The Day Lincoln Was Shot (23 page)

When the mare had been given water and feed, Booth invited the stagehands next door to Taltavul's for a drink. At this hour, only Spangler, Ritterspaugh and Maddox were in the theater, with the exception of a ticket seller out front. The conspirator invited everyone except the ticket man to join him in a drink.

He led them backstage, then down into the subterranean passage single file, then out through the south alley to the tavern. There he bought drinks and learned that a boy had been in looking for him—Herold. Booth had the respect of the stagehands because he was friendly without being condescending. He joked with them and, in conversation, asked if they had to be onstage for any particular work right now, and they said no, that this was dead time, that the scenery for tonight had already been set up and they were killing time.

Booth said that he had an errand to do, but, before he left, he bought a bottle of whiskey for the men and advised them to “drink up.” He left the group, saying that he might see them tonight, and went back through the alley and through the underground passage and up onto the stage. He picked up a ll/2-by-3-inch pine board which had held a music stand. A single brace of gas lamps was burning over the stage and, in their feeble light, he could see the flag-draped box.

He hopped offstage onto the orchestra floor and walked toward the back of the theater and on up the stairs to the dress circle. He moved along the aisle to the south and down to where a cane chair sat before the white door leading to the State Box. The actor paused, looked around, and saw no one.

Booth tried the door and it opened easily. He went inside, and closed it behind him. He struck some matches and tried to brace the pine board between the inside of the white door and
the rear wall of Box 7, which jutted into the corridor. The board was about half an inch too long. He had a penknife, but it would take an interminable time to whittle the board and time now was of the essence. Again he braced the board against the door—just above the knob—and tried to fit it against the wall. Where it jammed, he gouged plaster from the wall, holding a kerchief just below the spot and catching the fragments. In a few minutes, he had a niche into which the board fitted well.

Tonight, if anyone tried to follow him from the dress circle, they would find that the harder they pushed on the door, the more firmly wedged the board would become. He expected that, if he had to stab the guard outside the white door, there might be an outcry and people would try to follow. The board was important. He removed it and set it in a dark corner near the door.

Next he looked into the box. The partition was gone, the sofas and chairs had been arranged, and here, in the rear of the box, was President Lincoln's rocker. Both box doors were tried, and both worked easily. As he had known all along, the locks were broken.

Now he stood between the President's rocker and Mrs. Lincoln's chair and studied the jump to the stage. It wasn't much. If he stood on the ledge and jumped, it would be two feet higher, but if he swung himself over the ledge, hung on by his hands, and dropped, it would be shorter and safer.

John Wilkes Booth went out into the little corridor, with the door open, and crouched and studied the position where the President would be sitting. Then he closed the door and lit some matches. He withdrew a spiral-fluted gimlet with a wooden handle from his jacket pocket. The door had two panels, a top one and a bottom. At its thickest, the door was three-eighths of an inch deep. The panels were recessed and considerably thinner. He set his gimlet against the lower right-hand corner of the upper panel and leaned against it. He turned the handle and shavings began to fall off. In a moment, he had a small hole drilled through. He pressed his eye against it, with the door closed, and he had a hazy view of the upper part of the rocker. From his pocket he took a penknife, and began to gouge and ream the little hole and to peel the shavings from it. Again he stooped and looked. This time he had a good view of the spot where the President's shoulders and head ought to be.

Booth struck some more matches, and scooped up the shavings. He went back to the entrance to the corridor and, under matches, looked for grains of plaster. He scooped up the dust, dropped it into his pocket, and stepped outside the white door into the dress circle. Carefully, he studied the stage, the orchestra, and the dress circle. No one was in sight and he could hear no one.

He went downstairs and out the back way and got his mare. This time, instead of going up to F Street and opening the gate, he swung the other way in the T-shaped alley and went out Ninth Street, where there was no impeding gate. He went back to the National Hotel to eat and rest.

Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were pulling into the White House driveway when the President saw two men leaving. They were two old friends from home—Dick Oglesby, new governor of Illinois, and General Isham N. Haymes—and Mr. Lincoln stood in the barouche and yelled to them.

At the door, Mrs. Lincoln left the men, and advised the President that supper would be ready in a few minutes. Lincoln said that he wouldn't be long and he took his cronies into the office. The two, seeing the one so unusually happy, fell into a mood of horseplay and, in reminding each other of old events which only they would remember, all three roared with laughter.

The President had a column clipped from a newspaper and he said that it was one of his favorites and he would read
it to his friends. It was written by David R. Locke, who wrote coarse dialect under the name of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Sometimes, the President would read these columns in bed, and would laugh hard and slap his thigh and, wiping tears from his eyes, would appear at the bedroom door in his nightgown looking for someone to share them with.

This one read:

“I survived the defeet uv Micklellan (who wuz, trooly, the nashen's hope and pride likewise) becoz I felt assoored that the rane of the Goriller Linkin wood be a short wun; that in a few months, at furthest, Ginral Lee wood capcher Washington, depose the ape, and set up a constooshnal guvernment, based upon the great and immutable trooth that a white man is better than a nigger.”

The Confederates had “consentratid” and had lost Richmond. “Linkin rides into Richmond! 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 Conferasy hez at last consentratid its last concentrate. It's ded. It's gathered up its feet, sed its last words, and deceest. . . . Linkin will serve his term out—the tax on whiskey wont be repeeled—our leaders will die uv chagrin, and delerium tremens and inability to live so long out uv offis, and the sheep will be scattered. Farewell, vane world.”

Although there were barbs in the copy, aimed at him, the President almost always laughed at these stories. Once, he said: “For the genius to write these things, I would gladly give up my office.” On another occasion, he said: “I am going to write Petroleum to come down here, and I intend to tell him if he will communicate his talent to me, I will swap places with him.”

Word came that a cold supper was waiting and Governor Oglesby and General Haymes begged off and said that they had appointments, that they stopped in just for old times' sake, and would see the President again over the weekend.

The Lincolns, with Tad and Robert, ate together and Robert said that he had an evening out scheduled and did not know whether or not he could use the tickets to Grover's Theatre. This reminded Mrs. Lincoln that she had invited a young engaged couple, Clara Harris and Major Henry R. Rathbone, to come with them to the theater. Miss Harris was dark and lovely, a full-figured girl with rows of tiny spitcurls on her forehead. The major was tall and slender, a quiet, handsome man. It was a unique love affair. Miss Harris was the daughter of Senator Ira Harris of New York. The major was the Senator's stepson. Mrs. Lincoln said that, en route to Ford's Theatre, they would pick the couple up at the Harris home on H Street near Fourteenth. The President received the news in silence and nodded.

It was getting dark when, a hundred miles to the south, Marshal Ward Hill Lamon, the presidential worrier, drove through Richmond for the first time. The President was in his thoughts often, and there is no doubt that, as he saw the burned-out shells of once fine homes, and saw the deep strain of bitterness in the faces on the walks, he shuddered when he thought of the President walking these streets a week ago.

And if he continued to think of Lincoln, he must also have thought of the changes which had slowly come over the President, changes which old Hill saw, and which others, including Lincoln, could not see. He saw Lincoln coming to believe in his destiny as a great man, coming to believe in portents and dreams, coming to believe that it had been written in the stars scores of centuries ago that he was to be cut off at the very height of his fame and power, coming to believe that he must die at the hands of an assassin.

Hill was particularly vexed at the presidential belief in dreams as a portent of good and evil. When he told a dream in unsympathetic company, Lincoln sensed it and made fun
of the dream and said that everybody knew that they had no meaning, but it was obvious to Lamon that Lincoln not only believed in them, but was preyed upon by them and worried about them.

