The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (192 page)

By now it was close to 2 o’clock, and the meeting, nearly three hours long, adjourned. Grant however remained behind to talk with Lincoln: not about army matters, it turned out, but to beg off going to the theater that night. His wife, he said, was anxious to catch the late-afternoon train for Philadelphia, en route to a visit with their young sons in Burlington, New Jersey. Lincoln started to press him, but then refrained, perhaps realizing from the general’s embarrassed manner that the real reason was Julia Grant, who was determined not to expose herself to another of Mary Lincoln’s tirades, this time in full view of the audience at Ford’s. Disappointed, Lincoln accepted the excuse — reinforced just then by a note from Mrs Grant, reminding her husband not to be late for their 6 o’clock departure — and went upstairs for lunch, faced with the unpleasant job of informing his wife that the social catch of the season would not be going with them to the
theater that evening. If he also told her, as he would tell others between now and curtain time, that he too no longer wanted to go, it made no difference; Grant or no Grant, she was set on attending what the papers were calling the “last appearance of Miss Laura Keene in her celebrated comedy of
Our American Cousin.”

He was back in his office by 3 o’clock, in time for an appointment with the Vice President, the first since the scandalous scene at his swearing in. They talked for twenty minutes or so, and though neither left any record of what was said, witnesses noted that Lincoln called him “Andy,” shaking him vigorously by the hand, and that Johnson seemed greatly relieved to find himself greeted cordially after nearly six weeks of pointed neglect. This done, Lincoln attended to some paper work, including an appeal on behalf of a soldier convicted for desertion. So far in the war he had approved 267 death sentences for military offenses, but not this one. “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground,” he drawled as he fixed his signature to a pardon. Before setting out on a 4.30 carriage ride with his wife — “Just ourselves,” he had said at lunch when she asked if he wanted anyone else along — he walked over to the War Department, in hope that some word had come at last from Sherman. Again there was nothing, which served to weaken his conviction that the news of “some important event or disaster” would shake the capital before the day was over. Time was running out, and he was disappointed. It was then, on the way back from the telegraph office, that he told his bodyguard Crook that he did not want to go to the theater that night, and would not go, except for notices in the papers that he would be there. Crook was about to go off shift, and when they reached the White House door Lincoln paused for a moment and turned to face him. He seemed gloomy, depressed. “Goodbye, Crook,” he said, to the guard’s surprise. Always before, it had been “Good night, Crook,” when they parted. Now suddenly it was goodbye; “Goodbye, Crook.”

Still, by the time the carriage rolled out of the driveway a few minutes later, on through streets that glittered with bright gold April sunshine, he had recovered his spirits to such an extent that he informed his wife: “I never felt better in my life.” What was more — even though, just one month ago today, he had been confined to his bed with what his doctor described as “exhaustion, complete exhaustion” — he looked as happy as he said he felt. The recent City Point excursion, his first extended vacation of the war, had done him so much good that various cabinet members, after observing him at the midday meeting — in contrast to the one a month ago, when they gathered about his sickbed — remarked on the “expression of visible relief and content upon his face.” One said that he “never appeared to better advantage,” while another declared that “the weary look which his face had so long worn … had disappeared. It was cheerful and happy.” They were glad
to see him so. But Mary Lincoln, whose moods were quite as variable as his own, had a different reaction when he told her he had never felt better in his life. “Don’t you remember feeling just so before our little boy died?” she asked. He patted her hand to comfort her, and spoke of a trip to Europe as soon as his term was up. After that they would return to Springfield, where he would resume the practice of law and perhaps buy a farm along the Sangamon. “We must both be more cheerful in the future,” he told her. “Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.”

The good mood held. Seeing two old friends just leaving as the open barouche turned into the White House driveway an hour later, he stood up and called for them to wait. They were Richard Oglesby, the new governor of Illinois, and his adjutant general Isham Haynie, a combat brigadier who had left the army to work for him and Lincoln in the recent campaign. Lincoln led the way inside, where he read to them from the latest collection of “Letters” by Petroleum V. Nasby, a humorist he admired so much that he once said he would gladly swap his present office for the genius to compose such things. “Linkin rides into Richmond!” he read from the final letter. “A Illinois rale-splitter, a buffoon, a ape, a goriller, a smutty joker, sets hisself down in President Davis’s cheer and rites dispatchis! … This ends the chapter. The Confederasy hez at last consentratid its last consentrate. It’s ded. It’s gathered up its feet, sed its last words, and deceest.… Farewell, vane world.” The reading went on so long — four letters, with time out for laughter and thigh-slapping all around — that supper was delayed, as well as his departure for the theater. Even so, with the carriage waiting, he took time to see Colfax, who called again to ask if a special session of Congress was likely to interrupt a Rocky Mountain tour he was planning. The President said there would be no special session, and they went on talking until Mrs Lincoln appeared in the office doorway. She wore a low-necked evening dress and was pulling on her gloves, by way of warning her husband that 8 o’clock had struck.

