BACK AT FORD’S THEATRE THE MANHUNT FOR BOOTH ALMOST ended before it began when one man, an army major and lawyer named Joseph B. Stewart, rose from his front-row seat to pursue the assassin. Stewart, long-limbed at six foot five, and rumored to be the tallest man in Washington, decided to leap from the first row across the orchestra pit to the stage. But the wide opening served as Booth’s moat, sealing off any pursuit by the audience. Stewart slipped before he could make his leap. It was too far. He regained his balance and then, in an acrobatic display, danced across the pit by tiptoeing along the chair tops. In a few moments he reached the stage and followed Booth into the wings. Within days, newspaper woodcuts immortalized Stewart as the solitary audience member who thought of chasing after Booth.
Booth continued rushing through the wings and down the passageway leading to the back door that opened to Baptist Alley. A few more seconds, and he would be in the saddle. But he knew he wouldn’t be safe even then. Alert audience members from the rear of the theatre, guessing that the assassin would head for the alley, might sprint out onto Tenth Street to cut off his escape. At this moment, as Booth reached for the back door, interceptors might be running right on Tenth, then right again on F, to cut him off at the mouth of F and Baptist Alley. Even worse, someone might have already mounted a horse to chase him down.
Booth may have been focused on the alley, but the more immediate danger lay behind him, closing fast. Stewart, following him into the wings and down the passageway, was shortening the distance between them with every stride.
Booth prayed that Ned Spangler or John Peanut stood on the other side of that door, still holding his horse. If either one had tired of holding the animal and taken it back to the actor’s stable a few yards down the alley, or had tied her off behind the theatre, only to have her break free, Booth was doomed. He burst through the alley door, sucked his lungs full of fresh, spring night air, and slammed it shut behind him. Mrs. Anderson saw him run out "with something in his hand glittering." Where was the bay mare? She wasn’t where he left her. Was Booth trapped, about to suffer the same fate as Shakespeare’s Richard III—abandoned on enemy ground without his steed? But when Booth turned his head to the right he saw salvation: his horse, standing quietly in the alley, just a few steps away. In a split second Booth’s eyes raced the length of the leather reins, following them into the hands of a man reclining on the wood carpenter’s bench near Ford’s back wall. It was John Peanut! "Give me my horse, boy!" Booth commanded as he lunged for the animal. There was no wood stepping box nearby to elevate him to the stirrups. With brute strength, he yanked himself onto the black-legged bay mare with a white star on her forehead and grabbed the reins. John Peanut rose to surrender them. As thanks, Booth, still clutching his dagger stained with Major Rathbone’s blood, popped Peanut in the head with the pommel, then kicked the youth away hard with his boot heel. Better that than a cut to the throat of the harmless Peanut. Booth balanced himself in the saddle, and at that moment Stewart swung open the theatre door and saw Booth about to gallop away.
From the ground Stewart looked up and saw the assassin, illuminated by the rising moon. Stewart reached for the reins, but Booth, an experienced rider, spurred and pulled the horse in a tight, quick circle away from Stewart. The horse really could move like a cat. Stewart tried for the reins again, but once more Booth outmaneuvered him from the saddle. Stomping hooves pounded the ground until Booth finally broke free, settled low, and kicked the bay horse hard. She exploded into a gallop that Booth steered down the alley, then guided left toward F Street, vanishing from sight.
Mary Anderson, standing no more than twenty-five feet away, witnessed the assassin’s escape: “He had come out of the theatre-door so quick, that it seemed like as if he had but touched the horse, and it was gone in a flash of lightning.” Mary Ann Turner, her next-door neighbor, heard the commotion but wasn’t quick enough to witness Booth’s escape: “I only heard the horse going very rapidly out of the alley; and I ran immediately to my door and opened it, but he was gone.”
With F Street coming up fast, Booth looked ahead to the alley’s mouth. Had his pursuers reached it before him? No one blocked his way. He emerged onto F Street and reined his mount hard to the right. No one was chasing him. Booth galloped east down F Street. He had escaped from Ford’s Theatre—barely. But now he faced an even more difficult challenge. Could he escape from Washington, war capital of the Union, its streets filled with thousands of soldiers and loyal citizens, all there to celebrate the end of the Civil War?
By now, back in the alley, a number of people had poured out the door in pursuit of the assassin. “Which way did he go?” they asked Mrs. Anderson. “Which way did he go?” She asked a man what was the matter. “The president was shot,” he answered. “Why, who shot him?” “The man who went out on that horse: did you see him?”
A block down F and to his right, Booth rode past the Herndon House, where just two hours ago he had met with his gang and dreamed of this moment. As Booth continued another block east on F he approached two of Washington’s grandest landmarks. To his left he saw the Patent Office, his dark figure silhouetted by the white glow of the huge marble building that was the scene of Walt Whitman’s ministrations to wounded soldiers and, just six weeks ago, Lincoln’s inaugural ball. To Booth’s right, he saw the massive marble pile of the Post Office, where just ten hours ago Harry Clay Ford picked up the letter that he handed to the actor on the front step of the theatre. Gaslight bounced off the slick, polished walls of both buildings and bathed Booth in a searching glow. Past the buildings in seconds, Booth galloped right and cut across Judiciary Square to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Few people saw him as he fled through downtown Washington. That was understandable, however, because Booth rode away from the celebrating crowds that clogged the upper avenue. He rode east, then southeast, in the opposite direction from the throng, aiming for Capitol Hill. And what interest was one man on a horse to thousands of jubilant men? Booth crossed the Capitol grounds, riding beneath the shadow of the great dome, completed in time for Lincoln’s second inauguration. Booth then cut over to the southeast part of Pennsylvania Avenue. He galloped on to Eleventh Street and turned right, swinging south in the direction of the Navy Yard Bridge that led out of Washington and into Maryland. One thought possessed him. Could he reach that bridge and cross the Potomac’s eastern branch (now the Anacostia) before pursuers, or news of the assassination, caught up with him? Luck was with him that night. His hard riding kept him ahead of the news. As he neared the river he reined his horse and slowed to a trot. He saw guards ahead. Be natural, he instinctively thought. Don’t arouse suspicion.
sERGEANT SILAS T. COBB WAS STANDING WATCH AT THE Washington side of the bridgehead. He’d been there since sunset and was on duty until 1:00 A.M. Looking off into the distance, he saw an approaching rider. Cobb knew his orders: allow no one to cross the bridge after dark. Cobb and the handful of men under his command prepared to challenge the rider. Booth, with the flair only a master thespian could muster under such duress, prepared for an impromptu performance—talking his way across the bridge. The time was between 10:35 and 10:45 P.M.
“Who goes there?” Cobb challenged.
“A friend,” the actor replied. Perhaps Cobb would recognize the stage star and wave him across with a smile, his horse not even breaking stride. No such luck.
“Where are you from?”
“From the city,” Booth said vaguely.
