The Day Lincoln Was Shot (32 page)

Harry Phillips, who was to have sung “Honor to Our Soldiers” in the late intermission, was outside his dressing room when he heard the shot. He told Mr. Stanton and Justice Cartter that he ran downstairs in his shirtsleeves, heard actors and stagehands saying that Mr. Lincoln had been shot and that it was John Wilkes Booth who had shot him. “Are you certain it was Wilkes Booth?” he had asked Harry Hawk. And Hawk had said to him: “I could say it if I was on my deathbed.”

The parade of witnesses all said “Booth.” Ferguson, who took the little girl home, stopped at the D Street precinct to tell the police that he saw Booth go into the box, heard the shot, and saw Booth leap out of the box. Then he took his place in line to tell Stanton and Cartter and Augur the same thing.

“In fifteen minutes,” said Corporal Tanner, “I had testimony enough to hang Wilkes Booth higher than ever Haman hung.”

At police headquarters, Superintendent Richards interrogated seventeen witnesses. The blotter noted:

No word went out from Petersen House to apprehend Booth. Many fine literary minds have read into this an assent to the assassination on the part of War Secretary Stanton. There is no evidence in any record to support this. The opposite is true. Stanton felt stronger than the President and felt protective toward his person. He had seen Lincoln grow from a despised, unwanted figure to that of an almost sanctified statesman. Now, when his fears had been realized, when he saw the results of withholding the services of a man like Eckert through a lie, when he stood beside two beds and looked down at Seward and at Lincoln, his mind refused to accept the fact that the majesty of the United States Government had been affronted by one man, an actor. To him, Booth was small game. Stanton's function, as he saw it, was to stop the
pending
assassinations rather than to apprehend the perpetrators of the Lincoln shooting.

In support of his stand of a widespread plot, the commercial telegraph system went dead at 10:30
P.M.
that night. Major Eckert and his chief visualized this as isolating Washington City from the rest of the North. To achieve it, both agreed that a large band of men must be working together because many wires would have to be cut simultaneously. At the same time, Eckert decided that his U.S. Army wires must have been tapped, and so, when Stanton wanted to send a message to a garrison in the District of Columbia, Eckert dispatched it all the way to Old Point, Virginia, with a request that it be relayed back to the proper garrison in Washington. In effect, Mr. Stanton was at pains to outwit men who did not exist.

At 11:45
P.M.
the first order to apprehend went out from Augur. This was ninety minutes after the shooting, and Booth's name was not mentioned.

Colonel Thompson, at Darnestown, was ordered by Stanton to have his men patrol the area north of Washington City.
THE ASSASSINS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE ESCAPED TOWARD MARYLAND,
he wired. The secretary meant Montgomery and Anne Arundel counties to the north and east. Although Augur was beside him most of the night, Stanton sent a message to him too, ordering that no person suspicious or unknown be permitted to leave Washington City this night.

Just before midnight, Mr. Stanton further dissipated the Federal efforts when he sent another message to General Slough in Alexandria:
IT IS NOT KNOWN IN WHICH DIRECTION THE ASSASSIN HAS ESCAPED
.

At Fairfax Courthouse, General Gamble had eight hundred men on the roads between his headquarters and Leesburg. A message, directed to him via Major Waite, said:
ORDER GENERAL GAMBLE TO ALLOW NO ONE TO PASS HIS LINES. TO ARREST EVERYONE WHO ATTEMPTS. STANTON.

Alarms went out to Winchester, Harper's Ferry,
Cumberland, Baltimore, Annapolis, Acquia Creek, Relay House, almost everywhere except on the fat foot of Maryland which lies between the Potomac and the Patuxent. And that's where Booth was.

The hysteria was contagious and the generals and colonels were apprehending and arresting without reason. General Morris wired Stanton from Baltimore:
THE MOST VIGOROUS MEASURES WILL BE TAKEN. EVERY AVENUE IS GUARDED. NO TRAINS OR BOATS WILL BE PERMITTED TO LEAVE THIS DEPARTMENT
FOR THE PRESENT.
In reply, Stanton had to order the general to permit three trains, laden with food for Washington City, to proceed out of Baltimore.

Perhaps the first official word regarding Booth was contained in a message written in longhand by General Augur and sent to Colonel Gile, Commander, Reserve Corps, Washington:

Mr. Stanton persuaded Mr. Welles to issue like instructions to the navy. Steamers were ordered to patrol up and down the Potomac, looking for fugitives close to shore. Down at the mouth of the river, Commander Parker at Saint Inigoes
was ordered to bottle up the river. Point Lookout was ordered to stop any and all vessels proceeding south on the Potomac and to hold all persons aboard until further orders.

Every avenue of escape out of Washington was closed except the Navy Yard Bridge leading to southern Maryland, and no orders were issued about that one because, for a long time past, it had been closed every night at 9, and the attacks did not occur until 10:15. No one could have left the city that way.

At 11:55
P.M.
Sergeant Silas Cobb, in charge of the bridge detail, was surprised to find that his night relief man was early. They swapped news and the relief sergeant said that he had nothing to tell because, until a few minutes ago, he had been sleeping in barracks. Cobb said that matters were quiet on the bridge. A few Marylanders, after a night of fun in Washington City, had been permitted to cross. That was all.

Sergeant Cobb went to bed.

