Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  By Good Friday, Booth had worked out a demonic plot to murder the President. It was not personal revenge that motivated him, certainly not money (he had an annual income of $20,000), but a warped sense of justice. Better, he reasoned, for Lincoln to perish than for white America to sink into dishonor, into racial mixing and Yankee dictatorship. “Our country owed all our troubles to him,” Booth wrote in his memorandum book, “and God made me the instrument of His punishment.”

  And he wanted the world to know who had performed the act. For he was certain that the country and posterity itself would vindicate him. So he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Washington National Intelligencer, a letter Booth sealed and carried in his pocket. He had signed it: “Men who love their country better than gold or life: J. W. Booth, Paine, Herold, Atzerodt.”

  For Booth had dragged his faithful lackies into his scheme, directing that Atzerodt kill Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Powell Secretary of State Seward (little Davy Herold was to assist them), thus with Booth exterminating the top three executive officials in the land.

  At 11:30 Friday morning, Booth appeared at Ford’s Theater, where he took his mail. He learned from Harry Ford, co-owner of the theater, that the Lincolns were to attend Our American Cousin that night. Sometime in the afternoon, either Booth or one of his cronies went to the state box and completed preparations for the final act. The visitor apparently bored a peephole in the box door so that Booth could peer through at Lincoln while he sat in the rocking chair.*, The visitor also fixed the door at the end of the hallway that led to the first balcony: he chipped plaster from the frame so that a bar could be inserted to lock the door from the inside.

  A little after four, Booth rode a fast bay mare out of Pumphrey’s Livery Stable and headed for Pennsylvania Avenue. There he stopped to talk with an actor friend. A column of rebel prisoners had just toiled by, and the friend asked if Booth had seen them. “Yes,” Booth replied. Then he slapped his forehead dramatically. “Great God,” he exclaimed, “I have no longer a country.” He produced his letter to the editor of the National Intelligencer and asked his friend to deliver it on the morrow. The man agreed (but on the morrow he tore the letter open, read the contents, and burned it).

  Sometime that afternoon, Booth turned up at the desk of the Kirkwood House, where Vice-President Johnson was staying. Booth handed the clerk a card, unaddressed, with a note jotted on it: “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J Wilkes Booth.” The clerk thought he said the name Johnson—something that would contribute vastly to what one historian has labeled “The Great American Myth,” namely, that men high in the government, maybe even the Vice-President himself, were involved in Booth’s assassination plot. In point of fact, Booth was a friend of Johnson’s personal secretary and intended the card for him. Moreover, the Vice-President himself was a target in Booth’s grisly scenario.

  At eight, Booth and his three accomplices rendezvoused at the Herndon House, situated less than a block from Ford’s at Ninth and F streets. Here they rehearsed the plan to murder Seward and Johnson while Booth shot the President. At about 9:30 Booth reined up in the alley behind Ford’s Theater and left his mare in the care of scene shifter Edman Spangler, who later turned it over to a messenger boy. Dressed in his dark hat and high riding boots with spurs, Booth entered Ford’s through the back door, crossed under the stage, and emerged into another alley that led to Tenth Street. He stopped at a saloon for a whiskey and a chaser, then went out into the drifting mist and walked past the presidential carriage.

  From the lobby of Ford’s, ablaze with lights, we can see him approach the doorkeeper with a theatrical gesture. When the doorkeeper mechanically reached for a ticket, Booth took his hand by two fingers. “You don’t want a ticket, Buck,” he said, and asked the time. The doorkeeper directed him to a clock in the lobby. It was ten past ten.

  Crossing the lobby, Booth opened the door to the main floor of the theater and surveyed the audience and the state box. He could see Lincoln’s face when he leaned forward and glanced around at the audience, as though he had recognized somebody. Booth watched the play with more than professional curiosity: he knew every line and every scene by memory and had calculated the best moment to strike, when the two actresses had exited and Harry Hawk was on stage alone.

