The Day Lincoln Was Shot (11 page)

There was a low-ceilinged attic in the boardinghouse and this was used as a bedroom and dressing room by Miss Anna Surratt and her cousin, Olivia Jenkins. Both were young and coquettish and bought postcard photos of actors and brave Southern generals.

On the second floor there was a sizable sitting room—which was reached from the outside of the brick house by a white inverted V staircase—and a back parlor. This parlor was used as a double bedroom by Mrs. Surratt and a young boarder, Miss Honora Fitzpatrick. On the ground floor—or basement—was another sitting room, a dining room, and a kitchen.

Little evidence remains of this first attempt to kidnap President Lincoln. On the weekend prior to the Wednesday of the attempt (January 18) Herold was sent to southern Maryland to arrange for relays of horses. Atzerodt was in Port Tobacco inquiring about leasing a flatboat large enough “to float ten or twelve people and a carriage.”

The mechanics of the kidnapping appear to have been that Surratt would be detailed to shut off the master gas valve, under the stage of Ford's Theatre, at a signal. This would extinguish every light in the theater. He was then to come up onstage in the dark and wait, as Booth, in Boxes 7 and 8, forced the President at gunpoint to submit to gag and ropes. The actor would lower the President over the façade of the box eleven feet to the stage, then lower himself to the stage. The two men would hustle the President offstage, out the rear door, where a covered wagon would be waiting in the alley. There would be some confusion in the dark theater, among actors as well as patrons, and Booth counted on this to assist, not to hinder him. The President would be placed in the back of the wagon, trussed, and Surratt would drive the wagon out of the alley with Booth riding single-mount behind the wagon.

On the far side of the Navy Yard Bridge, they would pick up the first of Herold's team relays, and head for Port Tobacco, twenty-nine miles away. By the time Atzerodt had ferried the party across the Potomac to Mathias Point, the whole country would know of their glorious deed and the people of Virginia would assist them through the battle lines to Richmond.

Arnold and O'Laughlin were not part of this attempt. As punishment for not showing sufficient enthusiasm, Booth proceeded without them. At 7
P.M.
on January 18, the plotters were ready.

President Lincoln did not attend the theater that night. No reason was given. The management of the theater expected him because the partition between Boxes 7 and 8 was taken down in the afternoon and the President's favorite rocker was placed in the part of the box closest to the dress circle.

The disappointment was almost too much for Booth and his little band to bear. The following morning, they scattered like minnows. Booth fled to New York. Surratt went south to the protection of the Confederacy. Herold hurried back to his mother and his seven sisters. Atzerodt took a job in Port Tobacco.

In early February, the band took slight heart. There had been no arrests, no apparent shadowing. John Wilkes Booth enlisted the final member of the conspirators. In a way, this man was the best because he could be relied upon to kill on order. His name was Lewis Powell and he was a native of Florida. He had changed his name to Lewis Paine, and he would be known by this name until he died.

Lewis Paine was big and strong and silent and stupid. He had thick jet hair, a clean, handsome face, and the muscles of a circus strong man.

In the South, he had seen John Wilkes Booth on the stage once. Afterward, he had been taken backstage to meet the star, and Lewis Paine never forgot the courtly manners, the gracious attitudes, the born-to-rule air. Later, Lewis went off to war with his brothers and he developed into a most efficient soldier. His quiet boast was that he had never wounded a Union soldier. He killed—or missed. His greatest shield
against the moral strains of war was his stupidity, which kept him doing the work he was ordered to do, while preventing him from pondering on it. With no boastfulness, he displayed a skull which he used as an ash receiver and said that it was the head of a Union soldier whom he had killed.

Paine fought hard and well in the Peninsula Campaign, at Antietam, Chancellorsville, had two brothers killed at Murfreesboro, fought again at Gettysburg, was wounded and taken prisoner.

At this point, there is an unexplained hitch in his record. Paine was assigned as a male nurse in a Union hospital and escaped. He was next seen in the city of Baltimore, where Union authorities, instead of arresting him, ordered him to move farther northward, to Philadelphia or New York. It may be that it was here that Powell changed his name to Paine, and the authorities, having no record of Paine, assumed that he was one of the many wandering deserters of the Confederate Army, and wanted him at least two hundred miles north of the battle lines.

