The tolling of the bells began in Washington. Likewise in New York, Boston, Chicago, Springfield, Peoria, metropolitan centers and crossroads villages, the day had tolling bells hour on hour, flags at half-mast, the gay bunting, red, white and blue festoons brought down and crape or any fold of black put out and hung up for sign of sorrow.
Out on the Illinois prairie of Coles County they went to a farmhouse and told the news to an old woman who answered: “I knowed when he went away he’d never come back alive.” This was Sally Bush Lincoln, prepared for her sorrow which came that day.
Edwin Booth, the world’s foremost Shakespearian actor, lay abed in Boston the morning of April 15 when a servant came in and told him that his brother, John Wilkes Booth, had shot and killed the President. And as Edwin Booth related it to Joseph Jefferson, his mind “accepted the fact at once,” for he thought to himself that his brother “was capable of just such a wild and foolish action.” Edwin Booth added: “It was just as if I was struck on the forehead by a hammer.” To General Grant’s secretary, his old friend Adam Badeau, Edwin Booth on Sunday, April 16, wrote, “Abraham Lincoln was my President for, in pure admiration of his noble career and his Christian principles, I did what I never did before—I voted and for him!”
The man hunters and the fugitive John Wilkes Booth were second in national interest only to the death of Lincoln. Who was this Booth? Out of a mediocre fame he had now wrapped the letters of his name with a weird infamy. His own Southern heroes almost universally repudiated him as a madman, one who fought foul. And he was that—a lunatic—a diabolically cunning athlete,
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swordsman, dead shot, horseman, actor. Now his face and name were published with a War Department promise of $50,000 for his capture dead or alive.
John Wilkes Booth was one of ten children born to Mr. and Mrs. Junius Brutus Booth on a big wooded farm 25 miles from Baltimore. Junius Brutus Booth seemed to be a man filled with a compassion that often shook his controls and ran over into the pathetic, the ridiculous, even the comic. When he died in 1852 his feet had wandered before all shrines and altars and paid homage. He was brought up an Episcopalian; he made it a custom to keep some of the sacred days of the Koran; Catholic priests claimed him for one of their own because of his familiarity with their faith; and in synagogues he had been taken for a Jew when he joined fluently in their worship in their own tongue; Masons buried him in a Baptist vault. He was widely accepted as a figure in American cultural life, the supreme Shakespeare player.
He drank hard and often, and in moods and periods was definitely insane. In time Junius Brutus Booth came to sense the oncoming seizures of insanity and would make for home, where a rare and faithful wife nursed him through dark tortures. The daughter Asia wrote of these attacks being looked on in their home “with awe and reverence.”
The son, John Wilkes Booth, had room to play, a 200-acre wooded farm, an oak-floored bedroom facing the east and the sunrise, on the walls deer antlers, swords, pistols, daggers, a bookcase holding Bulwer, Marryat, Byron, Shakespeare. Over the father’s dark spells and grand whims, over Edwin’s impenetrable melancholy, over the failings of others of the family, the mother and loyal Asia had no such brooding near to anguish as they gave the boy and youth Wilkes. They knew it was said “women spoiled him,” that he did what he pleased and took what he wanted and kept his secrets. They saw vanity grow in him—vague, dark personal motives beyond reading and to be feared, projects and purposes vast with sick desire, dizzy with ego.
To the hanging of John Brown went J. Wilkes Booth as a lieutenant in the Richmond Grays. 1 hough he hated John Browns cause, he was fascinated and spellbound by the dramatic, lone-handed audacity of Old Ossawatomie.
His first stage successes came in Southern cities. As the Southern States moved into secession he moved North as a player. William Winter saw the young stars acting as raw, crude and much given to boisterous declamation.” He delighted in leaps and bounds while acting. The Baltimore Sun critic ticketed Wilkes Booth the Gymnastic actor.’ There were fellow actors, such as E. L. Tilton, knocked into an orchestra pit while fencing with Wilkes Booth; some had been cut by his sword in mimic duels.
