Manhunt (5 page)

On March 17, 1865, Booth and his coconspirators planned to, like eighteenth-century British highwaymen, ambush Lincoln's carriage on a deserted road as he rode back to the Executive Mansion after attending a performance of the play
Still Waters Run Deep
at Campbell Military Hospital. They would seize the president at gunpoint and make him their hostage. Booth's intelligence sources proved faulty, however, and Lincoln did not attend. Instead, unbelievably, while Booth and his gang lurked on the Seventh Street road on the outskirts of the city, several miles from downtown Washington, Lincoln was giving a speech at Booth's own hotel, the National. What a chance that would have presented, the actor mourned. If only the kidnapping plot had worked.
Then there would be no torchlight parades, thunderous cannonades, mobs serenading Lincoln at the Executive Mansion, citywide illuminations, or children scampering through the streets holding colorful little paper flags decorated with red, white, and blue stars and stripes and elephants and imprinted with slogans like “Richmond Has Fallen” and “We Celebrate the Fall of Richmond.” He could—should—have prevented all of this, he admonished himself.

Although his panicked followers scattered after that ludicrous failure, Booth hoped to try again, but events overtook him just eighteen days later when Richmond fell, and six days after that when Lee surrendered. Dejected, Booth remonstrated himself for not acting more boldly, even fantasizing aloud that he should have shot the president at the Capitol on inauguration day, March 4, 1865, an event he attended with his fiancée, Lucy Hale, daughter of U.S. Senator John Parker Hale. “What an excellent chance I had, if I wished, to kill the President on Inauguration day!” he boasted later to a friend.

Lincoln's April 11 speech provoked more violent talk. The president's proposal for a limited black suffrage had enraged the actor, a passionate devotee of white supremacy. But Booth did nothing. If he was serious about assassinating Lincoln, all he had to do was stroll over to the Executive Mansion, announce that the famous and talented thespian John Wilkes Booth wished to see the president, await his turn—which nearly always resulted in a private talk with Lincoln—and then shoot him at his desk. Incredibly, presidential security was lax in that era, even during the Civil War, and almost anyone could walk into the Executive Mansion without being searched and request a brief audience with the president. It was a miracle that no one had yet tried to murder Lincoln in his own office.

There can be no doubt that Booth had been fantasizing about killing Abraham Lincoln. But was he serious, or was it merely extravagant but harmless bravado? Booth had never killed a man. Was he capable of doing it? On April 13, on the afternoon of illumination day, Booth took what might have been his first step toward answering that question. He
visited Grower's Theatre, along with Ford's one of the two most popular establishments in the city. He asked the manager, C. Dwight Hess, if he had invited the president to attend a performance of
Aladdin
!, the current production. No, he had forgotten, Hess replied, but he would attend to it now. Lincoln did not come to Grover's. That night, Booth, as he had on countless previous nights, drank away the blues, watched the illumination, and before collapsing in his bed, wrote his mother a letter.

Booth's gang was not at full strength on April 14. Rebel courier John Surratt was in Elmira, New York, and it was impossible to command his return on a few hours' notice. Surratt had been away since March 25, the day he left for Richmond. The Confederacy's days were numbered, but Secretary of State Judah Benjamin had a final mission for the courier: Go North once more, pass undetected through Union territory, cross the border into Canada, and deliver dispatches to General Edwin Gray Lee, a cousin of Robert E. Lee, and head of Confederate Secret Service operations in Montreal. Surratt left Richmond on March 31 and on April 6 checked in at St. Lawrence Hall, unofficial headquarters of the South's covert operations there. Lee gave Surratt another mission: Go to New York to spy on the Union's prisoner-of-war camp at Elmira, in preparation for a raid to break out the Confederate soldiers languishing there. Surratt arrived in Elmira on April 13 and devoted the next two days to spying and shopping. He drew detailed sketches of the prison, counted the guards, tallied their small arms and cannon, and estimated the number of prisoners. He also made time for a personal mission. Surratt, a fastidious dresser—although not in the same league as Booth—visited clothiers in search of suits and shirts. On April 14, while Booth was planning the assassination, Surratt's most pressing concern was finding some fresh, white shirts to spruce up his wardrobe.

