by Hans Holzer
“Altering the government?” I repeated, “On whose side is he?”
“Insurgent side.”
“Is he in the U. S. Government?”
“My brother knows them…they have the government.”
“But who are they? What are their names?”
“They had numbers. Forty-nine. It means the area. The area they look after.”
“Is anyone in the government involved with these insurgents?”
“John knows…John’s dead…knew too much…the names…he wasn’t all…he’s mad!”
“Who killed him?”
“Soldier.”
“Why did he kill him?” I was now referring to John Wilkes Booth and the killing of the presidential assassin by Sergeant Boston Corbett, allegedly because “God told him to,” as the record states.
“Hunted him.”
“But who gave the order to kill him?”
“The government.”
“You say, he knew too much. What did he know?”
“I don’t know the names, I know only I wait for John. John knows the names. He was clever.”
“Was anyone in this government involved?”
“Traitors…in the head of the Army…. Sher…must not tell you, John said not to speak….”
“You must speak!” I commanded, almost shouting.
“Sherman…Colonel…he knows Sherman…. John says to say nothing….”
“Does Sherman know about it?”
“I don’t know…I am not telling you any more…” he said, trembling again with tears, “Everybody asks questions. You are not helping me.”
“I will try to help you if you don’t hold back,” I promised. “Who paid your brother?”
“Nothing…promised to escape…look after him…promised a ticket….”
“How often did your brother see this officer?”
“Not too often. Here. John told me…some things. John said not to talk. He is not always mad.”
“Who is the woman with him?” I tried to see if it would trick him into talking about others.
“She’s a friend,” the communicator said without hesitation.
“What is her name?”
“Harriet.”
“Where does she live?”
“In the city.”
“How does he know her?”
“He went to play there…he liked her….”
Evidently this was some minor figure of no importance to the plot. I changed directions again. “You are free to leave here now, John wants you to go,” I said, slowly. After all, I could not let this poor soul, whoever he was, hang on here for all eternity!
“Where are we?” he asked, sounding as confused as ever.
“A house….”
“My house?…No, Melville’s house….”
“Who is Melville?”
“Friend of Gee. Told me to come here, wait for John.”
“You are free to go, free!” I intoned.
“Free?” he said slowly. “Free country?”
“A hundred years have gone by. Do you understand me?”
“No.”
The voice became weaker as if the entity were drifting away. Gradually Sybil’s body seemed to collapse and I was ready to catch her, should she fall. But in time she “came back” to herself. Awakening, as if she had slept a long time, she looked around herself, as completely confused as the entity had been. She remembered absolutely nothing of the conversation between the ghost and myself.
For a moment none of us said anything. The silence was finally broken by Thomas Miller, who seemed visibly impressed with the entire investigation. He knew very well that the hole in the floor was a matter he was apt to point out to visitors in the house, and that no visitors had come here in a long time, as the house had been in disrepair for several years. How could this strange woman with the English accent whom he had never met before in his life, or for that matter, how could I, a man he only knew by correspondence, know about it? And how could she head straight for the spot in the semi-darkness of an unlit house? That was the wedge that opened the door to his acceptance of what he had witnessed just now.
* * *
“It’s cold,” Sybil murmured, and wrapped herself deeper into her black shawl. But she has always been a good sport, and did not complain. Patiently, she waited further instructions from me. I decided it was time to introduce everybody formally now, as I had of course not done so on arrival in order to avoid Sybil’s picking up any information or clues.
Phyllis Amos then showed us the spot where she had been hit by unseen hands, and pointed out the area where her younger sister Lynn, seven at the time and now nineteen, had heard the voices of a group of men whom she had also seen huddled together on the back stairs.
“I too thought I heard voices here,” Phyllis Amos commented. “It sounded like the din of several voices but I couldn’t make it out clearly.”
I turned to Thomas Miller, who was bending down now toward the hole in the floor.
“This is where John Wilkes Booth hid his guns,” he said, anticlimactically. “The innkeeper, Lloyd, also gave him some brandy, and then he rode on to where Dr. Mudd had his house in Bryantown.”
“You heard the conversation that came through my psychic friend, Mr. Miller,” I said. “Do you care to comment on some of the names? For instance, did John Wilkes Booth have a brother along those lines?”
“My father bought this property from John Wilkes’ brother,” Miller said, “the brother who went to live in Baltimore after John Wilkes was killed; later he went to England.”
That, of course, would be Edwin Booth, the “Prince of Players,” who followed his sister Asia’s advice to try his luck in the English theater.
* * *
I found this rather interesting. So Surratt’s tavern had once belonged to Edwin Booth—finger of fate!
Mr. Miller pointed out something else of interest to me. While I had been changing tapes, during the interrogation of the communicator speaking through Sybil, I had missed a sentence or two. My question had been about the ones behind the killing.
“S-T-…” the communicator had whispered. Did it mean Stanton?
“John Wilkes Booth was very familiar with this place, of course,” Miller said in his Maryland drawl. “This is where the conspirators used to meet many times. Mary Surratt ran this place as a tavern. Nothing has changed in this house since then.”
