by Hans Holzer
But was the idea of an involvement of General Grant really so incredible?
Wilson Sullivan, author of a critical review of a recently published volume of The Papers of Andrew Johnson, has this to say of Grant, according to the Saturday Review of Literature, March 16, 1968:
“Despite General Grant’s professed acceptance of Lincoln’s policy of reconciliation with the Southern whites, President Grant strongly supported and implemented the notorious Ku Klux Act in 1871.”
This was a law practically disenfranchising Southerners and placing them directly under federal courts rather than local and state authorities.
It was Grant who executed the repressive policies of the radical Republican Congress and who reverted to the hard-line policies of the Stanton clique after he took political office, undoing completely whatever lenient measures President Johnson had instituted following the assassination of his predecessor.
But even before Grant became President, he was the man in power. Since the end of the Civil War, civil administrations had governed the conquered South. In March 1867, these were replaced by military governments in five military districts. The commanders of these districts were directly responsible to General Grant and disregarded any orders from President Johnson. Civil rights and state laws were broadly ignored. The reasons for this perversion of Lincoln’s policies were not only vengeance on the Confederacy, but political considerations as well: By delaying the voting rights of Southerners, a Republican Congress could keep itself in office that much longer. Sullivan feels that this attitude was largely responsible for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and other racists organizations in the South.
Had Lincoln lived out his term, he would no doubt have implemented a policy of rapid reconciliation, the South would have regained its political privileges quickly, and the radical Republican party might have lost the next election.
That party was led by Secretary Stanton and General Grant!
What a convenient thing it was to have a southern conspiracy at the proper time! All one had to do is get aboard and ride the conspiracy to the successful culmination—then blame it all on the South, thereby doing a double job, heaping more guilt upon the defeated Confederacy and ridding the country of the one man who could forestall the continuance in power of the Stanton-Grant group!
That Stanton might have been the real leader in the northern plot is not at all unlikely. The man was given to rebellion when the situation demanded it. President Andrew Johnson had tried to continue the Lincoln line in the face of a hostile Congress and even a Cabinet dominated by radicals. In early 1868, Johnson tried to oust Secretary Stanton from his Cabinet because he realized that Stanton was betraying his policies. But Stanton defied his chief and barricaded himself in the War Department. This intolerable situation led to Johnson’s impeachment proceedings, which failed by a single vote.
There was one more tragic figure connected with the events that seemed to hold unresolved mysteries: Mrs. Mary Surratt, widow of a Confederate spy and mother of another. On April 14, 1865, she invited her son’s friend, and one of her boarders, Louis Weichman, to accompany her on an errand to her old country home, now a tavern, at Surrattsville. Weichmann gladly obliged Mrs. Surratt and went down to hire a buggy. At the tavern, Mrs. Surratt went out carrying a package which she described to Weichmann as belonging to Booth. This package she handed to tavernkeeper John Lloyd inside the house to safekeep for Booth. It contained the guns the fugitives took with them later, after the assassination had taken place.
Weichmann’s testimony of this errand, and his description of the meetings at the H Street house, were largely responsible for Mrs. Surratt’s execution, even though it was never shown that she had anything to do with the murder plot itself. Weichmann’s testimony haunted him all his life, for Mrs. Surratt’s “ghost,” as Lloyd Lewis puts it in Myths After Lincoln, “got up and walked” in 1868 when her “avengers” made political capital of her execution, charging Andrew Johnson with having railroaded her to death.
Mrs. Surratt’s arrest at 11:15 P.M., April 17, 1865, came as a surprise to her despite the misgivings she had long harbored about her son’s involvement with Booth and the other plotters. Lewis Paine’s untimely arrival at the house after it had already been raided also helped seal her fate. At the trial that followed, none of the accused was ever allowed to speak, and their judges were doing everything in their power to link the conspiracy with the confederate government, even to the extent of producing false witnesses, who later recanted their testimonies.
If anyone among the condemned had the makings of a ghost, it was Mary Surratt.
Soon after her execution and burial, reports of her haunting the house on H Street started. The four bodies of the executed had been placed inside the prison walls and the families were denied the right to bury them.
When Annie Surratt could not obtain her mother’s body, she sold the lodging house and moved away from the home that had seen so much tragedy. The first buyer of the house had little luck with it, however. Six weeks later he sold it again, even though he had bought it very cheaply. Other tenants came and went quickly, and according to the Boston Post, which chronicled the fate of the house, it was because they saw the ghost of Mrs. Surratt clad in her execution robe walking the corridors of her home! That was back in the 1860s and 1870s. Had Mary Surratt found peace since then? Her body now lies buried underneath a simple gravestone at Mount Olivet Cemetery.
The house at 604 H Street, N.W. still stands. In the early 1900s, a Washington lady dined at the house. During dinner, she noticed the figure of a young girl appear and walk up the stairs. She recognized the distraught girl as the spirit of Annie Surratt, reports John McKelway in the Washington Star. The Chinese establishment now occupying the house does not mind the ghosts, either mother or daughter. And Ford Theatre has just been restored as a legitimate theatre, to break the ancient jinx.
