The plan was not, at first, to kill anyone. For most of the winter of 1864 and into 1865, John Wilkes Booth — twenty-six years old, one of the most admired stage actors in America, and a fervent believer in the Confederate cause — wanted to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. The idea was to seize the president, spirit him south to Richmond, and ransom him for thousands of captured Confederate soldiers rotting in Union prisons. Booth assembled a small circle of accomplices around this scheme. On March 17, 1865, they lay in wait along a road where Lincoln was expected to pass on his way to a play at a soldiers’ hospital. Lincoln changed his plans. The kidnapping never happened.
Three weeks later, the war ended. On April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Two days after that, Booth stood in a crowd on the White House lawn and listened to Lincoln speak about extending the vote to some Black men. The kidnapping was now pointless; there was no Confederacy left to ransom prisoners to. Booth turned to a companion and said, in substance, that this would be the last speech Lincoln ever made.
What replaced the kidnapping needed no ransom and no Confederacy to be alive. It needed only a single night, and it started a clock that would run for the next twelve days.
Three targets in one night
Booth decided to decapitate the United States government in a single evening. He would kill Lincoln himself. Lewis Powell, a hulking former Confederate soldier, would kill Secretary of State William Seward. George Atzerodt, a German-born carriage painter, would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. The president, the vice president, and the secretary of state, all dead within an hour of each other, would — Booth imagined — throw the North into chaos and perhaps revive the dying cause.
He learned his opening almost by accident. Around noon on April 14, Good Friday, Booth stopped by Ford’s Theatre to collect his mail; he was a regular there, well known to the staff. He found out that the Lincolns would attend that night’s performance of Our American Cousin, a popular comedy. Booth knew the theatre intimately — every door, every corridor, the exact geography of the presidential box. He knew the play, too, well enough to know which line drew the biggest laugh. He had a few hours to turn a building he loved into a place of ambush.
The empty chair
Lincoln’s box that night should not have been easy to reach. A Washington policeman named John Frederick Parker had been assigned to guard the president. Parker was a poor choice — he had a long record of drinking on duty and sleeping at his post — and he lived down to it. At intermission he left the theatre entirely and went next door to the Star Saloon for a drink. The chair outside the door to Lincoln’s box stood empty.
The saloon was a busy place that night. Lincoln’s coachman and footman drank there. So did Parker. So, a little earlier, had Booth, who had steadied himself with whiskey and water before crossing back to the theatre he meant to turn into a crime scene.
He came out of the saloon a little after ten and asked the doorkeeper what time it was. He was working to a schedule that was not the clock’s but the play’s. He waited for a particular line — Asa Trenchard’s “you sockdologizing old man-trap,” a piece of frontier slang that drew the loudest laugh of the night — knowing the roar would be enough to swallow a gunshot.
With the policeman’s chair empty, the only man left outside the box was Charles Forbes, Lincoln’s valet, sitting by the vestibule door. Booth handed him a card of some kind — Forbes never gave an account of the night, and what was written on it has never been established — and Forbes let him pass. A famous actor could open almost any door in Washington. Booth stepped into the box behind the president, raised a small Deringer pistol, and at about a quarter past ten fired a single ball into the back of Lincoln’s head, behind the left ear.
Major Henry Rathbone, a young officer sharing the box with his fiancée Clara Harris, lunged at the assassin. Booth slashed him across the arm with a hunting knife, opening a deep wound, and vaulted over the railing toward the stage, some twelve feet below.
What he shouted has never fully settled. Many in the audience remembered the Latin motto of Virginia, Sic semper tyrannis — “thus always to tyrants.” Some heard only “Sic semper.” Some remembered him crying that the South was avenged. The accounts conflict, as eyewitness accounts of a few violent seconds always do.
The leap itself became its own small mystery. As Booth went over the rail, the spur on his boot caught the Treasury Guard flag draped on the front of the box and tore it. He landed hard, and somewhere in the next hours fractured the fibula of his left leg. He wrote later in a pocket diary that he broke it “in jumping.” But he told a tavern keeper that night that his horse had fallen on the leg during the escape, and many modern historians think the horse, not the jump, did the damage. His own two accounts do not agree. The injury is certain; its cause is not.
Booth crossed the stage in front of a stunned, uncomprehending audience, pushed out a back door to an alley where a horse was held for him, and rode into the night.