  Booth turned and climbed the stairs humming a tune, crossed the dress circle, and entered the narrow hall to the state box, closing and barring the door. The hallway was dark and empty. John Parker, Lincoln’s guard that night, a lazy oaf who served on the Metropolitan Police Force, had left his post in the hallway and had either sat down in the gallery to watch the play or gone outside for a drink. Doubtless Booth peered through the peephole in the door to the state box. In the narrow beam of light, he could see the back of Lincoln’s head. Mary was sitting close with her hand in his, and Major Rathbone and Miss Harris were staring raptly at Hawk, who was now by himself on stage. “Don’t know the manner of good society, eh?” the actor called out. “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sock-dologizing old mantrap.”

  At exactly that moment, Booth entered the box and fired his derringer point-blank at Lincoln’s head. Had we been back in the audience, we would have heard a muffled report from the President’s box and seen a scuffle there, as Booth slashed Rathbone’s arm with a dagger. Then he leaped from the box, only to catch his spur in the Treasury flag and crash to the stage, breaking his left shinbone just above the ankle. The audience was astonished. Why, it was the actor John Wilkes Booth. Was this part of the play? An improvised scene? Crying “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus be it ever to tyrants!”), Booth lunged at Harry Hawk, then limped out the back door and galloped away into the night.

  Inside was pandemonium. We can almost hear Miss Harris screaming, “The President is shot!” and Mary Lincoln shrieking from the box in terror, “Help! Help! Help!” People were yelling, shoving one another into the aisles, and rushing for the exits. In all the commotion, two doctors fought their way to the state box and one resuscitated Lincoln with mouth-to-mouth respiration. But he never regained consciousness, for Booth’s bullet had destroyed his brain and lodged behind his right eye.

  A throng of twenty-one men carried Lincoln out of the theater, and we can retrace their path across Tenth Street to a boardinghouse owned by William Petersen, a German tailor. Like Ford’s Theater, the interior of the Petersen house has been historically renovated, enabling us to relive the final hours of what Walt Whitman called “O Moody, Tearful Night.” As if civil war had not been atonement enough, for the first time in the history of the Republic a President had been assassinated, a calamity that demolished forever William H. Seward’s contention that “assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.”

  By candlelight in the Petersen House, the group of men bore Lincoln down a narrow hallway to the room of a War Department clerk named William T. Clark. Here they laid the President diagonally across a short four-poster bed, on a red, white, and blue coverlet with fierce eagles at each corner. On the way over, Lincoln had lost blood and brain matter, and his right eye was badly swollen now and discolored. Another boarder lit a gaslamp that hissed and illuminated the little room in a ghastly green. As we stand in the doorway, we can almost see the doctors laboring at Lincoln’s side, see Charles Sumner, the President’s personal friend, taking his hand now and bowing his head in tears. We can see Andrew Johnson (Atzerodt had lost his nerve and never sought him out), roused from his sleep at the Kirkwood House, “awed to passive docility” by the incomprehensible novelty of his new position. We can hear Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton taking testimony from witnesses in the second of two parlors at the front. With the President dying and the government at a standstill, Stanton was the only ranking official who had the presence of mind to take over. Close to breaking down himself, Stanton interrogated witnesses with the help of a federal judge and two other men. Within four hours
, the evidence pointed conclusively to Booth as Lincoln’s assassin. Meanwhile word came that someone (this was Powell) had tried but failed to murder Seward and that Washington was in a reign of terror, with lynch mobs roiling in the streets and soldiers and police firing on people who even looked suspicious. One soldier killed a man for saying, “It served Lincoln right.” At once Stanton put the city under martial law and organized dragnets to bring in Booth and all other suspects. For Stanton and other officials crowded into the Petersen House, this thing went beyond Booth. For them, it was a monstrous Confederate plot to seize Washington and annihilate all the heads of the government.

  As the Secretary of War came and went in the Petersen House, barking out orders, mobilizing troops and police, Mary Lincoln wept hysterically in the front parlor, while outside men and women, black people and white, waited in the rain as the President died. At last, at 7:22 A.M., April 15, the Surgeon General pulled a sheet over Lincoln’s face and Stanton muttered that he now belonged to the ages. The news went out to a shocked and grieving nation that Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, had been shot and killed in Washington, one of the final casualties of a war that had broken his heart and had now claimed his life, gone to join the other Union dead he himself had so immortalized.