Cobb asked his destination.
“I am going down home, down in Charles County.”
The sergeant noticed that the horse’s coat was wet and had been ridden hard. He studied Booth’s features: “Clear white skin … his hands were very white and he had no gloves on … [he] seemed to be gentlemanly in his address and style and appearance.” Cobb also noted that while Booth carried himself nonchalantly, he seemed to possess reserves of muscular power. Cobb continued to press the matter, asking Booth if he knew that the bridge leaving Washington closed at 9:00 P.M.
The actor claimed he didn’t and said he’d chosen a late start on purpose because “it is a dark road ahead and I thought if I waited a spell I would have the moon.”
Cobb pondered for a moment. Booth was at his wit’s end. Every second was precious, and this fool was wasting time with his stupid questions. Then Cobb agreed reluctantly to allow Booth to pass.
Booth adopted a reassuring, theatrical voice to calm the dutiful sergeant: “Hell, I guess there’ll be no trouble about that.”
Booth gave his horse a gentle tap with the spurs. Then Cobb noticed something unusual. Unlike its cool and collected rider, the horse was restive and nervous, so much that Booth had to rein her in so that she would walk, and not gallop, across the bridge. Cobb wondered why. Booth had handled Cobb perfectly. Except for two things. When the sergeant asked his name he responded, inexplicably, “Booth.” And when Cobb asked where he was going, Booth answered, “Beantown.”
This was a lucky moment for the assassin. If Cobb denied him passage, he had no alternate route of escape. He could not turn back to the city. He had to cross the river now, at this spot, into Maryland. Open, isolated country beckoned him from the other side of the bridge. He would find friends there. He had to cross. Armed with only a knife, Booth could never have fought his way across. Had he tried, the sergeant and his sentinels would have shot him out of his saddle, and the manhunt would have ended that night, less than an hour after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
Once over the bridge, Booth turned to see if his cat’s-paws—David Herold, Lewis Powell, or George Atzerodt—followed in the distance. This was their route, too. Booth saw no one, neither conspirators nor pursuers, behind him, but as he gazed across the river he saw a beautiful scene. The moon, two days past full, rose high over Washington, and under its cool, lunar light the great dome glowed like a twin moon descended upon the earth.
Like Lot’s wife, who paused, turned, and dared look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Booth could see the sleeping city from which he fled, and he knew it would awaken soon and hear of the destruction he had wrought. He had done it. And he had escaped.
BOOTH AND LEWIS POWELL HAD LEFT BEHIND SO MUCH blood. Sergeant Robinson and Fanny Seward worked feverishly to save the secretary of state’s life. Seward had more wounds than the sergeant had hands, and Robinson had to teach Fanny how to stanch the flow of blood with cloths and water. “I did not know what should be done,” she said. “Robinson told me everything.” Sprawled across sheets sheared by Powell’s knife, she knelt beside her father and, with all of her strength, pressed the ersatz bandages tightly against the cuts. Robinson played doctor and examined Seward’s body for additional wounds. Punctures to the lungs, stomach, or heart? No. Any nicked or severed arteries? No. If they could stop the bleeding and Seward could just hold on until Dr. Verdi, Dr. Norris, or Surgeon General Barnes arrived, he might live.
Within minutes messengers returned with the doctors, who relieved Fanny and Robinson. Their examination confirmed it. Despite their hideous appearance, the wounds were not fatal. Seward—who to Dr. Verdi looked like “an exsanguinated corpse”—would live. Verdi turned to the family and spoke: “I congratulate you all that the wounds are not mortal.” Robinson finally allowed himself to be treated by the doctors. He, too, would live, along with Gus Seward and Hansell. But Powell had inflicted a grievous and potentially fatal wound upon Frederick Seward. The Whitney revolver fractured his skull and exposed his brain. Fred wandered about the house like a zombie, babbling the same phrase, “It is … it is,” over and over unable to complete the thought, while touching the back of his head with his finger. Fred smiled at Dr. Verdi and seemed to recognize him.
Secretary of State William H. Seward and daughter Fanny.
Verdi, interpreting Fred’s hand gesture, asked: “You want to know whether your skull is broken or not?”
“Yes,” Fred replied.
Within half an hour Fred passed out for fifteen or twenty minutes, then woke up. Verdi and others helped him to bed, where he passed out again. When he awakened three days later, he had been unconscious for sixty hours. But he would live.
As the evening wore on, Fanny became increasingly fearful that Powell might return, or other assassins might be lurking in the house. Her mother ordered her not to wander off alone in the big mansion, but Fanny disobeyed and, prowling from room to room, searched alone—until others joined her—for concealed assassins. Finding none, she returned to her father’s bed and sat beside him. Weakly, Seward lifted his left arm and opened a soothing hand to Fanny to calm and reassure her. His good, brave girl had done well this night.
The house became quiet again. Everywhere she looked Fanny saw signs of the horror that she and her family had just survived. “All the white woodwork of the entry was covered with great dashes of blood,” she wrote in her diary, “the drugget on the stairs was sprinkled with it, all the way down to the floor below … on the inner side of the door of father’s room there was, in blood, the distinct impression of a hand … blood, blood, my thoughts seem drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor … the bed had been covered with blood—the blankets and sheets chopped with several blows of the knife.” Then she looked at herself: her hands, her arms, her long pretty dress, all drenched in blood. She could not stop screaming.
Sergeant Robinson, too, could not forget the blood, and later he sought a bizarre, gruesome relic of the battle that night. Might he, the fearless nurse queried the secretary of war, have the knife that Powell used to stab him and Secretary Seward? Stanton granted the unusual request:
War Department/Bureau of Military Justice, Washington, D.C., July 10th, 1866. Sir. Your application for the knife used by Payne [one of Powell’s pseudonyms], in his attempt to assassinate the Honorable William H. Seward, Secretary of State of the United States, at Washington D.C. on the night of the 14th of April 1865, having been referred to the Secretary of War, has been by him approved, and I am directed by him to comply with your request. Your conduct on the occasion mentioned is now a matter of history, and none will hereafter doubt but that by your self possession and courage in grappling with the assassin, you contributed largely to saving the life of the Secretary of State, at the extreme hazard of your own—a most meritorious public service, nobly rendered, and of which the weapon now committed to your keeping will be an enduring memento. Very respectfully, Your obedient Servt. J. Holt. Judge Advocate General.
Congress went one step further and proffered a generous and more conventional award: a gold medal was struck in Robinson’s honor, and he was given $5,000 in cash. The obverse of the medal included a bust portrait of Robinson’s profile in high relief, and the legend: “For his Heroic Conduct on the 14 Day of April 1865. In Saving the Life of Wm. H. Seward.” On the reverse, the engraver froze Robinson and Powell in perpetual combat, the assassin raising the knife high in the air while the sergeant held the striking arm at bay. Behind them, Seward lay helpless in bed, and Powell’s revolver lay broken on the floor.
