Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever Read online

  Now Stanton paces before the couch where Lincoln reclines, compiling his detailed argument against allowing the Virginia legislature to meet. He warns of the laws that might be passed, limiting the freedom of former slaves. He notes that the legislature has proven itself to be untrustworthy. And he reminds Lincoln that during his recent visit to Richmond the president made it clear that the Virginia lawmakers were being given only conditional authority—but that these same untrustworthy men are surely capable of ignoring those limits once they convene.

  At last, Stanton explains his idea for temporary military governments in the southern states until order can be restored.

  Lincoln doesn’t speak until Stanton finishes. Almost every single one of Stanton’s opinions runs contrary to Lincoln’s. Nonetheless, Lincoln hears Stanton out, then lets his thoughts percolate.

  As Stanton looks on, Lincoln slowly rises off the couch and draws himself up to his full, towering height. He walks to the great oak desk near the window, where he silently composes a telegram withdrawing permission for the Virginia legislature to meet. For those representatives who have already traveled to Richmond for the session, he guarantees safe passage home.

  Lincoln hands the telegram to Stanton, whose thick beard cannot hide his look of satisfaction after he finishes reading. Calling the wording “exactly right,” he hands the telegram to his clerk.

  During the course of the Civil War, Lincoln’s use of telegrams—his “t-mail”—made him the first leader in world history to communicate immediately with his generals on the battlefield. He has sent, literally, thousands of these messages through the Department of War. This is his last.

  On the walk back to the White House, Lincoln composes another sort of note in his head. It is to Mary, a simple invitation to go for a carriage ride on Friday afternoon. His words are playful and romantic, a reminder of the way things were before the war, and before the death of Willie. Their eldest son, Robert, is due home from the war any day. Surely, the cloud of melancholy that has hovered over the Lincolns is about to lift.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  MORNING

  The ides. As Booth takes the train to Baltimore, hoping to reenlist a former conspirator for that night’s expected executions, General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, arrive in Washington at dawn. They have taken an overnight boat from City Point, Virginia. Grant is in no mood to be there. He is eager to push on to New Jersey to see their four children, but Secretary of War Stanton has specifically requested that the general visit the capital and handle a number of war-related issues. Grant’s plan is to get in and get out within twenty-four hours, with as little fuss as possible. With him are his aide Colonel Horace Porter and two sergeants to manage the Grants’ luggage.

  Little does Grant know that an adoring Washington, D.C., is waiting to wrap its arms around him. “As we reached our destination that bright morning in our boat,” Julia later exclaimed, “every gun in and near Washington burst forth—and such a salvo!—all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.”

  If anything, Grant is even more beloved than the president right now. Strangers cheer the Grants’ open-air carriage on its way to the Willard Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. As they pull up to the entrance, workers are on the roof, installing the gas jets that will spell out UNION for that evening’s Grand Illumination—a mass lighting of every candle, gas lamp, and firework in the city. Thousands upon thousands of people are now streaming into Washington to witness what will be an attempt to turn night into day as yet another celebration of war’s end.

  Julia Grant

  Grant, who has seen more than his share of fiery explosions, could not care less about the Illumination. Their journey has been an odyssey, and the Grants are exhausted. Since leaving Lee at Appomattox, Grant has endured two days of train derailments, another day waiting for a steamer in City Point, and then the dawn-to-dusk journey up the Potomac. But standing beside his beloved Julia revives Grant.

  They have been a couple for more than twenty years and have endured many a long separation, thanks to the military life. It was Julia’s letters that sustained him during the Mexican War, when he was a homesick young lieutenant. And it was Julia who stood by her husband’s side during the 1850s, when he was discharged from the army and failed in a succession of businesses. They are happiest in each other’s company. Both are still young—he is not quite forty-three; she is thirty-nine. They have their whole lives in front of them. The sooner they can flee Washington, D.C., and get back to normal life, the better. And right now that means getting to their room, washing up, and letting the general race over to the War Department as quickly as possible.

  There’s just one problem: the Grants don’t have a reservation at the Willard.

  Grant has slept so many nights in impromptu battlefield lodgings procured on the fly by his staff that it never crossed his mind to send a telegram asking for a room. What he wants, he tells the flustered desk clerk, is a simple bedroom with an adjacent sitting room. It’s understood that Colonel Porter will need a room, too. The sergeants will bunk elsewhere.

  The Willard Hotel is overbooked. Yet to allow the famous Ulysses S. Grant to take a room elsewhere would be an unthinkable loss of prestige.

  Some way, somehow, rooms are instantly made available. Within minutes, Julia is unpacking their suitcases. Word about their location is already flying around Washington, and bundles of congratulatory telegrams and flowers soon flood the desk and bedroom. Julia will spend the afternoon reading each one, basking in the awareness that the man whose potential she had seen so long before, when he was just a quiet young lieutenant, has ascended from anonymity and disgrace to the level of great historical figure.

