A Night of Horrors

Special Smashwords Edition

A Night of Horrors

by

John Charles Berry

This book is a work of historic fiction. While the names, places and incidents are based on real events, the exact dialog and actions of characters involved are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual conversations, events or locales other than what is noted in the Bibliography is entirely coincidental.

A Night of Horrors

Special Smashwords Edition

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Copyright © 2011 by John Charles Berry. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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ISBN 978-1-937387-01-3 (eBook)

Version 2013.01.14

For Melanie…my one and only

…It was a night of horrors.

Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court describing the night of April 14, 1865

My dear Sir: I intend to adopt the advice of my friends and use due precaution…

Abraham Lincoln responding to General James Van Alen on April 14, 1865, who had urged him ‘to guard his life and not expose it to assassination’

Foreword

My goal in writing about the events in the twenty-four hours leading to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the attempted assassination of William Seward, and the aborted assassination of Andrew Johnson was to simultaneously capture the veracity of the events as they unfolded and the drama that played out on April 14th, 1865. While this novel is the fictional retelling of the twenty-four hours that terrorized a nation and forever altered its history, it is historical fiction. This novel is the first to fictionally recreate the twenty-fours leading up to Lincoln’s death as well as to capture the original intent of Booth’s conspiracy: to kill Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson at 10:15 PM that Friday night. I have utilized my training as a Ph.D. in English to research the events surrounding the assassination and then to represent them to the best of my ability in their proper sequence and occurrence. But, as all novelists do, I have relied upon my imagination to fill in the gaps that haven’t been documented by historical records or by the many historians who have studied and written about this singular event in United States history.

In order to maintain the narrative flow and not to impede the enjoyment of the read, I have provided a shortened bibliography in an Author’s Note after the novel. I have also provided a limited set of footnotes to show where I have used the original writing of these historical figures for their dialogue in my fictional retelling.

To see a comprehensive bibliography of my research, a timeline of the events of the twenty-four hours from 7:00 AM April 14th to 7:00 AM April 15th, as well as other information about the Lincoln assassination, please go to www.johnberrynovels.com. My greatest hope is that you enjoy this story and are inspired to learn more about the crucible of history that is the Civil War of the United States and that fateful day of April 14th, 1865.

I also want to formally thank my wife and two children, whose patience during the research and writing of the novel as well as their support in each step of this project has made it possible. They are the loves of my life and my greatest joy and success.

A Night of Horrors

Prologue

It was exactly four years before April 14th, 1865, that the Federal government surrendered Fort Sumter to the newly formed Confederacy. That April was the inception of the unending war. With each succeeding spring, the only colors that seemed to matter were the reds and browns of warfare rather than the pinks, whites, reds, and yellows of the blooming trees and flowers. The red blood of more than 400,000 men who were injured and the 620,000 men who died was mixed with the brown mud and muck that enveloped each battlefield, left to be cleaned up by the unlucky citizenry who happened to live near by.

In the previous spring and summer of 1864, the entire nation awaited the latest news, transmitted over the telegraph lines, of the pitched battles between Grant and Lee as they fought their way south through Virginia. Lee parried Grant’s moves and fired blistering salvoes into the charging Union forces. Grant sent his men on in a relentless and heartless drive towards the Confederate Capital, Richmond, Virginia. In early May, the two armies fought in the woods and dense underbrush of Virginia just south of the Rapidan River. It was a brutal engagement where the sparks discharged from the rifles ignited fires that caught and spread adding a new white smoke to the clouds of gray smoke already present from the gunpowder and cannon fire. Many of the men who lay injured from the relentless fighting were consumed alive in the conflagrations. Men screamed in agony and cried for friend or foe to put an end to the misery. The limbs of both men and trees shriveled in the fires. Grant, sensing that he was not going to find victory in The Wilderness, as the battle came to be called, disengaged from Lee’s army and turned south. News arrived in Washington City of the extensive casualties and the brutality of the fighting just ahead of the wagon trains that rolled into the city bearing the grim evidence of how primal the fighting had become. Men—burned, shot, stabbed, maimed, and missing limbs—quickly began to fill the Army hospitals. The President and Secretary of War paced the floor of the Telegraph Office, stunned at the losses reported by Grant.

