The Lincoln Assassination, Part 4

Lincoln died in the early morning hours of April 15, 1865 - 148 years ago today. With his death the country seemed simply to come unglued, as if all that was coherent and meaningful rested overmuch on the uncanny force of the person who had just been assassinated.  How much the country needed the magnanimity and sense of compassion that seemed incarnate in President Abraham Lincoln! And yet sadly all that seemed to move humankind was marked by small-mindedness, rancor and recrimination – and a bottomless quest for revenge.

For example, Stanton who was running the country on the fateful night that Lincoln lay dying concluded (rightly or wrongly, but certainly very quickly) that the assassin had been acting as an agent of the Confederate government, and offered the unheard-of sum of $100,000 (four times the President's annual salary) as a reward for the capture of Jefferson Davis.

Then there was Vice President Johnson who spent that fateful night pacing back and forth in his room repeating, "They shall suffer for this! They shall suffer for
this!"

At a more modest level, while Johnson was visiting Lincoln in the Petersen house across the street from Ford's Theater to which Lincoln was taken after he was shot, he was unceremoniously rushed out of the room when word reached Stanton that Mrs. Lincoln, who was in a room next to her dying husband, wished to visit her husband again - Mrs Lincoln detested "that miserable inebriate Johnson." [In a letter fully a year later she gave vent to her spleen: "he wrote me a line of condolence and behaved in the most brutal way... As sure as you and I live, Johnson had some hand in this."]

At one point on that fateful night Mary was frightened by her dying husband's rattling breathing, and she let loose a loud, piercing shriek and then fainted, which caused the irritable Stanton to order, "Take that woman out and do not let her back again!"

Were cooler heads to prevail in this dire emergency? In point of fact, it seemed clear that the one with the cool head was dead. Those that remained behind were full of inchoate rage and bottomless grief.