The Minutes of a Murder

THE DAY LINCOLN WAS SHOT (304 pp.) --Jim Bishop--Harper ($3.75).

The triumph and tragedy of Abraham Lincoln remains one of the great stories of U.S. history, and the poets, professors and politicians never tire of telling it in all its phases. Now an oldtime rewrite man has moved in, read 7,000,000 words of evidence about Lincoln's murder, and recast the familiar facts with startling, tabloid immediacy. In the course of his relentless, clock's-tick chronicle of the crucial hours, Jim Bishop, once of the New York News and Mirror and now editor of the Catholic Digest, sticks to police-blotter facts-and makes the state of the nation's security on April 14, 1865 look appalling.

Hundreds of Terrorists? At 10:15 p.m., as the Lincolns sat watching Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, John Wilkes Booth made his way unnoticed into the presidential box, fired a bullet into the back of the President's head, and escaped across the stage to his horse in the back alley. Where was Lincoln's bodyguard? John F. Parker, of the Washington police force, was drinking at a bar next door; he had deserted his post at the door to the presidential box, through which the assassin passed. Who was Parker? A questionable type with black marks on his police-force record (all kept from Lincoln). There was an uproar from the theater and a terrible cry that the President had been shot, but Parker was not heard from until 6 the next morning, when he turned in a streetwalker to show that he had not been idle. Never punished, Parker served three more years on the force before he was fired for sleeping on duty.

While Booth galloped over the Navy Yard bridge into southern Maryland, official Washington collapsed in "inert panic." Instead of directing pursuit of the assassin, the capital's police chief, who was in the audience and saw him, rushed off to tell his detectives to gather witnesses. Four soldiers bore the mortally wounded President to a tailor's house across from the theater. Word flashed that an attacker had stabbed Secretary of State Seward, bedridden by a recent accident. Washington's army commandant, General Christopher C. Augur, sent patrols out helter-skelter and waited for orders from his chief, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. With another Cabinet member, Stanton hurried from the bedside of Seward to the tailor's house and set up a frantic headquarters there. While the President lay bleeding in a hall bedroom and Mrs. Lincoln screamed and wept in the front parlor, Stanton "convened a special court of inquiry . . . issued orders, wrote messages . . . summoned high personages . . . and took the reins of government."

Sure that "hundreds of terrorists were in Washington City," he ordered all firemen on the alert against possible mass arson. Without bothering about legal authority, he ordered the arrest of "every human being" employed at Ford's Theatre.

He ordered out 8,000 soldiers and dispatched patrols in every direction except the one which Booth took (Stanton erroneously assumed that the wartime 9 o'clock closing of the Navy Yard bridge was still enforced). The telegraph went dead. Army units searched and arrested blindly.

An Old Tip. The witnesses who streamed in and out of Stanton's improvised HQ all identified Booth as the assassin. In a belated roundup of stablekeepers, army troops found a man who had kept Booth's horse for him till late afternoon.

Not until five hours after the shooting did Stanton name the actor in his communiques, and most U.S. newspapers went to press that morning without naming the assassin.

Finally, someone remembered a month-old tip that a plot was being hatched in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Mary Surratt.* Authorities hurried to the address, found documents and clues that persuaded Stanton that Actor Booth was responsible. As day broke, Stanton ordered all exits from the capital checked again, and decided that Booth had probably got away into southern Maryland. Then, as troopers rode out along the Potomac (it took twelve days to corner and kill Booth), Stanton and Mrs. Lincoln entered the little bedroom where Lincoln lay on a cornhusk mattress. Outside, a throng of weeping people, mainly Negroes, waited in the damp street. Cavalry horses were tied four and five to a picket post along the block. Newsboys ran past, shouting: "Assassination!" At the Baltimore & Ohio terminal, all train traffic stopped as detectives searched passengers, trainmen, mail bags. It was 7:22 a.m. The surgeon general of the United States leaned across the bed and placed two silver coins on the President's eyes.

The Secretary of War rose to the occasion. "Now he belongs to the ages," he said.

* With one of her boarders and six other men, Mrs. Surratt was arrested. She and three of the men died on the gallows three months later; the others went to prison. One died in prison, but in 1869 the others were pardoned.

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