They returned from their drive and prepared for a theatre party which had been fixed for that night.The management of the Ford's Theatre,where Laura Keene was to close her season with a benefit performance of Our American Cousin,had announced in the afternoon paper that "the President and his lady"would attend.The President's box had been draped with flags.The rest is a twice told tale--a thousandth told tale.
An actor,very handsome,a Byronic sort,both in beauty and temperament,with a dash perhaps of insanity,John Wilkes Booth,had long meditated killing the President.A violent secessionist,his morbid imagination had made of Lincoln another Caesar.The occasion called for a Brutus.While Lincoln was planning his peaceful war with the Vindictives,scheming how to keep them from grinding the prostrate South beneath their heels,devising modes of restoring happiness to the conquered region,Booth,at an obscure boarding-house in Washington,was gathering about him a band of adventurers,some of whom at least,like himself,were unbalanced.They meditated a general assassination of the Cabinet.The unexpected theatre party on the fourteenth gave Booth a sudden opportunity.He knew every passage of Ford's Theatre.He knew,also,that Lincoln seldom surrounded himself with guards.
During the afternoon,he made his way unobserved into the theatre and bored a hole in the door of the presidential box,so that he might fire through it should there be any difficulty in getting the door open.
About ten o'clock that night,the audience was laughing at the absurd play;the President's party were as much amused as any.
Suddenly,there was a pistol shot.A moment more and a woman's voice rang out in a sharp cry.An instant sense of disaster brought the audience startled to their feet.Two men were glimpsed struggling toward the front of the President's box.
One broke away,leaped down on to the stage,flourished a knife and shouted,"Sic semper tyrannis!"Then he vanished through the flies.It was Booth,whose plans had been completely successful.He had made his way without interruption to within a few feet of Lincoln.At point-blank distance,he had shot him from behind,through the head.In the confusion which ensued,he escaped from the theatre;fled from the city;was pursued;and was himself shot and killed a few days later.
The bullet of the assassin had entered the brain,causing instant unconsciousness.The dying President was removed to a house on Tenth Street,No.453,where he was laid on a bed in a small room at the rear of the hall on the ground floor.[12]
Swift panic took possession of the city."A crowd of people rushed instinctively to the White House,and bursting through the doors,shouted the dreadful news to Robert Lincoln and Major Hay who sat gossiping in an upper room....They ran down-stairs.Finding a carriage at the door,they entered it and drove to Tenth Street."[13]
To right and left eddied whirls of excited figures,men and women questioning,threatening,crying out for vengeance.
Overhead amid driving clouds,the moon,through successive mantlings of darkness,broke periodically into sudden blazes of light;among the startled people below,raced a witches'dance of the rapidly changing shadows.[14]
Lincoln did not regain consciousness.About dawn his pulse began to fail.A little later,"a look of unspeakable peace came over his worn features"[15],and at twenty-two minutes after seven on the morning of the fifteenth of April,he died.