Over a piece of scenery more than five feet high, wrote W. J. Ferguson, he saw Wilkes Booth jump “with little effort.” These unexpected feats were
accepted as part of a “dashing buoyancy” natural to him. “I saw him, after a rehearsal,” wrote Ferguson of Booth the swordsman, “take on two men at once with the foils and disarm them both within a few seconds.” In a billiard-hall quarrel Ferguson saw Booth, swiftly and without anyone but Ferguson seeing him, throw a heavy book that hit a man in the back. The man turned, accused an innocent party, and started a free-for-all fight. The lights went out and Booth made his getaway, having had one more of his practical jokes.
In April ’61, when Booth played with a stock company in Albany, the leading lady, Miss Henrietta Irving, rushed into his room at Stanwix Hall and with a dirk tried to stab him, landing only a light cut on his face. Then she retired to her own room and stabbed herself, though not seriously. A trifle short for heroic roles, noted Charles Wyndham, “he made up for the lack by his extraordinary presence and magnetism ... He was the idol of women. They would rave of him, his voice, his hair, his eyes.”
From ’61 continuously as he traveled the North he spoke as openly as was convenient for the Confederate cause. In Albany the theater treasurer found him at breakfast one morning and explained that he would ruin his engagement there and put himself in personal danger if he went on talking secession. “Is not this a democratic city?” asked Booth. The reply: “Democratic? yes—but disunion, no!” After which Booth quieted in his talk, though sullen and sour about being gagged.
In ’64 when he was filling fewer engagements because of a failing voice, Booth seemed to have a deepening sense of guilt over keeping himself in safety and comfort while the war raged and the Southern cause sank lower. His broodings took two directions. He would perform a deed saving the Southern cause while at the same time giving the world a breath-taking dramatic performance. In August ’64 he won two recruits to “the enterprise,” as they termed it. Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin, two former schoolmates of Booth at St. Timothy’s Hall, after two years in the Confederate Army, considered themselves “engaged” with Booth as leader. 1 he “enterprise,” worked out in their talks, designed the “capture” or “abduction” of the President. Having gotten their prisoner out of Washington down to Richmond, they would exchange him for enough Confederate prisoners to win the war.
Most of the time until April 14, 1865, Booth lived in Washington, checking in and out of his National Hotel quarters, taking many trips on errands whose purpose he kept secret. He studied Lincoln’s ways and habits, particularly as a theatergoer. At both Grover’s Theatre and Ford’s, Booth was at home, receiving his mail at Ford’s. The entries and exits of these theaters knew him, every door, corner, hall, lobby, passageway, familiar to him. To the stock
actors, stagehands, front-office employees, he was a distinguished figure whose nod they valued.
In November he rode a horse over Maryland and Virginia south of Washington, studied the roads, paths and hiding places by day or night. To Asia, in whom he had every trust, he gave an envelope later found to contain some bonds and oil stock certificates—and a letter. This gave the key to his scrambled brain, his vanity and self-importance, his desire to show the South that he was a Confederate hero even though they no longer loved him or cared about him. He referred in passing to his plan for making “a prisoner of this man, to whom she [the South] owes so much of her misery.”
The letter indicated a “master mind,” of a sort, holding sway over a little band of schemers and hopers meeting in a boardinghouse on H Street between Sixth and Seventh in Washington. They included a drugstore clerk, 20 years old, David E. Herold, out of work and seeking a job when Booth found him. Another was a hump-shouldered, scraggly-bearded fellow, dark, sly, fierce of looks though a coward in a pinch; he was of German descent, a carriage-maker at Port Tobacco, Virginia. Booth’s promises of gold brought him in—George A. Atzerodt. Then there was a tall, broad-shouldered 20-year-old athlete joining ox and tiger in his frame, a veteran of Antietam and Chancellorsville, wounded at Gettysburg. In January ’65 this youth after nearly four years of hard fighting at bloody salients had despaired of the Confederacy and deserted, happening in Baltimore when he was homeless, penniless, in rags, without money to buy food, to meet Booth, finding sympathy, praise, new clothes and money. This was the man known as Lewis Paine (Lewis Thornton Powell), whose entry into the Seward home had resulted in five persons stabbed and the Secretary of State narrowly missing a death wound. The keeper of the boardinghouse where the plotters met was the widow of a Confederate informer and dispatch-carrier, Mary E. Surratt.
