The Day Lincoln Was Shot (3 page)

On at least one occasion, the two men locked horns and, when it was over, the President prevailed. Mr. Lincoln had issued an order, without consulting his Secretary of War, that all Confederate prisoners who wanted to fight for the Union were to be freed. Stanton seethed. He hurried to the White House and he confronted the President and, barely able to restrain himself, he pointed out that if the order was executed, the one-time Confederate soldiers would be wearing uniforms of blue and, if captured, they faced hanging.

“Now, Mr. President,” he said angrily, “those are the facts and you must see that your order cannot be executed.”

“Mr. Secretary,” the President drawled, “I reckon you will have to execute that order.”

“Mr. President,” said Stanton, “I cannot do it.”

Lincoln locked his teeth and said softly: “Mr. Secretary, it will
have
to be done.”

It was.

The Secretary of War was a complex man who, in his spare time, was composing a book entitled:
The Poetry of the Bible.
He was loyal, stubborn, hardworking, pedantic, driving, emotional, hated. When he was angry, he closed disagreements with “That will do, sir!” Sometimes, in his hands, power and cruelty were synonymous. And yet, when the power was in other hands and used against him, Mr. Stanton cringed for mercy. He was a perfectionist, and a master of deceit. He abhorred lying but he practiced it.

At the time that General McClellan became a public hero, the Secretary of War took note of it, then announced that McClellan expected to take Richmond soon, even though the general's telegrams of that day proved that McClellan was fearful of being overwhelmed by superior forces. When McClellan failed to take Richmond, the public blamed the general and the press called him a disappointment.

In war, Stanton favored a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and, in his tenure of office, sanctioned the arrest of more than a quarter of a million persons. Once, when a colonel was refused a request, he stared at the secretary and roared: “You can dismiss me from the service as soon as you like, but I am going to tell you what I think of you.” Stanton heard the man out, then granted the request.

Lincoln summed up his own feelings about his Secretary of War when he said: “Stanton is the rock upon which are beating the waves of this conflict . . . I do not see how he survives—why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him, I should be destroyed.”

Over at the Metropolitan Hotel, a group of Baltimore celebrants watched Michael O'Laughlin get out of bed hungover and sad of eye. They had come down from Baltimore yesterday to celebrate the end of the war. His friends, dressed, laughed as Mike sat on the edge of his bed in long drawers and tried to orient himself. He was a small, delicate-looking man with long black hair and heavy imperial mustaches. They asked him if he could stand a drink. He looked up, smiled sadly, and said that he would have one after he got a shave.

Mr. O'Laughlin was an old friend of John Wilkes Booth. He was one of the original band of conspirators. Now, he lived at 57 North Exeter Street, Baltimore, and he worked for his brother in the produce and feed business.

Across the street from the White House, on the east side of Lafayette Square, the oldest man in the Cabinet was shaved in bed in his room on the third floor front. He was William H. Seward, near sixty-four, Secretary of State. He was white-haired, almost patrician, and he was in constant pain.

Nine days before, on April 5, his span of blacks had become frightened and had run away with his carriage, smashing it against the curb. He was taken home unconscious.

Charles Wood, of the Booker and Stewart barber shop, was doing the shaving, and he didn't like the job. The secretary was on the extreme edge of the bed, so that his broken right arm could hang free, and the double iron brace around his neck and jaw forced Mr. Wood to use only the most delicate of strokes as he kept the secretary smooth-skinned. Mr. Seward could talk in lipless grunts, and he listened to his son Frederick, Assistant Secretary of State, explain what he planned to say, in his father's name, at the Cabinet meeting this morning.

Stanton came in, asked how Seward felt, related the latest good news, watched the barber clean his straight razor, and departed for the War Department.

On the other side of town, John Wilkes Booth got out of bed and washed. He had had less than six hours of sleep, but he was restless. He was vain, courtly and meticulous. He scrubbed carefully, rubbed scented pomade in his hair and on his black mustache, put on a fresh suit and riding boots, checked the money in his wallet, and stepped out of his room at the National Hotel. This man had earned $20,000 in a year as an actor. As a Southern patriot, he earned nothing.

