Manhunt (13 page)

The scene riveted Keene and excited her theatrical instincts. Mesmerized by the image of the stricken president, Keene imagined a fantastic tableaux with her as its central figure. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, impossible to resist. Might she, the actress asked Dr. Leale, cradle the dying president's head in her lap? It was a shocking request, and of no possible physical comfort or medical benefit to Lincoln. Under normal circumstances, its brazenness would have provoked the volcanic Mary Lincoln into paroxysms of jealous anger. Recently Mary had embarrassed herself and her husband when she raged viciously in public against the lovely wife of General Ord. Mrs. Ord's crime? Riding too close to President Lincoln during a military review, and, in Mary's opinion, masquerading as the first lady. To all who witnessed it, the ugly incident opened a portal into the workings of Mary Lincoln's troubled and sometimes pathetic mind. But now, delirious with grief and fear, Mary Lincoln, sitting on the sofa a few feet away, uttered no objection to Keene's intimate request. She probably did not even hear it. Dr. Leale consented.

Laura Keene knelt beside Lincoln and formed her lap into a natural pillow. She lifted his head, exposing the bloodstained linen handkerchief that Dr. Leale had placed below the wound. Leale removed it, and Keene rested Lincoln's head in her lap. Bloodstains and tiny bits of gray
matter oozed onto the cream silk fabric, spreading and adding color to the frock's bright and festive red, yellow, green, and blue floral pattern. The wound did not bleed profusely, and of the trio of dresses bloodied that night, Laura's dress alone was spared the drenching that saturated the garments of Fanny Seward and Clara Harris.

Fanny's and Clara's dresses did not survive. But Laura Keene, like a Victorian bride who lovingly preserved her wedding dress as a sacred memento of her happiest day, cherished the blood- and brain-speckled frock from this terrible night. In the days ahead, people begged to see the dress, to caress its silken folds, and to marvel at the stains and the scenes of high drama they evoked. Soon it became the object of morbid curiosity. Others even asked Keene to model the dress and made surreptitious attempts to cut coveted swatches as bizarre keepsakes. In time, Keene banished the haunted artifact from her sight. But she could not bear to destroy it and instead exiled it into the care of her family so that she would never have to look at it again. The dress vanished long ago, but miraculously a few remnants—five treasured swatches—survived. Their gay floral pattern remains almost as bright as the day the dress was fashioned nearly a century and a half ago by Jamie Bullock of Chicago. But long ago the stains, once red, faded to a rust-colored, pale brown. Laura Keene became forever known for the Pietà-like improvisational scene she staged in the president's box. We remember her not for her deep talent, diverse repertoire, or lifetime of great performances, but for a single unscripted act that played out for only a few minutes in the box at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. Her great contemporaries from the nineteenth-century American stage have faded into oblivion, forgotten by all except a tiny fraternity of theater scholars. But Keene's name lives on, forever linked to Abraham Lincoln's by the macabre, supporting role she played that night.

Her presence in the box also highlighted an uncomfortable fact. She was an actress, this was a theatre, and it was Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. But the president of the United States was not worshiping in church. Instead, he was dying on the floor
of a secular and morally illicit landmark. The great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend spoke for many when he wrote, “The Chief Magistrate of thirty millions of people—beloved, honored, revered,—lay in the pent up closet of a play-house, dabbling with his sacred blood the robes of an actress.”

Indeed, in two days a number of ministers would admonish Lincoln in their Sunday sermons for spending Good Friday in a theatre. So did John Wilkes Booth's devoted sister, Asia Booth Clarke: “It was the moan of the religious people, the one throb of anguish to hero-worshippers, that the President had not gone first to a place of worship or have remained at home on this jubilant occasion. It desecrated his idea to have his end come in a devil's den—a theatre…. That fatal visit to the theatre had no pity in it; it was jubilation over fields of unburied dead, over miles of desecrated homes.”

