Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Until the screams broke forth from the president’s box, many in the audience thought the dramatic moment was part of the play. Then they saw Mary Lincoln frantically waving. “They have shot the President!” she cried. “They have shot the President!” Charles Leale, a young doctor seated near the presidential box, was the first to respond. “When I reached the President,” he recalled, “he was almost dead, his eyes were closed.” Unable at first to locate the wound, he stripped away Lincoln’s coat and collar. Examining the base of the skull, he discovered “the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.” Using his finger “as a probe” to remove “the coagula which was firmly matted with the hair,” he released the flow of blood, relieving somewhat the pressure on Lincoln’s brain. Another doctor, Charles Sabin Taft, Julia Taft’s half brother, soon arrived, and the decision was made to remove the president from the crowded box to a room in the Petersen boardinghouse across the street.
By this time, people had massed in the street. The word began to spread that assassins had attacked not only Lincoln but Seward as well. Joseph Sterling, a young clerk in the War Department, rushed to inform Stanton of the calamity. On his way, he encountered his roommate, J. G. Johnson, who joined him on the terrible errand. “When Johnson and I reached Stanton’s residence,” Sterling recalled, “I was breathless,” so when Stanton’s son Edwin Jr. opened the door, Johnson was the one to speak. “We have come,” Johnson said, “to tell your father that President Lincoln has been shot.” Young Stanton hurried to his father, who had been undressing for bed. When the war secretary came to the door, Sterling recalled, “he fairly shouted at me in his heavy tones: ‘Mr. Sterling what news is this you bring?’” Sterling told him that both Lincoln and Seward had been assassinated. Desperately hoping this news was mere rumor, Stanton remained calm and skeptical. “Oh, that can’t be so,” he said, “that can’t be so!” But when another clerk arrived at the door to describe the attack on Seward, Stanton had his carriage brought around at once, and against the appeals of his wife, who feared that he, too, might be a target, he headed for Seward’s house at Lafayette Square.
The news reached Gideon Welles almost simultaneously. He had already gone to bed when his wife reported someone at the door. “I arose at once,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and raised a window, when my messenger, James called to me that Mr. Lincoln the President had been shot,” and that Seward and his son had been assassinated. Welles thought the story “very incoherent and improbable,” but the messenger assured him that he had already been to Seward’s house to check its veracity before coming to see his boss. Also ignoring his wife’s protests, Welles dressed and set forth in the foggy night for the Seward house on the other side of the square.
Upon reaching Seward’s house, Welles and Stanton were shocked at what they found. Blood was everywhere—on “the white wood work of the entry,” on the stairs, on the dresses of the women, on the floor of the bedroom. Seward’s bed, Welles recalled, “was saturated with blood. The Secretary was lying on his back, the upper part of his head covered by a cloth, which extended down over his eyes.” Welles questioned Dr. Verdi in a whisper, but Stanton was unable to mute his stentorian voice until the doctor asked for quiet. After looking in on Fred’s unconscious form, the two men walked together down the stairs. In the lower hall, they exchanged what information they had regarding the president. Welles thought they should go to the White House, but Stanton believed Lincoln was still at the theater. Army quartermaster general Meigs, who had just come to the door, implored them not to go to 10th Street, where thousands of people had gathered. When they insisted, he decided to join them.
Twelve blocks away, in his home at Sixth and E streets, Chief Justice Chase had already retired for the night. Earlier that afternoon, he had taken a carriage ride with Nettie, intending to stop at the White House to remonstrate with Lincoln over his too lenient approach to Reconstruction and his failure to demand universal suffrage. At the last minute, “uncertain how [Lincoln] would take it,” Chase had decided to wait until the following day.
