With Malice Toward None: Lincoln's Final Days

With Malice Toward None: Lincoln’s Final Days
David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College

In his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stated, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right… let us strive… to bind up the nation’s wounds [for] a just and lasting peace.” In a speech on April 11, Lincoln reasserted his flexible approach to reconstruction. In his conception, it would be a “reconciliation” brought about through a speedy return of the Southern states into the union on the most generous terms. The only two essential conditions were loyalty to the union and a commitment to emancipation of all slaves. He was excruciatingly vague about the most controversial issues (topping the list, “universal [Negro] suffrage” and amnesty for rebels). Not everyone was feeling charitable and free of malice; three days later, Good Friday, Lincoln went to see a play at Ford’s Theater, and there he was fatally shot by an assassin.

On the morning of April 14, the president awoke in a good mood, a rare occurrence he took as a positive omen. “I never saw Mr. Lincoln so cheerful and happy,” remarked one of his Cabinet Secretaries. After a brief meeting with General Grant and the Cabinet, Lincoln attended to the normal routine of papers to be signed, followed by endless appointments with legislators, foreign dignitaries and various other visitors. Late in the afternoon he broke away from his executive duties to take his wife on a carriage ride. That evening Mary Lincoln complained about a headache, but Lincoln said he wanted to go to Ford’s Theater. A wacky British comedy, Our American Cousin, was playing and Lincoln needed a good laugh. Earlier in the day, Lincoln had asked Ulysses and Julia Grant to accompany the Lincolns to the theater, but the Grants declined. They were catching a train that evening to visit their sons in New Jersey (which was true enough, although Julia Grant, having been insulted previously by Mary Lincoln, couldn’t bear an evening out with the first lady anyway). A dozen people declined the Lincolns’ invitation until, finally, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris agreed to accompany them.

Lincoln often seemed fatalistic about life in general and his own safety in particular. Earlier that evening, in fact, he had dismissed his usual bodyguard, William Crook, acknowledging that if someone was determined to assassinate him it would be impossible to prevent it. “You’ve had a long, hard day’s work, and must go home,” he said. The Lincolns entered the theater, with Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, the president’s personal attendant Charles Forbes, and Lincoln’s lone guard for the evening, John Parker, while the play was already in progress. The audience rose to its feet and applauded as the orchestra played an impromptu chorus of “Hail to the Chief.” Without missing a beat, the male lead in the play, Harry Hawk, improvised: “This reminds me of a story—as Mr. Lincoln used to say—” and the audience roared in laughter. The presidential party settled into their seats and the play continued. Sometime later Lincoln’s guard slipped off, either to watch the play or grab a drink.

At about ten o’clock, the president leaned forward in his seat anticipating a punch line: “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap….” The crowd burst into applause and laughter just as a single shot was heard and a puff of smoke drifted out of the presidential box. Major Rathbone tried to wrestle the assailant to the floor and received a deep gash in his arm from a seven-inch dagger. Out of the smoke a man jump down from the box and tumbled onto the stage. The audience was stunned. The man was immediately recognized as the well-known actor John Wilkes Booth. Was it an improvised part of the play? Booth shouted: “Sic semper tyrannis!” (the Virginia state motto: Thus always to tyrants), and ran out the backstage door. Mary Lincoln screamed for help and Miss Harris cried out, “The president is shot!” By now the theater was in pandemonium. “Is there a doctor in the house?” As people shoved into the aisles, rushing for the exits, a young army doctor named Charles Leale fought his way through the crowd to the presidential box. Lincoln was slumped forward in his chair in the arms of Mrs. Lincoln. Dr. Leale lay the president on the floor and examined the wound. The bullet had entered just behind the left ear and lodged behind his right eye. Lincoln’s breath was shallow, his wrist had no pulse, and he was paralyzed. Leale immediately applied artificial respiration and managed to revive the president’s heartbeat and breathing, but Lincoln remained unconscious. Leale sadly pronounced that the president's wound was mortal. "It is impossible for him to recover.”

Booth’s shooting of Lincoln was but one of at least three coordinated attacks scheduled to take place at the same time across Washington. Also targeted were Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. (According to some sources, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and General Grant also may have been targets.) The Confederacy would be avenged for Lincoln's prosecuting the war, and perhaps in the ensuing chaos and panic, Booth reasoned, Southern independence might yet be achieved somehow.

