It was in Southern theaters, notably in Richmond, that he first gained recognition. Southerners appreciated his flamboyant, athletic style of acting: the twelve-foot leaps he sometimes used to make his first appearance on stage, the duels that were so realistic that blood was shed, the impassioned love scenes. When he began playing Shakespearean roles, considered the real test of an actor in the 1850s, he reminded audiences of his father, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean performer of his generation, and of Edwin Forrest. Southern audiences preferred Wilkes Booth’s portrayal of Hamlet as an unmistakably mad prince and of Richard III as a diabolical monster to the coolly intellectual characterizations offered by his older brother Edwin.
Offstage, Southerners found Wilkes Booth delightful, and they were charmed by his quick excitability, his love of fun, and his joyousness. “He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I ever listened,” a fellow actor recalled. “As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic.” Young Southern men were impressed by his ability to hold his liquor. His excellent manners won him access to social circles in the Deep South from which he had been excluded in Maryland, where people remembered that he was illegitimate. Deserting a first wife in England, his father had come to America with Mary Anne Holmes, who became the mother of John Wilkes Booth and his nine siblings.
Southerners also liked Wilkes Booth because he held conventional Southern views about slavery, which he considered “one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” He firmly believed “the country was formed for the white, not for the black man.” As sectional tensions mounted, he denounced what he called the treasonable activities of the abolitionist Republicans and called for retribution: “The South wants justice, has waited for it long, and she will wait no longer.” Acting in a Richmond theater when he heard the news of John Brown’s capture, he borrowed a uniform and went with the Richmond Grays to witness the execution of the old abolitionist.
When the war broke out, Booth made no attempt to conceal his sympathies for the Confederacy. “So help me holy God!” he swore to his sister, “my soul, life, and possessions are for the South.” But he did not rush to enlist in the Confederate army, explaining to his brother Edwin, a loyal supporter of the North, that he had promised their mother to keep out of the quarrel. His contempt for President Lincoln was open. He was offended by “this man’s appearance, his pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity” as much as he was by Lincoln’s efforts “to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies.”
Booth did little more than grumble about Lincoln until August or September 1864, when the reelection of the President seemed increasingly probable, but he then decided that something must be done to rid the country of this “false president,” who clearly was “yearning for kingly succession.” No doubt the chronic hoarseness that was clouding his career as a theatrical star and the failure of his investments in Pennsylvania oil schemes to pay off contributed to his general unhappiness, which was now directed against the President. Exactly how Booth got in touch with the Confederate secret service is not known, but he had many contacts in the South, and the private funds he had used to buy quinine and other needed medicines to be smuggled into the Confederacy gave evidence of his good faith. Presently, after conferring with Southern agents in Maryland, in Boston, and in Canada, he came up with the scheme of kidnapping Lincoln, taking him behind the Confederate lines in Virginia, where he would be held hostage for the release of thousands of Southern soldiers languishing in Northern prisons. It cannot be proved that any Confederate authority—much less the heads of the Confederate government—knew about, authorized, or even approved Booth’s plan, though it is clear that, at least at the lower levels of the Southern secret service, the abduction of the Union President was under consideration. Indeed, Booth’s scheme was very much like the one that Confederate authorities permitted Thomas N. Conrad to attempt in the fall of 1864.
Booth recruited for his plot two of his boyhood friends from Baltimore, Samuel B. Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin. Expecting to take the President across the Potomac below Washington, he added the Prussian-born George A. Atzerodt from Port Tobacco, Maryland, because he had ferried Confederate spies across the river and knew all the creeks and inlets. John H. Surratt, who had repeatedly served as a courier between secessionist sympathizers in Baltimore and Southern authorities in Richmond, added firsthand knowledge of the Confederate underground that was active in southern Maryland, and his mother, Mary Surratt, who may or may not have known the plots that were being hatched, offered headquarters for the conspirators in the inn she owned at Surrattsville, Maryland, and in the boardinghouse she opened on H Street in Washington. For brute strength needed to overcome any resistance on the part of the President, Booth enrolled the burly, violent Lewis Paine (or “Payne,” or “Powell,” or “Wood,” as he variously called himself), who had served in Mosby’s Confederate Rangers before taking the oath of allegiance to the Union cause. And finally he allowed the young druggist’s clerk, David E. Herold, to join the group; Herold was a trifler who gave the appearance of being not very bright but, as an avid bird hunter, he was supposed to know the poorly mapped roads below Washington. It was a loose, informally organized group, tied together only by devotion to the Confederate cause, personal attachment to Booth, and the considerable amounts of money that the actor paid to house and feed his team in Washington.