Just a day after disengaging from Lee’s army, the Union soldiers found the Confederates entrenched near a small Virginia town called Spotsylvania. The nation held its breath for twelve long days as the wires brought news of Grant’s determined and unyielding assaults on the Confederate troops. Grant, finding his nemesis too well established to be defeated, disengaged once more and moved again further south. During the last week of May in 1864, the two armies moved, set up fortifications, and then moved again as they attempted to gain a stronger position and some advantage over their enemy. Then, on June 1st, Washington City began to hear dribs and drabs of another major conflict. Over the next few days it became astonishingly clear that Grant had sent wave after wave of Union men against Lee’s impregnable position at Cold Harbor, Virginia. Sixty thousand Union soldiers attacked the Army of Virginia in the initial advance. In one of the most brutal sixty minutes of the war, 7,000 Union soldiers were killed in just the first hour alone. The fighting continued for a few days, while the men lay dead and dying between the lines—almost all of them in blue uniforms. Then it became a stand off of wills between the two generals: Grant and Lee. After a week of considering his options, Grant, again, moved the Army of the Potomac south, ever closer to Richmond. He left behind some 50,000 casualties, but he was also within ten miles of Richmond, the Confederate Capital. The toll on the Army of the Potomac continued to mount, as did the calls for President Lincoln to remove Grant from his position as General of all Union forces. The General was now known as The Butcher across the northern states. After more skirmishing and feints, Grant moved his army across the James River and set up siege-works at Petersburg, just south of Richmond, a position that allowed him to cut off supplies to Lee’s Army of Virginia, hunkered down in Richmond.

Grant’s determination to grind away at Lee had been met with disbelief, then outrage, and finally sheer heartbreak by the populace at large across the Northern states. Governors sent telegrams to Abraham Lincoln, telling him their cities were nothing but one long funeral train. Indeed, in the space of just forty days, the Army of the Potomac, under Grant’s leadership, had suffered half as many casualties as in the previous three years of the war combined. In the Capital, Washington City, the hospitals were overrun. Lincoln paced the floor of the telegraph office in the War Department, just across the west lawn of the Executive Mansion, shaking his head as the news came in. But even in the midst of the carnage, Lincoln was encouraged by Grant’s progress towards the Southern Capital. He alone of his generals attacked and fought the enemy.

He moves south. He moves south, he would say to Edwin Stanton, his bearded Secretary of War. Lincoln had realized early on that the North had superior resources to the South, both human and industrial. He had impressed on the previous generals of the Army of the Potomac—McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker—that there was a calculus to the North’s victory. He called it the awful math. Union armies could sustain more casualties than the Confederate armies and bleed the South into defeat. But it was to no avail with them. Grant, though, did not fear Lee and his reputation. So Lincoln sustained Grant in those dark days of the spring and summer of 1864, because the General pressed on and fought Lee at every opportunity. He sustained his General in the same way that he sustained himself. There was one principle that had shone bright and clear to him through the dark days of the war, like a white full moon in the deepest hour of the night: the Union must be preserved. Lincoln believed with a fervor, which never waned, that the United States of America must emerge from the end of the war intact as one country. For if the South were to win and break the country into two, then the very democratic principles on which the country was founded would vanish from the earth like the mists of the morning. Lincoln was a pragmatist in politics and in war. Though he might change his tactics based on the most recent facts before him, he never swerved from that single principle that had become the great crusade of his life: preserving the Union. And for his inspiration, he did not go to the United States Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence. That singular document meant more to him and it was there that he found the inspiration of the shining principles on which the nation was founded and for which it must be preserved.

