Lewis Paine walked into the sitting room at Herndon House. Mrs. Murray, the wife of the proprietor, was sitting at the desk. The gladiator said that he was leaving for Baltimore. He never wasted time on pleasantries or politeness, and expected neither in return. She asked if he wanted his bill. He said that was why he was here.
Mrs. Murray made it out, and Paine paid it. He turned to leave and the lady said that it was too early for the regular dinner, only three o’clock, but that she could have some cold beef and potatoes sent up to the dining room. Paine said all right.
He ate and left.
A man walked into the President’s office, at the White House, with a ready-made smile. He looked behind the desk and saw no one, and the smile died. This was Chaplain Edward D. Neill, of the First Minnesota Infantry. In the doorway behind him stood a colonel from Vermont. The chaplain was now a clerk at the White House, and had used his favorable position to have Lincoln brevet the colonel a Brigadier General.
Now, finding the office empty, he took the further liberty of examining the papers on the President’s desk, trying to find the signed commission. He was shuffling papers as quietly as possible when the President, as quietly as possible, approached the desk. Chaplain Neill looked up, startled. Mr. Lincoln was chewing on an apple.
Neill explained that he was looking for the signed commission, that he was sure that the President wouldn’t mind and, as he was talking, Mr. Lincoln pulled the bell cord.
“For whom are you ringing?” the chaplain said nervously.
There was a hint of humor in Lincoln’s eye as he grabbed the reverend by the lapel, leaned close, and, in a stage whisper, said: “Andrew Johnson!”
The chaplain said: “I will come in again,” and left.
The thing that irked Lincoln was Johnson’s acting like a one-man proletariat. Johnson never tired of telling of his humble beginnings, as though it were something exclusive to him. He acted like a swamp snob and, to Lincoln, the original rail splitter, the penniless log-cabin rustic, it was anathema.
The Vice President had sought interviews with the President and he worried when, on pretexts, they were denied. When Congress adjourned, he had stayed on in Washington City, hoping to heal whatever sore was on Lincoln’s mind. Now he had been sent for, and he was early and had paced the grounds outside waiting for the Cabinet meeting to be over.
Johnson felt relieved when the Chief Executive grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously and called him “Andy.” The two sat on opposite sides of the desk and talked for twenty minutes. Neither told what this conference was about, but the President was not a man to mention Inauguration Day. When the appointment was made, Lincoln had told his secretary, John Nicolay, that reconstruction was a brand-new problem and that the Vice President should be made acquainted with it and should understand the wishes of the President.
The probability is that Lincoln timed the first interview immediately after the first peacetime Cabinet session so that he could not only tell Johnson what was in his mind about reconstruction, but also what the Cabinet had agreed upon. When the Vice President left, he looked less tense than when he entered the White House.
At the outer gate, a big-handed colored woman, sick with hunger, staggered up to the sentry box. A soldier stepped out, swung his rifle diagonally across his body, and said solemnly: “Business with the President?” The other guards laughed.
“Before God,” the woman whispered. “Yes.”
“Let her pass,” one of the guards said, still laughing. “They’ll stop her further on.”
The woman staggered through, and across the drive and on up to the White House porch and the big doors. There, a second soldier barred her.
“No further,” he said. “Against orders.”
With what seemed to be her final energy, the woman darted under his arm and ran straight through the long corridor and down the length of the carpet and upstairs, her cotton skirt billowing in back, her face a study in dark agony. The presidential office guard stood before the door with his rifle in both hands.
Breathing hard, and crying at the same time, she begged: “For God’s sake, please let me see Mr. Lincoln.”
“Madam,” the guard said. “The President is busy. He cannot see you.”
She may have screamed, or sobbed, because the noise she made caused the door to open and, through the iridescence of her own tears, she saw the wavering figure of the President of the United States.
He looked down at her, and he was smiling. In his deep tones, he said: “There is time for all who need me. Let the good woman come in.”
She was Mrs. Nancy Bushrod and, when he had seated her beside his desk, it took time for her to compose herself. She told him her name and how many babies she had and that her husband’s name was Tom Bushrod and that both of them had been slaves on the Harwood plantation outside of Richmond. When they had heard about the Emancipation Proclamation, they heard it said that it meant that they were free, and they had run away and come straight to Washington.