Booth's boyhood chums, Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen, were not on hand to help with the assassination either. Arnold was back home in Baltimore. O'Laughlen was somewhere in Washington but not under Booth's command. O'Laughlen had taken in the illumination
with friends and then gone on a drinking spree. Later, evidence suggested that he might have met secretly with Booth in the actor's hotel room sometime on the thirteenth or fourteenth.

Present at the Herndon House were Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. Booth had put Powell up at the Herndon, and he sent Herold over to the Kirkwood House, Atzerodt's hotel, to summon him to the meeting. Before returning to the Herndon, Herold went up to Atzerodt's room and placed a revolver, knife, and a coat there. Then both men rendezvoused with Booth and Powell. Booth spoke in a confidential tone barely above a whisper. No one in the halls or in an adjoining room must overhear what he was about to say. The cause was almost lost, stated Booth. Capturing the president would no longer be enough to turn the tide of the war. It would take something bolder, something so daring and shocking that he had never even thought of it before. They would target not only President Lincoln, but also Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. The secretary of state was not, after the vice president, next in line for the presidency. But Seward, a longtime abolitionist, was viewed as a forceful advocate of Lincoln's policies, including the suppression of dissent, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the imprisonment without trial of several thousand citizens suspected of disloyalty. Booth had had his eye on General Grant, too, but unfortunately Grant broke his engagement with the president. Booth probably told his gang that he had spotted the Grants in their carriage earlier that afternoon, heading toward the train station. Perhaps it was for the best. The commanding general might have been accompanied by an entourage of staff officers, messengers, and other factotums. No, Booth explained, they would not kidnap Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. How could a skeleton crew of only four conspirators possibly kidnap three men in different parts of the city?

But Booth did have just enough men to accomplish another mission. “Booth proposed,” Atzerodt recalled, “that we should kill the president.” It would, said Booth, “be the greatest thing in the world.” Tonight,
at exactly 10:00 P.M., they would strike simultaneously and murder Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. Armed with a revolver and a knife, George Atzerodt's assignment was to assassinate the vice president in his residence at the Kirkwood House. “You must kill Johnson,” Booth told him. Powell, also armed with a revolver and a knife, would murder the secretary of state in his bed at his mansion. David Herold would accompany Powell, direct him to Seward's home, and then guide the assassin, unfamiliar with the capital's streets, out of the city. Booth claimed the greatest prize for himself. He would slip into Ford's Theatre and assassinate the president in the middle of the play. Powell and Herold, Booth's two most loyal servants, agreed to the plan. Atzerodt noticed that Powell “had a wild look in his eyes.” Atzerodt balked at his assignment. He would not do it, he said. “Then we will do it,” Booth said, “but what will become of you?” Kidnapping was one thing, but murder? Booth threatened him, implying that he might as well do it because if he didn't, Booth would implicate him anyway and get him hanged. The actor promised him “if I did not I would suffer for it,” and said he would blow Atzerodt's brains out. The German did not know it, but Booth had implicated all of them several hours ago when he entrusted that sealed envelope to John Matthews. In his letter to the
National Intelligencer
, not only did Booth justify the triple assassination, he signed his cocon-spirators' names to the document:

Atzerodt's reluctance jeopardized the entire enterprise. If he left that meeting and went to the authorities, Booth, Powell, and Herold would
be finished. Guards would rush to protect those marked for death, and the conspirators would be hunted down. “You had better come along and get your horse,” Booth suggested. Booth adjourned the meeting.

a
T THE
E
XECUTIVE
M
ANSION, THE
L
INCOLNS WERE BEHIND
schedule. It was past 8:00 P.M. and they still had not gotten into their carriage. As the curtain rose at Ford's, coachman Francis Burke and valet Charles Forbes were waiting atop the carriage box. The Lincolns' private, afternoon carriage ride and absence from the mansion had frustrated several politicians who wanted to see the president, and they would not be denied.