He was fast asleep when a servant knocked on his bedroom door. There was a gentleman downstairs, the servant said, who claimed “the President had been shot.” The caller was a Treasury employee who had actually witnessed the shooting “by a man who leaped from the box upon the stage & escaped by the rear.” Chase hoped “he might be mistaken,” but in short order, three more callers arrived. Each “confirmed what I had been told & added that Secretary Seward had also been assassinated, and that guards were being placed around the houses of all the prominent officials, under the apprehension that the plot had a wide range. My first impulse was to rise immediately & go to the President…but reflecting that I could not possibly be of any service and should probably be in the way of those who could, I resolved to wait for morning & further intelligence. In a little while the guard came—for it was supposed that I was one of the destined victims—and their heavy tramp-tramp was heard under my window all night…. It was a night of horrors.”
When Stanton and Welles arrived at the crammed room in the Petersen boardinghouse, they found that Lincoln had been placed diagonally across a bed to accommodate his long frame. Stripped of his shirt, “his large arms,” Welles noted, “were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance.” His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so
much vitality
” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.
Mary spent most of the endless night weeping in an adjoining parlor, where several women friends tried vainly to comfort her. “About once an hour,” Welles noted, she “would repair to the bedside of her dying husband and with lamentation and tears remain until overcome by emotion.” She could only rotely repeat the question “Why didn’t he shoot me? Why didn’t he shoot me?” Though everyone in the room knew the president was dying, Mary was not told, out of fear that she would collapse. Whenever she came into the room, Dr. Taft recalled, “clean napkins were laid over the crimson stains on the pillow.”
Early on, Mary sent a messenger for Robert, who had remained at home that night in the company of John Hay. He had already turned in when the White House doorkeeper came to his room. “Something happened to the President,” Thomas Pendel told Robert, “you had better go down to the theater and see what it is.” Robert asked Pendel to get Hay. Reaching Hay’s room, Pendel told him, “Captain Lincoln wants to see you at once. The President has been shot.” Pendel recalled that when Hay heard the news, “he turned deathly pale, the color entirely leaving his cheeks.” The two young men jumped in a carriage, picking up Senator Sumner along the way.
Mary was torn over whether to summon Tad, but was apparently persuaded that the emotional boy would be devastated if he saw his father’s condition. Tad and his tutor had gone that night to Grover’s Theatre to see
Aladdin.
The theater had been decorated with patriotic emblems, and a poem commemorating Fort Sumter’s recapture was read aloud between the acts. An eyewitness recalled that the audience was “enjoying the spectacle of Aladdin” when the theater manager came forward, “as pale as a ghost.” A look of “mortal agony” contorted his face as he announced to the stunned audience that the president had been shot at Ford’s Theatre. In the midst of the pandemonium that followed, Tad was seen running “like a young deer, shrieking in agony.”
“Poor little Tad,” Pendel recalled, returned to the White House in tears. “O Tom Pen! Tom Pen!” Tad wailed. “They have killed Papa dead. They’ve killed Papa dead!” Pendel carried the little boy into Lincoln’s bedroom. Turning down the bedcovers, he helped Tad undress and finally got him to lie down. “I covered him up and laid down beside him, put my arm around him, and talked to him until he fell into a sound sleep.”
By midnight the entire cabinet, with the exception of Seward, had gathered in the small room at the Petersen boardinghouse. An eyewitness noted that Robert Lincoln “bore himself with great firmness, and constantly endeavored to assuage the grief of his mother by telling her to put her trust in God.” Despite his brave attempts to console others, he was sometimes “entirely overcome” and “would retire into the hall and give vent to most heartrending lamentations.” Almost no one was able to contain his grief that night, for as one witness observed, “there was not a soul present that did not love the president.”
To Edwin Stanton fell the onerous task of alerting the generals, taking the testimony of witnesses at the theater, and orchestrating the search for the assassins. “While evidently swayed by the great shock which held us all under its paralyzing influence,” Colonel A. F. Rockwell noted, “he was not only master of himself but unmistakably the dominating power over all. Indeed, the members of the cabinet, much as children might to their father, instinctively deferred to him in all things.”
