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

The night of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln was one of horrors in the National Capital. According to a proclamation by his successor (Andrew Johnson), there was “evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice,” that there had been a conspiracy formed by “Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, Beverly Tucker, George N. Saunders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the Government of the United States, harbored in Canada,” to assassinate the President, and the Secretary of State, Mr. Seward;¹ and circumstances seemed to warrant the charge that they had intended the same fate for other members of the Cabinet, General Grant, and several leading Republicans, their object evidently being to put out of the way men in high places, opposed to the Conspirators, who, on the death of the President, might administer the Government, hoping thereby to produce anarchy, which, in some way, might lead to the accession to power of the leaders of the rebellion. Accordingly, on the night, and at the same hour, when Mr. Lincoln was murdered, a man named Lewis Payne Powell, of Florida, who had been a Confederate soldier, attempted to slay Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, who was seriously ill at his house, in consequence ,of having been thrown from his carriage a few days before. Powell, or “Payne,” as his associates called him, went to the Secretary's house with the pretense that he was a messenger of the Minister's physician. When the porter refused him admittance, he rushed by him and up two flights of stairs to Mr. Seward's chamber, at the door of which he was met and resisted by the Secretary's son, Frederick William. Payne struck the younger Seward to the floor with the handle of his pistol, fracturing his skull and making him insensible. The Secretary's daughter was attracted to the room-door by the noise, when Payne rushed by her, sprang like a furious tiger upon the bed, and inflicted three severe wounds upon the neck and face of Mr. Seward, with a dagger, when an invalid soldier, named Robinson, who was in attendance as nurse, seized the assassin from behind. The feeble resistance offered by the Secretary barely saved his life. While Payne was struggling with Robinson, Miss Seward shouted “Murder!” from the open window, and the porter ran into the street, crying for help. Payne, perceiving his peril, did not stop to finish his murderous work; but, with a great effort, he escaped from Robinson, rushed down the stairs to the street, mounted a horse that he had in readiness, and fled into the open country beyond the Anacosta, in search of Booth, the principal executor of the assassination plot.

At the time of the murder, the Secretary of War (Mr. Stanton) was absent from his own house. He had left Mr. Seward half an hour before the attack upon him. He was now called to action. Measures were immediately adopted for the discovery and arrest of the assassin, then unknown.