Manhunt (11 page)

Secretary of State William H. Seward and daughter Fanny.

Verdi, interpreting Fred's hand gesture, asked: “You want to know whether your skull is broken or not?”

“Yes,” Fred replied.

Within half an hour Fred passed out for fifteen or twenty minutes, then woke up. Verdi and others helped him to bed, where he passed out again. When he awakened three days later, he had been unconscious for sixty hours. But he would live.

As the evening wore on, Fanny became increasingly fearful that Powell might return, or other assassins might be lurking in the house. Her mother ordered her not to wander off alone in the big mansion, but Fanny disobeyed and, prowling from room to room, searched alone—until others joined her—for concealed assassins. Finding none, she returned to her father's bed and sat beside him. Weakly, Seward lifted his left arm and opened a soothing hand to Fanny to calm and reassure her. His good, brave girl had done well this night.

The house became quiet again. Everywhere she looked Fanny saw signs of the horror that she and her family had just survived. “All the white woodwork of the entry was covered with great dashes of blood,” she wrote in her diary, “the drugget on the stairs was sprinkled with it, all the way down to the floor below … on the inner side of the door of father's room there was, in blood, the distinct impression of a hand … blood, blood, my thoughts seem drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor … the bed had been covered with blood—the blankets and sheets chopped with several blows of the knife.” Then she looked at herself: her hands, her arms, her long pretty dress, all drenched in blood. She could not stop screaming.

Sergeant Robinson, too, could not forget the blood, and later he sought a bizarre, gruesome relic of the battle that night. Might he, the fearless nurse queried the secretary of war, have the knife that Powell used to stab him and Secretary Seward? Stanton granted the unusual request:

Congress went one step further and proffered a generous and more conventional award: a gold medal was struck in Robinson's honor, and he was given $5,000 in cash. The obverse of the medal included a bust portrait of Robinson's profile in high relief, and the legend: “For his Heroic Conduct on the 14 Day of April 1865. In Saving the Life of Wm. H. Seward.” On the reverse, the engraver froze Robinson and Powell in perpetual combat, the assassin raising the knife high in the air while the sergeant held the striking arm at bay. Behind them, Seward lay helpless in bed, and Powell's revolver lay broken on the floor.

T
HE PRESIDENT'S BOX AT
F
ORD'S
T
HEATRE WAS ALSO DRENCHED
. in blood

After Booth's leap to the stage, the women attended to their men. Mary Lincoln turned to her left and stared at the president. He was motionless in the rocker, his head hung low, eyes shut, his chin resting on
his chest. He did not return her imploring gaze. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. She touched him; he did not stir. “Father … father!” she shouted into his right ear from just a few inches away. Lincoln did not react. Now frantic, Mary moved closer and tried to push his body into a more upright position. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, chest, and arms, all limp, offered no resistance. Lincoln had no visible wounds. There was no blood on his face or neck. His white linen shirt was unstained. Her touch left no wet, red spots upon her hands. But her loving hands had overlooked the back of his head. Mary Lincoln, terrified, uncomprehending, and by now nearly hysterical, clutched her husband's body and supported it in a sitting position in the chair.

Clara Harris lifted her eyes from the stage below and looked back into the box. She beheld Rathbone, wild-eyed, staggering, and clutching his upper left arm with his right hand. He could not suppress the copious flow of blood that flooded over his hand, and dripped on the luxurious Turkish carpet. Booth had struck him hard, and the knife had penetrated deep. Clara, who had seen the whole thing, never forgot the forceful swing of Booth's “practiced and powerful arm.” Superficially, Rathbone's wound appeared small—just a narrow puncture of the skin near the elbow, no more than about one and a half inches wide, mimicking the dimensions of the blade. But the knife had sliced deep inside the major's raised, parrying arm, parallel to the bone, and nearly to the shoulder, cutting an artery, nerves, and veins. Most of the damage was beneath the skin. Clara rushed to attend to her fiance's wound.

