Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Southern newspapers also called for Lincoln’s death. The editors of the Richmond Dispatch said: “Assassination in the abstract is a horrid crime … but to slay a tyrant is no more assassination than war is murder. Who speaks of Brutus as an assassin? What Yankee ever condemned the Roundhead crew who brought Charles I to the block, although it would be a cruel libel to compare him politically or personally to the tyrants who are now lording it over the South?”86 The Baltimore South ran a poem suggesting that Lincoln be hanged:87

  Two posts standant;

  One beam crossant;

  One rope pendent;

  Abram on the end on’t;

  Glorious! Splendent.

  In late 1864, the Selma, Alabama, Dispatch carried an ad by a lawyer offering to act the role of assassin: “If the citizens of the Southern Confederacy will furnish me with the cash, or good securities for the sum of one million dollars, I will cause the lives of Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and Andrew Johnson to be taken by the 1st of March next. This will give us peace, and satisfy the world that cruel tyrants can not live in a ‘land of liberty.’ If this is not accomplished, nothing will be claimed beyond the sum of fifty thousand dollars, in advance, which is supposed to be necessary to reach and slaughter the three villains.”88

  After the assassination, many Northerners blamed such violent rhetoric for creating the atmosphere that predisposed Booth to murder Lincoln. Said a California newspaper: “The deed of horror and infamy … is nothing more than the expression in action, of what secession politicians and journalists have been for years expressing in words. Wilkes Booth has simply carried out what the Copperhead journalists who have denounced the President as a ‘tyrant,’ a ‘despot,’ a ‘usurper,’ hinted at, and virtually recommended. His weapon was the pistol, theirs the pen; and though he surpassed them in ferocity, they equaled him in guilt. … Wilkes Booth has but acted out what Copperhead orators and the Copperhead press have been preaching for years.”89

  Booth was biased against immigrants, especially from Ireland, as well as blacks. During the 1850s he, like many other Marylanders, supported the nativist Know-Nothing Party, and in 1864 he denounced Lincoln’s supporters as “false-hearted, un-loyal foreigners,” “bastard subjects of other countries,” and “apostates” who “would glory in the downfall of the Republic.” Booth also had a snobbish streak that made him reluctant to dine with the laborers on his father’s farm. That snobbery also led him to condemn Lincoln’s “appearance, his pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity.”90

  While Booth’s act resembled the racist crime of James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, it was also the work of a deeply neurotic man with conflicted feelings about his parents. He seems to have identified the Confederacy with his beloved mother and the North, embodied by Lincoln, with his father. In the draft of an undelivered speech, written in 1860, he spoke extravagantly of his love of country: “Indeed I love her so that I oft mentally exclaim, with Richelieu. O my native land let me but ward this dagger from thy heart! and die upon thy bossom. Such is my love that I could be content to crawl on to old age. With all the curses, that could be heaped upon me, to see her safe from this coming tempest!” He asserted that “I am … a mear child a boy, [compared] to some I see around me. A child indeed and this union is my Mother. A Mother that I love with an unutterable affection. You are all her children, and is there no son but I to speak in its Mother’s cause[?] O would that I could place my worship for her in another heart, in the heart of some great orator, who might move you all to love her, to help her now when she is dieing. … You all do love her. You all would die for her.” He hoped she could be saved peacefully, but if not, “it must be done with blood. Ay with blood & justice.” The South “has been wronged. Ay wronged. She has been laughed at, preayed upon and wronged. … She must be reconciled. How can she. Why as I said before with naught but justice. The Abolition party must throw away their principals. They must be hushed forever. Or else it must be done by the punishment of her aggressors. By justice that demands the blood of her oppressors. By the blood of those, who in wounding her have slain us all, with naught save blood and justice. Ay blood, in this case, should season justice.” When Booth wrote thus about his exaggerated love of country, he meant the entire United States, but once war broke out, he regarded the South as his country. “My love is for the South alone,” he stated toward the end of the conflict.91 To his sister he declared: “So help me holy God! my soul, life, and possessions are for the South.”92 During the war, he had acted as a sometime Confederate courier, spy, and smuggler. To kill Lincoln would be to help the Confederacy as it was dying. Then he could perish on her bosom.

