Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

Everywhere, the red slashed banners of the Confederacy were coming down, the old flag was going up again, and the war would be over.35

But there was one last act in the drama to be played out, and with cunning appropriateness, it would be played out in a theater, almost onstage. On Good Friday, April 14, President Lincoln met his cabinet in a rare mood of relaxation and good humor, and told them of the dream he had had, the dream that always promised good tidings. In the evening he and Mary were joined by the only couple they could persuade to spend Good Friday with them at the theater, Clara Harris (the daughter of New York senator Ira Harris) and her fiancé, Major Henry R. Rathbone. Together they set out in the presidential carriage for Ford’s Theatre, only a short distance from the White House, to watch Laura Keene and the lead actors from her New York City theatre company in her 1,000th performance in a popular comedy of manners called Our American Cousin. The theatre’s owner, John Ford, had beseeched the Lincolns to attend that night in order to boost gate receipts. Sure enough, when the Lincolns arrived shortly after curtain time, the theatre was packed to its capacity, and the little orchestra in the pit struck up a rousing “Hail to the Chief” as the Lincolns made their way to a private box overlooking stage left. The cast cheerfully ad-libbed “many pleasant allusions” to the president into their lines, recalled War Department clerk James Knox, who was sitting in the audience, “to which the audience gave deafening responses, while Mr. Lincoln laughed heartily and bowed frequently to the grateful people.”36

Somewhere in the confusion of the surrender celebrations and the hectic gaiety of the theatre, the security net Lamon and Stanton had drawn around Lincoln fell down: Lamon was in Richmond on government business, and John Parker, the District of Columbia policeman Stanton had detailed to guard the president, sauntered casually away from the door of the box to get a better view of the play. At approximately 10:00 PM, a twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth, slipped up a stairway to the outer door of the president’s box. He was stopped there by someone, possibly by Lincoln’s footman, Charles Forbes, but Booth merely showed him his card and assured him that the president, who was known to be fond of actors, had asked to see him.37

This was not at all implausible. Lincoln loved the theater, especially Shakespeare, and invited the English Shakespearean James Hackett for a private performance at the White House. And Booth was a member of one of the greatest acting families of the day—his brother Edwin was an outstanding Shakespearean whom Lincoln greatly admired. But John Wilkes Booth was also a rabid Confederate sympathizer. He had gathered around him a weird little coterie of conspirators—a Confederate deserter named Paine, a half-wit named David Herold, and a few others of even lower mental visibility—who were pledged to take personal revenge on Lincoln and his administration. Booth had originally planned, with the help of the Confederate secret service, to kidnap Lincoln and deliver him to Richmond. But the collapse of the Confederate armies convinced Booth that a more dramatic step was needed. Instead of kidnapping Lincoln, he would murder him in public, while his co-conspirators simultaneously assassinated the vice president, the secretary of state, and General Grant. Booth only learned about the special performance of Our American Cousin and Lincoln’s agreement to attend on the morning of the fourteenth, when he stopped at Ford’s Theatre to pick up some mail. But the plan formed at once in his mind, and that night he and his peculiar gaggle of friends were ready to strike. Using his familiarity with the building and staff at Ford’s Theatre, Booth was able to walk unnoticed into the theatre, ascend to the packed galleries, pass by the footman, and quietly open the outer door to the passageway leading to the president’s box.38

Once inside the narrow passageway, Booth wedged the outer door shut to ensure he would not be discovered and waited until the one point in the play when (as he well knew, from his familiarity with the play) all but one of the actors, Harry Hawk (playing Asa Trenchard), had left the stage. Then, drawing a small, single-shot derringer, he opened the inner door of the presidential box, stepped up behind Lincoln, and shot him behind the left ear. For a second no one in the house moved. Major Rathbone sprang up to seize Booth, but Booth had a long-bladed hunting knife in his other hand that he used to slash Rathbone’s arm, cutting an artery. Then Booth vaulted over the rail of the box and onto the stage, ran past the dazed stagehands to the theater’s backstage door, where a horse was tied for him, and galloped off into the dark of the Washington streets. At the same instant, Lincoln slumped forward in the rocking chair provided for him in the box, while Mary, “on her knees uttered shriek after shriek at the feet of the dying president.”39

Soldiers and civilians began smashing on the door of the box and were finally let in by the bloodied Major Rathbone. An army surgeon, Dr. Charles A. Leale, who had been sitting in the audience only forty feet from the box, was beside Lincoln in minutes and helped to lay him out prostrate on the floor; another surgeon, Charles Sabine Taft, was sitting down with the orchestra and was quickly boosted up to the box from the stage. Leale, whose specialty was gunshot wounds, could see at once that Lincoln’s wound was mortal. But he managed to keep Lincoln’s uneven breathing going, and the unconscious president was moved across the street to a room in a boardinghouse. There, at 7:22 AM the next morning, with members of his cabinet around his deathbed and his wife sobbing insanely in the front parlor, Abraham Lincoln died. “Now,”