Greenwood County History -
Witness to Nation’s Tragedy
Stanton and boarded with a German family named Kramer on Tenth Street just opposite the theatre where Laura Keene was playing in Our American Cousin. The war was just over and the city was filled with officers and soldiers who had come to Washington to get their accounts straightened out and to get their final discharge papers. Many of them had already been paid, the city was filled with men who were celebrating the close of the war. Let Mr. Hoffman tell the story: “A friend of mine who had served in the army was with me and we were playing pigeon pool, a game now almost forgotten. I am not now particularly proud of the fact that at the end of each game there were proper refreshments for which we had to go to the basement of the building. The last game had resulted in the friend being ‘stuck.’ That man is now department commander of the Grand Army in one of the states in the union. We had gone to the basement to get out our refreshments when we noticed a crowd at Fords. ‘Fight,’ someone called out. We started across to the theatre to see what the difficulty was and as there wasn’t anyone ‘on the door’ we walked right in. The theatre was still as death. People appeared to be stunned. We knew not what had happened until Miss Keene stepped out on the stage and said the President had been shot and asked for surgeons to come forward. Several men arose and were lifted bodily into the box where the nation’s martyr lay wounded. By this time people had recovered their senses and the dress circle where we were standing was in an uproar, people rushing about trying to ascertain who had fired the shot and where the murderer had gone.
“I felt stunned myself,” Mr. Hoffman continued. “ I didn’t realize that I was an eyewitness to one of the world’s tragedies. I only knew that the nation’s chief lay wounded.
“ With my friend I struggled through the mass of people toward the box. In those days people wore pa-per collars, generally, but Mr. Lincoln had on that night a linen collar. The surgeons tore this from his throat in order that he might have air. It fell to the floor and a friend and I struggled for the possession of it. Each had a part and we compromised by cutting it in two and for years I kept this bloodstained relic of that awful night when a nation waited breathlessly for news that the man who had piloted them through the dark days of the war was coming back to consciousness, a hope that prove futile.”
“Slowly they bore the suffer across the street to a house adjoining the one where I boarded and there in the gray dawn of the next day Secretary Stanton announced that ‘ he belonged to the ages and the martyred chief passed to his reward.”
“We knew either that night or early next morning that John Wilkes Booth had committed the deed and that he had escaped across the long bridge. It was several days before we heard that he had been shot to death in a barn in Maryland.”
Mr. Hoffman was a Steubenville, Ohio, boy, the former home of Secretary Stanton and it was through his influence that he was given the clerkship in the department. He came into intimate personal contact with the great secretary and often saw Lincoln going to and from the department conferring with Stanton and examining the dispatches from the front during the war years.
