The local train carrying General and Mrs. Grant chuffed into Philadelphia terminal an hour late. Except for a few officials, the stationmaster and some police officers, the train shed was empty. There had been no public announcements that the Grants were coming to Philadelphia and only the barest telegraph warning had gone to railroad executives.
The Grants were greeted effusively by the few. Both were tired and gratefully boarded a military ambulance, which took them down to the Camden ferry. They were waiting in the ferry house with their luggage when Stanton’s telegram arrived telling of the assassinations in Washington. At the end of the telegram, the Secretary of War said that arrangements were being made to bring the general back to Washington by special train.
The general was shocked at the news. After some thought, he decided that he would accompany his wife to the Camden side of the Delaware, and then would return to Washington at once. However, on the ferry ride, he must have changed his mind because Grant went all the way to Burlington, New Jersey, with his wife, saw his two children, and then agreed to go to Washington.
Back at Petersen House, Stanton did not need the services of Grant. Stanton needed no one, in fact, and barely consulted the other members of the Cabinet. And yet there was no exultance in the power he wielded on this night. He assumed that only he could be trusted to keep his head in an emergency; only he could fathom the complicated moves which must be made, and only he could execute them with dispatch. On this night, only he issued orders, wrote messages, barked questions, threatened witnesses, summoned high personages, detained, arrested, disposed and took the reins of government as though all his life had been a training ground for this one event.
He was in this little sitting room not to weep, not to brood over a man he had often belittled, but in cold fury to play the part of the master policeman. He did not hesitate to issue orders even where he lacked power. He had no jurisdiction over the metropolitan police force and yet he ordered the day men to get dressed and patrol the streets. He held the news of all that was happening in his fist, and he refused to open it until he was ready. He it was who ordered that no news of the assassination be permitted in any of the military districts of the South. It would be days before Atlanta and Savannah and Mobile knew that Lincoln had been shot.
Edwin McMasters Stanton was boss.
One of the few poignant mistakes he made was when he ordered Attorney General Speed to draw up a formal note to the Vice President advising him that President Lincoln had died and asking him to prepare to assume the presidency at once. When it was completed, Stanton read it aloud and ordered General Vincent to “make a fair copy of it for the files.” He heard a scream, and turned to see Mrs. Lincoln standing, her hands clasped in entreaty. “Is he dead?” she shrieked. “Oh, is he dead?”
The Secretary of War tried to explain that he was merely preparing for a grave eventuality, but Mrs. Lincoln was moaning and not listening. She was led back to the front parlor.
In moments of absolute quiet, the President’s breathing could be heard in the several rooms on the ground floor of the house. Dr. Barnes noted that spasmodic contractions of both forearms had begun. The muscles of the chest became fixed and the patient began to hold his breath in spasms, emitting it in gusty explosions.
Senator Sumner, sitting near the head of the bed, took the President’s left hand in his and, bowing his head to the bed, began to sob. Seeing this, Robert Lincoln began to weep. Dr. Charles Taft, leaving, said: “It’s the saddest death scene I’ve ever witnessed.”
Among those for whom this ordeal was difficult was Dr. Leale. He had a professional interest, and a personal interest. No one knew—and Leale did not mention it this night—that the young doctor had idolized Lincoln for a long time. On Tuesday, he had finished his surgical duties at the Soldiers’ Hospital early so that he could stand in a crowd and hear Lincoln speak at the White House. He had come to stand in front of Ford’s Theatre tonight, not to gawk, but to look upon the face of a man he loved. He had bought postcard pictures of Lincoln to hang in his room. To Leale, the sixteenth President was the greatest.
Now he was a doctor on a case. And his opinions were crisply professional as he worked through the final hours. A clot formed in the bullet hole every few minutes, and Leale insisted that he would remove them, and no one else. He remained at the President’s side and sometimes, if the Surgeon General watched, he would see Leale holding the President’s hand. He wasn’t taking a pulse. He was holding the hand.