Once the President had said that he believed that dreams were part of the “workmanship of the Almighty.” If Lamon made fun of this thesis, Lincoln would turn his heavy-lidded eyes on his old friend and say: “Hill, play a little sad song for me,” and Lamon would plunk it out on a banjo, the two of them listening to the cracked notes, the plaintive air.

The President said that, before he came to the White House, he was lying on a couch in Springfield and he glanced up at a mirror and saw two images of himself: one glowing bright, one ghastly in death. The meaning, he said, was decipherable: he would be healthful in his first term of office, and death would overtake him in his second. He admitted that, since that day on the couch in 1860, he had tried many times to conjure the same double image and had failed.

Dreams were in code; they were warnings, clues, waiting to be understood. He could plumb their meanings and he believed that the art of understanding dreams was shared only by common people. “The children of nature,” he called them. He had a deep respect for the wisdom of the “children of nature” and believed that they were wiser, in many ways, than those with vast formal educations.

As he rode through the streets of Richmond, Ward Hill Lamon thought of the dreamer back home in Washington City. He loved Lincoln, and he knew that, if the President went outdoors on any of these nights, he would never forgive himself for not remaining at his side.

Ford's Theatre opened. The sun was setting at 6:45 and Peanut John came out front and lit the big opaque gas globe in front of the main entrance. A small, steady line of people
stood before the box office. The ushers were dusting the gas globes around the walls inside the theater and Spangler, Maddox and Ritterspaugh sat out on the stone step in back, each pleasant in the glow of whiskey and each wondering if Booth would come back later and buy some more. John Matthews arrived backstage and removed his frock coat, the one with the letter in it. Harry Ford went out to the box office to remind Joseph Sessford—who was substituting for the sick Thomas Raybold—not to sell any box seats for tonight's performance.

* * *

Night came like a gentle sneak and the city lamplighters fought it with ladders in one hand and tapers in the other. Women about to go out for the evening studied the feeble lakes of light in the sky and decided to take good warm coats; some even carried small muffs. The people were still on the town, still celebrating, and with darkness came license. The rented carriages did a fine business, merely standing in front of a saloon until a couple came out, and those who had never hired one before hired a carriage tonight and, in the sour perfume of partly digested whiskey, men kissed their girls passionately and made promises which, in the morning, would not be remembered.

It was another gala night in a succession of them. Man had been harassed and fatigued by war for so long that he had forgotten that this was not the normal way of life, and now that he was free of anxiety, he was excessive in his desire to taste what it was like. Those who had least believed that this day would come made the most of it.

In the White House, William H. Crook stood outside the President's office with hands clasped behind his back. He was angry, but he was good at hiding his feelings. He had worked the 8
A.M.
to 4
P.M.
tour of duty as Lincoln's bodyguard today, and, since 4
P.M.,
he had been waiting for the night man to relieve him.

John F. Parker was now three hours late. Crook would not complain to Mr. Lincoln, nor to anyone else. This had happened before, and John Parker's shiftlessness as a member of
the Washington City police force was well known. No one seemed to know who had selected him as a personal bodyguard for the President. His record, as Crook knew, was bad, but that too seemed beside the point right now. The only thing that mattered was that John F. Parker was three hours late.

William H. Crook was still thinking about it when he saw Parker walking down the corridor. The good policeman choked down his anger and merely said: “The President is going to the theater tonight. You will go with him. Are you armed?” Parker said he was, and patted his pocket. Crook told him, tersely, the White House news of the day, and said that, after supper, he had walked Mr. Lincoln over to the War Department for a final evening visit, but that telegrapher Bates, and newspaperman Noah Brooks, who had been there, said that there was no news from General Sherman. Mr. Stanton, they found, had gone home. So too had Major Eckert. Grant would not be going to the theater with the President tonight; he had gone to visit his children. The President was going to take an engaged couple instead, which meant that there would be no room in the presidential carriage for Parker, and perhaps he had better leave the White House fifteen minutes ahead of time, and wait there for Lincoln.