General Augur was still thinking about Booth and the boardinghouse when Richards, at police headquarters, made up his mind to raid the place. Before him he had the names of Booth, Herold, Surratt. The only one of the three with a known address was Surratt, and Richards remembered that the military had issued a confidential report on the Surratt house based on intelligence given by an informer in the War Department.
The superintendent of police called Detective John A. W. Clarvoe and explained his hunch. He asked that Clarvoe select a squad of good detectives and go up to H Street and raid the place now. Richards asked him to bring back Booth and Surratt, if they were there. Richards might have said: “Bring back anyone on the premises,” but his hunch was still only a hunch and he did not want to be in the position of instigating terror raids at 2 A.M.
In fifteen minutes, Clarvoe was standing in front of the darkened house. H Street was deserted. He had ten men with him and he posted them carefully. One went to the back of the house, in the yard, one in the alley to the east, four men at the four corners of the building. Then Clarvoe, accompanied by Lieutenant Skippon, Detective Donaldson, Detective McDevitt and Officer Maxwell, climbed the white stone steps to the parlor floor. Clarvoe pulled the bell.
The men could hear it jangle inside. Maxwell kept a hand on his gun. The detective was ready to pull the bell again when he heard a sleepy male voice from inside the door.
“Who is it?”
“We’re police.” The door opened slightly. “Who are you?”
“Louis Wiechman.”
“Is John Surratt in?”
“No. He is not in the city.”
“Does his mother live here?”
“Yes.”
“I would like to see her.”
“I’m sorry. She’s in bed.”
“It makes no difference. I must see her.”
“All right. I will speak to her first.”
The big boarder tried to close the door. Clarvoe and Skippon leaned on it and stepped inside. Wiechman was frightened. He stood with a small lamp, his nightshirt tucked into his trousers, his feet bare. He walked to the back of the house, Clarvoe a step behind him. The other policemen began to light lamps in the house. One went upstairs to the top floor, the other down to the basement dining room and kitchen.
Wiechman knocked on Mrs. Surratt’s door and, through the closed panel, held a whispered conversation. Detective Clarvoe stepped closer and said: “Is this Mrs. Surratt?”
“Yes,” said the woman behind the door.
“I want to see John.”
“John is not in the city, sir.”
“When did you see him last?”
“It must be two weeks ago.”
Clarvoe signaled for another detective to take over the questioning of Mrs. Surratt. He turned to Wiechman and walked back to the sitting room.
“Do you belong here?” Clarvoe said.
“I do.”
“Where is your room?”
Wiechman pointed.
“I want to see it,” said the policeman.
Wiechman led the way upstairs, followed by Clarvoe and Lieutenant Skippon. The boarder opened the door to his room and stepped inside. He turned the kerosene lamp up.
“Is that your trunk?” said Clarvoe.
“Yes sir.”
As the policeman stooped to open it, Wiechman laid a timid hand on his shoulder. The boarder’s eyes were pleading.
“Will you be kind enough to tell me the meaning of all this?”
Clarvoe straightened. “That is a pretty question for you to ask me. Where have you been tonight?”
“I have been here in the house.”
“Were you here all evening?”
“No. I was down the country with Mrs. Surratt.”
A second detective was rummaging through a closet. “Do you pretend to tell me that you do not know what happened this night?”
“I do,” Wiechman said. “What happened?”
“I will tell you,” Clarvoe said. From his pocket he pulled a piece of wilted collar and a small bow from a tie. The collar was stained orange. “Do you see this blood? This is Abraham Lincoln’s blood. Wilkes Booth has murdered the President and John Surratt has assassinated Mr. Seward.”
The boarder clapped a hand to his forehead dramatically. “Great God!” he moaned. “I see it all now!” He staggered. “Is it really true?”
Clarvoe rummaged through the trunk and Skippon, who had finished with the closet, nodded to him. They went downstairs with Wiechman. At the foot of the stairs, Mrs. Surratt was answering some questions asked by Detective McDevitt.
The boarder said: “What do you think, Mrs. Surratt? President Lincoln has been murdered by John Wilkes Booth and the Secretary of State has been assassinated.”
Mrs. Surratt raised both hands above her head and said: “My God! You don’t tell me so!”
Clarvoe closely watched the reactions of the landlady and the boarder to the news, and both seemed to him to be genuinely shocked.
“Mrs. Surratt,” said the detective, “I am going to ask you a couple of questions and I want you to be very particular how you answer them because a great deal depends upon them. When did you see John Wilkes Booth?”
The little landlady thought for a moment. “Why,” she said, “two o’clock this day.”
“You mean yesterday?”
“Yes, yesterday.”