Daily Mrs. Surratt saw her boarders acquainting themselves with weapons, holding vague whispered conversations, telling her nothing definite, intimating they would save the sinking Southern cause. The air had a touch of terror. Daily she crossed herself and more often hurried to church to pray. Mrs. Surratt’s son John H., Jr., at first opposed and then gave way to Booth’s eloquence. Just old enough to vote, six feet tall, slender but powerful, blond, with eyes sunken under a bulging forehead, he knew his footing more surely than the others. He quit his job as an Adams Express Company clerk to join Booth. With him came one Louis J. Weichmann, a wavering, suspicious and careful young man who had been Surratts chum for two years at college when Surratt studied for the priesthood. ''Veichmann had been a schoolteacher in Washington, later getting a clerkship in the office of the commissary general of prisoners.
Of the two former Maryland schoolmates of Booth, Samuel Arnold was a farm hand who hated farm work, rather lazy, a student of books with an unmanageable vocabulary; Michael O’Laughlin was a Baltimore livery-stable worker, fairly good at handling horses and better yet at carrying liquor. The crew filled the seven bedrooms of Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse. Some of them subsisted on money furnished by Booth, and all except Weichmann were led and lighted by Booth’s stratagems and wildfire eloquence over the glory awaiting them all for their service to the Confederacy.
On at least one day Booth prowled the White House grounds with Paine. And if later statements of Paine to Major Thomas T. Eckert were correct, Booth directly suggested to the powerful young panther from Florida that he should go into the White House, send in his card, enter Lincoln’s office like any one of many petitioners—and then and there shoot the President. Booth seemed to have taunted Paine with lacking nerve in this. Yet on Booth’s suggestion Paine lurked among bushes in front of the White House conservatory. After a light rain had come a freeze with a crust of ice crackling under footsteps. Lincoln walked by in company with Eckert, and Paine heard Lincoln say, “Major, spread out, spread out, or we shall break through the ice.” Paine in the bushes heard Lincoln telling Eckert of Illinois days once when neighbors returning from mill with their meal bags were crossing the frozen Sangamon River and as the ice cracked when they were part way over someone called the warning, “Spread out, spread out, or we shall break through the ice.”
April 8 Washington is ablaze with flags and the North howling joy over the surrender of Lee’s army. Paine, Atzerodt and Herold are left to Booth, awaiting his wish and whim. The evening of April 11 Booth is with Paine on the White House lawn near the window where the President speaks. He is shaken with rage at the President’s saying the elective franchise, the ballot, should be given to the colored man, “the very intelligent, and . . . those who serve our cause as soldiers.” He urges Paine to shoot the speaker, Paine protesting the risk is too great. The two walk away, Booth muttering, “That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Events had swept away all doubts for Booth as to his course. He would be the whirlwind dark angel of retribution and justice—this was the fond wish. Never for a moment in the piled and ramified materials of evidence was there an indication that he examined his own heart and studied himself on the question of what was driving him on and whether he was first of all an actor. Until this week, believed his sister Asia, who perhaps understood him through a deeper love than he had ever had to search himself with, he was sane. “If Wilkes Booth was mad,” she wrote, “his mind lost its balance between the fall of Richmond, and the terrific end.”
In an inside coat pocket he carried the photographs of four actresses, beautiful women as the pictures rendered their faces, Fay Brown, Effie Germon, Alice Gray, Helen Western—and a fifth woman, half-smiling, later identified merely as “a Washington society woman.” Whether any of them had intimacy of word and mind with him so as to know the seething concentrated purpose that swept aside all other passions—the later record revealed nothing.
