Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  Their route, leading north from the wharf, was the pride of the post. It was a stately tree-lined boulevard. Great dismounted guns, light artillery batteries, and pyramids of cannonballs dressed the right-hand side of the avenue. On the left, and extending to the Potomac, was a beautifully maintained lawn upon which stood several large ballistic pendulums used to measure bullet velocity. The flickering rays of the lantern cast fantastic shadows on this gallery of war as the party moved forward in silence. No one said a word. There was only the crunch of wheels, shuffle of feet, and rattle of hoofs on the gravel way.

  This place was hallowed to Porter by the hours the late president spent here witnessing experiments with small arms, and it was odd that his murderer now traveled the road. Earlier in the day an estimated fifty thousand people in Buffalo paid homage to Lincoln’s remains, part of the phenomenal total of seven million Americans who witnessed Lincoln’s long trip home from Washington to Springfield.94 Now six strangers were Booth’s pallbearers as they hauled him to an ignoble grave. The occasion seemed poignant to Porter. As the years went by he felt its awe and solemnity even more.

  Stebbins unlocked an enormous vaultlike door into the central section of the prison building and admitted the burial detail to the large wareroom. The wagon rumbled across a brick floor, past stout cedar columns, and stopped in a corner. Earlier a team of three men had attempted to dig a grave in one of the prison’s suffocatingly small cells. They reported that the floor was stone rubble laid in cement. They might as well try to dig through a rock wall. That site was abandoned, leaving little doubt why no convict had ever tunneled out of this place, and the trio went to work here. Removing the bricks from the floor, they dug a pit, which in Porter’s words “could not be dignified by the term grave.” Booth’s body was placed in an old arms case and lowered into the ground. The excavation was filled and the bricks replaced.

  As the work was under way, Porter looked around the room. In such a large space a lantern threw little more light than a candle, and the thought occurred to the doctor that some important official might be watching them from behind an ammunition case in the dim recesses. But no, Porter concluded. Of course not. Stebbins had unlocked the door to let them in. He relocked it when they left. This was just what it seemed to be—a cold, bleak place, a hole in the ground, a tomb.

  Epilogue: A Green and Narrow Bed

  for two and one half years John Wilkes Booth’s remains moldered beneath the floor of the Old Penitentiary storeroom. Overhead his principal confederates went on trial in a courtroom on the third floor of the building. David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were found guilty of conspiring with Booth to murder Abraham Lincoln and others, and they were condemned to death. “The hanging of one woman and three imbeciles,” as an unsympathetic reporter phrased it, took place in the prison courtyard on July 7, 1865.1 The four were buried near the scaffold.

  Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and Samuel Mudd were sentenced to life at hard labor. Edman Spangler got a six-year term. John Surratt escaped to Europe, where he remained at large for more than a year. Captured in Alexandria, Egypt, he was returned to Washington, where the federal government prosecuted him. Luckily for Surratt, the rage for retribution had spent itself by then, and that, combined with sympathy over his mother’s fate, carried the day. After two years of contentious legal proceedings, he left the court a free man.2

  Bainbridge, Ruggles, and Jett were arrested along with Dr. Stuart and the two Garrett sons. Cox and Jones were also rounded up, while Harbin, although under suspicion, evaded arrest. Stanton had warned persons harboring Booth or assisting him to escape that they would be subject to a military trial and death. Yet of this group, only Mudd went to prison. The rest were ultimately discharged. The Garrett boys left Washington with a Bible, a handshake, and twenty-five dollars from Boston Corbett. Jones returned home as silently as he left it, and the public did not learn of his role in Booth’s escape until twenty years later when the fisherman told his story to Townsend. All it cost him at that late date was a government job.3

