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The Darkest Dawn

Page 24

by Thomas Goodrich


  On the evening of April 26, while a huge crowd swarmed about the Kirkwood House on Pennsylvania Avenue, hundreds of policemen and soldiers poured into the hotel itself. A short time later, the searchers fanned out to neighboring buildings, going from door to door and from roof to roof. Somewhere in the crowd below, a rumor had started which stated that John Wilkes Booth—painted black, wearing a “white negro wig,” clad in a dress, walking on crutches—had been recognized before limping away near the Kirkwood. “Joe, don’t say anything!” Booth had supposedly said after shaking hands with the friend. “Joe,” of course, promptly did and for the next several hours the furious manhunt for the murderer continued. At length, the source of the report was finally found—a local sot just released from the city holding tank. “Drunk again,” growled an angry policeman. “Go home and get sober.”8

  The following day another rumor raced through Washington, and an even larger crowd hastened to the Potomac. Unlike the hoax of the night before, this report proved true.9 At 1:45 that morning, a tug had drawn alongside the gunboat Montauk as it lay anchored in the river. Several men had crossed over to the warship from the tug, including the Secret Service chief, Colonel Lafayette Baker. With them came the decomposing body of John Wilkes Booth. Although there was little doubt in anyone’s mind, a formal identification of the assassin’s body was scheduled for later that day. David Herold also was taken aboard, then whisked below, where he was heavily secured by double irons.10

  As the sun rose and the report spread, thousands hurried down to the river, where they stood staring in grim fascination at the black ship.11 Hundreds of requests were made for passes, that the morbid and curious might feast their eyes on the “monster,” but only a handful were granted. Most simply stared and pointed from the shoreline or peered through field glasses and powerful telescopes.12 As frustrating as the quarantine was for a people who desperately wanted to scowl at the actor and spurn his dead body, there was soon something very tangible in which all could share.

  Walking into the War Department, Lieutenant Edward Doherty presented himself to Edwin Stanton. Beside the officer stood his sergeant from the 16th New York.

  “Are you sure Corbett shot Booth?” stared the stern secretary of war.

  “I am,” answered Doherty.

  “You arrested him for firing without your order?”

  “I did.”

  “You did right,” said Stanton as he turned to the little sergeant. “Do you agree with the Lieutenant’s story?”

  “Yes,” replied Corbett, “I shot without an order. Booth would have killed me if I had not shot first. I think I did right.”

  After a brief pause to study the strange little man, Stanton at last spoke: “The rebel is dead, the patriot lives; he has spared the country expense, continued excitement and trouble. Discharge the patriot.”13

  Thus did Boston Corbett narrowly avert yet another court-martial. Even greater surprises were waiting outside, however. Accepting a lunch invitation from a War Department employee named Johnson, Corbett and his host were followed by a growing crowd eager to feast their eyes on the slayer of Booth. Once at the home, the throng became so noisy, and their demands for a speech were so loud, that the hero was finally forced to step out to the porch.14 When the cheers and applause died down, Corbett spoke.

  “Fellows,” shouted the sergeant, “I am glad to see you all. Johnson won’t let me make a speech. Goodbye.”15

  After lunch, Corbett’s host led him through the streets toward Matthew Brady’s studio, where photographs of the now famous celebrity were scheduled.16 Again, surrounded by wild, cheering crowds, the sergeant was besieged by hundreds seeking his autograph. One man offered Corbett a thousand dollars for the revolver he had used to kill Booth. Although his carbine had already disappeared while he was at the War Department, the little soldier refused the money, stating that the pistol was government property and not his to sell.17 Others in the throng merely wanted to hear Corbett speak and tell his tale. The hero was happy to oblige:

  I aimed at his body. I did not want to kill him. . . . I think he stooped to pick up something just as I fired. That may probably account for his receiving the ball in the head.18

  [W]hen the assassin lay at my feet, a wounded man, and I saw the bullet had taken effect about an inch back of the ear, and I remembered that Mr. Lincoln was wounded about the same part of the head, I said: “What a God we have. . . . God avenged Abraham Lincoln.”19

