Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  “I told him I was willing to try it.”

  Surratt secured, Booth turned to prospects of his own. Visiting stars who played at Ford’s often remarked that “there were several persons connected with this theatre whose violent sentiments in favor of the rebellion and its leaders have frequently been noticed.”21 It is not surprising, therefore, to find Booth at the 1864 Christmas dinner given by the Fords for their theatrical family.

  Helen Truman, a novice actress, observed considerable intimacy between Booth and one player of Southerner birth, Edwin Emerson of Alexandria, Virginia.22 Emerson was promising material. His older brother Benjamin, a Confederate soldier, had died of wounds received in battle near Richmond in 1862. His younger brother Henry had been arrested in 1863 for running the Potomac blockade with medicines and goods and had languished for months in the Old Capitol Prison, refusing to take the oath of allegiance.23 But Emerson, who had much to say about his friendship with Booth in later years, never mentioned being approached for the abduction team. If he had been, Emerson rebuffed him. A markedly religious man, he felt that the war had grown so brutal and demoralizing that neither side held the moral high ground.24

  More is known about Booth’s courtship of John Mathews, who took eccentric and character roles for Ford. Mathews had known Booth since boyhood days in Baltimore when they had run to fires on the trail of the hose companies, knowing a good fight between the companies was likely to ensue at their destination. The pair were “friends, chums, and comrades,” according to a mutual acquaintance.25 Since Mathews was unquestionably loyal, Booth attempted to recruit him. All he accomplished was frightening him. Mathews grew up in the home of a coroner and had seen enough of death. When he would not say yes but could not say no, Booth exploded, declaring that the fellow Marylander was a coward and not fit to live. Mathews was properly frightened of Booth, too, and promised silence. “I cowed him down,” Booth boasted to Samuel K. Chester.26 Mathews would ultimately be browbeaten into doing a few errands for the conspiracy.

  Behind the scenes at the theater “they were all Secech,” recalled Harry Hawk, the sole actor onstage when Lincoln was shot. Indeed, when Hawk came to work on the day of the assassination, the staff greeted him with the salutation “you damned Yankee.”27

  Booth’s easy manner and his open-handedness at neighborhood taverns won him a large following among the theater’s stagehands and roustabouts. One of these admirers was the scene shifter Edman Spangler, a family friend who had done carpentry work when Tudor Hall was built. Fat and jovial, with a high-pitched voice and a fondness for the bottle, the good-natured Spangler was the butt of practical jokes about the theater.28 He presented the appearance of being an insubstantial drudge, victimized by his admiration for Booth. There may have been more to him, however. Spangler was a member of the Order of the American Knights, a secret antiwar organization with a militantly antiadministration edge.29 “He was always one of the hardest kind of Copperheads,” said a coworker at Ford’s. And he was constantly in Booth’s company, holding his horse or blackening his boots with an obliging attention.30 Thomas Harbin stated that Spangler was involved with their plot, but George Atzerodt, a subsequent member of Booth’s team and one quick to implicate others, believed him innocent, as did Samuel Arnold.31 It seems most likely that Spangler, like Mathews, knew what was afoot, though he took no part in it.

  Booth’s home county of Harford was also a promising recruiting ground. Maryland’s new antislavery constitution failed at the polls here in October 1864, despite the fact that only citizens who took oaths of loyalty to the Union were permitted to vote. That Mudd’s Charles County and Surratt’s Prince George’s voted against the constitution surprised no one. They were in southern Maryland and had much in common politically with adjacent areas of Virginia across the Potomac. But Harford, on the state line with Pennsylvania, had always enjoyed a more liberal reputation. The military draft was also detested in the county. Opponents conducted a campaign of arson attacks on the barns of enrollment officials. Authorities struck back with collective punishment, levying punitive fines on families judged disloyal whether or not a personal culpability in the attacks could be shown. Booth discovered great animosity over these matters, together with anxiety about the prospect of enforced racial equality, when he visited in Bel Air to fish the waters.32