As the hot days of the summer of 1864 lingered, the dread of those brutal battles in May and June gave way to the torpor of a siege. Once ensconced at Petersburg, Grant and Lee skirmished, with no real battles for endless weeks and months, through the rest of 1864. Meanwhile, Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2nd, 1864, and then proceeded to cut and burn a swathe across Georgia until he arrived in Savannah at Christmas time. As the new year of 1865 turned warm, Sherman resumed his march and burned a broad path through South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union. As spring softened the ground, Grant began to tighten his grip on Petersburg and Richmond. During the cold winter of 1864 to 1865, Grant’s army had effectively cut all supply lines to Lee’s army entrenched at Petersburg. The soldiers of Lee’s Army of Virginia were clothed in rags and many were shoeless. Lee’s demands for food and clothes had gone unanswered by the Confederacy. Not because Confederate President Jefferson Davis was unsympathetic; he was simply unable to give what he did not have. As Grant began to move his men closer for the inevitable battle in the spring of 1865, Robert Lee knew his army could not sustain the losses of a fight. Feeling his desperate plight, Lee decided to flee south to try and join with Johnston and his army of 30,000 in North Carolina. So the Confederate troops abandoned Richmond and Petersburg and made a run for it. The Union army took possession of Richmond on Monday, April 3rd, and Grant pursued Lee and his army across southern Virginia, blocking his path to North Carolina. The City of Washington came to life with celebration. For the first time in four long years of fighting, the people began to hope that the end was nearing. Then, just six days later, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant on Sunday, April 9th. It was Palm Sunday.

Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, ordered a five hundred-gun salute that rattled doors and broke windows in the houses surrounding the War Department. On Thursday, April 13th, Washington City celebrated with a great Illumination. As darkness began to settle over the Capital, throngs of people walked, rode their horses, and drove their carriages through the city. Everywhere you looked, candles burned in the windows. The Executive Mansion, the Treasury building, the War Department building, and the State Department building each had several candles in each of their windows. But none could outdo the Patent Building which seemed to light the very night sky with more than 5,000 candles burning in celebration of the end of the war. Great-sized eagles were illuminated and sent out bright garish light against the night sky. At the Willard Hotel there were gas jets arranged to form the word Union on the roof. As celebrating crowds passed along Pennsylvania Avenue, heading south and east, there were great bonfires with men and women standing and cheering. Songs would spontaneously erupt and all along the way, total strangers would join into the strains of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Men and women drank themselves to stumbling incoherence and openly embraced one another. Above the city, the new dome of the Capitol Building glowed fiercely in the night when it was lit for the first time in its history. The white dome glittered against the black velvet of the night sky in a tremendous display of National zeal. The gardens around the Capitol were alive with the constant movement of people as they milled about in one endless river of human happiness.

Robert Lee has surrendered! People yelled.

Three cheers for Unconditional Surrender Grant! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

Long live Abraham Lincoln! And so it went. The relief in the North was universal and it was deep. There was not a single household that had not been touched by the war. Above the boisterous crowds, fireworks exploded, taking the celebration into the heavens. The bright blues, reds, and whites glowed on the upturned faces, full of smiles and tears. The war was finally over. The shooting and the stabbing and the wounding and the killing would now come to an end. The binding up of the wounds, which Abraham Lincoln called for in his second inaugural address just weeks earlier, was beginning.

Lincoln’s visage displayed both the relief and the searing pain the long and terrible war had wrought on the nation. In the days of March and April 1865, his countenance went from joy to sadness in the same hour as he rode the peaks and valleys of hope and disappointment. Now in mid April, he realized that he had saved the Union, but it had cost almost a generation of men. Six hundred thousand had perished, nearly two percent of the entire population. There were more than four hundred thousand more who survived, but they would go through the rest of their lives lacking eyes, hands, arms, legs, or feet. Lincoln had bet on the endless resources of the United States and won the wager, but he had nearly sapped his own inner resources in the process. In mid April 1865, he turned his full attention to reconstructing the Union he so prized and cherished.

In the midst of the joyous celebration, however, were pockets of citizens in Washington City who were not as sanguine about the Union victory. While northerners toasted Lincoln and Grant in celebration, Southern sympathizers drank to forget their loss and to try and extinguish their anger.