John Deery, who kept a bar in front of Grover’s Theatre, during this April week saw Booth often. Said Deery, “He sometimes drank at my bar as much as a quart of brandy in the space of less than two hours of an evening.” Later Deery was to judge of this, “Booth was crazy, but he didn’t show it.” His theory was that any natural and inherited insanity dominating Booth this week was heightened and accentuated by liquor.
On April 12 Booth writes to a woman in New York who signs herself “Etta.” She answers April 13, “Yes, Dear, I can heartily sympathize with you, for I too, have had the blues ever since the fall of Richmond, and like you, feel like doing something desperate.” He has enlisted her in some phase of his projects and she lets him know: “I have not yet had a favorable opportunity to do what you wished, and I so solemnly promised, and what, in my own heart, I feel ought to be done. I remember what happiness is in store for us if we succeed in our present undertakings.” She informs him that “the means you gave me when we parted” is gone. She quotes, “Money makes the mare go” and assures him, “I do as you desired and keep as secluded as a nun, which is not agreeable to me as you have found.”
On April 14 Booth writes to his mother a letter dated “2 A.M.” of that day. “Dearest Mother:” he begins. “I know you hardly expect a letter from me. Excuse brevity; am in haste. With best love to you all I am your affectionate son ever. John.” That was all. To his mother, to his brother Edwin, to such friends as John I. Ford and John Deery, no inklings of a deed and a motive for which he is willing to pay with his life. The word “assassin,” several commentators were to note, took root from the word “hashish” or “hasheesh,” an East Indian drug that inflates the self-importance of the one eating it.
Between 11 and 12 o clock of Good Friday morning, April 14, Booth comes to folds 1 heatre for his mail, hears that a messenger from the White House has engaged a box for the President that evening. He goes into action, hires a bay mare for himself to be ready at four o’clock in the afternoon. He calls on Mrs. Surratt just as she with Weichmann is leaving for Surrattsville, handing her a package holding a field glass to be delivered at a tavern there. Fo the empty Fords I heatre he goes, seeing the two boxes thrown into one, the rocking chair brought for the President’s corner of the box. He inspects
locks, bores a hole through the box door, digs a niche in the plastered brick wall.
At seven in the evening Booth leaves his room at the National Hotel. In passing he asks the hotel clerk if he is going to Ford’s Theatre this evening. The clerk hadn’t thought about it. “There will be some fine acting there tonight,” says Booth; he hurries to the Herndon House and sees Paine. They arrange their timing: at the same hour and minute of the clock that night Paine is to kill the Secretary of State and Booth is to kill the President. Atzerodt, run the further plans, is to kill Vice-President Johnson. Herold is to guide Paine to the Seward home and then hurry to the support of Atzerodt. On the street Booth talks with Atzerodt, who has heard of the fighting nerve of Andy Johnson and now tells Booth he enlisted for abduction but not killing. Atzerodt begs and whimpers. Booth storms at him and curses him.
Atzerodt, armed with a revolver he knows he can never use, drifts away, never to see Booth again. Early in the morning on foot headed toward his boyhood home 22 miles west of Washington, in Georgetown pawning his revolver for $10, was a muddled wanderer, one of the only three men in the world who could have told the police beforehand to the hour of Booth’s intentions that night.
At a stable near Ford’s and close to ten o’clock Booth, Paine and Herold get on their horses and part, Booth to go to Ford’s, Herold to guide Paine to the Seward house. At the back door of Ford’s Booth calls for the theater carpenter Spangler to hold his horse, enters and goes down under the stage, out of a private door into an alley and therefrom to the street in front of the theater. Spangler meantime calls the door boy John Peanuts to hold Booth’s horse. Peanuts says he has to tend his door, Spangler saying if anything goes wrong to lay the blame on him. Out front on the street Booth sees the President’s carriage at the curb, a crowd of curiosity seekers on the sidewalk, some of them waiting to have a look at the presidential party when it leaves the theater. The play is more than half over and a stir of voices and laughter drifts out from the windows to the lighted and cheerful street.