THE PRESIDENT’S BOX AT FORD’S THEATRE WAS ALSO DRENCHED. in blood
After Booth’s leap to the stage, the women attended to their men. Mary Lincoln turned to her left and stared at the president. He was motionless in the rocker, his head hung low, eyes shut, his chin resting on his chest. He did not return her imploring gaze. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. She touched him; he did not stir. “Father … father!” she shouted into his right ear from just a few inches away. Lincoln did not react. Now frantic, Mary moved closer and tried to push his body into a more upright position. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, chest, and arms, all limp, offered no resistance. Lincoln had no visible wounds. There was no blood on his face or neck. His white linen shirt was unstained. Her touch left no wet, red spots upon her hands. But her loving hands had overlooked the back of his head. Mary Lincoln, terrified, uncomprehending, and by now nearly hysterical, clutched her husband’s body and supported it in a sitting position in the chair.
Clara Harris lifted her eyes from the stage below and looked back into the box. She beheld Rathbone, wild-eyed, staggering, and clutching his upper left arm with his right hand. He could not suppress the copious flow of blood that flooded over his hand, and dripped on the luxurious Turkish carpet. Booth had struck him hard, and the knife had penetrated deep. Clara, who had seen the whole thing, never forgot the forceful swing of Booth’s “practiced and powerful arm.” Superficially, Rathbone’s wound appeared small—just a narrow puncture of the skin near the elbow, no more than about one and a half inches wide, mimicking the dimensions of the blade. But the knife had sliced deep inside the major’s raised, parrying arm, parallel to the bone, and nearly to the shoulder, cutting an artery, nerves, and veins. Most of the damage was beneath the skin. Clara rushed to attend to her fiance’s wound.
Down in the audience, more than fifteen hundred people went wild. Some playgoers climbed to the stage, looked up to the box, and shouted desperate queries to its occupants. “What has happened?” “Is the president alive?” Throughout the theatre hundreds of people turned to friends, spouses, and total strangers, all repeating the same questions: “Has the president been shot?” “Who was that man onstage?” “Was that a knife?” “What did he say?” Some women fainted. Innumerable, half-crazed voices cried out from all corners of the theatre in a frightening chorus of vengeance: “Kill the murderer!”; “Hang him!”; “Shoot him!”; Cut his heart out!”; “Catch him!”; “Don’t let him escape!” None of them realized that the assassin was already out the back door, safe from the reach of their vigilante howls. Like a violent spring storm, the climate inside Ford’s became dark, ugly, and menacing. Under the dim glow of the hissing gaslights, people pushed one another to get to the stage. Others, in a panic to flee, shoved men, women, and children out of the aisles. The voices grew louder until nearly all fifteen hundred of them came together to create an angry roar. This was a mob.
Other voices, these pleading for assistance, not roaring for vengeance, arose from the mob. “Water!” “Has anyone any stimulants?” “Stand back!” “Give him air!” “Is there a doctor in the house?”
In the dress circle, sitting just a few yards from the door to the president’s box, Charles Leale jumped up from his seat. Disregarding the aisles and customary route to the box, he raced there in a direct line, and, like a hurdler gone haywire, staggered and half vaulted over the cane-bottomed chairs obstructing his path as he shouldered his way past dazed playgoers. He joined a number of other men who were trying to get inside the box. But the door was locked.
Inside, Major Rathbone walked toward the sound of the beating fists. The men were pounding on the door like it was a drumhead, but their fists and shoulders could not break it open. They shouted to the occupants, if any of them were still alive, to unlock the door. Rathbone staggered forward, already feeling the effects of blood loss and shock. He cupped the hand of his good arm under the wooden music stand that Booth used to bar the door, and tried to pull it up. It wouldn’t budge. He tried harder, then realized that the harder the men on the other side pushed, the more effective Booth’s device became. It was too thick to snap, so every push created a tighter seal between the door panel and the head of the bar. “For God’s sake open the door,” the voices pleaded. Rathbone shouted through the door to stop pushing—the door was barred. The men obeyed Rathbone’s order and stepped back. Weakening rapidly, Rathbone pulled up with his remaining strength. The music stand popped free and nearly a dozen men rushed inside.
Dr. Leale, not in uniform, announced his rank and profession and stepped ahead of them. Immediately he saw all four occupants. Like an officer under enemy fire, he needed to regain his composure. “Halt!” he commanded himself silently. Do not panic. “Be calm,” he chided himself. Do your duty. Major Rathbone, standing between Leale and Lincoln, beseeched the doctor to treat him first, and as proof of his injury, he ostentatiously used his right hand to hold up his wounded left arm. Leale lifted Rathbone’s chin, peered into his eyes, and, when “an almost instantaneous glance revealed the fact that he was in no immediate danger,” ignored the emotional major and rushed to the president’s side.
Leale approached Mary Lincoln and introduced himself as a United States Army surgeon. Wordlessly, she thrust out her hand, and he grasped it tightly. Then she unleashed a torrent of pitiful pleas: “Oh, Doctor, is he dead? Can he recover? Will you take charge of him? Do what you can for him. Oh, my dear husband.” The doctor assured the first lady that he would do everything possible for her husband. As Mary wept bitterly, Leale released her hand and began his examination.
Lincoln looked dead. His eyes were closed, he was unconscious, and his head had fallen forward. Leale concluded, from Lincoln’s “crouched-down sitting posture,” that if Mary had not held his body upright in the rocking chair, the president would have already tumbled to the floor. Leale took Lincoln’s right radial pulse, but felt no movement of the artery. Just to be sure, Leale and others lifted Lincoln from the rocker and laid him in a recumbent position on the floor. While Leale held the president’s head and shoulders, one of his hands felt a wet spot, invisible to the eye, on the left shoulder of Lincoln’s black frock coat. It was a clot of blood. Leale, remembering Booth’s flashing dagger onstage and noting Rathbone’s severely bleeding wound, assumed that Lincoln had been stabbed. Leale called for a knife. He brought no surgeon’s tools to a social night at the theatre. If Lincoln had been stabbed, how could he suture the wounds without needles and thread? By now several men had joined Rathbone in the box, and hands began fishing wildly in pants pockets until William Kent, a government employee, produced a pocketknife. Leale removed Lincoln’s custom-made, black wool frock coat, trimmed at the collar, lapels, and cuffs with grosgrain piping. The box was too dimly lit to read the tailor’s label sewn inside the collar—Brooks Brothers, New York—or to admire the black silk lining embossed with a large American eagle, a shield of stars and stripes, and the motto “One Country, One Destiny.” Leale cut open Lincoln’s collar, shirt, and coat to examine him for knife wounds. There were none. Then Leale lifted each of the president’s eyelids, studied the pupils, and reeled in dismay: it was a brain injury. Leale separated his fingers, weaved both of his hands gently through Lincoln’s hair, and as he worked them thoroughly around the head, he discovered that the hair was matted with blood. Leale’s fingers probed rapidly for its source and found it within seconds, behind the left ear. A neat, round hole, about the diameter of a man’s fingertip, clotted with a plug of wine-red, coagulated blood. Leale’s heart sank.
