Manhunt (12 page)

Although Leale feared that Lincoln might already be dead, he made a split-second decision to revive him. To relieve pressure on the brain, he used his fingers to pull the clot from the bullet hole. Then he dropped to his knees, straddled Lincoln, opened the president's mouth, stuck
two fingers down his throat, pressed hard on the base of his paralyzed tongue, and opened the larynx. Air could now reach Lincoln's lungs, and to draw life-sustaining oxygen into them, Leale pressed the diaphragm upward and ordered two men to manipulate Lincoln's arms like levers on a water pump. Then Leale stimulated the apex of the heart by pressing hard under the ribs. To everyone in the box, including Dr. Leale, the situation seemed hopeless. Then the president's reluctant heart began to beat and his lungs sucked in a breath. The heartbeat was feeble, the breathing irregular, but Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Barely. However, unless Leale could stabilize him immediately, Lincoln would expire within a few minutes. The doctor raced against the clock. Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams.

Leale leaned forward until his chest met Lincoln's and their faces nearly touched. Leale sucked in as much air as his lungs could hold, until he felt like they would burst, and then he breathed air directly into Lincoln's mouth and nostrils. Lincoln's lungs expanded and his respiration improved. After forcing several more lungfuls of air into the president, Leale paused, studied his patient's face for a moment, placed his ear over Lincoln's thorax, and, amid the cacophony of shrieks, moans, cries, and threats that filled the theatre, along with Mary's deep sobs a few feet way, he listened keenly. Then he heard it, almost inaudible at first, then louder: Lincoln's heart, stronger, sustaining a regular beat. Leale leaned back and monitored Lincoln's mouth and rising chest. The president's lungs started filling on their own. Leale's quick thinking saved the president from immediate death.

Time seemed to stop again, just as it did the moment after Booth fired his pistol. Mary Lincoln sank into the sofa and was comforted by Clara Harris, whose face, hair, hands, and dress were smeared with her fiance's blood. Major Rathbone continued to apply pressure to his wound and tried to remain conscious. Sensing that Dr. Leale's work was done, the occupants of the box hushed to a breathless silence. Still on
his knees, with all eyes fixed upon him, Dr. Leale intoned his diagnosis and prognosis simultaneously: “His wound is mortal; it is impossible for him to recover.”

a
T THE
K
IRKWOOD
H
OUSE
, G
EORGE
A
TZERODT HAD YET TO
inflict a mortal wound upon Vice President Johnson. Around 10:00 P.M., as Booth closed in on Lincoln and Powell on Seward, Atzerodt showed up at T. Naylor's livery stable and talked to the foreman, John Fletcher. He wanted to pick up the horse that he and David Herold had dropped off there that afternoon. But first Atzerodt invited Fletcher to join him for a drink at the nearby Union Hotel, at 13½ and E streets. Fletcher ordered a glass of beer and Atzerodt had a whiskey. After they left the hotel, Atzerodt said a strange thing: “If this thing happens tonight, you will get a present.” Fletcher didn't know what he was talking about and assumed that the German was drunk: “He seemed to be about half-tight, and was very excited-looking. I did not pay much attention to him.” When they got back to the stable and Atzerodt mounted the horse, Fletcher cautioned him that the mare seemed as nervous as he did.

“I would not like to ride that mare through the city in the night, for she looks so skittish.”

“Well,” Atzerodt replied, “she's good upon a retreat.”

Fletcher remembered that Atzerodt's friend, David Herold, was overdue in returning the horse he had rented that day. “Your acquaintance is staying out very late with our horse.”

“Oh, he'll be back after a while,” Atzerodt assured him.

Fletcher watched Atzerodt go down E Street, pass 13½ Street, and enter the Kirkwood House. Like Powell, Atzerodt was armed with a knife and a pistol—a six-shot revolver. Indeed, he was better armed than Powell, for he had in his room upstairs a second revolver and knife. His room, number 126, was one floor above Johnson's. The vice president—alone and unguarded—had retired for the night. All Atzerodt
had to do was knock on his door and, the moment Johnson opened it, plunge the knife into his chest or shoot him dead. Compared with the tasks that faced Booth and Powell, Atzerodt had the easiest job of all.

Atzerodt hunkered down over the Kirkwood bar, hoping to drink enough courage to carry him up the stairs to Andrew Johnson's room. John Fletcher had kept an eye on the Kirkwood ever since Atzerodt went inside. Perhaps something about the garrulous German's behavior had aroused his curiosity, or his suspicion. Fletcher watched Atzerodt walk out of the Kirkwood a few minutes after he went in, mount his horse, and ride toward D and Tenth streets, near Ford's Theatre. He did not appear to be in a hurry.