  His disobedience of orders and a single pistol shot had elevated Boston Corbett from a religious crank and crazy fanatic to an “eccentric” hero and man of the hour.20

  “[H]e will live as one of the World’s great avengers,” praised a grateful editor.21

  Not everyone was happy with Corbett’s deed, of course. Hundreds of young women who would secretly love John Wilkes Booth for the rest of their lives, no matter what he had done, were shattered by the news. When she first heard word of the assassin’s death, one such woman who was traveling on a Washington streetcar became so overcome with emotion that she wept aloud, then pulled out a small photo of the actor and kissed it.22 Millions more were unhappy with Corbett’s actions for other reasons. Most censured the deed because it deprived them of the supreme satisfaction of seeing the assassin brought back in chains; of relishing his imprisonment and trial; of savoring his last moments as he trembled on the gallows.23

  “What a pity there was not enough life left in Booth to choke out of him by the hangman,” raged one man.24

  Had Booth indeed been captured alive, many would have been in favor of slow torture.25 The “well-known English poet,” Dr. C. Mackay, had suggested that between his capture and execution, Booth should receive a savage flogging each morning and night.26 His agony, insisted a Washington editor, should be “long drawn out. . . . No humane man should object to apply such mental tortures to such a wretch.”27 Others argued that following the lengthy torture, Booth’s body should be chopped up and the parts put on public display.28

  Denied the sadistic satisfaction of watching his demise, active imaginations sought solace by envisioning the agony the murderer must have suffered before death.29 Wrote a citizen to the Chicago Tribune:

  For ten days and nights [sic] the forests and swamps were his home, with pain, and dread, and anguish. When discovered, the barn was fired; before him a sea of flame, ready to engulf him; beyond the grave, a still greater sea of flame awaiting him; and at that instant he received his peculiar, his wonderful wound. . . . Could the end of such a life have been more painful, more dreadful, more appalling? Was there not in it all the hand of an overruling Providence?30

  “Justice hunted the crippled fugitive like a starved beast from swamp to swamp,” echoed a Washington editor, “and at last, exhausted by exposure and hunger and pain, the wretch died the death of a. . . . mad dog in an out-house.”31

  Aghast at the savagery evinced, repulsed by the growing mountain of lies heaped on a dead man, some stalwart individuals could not remain silent, even if the victim was a much-hated assassin. Protested the editor of a Canadian newspaper:

  The shooting of Booth was a cold-blooded murder—nothing more or less. Granted that he was a criminal of the deepest dye—that was no reason why he should have been shot down the way he was. He was a foolish man, but a brave one. He died like one who loved his country dearly, according to his idea of what a noble death was. It is very evident that the detective gang were a lot of cowards, or they would never have had recourse to the means they adopted to finish up the “brief, eventful history” of a man who was already half disabled.32

  When others agreed and suggested that even the devil deserved his due, that Booth had been a brilliant, beloved actor who had shown no mean amount of boldness and bravery both in staging his deed and in meeting his end, the voices of fairness were shouted down by a roar of anger. Exploded a Baltimore editor:

  His whole history is a history of libertinism, baseness and dishonor. Any attempt to illumine a lifetime of shame a
nd misconduct is a wretched sham. If he had had any redeeming qualities, he has swamped them all by a crime whose magnitude is not paralleled in the annals of human events. . . . He has left a name infamous beyond expression. “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,” and any apology for his damning misdeeds should be crushed forever. Let him take his place where he belongs; let the evil he has done live after him; and let not those who he has so foully wronged, the good and true and loyal men of the whole nation, be sickened with pitiful attempts to make a martyr of a villain, to array in the garb of a hero a monster of crime, and to surround with fragrant flowers and rainbow colors the exit of one who died like a dog.33

  While those on shore strained to see, a number of important individuals, along with a cumbersome camera, were rowed out to the Montauk, and the official identification of the body began.34 As the tarpaulin was pulled back and the corpse was revealed, those on deck had their first glimpse of the assassin. Accompanying his father—a physician who had performed some minor surgery on Booth in the past—was John May, a teenager well acquainted with the actor. The boy was shocked by what he saw. “[N]ever in a human body,” May said later, “had greater change taken place . . . than in the haggard corpse which was before me with its yellow discolored skin, its unkempt and matted hair, and its whole facial expression sunken and sharpened by the exposure and starvation that it had undergone.”35