Down in the audience, more than fifteen hundred people went wild. Some playgoers climbed to the stage, looked up to the box, and shouted desperate queries to its occupants. “What has happened?” “Is the president alive?” Throughout the theatre hundreds of people turned to friends, spouses, and total strangers, all repeating the same questions: “Has the president been shot?” “Who was that man onstage?” “Was that a knife?” “What did he say?” Some women fainted. Innumerable, half-crazed voices cried out from all corners of the theatre in a frightening chorus of vengeance: “Kill the murderer!”; “Hang him!”; “Shoot him!”;
Cut his heart out!”; “Catch him!”; “Don't let him escape!” None of them realized that the assassin was already out the back door, safe from the reach of their vigilante howls. Like a violent spring storm, the climate inside Ford's became dark, ugly, and menacing. Under the dim glow of the hissing gaslights, people pushed one another to get to the stage. Others, in a panic to flee, shoved men, women, and children out of the aisles. The voices grew louder until nearly all fifteen hundred of them came together to create an angry roar. This was a mob.

Other voices, these pleading for assistance, not roaring for vengeance, arose from the mob. “Water!” “Has anyone any stimulants?” “Stand back!” “Give him air!” “Is there a doctor in the house?”

In the dress circle, sitting just a few yards from the door to the president's box, Charles Leale jumped up from his seat. Disregarding the aisles and customary route to the box, he raced there in a direct line, and, like a hurdler gone haywire, staggered and half vaulted over the cane-bottomed chairs obstructing his path as he shouldered his way past dazed playgoers. He joined a number of other men who were trying to get inside the box. But the door was locked.

Inside, Major Rathbone walked toward the sound of the beating fists. The men were pounding on the door like it was a drumhead, but their fists and shoulders could not break it open. They shouted to the occupants, if any of them were still alive, to unlock the door. Rathbone staggered forward, already feeling the effects of blood loss and shock. He cupped the hand of his good arm under the wooden music stand that Booth used to bar the door, and tried to pull it up. It wouldn't budge. He tried harder, then realized that the harder the men on the other side pushed, the more effective Booth's device became. It was too thick to snap, so every push created a tighter seal between the door panel and the head of the bar. “For God's sake open the door,” the voices pleaded. Rathbone shouted through the door to stop pushing—the door was barred. The men obeyed Rathbone's order and stepped back. Weakening rapidly, Rathbone pulled up with his remaining strength. The music stand popped free and nearly a dozen men rushed inside.

Dr. Leale, not in uniform, announced his rank and profession and stepped ahead of them. Immediately he saw all four occupants. Like an officer under enemy fire, he needed to regain his composure. “Halt!” he commanded himself silently. Do not panic. “Be calm,” he chided himself. Do your duty. Major Rathbone, standing between Leale and Lincoln, beseeched the doctor to treat him first, and as proof of his injury, he ostentatiously used his right hand to hold up his wounded left arm. Leale lifted Rathbone's chin, peered into his eyes, and, when “an almost instantaneous glance revealed the fact that he was in no immediate danger,” ignored the emotional major and rushed to the president's side.

Leale approached Mary Lincoln and introduced himself as a United States Army surgeon. Wordlessly, she thrust out her hand, and he grasped it tightly. Then she unleashed a torrent of pitiful pleas: “Oh, Doctor, is he dead? Can he recover? Will you take charge of him? Do what you can for him. Oh, my dear husband.” The doctor assured the first lady that he would do everything possible for her husband. As Mary wept bitterly, Leale released her hand and began his examination.