  In late 1864, Booth apologized to his mother for leaving her “to do what work I can for a poor oppressed downtrodden people.” Extravagantly, he declared his undying devotion: “Heaven knows how dearly I love you. … Darling Mother I can not write you, you will understand the deep regret, the forsaking your dear side, will make me suffer, for you have been the best, the noblest, an example for all mothers.” Much as he would like to please her by staying out of harm’s way, “the cause of liberty & justice” called. “I have not a single selfish motive to spur me on to this,” he protested, “nothing save the sacred duty, I feel I owe the cause I love, the cause of the South.” He felt compelled “to go and share the sufferings of my brave countrymen, holding an unequal strife (for every right human & divine) against the most ruthless enemy, the world has ever known.”93

  This letter tends to corroborate the statement of an actress that the “love and sympathy between him and his mother were very close, very strong. No matter how far apart they were, she seemed to know, in some mysterious way, when anything was wrong with him. If he were ill, or unfit to play, he would often receive a letter of sympathy, counsel, and warning, written when she could not possibly have received any news of him. He has told me of this, himself.”94 Two weeks before the assassination, Booth’s mother wrote him saying: “I never yet doubted your love & devotion to me—in fact I always gave you praise for being the fondest of all my boys.”95 According to his brother Edwin, John was “his mother’s darling.”96 When away from her, he wrote every Sunday.

  By killing Lincoln, Booth also hoped, not unreasonably, that he would achieve lasting renown for doing something truly memorable. A schoolmate recalled that as an adolescent he “always said ‘he would make his name remembered by succeeding generations.’ ”97 “I must have fame! fame!” he reportedly exclaimed. In 1864 he declared: “What a glorious opportunity there is for a man to immortalize himself by killing Lincoln!”98 A week before the assassination, he remarked to a friend: “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President, if I had wished, on inauguration day!”99 When asked what good that would have done, he replied: “I could live in history.”100 To another friend who allegedly posed the same question, Booth cited a passage from Colley Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III:

  The daring youth that fired the Ephesian dome

  Outlives in fame the pious fool that reared it.101

  In early 1865, Booth told an acquaintance that he longed to “do something which the world would remember for all time.”102 The evening he shot Lincoln, Booth replied to someone who predicted that he would never achieve the fame his father had attained: “When I leave the stage for good, I will be the most famous man in America.”103

  In the revealing diary he kept while fleeing his pursuers after the assassination, Booth wrote: “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me. When if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great.” When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, he determined that “something decisive & great must be done.” Mystified by the execration he was receiving in the press, he wallowed in self-pity: “For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a hero” he was now unfairly “looked upon as a common cutthroat.” He boasted that he had “too great a soul to die like a cr
iminal.” Clearly, he thought by doing something “decisive & great” he would be honored just as Brutus was for killing Julius Caesar and William Tell was for killing Hermann Gessler.104 As the fugitive Booth was chatting with the family of Richard H. Garrett, a Virginia farmer in whose tobacco barn he would die, the subject of Lincoln’s assassin came up. When Garrett’s daughter speculated that the villain probably had been well paid, Booth opined that “he wasn’t paid a cent, but did it for notoriety’s sake.”105

  Booth’s famous brother Edwin considered John mentally unbalanced from boyhood. “He was a rattle-pated fellow, filled with Quixotic notions,” Edwin wrote. “We regarded him as a … wild-brained boy, and used to laugh at his patriotic froth whenever secession was discussed. That he was insane on that one point no one who knew him can doubt.”106 A friend in Washington reported that shortly before the assassination Booth “seemed a bit crazed.”107 Once in a burst of maniacal temper he nearly strangled to death his brother-in-law for mildly criticizing Jefferson Davis.

