Out in the streets of Washington, nobody had any real idea of what was happening. The only source of information that night was rumor, but there were so many rumors that they only served to add to the collective confusion and anxiety. And the fact that so many of them contradicted one another did not help the situation. Some of the stories in circulation claimed that the president had only suffered a slight wound, but that Andrew Johnson was dead. One account insisted that the entire cabinet, including William Seward, had been assassinated. Another said that General Grant had been killed aboard a train on his way to New Jersey.

Several of the rumors being circulated involved Confederate leaders: the Confederate government had been behind the president's shooting, which was the signal for a general uprising; guerilla warfare would soon break out, with armed Confederate extremists seizing bridges and other strategic points around the city. But none of these rumors gave any indication of who these mysterious conspirators might be, when they were planning their insurrection, or even how many of them were under suspicion. There were certainly enough soldiers on the street to make anyone believe that something sinister was about to take place—mounted cavalry and foot soldiers could be seen all over the city. During the early hours of Saturday morning, the best thing anyone could hope for was that the coming day would bring better news, or at least more reliable information.

At the Petersen house, the assembled family members, cabinet members, friends, and colleagues were fully aware that President Lincoln had absolutely no chance of surviving, or even of living through the night, and they waited for him to die. By about one o'clock, the doctors had already pronounced him brain dead—“he would have some movements, some twitching, things like that,” a doctor would state more than 150 years after the event, “and it's a foregone conclusion that he was brain-dead by about 1:00 a.m.”1 Robert Lincoln had also joined the group, but there was nothing he could do except look at his father and wait, along with all the others.

The president's pillow had become saturated with blood. During the early morning hours, his head was raised and a new pillow was placed under his head. His breathing was uneven, sometimes shallow and sometimes with a heavy rasping noise. Mary Lincoln came into the room every now and again, distraught and on the verge of hysteria, shouting at her husband to wake up and unnerving everyone present. At one point, when the president's breathing became particularly loud, Mary let out a penetrating scream and fell to the floor. Secretary Stanton, who was never the soul of tact and discretion under the best of circumstances, lost his temper and shouted, “Take that woman out and do not let her in again.”²

Everyone's nerves were being taxed to the limit; they had been listening to President Lincoln's groans and had been watching him expire before their eyes for the past few hours. At about six o'clock, Gideon Welles decided that he had to get away from that house, if only for a few minutes, and took a short walk: “It was a dark and gloomy morning, and rain set in before I returned to the house,” which was about fifteen minutes later.³ He passed several groups of people along the way, “all anxious and solicitous,” and all asking about the president. When he replied that Lincoln could not survive, the reaction was always overwhelming grief.

After returning to the house, Secretary Welles settled into what he called the “back parlor,” where Secretary Stanton and several others were discussing the assassination. He went back to the president's room a short while before seven o'clock. It was evident that President Lincoln “was rapidly drawing near the closing moments.”4 Robert Lincoln stood near the head of the bed. On two occasions, according to Secretary Welles, “he gave way to overpowering grief and sobbed aloud,” leaning on Senator Sumner's shoulder. But, as Welles pointed out, the end was not far off: “The respiration of the President became suspended at intervals, and at last entirely ceased at twenty-two minutes past seven.” Secretary Stanton famously pronounced, “Now he belongs to the ages.”⁵

A Presbyterian minister, Dr. Phineas Gurley, knelt on the floor and said a prayer. Mary Lincoln was escorted out of William Petersen's house and back to the White House, screaming when she saw Ford's Theatre across the street. After the doctors, friends, and relatives left the room, a cabinet meeting was held in the same room. According to a newspaper account, “Immediately after the President's death a cabinet meeting was called by Secretary Stanton, and held in the room in which the corpse lay. Secretaries Stanton, Welles and Usher [John P. Usher, Secretary of the Interior], Postmaster General Dennison, and Attorney General Speed present.”⁶ The account concludes with, “The results of the Conference are yet unknown.”

