After shooting the president and getting out of the theater as quickly as possible, Booth had managed to cross the bridge over the Potomac near the navy yard. Joined by David Herold, he eluded the federal troops for twelve days, but on April 26, in Caroline County, Virginia, the soldiers discovered Booth hiding in a tobacco barn owned by Richard Garrett. Garrett’s barn was burned, Herold surrendered, and Booth was mortally shot in the neck by a skittish soldier, Sergeant Boston Corbett, who hit the actor through a hole in the barn’s wall. A few hours later, Booth muttered, “Tell my mother I die for my country.”
ARNOLD, O’LAUGHLEN, SPANGLER, Powell, Atzerodt, Herold, Mudd, and Mrs. Surratt: the eight of them were held in irons at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. They had been accused of maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously conspiring to murder the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and General Grant, who, on that fateful night, had decided not to attend the theater.
They had also sabotaged the peace and undermined the war, and because Lincoln, as president, was commander in chief and thus a military personage whose assassination was a military crime—not a mere criminal offense—Andrew Johnson decided that the eight alleged conspirators should be tried by a military court. The decision was controversial. This was no time for either vengeance or military despotism, former attorney general Edward Bates angrily wrote in his diary. The suspects were not military personnel, for one thing. And they were charged with murder or conspiracy to commit murder, not with treason. Plus, with the civil courts in Washington open, there was no constitutional reason for a military trial. “Ours is a government of Law,” he declared, “and that the law is strong enough, to rule the people wisely and well.” Unconstitutional and unlawful and an overreach of government: it was a disastrous policy. The public cried out against the tribunal. In haste, Johnson instructed the attorney general, James Speed, to defend the constitutionality of his decision, but Bates considered Speed nothing more than a lackey and an imbecile.
Just as controversial was the decision of the military court to hold its trial in secret. Reporters were not to be admitted; the court’s proceedings would be communicated by one man, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, who was presiding, to a single representative of the press at the end of each day. This too seemed an unconstitutional muzzling of the freedom of the press, particularly since the country was no longer at war. Holt reversed this ruling—and only this ruling.
Yet, as expected, the testimony darkened the already dark mood of the country, especially in the North, where it was rumored that the assassination had been a Confederate plot to create anarchy in the North and prepare the way for a dictator, or so said Benjamin Perley Poore, the journalist who edited the Congressional Directory and the Congressional Record and who, as a court reporter, published the trial proceedings. The simple, fierce deed could not have been simple. It was unthinkable that a U.S. president, even during wartime, could actually be killed by a lone assassin—never mind by a mediocre actor flanked by a cadre of ne’er-do-wells. But had they acted alone? Weren’t they connected to Confederate officials or spies?
Even if it wasn’t a conspiracy, Lincoln’s murder was yet another consequence of the South’s benighted institution of slavery, which lay at the heart of everything that had happened during the last four years. “It is not simply the death of a man, however high his station, however great his attributes, however foully murdered, that tortures us today,” Anna Dickinson told a crowd of 3,000 at Cooper Union, where Lincoln had spoken so memorably during his 1860 election campaign. “It is liberty that was assailed in the person of our Chief—it is the country that bleeds and put it how we will, it is slavery that inflicts the blow.”
