Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It seems like the entire town is drunk. Lee’s Confederate army has surrendered. In the Union capital whiskey is chugged straight out of the bottle, church bells toll, pistols are fired into the air, fireworks explode, newsboys hawk final editions chock-full of details from Appomattox, brass bands play, church hymns are sung, thirty-five U.S. flags are hoisted, and army howitzers launch an astonishing five-hundred-gun salute, which shatters windows for miles around the city.

The war is done! After four long years, and more than 600,000 dead altogether, euphoria now floats through the air like an opiate.

Complete strangers clasp one another’s hands like long-lost friends. They rub shoulders in taverns, restaurants, cathouses, and the impromptu glow of blazing streetside bonfires. Revelers march from one place to the next, passing the flask, aimless and amazed. Sooner or later it becomes obvious that their passion needs a purpose—or, at the very least, a focus. The human mass snakes toward the White House, handheld torches lighting the way. The people of Washington, D.C., overcome by news of the war’s end, hope to glimpse their president on this historic night. Perhaps, if they are very lucky, he will give one of the speeches for which he has become so famous.

The nation’s capital is not yet the cosmopolitan city it will become. The streets are mostly dirt and mud. It is not uncommon for traffic to stop as farmers drive cattle to market. Open spaces have been military staging areas during the war, with the camp followers and soldiers’ businesses such a designation implies. The Tiber Creek and its adjacent canal are open sewers, a breeding ground for typhus, cholera, and dysentery. The vile stench is made worse by the Central Market’s butchers, fond of heaving freshly cleaved carcasses into the rancid waters each morning. This might not be a problem, were it not for the Tiber being located a stone’s throw from the Capitol Building, that beautiful unfinished idea that towers above the city like an allegory for the nation itself.

To Lincoln, the Capitol is the most important structure in Washington. During the war, even when resources were limited and manpower was desperately needed on the battlefields, he refused to halt construction. Its signature element, the dome, was fitted into place just over a year ago. Inside, scaffolding still climbs up the curved walls of the unfinished rotunda. Workmen mingle with the Union soldiers who have used the Capitol as a barracks, sleeping on the sandstone floors and waking each morning to the aroma of baking bread, thanks to the cadre of bakers in the basement turning out sixty thousand loaves each day for shipment to distant battlefields.

The Capitol was an obvious artillery target during the war, so the gas lamps atop the dome remained unlit for the duration. Now they blaze. The Capitol glows above the frenzied crowds like some great torch of freedom, a wondrous reminder that Lincoln’s common refrain of “the Union must go on” has, indeed, come to pass.

So it is fitting that on the night the Capitol dome is lit, the crowd of more than two thousand staggers to an unruly halt on the grass outside the White House’s front door, waiting for Lincoln to show himself from the windows of the second-floor residence. When Lincoln doesn’t appear right away, they cry out for him. At first it’s just a few random shouts. Then a consensus. Soon they roar as one: “Lincoln,” the people cry. “Speech.”

The crowd is crazy to touch President Lincoln, to see him, to hear his voice. They continue calling out to him, the chant getting louder until the sound is deafening.

But Lincoln is in no mood to speak. The president sends a messenger out to the people, letting them know he is not up to it tonight. That only makes the crowd cheer louder. Lincoln tries to mollify them by going to a window, pulling back a curtain, and waving. Upon seeing the president, the crowd explodes. Men hoist their caps and umbrellas and women wave their handkerchiefs.

Still, Lincoln does not give a speech.

The crowd doesn’t leave. He goes to the window a second time, hoping his appearance will send them on their way. To his utter amazement, twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln is now down on the grass with all those people, running through the crowd with a captured rebel battle flag. The people laugh good-naturedly at the stunned look on Lincoln’s face, then cheer him as he steps alone from the front door of the White House to retrieve his young boy. It will be impossible for him to escape without saying a word or two. Lincoln has no protection as he wades into the crowd to get Tad.

The president returns inside the White House, even as the folks remain in the front yard.

Lincoln, at heart, is a showman. He reappears at the second-floor window, smiling and holding up a hand in acknowledgment. “I am very greatly rejoiced to find that an occasion has occurred so pleasurable that the people cannot restrain themselves,” he jokes, knowing that the crowd will respond by cheering even louder.

They do.

The president is tired, having hardly been able to sleep, due to a series of dreadful nightmares and anxiety over the struggles still to come. He sees the bonfires and the lanterns, and basks in the ovation, feeling the fatigue slip away. He hears the hurrahs, along with again the single loud cry in unison of “Speech.”

Lincoln sighs inwardly. He has waited so long for this moment, and yet he must hold back. These words cannot be delivered impulsively. Nor can he hope to be bathed in applause after they are spoken.

The people need to hear the truth, even though that’s not what they want to hear. The crowd wants retribution, not reconciliation; they want grand and eloquent words. Inspirational words. Fortifying words. Even boastful words. They will tell their children’s children about the night after the war was won, the night they heard the great Abraham Lincoln frame the victory in the most beautiful and poetic way possible.

They wish, in other words, to witness history.

Lincoln would like to indulge them. But the sentiments are half-formed and the words not yet written. Instead of telling the crowd what’s on his mind—how the thrill about the war’s end that filled his heart just yesterday is being replaced by weariness at the prospect of the hard work to come—Lincoln smiles that easy grin for which he is so well known. If you want to hear a speech, Lincoln yells to the crowd, please come back tomorrow night.

There is no malice in his tone, no undercurrent of sarcasm born of the many years of public ridicule. The veteran politician works his audience with professional ease. His unamplified voice carries powerfully through the chill night air.

Spying the Navy Yard brass band taking shelter under the White House eaves, he calls out a request: “I always thought that ‘Dixie’ was one of the best tunes I ever heard. Our adversaries over the way, I know, have attempted to appropriate it. But I insist that yesterday we fairly captured it.

“It is now our property,” he informs the crowd, then directs the band to “favor us with a performance.”

As the musicians strike up the Confederate anthem, and the crowd sings and claps to that old familiar rhythm, Lincoln slips back into the White House and starts writing the last speech he will ever give.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

John Wilkes Booth picks up his gun.

One mile down Pennsylvania Avenue, so close he can almost hear the beloved strains of “Dixie” being belted out so heretically by a Yankee band, the twenty-six-year-old actor stands alone in a pistol range. The smell of gunpowder mixes with the fragrant pomade of his mustache. His feet are set slightly wider than shoulder width, his lean athletic torso is turned at a right angle to the bull’s-eye, and his right arm is extended in a line perfectly parallel with the floor. In his fist he cradles the sort of pint-sized pistol favored by ladies and cardsharps.

He fires.

Booth scrutinizes the target. Satisfied, he reloads his single-shot .44-caliber Deringer. His mood is a mixture of rage and despondence. Things have gone to hell since Lee surrendered. Richmond is gone, and with it the Confederate leadership. The “secesh” community—those southern secessionist sympathizers living a secret life in the nation’s capital—is in disarray. There’s no one to offer guidance to Booth and the other secret agents of the Confederacy.

At this point, there are at least four Confederate groups conspiring to harm the president. Two are plotting a kidnapping, one is planning to smuggle dress shirts infected with yellow fever into his dresser drawers, and another intends to blow up the White House.

Booth is part of a kidnapping conspiracy. He prefers the term “capture.” Kidnapping is a crime, but capturing an enemy during a time of war is morally correct. The Confederate government has strict rules governing its agents’ behavior. If Booth does indeed get the chance, he is allowed to capture the president, truss him like a pig, subject him to a torrent of verbal and mental harassment, and even punch him in the mouth, should the opportunity present itself. The one thing he is not allowed to do is engage in “black flag warfare.”

Or in a word: murder.

Booth wonders if the restriction against black flag warfare still applies. And, if not, what he should do about it. That’s why he’s at the range. He has a major decision to make. Shooting helps him think.

Booth fires again. The split-second bang fills him with power, drowning out the celebrations and focusing his mind. Again, he tamps in a ball and a percussion cap.

There is a darkness to Booth’s personality, born of the entitlement that comes with celebrity. He is a boaster and a liar, fond of embellishing stories to make himself sound daring and adventurous. He is cruel and mercurial. He is a bully, eager to punish those who don’t agree with his points of view. Outside of his love for his mother, Booth is capable of doing anything to satisfy his own urges.

Booth is also a white supremacist. His most closely guarded secret is that he has temporarily given up the profession of acting to fight for the pro-slavery movement. The abolition movement, in Booth’s mind, is the real cause of the Civil War, a serpent that must be crushed. Enslavement of blacks is part of the natural order, Booth believes, and central to the South’s economy. Blacks, he maintains, are third-class citizens who should spend their lives working for the white man. Not only does this life fulfill them, but they are begging for correction when they step out of line. “I have been through the whole south and have marked the happiness of master and man,” Booth writes. “I have seen the black man whipped. But only when he deserved much more than he received.”