The meeting's main activity was to contact Andrew Johnson by letter, to inform him officially of the president's death and also to let him know that “the government devolved upon him.”⁷ The letter was straightforward and to the point:

WASHINGTON CITY, April 15, 1865.

SIR: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, was shot by an assassin last evening at Ford's Theatre, in this city, and died at the hour of twenty-two minutes after seven o'clock. About the same time at which the President was shot, an assassin entered the sick chamber of Hon. W. H. SEWARD, Secretary of State, and stabbed him in several places in the throat, neck and face, severely, if not mortally, wounding him. Other members of the Secretary's family were dangerously wounded by the assassin while making his escape.

By the death of President LINCOLN, the office of President has devolved, under the Constitution, upon you. The emergency of the government demands that you should immediately qualify, according to the requirements of the Constitution, and enter upon the duties of President of the United States. If you will please make known your pleasure, such arrangements as you deem proper will be made.

Your obedient servants,

HUGH MCCULLOCH,

Secretary of the Treasury.

EDWIN M. STANTON,

Secretary of War.

GIDEON WELLES,

Secretary of the Navy.

WILLIAM DENNISON.

Postmaster-General.

J. P. USHER,

Secretary of the Interior.

JAMES SPEED,

Attorney-General.8

Secretary Welles went to his house for breakfast, where he discovered that his wife had gone to the White House—Mary Lincoln had sent for her. Mrs. Welles would stay at the White House throughout the day, in spite of the fact that she had been unwell during the entire past week. The secretary himself—“wearied, shocked, exhausted, but not inclined to sleep”—rode over to the White House after breakfast through “a cheerless cold rain.”9 Several hundred recently freed slaves stood about in front of the White House, loudly weeping and showing their grief over the loss of President Lincoln. The crowd did not disperse throughout the entire day, even though the rain would not let up.

“At the White House, all was silent and sad,” Secretary Welles noted. Mrs. Lincoln, accompanied by Mrs. Welles, met him in the library, where they were soon joined by Attorney General Speed. They also met young Tad Lincoln, who asked, “Oh, Mr. Welles, who killed my father?” Nobody knew what to say. “Neither Speed nor myself could restrain our tears, nor give the poor boy any satisfactory answer.”¹⁰

Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president a few hours later, at about ten o'clock. By Johnson's request, the short ceremony was held in his room at the Kirkwood Hotel; it was administered by Chief Justice Salmon Chase. Before leaving to perform the ceremony, the chief justice checked the US Constitution to make certain he was proceeding correctly—no president had ever been assassinated before, and he wanted to check to be sure that Johnson's swearing in was correct according to the Constitution. After satisfying himself that the succession procedure was accurate and that he could go ahead, he left for the Kirkwood to perform the ceremony.

About ten people had assembled in Andrew Johnson's room to witness the procedure, including Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the treasury; Attorney General Speed; and several senators. Johnson put his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand, and repeated the oath as Chief Justice Chase recited it: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” When the ceremony had ended, Chief Justice Chase duly informed Andrew Johnson that he was now president of the United States. President Johnson responded by making a short speech, which began, “Gentlemen, I must be permitted to say that I have been almost overwhelmed by the announcement of the sad event which has so recently occurred.”11

“I hardly thought that the authority could be passed so easily from one who was great and popular into the hands of a man who has yet neither power nor prestige,” the Marquis de Chambrun wrote. “But such is the law!”¹²

“Washington, as well as the whole country, was plunged in an agony of grief, and the excitement knew no bounds,” Colonel Horace Porter wrote.¹³ General Grant made the same observation: “The joy that I had witnessed among the people in the street and in public places in Washington…had been turned into grief; the city was in reality a city of mourning.”¹⁴ Along with the rest of the country, the city not only mourned, it also seethed with anger. The headline of the New York Times ran: “AWFUL EVENT—President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin—The Deed Done at Ford's Theatre Last Night—The Act of a Desperate Rebel.”¹⁵

