Bloody Crimes (14 page)

I sent you a telegram but fear it was stopped on the road. Genl. Bonham bears this and will [tell] you more than I can write as his horse is at the door and he waits for me to write this again and ever your’s
—

Lincoln began another busy day that included breakfast with his son Robert, just back from Appomattox; a cabinet meeting attended by General Grant; meetings with several congressmen; and letter writing, including one to a Union general about the future: “I thank you for the assurance you give me that I shall be supported by conservative men like yourself, in the efforts I may make to restore the Union, so as to make it, to use your language, a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States.” He agreed to escort Mary to the theater that night—Laura Keene was playing in the comedy
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s.

In the afternoon Abraham and Mary Lincoln went on a carriage ride to the Navy Yard. He told her that this day, he considered the war to be over. It was Good Friday, and in two days Washington would celebrate Easter. Lincoln wanted to laugh this night. That evening, just before he left the White House for the theater, a former congressman arrived and asked to see him on business. The president wrote a
pass giving him an appointment at 9:00
A.M
. the next day. As he was stepping into his carriage another former congressman, this one a friend from Illinois, approached him in the driveway. Lincoln said he couldn’t talk then or he would be late for the play. Come back later, the president told him. We will have time to talk then. Lincoln closed the carriage door.

I
n Greensboro, Davis spent a quiet night wondering what events the coming days might bring. His journey, although difficult, had not been a complete disaster. Yes, he had fled Richmond, lost Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, and abandoned the state of Virginia to the enemy. He did not deny that these disasters had inflicted catastrophic blows upon the cause. Indeed, in his letter to Varina he despaired, saying everything was “dark.” But the situation was not all bad. During his twelve days on the run, he had escaped capture; relocated the Confederate capital twice, first to Danville, then Greensboro; kept the cabinet intact; retained the loyalty of a hand-picked inner circle of aides who vowed to never abandon him; protected his family; and prevented his strategic retreat from unraveling into a disorderly free-for-all. And he had maintained his dignity. He had fled Richmond not like a thief in the night, but as a head of state.

N
o one living in William Petersen’s house across the street from Ford’s Theatre ever claimed to have seen President Lincoln’s carriage pull over and park across the street. No one in the handsome, threestory brick house watched the coachman, Francis Burke, tighten the slack in the reins, nor did anyone see the president’s valet, Charles Forbes, jump down from the black, closed-top carriage to the dirt street, reach for the handle, and swing open the door for the passengers. Some of the Petersen boarders were out for the evening. The rest were occupied with other things.

They did not watch the president and Mrs. Lincoln or their companions, Major Henry Rathbone, an army officer, and Clara Harris, daughter of a U.S. senator, as they disembarked, walked several yards to the front door of Ford’s Theatre, and disappeared inside. It was Good Friday, at approximately 8:30
P.M.
, April 14, and they were late. And no one from the Petersen house hurried across Tenth Street, or followed the Lincolns into the theater, and purchased a ticket to the play, as more than 1,500 other Washingtonians had done, to attend the tired old comic chestnut
Our American Cousin
in the company of the president of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln loved the theater, and during the Civil War he had attended many plays at Ford’s and Grover’s, Washington’s two leading, and rival, playhouses. Tonight, twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln enjoyed
Aladdin
at Grover’s, a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Lincolns’ other surviving son, twenty-two-year-old Robert, home from his duties on Grant’s staff, chose to stay at the White House to read.

The next few hours passed without incident. Passing by Ford’s that night was the customary Friday-night foot and horse traffic, as well as revelers in the ongoing war’send celebration. At Ferguson’s restaurant, adjacent to the theater’s north wall, patrons ate their meals without the owner, James Ferguson, who had gone to Ford’s hoping to see General Grant. Earlier that day, newspaper ads had mistakenly touted the general as Lincoln’s theater guest. They were wrong: He and his wife, Julia, had declined the invitation and left town.

