by Jim Bishop
The south can make no choice. It is either extermination or slavery for themselves (worse than death) to draw from. I know my choice. . . .
But there is no time for words. I write in haste. I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as this, where, on one side, I have many friends and everything to make me happy, where my profession alone has gained me an income of more than twenty thousand dollars a year, and where my great personal ambition in my profession has such a great field for labor. On the other hand, the south have never bestowed upon me one kind word; a place now where I have no friends, except beneath the sod; a place where I must either become a private soldier or a beggar. To give up all of the former for the latter, besides my mother and my sisters, whom I love so dearly (although they so widely differ with me in opinion) seems insane; but God is my judge. I love justice more than I do a country that disowns it, more than fame or wealth; more (Heaven pardon me if wrong) more than a happy home. . . .
My love (as things stand today) is for the south alone. Nor do I deem it a dishonor in attempting to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much of misery. If success attends me, I go penniless to her side. They say that she has found that “last ditch” which the North has so long derided, and been endeavoring to force her in, forgetting they are our brothers, and that it is impolitic to goad on an enemy to madness. Should I reach her in safety and find it true, I will proudly beg permission to triumph or die in that same “ditch” by her side.
A confederate doing duty upon his own responsibility.
J. Wilkes Booth.
He signed it, assured himself of a place in the history books, and hurried back to Washington. He sent to Baltimore for two boyhood friends, Michael O’Laughlin and Sam Arnold. Both were Confederate veterans, and both were hardened to the rigors of war, but they were shocked when their old friend told them the mission. Arnold was so frightened that he spent time trying to convince Booth that the scheme had to fail.
Neither of these recruits was bright. They were poor Baltimore boys who looked upon Wilkes as a rich and influential friend. The actor convinced them that they were part of a big secret band.
The rest of the group—Arnold and O’Laughlin had not met them yet, nor even heard their names—consisted of George A. Atzerodt, a carriage maker from Port Tobacco; David Herold, a young drug clerk who wearied of a matriarchal world; and John Surratt, Confederate courier, whose mother managed a boardinghouse.
Mr. Atzerodt is worth some special comment here, since he was later “assigned” to kill the Vice President. He was a German who worked by day with wood and wheels—a small man with small sly eyes and a drooping mustache; a man with features as malleable as warm putty; a man who always looked dirty and was conscious of it. At night, he ferried Southerners back and forth across Pope’s Creek and, if a Northerner wanted to get through the blockade, George would ferry him too. The kindest thing that was ever said about Mr. Atzerodt was that he was a man who would not resent an insult.
He was pitifully anxious to make a friend, and to this end he bought drinks for barflies and laughed at their jokes, but, the moment any of them challenged something that he had said, Mr. Atzerodt jammed his brown beaver hat on his head and left.
Booth had five men, in two groups. Each was in the plot to “capture” the commander in chief of the Union; none wanted to kill; two were in serious doubt about the propriety and feasibility of capture. Sam Arnold was afraid of any plot involving Lincoln. John Surratt, who had risked his life for the Confederacy as a courier, started as a member of the band by entertaining the notion that the arch-conspirator was insane. However, Booth visited the H Street boardinghouse and charmed Surratt with his candor and absence of condescension, and convinced the courier that the very brazenness of the idea would help to effect complete surprise, plus the fact that “capture” was a legal act.
Still Booth needed an actor, a theater-wise person who could turn out all the lights in a theater on cue, and, having been turned down by Sam Chester, he tried to enlist the services of a small-parts actor in Washington named John Matthews. Mr. Matthews was conscious of his own smallness in the world of the American theater, and, although he worked the full season at Ford’s Theatre, his habit was not to drink with actors at Taltavul’s saloon because he might be expected to buy drinks in return. He drank in a small place a block away from the theater.
Booth tried to interest Matthews in the plot and the little actor recoiled. He turned it down at once and advised the star to forget it. “Matthews,” said Booth later, “is a coward and not fit to live.” The actor would not forget his contempt of Matthews, and would try to hurt him.
