Learning more.."Performance about haft-past 10 o'clock"
"I thought immediately that it had something to do with the murder. About that time, a squad of cavalry came up to scout the country about there. I reported have taken the horse to the officer in charge. He wanted to take it, but I refused letting him have it, but went myself with it to Major General Augar's office and delivered it up. The horse was afterwards identified as the one Booth road."
"The General's adjutant thanked me and desired a Captain and myself (sic) and a guard should search the houses about the hospital, thinking he might have been thrown from his horse and secreted in some place. We searched until morning without success".
"The next day I attended my regular duties and in the evening the doctor called me to his room and said that he was afraid the soldiers would mob the rebel prisoners at our hospital as they (the soldiers) were very much aroused at the death of our President, and desired me to take a guard and be around that night. I put a guard over every ward and would not let a man out. So you see I was on duty for 48 hours straight without sleep…"
"The report this evening is that they have caught the man who attempted the life of Secretary Seward. The city here is draped in mourning."
"The night the President was murdered, I done something I have not done in a good while, and that was to cry. The tears showed themselves before I knew it."
"We officers are to wear the badge of mourning for six months. I am going down to see the President's remains, as I understand they are to lay in state."
Toffey was later called upon to testify as to the capture of Booth's horse during the trial of three of Booth's co-conspirators. He also witnessed their execution. "I hope I never see another hanging," he wrote his parents afterwards. But that was not to be. Almost 30 years later, while serving as sheriff of Hudson County, Toffey had to direct the execution of a convicted murderer. Toffey's career in public life included two terms in the New Jersey Assembly and six years as State Treasurer.
Toffey was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service at Missionary Ridge, a crucial battle in the Civil War. Ordered excused from duty because of illness, he disregarded orders and went to the front. There he accepted an assignment to take command of an adjoining battalion from which all of the officers had been picked off by the enemy firmly entrenched atop the ridge. He reformed the faltering battalion, and was leading it in its successful assault when he fell wounded.
Interestingly, John Toffey was accompanied during combat by his brother, Daniel Toffey, also of Jersey City, who had already taken part in the Civil War's most spectacular naval engagement. (sic)
Daniel Toffey had signed up as clerk for his uncle, Lieutenant John Worden, then commander of the Union's first ironclad vessel, the Monitor. He served on the Monitor during the harrowing trip from Brooklyn, N.Y., where it fought the Confederacy's Merrimac. He was with his commander when Worden was seriously wounded, and caught him as he fell. Daniel Toffey quit the Navy when his enlistment was up, and joined his brother's infantry regiment as a subtler, or provision.
[Amazon.com: Between First Ironclads; William Davis.(Book, 2011.]