The assassination of Lincoln - in California
After the Gold Rush
In San Francisco, the assassination of Lincoln was scooped by a trio of unlikely aspiring newspapermen - the three teenage de Young brothers. The hardscrabble sons of a prostitute had built a daily rag, mostly a theater gossip sheet, heavy on ads, until the youngest of them, Michael, was in the right place at the right time to catch the news of a century.
April 14, 1865
San Francisco, California
Michael, Gus, and Charles de Young
The de Youngs had been working around the clock, like all the other newsmen in the city, ever since the announcement two days ago: General Lee had surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. At long last, the war was over.
And the new Daily Dramatic Chronicle was thriving, now with a circulation of over four thousand.
The brothers did all the work themselves: not just the writing and printing, but folding the papers themselves and delivering them throughout the city to saloons, hotels, restaurants and theater box offices. At the end of the day, they swept through the same venues to gather up discarded papers, which they brought back to the office to smooth and dry the beer-soaked pages, so they could mail the reconstituted newspapers out to hotels outside the city.
Michael continued to drop by the telegraph offices to chat with the operators. He did so nearly every day, to the point that sometimes no one noticed him when he walked in.
He was exhausted from covering the news of the war’s end, the daily work of the paper, and on top of all that, keeping up with his schoolwork. At Charles’ insistence he was attending class both at the primary school and secondary school, to finish both at once.
But on the morning of April fourteenth, he’d wakened early, and something drove him to dress and head down the telegraph office. He found the office in a state unlike any other he had experienced. There was flurry and consternation. One of the agents was crying. A grown man. Crying!
The center of the storm seemed to be a telegram on the operator’s desk.
Michael felt a sick lurch in his stomach. He was suddenly unable to move his limbs. Time seemed to slow, as in a dream.
He took a step forward. The other men in the office were too distracted to notice him moving toward them. And before anyone could think to stop him, he had snatched up the dispatch.
The words were blacker on the page than any he’d ever seen.
It is a dream, he thought. And for a moment, he was comforted. But the hollowness in his stomach wasn’t going away.
You can’t read in a dream, he remembered.
Finally an operator noticed him standing there with the telegram in hand. “Hey. You can’t be reading that—”
Michael let the telegram fall. He ran for the door, and bolted down the stairs.
He burst out of the doors of the building and ran for a block before he stopped, gasping for breath. He pulled the pen from behind his ear and with shaking fingers, he wrote down what he had seen, word for word.
Then he ran all the way to the print shop.
Charles and Gus looked up, startled, as Michael burst through the doors of the shop.
It was Gus, sensitive Gus, who spoke first. His voice was frightened. “Michael. Are you ill? What is it?”
Michael’s chest was on fire, his throat so parched he could barely choke out the words. “The President. The President…”
He held out his notebook, open to the page he had copied.
Charles strode forward, snatched the book out of his hand to look down at the terrible words:
president Lincoln assassinated
at the theater last night.
Lincoln died At 8:30 this morning and
secretary seward a few minutes past 9.
Charles dropped the pad and grabbed Michael’s shoulders so hard Michael gasped. “Are you certain?”
Michael dipped his chin. “I— memorized the telegram. I put it down word for word.”
Gus had picked up the notebook and was staring down at the page, his face white as chalk. “It cannot be. It cannot be.”
Charles leaped to the table and started tearing up the type that Gus had halfway finished. “Get rid of this. Now. Now. We’re putting out a special edition.” Charles snatched the notebook from Gus, strode to the press.
Michael jumped to do it. Gus stood still, weeping. Charles grabbed him by the shoulders and screamed in his face. “You useless sack. Wipe your face and get to work.”
Charles hit him, and kept hitting him as Gus slumped to the floor, crying.
Michael set his jaw, and began setting type.
Charles sent him and other stringers out to pick up on more arriving details. When the special edition was printed, complete with a dramatic sketch imagining the shooting at Ford’s Theater, and of course the usual ads, Gus was still immobile on the floor.
ASSASSINATION
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
[FIRST DESPATCH]
Washington, April 15
Gen. H.W. Carpentier: His Excellency President Lincoln
was assasinated at the theater last night.
----
[SECOND DESPATCH]
President Lincoln died at 8:30 this morning,
and Secretary Seward a few minutes past 9.
----
[THIRD DESPATCH]
Reports of are contradictory. It is reported that
President Lincoln died at 7:22.
Michael took a stack and went out to call the paper with the rest of the newsies.