Throughout the night, Stanton dictated numerous dispatches, which were carried to the War Department telegraph office by a relay team of messengers positioned nearby. “Each messenger,” Stanton’s secretary recalled, “after handing a dispatch to the next, would run back to his post to wait for the next.” The first telegram went to General Grant, requesting his immediate presence in Washington. “The President was assassinated at Ford’s Theater at 10.30 to-night and cannot live…. Secretary Seward and his son Frederick were also assassinated at their residence and are in a dangerous condition.” The dispatch reached Grant in the Bloodgood Hotel, where he was taking supper. He “dropped his head,” Horace Porter recalled, “and sat in perfect silence.” Noticing that he had turned “very pale,” Julia Grant guessed that bad news had arrived and asked him to read the telegram aloud. “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received,” he warned. As he made plans to return to Washington, he told Julia that the tidings filled him “with the gloomiest apprehension. The President was inclined to be kind and magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”
At 1 a.m., Stanton telegraphed the chief of police in New York, telling him to “send here immediately three or four of your best detectives.” Half an hour later, he notified General Dix, “The wound is mortal. The President has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.” Three hours later, he updated Dix: “The President continues insensible and is sinking.” Early eyewitness accounts, Stanton revealed, suggested “that two assassins were engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the President.”
Shortly after dawn, Mary entered the room for the last time. “The death-struggle had begun,” Welles recorded. “As she entered the chamber and saw how the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor.” Restoratives were given, and Mary was assisted back to the sofa in the parlor, never again to see her husband alive.
No sooner had “the town clocks struck seven,” one observer recalled, than “the character of the President’s breathing changed. It became faint and low. At intervals it altogether ceased, until we thought him dead. And then it would be again resumed.” Lincoln’s nine-hour struggle had reached its final moments. “Let us pray,” Reverend Phineas D. Gurley said, and everyone present knelt.
At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. Stanton’s concise tribute from his deathbed still echoes. “Now he belongs to the ages.”
When Mary was told that he was gone, she piteously demanded, “Oh, why did you not tell me that he was dying.” Her moans could be heard throughout the house. Finally, with Robert’s help, she was taken to her carriage, which had waited in front of the house through the long night.
Until the moment of Lincoln’s death, Stanton’s “coolness and self-possession” had seemed “remarkable” to those around him. Now he could not stop the tears that streamed down his cheeks. In the days that followed, even as he worked tirelessly to secure the city and catch the conspirators, “Stanton’s grief was uncontrollable,” recalled Horace Porter, “and at the mention of Mr. Lincoln’s name he would break down and weep bitterly.”
While Stanton’s raw grief surprised those who had seen only his gruff exterior, John Hay understood. “Not everyone knows, as I do,” he wrote Stanton, “how close you stood to our lost leader, how he loved you and trusted you, and how vain were all the efforts to shake that trust and confidence, not lightly given & never withdrawn. All this will be known some time of course, to his honor and yours.”
Salmon Chase was up at dawn. Soldiers had guarded him through the “night of horrors,” and he was ready to join his colleagues at Lincoln’s side. As he reached 10th Street, however, he encountered Assistant Treasury Secretary Maunsell Field. “Is he dead?” Chase asked. “Yes,” Field replied, noting that Chase’s “eyes were bloodshot, and his entire face was distorted.” The Chief Justice had arrived too late, the president was already dead, and his colleagues had dispersed. Uncertain what to do next, Chase walked to Seward’s house. Guards had been stationed to prevent entry, but Chase was recognized and allowed into the lower hall. There, doctors told him that Seward “had partially recovered” and, though still in critical condition, “might live—but that Mr. Frederick Seward’s case was hopeless.”
Chase headed toward the Kirkwood Hotel to call on the man who represented the future: the soon-to-be president, Andrew Johnson. In Johnson’s suite, he encountered his old enemies Montgomery Blair and his father. He took Old Man Blair’s hand and “with tearful eyes said ‘Mr. Blair I hope that from this day there will cease all anger & bitterness between us.’” The old gentleman responded with equal warmth and kindness.
Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,” Elizabeth Blair remarked to her husband in a letter later that day. “Their grief is as honest as that of any one of our side.” An editorial in the
Richmond Whig
expressed similar sentiments, observing that with Lincoln’s death, “the heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has descended.”