After President Lincoln settled in to enjoy Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, his guard left to drink at a nearby saloon, leaving Lincoln vulnerable.
Posted on 04/09/2010 12:34:10 AM PDT by Palter
What happened to Officer John Parker, the man who chose the wrong night to leave his post at Ford's Theater?
When a celebrity-seeking couple crashed a White House state dinner last November, the issue of presidential security dominated the news. The Secret Service responded by putting three of its officers on administrative leave and scrambled to reassure the public that it takes the job of guarding the president very seriously. “We put forth the maximum effort all the time,” said Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan.
That kind of dedication to safeguarding the president didn’t always exist. It wasn’t until 1902 that the Secret Service, created in 1865 to eradicate counterfeit currency, assumed official full-time responsibility for protecting the president. Before that, security for the president could be unbelievably lax. The most astounding example was the scant protection afforded Abraham Lincoln on the night he was assassinated. Only one man, an unreliable Washington cop named John Frederick Parker, was assigned to guard the president at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
Today it’s hard to believe that a single policeman was Lincoln’s only protection, but 145 years ago the situation wasn’t that unusual. Lincoln was cavalier about his personal safety, despite the frequent threats he received and a near-miss attempt on his life in August 1864, as he rode a horse unescorted. He’d often take in a play or go to church without guards, and he hated being encumbered by the military escort assigned to him. Sometimes he walked alone at night between the White House and the War Department, a distance of about a quarter of a mile.
John Parker was an unlikely candidate to guard a president—or anyone for that matter. Born in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1830, Parker moved to Washington as a young man, originally earning his living as a carpenter. He became one of the capital’s first officers when the Metropolitan Police Force was organized in 1861. Parker’s record as a cop fell somewhere between pathetic and comical. He was hauled before the police board numerous times, facing a smorgasbord of charges that should have gotten him fired. But he received nothing more than an occasional reprimand. His infractions included conduct unbecoming an officer, using intemperate language and being drunk on duty. Charged with sleeping on a streetcar when he was supposed to be walking his beat, Parker declared that he’d heard ducks quacking on the tram and had climbed aboard to investigate. The charge was dismissed. When he was brought before the board for frequenting a whorehouse, Parker argued that the proprietress had sent for him.
In November 1864, the Washington police force created the first permanent detail to protect the president, made up of four officers. Somehow, John Parker was named to the detail. Parker was the only one of the officers with a spotty record, so it was a tragic coincidence that he drew the assignment to guard the president that evening. As usual, Parker got off to a lousy start that fateful Friday. He was supposed to relieve Lincoln’s previous bodyguard at 4 p.m. but was three hours late.
Lincoln’s party arrived at the theater at around 9 p.m. The play, Our American Cousin, had already started when the president entered his box directly above the right side of the stage. The actors paused while the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln bowed to the applauding audience and took his seat.
Parker was seated outside the president’s box, in the passageway beside the door. From where he sat, Parker couldn’t see the stage, so after Lincoln and his guests settled in, he moved to the first gallery to enjoy the play. Later, Parker committed an even greater folly: At intermission, he joined the footman and coachman of Lincoln’s carriage for drinks in the Star Saloon next door to Ford’s Theatre.
John Wilkes Booth entered the theater around 10 p.m.. Ironically, he’d also been in the Star Saloon, working up some liquid courage. When Booth crept up to the door to Lincoln’s box, Parker’s chair stood empty. Some of the audience may not have heard the fatal pistol shot, since Booth timed his attack to coincide with a scene in the play that always sparked loud laughter.
No one knows for sure if Parker ever returned to Ford’s Theatre that night. When Booth struck, the vanishing policeman may have been sitting in his new seat with a nice view of the stage, or perhaps he had stayed put in the Star Saloon. Even if he had been at his post, it’s not certain he would have stopped Booth. “Booth was a well-known actor, a member of a famous theatrical family,” says Ford’s Theatre historical interpreter Eric Martin. “They were like Hollywood stars today. Booth might have been allowed in to pay his respects. Lincoln knew of him. He’d seen him act in The Marble Heart, here in Ford’s Theatre in 1863.”