He stood on the corner of Montgomery and Clay, and found his throat was so dry nothing came out. He bit the inside of his cheek until saliva came, swallowed, and raised his voice. “Extra! Extra! Assassination of President Lincoln! Lincoln assassinated!”
It was as if he’d exploded a bomb. Immediately he was swarmed with people, crying out in shock, in outrage.
“You lie, boy!” “Get off with you!” But they grabbed for the papers in a frenzy, peeling off to read the words in shock. Soon the whole street was crowded with crying, shouting citizens. The Chronicle was free, but men were throwing dollar pieces at him to get copies.
Michael kept calling the words until he was shaking, tears streaming down his face. He turned away, sliced open another stack of papers, and kept shouting the words until they were just meaningless syllables in his mouth.
Phoebe Hearst, Willie Hearst
Phoebe heard the front door open and shut. She waited for Eliza to shout out a greeting. Eliza had been out shopping, and she never entered the house without calling out that she was home.
But moments went by, and no voice came from the hall.
“Eliza?” Phoebe called out herself.
When there was no response, Phoebe felt a wash of dread. She stood, her heart beating fast…
Eliza burst into the parlor with her coat and hat still on. Her face was pale and she clutched a newspaper.
Phoebe caught a glimpse of the masthead. It was that new paper people were talking about, the Chronicle.
Then Eliza, steady, stalwart Eliza, burst into tears. “Missus Hearst. Oh, Missus Hearst.”
“Why, Eliza…”
In his bedroom, two-year old Willie heard an alarming sound. He toddled in looking for his mother... and was dismayed to find both his mother and Eliza sobbing.
“Mama cryin. Why Mama cryin? Why Liza cryin?”
He took up the paper Phoebe had dropped on the floor, stared down at its big black angry lines.
His Mama scooped him up, held him tight, her fragrant cheek wet against his warm one. “Oh, Willie. My baby.”
Chronicle Evening Edition, April 15, 1865
DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT
----
MURDEROUS ATTACK ON MR. SEWARD
----
Wilkes Booth Supposed to be
the Murderer of the
President
----
Washington, April 14-- President Lincoln and wife, along with other friends, visited Ford’s Theatre for the purpose of witnessing the performance of “American Cousin.” It was announced in the paper that General Grant would also be present, but that gentleman took a late train of cars for New Jersey. The theatre was densely crowded, and everyone seemed delighted with the scene before them.
During the third act, and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed in front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand exclaiming, “sic semper tyrannus” and immediately leaped from a box which was in the second tier to the stage beneath, ran across to the opposite side of the stage, making his escape…
Captain Isaiah Lees
In police headquarters, the Chronicle evening edition lay on Captain Isaiah Lees’ desk. Lees could only stare into space, overcome with the news, and was jarred back to his senses only when an officer burst into the room. “There’s trouble down on Montgomery. Looks like a riot.”
Lees twisted in his chair and grabbed for his coat.
Michael and Charles de Young
Over a hundred San Franciscans, all men, were massing at the corner of Montgomery and Clay.
On another street corner, Michael stood, still passing out papers as fast as Charles could print them. When he saw the gathering crowd move in a mob down the street, he grabbed the last stack of papers and followed.
The mob marched through the middle of the street to the offices of the Daily Democratic Press. The men at the front of the crowd battered and broke through the doors, swarming into the building with calls of “Down with the traitors!”
Moments later Michael heard windows shattering in the building above him. A hand thrust a Confederate flag out an upper window, set it ablaze, and released it to flutter down to the ground in flames.
A moment later furniture and typesetting equipment began to fall to the sidewalk, tossed out the windows of the composing room by the rioters. Every explosive crash brought three cheers from the ever-growing crowd.
Michael ducked into the entryway of a building to avoid the falling furniture.
Charles found him there, scribbling notes as if his life depended on it:
The “Democratic Press” office has just been thrown into the street by an infuriated Mob of Outraged citizens! An Attempt is now being made to destroy the “News Letter” office-
Charles grabbed Michael’s sleeve. “Never mind that.” He pulled Michael through the gathered men on the street, away from the fray. Charles stopped on the sidewalk, and ordered, “Look.”
All over the plank street lay scattered printing and typesetting equipment that rioters had tossed out windows. At the brothers’ feet, type was scattered like grains of corn.
Charles’ face glowed with a feverish excitement. “There’s our new print office. Right there.”
Michael’s pulse spiked. He took a quick glance at the police officers pushing through the crowd on the sidewalk.
