Lincoln's Last Days Read online

  Herold paddles for several hours against the current, but the combination of fast current and lack of light to help them see the compass to make sure they are heading in the right direction causes them to go the wrong way.

  Finally, they land, four miles upriver from where they departed, still in Maryland. They are forced to hide themselves and their boat in the brush for yet another day.

  And so, after one last, long twenty-four hours of hiding from the thousands of soldiers now combing the countryside looking for them, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold once again set out under cover of darkness, rowing hard for Virginia. This time they make it.

  Next stop Kentucky and, eventually, Mexico.

  John Wilkes Booth’s compass.

  Newspapers in the North and the South reported on the assassination for weeks after the event.

  Chapter

  52

  MONDAY TO TUESDAY, APRIL 24 TO 25, 1865

  Virginia–Maryland Border

  SAMUEL H. BECKWITH is Baker’s telegraph operator in Port Tobacco, Maryland. He telegraphs a coded message back to Washington, stating that investigators have questioned local smugglers and learned that Booth and Herold have gone across the Potomac River.

  The information is not quite accurate. While it is true that Booth and Herold have crossed the Potomac, the information actually refers to a group of men smuggled into Virginia on Easter Sunday, not Booth and Herold. Lafayette Baker immediately reacts. A unit of twenty-six members of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry is sent by the steamship John S. Ide from Washington to Belle Plain, Virginia, about thirty miles south of Washington. With the Union cavalry are Baker’s cousin, Lieutenant Luther Baker, as well as Colonel Everton Conger, a twenty-nine-year-old, highly regarded veteran of the Civil War.

  The Ide arrives just after dark. The men immediately spur their horses down the main road of Belle Plain and then into the countryside, knocking on farmhouse doors and questioning the occupants. They stop any and all riders and carriages they encounter, pressing hard for clues.

  But nobody has seen Booth or Herold—or, if they have, they’re not talking. By morning, the cavalry squad is in Port Conway. Exhausted, their horses wrung out from the long night, the soldiers are starting to feel as if they have been sent to follow a false lead. Conger has promised them all an equal share of the more than $200,000 in reward money to be paid for the capture of Booth. This spurred them to ride all night, but now the prize seems out of reach.

  Belle Plain, Virginia, in 1864 with Union troops on their way to capture Richmond, Virginia.

  This Union steamer is typical of the kind of ships, like the John S. Ide, that traveled up and down the rivers.

  Then, just as they are about to give up and go home, at a ferry crossing known as Port Royal, two men they question positively identify Booth and Herold. The fugitives had passed through the previous day with a small group of Confederate veterans. Whether or not they are still with the soldiers is not known.

  By this time, the cavalry soldiers are exhausted, “so haggard and wasted with travel that [they] had to be kicked into intelligence before they could climb to their saddles,” Lieutenant Baker will later recall.

  But climb into their saddles they do, for hours and hours of more searching.

  At two o’clock in the morning, at a handsome whitewashed farm three hundred yards off the main road, they finally come to a halt. The ground is soft clay, so their horses’ hooves make no sound. The soldiers draw their short-barreled carbine rifles from the rifle boots attached to their saddles. Lieutenant Baker dismounts and opens the property’s main gate. He has no certain knowledge of what they’ll find. It is just a hunch.

  Fanning out, the riders make a circle around the house and barn.

  In a very few minutes, Lieutenant Baker’s hunch will make history.

  A drawing showing horse saddles and harnesses used during the Civil War.

  Chapter

  53

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 1865

  Garrett Farm, Virginia

  Dusk

  UNTIL JUST A FEW HOURS AGO, John Wilkes Booth was happier and more content than at any time since killing Lincoln. His broken leg notwithstanding, these three days in Virginia, with its pro-Confederate citizens and custom of hospitality, have made him think that escape is a possibility.

  He’s spent the last day at the farmhouse of Richard Garrett, whose son John just returned home from the war. The Garretts do not know Booth’s true identity and believe his story about being a former soldier. He’s enjoyed hot meals and the chance to wash and sleep. Then, an hour before sunset, came word that federal cavalry were crossing the ferry over the Rappahannock River from Port Conway to Port Royal.

