Lincoln: A Photobiography (15 page)

At eleven, he met with his cabinet. He had invited General Grant to attend the meeting as guest of honor. Most of the talk centered on the difficult problems of reconstruction in the conquered South. Lincoln emphasized again that he wanted no persecutions, "no bloody work." Enough blood had been shed. "There are men in Congress/' he said, "who possess feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which I do not sympathize and can not participate."

After lunch he returned to his office to review court-martial sentences. He revoked the death sentence of a Confederate spy And he pardoned a deserter, signing his name with the comment, "Well, I think this boy can do us more good above ground than under ground."

Late in the afternoon he went for a carriage ride with Mary That evening they would attend the theatre with another couple, but for the moment, they wanted some time to themselves. The war had been hard on both of them. Since Willie's death, Mary had been plagued by depression and imaginary fears, and at times, Lincoln had feared for his wife's sanity. As their carriage rolled through the countryside, they talked hopefully of the years ahead. "We must both be more cheerful in the future," Lincoln said. "Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have been very miserable."

After dinner, Lincoln and Mary left for Ford's Theatre in the company of a young army major, Henry R. Rathbone, and his fiancee, Clara Harris. Arriving late, they were escorted up a winding stairway to the flag-draped presidential box overlooking the stage. The play had already started, but as Lincoln's party appeared in the box, the orchestra struck up "Hail to the Chief" and the audience rose for a standing ovation. Lincoln smiled and bowed. He took his place in a rocking chair provided for him by the management and put on a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses he had mended with a string. Mary sat beside him, with Major Rathbone and Miss Harris to their right.

The play was
Our American Cousin,
a popular comedy starring Laura Keene, who had already given a thousand performances in
the leading role. Lincoln settled back and relaxed. He laughed heartily, turning now and then to whisper to his wife. Halfway through the play, he felt a chill and got up to drape his black overcoat across his shoulders.

Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C.

During the third act, Mary reached over to take Lincoln's hand. She pressed closer to him. Behind them, the door to the presidential box was closed but not locked. Lincoln's bodyguard that evening, John Parker, had slipped away from his post outside the door to go downstairs and watch the play.

The audience had just burst into laughter when the door swung open. A shadowy figure stepped into the box, stretched out his arm, aimed a small derringer pistol at the back of Lincoln's head, and pulled the trigger. Lincoln's arm jerked up. He slumped forward in his chair as Mary reached out to catch him. Then she screamed.

Actor John Wilkes Booth fires the fatal shot. Drawing from
Harper's Weekly.

Major Rathbone looked up to see a man standing with a smoking pistol in one hand and a hunting knife in the other. Rathbone lunged at the gunman, who yelled something and slashed Rathbone's arm to the bone. Then the assailant leaped from the box to the stage, twelve feet below. One of his boot spurs caught on the regimental flag draped over the box. As he crashed onto the stage, he broke the shinbone of his left leg.

The assailant struggled to his feet, faced the audience, and shouted the motto of the commonwealth of Virginia: "
Sic semper tyrannis
"—(Thus always to tyrants). The stunned and disbelieving audience recognized him as John Wilkes Booth, the well-known actor. What was going on? Was this part of the play?

Booth hobbled offstage and out the stage door, where a horse was saddled and waiting. Twelve days later he would be cornered by federal troops and shot in a Virginia barn.

The theatre was in an uproar. People were shouting, standing on chairs, shoving for the exits, as Laura Keene cried out from the stage, "The president is shot! The president is shot!"

Two doctors rushed to the president's box. Lincoln had lost consciousness instantly. The bullet had entered his skull above his left ear, cut through his brain, and lodged behind his right eye. The doctors worked over him as Mary hovered beside them, sobbing hysterically. Finally, six soldiers carried the president out of the theatre and across the fog-shrouded street to a boardinghouse, where a man with a lighted candle stood beckoning. He was placed on a four-poster bed in a narrow room off the hallway. The bed wasn't long enough for Lincoln. He had to be laid diagonally across its cornhusk mattress.

Five doctors worked over the president that night. Now and then he groaned, but it was obvious that he would not regain consciousness. The room filled with members of the cabinet, with
congressmen and high government officials. Mary waited in the front parlor. "Bring Tad—he will speak to Tad—he loves him so," she cried. Tad had been attending another play that evening. Sobbing, "They killed my pa, they killed my pa," he was taken back to the White House to wait.

Blandishing a knife, Booth leaps from the presidential box to the stage. From
Harper's Weekly.

At the stage door, Booth jumps onto a waiting horse and escapes. From
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

Robert Lincoln was summoned to join the hushed crowd around his father's bedside. Outside, cavalry patrols clattered down the street. Another assassin had just tried to murder Secretary of State William Seward. Everyone suspected that the attacks were part of a rebel conspiracy to murder several government officials and capture the city.

By dawn, a heavy rain was falling. Lincoln was still breathing faintly. Robert Lincoln surrendered to tears, then others in the room began to cry. At 7:22
A.M.
on April 15, Lincoln died at the age of fifty-six. A doctor folded the president's hands across his chest. Gently he smoothed Lincoln's contracted face muscles, closed his eyelids, and drew a white sheet over his head. It was then that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton murmured, "Now he belongs to the ages."

The funeral was held in the East Room of the White House four days later, on April 19. Afterwards, the long funeral procession, led by a detachment of black troops, moved slowly up Pennsylvania Avenue to the muffled beat of drums and the tolling of church bells. When the procession reached the Capitol, Lincoln was carried inside to lie in state under the huge Capitol dome. The next day, thousands of people, black and white, soldiers and civilians, stood patiently in the rain, waiting to file past the open coffin.

On April 21, a funeral train set out on a sixteen-hundred mile journey to Illinois, carrying Abraham Lincoln home to his final resting place in Springfield. The train followed the same route Lincoln had taken when he came to Washington as president-elect. It stopped at major cities along the way, so mourners could again file past the coffin. Where it did not stop, men and women with their children stood silently along the route to watch the train pass.

On the night of May 2, the train left Chicago and puffed its way southward through the rain across the Illinois prairie. People had built bonfires along the railroad tracks, and they stood outlined against the glowing red flames at every prairie village and country crossroads as the funeral train passed through.

At 9
A.M.
it approached Springfield with its bell tolling. It steamed slowly through the business center and pulled up at the station, where regiments of soldiers and delegations of officials
were waiting to meet it. Tens of thousands of people jammed the streets around the station and stood on nearby rooftops. A military band began to play a funeral dirge. All the bells of Springfield tolled. Guns fired a salute. And the crowd fell silent as the train came to a stop.

Lincoln's funeral procession on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., April 19, 1865.

Citizens of Springfield wait their turn to file into the state capitol to view Lincoln's body.

On the morning that Lincoln died, someone emptied the contents of his pockets and placed them in a box, which was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. Robert Lincoln passed the box on to his daughter, who presented it to the Library of Congress in 1937. Labeled "Do Not Open," it remained locked in a vault until 1976, when the string was untied and the paper unwrapped as the library staff looked on.