• • •
As those foreign complications were being resolved, the nation soon learned that domestic healing would not come so easily. Traveling through the South, one writer from Massachusetts spoke with a South Carolina innkeeper who had been ruined by the war. The Yankees had left him “one inestimable privilege,” the man said, and that was “to hate ’em. I get up at half past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve midnight, to hate ’em.”
That was the mood in the South on May 29, 1865, some six weeks after he had been sworn in as president, when Andrew Johnson revealed his vision for uniting America.
Johnson issued a sweeping amnesty so “that peace, order and freedom may be established.” His decree would restore all property—except slaves—to the rebels so long as they took an oath to “support, protect and defend the Constitution and all laws and proclamations issued during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of the slaves.” The oath would end with the traditional “So help me God.”
Johnson went on to list the categories of men who were not to receive that amnesty. He barred those who had assumed an office in the Confederacy or had left Congress or their Union judgeships to join the rebellion. Also excluded were those who resigned their army or navy commissions to hold a rank above that of colonel in the “pretended Confederate government” or its military.
The several other exemptions involved participants in the rebellion whose taxable property was worth more than twenty thousand dollars and anyone who had mistreated Union prisoners of war.
But even those men denied the general amnesty could apply directly to the president “and such clemency will be liberally extended as may be consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States.”
Since Johnson’s terms for amnesty were not significantly different from those Lincoln had proposed at the end of 1863, the Congress seemed prepared to endorse them.
But when Johnson appointed William Holden, who had stayed loyal to the Union, as provisional governor of North Carolina, the president did not act jointly with Congress but rather made the appointment in his capacity as commander-in-chief.
Within six weeks, Johnson had issued similar proclamations naming governors for Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida. He considered reconstruction far enough advanced in the other four Confederate states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana—that he need not provide a provisional governor.
As federal control was re-established, Johnson directed his appointed governors to select officials in their state who had remained loyal to the Union. To establish qualifications for voting, the rebel states themselves would be responsible, either through a convention or through their reinstituted legislatures.
• • •
For Charles Sumner, the question of voting for blacks was “the essence, the great essential” of Reconstruction, and his conversations with the new president were reassuring. In fact, he considered Johnson more sympathetic to Negro suffrage than Lincoln had been. “There is no difference between us,” the president had assured him.
In the week following Johnson’s proclamation, he was besieged with individual requests for amnesty. None was more poignant than the handwritten submission of June 13, 1865, on plain ruled paper:
Asking for full restoration of his rights, Robert E. Lee concluded, “I graduated at the Mil: Academy at W. Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April ’61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va: 9 April ’65.
“I have the honour to be Very respt. your obt. Servt. R. E. Lee.”
Robert E. Lee
Bureaucratic requirements and confusion held up Lee’s petition. His pardon was not issued until it was included in a broad category on Christmas Day, 1868.
• • •
Through all the delays, General Lee’s request seemed likely to be granted since he had never been linked in any way to Lincoln’s assassination. During the weeks after the murder, investigators had been filling in details of the president’s last night while Booth was being tracked down.
They concluded that the actor’s familiarity with the play Our American Cousin had allowed him to fire his shot during a bit of dialogue in the third act guaranteed to provoke gales of laughter. During an intermission, Booth had taken a drink at a saloon next to the Ford Theater, then returned to a stairway to the dress circle to await his moment.
He heard the actress playing the pretentious Mrs. Mountchessington insult her rustic foil, Asa Trenchard, and stalk offstage. Watching her go, Trenchard grinned and delivered the last words Lincoln would hear:
“Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologising old man-trap.”
Booth put his .44-caliber Derringer to the back of Lincoln’s head and pulled the trigger. With a knife, he fought off a young army major invited by Mary Lincoln to the box with his fiancée as substitutes for the Grants.
Booth’s leap from the president’s box was broken when his boot nicked a portrait of George Washington and his spur got caught in a display of regimental colors. Once on the stage, Booth confronted the horrified audience and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—thus always to tyrants! Long before it became the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1776, the cry had been attributed to Brutus as he struck down Julius Caesar.
Brandishing his knife, Booth hobbled past the actor playing Trenchard and stumbled down a back corridor to the alley, where a stagehand called “Peanut” was holding Booth’s rented horse.
• • •
As a dragnet spread across Maryland, Lincoln’s murder revived the career of Lafayette Baker, a Union army operative. Baker had once headed the War Department’s intelligence unit until he was caught intercepting Secretary Stanton’s wires and banished to New York.
Called back to hunt down the assassin, Baker sent men along the trail Booth had ridden in the company of David Herold. Booth’s leg was painful, but they were young and fit—Herold twenty-three, Booth twenty-six. They rode nine miles to a tavern that Mary Surratt had once owned and then another nineteen miles to reach the house of Dr. Samuel Mudd. There, on the afternoon of April 15, they learned that Secretary Stanton had posted a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for Booth’s capture.