He was twenty, and boarded with Mrs. Mary Branson at 16 Eutaw Street, Baltimore. A few of the neighbors tried to make friends with him, or to strike up an acquaintanceship, and these drew nothing more than a blank stare. When he talked, he seemed to do it without moving his lips. Only the right side of his upper lip showed motion, and this gave him a sneering manner.

Paine's weakness was a rare temper. It seldom mastered him, but, when it did, mastery was complete. A Negro maid came into his room one morning to make up his bed and he asked a question. She made the mistake of answering insolently. In a flash, both of his big hands were around her throat and he squeezed until she collapsed and fell to the floor. He stood over her, staring. The maid lived.

In the second week of February, John Wilkes Booth was in Baltimore to see Arnold and O'Laughlin about resurrecting
the “capture” when Paine, lounging on a street corner, saw him and hailed. In spite of almost five years of time, Booth remembered the big Southern kid who had once been brought backstage for an introduction. They had a long talk about Paine's war record, and the actor bought him a suit of clothes and gave him money.

From that moment on, Booth had a faithful dog. Paine's feeling for the actor was slightly shy of idolatry. Booth was pleasantly surprised to find that his new man was almost ideal; he would do as he was told without question; he could be left alone for weeks in a boardinghouse and would not get into mischief and did not care for the company of girls. He seemed to be able to spend long periods of time sleeping and eating.

Paine was brought to the Surratt boardinghouse and introduced as the Reverend Lewis Wood, Baptist preacher. Mrs. Surratt, Catholic, thought that it was amusing that a Protestant minister would seek her place, of all the boardinghouses in Washington, but she told her daughter Anna that if the Reverend had no complaints, she had none.

There was much to see in Washington, but Paine was not interested. Every time he ventured on the streets to reach a rendezvous with “Cap,” he got lost and found it difficult to get back to the boardinghouse. He complained that the streets were laid out crooked, that they did not intersect at right angles, and he could make no sense of them.

On the night of Tuesday, March 7, four weeks and three days prior to the important day, a small incident occurred at Ford's Theatre. Mr. Thomas Raybold, ticket seller, sold four orchestra seats in advance to Thomas Merrick, the day clerk at the National Hotel. The policy of the theater, when seat holders did not show up by the end of the first act, was to permit the ushers to move less favored patrons up to the empty chairs.

Merrick arrived, at the start of Act Two, to find that his seats had been taken. With him were a Mrs. Bunker and a Mr.
Norton. Merrick was irritated. Raybold too was distressed, and offered to show the party to any good seats in the house, box seats. This mollified the party and they followed the ticket seller up the dress circle stairs of Ford's Theatre and down the left-hand aisle to Box Number 6. It was locked.

Raybold's embarrassment deepened, and he explained that the usher kept the keys to all boxes, because Mr. Ford did not like to have the stagehands sleeping in them by day, but that the dress circle usher was home ill and the best thing to do would be to take the party to the other side of the theater and put them in the presidential box. He led the party to the back of the dress circle, across, and down the right-hand aisle. They went through a little white door to Box 7. The door was locked. Raybold tried the door to Box 8. Locked.

The ticket seller, at this point, was angry at himself. He placed his shoulder against the door of the box and pushed. The door bent inward, and bounded back. He pushed again. In the rear of the dark corridor, Mrs. Bunker giggled. Raybold lifted his foot, aimed at the lock, and smashed. The lock snapped. The door flew open. The hasp which had held the lock swung loosely. When the party had been seated, and had forgiven him, Raybold tried the lock and found that it was broken. In the future, the door to the presidential box could be opened by anyone.

Mr. Raybold did not report it.

On a cold afternoon, Booth took Lewis Paine for a walk and showed him the White House. They walked across the south grounds toward the front of the mansion. Booth talked confidentially as they looked at the black stately trees, the squatters, the sentries warm inside their boxes, and heard the complaining bleat of Tad Lincoln's goats, the barking challenge of a sentry on the far side of the mansion.