  Perhaps these men had earned a share of trouble, but the same could not be said of the Booth family. “I can give you no idea of the desolation which has fallen upon us,” Asia wrote Jean Anderson. “The sorrow of John’s death is very bitter. The disgrace is far heavier.” June was arrested when the War Department grew suspicious of a letter he had written John. He was deposited in Old Capitol Prison, and John S. Clarke was brought in for good measure. Joe Booth, en route from California when the assassination occurred, was detained upon his arrival in New York City. An examination before General Dix revealed the younger brother’s utter ignorance of affairs—Joe did not even seem to know how old he was—and he was released. Edwin was taken to Washington when it appeared his testimony might be required. It was not, and the avowedly unionist brother was not further inconvenienced. Clarke and June were released before the trial of the conspirators concluded. The former emerged bellowing for a divorce from Asia to free himself from the family shame, while the latter counseled patience to the family. “Time is the only cure for our ills,” he wrote Edwin. “Time will bring all things right—that is, as right as we have any right to expect.” In his diary June turned to April 14, 1865—Good Friday, the day of the murder—and scratched out the word Good.4

  In the autumn of 1867 the central portion of the prison was demolished as part of a renovation of the Arsenal. This necessitated the removal of Booth’s body.5 Stanton sent over the wareroom door key, which he had kept in his possession, and a team of laborers entered to exhume the assassin’s remains. The men took the coffin box to a fifteen-foot-long trench dug in a nearby warehouse. Here a common grave had been prepared for the relocated remains of Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, Surratt, and Booth, and of Henry Wirz, commander of Fort Sumter prison at Andersonville, Georgia, who had been hanged two years earlier. At the head end of Booth’s box his name was painted in black letters using a tin template such as packers employed to label their goods. Each body was identified in this manner, and the location of each grave charted by order of Grant, then interim secretary of war.6 The work was done in such secrecy that few were aware of what transpired, although by this time the word was out that Booth was at the Arsenal.7

  Booth’s remains were disturbed yet again in 1869. Mary Lincoln, in her anguished widowhood, imagined that Andrew Johnson had a hand in her husband’s death.8 She was not alone in this belief. Although his name was on Booth’s hit list, Johnson was investigated by the House Judiciary Committee, some of whose members thought (or at least hoped) he was a co-conspirator. Other charges led to his impeachment, and he narrowly escaped removal from office. A few weeks before leaving the White House, the lame-duck Johnson, having no popularity to lose, decided to conclude assassination matters by pardoning Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler. (Mike O’Laughlen had died the previous year.) Released from a military prison off the Florida Keys, the men returned to their homes.9

  Would Johnson, in pardoning the living, pardon the dead as well? Would he bring an end to what the New York World journalist St. Clair McKelway termed “the long war of the government of the United States against a corpse”?10 Edwin requested John’s body within weeks of his death, dispatching Stuart of the Winter Garden to fetch it.11 The manager was curtly rebuffed. “It would be a source of irritation to the loyal people of the country if his body was permitted to be made the instrument of rejoicing at the sacrifice of Mr. Lincoln,” Stanton explained.12 By November 1865, attitudes had changed, and Edwin received indirect word from Stanton (delivered through the New York political boss Thurlow Weed) that it would be possible in the fullness of time.13 An eager response brought no reply.

  Despite this, “Edwin never desisted from his patient and quiet endeavor to recover the body,” recalled the playwright Edward Alfriend, the brothers’ Richmond friend.14 Booth approached Grant through Adam Badeau, who served on the general’s staff. The elder brother stressed his strongest suit, namely the cons
olation this would bring Mary Ann. “I appeal to you on behalf of my heart-broken mother that she may receive the remains of her son,” he wrote the general in September 1867. “What a consolation it would be to an aged parent to have the privilege of visiting the grave of her child.”15 Once again no bones were forthcoming.

  Edwin was performing in New York on February 10, 1869, when the Times of that day published the startling news that President Johnson had given Anna Surratt her mother’s remains for reburial. Edwin wrote immediately to the president, renewing his plea for the body and promising secrecy in the affair. The letter was entrusted to John H. Weaver, sexton of Christ Church, Baltimore, whom Edwin commissioned to handle the arrangements.16 Weaver was also an undertaker and had buried both Booth’s father and grandfather.