At Taltavul’s Star Saloon, the narrow brick building just south of Ford’s, customers gulped their whiskeys and brandies and tossed their coins on the bar as payment. One patron—a handsome, paleskinned, black-eyed, raven-haired, mustached young man—placed his order, drank it, and left the bar without speaking a word.

If anyone from the Petersen house had been watching the front door of the Star Saloon between 9:30 and 10:00
P.M.
, he might have recognized John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous stage stars
in America, as he emerged wearing a black frock coat, black pants, thigh-high black leather riding boots, and a black hat. Booth turned north up Tenth Street, observed the president’s carriage parked several yards in front of him, and then turned right, toward the theater, passing under the white painted arch and through Ford’s main door, the same one the president had passed through about an hour earlier. If his intention was to see the play, Booth was impossibly late.

CHAPTER FOUR
“Borne by Loving Hands”

T
he Petersen house was no different from hundreds of other boardinghouses that had enjoyed a thriving business during the last four years in overpopulated wartime Washington. Indeed, this style of urban living had been commonplace ever since the District of Columbia was established as the national capital. Military officers, cabinet members, senators, and congressmen—including a one-term representative named Abraham Lincoln elected from Illinois in 1846—were veterans of Washington’s traditional boardinghouse culture.

William Petersen, like many homeowners in Washington, rented out extra rooms to boarders. Born in Hanover, Germany, William and his wife, Anna, had emigrated to the United States in 1841, when they were twenty-five and twenty-two years old. Landing in the port of Baltimore, they moved to Washington and on February 9, 1849, purchased the lot at 453 Tenth Street for $850. Petersen, a tailor, hired contractors to build him a large, attractive, four-level brown brick row house with a tall basement and three main stories. By 1860, the year Lincoln was elected president and South Carolina seceded from
the Union, nine boarders resided there, along with the Petersens’ seven children, bringing the household total to eighteen occupants living in eleven rooms.

At one moment the street between the Petersen house and Ford’s Theatre was quiet. At the next, sometime between 10:15 and 10:30
P.M.
, dozens of playgoers rushed out the doors onto Tenth Street. This was not an audience’s ordinary, leisurely exit at the end of a performance. And the play was not over yet—the last scene had not yet been performed. People began pushing one another aside and knocked one another down to squeeze through the exits, like a great volume of water bursting through a tiny hole in a dike. Some of the first men who escaped the theater fled in both directions on Tenth Street toward E and F streets, shouting crazy, unintelligible words as they ran. Within seconds they turned the corners and vanished from sight. Then hundreds of men, women, and children escaped Ford’s and gathered in the street. Many screamed. Others wept. Soon more than one thousand panicked playgoers were crowded in front of the theater. Screaming, cursing, shouting, weeping, their voices combined into a loud and fearful roar. Something had gone terribly wrong inside Ford’s Theatre.

At first it appeared that the theater might have caught fire. Fires were a constant and almost unpreventable danger in nineteenth-century urban America. Wood buildings, fabric drapes, errant candles, whale-oil lamps, primitive gas lighting, and the lack of effective firefighting equipment led to disastrous conflagrations that had nearly destroyed several major American cities. New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and other urban centers had each suffered fantastic firestorms that spread from building to building and burned wide swaths through the hearts of their residential, commercial, and industrial districts.

Fires were so commonplace that Currier & Ives published numerous prints depicting American cities ablaze, meticulously handcoloring each calamitous scene with menacing orange and yellow
flames. Fire was such a source of dread that long before the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson compared the antebellum conflict over slavery to a “fire bell in the night” that might burn down the American house.

Theater fires were especially dangerous. Wood stages, huge fabric curtains, footlights of open gas flames, and large audiences seated in close quarters with few exits could prove a deadly combination. Fifty-four years earlier, in 1811, a horrible fire in Richmond killed more than seventy-five playgoers. Those not consumed by flames or smoke leaped to their deaths, according to a rare surviving print of the disaster. In Washington, in 1862, just three years before, Ford’s Theatre had burned to the ground and a new one, guaranteed fireproof by the Ford brothers, arose in its place.