In just about every town throughout the North, flags flew at half-staff and were frequently draped in black crepe. All official government buildings were also hung with black—city halls, town halls, court houses, libraries. Dry good shops ran out of their supply of black cloth within the space of an hour or so. Banks and businesses closed for the day. Newspapers announced that they would not print an edition on the following day. “The Washington tragedy absorbed all thought and all conversation,” a news reporter observed. “In the stores, on the street corners, in the railroad cars, men, women and children of all classes could talk of nothing else. All agreed that the crime that had been committed was the greatest of modern times.”¹⁶

The day following the president's death, April 16, was Easter Sunday. Clergymen throughout the North memorialized President Lincoln in their sermons. Some pointed out the Lincoln, like Jesus, was killed on Good Friday. Also like Jesus, Lincoln was a martyr—Jesus died for the sins of mankind, while Lincoln died for the sins of his country, especially slavery. Other sermons compared Lincoln with Moses. They both led their people to the Promised Land, but had not been allowed to go there themselves: “I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go there.”17 The Chicago Tribune also thought that Lincoln was a martyr to slavery: “On the sacred anniversary on the day made holy by the crucifixion of Him…we mourn another martyrdom…another martyr to the demon—Slavery.”¹⁸

There was a widespread feeling that John Wilkes Booth had acted with the approval of Jefferson Davis, a suspicion that turned out to be completely unfounded. Throughout the North, there were many who called for some measure of revenge against Confederate leaders, as well as for defensive measures to prevent any further assassinations or possible insurrections or uprisings. These feelings were not just held by the public at large.

General Ulysses S. Grant was also on edge, and he issued an order to keep a heightened lookout and tighten all security—he still had Charles Dana's warning on his mind to keep a close watch on all suspicious persons. As soon as he returned to Washington from Burlington, General Grant ordered General Edward Ord to arrest the mayor of Richmond, as well as all members of the city council. He also wanted General Ord to round up and arrest any Confederate officers who had not taken the oath of allegiance to the United States. General Ord objected that such measures might serve to incite an open rebellion. General Lee was in Richmond; arresting General Lee in the former Confederate capital might cause residents to riot in the streets, or even to take up arms. Grant saw the rationale behind General Ord's objections and canceled his order. But he still advised Ord to increase his vigilance against anyone in Richmond who even looked suspicious, who might turn out to be an assassin or a saboteur.

General Grant also ordered General Philip Sheridan to prepare to make an advance against General Joseph E. Johnston. General Johnston and his army were still at large in North Carolina, and General Sherman did not have enough cavalry to suit General Grant. Phil Sheridan had an outstanding cavalry corps, one of the best in the Union army. Grant ordered him to move south, and to keep himself in readiness to go after Joe Johnston if necessary. All of this took place less than a week after Appomattox, where General Grant offered Lee the most generous and lenient terms possible. His change of heart gives a good indication of how the country at large felt about the South following the assassination.

William Crook did not hear anything at all about the assassination until Saturday morning, April 15. He had gone to bed early on Friday night, and had slept right through all the hysteria of the night before. His reaction to the president's death was completely different from anyone else's: “My first thought was, If I had been on duty at the theatre, I would be dead now.”19 If he had been stationed outside the president's box at Ford's Theatre, William Crook reasoned that he would have confronted John Wilkes Booth and would have been killed by Booth instead of President Lincoln. But he had not been assigned to protect the president that night. That job had been given to John F. Parker, a policeman on Washington's metropolitan force, who was to have guarded President Lincoln from four o'clock in the afternoon until midnight.

John F. Parker had been at his station when the president arrived at Ford's Theatre, and had sat in a chair outside the president's box. But at around nine o'clock he left the theater and went to a nearby bar to have a drink. When John Wilkes Booth came to the theater, Parker was still at the bar.