Booth walks past the doorkeeper Buckingham and with a pleasant smile and “You’ll not want a ticket from meO asks the time, and is pointed to the clock in the lobby. He requests a chew of tobacco from Buckingham, who draws a plug from which Booth takes a bite, as customary a proceeding as gentlemen of a previous generation exchanging snuff. On the street an actor who is to sing a new patriotic song asks the time and the theater costumer steps into the lobby and, looking at a large clock on the wall, calls out, “Ten minutes past ten.” Booth opens a door from the lobby into the parquet, takes note of the presidential box, whether there are any visitors. He has seen Our
American Cousin played and has calculated to fine points the strategic moment for his deed. Soon only one actor will be out front on the stage, only a woman and a boy in the wings. A laugh from the audience usually follows the exit of two ladies, a loud enough laugh perhaps to smother any unusual noises in a box.
Booth goes up the stairs leading to the dress circle, picks his way among chairs behind an outer row of seats, reaches the door of the passageway leading to the presidential box. He leans against the wall, takes a cool survey of the house. On the stage is only one actor. Booth knows him well, Harry Hawk, playing the character of Asa Trenchard, a supposedly salty American character. Mrs. Mountchessington has just left Asa alone with a rebuke that he was not “used to the manners of good society.” Asa meditates alone over this: “Well,
I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.”
Booth opens the door into the narrow hallway leading to the box, steps in, closes the door, fixes the bar in the mortised niche and against the door panel. On soft tiger feet he moves toward the box door, puts an eye to the hole bored through the door, sees his victim is precisely where he wishes and as he had planned. Softly he swings the door back and with his brass derringer pistol in the right hand and a long dagger in the other, he steps into the box.
Up till that instant any one of a million ordinary conceivable circumstances of fate could have intervened and made the next moment impossible. Yet not one of those potential circumstances arrived. What happened that next moment became world history—not because of him who did what was done, but because of the name, life and works of the victim of the deed.
“Think no more of him as your brother,” wrote Edwin Booth to Asia; “he is dead to us now, as soon he must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.” And referring to a weeping nameless betrothed one, Edwin added, “I have had a heart-broken letter from the poor little girl to whom he had promised so much happiness.”
And the one man whose sworn duty it was to have intercepted the assassin— John E Parker? There were charges brought against him by Superintendent A. C. Richards of the Metropolitan Police Force, “that Said Parker was detailed to attend and protect the President Mr. Lincoln, that while the President was at Ford’s Theatre on the night of the 14th of April last, Said Parker allowed a man to enter the Presidents private Box and Shoot the President. But there was no trial on these charges, and it was not till three years later that Parker was to be dishonorably dismissed from the police force for sleeping on his beat.
Neither Stanton nor La Fayette C. Baker nor any member of Congress nor any newspaper metropolitan or rural, nor any accustomed guardian of
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public welfare, took any but momentary interest in the one guard sworn to a sacred duty who distinguished himself as a marvelous cipher, a more curious derelict than any during the war shot by a firing squad for desertion, cowardice in the face of the enemy, or sleeping at the post of duty. The watch-guards of public welfare all had other fish to fry, and it was to be many years before the dereliction of John F. Parker, a nonentity and as such a curiously odd number, was to be duly assessed.
How did Parker take the news of Lincoln’s assassination? It woke some lethargy in his bones. Probably all night long he wandered half-dazed over the streets of Washington, stopping in saloons, gathering the news, wondering, bothering his head about what explanations he could make. At six in the morning, according to the police blotter, he brought to headquarters a woman of the streets he had arrested, her name Lizzie Williams. Parker had decided he would make it a matter of record that he was on the job as a police officer, that early in the morning he was on the job. So he brings in a forlorn, bedraggled streetwalker—against whom he proved no case, and Lizzie Williams was promptly discharged. This was his offering: instead of intercepting the killer of the President shortly after 10 P.M. he brings in to headquarters a battered and worn prostitute at 6 A.M. in a cold gray rain and the sky a noncommittal monotone.