Still, for all practical purposes, the war against slavery was over. The Thirteenth Amendment, having passed both houses, had already been ratified by twenty-one states; it was well on its way to the necessary three-quarters. Jefferson Davis was on the run; General Joe Johnston had surrendered to General Sherman. And yet there was something undeniably personal about the assassination of a president—the murder of the country’s titular father—that the country took personally, holding its collective breath as Lincoln’s funeral train retraced in reverse the route he’d taken before his first inaugural, when he had ridden to Washington from Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln was to be buried in Springfield. As the nine cars of the so-called Lincoln Special slowly chugged along the tracks, more than seven million men and women stood dumbstruck. George Templeton Strong heard how some solitary farmer might lay down his hoe or stop his team, take off his hat, and stand stock-still, his head uncovered, while the train passed by. “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,” Whitman wrote in his great elegy. “I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
ON MAY 10, less than a month after the assassination, Jefferson Davis was captured in Irwinsville, Georgia, by soldiers in the 4th Michigan Cavalry, who reputedly saw his boots underneath the hoopskirt he was wearing while trying to escape. “The news of the capture of Jeff. Davis falls quietly upon the public ear,” noted The New York Times, “so much is the universal eye and ear turned toward the great assassination trial.” The trial had begun the same day Davis was caught, on the third floor of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, where the eight defendants were accused of conspiring to kill President Lincoln and of conspiring with Jefferson Davis—in other words, of a general conspiracy, which was in effect the Confederacy itself.
THE TRIAL WAS the most exciting tourist attraction in Washington that spring—the trial of the century for the crime of the century. Marian “Clover” Hooper (later Mrs. Henry Adams), one of the many ticket holders crammed into the courtroom, carefully examined Mary Surratt for signs of guilt or innocence, but, disappointed, she couldn’t settle on either. Mrs. Surratt seldom raised her eyes, though one could see they were iron gray—a slightly darker shade of gray than a Confederate private’s spanking new uniform. Dressed in black, she wore her dark brown hair parted in the middle and tied in the back. She fingered her rosary and in an unflattering photograph, clutched a New Testament with a large gilt cross on its cover. Nearly forty, large-sized, shabbily dressed, and with a coarse expression was how the usually sedate New York Times described her.
Surratt was seated not far from the panel of nine handpicked judges, combat generals and colonels, all military men presided over by Judge Advocate General Holt, the Kentucky Unionist who had been Buchanan’s attorney general and one of the cabinet members who had stood firm while Buchanan hemmed and hawed over the supplying of Fort Sumter. A friend of Edwin Stanton, Holt had been serving as judge advocate general under him since 1862. The judges included Major General David Hunter, the man who had issued his own peremptory emancipation declaration in the Sea Islands in 1862 and then gone on to uncertain fame as a Shenandoah Valley burner. More recently, his hair now white, he had accompanied the late president’s body as it traveled to its final resting place in Springfield. He was joined by Major General Lewis “Lew” Wallace, a small, pale, lithe man who wore a long, dark mustache. Formerly a lawyer from Indiana, Wallace would later become governor of New Mexico—and the author of the wildly popular novel Ben-Hur. Another commissioner was Major General August V. Kautz, a cavalry officer. None of the men had legal training.
Under the rules of martial law, the judge advocate operated both as prosecutor and judge. What’s more, a military court would not have to bother with the rules of evidence that had to be carefully laid out in civil trials. Nor were the suspected conspirators informed of their right to counsel, although Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a Unionist, briefly served as attorney for Mrs. Surratt, as did Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., General Sherman’s stepbrother. During the length of the trial, which lasted fifty days, they heard 360 witnesses tell the truth as they had seen or remembered it. Twenty-nine of them were former slaves who testified both for and against the defendants. But whatever anyone—black or white—alleged, or whatever the presumed innocence or the
guilt of the defendants, the Northern public wanted convictions, and the government wanted to show that Booth’s single bullet could not undo what so many soldiers had died for.
During fifty days of testimony, the public heard depositions that extended far beyond the defendants and John Wilkes Booth; they heard about Canadian Confederates who had planned irregular warfare, about vials of smallpox smuggled over the border in suitcases by Confederate agents hoping to infect the North, and about the horrific conditions at the notorious prisons, Libby in Richmond and Andersonville in Georgia, where, at the latter, in just one year 13,000 Yankees had been left to starve or rot or die of dysentery, gangrene, and scurvy if they hadn’t been lucky enough to be killed. Somehow the eight defendants who shuffled into the makeshift courtroom, their legs in irons, and wearing hoods over their heads (except for the woman, Mary Surratt), were accused of more than conspiring to kill the president; they were guilty of war crimes.
