The Lincolns had caused a stir when they entered the theater. When the president appeared in his box, an actor onstage ad-libbed, “This reminds me of a story, as President Lincoln would say.” The orchestra broke out with a rousing “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln smiled and bowed as the audience stood and cheered. He then settled into the velvet-covered rocking chair that the theater manager had put there for him. To his right was Mary, and beyond her sat Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone.
Our American Cousin, which Lincoln had seen before, was the sort of frothy fare he enjoyed when he wanted to forget everything. He and Mary laughed their way through the silly confrontations between the play’s crude Vermonter and his snooty British relatives. Mary leaned close to Lincoln and whispered, “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” He replied with a smile, “She won’t think anything about it.”82
They were being watched. John Wilkes Booth, spiked with whiskey, had entered the theater at about 10:00 p.m. He went up the stairs to the dress circle and walked down the corridor, ignoring two acquaintances who greeted him. When he reached the door outside the president’s box, he handed a visiting card to the valet Charles Forbes, an unsuspecting man who let Booth pass. Booth pushed open the door that led to the passageway that adjoined the president’s box. He jammed the door behind him with the board that had been left on the floor. Through the peephole he had made, he could see Lincoln. Booth knew Our American Cousin well, for he had acted in it twelve times. He was waiting for a really funny moment when he knew the audience would be distracted.
That moment came at around 10:13 p.m., in act 3, scene 2 of the play, when the play’s bumpkin hero declares, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.” As the audience exploded in laughter, a loud shot was heard. Booth had approached Lincoln from behind and fired at him from about four feet away.
Lincoln, shot through the brain, slumped forward, senseless, as though dozing, as he often did at the theater. Mary looked at him and shrieked. Henry Rathbone spotted Booth and lunged at him. The two grappled. Booth slashed Rathbone’s left arm with his knife, wounding it badly. Booth mounted the rail of the box and jumped twelve feet down to the stage. He landed awkwardly; he would claim that he broke his left leg in the fall, although the snapping of his left fibula may have happened later, when his horse fell.83 He walked across the stage and exited on the left. Partway across, he turned to the audience and, his eyes glaring, raised his knife, which glittered like a diamond in the stage lights. Some heard him hiss the Virginia state motto: “Sic semper tyrannis!” [“Thus always to tyrants!”]84 Heading toward the rear exit, Booth was intercepted by the orchestra leader, William Withers Jr. Booth slashed him with his knife, pushed through the stage door to the alley, grabbed his horse’s reins from Peanuts Burroughs, and, apparently with difficulty because of his bad leg, mounted the mare, which wheeled violently before galloping away.
The theater became sheer mayhem. Some in the audience surged forward, tumbling over seats toward the stage. Others rushed out of the theater. Cries of “Stop him!” “Hang him!” “Burn the theater!” rang out.85 Several, including two doctors and the actress Laura Keene, went directly to Lincoln’s box, bursting into it after Rathbone removed the door brace. The actress cradled Lincoln’s head in her lap. Mary Lincoln, hysterical at the sight of the blood-stained dress of Clara Rathbone, shrieked, “My husband’s blood!,” unaware that Lincoln’s wound bled little because a clot had quickly formed; the blood she saw came from Rathbone’s slashed artery Lincoln never regained consciousness. He was carried across Tenth Street to the house of William Petersen, a German tailor. Taken to a small room at the end of the front hall, the president was laid out on a bed diagonally because of his seventy-six-inch length; even then, his feet rested on the bottom bed board, which could not be removed from the frame. His clothes were taken off. An army blanket and colored wool coverlet were thrown over him. When doctors pulled down the covers to hear his lungs and heart, witnesses were astonished by the lean muscularity of his body. The rail-splitter and wrestling champion from New Salem was still in fine trim.