  “[T]he body looked more like that of some dirt-bearer than of the whilom fop,” sneered another viewer.36

  In addition to a growth of beard, the body was undergoing rapid decomposition. Nevertheless, the tattoo “JWB” was still visible on the left hand.37 Also, a scar was yet plainly seen on the back of the neck. Earlier, John May’s father had removed a tumor in that spot. “Booth at the time,” young May recalled, “was playing with Charlotte Cushman in Romeo and Juliet and during the play she embraced him with so much ardor that she tore out the stitches and tore open the wound. It then healed . . . and left a wide large scar.”38

  With identification settled, Alexander Gardner set up his equipment and took a number of plates of the body.39 While the camera was in place, it was decided to bring up David Herold as well. “As I stood near the hatchway,” remembered Seaton Munroe, “I had my first look at him as he slowly ascended and moved forward with the sentries.”

  He was not only handcuffed, but to his leg irons were attached a chain, and a 32-pound shot, the latter being carried by the sentry in the rear. As they approached the turret the gangway narrowed, and their footsteps along the iron deck were but a few feet from the water. The idea instantly seized me that at this moment had come to the unhappy wretch the first, last and only opportunity of escape from the gallows. A sudden dash to the right, and his impetus would have dragged the shot, if not the sentry, after him over the unrailed side of the “Monitor”; and in two minutes thereafter his parting breath would have bubbled to the surface from where he lay anchored, three fathoms below, on the muddy bottom of the river.40

  Although the assassin had not been captured alive, as many had hoped, he was no longer at large; nor had he escaped retribution, as many had feared. And for this, all mourners of the martyred president were eternally grateful.41

  And thus, concluded a Chicago editor, “the fifth act in the most imposing tragedy the world has ever seen has closed, and the curtain fallen upon the dead body of J. Wilkes Booth. The assassin and his victim have met in the presence of Him who is the Judge of the quick and the dead.”42

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE HEART OF ISRAEL

  ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 27, the Lincoln funeral train, draped in black cloth, left Buffalo, New York, and continued its slow journey west. Although an estimated one hundred thousand people, including a tearful Millard Fillmore and many Canadian visitors, passed the coffin as it lay in St. James Hall, the funeral was considered by many to be a failure.1 Because Buffalo had earlier staged its own extravagant ceremony before it was learned that the city would be an official stop, neither the time, energy, nor resources were available for yet another funeral. Disappointing as the reception may have been to some, all else between Buffalo and New York City had been impressive.

  After Manhattan Island, the entire route up the Hudson Valley was literally lined with viewers.2 When opposite the United States Military Academy at West Point, cadets were drawn up at attention, and as the “black train” stopped briefly, the young men were allowed to pass through the funeral car.3 At Sing Sing, the train passed under a huge black and white arch covered with evergreen boughs and capped by a statue of Liberty. “He Died for Truth, Justice and Mercy,” read one inscription; “We Mourn Our Country’s Loss,” proclaimed another.4

  When night darkened the valley, still the people stood.

  “[A]t every town and village on the way,” wrote passenger John Hay, “vast crowds were revealed in waiting by the fitful glare of torches; dirges and hymns were sung as the train moved by.”5

  When the cars reached Albany near midnight, the thousands of lamps, candles, torches, and gas jets made the New York capital “as light as day.”6 Almost immediately, and with every bell in town tolling, the public poured into the capitol to view the body. For the next twelve hours, thousands of New Yorkers and New Englanders filed past to pay their last respects. As in Philadelphia, the crowds were so great outside the building that women fainted in the jam and were passed overhead from hand to hand to safety.7

  At noon the following day, after a scheduled circus parade of giraffes, bears, and ostriches had been postponed, the body was escorted once again to the waiting cars, and the long trip home was renewed.8

  As was the case throughout the trip, a pilot engine preceded the train by several miles, ensuring that there were no mishaps. On board this lead locomotive were telegraph operators and mechanics with their tools. Seldom running more than twenty miles per hour, the funeral train commonly slowed to a crawl as it passed through the numerous towns and villages.9 In some of the smaller communities where the train did indeed stop, many of those on board were surprised at how genuine and heartfelt emotions were. With limited resources, many hamlets had little more than wildflowers and tears to give; but give they did, and freely.