T
HE SCENE IN THE PRESIDENT's BOX WOULD HAVE AMUSED
Asia's brother John. Leave it to Laura Keene to try to upstage his spectacular performance. Just like an actress to ride his coattails. Now safely across the Eleventh Street Bridge, Booth looked toward Maryland and plunged ahead into the dark. Of his three cohorts, he needed Davey Herold the most right now, more than Atzerodt or Powell. Once Booth escaped downtown Washington, reached the city limits, and crossed the river into Maryland, he sidestepped immediate danger. The countryside was dark and quiet, with few travelers using the empty roads. He trotted over the route he had rehearsed over the previous year for the kidnapping plot. No need to gallop now, with no pursuers in sight when Sergeant Cobb let him pass. Better to let the horse rest and regain her strength for later. As Booth rode on, he searched the horizon for Soper's Hill, the chosen rendezvous place. In daylight it seemed simple, but nightfall had leveled the hills. Alone in the country, he was out of his milieu. Booth was a creature of the city and its fancy hotel lobbies, hard liquor saloons, oyster bars, back alleys, and gaslit shadows. He did not
have the skills he'd need to survive in the coming days, those of outdoorsman, hunter, or river boatman. But Herold was all of those things, and that's why Booth chose him, above all the others, to guide him.

Now that Booth had slowed down, the pain in his left leg bloomed under the moonlight. Near desperation after his hard ride, he gazed into the horizon just before midnight—he was about eight miles from Washington's city limits. Davey and the others might be a few minutes ahead or behind him, depending on exactly how they had timed their attacks on Seward and Johnson. Booth saw nothing ahead of him. When he turned to look behind him, he heard a noise trailing in the distance. Horses' hooves pounding the earth. Was it the first warning of a cavalry patrol in hot pursuit? As the noise increased in volume, it sounded, to Booth's relief, like one horse, not many. Then his solitary pursuer came within sight—a small man on a large gray horse. His eyes held Booth's for a long, suspicious moment, then relief trickled down the wounded assassin's spine. It was David Herold.

The actor was jubilant. He was on safe ground, and now he had his guide. Maryland, although it did not secede from the Union in 1861, remained a hotbed of secessionism. Maryland was as Confederate as a state could be without actually joining the Confederacy. If Maryland had become the twelfth star on the Confederate flag, the Union would have been in grave danger. Washington, D.C., would be surrounded by rebel states, isolated from the rest of the North. Thousands of its citizens joined the Confederate army, marching off to war to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.” Rebel spies and couriers infested the state, and James McPhail, the U.S. Army provost marshal stationed there, had his hands full suppressing Confederate schemes in Baltimore. It was in Baltimore that the citizens plotted to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in February 1861 when he traveled through their city on the way to his inauguration, and a Baltimore mob had attacked Union troops—the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry—as the unit marched through the city. It was from Maryland that Booth drew several of the conspirators for his kidnapping plot. And it was in Bel Air that Booth grew from boy to
young adult. Maryland was his ground, and, he was certain, its people would shelter him and wish him Godspeed on his journey to the Deep South.

Booth and Herold spurred their horses, riding southeast to their first safe house just a few miles away in Maryland. Booth likely grilled Herold with questions: Why was he alone? Where is Powell? Did he kill Seward? Had he seen Atzerodt? Did he murder Vice President Johnson? No, Herold would have answered, he hadn't seen Atzerodt since the conspirators broke up earlier in the evening to carry out the three assassinations. He had no idea whether Johnson was dead. Herold recounted what had happened at the Seward residence: the entry plan worked perfectly, and Powell and his little package were admitted to the mansion. All seemed quiet in the house. Herold heard no gunshots. About ten minutes later, a black servant ran out the front door into the street screaming “murder,” and then a girl threw open an upstairs window and started yelling, too.

This news seemed to prove to Booth that the faithful Powell had carried out his mission. But the actor must have been displeased with Herold for abandoning Powell, for whom he had a special fondness. And Powell would have come in handy if they had to do to any fighting during their escape. Booth guessed that Powell, who never learned the geography of the capital city, was a lost man. Herold explained how he almost got caught, not by the police or the army, but by John Fletcher, the stable man who rented Herold his horse. Booth certainly told Herold of his success at Ford's Theatre. This was the assassin's first opportunity to describe his deed, and the irrepressible thespian in him probably laid it on thick.