As a teenager, Booth was traumatized when runaway slaves killed a schoolmate’s father. He is willing to swear an oath that this sort of violence will happen on a much larger scale if the South loses the war. Newly freed slaves will slaughter southern white men, rape their women and daughters, and instigate a bloodbath unlike any other in recorded history.

The only way to prevent that is to reinstate slavery by winning the Civil War.

It crushes Booth to think that the South has lost. He shuts the idea out of his mind. Lee’s surrender, Booth believes, was a gross error in judgment. Even the great Marse Robert is allowed an occasional lapse.

Booth takes solace in the 146,000 Confederate troops spread out from North Carolina to Texas that have refused to lay down their weapons. So long as those men are willing to fight, the Confederacy—and slavery—will live on.

And now, Booth will give them another reason to fight.

That he was born just south of the Mason-Dixon Line and nearly a northerner means nothing. Booth nurtures a deep hatred for his father and the nation’s father figure, Abraham Lincoln. Booth was jealous of his father, an accomplished actor who never acknowledged his young son’s talent. Booth’s paternal loathing has now been transferred to the president; it flared to full burn when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Booth could have enlisted in the war. But soldiering, even for the Confederate cause, is far too mundane for his flamboyant personality. He cares little about battles won or lost, or battlefields hundreds of miles from the fancy hotels he calls home. Booth is fighting the Civil War on his terms, using his talents, choreographing the action like a great director. The grand finale will be a moment straight from the stage, some stunning dramatic conclusion when antagonist and protagonist meet face-to-face, settling their differences once and for all. The antagonist, of course, will win.

That antagonist will be Booth.

And what could be more dramatic than kidnapping Lincoln?

The plan is for Booth to gag and bind him, then smuggle him out of Washington, D.C., into the hands of Confederate forces. The president of the United States will rot in a rat-infested dungeon until slavery has been reinstated. Booth will sit before him and deliver a furious monologue, accusing Lincoln of stupidity and self-importance. It doesn’t matter that Lincoln won’t be able to talk back; Booth has no interest in anything the president has to say.

Lincoln keeps a summer residence three miles outside Washington, at a place called the Soldiers’ Home. Seeking respite from the Washington humidity or just to get away from the office seekers and politicos permeating the White House year-round, the president escapes there alone on horseback most evenings. From George Washington onward, presidents of the United States have usually been comfortable traveling with an entourage. But Lincoln, who enjoys his solitude, has no patience for that.

The president thinks his getaways are secret, but men like Booth and the members of the Confederate Secret Service are always watching. Booth’s original mission, as defined by his southern handlers, was to capture Lincoln while he rode on the lonely country road to the Soldiers’ Home.

Booth tried and failed twice. Now he has a new plan, one that preys on Lincoln’s fondness for the theater. He will grab him in mid-performance, from the presidential box at a Washington playhouse.

The scheme, however, is so crazy, so downright impossible that none of his co-conspirators will go along with it.

One of them has even backed out completely and taken the train home. It is as if Booth has rehearsed and rehearsed for a major performance, only to have the production canceled moments before the curtain rises. He has poured thousands of dollars into the plan. Some of that money has come from his own pocket; most has been supplied by the Confederacy. And now the scheme will never come to pass.

Booth fires at the bull’s-eye.

The Deringer is less than six inches long, made of brass, with a two-inch barrel. It launches a single large-caliber ball instead of a bullet and is accurate only at close range. For this reason it is often called a “gentleman’s pistol”—small and easily concealed in a pocket or boot, the Deringer is ideal for ending an argument or extracting oneself from a dangerous predicament but wholly unsuited for the battlefield. Booth has purchased other weapons for his various plots, including the cache of revolvers and long-bladed daggers now hidden in his hotel room. But the Deringer with the chocolate-colored wooden grip is his personal favorite. It is not lost on him that the pistol’s primary traits—elegance, stealth, and the potential to produce mayhem—match those of its owner.

Booth is almost out of ammunition. He loads his gun for one last shot, still plotting his next course of action.

He is absolutely certain he can kidnap Lincoln.

But as Booth himself would utter while performing Hamlet, there’s the rub.

If the war is over, then kidnapping Lincoln is pointless.

Yet Lincoln is still the enemy. He always will be.

So if Booth is no longer a kidnapper, then how will he wage war? This is the question that has bothered him all night.

Booth fires his last shot, slides the Deringer into his pocket, and storms out the door, only to once again find the streets full of inebriated revelers. Outraged, he steps into a tavern and knocks back a drink. John Wilkes Booth thinks hard about what comes next. “Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done,” he tells himself.

Until now, Booth has taken orders from Confederate president Jefferson Davis, currently in hiding. It was Davis who, nearly a year ago, sent two agents to Montreal with a fund of $1 million in gold. That money funded various plots against Lincoln. But Davis is done, fleeing to North Carolina in a train filled with looted Confederate gold, most likely never to return. Booth alone must decide for himself what is wrong and what is right.

From this moment forward he will live and breathe and scheme in accordance with his brand-new identity, and his new mission. The time has come for black flag warfare.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Booth’s Washington residence is the National Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth. Just around the corner is James Pumphrey’s stable, where he often rents a horse. The actor feels perfectly at home at Pumphrey’s, for the owner is also known to be a Confederate sympathizer. Now, well past eight, and with no streetlights beyond the city limits, the night is far too dark for a ride into the country. But a half-drunk Booth needs to get on a horse now—right now—and gallop through Washington, D.C., reassuring himself that he has a way out of the city after putting a bullet in Abraham Lincoln.

I am the man who will end Abraham Lincoln’s life. That thought motivates Booth as he walks. He returns to the idea over and over again. He is thrilled by the notion, not bothered in the least by his ability to make the mental jump from the passive violence of kidnapping to cold-blooded murder. I will kill the president of the United States.

Booth ruminates without remorse. Of course, killing a man is immoral. Even Booth knows that.

This is wartime. Killing the enemy is no more illegal than capturing him.

The actor thinks of Lincoln’s second inaugural and how he stood so close to Lincoln on that day. I could have shot him then, if I had wished.

Booth regrets the lost opportunity, then sets it aside. There will be another chance—and this time he will stand even closer, so close he can’t miss. So close he will see the life drain from Lincoln’s eyes.

It occurs to him that no American president has ever been assassinated. I will be the first man to ever kill a president. He is now even more dazzled by his own violent plan.

The United States is just three months shy of being eighty-nine years old. There are thirty-six states in the Union, thanks to Nevada’s recent admission. Lincoln is the sixteenth president. Two have passed away from illness while in office. None of them, as Booth well knows, has died by someone else’s hand. If successful in his assassination attempt, the actor will achieve the lasting recognition he has always craved.

For a nation founded by rebellion and torn open by a civil war, the citizens of the United States have been remarkably nonviolent when confronted with politicians they despise. Only one American president was the target of an assassin. And that was Andrew Jackson, the man whose politics sowed the seeds of Confederate rebellion thirty years earlier.

Jackson was leaving a funeral in the Capitol Building on January 30, 1835, when a British expatriate fired at him twice. Unfortunately for the mentally unbalanced Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be the king of England, both his pistols misfired. The bullets never left the chamber. Congressman Davy Crockett wrestled Lawrence to the ground and disarmed him, even as Jackson beat the would-be assassin with his cane.

Jackson was also the first and only American president to suffer bodily harm at the hands of a citizen, when a sailor discharged from the navy for embezzlement punched Jackson at a public ceremony in 1833. Robert Randolph fled the scene. Jackson, ever the warrior, refused to press charges.

These are the only acts of presidential insurrection in the nation’s entire history. The American people are unique in that their considerable political passion is expressed at the ballot box, not through violence directed at their leaders, whom they can vote out of office. If judged only by this yardstick, the Democratic experiment undertaken by Americans four score and nine years ago seems to be working.

Maybe this is why Lincoln rides his horse alone through Washington or stands fearlessly on the top deck of a ship in a combat zone. The president tries to convince himself that assassination is not part of the American character, saying, “I can’t believe that anyone has shot, or will deliberately shoot at me with the purpose of killing me.”

A wider look at human history suggests otherwise. Tribal societies murdered their leaders long before the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was slain by his advisers in 1324 B.C. Stabbing and beating were the earliest methods of assassination. The Moabite king Eglon was disemboweled in his chambers, his girth so vast that the killer lost the knife in the folds of his fat. Over time, well-known historical figures such as Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) and perhaps even Alexander himself were assassinated. And politically motivated killing was not limited to Europe or the Middle East—records show that assassination had long been practiced in India, Africa, and China.