A fellow presidential bodyguard, William H. Crook, wouldn’t accept any excuses for Parker. He held him directly responsible for Lincoln’s death. “Had he done his duty, I believe President Lincoln would not have been murdered by Booth,” Crook wrote in his memoir. “Parker knew that he had failed in duty. He looked like a convicted criminal the next day.” Parker was charged with failing to protect the president, but the complaint was dismissed a month later. No local newspaper followed up on the issue of Parker’s culpability. Nor was Parker mentioned in the official report on Lincoln’s death. Why he was let off so easily is baffling. Perhaps, with the hot pursuit of Booth and his co-conspirators in the chaotic aftermath, he seemed like too small a fish. Or perhaps the public was unaware that a bodyguard had even been assigned to the president.
Incredibly, Parker remained on the White House security detail after the assassination. At least once he was assigned to protect the grieving Mrs. Lincoln before she moved out of the presidential mansion and returned to Illinois. Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, former slave Elizabeth Keckley, recalled the following exchange between the president’s widow and Parker: “So you are on guard tonight,” Mrs. Lincoln yelled, “on guard in the White House after helping to murder the President.”
“I could never stoop to murder,” Parker stammered, “much less to the murder of so good and great a man as the President. I did wrong, I admit, and have bitterly repented. I did not believe any one would try to kill so good a man in such a public place, and the belief made me careless.”
Mrs. Lincoln snapped that she would always consider him guilty and ordered him from the room. Some weeks before the assassination, she had written a letter on Parker’s behalf to exempt him from the draft, and some historians think she may have been related to him on her mother’s side.
Parker remained on the Metropolitan Police Force for three more years, but his shiftlessness finally did him in. He was fired on August 13, 1868, for once again sleeping on duty. Parker drifted back into carpentry. He died in Washington in 1890, of pneumonia. Parker, his wife and their three children are buried together in the capital’s Glenwood Cemetery—on present-day Lincoln Road. Their graves are unmarked. No photographs have ever been found of John Parker. He remains a faceless character, his role in the great tragedy largely forgotten.
After President Lincoln settled in to enjoy Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, his guard left to drink at a nearby saloon, leaving Lincoln vulnerable.
You’re right - there is disparity there. If it can’t be perfect then perhaps someone should abolish voting altogether...lol
I must have missed the part where Butler was allowing open season on rape. Where was that?
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Thanks Palter. |
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There's a big moral difference in collateral damage of dropping bombs from 30,000 feet versus skewering a 10 year old Georgia boy with a bayonett. Of course your flawed liberal logic fails to see that.
Yeah I know my history. Compare Lee's incursion into Md. and Pa. versus Sherman's march through Georgia and get back with me sonny.
Not to mention one is a part of history and the 10 year old boy is myth. But your warped Lost Cause bias prevents you from telling one from the other.
Lee? Oh, yeah, the guy that killed off Southerns by the boat load and lost the war( which he knew would happen ). Double plus good.
All I can say if you happen to be in or near St. Louis and need a restroom break....
Link WTS------>http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=951
If that is true then I know what you must feel like.
I appreciate the excellent and informative discussion. However, I find myself in general agreement with ConservativeNewYorker while I have issues with the interpretation of you other two.
Not to start another subject, all though it might, it seems to me the underpinning of this whole issue is one of economics and the federal power on which Lincoln relied.
IIRC, the issue arose when the rural South decided to buy equipment, specifically farm equipment, from England rather than from the manufacturers of such equipment in New England. The issue was price with the farmers thinking they were being gouged. Rather than lower their prices, the Northern manufacturers and politicians prevailed with Lincoln and the Congress and a tariff was impose on those manufactured products coming from England. That started the whole ruckus and Lincoln blockaded the ports to prevent the foreign products from being off loaded.
As they say, the rest is history.
