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The president felt there was something momentous about this day—Good Friday. He was not sure what to expect, he told the cabinet, perhaps news of Johnston’s surrender or the capture of Jefferson Davis, but the night before he had dreamed his recurring dream—the one that always seemed to precede good news—in which he was sailing “with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.”23 When he joined Mary Lincoln for a carriage ride a couple of hours later, Lincoln was even more emphatic about his feelings: “I consider this day, the war has come to a close,” he told her. “We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”24

That evening the Lincolns went to Ford’s Theatre to watch Laura Keane in her one-thousandth performance of Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin.38.2 All of Washington knew that Lincoln was going to be there, and many people had bought tickets just so they could catch a glimpse of him. The information helped John Wilkes Booth to make up his mind; his previous attempts to kidnap the president had all been thwarted by faulty intelligence or human failure. Months of frustration had exacerbated his already volatile nature, and tonight he was determined “to live in history.”25 He expected three deaths to occur simultaneously: Lincoln’s by his hand, Vice President Andrew Johnson’s by the hand of George Atzerodt, and Seward’s by the hand of Lewis Powell; and he had prepared a statement in advance for the National Intelligencer justifying the murders. The three men started out together, but George Atzerodt could not bring himself to perform the task and retreated to a hotel bar. At 10:00 P.M. Powell called at Seward’s house, claiming to have brought medicine from the doctor. A servant took him to the third floor, where Fanny and a male nurse were tending to Seward. But Frederick, Seward’s younger son, became suspicious and refused to let Powell enter the patient’s room. Throwing off his pretense, Powell attempted to shoot Frederick, and when the gun failed to go off, he used it to beat him unconscious. Easily dispensing with the nurse who opened the door to investigate the noise, Powell ignored Fanny and went straight for Seward, who struggled to defend himself as Powell hacked at his head and neck with his bowie knife. Fanny’s screams alerted Seward’s older son, Augustus, who rushed into the room and tried to grab the knife. Powell slashed at him wildly; breaking free of Augustus’s grip, he hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house, stabbing a State Department messenger who happened to call at the wrong time.

A few minutes later, just after the curtain had risen for the third act of Our American Cousin, Booth talked his way into the presidential box and fired a single shot into the back of Lincoln’s head. Before anyone could stop him, Booth leaped over the balustrade and onto the stage, the petrified actors watching helplessly as he hobbled out the back. Lincoln was carried to a house across the street where he lingered, unconscious, for nine hours, his decline observed by the cabinet and several doctors. Mary Lincoln became so hysterical that she was removed from the room several times, and she was absent when Lincoln took his final breath at twenty-two minutes past seven in the morning.

Seward lived, though his throat had been slashed several times and his right cheek nearly sliced off as he tried to fight his attacker. Frederick was in a coma, his skull broken in two places, and Augustus had suffered two stab wounds to the head and one to his hand. The secretary of state drifted in and out of consciousness for several days, unaware that Lincoln was dead or that Andrew Johnson had been sworn in as the seventeenth president of the United States. Although propped up on pillows so he could watch Lincoln’s funeral procession on April 19, Seward admitted later that the black funeral plumes passing beneath his window had caught his eye but failed