Manhunt (9 page)

At the top of the staircase Frederick Seward, who served his father as assistant secretary of state, confronted Bell and the stranger. Powell did not know it, but Frederick stood only a few feet from the closed door to his father's sickroom. The stranger explained his mission again. Frederick told him that his father was asleep and that he would take delivery of the medicine for him. Again Powell refused, arguing that he must see the secretary. Incredibly, Powell, thanks to that little package he prominently displayed as a prop, had still not aroused suspicion about his true intentions. To Frederick he seemed merely like a stupid messenger, a man so dull-witted that he took instructions literally, believing that Dr. Verdi meant for him to actually place the package into the secretary of state's hands. Soon Powell would make Frederick regret his assuming condescension.

Inside the bedroom, Fanny sensed a presence in the hall. Perhaps President Lincoln had come for another visit, she thought. Such a late-night call would not be unusual. Lincoln was famous for his nighttime walks. Perhaps he had strolled to the telegraph office at the nearby War Department for the latest news and then decided to call on the secretary. Fanny hurried to the door and opened it only a little to shield her
father from the bright gaslight that would otherwise flood the bedchamber. She saw her brother and, to his right, the tall stranger in the light hat and long overcoat. She whispered, “Fred, Father is awake now.” She knew in an instant that she had done wrong. “Something in Fred's manner led me at once to think that he did not wish me to say so, and that I had better not have opened the door.” Powell leaned forward and tried to peer into the dark room, but Fanny held the door tight to her body, and the assassin was not able to see his target. He stared at Fanny and, in a harsh and impatient tone, demanded, “Is the Secretary asleep?” Then Fanny made a terrible mistake. She glanced back into the room in the direction of her father, and replied, “Almost.” Fred Seward grabbed the door and shut it quickly.

It was too late. Innocently, Fanny had given Powell the priceless information he needed. Secretary of State William H. Seward was in that room, lying helpless in a bed against the wall, to the right of the door, defended by no one, Powell probably assumed, but a frail-looking girl. Powell did not know that Sergeant Robinson was in the bedroom too. Powell resisted the impulse to draw his knife that instant and burst through the door. With William Bell and Frederick Seward hovering close, his wit restrained his body and he calculated his next move. The pair was no match for him, but together, they could delay by precious seconds his entry to the bedroom. Trickery had taken him this far—time for one more charade.

Powell continued to argue with Frederick outside the door. Finally Fred, exasperated, gave Powell an ultimatum: surrender that medicine now, or take it back to Dr. Verdi. Powell glared at the young Seward, still refusing to yield the medicine. Finally, the persistent messenger feigned surrender in this battle of wills. He stuffed the package into his pocket, turned around, and began his descent. He did not remove his hand from the pocket. Bell, walking down ahead of Powell, turned over his shoulder and chided him again about walking so loudly. Bell continued down the stairs, his eyes looking ahead now to the front door through which, in a few moments, he would, with pleasure, conduct the
illmannered stranger into the street. At the top of the stairs Frederick Seward, satisfied at turning away an annoying pest, took his eyes off Powell's back and headed for his room. In a flash, Powell reversed course and bounded up the stairs. Before Seward could turn around, Powell already stood behind him. Seward whirled but too late: Powell was pointing a Whitney revolver at him, the muzzle inches from his face. In
another moment a .36-caliber conical lead round would explode his face, and the hot black powder would, at this range, not only kill him instantly but also burn and disfigure his flesh a hideous black.

“I'm mad, I'm mad!” Lewis Powell,
Secretary of State Seward's assassin.

Powell, staring into Seward's eyes, squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell and struck the percussion cap. Seward had no time to move—he knew he was dead. Then he heard a metallic click. Misfire! Either the copper percussion cap malfunctioned or the faulty powder charge in the chamber did not ignite. The reason did not matter: Seward was still alive. But Powell, unlike his master Booth, had five more rounds in his revolver. He could draw the hammer back with his thumb, cock the pistol, rotate the revolver's cylinder to bring a fresh round into firing position, and shoot again. It would take just a moment. Then Powell made the first of two miscalculations that jeopardized his mission.