On April 14th and 15th, 1865, the following events occurred over a twenty-four hour period….

An Oath and a Pledge

Booth blinked open bleary eyes, shot through with blood from too much brandy the night before. He closed them against the bright sun streaming in from behind the heavy drape of the hotel room. Dust motes danced like gnats in the streaming light. He strained his eyes open and brought the blurry outline of the dresser bureau into focus. He rubbed the knuckles of his forefingers into his eyes and yawned at the ceiling. His tongue was pasty and thick as if he had held sand in his mouth while he slept. He took the fingertips from both of his hands and rubbed them back and forth across his scalp. The tingling sensation always helped to awaken him after a night of heavy drinking. Now, he could feel his thick black hair sticking up and pointing in various directions. He would definitely have to head over to Booker’s barbershop for a morning’s grooming.

Booth sighed and scratched himself under the covers and squeezed his eyelids tightly closed, hoping it would help his eyes to focus. As he lay there, eyes closed, the sounds of the street slowly filled the room. And though the window and drape muted them, Wilkes Booth could hear the morning sounds of the nation’s Capital coming to life. Carriages rumbled noisily past the National Hotel on the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue. Horses clopped by, some with riders, others pulling wagons to market. Though he did not want to, he could make out the sounds of the voices and the occasional cheers. The celebrations would continue today as they had every day for the past week and a half.

I’ll be damned, he murmured aloud. It’s already beginning.

The news on the past Sunday of the surrender of the great Robert E. Lee and the inimitable Army of Virginia had pitched the citizens of Washington City into a frenzy far beyond that of the news of the fall of Richmond just five days before. Everywhere Wilkes Booth went he was confronted with the self-congratulatory air of the Union sympathizers. The thoughts of facing another day of having to listen to these pleasantries while he mourned the loss of his country, the Confederate States of America, made him want a drink. But he didn’t duck his head back under his covers.

Booth sat up on the side of the bed and ran his fingers through his thick curly hair as he tried to smooth the tousling he’d created earlier in his attempts to awaken and rouse himself. He stretched and yawned and tried to get the blood moving in his veins. The glint and gleam were already returning to his hazel eyes. John Wilkes Booth was famous for his lustrous eyes, pools of hazel and chocolate into which countless women had lost themselves. Women came for many a mile to sit in the theater audiences at the hope of a glance their way as he strutted and stunted across the stage in his various roles. His black hair rose a bit high on his crown for a man in his early twenties, but the receding hairline was compensated for by piles of dark curls. He sported a black moustache that softened the length of his nose. There was a refinement to his features that hinted at an easy and pampered life. Though Booth liked to play the part of the wealthy actor, he had worked very hard at his stagecraft. He had worked tirelessly in smaller roles, building himself up until he had become one of the most successful actors in the United States. Booth knew how to work the starring system, and had appeared in the top bill all over the North during the war. His celebrity, expensive clothes, and dark looks came together to give Wilkes Booth a darkly fierce beauty that many women, and men, found too much to resist. He was the vitality of perfect manhood.

Booth stood up from the bed contemplating what he would do if he had the chance to stand before Robert E. Lee. It was strange to him to nurture these new emotions of hatred toward a man he had literally worshipped as the singularly bravest and most brilliant military leader in history. But it was true, in three short days he had come to revile Lee with a ferocity that sometimes surprised himself. But then he would sigh and realize that his anger and hatred for Lee were a distraction from the true focus of his disdain. But the war could not be over! The battle for freedom could not now be lost!

Great God, he said aloud and straightened up with a realization. I have no country. The Confederate States of America are no more. He shook his head.

As the last several days had passed, the celebrations grew larger and brighter and louder than the day and night before. With each day, the commendations of Ulysses Grant grew more verbose. Even worse were the adulations of that tyrant, Abraham Lincoln. With each day the praise for the President grew more fervent, bordering on religious ecstasy. To Booth, Lincoln was turning the office of President into a monarchy. The oafish man paraded and preened and pretended to the greatest office in the land. The cheers of the drunken Unionists became obnoxious to him.

