The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth, and the Great American Tragedy

Chapter Fifteen: The Darkest Dawn

chapter fifteen THE DARKEST DAWN As James Tanner neared the street his boarding house sat on, he found his steps increasingly slowed. Several hundred yards from the building itself, the twenty-one-year-old former soldier found his path blocked entirely. In contrast to the riotous mobs elsewhere, a ghostly silence pervaded the dense crowd that stood outside the Petersen house. Dismayed, yet determined to reach his room, Tanner edged and slid his way forward on his shaky artificial legs. At length, he reached the military cordon encircling the Petersen home. After some intense explanation , Tanner eventually convinced the officers in charge that his quarters were indeed in the adjoining boarding house, and he was permitted to enter the building. Upon reaching his room, however, the exhausted young man was in for another surprise.1 “There was a balcony in front,” he said, “and I found my rooms and the balcony thronged by other occupants of the house.”2 From this high vantage, Tanner and the others had a front row seat to the drama unfolding next door. Like everyone else around him, the young man was absorbed by the coming and going at the Petersen house. As the stunned spectators watched, Edwin Stanton, Charles Sumner, and Robert Lincoln hastened up the steps, as did numerous political and military men. None, though, was more instantly recognizable than Gideon Welles, the dour, white-bearded man with the ill-fitting wig. After Welles entered the home, he hurried down the hall to the room where his beloved chief lay. Wrote the secretary of navy in his diary: The room was small and overcrowded. The surgeons and members of the Cabinet were as many as should have been in the room, but there were many more, and the hall and other rooms 117 118 the darkest dawn in the front or main house were full. . . . The excitement and bad atmosphere from the crowded rooms oppressed me physically.3 Indeed, the modest rooms were soon packed with scores of people, with no fewer than sixteen doctors alone.4 Around the fallen leader’s bed were arrayed his shaken Cabinet members, most of whom were crying uncontrollably.5 The normally stern and unbending Edwin Stanton, his body now convulsed with sorrow, sat stooped beside the bed, the tears trickling through his fingers to the floor.6 Senator Charles Sumner was particularly affected. “He was sobbing like a woman,” noted a reporter, “with his head bowed down almost in the pillow of the bed.”7 When Gideon Welles, his body shaking with emotion, finally asked a physician about Lincoln’s condition, the words were heartbreaking: He replied the President was dead to all intents, although he might live three hours or perhaps longer. . . . He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms . . . were of a size which we would scarce have expected from his spare appearance. His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes with each breath that he took. His features were calm and striking.8 Indeed, the president’s great strength and stamina were astonishing to those who witnessed the struggle. Among the physicians present, all agreed that a normal man would have succumbed soon after receiving such a grievous injury.9 All the same, and except for some ineffectual probing of the wound, there was little that surgeons could do but keep the president’s body warm while they waited for inevitable death.10 “His face looked ghastly,” recalled fifteen-year-old Fred Petersen, son of the homeowner. “He lay with his head on [the] pillow, and his eyes, all bloodshot [were] almost protruding from their sockets. . . . [H]is jaw had fallen down upon his breast, showing his teeth.”11 Other visitors to the house were soon made aware that with each rise and fall of the president’s chest there issued “one of the most dismal, mournful, moaning noises ever heard.”12 Secretary of the Interior John Usher was startled by the sound the moment he entered the home. “[H]is breathing was deep[,] almost a snore . . . almost a moan,” said Usher.13 Heartrending as the sounds were to those who loved him, no one felt the impact more than his wife. Drawn from the front parlor by her husband’s suffering, her hair disheveled, her gown crumpled and bloody, Mary entered the tiny room on the verge of total collapse.14 Wrote John Usher: She implored him to speak...