Though testimony at the hearing was not recorded, we can easily imagine why Parker was not found guilty. He had been assigned to the White House on detached service to the commissioner of public buildings, and was paid out of the Interior Department budget to protect the building and its furnishings—not the president. Mr. Lincoln had never been guarded in the theater before, and if anyone had suggested he be accompanied by guards on Good Friday, he undoubtedly would have rejected the idea.25
Eisenschiml may have been wrong, but at least he was honest. The same could not be said for a Memphis lawyer named Finis L. Bates. In 1907, Bates wrote a bestseller called The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth in which he claimed that Lincoln’s assassin lived in Granbury, Texas, in the 1870s, and ultimately committed suicide, under the name of David E. George, at Enid, Oklahoma. This was one of many Booth escape legends, but it was the best known by far. Bates’s story was featured in an episode of the Unsolved Mysteries television show, and it inspired a 1995 lawsuit aimed at digging up the remains in the Booth lot at Green Mount Cemetery. Though Booth’s relatives consented to the exhumation, the cemetery refused to permit it, and the matter ended up the Baltimore County Circuit Court. Green Mount presented five days of testimony about the shooting at Garrett’s farm, and about the two separate identifications of the man who was killed there. Historians pointed out that the corpse examined on the Montauk had Booth’s most distinctive features: a scar on the back of his neck and a “J.W.B.” tattoo on his left hand. And the assassin’s family had identified the remains to their own satisfaction in 1869.
Ultimately, what Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan found most persuasive was the testimony showing that the whole dispute was rooted in the work of Finis Bates, and that The Escape and Suicide was filled with misquoted sources, doctored affidavits, retouched photographs, and appallingly poor research. And since the only test being sought (photographic superimposition) was not likely to resolve the issue, Kaplan ruled that the grave should not be disturbed.26
Worldwide coverage of the exhumation hearings demonstrated that John Wilkes Booth could still excite the public’s interest 130 years after his death. There is something captivating about Booth as a historical character. He was a romantic villain—a strange mix that defies understanding but explains, in a way, why his story has inspired so many fanciful legends; why the ladies of Baltimore paid special attention to his grave on Decoration Day; and why his autograph is worth more today than that of his illustrious victim. More than anyone has recognized, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln reflected the complexities of a rapidly changing time. He was the Byronic hero, the tyrant-slayer of the past, resisting the advent of a new, uncertain time. In an age of sharply divided values, he was seen as both extraordinarily good and unspeakably evil.27
Booth lived in a violent time, when distrust was rampant and words alone could send a man to jail, or even to his death. Yet in the midst of unprecedented paranoia, he and his followers conspired against the government, undetected, for the better part of a year. Their survival, in spite of the odds, speaks more about its leader than any anecdote, memoir, or theatrical review. Booth shielded himself with a second conspiracy—one made of smoke and mirrors. Seen from within, it was an inducement to join and a hedge against breaking ranks. To the rest of the world, it was a genuine threat to free government, as real and as dangerous as one’s own fears could make it. To Booth himself, it was a tool to cast suspicion on guilty and innocent alike.
It was this shadow conspiracy that made the real plot work. Booth wanted the world to believe that John Mathews, Sam Chester, John Sleeper Clarke, and others had a hand in plotting the president’s death. But in truth, their guilt was a false impression created by the circumstances Booth orchestrated: the horseback ride that made Mathews seem to be scouting an escape route; the request to hire Sam Chester to work at Ford’s Theatre; the letters left in Sleeper Clarke’s safe.
Walter S. Cox, the attorney for Mike O’Laughlen, understood what Booth was doing, and he tried to call it to the attention of the military commission. In his closing argument, Cox urged the officers to look closely at Booth’s methods, and to be sure they did not convict one man for something another man had done. If they allowed such a thing to happen, he said, “it would be in the power of any man to ruin another simply by sending him a telegram.” Lou Weichmann knew that as well as anyone. It was Weichmann who received Booth’s instructions to “tell John to telegraph number and street at once,” and who innocently waved it around the office just to prove his friendship with a famous man. It was Weichmann who showed up at meetings, drove the carriage, and wrote incriminating notes in his own hand whenever Booth or the Surratts asked him to. Though all of these acts appeared to implicate him, John Surratt later admitted that Weichmann was not actually involved in the plot. Since Weichmann could neither ride nor shoot, they would not let him join.
The hurt of betraying Mrs. Surratt stayed with Weichmann for the rest of his days. Soon after the conspiracy trial, he moved to Philadelphia and was given a government job. He married, but then left his wife and moved to Anderson, Indiana, where he ran a business school. For many years he worked on his memoirs, but they were not published until 1975, seventy-three years after his death.