At the commercial telegraph office, Mr. Dwight Hess, manager of Grover's Theatre, left a telegram to be sent to Mr. Grover in New York when service was resumed:

* * *

Among the small figures of history, John Fletcher stands as a man of tenacity. At this hour, he was still trying to find a horse. He went to the police station on Tenth Street to register a complaint against David Herold and, in the light of his own exasperating problem, could not understand why, at midnight, the precinct station was so full of fashionably attired ladies and gentlemen. He knew that the President had been shot, but Fletcher had given no further thought to it.

Now he spoke to Detective Charles Stone and asked if a roan horse had been picked up. Stone said: “Who are you?” Fletcher told him, and now, in a flash of revelation, the stable foreman began to wonder why Atzerodt wanted his horse made ready as late as 10
P.M.
and why Herold had panicked and run off twenty-five minutes later when Fletcher asked him to get off the horse.

Stone said that a horse had been picked up, and that he would accompany Fletcher down to General Augur's headquarters, where they were trying to identify it.

Augur had returned from another conference with Stanton, and sat at his desk. Witnesses were waiting in an anteroom. Stone said that the stableman had rented a roan and the general asked if Fletcher remembered the name of the renter.

“I do,” said Fletcher. “His name is Herold and he is young, not more than twenty-one or -two, he looks like a boy, and I can tell you that I followed him to the Navy Yard Bridge before I lost him.”

There Augur had the key to the conspiracy. But he shook his head sadly. The description did not fit John Wilkes Booth, and Booth was the man that Augur wanted. Besides, the general agreed with Mr. Stanton that the attempts on the lives of Seward and Lincoln were probably executed by the same man. There was no room in Augur's mind for a boyish-looking assassin.

The general nodded toward a flat saddle and bridle lying on a chair.

“Do you know anything about that?” he said.

Fletcher, an expert in such matters, walked over and fingered the leather. He turned the bridle over in his hand.

“I do,” he said.

“What kind of a horse had that saddle and bridle on?”

“A big brown horse, blind of one eye; a heavy horse with a heavy tail; a kind of pacing horse.”

Augur was now interested. An hour ago, a big brown blind horse had been picked up in East Capitol near Fifteenth Street in a farm district. He did not know whether this horse figured in the assassinations, and his best thinking was that there was no connection. He could not imagine desperate killers on brewery horses.

“Who rode this horse?”

Fletcher said he could not remember the name, but he could get the name from his stable records. He had stabled the horse that wore these trappings. And he knew the little man with the funny name. But he pointed out that this man had used the horse until
recently.
Who had him tonight Fletcher had no idea. The detective accompanied him back to the stable and the Irishman returned with the name of George Atzerodt. This meant nothing to Augur. He was even less interested when Fletcher said that Atzerodt claimed that he had sold the horse and equipment in southern Maryland.

Now the general had the names Booth—Herold—Atzerodt.
He needed only the name of Lewis Paine, who had ridden and abandoned the blind horse tonight, to complete the roster of all the conspirators. Augur felt that he was wasting too much time with the stableman. He had important eyewitnesses waiting outside. He excused Fletcher. Had he chatted with the irritated Irishman a little longer, he would have learned that Atzerodt and Herold had a friend named Booth, and that Booth was accustomed to lending his horses to a man on H Street named Surratt, and that, quite often, these men rode to Surrattsville. Fletcher even knew that John Surratt's father had owned a tavern in Surrattsville.

A horse car lit up the East Capitol section as it moved slowly down Sixth Street to the Navy Yard. Some of the night-shift men were on their way to work. A few late revelers dozed in the seats. The car stopped at A Street and George Atzerodt got aboard. Most of the men in the car saw him as an apologetic little man in a round hat, a man who excused himself as he pushed toward the back.

Atzerodt had to find his friend who owned the store. He was drunk and apprehensive, and he needed rest. He would sleep on the floor of the store. He was still pushing toward the back, and the horse in front was walking slowly between the undulating rails when someone tapped him on the back. It was Washington Briscoe, the man he was looking for.

“Have you heard the news?” said Briscoe.

“Yes,” said Atzerodt. He asked Briscoe if he could have permission to sleep in front of the store.

“No,” said Briscoe. “I cannot do that, George.”

“I will make no noise,” said Atzerodt.

“I am very sorry, George. The owner is at my place and I won't have any guests tonight.”

“As a favor.”

“No.”

Both got off at the Navy Yard. George Atzerodt asked once more. The answer was no. The conspirator looked sad.

“I will go back to the Kimmel House,” he said. This was a neighborhood nickname for Pennsylvania House, a four-and-five-men-to-a-room hotel on C Street near Fourth. He waited for the horse car to turn around. George Atzerodt, right now, was within a few streets of the Navy Yard Bridge, but he had no desire to join the other conspirators.

It was a night of frustrations and heartache. In Augur's quarters, a young captain walked in, saluted, and asked for permission to lead a mounted squad to the conspirators and capture them tonight. The general had little sympathy with inspirational heroes.

“No,” he said. “Permission is denied. Instead, you will remain here, Captain, for whatever emergency duty may be assigned to you.”

The captain remained. All night long at headquarters, he waited for someone to give him something to do, but Augur's staff did not know him and did not need him. Thus another opportunity was lost, for this was Captain D. H. L. Gleason, the man who worked with Louis Wiechman and who reported that a plot was being devised against the President at a boardinghouse called Surratt's, 541 H Street. Gleason knew that Booth and the other conspirators sometimes met at a tavern in Surrattsville, and that one or more of them came from Port Tobacco.