Read Bloody Times for Free Online Page A

Six
    On April 14, Jefferson Davis sent a hurried note to Varina.
    Greensboro N.C.
14 April 65
    Dear Winnie
    I will come to you if I can. Every thing is dark.—you should prepare for the worst by dividing your baggage so as to move in wagons. If you can go to Abbeville it seems best as I am now advised—If you can send every thing there do so—I have lingered on the road and labored to little purpose—My love to the children and Maggie—God bless and preserve you ever prays your most affectionate
    Banny —
    I sent you a telegram but fear it was stopped on the road. Genl. Bonham bears this and will [tell] you more than I can write as his horse is at the door and he waits for me to write this again and ever your’s—
    Then he spent a quiet night wondering what events the coming days might bring. His journey, although difficult, had not been a complete failure. Yes, he had fled Richmond, lost Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, and abandoned the state of Virginia to the enemy. But the situation was not all bad. During his twelve days on the run, he had escaped capture, kept his government together, and protected his family. And he had kept his dignity. He had not fled Richmond like a thief in the night, but as a head of state.
    Abraham Lincoln began another busy day on April 14 with breakfast with his son Robert, an army officer on Grant’s staff and just back from Lee’s surrender. The president spent the day in meetings and writing letters. He agreed to go with his wife to Ford’s Theatre that night to see the comedy Our American Cousin. In the afternoon Abraham and Mary Lincoln went on a carriage ride to the Navy Yard. He told her that today he considered the war to be over. Abraham Lincoln wanted to laugh tonight.
    Around 8:30 P.M. the President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with their companions, Major Henry Rathbone, an army officer, and his fiancée, Clara Harris, daughter of a United States senator, got out of their carriage, walked several yards to the front door of Ford’s Theatre, and disappeared inside.
    Abraham Lincoln loved the theater, and during the Civil War he had gone to many plays. Tonight, while his parents attended Our American Cousin , twelve-year-old Tad Lincoln enjoyed Aladdin at Grover’s Theatre, a few blocks away. Lincoln’s other son, twenty-one-year-old Robert, chose to stay at the White House to read.
    At the Star Saloon, the brick building just south of Ford’s, customers gulped their whiskeys and brandies and tossed their coins on the bar in payment. One of them—a handsome, pale-skinned, black-eyed, raven-haired young man with a mustache—swallowed his drink and left the bar without speaking a word. If anyone had been watching the front door of the Star Saloon between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M. , he might have recognized John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous stage stars in America, as he left wearing a black frock coat, black pants, thigh-high black leather riding boots, and a black hat.
    Booth turned north up Tenth Street, saw the president’s carriage parked several yards in front of him, and then turned right, toward the theater, passing through Ford’s main door, the same one through which the president had entered about an hour earlier. If he intended to see the play, John Wilkes Booth was impossibly late.
    It was ten o’clock. By eleven, quiet Tenth Street would be filled with a screaming mob of thousands of people.
    It began between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. At one moment the street was quiet. At the next dozens of playgoers rushed out the doors from Ford’s Theatre onto Tenth Street. People pushed one another aside and knocked one another down to squeeze through the exits.
    Some of the first men to escape the theater headed toward E and F Streets, shouting as they ran. Within seconds they turned the corners and vanished from sight. Then hundreds of men, women, and children fled Ford’s and gathered in the street. Many screamed. Others wept. Soon their voices combined into a