And then, of course, there was Julius Caesar, the victim of the most famous assassination in history. The Roman ruler was stabbed twenty-three times by members of the Roman Senate. Of the two stab wounds to his chest, one was the blow that killed him. The killing took place during a lunar cycle known as the ides, fulfilling a prophecy by a local soothsayer.

The truth is that Lincoln, despite what he says, secretly believes he will die in office. He is by far the most despised and reviled president in American history. His closest friend and security adviser, the barrel-chested Ward Hill Lamon, preaches regularly to Lincoln about the need for improved security measures. More tangibly, there is a packet nestled in a small cubby of Lincoln’s upright desk. It is marked, quite simply, “Assassination.” Inside are more than eighty death threats. Every morning, sitting in his office to conduct affairs of state, Lincoln’s eyes cannot help but see those letters. “God damn your god damned old hellfire god damned soul to hell,” reads one letter. “God damn you and your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell.”

“The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable,” Lincoln has admitted to an artist who came to paint his portrait, “but they have ceased to give me any apprehension.

“I know I am in danger, but I am not going to worry over little things like these.”

Rather than dwell on death, Lincoln prefers to live life on his own terms. “If I am killed I can die but once,” he is fond of saying, “but to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.”

While the war still raged he told the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Whichever way the war ends, I have the impression that I shall not last long after it is over.”

A small number of assassins are delusional or impulsive killers, but on the whole, the successful assassin stalks his target, planning every detail of the crime. This means knowing the victim’s habits, schedule, nuances, and security detail. Only then can the two most complex and dangerous tasks be successfully executed.

The first involves the shooting—and in 1865 it must be a shooting, because there is little likelihood of getting close enough to stab a major political figure. The assassin must figure out the when and where (a large crowd is ideal); determine how to get in and out of the building or ceremony; and choose the perfect weapon.

Second is the escape. A successful assassin is a murderer. A perfect assassination, however, means getting away from the scene of the murder without being caught. This is even more of a long shot than the crime itself. Plenty of men in those large crowds will want to play the hero. They will tackle and subdue the assailant without fear for their own lives. And even if an assassin eludes those crowds, he must escape the city in which it takes place, and then the country, until arriving at some foreign location of true refuge.

As Booth strolls to Pumphrey’s, he carries a map in his coat pocket showing the location of General Joe Johnston and his Confederate holdouts, who are hiding in North Carolina. Booth knows the map by heart. He can pinpoint the precise route Johnston must take to evade the Federal troops and reignite the war. To Booth, the map is much more than a detailed depiction of contours and boundaries. It is also a glimmer of hope, reminding him that the noble cause is alive and well, and why he must do what he must do.

His mind wanders to his buggy, of all things. Booth bought it to transport Lincoln after the kidnapping. Now it serves no purpose. Booth makes a mental note to put the buggy up for sale. But in an instant, his thoughts revert back to President Lincoln, who now has only five days to live.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Booth turns onto C Street and then out of the cold, wet night into James Pumphrey’s stable. His clothes are damp. He smells of drink and tobacco. A quick glance around the stalls shows that most of the horses are already rented out for the evening. Pumphrey may be a Confederate sympathizer and a full-fledged member of the secessionist movement, but he has no qualms about making an honest buck off this night of Union celebration.

Pumphrey is an acquaintance of twenty-year-old John Surratt, the courier instrumental in ensuring that Booth’s operation is fully funded by the Confederacy. Surratt travels frequently between Canada, the South, New York City, and Washington, brokering deals for everything from guns to medicine. Like Booth, the young man is furious that the Confederacy has lost.

John Surratt is often hard to locate, but when Booth needs details about his whereabouts or simply wants to get a message to him, the task is as simple as walking to Sixth and H Streets, where his mother keeps a boardinghouse. Mary Surratt is an attractive widow in her early forties whose husband died from drink, forcing her to move to Washington from the Maryland countryside to make a living. Like her son, Mary is an active Confederate sympathizer who has been involved with spying and smuggling weapons.

She also runs a pro-Confederate tavern in the Maryland town of Surrattsville, where she and her late husband once owned a tobacco farm. The Maryland countryside is untouched by war and not occupied by Union troops.

Washington, D.C., with its Federal employees and Union loyalties, is a city whose citizens are all too prone to report any conversation that suggests pro-Confederate leanings, making it a dangerous place for people like Mary Surratt and John Wilkes Booth. Her boardinghouse and Pumphrey’s stable are two of the few places they can speak their minds. For Booth, a man who deeply enjoys doing just that, such locations are safe havens.

It would seem natural that Booth tell the others about his new plan. They might have insights into the best possible means of escape: roads under construction or in need of repair, overcrowded streets, bridges still under wartime guard—for the only way out of Washington, D.C., is on a boat or over a bridge.

The first exit is via the Georgetown Aqueduct, a mile and a half northwest of the White House. The second is Long Bridge, three blocks south of the White House. The third is Benning’s Bridge, on the east side of town. And the last one is the Navy Yard Bridge, on Eleventh Street.

But Booth has already made up his mind: the Navy Yard Bridge. The other three lead into Virginia, with its plethora of roadblocks and Union soldiers. But the Navy Yard Bridge will take him into the quiet backcountry of Maryland, home to smugglers and back roads. Friends like Mary Surratt and Dr. Samuel Mudd can offer their homes as way stations for a man on the run, storing weapons for him and providing a place to sleep and eat before getting back on the road. The only drawback is that sentries man the bridge and no traffic is allowed in or out of Washington after ten P.M.

Booth wants to see those sentries for himself. Tonight. Which is why he’s come for a horse. He doesn’t tell Pumphrey, just to be on the safe side. In the end it doesn’t matter: Booth’s favorite horse has already been rented.

Not the least bit discouraged, Booth walks up to Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street. This converted Baptist church is Booth’s touchstone. After it was burned to the ground in 1863, owner John Ford rebuilt it as a “magnificent thespian temple,” replacing the pews with seats and transforming the deacons’ stalls into private boxes. Upon completion, Ford’s became the most state-of-the-art theater in D.C.

Booth performed one night at Ford’s in mid-March, but his theater appearances are few and far between these days. (If asked, he explains that he is taking a hiatus to dabble in the oil business.) He still, however, has his mail sent to Ford’s, and his buggy is parked in a space behind the theater that was specially created for him by a carpenter and sceneshifter named Ned Spangler. Booth uses Spangler often for such favors and odd jobs. Thirty-nine and described by friends as “a very good, efficient drudge,” the hard-drinking Spangler often sleeps in either the theater or a nearby stable. Despite the late hour, Booth knows he will find him at Ford’s.

Inside the theater, rehearsals are under way for a one-night-only performance of the farce Our American Cousin. Like most actors, Booth knows it well.

Booth finds Spangler backstage, befuddled, as usual. He asks the stagehand to clean up his carriage and find a buyer. Spangler is devastated—a great many hours of work have gone into modifying the theater’s storage space so that the carriage will fit. It’s a waste for Booth to sell the carriage, and Spangler tells him so.

“I have no further use for it,” Booth replies. “And anyway, I’ll soon be leaving town.” Booth will not say where he’s going, leaving Spangler even more befuddled.

The word “assassin” comes from “Hashshashin,” the name of a group of hit men who worked for Persian kings between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries. One of their jobs was to execute the Knights Templar, a legendary band of Christian warriors known for their cunning and ferocity in battle. Legend says that the reward for a successful execution was being able to visit a lush royal garden filled with milk, honey, hashish, and concubines.

None of those things await John Wilkes Booth. He is everything an effective assassin should be: methodical, passionate, determined, and an excellent strategist and planner. He is prone to depression, as many assassins are, but his ability to turn angst into rage makes him even more dangerous. He expects no reward for killing Lincoln, though infamy would be nice.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lee’s surrender at Appomattox is just two days old, but events are moving so quickly that it might as well be two months.

The citizens of Washington have spent today sleeping off their celebratory hangover. Now, as evening falls, they again spill out into the streets and sip a drink or two. Just like that, the party starts all over. As it grows and becomes more rowdy, every guzzle and utterance has a hum, an anticipation: Abraham Lincoln is speaking tonight. Love him or hate him, the president of the United States is making a personal appearance at the White House, and everyone wants to see it.

And then, once again, the crowd is on the march. The spring air is thick with a warm mist as the sea of humanity parades down Pennsylvania Avenue. Thousands upon thousands are on their way to hear Lincoln speak, trampling the White House lawn and standing up to their ankles in the mud of once-manicured daffodil beds, pushing and straining against one another, climbing into trees, and even pressing up against the great building itself. All are desperate to be as close to Lincoln as possible. But hungover, dehydrated, and sullen, this is not the lighthearted crowd of the night before. It is something akin to a lynch mob, thirsty for Lincoln’s words, and yet ready to pass judgment on them.