William Crook's next thought was to wonder if John F. Parker was dead. “Had Parker been at his post at the back of the box—Booth still being determined to make the attempt that night—he would have been stabbed, probably killed.”20 Crook reasoned that the struggle between Parker and Booth “would have given the alarm,” and that Major Rathbone and President Lincoln himself could have disarmed Booth, “who was not a man of great physical strength.” Crook was angered and frustrated by Parker's dereliction of duty. “It makes me feel rather bitter,” he said, “when I remember what the President had said, just a few hours before, that he knew he could trust all his guards.”

Parker was never brought up on charges for his misconduct on the night of April 14. During the early morning hours of April 15, he walked into his precinct station with a prostitute named Lizzie Williams in tow. The desk sergeant dismissed her, simply because there was no evidence of any criminal activities against her. The sergeant did not ask Parker any questions, either about Ford's Theatre or the assassination. When his shift ended, Parker went home. He remained a member of the Washington police force for three more years, when his lackadaisical attitude toward his job finally caught up with him—he was found asleep on his shift, when he should have been walking his beat, and was dishonorably dismissed from the police force.

Commander John S. Barnes, who had worried about the president's safety while he was in Richmond, was awakened by an orderly early on Saturday morning. The orderly said that the flagship, the USS Minnesota, had hoisted her colors at half-mast, and also that Admiral Porter had signaled for Commander Barnes to come on board at once. It was a very early hour in the day to receive such an order; the commander was afraid that something must have happened to Admiral Porter. He dressed as quickly as he could and was rowed over to the Minnesota.

Commander Barnes was met at the gangway by Commodore Rockendorf, who escorted Barnes to his cabin. Once they were out of sight of the ship's crew, the commodore handed Commander Barnes a telegram from Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy: “President Lincoln was assassinated last night in Ford's Theater, and is dead.”²¹

Barnes read and reread the dispatch, while Commodore Rockendorf tactfully walked away in silence. “It seemed as though the fact could not impress itself upon my mind. For some moments I could not utter a word.”22 When the impact of Secretary Welles's telegram finally took effect, “I am not ashamed to say I sat down and gave way to a bitter grief that was heartfelt and sincere.”

Elisha Hunt Rhodes learned of the assassination in camp at Burkesville, Virginia. A corporal informed him that “President Lincoln was dead, murdered.”²³ Colonel Rhodes told the corporal not to repeat the story to anyone in camp, but a short while later a messenger rode up with a circular from General Meade that gave the news in more detail. The dispatch was read to the officers and men of the regiment by the adjutant. “The sad news was received in grief and silence, for we feel that we have lost a personal friend,” Colonel Rhodes remembered. “The soldiers feel that the leaders of the Rebellion are responsible, and I fear that if Lee's Army had not surrendered that they would have fared hard at our hands.”

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain did not hear the news until Sunday afternoon. He had made his headquarters in a grand prewar manor house—“an old mansion of the ancient regime,” he called it—and was listening to a German band from his former brigade playing cheerful tunes. While the general was enjoying his peaceful day, a cavalryman rode up with a message. There was nothing unusual about receiving a military telegram, even on a Sunday afternoon, but there was something about the messenger's look and manner that caught Chamberlain's attention.

The rider dismounted and handed the telegram to General Chamberlain's chief of staff, saying, “I think the general would wish to treat this as personal.”²⁴ The officer walked over to General Chamberlain and handed him the “flimsy,” a telegram written on yellow tissue paper.

Washington, April 15, 1865

The President died this morning. Wilkes Booth the assassin. Secretary Seward dangerously wounded. The rest of the Cabinet, General Grant, and other high officers of the Government included in the plot of destruction.

General Chamberlain's first thought was of the effect this news would have on the men; he was afraid that they would rise up against the local residents and destroy their town. “It might take but little to rouse them to a frenzy of blind revenge,” he reflected. “They, for every reason, must be held in hand.” He ordered a double guard to be placed on the entire camp immediately. “Tell the regimental commanders to get all their men in, and allow no one to leave.” Next, he called a meeting with his officers to tell them the “appalling news,” as well as to issue an order that word of the assassination was to be kept secret from the soldiers. The news must be “prudently broken” to the men; “what if now this blackest crime should fire their hearts to reckless and implacable vengeance?”

