Read The Day Lincoln Was Shot Online
Authors: Jim Bishop
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
Dedicated to My Dearest Friend
John M. Bishop
Who Is Also My Father
Good Friday was the day
Of the prodigy and crime,
When they killed him in his pity,
When they killed him in his prime. . . .
. . . They killed him in his kindness,
In their madness in their blindness,
And they killed him from behind. . . .
He lieth in his bloodâ
The Father in his face;
They have killed him, the forgiverâ
The Avenger takes his place. . . .
There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand:
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand.
â
Herman Melville
For the Record
This is a book about a day, a place and a murderâand about a wide variety of men and women. It begins with the casual and somewhat late good morning of President Abraham Lincoln outside his bedroom door at 7
A.M.
on Friday, April 14, 1865, and it ends at 7:22
A.M.
the following morning when, as Surgeon General Barnes pressed silver coins to the President's eyelids, Mrs. Lincoln moaned: “Oh, why did you not tell me he was dying!”
The elapsed time is twenty-four hours, twenty-two minutes. To many people, this is the single most dramatic day in the life of the Republic. It has been written about before, as a chapter of a book, or a part of a chapter and once in a terse volume written by John W. Starrâa volume which ended at 8
P.M.
Some of these passages have been beautiful and moving and some have been skimpy and vague and laden with unsupported suspicion. Some of the lurid journalists, feeling that there was not sufficient natural drama in the violent death of Lincoln, filled in the blank spots of this day with imaginings, and the story of the assassination, in time, became so interlarded with fiction that the principal assassin, John Wilkes Booth, became a minor character.
In addition to the chapters dealing with specific hours of the day and night, I have included here two chapters of background in a section entitled
The Days Before.
I have been reluctant to interrupt the narrative with the insertion of this background section, but have been persuaded that this is necessary and useful in placing the events of the day in context.
As a student of President Lincoln and his times, I began, in 1930, to keep notes on the events of this day. The best, and simplest way, I felt, was to keep notebooks labeled 7
A.M.
Friday, 8
A.M.
Friday, 9
A.M.
Friday and so on through 7
A.M.
Saturday. That made twenty-five notebooks. In addition, I kept one marked “Lincoln and Family,” one labeled “The Conspirators,” one called “WashingtonâEra,” and one marked “Bibliography.” This must be of small interest to any reader except to point out that, after years of reading and making notes, I found that I had as many as three or four versionsâeach at variance with the othersâof what had happened in any one hour. Two years ago, when I intensified the research and started to read seven million words of government documents, the pieces of the puzzle began to orient themselves. There were still conflicts of time and place and event, and these were eventually reconciled by (1) the preponderance of evidence tending toward one version: (2) the testimony of more than one supporting witness at the trial of the conspirators: (3) the relationship of the event in question with an event that occurred prior to it or immediately after.
Still, I do not believe that this book presents all of the facts, nor anywhere near all of the facts. In the little notebooks today, hundreds of pages are marked “void.” In the multitude of trial records, documents and books, there are many blank places although, to compensate for this, I must acknowledge that many of the witnesses supplied sufficient material so that conversations could be reconstructed in dialogue without straining the quotation marks. In fact, the only liberties I have taken are in describing facial expressions (“he scowled”; “Booth looked tired,” etc.) and in describing what certain characters thought, although in each case the thought is based on knowledge of facts then in the possession of the character. Other than that, this book is pretty much a journalistic job.
To insure that the book should be factually sound, galleys were sent to such Lincoln scholars as Bruce Catton, Stefan Lorant, and Harry E. Pratt, Historian of the Illinois State Historical Library. I hope that their suggestions and their challenges have been met and that the book is better, smoother and more sure of itself because of their ministrations.
Sometimes, small facts become elusive. For example, I assumed all along that Lincoln's office was on the ground floor of the White House. It did not occur to me to challenge this until I read in a Carl Sandburg book that the President was informed, in his office, that people “were waiting downstairs.” The book was nearly complete when, through the kind offices of Congressman Frank Osmers (N.J.), it was put beyond dispute that Lincoln worked upstairs, not down. Another “small” fact is that most writers assumed that Booth, in his escape from the alley behind Ford's Theatre, spurred his mare up the alley to F Street, and turned right. It did not occur to me to question this until I learned, in an old document, that a wooden gate, used as a billboard, closed the F Street exit and that the assassin would have had to ride up the alley, halt, dismount, open the gate, and then flee. In Ford's Theatre, a National Parks guard told me that the alley, in 1865, formed a T, and that John Wilkes Booth was aware of the gate at F Street and had not used it, turning instead down the other leg of the alley to Ninth Street, and thence right to Pennsylvania Avenue. In the library at the back of Ford's Theatre, this guard had an old government pamphlet which proved the point.