The conspirators—with the exception of Arnold and O’Laughlin—met infrequently at Mrs. Surratt’s boarding-house. They whispered, consulted in upstairs rooms, wrestled with knives on a bed, bought pistols and became acquainted with their workings, and rode off into the country. The widow Surratt got to know them and once, in a moment of reflection, she asked her son John why these men were trooping into the house at odd hours and John said that they were all interested in a common oil speculation. Mrs. Surratt admired Booth, the courtly gentleman who attracted the eye of her seventeen-year-old daughter; she was fond of young David Herold, who was full of tall tales of hunting in her own southern Maryland; she didn’t like George Atzerodt, whom the boarders called “Port Tobacco.” Mrs. Surratt was, by all the rules of evidence, a pious zero with a penchant for falling on evil days. There is no corroborative evidence to show that she ever knew anything about a plot.
Mrs. Surratt had three children: Isaac, a Confederate soldier; John, a Confederate courier; and Anna. The boardinghouse kept Mrs. Surratt and Anna alive. Years before, she and her husband had had a farm and a tavern in southern Maryland and the government had made Mr. Surratt a postmaster and had called the crossroads Surrattsville. A few years ago, Mr. Surratt had died and his widow learned that the farm and tavern were difficult to administer. She had called John home from St. Charles College, near Ellicott’s Mills and, for a while, the boy filled his father’s shoes as a local postmaster. The appointment went to someone else, and John found that the rest of it had no appeal for him. He was a tall, blond, intelligent boy with cavernous eyes and a domed forehead. He was now twenty, and so he grew a wispy goatee.
Mrs. Surratt leased farm and tavern to Mr. John Lloyd, a drunkard with a poor memory. She took John and Anna off to Washington City and opened her impeccable little boarding-house on H Street. She placed advertisements in the Star and the National Intelligencer and she got boarders and set a good table.
Still, her troubles were economic and she needed every penny due her. She was in debt, for example, to Mr. Charles Calvert of southern Maryland for a few hundred dollars. In protracted correspondence with him, she held him off by saying that, many years ago, her husband had sold a piece of property to Mr. John Nothey and, if she could get him to pay her, she would be happy, in turn, to pay Mr. Calvert.
Her political horizon was small, and it is doubtful that she understood the issues between the states, but it is beyond argument that her sympathy was with the South and she was certain that the North was wrong in invading the South. She had owned a few slaves at one time, and at least one of them testified that she was harsh; two others testified that she was warm and solicitous. It is known that, at Surrattsville, she had fed passing Union soldiers and refused to accept money for it. Once she found some stray army horses and she had barned them until the proper authorities called for them. She refused to accept payment for feeding them.
Among her boarders now, all of whom had eaten early today, were Mr. and Mrs. John T. Holahan, and their daughter, fourteen. Mr. Holahan was a big man with big hands. His work was the cutting of tombstones. The Holahans occupied the front room on the third floor and the alcove too. The back room on that floor was used by John Surratt (when he was at home) and a former schoolmate, Louis J. Wiechman. Mr. Wiechman was big and soft and pungent, an overri
pe melon. He had studied for the priesthood at St. Charles and had failed. He had taught in school for a while, but that job too had sifted through his hands. Now he worked for the United States Government at the Office of the Commissary General of Prisoners. Some of his failures may have been attributable to Wiechman’s personality, which was akin to that of a professional sneak. He felt drawn to eavesdropping and gossip and, at the same time, had the aura of a suffering saint who has been snubbed.
There was a low-ceilinged attic in the boardinghouse and this was used as a bedroom and dressing room by Miss Anna Surratt and her cousin, Olivia Jenkins. Both were young and coquettish and bought postcard photos of actors and brave Southern generals.
On the second floor there was a sizable sitting room—which was reached from the outside of the brick house by a white inverted V staircase—and a back parlor. This parlor was used as a double bedroom by Mrs. Surratt and a young boarder, Miss Honora Fitzpatrick. On the ground floor—or basement—was another sitting room, a dining room, and a kitchen.