All night he was attended by physicians, and the room was visited by many people—cabinet members and other politicians as well as ordinary citizens. Mary kissed her husband and tried to get him to respond by showering him with endearments. For nine hours she watched her husband die. She intermittently left, going to an adjoining room where she let loose her grief. Robert stood for long periods by his father’s side, crying. Booth’s bullet, a lead ball, had entered Lincoln’s skull behind the left ear and settled in the brain behind the right eye, around which the skin darkened. Trying to remove the bullet, doctors probed the wound with a long instrument, but they reached only a few bone fragments. Lincoln’s breathing and heart rate wavered throughout the night and finally stopped altogether at 7:22 in the morning of April 15. Edwin Stanton, who had been by Lincoln’s side through the night and who had wept uncontrollably, said, according to John Hay, “Now he belongs to the ages.”86 Outside, it was pouring.
John Wilkes Booth met up with David Herold and made his way south through Maryland over the next twelve days but was tracked to a Virginia farm and killed there when he tried to fight his pursuers when cornered. Lewis Powell forced his way into William Seward’s home and stabbed but did not kill the secretary, whose bodyguard and two other men managed to shove Powell out of the house; Seward’s son Frederick was badly wounded in the attack. George Atzerodt made no attempt on Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House. Instead, he drank at the hotel bar and then went out, threw his knife in a gutter, pawned his guns in Georgetown, and traveled to Germantown, Maryland, where he was arrested six days later. Although he had not carried out his murderous assignment, he was too deeply involved in the conspiracy to escape punishment. The seven-week trial of the Lincoln conspirators resulted in the hanging of Atzerodt, Powell, Herold, and, controversially, Mary Surratt,
who ran a boardinghouse where the conspirators sometimes stayed. Two other conspirators were sentenced to prison for life and another one was jailed for six years.
Several people directly involved in the tragedy had dark fates. Clara Harris saved Henry Rathbone’s life that evening by improvising a tourniquet for his badly hurt arm. The two were married in 1867. They went on to have three children. Henry, obsessed by the question of whether or not he could have saved Lincoln, sank into depression. He also came to suspect his wife of infidelity. In 1883, after the family had moved to Germany, he murdered Clara by stabbing and shooting her, and attempted suicide by stabbing himself several times in the chest. He survived, but he spent the rest of his days in a German hospital for the criminally insane.
Mary Lincoln was prostrated by grief. For forty days she mainly lay in bed. Because she refused to stay in any familiar room in the White House, Lizzy Keckly and Elizabeth Dixon (a Connecticut senator’s wife) chose for her a small, little-used “summer room.”87 Lizzy Keckly, who took care of her, never forgot “the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul.”88 Mary did not attend the funeral service held in the White House on April 19; of the immediate family, only Robert went. Mary was so indifferent about her surroundings that strangers walked in and out of the White House at will, taking away silver, china, pieces of carpet, and even heavy furniture.89
In late May, Mary gathered herself sufficiently to leave the White House and move to Chicago, where she lived, initially with Robert and Tad and eventually with Tad alone. She wore black widow’s clothes for the rest of her life. She wrote on mourning stationery bordered in black. Hard-pressed for money, she created a scandal by selling many of her White House dresses. She continued to take comfort from spiritualism and was delighted when William Mumford took a spirit photograph of her with Lincoln standing behind her. She was devastated, however, when in 1866 William Herndon, publicized the claim that Lincoln had always loved Ann Rutledge, not Mary; and when, two years later, Lizzy Keckly published her White House tell-all Behind the Scenes. The offended Mary never again spoke to the dressmaker she had called her “best living friend.”90
When Tad heard that his father had been shot, he was inconsolable for a day, but on Easter Sunday, he awoke to a beautiful spring morning. During the day, he asked a White House visitor if he thought his father was now in heaven. The stranger assured him, “I have not a doubt of it.” Tad said, “I am glad he has gone there, for he was never happy after he came here [to Washington]. This was not a good place for him!”91 Tad went on to become a decent student and a responsible young man. However, he died of pneumonia or tuberculosis at eighteen—another terrible blow for Mary.
