Where was Andrew Johnson?

Attending the Ford Theater performance on the night of Lincoln's assassination was former Wisconsin Governor Leonard Farwell. Farwell was a friend of Andrew Johnson who lived on the same floor at the Kirkwood House. Upon witnessing the shooting of the President, he immediately left the theater and hurried to Andrew Johnson’s hotel room. A few moments after calling loudly for him and rapping on the door, the Vice-President rose from his bed and answered his call. Farwell told him of the assassination, locked and bolted the door, and isolated him from the mob forming in the streets by insisting the hotel place a guard outside his room.

Washington’s Provost Marshall Major James O’Beirne also sent a man to guard the Vice-President as soon as he heard the news of the attack. After a briefing with Secretary of War Stanton, O’Beirne, secured a buggy and fought his way through the crowds to summon the Vice-President at the Kirkwood House.

Asked by Johnson if the President was dead, O’Beirne replied that he was not when he left the Peterson House but death could come at any moment. He then told him, “It is the wish of Mr. Stanton that you come down to the Peterson House, in order to be sworn in when Mr. Lincoln dies. And I believe it is intended to hold a cabinet meeting in the parlor of the house.”

Senator Charles Sumner was at Lincoln’s bedside the entire night and said Johnson arrived ‘about two o’clock in the morning’. According to the Senator, Johnson remained only two minutes in the Lincoln’s room, because Mary wanted to visit her husband again.

Since Johnson’s visit to Lincoln’s deathbed was so brief, we have to assume he spent the majority of his time conferring with Stanton. Best estimates put his stay between 20 to 30 minutes. Johnson was a virtual prisoner in his room after the attack and was anxious to learn as much as possible. He continually queried his guards over Lincoln and Seward’s condition. He even asked Farwell to go in person to see the President and not be satisfied with second or third hand information.
Senator Sumner knew that Mrs. Lincoln had a strong dislike for Andrew Johnson and thought it best that she not see him hovering over her husband. Since his briefing with Stanton was finished, Johnson excused himself and disappeared into the night. What happened next became a mystery and controversy.

The only people that we know who were actually looking at their watches and recording the time of events was Stanton as he dispatched orders and Dr. Ezra Abbott who was recording Lincoln’s pulse readings.

Mary Lincoln’s friend Elizabeth Dixon wrote that Mrs. Lincoln left her husband’s side only twice the entire evening. From Dr. Abbott’s notes, we know that the first time she left was 2:10 a.m. returning to his side at 3:00 a.m.

1.30 o’clock. Pulse 95; appearing easier.
1.45 o’clock. Pulse 86; respiration irregular; Mrs. Lincoln present
2.10 o’clock. Mrs. Lincoln, with Robert Lincoln, retired to an adjoining room.
2.30 o’clock. Pulse 54; President very quiet; respiration 28.
2.52 o’clock. Pulse 48; respiration 30.
3.00 o’clock. Visited again by Mrs. Lincoln.

The second and last time was twenty minutes before his death confirmed by the accounts of Dr. Leale and Mrs. Dixon.

If the Dixon and Sumner accounts are true, then Johnson’s visit with Stanton had to have taken place between 2:10 and 2:52 am. His visit to Lincoln’s bedside occurred the first time Mary Lincoln was absent from the room. Since he left before she entered, we have to assume he left the building between 2:52 and 3:00 am.

At 7:22 Lincoln died. Upon Lincoln's death, Stanton remarked, "Now he belongs to the ages." He later eulogized Lincoln with the words, "There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.”

Remarkably, President Andrew Johnson gave Lincoln no eulogy at all. Nor did he offer any condolences to his widow or his family. When Robert Lincoln offered to sell Johnson the former president’s carriage, horses and other trappings of the office, he refused to consider it. He also refused to set foot on the boat Lincoln used to sail on the Potomac. Furthermore, his actions at the Peterson House seemed callously irresponsible. Stanton’s purpose for calling him, according to O’Beirne, was to keep the government functioning by not leaving the position of President vacant. Johnson’s abrupt departure left the impression that Lincoln was not dying fast enough for him.