The attack on Seward began with an innocent ring of the doorbell at his home. A large, well dressed man claimed to be delivering medicine for Mr. Seward, who had been badly injured a week earlier in a carriage accident. Pushing his way past the doorman, the assailant ran into Seward’s son Fred and clubbed him into unconsciousness. He then encountered Seward’s daughter and a male army nurse, swiftly knocking them both senseless. Then he entered the bedroom where Seward lay immobilized with a fractured jaw and broken arm. He savagely attacked Seward with a knife, slashing and stabbing his face and neck. Another of Seward’s sons, Augustus, entered the room and was stabbed several times. The army nurse recovered, staggered to the room, and wrestled the assailant to the floor but was stabbed four times. The man then ran out of the house leaving behind five casualties. The assailant was Lewis Powell (alias Lewis Paine), an Alabama native who had been wounded at Gettysburg, deserted, and rode with Mosby’s raiders in Northern Virginia. Vice President Johnson’s designated assassin, George Atzerodt, a Washington carriage maker who secretly ferried Confederate spies across the Potomac, lost his nerve and spent the night of mayhem and murder getting drunk in a tavern.

When word of the attacks on Lincoln and Seward swept across Washington, there was widespread fear that Confederate agents were planning to assassinate other federal officials and perhaps set fire to the city. Martial law was quickly declared and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took charge of the government. Lincoln was moved across the street from Ford’s Theater to the home of William Peterson. At 7:22 a.m. the next morning, April 15, the president died. Never before had an American president been assassinated; and never before had the country lost a president in wartime.[1] Amid the panic and outrage, there were calls for Confederate blood. Government offices and businesses abruptly closed, but all did not come to a standstill. The chaos Booth hoped for did not ensue. In unsteady but deliberate steps, the nation’s first ever transfer of power in a crisis was carried out less than three hours after Lincoln’s death. At 10:00 a.m. on April 15, Andrew Johnson solemnly took the oath of office, administered by Justice Salmon Chase in the presence of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet and several prominent senators.

What about Booth? A militant Confederate sympathizer from the outset of the war, Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 apparently drove him to the breaking point. First he planned to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. He recruited a band of local riff-raff who were taken in by his charismatic personality, coupled with their own hatred of Lincoln. Although evidence suggests that the Confederate secret service may have known about his plan to kidnap Lincoln, most historians dismiss the notion that the Confederate high command had any knowledge of the assassination plot.[2] Booth and his fellow conspirators spent weeks trailing the president around Washington. They studied maps and drawings of the White House, collected supplies (weapons, chloroform, ropes, a boat, horses…), but never managed to execute the kidnapping. Gradually his group of conspirators began to fall apart; and by April the waning fortunes of the Confederacy pushed Booth over the edge. He began drinking heavily and convinced himself that his greatest role was meant to be on the stage of history, not theater (though in a strange twist of fate, the crime was to take place in the theater). Remarkably, Booth and his supportive cast of rag-tag amateurs came close to pulling it off. Booth did his part, but Seward miraculously survived and Johnson was spared when Atzerodt got cold feet. “I enlisted to abduct the President,” he said, "not to commit murder."

Immediately after Lincoln’s assassination, a massive manhunt was launched with a $50,000 bounty placed on Booth’s head. Nearly everyone associated with Booth was questioned and tossed in jail, held as potential witnesses or possible conspirators. Within a week, Powell (Seward’s assailant), Atzerodt, and several other tangential accomplices were apprehended; ultimately four were hanged and four were imprisoned.[3] Booth remained at large. After shooting Lincoln, he had fled the theater in the confusion, jumped on a horse and raced across town to the Navy Yard Bridge. Just before midnight, sergeant of the guard Silas Cobb stopped him for questioning, but since Booth moved faster than word of the crime, the sentry allowed him to pass into Maryland. A few moments later Sgt. Cobb questioned Booth's accomplice, David Herold, and let him pass, too. (Officially the drawbridge was closed after 9 p.m., but with the end of the war near and a generally relaxed and festive mood in the city, the rules were not strictly enforced.) For twelve days, Booth and Herold eluded the federal dragnet with the aid of Confederate sympathizers in Maryland and Virginia.[4] On April 26 they were cornered by 16th New York cavalry at the farm of Richard Garrett, approximately 70 miles from Washington. Trapped in Garrett’s tobacco barn, Herold came out with his hands up but Booth refused to give up. The barn was torched and Booth was shot by Sgt. Boston Corbett when he moved toward the door. Still alive, he was dragged to the porch of the Garrett farmhouse where he died. In a melodramatic irony of fate, it was Booth’s birthday. He was twenty-seven. Booth whispered, “Tell my mother that I did it for my country—that I die for my country.” As Booth later wrote in his diary (April 17), "I can never repent it, though we hated to kill: Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God made me the instrument of his punishment."

