Hanged!: Chapters 1–5

“For God’s sake, gentlemen, what means this search of the house so early in the morning?” Weichmann implored.

“Do you see that blood?” Clarvoe asked, brandishing the torn necktie.

One of the actors on the stage had improvised a line to alert the theater to the president’s entrance: “This reminds me of a story, as Mr. Lincoln says…” Understanding this impromptu cue, the orchestra launched into a rendition of “Hail to the Chief” as Abraham Lincoln; his wife, Mary; and their guests, Major Henry Rathbone and Miss Clara Harris, made their way to the box that had been specially furnished and decorated in the president’s honor.

President Lincoln acknowledged the standing ovation and “vociferous cheering” with a bow, then settled into a rocking chair in the corner of his flag-draped box to indulge in a long-overdue evening of diversion.

Frederick met the man at the top of the steps, just outside his father’s door, where a similar confrontation ensued over the medicine: the stranger doggedly insisted upon delivering it directly to the secretary of state, and Frederick refused.

Thinking to placate the messenger, Frederick opened his father’s door just enough to peek inside.

“Don’t walk so heavy,” William Bell said, turning back to admonish him yet again.

Finding two men grappling at the foot of his father’s bed in the dim light of a single gas lamp, Augustus assumed his father was delirious and that the nurse was trying to subdue the restless secretary.

Augustus leapt into the fray, grabbing the man he thought was his father.

The assassin had barricaded the door behind him as he’d entered—every attempt to break it open from the corridor only wedged the brace more firmly into its notch, making it impossible for Major Rathbone, who was himself bleeding profusely, to dislodge the brace.

Rathbone approached Leale with his left arm cradled in his right, the surgeon would later recall, “beseeching me to attend to his wound.”

Though visibly wearied by four grueling years of civil war, Lincoln’s body still possessed an uncanny physical strength.

As soon as he recovered himself, Stanton requisitioned the room nearest to the one where Lincoln lay dying and transformed it by his very presence into the de facto War Department.

As soon as he recovered himself, Stanton requisitioned the room nearest to the one where Lincoln lay dying and transformed it by his very presence into the de facto War Department.

Before midnight, General Augur further ordered the city closed—anyone attempting to leave Washington would be arrested. Clearly more than one criminal had to be apprehended.

Soon after Stanton’s arrival on the scene, a team of three interrogators and a stenographer were taking down testimony from witnesses.

A search of Booth’s room at the National Hotel, for instance, turned up a cryptic letter containing hints and advice about an unnamed “undertaking.”

Fearing that the suspicions of the United States government had already been aroused, the writer cautioned, “Time more propitious will arrive yet. Do not act rashly or in haste.”

Backstage witnesses at Ford’s Theatre quickly related that upon his arrival at the back door of the theater, Booth had called out to Edman “Ned” Spangler, requesting that the sceneshifter hold his horse. Though Ned had passed off the task to a young peanut seller named Joseph Burroughs, that did not exonerate him.

While news of the assassination careened across the city, Metropolitan Police detective John Clarvoe was questioning Mary Surratt in the hallway outside her bedroom.

Every time an officer brought a witness in for debriefing, it threw the growing mass of soldiers and citizens into a frenzy of anger and grief.

Outside the theater itself, incensed citizens were threatening to hang the actors and burn the building to the ground.

Aware that the situation was on the verge of detonating, McDevitt went out onto the steps of police headquarters and appealed to the people for their cooperation.

Four other men would eventually claim the honor of pointing the authorities toward H Street—a foreman at a stable who had rented a horse to one of Booth’s accomplices, the keeper of the saloon that adjoined Ford’s Theatre, a friend and fellow actor of Booth’s, and Louis Weichmann’s supervisor—all of them adamant about their role in guiding the police toward Mary Surratt’s house.

“Mark you, this was the first intimation given or received by any one as to where the plot was hatched,” Detective McDevitt declared.

The horror at the news of Lincoln’s murder was so profound, it was as though the entire nation had been struck by Booth’s bullet.

“A shock from heaven laying half the city in ruins would not have startled us as did the word that started out from Ford’s Theatre half an hour ago, that the President had been shot,” wrote the Boston Daily Advertiser’s Washington correspondent that night.

In Washington itself, the ensuing terror and confusion created a panic unlike anything the capital had ever known.

Not a vestige of the postwar celebration remained.

Now the city was swathed in mourning. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln were appearing on doors and windows. Festoons of black crepe draped nearly every edifice.

He had suspended the fundamental legal right of habeas corpus. This suspension had allowed the government to arrest and detain its own citizens without showing probable cause.

“Booth had turned the execration and hatred of many, even of Lincoln’s own party, who had been his bitterest political enemies, into the most profound reverence.”

Bluntly put, Louis Weichmann could not see a reason in the world why as renowned and celebrated a man as John Wilkes Booth had bothered befriending anyone like John Surratt.
Though proud of this eminent association, John’s mother had also seemed faintly puzzled by her son’s association with Booth.

Weichmann opened the door, and to his chagrin could not remember the man’s name.

Perturbed and puzzled, Weichmann hid the feeble disguise in his toiletries box, then moved it to a paint box in his trunk.

“Never in my life did I witness a man play with so much intensity and passion as did Booth on that occasion. The hideous, malevolent expression of his distorted countenance, the fierce glare and ugly roll of his eyes, which seemed ready to burst from their sockets as he seized his victim by the hair…are yet present with me,” he wrote decades later.

In and of itself, there was nothing strange about that evening, but on the morning after the assassination, the thought of having been Booth’s guest at the scene of the crime was enough to make anyone feel as though they were somehow implicated.

The shame, the fear, and the rudeness were all too much. She began to cry.
Major Smith, too, was unwilling to tolerate such blatant disrespect from Devoe.

He claimed to be itinerant, illiterate, and poor—working with his pickaxe for a dollar or a dollar and a half a day when he could get work at all.

In Mary Surratt’s bedroom, Captain Wermerskirch found a bullet mold on top of the wardrobe, and a number of percussion caps—necessary for firing bullets—in a bureau drawer.