Manhunt (16 page)

“I will tell some news, if you want to hear it,” Booth offered.

Lloyd responded indifferently. “I am not particular; use your own pleasure about telling it.”

“Well,” continued Booth, “I am pretty certain that we have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.”

Lloyd, “very much excited and unnerved” by his own account, said nothing. He watched them ride off into the night “at a pretty rapid gait,” not understanding exactly what Booth had meant. Then he went back to bed. Booth and Herold had spent less than five minutes in Surrattsville.

They continued on to the south and east for an unplanned but necessary detour.

Booth's leg was throbbing painfully. He needed a doctor. And he knew just where to find one, a four hours' ride away.

a
T THE
P
ETERSEN HOUSE
, A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN WOULD SOON
have more doctors than he could ever want, but little use for any of them.

As soon as the president was carried across the threshold, Dr. Leale commanded Henry Safford to “take us to your best room.” To his right Leale saw a narrow staircase leading up to the second- and third-floor bedrooms. To his immediate left was the front parlor where, just a few minutes earlier, Safford read quietly until he heard the commotion in the street. In front of Leale a dim hallway led to the rear of the house. Safford told the doctor to follow him there. Leale, and as many of Lincoln's bearers as could squeeze their bodies into the tight passageway, carried the president behind their host. As they shuffled along, they passed a second parlor on the left situated directly behind the first. They could not see the bed until they actually stepped into the back room, glanced to the right, and found it wedged into the northeast corner, its side running along the north wall and the headboard pushed against the east wall, close to the door. Leale's eyes cast about the chamber. The occupant, William Clark, was out for the evening, celebrating the end of the war. This would do. It would have to.

Chasing after the president, Mary Lincoln, escorted by Clara Harris and Major Rathbone, with Laura Keene trailing at their heels, burst into the Petersen boardinghouse. Wringing her hands in anguish, Mary
looked “perfectly frantic” to George Francis, one of the tenants. “Where is my husband? Where is my husband?” she pleaded to no one in particular. Behind the first lady's party, a number of opportunistic strangers scampered up the stairs, and, taking advantage of the confusion, slipped into the house before any guards could be posted at the door. The interlopers were probably no more than heedless curiosity seekers, but who could guarantee that more assassins were not lurking among them, intent on finishing Booth's work? The strangers invaded the first-floor parlors and worked their way down the hallway, inching closer to the president. If someone did not take command soon, the situation in the Petersen house would break down into utter chaos.

At the corner of Tenth and F streets, Secretary of War Stanton's carriage approached the surging mob. Apprehensive, Major Eckert doubted whether the horses would drive through it. Wary of the crowd's size and sensing its mood, they might balk. And there was the possibility that the throng, refusing to yield, might overwhelm them. But Stanton and Welles were determined to ignore the danger. They must push on.

In the back bedroom, Dr. Leale ignored the chaos around him. Only one person mattered now. Someone tore back the coverlet and top sheet. Someone else turned up the valve of the gas jet protruding from the wall to full flame. In an instant the hissing, burning vapor illuminated the grotesque scene. The others laid the unconscious body upon the mattress. Mary Lincoln burst into the room, and the bright gaslight confirmed to her that this was not the nightmare she hoped it was—this was real.

Leale held the president's head steady and ordered his helpers to stretch Lincoln's body out to its full length, in preparation for a complete examination. When Lincoln's heavy boots kicked the footboard, his legs were still not straight. The bed was too short, and his bent knees stuck up in the air. Break the footboard off the bed, Leale demanded. But it wouldn't budge. Try again, exhorted Leale. Impossible, Doctors Taft and King explained. It was integral to the construction of the bed, and if they broke it off, the whole bed would collapse to the floor with
Lincoln in it. Frustrated, Leale laid Lincoln out across the bed diagonally, with his head on the corner of the mattress closest to the door and his feet on the corner closest to the wall.

Leale leaned in close to the president's face. He was still alive. Leale decided to give the president a few minutes to gather what strength he still possessed before undertaking a complete examination. At this moment of temporary repose, Leale seemed, for the first time, to take in his surroundings. He sniffed the moist and stifling air. There were too many people in the little room, raising the temperature and sucking the oxygen that Lincoln needed to live. Leale ordered the windows opened. Then he ordered everyone but doctors and friends of the president out. Still too many people. Leale asked all but the doctors to leave. Mary Lincoln remained and hovered over her husband. Dr. Leale prodded her gently. He explained that he and the other doctors must examine the president now. After that, she could return to his side. Mary agreed to leave the room and went to a sofa in the front parlor, where she remained throughout the night whenever she was not at the bedside. Alone with their patient, Leale, Taft, and King worked quickly, stripping Abraham Lincoln naked, head to toe.

Maunsell B. Field, assistant secretary of the treasury, pushed through the masses packed in front of the Petersen house and forced his way inside. The first person he saw, Clara Harris, told him that the president was dying but admonished him not to tell Mary Lincoln. It was obvious to everyone that Mary was coming apart and no one wanted to push her over the edge into total breakdown. Field entered the parlor and found Mary “in a state of indescribable agitation.” He heard her ask the same question “over and over again”: “Why didn't he kill me? Why didn't he kill me?” To Clara Harris, Mary Lincoln chanted another lament throughout the night. Whenever Mary laid eyes upon Clara's crimson-streaked dress, she recoiled in horror. “My husband's blood,” she moaned again and again. “My husband's blood.” Clara chose not to correct her. It was not the president's blood that soaked her dress, but that of her fiancé, Henry. And his supply was running low: “The wound
which I had received was bleeding profusely, and, on reaching the house … feeling very faint from the loss of blood, I seated myself in the hall, and soon after fainted away, and was laid upon the floor. Upon the return of consciousness, I was taken to my residence.”