In the theatre below, the audience would soon be past control. In a valiant attempt to calm them, the actress Laura Keene marched to the front of the stage, close to the footlights, and begged the crowd to remain calm. “For God’s sake, have presence of mind and keep your places, and all will be well.” The president was not dead, she assured them, without knowing whether that was really true. Then the mayor of the District of Columbia took to the stage to try to keep the crowd under control. An angry voice shouted, “Burn the theatre!” and others echoed him. Yes, burn it down. Others remembered that on Capitol Hill, not more than a fifteen-minute march from Ford’s, the Old Capitol prison was filled with disloyal rebel prisoners. The assassin may have escaped, but they could take their revenge there. And walking in the very streets of Washington this night were ex-Confederate soldiers and officers, some of them still wearing their rebel uniforms. This would be a dangerous night for anyone who came into the proximity of the mob. In a few hours, when the telegraph spread the horrible news to the other great cities of the North, dangerous mobs would take to the streets across the country.
Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, an army doctor seated on the main floor near the orchestra pit, heard voices shout for “a doctor!” He rose and headed for the stage. His wife begged him to stay: “You sha’n’t go! They’ll kill you too—I know they will!” He got onstage in moments and stood helplessly below the president’s box. The distance from the stage to the balustrade overhead was too far—eleven feet six inches—to jump. It was one thing to leap down from the box—not an easy move even for an athlete like John Wilkes Booth—but it was impossible to jump up to it. There had to be another way up there. Perhaps other men could lift him and launch him into the box. Taft corralled a few of the men standing onstage to form a human catapult. Men bent low and shaped their interlocked fingers into improvised stirrups. Taft dug his boot heels into their cupped palms and fastened his hands to their shoulders for balance. Then, with one rapid, fluid motion the men’s twitching leg, arm, and shoulder muscles exploded in a burst of strength and propelled Taft skyward. On the way up, he shot his arms above his head as high as they could reach, ready to grab anything he could get his hands on. The catapult launched him just high enough. His fingertips grasped wildly for the balustrade, for the framed engraving of George Washington hanging from a thin wire, for the flags, for the bunting—anything that would save him from a plummet to the polished, hardwood stage. His blue army officer’s cape unraveled from his neck and floated back to the stage. Taft swung momentarily from a piece of bunting until others who followed Dr. Leale into the box reached over the side and pulled him up and into the box. But by now Dr. Leale was already attending the president. Under customary medical tradition, Lincoln was Leale’s patient.
Although Leale feared that Lincoln might already be dead, he made a split-second decision to revive him. To relieve pressure on the brain, he used his fingers to pull the clot from the bullet hole. Then he dropped to his knees, straddled Lincoln, opened the president’s mouth, stuck two fingers down his throat, pressed hard on the base of his paralyzed tongue, and opened the larynx. Air could now reach Lincoln’s lungs, and to draw life-sustaining oxygen into them, Leale pressed the diaphragm upward and ordered two men to manipulate Lincoln’s arms like levers on a water pump. Then Leale stimulated the apex of the heart by pressing hard under the ribs. To everyone in the box, including Dr. Leale, the situation seemed hopeless. Then the president’s reluctant heart began to beat and his lungs sucked in a breath. The heartbeat was feeble, the breathing irregular, but Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Barely. However, unless Leale could stabilize him immediately, Lincoln would expire within a few minutes. The doctor raced against the clock. Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams.
Leale leaned forward until his chest met Lincoln’s and their faces nearly touched. Leale sucked in as much air as his lungs could hold, until he felt like they would burst, and then he breathed air directly into Lincoln’s mouth and nostrils. Lincoln’s lungs expanded and his respiration improved. After forcing several more lungfuls of air into the president, Leale paused, studied his patient’s face for a moment, placed his ear over Lincoln’s thorax, and, amid the cacophony of shrieks, moans, cries, and threats that filled the theatre, along with Mary’s deep sobs a few feet way, he listened keenly. Then he heard it, almost inaudible at first, then louder: Lincoln’s heart, stronger, sustaining a regular beat. Leale leaned back and monitored Lincoln’s mouth and rising chest. The president’s lungs started filling on their own. Leale’s quick thinking saved the president from immediate death.
Time seemed to stop again, just as it did the moment after Booth fired his pistol. Mary Lincoln sank into the sofa and was comforted by Clara Harris, whose face, hair, hands, and dress were smeared with her fiance’s blood. Major Rathbone continued to apply pressure to his wound and tried to remain conscious. Sensing that Dr. Leale’s work was done, the occupants of the box hushed to a breathless silence. Still on his knees, with all eyes fixed upon him, Dr. Leale intoned his diagnosis and prognosis simultaneously: “His wound is mortal; it is impossible for him to recover.”
aT THE KIRKWOOD HOUSE, GEORGE ATZERODT HAD YET TO inflict a mortal wound upon Vice President Johnson. Around 10:00 P.M., as Booth closed in on Lincoln and Powell on Seward, Atzerodt showed up at T. Naylor’s livery stable and talked to the foreman, John Fletcher. He wanted to pick up the horse that he and David Herold had dropped off there that afternoon. But first Atzerodt invited Fletcher to join him for a drink at the nearby Union Hotel, at 13½ and E streets. Fletcher ordered a glass of beer and Atzerodt had a whiskey. After they left the hotel, Atzerodt said a strange thing: “If this thing happens tonight, you will get a present.” Fletcher didn’t know what he was talking about and assumed that the German was drunk: “He seemed to be about half-tight, and was very excited-looking. I did not pay much attention to him.” When they got back to the stable and Atzerodt mounted the horse, Fletcher cautioned him that the mare seemed as nervous as he did.
“I would not like to ride that mare through the city in the night, for she looks so skittish.”
“Well,” Atzerodt replied, “she’s good upon a retreat.”
Fletcher remembered that Atzerodt’s friend, David Herold, was overdue in returning the horse he had rented that day. “Your acquaintance is staying out very late with our horse.”
“Oh, he’ll be back after a while,” Atzerodt assured him.
Fletcher watched Atzerodt go down E Street, pass 13½ Street, and enter the Kirkwood House. Like Powell, Atzerodt was armed with a knife and a pistol—a six-shot revolver. Indeed, he was better armed than Powell, for he had in his room upstairs a second revolver and knife. His room, number 126, was one floor above Johnson’s. The vice president—alone and unguarded—had retired for the night. All Atzerodt had to do was knock on his door and, the moment Johnson opened it, plunge the knife into his chest or shoot him dead. Compared with the tasks that faced Booth and Powell, Atzerodt had the easiest job of all.