Robert Lincoln became estranged from his mother. Appalled by what he considered her strange behavior, some of it associated with her spiritualist visions, he committed her to a Batavia, Illinois, asylum, the upscale Bellevue Place, in 1875. Her four months there were uneventful. All told, her nineteen years of life after Lincoln’s death saw her struggling to maintain mental stability and to avoid a financial meltdown that was, given her sizable assets, a chimera produced by her anxieties. Toward the end, suffering from illnesses, she confined herself in a room in a relative’s home in Springfield with the shades always drawn, even in sunny weather. She died of a stroke at age sixty-three in July 1882. Robert, a lawyer and businessman, went on to serve as secretary of war under James A. Garfield and Chester Arthur and as an ambassador to England under Benjamin Harrison
Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865, prompted an outpouring of mourning throughout the North and even in much of the South.92 Sorrow seized the nation’s capital. On Tuesday, the eighteenth, the president, whose body had been embalmed, lay in state in the East Room of the White House, where at least twenty thousand mourners, including many African Americans, solemnly walked by his body. The next day, after a funeral service in the East Room, Lincoln was taken by hearse in a procession a mile and a half to the Capitol Rotunda for another public viewing. African American troops, who arrived late, met the procession head on, and, turning around, took its lead fortuitously; they were followed by white military regiments, government officials, and dignitaries. Gun salutes crackled, cannon boomed, and bells tolled.
On Friday, the twenty-first, Lincoln’s funeral train set out on a ceremonial journey to Springfield, Illinois, the president’s home city, where he would be buried. Also on the train was the exhumed body of Willie Lincoln, to be interred along with his father. Robert Lincoln was on the train, but Mary Lincoln, incapacitated by grief, was still back in the White House with Tad. The funeral train proceeded on a circuitous 1,700-mile, 12-day journey through 180 cities and towns in 7 states. Nearly the entire way, mourners lined the route, standing silently with their heads uncovered as the train passed. The train stopped many times, and there were processions and viewings of the body in Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Cleveland, Chicago, and many other places.
Walt Whitman, in his sonorous eulogy to Lincoln “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” described the president’s last train journey in grief-laden lines:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, . . .
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.93
During that journey, Lincoln’s decomposing corpse, growing ever darker and more shrunken, required constant powdering by his embalmer, who was among the some three hundred people who were on the funeral train.
In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had written, “Springfield is my home, and there, more than elsewhere, are my life-long friends.”94 On May 3, 1865, Lincoln arrived home. For twenty-four hours, his body lay for viewing in Springfield’s state house. The next day at around 11:00 a.m., the president’s casket was put into a lavish hearse drawn by six black horses and taken in a procession to Oak Ridge Cemetery, two miles away.95 General Joseph Hooker led the procession, which was headed by two army divisions, followed by the hearse, behind which, in carriages or on foot, came state and federal officials, fraternal groups, and average citizens—some ten thousand in all. The only blood relatives in attendance at the funeral were Robert Lincoln and John Hanks, the president’s first cousin once removed, who had helped create the Abe image in 1860, when he publicly presented fence rails once split by Lincoln.
Just behind the hearse, the African American ministers Harry Brown and William C. Trevan led Lincoln’s horse, Old Bob. Lincoln’s longtime barber and friend William Florville witnessed the funeral along with thousands of other blacks, some of whom joined the immense procession that followed the casket.
At the cemetery, the Baptist preacher Andrew C. Hubbard conducted a religious service, which included a reading of the Second Inaugural Address. At least five other ministers participated as well, including the Methodist bishop Matthew Simpson, who delivered an hour-long eulogy. Lincoln and Willie were laid to rest in a large vault. At last, the father and his beloved son were reunited.96 Over the years, they would be joined by Mary, Tad, and Eddie. Robert Lincoln, who died at eighty-two in 1926, was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
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