Earlier that afternoon, Lincoln was happy to be free of them and all the burdens of his office. It was one of the happiest days of his life. At breakfast his eldest son, Robert, regaled his parents with his personal observations of Lee's surrender. For once, the cabinet meeting was free of crises, battle news, casualty figures, and innumerable problems requiring the president's immediate attention. Victory had elated him, and ever since Lee's surrender Lincoln had been more buoyant than at any other time during his presidency. He expected more good news from General Sherman about the expected surrender of Confederate General Joe Johnston's army.

But first he wanted to ride with Mary. He had made the appointment two days ago when he sent her a note, “written from his office … a few lines, playfully and tenderly worded, notifying, the hour, of the day,
he
would drive with me!” The war had increased their estrangement. Official Washington, under a heavy Southern influence, had snubbed her as a gatecrasher and a western parvenu from the start, despite her aristocratic Kentucky slaveholding origins. She had been emotionally distraught since the death of their favorite son, eleven-year-old William Wallace Lincoln—“Willie”—in February 1862, and she had fallen under the spell of mediums and spiritualists at White House séances. The president, who scorned her infatuation with the spirit world, once attended
one of her supernatural events. It was enough to entice a music publisher to issue a sheet-music parody, “The Dark Séance Polka,” the cover art depicting a wild Executive Mansion séance with objects flying through the air. Mary was at heart a kind woman, but her critics preferred to criticize her personal eccentricities—her expensive shopping habits both for the White House and for herself, and her raging, jealous temper—rather than to praise her good works for soldiers or her absolute loyalty to husband, liberty, and Union. And the demands of the war had been so great that the president spent less and less time with her.

Lincoln knew he had to change that now. He wanted to talk to Mary about their future. He escorted her to the open carriage, and before the coachman drove on she asked him if anyone should accompany them on their ride.

“No,” he replied, “I prefer to ride by ourselves today.”

Lincoln's joy was irrepressible. Mary Lincoln had noticed it on their recent river cruise: “Down the Potomac, he was almost boyish, in his mirth and reminded me, of his original nature, what I have always remembered of him, in our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well and
by whom
, he was so idolized.”

Now, during their afternoon carriage ride, Mary spoke to him about his happy mood.

“Dear husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.”

“And well I may feel so, Mary,” the president replied. “I consider
this
day, the war has come to a close.”

“We must
both
, be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”

During their leisurely ride, which took them, among other places, down to the Navy Yard near Capitol Hill, where they inspected an ironclad naval vessel, the monitor
Montauk
, the president told his wife that they must try to be happy again. That he would like to see the Pacific Ocean. That perhaps at the end of his second term in office, they would move to Chicago and he would practice his trade again. Freed from the vexations of war and death—he would send no more armies of young
men to die—Lincoln dreamed of the future. Yes, they would be happy again. Later, Mary remembered that on “
The Friday
, I never saw him so supremely cheerful—his manner was even playful.”

a
T
L
AFAYETTE
P
ARK NEAR THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
, M
AJOR
H
ENRY
Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, awaited their hosts at the residence of Senator Harris, at Fifteenth and H streets. The Lincolns had promised to pick them up on the way to the theatre, but they were almost twenty minutes late. The major and Miss Harris hoped that the president had not forgotten them. Then, about 8:20 P.M., the carriage appeared. The popular young couple, although known to the Lincolns, was not their first choice. After the Grants changed their plans, the Lincolns invited several people to join them, but all declined. Finally they settled on Rathbone and Harris who, ignorant of how many others had declined before them, were delighted to accept. There was happy talk during the ten-minute ride to the theatre, Miss Harris remembered, reflecting the spirit of a week of joy and celebration: “They drove to our door in the gayest spirits; chatting on our way.” At Ford's the management decided not to hold the curtain for the presidential party, and the play began without them.