Word: stantons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...house across from the theater. Word flashed that an attacker had stabbed Secretary of State Seward, bedridden by a recent accident. Washington's army commandant, General Christopher C. Augur, sent patrols out helter-skelter and waited for orders from his chief, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. With another Cabinet member, Stanton hurried from the bedside of Seward to the tailor's house and set up a frantic headquarters there. While the President lay bleeding in a hall bedroom and Mrs. Lincoln screamed and wept in the front parlor, Stanton "convened a special court of inquiry . . . issued orders...
...ordered out 8,000 soldiers and dispatched patrols in every direction except the one which Booth took (Stanton erroneously assumed that the wartime 9 o'clock closing of the Navy Yard bridge was still enforced). The telegraph went dead. Army units searched and arrested blindly...
...witnesses who streamed in and out of Stanton's improvised HQ all identified Booth as the assassin. In a belated roundup of stablekeepers, army troops found a man who had kept Booth's horse for him till late afternoon...
...until five hours after the shooting did Stanton name the actor in his communiques, and most U.S. newspapers went to press that morning without naming the assassin...
Finally, someone remembered a month-old tip that a plot was being hatched in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Mary Surratt.* Authorities hurried to the address, found documents and clues that persuaded Stanton that Actor Booth was responsible. As day broke, Stanton ordered all exits from the capital checked again, and decided that Booth had probably got away into southern Maryland. Then, as troopers rode out along the Potomac (it took twelve days to corner and kill Booth), Stanton and Mrs. Lincoln entered the little bedroom where Lincoln lay on a cornhusk mattress. Outside, a throng of weeping people, mainly...