Lincoln's Last Days Page 5

  Booth hasn’t told the others that the plan has changed from kidnapping to assassination. He brought them along to hear Lincoln’s speech, hoping that some phrase will fill them with rage. When it does, Booth will let them in on his new plan.

  Soon Lincoln stands before an open second-story window, a piece of paper in one hand.

  The mere sight of Lincoln thrills the crowd. The applause rolls on and on and on, continuing even as Lincoln tries to speak.

  Looking out into the audience, he prepares to tell them about the task ahead and how the ability to trust the Southern states to peacefully rejoin the Union will be as great a challenge to the nation as the war itself. It is, in fact, a downbeat speech, almost an informal State of the Union address, designed to undercut the revelry and prepare the country for years of more pain and struggle.

  The president begins gently. “We meet this evening not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” Lincoln says. He thanks General Grant and the army for their struggle, and promises to have a national day of celebration very soon, with a great parade through Washington.

  The speech is so long and so unexciting that people in the audience begin shifting their feet and then lowering their heads and slipping away into the night, off to search for a real celebration. Booth stays, of course. He doesn’t want to miss a single word. He listens as Lincoln talks of extending voting rights to literate blacks and those who fought for the Union.

  A soldier in a Confederate uniform holding a Colt Navy revolver in his right hand and a Bowie knife in his left.

  Booth seethes at the outrageous notion that slaves be considered equal citizens of the United States. He points to the Colt Navy revolver on Powell’s hip. The Colt has more than enough pop to kill Lincoln from such close range. “Shoot him now,” Booth commands Powell. “Put a bullet in his head right this instant.”

  But Powell refuses to draw his weapon. He is afraid of offending Booth but even more terrified of this mob, which would surely tear him limb from limb.

  “I’ll put him through,” Booth sneers, planting another seed about assassination in the minds of Powell and Herold. “By God, I’ll put him through.”

  Then Booth spins around and fights his way out of the crowd. Twenty-four hours ago, he was still thinking of ways to kidnap the president. Now Lincoln’s speech has reinforced his change of plans. He will shoot Abraham Lincoln dead.

  A March 6, 1865, photograph of Abraham Lincoln, one of the last photographs taken of the president. The stress of the war shows in his worn features.

  Chapter

  18

  TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 1865

  Washington, D. C.

  Night

  THERE HAVE BEEN THREATS against Lincoln’s life since he was first elected president.

  The first was the Baltimore Plot, in 1861, in which a group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle planned to shoot Lincoln as he traveled to Washington for the inauguration. In a strange twist, many newspapers mocked Lincoln for the way he eluded the assassins by wearing a cheap disguise as he snuck into Washington. His enemies made much of the deception, labeling Lincoln a coward and refusing to believe that such a plot existed in the first place.

  The Baltimore Plot taught Lincoln a powerful lesson about public perception. Since that day, he has adopted a veneer of unshakable courage. Now he moves freely throughout Washington. In 1862 he began having military protection beyond the walls of the White House, but it was only late in 1864, as the war wound down and the threats became more real, that Washington’s Metropolitan Police assigned a select group of armed officers to protect him. Two remain at his side from eight A.M. to four P.M. Another stays until midnight, when a fourth man takes the graveyard shift, posting himself outside Lincoln’s bedroom or following the president through the White House when he cannot sleep.

  Ward H. Lamon.

  The truth is that Lincoln, despite what he says, secretly believes he will die in office. His closest friend and security adviser, the barrel-chested Ward Hill Lamon, preaches regularly to Lincoln about the need for improved security measures. As evidence of the need, there is a packet nestled in a small cubby of Lincoln’s upright desk. It is marked, quite simply, “Assassination.” Inside are more than eighty death threats.

  “The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable,” Lincoln has admitted to an artist who came to paint his portrait, “but they have ceased to give me any apprehension.”

  Rather than dwell on death, Lincoln prefers to live life on his own terms. “If I am killed I can die but once,” he is fond of saying. “But to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.”

  Normally, because of the memories it will raise in his wife of the deaths of their sons Edward, from tuberculosis, and Willie, from typhoid fever, Lincoln does not talk about death with Mary present. But on this night, surrounded by friends and empowered by the confessional tone of the speech, he can’t help himself.

