What Grant Thought The Moment He Heard Lincoln Was Dead

It is the middle of the night, April 14th, 1865. Ulissiz S. Grant is sitting in a private train car. He is the most famous man in the world. 5 days ago, he broke the back of the Confederacy. He accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender. The war is over. The killing has stopped. For the first time in 4 years, the general of the army is sleeping without a revolver on his hip.

 But the piece is a lie. A lantern swings outside. A messenger scrambles aboard the train in Philadelphia. He hands a telegram to Grant. Grant unfolds the paper. The words are short, brutal. The president has been shot. The world stops, but Grant doesn’t scream. He doesn’t weep. His eyes scan the date. Then the time. And then a cold mechanical realization hits him like a cannonball.

 Everyone knows John Wils Booth killed Lincoln. That’s the textbook story. But that night in that train car, Grant realized something the history books often leave out. Booth had a list. There were two names at the top. Lincoln was number one. Grant was number two. The only reason Grant is alive to read that telegram is because of a petty argument between two women earlier that afternoon.

 Grant isn’t just mourning a president. He is staring at his own ghost. He survived the war, but tonight he almost lost the peace. Here is what went through the general’s mind the moment the world fell apart. To understand the shock of that telegram, you have to understand the atmosphere of the morning. You have to understand the noise.

 Washington DC on April 14th isn’t a city. It is a boiler room. The pressure is lethal. For 4 years, this city has been a fortress on the edge of a cliff. The Confederate lines were sometimes visible from the capital dome. The hospitals are still full of men missing arms and legs. The smell of unwashed bodies, coal smoke, and horse manure is permanent.

 But today, the pressure valve has blown. Lee has surrendered. The war is technically over. The streets are a riot of flags. People are drinking in the gutters. Cannons are firing salutes every hour, shaking the windows of the White House. It is a delirium of victory. General Grant rides into this chaos. He is the architect of the wind.

 He is the hammer that shattered the rebellion. But Grant doesn’t look like a conqueror. He looks like a man who hasn’t slept since 1861. He is 42 years old, but the war has carved canyons into his face. He is exhausted. He is quiet. He hates the pomp. He hates the brass bands. All he wants is to disappear. He wants to get on a train to Burlington, New Jersey.

 He wants to see his children. He wants to be a father, not a monument. But Washington doesn’t let you go. At the White House, the mood is electric. President Lincoln is beaming. He has aged 100 years in for. But today, the weight is lifting. He tells his cabinet that he had a dream the night before. a strange recurring dream about a ship moving at high speed toward a dark shore. He thinks it means good news.

 He thinks it means peace. He invites Grant to the theater. Ford’s theater comedy, our American cousin. It is a public relations masterstroke. The savior of the union and the sword of the union sitting side by side in a box. The crowd will go insane. It is the perfect image to seal the victory. Grant knows he should go. Duty is his religion.

 You do not say no to the commander-in-chief. You do not say no to the president who stood by you when the press called you a butcher and a drunk. But Grant has a problem. And it isn’t military. It’s domestic. His wife, Julia Dent Grant, is a force of nature. She is fiercely protective of her husband, and she absolutely despises the first lady.

 Mary Todd Lincoln is a tragic figure, but she is also volatile. She is prone to public outbursts. She is jealous of other women. She has publicly bered Julia in the past. Julia gives Ulisses an ultimatum. She will not sit in that box. She will not endure an evening of whispers and tension with Mary Lincoln. She wants to go to New Jersey.

 She wants to go home. Grant is the man who stared down the Confederate army at Shiloh. He is the man who ordered the assault on Cold Harbor. But he cannot win this argument. He goes to the president. He apologizes. He lies. He tells Lincoln that he must attend to his children. Lincoln is disappointed. You can see it in the accounts of the day.

 He wanted his general there. He wanted a friend. But he smiles. He understands. He shakes Grant’s hand. That handshake is the pivot point of American history. If Grant stays, the night changes. If Grant stays, the seating chart changes. If Grant stays, the security detail changes. But Grant walks away. He walks out of the White House and heads for his hotel to pack.

 He thinks he is escaping a boring play and an awkward social encounter. He doesn’t know that he is walking out of a killbox. While Grant is packing his bags at the Willard Hotel, the other side of the equation is moving into position. We often think of John Wils Booth as a lone actor, a mad actor with a little pistol. This is wrong.

Booth is a spy. He is a smuggler. He is the head of a cell. For months, he has been plotting to kidnap Lincoln. But with the surrender of Lee, kidnapping is useless. The Confederacy is dead. There is nothing to trade Lincoln for. So the plan shifts. It shifts from leverage to revenge. It shifts to decapitation.

 The logic is cold and military. If you kill the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state all in the same hour, the Union government collapses. The succession is unclear. The military is headless. The radical Republicans turn on the Democrats. Chaos reigns. And in that chaos, the South might rise again.