  Beyond the hallway of the Petersen House, we can see Robert Lincoln, the oldest son, helping his mother into a carriage, a crowd closing around as it lurched away. The bedroom emptied now, as the doctors and attendants carried Lincoln’s body out to a hearse that would take him back to the White House. We can hear a man give a shout for Jefferson Davis, whereupon the crowd surged forward and almost beat him to death. Finally the police cleared muddy Tenth Street, leaving only the sentinels at the front of Ford’s Theater.

  The clerk’s little bedroom seems empty and lifeless now. But the bloodstained pillow remains an eternal reminder of what happened here. We leave the room by a side door, walk down through the Petersen House, and emerge into modern Washington, whose noisy streets and congested sidewalks strike us like a physical blow. When I come out of the Petersen House, I always find it hard to believe that I am in the twentieth century. Drawn back to Ford’s Theater, I keep expecting the paved street to turn into liquid mud. I keep hearing the noises of that unforgettable night—shouts, the clatter of hooves, the rumble of soldiers storming the theater with bayonets fixed. I stand there, rooted to the spot, stricken with the realization that the thing has really just happened, that the events of that Friday and Saturday are frozen here, timeless, shattering, and irrevocable.

  2: AFTERMATH

  In the museum of Ford’s Theater, in the midst of visitors with cameras and tourist maps, we find several artifacts and photographic exhibits that suggest the drama of the events unleashed by Lincoln’s murder. By Sunday, April 16, a huge manhunt was under way in the Washington-Maryland area, as Stanton pressed all War Department resources, soldiers, civilian personnel, and Secret Service men into the pursuit of Booth and his accomplices. Within a week, War Department agents had apprehended Powell, an inebriated Atzerodt, Arnold, O’Laughlin, and scene shifter Edman Spangler, locking them all in double irons in the hold of a monitor anchored in the Potomac. In their zeal to get all suspects, authorities also arrested Mary Surratt, John’s mother and a Confederate sympathizer, who ran a Washington boardinghouse where Booth and his fellow conspirators often met. Surratt himself escaped to Canada and eventually made his way to Italy.

  Meanwhile Booth and Davy Herold were still at large, with rewards of $20,000 apiece on their heads. After shooting Lincoln, Booth had ridden across the Navy Yard Bridge and fled into backcountry Maryland. Herold overtook him there, and the two headed for the dying Confederacy, helped through lower Maryland by rebel sympathizers who gave them food and supplies. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd of Bryantown, an acquaintance of Booth’s and also a Confederate sympathizer, even set his injured leg and furnished him a pair of crude crutches. On the fugitives went, racing from one hiding place to another in the thickets and swamps, as swarms of soldiers, detectives, and Stanton’s Secret Service men closed in on them. Once troops rushed by so close that the hidden fugitives could hear their rattling sabers.

  Finally, with the assistance of a former Confederate underground mailrunner, Booth and Herold slipped across the Potomac and made their way to Richard H. Garrett’s tobacco farm near Port Royal on the Rappahannock. Here, in the early morning of April 26, a column of federal troops and War Department detectives cornered the fugitives in a tobacco barn and ordered them to surrender. Herold emerged with his hands up, but Booth was defiant. “Well, my brave boys,” he shouted, “you can prepare a stretcher for me.”

  At that, they set the barn ablaze to smoke him out. Through the open slats of the building, they could see Booth limping toward the door with a carbine in one hand and a revolver in the other. Somebody opened fire—probably Sergeant Boston Corbett of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry—and Booth staggered and fell. Several officers dragged him from the smoking barn and laid him mortally wounded on the grass outside. “Tell my mother,” Booth whispered—“tell my mother I die for my country.” Two hours later he was dead. On that same day, the last rebel army in the East surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina, an event Lincoln had eagerly awaited on the final day of his life.

  The officers sewed Booth up in a bag and conveyed him and his personal effects to Washington and Secretary of War Stanton. Among Booth’s things was a compass, a little Catholic medal, a pocket knife, and a leather-bound memorandum book—often called Booth’s diary—which was to excite a storm of controversy and wild speculation in later years. This document revealed no devastating secrets about Booth’s life and murder of Lincoln, incriminated no government officials in his plottings, as I shall discuss later. Thirty-six pages were missing from the diary, but the officers who brought it to Washington later testified that the pages were gone when they took it from Booth. According to William Hanchett, a present-day expert on the assassination, Booth himself removed the pages and used them mainly to send as notes.

