The Plot Thickens

BRIAN: We’ll begin with the assassination plot itself. Now as we mentioned a minute ago, it was originally supposed to be a kidnapping. The previous summer, Booth had assembled a team of conspirators, some muscle to subdue Lincoln, a hunter to navigate the backwoods of Maryland and Virginia, and a boatman to ferry the team across the Potomac.

Some accounts say they came close to putting all this into action in March of 1865, but that a last minute change in Lincoln’s itinerary kept the president out of their grasp. News of the wars end threw the conspirators’ plans into disarray. Their main goal of prisoner exchange no longer seemed so pressing. And yet, Booth remained fixated on the president.

That spring, his kidnapping scheme started to morph into a murder scheme. The events of April 14th, 1865 have been the focus of countless books over the years. We spoke with the authors of a few of those books and compiled this play by play of how it all went down.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Booth’s original assassination plan included four people. It had included the president, Lincoln, it included Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of State William Seward, and General of the Armies Ulysses Grant.

TERRY ALFORD: The idea being, of course, that if he cuts the head off the federal government, in such a sense, you know, it might get the Confederates a second chance. I’m Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool, a new biography of John Wilkes Booth.

EDWARD STEERS JR: My name is Edward Steers Junior. I write mostly nonfiction dealing with Abraham Lincoln and his assassination.

TERRY ALFORD: April 14th, 1865 was the end of a really tumultuous week. The Confederate army in Virginia, Robert E Lee’s Army in Northern Virginia had surrendered on Sunday. On that particular day, Booth went to the theater.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Booth used Ford’s Theater as one of his mail drops. And Friday the 14th was one day that he decided to stop by the theater and pick up any mail that had been addressed to him.

SARAH JENCKS: I’m Sarah Jencks, Director of Education at Ford’s Theater Society. We’re in what would’ve been the Ford’s Theater box office. And this is most likely where John Wilkes Booth picked up his mail.

TERRY ALFORD: And while he was getting his letters, he discovered that the theater management had invited Lincoln to come to the play that night. He saw Lincoln’s name written on the cardboard plan of seats. He spun the plan around, saw Lincoln’s name, spun it back, and gave no appreciable emotional reaction to it, but his head must’ve been spinning because here was Booth’s opportunity.

EDWARD STEERS JR: And of course, that spurred Booth to action.

TERRY ALFORD: The next few hours must’ve seemed like a blur. He had to contact his team, alert them to things he wanted to do. He needed to rent a horse for his escape. At 8 o’clock that night, Booth gathered the fateful few who were still in the plot with him. At that meeting, Booth assigned everyone their role. He would take Lincoln he said.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Grant had also been targeted. Now Grant canceled, didn’t go to the theater with the Lincolns.

TERRY ALFORD: He wanted Lewis Powell to attack Secretary of State Seward. He wanted to George Atzerodt to attack Vice President Johnson.

EDWARD STEERS JR: George Atzerodt’s role in the original conspiracy was as a boatman. Atzerodt protested and said that he didn’t know if he was up to being able to assassinate or kill Johnson.

TERRY ALFORD: And he said– and he told Booth I signed up for kidnapping, right? I’m not– I’m not doing this. And Booth says you’ve got to do it or I’ll kill you. And I think at that point, Atzerodt realized that the only way out of this was further in. So he agreed to do it. By 8 o’clock, the plan was set, the assignments had been given, now it was just a matter of waiting on Lincoln to come to the theater. Lewis Powell went to the home of Secretary of State William Seward.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Where Seward was convalescing from a very serious carriage accident.

TERRY ALFORD: And was confined to is bed from a broken jaw and some other pretty serious injuries.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Powell very cleverly posed as delivering medicine for Seward at the order of Seward’s doctor.

TERRY ALFORD: He was able to get into the door, go up the stairs, where one of the Seward’s sons stopped him.

EDWARD STEERS JR: Powell basically pistol-whipped Fredrick Seward, fracturing his skull and knocking him unconscious, and then forced his way into Seward’s bedroom, where he attacked Seward in bed with a knife and slashed him very badly. Powell then made his way out of the house, leaving Seward behind in a bloody mess.