Instead of trying to fire again, Powell raised the pistol high in the air and brought down a crushing blow to Seward's head. He hit him so hard that he broke the pistol's steel ramrod, jamming the cylinder and making it impossible to fire the weapon again. In a fury, Powell, using all his might, clubbed Seward repeatedly with the barrel of the broken Whitney. William Bell ran down the stairs and into the street, shouting, “Murder!” Watching from across the street, a skittish David Herold knew this was not part of the plan.

Fanny, ignorant of the mayhem on the other side of the door, sat down in her chair beside her father. A few minutes after her encounter with the determined stranger, she heard “the sound of blows—it seemed to me as many as half a dozen—sharp and heavy, with lighter ones between.” She thought the servants were chasing a rat. When the sounds continued, Fanny turned to Sergeant Robinson: “What can be the matter? Do go and see.” Suddenly afraid, she rose and accompanied him. While Fanny was puzzling about the sound, Lewis Powell stood on the other side of the door, beating in her brother's brains. As soon as Robinson opened the door, Fanny saw a horrible sight—her brother's face, wild-eyed, covered with blood. Powell moved lightning fast. He shoved Fred aside and struck Robinson in the forehead hard with the knife,
stunning him with the blow. The assassin pushed past the reeling sergeant and the waiflike girl blocking his path and sprinted to the bed with his arms outstretched, clutching the knife in his right hand and the pistol in his left, brushing Fanny with it as he passed.

In near darkness, Fanny raced Powell to the bed, trying to throw her slender body between the huge assassin and her helpless father. Unable to get ahead of him, she could do no better than run beside him. The assassin reached the bed and pounced upon Seward. Fanny shouted, “Don't kill him!” Seward awoke, tried feebly to raise himself, turned to the left, and saw Fanny. Then he looked up. He glimpsed Powell's unforgettable rugged face, lantern jaw, and searing eyes. The assassin's left hand pushed down hard on the secretary's chest, pinning him to the bed. Powell's right hand clutching the knife rose high until he exerted every ounce of strength he possessed to swing down a tremendous blow. The knife flashed past Seward's face, cutting into the sheets and plunging into the mattress. Powell had missed. Inflamed, Powell thrust the knife above his head again and delivered another powerful blow. He missed again. In the dim light, and with Seward positioned by his doctors on the far side of the bed so that his broken arm could hang free over the side, Powell's aim was off. His style of attack was wrong. The theatrical arcing swing of the knife that Booth employed against Major Rathbone had no place in an almost pitch-black room. The darkness made it too hard to aim the pivoting strike. Moreover, Powell, unlike Booth—renowned for his expertise with swords and daggers—was not a knife fighter. As a Confederate soldier, his primary tools were firearms—the musket and the pistol—not edged weapons. Powell needed to get in close and slice across Seward's throat, or stab through an eye socket into the brain, or sink the blade into the soft stomach tissue.

Determined not to miss again, Powell adjusted himself and delivered a third mighty blow aimed at Seward's throat. The agonized groan that rose from the bed told Powell he had finally baptized his knife. The blade slashed open Seward's cheek so viciously that the skin hung from a flap, exposing his teeth and fractured jawbone. His cheek resembled a
fish gill. Seward choked on the warm, metallic tasting syrup that spurted from his mouth and poured down his throat. The bedsheets, stained with blood and scarred by the blade, and preserved to this day as holy relics at Seward's home in Auburn, New York, survive as mute testimony to the power of Powell's striking arm.