Little evidence remains of this first attempt to kidnap President Lincoln. On the weekend prior to the Wednesday of the attempt (January 18) Herold was sent to southern Maryland to arrange for relays of horses. Atzerodt was in Port Tobacco inquiring about leasing a flatboat large enough “to float ten or twelve people and a carriage.”
The mechanics of the kidnapping appear to have been that Surratt would be detailed to shut off the master gas valve, under the stage of Ford’s Theatre, at a signal. This would extinguish every light in the theater. He was then to come up onstage in the dark and wait, as Booth, in Boxes 7 and 8, forced the President at gunpoint to submit to gag and ropes. The actor would lower the President over the façade of the box eleven feet to the stage, then lower himself to the stage. The two men would hustle the President offstage, out the rear door, where a covered wagon would be waiting in the alley. There would be some confusion in the dark theater, among actors as well as patrons, and Booth counted on this to assist, not to hinder him. The President would be placed in the back of the wagon, trussed, and Surratt would drive the wagon out of the alley with Booth riding single-mount behind the wagon.
On the far side of the Navy Yard Bridge, they would pick up the first of Herold’s team relays, and head for Port Tobacco, twenty-nine miles away. By the time Atzerodt had ferried the party across the Potomac to Mathias Point, the whole country would know of their glorious deed and the people of Virginia would assist them through the battle lines to Richmond.
Arnold and O’Laughlin were not part of this attempt. As punishment for not showing sufficient enthusiasm, Booth proceeded without them. At 7 P.M. on January 18, the plotters were ready.
President Lincoln did not attend the theater that night. No reason was given. The management of the theater expected him because the partition between Boxes 7 and 8 was taken down in the afternoon and the President’s favorite rocker was placed in the part of the box closest to the dress circle.
The disappointment was almost too much for Booth and his little band to bear. The following morning, they scattered like minnows. Booth fled to New York. Surratt went south to the protection of the Confederacy. Herold hurried back to his mother and his seven sisters. Atzerodt took a job in Port Tobacco.
In early February, the band took slight heart. There had been no arrests, no apparent shadowing. John Wilkes Booth enlisted the final member of the conspirators. In a way, this man was the best because he could be relied upon to kill on order. His name was Lewis Powell and he was a native of Florida. He had changed his name to Lewis Paine, and he would be known by this name until he died.
Lewis Paine was big and strong and silent and stupid. He had thick jet hair, a clean, handsome face, and the muscles of a circus strong man.
In the South, he had seen John Wilkes Booth on the stage once. Afterward, he had been taken backstage to meet the star, and Lewis Paine never forgot the courtly manners, the gracious attitudes, the born-to-rule air. Later, Lewis went off to war with his brothers and he developed into a most efficient soldier. His quiet boast was that he had never wounded a Union soldier. He killed—or missed. His greatest shield against the moral strains of war was his stupidity, which kept him doing the work he was ordered to do, while preventing him from pondering on it. With no boastfulness, he displayed a skull which he used as an ash receiver and said that it was the head of a Union soldier whom he had killed.
Paine fought hard and well in the Peninsula Campaign, at Antietam, Chancellorsville, had two brothers killed at Murfreesboro, fought again at Gettysburg, was wounded and taken prisoner.
At this point, there is an unexplained hitch in his record. Paine was assigned as a male nurse in a Union hospital and escaped. He was next seen in the city of Baltimore, where Union authorities, instead of arresting him, ordered him to move farther northward, to Philadelphia or New York. It may be that it was here that Powell changed his name to Paine, and the authorities, having no record of Paine, assumed that he was one of the many wandering deserters of the Confederate Army, and wanted him at least two hundred miles north of the battle lines.
He was twenty, and boarded with Mrs. Mary Branson at 16 Eutaw Street, Baltimore. A few of the neighbors tried to make friends with him, or to strike up an acquaintanceship, and these drew nothing more than a blank stare. When he talked, he seemed to do it without moving his lips. Only the right side of his upper lip showed motion, and this gave him a sneering manner.