John Fletcher could not stop fretting about his overdue horse. Herold knew that he wasn't supposed to keep “Charlie” past 8:00 P.M.—9:00 at the latest. “At about 10 o'clock [I was] having a suspicion that Herold was going to take the horse away.” Fletcher feared the worst—the horse had been stolen. He wasn't going to wait any longer. He decided to search the streets of downtown Washington for the Naylor stables' property.

Andrew Johnson had escaped the reaper's knock on his door. Atzerodt couldn't do it. The more he drank, the worse the plan sounded. He did not call on Andrew Johnson. He left the bar and walked out. Abandoning his mission, Atzerodt got on the mare and rode away. He wasn't sure what to do now. He didn't know it yet, but he was about to undertake a comical escape journey.

In the saddle, a few blocks from Ford's, David Herold relished his escape from the Seward house disaster. He had gotten away just in time, before the fleeing Powell could rejoin him on the street or call out his name. No one in the house realized that Powell had an accomplice waiting in the wings. Fanny Seward possessed the right instincts in suspecting that Powell was not alone, but she feared a companion assassin lurking in the house, not on the street outside. For the moment, Davey was safe. No one pursued him when he fled the scene, and no one at the Seward house saw or could implicate him. At the moment he was just
another man on a horse on a happy night in Washington. He regretted abandoning Powell, but when the titan botched his assignment, Herold decided to save himself.

For half an hour, between about 10:15 and 10:45 P.M., David Herold was a man with options. He could go home to his widowed mother's house on Eighth Street, pretend that nothing had happened, and hope for the best, a risky strategy if the manhunters captured Booth, Powell, Atzerodt, Arnold, O'Laughlen, or the Surratts. Any one of them could implicate him. Even if they did not, too many people in Washington had seen him in Booth's company too many times. Someone would remember that. It was only a matter of time before the police or soldiers came to question him. No, going home was a bad idea. Alternatively, he could run away and lose himself in the isolation of a small town or the anonymity of a big city like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Or he could outfit himself and take to the backwoods of Maryland for months, living by his wits and his hunting and fishing skills. Or he could cleave unto Booth, his master, who would soon approach the Navy Yard Bridge and then close in on their prearranged rendezvous point on the other side of the river.

Between 10:20 and 10:30 P.M., Herold rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving the Seward mansion behind, and now heading away from the Treasury building and approaching Fourteenth Street. At the same time, Fletcher was walking up Fourteenth toward Pennsylvania. Herold and Fletcher reached the intersection, near Willard's hotel, simultaneously. Instinctively, Charlie pulled against the reins, trying to get off Pennsylvania and turn onto Fourteenth. Fletcher recognized the action—the horse was heading home. The roan, Fletcher knew, “was a horse very well acquainted with the stable,” and he “seemed as if he wanted to go to the stable.” Fletcher, eager to make that happen, prepared to dash after Herold and unseat him from the saddle: “I thought, if I could get close enough to him … I would take the horse away from him.” As Fletcher closed the distance Herold spotted him—“I expect he knew me by the light of the gas, the lamp from Willard's corner,” Fletcher
concluded. Herold yanked on the reins and spun Charlie around. Fletcher yelled at him to stop: “You get off that horse now! You have had that horse out long enough.”

Herold didn't say a word. Fletcher, on foot, watched helplessly as Herold “put spurs to the horse, and went, as fast as the horse could go, up Fourteenth Street.” Fletcher lost sight of him when Herold turned right on F Street from Fourteenth. It was about 10:25 P.M. The foreman hurried back to Naylor's stable, saddled a mount, and went after Herold. Fletcher described his route of pursuit: “[I] went along … [Pennsylvania] Avenue until I came to Thirteenth Street; went up Thirteenth to E until I came to Ninth, and turned down Ninth Street to Pennsylvania Avenue again. I went along the avenue to the south side of the Capitol. I there met a gentleman, and asked him if he had passed any one riding on horseback. He said yes, and that they were riding very fast.”

In a few minutes, Herold, mimicking Booth's route, approached the bridgehead at Eleventh Street. Sergeant Cobb and his guards were not inclined to let another man pass.

“I halted him,” Cobb reported, “and when challenged he answered ‘a friend.' “The sergeant asked where he was going.

“Home to White Plains.”

Cobb vetoed Davey's crossing: “You can't pass it is after nine-o'clock, it is against the rules.”

Herold challenged him back: “How long have these rules been out?” He hoped that pleading ignorance of the law might gain an exception.

