Read Bloody Times for Free Online Page B

loud and fearful roar. They shouted strange words which pierced the din: “Murder.” “Assassin.” “President.” “Dead.”
    Then random words formed into sentences: “Don’t let him escape.” “Catch him.” “It was John Wilkes Booth!” “Burn the theater!” “The president has been shot.” “President Lincoln is dead.” “No, he’s alive.”
    In the Petersen house, a boardinghouse across the street from Ford’s Theatre, Henry Safford, who shared a second-floor rented room, heard the noise outside. He had not gone to bed and was still awake, reading a book. From his window he saw the crowd. Something was wrong. He raced downstairs, unlocked the door, and hurried into the street. He pushed through the crowd. Halfway across, the mob blocked his progress. He could not take another step. There were too many people. He saw that this crowd was angry, perhaps dangerous. But why?
    Safford decided to return to the safety of the Petersen house. “Finding it impossible to go further, as everyone acted crazy or mad, I retreated to the steps of my house,” he wrote later. Before he got out of the mob, he heard its news: Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated in Ford’s Theatre. He had been shot, the murderer had escaped, and the president was still inside.
    Other boarders at Petersen’s heard the noise outside. George Francis and his wife, Huldah, lived on the first floor, and their two big front parlor windows faced the theater. “We were about getting into bed,” Francis recalled. “Huldah had got into bed. I had changed my clothes and shut off the gas, when we heard such a terrible scream that we ran to the front window to see what it could mean.” Looking out into the street, they saw “a great commotion—in the Theatre—some running in, others hurrying out, and we could hear hundreds of voices mingled in the greatest confusion. Presently we heard some one say ‘the President is shot,’ when I hurried on my clothes and ran out, across the street, as they brought him out of the Theatre—Poor man! I could see as the gas light fell upon his face, that it was deathly pale, and that his eyes were closed.”
    While George Francis stayed in the street, Henry Safford had returned to the Petersen house. From the first-floor porch, he noticed a commotion at one of the theater doors, and then watched a small knot of people push their way into the street. An army officer waved his sword in the air, bellowing at people to step back and clear the way. Someone else ran from Ford’s across the street and pounded on the door of the house next to the Petersen house. No one answered.
    In command of that little group was Dr. Charles A. Leale, a U.S. army surgeon who had been watching the play and who was the first doctor to see Lincoln after the shooting. “When we arrived to the street,” he remembered, “I was asked to place him in a carriage and remove him to the White House. This I refused to do fearing that he would die as soon as he would be placed in an upright position. I said that I wished to take him to the nearest house, and, place him comfortably in bed. We slowly crossed the street.”
    Safford watched the little group of several men inch through the mob. They were carrying something. It was a man. It was the body of Abraham Lincoln. “Where can we take him?” Safford heard one of the men shout.
    Henry Safford seized a candle and held it up so that the men carrying the president could see it. “Bring him in here!” he yelled. He waved the light. “Bring him in here!” He caught their attention. “I saw a man,” said Dr. Leale, “standing at the door of Mr. Petersen’s house holding a candle in his hand and beckoning us to enter.”

    The Petersen House, where Lincoln died.
    Lincoln’s bearers walked from Ford’s Theatre to the Petersen house. From the safety of her front parlor, Huldah Francis watched them get closer and closer. Soon they were right below her window. When she saw the