April 14, 1865, was a holy day in Christendom—Good Friday, the anniversary of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. It had now been five days since Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s main military force, to Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Confederate General Joe Johnston still had a sizable army in the Carolinas, and there were still pockets of Confederates in arms elsewhere, but the bloody fratricidal war that had torn the country apart for four years was virtually over.
President Abraham Lincoln woke around 7:00 a.m., dressed, and shambled down the hall to work in his office before he breakfasted. Sitting at his table that morning, Lincoln donned his specs and wrote a note to General Grant. Grant and his wife, Julia, had arrived in Washington the day before and were staying at the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, about two blocks from the White House. Willard’s was not Washington’s largest hotel, but it was its most posh. While both Northerners and Southerners lodged there, they used different doors so as not to run into one another.1 When they arrived, Grant received an invitation to ride with Lincoln and his wife later that evening to watch the city’s “grand illumination.” Mary pointedly omitted Julia from the invitation; a few weeks earlier they had had a falling-out. Sometime during their ride through the city, Lincoln invited Grant and his wife to go with him and Mary to the theatre the following night.
Mary Lincoln received two invitations to go to the theatre on April 14. The earlier invitation was from C. D. Hess, manager of Grover’s Theatre, to see Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp and the special illuminations he was planning for Friday.2 The second invitation, from Dick Ford at Ford’s Theatre, arrived at the White House sometime during breakfast.
Mary asked Lincoln if he would mind going to Ford’s Theatre instead of Grover’s Theatre to see Our American Cousin, a comedy about Asa Trenchard, a good-natured rube from Vermont who visits England to claim a family estate. Laura Keene, playing Asa’s kissing cousin (although she was forty at the time), was the star of the show. She owned the rights to the play and had performed in it more than a thousand times. This was to be her last performance in Washington. Lincoln said he didn’t care and would go to Ford’s Theatre if that was what Mary preferred.
After breakfast, Mary sent a note to Dick Ford saying she and Lincoln and the Grants would be happy to accept his invitation. Another note went to Hess thanking him for his invitation. They would not be attending, but their son Tad and his chaperone were happy to go in their stead.
Harry Ford, Dick’s brother and the theatre’s treasurer, was ecstatic. Good Friday was one of the worst box office nights of the year, and he had expected most theatregoers would be at the “illumination” at rival Grover’s Theatre that night. The president’s presence would boost ticket sales. Even better, Mrs. Lincoln said that General Grant and his wife would be accompanying them. The two most famous people in America at his theatre would bring the gawkers out. Harry lost no time blocking off the presidential box seats on the cardboard seating plan posted in the ticket window. In the margin he wrote, “President and his party will be at the theatre tonight.” Then he dashed off a note to the newspapers announcing their attendance in time for the afternoon edition.
That same morning, John breakfasted unusually early at his hotel with Lucy Hale,3 then he strolled over to Booker and Stewart’s barbershop on E Street around 9:00 a.m. to get a shave and haircut. On the way he met David Herold, Michael O’Laughlen, and two other men. John had sent word to his gang to meet him there but didn’t say why.
John was always vain about his personal appearance. “In his leisure, he liked to stand in front of the Theatre [Ford’s], twirling his mustache and frankly exhibiting himself,” said Joseph Hazelton, Ford’s Theatre’s program boy.4 It was especially important to look dashing that day. History would remember him not just for what he did but how he looked when he did it.
Charlie Wood had been a barber in Baltimore before moving to Washington and had cut John’s hair when he was a boy. Wood had just returned from cutting Secretary of State William H. Seward’s hair at his home. Seward was bedridden, having been injured in a carriage accident several days before. John slid into Wood’s chair. Wood lathered and shaved his face and sculpted his distinctive horseshoe mustache. That done, he sprinkled John’s black, curly hair with tonic and trimmed it. Wood recalled that John seemed to be in an upbeat mood.5
Telling his accomplices to wait in the barbershop for a while, John hastened over to Grover’s Theatre to make sure Lincoln was coming that night. Outside the theatre Helen Moss and her sister-in-law Julia Hess, the manager’s wife, were chatting. Both looked downcast. What was wrong, he asked? Helen Moss told him a messenger from the White House had just left a note that the Lincolns wouldn’t be there that night.6
John was crestfallen. He couldn’t believe what Helen Moss had just told him. He burst into Hess’s office to make sure.
