The Darkest Dawn Read online

  It was just such acts of kindness and mercy as the above which endeared Wilkes to those who knew him best. He was, said E. A. Emerson, who played opposite Booth in many roles, a “kind-hearted, genial person. . . . Everybody loved him.”43

  One of those who fell hopelessly under Booth’s spell was Lucy Hale, daughter of a U.S. senator from New Hampshire. The couple had set a date to be wed within a year.44 Yet another of those smitten by the actor was Abraham Lincoln. On the night of November 9, 1864, Lincoln, Mary, and several guests watched from the presidential box as the twenty-six-year-old thespian performed at Ford’s Theater.45 So impressed was the president by Booth’s performance that he applauded “rapturously,” then requested an interview following the play, a request that was denied. Far from being flattered by Lincoln’s attention, Booth declared later that he would “sooner have applause from a negro.”46 As anyone who knew could attest, John Wilkes Booth was a Southerner through and through.

  At length, when he had finished reading his mail on the steps of the theater, Booth rose and approached Harry Ford, brother of the owner.

  “What’s on tonight?” asked the actor.

  “Our American Cousin,” replied Ford, “and we are going to have a big night. The president and General Grant are going to occupy the president’s box.”47

  In a moment, Booth’s entire demeanor changed. A dark, faraway look now swept over his handsome face, as if he was lost in deep thought.48

  “Booth then left the theater in a kind of hurry,” remembered Ford, “as if he had made up his mind about something to be done.”49

  Around noon, an already agitated Julia Grant heard a loud rap on her door.

  “What do you want?” asked the woman when she discovered a messenger standing outside.

  “Mrs. Lincoln sends me, Madame, with her compliments to say she will call for you at exactly eight o’clock to go to the theater.” To this, I replied with some feeling (not liking either the looks of the messenger or the message, thinking the former savored of discourtesy and the latter seemed like a command), “You may return with my compliments to Mrs. Lincoln and say I regret that as General Grant and I intend leaving the city this afternoon, we will not, therefore, be here to accompany the president and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater.” He hesitated a moment, then urged: “Madame, the papers announce that General Grant will be with the president tonight at the theater.” I said to this: “You deliver my message to Mrs. Lincoln as I have given it to you. You may go now.”50

  Concerned that her refusal was insufficient, recalling vividly the insults and humiliations she had endured via the tongue of Mary Lincoln—”How dare you be seated until I invite you!”—Julia quickly sent a note to her husband, then dispatched three staff officers to follow it up, warning her husband that she would not go to the theater under any circumstances—they must leave the city that very day.51

  Other women who received theater invitations for that night were just as desperate as Julia. The wife of the secretary of war, Ellen Stanton, a woman “as white and cold and motionless as marble whose rare smiles seemed to pain her,” urgently wanted to know what Julia’s course of action would be. “For unless you accept the invitation,” Mrs. Stanton announced, “I shall refuse. I will not sit without you in the box with Mrs. Lincoln!”52

  CHAPTER SIX

  SIC SEMPER

  TYRANNIS

  IF ANYONE HAD THE SLIGHTEST DOUBT that the Great Rebellion was all but over, the scene on Pennsylvania Avenue would have quickly cured them of their delusion. Cordoned by guards, more than four hundred Confederate officers captured in the recent fighting around Appomattox now trudged dejectedly through Washington.1 As word spread, hundreds, then thousands, of curious citizens lined the street to watch. In contrast to similar processions earlier in the war, which were greeted by hoots and jeers, only silence—solemn, even sad—now surrounded these prisoners, the pathetic remnant of a once mighty army.

  “It was a sorrowful sight,” one federal soldier wrote. “No man with the heart of a man beating in his bosom could witness it without emotion. In their old tarnished and torn uniforms they marched erect and proud, with no semblance of bravado, and yet with no apparent sense of humiliation.”2

  “Great God!” John Booth gasped to a friend as they watched. “I have no longer a country!”3

  As the funeral-like column passed, neither Booth nor a scattering of diehard Southern sympathizers could deny that, indeed, the death of Dixie was at hand. And yet, for a few like the actor, the end had not been reached. As long as even one Confederate army remained in the field, as long as Jefferson Davis was free, as long as liberty burned in the breast of even one man, hope lived.

  When the words of Harry Ford finally sank in, a sense of urgency energized John Wilkes Booth once more. In his mind, there was still time. The fortunes of the South might yet be retrieved. But the blow must be struck, and soon. As events at Richmond and Appomattox had shown, and, most recently, as the rebel prisoners on Pennsylvania Avenue had graphically illustrated, there was not a moment to spare. Over the next several hours, Booth moved swiftly about Washington, reestablishing contact with his small circle of fellow conspirators. For months, the group had plotted and planned a great stroke to save the South in its eleventh hour—the kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln. After one feeble attempt, the plan had eventually been abandoned as impossible.4 Now, at the midnight of the Confederacy, the original organization would be activated again to attempt an even more daring, deadly mission.

  “Our cause being almost lost, something great and decisive must be done,” scratched Booth in his diary.5

  The odds were long, the chances of success slim. But, should the bid prevail, the liberty of not only Southerners but also free men everywhere might be gained. In that event, millions would enshrine his name forever.