In thankfulness to Mr. Lincoln, Tom had forthwith enlisted in the Army of the Potomac, leaving Nancy in a little shack with twin boys and a baby girl. His pay kept coming regularly every month, then it stopped. Nancy had walked the streets of Washington City, looking for work. No one had any washing or sewing or cleaning to be done. All the colored people in the world seemed, to Nancy, to be looking for work in Washington City.
She started to cry again. Would the President please help her about Tom’s pay? She would not have come, but there was no other way.
“You are entitled to your husband’s pay,” Mr. Lincoln said. “Come this time tomorrow and the papers will be signed and ready for you.”
As Mrs. Bushrod told about it later, she said: “I couldn’t open my mouth to tell him that I was going to remember him forever and I couldn’t see because the tears were falling.”
When he had escorted her to the office door, he said: “My good woman” (in the tone of the stern lecturer), “perhaps you will see many a day when all the food in the house is a single loaf of bread. Even so, give every child a slice and send your children to school.”
Then, as Nancy Bushrod looked back at him, she said he bowed “like I was a natural-born lady.”
A little more than a hundred yards to the west, Mrs. Stanton, out shopping in her carriage, stopped at the War Department and asked her husband how she should decline the invitation of the Lincolns to the theater. The secretary must have assumed that the matter had been taken care of, because he looked, for a moment, as helpless as most husbands in similar situations and said: “Why, just send regrets.”
No snub was intended in the regrets. Stanton had an aversion to the theater. As a serious student of the Bible, he was sure that theaters and sin were kin. He had felt, all along, that Lincoln did not expect him to accept the invitations, but had sent them along for form’s sake. In all the time that Stanton had been in Washington, he had been to a theater once, and that occurred one night when he tiptoed into the State Box at Grover’s Theatre with a message for Lincoln and, delivering it and getting a reply, tiptoed out.
Then too, he knew that Mrs. Stanton felt tense in the presence of the First Lady, and this alone inclined him to turn down all but invitations to state functions, where the presence of the Secretary of War and his lady were required. Thirdly, Stanton’s repeated admonitions to the President to keep away from the theater, and from all public appearances, would have little validity if the man with the perfumed whiskers did not practice what he preached.
Grant stopped in to say good-by to his boss, and to leave a temporary forwarding address at Burlington, N.J. Stanton and the general talked for a few minutes about army business, and then shook hands and parted.
The general got back to the Willard at about the time that Wilkes Booth was entering Kirkwood House, two blocks east. Booth wanted to discuss final plans for the assassination of Johnson with George Atzerodt. The clerk told Mr. Booth that Atzerodt was out.
The actor had a drink at the bar, and got an idea. He reasoned that if Lincoln was killed tonight, Andrew Johnson would become President. Johnson was to be shot by Atzerodt, but Booth had little faith that this would be accomplished. If Johnson lived, the affairs of the Union would be carried on with little impediment except grief for Lincoln. Booth had to hurt Johnson’s chances of becoming President, and he seized upon a novel idea.
He asked the desk clerk if the Vice President was at home. The clerk said no. Booth asked for a blank card. On it he wrote, “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.” The actor had never met Andrew Johnson but, after the assassination of Lincoln, the Vice President would have a difficult time explaining the visiting card from the arch-conspirator. With passions high, it might look as though Johnson was the prime mover in a plot to make himself President of the United States.
Before leaving, Wilkes Booth wrote a note to Atzerodt, and shoved it under the carriage maker’s door. He walked out jauntily, certain that the government would be so hamstrung with suspicion tonight that Johnson might, instead of being sworn in as President, be thrown into the Federal Penitentiary at the foot of Greenleaf’s Point.
History often hinges on small accidents. A short time after the actor left, Colonel Browning came into the lobby of Kirkwood House. The colonel was secretary to the Vice President. He stopped at the desk for his mail. The desk clerk had standing orders to put all mail for Johnson into Colonel Browning’s box because the colonel did all the sorting and reading for the unhappy tailor. When Browning got to his room, and began to read the missives, he came to the card that Booth had left, and at once assumed that the actor had left it for him. Years before, he had witnessed a performance of Booth’s in the South, and had been introduced to the actor. Browning was pleased that Wilkes Booth remembered him, and made a mental note to find out if he was starring in a play in Washington. If so, Browning wanted to return the compliment.