And this is what the mob wants to hear: the South must be punished.

These men and women of the North, who have endured the loss of their sons, brothers, and husbands, want vengeance. They want the Confederate leaders and generals hanged, they want the South to pay war reparations, and they want Lincoln’s speech to be full of the same self-righteous indignation they feel so powerfully in their hearts.

Booth leans against a tall tree, using it as a buffer against the crowd. He is close enough that Lincoln will be a mere pistol shot away. With him are two co-conspirators. David Herold is a former pharmacy clerk who was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Like Booth, he possesses matinee-idol good looks. But he is more educated and rugged. Herold’s degree comes from Georgetown, and he is fond of spending his leisure time with a rifle in his hand, hunting animals. It was John Surratt who introduced the two, four months earlier. Since then, Herold has been an impassioned and committed member of Booth’s team.

The second co-conspirator is Lewis Powell—who also goes by the name Lewis Payne—a twenty-year-old who served as a Confederate soldier and spy before joining Booth’s cause. Like Herold, he has fallen under Booth’s spell.

The actor hasn’t told either man that the plan has changed from kidnapping to assassination. That can wait. He brought them along to hear the speech, hoping that some phrase or anticipated course of action will fill them with rage. Then, and only then, will Booth let them in on his new plan.

Soon Lincoln stands before an open second-story window, a scroll of paper in one hand. The president is wearing the same black garb he usually wears but no hat. He is somber. His speech is now written, and he is ready to give it.

Unseen by the crowd, Mary Lincoln shows her husband her support by standing next to him. She has invited Clara Harris, her dear friend and the daughter of a New York senator, to stand with her and witness this historical moment.

Outside, the mere sight of Lincoln elicits a prolonged ovation. The applause rolls on and on and on, continuing even as Lincoln tries to speak.

The crowd cannot possibly know the tremendous weight pressing down on Lincoln’s shoulders. Looking out into the audience, he prepares to tell them about the daunting task ahead and how the ability to trust the southern states to peacefully rejoin the Union will be as great a challenge to the nation as the war itself. Lincoln clearly sees the faces of the crowd, with their spontaneous smiles and unabashed joy, and prepares to deliver a speech that is anything but warmhearted. It is, in fact, a heavy, ponderous, de facto State of the Union address, specifically designed to undercut the revelry and prepare America for years of more pain and struggle.

The president begins gently. “We meet this evening not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” Lincoln says. He thanks General Grant and the army for their struggle, and promises to have a national day of celebration very soon, with a great parade through Washington.

Lincoln is one of the best speakers in America, if not the world. He can read the mood of a crowd and adjust the cadence and rhythm of his voice for maximum effect, coaxing whatever emotion or response is needed to hold the audience in the palm of his hand. Lincoln’s voice is clear, his pronunciation distinct. He understands the power of words and emphasizes certain phrases to make a lasting impression. The Gettysburg Address is perhaps the best example of Lincoln’s oratorical genius.

But tonight there is no theatricality. No tricks. Just cold, hard facts, delivered in a somber and even depressing monotone. The speech is so long and so unexciting that people in the audience begin shifting their feet and then lowering their heads and slipping away into the night, off to search for a real celebration. Booth stays, of course. He doesn’t want to miss a single word. He listens as Lincoln talks of extending suffrage to literate blacks and those who fought for the Union.

Booth seethes at the outrageous notion that slaves be considered equal citizens of the United States, able to own property, vote, run for elected office, and maybe even marry white women. Suffrage, as preposterous as it sounds, means a black man might someday become president of the United States. Booth cannot let this ever happen.

“That means nigger citizenship,” he hisses, pointing to the navy revolver on Powell’s hip. Fourteen inches long, with a pistol sight and a .36-caliber round, the Colt has more than enough pop to kill Lincoln from such close range. “Shoot him now,” Booth commands Powell. “Put a bullet in his head right this instant.”

Powell is a dangerous young man, with powerful shoulders and a psychotic temper. But he refuses to draw his weapon. He is terrified of offending Booth but even more afraid of this mob, which would surely tear him limb from limb.

Booth sizes up the situation. It would be easy enough to grab Powell’s gun and squeeze off a shot or two before the crowd overpowers him. But now is not the time to be impulsive. Booth certainly doesn’t tell this to Powell. Instead he lets Powell believe that he has let Booth down. Only when Powell believes that he has really and truly disappointed Booth will he begin thinking of ways to make it up to him. And that’s when Booth will tell him about his amazing new plan.

“I’ll put him through,” Booth sneers, planting another seed about assassination in the minds of Powell and Herold. “By God. I’ll put him through.”

Then Booth spins around and fights his way back out of the crowd. Twenty-four hours ago he was still thinking of ways to kidnap the president. Now he knows just where and how and when he will shoot Abraham Lincoln dead.

The date will be Thursday, April 13.

Or, as it was known back in Julius Caesar’s time, the ides.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“It seems strange how much there is in the Bible about dreams,” Lincoln says thoughtfully, basking in the afterglow of his speech. It is just after ten P.M. The people of Washington have moved their party elsewhere, and the White House lawn is nearly empty. Lincoln is having tea and cake in the Red Room with Mary, Senator James Harlan, and a few friends. Among them is Ward Hill Lamon, the close friend with the beer-barrel girth. Lamon, the United States marshal for the District of Columbia, has warned Lincoln for more than a year that someone, somewhere will try to kill him. The lawman listens to the president intently, with a veteran policeman’s heightened sense of foreboding, sifting and sorting through each word.

Lincoln continues: “There are, I think, some sixteen chapters in the Old Testament and four or five in the New in which dreams are mentioned … . If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that in the old days, God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.”

Mary Lincoln smiles nervously at her husband. His melancholy tone has her fearing the worst. “Why? Do you believe in dreams?”

Yes, Lincoln believes in dreams, in dreams and in nightmares and in their power to haunt a man. Night is a time of terror for Abraham Lincoln. The bodyguards standing watch outside his bedroom hear him moan in his sleep as his worries and anxieties are unleashed by the darkness, when the distractions and the busyness of the day can no longer keep them at bay. Very often he cannot sleep at all. Lincoln collapsed from exhaustion just a month ago. He is pale, thirty-five pounds underweight, and walks with the hunched, painful gait of a man whose shoes are filled with pebbles. One look at the bags under his eyes and even hardened newspapermen write that he needs to conserve his energies—not just to heal the nation but to live out his second term. At fifty-six years old, Abraham Lincoln is spent.

There have been threats against Lincoln’s life ever since he was first elected.

Gift baskets laden with fruit were sent to the White House, mostly from addresses in the South. The apples and pears and peaches were very fresh—and very deadly, their insides injected with poison. Lincoln had the good sense to have them all tested before taking a chance and chomping down into a first fatal bite.

Then there was the Baltimore Plot, in 1861, in which a group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle planned to shoot Lincoln as he traveled to Washington for the inauguration. The plot was foiled, thanks to brilliant detective work by Pinkerton agents. In a strange twist, many newspapers mocked Lincoln for the way he eluded the assassins by wearing a cheap disguise as he snuck into Washington. His enemies made much of the deception, labeling Lincoln a coward and refusing to believe that such a plot existed in the first place. The president took the cheap shots to heart.

The Baltimore Plot taught Lincoln a powerful message about public perception. He adopted a veneer of unshakable courage from that day forward. Now he would never dream of traveling in disguise. He moves freely throughout Washington, D.C. Since 1862 he has enjoyed military protection beyond the walls of the White House, but it was only late in 1864, as the war wound down and the threats became more real, that Washington’s Metropolitan Police assigned a select group of officers armed with .38-caliber pistols to protect Lincoln on a more personal basis. Two remain at his side from eight A.M. to four P.M. Another stays with Lincoln until midnight, when a fourth man takes the graveyard shift, posting himself outside Lincoln’s bedroom or following the president through the White House on his insomniac nights.

The bodyguards are paid by the Department of the Interior, and their job description, strangely enough, specifically states that they are to protect the White House from vandals.

Protecting Lincoln is second on their list of priorities.

If he were the sort of man to worry about his personal safety, Lincoln wouldn’t allow such easy public access to the White House. There is no fence or gate blocking people from entering the White House at this time. The doorman is instructed to allow citizens to roam the first floor. Friends and strangers alike can congregate inside the building all day long, seeking political favors, stealing scraps of the curtains as keepsakes, or just peering in at the president while he works. Some petitioners even sleep on the floor in the hallways, hoping to gain a moment of Lincoln’s time.

Lincoln’s bright young secretary John Hay frets constantly about his boss’s safety. “The President is so accessible that any villain can feign business, and, while talking with him, draw a razor and cut his throat,” Hay worries aloud, “and some minutes might elapse after the murderer’s escape before we could discover what had been done.” Lincoln, however, reminds Hay that being president of the United States stipulates that he be a man of the people. “It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he were, or were assuming to be an emperor,” he reminds them.