  Despite the delirium sweeping the North, victory had come at a terrible price. Elected to check the spread of slavery and sustain the Union, Abraham Lincoln had been determined to do just that, no matter the cost in blood and treasure, no matter the loss of liberty. Hardly had the war begun when the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in Booth’s home state, Maryland, out of what was termed “military necessity.” When members of the state legislature were arrested soon after, many felt that it was a political move, pure and simple.6 Arbitrary arrests across the nation soon followed. While many of those jailed without due process were subversives bent on sedition, others were mere political opponents of the Lincoln administration, confined for “disloyal utterances” and for daring to raise their voices against unconstitutional excess.7 Wrote one critic:

  Citizens were arrested by thousands, and incarcerated without warrant. Judges were torn from the bench, bruised and bleeding. Ministers of the Gospel . . . were stricken down. . . . Women were incarcerated, and subjected to insult and outrage. Doctors were ruthlessly taken from the bedside of the dying patient. . . . [L]awyers [were] arrested and consigned to the same cells with their clients whose release they were endeavoring to effect. Post offices were searched; newspapers seized and suppressed, while the editors were handcuffed and secretly hurried to prison.8

  Among those arrested was Frank Key Howard. Imprisoned with others at the same site where his famous grandfather had penned the words to “The Star Spangled Banner” in 1814, Howard could not escape the cruel irony of his situation.

  “As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict,” the prisoner wrote from Fort McHenry in Baltimore, “I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before. The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving, at the same place, over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.”9

  By 1865, tens of thousands of Americans had been arrested and held without trial. Even more troubling, many victims had undergone torture.10 Despite the very real threat of imprisonment, aged Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney, ex-president Franklin Pierce, Lincoln’s former attorney general Edward Bates, and others con
tinued to criticize, in public and private, the loss of freedoms.11 Lincoln’s crimes, ventured the Alton Telegraph in the president’s home state of Illinois, were “black enough to damn him . . . for all time to come.”12

  “How the greatest butchers of antiquity sink into insignificance when their crimes are contrasted with those of Abraham Lincoln,” echoed the editor of the Illinois State Register from the president’s hometown of Springfield.13

  Despite the brave efforts of those who risked life and limb to rouse their countrymen to action, most Americans remained unconcerned about constitutional matters; instead, most were simply happy that the war was being won, and, more important, most were relieved that they were not required to help win it.

  As if the assault on their birthright were not already troubling enough, many thoughtful Americans viewed Lincoln’s reign as by far the most damaging, embarrassing, and atrocious in the nation’s history. Far from being “Honest Abe,” continued the Illinois State Register, Lincoln the lawyer was a shrewd and cunning opportunist, “the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office in America.”14 Moreover, critics argued, the “railsplitter” was crude, coarse, and comical, an unworthy successor to such stately and dignified chief executives as Jefferson, Polk, and Pierce. “He is brutal in all his habits and in all his ways,” sneered one New York editor. “He is filthy. He is obscene. He is vicious.”15

  Lincoln’s well-known fondness for ribald jests and “smutty” stories also caused even well-wishers to shake their heads in shame.16 According to one White House visitor, some of the president’s anecdotes were revolting in the extreme, as when a young Lincoln, after a hunting trip, climbed a tree while several of his companions lay down just below:

  Golliher shut his eyes like he was asleep. . . . I thought I would shit in his hat[.] Golliher was watching and when I let the load drop he swaped [sic] hats and my hat caught the whole Charge.

  At the telling of this tale, recalled the visitor, Lincoln “laughed heartily.”17

  But by far the greatest source of Northern antipathy toward the president was his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and, more recently, his hint at Negro suffrage. While other issues struck at significant though smaller segments of society, this last raised concern among even those formerly void of opinions. “The simple question to be decided,” announced a Kansas editor, “is whether the white man shall maintain his status of superiority or be sunk to the level of the Negro.”18 Unless Lincoln’s program was thwarted, one New York editor warned, the United States would soon become a “mongrel concern of whites, negroes, mulattoes, and sambos, . . . the most degrading and contemptible the world ever saw.”19

  It was this perception among many Americans that Lincoln was now fighting for the black man, and not the white, that caused his greatest loss of support. And of all issues, the dread specter of Negro enfranchisement and miscegenation was the spark that ignited John Wilkes Booth to contemplate bloody deeds. Standing in the crowd outside the White House on the night of April 11, when the actor heard the president suggest that in the post-war world some blacks—the soldiers, the educated, the intelligent—should have the vote, he was outraged.