But no one fleeing Ford’s shouted the terrifying word “fire!” Instead they screamed out other strange words such as “murder,” “assassin,” “president,” and “dead” that pierced the din and could be heard above the general roar. Then random words formed into sentences: “Don’t let him escape.” “Catch him.” “It was John Wilkes Booth!” “Burn the theater!” “The president has been shot.” “President Lincoln is dead.” “No, he’s alive.”

On Pennsylvania Avenue and Tenth Street, two blocks south of Ford’s, Seaton Munroe, a treasury department employee, was walking with a friend when “a man running down 10th Street approached…wildly exclaiming: ‘My God, the President is killed at Ford’s Theatre!’” Monroe ran to Ford’s, where he found “evidences of the wildest excitement.”

In the Petersen house, Henry Safford, one of the renters, who shared a second-floor room facing Tenth Street, heard the disturbance outside. He was still awake, reading a book. From his window he had an unobstructed view of Ford’s Theatre and the street below. He saw the crowd and heard its anger and fear. Something was wrong. He raced downstairs, unlocked the front door, and descended the curving staircase that led from the door to the street. He walked past the tall gaslight lamp in front of his house, stepped into the dirt
street and tried to push through the crowd. Halfway across, the mob blocked his progress to Ford’s. He could not take another step. He dared not fight his way through them. This crowd was angry, volatile, and potentially dangerous. But why?

Safford decided to return to the safety of the Petersen house. “Finding it impossible to go further, as everyone acted crazy or mad, I retreated to the steps of my house.” Before he disentangled himself from the mob, he heard their news: Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated in Ford’s Theatre. He had been shot, the murderer had escaped, and the president was still inside.

An eyewitness from Ford’s reached nearby Grover’s Theatre by 10:40
P.M
. In the audience was an employee from the War Department hardware shop, Mose Sandford:

I was at Grover’s…They were playing Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp and had just commenced the fourth act…Miss German had just finished a song called “Sherman’s March Down to the Sea” and was about to repeat it when the door of the theatre was pushed violently open and a man rushed in exclaiming “turn out for Gods sake, the President has been shot in his private box at Ford’s Theatre.” He then rushed out. Everybody seemed glued to the spot I for one and I think I was one of the first who attempted to move…Everybody followed. I made straight for Ford’s and such another excited crowd I never before witnessed. I asked who did it and was informed Wilkes Booth. They were just bringing the President out when I arrived on the spot. The city was in one continued whirl of excitement. Crowds on every corner and 10th Street was one solid mass of excited men flourishing knives and revolvers and yelling “down with the traitors” instead of hunting for them.

Soon other boarders at Petersen’s were aroused by the disturbance. George Francis and his wife lived on the first floor, and their two big
front parlor windows faced the theater. “We were about getting into bed,” Francis recalled. “Huldah had got into bed. I had changed my clothes and shut off the gas, when we heard such a terrible scream that we ran to the front window to see what it could mean.”

Perhaps it was nothing more than an intoxicated reveler celebrating the end of the war, they thought. George had seen a lot of that: “For a week before the whole city had been crazy over the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army. Only the night before, the city was illuminated, and though it had been illuminated several times just before this time, it was more general, and was the grandest affair of the kind that ever took place in Washington.” But tonight was different. They looked out their windows: “We saw a great commotion—in the Theater—some running in, others hurrying out, and we could hear hundreds of voices mingled in the greatest confusion. Presently we heard some one say ‘the President is shot,’ when I hurried on my clothes and ran out, across the street, as they brought him out of the Theatre—Poor man! I could see as the gas light fell upon his face, that it was deathly pale, and that his eyes were closed.”

While George Francis, Mose Sandford, and more than a thousand other people loitered in the street, Henry Safford had returned to the Petersen house. He climbed the stairs and, at this moment, elevated above the heads of the people going mad in the streets, he observed from the first-floor porch the confusing scene. He noticed a knot of people at one of the theater doors and then watched as they pushed their way into the street. An army officer waved his unsheathed sword in the air, bellowing at people to step back and clear the way.