  An engraving by William Sartain of Abraham Lincoln and his family in the White House. From left to right: Thomas, Abraham, Robert Todd, and Mary Todd.

  “I had a dream the other night, which has haunted me since,” he admits soulfully.

  “You frighten me,” Mary cries.

  An illustration over a Mathew Brady photograph of William “Willie” Lincoln, who died in 1862 at the age of eleven. The photograph was taken shortly before his death.

  A photograph of Thomas “Tad” Lincoln on horseback taken between 1860 and 1865. Tad would die of heart failure at the age of eighteen in 1871.

  Lincoln will not be stopped. He tells her that, ten days ago, he went to bed late. That night, he had stood alone on the top deck of a steamboat called the River Queen, watching Grant’s big guns shell the Confederate defenders of Petersburg.

  I had been waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.

  Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, 1865.

  There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms. Every object was familiar to me. But where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this?

  This Currier & Ives drawing, Abraham’s dream!—“Coming events cast their shadows before,” portrays the president tormented by nightmares of defeat in the election of 1864.

  Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and shocking, I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. There I was met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. And there were a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President,” was the answer. “He was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.

  Mary doesn’t want to hear. “That is horrid,” she wails. “I wish you had not told it.”

  “Well, it was only a dream, Mary,” he chides her. “Let us say no more about it.”

  A moment later, seeing the uneasiness in the room, Lincoln adds, “Don’t you see how it will all turn out? In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow that was killed.”

  His words cheer no one, especially not Mary.

  Chapter

  19

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1865

  Washington, D. C.

  Morning

  AFTER A NIGHT OF RESTLESS SLEEP and a light breakfast, Booth walks the streets of Washington, his mind filled with the many s
trands of his unfinished plan. The longer he walks, the more it all comes together.

  It is the morning after Lincoln’s speech and the third day since Lee’s surrender.

  Booth frames every action through the prism of the dramatic, a trait that comes from being born and raised in an acting household. As he builds the assassination scheme in his head, layer by layer, everything is designed to make him the star performer. This will be the biggest assassination plot ever, and his commanding performance will guarantee an eternity of recognition.

  He knows there will be an audience. By the morning after Lincoln’s speech, Booth has decided to shoot the president inside a theater, the place where Booth feels most comfortable. Lincoln is known to attend the theater frequently.

  Booth walks faster, energized by the awareness that he has much to do.

  He must find out when Lincoln will be attending the theater and which one. He must find out which play is being performed, so that he can select just the right moment in the show for the execution—a moment with few actors onstage, if possible. The escape plan is to gallop out of Washington on horseback and disappear into the loving arms of the South, where friends and allies and even complete strangers who have heard of his daring deed will see that he makes it safely to Mexico.

  But that’s not all.

  There are rumors that General Grant will be in town. If he attends the theater with Lincoln, which is a very real possibility, Booth can kill the two most important causes of the South’s fall within seconds.

  And yet Booth wants even more. The team he put together for the kidnapping will do whatever he asks. Rather than just kill Lincoln and Grant, he now plans to do nothing less than undertake a top-down destruction of the government of the United States of America.

  * * *

  Vice President Andrew Johnson is an obvious target. He is first in line to the presidency, lives at a nearby hotel, and is completely unguarded. Like all Confederate sympathizers, Booth views the Tennessee politician as a turncoat for siding with the Union and Lincoln.

  Secretary of State William H. Seward, whose oppressive policies toward the South have long made him a target of Confederate anger, is on Booth’s list as well.

  The deaths of Lincoln, Grant, Johnson, and Seward should be more than enough to cause chaos in the government and begin to avenge the South.

  To Lewis Powell, the former Confederate spy who watched Lincoln’s speech with Booth, will go the task of killing Secretary Seward, who, at age sixty-three, is currently bedridden after a near-fatal carriage accident. He has no chance of leaping from the bed to elude a surprise attack.

  Vice President Andrew Johnson.

  Powell’s job should be as simple as sneaking into the Seward home, shooting the sleeping secretary in his bed, then galloping away to join Booth for a life of sunshine and easy living in Mexico. For the job of killing Johnson, Booth selects a drifter named George Atzerodt, a German carriage repairer with an unhealthy complexion who drinks a lot. He was brought into the plot for his encyclopedic knowledge of the smuggling routes from Washington, D.C., into the Deep South. Booth suspects that Atzerodt may be unwilling to go along with the new plot. Should that be the case, Booth has a foolproof plan in mind to blackmail Atzerodt into cooperating.