Across the room Sergeant Robinson regained his senses and made a split-second decision: he would fight to the death before he allowed the assassin to murder the secretary of state and Miss Fanny. He rushed Powell. In an instant the two battle-hardened Civil War veterans grappled in a death struggle. Powell's strength surprised Robinson—he could barely hold on to him as Powell went for the bed again. Fanny, temporarily dazed, thought for a moment that it was all a “fearful dream.” Then she knew. She screamed, not once, but in a ceaseless, howling, and terrifying wail that woke her brother Augustus, or “Gus,” who was asleep in a room nearby. Fanny then opened a window and screamed to the street below. That was enough for David Herold. He kicked his horse and fled, abandoning Powell to fate. Undeterred by Fanny's screaming, Powell kept fighting. His adventures at Gettysburg and with Mosby's Rangers made him cool under fire. His resolve stiffened. He would not permit one man and a screaming girl to scare him off.

Gus Seward, dressed in his nightshirt, raced to his father's room and saw the shadows of two men fighting. Confused, he thought his father had become delirious and the male nurse was trying to restrain him. As soon as Gus seized the shadowy figure he believed was his father, he knew it was someone else. Now combating two men, Powell fought harder, slashing wildly with the knife. When Robinson got behind him and wrapped him in a bear hug, Powell reversed the knife, thrust it blindly over his shoulder, and stabbed Robinson twice in the shoulder, deeply and to the bone. Robinson ignored the wounds and kept fighting. In the dark it was hard to see the knife coming clearly enough to parry the blows. Throughout the battle Powell hadn't said a word. When the sergeant and Gus wrestled Powell into the hall and into the bright gaslight, Powell and Gus, their faces inches apart, locked eyes. Then
Powell spoke for the first time during the attack. In an intense but eerily calm voice, the assassin confided to Gus, as though trying to persuade him, the strangest thing: “I'm mad. I'm mad!”

Secretary Seward's wife, alarmed by Fanny's screams, emerged from her third-floor, back bedroom in time to witness the climax of the hallway struggle between Powell and her son Gus. Uncomprehending, she assumed that her husband had become delirious and was running amok. Fred's wife, Anna, rushed to the scene, and Fanny ran out of her father's bedroom and shouted, “Is that man gone?” Bewildered, Mrs. Seward and Anna replied, “What man?”

Powell wound his arm around Robinson's neck in a choke hold, and the sergeant braced himself for the knife that was sure to follow at any moment. Then, in a curious act of mercy, Powell let him go and, instead of stabbing him again, punched him with his fist. Powell fled down the stairs. On his way out, he caught up with Emerick Hansell, who was running down the staircase, trying to stay ahead of the assassin. The State Department messenger, on duty at Seward's home, was fleeing rather than joining the battle. But Powell gave Hansell a parting gift as he ran past him—an inglorious stab in the back. Hansell crumpled to the floor. He had been stabbed over the sixth rib, from the spine obliquely toward the right side. The cut was an inch wide and between two and a half and three inches deep, but the blade had not penetrated the lungs. Powell ran into the street, his eyes searching desperately for David Herold, but found nothing more than his lone horse. Powell tossed his knife to the ground, mounted his horse, and, instead of galloping into the night, calmly and inconspicuously trotted away. William Bell, flailing in the street, pursued Powell on foot for a few blocks, yelling all the way. Unable to keep pace with the horse, he gave up and returned to the Clubhouse.

Fanny ran back to her father's room only to find the bed empty. “Where's father?” she cried in panic. She spotted what she thought was no more than a pile of discarded bedclothes on the floor—but it was the secretary of state, bloody and disheveled. To save his life he had
rolled out of bed during the attack and crashed to the floor, hoping to escape Powell's reach in the dark room. That agonizing tumble aggravated his broken bones and sent spasms of pain through his body. Fanny slipped on a big puddle of blood and tumbled to the floor beside her father. He looked “ghastly … white, and very thin.” And that made her scream: “O my God, father's dead.” Sergeant Robinson, ignoring his own wounds, flew to her side, lifted the broken Seward from the floor, and laid him tenderly in his bed. Seward opened his eyes, looked up at his terrified daughter, and, in unimaginable pain and fighting off the effects of shock, concentrated his mind, spit the blood out of his mouth, and whispered: “I am not dead; send for a doctor, send for the police, close the house.”