* * *
From Thomas Miller I also learned that plans were afoot to restore the house at considerable cost, and to make it into a museum.
* * *
We thanked our host and piled into the car. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten my briefcase inside the house, so I raced back and recovered it. The house was now even colder and emptier, and I wondered if I might hear anything unusual—but I didn’t. Rather than hang around any longer, I joined the others in the car and we drove back to Washington.
I asked Countess d’Amecourt to stop once more at a house I felt might have some relationship with the case. Sybil, of course, had no idea why we got out to look at an old house on H Street. It is now a Chinese restaurant and offers no visible clues to its past.
“I feel military uniforms, blue colors here,” Sybil said as we all shuddered in the cold wind outside. The house was locked and looked empty. My request to visit it had never been answered.
“What period?”
“Perhaps a hundred years…nothing very strong here…the initial S…a man…rather confusing…a meeting place more than a residence…not too respectable…meeting house for soldiers…Army….”
“Is there a link between this house and where we went earlier this afternoon?”
“The Army is the link somehow….”
* * *
After I had thanked the Countess d’Amecourt for her help, Sybil and I flew back to New York.
For days afterward I pondered the questions arising from this expedition. Was the “S” linking the house on H Street—which wa
s Mary Surratt’s Washington boarding house—the same man as the “S-T-…” Sybil had whispered to me at Mary Surratt’s former country house? Were both initials referring to Secretary Stanton and were the rumors true after all?
* * *
The facts of history, in this respect, are significant. Lincoln’s second term was actively opposed by the forces of the radical Republicans. They thought Lincoln too soft on the rebels and feared that he would make an easy peace with the Confederacy. They were quite right in this assumption, of course, and all through Lincoln’s second term of office, his intent was clear. That is why, in murdering Abraham Lincoln, Booth actually did the South a great disservice.
In the spring of 1864, when the South seemed to be on its last legs, the situation in Washington also came to a point where decisions would have to be made soon. The “hawks,” to use a contemporary term, could count on the services of Stanton, the War Secretary, and of Seward, Secretary of State, plus many lesser officials and officers, of course. The “doves” were those in actual command, however—Lincoln himself, Grant, and Vice President Johnson, himself a Southerner. Logically, the time of crisis would be at hand the moment Grant had won victory in his command and Sherman, the other great commander, on his end of the front. By a strange set of circumstances, the assassination took place precisely at that moment: Both Grant and Sherman had eminently succeeded and peace was at hand.
* * *
Whenever Booth’s motive in killing Lincoln has been described by biographers, a point is made that it was both Booth’s madness and his attempt to avenge the South that caused him to commit the crime. Quite so, but the assassination made a lot more sense in terms of a northern plot by conveniently removing the chief advocate of a soft peace treaty just at the right moment!
This was not a trifling matter. Lincoln had proposed to go beyond freeing the slaves: to franchise the more intelligent ones among them to vote. But he had never envisioned general and immediate equality of newly freed blacks and their former masters. To the radicals, however, this was an absolute must as was the total takeover of southern assets. While Lincoln was only too ready to accept any southern state back into the Union fold that was willing to take the oath of loyalty, the radicals would hear of no such thing. They foresaw a long period of military government and rigid punishment for the secessionist states.
Lincoln often expressed the hope that Jefferson Davis and his chief aides might just leave the country to save him the embarrassment of having to try them. Stanton and his group, on the other hand, were pining for blood, and it was on Stanton’s direct orders that the southern conspirators who killed Lincoln were shown no mercy; it was Stanton who refused to give in to popular sentiment against the hanging of a woman and who insisted that Mrs. Surratt share the fate of the other principal conspirators.
Stanton’s stance at Lincoln’s death—his remark that “now he belongs to the ages” and his vigorous pursuit of the murderers in no way mitigates a possible secret involvement in a plot to kill the President. According to Stefan Lorant, he once referred to his commander-in-chief Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” He frequently refused to carry out Lincoln’s orders when he thought them “too soft.” On April 11, three days prior to the assassination, Lincoln had incurred not only Stanton’s anger but that of the entire Cabinet by arranging to allow the rebel Virginia legislature to function as a state government. “Stanton and the others were in a fury,” Carl Sandburg reports, and the uproar was so loud Lincoln did not go through with his intent. But it shows the deep cleavage that existed between the liberal President and his radical government on the very eve of his last day!
* * *
Then, too, there was the trial held in a hurry and under circumstances no modern lawyer would call proper or even constitutional. Evidence was presented in part, important documents—such as Booth’s own diary—were arbitrarily suppressed and kept out of the trial by order of Secretary Stanton, who also had impounded Booth’s personal belongings and any and all documents seized at the Surratt house on H Street, giving defense attorneys for the accused, especially Mrs. Mary Surratt, not the slightest opportunity to build a reasonable defense for their clients.