The guard Crook awoke in his home the morning after Good Friday to hear the news, and his first thought was, “If I had been on duty at the theater, I would be dead now.” His next thought was to wonder whether his fellow guard Parker was dead. Years later he was to wonder why the negligence of the guard on duty had “never been divulged,” writing: “So far as I know, it was not even investigated by the police department. Yet, had he [Parker] done his duty, President Lincoln would not have been murdered by Booth.” Crook reasoned that a single guard at the box entrance could have made a struggle and an outcry that would have resulted in the disarming of Booth. “It makes me feel rather bitter,” wrote Crook, “when I remember that the President had said, just a few hours before, that he knew he could trust all his guards.”
In company with Senator Ben Wade went Congressman Henry Laurens Dawes to greet in the Kirkwood House the newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson. And Wade’s greeting, as Congressman Dawes told it to his daughter Anna, ran: “Mr. Johnson, I thank God that you are here. Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with these damned rebels. Now they will be dealt with according to their deserts.” This feeling ran through a caucus of the Republican party radicals meeting that day to consider, as
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Congressman George Julian phrased it, “a line of policy less conciliatory than that of Mr. Lincoln.”
Of the new President little was known, and from the Judge Advocate’s office, at headquarters of the Department of the South, Hilton Head, South Carolina, John C. Gray, Jr., wrote to John C. Ropes: “He may turn out more of a man than we hope. Henry Ward Beecher told an officer on the dock [at Charleston] a few hours after the news was announced of Lincoln’s death, that Johnson’s little finger was stronger than Lincoln’s loins, and though I have heard nothing so bad myself, I can see that a good many think that Mr. Lincoln would have been too lenient with the rebels.”
The single event of an assassination swept away a thousand foundations carefully laid and protected by the living Lincoln. A long series of delicate roots of human relationships the living Lincoln had nursed and guarded were torn up in a night.
One question was held pertinent: What from year to year during the war did Wilkes Booth meet that might generate a motive and play on it and shape it with finality? He saw and heard hundreds of men of the educated and privileged classes indulging in an almost unrestricted freedom of speech. Did they tell him anything else of import than that this one man had by his own whim and determination carried the war on through four devastating, howling, bitter years of agony? On the head of this one man Lincoln had been heaped a thousand infamies any one of which could easily inflame the mind of a vain and cunning fool. What was one more killing of a man in a land already strewn with corpses and cripples and famished skeletons in prisons?
The New York Herald on Easter Sunday, April 16, editorialized on the press as no factor of enlightenment, no sobering influence at all. It said directly that newspaper editors shared in the guilt of leading an assassin toward his bloody work. “It is as clear as day that the real origin of this dreadful act is to be found in the fiendish and malignant spirit developed and fostered by the rebel press North and South. That press has, in the most devilish manner, urged men to the commission of this very deed.”
Party spirit and its mouthpieces, the press, the politicians and orators, came in for blame from Harper’s Weekly. Directly and indirectly, openly and cunningly, the passions of men were set on fire by “the assertion that Mr. Lincoln was responsible for the war, that he had opened all the yawning graves and tumbled the victims in ... Is it surprising that somebody should have believed all this, that somebody should have said, if there is a tyranny it can not be very criminal to slay the tyrant?”
Mrs. Chesnut saw a tide rolling toward her people, writing in her diary:
Lincoln, old Abe Lincoln, has been kdled . . . YOTy? By whom? It is
simply maddening ... I know this foul murder will bring upon us worse miseries.”
Sherman on his way to a conference with the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston had a decoded telegram handed him from Stanton: “President Lincoln was murdered about 10 o’clock last night.” Sherman pledged the operator to say nothing to anyone of the telegram. When Sherman and Johnston sat alone in a small farmhouse, Sherman handed over the telegram. Johnston read. On his forehead slowly came sweat “in large drops,” as Sherman watched him, Sherman remembering so clearly and for so long a time afterward how one of the greatest of Confederate captains said that “Mr. Lincoln was the best friend they had” and the assassination was “the greatest possible calamity to the South.” In the surrender terms they were to sign, Sherman’s motive, according to his keenest interpreter, probably ranged around a thought: “Lincoln is dead. I will make his kind of a peace.” When later the dread news was given to Sherman’s army, many were ready to burn the city of Raleigh to the ground. Logan made speeches against it, other officers intervened, and discipline prevailed.