  Booth reacts to the news with visible fear. The Garretts, seeing this, grow suspicious and insist that both men leave. Booth and Herold refuse, though not in a belligerent way. Not knowing what to do and not wanting to create a problem with the two armed strangers, John Garrett sends them to sleep in the barn. Now Booth and Herold are hiding in a forty-eight-by-fifty-foot wooden structure filled with hay and corn. Worried that the fugitives plan to steal their horses and escape in the night, John and his brother William, armed with a pistol, sleep outside the barn.

  Booth doesn’t realize the Garrett brothers are outside guarding the barn, nor does he know that the cavalry is surrounding the place. All he is sure of is that at two A.M. dogs begin barking. Then a terrified John Garrett steps into the barn and orders the men to give up their weapons. The building is surrounded, he tells them.

  “Get out of here or I will shoot you,” cries Booth. “You have betrayed me.”

  Sergeant Boston Corbett.

  Garrett flees, locking the barn door behind him. Then Herold says he wants to get out. He’s sick of life on the run and wants to return home. He’s done nothing wrong and wishes to proclaim his innocence.

  “Captain,” Booth calls out, not knowing the proper rank to use, “there is a man here who very much wants to surrender.”

  Then he turns to Herold in disgust. “Go away from me, damned coward.”

  Herold exits through the main door, wrists first. He is immediately arrested and taken away by the soldiers.

  Lieutenant Baker calls to Booth, telling him that the barn will be set on fire unless he surrenders. “Well, Captain,” Booth cries out, his old sense of the dramatic now fully returned, “you may prepare a stretcher for me. Draw up your men. Throw open the door. Let’s have a fair fight.”

  Booth hears the crackle of burning straw and smells the sweet smoke of burning cedar. “One more stain on the old banner!” he yells, doing his best to sound fearless. No one quite knows what that statement means.

  He looks across the barn and sees Lieutenant Baker opening the door. The actor lifts his rifle.

  Booth hears the crack of a rifle and feels a jolt in his neck, and then nothing. Sergeant Boston Corbett, one of the men under Baker’s command, has fired a bullet that slices through Booth’s spinal cord and paralyzes him from the neck down. He collapses to the floor, the flames climbing higher and higher all around him.

  Baker and Colonel Everton Conger pull Booth from the barn moments before it is engulfed in flames. The actor is still alive.

  As with Lincoln, the decision is made not to transport Booth because any movement will surely kill him. But within two hours, he is dead. His limp body is thrown into the back of a garbage wagon.

  The flight—and life—of John Wilkes Booth has come to an end. He is just twenty-six years old.

  An illustration showing Union soldiers dragging the wounded body of John Wilkes Booth from the burning barn. This was on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News on May 13, 1865.

  Chapter

  54

  FRIDAY, JULY 7, 1865

  Washington, D. C.

  Dawn

  TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER, rounding up Lincoln’s killers has become a national obsession. Secretary of War Stanton has personally taken charge of identif
ying the larger conspiracy that has grown out of Booth’s single gunshot, pushing Lafayette Baker from the limelight. While some in the South call Booth a martyr and hang pictures of him in their homes as they would for any family member, Northerners are determined to see every last one of his fellow conspirators found—and killed. The jails are full of men and women who have been trapped in the spider’s web of the Stanton investigation. Some have nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, like James Pumphrey, the Confederate-sympathizing owner of a stable, who spent a month behind bars. No one is immune from suspicion. Federal agents scour lists of suspects, making sure no one is overlooked. One missing suspect is twenty-one-year-old John Surratt, whose mother, Mary, provided Booth and his conspirators with weapons and lodging.

  Mary Surratt sits inside the old Arsenal Penitentiary in what will much later be the Army base named Fort Leslie J. McNair in south-central Washington, D.C., awaiting her fate. She’s been locked up since her arrest on April 17. The trial of all the conspirators, including Mary, began on May 9, and 366 witnesses were called before it was over at the end of June.