  Booth’s mental instability and fondness for liquor may have been in part genetic. His alcoholic father, the celebrated English-born tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, suffered from spells of madness. In the winter of 1829, he broke character on stage and shouted as the management hustled him away: “Take me to the Lunatic Hospital!”108 One day he was about to hang himself when his wife, the former Mary Ann Holmes, stopped him. “My God—my God! what could have come over me?” he exclaimed.109 On other occasions, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on laudanum and by leaping into the waters off Charleston harbor. He had homicidal as well as suicidal impulses. In 1824, he asked a fellow actor: “I must cut somebody’s throat today, and whom shall I take? Shall it be Wallack, or yourself, or who?” Just then John Henry Wallack appeared, and Booth draw a long dagger and attempted to stab him. (His son John Wilkes would use a similar weapon against Major Rathbone in the assassination.) One night in 1838, for no good reason, Junius assaulted a friend and dealt him a serious blow with an andiron. In 1835, after failing to appear for a performance, he apologized, citing “a mind disordered” and “a partial derangement.” At that same time, his doctor reported that Booth “has for years past kept his wife in misery, and his friends in fear by his outrageous threats & acts [and] has bothered his acquaintances by vexatious importunity, till they bolt their doors against him.”110

  When drunk, Junius Booth directed tirades against Mary Ann and may have beaten her. He certainly humiliated her and their children when it was revealed that he had earlier married and then abandoned a woman in England, Marie Christine Adelaide Delannoy. When John Wilkes was 12 years old, Adelaide sued for divorce. Her allegations about Junius and Mary Ann’s “adulterous intercourse” and “the fruits of said adulterous intercourse” were extremely embarrassing, as were her screaming confrontations with her husband on the streets of Baltimore.111 Legally, John Wilkes was a bastard. After the divorce from Adalaide was finalized, Junius wed Mary Ann on John Wilkes’s thirteenth birthday. The embarrassment persisted, for the press ran lurid stories again at the time of Adelaide’s death in 1858. John Wilkes probably harbored strong feelings against his father for abusing his mother and humiliating him. Those negative feelings could not be expressed openly, for Junius died in 1852. John Wilkes evidently displaced the buried rage against his father onto Republicans and their leader, Abraham Lincoln.

  Booth hated Lincoln passionately, holding the president responsible for all that had gone wrong in the nation. “Our country owed all her troubles to him,” he wrote in his diary.112 A few months before the assassination, he told his friend Alfred W. Smiley that “he had a personal hatred of Lincoln.” Smiley inferred from Booth’s “utterances that he had a very strong hatred of Abe Lincoln.” One of those utterances was particularly emphatic: “I would rather have my right arm cut off at the shoulder than see Lincoln made president again.” A barber recalled that while being shaved, Booth would deliver “a tirade against Lincoln.” He “would sit in the chair and call Lincoln all the vile names he could think of, ‘a rail splitting this, that, and the other thing.’ His enmity towards Lincoln was intense.”113 On another occasion, Booth took offense during an argument about Lincoln and reached for his gun, but was persuaded not to kill the president’s defender.

  By assassinating Lincoln, Booth unconsciously avenged his mother, whose troubles were the fault of Junius Brutus Booth. Immediately after shooting the president, Booth reportedly said not only “sic semper tyrannis” but also “the South is avenged” (or “Revenge for the South.”)114

  Booth’s sister reported that “he wanted to be loved of the Southern people above all things.” As he lay dying, he said: “Tell my mother—tell my mother that I did it for my country—that I die for my country.” If in fact he unconsciously equated his mother with the South and his father with Lincoln, the killing of Lincoln would in effect be a way of proving his love for her.

  Booth’s willingness to die for his country also had roots in a martyr complex. He despised John Brown’s abolitionist views but extravagantly admired his courage. Booth called Brown, whose execution he witnessed, “a man inspired, the grandest character of the century.” His favorite literary figures were martyrs for liberty in the works of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, and Plutarch. Booth’s sister thought his “wild ambition” had been inborn and “fed to fever-heat by the unhealthy tales of Bulwer.”115

  Assassination

  Once seated in their box at Ford’s Theatre, the Lincolns and their guests sat back to enjoy the show. Around 10:30, as Booth made his way toward them, he encountered Charles Forbes outside the box and gained admission after showing him a card. (Lamon probably would not have allowed him to pass. Mrs. Lincoln ultimately held Forbes responsible for her husband’s death.) After entering the anteroom, Booth barred the door behind him with an improvised jam. Through a tiny peephole he had bored earlier he could see the president. Waiting till there was but one actor on stage, he opened the inner door, stepped quickly toward the president’s rocking chair, and shot him in the back of the head at point-blank range with a derringer. Rathbone struggled with the assassin, who slashed the major’s arm badly with a long dagger, then leaped to the stage. (Booth liked to make sensational jumps onto the stage, especially when entering the witches’ cave in Macbeth.) Upon landing, he shouted out “sic semper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants), the Virginia state motto. Striding across the stage, he escaped out the back door, mounted a horse, and rode toward southern Maryland, following the route he had earlier established as part of the kidnapping scheme.