He was not tall, but he had the lean and bouncy quality of a man ready to spring. His hair was as black as washed coal and his eyes had a liquid quality of articulation which found a quick, sympathetic response in many women. He was his mother's favorite, although he was her ninth child, and she called him “Pet.” Secretly, silently, sometimes poutingly, she worried about him. At twenty-six, he was a fine horseman, an expert fencer, a crack shot. In the world of the theater, he was only slightly less known than his father, Junius, one of America's great Shakespearean tragedians, who had died twelve years before, and his brother Edwin, perhaps America's greatest Shakespearean actor. Wilkes had bowed legs, but he hid them with custom-made wide pantaloons and extra-long coats.

As he left his room on Good Friday morning, his friend George Atzerodt was registering for a room he did not want at Kirkwood House, Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr. Atzerodt was assigned to Room 126, at the head of the stairs, on the left side of the corridor, almost directly above the room occupied by Vice President Andrew Johnson. Atzerodt took the key to his room and walked out. He had a consuming ambition to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. His assignment today was to kill the Vice President of the United States.

Other men, good and bad, were getting out of bed. Down in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Samuel Arnold had been out of bed an hour. Once, like his friend Michael O'Laughlin, he had been a Confederate soldier. Now he was a store clerk outside a Union fortress. He was young and had brown curly hair and dark eyes. Sam liked to make friends. One of his friends was Wilkes Booth. In Sam's pocket was a letter from Wilkes asking him to come to Washington at once. Arnold knew what that meant. The old plot to kidnap the President was being revived. Sam wouldn't leave the fort. Nor would he answer the letter.

The stone-jawed William Dennison was at breakfast. Formerly Governor of Ohio, he had presided at the convention which had renominated Lincoln. Now he had been paid off. He was the Postmaster General of the United States. The angry-faced Andrew Johnson addressed himself to his plate at the Kirkwood House. When he ate, a Negro servant always stood behind him. The Secretary of the Interior, John P. Usher, a gray-faced man with poached eyes, sat at his front window looking through a lace curtain at the people passing by. What he was thinking about, no one knows. He was a friend of Lincoln's from the circuit-riding days. Soon, he would quit and go home.

On the north side of Lafayette Square, the suspicious Santa of the administration left for his office. This was Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. He had full whiskers and puffed cheeks. At sixty-three, he was certain that Washington City was full of intrigue, and he kept a devastating diary of what the Cabinet members said and did. He disliked banks and seldom forgot either a name or a face.

Down in the Navy Yard section, David Herold sat on the edge of his bed and wondered what time it was. David was twenty-three, looked seventeen, and had the mentality of a boy of eleven. His nose curved like a scimitar and he had black hair and a manner of shifting from foot to foot when someone was talking.

He was unemployed now. Two years ago, he had had a job at Thompson's drugstore on Fifteenth at New York Avenue. Once he had delivered a bottle of castor oil to the White House and the President had asked him to charge it. This young man had three loves: John Wilkes Booth; hunting in southern Maryland; and practical jokes. His only resentment was that fate had given him seven sisters, the oldest of whom lectured him, the youngest of whom giggled when he tried to raise a mustache.

The man who slept late this morning was Lewis Paine. He was at Herndon House on Ninth Street, a block from Ford's Theatre. He was formidable, even in repose. Paine had no job, no ambition, no money, no girl. His only desire was to please Booth, whom he called “Cap.” He placed no higher value on the lives of others than he did on his own, which was none.

Three and a half blocks north, Mrs. Mary E. Surratt was already cleaning up after breakfast. She was assisted by her daughter Anna, who was seventeen and who had secretly pasted Booth's picture behind a lithograph in her room, and by Susan Mahoney, an ex-slave. Breakfast was a detailed operation at 541 H Street, because this was the Surratt boardinghouse. It was here that the conspirators met.

Mrs. Surratt was a small woman, forty-five, a widow with a plain, unlovely face who parted her mousy hair in the middle and combed it back behind her neck. Her attitude was one of forced cheerfulness, as though she were being brave in the face of impending disaster.

