The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth | Page 5

Secretary Stanton!" "Where are the rest of
the cabinet?" broke from thousands of lips. A conflagration of fire is
not half so terrible as was the conflagration of passion that rolled
through the streets and houses of Washington on that awful night.
The attempt on the life of Secretary Seward was perhaps as daring, if
not so dramatic, as the assassination of the President. At 9:20 o'clock a
man, tall, athletic, and dressed in light coloured clothes, alighted from a
horse in front of Mr. Seward's residence in Madison place, where the
secretary was lying, very feeble from his recent injuries. The house, a
solid three-story brick building, was formerly the old Washington

Club-house. Leaving his horse standing, the stranger rang at the door,
and informed the servant who admitted him that he desired to see Mr.
Seward. The servant responded that Mr. Seward was very ill, and that
no visitors were admitted. "But I am a messenger from Dr. Verdi, Mr.
Seward's physician; I have a prescription which I must deliver to him
myself." The servant still demurring, the stranger, without further
parley, pushed him aside and ascended the stairs. Moving to the right,
he proceeded towards Mr. Seward's room, and was about to enter it,
when Mr. Frederick Seward appeared from an opposite doorway and
demanded his business. He responded in the same manner as to the
servant below, but being met with a refusal, suddenly closed the
controversy by striking Mr. Seward a severe and perhaps mortal blow
across the forehead with the butt of a pistol. As the first victim fell,
Major Seward, another and younger son of the secretary, emerged from
his father's room. Without a word the man drew a knife and struck the
major several blows with it, rushing into the chamber as he did so; then,
after dealing the nurse a horrible wound across the bowels, he sprang to
the bed upon which the secretary lay, stabbing him once in the face and
neck. Mr. Seward arose convulsively and fell from the bed to the floor.
Turning and brandishing his knife anew, the assassin fled from the
room, cleared the prostrate form of Frederick Seward in the hall,
descended the stairs in three leaps, and was out of the door and upon
his horse in an instant. It is stated by a person who saw him mount that,
although he leaped upon his horse with most unseemly haste, he trotted
away around the corner of the block with circumspect deliberation.
Around both the house on Tenth street and the residence of Secretary
Seward, as the fact of both tragedies became generally known, crowds
soon gathered so vast and tumultuous that military guards scarcely
sufficed to keep them from the doors.
The room to which the President had been conveyed is on the first floor,
at the end of the hall. It is only fifteen feet square, with a Brussels
carpet, papered with brown, and hung with a lithograph of Rosa
Bonheur's "Horse Fair," an engraved copy of Herring's "Village
Blacksmith," and two smaller ones, of "The Stable" and "The Barn
Yard," from the same artist. A table and bureau, spread with crotchet

work, eight chairs and the bed, were all the furniture. Upon this bed, a
low walnut four-poster, lay the dying President; the blood oozing from
the frightful wound in his head and staining the pillow. All that the
medical skill of half a dozen accomplished surgeons could do had been
done to prolong a life evidently ebbing from a mortal hurt.
Secretary Stanton, just arrived from the bedside of Mr. Seward, asked
Surgeon-General Barnes what was Mr. Lincoln's condition. "I fear, Mr.
Stanton, that there is no hope." "O, no, general; no, no;" and the man,
of all others, apparently strange to tears, sank down beside the bed, the
hot, bitter evidences of an awful sorrow trickling through his fingers to
the floor. Senator Sumner sat on the opposite side of the bed, holding
one of the President's hands in his own, and sobbing with kindred grief.
Secretary Welles stood at the foot of the bed, his face hidden, his frame
shaken with emotion. General Halleck, Attorney-General Speed,
Postmaster-General Dennison, M. B. Field, Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury, Judge Otto, General Meigs, and others, visited the chamber at
times, and then retired. Mrs. Lincoln--but there is no need to speak of
her. Mrs. Senator Dixon soon arrived, and remained with her through
the night. All through the night, while the horror-stricken crowds
outside swept and gathered along the streets, while the military and
police were patrolling and weaving a cordon around the city; while men
were arming and asking each other, "What victim next?" while the
telegraph was sending the news from city to city over the continent,
and while the two