Lincoln’s
Last Witness
Corporal James Tanner,
who had already given
much to the Union, played
a key but little-known
role in the aftermath of
Lincoln’s assassination
By Kim A. O’Connell
By the time Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, James R. Tanner had seen
enough of bloodshed. Just 17 years old at the outbreak of the Civil War, he had enlisted in
Company C of the 87th New York Infantry, with which he participated in some of the heaviest
fighting in Virginia in 1862—notably the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days’ Battles. The 87th
had been decimated by combat, disease and desertions that summer, and by the Second Battle of
Bull Run in August what remained of the unit was temporarily attached to the 105th Pennsylvania.
On the afternoon of August 30, the second day of the battle, the 105th came under intense Confederate artillery fire.
Tanner and his comrades were lying in wait on their stomachs when a shell fragment struck Tanner, all but severing
his left foot and pulverizing his right leg. As Tanner later
put it, “my feet were hanging by shreds of flesh.” A surgeon
at a nearby field hospital amputated each of his legs 4 inches
below the knees.
Tanner moved back to his home state of New York, where
he learned to walk with prosthetic limbs. Recognizing that
he was still young and needed a useful profession, he studied stenography at Ames’ Business College in Syracuse.
During the Civil War, the prevailing method of taking notes
via shorthand was the Pitman method, a phonetic or soundbased system wherein the symbols represent sounds rather
than letters. As a result, stenography was then often known
as “phonography.”
By 1864, prepared for a new career, Tanner returned to
Washington, D.C., and began work as a clerk for the Ordnance Bureau of the War Department. He rented an upstairs
apartment on 10th Street, directly across from the theater
that John T. Ford had opened just a couple of years earlier
in an old church meeting house. Tanner had no idea that the
last act of the Civil War would land on his doorstep.
O
n Good Friday, April 14, 1865, the mood in Washington was jubilant. The war was effectively over, and
residents were filling theaters, bars and restaurants
to celebrate. Like so many others that night, Tanner and
60
CIVIL WAR TIMES | JUNE 2015
a friend had opted to see a show. Rather than attend the
performance of Our American Cousin playing across the
street at Ford’s Theatre, they chose instead to see Aladdin,
Or the Wonderful Lamp at Grover’s New National Theater,
located three blocks away. Aladdin was a light fantasy, perfect for sweeping away war’s pall. In fact, according to historian James Marten, author of America’s Corporal: James
Tanner in War and Peace, Grover’s had gone all out that
night: hanging a very large painting of Charleston Harbor
and Fort Sumter, and commissioning a special performance
of a song titled “When Sherman Marched Down to the Sea.”
The owner had invited the Lincolns to watch Aladdin from
a private box, but they instead opted to see the show at
Ford’s. Almost as a consolation prize, they had sent their
son Tad over to the show at Grover’s.
At just after 10 p.m., according to a letter Tanner wrote
to a friend three days later, the doors to Grover’s theater
burst open and a man yelled that Lincoln had been shot.
The crowd gasped and stood up, preparing to leave the
thea­ter—but most audience members were quickly convinced that it was merely a trick pulled by pranksters or
pickpockets. People sat back down and the show briefly
continued, before another man burst in and confirmed the
shocking report. The crowd immediately dispersed.
Tanner and his friend first went to Willard’s Hotel, where
they learned nothing new. They then decided to head back
to Tanner’s flat. When they approached 10th Street, Tanner
recalled, “There was an immense throng there, very quiet
yet very much excited; the street was crowded and I only
Hermann Faber, an
artist on the surgeon
general’s staff who was
at Lincoln’s deathbed,
drew this sketch of
the mournful scene.
Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton sits at far right.
JUNE 2015 | CIVIL WAR TIMES
61
and he was a little over middling height.” Then the shot
rang out and the assassin jumped to the stage, which is
when Crawford noted that “he very strongly resembled the
Booths.” In his transcription, Tanner would later underline
“Booths” three times.
The third witness was actor Harry Hawk, who had been
standing on the stage when the assassin jumped. Hawk’s
recollection was unambiguous: “I believe to the best of
my knowledge that it was John Wilkes Booth….He made
some expression when he came on the stage but I did not
understand what.” That expression, of course, was “Sic
semper tyrannis”—thus always to tyrants—the Virginia
state motto.
Tanner went on to record accounts by James C. Ferguson, a neighboring saloonkeeper who knew Booth, and
Henry B. Phillips, an actor from Philadelphia who recalled
a conversation with Booth a few days earlier in which he had
lamented the Union victory and said it had given him “the
blues.” Very brief remarks from Colonel George V. Rutherford of the Quartermaster Corps rounded out the testimony. (Some accounts say that Laura Keene, the star of Our
American Cousin, also gave testimony. Keene is known to
have knelt at Lincoln’s bedside and gotten his blood on her
dress, but her observations were not recorded by Tanner or
anyone else.)
“In fifteen minutes,” Tanner later wrote, “I had testimony enough down to hang Wilkes Booth, the assassin,
higher than ever Haman hung,” a reference to the villain in
the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible.
Tanner immediately began transcribing his notes, finishing by 6:45 a.m. By then it was clear that Lincoln’s last breath
was imminent. The president’s minister, the Rev. Phineas D.
Gurley, said a final prayer that Tanner attempted to record,
but he found that his pencil point had broken in his pocket.