Atzerodt hunkered down over the Kirkwood bar, hoping to drink enough courage to carry him up the stairs to Andrew Johnson’s room. John Fletcher had kept an eye on the Kirkwood ever since Atzerodt went inside. Perhaps something about the garrulous German’s behavior had aroused his curiosity, or his suspicion. Fletcher watched Atzerodt walk out of the Kirkwood a few minutes after he went in, mount his horse, and ride toward D and Tenth streets, near Ford’s Theatre. He did not appear to be in a hurry.
John Fletcher could not stop fretting about his overdue horse. Herold knew that he wasn’t supposed to keep “Charlie” past 8:00 P.M.—9:00 at the latest. “At about 10 o’clock [I was] having a suspicion that Herold was going to take the horse away.” Fletcher feared the worst—the horse had been stolen. He wasn’t going to wait any longer. He decided to search the streets of downtown Washington for the Naylor stables’ property.
Andrew Johnson had escaped the reaper’s knock on his door. Atzerodt couldn’t do it. The more he drank, the worse the plan sounded. He did not call on Andrew Johnson. He left the bar and walked out. Abandoning his mission, Atzerodt got on the mare and rode away. He wasn’t sure what to do now. He didn’t know it yet, but he was about to undertake a comical escape journey.
In the saddle, a few blocks from Ford’s, David Herold relished his escape from the Seward house disaster. He had gotten away just in time, before the fleeing Powell could rejoin him on the street or call out his name. No one in the house realized that Powell had an accomplice waiting in the wings. Fanny Seward possessed the right instincts in suspecting that Powell was not alone, but she feared a companion assassin lurking in the house, not on the street outside. For the moment, Davey was safe. No one pursued him when he fled the scene, and no one at the Seward house saw or could implicate him. At the moment he was just another man on a horse on a happy night in Washington. He regretted abandoning Powell, but when the titan botched his assignment, Herold decided to save himself.
For half an hour, between about 10:15 and 10:45 P.M., David Herold was a man with options. He could go home to his widowed mother’s house on Eighth Street, pretend that nothing had happened, and hope for the best, a risky strategy if the manhunters captured Booth, Powell, Atzerodt, Arnold, O’Laughlen, or the Surratts. Any one of them could implicate him. Even if they did not, too many people in Washington had seen him in Booth’s company too many times. Someone would remember that. It was only a matter of time before the police or soldiers came to question him. No, going home was a bad idea. Alternatively, he could run away and lose himself in the isolation of a small town or the anonymity of a big city like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Or he could outfit himself and take to the backwoods of Maryland for months, living by his wits and his hunting and fishing skills. Or he could cleave unto Booth, his master, who would soon approach the Navy Yard Bridge and then close in on their prearranged rendezvous point on the other side of the river.
Between 10:20 and 10:30 P.M., Herold rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving the Seward mansion behind, and now heading away from the Treasury building and approaching Fourteenth Street. At the same time, Fletcher was walking up Fourteenth toward Pennsylvania. Herold and Fletcher reached the intersection, near Willard’s hotel, simultaneously. Instinctively, Charlie pulled against the reins, trying to get off Pennsylvania and turn onto Fourteenth. Fletcher recognized the action—the horse was heading home. The roan, Fletcher knew, “was a horse very well acquainted with the stable,” and he “seemed as if he wanted to go to the stable.” Fletcher, eager to make that happen, prepared to dash after Herold and unseat him from the saddle: “I thought, if I could get close enough to him … I would take the horse away from him.” As Fletcher closed the distance Herold spotted him—“I expect he knew me by the light of the gas, the lamp from Willard’s corner,” Fletcher concluded. Herold yanked on the reins and spun Charlie around. Fletcher yelled at him to stop: “You get off that horse now! You have had that horse out long enough.”
Herold didn’t say a word. Fletcher, on foot, watched helplessly as Herold “put spurs to the horse, and went, as fast as the horse could go, up Fourteenth Street.” Fletcher lost sight of him when Herold turned right on F Street from Fourteenth. It was about 10:25 P.M. The foreman hurried back to Naylor’s stable, saddled a mount, and went after Herold. Fletcher described his route of pursuit: “[I] went along … [Pennsylvania] Avenue until I came to Thirteenth Street; went up Thirteenth to E until I came to Ninth, and turned down Ninth Street to Pennsylvania Avenue again. I went along the avenue to the south side of the Capitol. I there met a gentleman, and asked him if he had passed any one riding on horseback. He said yes, and that they were riding very fast.”
In a few minutes, Herold, mimicking Booth’s route, approached the bridgehead at Eleventh Street. Sergeant Cobb and his guards were not inclined to let another man pass.
“I halted him,” Cobb reported, “and when challenged he answered ‘a friend.’ “The sergeant asked where he was going.
“Home to White Plains.”
Cobb vetoed Davey’s crossing: “You can’t pass it is after nine-o’clock, it is against the rules.”
Herold challenged him back: “How long have these rules been out?” He hoped that pleading ignorance of the law might gain an exception.
For a while, Cobb replied, unmoved: “Some time ever since I have been here.”
Davey persisted: “I didn’t know that before.”
Just as Cobb had questioned Booth, he asked Herold why he had left Washington so late: “Why weren’t you out of the city before?”
Davey fabricated the perfect reply, one that any soldier might forgive: “I couldn’t very well, I stopped to see a woman on Capitol Hill and couldn’t get off before.”
Herold waited for Cobb’s reply and did not ask him if another rider matching Booth’s description had crossed recently. Sergeant Cobb waved Herold across.
Fifteen minutes later, a third rider approached the bridge. It was Fletcher. He wasn’t going to give up. “I followed on until I got to the Navy Yard bridge.” One of the soldiers stopped him and called for his sergeant. When Cobb emerged from the guardhouse Fletcher asked if a horse matching this description had crossed: “A light roan horse; black tail, black legs, black mane, and close on fifteen hands high.” The stolen animal had special characteristics: “He was a lady’s saddle-horse; and any one could ride him, he was so gentle and nice.” Then Fletcher described the saddle, bridle, and rider.
“Yes, he has gone across the bridge,” Cobb replied.
“Did he stay long here?” “Did he tell you his name?”
“Yes,” Cobb divulged, “he said his name was Smith.”
Fletcher wanted to chase Herold into Maryland, and asked Cobb if he could continue the pursuit.
“Yes, you can cross the bridge; but you cannot return back.” Those were the rules, Cobb insisted. He had already bent them twice. He would not do it again.
Fletcher wanted to return to Washington tonight. Dejected, the self-appointed manhunter gave up. “If that is so, I will not go.” He turned around and rode back to the city. When he got to Third Street he looked at his watch. It was 11:50 P.M. He stopped at another stable, Murphy’s, and the foreman told him the news: “You had better keep in, for President Lincoln is shot and Secretary Seward almost dead.” Fletcher returned to Naylor’s, put up his horse, and, at about 1:30 A.M., sat down in front of the office window. He didn’t know that his private manhunt had almost captured one of the accomplices of Lincoln’s killer.