The general was so shaken by the telegram that it affected his demeanor. The lady of the prewar mansion—“there were never any men at home in those days”—came out to ask the general what was wrong. “It is bad news for the South,” he answered.

“Is it Lee or Davis?” she asked, with some anxiety in her voice. “I must tell you, madam, with a warning,” he replied. “I have put your house under a strict guard. It is Lincoln.” When he spoke, the woman's face brightened with relief. General Chamberlain was sorry to see her change of expression. “The South has lost its best friend, madam,” was the only thing he could say to her.

After meeting with his officers, the general and two other officers rode off to see General George Gordon Meade. “We found him sad—very sad,” as well as filled with foreboding. At that point in time, nobody knew who was behind the assassination—possibly Jefferson Davis and other members of the Confederate government had planned it. “The plan is to destroy the Government by assassination,” General Meade said. “They probably have means to get possession of the capital before anybody can stop them. There is nothing for it but to push the army to Washington, and make Grant military dictator until we can restore constitutional government.” If General Meade was thinking along these lines, this gives some idea of how the army as a whole was thinking.

Secretary of State William Seward learned of President Lincoln's death on the morning after Ford's Theatre, according to his daughter Fanny. The New York Tribune reported that “he bore up well under the depressing announcement with remarkable fortitude.”25 A few days later, Secretary Seward asked to have his bed moved closer to the window. When he saw the flags at the War Department flying at half-staff, he said to an attendant that he now fully realized that the president was dead. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me; but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there's the flag at half mast.” The truth had finally registered in his mind.²⁶

Jefferson Davis received the news of President Lincoln's assassination on April 18, when he arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina. John C. Breckinridge, Davis's Secretary of War, had learned of the assassination in a telegram from General Sherman; Breckinridge passed the information along to President Davis. The messenger who delivered the dispatch also read its contents to some nearby Confederate troops. The soldiers cheered the news, “not appreciating the evil it portended,” but President Davis immediately realized the full implication of Lincoln's death.²⁷

“For an enemy so relentless in the war for our subjugation, we could not be expected to mourn,” President Davis would write, “yet in view of the political consequences, it could not be regarded otherwise than a great misfortune to the South.” He was not about to call Abraham Lincoln a friend of the South, but he could see that Lincoln was not an enemy, either, and was probably the closest thing to a friend that the South could have hoped for.

“He had power over the Northern people, and was without personal malignity toward the people of the South,” Davis continued, “his successor was without power in the North and the embodiment of malignity toward the Southern people, perhaps the more so because he had betrayed and deserted them in their hour of need.” When Tennessee had seceded from the Union, Andrew Johnson did not go with his state; he retained his seat in the US Senate. In 1862, President Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of the state. To the North, Andrew Johnson was considered a courageous Southern Unionist who refused to commit treason and desert his country, but to Jefferson Davis and most of the South he was a traitor who turned his back on his native state.

General Robert E. Lee declared that President Lincoln's assassination was nothing less than a disgrace and a horrible crime. The war was over. General Lee wanted nothing more than for the former Confederate states to come back into the Union in peace and honor. Lincoln's death at the hands of a fanatical Confederate sympathizer could only impede an honorable peace, and would also stand in the way of a true reconciliation between North and South. The general realized that Lincoln's death was not an auspicious event, either to the South or to the restoration of peace.