Death is no stranger to Abraham Lincoln, and in that way it is less terrifying. The Lincolns’ three-year-old son Edward died of tuberculosis in 1850. In 1862, the Lincolns lost eleven-year-old Willie to a fever. Willie was a spirited child, fond of wrestling with his father and riding his pony on the White House lawn. Mary, who already suffered from a mental disorder that made her prone to severe mood swings, was emotionally destroyed by the loss of her boys. Even as Lincoln was mired in the war and dealing with his own grief, he devoted hours to tending to Mary and the silent downward spiral that seemed to define her daily existence. He indulged her by allowing her to spend lavishly, to the point of putting him deeply in debt, though he is by nature a very simple and frugal man. Also to please Mary, he accompanied her to a night at the theater or to a party when he would much rather conserve his energies by relaxing with a book at the White House. And while this indulgence has worked to some extent, and Mary Lincoln has gotten stronger over time, Lincoln of all people knows that she is one great tragedy away from losing her mind.

Normally, their history precludes Lincoln from talking about death with Mary present. But now, surrounded by friends and empowered by the confessional tone of that night’s speech, he can’t help himself.

“I had a dream the other night, which has haunted me since,” he admits soulfully.

“You frighten me,” Mary cries.

Lincoln will not be stopped. Ten days ago, he begins, “I went to bed late.”

Ten days ago he was in City Point, each man and woman in the room calculates. It was the night Lincoln stood alone on the top deck of the River Queen, watching Grant’s big guns blow the Confederate defenders of Petersburg to hell. “I had been waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.”

In addition to being the consummate public speaker, Lincoln is also a master storyteller. No matter how heavy the weight of the world, he invests himself in a story, adjusting the tone and cadence of his voice and curling his lips into a smile as he weaves his tale, until the listener eventually leans in, desperate to hear more.

But now there is pain in his voice and not a hint of a smile. Lincoln isn’t telling a story but reliving an agony. “There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms. Every object was familiar to me. But where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this?”

Lincoln is lost in the world of that dream. Yet his audience, uncomfortable as it may feel, is breathless with anticipation. “Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and shocking, I kept on until I arrived in the East Room, which I entered. There I was met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. And there were a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was the answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.”

Mary can’t take it anymore. “That is horrid,” she wails. “I wish you had not told it.”

Lincoln is pulled back to reality, no longer sound asleep on the River Queen but sitting with a somewhat shell-shocked gathering of dignitaries in the here and now. Young Clara Harris, in particular, looks traumatized. “Well it was only a dream, Mary,” he chides. “Let us say no more about it.”

A moment later, seeing the uneasiness in the room, Lincoln adds, “Don’t you see how it will all turn out? In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow that was killed.”

His words convince no one, especially not Mary.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After a light breakfast and a night of restless sleep, Booth walks the streets of Washington, his mind filled with the disparate strands of an unfinished plan. The more he walks, the more it all comes together.

It is the morning after Lincoln’s speech and the third day since Lee’s surrender.

Booth frames every action through the prism of the dramatic, a trait that comes from being born and raised in an acting household. As he builds the assassination scheme in his head, layer by layer, everything from the location to its grandiosity is designed to make him the star performer in an epic scripted tale. His will be the biggest assassination plot ever, and his commanding performance will guarantee him an eternity of recognition.

He knows there will be an audience. By the morning after Lincoln’s speech Booth has decided to shoot the president inside a theater, the one place in the world where Booth feels most comfortable. Lincoln is known to attend the theater frequently. In fact, he has seen Booth perform—although Lincoln’s presence in the house so angered Booth that he delivered a notably poor performance.

So the theater it will be. Booth has performed at several playhouses in Washington. He knows their hallways and passages by heart. A less informed man might worry about being trapped inside a building with a limited number of exits, no windows, and a crowd of witnesses—many of them able-bodied men just back from the war. But not John Wilkes Booth.

His solitary walk takes him past many such soldiers. The army hasn’t been disbanded yet, so they remain in uniform. Even someone as athletic as Booth looks far less rugged than these men who have spent so much time in the open air, their bodies lean and hard from hours on the march. If he thought about it, their familiarity with weapons and hand-to-hand combat would terrify Booth, with his choreographed stage fights and peashooter pistol.

But Booth is not scared of these men. In fact, he wants to linger for a moment at center stage. With the stage lights shining down on his handsome features, clutching a dagger with “America, Land of the Free” inscribed on the blade, he plans to spend what will surely be the last seconds of his acting career making a political statement. “Sic semper tyrannis,” he will bellow in his most vibrant thespian delivery: Thus always to tyrants.

The dagger is useless as a stage prop. Booth has no specific plans to use it, knowing that if he fires a shot from a few feet away and it misses, there will be no chance to run at Lincoln and stab him. He has borrowed the idea from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which he performed six months earlier on Broadway with his two actor brothers, both of whom he despises. Booth, ironically, played Marc Antony, a character whose life is spared from a potential assassin.

Those performances provided Booth with his inspiration about the ides. In Roman times it was a day of reckoning.

The ides are tomorrow.

Booth walks faster, energized by the awareness that he hasn’t much time.

He must find out whether Lincoln will be attending the theater tomorrow night and, if so, which one. He must find out which play is being performed, so that he can select just the right moment in the show for the execution—a moment with few actors on stage, if possible, so that when he stops to utter his immortal line there won’t be a crowd to tackle him. The details of his escape are still fuzzy, but the basic plan is to gallop out of Washington on horseback and disappear into the loving arms of the South, where friends and allies and even complete strangers who have heard of his daring deed will see that he makes it safely to Mexico.

But that’s not all.

There are rumors that General Grant will be in town. If he attends the theater with Lincoln, which is a very real possibility, Booth can kill the two most prominent architects of the South’s demise within seconds.

And yet Booth wants even more. He has been an agent of the Confederacy for a little less than a year and has had long conversations with the leaders of the Confederate Secret Service and men like John Surratt, discussing what must be done to topple the Union. He has, at his disposal, a small cadre of like-minded men prepared to do his bidding. He personally witnessed the northern crowd’s malice toward the South at Lincoln’s speech last night. Rather than just kill Lincoln and Grant, he now plans to do nothing less than undertake a top-down destruction of the government of the United States of America.

Vice President Andrew Johnson is an obvious target. He is first in line to the presidency, lives at a nearby hotel, and is completely unguarded. Like all Confederate sympathizers, Booth views the Tennessee politician as a turncoat for siding with Lincoln.

Secretary of State William H. Seward, whose oppressive policies toward the South have long made him a target of Confederate wrath, is on the list as well.

The deaths of Lincoln, Grant, Johnson, and Seward should be more than enough to cause anarchy.

To Lewis Powell, the former Confederate spy who watched Lincoln’s speech with Booth, will go the task of killing Secretary Seward, who, at age sixty-three, is currently bedridden, after a near-fatal carriage accident. He was traveling through Washington with his son Frederick and daughter Fanny when the horses bolted. While reaching for the reins to try to stop them, Seward caught the heel of one of his new shoes on the carriage step and was hurled from the cab, hitting the street so hard that bystanders thought he’d been killed. Secretary Seward has been confined to his bed for a week with severe injuries and is on an around-the-clock course of pain medication. Seward has trouble speaking; he has no chance of leaping from the bed to elude a surprise attack.

Powell’s job should be as simple as sneaking into the Seward home, shooting the sleeping secretary in bed, then galloping away to join Booth for a life of sunshine and easy living in Mexico.

For the job of killing Johnson, Booth selects a simpleton drifter named George Atzerodt, a German carriage repairer with a sallow complexion and a fondness for drink. To him will go the job of assassinating the vice president at the exact same moment Booth is killing Lincoln. Atzerodt, however, still thinks the plan is to kidnap Lincoln. He was brought into the plot for his encyclopedic knowledge of the smuggling routes from Washington, D.C., into the Deep South. Booth suspects that Atzerodt may be unwilling to go along with the new plan. Should that be the case, Booth has a foolproof plan in mind to blackmail Atzerodt into going along.

Booth has seen co-conspirators come and go since last August. Right now he has three: Powell, Atzerodt, and David Herold, the Georgetown graduate who also accompanied Booth on the night of Lincoln’s speech. One would imagine that each man would be assigned a murder victim. Logically, Herold’s job would be to kill Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the man who trampled the Constitution by helping Lincoln suspend the writ of habeas corpus and did more than any other to treat the South like a bastard child. Stanton is the second-most-powerful man in Washington, but in the end no assassin is trained on him. Instead, Herold will act as the dim-witted Powell’s guide, leading his escape out of Washington in the dead of night.