The point is if one can say a state can leave without the consent of the other states because the Constitution does not specifically prevent it then states can get together and expel another state against its will because the Constitution does not explicitly prevent that either. True?
As my previous post indicated, all ousting one can harm the one while one freely leaving the others does no harm to the rest.
Doesn't it? Say Texas walked out tomorrow, you claim that there would be no harm to the rest of the states. But what about obligations the country entered into while Texas was as state? Treaties, Iraq, Afghanistan, all have to be borne by the other states because Texas has walked out of it. What about debt built up while Texas was a part of the country, aided in no small part by three recent Texan presidents? Texas has walked out on it leaving the remaining states to pick up the slack. What about federal property that Texas walks off with, highways and dams and what have you built with federal funds? Texas walks out with all that and no compensation for the other states. Social security, pensions, and the like, will the remaining states have to pay those to Texas residents while Texas gets off scott free?
States don't exist in a vacuum. Their actions impact the interests and well-being of the states around them. That includes when they leave.
IIRC, the issue arose when the rural South decided to buy equipment, specifically farm equipment, from England rather than from the manufacturers of such equipment in New England. The issue was price with the farmers thinking they were being gouged. Rather than lower their prices, the Northern manufacturers and politicians prevailed with Lincoln and the Congress and a tariff was impose on those manufactured products coming from England. That started the whole ruckus and Lincoln blockaded the ports to prevent the foreign products from being off loaded.
I think you recall incorrectly.
One of the more insidious aspects of the rebellion was how it affected the border states. Literally caught in the middle, the citizens of those states largely wished to stay out of the fray but, by virtue of placement and proximity, were forced to make the devils choice of staying with the Union they pledged allegiance to, or submit to the intimidation of the rebels.
Here is an instance of the jeopardy that I see Non-Sequitur referring to when he says that the actions of seceding state(s) affect more than their “personal” affairs. Virginia was literally torn apart. Would you not agree that the citizens of Virginia - or Tennessee or Kentucky for that matter - were honorable folks, whether they stayed in the Union or joined the rebellion?
Wouldn’t you also agree that the citizens of Virginia were harmed when they were forced to cast their lot?
What if a state had not supported the treaties and other government programs you describe? As independent republics joined in an agreed upon union are they obligated to uphold things they disagreed with and did not support?
I know what the answers are today since we have strayed so far from original intent in so many areas but I am thinking about the original agreement and what the signers thought they were agreeing to.
While I do research to refresh my memory of courses I took 50 - 60 years ago why don't you tell me what the Tariff of Abomination was about and why Lincoln blockaded the Southern ports?
How would you demonstrate that?
While you do your research I hope you'll come across the fact that the Tariff of Abomination was passed in 1828 when Lincoln was 19. And Lincoln blockaded the Southern ports because "...a combination of persons engaged in such insurrection, have threatened to grant pretended letters of marque to authorize the bearers thereof to commit assaults on the lives, vessels, and property of good citizens of the country lawfully engaged in commerce on the high seas, and in waters of the United States..."
In my research I have refreshed my memory. The discussion we are having now was a hot topic from the very beginning and was only settled by the war. Then and only then was the question of a strong federal government versus states rights finally decided, decided by force not intellectual reasoning.
Much of the disagreement was about Article IV and what it really meant, what was its intention? The states rights folks understood it to govern the relationship of those within the union with no reference to secession. To them, if the union became hostile to the needs of the state the state could voluntarily leave as per the original agreement.
I also was reminded that there are still two versions of the causes of the war, a Northern version and a Southern version. Neither denies the facts but only differ where the emphasis is placed.
The Northern version is heavily weighted toward eliminating slavery as the main reason and the Southern version emphasizes the states rights version which was pushed to the wall by the tariff issue.
I know the Morrill Act, the Tariff of Abomination, was passed in 1928 but that was just part of the ongoing disagreement. It placed a 20% tariff on certain imported goods, goods mainly imported by the South, and caused quite a stir. Later Lincoln was talking about raising it to 40%.