Lincoln looked dead. His eyes were closed, he was unconscious, and his head had fallen forward. Leale concluded, from Lincoln's “crouched-down sitting posture,” that if Mary had not held his body upright in the rocking chair, the president would have already tumbled to the floor. Leale took Lincoln's right radial pulse, but felt no movement of the artery. Just to be sure, Leale and others lifted Lincoln from the rocker and laid him in a recumbent position on the floor. While Leale held the president's head and shoulders, one of his hands felt a wet spot, invisible to the eye, on the left shoulder of Lincoln's black frock coat. It was a clot of blood. Leale, remembering Booth's flashing dagger onstage and noting Rathbone's severely bleeding wound, assumed that Lincoln had been stabbed. Leale called for a knife. He brought no surgeon's tools to a social night at the theatre. If Lincoln had been stabbed, how could he suture the wounds without needles and thread? By now several men
had joined Rathbone in the box, and hands began fishing wildly in pants pockets until William Kent, a government employee, produced a pocketknife. Leale removed Lincoln's custom-made, black wool frock coat, trimmed at the collar, lapels, and cuffs with grosgrain piping. The box was too dimly lit to read the tailor's label sewn inside the collar—Brooks Brothers, New York—or to admire the black silk lining embossed with a large American eagle, a shield of stars and stripes, and the motto “One Country, One Destiny.” Leale cut open Lincoln's collar, shirt, and coat to examine him for knife wounds. There were none. Then Leale lifted each of the president's eyelids, studied the pupils, and reeled in dismay: it was a brain injury. Leale separated his fingers, weaved both of his hands gently through Lincoln's hair, and as he worked them thoroughly around the head, he discovered that the hair was matted with blood. Leale's fingers probed rapidly for its source and found it within seconds, behind the left ear. A neat, round hole, about the diameter of a man's fingertip, clotted with a plug of wine-red, coagulated blood. Leale's heart sank.

In the theatre below, the audience would soon be past control. In a valiant attempt to calm them, the actress Laura Keene marched to the front of the stage, close to the footlights, and begged the crowd to remain calm. “For God's sake, have presence of mind and keep your places, and all will be well.” The president was not dead, she assured them, without knowing whether that was really true. Then the mayor of the District of Columbia took to the stage to try to keep the crowd under control. An angry voice shouted, “Burn the theatre!” and others echoed him. Yes, burn it down. Others remembered that on Capitol Hill, not more than a fifteen-minute march from Ford's, the Old Capitol prison was filled with disloyal rebel prisoners. The assassin may have escaped, but they could take their revenge there. And walking in the very streets of Washington this night were ex-Confederate soldiers and officers, some of them still wearing their rebel uniforms. This would be a dangerous night for anyone who came into the proximity of the mob.
In a few hours, when the telegraph spread the horrible news to the other great cities of the North, dangerous mobs would take to the streets across the country.

Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, an army doctor seated on the main floor near the orchestra pit, heard voices shout for “a doctor!” He rose and headed for the stage. His wife begged him to stay: “You sha'n't go! They'll kill you too—I know they will!” He got onstage in moments and stood helplessly below the president's box. The distance from the stage to the balustrade overhead was too far—eleven feet six inches—to jump. It was one thing to leap down from the box—not an easy move even for an athlete like John Wilkes Booth—but it was impossible to jump up to it. There had to be another way up there. Perhaps other men could lift him and launch him into the box. Taft corralled a few of the men standing onstage to form a human catapult. Men bent low and shaped their interlocked fingers into improvised stirrups. Taft dug his boot heels into their cupped palms and fastened his hands to their shoulders for balance. Then, with one rapid, fluid motion the men's twitching leg, arm, and shoulder muscles exploded in a burst of strength and propelled Taft skyward. On the way up, he shot his arms above his head as high as they could reach, ready to grab anything he could get his hands on. The catapult launched him just high enough. His fingertips grasped wildly for the balustrade, for the framed engraving of George Washington hanging from a thin wire, for the flags, for the bunting—anything that would save him from a plummet to the polished, hardwood stage. His blue army officer's cape unraveled from his neck and floated back to the stage. Taft swung momentarily from a piece of bunting until others who followed Dr. Leale into the box reached over the side and pulled him up and into the box. But by now Dr. Leale was already attending the president. Under customary medical tradition, Lincoln was Leale's patient.