During the fall and winter of 1864, while Booth was recruiting his band of conspirators, he spent much time studying the maps and exploring the roads in Charles County, Maryland, in order to plan for carrying the kidnapped President across the Potomac. The whole venture, despite its deadly seriousness, had a theatrical quality about it, and at times Booth, who had trouble separating fantasy from reality, seemed to be playing one of his more melodramatic theatrical roles. To make sure that nobody misunderstood the script that he was following, he took time to write an impassioned letter explaining his actions in advance, which he sealed and entrusted to his brother-in-law. “There is no time for words,” he asserted—only to run on for some thirteen hundred words attacking Lincoln, defending the South, and announcing that he intended “to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much misery.” He signed the document, “A Confederate at present doing duty on his own responsibility.” Then he paused and struck through “at present.”
How much of this was playacting is hard to determine. Certainly Booth’s first plan, to capture Lincoln while he was attending Ford’s Theatre on January 18, bind him and lower him from the box to the stage, and then carry him off to the Confederacy was pure theater, more akin to farce than to tragedy. Only an inferior playwright could conceive a scenario in which the powerful six-foot-four-inch Lincoln could be bound and gagged while a thousand spectators quietly watched the abduction. The plan was never tried, because the President stayed at home on this stormy night.
A more practicable plan for abducting the President, similar to that of Conrad, the Confederate agent, was to capture him while he was riding in his carriage on the outskirts of the city. Learning that Lincoln planned to attend a performance of Still Waters Run Deep at the Campbell Hospital, near the Soldiers’ Home, on March 17, the conspirators decided to intercept the President, overpower him and his coachman, and rush him through southeastern Maryland and across the Potomac. At the last minute the attempt had to be aborted when Booth learned that Lincoln had remained in the city to review a returning regiment of Indiana volunteers rather than attend the play.
Instead of discouraging Booth, these failures led him to contemplate a new course of action. As early as March 4—even before the failure of the kidnapping scheme—he had begun to think of assassination rather than abduction. Standing in the rotunda of the Capitol as Lincoln passed through to the portico, where he gave his second inaugural address, Booth reflected on the excellent chance he had to kill the President
if he wished.
The failure of the abduction scheme made that wish an obsession. Because the collapse of the Confederacy removed the source of any orders or suggestions for his conspiracy, Booth was now acting entirely on his own, and there was nothing to curb his fervid imagination. Drinking very heavily at this time, he increasingly came to think of himself as not just a self-appointed Confederate secret agent but as the reincarnation of one of the tragic theatrical heroes whose lines he mouthed so eloquently. Sometimes he fancied himself a present-day William Tell. More often he saw himself as Brutus, striking down the despotic Caesar. Always he brought death to the tyrant.
Lincoln’s address on April 11 triggered Booth’s shift from thought to action. In the crowd outside the White House that evening, he heard the President recommend suffrage for blacks who were educated or had served in the Union armies. “That means nigger citizenship,” the actor muttered, and he vowed, “That is the last speech he will ever make.” He urged Lewis Paine to shoot the President on the spot. When Paine refused, Booth turned in disgust to his other companion, David Herold, and exclaimed, “By God, I’ll put him through.”
IV
Lincoln, of course, knew nothing of these plots as he continued to plan for a speedy restoration of the Union under lenient terms of reconstruction. But he found few were ready to follow his lead. In Virginia, Campbell and his associates in the Virginia legislature seemed to be dragging their feet. On April 6 the President had authorized them to meet, but nothing much happened. During the next three days, while fighting continued, Campbell took time to constitute a committee of the legislators; the committee took time to compose an address; the military took time to approve the address and then it had to be published in the newspapers; it took more time to assure the members of the legislature that they would be given safe-conduct and provided with transportation to Richmond. Lacking any sense of urgency, Campbell took an increasingly enlarged view of his role in the negotiations, calling for an armistice—something that Lincoln had explicitly refused—and suggesting peace negotiations with the Confederate legislature of South Carolina as well as that of Virginia. It seems not to have occurred to him that Lee’s surrender on April 9 made his activities largely irrelevant.
Along with foot-dragging from the Confederates, Lincoln had to deal with opposition in the North. Radicals overwhelmingly rejected the compromises he had offered in his April 11 speech. One of Sumner’s abolitionist correspondents in Boston thought that it again demonstrated Lincoln’s “backwardness” and argued that “it will be wicked and blasphemous for us as a nation to allow any distinction of color whatever in the reconstructed states.” Sumner agreed. He rejected Lincoln’s egg-and-fowl metaphor for the Louisiana government—an image the President was particularly pleased with—noting grimly that only crocodiles emerge from crocodile eggs. By failing to adopt “a just and safe system” of reconstruction—meaning one that enfranchised all the freedmen—the President was going to promote “confusion and uncertainty in the future—with hot controversy.” “Alas! Alas!” he grieved.
The President’s immediate advisers also objected to the proposed meeting of the Virginia legislators, which seemed much less urgent after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He had deliberately not broached the subject in the cabinet meeting before he gave his speech, but some of the members knew about the plan because Charles A. Dana, who was with the President at City Point, sent Stanton detailed reports on Lincoln’s meetings with Campbell. Stanton apparently leaked news of the Virginia peace negotiations to Speed and Dennison, and he possibly also informed Chief Justice Chase.
