UPK Book Examines Lincoln’s Last Moments

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 14, 2016) — According to a palm reader, 14-year-old John Wilkes Booth had one of the worst hands she’d ever seen. Born under an unlucky star, he would live “grand, fast and short,” and have many enemies. Her prediction would ring true when, on April 14, 1865, Booth fired his derringer point-blank at President Abraham Lincoln, shots rang out from inside the playhouse, screams ensued and the 16th president of the United States was mortally wounded.

Dr. Charles Leale, a 23-year-old Army surgeon who had finished medical school 45 days prior, rushed to Lincoln’s box as members of the audience attempted to capture the fleeing Booth, who was escaping through the theater armed with a bowie knife inscribed with the words “Liberty” and “America.”

Four blocks away, an acrobat performing in a staging of “Aladdin!” was scheduled to appear around 10:30 at Grover’s National Theatre, its entrance illuminated to celebrate the Union victory; instead, theater manager C.D. Hess appeared onstage and broke the grave news to the audience: “President Lincoln has been shot at his private box at Ford’s.”

As President Abraham Lincoln’s body was carried across the street from Ford’s Theatre to Petersen’s boardinghouse, Capt. Oliver Gatch, one of the men who bore the president, was surprised to hear the swarm of people on 10th Street fall silent. Gatch and the other bearers moved so slowly and cautiously that artist Carl Bersch was able to sketch the entire scene from his balcony.

The injured president was carried to a small, cramped back bedroom where one week ago, his assassin had also slept under the same checked-and-flowered quilt. Upstairs, boarder John Mathews, a lifelong friend of Booth’s, discovered the Booth’s manifesto and burned the evidence in his bedroom fireplace. Downstairs, the Petersen children performed their services hurriedly, carrying bottles of hot water to the doctor and providing cloth napkins to soak up the blood. When 14-year-old Pauline Petersen overheard Booth’s name, she carried the tea tray into the parlor, all the while trying to conceal her panic at the fact that the president’s attacker was a frequent tenant at her family’s establishment. Meanwhile in the death room, Mary Todd Lincoln sobbed, “Kill me. Shoot me too!” as artists asked the doctors to pose for their paintings of the deathbed scene.

On one of the most horrific days in American history, ordinary Washingtonians would play extraordinary roles in the aftermath of Booth’s crime. Their accounts complete the picture of the president’s last moments in “Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President.” The new book published by University Press of Kentucky (UPK) and written by award-winning crime reporter Kathryn Canavan is the perfect read on the 151st anniversary of President Lincoln’s death.

Canavan was “stunned” when she learned that in 150 years, no one had ever written a book about what else was happening inside Petersen’s boardinghouse on the night President Lincoln died. She set out to “find the true stories of the workers, boarders and neighbors who witnessed what went on in the death room and behind the scenes.”

After many years in journalism and crime writing, Canavan began her investigation on the most consequential crime in American history. She went beyond most other scholars who have written books about Lincoln’s assassination as she “mined diaries, letters and interviews for details that might have otherwise been lost to history.”

With vivid prose and a journalist’s eye for detail, Canavan revisits Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1865 to tell the story of Lincoln’s death from the perspective of those who have received surprisingly little attention from history: the citizens who witnessed it. “Lincoln’s Final Hours” reveals not only the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre, but also the personal and political motivations of the Petersen family and their boarders, and the planning of Booth’s conspiracy.

William Petersen, the boardinghouse owner who was suspiciously absent during the tragedy, was found asleep in his tailor shop. Upon returning to the tumult, he was appalled to find blood, mud and dirty basins mucking up his house. He later tried to bill the federal government for using his boardinghouse as a makeshift hospital, including the use of every tool as well as his time, before the president was buried in the ground. Also profiting on the night of April 14, his precocious 15-year-old son Fred, earned $1.12 in less than 10 minutes when he cut squares of plain white paper and dipped them in blood from the front hallway, selling them as souvenirs.

Yet, Lincoln’s death is merely the beginning of the story. To uncover the far-reaching impact of that infamous night, Canavan links seemingly disconnected events such as public deaths at the Smithsonian and at a famous Broadway nightclub, as well as a high-society murder in Albany, New York. From the actor who played the bailiff in “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre on that fateful night to the merchant tailor who sat in the audience, ordinary citizens were thrust into history. Using letters, diaries, interviews, public records and newspaper accounts, Canavan’s thorough research stretches our imagination beyond the room where Lincoln would take his last breath to recall the fascinating stories that followed.

Kathryn Canavan is a former independent researcher and freelance writer for USA Today and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware.

UPK is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, representing a consortium that includes all of the state universities, five private colleges, and two historical societies. The press’s editorial program focuses on the humanities and the social sciences. Offices for the administrative, editorial, production, and marketing departments of the press are found at the University of Kentucky, which provides financial support toward the operating expenses of the publishing operation through the UK Libraries.

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MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Hale, 859-257-8716; whitney.hale@uky.edu