Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[564] dark cloud appeared, and suddenly overspread the firmament as with a pall. Before midnight the electric messengers went over the land with the tidings that the President had been murdered! The sad story may be briefly told as follows:--

On the morning of the 14th, General Grant arrived in Washington.¹ Captain Robert Lincoln, the President's son, was one of his staff officers. They had arrived in time for the latter to breakfast with his father, and give him the narrative of an eye-witness, as he was, of the scenes of Lee's surrender. At 11 o'clock the President attended a Cabinet meeting, at which Grant was present. When the meeting adjourned, he made an arrangement with the General to attend Ford's Theater in the evening, and sent a messenger to engage a box. When, awhile afterward, Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, visited him, he invited that gentleman to accompany Mrs. Lincoln and himself to the theater, but previous engagements caused Mr. Colfax to decline. General Grant was called to New York that evening.

It was publicly announced in the afternoon, that the President and General Grant would be at the theater. The house was crowded. Mr. Lincoln and a little party² arrived just after eight o'clock. The President was seated in a high-backed rocking-chair, with Mrs. Lincoln and Miss Harris on his left. The box had been draped with an American flag in honor of the President. The play, “Our American cousin,” was drawing to a close, when, at a little past ten o'clock, John Wilkes Booth, an actor by profession, passed near the box where the President and his party were seated, and. after presenting a card to Mr. Lincoln's messenger, in the passage way,³ he stood and looked down upon the orchestra and the audience for a few minutes. He then entered the vestibule of the President's box, closed the door and fastened it from the inside with a piece of plank previously provided, so that it might not be opened from the outside. He then drew a Derringer pistol, and with this in his right hand, and a long two-edged dagger in his left, he entered the inner door of the box directly behind the President, who was leaning a little forward, absorbed in the interest of the drama. Holding the pistol over the back of the chair, he shot Mr. Lincoln in the head. The ball entered back of the ear, and passing through the brain, lodged just behind the right eye. The President's head fell slightly forward, and his eyes closed; he lived nine hours afterward, but was not conscious.

Major Rathbone was startled by the report of the pistol, and seeing Booth, who was half hidden by the powder-smoke that filled the box, seized him. The murderer tore away from his grasp, dropped his pistol, and striking with his dagger, made a serious wound on the Major's left arm. The assassin then rushed to the front of the box, with the gleaming weapon in his hand, and shouted, “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” --so may it be always with Tyrants — the motto of the seal of Virginia, and then leaped upon the stage.