On April 14, Lewis Powell lurked in the shadows outside the “Clubhouse,” the nickname Washington insiders gave Secretary of State William H. Seward’s brick mansion. The Secret Service operative surveilled the home while Seward was in bed recovering from a recent carriage accident. Powell waited for an opportunity to strike and assassinate the cabinet member, which was part of an operation simultaneously targeting three men that night. Powell targeted Seward, Booth planned to assassinate President Lincoln, and George Atzerodt would strike Vice President Andrew Johnson.
The conspirators had concocted a cunning plan to kill Seward. Powell had an empty box wrapped in butcher paper that looked like a medicine delivery from Seward’s doctor. David Herold, a fellow conspirator and former pharmacist’s assistant, made medicine deliveries to patients and probably schooled Powell on what to say. After 10 p.m. Powell knocked on the door. Nineteen-year-old African American servant William Bell answered. Powell said he was delivering medicine for the secretary and insisted on seeing Seward in person to direct him how to take it. As Bell refused, Powell continued slowly walking up the stairs, treading heavily on each stair, and repeating the mantra “I must go up.”1
At the top of the stairs, Frederick, Seward’s oldest son, again blocked Powell. “You cannot see him,” Frederick reiterated, and when the Ranger persisted, Frederick said, “If you cannot leave your message with me, you cannot leave it at all.” Powell continued to insist, then finally said, “Well, if I cannot see him—” and feigned leaving but suddenly turned around and pointed his pistol at the young man. The Whitney revolver misfired, and Powell raised the pistol and repeatedly clubbed Frederick Seward over the head, breaking the weapon’s ramrod, which jammed the Whitney’s cylinder, making it inoperable. In the meantime, Bell ran outside the house yelling, “Murder!”2
Casting aside Frederick Seward, Powell then slashed Union sergeant George F. Robinson with his knife as he made his way toward the slumbering elder Seward. Seward’s daughter, Fanny, who watched over her bedridden father, pleaded, “Don’t murder him!”
Pinning the secretary with one hand, Powell brought the knife down with the other. He missed. The blade plunged into the mattress. In the darkness of the room, Seward squirmed. The steel cut into the old man’s cheek and fractured his jaw. Repeated blows turned Seward into “an exsanguinated corpse.”3 Blood spurted everywhere and drenched the sheets. Miraculously, however, none of the wounds proved fatal.
The Union sergeant regained his senses and lunged at Powell, grabbing him in a bear hug. The would-be Confederate assassin parried and stabbed the soldier. Seward’s son Gus also joined the melee, trying to wrestle Powell to the ground.
“I’m mad. I’m mad!”4 protested the Confederate. He punched Sergeant Robinson and stabbed a State Department messenger in the back as he ran down the stairs. Fleeing the house, he mounted Booth’s one-eyed horse and galloped into the maze of Washington’s streets. The Ranger rode the horse hard and the exhausted animal collapsed near Lincoln Hospital, east of the capitol. For two days, Powell hid in a cemetery, until hunger forced him back to the familiar ground of the Nest, the boarding house owned by Mary Surratt.
Needing a cover and a disguise, Powell found a pickax and adopted the role of a laborer. He fashioned a hat out of the sleeve of his knit shirt. The Ranger fatefully arrived as detectives were searching the house following Lincoln’s assassination for incriminating evidence from the conspirators. He knocked and rang the doorbell only to be answered by the detectives. Remarkably, after two days on the run, exhausted and hungry, Powell put together a convincing alibi and claimed he was there to dig a ditch for Surratt. Mary Surratt disavowed any knowledge of Powell: “Before God, I do not know this man; I have never seen him. I have not hired him to dig a ditch!”5 Detectives asked a number of probing questions, which Powell answered convincingly, but when asked about where he had worked previously, he had no answers. Surratt’s denial doomed both her and the Ranger. William Bell was then brought forward and very convincingly identified Seward’s attacker. The Federal authorities put leg irons on Powell and threw him into the bowels of the iron-clad Saugus. Powell remained tight-lipped, revealing very little to Federal authorities.