to attend one show and not the other, an eerie coincidence will unravel: thanks to the performance that took place in Chicago in 1860, Our American Cousin will bracket both the beginning and the end of the Lincoln administration.
Over breakfast a few hours earlier, Mary told the president that she wanted to go to Ford’s. Lincoln absentmindedly said he would take care of it.
Now, between Oval Office appointments, Lincoln summons a messenger. He wants a message delivered to Ford’s Theatre, saying that he will be in attendance this evening if the state box is available. General Grant and his wife will be with him, as will Mary.
Abraham Lincoln is the undisputed leader of the world’s most ascendant nation, a country spanning three thousand miles and touching two oceans. During the war, he could send men off to die with a single command to his generals. He has freed the slaves. This is a man who has the power to do almost anything he wants. And tonight, if truth be told, he would prefer to see
Aladdin.
Yet Lincoln would never dream of contradicting Mary’s wishes. His life is much easier when she is appeased. A volatile and opinionated woman whose intellect does not match her considerable capacity for rage, Mary Lincoln is short and round, wears her hair parted straight down the middle, and prefers to be called “Madame President,” which some believe is pretentious, to say the least. Mary’s rants about some person or situation that has angered her can sidetrack Lincoln’s day and drain him of precious energy, so he does all he can to make sure nothing upsets her unstable psyche.
But to be fair, Mary Lincoln has also suffered the deaths of two
young sons during her twenty-two-year marriage. Lincoln dotes on her. A compassionate man, he tries more to ease the lingering pain than to merely keep the peace. Mary Lincoln is almost ten years younger than her husband, and they had an on-again, off-again courtship and even broke off their first engagement when Lincoln had cold feet about marrying her. Mary is from an affluent home, which afforded her an education that few American women enjoyed at the time. Lithe in her early twenties, Mary has put on considerable weight. And though she had many suitors as a young woman, few would now consider her to be good-looking. Nevertheless, Lincoln is enamored. The president considers Mary the love of his life. Some historians believe that because Lincoln lost his mother at the age of nine, he was drawn to women with maternal, protective instincts. Mary Lincoln certainly fits that description.
Mary Todd Lincoln
 
 
Lincoln is overdue at the War Department. He also has a cabinet meeting scheduled in just over an hour. He hurriedly steps out of the White House and walks over to see Stanton. Mary demands that he wear a shawl, and so he does, not caring in the slightest that the gray garment draped over his shoulders gives him a decidedly nonpresidential appearance.
Lincoln strolls into Stanton’s office unannounced, plops down on the couch, and casually mentions that he’s going to the theater that night. The words are designed to provoke a reaction—and they do.
Stanton frowns. His network of spies have told him of assassination rumors. Last night, during the Illumination party at his home, Stanton adamantly warned Grant away from going to the theater with the Lincolns. Stanton is no less stern with Lincoln. He thinks the president is a fool for ignoring the assassination rumors and argues that Lincoln is risking his life.
“At least bring a guard with you,” Stanton pleads, once it becomes obvious that Lincoln will not be dissuaded. That statement is the best evidence we have that Secretary of War Stanton did not wish Lincoln ill. If, as some conspiracy theorists believe, Stanton wished Lincoln dead, why would he want to provide him with protection?
The president is in a playful mood. “Stanton,” Lincoln says, “did you know that Eckert can break a poker over his arm?”
Major Thomas T. Eckert is the general superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps. He once demonstrated the shoddy nature of the War Department’s fireplace irons by breaking the defective metal rods over his left forearm.
“Why do you ask such a question?” Stanton replies, mystified.
“Stanton, I have seen Eckert break five pokers, one after the other, over his arm, and I am thinking that he would be the kind of man who would go with me this evening. May I take him?”
“Major Eckert has a great deal of work to do. He can’t be spared.”
“Well, I will ask the major himself,” Lincoln responds.
But Eckert knows better than to cross Stanton. Despite a barrage
of good-natured pleading by the president, Eckert says he cannot attend the theater that evening.
His business with Stanton concluded, Lincoln wraps his shawl tightly around his shoulders and marches back to the White House for his cabinet meeting.

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