Now Laura Keene and Harry Hawk and the cast of Our American Cousin were in jail, detained for inquiry. Now the gentle sister Asia Booth was taken from her Philadelphia home ro a Washington prison. Now the brother Edwin announced he would play no more drama for the American public—not for years, if ever again. Now the pursuit of the fugitive Jefferson Davis was urged more furiously by Stanton. Now a colonel had come to Charles A. Dana’s house early of a morning to say, “Mr. Lincoln is dead and Mr. Stanton directs you to arrest Jacob Thompson.” Lincoln had said No to this but now Stanton and a host of officials had no hesitations about drastic policies of punishment.
The fugitive Jefferson Davis wrote later of his dominant feeling: “The news [of the assassination] was to me very sad, for I felt that Mr. Johnson was a malignant man, and without the power or generosity which I believed Mr. Lincoln possessed.” Harper’s Weekly reported: “Roger A. Pryor stated in Petersburg that he believed Mr. Lincoln indispensable to the restoration of peace, and regretted his death more than any military mishap of the South. General Lee at first refused to hear the details of the murder ... He said that when he dispossessed himself of the command of the rebel forces he kept in mind President Lincoln’s benignity, and surrendered as much to the latter’s goodness as to Grant’s artillery. The General said that he regretted Mr. Lincoln’s death as much as any man in the North.”
Yet Booth had not entirely miscalculated. A small extremist minority element North and South exulted over his deed. In front of the New York
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post office April 15 a man saluted someone, Did you hear of Abes last joke? In a few minutes he was encircled by raging men beating his head and crying “Hang him!” “Kill him!” “Hang the bastard up!” Police rescuers took a volley of bricks and stones. A young Englishman, Peter Britton, having had a few drinks, chronicled the New York Herald, walked Vandewater Street snarling
oaths at Lincoln, saying, “I came a good ways to see the-buried.
Rescued by police from an excited crowd and taken before Justice Dowling, Britton was sentenced to six months in prison at hard labor. Police Sergeant Walsh of the 6th precinct, at the corner of Chatham and Pearl Streets threw a knockout blow to the mouth of one George Wells on hearing from that mouth: “Old Abe, the son of a bitch, is dead, and he ought to have been killed long ago.” Justice Dowling sent Wells to prison for six months.
New York, the major draft-riot city, saw more of this tumult than other places. From coast to coast, however, there was a Copperhead minority to whom Booth was a hero. At Swampscott, Massachusetts, dispatches recited that one George Stone “said in public it was the best news we had received for four years, and gave three cheers.” Citizens and soldiers tarred and feathered Stone. In most of these cases the offender spoke his first personal reaction to the news, without stopping to think of his community’s reaction. The Lincoln- haters at first had no notion of how crushed with grief, how exquisitely sensitive, were an overwhelming number of Lincoln loyalists.
In Chicago on Madison Street and on Canal Street men and boys sent rocks crashing through the big glass windows of several places where a Copper-head saloonkeeper had hung in the front window a large portrait of J. Wilkes Booth.
The North was in grief. Everywhere the eye might turn hung the signs of this grief. The sermons, editorials, talk in streets, houses, saloons, railroad cars and streetcars, the black bunting and the crape—these were attempts to say something that could not be said. Men tried to talk about it and the words failed and they came back to silence. To say nothing was best. Lincoln was dead. Was there anything more to say? A great Friend of Man had suddenly vanished. Nothing could be done about it. Silence, grief and quiet resolves, these only were left for those who admired and loved and felt themselves close to a living presence that was one of them.