President Lincoln was a lean eater. His meals were not uniform, but they were nearly so. For breakfast, he usually ate one egg and drank one cup of coffee. For lunch, he ate one biscuit, drank one glass of milk, and ate one apple. At dinner, he sometimes drank hot soup, and almost always ate meat and potatoes. He would eat dessert if the dessert was homemade apple pie.

This morning, he wanted to listen to his grown son Robert. The boy had returned from a tour of duty with General Grant, and Lincoln wanted his son's firsthand opinions about Grant and the last days of the war. Mrs. Lincoln sat at the opposite end of the table, flanked by her sons Robert and Tad.

She was birdlike and happy this morning and, as Robert talked about the genius of Grant, she interrupted with admonitions to little Tad that he couldn't possibly play on the south grounds today because it was miserable out, and chilly too. Robert, as a joke, presented a picture of General Robert E. Lee to his father and the President, far from taking it as a joke, wiped his glasses on a napkin, studied the portrait a long time, and then said: “It is a good face. I am glad the war is over at last.”

Mrs. Lincoln said that she had tickets for Graver's Theatre, which was staging a tremendous celebration tonight, but that she would rather see Laura Keene in
Our American Cousin
at Ford's. The President, listening to Robert, seemed to have little interest except to say that he would take care of it. Mother asked Robert if he would join them and he said that he was sorry, but that he had promised some friends that he would spend the evening with them. Tad said that nobody asked him to go. He was twelve and had a cleft palate and a sibilating lisp which kept him from regular attendance at school. This may be the reason that he was his father's favorite. The President spoiled him. Tad was the only person, highly placed or low, who could break in on a conference of state with no apology. Another reason may have been that the President had lost two sons. Edward Baker Lincoln died in 1850, not quite four years of age. In the same year, Mrs. Lincoln had given birth to William Wallace Lincoln. He died on February 20, 1862, of typhoid. At that time, the mother's grief was so severe that she was not permitted to attend the funeral and, for some time afterward, she had tried to communicate with Willie at spiritualistic séances.

Robert, the firstborn, was now twenty-one, a good-looking youth with brown hair plastered flat, and a mustache. He had graduated from Harvard University and he wanted to “join the colors,” but Mrs. Lincoln was opposed to the idea, having lost enough sons to natural causes without risking a death in action. After much family discussion, the President did something that, for him, was mean. He asked General Grant to give the boy a commission and to place him on his personal staff, the inference being that he did not want Robert to be in danger.

Now the boy was home and he bubbled with stories about the siege of Petersburg and the gallantry of General Sheridan. His mother asked if he would not like to have the tickets to Graver's Theatre and he said he could use them, or give them to friends.

Mrs. Lincoln asked if the Grants would join them at the theater and the President said that he guessed they would, that Grant was a great hero and that the people were entitled to a look at him. His wife, who had a facility for cutting across conversational lines, asked if he would have time today for an afternoon drive. The President said that he did not know; that he would see. She said she wished that he would get out in the sun more often.

This was, at the moment, a happy family at breakfast. It wasn't always like this; in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that it was seldom like this. With the exception of Robert, it was a tragic group. Two of the boys were dead; the father would be dead by this time tomorrow; Tad would live six years; in ten years the mother would be certified as a “lunatic.” In the family circle, there was often an aura of tension.

The mainspring of the family was not the President. It was Mary Todd Lincoln. She ruled by negation, and by fear. She was ten years younger than the President—he was fifty-six; she was forty-six. She was extravagant, economically and emotionally. Her inaugural dress of 1865 cost $2,000: In four months' time, she had bought three hundred pairs of gloves.

As a child, she was proud and haughty. Like John Wilkes Booth, she had an astonishing memory for long classical poems. She had a passion for sewing and her admiration in the early years went to her maternal grandmother, who ruled in chilly hauteur. When something was mildly funny, Mary laughed hysterically. When something was mildly sad, she wept hysterically.