  The regulars at George Cook’s store in Five Forks, a community fourteen miles northwest of Bel Air, were entirely disaffected from Lincoln. Cook, a widower with a large family, hated the war. Intently pro-Southern, he had no intention of traveling the abolitionist warpath, nor did the DeVoes, Gibsons, Russells, Whitefords, and other neighbors who gathered about Cook’s hot stove on wintry mornings to share the latest news with Booth. Having often hunted in the area, Booth knew these men and talked to them with relative freedom. These farmers were serious people, not simply the usual ne’er-do-wells who always congregated to eat Cook’s free crackers and drink his whiskey. “Many people prominent in Harford County were wont to gather and talk with Booth,” recalled Cook’s then eleven-year-old daughter Hannah, whom Booth would pull up to his lap for a kiss. “Booth was a fine young man.”

  “Father and a few of the neighbors and Booth blathered about the store stove and discussed the feasibility of removing Lincoln from the Presidency,” said Hannah in an interview given about 1926. “His murder was not considered, but the kidnapping and removal to the Far South was tentatively agreed upon. There he was to be held for a king’s ransom, all for the Southern cause.” When pressed for details about the abduction plot, Hannah demurred, “Oh, well, the war is ended.”33

  Herman Stump was also active in Booth’s plot, according to an unpublished family history drawing upon the recollections of Mary North Stump, a sister-in-law who lived with the attorney at his estate. “Deeply involved in the Southern cause, he worked in underground organizations outlawed by the Federal Government. If the South had been victorious, the members of these secret organizations would have been heroes and more information would have come down to us,” the memoir states, “but as it was in defeat and [with] the probable involvement of some in the assassination of Lincoln, the result has been practically a blank.”

  Determined to preserve for history some details about all this, Herman Stump Murray, Stump’s cousin and namesake, made a special trip from New York City in 1917 to interview Booth’s old friend. Murray recalled that Stump acknowledged, by certain gestures he made, that he had been involved with Booth, then cut off further discussion of the topic by reminding his kinsman that he had been sworn to secrecy and must honor his oath. To assuage Murray’s disappointment, the lawyer adopted the Hannah Cook principle. “It was a long time ago,” Stump said philosophically, “and times have changed. What seemed right then may seem wrong now, and too many people would be hurt.”34 Silence had served Stump well. He went on to be elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and served as superintendent of immigration for President Grover Cleveland in the 1890s.

  Edwin and June visited Stump and George Y. Maynadier, Stump’s close friend and law partner, in Bel Air in 1867. The actors, who were old acquaintances of the attorneys and their families, spent a pleasant evening chatting with them in their office. The conversation was free, fun, and unrestrained—except on one topic. John Wilkes Booth’s name was never mentioned. Maynadier observed that Stump did not bring it up. No one else did either.35

  Years later Maynadier put another name before the public. George B. Love was Booth’s classmate at Bel Air Academy and his intimate friend. “He was likewise the most notorious of all the boys and young men at school or in the village, as the ringleader of everything desperate and reckless,” wrote Maynadier. Court-martialed for corruption while serving as a steward in a federal hospital, Love committed suicide days after Lincoln’s death. Maynadier, who knew a great deal of the Southern network in Maryland, thought that Love killed himself because he feared the consequences of his plotting with Booth. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just “a
curious coincidence,” Maynadier teased readers in a 1902 reminiscence. “ ‘I tell the tale as ’twas told to me’ is all the comment I have to make.” 36

  Booth was at Edwin’s home in New York on Christmas Day 1864. That night he drank heavily with Sam Chester at the House of Lords on Houston Street. Afterward the men sauntered up Broadway and over to Fourth. Chester was miserable working with Edwin and Clarke at the Winter Garden, and Booth had enticed him to join in an unspecified but “big speculation sure to coin money.” At an unfrequented spot along the street Booth said, “I want to tell you what this speculation is.”

  “I wish you would because you have worried me enough about it,” replied Chester.

  Making certain they were alone, Booth hemmed and hawed and finally said, “It is a conspiracy against the government.”