Why was the secretary of war spared?

The answer may come from a shadowy figure named Lafayette Baker. Early in the war, Baker distinguished himself as a Union spy. Secretary of State William Seward hired him to investigate Confederate communications that were being routed through Maryland. Baker’s success in this role saw him promoted to the War Department, where Secretary of War Edwin Stanton gave him full power to create an organization known as the National Detective Police. This precursor to the Secret Service was a counterterrorism unit tasked with seeking out Confederate spy networks in Canada, New York, and Washington.

But Lafayette Baker was a shifty character, with loyalties undefined, except for his love of money and of himself, though not necessarily in that order. Secretary Stanton soon grew weary of him, so Baker returned to New York City. His movements during this time are murky, as befitting a man who thinks himself a spy, but one elaborate theory ties together his activities with those of John Wilkes Booth. This theory suggests that Baker worked as an agent for a Canadian outfit known as the J. J. Chaffey Company. Baker received payments totaling almost $150,000 from that firm, an unheard-of sum at the time. The J. J. Chaffey Company also paid John Wilkes Booth nearly $15,000 between August 24 and October 5, 1864. He was paid in gold, credited to the Bank of Montreal. In the same month the last payment was made to him, Booth traveled to Montreal to collect the money and rendezvous with John Surratt and other members of the Confederate Secret Service to plot the Lincoln issue.

The common thread in the several mysterious payments and missives involving Baker and Booth is the mailing address 178¹/₂ Water Street. This location, quite mysteriously, is referenced in several documents surrounding payments between the J. J. Chaffey Company, Baker, and Booth.

To this day, no one has discovered why the J. J. Chaffey Company paid Lafayette Baker and John Wilkes Booth for anything. A few clues exist, including a telegram sent on April 2, 1865, the very same day on which Lincoln stood atop the deck of the River Queen to watch the fall of Petersburg. A telegram was sent from 1781/2 Water Street to a company in Chicago. “J. W. Booth will ship oysters until Saturday 15th,” it reads, intimating that Booth, a man who never worked a day in his life in the shipping or the oyster business, was involved in some kind of project that was totally inappropriate for his skills. And yet no one has been able to conclusively determine what the telegram alluded to.

Lafayette Baker freely admitted that he had tapped Secretary of War Stanton’s telegraph lines, though he never explained why he did what he did. Baker would have known that if Lincoln were assassinated, ascension to the presidency could eventually fall to Stanton—the man who ran against Lincoln in 1860. The United States has had a succession plan in place since 1792, with the vice president replacing the fallen president, as when Zachary Taylor died in office and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. If a more elaborate assassination plot were hatched, one that killed Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward along with President Lincoln, a skilled constitutional scholar like Edwin Stanton could attempt to manipulate the process in his favor—and perhaps even become president. This connection between Baker, Booth, and Stanton continues to intrigue and befuddle scholars. Why was Baker, a spy, paid an exorbitant amount for his services? And why did John Wilkes Booth secure a healthy payment from the same company?

Clues such as this point to Stanton’s involvement, but no concrete connection has ever been proven. Circumstantially, he was involved. Secretary Stanton employed Baker, who was in regular contact with Surratt and Booth. Some historians believe that Stanton fired Baker as a cover and that the two remained in close contact.

Or so the elaborate theory goes.

Whether or not that is true, Stanton will be the sole reason that Baker’s role in the dramatic events of April 1865 is hardly over.

Booth is satisfied that his plan is simple enough that the synchronized slayings will not tax the mental capacities of his underlings. Now all he needs to do is find Lincoln.

The odds of the Lincolns’ remaining in the White House on such an auspicious night of celebration are almost nonexistent. The president and Mrs. Lincoln are known to be fond of the theater and prone to making their public appearances in such a venue. They will be either there or at one of the many parties being held to celebrate the city’s Grand Illumination.

If it is to be an Illumination party, Booth will canvass the city’s notable residences for signs of a celebration. Once the president is located, the next step will be waiting for a moment when he is unguarded, whereupon Booth can use his celebrity to gain entrance and then shoot him.

If it is to be the theater, the obvious choices are either the Grover or Ford’s, both of which are staging lavish productions. Booth must reacquaint himself with their floor plans so that when the moment comes he can act without thinking.

Booth turns the corner onto Pennsylvania Avenue. First stop: Grover’s Theater. The assassination will be tomorrow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Inside the White House, just a few blocks from where John Wilkes Booth is walking the streets, a beaming Mary Lincoln holds a slim leather-bound copy of Julius Caesar. She is in a good mood for a change, and the new book is certainly helping her disposition. The president will be thrilled by her purchase. This is most important to Mary Lincoln. Even in her lowest moods, she craves the attention and affection of her husband.

Lincoln’s fondness for all things Shakespeare is well known. While he enjoys lowbrow entertainment, like the comedian Barney Williams, who performs in blackface, he never misses the chance to attend a Shakespearean tragedy. During one two-month span in the winter of 1864, he saw Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and, of course, Julius Caesar.

The actor playing all the lead roles was Edwin Booth, John’s older brother. In addition to his acting, he did the Lincolns an inadvertent favor by saving the life of their eldest son. When twenty-year-old Union officer Robert Todd Lincoln was shoved from a crowded railway platform into the path of an oncoming train, it was Edwin Booth who snatched him by the coat collar and pulled him back to safety. Robert never mentioned the incident to his father, but his commanding officer, Ulysses S. Grant, personally wrote a letter of thanks to the actor. Edwin’s brother’s reaction to this incident has never been determined—if he knew at all. This is the second remarkable coincidence linking Robert Todd Lincoln to John Wilkes Booth, the first being his infatuation with Lucy Hale, Booth’s fiancee.

Robert is due back in Washington any day, as is Grant. Lincoln’s spirits will soar at the sight of both men, but in the meantime Mary cannot wait to see his face light up when she presents him with Julius Caesar.

Lincoln is fond of two books more than any other: the Bible and Shakespeare’s collected works. Like his dog-eared Bible, Lincoln’s volume of Shakespeare has become frayed and worn over the years. This brand-new copy of Julius Caesar will certainly keep the president’s mood upbeat, which, in turn, will do wonders for Mary’s morale. Their euphorias and depressions are so closely intertwined that it’s hard to say which one’s emotional peaks and valleys influence the other more.

Lincoln is not at the White House right now. He’s taken a walk over to the War Department, where he sits on a comfortable sofa, hard at work on the business of healing the nation. His first test is immediate. The Virginia legislature is about to convene in Richmond. These are the same elected representatives who once voted to leave the Union. Now this “rebel legislature” will meet in the giant columned building designed by Thomas Jefferson, determined to rebuild the shattered state and return it to its former glory.

On the surface, this is a good thing. Lincoln himself urged the legislature to convene during a visit to Richmond the previous week, saying that “the prominent and influential men of their respective counties should come together and undo their own work.”

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the brilliant Ohio lawyer who is for whatever reason not on Booth’s list of targets, and in whose office Lincoln now sits, is strongly opposed. He tells Lincoln that to “place such powers in the Virginia legislature would be giving away the scepter of the conqueror, that it would transfer the result of the victory of our arms to the very legislature which four years before said, ‘give us war.’”

Lincoln disagrees. He is reluctant to see the United States Army turned into an occupying force, policing the actions of legislatures throughout the South. But he also realizes that by allowing Virginia’s lawmakers to meet without close Federal observation, he is setting a dangerous precedent. There would be nothing to stop other southern states from passing laws that conspire against the Federal government—in effect, keeping the Confederacy’s ideals alive.

Stanton and Lincoln were once sworn rivals, two opinionated and charismatic midwesterners who came to Washington with their own personal visions of what the country needed. They are physical opposites—Stanton’s stump to Lincoln’s beanpole. Stanton didn’t vote for Lincoln in 1860, but that didn’t stop the president from crossing party lines to name him attorney general, then secretary of war. Lincoln’s low wartime popularity was matched only by that of Stanton, who was relentless in his prosecution of any Union officer concealing Confederate sympathies. “He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing,” Lincoln once said of Stanton. “I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him I should be destroyed.”

As General Sam Grant glibly described Stanton: “He was an able constitutional lawyer and jurist, but the Constitution was not an impediment to him while the war lasted.”

Stanton, with a graying beard extending halfway down his chest, has the sort of strong-willed personality that terrifies timid souls. The Civil War may be over, but Lincoln has made it clear that the secretary of war will be instrumental in helping the country rebuild. He trusts Stanton’s counsel and uses him as a sounding board when tough decisions like this must be made. In many ways, Stanton does not behave as if he is subordinate to Lincoln. He expresses himself without fear of edit or censure, knowing that while Lincoln has strong opinions of his own, he is a good listener who can be swayed by a solid argument.