  William H. Seward was ambitious and powerful. His opposition to slavery made him one of Booth’s targets.

  Chapter

  20

  THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 1865

  Washington, D. C.

  GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT and his wife, Julia, arrive in Washington at dawn. He is eager to push on to New Jersey to see their four children, but Secretary of War Edwin 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 Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter and two sergeants to manage the Grants’ luggage.

  Julia Grant.

  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.”

  Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

  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.

  The Grants have been married for more than twenty years and have endured many long separations due to military life. Julia’s letters sustained Ulysses during the Mexican War, when he was a homesick young lieutenant. And Julia 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. And right now they need to get to their room and wash up before the general goes over to the War Department.

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

  Grant has slept so many nights in battlefield lodgings arranged for 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 a sitting room. It’s understood that Colonel Porter will need a room, too. The sergeants will bunk elsewhere.

  The Willard Hotel, photograph taken in the early 1920s.

  The Willard Hotel is full. Yet to allow the famous Ulysses S. Grant to take a room at another hotel would be unthinkable.

  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 messages and flowers soon flood the desk and bedroom. Julia will spend the afternoon reading each note.

  Not that General Grant cares. He just wants to get on with his business and return home. Within minutes, he and Porter meet in the lobby, then step out onto Pennsylvania Avenue for the short walk to the War Department. At first the going is easy. They are just two regular guys in uniform joining the sea of pedestrians, soldiers, and tourists. But Grant is hard to miss. Images of his bearded, expressionless face have been on the front pages of newspapers for more than a year. Soon autograph seekers and well-wishers surround him. Porter tries to push them back, protecting his general. But there are so many that Grant is swallowed by the crowd.

  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.

  At the War Department, Grant reads telegrams from his commanders in the field, issues appropriate orders, and takes care of a variety of administrative tasks requiring his attention. After that business is done, he meets with Lincoln at the White House. 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. The ride is Lincoln’s way of giving Grant his moment in the sun after so many months of hardship.

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

  Meanwhile, John Wilkes Booth continues to work on his conspiracy of revenge that will turn all this joy into sadness.

  Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter.

  Lincoln’s chair.

  Chapter

  21

  FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865

  Washington, D. C.

  7 A.M.

  LINCOLN AWAKENS AT SEVEN A.M. Outside the White House, the Washington weather is splendid, a sunny fifty-degree day. The president rises from his bed, slips on a pair of battered slippers, pulls on a weathered robe, and walks down a second-floor hallway to the library.

  The president’s favorite chair is in the exact center of the room. He sits down and opens his Bible, not because it is Good Friday, the Friday before Easter, but because
starting the day reading Scripture is his lifelong habit.

  Lincoln then walks down the hall to his office. His desk is mahogany, with cubbies and shelves. He can see the Potomac River clearly out the window.

  Breakfast is scheduled for eight o’clock. Lincoln is eager to be downstairs because his son Robert is just back from the war and will be joining him, twelve-year-old Tad, and Mary for breakfast. Robert was in the room when Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Though Lincoln heard the story from Grant yesterday, he is eager to hear more.

  Robert Todd Lincoln, photograph taken about 1860.

  Robert is just twenty-one, with a thin mustache and a captain’s rank in the Union army. As Lincoln sips coffee and eats a single boiled egg—his usual breakfast—Robert describes “the stately elegant Lee” and Grant, “the small stooping shabby shy man in the muddy blue uniform, with no sword and no spurs.”

  When Lincoln asks what it was like to be there, his son is breathless. “Oh, it was great!” the normally articulate Robert exclaims, unable to find a more expressive way to describe the event.

  Pressing business awaits Lincoln in his office, but he allows breakfast to stretch on for almost an hour. At last he stands. He is relaxed and happy, even though the stress of the war had caused him to lose so much weight that he looks like “a skeleton with clothes,” in the words of one friend.

  By nine A.M., President Lincoln is sitting at his desk. His workday has officially begun.

  A mile down Pennsylvania Avenue, John Wilkes Booth is setting his affairs in order.