Helen Moss wasn’t wrong. Lincoln would not be there that night. John was downhearted. Fate was again conspiring against him. Outside Grover’s Theatre, John got into a heated argument about the war with George Wren and a number of other actors loitering about after that morning’s rehearsal. Wren thought John had been drinking. It wasn’t liquor that was roiling John; it was frustration.7
John trudged back to the barbershop, told his gang to go about their business, and drifted back to his hotel. When he came in, Henry Merrick, the hotel clerk, thought John looked unusually pale.8
Disheartened, his dream of lasting fame now dashed forever, John brooded in his room until before noon then strolled over to Ford’s Theatre, five blocks away, to collect his mail. Providing a mailing address was one of the courtesies Ford’s Theatre provided for actors. Spotting the dapper actor coming down the street, carrying his gold-handled cane and faultlessly dressed in a loose hanging cape and his gray Inverness overcoat with a chinchilla collar and deep sleeves, Harry Ford remarked to a man standing beside him, “Here comes the handsomest man in America.”9
As he was picking up his letters at the box office, John noticed the diagram of the theatre’s floorplan through the ticket window and Harry Ford’s penciled comment in the margin that Lincoln and his party would be at the theatre that night.10
“Is the old scoundrel going to be here tonight?” he asked Harry.
Ford told him he shouldn’t talk that way about the president. And yes, Lincoln was coming to see the show that evening along with General Grant and his wife. In fact, stagehands were at that very moment removing the partition between boxes seven and eight on the second floor “Dress Circle” to create a single, larger presidential box for the Lincolns and their guests.
John’s mind was spinning. As he sat down on the front steps to read his mail, he realized here was the golden opportunity he’d been hoping for. Even better, it was a chance to kill not just Lincoln but Grant as well.
Lost in thought, he left the theatre and walked toward Pennsylvania Avenue. On the way he bumped into an old friend, John F. Coyle, editor of the Washington National Intelligencer. As the two men shook hands, John casually asked Coyle, “What would be the result if someone would put Lincoln and the cabinet out of the way?”
“We don’t have any Brutuses in these days,” Coyle chuckled.
John chuckled in return, said goodbye, and went on his way.11
As he continued walking, John realized he might be able to decapitate the whole federal government by also eliminating Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward as well. The ensuing chaos would give the South a chance to regroup and survive.12 As long as General Joe Johnston was still viable in North Carolina, John believed the Confederacy was not doomed. He left word for what remained of his gang to meet him at 8:00 p.m. in Lewis Powell’s room at the Herndon House.
An hour or two later John returned to Ford’s Theatre to reconnoiter the upstairs presidential box. John Maddox, Ford’s Theatre property manager, saw him approaching and invited him to go next door for drinks at Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon. John declined at first, saying he had a pain in his heart. Then he abruptly changed his mind.13 Later that same day, Bill Ferguson would also ask him to go with him for drinks. Again, John declined at first, claiming “a touch of pleurisy”14 was giving him chest pain. Then, as before, he changed his mind.
After drinking with Maddox, John returned to Ford’s Theatre, broke off a wooden piece from one of the musician’s stands in the orchestra, and went up the stairs to the presidential box. If anyone saw him, they didn’t think anything of his being there. He was just one of the actors and a friend of the manager’s.
John was very familiar with the layout of the presidential box. He had sat in the box himself to watch plays at Ford’s Theatre when it was not otherwise occupied.
The entrance to the presidential box was through a ten-foot-long by four-foot-wide vestibule. John knew that when the door to the vestibule was locked, no one would be able to enter the box. But the lock on the door had been broken for some time. Once inside the vestibule, he whittled a notch in the wall behind the door and jammed in the wooden bar to make sure it would keep the door from opening once he was inside. John planned to escape by jumping over the balustrade at the front of the box. It was nine feet above the stage,15 but he had made those kinds of leaps before.