Not everyone in the South agreed with General Lee. As far as many Southerners were concerned, Abraham Lincoln was a monster and a tyrant and should have been killed a lot sooner. A woman from North Carolina referred to the president as “Lincoln the oppressor” and wondered why Booth had not shot him before. But she also wondered exactly what Andrew Johnson would be like, and wrote, “Lincoln the rail splitter was bad enough, Johnson, the renegade tailor, is worse.”28

Newspapers throughout the South varied in their carrying of the news of the assassination, as well as in their points of view regarding the incident itself. A North Carolina paper lamented the news of Lincoln's death, and also feared that it might be the cause for additional hostility from the North. “Abraham Lincoln was the best friend the South had in all the North,” the paper's editor wrote. “We pray God that his untimely and cruel death may not add to the miseries of our afflicted state. North Carolina had no agency in the awful deed.”29

Not every editor was as diplomatic, or even pretended to have any regrets over Lincoln's death. Some even ridiculed other Southern newspapers that lamented the assassination. At least one Texas newspaper came right out and said it was glad that President Lincoln was dead. “It is certainly a matter of congratulation that Lincoln is dead,” the paper's editor wrote, “because the world is now happily rid of the monster that disgraced the form of humanity.”³⁰

Some editors did not give any opinion at all regarding what had happened at Ford's Theatre. A South Carolina newspaper treated the story as a foreign news event, and reported the overseas reaction to the assassination: “The news of the assassination of President Lincoln and attempted assassination of Secretary Seward had reached England, producing there, and throughout Europe, a most profound sensation of horror, and calling forth expressions everywhere of earnest sympathy and respect.”³¹

And not every editor managed to get his facts straight. A newspaper in Alabama ran this as its headline: “GLORIOUS NEWS—Lincoln and Seward Assassinated!—LEE DEFEATS GRANT—Andy Johnson Inaugurated President.”³² The short piece went on to state that Lincoln and Seward were both dead. “Lincoln was shot through the head in the theatre; Seward was slain while in bed,” and added, “This is said to be true beyond a doubt.” The article added, “A gentleman just from Selma says it is believed in Selma that Lee and Johnston had effected a junction and whipped Grant soundly.”

Nearly every account in every newspaper, North and South, had one item in common—now that President Lincoln was gone, editors and reporters wondered what would happen next. Andrew Johnson was a completely unknown entity. Many in the North regarded him with suspicion; Southerners tended to look at him with foreboding. Nobody, North or South, knew exactly what to expect. The assassination had created an entirely new world. Nobody could say whether this new world would be better or worse, but everyone had their anxieties.

John Wilkes Booth wrote a letter explaining exactly why he felt compelled to kill the president: he had not done anything to support the Confederacy for four years, and now he had to something great and decisive to make up for his inactivity. In a letter to his mother dated 1864, he explained, “For, four years I have lived (I may say) A slave in the north (A favored slave its [sic] true, but no less hateful to me on that account.)” After saying this, he went on to make his point, “Not daring to express my thoughts or sentiments, even in my own home Constantly hearing every principle, dear to my heart, denounced as treasonable, And knowing the vile and savage acts committed on my countrymen their wives & helpless children, that I have cursed my willful idleness, And begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence.”33

An entry in Booth's diary, dated “April 13th/14 Friday the Ides,” he attempted another explanation: “Until to day [sic] nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country's wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done.”³⁴ He also gave his own account of what happened at Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14: “I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A Col- was at his side. I shouted Sic semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night, with the bones of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill: Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it was. This forced union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to out-live my country.”

According to his own version, he is the hero of the story. “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every mans hand against me, I am here in despair,” Booth wrote. “And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero.” Comparing himself to Brutus, who assassinated Julius Caesar, and the Swiss folk hero William Tell, he wrote, “My action was purer than either of theirs.”35

John Wilkes Booth was trailed and cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia. The barn was set alight; Booth was fatally shot by one of the pursuing troops. After being dragged from the barn, he asked the soldiers to tell his mother that he died for his country. David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, who owned the boarding house where the conspirators sometimes met, were tried and convicted of conspiracy to murder the president, the vice-president, and the general-in-chief of the army. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. On July 7, 1865, all four were hanged at Washington's Old Arsenal Penitentiary.