  On Monday afternoon, February 15, Johnson was chatting with the World’s McKelway in his private office at the White House when the president took up a single card from among many brought to him. The card belonged to Weaver. “A moment’s trivial business,” said the president, interrupting their chat.

  The door opened, and Weaver, attired in somber sable colors, glided into the office. Slim, solemn, impassive, mournful, and mechanically polite, Weaver seemed a caricature of his profession. If this man isn’t an undertaker, McKelway chuckled to himself, he missed his calling. Johnson gave Weaver’s note a quick scan. “It is all right,” remarked the president, “but see that the matter is done quietly.” Bowing to Johnson as though he were a pharaoh, Weaver backed away.17

  Accompanied by Richard Harvey of the Washington firm of Harvey and Marr, Weaver went to the Arsenal, claimed the body, and loaded it in a small red express wagon. To avoid an inquisitive crowd gathering in front of his establishment, Harvey returned to the rear. The back entrance shared the alley behind Ford’s Theatre by which Booth escaped. The thought was inescapable: the murderer had returned to the scene of the crime.

  It had grown dark, and Harvey’s lamp was called for. Its yellow light revealed that Booth’s gun box, set up on trestles for inspection, was much decayed. The corpse was lifted out and placed into a plain unpainted coffin. In less than an hour the body was at the depot awaiting the 7:30 p.m. train to Baltimore.18 It arrived there later that same night and was taken to Weaver’s funeral home on Fayette Street opposite the rear door of John T. Ford’s Holliday Street Theatre. “Successful and in our possession here,” Ford telegraphed Edwin.19

  The rollicking burlesque Ixion; or, The Man at the Wheel was in rehearsal on Wednesday when Ford came onstage and whispered something to the comedian Charles Bishop.20 To everyone’s surprise Ford then dismissed the company. Walking over to Blanche Chapman, his goddaughter, Ford took both of her hands in his and said, “Blanche, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.” The manager escorted the teenager across the street to Weaver’s. Bishop, who had run John-related errands for Edwin in the past, followed with Blanche’s younger sister, Ella. Accompanying them were Harry Ford, his niece Annie Ford, Holliday stage manager Thomas A. Hall, doorkeeper Basil Moxley, property man Billy Ballauf, and others.21 The actor Frank Oakes Rose, not about to be left out, scaled the fence around Weaver’s and added himself to a party of about twenty-five, several of whom were army officers.22

  In the half-light of two gas jets flickering feebly at either end of a darkened room, Blanche recognized Mrs. Booth and Rose. Shaking with excitement, she went forward to greet them. Nearby were Joe Booth and the actor Joe Whiting, his close friend.23 Blanche knew the Booths well, having stayed several weeks at their home when she and Marion, June’s daughter, were dismissed from Eden Hall School, operated by the Society of the Sacred Heart near Philadelphia, for being the children of actors. Blanche made herself memorable by wolfing down pancakes, appropriating Edwin’s hair tonic, and generally unsettling the household.24

  The cadaver that all had come to see was scarcely recognizable. The mass of blackened bones reposed in the clothes in which the assassin died. A search of the garments uncovered two buttons and a pistol cartridge in a vest pocket. On the right foot was a heavy riding boot. Dr. Mudd’s brogan, split open to accommodate swelling, was on the left. The broken leg was disjointed at both the knee and ankle. The skull was entirely detached. A small amount of flesh clung to the face, with a hole about the size of a dime in each cheek. This indescribable substance crumbled into nothingness at the touch. The sockets of the eyes seemed filled with something resembling damp sawdust. Booth’s hair was surprisingly full. The dead man’s teeth were set tightly together as if he were still in agony. One look at the remains made Blanche’s head swim.25

  The body was housed in a case of special design patented by Weaver during the war. It featured an intermediate glass cover that could be closed and still permit viewing of remains sealed below.26 The splendid casket, made of reddish-brown mahogany, had silver mountings, moldings, and handles. A lining of white silk merino cradled the corpse, while the interior of the outer lid was upholstered with white satin. No one could say the heap of decay and rotting clothes that was John Wilkes Booth was not elegantly coffined.