B
ETWEEN 11:30 P.M. AND MIDNIGHT
, G
EORGE
A
TZERODT
appeared on Sixth Street, without his horse, and boarded a streetcar headed for the Navy Yard. By chance, one of the passengers was someone he'd known for the past seven or eight years, a man named Washington
Briscoe. Atzerodt failed to recognize him until Briscoe spoke to him. Briscoe asked him if he'd heard the news—Lincoln had been assassinated. Yes, he had, George replied. Atzerodt asked if he could spend the night at Briscoe's store at the Navy Yard. When Briscoe said no, Atzerodt became agitated: “His manner was excited, and he was very anxious to sleep there; he urged me to let him.” Briscoe explained that someone else was already sleeping there, too, and he could not impose upon the man. Atzerodt stayed on the car and got off with Briscoe on I Street, near Briscoe's store. He asked a third time if he could spend the night. Briscoe refused again, but he waited with Atzerodt at the corner of I and Garrison streets for the streetcar to return. George told Briscoe that he was heading to the Pennsylvania House, also known as the Kimmell House, on C Street. Atzerodt got on the next car and headed back to downtown Washington. He still had his room key to the Kirkwood in his pocket. When he left there, he failed to surrender it to a front-desk clerk.

Luckily, Atzerodt did not return to the Kirkwood House. By late Saturday morning, John Lee, a member of the military police force, was breaking down the door to room 126. After the assassination, Major James O'Beirne, provost marshal of Washington, ordered Lee to rush to the vice president's hotel. He, too, might be a target. When Lee got there, a bartender, Michael Henry, informed him that a suspicious-looking man had rented a room the previous day. Lee scanned the hotel register until he spotted it: “a name written very badly—G. A. Atzerodt.” Desk clerks Robert R. Jones and Lyman Sprague could not find the room key. Sprague escorted Lee upstairs. Atzerodt's door was locked. Lee broke it open and searched the room. Under the pillow he found a revolver, loaded and capped; between the sheets and mattress he discovered a large Bowie knife.

The room was filled with clues: a brass spur, a pair of socks, two shirt collars, a pair of new gauntlets, three boxes of cartridges, a piece of licorice, and a toothbrush. A black coat hung from a hook on the wall. Lee searched it and found a map of Virginia and three handkerchiefs.
One was embroidered with the name “Mary R. Booth.” Lee found a bankbook from the Ontario Bank in Montreal, showing a credit of $455.00. The name of the account holder was “Mr. J. Wilkes Booth.”

D
R
. L
EALE KNEW THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF REASONS HE
couldn't leave Abraham Lincoln to die on a theatre floor. The president was going to die—it was just a matter of time—and Leale had never seen a man with such a wound survive more than an hour. He was helpless to save Lincoln's life, but, now that he had stabilized him, he did have power over the place and manner of the president's passing. George Washington, the nation's first president, and the first former one to die, and William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, the only presidents who had died in office, did not expire under tawdry circumstances, in shredded clothes on a boot-tracked, soiled floor, and neither would Abraham Lincoln. Leale's instincts issued another silent command: “Remove to safety.” The president of the United States would die with dignity, in a proper bed. “Take him to the White House,” someone in the box implored. Yes, take him home. Impossible, Leale explained, and the other two doctors who had joined him in the box, Charles Sabin Taft and the improbably named Albert Freeman Africanus King, who had arrived just after Taft, concurred. Even the brief carriage trip between Ford's and the Executive Mansion over unpaved, muddy streets, gouged deeply with ruts and tracks from hundreds of carriage wheels, would be too much for Lincoln to endure. The bumpy ride would jostle the head wound and instantly kill him. No, they must take him someplace closer. Another voice suggested Peter Taltavul's saloon next door, where Booth enjoyed his last drink. Others vetoed that suggestion at once: it was bad enough that Lincoln might die in a theatre, but a tavern? Unthinkable. Even obscene.

They prepared to lift Lincoln's body without knowing where they would take him. First Dr. Leale closed the curtain on Laura Keene's maudlin, private drama. Her fame guaranteed, her dress sanctified by
gore, she released her hold on the martyr, rose from the floor, and stepped back. Leale told Dr. Taft to support Lincoln's right shoulder and Dr. King the left. Leale ordered other men in the box to place their hands under the torso, the pelvis, the legs. Leale bent down and cradled the head. On his order, their hands worked in unison and lifted the president from the floor. They inched toward the vestibule. Clara Harris and Major Rathbone got Mary Lincoln on her feet and supported her unsteady gait. The trio, accompanied by Keene, followed the body. They carried Lincoln through the vestibule headfirst. Creeping backward and looking over his shoulder at the door leading to the dress circle, Leale observed a crush of humanity blocking the way and straining to get a glimpse of the president. Leale's voice blasted at them twice like a battlefield trumpet: “Guards, clear the passage! Guards, clear the passage!”