Somewhere east of the Capitol building, Lewis Powell was not having as easy a time as Booth and Herold in fleeing the city. He had evaded William Bell and the others, and no one was chasing him now. But he did not know where he was. It got worse. He had lost or abandoned his surest and swiftest means of escape, the one-eyed horse that Booth bought for his gang. As midnight approached on the night of April 14, Lewis Powell was in trouble: he was a solitary figure standing in the moonlight, lost and unarmed, and wearing a coat stained with another man’s blood. He did not know where to go or what to do. For the next two nights he slept in a tree. Without Booth to command him, he became confused and began thinking about some of the places he knew in Washington, places where Booth had taken him before. There was one in particular. He might be safe there—if he could just remember the address.
In Surrattsville, Maryland, thirteen miles southeast of Washington, John Lloyd, the proprietor of Surratt’s tavern, retired for the night. He had been pretty tight in liquor that evening—really since the afternoon, if he were to be honest about it—and he was tired. Although Mary Surratt had told him that afternoon to expect some nighttime callers, they had never shown up. It made no difference to him.
Several miles south of Surrattsville, on an isolated farm near Bryantown, Maryland, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, his wife, and their four young children were also in bed. Beantown, where Booth told Sergeant Cobb he was headed, was not far away.
aBRAHAM LINCOLN SLEPT, TOO. MORE THAN FIFTEEN MINutes after he was shot, he still lay prone on the floor of boxes seven and eight at Ford’s Theatre. Although Dr. Leale had averted the president’s immediate death and stabilized his patient, the novice surgeon wasn’t sure what to do next. Lincoln could not be left to die on the floor of a theatre gone mad. As Leale contemplated his next move, a woman rushed through Ford’s to get to the president. She knew that history was being made in that box, and she had convinced herself that she must be part of it. From her vantage point onstage, she saw that swift passage through the main floor was impossible. She would have to push through the throng on the main floor, and then go up the stairs against a panicked mob coursing down them. They might sweep her off her feet and crush her. But her expert knowledge of the theatre’s architecture allowed her to bypass almost the entire audience that stood between her and Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Gourlay, father of the actress Jennie Gourlay, led Keene to the box. Carrying a pitcher of water that would serve as her passport to the president’s box—she dare not spill it—she slipped through a door near the stage and scurried up a hidden staircase that took her straight up to a private office near the box. In less than a minute, she traversed the entire length of Ford’s and emerged on the second floor on the same side as Lincoln’s box. She fought her way to the door, through the vestibule, and into the box. No one thought to bar the way to the great actress Laura Keene, star of tonight’s performance.
The scene riveted Keene and excited her theatrical instincts. Mesmerized by the image of the stricken president, Keene imagined a fantastic tableaux with her as its central figure. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, impossible to resist. Might she, the actress asked Dr. Leale, cradle the dying president’s head in her lap? It was a shocking request, and of no possible physical comfort or medical benefit to Lincoln. Under normal circumstances, its brazenness would have provoked the volcanic Mary Lincoln into paroxysms of jealous anger. Recently Mary had embarrassed herself and her husband when she raged viciously in public against the lovely wife of General Ord. Mrs. Ord’s crime? Riding too close to President Lincoln during a military review, and, in Mary’s opinion, masquerading as the first lady. To all who witnessed it, the ugly incident opened a portal into the workings of Mary Lincoln’s troubled and sometimes pathetic mind. But now, delirious with grief and fear, Mary Lincoln, sitting on the sofa a few feet away, uttered no objection to Keene’s intimate request. She probably did not even hear it. Dr. Leale consented.
Laura Keene knelt beside Lincoln and formed her lap into a natural pillow. She lifted his head, exposing the bloodstained linen handkerchief that Dr. Leale had placed below the wound. Leale removed it, and Keene rested Lincoln’s head in her lap. Bloodstains and tiny bits of gray matter oozed onto the cream silk fabric, spreading and adding color to the frock’s bright and festive red, yellow, green, and blue floral pattern. The wound did not bleed profusely, and of the trio of dresses bloodied that night, Laura’s dress alone was spared the drenching that saturated the garments of Fanny Seward and Clara Harris.
Fanny’s and Clara’s dresses did not survive. But Laura Keene, like a Victorian bride who lovingly preserved her wedding dress as a sacred memento of her happiest day, cherished the blood- and brain-speckled frock from this terrible night. In the days ahead, people begged to see the dress, to caress its silken folds, and to marvel at the stains and the scenes of high drama they evoked. Soon it became the object of morbid curiosity. Others even asked Keene to model the dress and made surreptitious attempts to cut coveted swatches as bizarre keepsakes. In time, Keene banished the haunted artifact from her sight. But she could not bear to destroy it and instead exiled it into the care of her family so that she would never have to look at it again. The dress vanished long ago, but miraculously a few remnants—five treasured swatches—survived. Their gay floral pattern remains almost as bright as the day the dress was fashioned nearly a century and a half ago by Jamie Bullock of Chicago. But long ago the stains, once red, faded to a rust-colored, pale brown. Laura Keene became forever known for the Pietà-like improvisational scene she staged in the president’s box. We remember her not for her deep talent, diverse repertoire, or lifetime of great performances, but for a single unscripted act that played out for only a few minutes in the box at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Her great contemporaries from the nineteenth-century American stage have faded into oblivion, forgotten by all except a tiny fraternity of theater scholars. But Keene’s name lives on, forever linked to Abraham Lincoln’s by the macabre, supporting role she played that night.
Her presence in the box also highlighted an uncomfortable fact. She was an actress, this was a theatre, and it was Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. But the president of the United States was not worshiping in church. Instead, he was dying on the floor of a secular and morally illicit landmark. The great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend spoke for many when he wrote, “The Chief Magistrate of thirty millions of people—beloved, honored, revered,—lay in the pent up closet of a play-house, dabbling with his sacred blood the robes of an actress.”
Indeed, in two days a number of ministers would admonish Lincoln in their Sunday sermons for spending Good Friday in a theatre. So did John Wilkes Booth’s devoted sister, Asia Booth Clarke: “It was the moan of the religious people, the one throb of anguish to hero-worshippers, that the President had not gone first to a place of worship or have remained at home on this jubilant occasion. It desecrated his idea to have his end come in a devil’s den—a theatre…. That fatal visit to the theatre had no pity in it; it was jubilation over fields of unburied dead, over miles of desecrated homes.”
