Lincoln's Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America's Greatest President

By Kathryn Canavan

“Will startle and enthrall even the most hard-core of Lincoln aficionados.” ―Erik Larson, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile
 
When John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer point-blank into President Abraham Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of dramatic consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Washingtonians and Americans alike. In a split second, the story of a nation was changed. During the hours that followed, America's future would hinge on what happened in a cramped back bedroom at Petersen’s Boardinghouse, directly across the street from Ford’s Theatre. There, a twenty-three-year-old surgeon—fresh out of medical school—struggled to keep the president alive while Mary Todd Lincoln moaned at her husband’s bedside.
 
Lincoln’s Final Hours takes a magnifying glass to the last moments of the president’s life and the impact his murder had on a country still reeling from a bloody civil war. This fast-paced, thoroughly researched account not only furnishes a glimpse into John Wilkes Booth’s personal and political motivations but illuminates the stories of ordinary people whose lives were changed forever by the assassination.

Lincoln's Final Hours moves beyond the well-known traditional accounts of the assassination, offering readers a front-row seat to the drama and horror of Lincoln’s death by putting them in the shoes of the audience in Ford’s Theatre that dreadful evening. Through careful narration of the twists of fate that placed the president in harm’s way, of the plotting conversations Booth had with his accomplices, and of the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Kathryn Canavan illustrates how a single night changed the course of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813166094

Book preview

Lincoln’s

Final Hours

LINCOLN’S

FINAL HOURS

Conspiracy, Terror, and

the Assassination of America’s

Greatest President

KATHRYN CANAVAN

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Copyright © 2015 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Canavan, Kathryn.

Lincoln’s final hours : conspiracy, terror, and the assassination of America’s greatest president / Kathryn Canavan.

    pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-6608-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8131-6610-0 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8131-6609-4 (epub)

1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865—Assassination. I. Title.

E457.5.C25 2015

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For John, Matt, and Greg,

three marvelous writers

with unlimited stories inside them.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

—Cicero

Contents

Preface

1. The Secret about Booth

2. Washington City Then

3. The Great Illumination

4. The Making of an Assassin

5. Plans and Dreams

6. Nothing Exactly According to Plan

7. Shuffling History

8. The Turning of the Tide

9. Looking Forward to a Memorable Evening

10. Booth’s End Game

11. ’Tis the Wink of an Eye

12. Thunderstruck

13. Their Precious Burden

14. Enough Evidence to Hang Booth

15. Waiting for History

16. That’s the Last of Him

17. Caught in the American Nightmare

18. Grief and Greed

19. The Most Elaborate Funeral in US History

20. The Manhunt Closes In

21. Unrivaled Honors and an Unexpected Invoice

22. Paltry Meanness

23. History Forgot Tenth Street

24. Lincoln Would Not Be the Last to Die at Ford’s

25. A Place to Make Him Comfortable

Epilogue: What’s Past Is Prologue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

History burst through the front door of one Washington home on April 14, 1865. The Petersens, who owned a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theatre, were scarcely aware the president had been shot when doctors carried him to their front door.

Unbeknownst to them, one of their boarders was standing in a second-story window watching the commotion across the street. It was he who made the split-second decision to run outside with a lighted candle and beckon the doctors to their door.

Imagine how you might feel if there were a knock at your door this Friday evening and, without a word of warning, soldiers rushed the fatally wounded president of the United States into your bedroom, followed by the first lady, cabinet members, and a bevy of socialites. Now imagine you have no electricity, no hot water, and no bathrooms, just gas lamps, a stove to boil water on, and chamber pots that you must empty.

Ordinary people like the Petersens and their boarders were thrust into an extraordinary circumstance.

Some handled it better than others.

Until now, most of their stories were untold.

Although some of the events that took place that night startle, every detail and quotation in this book is true, actual and documented.

Petersen House, where President Lincoln died, shown on a 1907 picture postcard. The house originally had light green shutters.

Credit: The Collection of Jim Garrett

1

The Secret about Booth

Fred Petersen heard the clatter of a carriage pulling up at Ford’s Theatre. The green, monogrammed carriage itself, with its solid silver hubcaps, was enough to merit a second look, but this night, one of the passengers inside was the most celebrated man in Washington.

Fred watched as the footman tugged the silver door handle, and a set of stairs automatically sprang forward. President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and their guests stepped out in silks and satins, the president carrying a monogrammed silver and ebony cane.¹ One of the happiest days of Mr. Lincoln’s life was proceeding, just a little behind schedule.

Already late for the show, the party of four descended the carriage steps directly onto the wooden platform that led to the theater’s five arched entrances, bypassing the dusty, rutted, sand street.² It was the tail end of the most exciting week in Washington history, one that had begun with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on Sunday and would end in an uproar.