On Wednesday, July 5, 1865, Judge Advocate General Holt handed down guilty verdicts for all eight defendants. Four of them, including Surratt, were sentenced to hang; O’Laughlen, Mudd, Arnold, to life in prison; Ned Spangler, to six years in prison. Mary Surratt wept. The execution would take place in just two days. Her attorneys asked for a postponement, claiming that she needed time to see her priest—she was Catholic—and prepare for death. They applied for a writ of habeas corpus. The public suddenly seemed sympathetic to her; the idea of hanging a woman was repugnant. Five of the commissioners who had convicted her—one of them was David Hunter—petitioned for executive clemency for Mrs. Surratt. Stephen Douglas’s handsome widow went straight to the White House to plead for mercy for Surratt. But to grant the writ would have been to interfere with a military trial; to accede to Mrs. Douglas’s demands would have been to tie oneself to a petticoat. Even the commissioners’ petition recommending clemency fell on deaf ears. Mrs. Surratt had kept the nest that had hatched the plot, Andrew Johnson said; and besides, he grumbled, there hadn’t been enough women hanged in this war.
The execution took place on schedule early in the afternoon of July 7. It was a sweltering day. As the unofficial government photographer, Alexander Gardner had already photographed Ford’s Theatre inside and out, and aboard the Montauk and the USS Saugus, where the accused conspirators were initially held, Gardner took stark photographs of the men: two views, one front-faced and one in profile in the prototype of what would become the conventional mug shot. He also photographed the execution. Even today, the photographs seem astounding, horrible, and prurient. Yet, anticipating Gardner, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist in The House of the Seven Gables had claimed that pictures might well serve “as a point of evidence that may be useful . . . and also as a memorial.”
THE FOUR CONVICTED conspirators were executed for plotting to assassinate President Lincoln; but the only man executed as a war criminal was Commandant Heinrich Hartmann “Henry” Wirz of the Andersonville (aka Camp Sumter) prison, a hellhole in rural southwest Georgia and a symbol of cruelty, neglect, and bureaucratic failure.
A peevish martinet with blood on his hands, the Swiss-born Wirz was also a scapegoat.
Born in Zurich, he’d emigrated in 1849 to the United States and for a while had worked as a weaver in one of the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, before moving to Kentucky and then to Louisiana, where he had found employment as a physician on a plantation despite the fact that he wasn’t a doctor. In 1861, he had enlisted in the Confederate army; badly wounded in the right arm during the Seven Days’ Battle, after his recovery he had been posted at a military prison in Alabama. In the spring of 1864 he had taken charge of Andersonville.
Wirz firmly believed that he should not be blamed for the cruel corollaries of war, such as the condition of prisons. But at the trial of the Lincoln conspirators, men and women heard harrowing stories about men left for dead or gagged and dumped outside in the cold, or chased by bloodhounds and torn apart, their bodies piled onto wagons and flung into trenches, or of old Captain Wirz telling his guards that if a Yankee prisoner crossed a line and was shot, the shooter would receive a forty-day furlough. Yet, as a former prisoner recalled, Wirz was no villain, just “gnat-brained, cowardly, and feeble-natured” and not particularly troubled by good intentions.
Wirz presented himself as a functionary whose hands were tied. His superior officer had just died. His requests for shoes or the materials to make them, or for rations, went unanswered by a beleaguered Richmond. Besides, Wirz suggested, were the prisons in the South, of which Andersonville was the most chilling example, really more lethal and disgraceful than those in the North?
For example, in the summer of 1864, Grant had ordered General Butler to stop allowing the exchange of prisoners even though Grant, like Lincoln, was aware of Andersonville’s squalor: the miserable deaths from exposure or disease that numbered anywhere from thirty to seventy a day; the vermin, the ignominy. “It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them,” Grant had explained, “but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man we hold, when released on parole or otherwise, becomes an active soldier against us at once either directly or indirectly.” At the same time Grant also told Secretary Seward, “We ought not to make a single exchange nor release a prisoner on any pretext whatever until the war closes. We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination.” Paroled Confederates frequently rejoined their army, while paroled Federals often deserted.