“When did you last see your son John?”
“About two weeks ago.”
“Where is he?”
“The last I heard, in Canada. I received a letter from him. There are a great many mothers who do not know where their sons are. What is the meaning of all this?”
Clarvoe started up the stairs again. He nodded to McDevitt: “Mack, you tell her.” He went to the top floor and tried a doorknob. The door was locked. He heard a female voice say: “Who is it?” On the opposite side of the hall, a door opened and John Holahan came out in his nightshirt.
“John,” said Clarvoe, “how do you do? What are you doing here?”
Holahan, half awake, squinted in the gaslight and roared: “And how are you, John? I board here. What’s the matter?”
“How long have you been here tonight?”
“Why, I took a walk and got in early. Nine o’clock, I think.”
“President Lincoln has been murdered.”
Holahan reacted like the others. He took a staggered step backward.
“Great God Almighty!”
Clarvoe took the doorknob in his hand, and Holahan restrained him. “My little daughter is in there,” he said. Clarvoe tried to go into the other bedroom. “John,” said Holahan, “my wife is in there. Let me talk to her and then you can come in.”
Clarvoe waited outside of both doors. The boarder talked to Mrs. Holahan and said that she would be presentable in a minute. The detective wanted to know if there was anything upstairs, and Holahan told him a furnished attic, and led the way. Anna Surratt was there and, with her was the young girl who usually shared a bed with Mrs. Surratt, Honora Fitzpatrick.
“Do you mind,” said Holahan, “if I warn them first that someone is coming in?”
“Go ahead.”
Holahan stepped into the room, awakened the young ladies, and told them to get dressed, that police were in the house. The girls did not get dressed. In fright, they elected to cover their heads with bedclothes and remain where they were. Clarvoe searched the room and, realizing that he did not know who was under the bedclothes, said that he was sorry, but that he would have to see their faces. He pulled the bedclothes back a little and took a look.
He went back downstairs, met Mrs. Holahan, examined that bedroom, peeked into the one across the hall where young Miss Holahan was, and then joined the others down on the parlor floor. Clarvoe and Skippon went down to the basement and searched it. In the kitchen, they saw a Negro woman.
“Auntie,” said Clarvoe, “is John Surratt in this house?”
The woman was badly frightened. She shook from cheek to heel. “Do you mean Mrs. Surratt’s son?” she said.
“I do,” Clarvoe snapped. “I didn’t know she had a husband.”
“I have not seen him for two weeks.”
Clarvoe and Skippon went back upstairs and searched that floor from front to back. They questioned the boarders in the parlor. They left. They took no prisoners.
Mr. Stanton would know about all of this in about an hour, but, at the moment, in Petersen House, he had lost his temper. Mrs. Lincoln had made one more trip to the deathbed. She was supported by Miss Harris and Miss Keene and she had leaned across the bed so that her cheek rested on her husband’s. At that precise moment, the President expelled an explosive breath, and, as her ear was close to his mouth, the noise terrified her and she screamed and fell into a dead faint.
Stanton heard the commotion, the cries of the other ladies, and he came into the bedroom pointing a finger at the unconscious Mrs. Lincoln.
“Take that woman out,” he said loudly, “and do not let her in again.”
When the room had been cleared, Dr. Barnes ordered the patient to be turned toward the wall. The doctor sat on the bed and, with cotton soaked in alcohol, combed the black matted hair away from the round wound. Then, using a silver probe, he tried to locate and remove the bullet. The probe moved inward two inches, and met an obstruction.
Barnes asked his assistant for a long Nélaton probe. It had a tiny white porcelain bulb on the end. This, when inserted, passed the two-inch mark and continued onward diagonally across the brain. At a depth of four inches, it ran into an obstruction. Barnes turned the probe slowly so that segments of whatever the obstruction was would be found on the porcelain bulb. If it was a bullet, traces of lead would be found. He withdrew it. There was no indication of lead. The other doctors studied the probe and agreed that he had probably contacted a piece of loose bone which had been blown from the back of the skull by the impetus of the bullet. The Nélaton probe was tried again, without result. The Surgeon General, after a consultation, agreed that no further effort would be made to find the bullet.
Andrew Johnson felt that he had waited long enough to visit President Lincoln. Later, many would say that the Vice President did not want to go to Petersen House. Whether or not this was so, he received the Stanton message to be prepared to take the oath of office and at once insisted that he was going to Petersen House. Governor Farwell opposed it. He said that the future of the Republic was bound up with Johnson now, and that the Vice President should remain where he was. Major James O’Beirne was present, and he too opposed the visit.