  Not that General Grant cares. He just wants to get on with his business and get home. Within minutes, he and Porter meet in the lobby before the short walk to the War Department. It’s three blocks, just on the other side of the White House.

  The two men step out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. At first the trek is easy, just two regular guys in uniform joining the sea of pedestrians, soldiers, and all those tourists pouring into the city for the Illumination. But Grant is hard to miss. Photographs of his bearded, expressionless face have been on the front pages of newspapers for more than a year. Soon the autograph seekers and the well-wishers, startled but elated by his presence, surround him. Porter tries to push them back, protecting his general in peacetime as he did in warfare. But he is just one man against many, and the diminutive Grant is swallowed by the mob. Porter pushes and elbows, grabbing Grant with one arm while shoving people back with the other. It’s a benevolent crowd, cheering for Grant even as they strain to touch him. But Porter knows a simple truth: this is a perfect opportunity for a disgruntled southerner to take a shot at Grant, then disappear in an instant.

  Just when the situation begins to border on pandemonium, the Metropolitan Police come to their rescue. Grant and Porter are soon on their way again, this time inside a carriage, with a cavalry escort.

  An introvert, Grant is pained by the attention and stares. Once inside the War Department, he hurries to formally conclude the logistics of war. Pen in hand and cigar clenched in his teeth, he tells the quartermaster general to stop ordering supplies and suspends the draft and further recruitment. With these orders, he saves the nation $4 million per day.

  Though Grant hates public appearances, the city of Washington has planned the Grand Illumination celebration for this very night, specifically so he can be there. The Capitol dome will be lit, the Willard Hotel will illuminate the word UNION, and the governmental buildings are having a competition to see which can be the most brilliantly decorated. Stanton is fussing over the War Department’s display, which includes guns and flags as well as lights, while over at the Patent Office some five thousand candles will glow from every window. There will also be a massi
ve fireworks display. And, of course, the bonfires that have blazed all week will still be burning bright. As intensely as Washington celebrated on Monday, Thursday night’s Grand Illumination will be even more monumental.

  That afternoon, Grant meets with Lincoln in the Oval Office. The last time they met was the day after Petersburg fell, on that veranda in the midst of that shattered city. There, Grant promised Lincoln that he would catch Lee and end the war. Now that Grant has fulfilled that promise, a grateful Lincoln offers his congratulations. He calls for a carriage. The two men ride around the crowded streets of Washington with the top down, shocking the flood of arriving visitors, who can’t believe that they are actually laying eyes on President Lincoln and General Grant. The ride is Lincoln’s way of giving Grant his moment in the sun after so many months of being second-guessed and labeled a butcher and of deflecting the glory showered upon him onto the man whose genius made it all possible.

  It works. The two men are loudly cheered on every street corner.

  When it is done, they make plans to meet again that night for the Illumination. They will be the center of attention, these two men who won the Civil War, watched by one and all.

  Meanwhile, John Wilkes Booth and his band of assassins tend to their work of sharpening knives and cleaning their pistols, eager for their night of reckoning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  NIGHT

  The four conspirators squeeze into room 6 at the Herndon House hotel, a few blocks from the White House. Booth, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and George Atzerodt lounge on the chairs and perch on the edge of the bed as Booth talks them through the plan. His recruiting trip to Baltimore was unsuccessful. He is too agitated to sit, so he paces as he thinks out loud. The wooden floor becomes a stage, and his oration a performance that takes him from stage left to stage right, then back to stage left again as he breaks down the plan. The parties outside are neither a distraction nor an offense, but a reminder of why they have gathered. Logically, each man knows that there must be plenty of Confederate sympathizers in Washington, huddled in their homes with jaws clenched as they endure the revelry. But right now the would-be assassins feel that they are the only ones who can right the grievous wrong.

  Lewis Powell is the youngest and most experienced of the conspirators. He is a tall, powerfully built, and otherwise very handsome man—save for his face being deformed on one side, thanks to a mule’s kick. Unlike the others, Powell has actually killed a man, and may have enjoyed it very much. During the war the Floridian fought in several major battles, was wounded at Gettysburg, successfully escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp, and worked for the Confederate Secret Service. He is a solid horseman and quick with a knife. Thanks to his military training, Powell knows the value of reconnaissance. He prepped for his attack that morning by walking past Secretary of State Seward’s home on Madison Place, scoping out the best possible ways in and out of the building. He boldly struck up a conversation with Seward’s male nurse, just to make sure the secretary was indeed at home.

  The reconnaissance is good news for Booth. He thus knows the location of two of the intended victims. Now it is his job to find Lincoln. An afternoon talking to stage managers had led to the inescapable conclusion that Lincoln is not going to the theater tonight. Booth, it seems, will not have his grand theatrical moment. Much to his dismay, it appears as if shooting Lincoln will be as mundane as putting a bullet into his brain on a crowded street during the Grand Illumination and then running like hell.