By not exchanging soldiers, the Federals had guaranteed overcrowding in Confederate jails—and the likely death of their soldiers, who frequently believed that they’d been abandoned by the government. At Andersonville, they had been forced to drink from the clotted stream that served as the prison’s sewer system and, as one of them testified, were given a whole day’s ration of a half-pint of cornmeal ground with cobs and stones, two ounces of rotten bacon, and a spoonful of salt. Who was to blame?
In a large, well-carpeted room in the Court of Claims Hall, the sickly Wirz, guarded by eight soldiers, faced a military tribunal, as the Lincoln conspirators had, and, much agitated, listened while Colonel Chipman, the presiding judge advocate, read the charges against him: conspiracy to destroy the lives of Union soldiers; and murder, in violation of the laws or customs of war. The New York Times, in an article called “The Rebel Assassins,” which linked him with Booth, condemned Wirz as “a man of iron will, determined in purpose, and heartless in the execution of it.” Wirz pleaded not guilty.
Angular, slender, stooped, and penniless, Wirz protested that he should not have been arrested at all but should have been paroled under the terms of surrender agreed upon by Generals Johnston and Sherman. Before a packed courtroom, for two months Wirz heard testimony that was vicious, uncontested, heartbreaking, and in many cases highly impeachable: Wirz was said to have killed men even though he could not have been present at the time of the killing; he had murdered prisoners who had never been prisoners. Testimony on his behalf was routinely disallowed. Southerners believed that the trial was engineered to deflect attention away from the Union’s refusal to exchange prisoners.
Sentenced to hang, Wirz was said to be responsible for the death of ten thousand men. And in his synopsis of the trial, Judge Advocate Holt declared the atrocities at Andersonville, “accomplished by the rebel authorities and their brutal underlings,” to be part of a “monstrous conspiracy.” Wirz was then the sole person in a conspiracy that neither Holt nor Stanton could prove, much as they would have liked to impugn Jefferson Davis, James Seddon, or Howell Cobb—and Davis, in his own defense, later claimed that a member of Johnson’s cabinet had promised Wirz a pardon if he would implicate Davis in the cruelties of Andersonville. If Wirz had been so approached, he had turned down the offer.
President Johnson refused to hear any plea of clemency, and Wirz was hanged on Friday, November 10, in the morning, about four mon
ths after the Lincoln assassination conspirators were executed, probably for some of the same reasons: horror, grief, vengeance, and an odd form of relief. “Talk about liberty in this country,” Wirz scoffed, and then was said to pray for his prosecutors’ souls.
The two hundred or so spectators—a thousand had applied for admission tickets—who hoped that Wirz might yell, cry, or repent were disappointed. From the tops of their homes or perched on tall trees, they saw a man who seemed braver, or so wrote one reporter, than the Lincoln conspirators. Alexander Gardner photographed Wirz, his head lowered, at the gallows, erected on what would be the site of the Supreme Court of the United States. He also photographed the autopsy conducted on Wirz’s body even though the War Department, which had authorized the photograph, later suppressed it. The taking of it—and those of Booth’s autopsy—was again strange. Meanwhile, relic hunters cut off splinters from the scaffold and spirited away about a dozen feet of rope.
ON APRIL 11, two days after Appomattox and just four days before he was shot at point-blank range, Abraham Lincoln had addressed a roaring, interracial crowd about the work that lay ahead. The nation’s capital had been exuberant for two days. The buildings were lit with candles, bonfires were blazing, and the front of the War Department was decorated with flags and evergreens. Across the Potomac, the Custis-Lee Mansion, where General Lee had once lived, now confiscated, was brightly illuminated with blinking colored lights on the vast lawn. Cheering loudly, the crowd was expecting a different speech that misty evening from the one they heard.
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