Both Stern and Emanuel Hertz quote an incident in the life of Robert Lincoln, whom a Mr. Young discovered destroying many of his father’s private papers. When he remonstrated with Lincoln, the son replied that “the papers he was destroying contained the documentary evidence of the treason of a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet, and he thought it best for all that such evidence be destroyed.”
Mr. Young enlisted the help of Nicholas Murray Butler, later head of Columbia University, New York, to stop Robert Lincoln from continuing this destruction. The remainder of the papers were then deposited in the Library of Congress, but we don’t know how many documents Robert Lincoln had already destroyed when he was halted.
There remains only the curious question as to the identity of our communicator at the Surratt tavern in November 1967.
“Shot down like a dog,” the voice had complained through the psychic.
“Hunted like a dog,” Booth himself wrote in his diary. Why would Edwin Booth, who had done everything in his power to publicly repudiate his brother’s deed, and who claimed that he had little direct contact with John Wilkes in the years before the assassination—why would he want to own this house that was so closely connected with the tragedy and John Wilkes Booth? Who would think that the “Prince of Players,” who certainly had no record of any involvement in the plot to kill Lincoln, should be drawn back by feelings of guilt to the house so intimately connected with his brother John Wilkes?
But he did own it, and sell it to B. K. Miller, Thomas Miller’s father!
I couldn’t find any Lowell, Virginia on my maps, but there is a Laurel, Maryland not far from Surrattsville, or today’s Clinton.
Much of the dialogue fits Edwin Booth, owner of the house. Some of it doesn’t, and some of it might be deliberate coverup.
Mark you, this is not a “ghost” in the usual sense, for nobody reported Edwin Booth appearing to them at this house. Mrs. Surratt might have done so, both here and at her town house, but the principal character in this fascinating story has evidently lacked the inner torment that is the basis for ghostly manifestations beyond t
ime and space. Quite so, for to John Wilkes Booth the deed was the work of a national hero, not to be ashamed of at all. If anything, the ungrateful Confederacy owed him a debt of thanks.
No, I decided, John Wilkes Booth would not make a convincing ghost. But Edwin? Was there more to his relationship with John Wilkes than the current published record shows? “Ah, there’s the rub…” the Prince of Players would say in one of his greatest roles.
Then, too, there is the peculiar mystery of John Surratt’s position. He had broken with John Wilkes Booth weeks before the murder, he categorically stated at his trial in 1867. Yes, he had been part of the earlier plot to abduct Lincoln, but murder, no. That was not his game.
* * *
It was my contention, therefore, that John Surratt’s role as a dual agent seemed highly likely from the evidence available to me, both through objective research and psychic contacts. We may never find the mysterious colonel on Sherman’s staff, nor be able to identify with certainty Major General “Gee.” But War Secretary Stanton’s role looms ominously and in sinister fashion behind the generally accepted story of the plot.
* * *
If Edwin Booth came through Sybil Leek to tell us what he knew of his brother’s involvement in Lincoln’s death, perhaps he did so because John Wilkes never got around to clear his name himself. Stanton may have seen to that, and the disappearing diary and unseeming haste of the trial all fall into their proper places.
* * *
It is now over a hundred years after the event. Will we have to wait that long before we know the complete truth about another President’s murder?
* 10
A Visit with Woodrow Wilson
THE WASHINGTON POST may have published an occasional phantom story over the years, but not too many ghost stories. Thus it was with a degree of skepticism that I picked up a copy of that ebullient newspaper dated May 4, 1969. It had been sent to me by a well-meaning friend and fan living in Washington. Mrs. Charles Marwick, herself a writer and married to a medical writer, is of Scottish ancestry and quite prone to pick up a ghost story here and there.
The piece in question had attracted her attention as being a little bit above the usual cut of the journalistic approach to that sort of material. Generally, my newspaper colleagues like to make light of any psychic report, and if the witnesses are respectable, or at least rational on the surface of it, they will report the events but still add a funny tag line or two to make sure that no one takes their own attitude toward the supernatural too seriously.
Thus, when I saw the headline, “Playing Host to Ghosts?” I was wormed. This looked like one of those light-hearted, corny approaches to the psychic. I thought, but when I started to read the report by Phil Casey I realized that the reporter was trying to be fair to both his editor and the ghosts.
The Woodrow Wilson House at 2340 S St. NW is a quiet, serene place most of the time, with only about 150 visitors a week but sometimes at night there’s more noise than José Vasquez, the house man, can stand.
Vasquez has been hearing queer, and sometimes loud, noises in the night a couple of times a year for the past four years, but they didn’t bother him much until the stroke of midnight, Saturday, April 5.
“It was depressing,” he said. “If I were a nervous man, it would be very bad.”
Vasquez, who is 32, is from Peru, speaks four languages, plays the piano and is a student at D.C. Teachers College, where he intends to major in psychology. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he’s finding it hard to hold that position the way things are going around that house.