What happened to the other two
The triple murder did not come off. At Seward’s house, Powell talked his way to the door claiming to deliver medicine, then forced his way upstairs and attacked the secretary of state in his sickbed, where he was recovering from a carriage accident nine days earlier that had broken his jaw and his right arm. He stabbed the defenseless man in the face and neck at close range and still failed to kill him. The army nurse at the bedside, Private George Robinson, threw himself at the attacker and dragged him back. And the bedding heaped around Seward’s throat, a modern surgical reading of the wounds suggests, was probably what kept the blade off the great vessels. Powell stabbed and slashed his way through the household, leaving five people wounded — the secretary himself, his two sons, Robinson, and a messenger who walked in as the attacker was leaving — before fleeing into the streets shouting that he was mad. Every one of them survived, Seward included.
Atzerodt did nothing at all. He took a room in the same hotel as Vice President Johnson, drank through the evening, lost his nerve, and wandered off without ever attempting the killing. Of the three men marked to die that night, only Lincoln was hit.
The president never regained consciousness. Soldiers carried him across the street from the theatre to a boarding house, the Petersen House, and laid him diagonally across a bed too short for his frame. He died there at 7:22 the next morning, April 15. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, standing at the bedside, is remembered as saying, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
The clock starts running
By then Booth was already deep into southern Maryland, riding with David Herold, one of the conspirators, who had joined him in flight. The two stopped near midnight at a tavern in Surrattsville to collect weapons and whiskey stashed in advance. Before dawn they reached the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set and splinted Booth’s broken leg and let the fugitives sleep. Whether Mudd knew exactly who he was treating became one of the most argued questions of the whole affair.
The largest manhunt the country had ever mounted closed in behind them. The War Department posted a reward totaling one hundred thousand dollars for Booth and his accomplices. Thousands of soldiers and detectives fanned across Maryland. Booth, who had expected to be hailed across the South as a hero, instead read newspapers that called him a coward and a murderer. The diary he kept on the run curdled with bewilderment that the act he had thought heroic had won him only revulsion.
For days the pair hid in a pine thicket while a Confederate sympathizer named Thomas Jones smuggled them food and waited for a chance to get them across the Potomac. Their first attempt at the river failed and pushed them back to the Maryland shore. At last they crossed into Virginia, the territory Booth had imagined as safety.
The barn
It was not safe. On the night of April 25, Booth and Herold were sleeping in a tobacco barn on the farm of Richard Garrett, near Port Royal, having talked their way into shelter as wounded Confederate soldiers. The family, uneasy about their guests, had locked them in the barn to keep them from stealing horses.
After midnight, the 16th New York Cavalry rode up the lane — a detachment of twenty-five men under Lieutenant Edward Doherty, guided by two detectives, Everton Conger and Luther Baker, who had finally traced the route across the river. The Garretts, pressed hard, gave up where the men were hiding.
The soldiers surrounded the barn and demanded surrender. Herold, after some back-and-forth, came out and was seized. Booth refused. He called through the boards that if the men would draw up in line fifty paces off, he would come out — he was lame, he said, and had only one leg. They declined. To force him into the open, Conger set fire to the hay at the back of the barn.
In the rising firelight, Booth was visible through the gaps in the wall, moving toward the door with a carbine. Sergeant Boston Corbett — a hatter by trade, religiously fervent, eccentric to the point of instability — put his pistol to a crack between the boards and fired. The ball entered low in Booth’s neck, a couple of inches above the collarbone, tore through the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, and severed his spinal cord.
The soldiers dragged him out of the burning barn and laid him on the Garretts’ porch. The paralysis, the autopsy noted, was immediate and total. He lingered there for hours as the sun came up. At one point he asked the men to lift his hands so he could see them, and looking at the hands that could no longer move, he is said to have whispered, “Useless, useless.” He died on the porch shortly after seven in the morning on April 26, twelve days after he shot the president.
After
The War Department had wanted Booth in the flesh, and Corbett was hauled to Washington to answer for firing. Asked why, he said Providence directed him. Conger’s report had him shooting “without order, pretext or excuse.” But whether a hold-your-fire order was ever actually spoken to the men is another of the night’s unsettled questions — later, under oath, Conger and Baker both said no one had been told to shoot or not to shoot. No charge was brought. Corbett went home with a share of the reward.
Eight people were tried by a military tribunal for the conspiracy. Four were hanged together on July 7, 1865, at the Washington Arsenal: Powell, Atzerodt, Herold, and Mary Surratt, who had kept the boarding house where the plotters met and became the first woman executed by the United States federal government. Dr. Mudd and three others were sent to a remote island prison off the Florida coast.
Booth had fired the shot in the belief that it would be remembered as tyrannicide, that the South would name him among its heroes, that history would read his motto and agree. Instead the twelve days handed him the reverse of all of it. He read his own infamy in the papers that called him a coward. He was hunted through swamps and river thickets by the army of the government he had hoped to topple. And he died on a stranger’s porch, shot through the neck by an eccentric sergeant who walked away from it with a share of the reward, looking at the hands he could no longer lift.