The clerk’s later recollection of the scene, however, calls
into question one of the most vivid and oft-quoted parts of
the Lincoln deathbed story: “As ‘Thy will be done, Amen’
in subdued and tremulous tones floated through the little
got across on account of my boarding there.” The president had already been carried across the street to William
Petersen’s house, adjacent to Tanner’s building. Tanner
climbed to his second-floor balcony, where he witnessed the
comings and goings of such luminaries as Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton and Generals Henry Halleck and Montgomery Meigs, the latter of whom placed himself in the doorway
of the house and acted as a gatekeeper. When it was evident
no more could be done for the president other than keep
him comfortable, Stanton asked for someone fluent in phonography to take down eyewitness testimony. A clerk on the
scene called Tanner over.
The atmosphere in the house was oppressively solemn,
Tanner recalled, with Mrs. Lincoln weeping in the front
parlor as the dying president gasped and groaned in the
back room, where he had been laid across the bed. In the
midst of the unfolding drama, Tanner was nervous and his
first attempts at shorthand were shaky. “I was so excited
when I commenced that I am afraid that it did not much
resemble Standard Phonography or any other kind,” he
wrote later. “But I could read it readily afterward, so what
was the difference?”
It was after midnight when he began with the first witness, Alfred Cloughly, a clerk in the Auditor’s Office who
had witnessed the escape of the would-be assassin of Secretary of State William Seward a few blocks away (later determined to be conspirator Lewis Powell, then known as Lewis
Payne). In a series of squiggles, slashes and x marks that
comprised Pitman’s shorthand, Tanner took down Cloughly’s astonishing recollections: “I was walking with a lady in
Lafayette Square. I heard someone cry out that the gates
should be shut & immediately after the cry of murder and
stop thief.”
The second witness was Lieutenant A.M.S. Crawford of
the Volunteer Reserve Corps, who had been sitting close to
the president’s box at Ford’s when the assassin appeared.
“He attracted my attention,” Crawford recalled. “I thought
first that he was intoxicated. There was a glare in his eye
Panic swept through
Washington as word spread
of Lincoln’s assassination
on April 14, 1865. John
Wilkes Booth managed to
escape the city despite the
alarm, and remained on the
run until he was mortally
wounded on April 26.
Willard
Hotel
President’s
House
CIVIL WAR TIMES | JUNE 2015
y
Petersen
House
Grover’s
National
Theatre
washington
monument
62
Surratt
Boarding
House
Seward
House
c
Ford’s
Theatre
w
a
s
h
i
n
g
t
o
i
t
n
the capitol
The first transcription James Tanner, seen
at right in the 1890s, made of the murder
witness accounts was sloppy, so he made a second, neater
copy for Edwin Stanton, and kept the original for himself. Tanner donated
his copy, above, to the Union League in Philadelphia, where it remains.
chamber,” Tanner later wrote, “Mr. Stanton raised his head,
the tears streaming down his face. A more agonized expression I never saw on a human countenance as he sobbed out
the words: ‘He belongs to the angels now.’ ”
Of course, the statement far more commonly attributed
to Stanton in that moment is “Now, he belongs to the ages.”
Ages, not angels. In Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin acknowledges that witnesses recalled slightly different
comments that morning, though all the ones she quotes end
in “ages.” But other historians, most notably Jay Winik,
author of April 1865: The Month That Saved America, and
James L. Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase
for Lincoln’s Killer, settled on “angels.” As Swanson writes,
“the most persuasive interpretation supports ‘angels’ and
is also more consistent with Stanton’s character and faith.”
T
anner quickly faded into obscurity—though he
wouldn’t stay there for long. In September 1865, he
returned to New York, where he obtained various
clerkships and studied law. In 1866 he married Mero White,
with whom he would have four children—two girls and
two boys—before her tragic death in 1906 during a vacation in Montana.
Tanner soon began to gain prominence through a variety of platforms. He became a vocal advocate for veterans,
eventually serving as commander in chief of the Grand
Army of the Republic. He enjoyed touring the lecture circuit and became a regular spokesperson for the Republican
Party. He served for five months as the Commissioner of
Pensions, during which time his desire to “treat the boys
liberally” and make it easier for veterans to qualify for pensions rubbed some people the wrong way, leading to his dis-
missal. And in the early 1900s, he was named the Register
of Wills for the District of Columbia, as well as a leader in
the reorganization of the Red Cross.
As the Civil War generation began to pass into memory,
the early 20th century found renewed interest in sharing
stories about the war. During this time Tanner gave several
public accounts of his role that night at the Petersen House.
His son had also mounted his father’s original notes—both
the shorthand and the transcriptions—on linen, and the
newly bound manuscript became an object of fascination.
Tanner died on October 2, 1927, in Washington, D.C., with
three of his four children at his bedside. Along with Mero,
he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, which recently
bestowed upon him a new honor (see “Etc.,” P. 81).
“I tell you,” Tanner wrote to a friend back in 1865, “I
would not regret the time and money I have spent on Phonography if it never brought me more than it did that night,
for that brought me the privilege of standing by the deathbed of the most remarkable man of modern times and one
who will live in the annals of his country as long as she continues to have a history.”
A century and a half later, Tanner’s assessment of Lincoln
still holds true. Yet the corporal himself played an important
role in the annals of his country, although he remains lesser
known. Perhaps the most salient point is that he did what
all good people should do when faced with a challenging
situ­ation. As he had done before, and as he would do again,
James R. Tanner rose to the occasion. n
Kim O’Connell has seen productions at both Ford’s Theatre
and Grover’s New National Theater (now known as the
National Theatre) many times.
JUNE 2015 | CIVIL WAR TIMES
63