THE SCENE IN THE PRESIDENT’s BOX WOULD HAVE AMUSED Asia’s brother John. Leave it to Laura Keene to try to upstage his spectacular performance. Just like an actress to ride his coattails. Now safely across the Eleventh Street Bridge, Booth looked toward Maryland and plunged ahead into the dark. Of his three cohorts, he needed Davey Herold the most right now, more than Atzerodt or Powell. Once Booth escaped downtown Washington, reached the city limits, and crossed the river into Maryland, he sidestepped immediate danger. The countryside was dark and quiet, with few travelers using the empty roads. He trotted over the route he had rehearsed over the previous year for the kidnapping plot. No need to gallop now, with no pursuers in sight when Sergeant Cobb let him pass. Better to let the horse rest and regain her strength for later. As Booth rode on, he searched the horizon for Soper’s Hill, the chosen rendezvous place. In daylight it seemed simple, but nightfall had leveled the hills. Alone in the country, he was out of his milieu. Booth was a creature of the city and its fancy hotel lobbies, hard liquor saloons, oyster bars, back alleys, and gaslit shadows. He did not have the skills he’d need to survive in the coming days, those of outdoorsman, hunter, or river boatman. But Herold was all of those things, and that’s why Booth chose him, above all the others, to guide him.
Now that Booth had slowed down, the pain in his left leg bloomed under the moonlight. Near desperation after his hard ride, he gazed into the horizon just before midnight—he was about eight miles from Washington’s city limits. Davey and the others might be a few minutes ahead or behind him, depending on exactly how they had timed their attacks on Seward and Johnson. Booth saw nothing ahead of him. When he turned to look behind him, he heard a noise trailing in the distance. Horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Was it the first warning of a cavalry patrol in hot pursuit? As the noise increased in volume, it sounded, to Booth’s relief, like one horse, not many. Then his solitary pursuer came within sight—a small man on a large gray horse. His eyes held Booth’s for a long, suspicious moment, then relief trickled down the wounded assassin’s spine. It was David Herold.
The actor was jubilant. He was on safe ground, and now he had his guide. Maryland, although it did not secede from the Union in 1861, remained a hotbed of secessionism. Maryland was as Confederate as a state could be without actually joining the Confederacy. If Maryland had become the twelfth star on the Confederate flag, the Union would have been in grave danger. Washington, D.C., would be surrounded by rebel states, isolated from the rest of the North. Thousands of its citizens joined the Confederate army, marching off to war to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.” Rebel spies and couriers infested the state, and James McPhail, the U.S. Army provost marshal stationed there, had his hands full suppressing Confederate schemes in Baltimore. It was in Baltimore that the citizens plotted to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in February 1861 when he traveled through their city on the way to his inauguration, and a Baltimore mob had attacked Union troops—the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry—as the unit marched through the city. It was from Maryland that Booth drew several of the conspirators for his kidnapping plot. And it was in Bel Air that Booth grew from boy to young adult. Maryland was his ground, and, he was certain, its people would shelter him and wish him Godspeed on his journey to the Deep South.
Booth and Herold spurred their horses, riding southeast to their first safe house just a few miles away in Maryland. Booth likely grilled Herold with questions: Why was he alone? Where is Powell? Did he kill Seward? Had he seen Atzerodt? Did he murder Vice President Johnson? No, Herold would have answered, he hadn’t seen Atzerodt since the conspirators broke up earlier in the evening to carry out the three assassinations. He had no idea whether Johnson was dead. Herold recounted what had happened at the Seward residence: the entry plan worked perfectly, and Powell and his little package were admitted to the mansion. All seemed quiet in the house. Herold heard no gunshots. About ten minutes later, a black servant ran out the front door into the street screaming “murder,” and then a girl threw open an upstairs window and started yelling, too.
This news seemed to prove to Booth that the faithful Powell had carried out his mission. But the actor must have been displeased with Herold for abandoning Powell, for whom he had a special fondness. And Powell would have come in handy if they had to do to any fighting during their escape. Booth guessed that Powell, who never learned the geography of the capital city, was a lost man. Herold explained how he almost got caught, not by the police or the army, but by John Fletcher, the stable man who rented Herold his horse. Booth certainly told Herold of his success at Ford’s Theatre. This was the assassin’s first opportunity to describe his deed, and the irrepressible thespian in him probably laid it on thick.
BETWEEN 11:30 P.M. AND MIDNIGHT, GEORGE ATZERODT appeared on Sixth Street, without his horse, and boarded a streetcar headed for the Navy Yard. By chance, one of the passengers was someone he’d known for the past seven or eight years, a man named Washington Briscoe. Atzerodt failed to recognize him until Briscoe spoke to him. Briscoe asked him if he’d heard the news—Lincoln had been assassinated. Yes, he had, George replied. Atzerodt asked if he could spend the night at Briscoe’s store at the Navy Yard. When Briscoe said no, Atzerodt became agitated: “His manner was excited, and he was very anxious to sleep there; he urged me to let him.” Briscoe explained that someone else was already sleeping there, too, and he could not impose upon the man. Atzerodt stayed on the car and got off with Briscoe on I Street, near Briscoe’s store. He asked a third time if he could spend the night. Briscoe refused again, but he waited with Atzerodt at the corner of I and Garrison streets for the streetcar to return. George told Briscoe that he was heading to the Pennsylvania House, also known as the Kimmell House, on C Street. Atzerodt got on the next car and headed back to downtown Washington. He still had his room key to the Kirkwood in his pocket. When he left there, he failed to surrender it to a front-desk clerk.
Luckily, Atzerodt did not return to the Kirkwood House. By late Saturday morning, John Lee, a member of the military police force, was breaking down the door to room 126. After the assassination, Major James O’Beirne, provost marshal of Washington, ordered Lee to rush to the vice president’s hotel. He, too, might be a target. When Lee got there, a bartender, Michael Henry, informed him that a suspicious-looking man had rented a room the previous day. Lee scanned the hotel register until he spotted it: “a name written very badly—G. A. Atzerodt.” Desk clerks Robert R. Jones and Lyman Sprague could not find the room key. Sprague escorted Lee upstairs. Atzerodt’s door was locked. Lee broke it open and searched the room. Under the pillow he found a revolver, loaded and capped; between the sheets and mattress he discovered a large Bowie knife.
The room was filled with clues: a brass spur, a pair of socks, two shirt collars, a pair of new gauntlets, three boxes of cartridges, a piece of licorice, and a toothbrush. A black coat hung from a hook on the wall. Lee searched it and found a map of Virginia and three handkerchiefs. One was embroidered with the name “Mary R. Booth.” Lee found a bankbook from the Ontario Bank in Montreal, showing a credit of $455.00. The name of the account holder was “Mr. J. Wilkes Booth.”