Dr. Leale had a reason for this. He thought that, just before death, reason and recognition often return to a patient for a brief moment. Leale held Lincoln’s hand, as he explained later, so that if reason did come for a moment, “he would know, in his blindness, that he was in touch with humanity and had a friend.”
In the back parlor, Attorney General Speed made the finished copy of the formal notification of Lincoln’s death at 1:30 A.M. and called upon the members of the Cabinet to sign it. This was done at once. At almost the same time, Stanton decided to release the news, through General John Adams Dix, Commandant, New York. General Dix resembled Secretary Seward in looks, having the same gray hair, smooth cheek, and patrician air.
War Department April 15, 1865
1:30 a.m.
Sent 2:15 a.m.
Major General Dix,
New York:
Last evening, about 10:30 P.M., at Ford’s Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Harris, and Major Rathbone, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the President. The assassin then leaped upon the stage, brandishing a large dagger or knife, and made his escape in the rear of the theater. The pistol-ball entered the back of the President’s head, and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal. The President has been insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.
About the same hour an assassin (whether the same or another) entered Mr. Seward’s home, and, under pretense of having a prescription, was shown to the Secretary’s sickchamber. The Secretary was in bed, a nurse and Miss Seward with him. The assassin immediately rushed to the bed, inflicted two or three stabs on the throat and two on the face. It is hoped the wounds may not be mortal; my apprehension is that they will prove fatal. The noise alarmed Mr. Frederick Seward, who was in an adjoining room, and hastened to the door of his father’s room, where he met the assassin, who inflicted upon him one or more dangerous wounds. The recovery of Frederick Seward is doubtful.
It is not probable that the President will live through the night. General Grant and wife were advertised to be at the theater this evening, but he started to Burlington at 6 o’clock this evening. At a cabinet meeting yesterday, at which General Grant was present, the subject of the state of the country and the prospects of speedy peace was discussed. The President was very cheerful and hopeful; spoke very kindly of General Lee and others of the Confederacy, and the establishment of government in Virginia. All the members of the cabinet except Mr. Seward are now in attendance upon the President. I have seen Mr. Seward, but he and Frederick were both unconscious.
Edwin M. Stanton
Secretary of War
Thus the first news of the assassination was designed for release in New York. The reader may quarrel with the small errors Mr. Stanton made in his report, but the big one is that he knew the name of the assassin but did not mention him. This, in effect, prevented the newspapers from broadcasting an alarm for Booth, because it left them with no high official source to attribute the name to. At this hour, every newspaper in Washington and the Associated Press in New York knew that the actor Booth was the man being hunted as the assassin, but, when they saw the Stanton statement in General Dix’s hands, most of them decided not to use Booth’s name; a few decided to hint by announcing that the “scion of a famous family of actors is being sought.”
At military headquarters in Washington, General Augur had completed questioning most of the witnesses, and had time to think. The more he thought about stableman Fletcher’s story of the blind horse, the more he thought that the conspirators might be traced through a stable. He ordered fresh patrols of cavalry out to canvass every stable in Washington City. If Booth rented a horse, he could hardly have concealed his identity. He wanted any stableman who had seen Booth brought to him at once.
The man arrived shortly before 2 A.M. He had seen Booth off on a small roan mare at four o’clock, he said. Augur listened. There was a sort of loose partnership in horses, the stableman said, between Wilkes Booth and a man named John Surratt. It was hard to tell which one owned the horses, because both men used them. Sometimes, either of them gave permission to a man named George Atzerodt and another man named David Herold to use the horses. And another strange thing: Booth had a big one-eyed gelding which only today he had ordered stabled in the back of Ford’s Theatre.
It was then that some unremembered officer on Augur’s staff figuratively snapped his fingers and, in substance, said: Just a moment. Didn’t we get a report on an alleged kidnapping of President Lincoln some months ago, and wasn’t someone named Surratt a part of that report? Didn’t a woman named Surratt keep a boardinghouse somewhere nearby? Wouldn’t that explain why, with the bridges closed and armed patrols all over the city, we have not been able to find John Wilkes Booth? Couldn’t it be that he is hiding right now in Washington City?
It could.