And there it was, that man. That name. That Usurper in Chief. He was never far from Booth’s waking thoughts. He did not think he could bear another day of listening to the banter of how that tyrannical king had supposedly saved the nation.

Destroyed a people is more like it. Booth spit the words with perfect elocution from his mouth. "Destroyed my people. Ruined my land. Took my country is what he did. The man is a butcher."

Wilkes Booth went to the dresser and poured water from the pitcher into the basin. He leaned over and splashed water onto his face and rubbed it onto his hands and forearms. He splashed the water again and let the coolness awaken him and he felt his anger course through his veins like liquid fire. He splashed the water onto his face again and then stopped, motionless. His face hovered above the surface of the rippling water. Clear crystal water drops clung to the tips of his nose and beaded along his cheeks rough with the stubble of his beard. His thick black moustache shined with the tiny droplets, clinging to each rich hair. He blinked his eyes and slowly stood up. He looked into the mirror at his now gleaming dark eyes. A small smile spread across his lips and Booth slowly nodded his head. He had come to a conclusion, a decision. His face was pale and there were dark circles around his eyes, reflecting the sleepless nights and anxiety he was battling. He slowly blinked. He nodded his head again, this time with a bit more urgency. It wasn’t the first time that he had entertained this thought, but this morning there was a finality to the thinking … a determination that made the statement an oath and a pledge to the country he had so dearly loved and lost.

"I will do it. I will kill that bastard Abraham Lincoln."

Domestic Idyll

April 14th was a balmy spring morning, filled with bright sun. The breezes carried the scent of seawater as they rolled off the Chesapeake Bay. The bright waves of the bay glinted and leapt and lapped along the shoreline. The briny water was clear and still cold from the winter months. It washed along the endless shoreline and mixed with the fresh water rolling down the Potomac and churned the ocean water from the Atlantic into the estuary where the blue crabs scuttled across the floor of the bay. The great Potomac River seemed to flow clearer and fresher that year in 1865. The trees that hung over these flowing waters were protected from the piercing bullets and blistering grapeshot of the cannons that earlier filled Petersburg, Virginia, and the James River, where the Union and Confederate forces had been facing each other for months. No, the waters of the Potomac ran cool, clean, and clear the farther up the Potomac you went. These flowing waters were just as inviting to Maryland as they were to Virginia. They were just as welcoming to North as to South. To Union as to Confederate.

An Osprey took wing and soared into the air, with its piercing yellow eyes scanning the land below for its prey. It crossed from Port Royal on the Rappahannock River and reached Port Tobacco on the northern branches of the Potomac. The sun bleached and dried the back roads of Charles County in Southern Maryland, where the war had not reached in actual battles but the secret secessionists lived and breathed threats against the Union Army. In a small village called Bryantown there was a crossroads. When you came to this place you could take small back roads leading east and west, but most people would take the main road and choose north or south, the choice forced on all people in the United States at that time. The road going north, stretched and snaked like a tendril, arrived at a small town called Surrattsville. From here it reached further still until it crossed the Anacostia branch and into the Capital of the nation.

There the spring sun shone down on the great dome of the recently completed Capitol, making it gleam and glow like a shining beacon, beckoning the nation to keep hope and press forward. The Executive Mansion, rebuilt and repainted after the War of 1812, had troops bivouacked on the front lawn, spilling around the back and across the Ellipse towards the same Potomac River that flowed south into the great Chesapeake Bay below. The bright buds of spring were breaking out in a riot of color. The red blossoms of Judas Trees, bursting along the thin limbs and trunks, were in contrast to the greens of the oaks and pines. Wispy Willows swayed in the breeze along the Potomac behind the Executive Mansion. The bright whites and soft pinks of Dogwoods on thin limbs seemed suspended on invisible trays in the air. Occasionally, the breeze wafted the unsavory smells of the canal that ran through the Capital and held the flotsam and cast-off of Washington City. For the most part, though, the breeze was balmy and warm, smelling of the impending humidity of summer months.