For a while, Cobb replied, unmoved: “Some time ever since I have been here.”

Davey persisted: “I didn't know that before.”

Just as Cobb had questioned Booth, he asked Herold why he had left Washington so late: “Why weren't you out of the city before?”

Davey fabricated the perfect reply, one that any soldier might forgive: “I couldn't very well, I stopped to see a woman on Capitol Hill and couldn't get off before.”

Herold waited for Cobb's reply and did not ask him if another rider
matching Booth's description had crossed recently. Sergeant Cobb waved Herold across.

Fifteen minutes later, a third rider approached the bridge. It was Fletcher. He wasn't going to give up. “I followed on until I got to the Navy Yard bridge.” One of the soldiers stopped him and called for his sergeant. When Cobb emerged from the guardhouse Fletcher asked if a horse matching this description had crossed: “A light roan horse; black tail, black legs, black mane, and close on fifteen hands high.” The stolen animal had special characteristics: “He was a lady's saddle-horse; and any one could ride him, he was so gentle and nice.” Then Fletcher described the saddle, bridle, and rider.

“Yes, he has gone across the bridge,” Cobb replied.

“Did he stay long here?” “Did he tell you his name?”

“Yes,” Cobb divulged, “he said his name was Smith.”

Fletcher wanted to chase Herold into Maryland, and asked Cobb if he could continue the pursuit.

“Yes, you can cross the bridge; but you cannot return back.” Those were the rules, Cobb insisted. He had already bent them twice. He would not do it again.

Fletcher wanted to return to Washington tonight. Dejected, the self-appointed manhunter gave up. “If that is so, I will not go.” He turned around and rode back to the city. When he got to Third Street he looked at his watch. It was 11:50 P.M. He stopped at another stable, Murphy's, and the foreman told him the news: “You had better keep in, for President Lincoln is shot and Secretary Seward almost dead.” Fletcher returned to Naylor's, put up his horse, and, at about 1:30 A.M., sat down in front of the office window. He didn't know that his private manhunt had almost captured one of the accomplices of Lincoln's killer.

Somewhere east of the Capitol building, Lewis Powell was not having as easy a time as Booth and Herold in fleeing the city. He had evaded William Bell and the others, and no one was chasing him now. But he did not know where he was. It got worse. He had lost or abandoned his surest and swiftest means of escape, the one-eyed horse that Booth
bought for his gang. As midnight approached on the night of April 14, Lewis Powell was in trouble: he was a solitary figure standing in the moonlight, lost and unarmed, and wearing a coat stained with another man's blood. He did not know where to go or what to do. For the next two nights he slept in a tree. Without Booth to command him, he became confused and began thinking about some of the places he knew in Washington, places where Booth had taken him before. There was one in particular. He might be safe there—if he could just remember the address.

In Surrattsville, Maryland, thirteen miles southeast of Washington, John Lloyd, the proprietor of Surratt's tavern, retired for the night. He had been pretty tight in liquor that evening—really since the afternoon, if he were to be honest about it—and he was tired. Although Mary Surratt had told him that afternoon to expect some nighttime callers, they had never shown up. It made no difference to him.

Several miles south of Surrattsville, on an isolated farm near Bryantown, Maryland, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, his wife, and their four young children were also in bed. Beantown, where Booth told Sergeant Cobb he was headed, was not far away.

a
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN SLEPT, TOO
. M
ORE THAN FIFTEEN MIN
utes after he was shot, he still lay prone on the floor of boxes seven and eight at Ford's Theatre. Although Dr. Leale had averted the president's immediate death and stabilized his patient, the novice surgeon wasn't sure what to do next. Lincoln could not be left to die on the floor of a theatre gone mad. As Leale contemplated his next move, a woman rushed through Ford's to get to the president. She knew that history was being made in that box, and she had convinced herself that she must be part of it. From her vantage point onstage, she saw that swift passage through the main floor was impossible. She would have to push through the throng on the main floor, and then go up the stairs against a panicked mob coursing down them. They might sweep her off her feet and
crush her. But her expert knowledge of the theatre's architecture allowed her to bypass almost the entire audience that stood between her and Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Gourlay, father of the actress Jennie Gourlay, led Keene to the box. Carrying a pitcher of water that would serve as her passport to the president's box—she dare not spill it—she slipped through a door near the stage and scurried up a hidden staircase that took her straight up to a private office near the box. In less than a minute, she traversed the entire length of Ford's and emerged on the second floor on the same side as Lincoln's box. She fought her way to the door, through the vestibule, and into the box. No one thought to bar the way to the great actress Laura Keene, star of tonight's performance.