While others gaped at the Lincolns, Fred sprinted down the street to make the curtain at Grover’s National Theatre, four blocks away.³ At fifteen, he already knew more celebrities than most adults. Three members of Congress had lived at his family’s boardinghouse directly across the street from Ford’s, and comedian John Mathews was a current resident.⁴ Why, even the actor John Wilkes Booth, called the handsomest man in America, sometimes napped in a small back bedroom on the first floor.⁵ Perhaps Fred would have stayed if he had known what was about to happen inside Ford’s. Only a handful of conspirators knew that though. And even the conspirators didn’t have an inkling of what the distant future held for the four members of the presidential party who were, right then, being greeted with five solid minutes of applause.⁶ Before two decades had passed, two of them would be murdered by madmen. The other two would be committed to insane asylums.

Grover’s National Theatre had illuminated its Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to mark the Union victory. Two oversized transparencies shone in the light. The one on the left side of the doors read, April 1861, the cradle. On the right: April 1865, the grave. The signs had been hung to celebrate the birth and death of the Confederacy, but in a few hours, everything would change, and passersby would view them as omens of evil.⁷

Inside Grover’s, audience members, many hoarse from cheering and singing all week, took their red, white, and blue programs and settled into their seats to watch Aladdin!⁸ The production was well under way when the theater doors banged open and a man shouted, President Lincoln has been shot in his private box at Ford’s! Turn out!⁹ The audience, thrown into confusion, stirred, until a calm voice called out, Sit down. It is a ruse of the pickpockets. It was James Tanner, a War Department clerk who had lost both his legs at the Second Battle of Bull Run.¹⁰ As the evening unfolded, the twenty-one-year-old would play a key role in the assassination investigation, but for now, the crowd sat.

The play went on.

Few people noticed the man who whisked twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln from the theater. Even fewer could hear the messenger who slipped around to Helen Moss’s seat during a scene shift and whispered instructions from her brother-in-law, theater manager C. D. Hess: Leave your seats quietly, and stand by the back door. President Lincoln has been shot at Ford’s Theatre. Mr. Hess is going before the curtain to announce it and close the theater at once. Before the man walked off, he warned her, Stand back, lest there be a rush for the door.¹¹

Moss couldn’t believe her own ears. Just that afternoon, Mr. Lincoln had welcomed her and her sister-in-law Julia Hess to the Executive Mansion conservancy. April 14, 1865, was a memorable day for Hess and Moss. They had shaken the hand of wavy-haired actor John Wilkes Booth in front of Grover’s. Then they had walked two blocks to the Executive Mansion, where they had shaken President Lincoln’s hand, too. The president, who knew Julia Hess’s husband, had given the women a tour of his conservancy, where they breathed the mild bouquet of his prize lemon tree. Moss was wearing flowers from that tree as she hurried from her seat to Grover’s back door.¹²

An acrobat was scheduled to tumble from a balloon to the stage some time after ten thirty. Instead, the balding twenty-seven-year-old theater manager stepped through the curtain. With the footlights shining on his stocky frame, Hess said he had a very grave announcement. Then he repeated the intruder’s words: President Lincoln has been shot in his private box at Ford’s. The house became still as death, Moss noticed. So still that she was sure she could have heard a pin drop. Patrons seemed glued to their spots. Then, the audience rose almost as one body, dazed looks on their faces. Soldiers armed with bayonets were on hand in case the crowd rushed the exits—but there was no rush. Cheerless patrons silently filed out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington’s widest commercial street. Illuminated for the war’s end, it was so bright that you could see for blocks in either direction. The only sound was horses’ hooves striking the cobblestones as the cavalry made for Tenth Street and Ford’s.

James Tanner, on his wooden legs, headed one block over to Willard’s Hotel to learn what he could.¹³ Fred Petersen tried to go home. Theatergoers, speaking in hushed tones, formed an impromptu procession headed for Ford’s. And, as soon as he could, the young manager Hess wired theater owner Leonard Grover at his New York hotel: President Lincoln shot tonight at Ford’s Theatre. Thank God it wasn’t ours. C. D. Hess.¹⁴

As Fred ran east to his house directly across from Ford’s Theatre, the mood shifted. Word had filtered out from Willard’s that Secretary of State William Seward’s throat had been slit in his own home. Men shouted that the rebels surrounded the city. They have begun their raid, one cried.¹⁵ In the space of two blocks, as if someone had flipped a switch, bewilderment became hysteria. As Fred rounded the corner to Tenth Street, running as fast as he could, he heard some men yelling, Hang him. Hang him. He turned just in time to see a knot of rowdies crowded under a sycamore tree. They had caught hold of a poor man they had decided to string up. Fred pushed his way past them and ran uphill toward home. As he reached his block, he eyed one solid mass of men waving knives and revolvers and denouncing the assassins.¹⁶ Like Pearl Harbor in the twentieth century and September 11 in the twenty-first, no one knew what would happen next.

