At noon Washington City was quiet. The sun was obscured and the view was heavy with haze. Many of the government employees had taken advantage of Stanton’s order, and similar orders in other departments, and had gone home. No church bells sounded. Few pedestrians were on the streets. It was twelve o’clock on Good Friday and this was the hour that Christ had been nailed to the cross.
It was an unnatural quiet, an uneasy quiet. The men at the long produce market on the south side of the Avenue worked at empty stalls, gutting shad, shucking oysters, butchers turned slabs of beef over in brine barrels, and all of them looked up and down the street and wondered what had become of the people.
The people were in church, or at home. They knelt, or they dozed. Even the bars were held erect by the very few and the very strong. Some honeymooners stopped at Gardner’s studio to pose—he sitting, she standing—for a lifetime memento. At the foot of Fourteenth Street, the daily thunder of army wagons could be heard on the loose planking of Long Bridge, coming home from war.
James R. Ford, in a buggy, was returning from the Treasury Department, laden with flags for decorating the President’s Box. He was walking his horse along E Street, and was turning off onto Tenth when he saw Booth. Ford pulled the horse up, and they chatted. It was a dull day, Ford admitted, but, with Grant and Lincoln present, the house was sure to be a sellout. Booth asked him if he had got all the flags he wanted and Ford said no, that he had asked Jones for a thirty-six-foot American flag that the Treasury used on special occasions, but that Captain Jones had told him that the flag had been on loan for the illumination and wasn’t back. Ford wanted it to drape down the upper floors of the front of the theater.
The two men parted, Booth saying that he would try to attend if he could, but not promising. James got back to Ford’s and, after getting his bunting indoors, asked an actor to write a special notice for the Washington Star and the National Republican announcing the presence of Grant and Lincoln as honored guests tonight. The actor said that it would have to wait; he was busy writing the regular advertisements.
James wrote the announcements himself, and then he worried about the propriety of it. Until it was on paper, it had seemed all right to capitalize on the presence of two great men. Now, as he read it back, it seemed cheap. He called young Harry and asked for an opinion. They read it aloud together and it seemed all right. They agreed that such an announcement could harm no one, and, at the same time, it was bound to draw the patronage of transients.
A colored boy delivered both by hand.
Wilkes Booth walked up to G Street, and across G to Seventh, and stepped into Howard’s Stable. The stableman knew him, and Booth asked that his big one-eyed roan be delivered to the little stable behind Ford’s Theatre and tethered there. He paid the feed bill for the horse, and left. Then he took the long walk down across the Mall to Pumphrey’s Stable, and asked for a sorrel which he had been renting for six weeks past. The stableman said that the sorrel was out and Mr. Booth could not have him. Instead, he said, he had a fine, fast roan mare for hire, a little nervous perhaps, but a good fast riding horse.
The stableman brought her out and turned her around inside the door. Booth studied the animal. She was young, about fourteen hands high, and she had croup chafes on her quarters. Her mane and tail were black. She had one white sock and a star on her forehead. Booth liked her skittish bearing.
“Have her saddled at four o’clock,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
George Atzerodt, new resident at Kirkwood House, Twelfth Street at the Avenue, was in and out of the hotel in the manner of a baggy-pants comic who knows that if he does something ridiculous three times it will induce laughter. On the hotel register, he had scrawled his right name: “G. A. Atzerodt” and, although he had not been in his room on the second floor since early morning, David Herold had been in it to leave clothes and weapons.
Atzerodt spent most of his time drinking at the bar and trying to be disarming. He asked so many questions of the bartender and the few customers that he excited suspicion. Where exactly, he wanted to know, is the Vice President’s room? Does he have a guard? Could any citizen knock on the door and have a chat with him? A man in his position doesn’t carry firearms, does he? How about the nigger who stands behind him when he eats—where does he go when Johnson goes back to his quarters? Does the Vice President stay home at night or does he go out? Would you say that he was a brave man or a coward? Ever see any soldiers around him?
The men at the bar studied Atzerodt, and the stupid face squeezed into a smile, and they relaxed. The glances around the bar were a shrug—this man was a drunken outlander.
Booth went back to the National Hotel to dress. He wanted calf boots and new spurs and a black suit with tight trousers, for riding. He wanted a good black hat too, and his wallet with the pictures of his girls, and the diary which had been bare of words. He wanted a small pocket compass, his gold timepiece, a small brass derringer, a gimlet and a long sheathed knife which could be stuck inside the trousers along the left side.
There would be no more failures; he knew that. Lincoln would die tonight, or Booth would. Or perhaps both. The last possibility did not frighten him. The actor was aware that the chances were that he would not get away, rather than that he would. Pulling the huge statue down with him was the important thing. The only thing.
If he worried, it was over his fellow conspirators. No one knew better than he that these men—his band of irregulars— were ciphers; nothings; buffoon assassins. A sniveling alcoholic, a giggling boy, and a brainless automaton. Atzerodt would be assigned to kill Vice President Johnson and Wilkes would be surprised if George approached the man at all. However, Johnson was the least important of the men he wanted to kill—a white trash tailor—and that’s why Atzerodt was assigned to him.* Seward was more important, and Paine would really kill the man if . . . if . . . if Paine could find him.
In the past several weeks, Booth had tried to make Washington City comprehensible to Lewis Paine, but the ex-soldier became more confused. He could not understand uptown from downtown, north from south, or right from left. Like a hound dog, he would have to be taken to the bush the bird nested in, and pointed. Davey Herold would do that. So, in substance, he had to use two men to get one sick man killed, and a third man to get nothing done. Only he, John Wilkes Booth, had the courage, the intelligence, and the patriotism to walk in “among a thousand of his friends” and slay the Despot Himself.
The plan called for meeting afterward on the road to Surrattsville. And this too, the actor must have known, was a dream. Each of them would bungle and fail, and each would bring sudden death on himself. In cool assessment, Booth was pretty sure that he would not be on the road to Surrattsville tonight. Getting into the State Box was a formidable problem; getting out of the theater and away was going to be almost impossible.
For a while, he toyed with the idea of taking Paine with him to Ford’s Theatre. Paine could be assigned to kill General Grant while Booth was dispatching President Lincoln. But the actor dropped the plan quickly. It would be infinitely more difficult to get two persons into that box tonight than one; and it would be more than twice as hard to get two people out of that theater, than one. Besides, if Paine assassinated Grant, and Booth failed to kill Lincoln, the actor would be a fool in history. His theatrical sense warned him not to share billing with anyone. He would do it himself—Lincoln with the gun; Grant with the knife.
Mrs. Surratt and Miss Honora Fitzpatrick left the boardinghouse and walked over to St. Patrick’s Church, on Tenth Street between E and F, to pray during a part of the Three Hours Agony. The church was dim and cool. The Crucifix was covered with purple cloth; so were the statues of the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph. And the Stations of the Cross which lined the walls of the church. Communicants knelt in pews and their lips moved in sibilant whispers. Their eyes blinked toward the now empty repository of the Holy Eucharist.
Others, seeking salvation, knelt in the Baptist Church, in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in the Methodist churches, the Episcopal. In Georgia, by the clock, He was dying; in Rome He was already dead; in California He was not yet on the cross.