Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [482]
The news reached Gideon Welles almost simultaneously. He had already gone to bed when his wife reported someone at the door. “I arose at once,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and raised a window, when my messenger, James called to me that Mr. Lincoln the President had been shot,” and that Seward and his son had been assassinated. Welles thought the story “very incoherent and improbable,” but the messenger assured him that he had already been to Seward’s house to check its veracity before coming to see his boss. Also ignoring his wife’s protests, Welles dressed and set forth in the foggy night for the Seward house on the other side of the square.
Upon reaching Seward’s house, Welles and Stanton were shocked at what they found. Blood was everywhere—on “the white wood work of the entry,” on the stairs, on the dresses of the women, on the floor of the bedroom. Seward’s bed, Welles recalled, “was saturated with blood. The Secretary was lying on his back, the upper part of his head covered by a cloth, which extended down over his eyes.” Welles questioned Dr. Verdi in a whisper, but Stanton was unable to mute his stentorian voice until the doctor asked for quiet. After looking in on Fred’s unconscious form, the two men walked together down the stairs. In the lower hall, they exchanged what information they had regarding the president. Welles thought they should go to the White House, but Stanton believed Lincoln was still at the theater. Army quartermaster general Meigs, who had just come to the door, implored them not to go to 10th Street, where thousands of people had gathered. When they insisted, he decided to join them.
Twelve blocks away, in his home at Sixth and E streets, Chief Justice Chase had already retired for the night. Earlier that afternoon, he had taken a carriage ride with Nettie, intending to stop at the White House to remonstrate with Lincoln over his too lenient approach to Reconstruction and his failure to demand universal suffrage. At the last minute, “uncertain how [Lincoln] would take it,” Chase had decided to wait until the following day.
He was fast asleep when a servant knocked on his bedroom door. There was a gentleman downstairs, the servant said, who claimed “the President had been shot.” The caller was a Treasury employee who had actually witnessed the shooting “by a man who leaped from the box upon the stage & escaped by the rear.” Chase hoped “he might be mistaken,” but in short order, three more callers arrived. Each “confirmed what I had been told & added that Secretary Seward had also been assassinated, and that guards were being placed around the houses of all the prominent officials, under the apprehension that the plot had a wide range. My first impulse was to rise immediately & go to the President…but reflecting that I could not possibly be of any service and should probably be in the way of those who could, I resolved to wait for morning & further intelligence. In a little while the guard came—for it was supposed that I was one of the destined victims—and their heavy tramp-tramp was heard under my window all night…. It was a night of horrors.”
When Stanton and Welles arrived at the crammed room in the Petersen boardinghouse, they found that Lincoln had been placed diagonally across a bed to accommodate his long frame. Stripped of his shirt, “his large arms,” Welles noted, “were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance.” His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so much vitality” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.
Mary spent most of the endless night weeping in