Satisfied, he removed the bar, scooped up the scrapings from the floor, and placed the bar behind the door. Walking briskly, John headed over to the Kirkwood House where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying. Hours earlier, John had told George Atzerodt to register at the same hotel.
John had had a passing acquaintance with Johnson when Johnson was governor of Tennessee. They had even kept two sisters as mistresses and been seen carousing together. He asked the clerk at the front desk if Johnson was in. Was John calling on Johnson just to make sure he was still at the Kirkwood House? Possibly it was also to ask Johnson for a pass to cross military lines so that he could make his escape without being unduly questioned at checkpoints. He would tell Johnson he wanted to lease a theatre in the South. Whatever his reasons, before leaving John left a note for Johnson: “Don’t wish to disturb you; are you at home?”16 It was a meaningless message. The clerk had just told him Johnson wasn’t “at home.” It is just one more enigma about the assassination that keeps historians scratching their heads.
Next he went to Mary Surratt’s boarding house on H Street. Once John Surratt, Mary’s son, became an integral member of John’s gang, John had become a regular visitor at the Surratt’s. In no time at all, he had become quite friendly with Mary, a homely widow of about forty-five. Rich or poor, young or old, homely or beautiful, there was no woman John failed to charm. Louis Weichmann, a boarder at Mary Surratt’s boarding house, thought Mary and her daughter Ann were rivals for John’s attention. Mary called John “my Pet.” In a letter he wrote to his cousin Belle Seaman, John Surratt described how excited his mother and sister Anna became when John Booth came to the house. You wouldn’t believe, John wrote, the “scamperings . . . such brushing and fixing.”17
In March, when John was still plotting to kidnap Lincoln, he sent John Surratt, Atzerodt, and Herold to Mary Surratt’s tavern in Surrattsville to cache two Spencer carbines, ammunition, and supplies for when they would be needed. The afternoon of the assassination, he asked Mary to take a parcel for him to her tavern for someone to pick up later that night.
No woman said no to John. Mary Surratt was no exception. John’s photograph with the word “Booth” written in pencil on the back of it was among the things she had hidden in her room when she was later taken into custody. Whether Mary knew there were binoculars inside the package, or what John was planning, is another detail historians still argue about. As she handed the package to John Lloyd, the man to whom she had rented the tavern, she told him to have it and the “shooting irons” ready later that night.18
When General Grant returned from his ride with Lincoln and Mary on Thursday night to see the city-wide illuminations, he told his wife Julia that Lincoln had invited them to go to the theatre on Friday. Still smarting from an earlier quarrel with Mary, Julia didn’t want anything to do with Mary. Lincoln was Grant’s superior, but Julia was his wife. Grant had been married long enough to know his priorities. He told Lincoln the day he hadn’t known Julia had already made plans to visit their daughter in New Jersey and they would be leaving on the four o’clock train.19
When Lincoln informed Mary that the Grants would not be going with them, Mary sent a last-minute invitation to Clara H. Harris and her fiancé Major Henry Reed Rathbone, asking them if they’d like to go. Clara Harris was the daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris, a Lincoln family friend. She and Rathbone had both been guests at Lincoln’s reception in Albany, New York, in 1861 on his way to his inauguration. Clara and Rathbone were both happy to go with the Lincolns the night of the fourteenth.
After leaving Mary Surratt’s, John reserved a horse for the day at James Pumphrey’s stable on C Street. Around 3:00 p.m., Jim Ferguson saw John on his horse talking to John Mathews, one of Ford’s Theatre’s stock actors. Mathews was an old friend of John’s. They had known each other since they were boys growing up in Baltimore. They had had a falling-out when John tried to recruit Mathews for his kidnapping plan and Mathews refused, but John had gotten over his anger and had visited with him in his room at the Petersen House, across the street from Ford’s Theatre. Ironically, it was the same room to which Lincoln would be taken after he was shot. The bed on which John rested when he visited Mathews was the same bed on which Lincoln would die.20
While they were talking, Mathews looked up and noticed Grant and his driver riding by in an open carriage on their way to the train station.
“Why, Johnny,” he motioned to John, “there goes Grant. I thought he was to be coming to the theater this evening with the President.”