The industrial North exported very little but the rural South exported a lot of agricultural products, especially cotton. The South was much richer than the North at that time. The sold goods to the Northern states and to the rest of the world. The North was able to sell very little to the rest of the world so was pretty much dependent on the South as its market. They wanted to protect that market and the federal government wanted the tax money.
Lincoln had no objection to the secession of the Southern states and said so in his first inaugural address. However, he did reserve the right to maintain the federally owned property in those states which was only Ft. Sumpter in Charleston Harbor and Ft. Hicks (?) off of Pensacola, Florida. He also maintained he still had the right to collect the tariffs imposed on imports and the forts were his tax collection points. Of course, the Confederate States disagreed.
From there we get the beginning of the war and the blockades.
By asking you the question. I inferred you would know.
Then the response is that the question is irrelevant. As part of the country as a whole, individual states reap the benefits. Their approval of all policies and all treaties entered into by the government is unnecessary for them to be bound by those treaties and have to comply with those policies. Now if, for example, Texas is dead set against Obama's health care plan and announces their intention to secede in order to avoid participating in it, then fine. No reason why they should foot the bill for something that is going to go into effect after they leave. But all other obligations, all other debts are as much their responsibility as any other state. And if they wish to leave then they leave with their fair share of the obligations. They may take their fair share of all federal property in the state. And the federal government also has an obligation to those remaining in Texas for all the Social Security paid and the federal and military pensions earned. It is the obligation of the remaining states to make sure that those obligations are met as well.
What original agreement? The original 13 states were bound together by the Articles of Confederation and later chose to replace it with the Constitution. They all ratified the Constitution and agreed to be bound by it. The 37 states that came later were all admitted with the permission of the existing states. There was no qualifications in that. The Constitution itself is silent on the question of secession, so the conclusion must be that it is allowed. The question is how. The obvious answer, and the one James Madison came to, is with the consent of the other states. Their permission is needed to join and once allowed in their permission is needed to combine, split, or change their border by a fraction of an inch. Leaving entirely should require the same.
The Northern version is heavily weighted toward eliminating slavery as the main reason and the Southern version emphasizes the states rights version which was pushed to the wall by the tariff issue.
No, the Northern version is that the main reason for opposing the Southern rebellion was the preservation of the Union. Slavery was not, at any time, a primary reason for why they were fighting. The Southern secession was based on what they saw as a threat to the expansion of their institution of slavery posed by the election of Abraham Lincoln. Their armed rebellion was the manner that they chose to further those aims.
I know the Morrill Act, the Tariff of Abomination, was passed in 1928 but that was just part of the ongoing disagreement. It placed a 20% tariff on certain imported goods, goods mainly imported by the South, and caused quite a stir. Later Lincoln was talking about raising it to 40%.
The Morrill Tariff was first passed out of the House of Representatives in the spring of 1860. It if was such a bone of contention then why didn't the South secede then? And when the original seven Southern states did secede, it was before the Morrill Tariff was finally passed. Again, if it was such a bone of contention then why didn't they wait for it to pass?
The industrial North exported very little but the rural South exported a lot of agricultural products, especially cotton. The South was much richer than the North at that time. The sold goods to the Northern states and to the rest of the world. The North was able to sell very little to the rest of the world so was pretty much dependent on the South as its market. They wanted to protect that market and the federal government wanted the tax money.
Very little in the way of tariffs was collected on goods destined for Southern consumers.
Lincoln had no objection to the secession of the Southern states and said so in his first inaugural address.
Say what?
"It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States."
However, he did reserve the right to maintain the federally owned property in those states which was only Ft. Sumpter in Charleston Harbor and Ft. Hicks (?) off of Pensacola, Florida.
Fort Pickens in Pensacola. And what of it? They were, after all, federal property.
He also maintained he still had the right to collect the tariffs imposed on imports and the forts were his tax collection points.
In the first place the Forts were not the tax collection points. They were forts. Tariffs in Charleston were collected at the Customs House on East Bay Street. In Pensacola it was at the Customs House and Post Office on Palafox Place.
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