Aside from killing President Lincoln, Booth's plot failed in every other aspect. The South was not inspired to fight on, the slaveholding aristocracy of the antebellum South was not saved, and the federal government was only momentarily paralyzed by the shock of assassination. Tracked down and killed, Booth did not bask in fame and glory as he had hoped. Instead, it was Lincoln who rose to the pantheon of American heroes.

The guns of war grew silent and the lines of Confederate soldiers and refugees streamed back to the remains of their devastated homes. Freed slaves wandered and wondered what lay in store for them. Northern troops returned to victory parades, though many were missing limbs and most carried emotional wounds. Over 620,000 men never came home; they died at places like Antietam Creek, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. The South had bet it all and lost; the North had waged total war and won. All that was left was the reconciliation of the two sides and the healing. As Lincoln had said, it was time “to bind up the nation’s wounds [for] a just and lasting peace.”

[1] This was not the first assassination attempt made on an American president. In 1835 a madman named Richard Lawrence tried to shoot Andrew Jackson outside the Capitol building. His derringer misfired.

[2] There is some inconclusive evidence suggesting that the Confederate high command may have known about Booth's plan to kidnap Lincoln, but not the assassination plot. Booth frequently traveled back and forth across Confederate/Union lines, at various times, conferring with Confederate agents; and he also met with Confederate officials in Canada. Apparently unaware of the plot, Jefferson Davis learned about Lincoln’s assassination on April 19. “Certainly I have no special regard for Mr. Lincoln,” he said, coldly, “but I fear it will be disastrous for our [the Confederate] people and I regret it.” Having retreated through the Carolinas after abandoning Richmond, Davis also learned that Gen. Joseph Johnston had followed Lee’s lead (disregarding orders from Davis) and surrendered the last of the Confederate army to Sherman in North Carolina. Davis vowed never to give up. On May 10th he was captured by the 1st Wisconsin cavalry in Georgia. (A persistent myth is that he was disguised as a woman. See Myths and Legends.) In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination, there were fears that Davis might be hanged for treason. He was imprisoned pending trial and eventually released.

[3] David Herold, Lewis Powell (a.k.a. Lewis Paine), George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were hanged on July 7, 1865. Samuel Arnold, Michael O'Laughlen, Edman Spangler and Dr. Samuel Mudd were imprisoned. The conspirators frequently met in Surratt's boarding house, a nest of Confederate espionage in Washington, and Mary was linked to both the kidnapping plot and the assassination. Her son John was a Confederate spy with knowledge of the kidnapping plot; he fled the country and was eventually apprehended in Egypt, then brought back to stand trial for Lincoln's murder in June 1867; the jury deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial. Arnold and O'Laughlen had been involved in Booth's plot to kidnap Lincoln but not the assassination; Spangler was an employee of Ford's Theater, possibly a co-conspirator but more likely an unwitting accomplice to Booth's escape; Dr. Mudd treated Booth's fractured fibula several hours after the assassination and was believed to have been involved in the kidnapping conspiracy. For images see: Lincoln Conspirators.

[4] The man who helped Booth and Herold across the Potomac River, Thomas A. Jones, was among the suspects arrested and questioned in the aftermath of the assassination, but he volunteered nothing and was released for lack of evidence. In 1883 Jones confessed his role in the escape to a journalist. He was never prosecuted and died in 1894.

Sources and recommended reading: Jay Winik, April 1865 (HarperCollins, 2001); Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus (Random House, 2004); James L. Swanson, Manhunt (HarperCollins, 2006).

© 2002, 2005, 2006 by David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College