John was just as surprised. “Where?” he exclaimed.
Mathews pointed to the barouche hurrying by. John stared for a second, squeezed Mathews’s hand in a farewell shake, and spurred his horse into a gallop to overtake the barouche.21 Passing the carriage, John wheeled his horse back in the opposite direction to make sure it was Grant speeding by. Seeing him leaving, John must have thought that once again his plans would come to naught. If Grant were not going to be at the theatre that night, Lincoln might likewise have changed his mind.
Gloomily John trotted back to Ford’s Theatre and stabled his horse at a small private stable he had leased behind the theater. Anxious for any word about Lincoln, he trekked over to Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon next door to Ford’s Theatre. He had to find out if Lincoln had also cancelled. Not hearing anything about a cancellation, he inwardly drew a breath of relief. Grant had got away. He still had Lincoln.
Around 5:00 p.m., Lincoln and Mary took their usual buggy ride together through the city, escorted by two cavalrymen. Mary had not seen him so lighthearted in years. He even seemed “playful” to her.
“Dear Husband,” she leaned toward him, “You almost startle me with your great cheerfulness.”
“Well I may feel so Mary,” Lincoln answered, “I consider this day, the war has come to a close.”22
They talked about what they would do after his term in office was over. He had saved some money, he said, but not enough to support them. “We will go back to Illinois, and I will open a law-office at Springfield or Chicago and practice law, and least do enough to help give us a livelihood.”23
After he left Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon, John returned to his room at the National Hotel, changed into a black wool overcoat, black inner jacket, dark riding breeches, and knee-high black leather boots, donned his black slouch hat, and loaded his derringer.
John’s derringer was a muzzle-loaded, .44 caliber, single-shot weapon. Less than four inches long, it only weighed a half pound and fit easily inside his coat pocket. A revolver could fire up to six times without having to reload, but a single shot was all he would need when he entered the presidential box. As far as John knew, Lincoln and his wife would be the only ones in the box. John slipped the gun into one of his coat pockets and a Bowie knife into another. The knife was just in case someone tried to interfere with his escape. Its blade had “Liberty” and “America” and “The Land of the Free” stamped into it.
John did not leave much else in the hotel. Charging through rural Maryland and Virginia, he would have little use or room for the personal belongings he left behind. Whether it was deliberate or merely carelessness, he didn’t bother destroying the letter Samuel Arnold had written him a month before, warning him to check with Richmond before going ahead with kidnapping Lincoln. There was also another mysterious letter in the trunk from an unidentified woman, pleading for him not to go ahead with his dangerous plan.24
Around 7:00 p.m., John came down from his room and tossed his keys to George Bunker, the night clerk at the National Hotel. Just before he left he asked Bunker if he was going to the theatre that night. Before he could answer, John added, “You should. There will be some fine acting there tonight!”25
A half hour later, John dropped in at Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon again and had a drink with Ford’s Theatre’s orchestra leader Bill Withers. As they were talking about actors they knew, Withers joked that John would never be as great as his father. “An inscrutable smile flitted across his face,” said Withers. “When I leave the stage,” John replied, “I will be the most talked about man in America.” Withers didn’t give it much thought at the time. Later he remembered it with a shock.26
John rendezvoused with Atzerodt, Paine, and Herold in Powell’s room at the Herndon House around 8:00 p.m.27 They had no prior inkling of what he was planning. He would kill Lincoln, Powell was assigned to kill Secretary of State Seward, Atzerodt was assigned to kill Vice President Johnson, and Herold was to show Powell the way to Seward’s house. John told them to time their assassinations for about 10:15 p.m. to coincide with his killing Lincoln.
At 7:00 p.m., William Crook, Lincoln’s usual body guard at the White House was still at his post. He was supposed to be relieved at 4:00 p.m. When his relief, John Parker, arrived, Crook told him there would be two others in the president’s coach that night. He suggested Parker get to the theatre about fifteen minutes ahead of the presidential party.
The Lincolns left the White House around 8:15 p.m. It was a chilly night. A damp heavy fog clogged the air. The streets were still rutted and muddy from the Spring thaw. The Lincolns’ coachman drove them to Fifteenth and H Streets and picked up Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone. Parker met them when they arrived at the theatre a little after 9:00 p.m.