He excused himself and they started out, only to be interrupted by two more men, a Massachusetts congressman and a former congressman from Illinois, both of whom had political favors to collect. One wanted a hearing for a client who had a sizeable cotton claim against the government; Lincoln gave him a card that put him first on tomorrow’s list of callers. What the other wanted no one knew, for he whispered it into the presidential ear. Lincoln had entered and then backed out of the closed carriage, cocking his head to hear the request. “Excuse me now,” he said as he climbed in again beside his wife. “I am going to the theater. Come and see me in the morning.”

Stopping en route at the home of New York Senator Ira Harris to pick up their substitute guests, the senator’s daughter Clara and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, the carriage rolled and clopped through
intersections whose streetlamps glimmered dimly through the mist. It was close to 8.30, twenty minutes past curtain time, when the coachman drew rein in front of Ford’s, on 10th Street between E and F, and the two couples alighted to enter the theater. Inside, about midway of Act I, the performance stopped as the President and his party came down the side aisle, and the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief” as they entered the flag-draped box to the right front. A near-capacity crowd of about 1700 applauded politely, masking its disappointment at Grant’s absence. Clara Harris and Rathbone took seats near the railing; the First Lady sat a little behind them, to their left, and Lincoln slumped into a roomy, upholstered rocker toward the rear. This last represented concern for his comfort and was also the management’s way of expressing thanks for his having been here at least four times before, once to see Maggie Mitchell in
Fanchon the Cricket
, once to see John Wilkes Booth in
The Marble Heart
— “Rather tame than otherwise,” John Hay had complained — and twice to see James Hackett play Falstaff in
Henry IV
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
. Tonight’s play resumed, and Lincoln, as was his habit, at once grew absorbed in the action down below: though not so absorbed that he failed to notice that the major was holding his fiancée’s hand, for he reached out and took hold of his wife’s. Pleased by the attention he had shown her on their carriage ride that afternoon, and now by this further expression of affection, Mary Lincoln reverted to her old role of Kentucky belle. “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging onto you so?” she whispered, leaning toward him. Lincoln’s eyes, fixed on the stage, reflected the glow of the footlights. “Why, she will think nothing about it,” he said, and he kept his grip on her hand.

Act I ended; Act II began. Down in Charleston the banqueters raised their glasses in response to Anderson’s toast, and here at Ford’s, in an equally festive mood, the audience enjoyed
Our American Cousin
with only occasional sidelong glances at the State Box to see whether Grant had arrived. He might have done so without their knowledge, for though they could see the young couple at the railing and Mrs Lincoln half in shadow behind them, the President was screened from view by the box curtains and draped flags. Act II ended; Act III began. Lincoln, having at last released his wife’s hand and settled back in the horsehair rocker, seemed to be enjoying what was happening down below. In the second scene, which opened shortly after 10 o’clock, a three-way running dialogue revealed to Mrs Mountchessington that Asa Trenchard, for whom she had set her daughter’s cap, was no millionaire after all.

— No heir to the fortune, Mr Trenchard?

— Oh, no.

— What! No fortune!

— Nary a red.…

Consternation. Indignation.

— Augusta, to your room.

— Yes, ma. The nasty beast!

— I am aware, Mr Trenchard, that you are not used to the manners of good society, and that alone will excuse the impertinence of which you have been guilty.

Exit Mrs Mountchessington, trailing daughter. Trenchard alone.

— Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing old mantrap!