On April 12, when Lincoln brought the question of Virginia reconstruction before the cabinet, nobody favored his plan. Afterward both Stanton and Speed had private interviews with the President in order to express their marked dissatisfaction and irritation with the proposal. In a second conversation that afternoon at the War Department, Stanton vehemently argued against “allowing the rebel legislature to assemble, or the rebel organizations to have any participation whatever in the business of reorganization,” and he warned that Lincoln’s action “would put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring trouble with Congress; [and] that the people would not sustain him.”
With Seward bedridden, Lincoln thought his strongest supporter would be Gideon Welles, but the Secretary of the Navy, to his surprise, also objected to “the policy of convening a Rebel legislature.” The President explained that all he was trying to do was “to effect a reconciliation as soon as possible, and he should not stickle about forms, provided he could attain the desired result.” But Welles was not convinced. “As we had never recognized any of [the Confederate] organizations as possessing validity during the war,” he argued, “it would be impolitic, to say the least, to now recognize them and their governments as legal.” Besides, he pointed out, there already was a Unionist government of Virginia, headed by Francis Pierpont.
Rather feebly the President countered that the Pierpont government “could be considered legal, but public sentiment or public prejudice must not be overlooked.” But Welles’s argument registered, and shortly afterward, when Pierpont came to the White House for a conference, Lincoln assured him, “I intended to recognize the restored government, of which you were head, as the rightful government of Virginia.”
With all his advisers opposed to the reassembling of the Virginia legislature, the President concluded, as he told Welles, that “he had perhaps made a mistake, and was ready to correct it if he had.” He decided to get out of the Virginia scheme with the best grace he could. If he had blundered, because of insufficient preparation and imprecise directives, he could blame the Southerners for dilatoriness and misinterpretation of his orders. On April 12 he wired General Weitzel that Campbell had exceeded his authority. Reminding the general that he had permitted the calling not of the legislature but of “the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion,” Lincoln denied that he had ever intended to recognize them “as a rightful body”; they were only a group of influential individuals who had the power to withdraw Virginia support from resistance to the United States. Their action was not needed now, “particularly as Gen. Grant has since captured the Virginia troops, so that giving a consideration for their withdrawal is no longer applicable.” “Do not now allow them to assemble,” he directed Weitzel; “but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.” Consequently Lincoln never made the announcement to the people of the South, promised in his speech of April 11.
What he considered a temporary setback did not dishearten him, and he continued to plan a speedy restoration of the Confederate states to the Union on the most generous terms. This was the principal subject of discussion in the cabinet meeting on Friday, April 14, which General Grant attended. The President was in great form. Speed thought he had never seen him in better spirits, and Stanton remarked he was “grander, graver, more thoroughly up to the occasion than he had ever seen him.” According to Frederick W. Seward, who attended in place of his injured father, all members expressed “kindly feeling toward the vanquished, and [a] hearty desire to restore peace and safety at the South, with as little harm as possible to the feelings or the property of the inhabitants.” The cabinet quickly agreed on the importance of promptly restoring normal commercial relations with the former Confederate states and of abolishing, as soon as possible, all the military and Treasury regulations that had been necessary during the war to govern trade with the South. With obvious pleasure the President responded to a petitioner who asked for a pass to permit him to travel to Virginia: “No pass is necessary now to authorize any one to go to and return from Petersburg and Richmond. People go and return just as they did before the war.”
How the Southern states were to be governed during the transition from disunion to loyalty remained to be settled. Lincoln had now given up the idea of temporarily working with the rebel legislatures, admitting to the cabinet that he “had perh
aps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.” But he felt strongly that the reorganization of these states could not be directed from Washington. “We can’t undertake to run State governments in all these Southern States,” he told the cabinet. “Their people must do that,—though I reckon that at first some of them may do it badly.”
Stanton brought up a plan for the appointment of military governors, who would rule under martial law in the South until civilian rule could be reestablished. Under his proposal, which he had submitted to the President the previous day and had also discussed with Grant, the military authorities would preserve order and enforce the laws while the several executive departments resumed their normal functions in the South: the Treasury Department would proceed to collect the revenues; the Interior Department would set its Indian agents, surveyors, and land and pension agents to work; the Postmaster General would reestablish post offices and mail routes, and so on. This was, Lincoln noted approvingly, “substantially, in its general scope, the plan which we had sometimes talked over in Cabinet meetings,” and it would bear further study. But Stanton also called for a single military governor for Virginia and North Carolina, and Welles strongly objected to the eradication of state boundaries and stressed the commitment that the administration had made to the Pierpont regime in Virginia.
Tactfully Lincoln handled the disagreement among his advisers by asking Stanton to revise his proposal, making separate plans for Virginia and North Carolina, which required different treatment. As to the former, the President said, “We must not... stultify ourselves as regards Virginia, but we must help her.” Declaring that he had not yet had a chance to study the details of Stanton’s proposal, he urged all the members to think carefully about the subject of reconstruction, because “no greater or more important one could come before us, or any future Cabinet.”
Lincoln Page 90