As he met with his Cabinet on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln revealed a premonition. Something important was about to happen, the president said. He was sure of it. He had had a dream the night before. 

It was the same dream he had had several other times—the night before Fort Sumter was shelled; the night before First Bull Run, the battle that made clear that the Civil War would be long and painful; the night before Antietam, the bloodiest single day in the Civil War and the battle that prompted the Emancipation Proclamation; the night before the Stone’s River; the night before Lee’s escape from Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, the double defeat that sealed the doom of the Confederacy. 

What dream, the curious Cabinet asked. Lincoln’s response was recorded by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles: “he seemed to be in a singular, indescribable vessel . . . [and] was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.” 

Two Sundays before, on April 2, the Confederate government had fled Richmond. The previous Sunday General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. What, then, could the president’s dream portend?

Lincoln himself expected good news, perhaps the surrender of General Joe Johnston’s army—the largest remaining Confederate fighting force—down in the Carolinas. Ulysses Grant, sitting in on the Cabinet meeting, was not so sure. Stone’s River, he believed, had been no great victory. 

Perhaps the president’s dream knocked the sturdy general slightly off kilter. Perhaps that’s why he declined the president’s invitation to join him and his wife that night at the theater.  

The rest of the Cabinet meeting was spent discussing Reconstruction, the next great task the nation faced. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had drafted a plan to create military governments in the former Confederate states until new elected governments could be formed. Lincoln was noncommittal. He was biding time on these details—though on the question of prosecuting or punishing former Confederate leaders, Lincoln was adamant. “He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war is over,” Welles recalled. “Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.” 

Cabinet members remarked on how cheerful the president was that day. So, too, did Mary Lincoln, who joined her husband in a carriage ride that afternoon. On their return, the president regaled some friends by reading from a humorous book, delaying calls to dinner until it grew too late to postpone the meal further. 

Finally the dinner call was answered; the president felt compelled to honor a commitment to attend the theater that night. Some time after eight o’clock, he and Mrs. Lincoln, joined by Clara Harris, the daughter of a senator and a friend of Mary Lincoln, and her fiancée Major H.R. Rathbone, left for Ford’s Theatre to see a comedy, Our American Cousin. 

The president’s party sat in the state box above and to the right of the stage. They enjoyed the play, Mary Lincoln frequently calling the attention of her husband to the funny business on stage.  

Meanwhile, other funny business was happening. At ten o’clock that evening, George Atzerodt was sitting at a bar in the Kirkwood Hotel, where Vice President Andrew Johnson lived. He was charged with killing the vice president, part of a triple assassination plot hatched in the fevered mind of pro-Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth. But Atzerodt had only signed on to a kidnapping plot. Murder was not in his belly. Rather than climbing the stairs to Johnson’s room, Atzerodt walked out of the hotel. 

Secretary of State William Seward, the third target that night, was less fortunate. Shortly after ten, Lewis Powell appeared at Seward’s home, claiming to have some medicine for Seward, who some months before had broken his jaw in a carriage accident. Fred Seward tried to stop Powell from reaching his father’s room, but Powell smashed his pistol on Fred’s head, leaving him with a shattered skull. He stabbed a private who served as Seward’s guard, brushed aside Seward’s daughter, and then slashed Seward’s cheek with a knife. He would have struck again, but the private and another Seward son—roused by the noise and his sister’s screams—tried to stop Powell, who hustled away, slashing a State Department aide before hitting the street.  

Seward survived. A contraption his physician had used to keep his broken jaw in place prevented Powell from cutting his jugular. 

Around the same time, Booth easily stole into the presidential box. He leveled a derringer at the rear of the president’s head and fired. Lincoln slumped forward. Major Rathbone rose to corral Booth, but the actor stabbed him and then jumped down to the stage. “Sic semper tyrannis!” he cried—the phrase attributed to the honorable Marcus Junius Brutus, which became the motto of Virginia. He hobbled away, lame with a broken leg. 

It was, as Bruce Catton said, “the heaviest bullet, all things considered, ever fired in America.” 

“They have shot the president! They have shot the president!” Mary Lincoln cried. His failing body was taken across the street to a boarding house. Too tall to be laid normally on a bed, he was placed on it diagonally.  

Physicians and intimates gathered in the room marked by hushed anxiety punctuated by weeping. The doctors reported that there was no hope. The Lincolns’ eldest son Robert arrived.* Secretaries Stanton and Welles, notified separately of the two attacks, went first to see Seward and then hurried off to see the president.  Stanton took charge, notifying Grant and other generals of the catastrophe and starting the investigation into the crime. 

Mostly, though, the night was spent waiting for the inevitable. 

In the early morning, after an absence, Mary Lincoln returned to the room. On seeing her husband’s prostrate, increasingly pale body, she fainted. 

At 7:22 on Saturday, April 15, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. “Now,” Stanton said, “he belongs to the ages.” Soon after, the gruff secretary, a tough lawyer, a Democrat, and an unflappable decision maker during the war, began weeks of weeping.**  

There is no way of knowing, of course, how Reconstruction would have differed had Lincoln lived. That chapter in American history—one of the darkest— resulted from the clash of racism, hubris, ongoing sectional differences, and economic forces that any individual would have been hard pressed to harness and drive in a positive direction. He, too, would have faced challenges from the Radical Republicans in Congress bent on punishing the South. He would have had to negotiate the delicate balance between his generous nature and the need to suppress the Klan. He would have been forced to find a way through or around the intransigent secessionists who quickly regained control of state governments in the South and erected barriers to the spirit of emancipation. 

On the other hand, Lincoln had maneuvered his way around the Radical Republicans throughout the Civil War. He had manipulated every political challenge to his advantage. He had turned Seward, who believed that he should be president, and Stanton, a skeptic and a Democrat, into his most loyal aides.

Thus, it is difficult not to agree with Ulysses Grant’s immediate reaction to Lincoln’s assassination: “His death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South, which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”  

* The youngest Lincoln, Tad, had been at another theater that night to see a performance of Aladdin. The play was interrupted by an announcement of the attack on the president. Tad’s tutor brought him home to the White House, and a family friend stayed with him until the dismayed little boy fell asleep. 

** Doris Kearns Goodwin perfectly captures a poignant aftermath: “News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. ‘He gazed awhile,’ Noah Brooks reported, ‘then, turning to his attendant,’ he announced, ‘The President is dead.’ The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. ‘If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,’ he said ‘but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.’ He lay back on the bed, ‘the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.’”  

Words © 2011 AtHome Pilgrim.

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