I’m currently reading Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, a history book chronicling the hunt for Abraham Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth. Whoever said that truth is stranger than fiction must have been talking about when Lincoln was assassinated. The events that lead to Booth shooting Lincoln, that if were not true, would seem too stupid, too far fetched even to be fiction.
If this book was a novel, if it was fiction, I would have stopped reading it after the second page.
It begins at the end of the American Civil War. The Confederate capitol in Richmond had been taken by Union forces and General Lee had surrendered to General Grant. The war was all but over. Lincoln had just been inaugurated for a second term as President, which oddly enough, Booth attended Lincoln’s inauguration as an invited guest.
On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln and the First Lady, Mary Lincoln, decided to go catch a play at Ford’s theater. They originally planned on attending the play with General Grant and his wife, but at the last minute, Grant backed out because of a scheduling conflict. Lincoln and his wife traveled to the theater and arrived after the play had already begun.
They went there with no security whatsoever. They didn’t have bodyguards. They had nobody with them that were responsible for their protection.
This is the thing that I just cannot wrap my brain around. It was during a time of war. Not just any war, but a civil war. A war between Americans. A war, coincidentally enough, that began because people in the southern states were angry that Abraham Lincoln won the presidency.
These people, even some living right outside Washington, hated Abraham Lincoln so much that they didn’t want to be Americans anymore.
Not only did a large percentage of the American people hate Abraham Lincoln, most of them were well armed. If you didn’t own a gun in 1865, it was because you didn’t want one. People back then regularly went around heavily armed.
How can a president that generated enough hate to start a war be allowed to wonder about without a heavily armed security force? It seems ridiculous to me that someone like Lincoln could just go to a public theater and watch a play like he was a regular person. What I find to be unbelievable about the story of Lincoln being assassinated by John Wilkes Booth was that it didn’t happen much sooner then it did.
Seriously, how could it not?
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I thought I read that there was a body guard at the theater, a guy named Parker that history does not speak well of:
http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln61.html
No, he wasn’t mentioned in the book. It did mention that Booth was surprised that there was nobody guarding the President’s box. He had expected to find someone sitting in a chair in front of the door leading into the box, but the chair was empty.