TERRY ALFORD: He was cut pretty good and would have a serious scar for the rest of his life, but he was able to survive this. George Atzerodt, who was assigned by Booth to attack the Vice President, Andrew Johnson, lost what little nerve he had. So he did absolutely nothing that night.

EDWARD STEERS JR: At the same time that Powell was attacking Seward–

TERRY ALFORD: A few minutes after 10:00–

EDWARD STEERS JR: Booth entered Ford’s Theater.

TERRY ALFORD: When Booth first came in the theater, Jeannie Gourlay, one of the actresses, was on stage and she looked up and she could see him because he was standing at the back of the theater and everyone else was sitting, of course, in the audience. And she wondered if he were ill because he looked so pale. But when she finished her scene and looked up again, he was gone. He was coming up the steps to the dress circle, to the second floor of seats, making his way around to the box where Lincoln was waiting.

SARAH JENCKS: Handed his visiting card to Lincoln’s footmen and entered the foyer of the box.

EDWARD STEERS JR: People may wonder why an individual would have access to the president in a presidential box, but it was not uncommon.

SARAH JENCKS: Booth shut this door. We’re standing right outside of boxes seven and eight, which is where the president and his party were seated that night. This is the scene of a crime.

TERRY ALFORD: Imagine being in something that was maybe four feet wide, six feet long, with two doors leading into the actual box where the president and his party were sitting.

SARAH JENCKS: He waited. We don’t know exactly how long he waited, when he came into the box. He knew what line he wanted, because he wanted the laughter of the audience to cover the pop of the gun.

TERRY ALFORD: Booth came into the box behind Lincoln. Just took maybe one step toward him, raised his pistol, it was a single shot Deringer pistol. Rather small thing, but at that range, it packed a fearsome wallop.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There’s a enveloping bluish gun smoke in the box and Booth emerges out of that like a phantom. There was an army officer in the box who dragged Booth back, but Booth struggled with the man, freed himself by stabbing this man in the arm with a Bowie knife. Then Booth was able to leap over onto the stage.

SARAH JENCKS: It was about a 15 foot leap and he fell hard. The accounts that we hear from witnesses are that he didn’t land quite evenly. And the thought is that he probably broke his leg when he landed. It was really only a moment, but it was long enough that everyone froze.

Booth came into the middle of the stage, yelled sic semper tyrannis, which means thus always to tyrants.

TERRY ALFORD: My belief, by looking at the sources, he didn’t say that on the stage, he said that as he was leaving the box.

SARAH JENCKS: So there are lots of different accounts of what he might have said. You can imagine they don’t always agree.

TERRY ALFORD: He went to the wings, where several actors were awaiting their scenes. He pushed between them and Booth was able to get out the back door to a horse he had waiting, get on the horse, and take off down the alley. The whole thing was done in 30 minutes easy, maybe less.

WYATT EVANS: The impact of that shot in Ford’s Theater, I can sum it up in a word, but the word requires explanation. And the word is obsession. This is Wyatt Evans. I’m a professor of history at Drew University.

So the question is why does the American public have this fascination and this fixation with this moment in our history. And I think part of it is just the basic trauma. We just keep– we can’t get over the fact that this happened, and so we keep replaying it. I think also, with Lincoln’s murder, many people in this country feel that American history took a wrong turn or that it’s destiny was thwarted.

Some people say, you know, if Lincoln had lived, the horrors of reconstruction would not have happened. And I think that there’s a speculation there that is hard to back up. But more broadly, there is this current in American history that goes all the way back, that feels that the United States is a special nation, that it has a special purpose, and that its history is supposed to be a special providential kind of working out of democracy and equal opportunity. And that when Lincoln died, that that got twisted, that got changed. So again, I think that’s part of the reason why we keep coming back to him.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER: Thanks to Terry Alford, Edward Steers Junior, Wyatt Evans, Sarah Jencks, and the good folks at Ford’s Theater for helping us tell that story. You can find links to Terry, Ed, and Wyatt’s great books on the assassination at backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: It’s time for us to take a short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, how the nation reacted to the first ever assassination of a sitting American president.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. Don’t go away.