  It finally dawns on one very drunk George Atzerodt that the plan has shifted from kidnapping to murder. The only reason he joined the conspiracy was that, in addition to running a small carriage-repair business in Port Tobacco, Maryland, he moonlights as a smuggler, ferrying mail, contraband, and people across the broad Potomac into Virginia. It is a hardscrabble and often dangerous existence. Atzerodt’s role in the kidnapping was to be an act of commerce, not rebellion. He was to be paid handsomely to smuggle the bound-and-gagged Lincoln into the hands of the Confederates.

  But there is no longer a Confederacy, no longer a kidnapping plot, no longer a need for a boat, and certainly no longer a need for a smuggler—at least in Atzerodt’s mind. The thirty-year-old German immigrant slurs that he wants out.

  Booth calmly springs his blackmail.

  Booth cannot do without Atzerodt. His boat and his knowledge of the Potomac’s currents are vital to their escape. A massive manhunt will surely begin the instant Lincoln is killed. Federal officials will seal off Washington, D.C., and canvass the Maryland and Virginia countryside, but with Atzerodt’s guidance Booth and his men will rush through rural Maryland ahead of the search parties, cross the Potomac, and then follow smugglers’ routes south to Mexico.

  Booth has rehearsed for this moment. He knows his lines and recites them with great drama.

  “Then we will do it,” Booth says, nodding at Herold and Powell, never taking his eyes off the drunk German. “But what will come of you?”

  And then, as if pulling the solution out of thin air: “You had better come along and get your horse.”

  At the word “horse,” Atzerodt’s heart skips a beat. He’s trapped. Booth long ago suggested that the two men share horses from time to time. The horse a man rides is part of his identity. By sharing Booth’s favorite horse—which seemed like such a simple and thoughtful gesture on the actor’s part all those weeks ago—Atzerodt is now visibly connected to the assassination plot. Atzerodt has ridden Booth’s horse all over Washington and has even helped him sell a few animals; so there will be no shortage of witnesses.

  Atzerodt sighs and nods his head. Murder it is. There is no way out for him.

  The time has come. The four men stand, aware that they are about to commit the greatest crime in the history of the United States.

  Before opening the door, Booth reminds them that their post-assassination rendezvous point is the road to Nanjemoy, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Normally the sight of a lone horseman galloping out of Washington, D.C., long after dark would make the sentries guarding the bridges suspicious. But tonight is not a normal night. All those folks who’ve come into Washington for the Illumination will be making their way back home when it’s all done. Booth and his men will easily blend in with the same drunken bleating masses who are now making that wretched noise on the streets outside room 6.

  If for some reason they can’t do the job tonight, they will remain in Washington and try again tomorrow.

  Booth shakes hands with each man. They leave one at a time and go their separate ways.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  NIGHT

  There once was a fifth conspirator, the one Booth traveled to Baltimore to corral the day before. Mike O’Laughlen, a former Confederate soldier who grew up across the street from Booth, was one of the first men recruited by him last August. Just a month earlier the two men had lain in wait together for a certain carriage making its way down the lonely country road to the Soldiers’ Home, only to find that its occupant was a Supreme Court justice instead of the president.

  Hiding in the tall grass along the side of the road, O’Laughlen had weighed the repercussions of actually kidnapping the president of the United States and realized that he would hang by the neck until dead if caught. He was actually relieved that the carriage belonged to Salmon P. Chase instead of Lincoln.

  The twenty-four-year-old engraver returned to Baltimore and put the kidnapping plot behind him. He wanted a normal life. When Booth came calling a week later with an even more far-fetched plot to kidnap the president by handcuffing him at the theater and then lowering his body to the stage, O’Laughlen shook his head and told Booth to go away.

  But Booth is nothing if not relentless. In Baltimore, he tried to convince O’Laughlen to rejoin the conspiracy. O’Laughlen told the actor he didn’t want any part of the kil
ling. Yet the same day he apparently changed his mind, and he traveled to Washington a short time later. O’Laughlen started drinking the minute he arrived, bellying up to the bar at a place called Rullman’s until his behavior became erratic. Like Booth, who now prowls Washington in the desperate hope of finding Lincoln, O’Laughlen prowls the bustling thoroughfares, unsure of what to do next.

  Meanwhile, General Sam Grant, whose idea of a stellar evening is chain-smoking cigars and sipping whiskey, would be very happy staying in for the evening. But as Julia points out, General and Mrs. Grant have not attended a party together for quite some time. Sitting in their room on this very special night, no matter how luxurious the accommodations, would be a waste. Julia shows her husband invitation after invitation to party after party. She is thrilled to be in the city but also eager to leave as soon as possible to rejoin their four children. Knowing that they have perhaps just this one night in Washington, Grant agrees that they should venture out.

  Reluctantly, Grant leaves the hotel. They engage a carriage to take them to the home of Secretary of War Stanton, who is holding a gala celebration for War Department employees. Four brass bands serenade the partygoers from nearby Franklin Square, and a fireworks demonstration will cap the night.

  Grant has been a target ever since he took command of Lincoln’s army. But even with all the people in the streets he is unafraid. The war is over.