  “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth growled to his companion, David Herold. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. . . . That is the last speech he will ever make.”20

  And thus, as Booth moved swiftly ahead with his plans on the afternoon of April 14, his goal was not simply to save the South; he was spurred on by a vision that his action would strike a blow for free white men everywhere. Time, though, was against him. When a friend encountered the normally buoyant actor on a sidewalk that day, he was surprised by Booth’s somber look. “What makes you so gloomy?” the man asked. Booth sidestepped the question by simply stating that he had been hard at work all day and was about to leave Washington, never to return.21

  After he chanced to meet another friend, a journalist, the two stepped briefly into a restaurant, where Booth began plying the man with questions:

  “Suppose Lincoln was killed, what would be the result?” I replied: “Johnson would succeed,” and he said, “But if he was killed?” “Then Seward,” I said, and he continued, “But suppose he was killed, then what?” “Then anarchy or whatever the Constitution provides,” and laughing, I said, “but, what nonsense, they don’t make Brutuses now days.” He shook his head and said: “No they do not.” I left him without a second thought of what he had said. . . .22

  Like his father before him, John Wilkes was named for a man who placed liberty above life. From father to son, the hatred of tyranny and the love of liberty were passed along. Also like his father, Booth craved glory and honor. Although the young actor would have gladly given his life for the cause he believed in, he was, after all, human. He much preferred to live for that cause and savor his success on the stage of world acclaim.23

  A stir was created as the carriage rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. Shortly, word spread along the sidewalks that Ulysses Grant was inside, and curiosity-seekers paused to point, cheer, and hopefully gain a glimpse of the famous general. Much to the relief of both Grant and Julia, in a short while they would be on a northbound train, leaving Washington and all their troubles behind.

  Suddenly, a horseman galloped past the carriage. After only a short distance, the man pulled up and wheeled his mount back. As the stranger came abreast of the vehicle, he peered intently at the occupants for a moment. Julia became uneasy. “That is the very man who sat near us at lunch to-day with some others, and tried to overhear our conversation,” she nudged her husband. “He was so rude . . . as to cause us to leave the dining-room. Here he is again, riding after us!”

  Grant dismissed the incident as idle curiosity, but Julia was troubled by the actions of the handsome, dark-haired man.24

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TOWARDS AN

  INDEFINITE SHORE

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, THE WEATHER had taken a turn for the worse. When the couple had set out earlier, the day was sunny and the thermometer was reaching for seventy. Now a cold, raw wind came whistling down the streets from the north, and the dark clouds above portended rain.1 Nevertheless, little or nothing could dampen the joy of the carriage ride.

  Following an inspection of the Montauk, a monitor gunboat that lay at anchor in the Potomac, and a jaunt to the “Soldier’s Home,” their summer retreat, Abraham and Mary Lincoln turned back toward the White House.2 As had been the case throughout the day, the president’s spirits were high. His goal had been reached. The weary load he had shouldered for the past four years was now about to be set down. And Abraham Lincoln felt relief.

  “Dear husband,” Mary stared at her normally morose mate, “you almost startle me, by your great cheerfulness.”

  “[W]ell I may feel so, Mary,” the president smiled. “I consider this day, the war has come to a close.”3

  “I never saw him so sumpremely [sic] cheerful—his manner was even playful,” remembered the first lady.4

  Recalled the president’s secretary, John Hay:

  The day was one of unusual enjoyment to Mr. Lincoln. . . . His mood . . . was singularly happy and tender. He talked much of the past and the future. . . . He was never simpler or gentler than on this day of unprecedented triumph; his heart overflowed with sentiments of gratitude to Heaven, which took the shape usual to generous natures, of love and kindness to all men.5

  Indeed, nothing bore out the truth of those words more than Lincoln’s actions earlier that day. Visiting with his father soon after returning from duty on General Grant’s staff, Lincoln’s oldest son, twenty-one-year-old Robert, handed the president a prized photograph. After carefully studying the face in the image, the face of the same man who had very nearly dashed all hopes for a reunited nation, Lincoln at last spoke. “It is a good face,” the president said softly as he sat gazing at Robert E. Lee. “It is the face of a noble, brave man. I am glad the war is over at last.”6

  Lincoln’s words were in sharp cont
rast to the cry of Radical Republicans who were even then demanding the arrest and execution of the “arch-traitor” Lee. The howl for the old Virginian’s blood was second only to that of Jefferson Davis. Many Northerners would have savored the spectacle of Davis and Lee being paraded through the streets of Washington in chains. Lincoln differed. Although his motives were no doubt based in part on politics, the president preferred to simply allow Lee to return to his home in peace and watch while Davis fled the country into exile.

  “Now, General,” the president had earlier suggested to William T. Sherman, “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff. Davis; but if you could manage to let him slip out unbeknownst-like, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much!”7

  Additionally, Lincoln hurried to save lives. Already noted for a liberal pardon policy, with the close of war the president picked up the pace. “Well, I think this boy can do more good above ground than under ground,” he said while commuting a death sentence for desertion that afternoon.8

  Coming down the staircase at the White House just prior to the carriage ride with Mary, the president overheard a one-armed soldier declare that he would almost be willing to lose the other arm if it could but shake the hand of Abraham Lincoln. “You shall do that and it shall cost you nothing, my boy!” the tall, smiling president announced as he approached the man.9

  “I have never been so happy in my life,” Lincoln admitted to Mary. Although her husband’s happiness should have been a source of comfort, the words were not entirely welcome to the superstitious woman. The last time Lincoln had uttered similar sentiments, their eleven-year-old son, Willie, had died.10 “We must both, be more cheerful in the future,” cautioned the husband. “[B]etween the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”11