His fiancee stands at his side, a sensual young woman whose senator father has no idea that his daughter is secretly engaged to a man of Booth’s lowly theatrical calling. Lucy Hale and John Wilkes Booth are a beautiful young couple quite used to the adoration of high society and the opposite sex. Yet not even she knows that Booth is a Confederate sympathizer, one who nurses a pathological hatred for Lincoln and the North. Lucy has no idea that her lover has assembled a crack team of conspirators to help him bring down the president. They have guns, financing, and a precise plan. At this point, patience is their watchword.
Standing in the cold Washington drizzle in the shadow of the Capitol dome, Booth feels nothing but hot rage and injustice. The actor is impulsive and prone to the melodramatic. Just before Lincoln’s speech, as the president stepped out onto the East Portico, Booth’s carefully crafted conspiracy was instantly forgotten.
John Wilkes Booth: celebrity, Confederate sympathizer, assassin
Though he had no gun or knife, Booth lunged at Lincoln. An officer from Washington’s Metropolitan Police, a force known to be heavily infiltrated by Confederate sympathizers, grabbed him hard by the arm and pulled him back. Booth struggles, which only made Officer John William Westfall grasp him tighter. Like everyone else in the city, Westfall is well aware that there are plots against Lincoln’s life. Some say it’s not a matter of if but when the president will die. Yet rather than arrest Booth, or even pull him aside for questioning, Westfall accepted Booth’s excuse that he merely stumbled. Arresting a celebrity like Booth might have caused the policeman problems.
But Booth is definitely not finished. He seethes as he listens to Lincoln’s speech. The grace and poetry of the words ignite his rage. The sight of so many black faces beaming up at Lincoln from the crowd makes him want to vomit. No, Booth is most definitely not finished. If anything, his determination to knock Lincoln off his “throne” becomes more intense.
Lincoln isn’t finished, either. The president has epic plans for his second term in office. It will take every one of those four years, and maybe longer, to heal the war-torn nation. Healing is Lincoln’s one overriding ambition, and he will use every last bit of his trademark determination to see it realized. Nothing must stand in his way.
But evil knows no boundaries. And it is a most powerful evil that is now bearing down on Abraham Lincoln.
Part One
TOTAL WAR
Lincoln with Union troops at Antietam
CHAPTER ONE
SATURDAY, APRIL 1, 1865
CITY POINT, VIRGINIA
The man with fourteen days to live is himself witnessing death.
Lincoln (he prefers to go by just his last name. No one calls him “Abe,” which he loathes. Few call him “Mr. President.”
His wife actually calls him “Mr. Lincoln,” and his two personal secretaries playfully refer to him as “the Tycoon”) paces the upper deck of the steamboat River Queen, his face lit now and again by distant artillery. The night air smells of the early spring, damp with a hint of floral fragrance. The River Queen is docked at City Point, a bustling Virginia port that was infiltrated by Confederate spies last August. Yet Lincoln strides purposefully back and forth, unprotected and unafraid, as vulnerable as a man can be to sniper fire, the bombardment serving as the perfect distraction from his considerable worries. When will this war ever end?
As one Confederate soldier will put it, “the rolling thunder of the heavy metal” began at nine P.M. Once the big guns destroy the Confederate defenses around Petersburg, the Union army—Lincoln’s army—will swarm from their positions and race across no-man’s-land into the enemy trenches, hell-bent on capturing the city that has eluded them for ten long months.
What happens after that is anyone’s guess.
In a best-case scenario, Lincoln’s general in chief, Ulysses S. Grant, will trap Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his army inside Petersburg, forcing their surrender. This is a long shot. But if it happens, the four-year-old American Civil War will be over, and the United States will be divided no more. And this is why Abraham Lincoln is watching the battlefield.
Federal supply boats in the harbor of City Point, Virginia, 1865
But Marse Robert—“master” as rendered in southern parlance—has proven himself a formidable opponent time and again. Lee plans to escape and sprint for the North Carolina border to link up with another large rebel force. Lee boasts that his Army of Northern Virginia can hold out forever in the Blue