In the National Archives are two letters—both addressed to Weichmann—that sum up the nature of the evidence against him. One is the intimate and incriminating letter from “Clara,” the apparent spy, and the other is from Father J. B. Menu, of St. Charles College. The Clara letter lays bare some of Weichmann’s most intimate secrets, and implies he knew a great deal about Surratt’s Confederate business. The letter from Father Menu came in response to an urgent and disturbing letter that Weichmann had written him on March 17, the day of the so-called kidnap attempt. Since Weichmann wrote of Mary Surratt “as if she were a rebel,” Father Menu wanted to know what prompted his remarks.
Certainly, Weichmann would not have wanted to save these documents. If the conspirators had seen the priest’s letter, they would have known how close Weichmann had come to reporting the plot. If detectives had found the other, they would surely have thought he was one of Booth’s conspirators. So it is hard to imagine why Lou Weichmann even kept them in the first place. The answer is simple: he didn’t. Those letters were found not among his papers, but among Booth’s. They had been intercepted, and the addressee himself may never have known they existed.
Weichmann was not the only person who figured out that he was being manipulated. When Dr. Mudd introduced Booth to Surratt (with Weichmann, a stranger, standing by in a federal uniform), the event was carefully scripted. Indeed, Booth and Surratt probably knew each other already. But by the time Mudd realized it, he was on a ship bound for the Dry Tortugas. As he and his fellow prisoners talked over their plight, Mudd must have told them that Booth had arranged to run into him in Washington, as if by accident. But someone on the ship was listening, and however Mudd chose to describe the incident, his words came out a little differently by the time they reached Judge Holt. What was originally meant to describe a “setup” on Booth’s part became a meeting “by appointment” on the part of all involved. On August 22, Captain George W. Dutton, who had escorted the prisoners to the Tortugas, told Holt that Mudd had made a full confession. Holt apparently believed it, and he forwarded Dutton’s statement to Henry Burnett, who appended it to the official trial record. He did not print Mudd’s heated denial.
Shortly after Dr. Mudd went off to prison, General David Hunter summed up his case this way: “The Court never believed that Dr. Mudd knew anything about Booth’s designs. Booth made him a tool as he had done with others. Dr. Mudd was the victim of his own timidity. Had he acknowledged to the soldiers who he saw in search of Booth (the day after the assassination) that Booth had got his leg set at his house and went off, and had he, like a man, come out and said he knew Booth, instead of flatly denying it to the Court, he would have had little trouble.”28
THERE WAS ONE MORE PERSON in Washington wh
o knew from experience that with John Wilkes Booth, not everything was as it seemed. President Andrew Johnson had been compromised by a small card left in his hotel mailbox, and the false impression it gave of intimacy with Booth would haunt him for the rest of his career. So when Sarah Frances Mudd petitioned the president for her husband’s release, Johnson could sympathize. He wrote out the text of Mudd’s pardon, and made a special point of calling attention to the doubts he now had about the doctor’s guilt.
For some of Mudd’s descendants, a pardon was not good enough. In the 1920s, the doctor’s grandson, Richard D. Mudd, began a seventy-fiveyear campaign to clear his family name. In 1992, he was granted a hearing by the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records. The five-judge panel reviewed the case and decided that Dr. Samuel A. Mudd’s trial by military commission had indeed been illegal. But under intense lobbying, the secretary of the army refused to endorse the board’s findings, and a long series of suits and motions followed. In 2001, a federal appellate court ruled that the army board had no jurisdiction in Mudd’s case, since it could only correct “military records.” An appeal was planned, but the attorney handling the case missed a filing deadline, and the last legal battle of the Lincoln conspiracy died in its sleep.
It was a cruel irony. Samuel Mudd had always argued that as a civilian, he should not have been tried in a military court. But his first appeal was rejected because the crime was military, and the last was rejected because the appellant was not.
Just after Dr. Mudd’s death in 1883, one of his attorneys, Frederick Stone, granted an interview to George Alfred Townsend, and he supposedly said this of his former client:
“The court very nearly hanged Dr. Mudd. His prevarications were painful; he had given his whole case away by not trusting even his counsel or neighbors or kinfolks. . . . He denied knowing Booth when he knew him well. He was undoubtedly [an] accessory to the abduction plot [and] had even been intimate with Booth.”
This was a shocking breach of ethics, and one cannot help wondering what possessed Stone to betray Dr. Mudd in this way. The answer may lie in the revelations of Richard M. Smoot, who, after the turn of the century, tried to set the record straight on the part he played in Booth’s conspiracy. Smoot named others who were involved in the plot. Among those identified was one Judge Stone, who had secured the loan that allowed John Surratt to purchase a boat for the capture plan. Soon after the assassination, he said, Surratt defaulted on the payments, and Stone himself made good on the loan. This “Judge Stone” was the same man who jumped, uninvited, into Dr. Mudd’s defense, and to whom the ungrateful doctor refused to admit his guilt. Did Stone join the defense to keep an eye on Mudd, lest he should try to save himself by implicating his neighbors? Were those remarks to Townsend intended as a preemptive move just in case Mudd had left behind a statement, the way Spangler did? It is intriguing to think that the Bureau of Military Justice may have conducted a trial under the tightest security, unaware that another conspirator sat in the courtroom, free to leave at any time.29
Like everything else in this case, it is hard to be certain where the truth lies. Booth made certain of that. He spent months crafting the persona he wanted the world to see—a heroic figure in the ancient mold. But his boasts and posturing left him in a real bind: by April 14, all he could do was sacrifice himself for the Cause, or accept the fact that his Unionist friends had been right about him all along—that he was a hotheaded loser who only talked while others gave their lives. Booth could not bear the thought of life as a former actor, a failed investor, or a pale shadow of his brother Edwin. His choice was made.