  Stanton turned the diary over to Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who kept it in his possession throughout the ensuing trials. The Judge Advocate General did not introduce it in court, nor did the defense attorneys ask that it be introduced. “There was nothing in the diary,” Holt later told a congressional committee, “which I could conceive would be testimony against any human being, or for anyone except Booth himself, and he being dead, I did not offer it to the Commission.”

  Stanton, in the meantime, was deeply concerned about how to dispose of Booth’s body. Frankly, the Secretary worried that rebels and rebel sympathizers might glorify it. His apprehension is understandable, for some rebels had audaciously praised what Booth had done. “God Almighty ordered this event,” shrieked the Dallas Herald. “Abe has gone to answer before the bar of God for the innocent blood which he has permitted to be shed,” echoed the Chattanooga Daily Rebel in a statement reprinted in the North. Even southern journals that tried to be temperate could not restrain their bitterness. And if the spot of Booth’s burial became known? What would disloyalists and rebel sympathizers do then? What might they say? Stanton shuddered at the thought, shuddered at how offensive it would be to him and “the loyal people of the country” if Booth’s remains became “the instrument of rejoicing at the sacrifice of Mr. Lincoln.” Well, he would not let that happen. He had the body taken to the grounds of the Washington Arsenal and secretly buried under the floor of a former penitentiary building.

  And it was Booth buried there. All of his intimate theater friends had identified his body for the government, as had a prominent Washington surgeon who had operated on him the previous year. In 1869, after the passion over Lincoln’s assassination had subsided, the War Department released Booth’s body to his family, who had it identified again and interred in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. But ever since, fantastic stories have circulated that “the real Booth” escaped to Oklahoma, to England, or some other impro
bable place. It is all unmitigated nonsense. The real Booth died at Garrett’s tobacco farm.

  As for Booth’s cohorts, Judge Advocate General Holt, Stanton, and President Johnson insisted that the assassination was a war-related act and therefore had the prisoners tried in secret before a military tribunal of nine officers. It was similar to the kind of military courts that had long functioned under Lincoln’s wartime authority. Charged with conspiracy to kill Lincoln were Powell, Atzerodt, and Herold, who had stayed with Booth through the assassination scheme; Arnold and O’Laughlin, who had participated in the abortive kidnaping plot; Spangler and Dr. Mudd, who had aided and abetted Booth; and matronly Mary Surratt, who had operated the boardinghouse where the conspirators had frequently congregated. The military proceedings began on May 10, with Holt as prosecutor.

  Critics then and thereafter denounced the prosecution of civilians in a secret military court as blatantly illegal and “a horrible miscarriage of justice.” I am not going to defend military courts, but one can understand why the Johnson administration resorted to them in the emotion-charged atmosphere of May, 1865. The nation still reeled in shock and rage over Lincoln’s murder, and a great many people in and out of government still thought it a diabolical Confederate plot. And the extolling of it in certain rebel newspapers did not disabuse them of that notion. Booth’s five bona fide accomplices, moreover, were not ordinary civilians standing trial in peacetime. All of them had served the Confederacy, three as soldiers. Too, the Civil War was not yet over—the last rebel army was still at bay out in the Trans-Mississippi Department when the trials commenced. In this context, as one scholar has recently argued, it seems absurd to think that a civilian court would have reached a different conclusion from that of the military commission.

  At the end of June, the court voted the death sentence for Powell, Atzerodt, Herold, and Mary Surratt, although she was probably innocent. The court did recommend clemency for Mrs. Surratt because of her sex and age. But President Johnson, who signed all four orders of execution, claimed that he never saw the mercy plea for Mrs. Surratt. Judge Holt, on the other hand, insisted to the end of his life that Johnson not only read the recommendation, but asserted that she had “kept the nest that hatched the egg.” And so it was decided. On July 7, under a blazing sun, Mary Surratt and Booth’s hapless minions hanged together. There is a striking blown-up photograph of the scene in the museum of Ford’s Theater.