Johnson said he would go anyway. At that, O’Beirne said he would summon a guard of soldiers. The Vice President refused. He wanted no guard, no carriage—he would walk. So Farwell and O’Beirne flanked the next President and walked him up Twelfth Street and across E to Tenth. Johnson said little. He had pulled his hat down hard over his eyes, raised his coat collar, and jammed his hands into his coat pockets.
Tenth Street was almost deserted. Cavalry horses were tied four and five to a picket post up and down the street and they looked dejected in the cool dampness of morning. A small group of civilians stood around Petersen House and two soldiers patrolled the front of the house.
The Vice President was shown into the bedroom. He stood with his hat in his hand, his hair mussed, looking down. He stood for a little while, never taking his eyes from the figure on the bed, not saying anything, not showing any emotion. Then he took Robert’s hand and whispered a few words. He stopped in the back parlor and said something to Stanton, who looked up at him and nodded curtly. He went back through the hall, through the bedroom with the flickering jet, and into the front room. He took Mrs. Lincoln’s hand in his and she looked up at him, whimpering.
Johnson walked back to Kirkwood House.
In New York and in Philadelphia and Chicago and Detroit and St. Louis and Boston, the morning newspapers were being made up. They knew. Now the editors were going to press with the biggest, saddest story of the age. Mourning rules were dropped into place by printers and many editors headed the story with the single big word “IMPORTANT!” This was followed by as many as fifteen and eighteen diminishing headlines which told, in brief, the facets of the story.
Radical Republican newspapers ripped out editorials which condemned Lincoln’s “soft” peace toward the South, and in their place went brand-new editorials which mourned the loss of a great man. Cartoons which slandered Lincoln’s features were tossed on the composing-room floor. Anti-Lincoln letters from irate readers were killed, the type distributed.
Mainly, the story ran down the left-hand column of page 1 and jumped from there to another page. Smaller sidebar stories, telling of the effect of the assassination on the national welfare, were run beside the main story. So were stories about Mr. Seward’s assassination, and there were a few stories about Johnson and Stanton.
The editors were also exasperated. They told their readers about the greatest crime of the nineteenth century, but in the story there was no criminal. They jammed the reopened wires to Washington with questions. A few who had stories which mentioned Booth removed the name from the copy because it seemed libelous. On the wires, the editors asked for confirmation, by a high official, of Booth as the assassin. Associated Press members were confused because they were asked, at one time in the night, to “kill” the story.
The editor of the National Intelligencer, who did not know that Booth had tried to give him a news beat and a confession in a letter, sat down at 2 A.M. to write an editorial in longhand. He gave his lead a lot of thought and then he wrote: “Rumors are so thick and contradictory that we rely entirely upon our reporters to advise the public of the details and result of this night of horrors. . . . We forbear to give the name of one of the supposed murderers, about whom great suspicion gathers. . . . At the Police Headquarters it is understood that Mr. Hawk, of Laura Keene’s troupe, has been held to bail to testify to the identity of the suspected assassin of the President, whom he is said to have recognized as a person well known to him.”
The Washington Chronicle, by comparison, stated the case for confusion as well as any newspaper: “We then ascertained that the police were on the track of the President’s assassin, and found that a variety of evidences, all pointing one way, would in all probability justify the arrest of a character well known throughout the cities of the United States. Evidence taken amid such excitement would, perhaps, not justify us in naming the suspected man, nor could it aid in his apprehension.”
Almost alone among the big daily newspapers, the New York Tribune named names: “Laura Keene and the leader of the orchestra declare that they recognized him [the assassin] as J. Wilkes Booth, the actor.”
Over on C Street, John Greenawalt had just retired at Pennsylvania House. He owned the hotel and the houseboys seldom disturbed him because, when he was sleepy, he was irritable. However, he had just become comfortable when a boy knocked, came in, and said: “There is a man came in with Atzerodt, and he wants to pay for a room.”
The houseboy was wrong. Atzerodt had not come in with anyone. He was in the lobby, dozing on a settee. He wanted a place to sleep, but he had no money. When a paying customer had come in, the houseboy used the event to say a good word for George.
Greenawalt got up, donned a robe, and went downstairs. He took some money from the paying customer and told the houseboy to show him to a room where some other men had left a vacant bed. Atzerodt sat up and asked if he could have his old room, number 51. It was occupied, Mr. Greenawalt said, but he was welcome to accompany the stranger and find a bunk in the same room.
The stranger registered as Sam Thomas. He gave five dollars and received change. Atzerodt tried to follow him up the stairs, but Mr. Greenawalt stopped him. “Atzerodt,” he said, “you have not registered.”
“Do you want my name?”
“Certainly.”
The conspirator signed his name and went to the room. He had finally found a place to sleep.