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Prologue No Regrets It was Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and almost everyone in the squalid, bustling capital city wanted to celebrate. Just five days before, Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Confederacy’s largest army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The war was finally ending, the Union would be preserved, and Leonard Grover, owner and proprietor of Grover’s New National Theater—locals usually just called it Grover’s or the National— pulled out all the stops. A lighthearted fantasy called Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp would set just the right celebratory tone. But Grover also decorated his theater with evergreen wreaths, arranged for the reading of an “Original Patriotic Poem,”asked one of the cast members of Aladdin, Effie Germon, to sing a new song called “When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea,” and mounted a “Magnificent Pyrotechnic Display” and a “Panoramic View”—a stage-sized painting—of Charleston Harbor and Fort Sumter, where the war had started almost four years earlier. As a matter of custom, Grover invited President Lincoln and his wife to watch from the private box he had built for them. The Lincolns chose instead to attend the production of a rather worn play called Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. But a tutor took their twelve-year-old son,Tad, to Grover’s for the child-friendly spectacle. Among the hundreds of others attending the gala was a young government clerk, James Tanner. Tanner was a boy from upstate New York who had joined the army as a seventeen-year-old in the fall of 1861. After recovering from the loss of his lower legs at Second Bull Run less than a year later,Tanner had learned to walk on prosthetic limbs; mastered the craft of stenography, or shorthand; and taken a clerk’s job in the War Department. Tanner would describe the remarkable events of this April evening and his role in them in a letter he began writing a few days later to a former classmate named Henry Walch. 2 Prologue Tanner’s narrative skipped the patriotic poems, songs, and even the play and jumped directly to the moment just after ten o’clock, when someone threw open a theater door and shouted that the president had been shot. The audience gasped and many surged toward the exits, but others scornfully argued that it was simply a ruse of pickpockets hoping to take advantage of a panicked crowd. Most of the audience uneasily returned to their seats, and the play went on. Soon, however, the manager stepped onto the stage and confirmed that the president had been critically wounded. Tanner and his friend hoped to discover more about the assassination at nearby Willard’s Hotel, a favorite hangout for politicians and officers—the poet Walt Whitman once referred with contempt to the hotel saloon being “full of shoulder-straps.” After learning nothing, they took a horse-drawn car to Ford’s Theater, coincidentally located across the street from Tanner’s second-floor flat on Tenth Street, between Avenues E and F. They found the street jammed with civilians and soldiers who had streamed into the neighborhood from saloons and other theaters. Gen. C. C. Augur, the military commander of Washington, and several soldiers and policemen maintained order; Tanner described the growing multitude as “very quiet” but “very much excited.” He squeezed through the crowd, crossed the street, and entered the building next to the house where the president had been taken. Tanner hobbled up the stairs to his room and out to a balcony overlooking the street, where he watched generals, politicians, and other dignitaries arrive and depart and could hear occasional grim reports about the president’s condition. Inside the Petersen House, as it came to be called, the irascible, gray-bearded secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, had begun hearing testimony from witnesses, but taking down evidence in longhand was too slow. Another government clerk on the scene knew of Tanner’s training, and soon Augur called Tanner into the house. Tanner managed to get down the stairs, through the soldiers and civilians crammed into the street and sidewalk, and into the middle room of the three-room flat. He sat at a small table, surrounded by most of the president’s cabinet, several generals, and the chief justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and of the District of Columbia. “Never in my life was I surrounded by half so impressive...

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