Two days previous Lincoln had sent Lamon to Richmond on business connected with the call of a convention to discuss reconstruction. Before his departure, Lamon had held an interview with Mr. Usher, Secretary of the Interior, in which he had requested the Secretary to endeavor to persuade the President to be more cautious as to his personal safety, and to go out as little as possible while Lamon was absent. Together they called upon the President, and Lamon preferred his request for the promise.
“I think I can venture to say I will,” was the reply. “What is it?”
“Promise me that you will not go out, after night, while I am gone,” said Lamon, “particularly to the theater.”
President Lincoln turned to Secretary Usher and said: “Usher, this boy is a monomaniac on the subject of my safety. I can hear him or hear of him being around at all times in the night, to prevent somebody from murdering me. He thinks I shall be killed, and we think he is going crazy. What does any one want to assassinate me for? If any one wants to do so, he can do it any day or night, if he is ready to give his life for mine. It is nonsense.”
The Secretary, however, insisted that it would be well to heed Lamon’s warning, as he was thrown, all the time, among persons from whom he had better opportunities to know concerning such matters, than any one else.
“Well,” said the President to the Marshal, “I promise to do the best I can toward it.”
The assassination of President Lincoln was most carefully planned, even to the smallest detail. The box set apart for the President’s party was a double one, in the second tier, and at the left of the stage. It had two doors with spring locks, but Booth had loosened the screws with which the locks were fastened, so that it was impossible to secure them from the inside. In one door he had made a gimlet hole, in order to be able to see what was going on inside.
An employe of the theater, named Spangler, who was an accomplice of the assassin, had even gone so far as to arrange the seats in the box to suit the purpose of the assassin.
On that eventful night the body of the theater was densely crowded with people. The presidential party arrived a few minutes after nine o’clock and was composed of the President and Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Harris and Mayor Rathbone, daughter and step-son of Senator Harris of New York, and the vast audience arose and cheered as the President was ushered to his box.
Booth, the assassin, came into the theater about ten o’clock, and being a well-known actor, of influence in his circle, could easily take unusual liberties about the theater.