  “To do what?”

  “To capture the heads of the government at Washington and carry them to Richmond, including Mr. Lincoln.” The abduction party was nearly ready, Booth explained. It would seize Lincoln while he attended a performance at Ford’s Theatre. But Booth was frustrated, he said, in his efforts to find help at that house. “He broached the affair to several but could not get any to assist him in the theatre,” Chester recalled. Hence this proposition. Booth needed Chester backstage to cut the gaslights, plunging the theater into darkness, and to open the rear door of the theater onto an alley for the capture team.

  Chester, who thought Booth wished to discuss a speculation in Maryland farmland, was terrified by what he heard. The mild-mannered actor played an effective heavy onstage, but he had no intention of taking that role to the streets. Chester was a peaceful sort and so apolitical that he had never even voted. He flatly refused Booth’s request.

  For an intense half hour Booth turned the full range of his powers on Chester. The friend parried every appeal. Neither friendship nor patriotism nor money could touch him. Any involvement would ruin his family, Chester pleaded. Booth countered by offering to leave behind for their use three or four thousand dollars, the value of the bonds he kept in a safe at Asia’s home in Philadelphia. When Chester remained adamant, Booth grew irritated, then threatening. He declared that he would destroy Chester in the profession if he did not join in.

  “I have facts in my possession that will ruin you for life,” Booth said menacingly.

  “It is very wrong [to say that], John, because I have always looked upon you as a friend and have never done you any wrong.” Chester begged Booth to drop the subject and never mention it again.

  “At any rate you won’t betray me,” Booth concluded. “I carry a derringer loaded to shoot every one that betrays us.”

  That said, they parted, Booth by no means finished with this conversation.

  He reconnected with Arnold and O’Laughlen in Baltimore and purchased a buggy there. This vehicle was to be used to haul Lincoln away. Arnold and O’Laughlen drove it to Washington. They also got the balance of the group’s weapons safely into the capital. Booth introduced them to young Surratt, and the two men took a room at a local hotel, awaiting orders.37

  Booth checked back into the National Hotel on New Year’s Eve and spent most of the month of January 1865 in Washington.38 He found Surratt actively engaged in arrangements for their enterprise.

  Richard M. Smoot, a Charles County farmer and blockade-runner, owned a large flat-bottomed bateau, painted the color of lead and capable of carrying fifteen people. Smoot found Surratt noticeably eager to purchase it, saying “the need of the boat would be the consequence of an event of unprecedented magnitude in the history of the country which would startle and astound the entire world.”39 Smoot inferred that this was the proposed abduction of Lincoln, a rumor of which had reached his ears. Mum about his purpose, Surratt smiled and told Smoot’s brother Edward, “If the Yankees knew what [I am doing], they would stretch this old neck of mine.” He jerked his head back to illustrate the point.40

  Surratt and Smoot agreed on a price of $250. The courier directed that the boat be hidden up King’s Creek, a small tributary of the Potomac, and held ready on a moment’s notice. He also informed Smoot that he needed two other boats of similar size, each capable of transporting fifteen persons. These were to be kept at different points along the river. Three boats would give the abduction team considerable flexibility on the flight from Washington should unforeseen circumstances arise.

  Surratt told Smoot to turn the boat over to George A. Atzerodt, a German immigrant and a blockade-runner whom he and Harbin had recruited. A swarthy man with long dark-brown hair and a narrow receding chin and forehead, Atzerodt had a look that invited suspicion. “This fellow might safely challenge the rest of the party as the completest personification of a low and cunning scoundrel,” thought the journalist Noah Brooks.41 Appearances aside, “Atzerodt was a man full of fun, country humor, and quaint stories,” said Surratt’s friend Weichmann. It was necessary to recruit a man like Atzerodt because, as the conspirators knew, “the Potomac was closely guarded, and it was a serious matter to get across.” Atzerodt’s muscular shoulders, indicating considerable strength gained by rowing, showed that he knew the river well. He crossed so frequently with contraband, “both rebel and federal, and picked up so much money in that way that he was very saucy,” thought one traveler on his way to Richmond. As far as Atzerodt’s politics went, “he always hated the niggers.”42