On April 18, Lincoln’s open casket went on display in the East Room of the White House before his body would be sent off by rail for burial in Illinois. Tens of thousands of mourners lined the train’s route, and Booth was aggrieved to learn from the newspapers that even in the South not everyone saw his deed as heroic.
In Washington, a young actress named Ella Starr was appalled by the stories of Lincoln’s murder. Although she was pregnant with Booth’s child, she had not been his only lover. As Baker’s men closed in on him, she tried, and failed, to kill herself with chloroform.
On April 25, Booth’s pursuers had finally trapped Booth and Herold in a tobacco barn on the farm of Richard Garrett, six miles south of the Rappahannock River. The fugitives had told Garrett’s family that they were Confederate officers heading for Mexico.
When Union troops demanded that the men come out of the barn, David Herold emerged and tried to separate himself from the man still inside. “He told me that his name was Boyd,” Herold said.
The barn was set on fire. In the confusion, a soldier named Boston Corbett claimed that Booth had fired and Corbett fired back. Booth died three hours later. Some witnesses said his last words were “Useless, useless.”
Booth’s body was identified by the initials “JWB” tattooed on his left hand. He had left a journal justifying his action. One entry read, “I can never repent it, though we hated to kill.”
• • •
In addition to David Herold, six of the other nine defendants were in custody. Booth had been identified quickly and then John Surratt, since the two men had not tried to disguise their unlikely intimacy.
In fact, a warning about the Surratt boardinghouse had been received by army officers from Louis Weichmann, who had studied for the ministry with Surratt in Maryland at the College of St. Charles Borromeo. While living at Mary Surratt’s establishment, Weichmann had become alarmed and reported what he had overheard there, but no one in authority had acted on his vague suspicions.
The next break in the investigation came when officials from the War Department seized Booth’s effects from the National Hotel and found the handcuffs Booth had intended for Lincoln in the days when he had hoped to kidnap him.
They also uncovered a letter from Samuel Arnold and traced him to his job in a store at Fort Monroe. Arnold promptly named the rest of the conspirators, including George Atzerodt and Michael O’Laughlen, but he could supply only their aliases for Lewis Powell and David Herold.
O’Laughlen was quickly picked up in Baltimore. Herold had been assigned to stand guard outside Seward’s house while Powell murdered him, but at the sounds of a struggle, he had ridden off to join Booth.
Disoriented, Powell had taken refuge in a crypt at a cemetery near the Capitol. On Easter Sunday, he crept out to retrieve a newspaper that nearby mourners had left behind and learned that his mission had failed and Seward lived. By Monday, suffering from hunger, Powell stumbled to Mary Surratt’s house.
He arrived a minute after an army officer had arrested her, her daughter Anna, and two other women in the house. Questioned by the soldiers, Powell concocted an alibi. Mrs. Surratt had engaged him, he said, to dig a gutter. The commander took Mary Surratt into the hall and asked whether she knew the man.
Looking back at him steadily, she raised her right hand and swore, “Before God, I do not know this man and have never seen him before, and I did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”
She then asked for permission to pray, which was granted. As she rose again from her knees, Mrs. Surratt seemed satisfied with her performance. “I am so glad you officers came here tonight,” she said, “for this man came here with a pickaxe to kill us.”
Mary Surratt
Powell was taken to army headquarters along with the women from the house, and Seward’s servant, William Bell, was called to identify him. Ushered into a room of prisoners, Bell went directly to Powell. “I know you,” Bell exclaimed. “You are the man.”
• • •
A knottier problem concerned the fate of Jefferson Davis. New York senator Edwin Morgan, who had been governor of his state during the rebellion, assured Andrew Johnson that to court-martial Davis for his “complicity with the assassination plots” would meet “with the approval of the world.”
It was while Davis was being taken in custody to Macon, Georgia, that he learned of a hundred-thousand-dollar reward posted for his arrest on the charge of conspiring with Booth to murder Lincoln. Davis regarded the charge as false on its face. He and Andrew Johnson had been personal and political foes since they served in the House of Representatives in 1845. He would have done nothing to make Johnson president.
Davis was transported with his wife and their youngest children from Macon to Augusta, Georgia, and reunited with another captive, his vice president, Alexander Stephens. They were next sent by ship to Norfolk, Virginia, and on to a primitive cell at Fort Monroe on Hampton Roads.
Since Secretary of War Stanton had left Davis’s treatment to his jailers, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles ordered Davis put in leg irons. When Davis resisted, a shamefaced officer directed several privates to lock the irons in place forcibly. Within five days, word of Davis’s ordeal had outraged even Northerners, and Stanton ordered the shackles removed.
But the rumor that Davis had tried to escape capture in his wife’s clothes proved harder to shake off. As the story swept Washington, Stanton’s representative called on Varina Davis. Without telling her the reason, he took away the gray raglan cloak she had thrown over her husband’s shoulders. The following day, he returned for her shawl.
Stanton had been pleased to see Northern editors accusing Davis of cowardice. As one newspaper put it, “a peal of inextinguishable laughter” was being directed at Davis for “cowering under a petticoat.”