 But there is a problem with the plan. The Union Army. As long as Ulisses s Grant is in command, the army is a unified weapon. If the politicians die, Grant takes control. He declares martial law. He holds the North together by sheer force of will. So Grant has to go. Booth knows Grant is supposed to be at the theater. He reads the newspapers.

The papers have announced it. Grant and the president to attend Fords tonight. This is the opportunity. Two birds, one box. But Booth isn’t relying on luck. He is stalking his prey. As the Grants leave the Willard Hotel and head to the train station, a man on horseback pulls alongside their carriage.

 The man is riding a distinct light colored mare. He is dressed well. He doesn’t look at the road. He looks inside the carriage. He stares at Grant. intense, unblinking, malignant. Grant notices. He is a soldier. He has an instinct for danger. He feels the eyes on him. He turns to Julia. That man, he says, there is something wrong with that man.

 The rider peels away. But a few blocks later, he comes back. He rides alongside again. He stares again. It is a psychological assault. It is a confirmation. Later, Julia would identify the rider as John Wils Booth. Booth is checking to see if Grant is actually leaving. He sees the luggage. He sees the direction.

 They are heading to Union Station. Grant is bailing out. This throws a wrench into the gears of the conspiracy. Booth can handle the theater, but he can’t be in two places at once. He needs a contingency. The theory supported by later testimony and the movements of the conspirators is that the assignment to kill Grant shifts.

 If they can’t get him in the box, they have to get him on the road. Michael Olaflin, one of the conspirators, is in DC. He has been tracking Grant’s movements. There are reports of men trying to enter Grant’s private car on the train later that night. The hunter is being hunted, and he doesn’t even know the game has started. Grant boards the train.

 The steam engine hisses. The wheels begin to turn. He watches Washington disappear behind him. He breathes a sigh of relief. He thinks the danger is behind him. He thinks the war is over. He lights a cigar. He watches the smoke curl up toward the ceiling of the private car. He is safe, or so he thinks.

 The train ride to Philadelphia is slow. The tracks are crowded. Grant is tired. the kind of tired that goes into your bones. He dozes. He talks to Julia. They discuss the children. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the clock hits 10:13 p.m. The play is in act three, scene two. A line is coming up. Funny line, the loudest laugh of the show.

 Booth is in the hallway behind the state box. He has bored a hole in the door earlier that day to spy on the occupants. He looks through. He sees the back of Lincoln’s head. He sees the rocking chair. But the other chair, the one to Lincoln’s right, is not occupied by the general in the blue uniform. It is occupied by Major Henry Wthbone, a young officer, a bureaucrat compared to Grant. Booth doesn’t hesitate.

 The plan is compromised, but the primary target is there. He waits for the line. You suckizing old man trap. The audience roars. The sound is deafening. Booth opens the door. He steps into the box. He raises the daringer. He fires. The sound is muffled by the laughter, but the smoke isn’t. Major Wthbone turns. He sees the man in the smoke. He jumps up.

Booth drops the gun and pulls a knife, a heavy Bowie knife. Wthbone grapples with him. But Wthbone is surprised. He is unarmed. He is fighting a desperate man. Booth slashes him. The blade rips through Wthbone’s arm, severing an artery. Wthbone falls back, bleeding out. Booth vaults over the railing. He catches his spur on the flag, the treasury guard flag.

 He lands hard on the stage. His leg snaps. He stands up. He screams, “Sick seer tyrannis.” He limps off the stage. The audience thinks it is part of the play. For a few seconds, there is silence. Then a woman screams. He has shot the president. Chaos. Absolute bedum. Soldiers run into the box. Doctors are lifted from the crowd. The president is unconscious.

 The wound is mortal. Across the city, another man enters the home of Secretary of State William Seard. He bluffs his way past the servant. His gun jams. He uses it as a club to crush the skull of Seward’s son. He pulls a knife. He slashes Seward’s face, cutting his cheek open to the jawbone. It is a slaughter. The telegraph lines begin to flash.

 The president is shot. Seward is dead. He wasn’t, but the reports were confused. The city is under attack. Lock down the bridges. The messages race outward. They travel down the copper wires faster than the trains, faster than the horses. They are racing toward Philadelphia. They are racing toward Grant.

 Grant’s train pulls into Philadelphia. It is late. The city is dark. They transfer to a ferry to cross the Delaware River to get to the Camden and Amboy line. They stop for food. Grant is sitting at a table in a railroad restaurant. He is eating a sandwich, maybe having coffee. A messenger runs in. He is breathless. He finds the general.

 He hands over the dispatch. Grant reads it. This is the moment. The insider moment. Watch his face. Witnesses say his face didn’t change. He didn’t gasp. He turned to stone. He reads it again. He hands the paper to Julia. She reads it. She bursts into tears. Oh, Ulies. The president. But Grant isn’t crying. He is calculating.

 He looks at the time of the shooting. He looks at the time of his departure. He realizes immediately that this wasn’t an assassination. This was a coup. If they hit Lincoln and they hit Seward, they were coming for him. He stands up. The exhaustion vanishes. The father vanishes. The husband vanishes. The general returns.