Now Stanton paces before the couch where Lincoln reclines, compiling his detailed argument against allowing the Virginia legislature to meet. He warns of the laws that might be passed, limiting the freedom of former slaves. He notes that the legislature has proven itself to be untrustworthy. And he reminds Lincoln that during his recent visit to Richmond the president made it clear that the Virginia lawmakers were being given only conditional authority—but that these same untrustworthy men are surely capable of ignoring those limits once they convene.

At last, Stanton explains his idea for temporary military governments in the southern states until order can be restored.

Lincoln doesn’t speak until Stanton finishes. Almost every single one of Stanton’s opinions runs contrary to Lincoln’s. Nonetheless, Lincoln hears Stanton out, then lets his thoughts percolate.

As Stanton looks on, Lincoln slowly rises off the couch and draws himself up to his full, towering height. He walks to the great oak desk near the window, where he silently composes a telegram withdrawing permission for the Virginia legislature to meet. For those representatives who have already traveled to Richmond for the session, he guarantees safe passage home.

Lincoln hands the telegram to Stanton, whose thick beard cannot hide his look of satisfaction after he finishes reading. Calling the wording “exactly right,” he hands the telegram to his clerk.

During the course of the Civil War, Lincoln’s use of telegrams—his “t-mail”—made him the first leader in world history to communicate immediately with his generals on the battlefield. He has sent, literally, thousands of these messages through the Department of War. This is his last.

On the walk back to the White House, Lincoln composes another sort of note in his head. It is to Mary, a simple invitation to go for a carriage ride on Friday afternoon. His words are playful and romantic, a reminder of the way things were before the war, and before the death of Willie. Their eldest son, Robert, is due home from the war any day. Surely, the cloud of melancholy that has hovered over the Lincolns is about to lift.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The ides. As Booth takes the train to Baltimore, hoping to reenlist a former conspirator for that night’s expected executions, General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, arrive in Washington at dawn. They have taken an overnight boat from City Point, Virginia. Grant is in no mood to be there. He is eager to push on to New Jersey to see their four children, but Secretary of War Stanton has specifically requested that the general visit the capital and handle a number of war-related issues. Grant’s plan is to get in and get out within twenty-four hours, with as little fuss as possible. With him are his aide Colonel Horace Porter and two sergeants to manage the Grants’ luggage.

Little does Grant know that an adoring Washington, D.C., is waiting to wrap its arms around him. “As we reached our destination that bright morning in our boat,” Julia later exclaimed, “every gun in and near Washington burst forth—and such a salvo!—all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.”

If anything, Grant is even more beloved than the president right now. Strangers cheer the Grants’ open-air carriage on its way to the Willard Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. As they pull up to the entrance, workers are on the roof, installing the gas jets that will spell out UNION for that evening’s Grand Illumination—a mass lighting of every candle, gas lamp, and firework in the city. Thousands upon thousands of people are now streaming into Washington to witness what will be an attempt to turn night into day as yet another celebration of war’s end.

Grant, who has seen more than his share of fiery explosions, could not care less about the Illumination. Their journey has been an odyssey, and the Grants are exhausted. Since leaving Lee at Appomattox, Grant has endured two days of train derailments, another day waiting for a steamer in City Point, and then the dawn-to-dusk journey up the Potomac. But standing beside his beloved Julia revives Grant.

They have been a couple for more than twenty years and have endured many a long separation, thanks to the military life. It was Julia’s letters that sustained him during the Mexican War, when he was a homesick young lieutenant. And it was Julia who stood by her husband’s side during the 1850s, when he was discharged from the army and failed in a succession of businesses. They are happiest in each other’s company. Both are still young—he is not quite forty-three; she is thirty-nine. They have their whole lives in front of them. The sooner they can flee Washington, D.C., and get back to normal life, the better. And right now that means getting to their room, washing up, and letting the general race over to the War Department as quickly as possible.

There’s just one problem: the Grants don’t have a reservation at the Willard.

Grant has slept so many nights in impromptu battlefield lodgings procured on the fly by his staff that it never crossed his mind to send a telegram asking for a room. What he wants, he tells the flustered desk clerk, is a simple bedroom with an adjacent sitting room. It’s understood that Colonel Porter will need a room, too. The sergeants will bunk elsewhere.

The Willard Hotel is overbooked. Yet to allow the famous Ulysses S. Grant to take a room elsewhere would be an unthinkable loss of prestige.

Some way, somehow, rooms are instantly made available. Within minutes, Julia is unpacking their suitcases. Word about their location is already flying around Washington, and bundles of congratulatory telegrams and flowers soon flood the desk and bedroom. Julia will spend the afternoon reading each one, basking in the awareness that the man whose potential she had seen so long before, when he was just a quiet young lieutenant, has ascended from anonymity and disgrace to the level of great historical figure.

Not that General Grant cares. He just wants to get on with his business and get home. Within minutes, he and Porter meet in the lobby before the short walk to the War Department. It’s three blocks, just on the other side of the White House.

The two men step out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. At first the trek is easy, just two regular guys in uniform joining the sea of pedestrians, soldiers, and all those tourists pouring into the city for the Illumination. But Grant is hard to miss. Photographs of his bearded, expressionless face have been on the front pages of newspapers for more than a year. Soon the autograph seekers and the well-wishers, startled but elated by his presence, surround him. Porter tries to push them back, protecting his general in peacetime as he did in warfare. But he is just one man against many, and the diminutive Grant is swallowed by the mob. Porter pushes and elbows, grabbing Grant with one arm while shoving people back with the other. It’s a benevolent crowd, cheering for Grant even as they strain to touch him. But Porter knows a simple truth: this is a perfect opportunity for a disgruntled southerner to take a shot at Grant, then disappear in an instant.

Just when the situation begins to border on pandemonium, the Metropolitan Police come to their rescue. Grant and Porter are soon on their way again, this time inside a carriage, with a cavalry escort.

An introvert, Grant is pained by the attention and stares. Once inside the War Department, he hurries to formally conclude the logistics of war. Pen in hand and cigar clenched in his teeth, he tells the quartermaster general to stop ordering supplies and suspends the draft and further recruitment. With these orders, he saves the nation $4 million per day.

Though Grant hates public appearances, the city of Washington has planned the Grand Illumination celebration for this very night, specifically so he can be there. The Capitol dome will be lit, the Willard Hotel will illuminate the word UNION, and the governmental buildings are having a competition to see which can be the most brilliantly decorated. Stanton is fussing over the War Department’s display, which includes guns and flags as well as lights, while over at the Patent Office some five thousand candles will glow from every window. There will also be a massive fireworks display. And, of course, the bonfires that have blazed all week will still be burning bright. As intensely as Washington celebrated on Monday, Thursday night’s Grand Illumination will be even more monumental.

That afternoon, Grant meets with Lincoln in the Oval Office. The last time they met was the day after Petersburg fell, on that veranda in the midst of that shattered city. There, Grant promised Lincoln that he would catch Lee and end the war. Now that Grant has fulfilled that promise, a grateful Lincoln offers his congratulations. He calls for a carriage. The two men ride around the crowded streets of Washington with the top down, shocking the flood of arriving visitors, who can’t believe that they are actually laying eyes on President Lincoln and General Grant. The ride is Lincoln’s way of giving Grant his moment in the sun after so many months of being second-guessed and labeled a butcher and of deflecting the glory showered upon him onto the man whose genius made it all possible.

It works. The two men are loudly cheered on every street corner.

When it is done, they make plans to meet again that night for the Illumination. They will be the center of attention, these two men who won the Civil War, watched by one and all.

Meanwhile, John Wilkes Booth and his band of assassins tend to their work of sharpening knives and cleaning their pistols, eager for their night of reckoning.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The four conspirators squeeze into room 6 at the Herndon House hotel, a few blocks from the White House. Booth, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and George Atzerodt lounge on the chairs and perch on the edge of the bed as Booth talks them through the plan. His recruiting trip to Baltimore was unsuccessful. He is too agitated to sit, so he paces as he thinks out loud. The wooden floor becomes a stage, and his oration a performance that takes him from stage left to stage right, then back to stage left again as he breaks down the plan. The parties outside are neither a distraction nor an offense, but a reminder of why they have gathered. Logically, each man knows that there must be plenty of Confederate sympathizers in Washington, huddled in their homes with jaws clenched as they endure the revelry. But right now the would-be assassins feel that they are the only ones who can right the grievous wrong.

Lewis Powell is the youngest and most experienced of the conspirators. He is a tall, powerfully built, and otherwise very handsome man—save for his face being deformed on one side, thanks to a mule’s kick. Unlike the others, Powell has actually killed a man, and may have enjoyed it very much. During the war the Floridian fought in several major battles, was wounded at Gettysburg, successfully escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp, and worked for the Confederate Secret Service. He is a solid horseman and quick with a knife. Thanks to his military training, Powell knows the value of reconnaissance. He prepped for his attack that morning by walking past Secretary of State Seward’s home on Madison Place, scoping out the best possible ways in and out of the building. He boldly struck up a conversation with Seward’s male nurse, just to make sure the secretary was indeed at home.