A large gas lamp in front of the theatre lit the entrance. The Lincolns and their guests stepped onto a wide wooden platform so that they wouldn’t muddy their shoes.
Usher James O’Brien led the party up the winding staircase to the second-floor dress circle. Lincoln tried to slip into the presidential box unnoticed. As he edged along the outer wall to the vestibule, his six-foot-four-inch height, long black wool coat, and stovepipe hat were instantly recognizable. Everyone rose and cheered.
Lincoln bowed in acknowledgment and continued into the box. As he and the others passed through the vestibule, no one noticed the notch in the wall or the bar on the floor behind the door. They walked to the end of the vestibule and through the door to box eight, into the expanded presidential box. Parker followed. His duties were to escort the president to and from wherever he went, not remain the rest of the time with him. Parker left after the Lincolns and their guests were seated.28
Lincoln gravitated to a velvet-covered rocker at the left-hand corner of the box behind one of the two yellow curtains at either end of the box. A gas-lit chandelier hanging from the ceiling provided dim light inside. Except to the actors on stage and people in the audience opposite the presidential box on the floor below, Lincoln was hidden from sight unless he leaned forward over the railing. Mary sat in a chair next to him. Clara Harris sat on the far side of the box and Major Rathbone sat behind her with his back to the door John planned to enter.
At 10:00 p.m. Powell and Herold reined in their horses outside Secretary of State Seward’s house facing Lafayette Park. Seward was in bed, suffering from a concussion and broken bones after being thrown from his carriage. Powell forced his way into the house and managed to slash the bedridden Seward in the face with a knife and injure one of Seward’s sons before being stopped by other members of the household.29 Powell fought them off and bolted for the front door. Blind with rage, he stabbed a messenger who had just arrived and ran out of the house, looking for Davy Herold. Herold was not there. He had heard the screams from inside the house, panicked, and run off, leaving Powell, who was unfamiliar with Washington, on his own.
Everyone Powell injured at Seward’s house would recover.
Around the same time that Powell was knocking on the door of the Seward house, George Atzerodt was at the Kirkwood House to kill Vice President Johnson. Neither Powell nor Atzerodt would have known where to find their quarry if John hadn’t told them where they would be and when they would be there.
Seward’s whereabouts were no problem. John knew Seward would be at home from reading the news about his accident. Just to be sure, he had seduced the Seward’s chambermaid, Margaret Coleman, to pump her for information about which room was Seward’s.30
John had made sure of Johnson’s whereabouts by stopping at the hotel earlier that day and verifying that he was still there. The note John left for Johnson, later presented at the conspiracy trial—“I do not wish to disturb you, are you at home?”—has long perplexed historians. Why would John have written such a note if the desk clerk told him Johnson wasn’t in? Just as perplexing is a version of the note—not presented at the trial—that the New York Tribune published on April 16, 1865: “I do not wish to disturb you, but would be glad to have an interview.”
Did John come back for that interview and briefly meet with Johnson?31 If so, that second message and their meeting may have been suppressed so as not to implicate Johnson in the assassination.32 In return for the favor of a pass, John could have offered Johnson his favorite company. “Paying for political string pulling with sexual favors, has long been a second currency in Washington.”33
John was well aware of Johnson’s weakness for women. They had caroused together in Nashville before Johnson became vice president with Johnson’s mistress and her sister.34 John would not have to look very hard for someone to be with Johnson that night. Ella Starr was so much in love with him she had told him she would do “anything that pleases you.”35 If he told her he owed Johnson a favor and asked her to entertain him for the night, she would have gone along, guaranteeing that Johnson would be in his room when Azterodt came by. And by the way, could she make sure the door to his room was open?
None of that is known for certain. But it accounts for what later happened. What is known is that when Atzerodt made his way to the hotel, the door to Johnson’s room was ajar, but he lost his nerve and fled, closing the door.
About a half hour later, former Wisconsin Governor Leonard Farwell pounded on Johnson’s door. He had raced to the Kirkwood House from Ford’s Theatre with the news that Lincoln had just been shot. Farwell waited for Johnson to open the door, but Johnson didn’t answer. Farwell pounded again and yelled to Johnson, “If you are in this room, I must see you!”36 Finally, Johnson opened the door.