This was the most important night and event in Johnson’s life. Where did he go? What did he do? . The silence on his whereabouts is deafening. Illustrators of the day placed Johnson in the death room with Lincoln dying in his arms, which we know was not true, but it gave the correct political spin that the country needed to see. By having no written account on the matter, Johnson’s biographers leave us with the impression that he merely returned alone to his room at the Kirkwood, finished reading a book, and went back to sleep waiting for Lincoln to die. If true, Johnson was the only man in Washington who slept that night. With every self-serving politician in D.C. trying to get into the Petersen House and anarchy running in the streets, the account of the Vice President’s actions seem to have been expunged. He simply disappears from history.

Break a Leg!

One of the truly enjoyable aspects of research is discovering what is truth and what is myth. One of the great myths of the Lincoln assassination is that John Wilkes Booth broke his leg in his leap from the stage.

The source of this tale was actually started by Booth himself, in the first melodramatic entry in his notebook. This diary was not made public until two years after the trial of the conspirators and was taken at face value as the truth. This was not Booth’s first attempt at twisting the facts to portray himself as a living legend. He did the same thing earlier in his career when he was able to spin his witnessing of John Brown’s execution into actually being involved in his capture. It made for good press, as the dramatist would have known, but the evidence brought forth by Michael Kauffman in his excellent biography American Brutus soundly contradicts this fairy tale.

J.W. Booth - Diary

I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted Sic semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump ……

The eyewitness accounts recorded in 1865 by members of the audience, give no hint that Booth fractured his leg while he was in the theater. They described him as running across the stage with no mention of a limp, much less a broken leg. All witnesses from the orchestra seats, described the assassin’s movement as “rushed” or indicate that he “ran” across the stage. The testimony of the young man who held Booth’s horse further dispels the myth:

Joseph “Peanuts” Borroughs

Q. What did he say when he came out?

A. He told me to give me his horse.

Q. Did he do anything besides that?

A. He knocked me down.

Q. With his hand or not?

A. He struck me with the butt of a knife.

Q. Did he do that as he mounted his horse?

A. Yes, sir, he had one foot in the stirrup.

Q. Did he also strike or kick you?

A. He kicked me.

Q. As he got on the horse?

A. Yes, sir.

Unquestionably, Booth was filled with alcohol and adrenaline as he ran off stage and onto his horse. However, putting a broken left leg into a stirrup and expecting it to support one’s full weight while getting into a saddle AND at the same time kicking with the right is a physical impossibility. Booth's mounting of his horse, as witnessed by Johnny Peanuts, was the last time he would ever get on a horse again without assistance.

Kauffman also points out that, Booth rode only thirty miles that night, not sixty as claimed in his diary. The broken leg he suffered was a simple fracture, not compound, so no bone could have been tearing at his leg with every jump. The entire passage was a complete falsification.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that Booth did not break his leg on his leap to the stage, the myth has become so strong that it will continue to be repeated whenever American history is taught. It has become an accepted truth similar to the ‘shots from the grassy knoll’ contention regarding the Kennedy assassination almost 100 years later.

Another New Deal?

There is much speculation (see Time Magazine) that the election of Barack Obama will usher in the second 'New Deal', following in the footsteps of FDR. Be careful of what you ask for.

It is amazing that the myth of the success of the New Deal is still perpetuated as a common fact. Many historians now concede that the New Deal may well have been responsible for turning a recession into the Great Depression.

If it had not been for the coming of WWII, there would have been no third term for FDR and his reputation would have been one largely of failure. As he took the oath for the third time, the unemployment was still at the same level as when he started eight years earlier.

So why would we want another New Deal?

The answer is in the myth making of the modern political legacy. After Lenin's death, Stalin had his body preserved and made his tomb into a shrine so as to legitimize his own position as the follower of Lenin's policies and his rightful heir. A similar tribute was paid to Roosevelt by putting his face on the dime before the mid-term elections. He had brought his party power for sixteen years and the next generation was anxious to cash in on his legacy. The timing of his death was impeccable, coming just before the end of the war he became the American Moses leading but never seeing the promised land.

FDR was the President who was in office when American industrial production and the American military won the war. Could we have won the war without him? Absolutely! But the bigger question would have been could he have maintained the peace? In my opinion it was Harry Truman who picked up the pieces and promises of FDR and set in motion the policies and means to preserve the peace. But since no one put his picture on American currency he is almost invisible to the myth makers. He deserves better.