He was downstairs playing the piano that night, he said, and he was all alone (his wife, a practical nurse, was at work at the National Institute of Health).
“I felt that someone was behind me, watching me,” he said. “My neck felt funny. You know? But there was no one there. I looked.”
Later, Vasquez was walking up to his fourth-floor apartment when he heard something behind him on the third floor, near the bedrooms of the World War I President and his wife.
“The steps were loud,” he said, “and heavy, like a man.”
The footsteps went into Mrs. Wilson’s bedroom, and Vasquez went in, too. He kept hearing the steps in the room, and was in a state of almost total unhappiness.
“I go to this corner,” he said, going to the corner, “and I stand here and wait. I waited a long time and then I hear the steps again, going into the hall and to Mr. Wilson’s bedroom. I follow.”
At that point, listening to the heavy footsteps at the foot of the President’s four-poster bed, Vasquez decided to hurry upstairs.
“And when I do, the steps they came running behind me,” he said, “and they follow me, bump, bump, bump, up the stairs. I am very nervous.”
The back stairway is iron, and noisy, which didn’t help any, Vasquez said, but he went on up to his apartment.
And then, he heard no more footsteps and he was glad about that.
Once, some time back, Vasquez was in his tub when he heard some knocking noises on the tub.
“I knock right back, like this,” he said, thumping the tub, “and the noise stops.”
His wife has never heard the footsteps or the tub knocking, but she hears an occasional noise and sometimes she wakes up in the night under the impression that someone is standing at the foot of the bed. There never is anyone she can see.
I talked to Mr. Vasquez, and he sounded like a very nice, rational fellow. He had nothing to add to the story that had appeared in the Post, but he referred me to the curator of the Wilson House for permission to visit.
I contacted Ruth Dillon and patiently explained the purpose of my investigation. As much as I tried to stress the historic aspects of it, she already knew from my name what I was after, and to my surprise did not object; so long as I did not publish anything untrue, she did not mind my talking about any specters that might be on the premises, famous or otherwise.
I knew very little about the late Woodrow Wilson myself, except what one generally knows of any President of the United States, and I made it a point not to read up on him. Instead I called Ethel Johnson Meyers, my good friend and many times my medium, and arranged for her to accompany me to Washington in the near future. Due to a sudden cancellation in Mrs. Meyers’ busy schedule, the date we were able to set was May 6, 1969, three days after the reporter had written his article. A good friend of mine, Mrs. Nicole Jackson, offered to drive us around since I do not drive a car, and the three of us arrived at the Woodrow Wilson House at the appointed hour.
That hour was 11 A.M., on a sunny and very warm May 6. The house was majestic, even from the outside. It looked the very essence of a presidential mansion. It looked that way to me today, although I gather that in the days when this house was built, such houses were not considered ostentatious but rather ordinary elegant town houses for those who could afford them.
Now the property of the National Trust, the house has been turned into a museum, and visitors are admitted at certain hours of the day. Four stories high, it also boasts a magnificent garden in the back and offers the privacy of a country estate along with the convenience of a town house. It is difficult to accurately describe the style of this building. Built for Henry Parker Fairbanks in 1915, the redbrick Georgian house was designed by the architect Waddy B. Wood. Late in 1920, as President Wilson’s second term neared its end, Mrs. Wilson searched for an appropriate residence. She happened to be passing the house on S Street, which she is later quoted as describing as “an unpretentious, comfortable, dignified house, fitted to the needs of a gentleman.” On December 14 of that year, according to the brochure published by the National Trust about the Woodrow Wilson House, Mr. Wilson insisted that his wife attend a concert, and when she returned, presented her with the deed to the property. The next day they visited the house, where Mr. Wilson gave her a piece of sod, representing the land, and the key to one of the doors, representing the house—telling her this was an old Scottish custom.
T
he Wilsons made certain changes, such as the installation of an elevator and the addition of a billiard room. They also constructed a brick garage and placed iron gates at the entrance to the drive. Some of the rooms were changed, and a large library was constructed to hold Mr. Wilson’s eight thousand books. Today the library contains a large collection of items connected with President Wilson and his contemporaries. These are mainly presentation copies of books and documents.
President Wilson lived in the house with his second wife, Edith Bolling Wilson. She was a devoted companion to him during his last years, went to Europe with him to attend peace conferences, and generally traveled with the President. She liked to read to him and he, conversely, liked to read to her, and in general they were a very close and devoted couple.
At the end of his second term he retired to this house, and died here three years later on February 3, 1924. Mrs. Wilson, who later presented the house to the American people under the guardianship of the National Trust, also lived and died there on December 28, 1961, which happened to be the 105th anniversary of President Wilson’s birth.
By and large the rooms have been kept as they were during their tenancy, with the sole addition of certain items such as furniture, antiquities, and documents pertaining to the Wilsons’ careers and lifetimes. If the house is a museum, it doesn’t look like one. It is more like a shrine—but not an ostentatious one—to what many consider a great American.