Johnson may not have answered the door right away if Ella was with him.
John had acted in Our American Cousin twelve times, not including rehearsals. He knew all the lines by heart. He also knew the joke that would send the audience laughing so loud that the bark of a gunshot would be muffled.
Around 9:30 p.m., John left Peter Taltavull’s Star Saloon and walked around to the back of the theatre to the stable where he left his horse. He saddled the mare, put on his spurs, walked the horse over to the back entrance of Ford’s Theatre, and shouted for stagehand Ned Spangler to come hold the horse for him. Spangler told John he couldn’t, as he was needed inside to change scenery. He called to “Peanut John,” the boy selling peanuts in the theater, to come out and handed him the reins, saying John would soon come back for the horse.
Around ten o’clock in the evening, John entered the theatre, nodded to John Buckingham, the doorkeeper, listened in the lobby for a few moments to what the actors on stage were saying, and left. He came and went several more times before going upstairs to the Dress Circle. Buckingham later claimed he heard John humming to himself on his way up.37
Just as the Lincolns had about an hour earlier, John walked along the rear wall toward the other side of the theatre. Picking his way around the people who had moved their chairs into the aisle to better see the stage, he made his way toward the vestibule and the presidential box. Several people noticed him. Some said they saw him hand someone sitting outside the vestibule a card before entering. If he did, that person has never been identified.
Once inside the vestibule, John slid the wooden bar into the notch he had made earlier so that no one would be able to intrude. Then he squinted through a hole he had made that afternoon in the door to box seven. Although the gaslight inside had been turned down, John could still see Lincoln silhouetted in a rocking chair on the far left and Mary beside him. Clara Harris and Major Rathbone were out of his line of vision.
John nudged the door to box eight ajar and listened. It was nearing the moment when actress Helen Muzzy, as the scheming Mrs. Mountchessington, berates bumpkin Trenchard, played by Harry Hawk, for not knowing “the manners of good society.” John waited for Harry Hawk to deliver his gut-busting comeback line:
“Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal-you sockdologizing old mantrap!” Today no one laughs when by rare chance someone says sockdologizing, but in John’s day it was a euphemism for an emasculating woman.
John eased the door open a second or two before the fateful line to fire at the crescendo of laughter. But he missed his cue and fired just as the laughter began to fade. Everyone in the audience heard the shot; no one knew what to think. The actors and stagehands knew there wasn’t any gunshot in the play. Something was wrong.
John’s timing was off because he hadn’t expected anyone else to be in the box other than Lincoln and Mary. When he eased the door open, expecting to creep up behind Lincoln, he saw a man in the sofa sitting with his back to him. He was momentarily flummoxed. Who else was in the room? Caught off guard, he hesitated. Instead of firing within inches of Lincoln’s head, John fired from just inside the door, about five feet from Lincoln, seconds later than intended.
At the very moment John fired, Lincoln was leaning over the balustrade and looking down to the left at someone in the audience.38 There had been no time to aim. Even if he had, from a distance of five feet, a derringer is an inaccurate weapon because of the gun’s recoil. In Columbus, Georgia, before he was shot in the thigh, he had missed a mark in the wall five feet away firing a derringer.
Leaning over the rail, Lincoln’s head was a very small target. If John had been aiming at Lincoln’s head, he likely would have missed because of the gun’s recoil. Lincoln’s back was a much larger target for a man hurrying his shot. Instead of hitting Lincoln in the back, the recoil jerked the derringer upward, sending the bullet slamming into the back of Lincoln’s head. It entered behind his left ear at 450 feet per second, ploughed seven inches into his brain, and rendered him senseless.39
Jim Ferguson, the only one in the audience looking up at the presidential box at the moment of the assassination, saw Lincoln leaning over the bannister seconds before the shot. Ferguson could not see into the box because of the dim light inside, but he saw the “flash of a pistol.” The flash, he said, didn’t come from behind Lincoln. It came from “right back in the box.”40
Rathbone didn’t see the shot. He heard it from behind him. Startled, he jumped up and turned toward the assassin. A dense cloud of gun smoke momentarily obstructed his view of the assassin, but not completely. Rathbone lunged at the gunman.
