The Final Hours of Abraham Lincoln

Five days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army at Appomattox. Washington had spent the week in a mood of exhausted celebration, bonfires and brass bands and a war that finally, after four years, looked like it was actually over. On the morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln held a cabinet meeting, met with General Ulysses S. Grant, and by most accounts seemed lighter than his aides had seen him in a long time. He talked about the future. He talked, his wife later said, about wanting to travel once his second term ended.

He also, by evening, very nearly stayed home.

The day he almost skipped

Ford's Theatre on 10th Street had announced that President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with General and Mrs. Grant, would attend that night's performance of the comedy "Our American Cousin." It was meant to be a small victory-lap outing. Then Grant begged off. His wife, Julia, did not want to spend an evening in Mary Todd Lincoln's company, and the Grants left Washington that afternoon to visit their children in New Jersey instead.

That left the Lincolns needing new company for a box the newspapers had already told the public they would occupy. Lincoln, by several accounts, would rather have stayed in and gone to bed. He had a headache and a long list of people still waiting to see him that day. But the performance had been publicized, a crowd was expected specifically to see the president, and Lincoln did not want to disappoint it. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee, Clara Harris, agreed to join the Lincolns in their place.

There is also a story, recounted afterward by Lincoln's friend and occasional bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, that Lincoln had described a strange dream in the days before, of walking through the White House and finding a coffin lying in state, told he was looking at an assassinated president. Lamon wrote it down only after the fact, so it is the kind of detail history treats with a raised eyebrow rather than full trust. What is certain is that Lincoln went to the theater that night the way a tired man keeps a commitment he would rather not keep.

The turning point

By afternoon, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and committed Confederate sympathizer, had learned the Lincolns would be at Ford's Theatre that night. Booth knew the building intimately, having performed there himself, and he spent the hours before the play finalizing a plan with a small group of co-conspirators to strike at the top of the Union government simultaneously: Lewis Powell was assigned to kill Secretary of State William Seward, George Atzerodt was assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Booth reserved the president for himself.

Sometime that afternoon or early evening, Booth returned to the theater, visited the presidential box, and bored a small peephole through the door so he could see inside once the play began. He also prepared a way to bar the door behind him after he entered, to buy himself a few extra seconds. The plan depended on one more thing going his way: the guard assigned to protect the president's box would need to not be there.

Inside Ford's Theatre

The Lincolns arrived a little after 8:30, late enough that the orchestra stopped the performance and struck "Hail to the Chief" as the audience stood and applauded. The president's box, on the second tier stage-right, had been decorated with flags and bunting for the occasion. John Parker, a Metropolitan Police officer detailed to guard the box that night, escorted the party in.

At some point during the evening, by the most widely accepted account, Parker left his post outside the box, either to get a better view of the play from elsewhere in the theater or to step next door for a drink at the saloon beside the building. Whichever it was, he was not standing at the door when it mattered. No official punishment followed. Parker kept his job.

Sometime in that final half hour, Lincoln and Mary spoke quietly in the box. Mary recalled afterward that he told her he wanted to visit Jerusalem one day. Because that detail rests only on her later memory of the moment, it is repeated as likely rather than verified.

Around 10:15 p.m., during the third act, Booth slipped into the unguarded passage, barred the outer door behind him with a length of wood he had wedged in place earlier, and looked through his peephole into the box. He waited for a line in the play, "you sockdologizing old man-trap," that reliably drew the loudest laugh of the night, and used the cover of the audience's roar to step in and fire a single shot from a small .44 caliber derringer into the back of Lincoln's head.

Rathbone lunged at Booth and was slashed across the arm with a knife for his trouble. Booth then vaulted from the box down to the stage, a drop of roughly twelve feet, catching a spur on the bunting on his way and breaking a bone in his leg on landing. Witnesses recalled him shouting something as he crossed the stage and fled out the back of the theater, most rendering it as "Sic semper tyrannis," the Virginia state motto meaning "thus always to tyrants," though accounts differ slightly on his exact words and whether he said them on the way down or already on his feet. He reached a horse waiting in the alley and rode into the Maryland night.

Across the street

Doctors in the audience, among them a young army surgeon named Charles Leale, reached the box within a minute or two and found the wound plainly mortal. Moving Lincoln back to the White House was judged too far and too rough a trip. Instead soldiers carried him out of the theater and across 10th Street to the nearest building willing to take him in, a boarding house owned by a tailor named William Petersen. He was laid diagonally across a bed in a small back room, too short for his frame.

What followed was less a rescue than a vigil. Doctors, including Surgeon General Joseph Barnes, monitored Lincoln's pulse and breathing through the night but could do nothing to reverse the damage. Mary Todd Lincoln moved in and out of the crowded room, at one point weeping so heavily that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had her asked to leave for a time. Their eldest son, Robert, stood by the bed for much of the night. Cabinet members and military officers filled the front rooms of the house, and Stanton, effectively running the government from the Petersen parlor, dictated telegrams and took witness statements even as the president lay dying down the hall.

Lincoln never regained consciousness. His breathing grew labored as the night wore on, the kind of slow, uneven breathing family members and doctors in the room recognized as the body shutting down. A Presbyterian minister, Phineas Gurley, was called in to pray over him before dawn.

The end

Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 on the morning of April 15, 1865, a little more than nine hours after he was shot. Stanton is widely quoted as saying, at or near the moment of death, either "now he belongs to the ages" or "now he belongs to the angels." Both versions appear in different early accounts, and no single contemporary record settles which he actually said, if either exactly.

Word spread through Washington within the hour. Flags that had flown in celebration of the war's end five days earlier came down to half-staff instead.

Aftermath, and what we may never pin down

The manhunt for Booth ended about two weeks later at a Virginia farm, where he was shot and killed after refusing to surrender from a burning barn. Powell's attack on Seward wounded the secretary badly but did not kill him. Atzerodt lost his nerve and never went after Johnson at all. A military tribunal tried the surviving conspirators that summer, and the trial record, along with the recollections of the doctors, guests, and cabinet officials who had crowded into the Petersen House, is the backbone of everything historians know about that night.

Even so, the record has gaps its witnesses never closed. Whether Parker was drinking at the saloon or simply watching the play from a bad angle is argued over rather than settled. The exact minute of the shot, Booth's precise words on the stage, and Stanton's exact phrasing at the deathbed all rest on witnesses who were exhausted, frightened, and recalling a few frantic seconds after the fact, sometimes years after the fact. What is not in dispute is the shape of the night itself: a president who nearly stayed home, a guard who was not where he was supposed to be, and a room across the street from a theater where a country waited out its president's last hours until morning.