1 housands on thousands would remember as long as they lived the exact place where they had been standing or seated or lying down when the news came to them, recalling precisely in details and particulars where they were and what they were doing when the dread news arrived.
Hundreds of thousands there were who had been the foundation and groundwork of what he had done. These people—the basic Lincoln loyalist
legion—had no words; they had only grief—sorrow beyond words. “A stricken people came to their altars.” Whatever was sensitively and humanly aware wore crape, seen or unseen.
Far out on the rolling prairie of the Iowa frontier, a farmer rode a fast horse and shouted from the saddle, first to this neighbor and then the next, “Lincoln is shot!” or “Lincoln is dead—shot in a theater!” That was all. The rider was gone. They had heard him. They stood in their foot tracks, amazed, dumbstruck, sadly waited for further news, some saying, “What will the country do now?”
On an early morning streetcar in Philadelphia a good Quaker unrolled a morning newspaper, stared at it, and broke out: “My God! what is this? Lincoln is assassinated!” In the gray dawn on this streetcar men cupped their faces in their hands and on the straw-covered floor fell hot tears. The driver of the streetcar came in to make sure of what he heard. Then the driver went out and took the bells off his horses. And he drove on with his car filled with mourners, some silent, some sobbing.
Newsboys at their stands cried no headlines, handed the damp sheets from the press to the buyers, one boy noticed as he brushed with his dirty hand the tears from his dirty cheeks. In thousands of stores the merchants told the clerks they would close for the day; in many schools the sobbing teacher could only tell the children, “Go home, there will be no school today.” The father, the children, coming home unexpected, the mother asked what was wrong and heard “Mama, they’ve killed the President” or “Our President is dead.” Then the family hunted up crape or black cloth for the front doorway.
In Charleston, South Carolina, one old black woman walked a street looking straight ahead, wringing her hands and crying: “O Lawd! O Lawd! Marse Sam’s dead! O Lawd! Uncle Sam’s dead!” In Boston a thousand or more men found themselves on the Common, marching in a silent procession, two by two, not a word spoken, just walking, just seeing each other’s faces, marching an hour or so and then slowly scattering, having reached some form of consolation in being together, seeing each other in mute grief.
In a home at Huntington, Long Island, a mother and son, Walt Whitman, heard the news early in the morning, sat at breakfast and ate nothing, sat at other meals during the day and ate nothing, silently passed newspaper extras to each other during the day and said little, the son deciding that as long as he lived he would on April 14 have sprigs of lilac in his room and keep it as a holy day for the man he later characterized as “the grandest figure on the crowded canvas of the drama of the nineteenth century.
Many of those who mourned knew there were times when with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and wept at those times in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.
Now Father Abraham was gone. Old Abe—there would be no more stories about him, alive there in the White House in Washington. They had saved the newspapers or they had clipped from the paper such pieces as the Gettysburg speech and the letter to Mrs. Bixby and the second inaugural. Now the newspapers had black borders, night’s crape darkness, on the front-page columns. Now there was a memory to keep. That was left—the life he had lived—the meanings and the lights of that life. This could not be taken away.
Farmers in southern Illinois said the brown thrush no longer sang, that in the year to come the brown thrush never once sang. One Illinois boy going to town, holding his father’s hand, having heard the church and town-hall bells all day, having seen only dark sorrow on all faces, looked up at the sky and found it strange the night stars were all out. Lincoln was dead—and yet as always the stars moved alive over the night dome.
Like a vast sunset of flame and changing gold ending a day and punctuating a period of time their faraway friend at Washington had vanished into the overhead planets and the same constellations of mist that had taken that long roll call of soldiers no longer answering “Here” to the company sergeant calling the names.
In a million and more American households they sought words that might help and assuage. “The land mourneth, every family apart,” ran one Easter Sunday text. Also “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and He delighteth in his way.” Over doorways, in store windows, on arches spanning streets, ran the legend “And the Lord blessed Abraham in all things.”
On one arch of crape and white over Broadway in New York ran the sentence “The great person, the great man, is the miracle of history.”
CHAPTER L I I