 He tells Julia to continue on to Burlington with the children. He cannot go with them. He is a target and he will not bring the crosshairs down on his family. He has to go back. He has to go back into the fire. He commandeers a special engine. A locomotive, a tender, and a single car. He orders it to take him back to Washington. Maximum speed.

 The return journey is the longest night of his life. He sits in the dark car. The engine is screaming down the tracks. The smoke is pouring past the windows. He is alone with his thoughts and his thoughts are dark. He replays the last 48 hours, the man on the horse, the strange behavior, the invitation, and then the tactical analysis kicks in.

 The what if Grant was a man of logic. He ran the war on math and logistics. He runs the math on the assassination. He knows Wthbone. Wthbone is a fine officer, but Wthbone isn’t a brawler. Grant is Grant is short, but he is made of iron. He is an expert horseman. He is physically powerful. And unlike Wrathbone, Grant had spent four years in the field.

 He carried a weapon. He lived with the threat of death every day. He tells his staff later, “I would have caught him. It isn’t a boast. It is a statement of fact in his mind.” He visualizes the box. He is sitting in the chair. He hears the door open. He doesn’t wait for the laugh. He turns. He sees the gun. Grant imagines blocking the shot or taking the bullet and still grappling.

He imagines grabbing Booth’s throat. He imagines saving Lincoln. The guilt washes over him. It is a heavy, suffocating blanket because he listened to his wife because he didn’t want to sit in a box with Mary Todd Lincoln. The president is dead. He feels he deserted his post, but there is no time for guilt. There is only the crisis.

 The telegraphs are still coming in at every stop. The news gets worse. Lincoln is dying. He won’t survive the night. Rumors are flying that the Confederate army has reversed course, that rebel cavalry is riding on Washington, that the whole surrender was a ruse to lower the guard of the Union. Grant has to assume the worst.

 He starts drafting orders in his head. If the government falls, the army is the government. He is ready to declare martial law over the entire eastern seabboard. He is ready to arrest every Confederate officer he just parrolled. The train hurls him back toward the nightmare. Grant arrives in Washington as the sun is coming up.

 It is April 15th. The city has changed. The celebration is dead. The flags are gone or draped in black crepe. The streets are full of mud and angry men. The mob is out. They are looking for blood. Anyone with a southern accent is being beaten. Confederate sympathizers are hiding in their basement. The crowd wants to burn the jail where the suspects are being held.

 Grant steps off the train. He is surrounded by soldiers. He goes straight to the war department. He doesn’t go to the deathbed immediately. He goes to work. He finds chaos. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is practically running the country from a backroom. He is issuing orders, arresting people, closing the ports. Grant brings the comm.

 He reviews the troop deployments. He secures the perimeter of the city. He sends out the cavalry to hunt Booth. He makes it clear. The Union stands, the army stands, but the fear is real. Grant moves his headquarters. He is warned that he is still a target. The assassins are still loose. Booth is in the wind. For the next few weeks, the victor of Appamatics lives like a fugitive in his own capital. He walks with guards.

 He checks the shadows. He attends the funeral. He stands by the coffin. He sees the face of the man who trusted him. He sees the cost of the empty chair. But there is a final twist to the story, a detail that haunts Grant until his dying day. During the investigation, the authorities capture the conspirators. They interrogate them.

They piece together the timeline. They find out about the man on the horse. It was Booth. But they also find out about the train. There was a man on the train to Philadelphia. A man who tried to get into Grant’s private car, but was stopped by a locked door and a conductor. The plan was active. If Grant had not received that telegram in the restaurant, if he had stayed on the train, if he had gone to sleep, he might have never woken up, the conspiracy failed to kill him, not because of security, but because of timing, because

the telegraph moved faster than the train. The news of the death saved his life. Ulisses s Grant went on to become the president of the United States. Two terms, he fought for the rights of the freed slaves. He crushed the Ku Klux Clan with the same ruthlessness he used to crush Lee.

 He tried to rebuild the nation Lincoln died for. But he was a haunted man. He never liked the theater again. He avoided it. The sound of a crowd laughing made him uneasy. In his memoirs, in his letters, the regret is always there, lurking under the surface of his stoic pros. He believed he could have stopped it.

 History tells us that John Wils booth changed the world with a single shot. But the real history is in the silence that followed. It’s in the image of a general sitting in a steam engine hurtling through the dark. Staring at his hands, wondering if they were strong enough to have held back destiny. Grant survived the war. He survived the peace.

 He survived the assassins. But he carried the weight of that empty chair for the rest of his life. The bullet that killed Lincoln missed Grant by a matter of inches and a simple twist of fate. And that gap, that tiny empty space between the general and the president is where the real history happened.

 If you want to know how Grant took that guilt and turned it into a weapon to hunt down the conspirators, how he turned the military tribunals into a machine of vengeance, you need to watch this video right here. We dig into the manhunt, the burning barn, the secret trials. Grant didn’t just get mad, he got