“He is right over there,” Booth said, pointing. Paine looked. “If you really want to kill him,” the actor said, “what I would
do is just walk in, present my card and, when I was admitted, walk up to his desk and shoot him.”

Paine made no answer. Booth said he lacked nerve. Still no answer. The actor offered a less dangerous alternative. If you want to, said Booth, you can lie in wait in the bushes at the front of the White House lawn any evening and shoot him as he returns from his last daily visit to the War Department.

Lewis Paine liked that idea. He said he would do it. This is the first time on record that the thoughts of John Wilkes Booth turned from capture to kill.

The soldier waited in the bushes one night and, when he returned to the boardinghouse, he told Booth that he had lost his nerve. He insisted that he had been close enough to have strangled the President of the United States.

Lincoln had walked back to the White House that night with Major Thomas Eckert, the chief of telegraphers, and Paine had heard the President say, in a jocular way: “Major, spread out, spread out or we shall break through the ice.”

Sometime in March 1865, the clerks in the office of the Commissary General of Prisoners were talking about the illness of the President, and some fell to wondering what would happen to the Union if he died. This, in turn, led to a discussion of the assassination plots featured in the newspapers and Louis Wiechman, the fat boarder at Surratt House, assumed the air of a man who has a rich morsel of gossip and said that a plot was hatching against Mr. Lincoln in the very house where he boarded. A group of “Secesh” people were scheming to do away with the President.

Unless Wiechman's character is being read wrong, this was intended as thrilling gossip, nothing more. Had the boarder feared for the President's life, he might have been expected to report directly to his superior at the Commissary of Prisoners, or, conceding Wiechman's flair for the dramatic,
he might have gone directly to Secretary of War Stanton. The least he might have done was to report the matter to Major General Christopher C. Augur, Commander, Department of Washington, 22nd Corps.

Wiechman was surprised and worried when he found that his morsel got out of hand. He was questioned by Captain Gleason of the office, who said that he would report the matter at once to Assistant Provost Marshal Lieutenant Sharp. Wiechman was worried. He was intelligent and he may have feared that someone might suspect that he was part of the plot. He hurried at once to a nearby office and breathlessly reported the entire matter to Captain McDavitt, U.S. Enrolling Officer. Thus Wiechman was on record as having patriotically warned the nation of the impending peril, even though he later admitted that he “talked secesh, but it was buncombe,” and even though it was proved that, after exposing the plot, he entertained Atzerodt in his bedroom and lent his military coat and cape to Atzerodt and Paine, and he continued to share a bed with John Surratt.

Louis Wiechman told Captain McDavitt the names of all the habitués of the boardinghouse, as well as the residents, so the government was armed with information. No captain would, on his own authority, withhold such information. It can be assumed that it boiled upward toward Stanton. Captain Gleason had the same information, independently, and he brought it to the attention of Lieutenant Sharp, who also sent it to higher echelons for evaluation. At the top of both heaps was Stanton, who was so chronically worried about assassination attempts that he was seeing plots where there weren't any. Is it too much to suggest that the United States Government, on one level or another, was aware of John Wilkes Booth and his band, plus the boardinghouse at 541 H Street, in mid-March of 1865? Is it too much to expect that the government officers would give this report more than casual attention
because it could not be classified with the crackpot anonymous letters which usually told about such plots, but came, rather, from a trusted clerk who worked for the War Department?

Mr. Stanton had caused the arrest of 38,000 persons in the war years, many on far flimsier evidence than the word of an army informer. Besides, Stanton was almost always in an arresting mood and, with the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, it would have required only a nod to put Booth and his band, and the Surratts too and their boarders, behind bars. In separate cells, under interrogation, no one can doubt that Atzerodt—and perhaps Herold too—would have cracked and told the story of the “capture” within a day or two.

Nothing was done, although detectives would insist later that they had the Surratt boardinghouse under surveillance for weeks. The safest surmise is that both reports, Gleason's and McDavitt's, were read, assessed and filed somewhere on the road up. They were never found. The detectives who said that the house had been watched for weeks were asked to relate the daily habits of any of the boarders, and couldn't.