  Joe Booth, Ford, and Weaver came forward. When the room grew quiet, Joe said, “If this is the body of my brother John, I can identify it by a gold-plugged tooth on the right side of the jaw next to the eye tooth.”

  Weaver produced a drawing of the molar. Pushing down the jaw, the undertaker located the tooth and pointed it out for all to see. “The teeth were beautiful and perfect, save [that] one,” wrote Norval Foard, an editor of the Baltimore Sun, whom Ford had invited to the examination.27 Ford announced that this peculiarly shaped filling was conclusive proof of identification in his mind. Besides, he added, the firm lower jaw could have belonged to no other man than Booth. As Ford spoke, the skull was passed from hand to hand as if it belonged to some Yorick and all were there Hamlet-like to meditate upon it.

  Blanche had never met Booth and wondered how Ford could be so certain. She asked Harry, whom she was to marry, if he was equally sure about this.

  “I knew Booth better than I know you,” he replied. “There’s no need of doctor or dentist. One look told me.”28

  William H. Burton, another fence-jumper, broke a hush. “That boot looks like a pair John used to wear when we went skating. If it is one of the pair, there will be a hole in the heel made by the screw of the skate.” What Burton meant was that a skate’s iron runner was secured to a shoe by boring a hole for an affixing screw with a gimlet. The skate was then stamped on and strapped to the foot. The boot on Booth’s right leg was examined. Sure enough, there on its heel were two telltale indentations cut for just such a purpose.29

  Mrs. Booth would not approach or even look upon the remains, so Weaver asked Ella to cut a lock of hair for the mother. The young woman shrank back, however, and Blanche took her sister’s place, snipping a large curl from the forehead. It fell into a paper held by Ford.30

  “I shall never forget that moment,” wrote Blanche of standing before the mother. “The sorrow in Mrs. Booth’s face. The tears dropping in her lap as she separated the strands of hair.” She gave Ella and Blanche each a small lock. As she did, a faint moan came from her lips.31

  Back at the coffin Blanche picked up a loose piece of blanket and stuffed it in her handbag.32

  Baltimore was Booth’s hometown, and it was not surprising that news of the body’s presence stirred the city. People gathered expectantly at the Baltimore Cemetery, where the Sun had announced that Booth would be interred. Others assembled at Weaver’s. By afternoon the curious, the sympathetic, and the unreconstructed around the funeral home numbered several hundred. Seeking mementoes, those admitted cut to pieces the blankets enclosing the body. There was talk of organizing a funeral demonstration. The police came by.

  Weaver, who had promised the family utmost privacy, complained angrily to the New York Times that no unruly crowd had stormed his establishment in the manner its reporter described or had taken souvenirs from the body. Only a handful of people saw the
body, and those solely for purposes of identification.33 Its correspondent had not seen what he had seen, Weaver claimed. Not so, countered the Sun’s Foard. “Many persons saw the remains. Some with a fondness for souvenirs tore off pieces of the blanket and secured locks of hair.”

  When the family left the funeral parlor and returned to their rooms at Guy’s Monument House down the street, Weaver completed his arrangements.34 Customarily he placed a metallic tablet-plate bearing the deceased’s name in the center section of the interior surface of the outer cover. This refinement was dispensed with, however, and the rough plank containing the assassin’s name was placed on his breast. The inner and outer doors of the casket were closed and locked.

  On the chilly morning of Thursday, February 18, 1869, Weaver took the body to Green Mount Cemetery. Fearing a hearse would attract attention, he transported the remains in an ordinary wagon. The undertaker had a receiving vault at Green Mount, a holding tomb dug in a hillside where the body could be kept until winter passed, a final burial place prepared, and a time for the family to gather determined. No other persons were present as Weaver and his assistants carried the casket through the flat-arched entrance of this temple-fronted vault. Inside, among family members like Weaver’s late wife, Margaret, and strangers accruing the two-dollar-per-month storage charge, Booth was left to slumber under the gaze of a marble statue of the Angel of Resurrection mounted above the door.35