The list of Booth’s victims is long and wide-ranging. It includes Frances and Fanny Seward, whose horrific experience contributed to their early deaths; Lucy Quesenberry, who was traumatized by her mother’s arrest, and died soon after; Henry Rathbone, who was tormented by self-reproach, and his wife, Clara, whom he killed; the two soldiers who died in the president’s funeral; the eighty-seven men who drowned while searching for Booth; and the countless others who were killed for rejoicing or for looking a little too much like the assassin. To those, we should add the victims of guilt by insinuation—the people Booth destroyed to keep his plot safe from detection.
If Booth intended to make himself a modern Brutus, he succeeded too well. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar, the killing of Lincoln did not accomplish the conspirators’ aims. It only martyred the victim, elevating him to secular sainthood and leading ultimately to the disillusionment and death of the assassin. Though some regarded Booth as a hero, the vast majority of people, both North and South, were horrified at what he had done. It embarrassed the South and forced many of its leading citizens to halt their support for continuing the war, lest they appear to endorse the assassin’s brand of warfare. Thus the “lasting condemnation of the North” of which Booth wrote was turned on its head.
Booth immortalized himself by staging one of history’s greatest dramas. In the process, he accomplished what every actor aspires to do: he made us all wonder where the play ended and reality began.
APPENDIX
BOOTH’S DIARY
Ti Amo
April 13–14 Friday the Ides1
Until today nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart. I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A Col. was at his side. I shouted Sic semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill; Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it was. This forced union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to out-live my country. This night (before the deed), I wrote a long article and left it for one of the Editors of the National Inteligencer, in which I fully set forth our reasons for our proceedings. He or the Govmt 2
[The text stops abruptly here, followed by a crudely drawn calendar in Booth’s own hand. The dates begin at April 17 and continue through June 18, with April 17–25 crossed off. The entry for April 20 is marked “on Poto[mac],” the 21st says “swamp,” and the 22nd is again marked “Poto.” The diary text resumes after several blank pages. ]
After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair.3 And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs. One hoped to be great himself. The other had not only his country’s but his own wrongs to avenge. I hoped for no gain. I knew no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone. A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end. Yet now behold the cold hand they extend to me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see any wrong except in serving a degenerate people. The little, the very little I left behind to clear my name, the Govmt will not allow to be printed. So ends all. For my country I have given up all that makes life sweet and Holy, brought misery upon my family, and am sure there is no pardon in the Heaven for me since man condemns me so. I have only heard of what has been done (except what I did myself) and it fills me with horror. God try and forgive me, and bless my mother. To night I will once more try the river with the intent to cross; though I have a greater desire and almost a mind to return to Washington and in a measure clear my name, which I feel I can do. I do not repent the blow I struck. I may before my God but not to man.
I think I have done well, though 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, though I did desire no greatness.
To night I try to escape these blood hounds once more. Who, who can read his fate God’s will be done.
I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. O may he, may he spare me that and let me die bravely.
I bless the entire world. Have never hated or wronged anyone. This last was not a wrong, unless God deems it so. And its [sic] with him to damn or bless me. And for this brave boy with me who often prays (yes, before and since) with a true and sincere heart. Was it crime in him, if so, why can he pray the same I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but “I must fight the course.” ’Tis all that’s left me.
[Original in the Lincoln Museum, Ford’s Theatre]
NOTES
Some of the citations below may require explanation. The records of the conspiracy trial prosecutors have been published by the National Archives on sixteen reels of microfilm, and are designated Microcopy M-599 by some authors. Here I refer to them as the Lincoln Assassination Suspect File, or LAS, and cite documents from them in this form: LAS [reel number: frame number]. This will distinguish them from other National Archives microfilms, documents from which are cited in the following form: [Microcopy publication number], [reel number: frame number].
Much of the information in this book has been published in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies or its companion series, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. These sources are cited as O.R. and N.O.R., respectively, in the following form: O.R. [series number], [volume number] (part number) [page numbers].
Bound textual records in the National Archives are cited in this form: RG [record group number] (record group part number ) [catalog entry number], [book or volume number]: [ page number]. Unbound textual records are cited in the same manner, but without the book or volume number.
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