The President had been shot a few minutes after ten.  The wound would have brought instant death to most men, but his vital tenacity was remarkable.  He was, of course, unconscious from the first moment; but he breathed with slow and regular respiration throughout the night.  As the dawn came and the lamplight grew pale, his pulse began to fail; but his face, even then, was scarcely more haggard than those of the sorrowing men around him.  His automatic moaning ceased, a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features, and at twenty-two minutes after seven he died.  Stanton broke the silence by saying: 

“Now he belongs to the ages.”

Booth had done his work efficiently.  His principal subordinate, Payne, had acted with equal audacity and cruelty, but not with equally fatal result.  Going to the home of the Secretary of State, who lay ill in bed, he had forced his way to Mr. Seward’s room, on the pretext of being a messenger from the physician with a packet of medicine to deliver.  The servant at the door tried to prevent him from going up-stairs; the Secretary’s son, Frederick W. Seward, hearing the noise, stepped out into the hall to check the intruders.  Payne rushed upon him with a pistol which missed fire, then rained blows with it upon his head, and, grappling and struggling, the two came to the Secretary’s room and fell together through the door.  Frederick Seward soon became unconscious, and remained so for several weeks, being, perhaps, the last man in the civilized world to learn the strange story of the night.  The Secretary’s daughter and a soldier nurse were in the room.  Payne struck them right and left, wounding the nurse with his knife, and then, rushing to the bed, began striking at the throat of the crippled statesman, inflicting three terrible wounds on his neck and cheek.  The nurse recovered himself and seized the assassin from behind, while another son, roused by his sister’s screams, came into the room and managed at last to force him outside the door—­not, however, until he and the nurse had been stabbed repeatedly.  Payne broke away at last, and ran down-stairs, seriously wounding an attendant on the way, reached the door unhurt, sprang upon his horse, and rode leisurely away.  When surgical aid arrived, the Secretary’s house looked like a field hospital.  Five of its inmates were bleeding from ghastly wounds, and two of them, among the highest officials of the nation, it was thought might never see the light of another day; though all providentially recovered.

The assassin left behind him his hat, which apparently trivial loss cost him and one of his fellow conspirators their lives.  Fearing that the lack of it would arouse suspicion, he abandoned his horse, instead of making good his escape, and hid himself in the woods east of Washington for two days.  Driven at last by hunger, he returned to the city and presented himself at Mrs. Surratt’s house at the very moment when all its inmates had been arrested and were about to be taken to the office of the provost-marshal.  Payne thus fell into the hands of justice, and the utterance of half a dozen words by him and the unhappy woman whose shelter he sought proved the death-warrant of them both.