Word spread of the assassinations of Seward, General U. S. Grant, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. It would be daylight before anyone really knew who had been assassinated and who had been spared.

The news passed from lip to lip that actor John Wilkes Booth was the president’s shooter. Nonsensical! Everyone knew the president had come out to see Booth play in Richard III and The Marble Heart. The president had even asked to meet the actor; few knew that Booth had purposely evaded meeting Lincoln.

When Fred Petersen approached his curving brownstone porch, he found two soldiers blocking his door. You can’t go in, one said. The president is lying in there. But I live here, Fred said. And he heard back, No difference, you can’t go in. I will see if I can’t get in, Fred muttered to himself.¹⁷

After a kitchen fire in 1863, the Petersens had built an addition to their home, separated from the original structure by a brick walkway.¹⁸ The president had been carried to a small slope-roofed bedroom in that back portion. The lot was just one hundred feet long, but a web of alleys and walkways crisscrossed it, and of course, Fred knew them all. Searching for an unguarded window, he spotted his chum Billy Ferguson, also rebuffed by the guards. The wiry, shiny-haired callboy at Ford’s had just rung down the curtain for the last time.¹⁹ Together, they pulled off a shutter, wriggled in a window, and climbed the crooked back steps to the floor where President Lincoln lay dying.²⁰

The first man Fred saw inside his house was his father, a stern tailor with swept-back dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a square face framed by untamed muttonchop sideburns and a short, trim beard.²¹ William Petersen made a good living sewing high-quality military uniforms at his shop at 442 Eighth Street West, good enough to send his oldest daughter to Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, the Pennsylvania boarding school that had graduated George Washington’s niece and John Jay’s daughter.²² Petersen, a cruel, oft-drunken German immigrant who had become an American citizen twenty-one years earlier, was fixing to pass the care of his president to his children, his boarders, and his live-in servant so that he could leave the house. His much-abused wife was out of town.²³

He told Fred that President Lincoln was lying in the small room above the kitchen and instructed him to see what he could do to help the doctors. As he neared the room, the boy’s stomach turned. Bandages stained with President Lincoln’s brain matter were already piled in the hallway. The stench took his breath away.²⁴ The narrow bedroom was swollen with doctors, family, friends, members of the cabinet, and boarders enlisted to fetch hot water bottles. It was so jammed that Fred couldn’t see more than an inch or two of the olive green and beige wallpaper with orange and mustard accents, except near the ceiling and behind the walnut bed where President Lincoln lay gasping on a corn-husk mattress topped with a softer cotton shoddy one.²⁵

The president’s face looked ghastly in the dim gaslight. His rigid lips never parted, but his face twitched. His right hand, the one that had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, jerked involuntarily.²⁶ The president’s blood penetrated the feather pillows. His brain matter dotted the red, white, and blue Irish wool quilt. With each rise and fall of his chest, there issued a bleak, unforgettable moan. Senator Charles Sumner was sitting on the bed, holding the president’s hand and sobbing like a child. The grim scene would have saddened anyone, but it jolted Fred and Ferguson. The boys knew something the sobbing cabinet members probably never imagined. They had both seen John Wilkes Booth lying on the same dark wood bed where Lincoln now lay unconscious. And they knew the assassin had cuddled up under the same quilt that now draped the dying president’s nude body. Booth’s convivial laughter had echoed through the small room then, just as the president’s doleful moans did now.²⁷

Billy Ferguson recalled hearing that lilting laughter three months earlier when he visited Petersen’s boardinghouse to deliver scripts to comedian John Mathews, who was renting the room with the sloping ceiling that week. About a half dozen actors were horsing around inside the comedian’s room when the boy entered. One of them was Johnnie Booth, a childhood friend of Mathews. Uncommonly handsome, Booth was always impeccably dressed save one peculiarity—his necktie was usually a little askew.²⁸

Ferguson’s esteem for Booth was nothing short of hero worship prior to the assassination, so much so that, even decades later, he could describe what the dashing actor did in the tight confines of Mathews’s room. Booth had been stretched out on the bed, his luxuriant black hair disheveled and a pipe hooked in his mouth. His gentle laughs made him seem even more attractive. Ferguson thought the inexpensive carte de visite photographs of Booth made him appear sullen, while the three-dimensional Booth was more joyous. The photographs could not capture his quick excitability and his unbridled love of fun.²⁹