  “The occasion is more like a funeral, less of show,” passenger Ozias Hatch confided following a brief stop in Little Falls, New York.10 After all the booming guns, trilling choirs, and soaring eulogies at Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere, one passenger was forced to admit that the journey seemed more like the triumphal march of a mighty monarch than the funeral for a common man.11 In their haste to honor the dead president, many communities inadvertently sacrificed dignity, decorum, and order. Sheer numbers alone precluded anything approaching solemnity. As a consequence, it was quickly observed that most of those who composed the surging, shouting mobs were mere “gawkers.”

  “Their grief is a fashion, their mourning a fashion,” said one disgusted woman, “there is little genuine feeling of any sort amongst them. . . . [M]any . . . come to such sights as they would to a wax work show.”12

  All the same, whether curious or reverent, the desire to see the body, the coffin, or simply the train as it passed had by now become a national obsession. In the minds of millions, the need to be in some way a part of the funeral had become all-absorbing, and a trek of one, two, even three hundred miles was not uncommon.

  As darkness fell over the Mohawk Valley and the torches and lamps of the waiting mourners were lit, the scene was like a “pillar of fire,” thought one witness. From the dark bluffs above, the train’s route as it moved west through New York looked like a burning fuse to some, or a speeding comet to others. Added to the spectacle was a dull, rolling thunder as town after town welcomed Lincoln with cannon salutes.13 Recorded one writer:

  Bonfires and torchlights illumined the road the entire distance. Minute guns were fired at so many points that it seemed almost continuous. Singing societies and bands of music were so numerous that, after passing a
station, the sound of a dirge or requiem would scarcely die away in the distance, until it would be caught up at the town or village they were approaching. Thus through the long hours of the night did the funeral cortege receive such honors.14

  “At every city and town, it seemed as though the entire population had turned out,” observed Ozias Hatch.15

  Amid bonfires, bells, and cannons, as well as thunder and lightning, thirty thousand people braved a midnight storm merely to watch the train pass through Syracuse. At 3:30 A.M., another thirty thousand ventured out in Rochester for the same reason.16

  Impressive though the numbers were in New York, they were nothing compared to what lay ahead. “As the train passed into Ohio,” John Hay revealed, “the crowds increased in density, and the public grief seemed intensified at every step westward; the people of the great central basin seemed to be claiming their own.”17 Not only numbers but the depth of emotion was noticeably greater as the train moved through Ohio.18

  Although Cleveland was smaller than many of the previous cities, virtually the entire population came out to honor Lincoln.19 With a few days extra to organize, the city had used its time wisely. To avoid the chaos and crush of Philadelphia, New York, and Albany, organizers opted to stage the event out-of-doors under a large pagoda-like shelter in Monument Square. With this simple solution, noted one viewer, “the size of the crowd was only limited by what all outdoors could hold.”20 Additionally, and again with the other disasters in mind, ladies were kindly requested to leave their hoop skirts at home.21

  Despite a merciless downpour that came and went and came again, ten thousand people an hour passed the coffin in orderly and quiet respect. It was this example of genuinely affected mourners in Cleveland that caused many to realize that the funeral had by now become a religious experience of mystical proportions. Already, for millions of blacks North and South, millions of former slaves who had never seen the living man and now never would, long since had their liberator and redeemer entered the realm of the supernatural. When one freed slave expressed a desire to see the president, another nearby ridiculed the notion: “No man see Linkum. Linkum walks as Jesus walk—no man see Linkum.”22 Now, for millions of whites, a similar transfiguration was taking place. In the rush to honor and exalt, Lincoln the man was slipping away, and Lincoln the myth was taking his place. Even skeptics and former enemies were stunned to silence by the irony and the timing of his death; it was as if a mighty, mysterious force had ordained it.

 

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