This is a book about a day, a place and a murder—and about a wide variety of men and women. It begins with the casual and somewhat late good morning of President Abraham Lincoln outside his bedroom door at 7 A.M. on Friday, April 14, 1865, and it ends at 7:22 A.M. the following morning when, as Surgeon General Barnes pressed silver coins to the President’s eyelids, Mrs. Lincoln moaned: “Oh, why did you not tell me he was dying!”
The elapsed time is twenty-four hours, twenty-two minutes. To many people, this is the single most dramatic day in the life of the Republic. It has been written about before, as a chapter of a book, or a part of a chapter and once in a terse volume written by John W. Starr—a volume which ended at 8 P.M. Some of these passages have been beautiful and moving and some have been skimpy and vague and laden with unsupported suspicion. Some of the lurid journalists, feeling that there was not sufficient natural drama in the violent death of Lincoln, filled in the blank spots of this day with imaginings, and the story of the assassination, in time, became so interlarded with fiction that the principal assassin, John Wilkes Booth, became a minor character.
In addition to the chapters dealing with specific hours of the day and night, I have included here two chapters of background in a section entitled The Days Before. I have been reluctant to interrupt the narrative with the insertion of this background section, but have been persuaded that this is necessary and useful in placing the events of the day in context.
As a student of President Lincoln and his times, I began, in 1930, to keep notes on the events of this day. The best, and simplest way, I felt, was to keep notebooks labeled 7 A.M. Friday, 8 A.M. Friday, 9 A.M. Friday and so on through 7 A.M. Saturday. That made twenty-five notebooks. In addition, I kept one marked “Lincoln and Family,” one labeled “The Conspirators,” one called “Washington—Era,” and one marked “Bibliography.” This must be of small interest to any reader except to point out that, after years of reading and making notes, I found that I had as many as three or four versions—each at variance with the others—of what had happened in any one hour. Two years ago, when I intensified the research and started to read seven million words of government documents, the pieces of the puzzle began to orient themselves. There were still conflicts of time and place and event, and these were eventually reconciled by (1) the preponderance of evidence tending toward one version: (2) the testimony of more than one supporting witness at the trial of the conspirators: (3) the relationship of the event in question with an event that occurred prior to it or immediately after.
Still, I do not believe that this book presents all of the facts, nor anywhere near all of the facts. In the little notebooks today, hundreds of pages are marked “void.” In the multitude of trial records, documents and books, there are many blank places although, to compensate for this, I must acknowledge that many of the witnesses supplied sufficient material so that conversations could be reconstructed in dialogue without straining the quotation marks. In fact, the only liberties I have taken are in describing facial expressions (“he scowled”; “Booth looked tired,” etc.) and in describing what certain characters thought, although in each case the thought is based on knowledge of facts then in the possession of the character. Other than that, this book is pretty much a journalistic job.
To insure that the book should be factually sound, galleys were sent to such Lincoln scholars as Bruce Catton, Stefan Lorant, and Harry E. Pratt, Historian of the Illinois State Historical Library. I hope that their suggestions and their challenges have been met and that the book is better, smoother and more sure of itself because of their ministrations.
Sometimes, small facts become elusive. For example, I assumed all along that Lincoln’s office was on the ground floor of the White House. It did not occur to me to challenge this until I read in a Carl Sandburg book that the President was informed, in his office, that people “were waiting downstairs.” The book was nearly complete when, through the kind offices of Congressman Frank Osmers (N.J.), it was put beyond dispute that Lincoln worked upstairs, not down. Another “small” fact is that most writers assumed that Booth, in his escape from the alley behind Ford’s Theatre, spurred his mare up the alley to F Street, and turned right. It did not occur to me to question this until I learned, in an old document, that a wooden gate, used as a billboard, closed the F Street exit and that the assassin would have had to ride up the alley, halt, dismount, open the gate, and then flee. In Ford’s Theatre, a National Parks guard told me that the alley, in 1865, formed a T, and that John Wilkes Booth was aware of the gate at F Street and had not used it, turning instead down the other leg of the alley to Ninth Street, and thence right to Pennsylvania Avenue. In the library at the back of Ford’s Theatre, this guard had an old government pamphlet which proved the point.
For help in amassing the material for this book, I am indebted to Mr. Evan Thomas, Managing Editor of Harper & Brothers; Mrs. Phyllis Jackson of Music Corporation of America; Miss Olive Tambourelle of the Teaneck, New Jersey, library; Mr. Robert Hug of the New York Public Library; the Illinois State Historical Society; to the Esso people for a fine street map of Washington; to Gayle Peggy Bishop, age ten, for facing thousands of pieces of carbon paper in one direction; to Virginia Lee Bishop, seventeen, for believing that no one but her father could have written this particular book.
Jim Bishop
Teaneck, New Jersey