The reconnaissance is good news for Booth. He thus knows the location of two of the intended victims. Now it is his job to find Lincoln. An afternoon talking to stage managers had led to the inescapable conclusion that Lincoln is not going to the theater tonight. Booth, it seems, will not have his grand theatrical moment. Much to his dismay, it appears as if shooting Lincoln will be as mundane as putting a bullet into his brain on a crowded street during the Grand Illumination and then running like hell.

It finally dawns on one very drunk George Atzerodt that the plan has shifted from kidnapping to murder. The only reason he joined the conspiracy was that, in addition to running a small carriage-repair business in Port Tobacco, Maryland, he moonlights as a smuggler, ferrying mail, contraband, and people across the broad Potomac into Virginia. It is a hardscrabble and often dangerous existence. Atzerodt’s role in the kidnapping was to be an act of commerce, not rebellion. He was to be paid handsomely to smuggle the bound-and-gagged Lincoln into the hands of the Confederates.

But there is no longer a Confederacy, no longer a kidnapping plot, no longer a need for a boat, and certainly no longer a need for a smuggler—at least in Atzerodt’s mind. The thirty-year-old German immigrant slurs that he wants out.

Booth calmly springs his blackmail.

Booth cannot do without Atzerodt. His boat and his knowledge of the Potomac’s currents are vital to their escape. A massive manhunt will surely begin the instant Lincoln is killed. Federal officials will seal off Washington, D.C., and canvass the Maryland and Virginia countryside, but with Atzerodt’s guidance Booth and his men will rush through rural Maryland ahead of the search parties, cross the Potomac, and then follow smugglers’ routes south to Mexico.

Booth has rehearsed for this moment. He knows his lines and recites them with great drama.

“Then we will do it,” Booth says, nodding at Herold and Powell, never taking his eyes off the drunk German. “But what will come of you?”

And then, as if pulling the solution out of thin air: “You had better come along and get your horse.”

At the word “horse,” Atzerodt’s heart skips a beat. He’s trapped. Booth long ago suggested that the two men share horses from time to time. The horse a man rides is part of his identity. By sharing Booth’s favorite horse—which seemed like such a simple and thoughtful gesture on the actor’s part all those weeks ago—Atzerodt is now visibly connected to the assassination plot. Atzerodt has ridden Booth’s horse all over Washington and has even helped him sell a few animals; so there will be no shortage of witnesses.

Atzerodt sighs and nods his head. Murder it is. There is no way out for him.

The time has come. The four men stand, aware that they are about to commit the greatest crime in the history of the United States.

Before opening the door, Booth reminds them that their post-assassination rendezvous point is the road to Nanjemoy, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Normally the sight of a lone horseman galloping out of Washington, D.C., long after dark would make the sentries guarding the bridges suspicious. But tonight is not a normal night. All those folks who’ve come into Washington for the Illumination will be making their way back home when it’s all done. Booth and his men will easily blend in with the same drunken bleating masses who are now making that wretched noise on the streets outside room 6.

If for some reason they can’t do the job tonight, they will remain in Washington and try again tomorrow.

Booth shakes hands with each man. They leave one at a time and go their separate ways.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

There once was a fifth conspirator, the one Booth traveled to Baltimore to corral the day before. Mike O’Laughlen, a former Confederate soldier who grew up across the street from Booth, was one of the first men recruited by him last August. Just a month earlier the two men had lain in wait together for a certain carriage making its way down the lonely country road to the Soldiers’ Home, only to find that its occupant was a Supreme Court justice instead of the president.

Hiding in the tall grass along the side of the road, O’Laughlen had weighed the repercussions of actually kidnapping the president of the United States and realized that he would hang by the neck until dead if caught. He was actually relieved that the carriage belonged to Salmon P. Chase instead of Lincoln.

The twenty-four-year-old engraver returned to Baltimore and put the kidnapping plot behind him. He wanted a normal life. When Booth came calling a week later with an even more far-fetched plot to kidnap the president by handcuffing him at the theater and then lowering his body to the stage, O’Laughlen shook his head and told Booth to go away.

But Booth is nothing if not relentless. In Baltimore, he tried to convince O’Laughlen to rejoin the conspiracy. O’Laughlen told the actor he didn’t want any part of the killing. Yet the same day he apparently changed his mind, and he traveled to Washington a short time later. O’Laughlen started drinking the minute he arrived, bellying up to the bar at a place called Rullman’s until his behavior became erratic. Like Booth, who now prowls Washington in the desperate hope of finding Lincoln, O’Laughlen prowls the bustling thoroughfares, unsure of what to do next.

Meanwhile, General Sam Grant, whose idea of a stellar evening is chain-smoking cigars and sipping whiskey, would be very happy staying in for the evening. But as Julia points out, General and Mrs. Grant have not attended a party together for quite some time. Sitting in their room on this very special night, no matter how luxurious the accommodations, would be a waste. Julia shows her husband invitation after invitation to party after party. She is thrilled to be in the city but also eager to leave as soon as possible to rejoin their four children. Knowing that they have perhaps just this one night in Washington, Grant agrees that they should venture out.

Reluctantly, Grant leaves the hotel. They engage a carriage to take them to the home of Secretary of War Stanton, who is holding a gala celebration for War Department employees. Four brass bands serenade the partygoers from nearby Franklin Square, and a fireworks demonstration will cap the night.

Grant has been a target ever since he took command of Lincoln’s army. But even with all the people in the streets he is unafraid. The war is over.

The Grants arrive at Stanton’s home. A bodyguard stands at the top of the steps, one of the few the general has encountered in Washington. The Grants are greeted with a loud round of applause as they join the partygoers, but they are soon lost in the sea of other prominent faces. Grant gets a drink and settles in to endure the politicking and glad-handing soon to head his way.

But the Grants have been followed. Mike O’Laughlen, wearing a dark suit, marches up the front steps of Stanton’s house and tries to crash the party. The sergeant providing security brushes him off, telling the unwanted guest, “If you wish to see him, step out on the pavement, or the stone where the carriage stops.”

O’Laughlen disappears into the night, only to return later asking to see Secretary Stanton. Coincidentally, Stanton and Grant are both standing just a few feet away, watching the fireworks. There is still something of the conspirator in O’Laughlen, a willingness to take risks where others might not. He takes a bold gamble, blends in with the crowd, and slips undetected into the party, despite the security detail. He then goes one better by walking over and standing directly behind Stanton.

But Mike O’Laughlen does nothing to harm the secretary of war. Nor does he bother Grant. The fact is, he doesn’t know what Stanton looks like, and as a former Confederate soldier with a deep respect for rank, he is too nervous to speak with Grant.

Observers will later remember the drunk in the dark coat and suggest that his intentions were to kill the general and the secretary. Nothing could be further from the truth: the surprising fact is that O’Laughlen is actually here to warn them about Booth. But even after all those drinks, Mike O’Laughlen still can’t summon the courage. He thinks of the repercussions and how if he informs on Booth, his childhood friend will most surely reveal the story about the kidnapping attempt four weeks earlier. That admission would mean the same jail sentence—or even execution—for O’Laughlen as for Booth.

No. Nothing good can come of telling Stanton or Grant a single detail of the plot. Mike O’Laughlen disappears into the night and drinks himself blind.

Meanwhile, a crowd gathers in front of Stanton’s home. For all his attempts at avoiding the limelight, word of Grant’s location has spread throughout the city. Cries of “Speech!” rock the night air, his admirers thoroughly unaware that Grant is terrified of public speaking.

Stanton comes to the rescue. Never afraid of expressing himself, the secretary throws out a few bon mots to pacify his audience. Grant says nothing, but the combination of a small wave to the crowd and Stanton’s spontaneous words are enough to satiate Grant’s fans. Soon the sidewalks are bare.

On the other side of town, John Wilkes Booth steps back into the National Hotel, frustrated and tired from hours of walking bar to bar, party to party, searching for Lincoln. The Deringer rests all too heavily in his coat pocket, in its barrel the single unfired round that could have changed the course of history. There has been no news of any other assassinations, so he can only assume that his conspirators have also failed—and he is right. Herold, Atzerodt, and Powell were all unable to conquer their fears long enough to cross the line from fanatic to assassin.

Perhaps tomorrow.

One mile away, in his White House bedroom, Abraham Lincoln slumbers peacefully. A migraine has kept him in for the night.

Hopefully that will not be the case tomorrow evening, for the Lincolns have plans to attend the theater.