“They’re otherwise occupied,” Charles whispered savagely. “This is our chance.”
While the brothers scavenged printing equipment, the crowd stormed another anti-Lincoln paper, and another, destroying five Confederate-leaning newspaper offices before Isaiah Lees and a squad of fifty policemen lined up on Sacramento Street to stop them. The city’s military commander, Major General Irvin McDowell, mounted a packing box and persuaded them to disperse.
Bret Harte, Charlie Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith
In the offices of the Californian, Harte and Ina and Charlie looked out the windows over the police patrols as they confronted the mob.
Ina was as white as a sheet, Charlie sobbing. “Not another. All the good people. It’s unbearable.”
The army was called out to keep the peace, and two thousand soldiers marched into the City from the Presidio. The fire bell on top of City Hall tower rang out to call the militia. Businesses all over the city closed and barricaded their doors. If someone had painted San Francisco that night, she could herself have been an occupied city of the defeated South, with troops in formation, cavalry rattling the pavement.
But the night passed without incident.
Charles and Michael de Young had managed to salvage a whole composing room of equipment and furniture, taking trip after trip to haul it all back to the print shop.
They immediately used it to put out two more editions of the paper that day, including Michael’s reporting on the destruction of the Southern-sympathizing newspaper offices, and corrections to the initial telegraph announcements. Secretary Seward had been gravely injured, but was still alive, fighting for life.
By Wednesday, April 19, the city came together in grief. A funeral procession snaked through the streets, fifteen thousand strong. Six white horses shrouded in black drew a casket emblazoned with LINCOLN in gold letters, surrounded by soldiers, clergymen, foreign consuls.
And toward the rear, a large number of Black men, marching with the others.
The cortege stopped at Union Square, where only a fraction of the mourners were admitted into the overflowing pavilion. The rest remained outside to listen until the services ended and everyone sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
In Virginia City, all stores and saloons were closed. 2,700 citizens took place in a funeral procession through the town, past balconies and windows draped in black and white. Church bells tolled from ten o’clock to four, with a gun fired every half hour from sunrise to sunset.
In Washington, Mary Todd Lincoln arranged for her slain husband’s body to be carried in state via a funeral train to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.
Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific happily provided the train, and journalist Ida Tarbell described the passage:
“The train entered scarcely a town that the bells were not tolling, the minute guns firing, the stations draped, and all the spaces beside the tracks crowded with people with uncovered heads. Night did not hinder them. Great bonfires were built in lonely countrysides, around which the farmers waited patiently to salute their dead president. At towns the length of the train was lit by blazing torches. Storm as well as darkness was unheeded. Much of the journey was made through the rain, in fact, but the people seemed to have forgotten all things but Abraham Lincoln, the man they loved and trusted.
Across the country, in every town, citizens lined the railroad silently, with tears in their eyes, as the train moved slowly past. Farmers working in the fields saw the train and dropped to their knees in prayer. For the wise man who had led the Union through four years of bloody civil war— Father Abraham— was dead.
Churches throughout the country held memorial services. Ministers told their people that God had taken Lincoln because the president had completed the job God had given him. He had brought peace to the Union, and freedom to all men.
That weekend, Easter and Passover services assumed profound new meaning. For Christian ministers, the comparison to Jesus was inevitable. Lincoln had died for his people’s sins and now would rise to immortality.
Rabbis likened him to a second Moses, quoting Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all of the inhabitants thereof,” and lamenting that the great leader had not lived to see the Promised Land himself.
The final service was at the cemetery outside Springfield, and ended with the words from Lincoln’s second inaugural speech:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right— as God gives us to see the right—let us strive on to finish the work we are in. Let us heal the nation’s wounds. Let us do all possible to get and keep a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
After the Gold Rush
is the epic story of the building of San Francisco as novelized history, told by the real people who built it, in their own words, from original source material such as newspapers, letters, court documents and the novels they wrote themselves.
Alexandra Sokoloff:
I’m a bestselling feminist crime and thriller author —but I also have a commitment and a platform to write about history that isn’t often talked about in the generalizations and most often outright whitewashing and male-washing of history textbooks.
Under this regime, working to counteract the suppression of history is more important than ever.
—-
Why subscribe?
After the Gold Rush is a reader-supported publication. To receive a monthly roundup of new posts and support this work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Likes, Shares and Comments are extremely helpful and much appreciated!
Wonderful. Thank you for narrating this account, which I had never heard before.