When Stanton saw the garments, however, he realized that the cloak was hardly different from a male raincoat and that many men, including Lincoln, commonly wore a shawl for warmth. The story of bonnets and hoopskirts was too good to debunk, however, and Stanton locked away the garments in a War Department safe.
The ridicule had reached Davis in captivity and contributed to his decline. He had long suffered from insomnia, and now a light was kept burning in his cell throughout the night while a guard checked on him every fifteen minutes.
The prison doctor detected a deterioration in Davis’s sight and hearing. Learning that he had trouble eating and had lost weight, President Johnson sent an emissary to the prison to monitor Davis’s condition and surroundings. By August, the prisoner’s health had improved, although the doctor described his mood as “dull and depressed.”
In October, Davis was moved to dry and brighter quarters being vacated by a Union artillery officer. By that time, he was permitted visits from his family, and his reading material included Washington Irving’s life of George Washington and a Bible from which Davis drew consolation as he waited for the Johnson administration to decide what to do with him.
Davis thought of himself as a martyr to the Confederate cause. If he were released eventually, he was determined never to submit to Yankee rule. Instead, he might join the ten thousand Confederate soldiers who had gone to live abroad or in Mexico.
Several from Davis’s cabinet had already made that decision. His secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, regarded as the smartest man in the Confederacy, had escaped to Florida and then to the Bahamas before reaching a haven in England. John C. Breckinridge, James Buchanan’s vice president, was taking a different route to the same sanctuary—first Cuba and Canada and on to London. Davis’s attorney general and his secretary of the Treasury had disappeared altogether.
• • •
After President Johnson asked his attorney general whether the defendants should be tried in civilian court or by a military tribunal, the responsibility fell to Joseph Holt, a fifty-eight-year-old Kentucky lawyer and former postmaster general.
Four years of Civil War had provided ample precedent for tribunals. More than 4,270 of them had already been held, even though most of the thirteen thousand defendants were civilians. Attorney General James Speed characterized the accused assassins as secret belligerents whose previous spying for the Confederacy disqualified them for civilian trials.
Hearing that the proceedings would be conducted by the military, Secretary of War Stanton wrote a quick note to his staff confirming Holt as the judge advocate general: “You should be governed by the opinions of Judge Holt. You will consider yourself under his direction.”
On April 29, Stanton ordered six prisoners transferred from ships anchored in the Potomac to the military prison at Washington’s arsenal.
Samuel Mudd and Mary Surratt, who had been held at the Old Capitol Prison, were also taken there.
Indicted were David Herold, brought back from the Garrett farm; Samuel Arnold, implicated in the kidnapping plot; Michael O’Laughlen, named by Arnold in his confession; George Atzerodt, who also confessed freely but stressed that he had not carried out Booth’s orders to kill Andrew Johnson; and Edward Spangler, a scenery mover at the Ford Theater, who was accused of aiding Booth’s escape.
Lewis Powell was indicted under his long-standing alias, Lewis Payne. Indications from the government suggested that Jefferson Davis would be tried separately on other charges in a civil court.
As for John Surratt, he had been traveling to Elmira, New York, on Confederate business when he learned that Booth had carried out their plot. Managing to slip into Canada, he eluded the attempts to capture him there. By the time of the trial, he had found refuge in a small town outside Montreal.
• • •
> When the tribunal opened on May 11, 1865, the proceedings captivated the nation. Twelve-year-old Thomas Lincoln, called “Tad” by his parents, showed up to listen solemnly to the testimony as a crowd of reporters strained to convey the scene. Each male defendant was scrutinized and appraised, although during their first appearance in court they were wearing hoods.
In a punitive spirit, Secretary Stanton had ordered the hoods made of heavy canvas and padded with cotton for maximum discomfort. With only a small hole at the mouth, they had none at all for the eyes or ears. Mary Surratt was spared a hood, but the men could not remove them nor were they permitted to bathe during the proceedings.
Only after the prison doctor protested were guards allowed to remove the hoods, although Lewis Powell remained in his. The brawniest of the prisoners, he did not seem to be suffering.
Powell was also the male defendant who most fascinated the observers; one spoke of his “massive robustness of animal manhood.” But journalists also accepted claims by Powell’s attorney that he was a weak-willed and illiterate man led astray by Booth.
Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen came off better—Arnold with his “intelligent face, curly brown hair and restless dark eyes,” and O’Laughlen, “a small, delicate-looking man with pleasant features” that were composed in “a sad, remorseful look.”
George Atzerodt, as a German foreigner, became “short, thickset, round-shouldered” or, to another journalist, “crafty, cowardly and mercenary.”
Observers were puzzled by Dr. Samuel Mudd, who seemed too high-born to be mixing with rabble like Atzerodt. With his hairline receding from an imposing brow and his “astute blue eyes,” Mudd was termed “the most inoffensive and decent in appearance of all of the prisoners.”
And yet Mudd had looked nervous when investigators came to question him about the men seen at his house soon after the assassination. Mudd claimed that they were strangers to him but that medical ethics had obligated him to set the broken leg of one of them.
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