  Charles Yates of Charles County was to have direction of the rowing party on the river. Yates was a skilled boatman as well as a crack shot.43 If Yates and his crew were ready and river conditions optimal, the Potomac could be crossed within an hour of the time it was reached. Once they reached the Virginia shore, two Confederate Signal Corps camps were near at hand, and locals like Benjamin B. Arnold of King George County, Virginia, a courier at one of the camps, pledged to hurry Lincoln to the rebel capital. In good weather the trip from the Potomac to Richmond might be made in one day. Given the myriad of complications that could arise, the certainty of a fierce pursuit, and the reprisals that would surely follow, Arnold had it right when he told his family that the undertaking would likely be “a very dirty job.”44

  Thomas A. Jones, Harbin’s brother-in-law, was alerted to the plot. Jones handled underground operations on the Potomac’s Maryland shore opposite one of the Confederate signal stations. Shrewd and daring, Jones dispatched rebel mail and agents and watched the river. He did not meet Booth personally until after the assassination, when he undertook the exceedingly dangerous job of hiding him and crossing him into the Old Dominion, but the involvement of professionals like himself and Harbin indicated the increasing sophistication of the planning. Jones recalled that Lincoln was to be chloroformed if necessary, that the kidnappers would be dressed in federal uniforms to pass checkpoints, and that relays of fresh horses were to be kept along the route to allow the abductors to outpace their pursuers.45

  Clearly, a sizable corps of supernumeraries was cast in Booth’s abduction drama, lending credibility to his boast to Chester that there was “an immense party connected with it, a party of fifty or a hundred.” “Plenty of parties in Charles County knew of the kidnapping affair,” confessed Atzerodt when captured and examined by authorities after the assassination. One Northern reporter who studied Booth’s plot wrote in disgust, “Its accessories were so numerous that the trouble is not whom to suspect, but whom not [to] accuse.”46

  thomas lister of boston published a horoscope of Abraham Lincoln in September1864. The astrologer forecast that “in January, 1865, some deep, base plot will be got up against the President as shown by the transit of the evil planet Mars.”47 The New York astrologer L. D. Broughton agreed. During the election period Lincoln enjoyed the beneficent influence of Jupiter “transiting over his ascendant in good aspect to Venus’ place and a secondary direction of the Moon to Jupiter.” This was clear. But a danger to Lincoln now arose. The reason Lister knew this, Broughton continued, was that he had lifted the horoscope, without acknowledgment, from Broughton’s own Monthl
y Planet Reader and Astrological Journal.48 Broughton’s indignation suggested that if Lister continued his career as a plagiarist, Lincoln would not be the only person in peril.

  Be that as it may, John Wilkes Booth, personifying malevolent Mars, was now together with Arnold and O’Laughlen in Washington. Since winter weather curtailed Lincoln’s visits to the Soldiers’ Home, the trio began to shadow the President for other opportunities. “Each watched, as far as practicable, the movements of Lincoln, being cautious not to draw the attention nor arouse the suspicions of the numerous hordes of detectives and spies who at that time thronged every thoroughfare,” recalled Arnold. On one occasion Arnold sent word to Booth that the president and his coachman had just crossed the Anacostia River on a drive. Only one guest accompanied them. Arnold thought the moment extraordinarily opportune for a strike. Incredibly, Booth failed to respond to this and to a second equally favorable opportunity. Arnold was frustrated, but his complaints met a curt response.49

  Booth had other ideas. Why chase the president when he would come to them? Lincoln could be abducted while he attended a performance at Ford’s. Booth took Arnold and O’Laughlen to reconnoiter the theater. They looked particularly at rear entrances. A man from New York (evidently Chester) would cut off the gas and create the confusion necessary for their escape across the stage, out the back, and down the alley at the theater’s rear. When Arnold expressed doubt about their chances in a crowded theater, Booth refused to listen.