On this particular Friday, Good Friday of 1865, the colors of the ladies’ dresses, bonnets, and parasols seemed brighter even than the blooming trees of spring. The step of the men was lighter and more self-assured, particularly those in their blue uniforms. The clopping of the horses and bumping of the wagons and carriages down the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue seemed gay and almost celebratory.

Abraham Lincoln awoke on this Friday morning, the day after the great Illumination celebration, feeling more refreshed than at any time since he’d moved into the Executive Mansion. He pulled on his robe and faded slippers and ambled down the hall to the family library on the second floor of the Executive Mansion, directly above the Blue Room. His over-sized feet made padding noises on the wooden floors. The big man scratched his head and rumpled his hair as he went into the library and took a seat in his favorite rocking chair. His long legs jetted out at awkward angles from the chair that was too small for him, but so was all of the furniture he owned. As on every morning, Lincoln began his day by reading two chapters from the Bible. He had spent many a day reading and rereading the brooding warnings of the prophet Jeremiah as he dispensed God’s judgment on the nation of Israel. Lincoln had taken these judgments to heart as he struggled to grasp the magnitude and endurance of the great war he had wanted to end so dearly. Lincoln had taken to heart those passages that said, The fierce anger of the LORD shall not return, until He hath done it, and until He hath performed the intents of His heart. Now he read those passages where God reminded Israel, through Jeremiah, there would be an end to the pain and desolation. Though He would correct thee in measure, and will not leave thee altogether unpunished, a time for rescue would come. He flipped back to the 29th chapter that had given him much encouragement of late and read, For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

Lincoln closed the book over his long bony finger and he held it to his chest and put his head back on the chair and rocked back and forth. He pondered this passage and its promise of a new future—an expected end. He drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. It was a deep sigh from the depths of his soul. The war was indeed over—though there still might be some fighting since Jefferson Davis, the President of the so-called Confederate States, had not been captured and there remained some 175,000 Confederate troops in various armies still in the field because they had not yet surrendered. But Sherman had Johnston and his men pinned down in Greensboro, North Carolina, and they were the largest of the armies. He hoped for good news from Sherman today. The family library had a couch and a stuffed chair, but Lincoln invariably sat in the rocking chair. He often rocked slowly forward and back as he read and pondered the passages of scripture. Or he would take up Shakespeare or one of the satirists that he so enjoyed reading and laughing about. The man didn’t simply read these works of literature and holy creeds, he consumed them. Lincoln was famous for his ability to quote long passages of Shakespeare to those who came to visit him.

Lincoln’s dark hair sprouted up from his head in a variety of directions. He referred to his unruly hair as bristles. His ears, like the rest of his body, were enormous and stuck out from the side of his head like flaps. His face, never handsome, was now more creased and lined from the years of worry with the war. The seemingly endless nights of huddling with the Secretary of War, the reams of paper used to write letters prodding and pushing reluctant generals into attacking, the hours waiting for word of the outcomes of the great and bloody battles had sucked the very life out of the him. The president had become a shrunken man. Lincoln was so thin that his face and head resembled the skull beneath his skin rather than the face of the leader of a nation. His cheeks, always thin, now appeared to have been sucked into his mouth. His skin was now pallid and his lips tight and drawn. Lincoln had devoted every day and night to the cause in which he believed so dearly these past four years and his vital energies seemed to be waning. His nose, another over-sized feature of his face, protruded so far out it made his eyes look smaller and more closely set together than they were. The mole that was evident on his right cheek only added to the man’s awkward looks. He kept his beard closely trimmed to his chin. With the streaks of gray that had grown into it over the past few years, it was now the one distinguishing feature of his face. But his eyes were bright and brown. No matter how drawn and tired his face became, Abraham Lincoln’s eyes remained bright and clear, always looking forward and seeing a certainty to the future that seemed to elude those around him.

This morning, as was usual for him of late, his hands were cold and clammy so he started a fire and returned to his chair and his thoughts. The President had not only had the