For help in amassing the material for this book, I am indebted to Mr. Evan Thomas, Managing Editor of Harper & Brothers; Mrs. Phyllis Jackson of Music Corporation of America; Miss Olive Tambourelle of the Teaneck, New Jersey, library; Mr. Robert Hug of the New York Public Library; the Illinois State Historical Society; to the Esso people for a fine street map of Washington; to Gayle Peggy Bishop, age ten, for facing thousands of pieces of carbon paper in one direction; to Virginia Lee Bishop, seventeen, for believing that no one but her father could have written this particular book.
Jim Bishop
Teaneck, New Jersey
* * *
The polished rosewood door swung back and the President of the United States came from his bedroom. He nodded to the nightman in the hall and said “Good morning.” He fingered his big gold watch, anchored to the chain across his vest, but he did not look at it. The hour of seven was late for Lincoln. Many a time, the guard remembered, the President was downstairs working at six.
The big man started down the hall slowly, like a person older in years, the legs perpetually bent at the knees, the black suit flapping about the frame. He looked like a man who did not feel well. The circles under his tired eyes were pouched; the skin of his face was almost saffron; the scraggly black beard thinned and died as it approached the hairline; the hair itself was almost combed; the feet moved with conscious effort, barely lifting off the red pile rug before being set down again; the thick lips, more brown than red, were pulled back in a semi-smile.
He saw the men ahead. There was no way to avoid them. The guards could not seem to keep them out, and many of them slept in the White House hall. The word had passed that he was coming, and so they were on their feet and smiling. Each of these wanted a favor. As he passed, hardly pausing, they asked for jobs or passes to Richmond or the commutation of a military sentence or presidential approval of an illegal business deal. In four years of living in the White House, Mr. Lincoln had become accustomed to the morning vultures. He could do little to be rid of them, and he had no desire to help them because, if their claims were just, they would have had satisfaction at the proper agency.
There was no way around them. His bedroom was in the southwest corner of the White House, on the second floor, and his office was in the southeast corner, on the same floor. Some men, desperate or arrogant, grabbed the crook of his arm and held him until the President pulled himself loose and said: “I am sorry. I cannot be of help to you.” Some spoke quietly and swiftly, their heads swinging to follow him as he kept walking. Some wept. A few muttered threats and departed.
He walked down the carpeted hall slowly, and through the door to his office. A soldier came to attention, and Lincoln nodded pleasantly and walked inside. It was a big office, bigger than two farm kitchens, and he walked over to the far side from the door and looked in the pigeonholes of the old desk and then sat at the small table near the south windows. He picked up a paper, crossed his legs and leaned back in the high chair. The light from the windows was not good; this was a misty morning and a chill breeze leaned against the newborn buds in Washington City. This would be a day for a coat in the morning hours and the evening hours. Down behind the Capitol, with its new dome looking like a marble breast, the sun was fighting a patient battle with gray clouds.
The streets, at this hour, were full of people. Unofficial Washington was on its way to work. In offices and shops, the business day began at 7:30 and the flagstone and wooden walks rang with the tempo of heavy boots. In the gray clay, teams of horses steamed as they pulled heavy brewery wagons and loads of produce to the taverns and markets of a gluttonous town. The drivers, in open vests and black peaked caps, bounced as they drove through brown puddles and kept an eye on the meticulous ladies who dipped brooms in hot water to sweep mud from the steps of the houses.
Washington City was a place of cobblestones and iron wheels, of hoop skirts and gaslight, of bayonets and bonnets, of livery stables and taverns. It was a city of high stoops and two-story brick houses with attics. From almost any point in the city, the dominating features were the Capitol and the Washington Monument. With a thumb on the dome of the Capitol, and a middle finger on the Monument, a circular span would embrace practically all of Washington City.
The town was Southern in character and habit, leisurely enough so that individual noises could still be heard. On Sunday mornings, no matter how deeply one huddled in blankets, bells from at least two churches could be heard tolling. A train leaving the Baltimore and Ohio terminal would shriek once, and a hundred shrieks would come back from the streets. A lounger at Pennsylvania Avenue and Third Street could watch a truck pass by, meet a friend, have a conversation, stop for a drink, and still return to the corner in time to see the same truck far up Pennsylvania Avenue, perhaps at Thirteenth Street.