That was as it should be, from Stanton’s point of view: fanning the popular hatred by letting the conspirators appear in as unfavorable a light as possible, a quick conviction and execution of the judgment, so that no sympathy could rise among the public for the accused. There was considerable oppostion to the hanging of Mrs. Surratt, and committees demanding her pardon were indeed formed. But by the time these committees were able to function properly, the lady was dead, convicted on purely circumstantial evidence: Her house had been the meeting place for the conspirators, but it was never proven that she was part of the conspiracy. In fact, she disapproved of the murder plot, according to the condemned, but the government would not accept this view. Her own son John H. Surratt, sitting the trial out in Canada, never lifted a hand to save his mother—perhaps he thought Stanton would not dare execute her.
* * *
Setting aside for the moment the identity of the spirit communicator at the Surratt tavern, I examined certain aspects of this new material: Certainly Sherman himself could not have been part of an anti-Lincoln plot, for he was a “dove,” strictly a Lincoln man. But a member of his staff—perhaps the mysterious colonel—might well have been involved. Sybil’s communicator had stated that Booth knew all about those Army officers who were either using him or were in league with him, making, in fact, the assassination a dual plot of southern avengers and northern hawks. If Booth knew these names, he might have put the information into his personal diary. This diary was written during his fight, while he was hiding from his pursuers in the wooded swamplands of Maryland and Virginia.
At the conspiracy trial, the diary was not even mentioned, but at the subsequent trial of John H. Surratt, two years later, it did come to light. That is, Lafayette Baker, head of the Secret Service at the time of the murder, mentioned its existence, and it was promptly impounded for the trial. But when it was produced as evidence in court, only two pages were left in it—the rest had been torn out by an unknown hand! Eighteen pages were missing. The diary had been in Stanton’s possession from the moment of its seizure until now, and it was highly unlikely that Booth himself had so mutilated his own diary the moment he had finished writing it! To the contrary, the diary was his attempt to justify himself before his contemporaries, and before history. The onus of guilt here falls heavily upon Secretary Stanton again.
It is significant that whoever mutilated the diary had somehow spared an entry dated April 21, 1865:
“Tonight I will once more try the river, with the intention 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.”
* * *
Philip Van Doren Stern, author of The Man Who Killed Lincoln, quite rightfully asks, how could a self-confessed murderer clear his name unless he knew something that would involve other people than himself and his associates? Stern also refers to David Herold’s confession in which the young man quotes Booth as telling him that there was a group of thirty-five men in Washington involved in the plot.
Sybil’s confused communicator kept saying certain numbers, “forty-nine” and “thirty-four.” Could this be the code for Stanton and a committee of thirty-four men?
Whoever they were, not one of the northern conspirators ever confessed their part in the crime, so great was the popular indignation at the deed.
John H. Surratt, after going free as a consequence of the inability of his trial jury to agree on a verdict, tried his hand at lecturing on the subject of the assassination. He only gave a single lecture, which turned out a total failure. Nobody was interested. But a statement Surratt made at that lecture fortunately has come down to us. He admitted that another group of conspirators had been working independently and simultaneously to strike a blow at Lincoln.
That Surr
att would make such a statement fits right in with the facts. He was a courier and undercover man for the Confederacy, with excellent contacts in Washington. It was he who managed to have the telegraph go out of order during the murder and to allow Booth to pass the sentry at the Navy Yard bridge without difficulty. But was the communicator speaking through Mrs. Leek not holding back information at first, only to admit finally that John Wilkes knew the names of those others, after all?
This differs from Philip Van Doren Stern’s account, in which Booth was puzzled about the identities of his “unknown” allies. But then, Stern didn’t hold a trance session at the Surratt tavern, either. Until our visit in November of 1967, the question seemed up in the air.
Surratt had assured Booth that “his sources” would make sure that they all got away safely. In other words, Booth and his associates were doing the dirty work for the brain trust in Washington, with John Surratt serving both sides and in a way linking them together in an identical purpose—though for totally opposite reasons.
Interestingly enough, the entranced Sybil spoke of a colonel who knew Sherman, and who would look after him…he would supply a ticket…! That ticket might have been a steamer ticket for some foreign ship going from Mexico to Europe, where Booth could be safe. But who was the mysterious Major General Gee? Since Booth’s group was planning to kill Grant as well, would he be likely to be involved in the plot on the northern end?
Lincoln had asked Grant and Mrs. Grant to join him at Ford’s Theatre the fateful evening; Grant had declined, explaining that he wished to join his family in New Jersey instead. Perhaps that was a natural enough excuse to turn down the President’s invitation, but one might also construe it differently: Did he know about the plot and did he not wish to see his President shot?
Booth’s choice of the man to do away with Grant had fallen on John Surratt, as soon as he learned of the change in plans. Surratt was to get on the train that took Grant to New Jersey. But Grant was not attacked; there is no evidence whatever that Surratt ever took the train, and he himself said he didn’t. Surratt, then, the go-between of the two groups of conspirators, could easily have warned Grant himself: The Booth group wanted to kill Lincoln and his chief aides, to make the North powerless; but the northern conspirators would have only wanted to have Lincoln removed and certainly none of their own men. Even though Grant was likely to carry out the President’s “soft” peace plans while Lincoln was his commander-in-chief, he was a soldier accustomed to taking orders and would carry out with equal loyalty the hard-line policies of Lincoln’s successor! Everything here points to Surratt as having been, in effect, a double agent.