Then it came, a half-muffled explosion, somewhere between a boom and a thump, loud but by no means so loud as it sounded in the theater, then a boil and bulge of bluish smoke in the presidential box, an exhalation as of brimstone from the curtained mouth, and a man coming out through the bank and swirl of it, white-faced and dark-haired in a black sack suit and riding boots, eyes aglitter, brandishing a knife. He mounted the ledge, presented his back to the rows of people seated below, and let himself down by the handrail for the ten-foot drop to the stage. Falling he turned, and as he did so caught the spur of his right boot in the folds of a flag draped over the lower front of the high box. It ripped but offered enough resistance to bring all the weight of his fall on his left leg, which buckled and pitched him forward onto his hands. He rose, thrust the knife overhead in a broad theatrical gesture, and addressed the outward darkness of the pit. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he said in a voice so low and projected with so little clarity that few recognized the state motto of Virginia or could later agree that he had spoken in Latin. “Revenge for the South!” or “The South is avenged!” some thought they heard him cry, while others said that he simply muttered “Freedom.” In any case he then turned again, hobbled left across the stage past the lone actor standing astonished in its center, and vanished into the wings.

Barely half a minute had passed since the jolt of the explosion, and now a piercing scream came through the writhing tendrils of smoke — a full-voiced wail from Mary Lincoln. “Stop that man!” Rathbone shouted, nursing an arm slashed by the intruder, and Clara Harris, wringing her hands, called down from the railing in a tone made falsely calm by shock: “Water. Water.” The audience began to emerge from its trance. “What is it? What happened?” “For God’s sake, what is it?” “What has happened?” The answer came in a bellow of rage from the curtained orifice above the spur-torn flag: “He has shot the President!” Below, men leaped from their seats in a first reaction of disbelief and denial, not only of this but also of what they had seen with their own eyes. “No. For God’s sake, no! It can’t be true.” But then, by way of reinforcement for the claim, the cry went up: “Surgeon! A surgeon! Is there a surgeon in the house?”

The young doctor who came forward — and at last gained admission to the box, after Rathbone removed a wooden bar the intruder had used to keep the hallway door from being opened while he went about his work — thought at first that he had been summoned to attend a dead man. Lincoln sat sprawled in the rocker as if asleep, knees relaxed, eyes closed, head dropped forward so that his chin was on his chest. He seemed to have no vital signs until a closer examination detected a weak pulse and shallow breathing. Assuming that he had been knifed, as Rathbone had been, the doctor had him taken from the chair and laid on the floor in a search for a stab wound. However, when he put his hands behind the patient’s head to lift it, he found the back hair wet with blood from a half-inch hole where a bullet had entered, three inches to the right of the left ear. “The course of the ball was obliquely forward,” a subsequent report would state, “toward the right eye, crossing the brain in an oblique manner and lodging a few inches behind that eye. In the track of the wound were found fragments of bone driven forward by the ball, which was embedded in the anterior lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain.” The doctor — Charles A. Leale, assistant surgeon, U.S. Volunteers, twenty-three years old and highly familiar with gunshot wounds — did not know all this; yet he knew enough from what he had seen and felt, here in the crowded box for the past five minutes, as well as in casualty wards for the past year, to arrive at a prognosis. Everything was over for Abraham Lincoln but the end. “His wound is mortal,” Leale pronounced. “It is impossible for him to recover.”

Two other surgeons were in the box by then, both senior to Leale in rank and years, but he remained in charge and made the decision not to risk a removal to the White House, six cobblestone blocks away. “If it is attempted the President will die before we reach there,” he replied to the suggestion. Instead, with the help of four soldier volunteers, the three doctors took up their patient and carried him feet first down the stairs and aisle, out onto 10th Street — packed nearly solid with the curious and grieving, so that an infantry captain had to draw his sword to clear a path for the seven bearers and their awkward burden, bawling excitedly: “Out of the way, you sons of bitches!” — up the front steps, down a narrow hall, and into a small back ground-floor bedroom in one of a row of modest houses across the way. Let by the night by its owner, a Swedish tailor, the room was mean and dingy, barely fifteen by nine feet in length and width, with a threadbare rug, once Turkey red, and oatmeal-colored paper on the walls. The bed itself was too short for the long form placed diagonally on the cornshuck mattress; Lincoln’s booted feet protruded well beyond the footboard, his head propped on extra pillows so that his bearded chin was on his chest, as it had been when Leale first saw him in the horsehair rocker, back at
Ford’s. By then the time was close to 11 o’clock, some forty-five minutes after the leaden ball first broke into his skull, and now began a painful, drawn-out vigil, a death watch that would continue for another eight hours and beyond.