John flung his now useless gun away and pivoted toward his attacker, slashing him with his dagger. Rathbone instinctively raised his arm to ward off the blow. The knife cut through Rathbone’s jacket, slicing into his arm between his elbow and shoulder, barely missing the brachial artery.
John dashed to the balustrade. The nine-foot jump onto the stage was formidable, but John had made similar leaps before. This time he was distracted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rathbone coming at him. As he leaped one of his spurs caught in the flag draping the balustrade, and he crashed off balance onto the stage, breaking the fibula bone in his leg above the ankle. Picking himself up, still defiant, he shouted, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (“Thus Always To Tyrants,” Virginia’s state motto), and ran offstage, brandishing his knife to ward off anyone who tried to stop him.
Harry Hawk, alone on stage, was directly in John’s path. “I did simply what any other man would have done,” he later related to his father, “I ran.”41
It took a few moments for the audience to realize what had happened. “There will never be anything like it on earth,” actress Helen Truman recalled. “The shouts, groans, curses, smashing of seats, screams of women, shuffling of feet and cries of terror created a pandemonium that throughout all the ages will stand out in my memory as the hell of hells.”42
Call boy Billy Ferguson was just gathering some books that he was supposed to place on a desk for the next scene when he heard the shot. Moments later he heard John crashing onto the stage. He ran into the passageway and was standing next to Laura Keene as John sped by between them, shoving them apart. John passed so close to Ferguson he could feel John’s breath on his face.43
Orchestra leader William Withers was standing further back in the three-foot-wide passageway with actress Jeannie Gourlay when John came toward them, screaming for them to get out of the way. Gourlay was too slow. John pushed her back with one arm and slashed out at Withers, cutting a gash through the left side of Withers’s coat, but not deep enough to wound him. The hapless Withers was too frightened to get out of the way. John slashed again, this time cutting him in the shoulder and neck. “Damn you,” John grunted and shoved Withers sprawling to the floor.44
With no one else in the way John sped toward the unlocked rear door into Baptist Alley. Without a word, he struck Peanut John, who was holding his horse’s reins, with the butt of his knife to get him out of the way then kicked him when the boy didn’t move fast enough. Despite his broken leg, he mounted his horse and galloped off through Washington toward the Navy Yard Bridge. John was confident that he would be safe once he was across the Anacostia River into Maryland and Prince George’s County. Only one man in that county had voted for Lincoln in the 1860 election.45
Ordered by an army sentry to halt and explain what he was doing out after the 9:00 p.m. curfew, John kept calm. Though he was feeling the pain in his leg, he managed not to grimace. With all the aplomb he could muster, he said he had been in Washington on an errand and was just finishing his business. He hadn’t known about the curfew he said. Without thinking, he told the sentry his name was John Wilkes Booth and that he was heading for Beantown in southern Maryland. It was a fatal mistake. His pursuers would now be able to track him.
Ten minutes later David Herold crossed the same bridge. Despite everyone’s opinion of him as being “dull,” Herold didn’t give the sentry his real name or state where he was going. Instead he said his name was Smith and he was heading for White Plains, Maryland.
Herold was the only other member of the gang to make it out of Washington. Powell and Atzerodt were later arrested. John Surratt was in Elmira, New York, on another mission and escaped to Canada before he could be apprehended.46 Mary Surratt and Ned Spangler, who were suspected of helping John escape, were taken into custody and later charged as conspirators, as were Arnold and O’Laughlen.
The conspirators were not the only ones to be arrested. Everyone else at Ford’s Theatre, actors as well as stagehands, was suspected of collusion in the assassination and arrested. Even though he was nowhere near Washington at the time, John T. Ford was also arrested and thrown in jail, as were his brothers Harry and Dick Ford. Laura Keene and Harry Hawk were arrested, given bail and passes to leave Washington, and then rearrested in Harrisburg. Carpenter Edmund Spangler was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hard labor on the flimsiest suspicion of complicity.