A few hundred feet away, Stanton's carriage came to a standstill, unable to penetrate the crowd. The coachman simply could not drive the horses through the mob. Stanton decided that if they could not ride, they would walk. He opened the door and dismounted the carriage, joined by his passengers Secretary of the Navy Welles, Judge Cartter, and General Meigs. Eckert could not believe his eyes. Sitting in their carriage, elevated above the crowd, the officials were relatively safe, like passengers in a lifeboat riding atop a tumultuous sea. But on foot, in the dark, in the midst of thousands of people, anything could happen that night. Indeed, it already had. But now Stanton's entourage, which included the two cabinet secretaries responsible for the entire, combined armed forces of the United States on land and at sea, headed into the mob and vanished from sight.

O
N THE ROAD SOUTH AND EAST FROM
S
URRATTSVILLE
, B
OOTH
and Herold had the road to themselves—they saw and were seen by no one. Although desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Washington, they had to be careful to not ride their horses too fast or hard. They had a long way to go and could not risk having the horses break down during a prolonged and dangerous sprint. Booth had pushed his horse to the limit when he galloped through downtown Washington, but escaping Baptist Alley and putting that first mile or two between himself and Ford's Theatre was vital. Once he left Lloyd's tavern, he paced the animal more carefully.

D
RS
. L
EALE
, T
AFT, AND
K
ING SCRUTINIZED
L
INCOLN'S ENTIRE
body front and back for knife or gunshot wounds but found nothing
other than the bullet hole in the head. During their examination they noticed that the president's lower extremities—his feet and legs—were already getting cold. Lincoln's eyes were closed. The lids and surrounding tissue were so filled with blood that to Dr. Taft they looked bruised, like someone had punched the president in the face. The doctors lifted the lid covering Lincoln's left eye: the pupil was very contracted. They lifted the lid over the right eye: the pupil was widely dilated, and both pupils were totally insensitive to light—all signs consistent with a catastrophic, irreversible injury to the brain. On the doctors' orders, a hospital steward from Lincoln Hospital, a nearby military facility, sprinted from the bedside and returned with hot water, brandy, blankets, and a large sinapism, or mustard plaster. Soon the surgeons covered the whole anterior surface of Lincoln's body, from the neck to the toes, with mustard plasters to keep him warm. Then they covered him up to his chin with a sheet, blankets, and a coverlet. His breathing was regular but heavy, interrupted by an occasional sigh. They laid a clean, white napkin over the bloodstains on the pillow. They placed a small chair at the head of the bed, near Lincoln's face. Now the president was ready for Mary to see him again. Leale sent an officer to the front parlor to inform her. She rushed to the bedroom and sat beside her husband. “Love, live but for one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.” Lincoln was deaf to her pleas.

With the president's condition stable for now, or at least as stable as that of a dying man shot through the brain could be, Dr. Leale diverted his attention from medical to practical concerns. He sent messengers summoning Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's eldest son; Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes; Surgeon D. Willard Bliss at the Armory Square Hospital; Lincoln's family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone; and the president's pastor, the Reverend Dr. Phineas T. Gurley. He also sent a hospital steward in search of a special piece of medical equipment, a Nelaton probe. There was work to do inside Lincoln's brain.

Secretary of War Stanton pushed through the crowd, clambered up the stairs of the Petersen house and rushed down the hall. The sight of
the president shocked him. He did not need doctors to tell him what would happen: Abraham Lincoln was going to die, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. But he could do something: in the president's absence, he could protect and defend the country.

Stanton took charge of the Petersen house and commandeered the back parlor, the one closest to the bedroom, as his field office. He made a quick executive decision. He would not return to the War Department tonight but instead would remain with the president. The Petersen boardinghouse was the War Department now. Edwin Stanton assumed that the Lincoln and Seward assassinations had exposed the existence of a devilish Confederate plot to kill the leadership of the national government, reverse the verdict of the battlefield, and, in one last desperate assault, win the Civil War. Stanton and his lieutenants assumed that all the cabinet heads had been marked for death tonight. And a rebel army might be advancing on Washington at this moment.

Stanton wanted his commanding general back in Washington immediately and ordered his aides to track down U. S. Grant. It was the first telegram issued from the ersatz War Department headquarters at the Petersen house.

It occurred to Charles A. Dana, assistant secretary of war, that Grant might be in danger. The newspapers had advertised his appearance at Ford's Theatre, and perhaps he, too, was on Booth's death list. Dana sent a telegram to Philadelphia, warning the commanding general of assassins or sabotage on the railroad: “Permit me to suggest to you to keep a close watch on all persons who come near you in the cars or otherwise; also, that an engine be sent in front of the train to guard against anything being on the track.” Stanton rushed guards to the homes of all the cabinet secretaries to protect them from imminent assassination, if they were not dead already. He ordered military units to take to the streets. At midnight Quartermaster General Meigs, who had ridden with Stanton to the Petersen house, dispatched an urgent message to Major General Christopher Columbus Augur (who signed his name “C. C.” for the obvious reasons), commander of the military district of Washington: “The Secretary directs that the troops turn out; the guards be doubled, the forts be alert; guns manned; special vigilance and guard about the Capitol Prison I advise, if your men are not sufficiently numerous, call upon General Rucker for assistance in furnishing guards.” The troops must maintain order and be ready for anything on this wild night. And clear away the mob from the street in front of this house, Stanton ordered. Soldiers tried to push back the insistent throng that pressed forward and obstructed Petersen's staircase.