Paine’s weakness was a rare temper. It seldom mastered him, but, when it did, mastery was complete. A Negro maid came into his room one morning to make up his bed and he asked a question. She made the mistake of answering insolently. In a flash, both of his big hands were around her throat and he squeezed until she collapsed and fell to the floor. He stood over her, staring. The maid lived.
In the second week of February, John Wilkes Booth was in Baltimore to see Arnold and O’Laughlin about resurrecting the “capture” when Paine, lounging on a street corner, saw him and hailed. In spite of almost five years of time, Booth remembered the big Southern kid who had once been brought backstage for an introduction. They had a long talk about Paine’s war record, and the actor bought him a suit of clothes and gave him money.
From that moment on, Booth had a faithful dog. Paine’s feeling for the actor was slightly shy of idolatry. Booth was pleasantly surprised to find that his new man was almost ideal; he would do as he was told without question; he could be left alone for weeks in a boardinghouse and would not get into mischief and did not care for the company of girls. He seemed to be able to spend long periods of time sleeping and eating.
Paine was brought to the Surratt boardinghouse and introduced as the Reverend Lewis Wood, Baptist preacher. Mrs. Surratt, Catholic, thought that it was amusing that a Protestant minister would seek her place, of all the boardinghouses in Washington, but she told her daughter Anna that if the Reverend had no complaints, she had none.
There was much to see in Washington, but Paine was not interested. Every time he ventured on the streets to reach a rendezvous with “Cap,” he got lost and found it difficult to get back to the boardinghouse. He complained that the streets were laid out crooked, that they did not intersect at right angles, and he could make no sense of them.
On the night of Tuesday, March 7, four weeks and three days prior to the important day, a small incident occurred at Ford’s Theatre. Mr. Thomas Raybold, ticket seller, sold four orchestra seats in advance to Thomas Merrick, the day clerk at the National Hotel. The policy of the theater, when seat holders did not show up by the end of the first act, was to permit the ushers to move less favored patrons up to the empty chairs.
Merrick arrived, at the start of Act Two, to find that his seats had been taken. With him were a Mrs. Bunker and a Mr. Norton. Merrick was irritated. Raybold too was distressed, and offered to show the party to any good seats in the house, box seats. This mollified the party and they followed the ticket seller up the dress circle stairs of Ford’s The
atre and down the left-hand aisle to Box Number 6. It was locked.
Raybold’s embarrassment deepened, and he explained that the usher kept the keys to all boxes, because Mr. Ford did not like to have the stagehands sleeping in them by day, but that the dress circle usher was home ill and the best thing to do would be to take the party to the other side of the theater and put them in the presidential box. He led the party to the back of the dress circle, across, and down the right-hand aisle. They went through a little white door to Box 7. The door was locked. Raybold tried the door to Box 8. Locked.
The ticket seller, at this point, was angry at himself. He placed his shoulder against the door of the box and pushed. The door bent inward, and bounded back. He pushed again. In the rear of the dark corridor, Mrs. Bunker giggled. Raybold lifted his foot, aimed at the lock, and smashed. The lock snapped. The door flew open. The hasp which had held the lock swung loosely. When the party had been seated, and had forgiven him, Raybold tried the lock and found that it was broken. In the future, the door to the presidential box could be opened by anyone.
Mr. Raybold did not report it.
On a cold afternoon, Booth took Lewis Paine for a walk and showed him the White House. They walked across the south grounds toward the front of the mansion. Booth talked confidentially as they looked at the black stately trees, the squatters, the sentries warm inside their boxes, and heard the complaining bleat of Tad Lincoln’s goats, the barking challenge of a sentry on the far side of the mansion.
“He is right over there,” Booth said, pointing. Paine looked. “If you really want to kill him,” the actor said, “what I would do is just walk in, present my card and, when I was admitted, walk up to his desk and shoot him.”
Paine made no answer. Booth said he lacked nerve. Still no answer. The actor offered a less dangerous alternative. If you want to, said Booth, you can lie in wait in the bushes at the front of the White House lawn any evening and shoot him as he returns from his last daily visit to the War Department.