Fred’s memory of Booth in the bed was even more recent than his chum’s. He had seen the actor napping under the same checked-and-flowered quilt just one week earlier.³⁰ Fred probably knew it would come out that the president and his slayer had occupied the same six-dollar bed.³¹ Mathews and the other actors all knew. And Harry Clay Ford, the treasurer of Ford’s Theatre, had gotten into a heated political row with Booth in the room two months earlier.³² Fred didn’t have much time to think about any of that. The doctors asked him to find more bottles to fill with hot water so they could pack them around the president’s stiff limbs to keep his circulation flowing. He walked downstairs to the kitchen, where the servant already had a fire going. He ordered her to fill the bottles and carry them to the bedroom.³³

Then Fred’s father approached. William Petersen told Fred he was returning to work at his shop until after the president had died. As the president gasped for breath, Petersen told his son to fetch him when it was all over. At least one of the lodgers was miffed that Petersen ducked out while he and the others trudged up and down the thirteen curving steps to the kitchen most of the night, filling hot water bottles. If his boarders were rattled about that, then they must have been outraged by what Petersen did three weeks later, before the president’s body was even in the ground.³⁴

2

Washington City Then

The city directory listed 111 boardinghouses in 1865, but nearly every home in Washington had a sign in the window welcoming those willing to pay three to ten dollars a week for a room.¹ Boarders were treated like family—and subjected to all the drama and dilemmas and confidences of the household.² Some families rented out one room. Some catered to a specific clientele, like Mrs. Beveridge’s at 224 Third Street West, where Indian chiefs stayed while negotiating treaties.³ And some houses, like the Petersens’, rented every available space, even the 6.5 x 10-foot second-floor staircase landing.⁴

It was a simple matter for a homeowner to rent out a space, no matter how small, during the war. The city’s population tripled to almost two hundred thousand, and prices rose too, so much that some foreign governments moved their embassies to Baltimore.⁵

Because Petersen’s boardinghouse stood just one and a half squares uphill from Pennsylvania Avenue, its roster of past tenants included at least three members of Congress—William A. Newell and Andrew K. Hay of New Jersey and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who went on to serve as vice president under James Buchanan and later switched sides and served as a Confederate general.⁶

In 1865, Washington was not the marble-faced, manicured capital it would become.⁷ The Washington Monument stood temporarily abandoned at 156 feet—less than a third of its eventual height. Cows, sheep, goats, and poultry grazed around its stump. Pavement was uncommon. Drainage was unheard of. Pigs rooted for garbage in city streets. Rubbish and sediment swept out of shops and homes washed into intersections.⁸ After a steady rain, the city’s unpaved streets of clay and loam were mired in mud, one to three feet of it, so much that carriages would get swamped, and their occupants would have to dismount.⁹ When a foreign delegation’s coach sank up to its axles near the Treasury Building, its occupants, in full diplomatic regalia, cried in vain for planks to be brought so they could disembark without sinking into the sludge. Long after the sun dried the streets, deep washboard ruts remained. Men, even the president, wore shin-high boots with suits and formal wear, because shoes sometimes vanished in the paste-like muck.¹⁰

Washington City in 1865. Credit: Hal Jespersen

The Washington Monument stood unfinished as soldiers camped on the Washington Mall in 1865. Credit: Library of Congress

Smithsonian Castle in 1862, nine years before William Petersen died there. Credit: Library of Congress

Dead dogs, cattle, and occasionally citizens drifted down the fetid Washington City Canal, along with most of the capital’s sewage. The canal, eighty feet wide in some spots, was an unwholesome leftover from the early part of the century. Long since replaced by railroads as a mode of transportation, it still stretched across the city from the front of the Capitol to the back of the Executive Mansion, reeking of rotted produce, discarded fish, and human excrement.¹¹ Adding to the stench were the stables and corrals that dotted the city. The largest, Giesboro Point Cavalry Depot, housed twenty-one thousand horses.¹²

Ears were assaulted with a constant din of voices, gunfire, bugle calls, and horses’ hooves. Soldiers discharged their weapons daily, and cannon fire vaguely echoed from battlefields in nearby Virginia. On top of the stench and the racket, the putrid canal water carried malaria, cholera, and the typhoid that killed eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln in 1862.¹³

Saloons and at least eighty-five houses of prostitution peppered the city.¹⁴ Gambling halls aplenty beckoned bettors, including members of Congress. Murderer’s Bay was the name locals gave to the shanties and saloons and houses of ill repute that lined the blocks just east of the Executive Mansion. Mrs. Lincoln insisted her husband carry