  The instant Lincoln was shot he lost consciousness, never to regain it in the remaining nine hours of his life. Amid the pandemonium in Ford’s Theatre, three doctors (Charles Leale, Albert King, and Charles Taft) made their way to the presidential box. They removed Lincoln from his chair, placed him on the floor, and inspected his body for wounds. Meanwhile, guards cleared the theater. Discovering the hole in the back of his head, which they realized was fatal, the physicians feared that he could not survive being transported back to the White House. So they had him carried across the street to the boardinghouse of William Petersen, where he was laid diagonally across a bed that was too short to accommodate his long body.

  Mary Lincoln later told a friend that “she saw the flash and heard the report of the pistol,” and “that something suddenly brushed past her … rubbing off her Shawl. It was Booth as he jumped from the Box.”116 She then screamed and fainted.

  Once she recovered from her faint, Mary Lincoln crossed the street to the Petersen house, escorted by Clara Harris and the bleeding Major Rathbone. Entering that domicile, she frantically exclaimed: “Where is my husband! Where is my husband!” as she wrung her hands in extreme anguish. Upon reaching his bedside, she repeatedly kissed his head, which was slowly oozing blood and brain tissue. “How can it be so?” she asked. “Do speak to me!”117 When he failed to respond, she suggested that Tad be sent for, saying “she knew he would speak to
him because he loved him so well.”118 With his tutor, the boy had been attending a performance of “Alladin” at nearby Grover’s Theater. But she had second thoughts about summoning him to the Petersen house. “O, my poor ‘Taddy,’ ” she asked plaintively, “what will become of him? O do not send for him, his violent grief would disturb the House.”119

  Tad in fact had heard the dreadful news when the management of Grover’s Theater announced it to the audience. He became hysterical and was taken to the White House, where he burst out to the guard Thomas F. Pendel, “O Tom Pen! Tom Pen! they have killed papa dead. They’ve killed papa dead!”120 Pendel informed Tad’s brother Robert, who had been socializing with John Hay. The two young men immediately rushed to Tenth Street, accompanied by Senator Sumner, who had happened to come to the Executive Mansion under the impression that the president had been taken there.

  At the Petersen house, Robert spoke briefly to his mother, then entered his father’s room and took a position at the head of the bed, crying audibly. Soon he composed himself, but on two occasions he sobbed loudly and leaned his head on Sumner’s shoulder. He had the presence of mind to ask that his mother’s good friend Elizabeth Dixon, wife of Connecticut Senator James Dixon, be notified. She came quickly to help comfort the distraught First Lady. “I held her & supported her as well as I could & twice we persuaded her to go into another room,” Mrs. Dixon reported.121 The senator’s wife was accompanied by her sister, Mary Kinney, and Mrs. Kinney’s daughter, Constance. Another Connecticut matron, Mary Jane Welles, wife of Gideon Welles, also rushed to help console the First Lady. Andrew Johnson called but abruptly left when Stanton, who knew that Mrs. Lincoln disliked the vice-president, advised him that his presence was unnecessary.

  As the bedroom in the Petersen house filled with cabinet members, doctors, generals, and others, Mary Lincoln occupied the front parlor, attended by some friends, including Clara Harris and the family minister, Dr. Phineas T. Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Miss Harris, whose dress was soaked with the blood of her fiancé, Major Rathbone, reported that “Poor Mrs. Lincoln all through that dreadful night would look at me with horror & scream, oh! my husband’s blood, my dear husband’s blood!”122 In hysterics, she repeatedly asked: “Why didn’t he shoot me?”123 Mary Lincoln made frequent visits to the bedroom. On one occasion she was so taken aback by his distorted features that she fainted. Coming to, she pleaded with her dying spouse: “Love, live but for one moment to speak to me once–to speak to our children!”124