DR. LEALE KNEW THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF REASONS HE couldn’t leave Abraham Lincoln to die on a theatre floor. The president was going to die—it was just a matter of time—and Leale had never seen a man with such a wound survive more than an hour. He was helpless to save Lincoln’s life, but, now that he had stabilized him, he did have power over the place and manner of the president’s passing. George Washington, the nation’s first president, and the first former one to die, and William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, the only presidents who had died in office, did not expire under tawdry circumstances, in shredded clothes on a boot-tracked, soiled floor, and neither would Abraham Lincoln. Leale’s instincts issued another silent command: “Remove to safety.” The president of the United States would die with dignity, in a proper bed. “Take him to the White House,” someone in the box implored. Yes, take him home. Impossible, Leale explained, and the other two doctors who had joined him in the box, Charles Sabin Taft and the improbably named Albert Freeman Africanus King, who had arrived just after Taft, concurred. Even the brief carriage trip between Ford’s and the Executive Mansion over unpaved, muddy streets, gouged deeply with ruts and tracks from hundreds of carriage wheels, would be too much for Lincoln to endure. The bumpy ride would jostle the head wound and instantly kill him. No, they must take him someplace closer. Another voice suggested Peter Taltavul’s saloon next door, where Booth enjoyed his last drink. Others vetoed that suggestion at once: it was bad enough that Lincoln might die in a theatre, but a tavern? Unthinkable. Even obscene.
They prepared to lift Lincoln’s body without knowing where they would take him. First Dr. Leale closed the curtain on Laura Keene’s maudlin, private drama. Her fame guaranteed, her dress sanctified by gore, she released her hold on the martyr, rose from the floor, and stepped back. Leale told Dr. Taft to support Lincoln’s right shoulder and Dr. King the left. Leale ordered other men in the box to place their hands under the torso, the pelvis, the legs. Leale bent down and cradled the head. On his order, their hands worked in unison and lifted the president from the floor. They inched toward the vestibule. Clara Harris and Major Rathbone got Mary Lincoln on her feet and supported her unsteady gait. The trio, accompanied by Keene, followed the body. They carried Lincoln through the vestibule headfirst. Creeping backward and looking over his shoulder at the door leading to the dress circle, Leale observed a crush of humanity blocking the way and straining to get a glimpse of the president. Leale’s voice blasted at them twice like a battlefield trumpet: “Guards, clear the passage! Guards, clear the passage!”
The bearers emerged from the vestibule with their precious, fragile cargo and walked north to the curved staircase that, two and a half hours before, the president had ascended. A small force of officers and soldiers shoved the gawkers aside. Leale reversed course at the landing and choreographed Lincoln’s descent feetfirst, to avoid tilting Lincoln’s head down and increasing the pressure on the brain. The descent seemed to take forever. But Lincoln was barely alive and Leale wanted no sudden movements that might jostle the president and disrupt the heartbeat or respiration. Seaton Munroe, an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, rushed from his seat to find out what had happened to Lincoln. “I now made my way towards the box exit to await the descent of Miss Keene, hoping to learn from her the President’s condition.” Munroe intercepted her, dress in disarray, hair disheveled, and stage makeup smeared, at the foot of the staircase leading from the box. “I begged her to tell me if Mr. Lincoln was still alive.”
“God only knows,” she shrieked.
The actress who began the night in a light comic role now looked to Munroe like an apparition from a nightmare. “Attired, as I had so often seen her, in the costume of her part in ‘Our American Cousin,’ her hair and dress were in disorder, and not only was her gown soaked in Lincoin’s blood, but her hands, and even her cheeks where her fingers had strayed, were bedaubed with the sorry stains.”
Outside Ford’s on Tenth Street, an anxious crowd of theatre patrons, swelled by bewildered passersby, hovered near the front doors and awaited the president. Leale’s team carried Lincoln through the lobby, out the doors, and across the top stone step where, just eleven hours earlier, John Wilkes Booth sat under the midday sun laughing and reading his letter, and calculating if he had enough time. The crowd gasped at the sight of the prostrate figure and pushed forward. Some men darted forward and dared to lay their hands upon Lincoln. In a few seconds they would swarm and surround the president. Leale, dismayed, searched for an open seam through the hundreds of pressing bodies that blocked his way. Paralyzed, Leale and the doctors and soldiers assisting him froze at the threshold of Ford’s, cradling the body of the dying president in their arms.
Nearby, just a few yards to the right, Lincoln’s carriage, its polished, black enameled surface glinting under the light of the big gas lantern atop the tall iron pole anchored in front of Ford’s, offered sanctuary from the mob and safe transport to the Executive Mansion. The president’s coachman Burke grasped the reins and tensed at the ready atop the carriage box, expecting in another moment to crack his whip for the mad dash up Tenth Street and then the quick turn west to the mansion. “For God’s sake, take him home to the White House to die,” an anonymous voice from the crowd cried, echoing the plea first voiced in the theatre. “To the White House,” other voices begged. A reporter who went to the White House found citizens assembling there: “An immense crowd was gathered in front of the President’s house, and a strong guard was also stationed there, many persons evidently supposing that he would be brought to his home.”
No, Dr. Leale ordered again, the president would never survive the trip. At that moment an army officer pushed through the half-insane crowd, faced Leale with steely resolve in his eyes, and drew his sword from its scabbard: “Surgeon, give me your commands and I will see that they are obeyed,” he bellowed.
The officer fought his way forward, cut a seam through the mob, and led Lincoln’s bearers into the dirt street. Leale’s eyes raced from side to side, scanning across Tenth Street for refuge. Straining his voice to communicate above the din to the sword-bearing officer, he shouted a succinct command. Take the president straight across the street and into the nearest house. A soldier sprinted ahead and pounded on the door, demanding entry. Then, incredibly, Leale halted the procession in the middle of the muddy street, and in full view of the horrified mob, yanked a blood clot from the hole in Lincoln’s head to relieve the pressure on the brain, and tossed the gooey mass into the street. Fresh blood and brain matter oozed through Leale’s fingers. The procession continued several more feet. Another clot. Then the same process all over again. When Leale was halfway across the street, soldiers on the far side made a beeline straight at him and yelled that the house was locked and no one answered the door. The scene was incredible, impossible. Shipwrecked, stranded in the middle of a muddy street with no place to go, the president of the United States was dying in the presence of hundreds, if not by now more than a thousand, frenzied witnesses.
From an upper window on the far side of Tenth Street, Carl Bersch, an artist, looked down on the drama playing out in the street below. His practiced observer’s eyes captured, like a camera, every detail—the big, glowing gaslight, the prostrate president borne by many hands, the swarming crowd. What a fine subject this scene would make for an oil painting, he mused.
Up until this moment no one had paid attention to William Petersen’s neat, three-story brick row house next door to the home that denied entry to the president. Inside, one of Petersen’s boarders, Henry Safford, sat quietly reading a book in the front first-floor parlor. Dr. Leale was trying to figure out what to do next when he saw somebody open the front door of 454 Tenth Street. Safford had heard the shouting mob and ventured outside to see what was happening. He stepped out onto the top step of the high, curved staircase, and raised high a sole candle. “Bring him in here!” he shouted above the human sea that coursed between him and the president. “Bring him in here!”
Leale changed course. He’d found a safe house, at last.