Dr. Charles S. Taft: The Army Surgeon Who Tended the Dying Lincoln

The Mount Vernon (N.Y.) Argus announces Dr. Taft's death in 1900.

History often turns on timing and place. Dr. Charles S. Taft's link to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a matter of both — but not really coincidence.

Ford's Theatre

The 30-year-old Army surgeon went to see Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, because he wanted to see the President. The Civil War had just ended in Union victory, Lincoln was a hero, and word had spread that he would be there that night.

Taft wrote the next day what he saw:

• At about 10:30, in the third act, a pistol shot rang out from behind the President's box. Many in the audience took it for a stage effect.
• A moment later a hatless, white-faced man leaped twelve feet from the box to the stage. His spur caught in the flag draped over the box, and he landed partly on his hands and knees, then sprang up, brandished a long knife, shouted "Sic semper tyrannis," and strode off the stage.

The man was John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and actor, who had shot the President with a derringer at point-blank range.

At the President's side

"I leaped from the top of the orchestra railing in front of me upon the stage, and, announcing myself as an army surgeon, was immediately lifted up to the President's box by several gentlemen who had collected beneath," Taft recalled.

• He helped diagnose the wound — declared mortal — and helped carry Lincoln to a back room of a boardinghouse across the street.
• Through the long night, in a small room crowded with cabinet officers, Lincoln's wife and son, and physicians, he assisted with nearly hopeless treatments. A famous painting of the deathbed shows Taft holding the President's head.

Later life

• Army surgeon at posts in the South through 1876, then private practice in New York City.
• In May 1899 he, his wife and daughter bought a large wooden house — still standing — on South 7th Avenue in Mount Vernon's "doctors' row." He attended the First Baptist Church and was active in the Farnsworth Post of the Grand Army of the Republic.
• He never escaped that Good Friday: months before his death, 35 years after the assassination, a young New York reporter tracked him down to hear the story once more.

He died of throat cancer at home, aged 65, on December 18, 1900, and was buried the next day in the city section of the St. Paul's cemetery.

Sources

Based on "Dr. Charles S. Taft: Lincoln assassination attending surgeon buried at St. Paul's," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service, quoting Taft's account; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The 1900 newspaper is in the public domain.