  After deliberating for three days, the nine-member jury finds Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold guilty. They will be hanged. As for Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Ned Spangler, and Samuel Arnold, their punishment will be the remote penitentiary of Fort Jefferson on the island chain of the Dry Tortugas, about eighty miles west of Key West, Florida.

  No one is willing to speak up for the men who will hang. But Mary Surratt’s priest comes to her defense. So does her daughter, Anna—though not her missing son, John. Mary Surratt’s attorney frantically works to get an audience with President Andrew Johnson so that he might personally ask for mercy on her behalf. Her supporters say she was just a lone woman trying to make ends meet by providing weapons for Booth and his conspiracy and point out that she didn’t pull the trigger and was nowhere near Ford’s Theatre.

  Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

  There is hope. Not much, but a little. The other three sentenced to hang are all part of Booth’s inner circle. But Mary Surratt is not. Although President Johnson will not speak to him, Surratt’s attorney continues to argue that her life should be spared.

  The hooded conspirators taken from the Navy Yard to the site of their execution.

  Mary Surratt spends the night of July 6 in prayer, asking God to spare her life.

  In the morning, she refuses breakfast, and even at ten A.M., when her visitors are told to leave so that she can be prepared, Mary is still hopeful. Then she is marched out into a blazing summer sun. She looks up at the ten-foot-high gallows, newly built for the execution of the conspirators. She sees the freshly dug graves beneath the gallows—the spot where her body will rest.

  Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold climb the gallows staircase. They are seated in chairs on the platform at the top. Their hands and arms are tied to their bodies—the men’s with ropes, Mary’s with white cloth. Their legs are tied together at the ankles and knees so that they won’t kick wildly after the hangman springs the door. They are all then helped up. Each is placed in position over a gallows trapdoor. Next, white cotton hoods will be placed over their heads, then the noose of the hangman’s rope.

  “Mrs. Surratt is innocent!” Powell cries out, just before the white hood is lowered over his head.

  Outside the prison, Mary’s supporters gather. Time is short. But there is still hope. Soldiers stand on top of the penitentiary walls, just in case a rider approaches with a last-minute pardon. Inside the penitentiary, one hundred civilians have won the right to watch Lincoln’s killers die.

  “Please don’t let me fall,” Mary says to an executioner, getting dizzy as she looks down on the crowd from atop the tall, unstable gallows. He puts the white hood over her head. And, as he has done with the others, he then slides the noose over her head and draws it snug so the neck will snap quickly.

  The death sentences are read in alphabetical order by General Winfield Scott Hancock.

  Each trapdoor is held in place by a single post. At the bottom of the scaffold stand four hand-selected members of the armed forces. It is their job to kick away the posts on the signal from the hangman. Suddenly, that signal is given.

  The trapdoors swing open. The four conspirators drop six feet in an instant.

  Stanton, who has witnessed the execution with other officials, lets the bodies dangle for twenty minutes before pronouncing that he is satisfied the condemned are dead. The corpses are buried in the prison yard.

  * * *

  As the spectacle of the hangings fades from the public’s preoccupation, Lincoln’s reputation grows. He becomes an icon, representing the fairness and strength of purpose that most citizens feel are America’s best characteristics.

  The Lincoln assassination conspirators just before they are executed.

  Afterword

  THE STORY OF LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION continued long after his death. The primary conspirators met their fates within three months. Other key figures either profited or suffered from their roles. For many, Lincoln’s assassination was the most important event of their lives. Here is a summary of their stories after April 14, 1865.

  * * *

  The body of John Wilkes Booth was returned to Washington from the Garrett Farm in Virginia on the John S. Ide. Booth’s dentist and his personal physician were both brought in to testify that the body was Booth’s. It was photographed and then the surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Barnes, who had tended to Lincoln in the president’s final hours, performed an autopsy. The cause of death was determined to be a “gunshot wound in the neck,” with the added notation that paralysis was immediate after Booth was shot, “and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.”

  The front cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper showing the mock burial of John Wilkes Booth’s body in the Potomac River.

  Dr. Barnes removed the third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae from Booth’s neck. These clearly showed the path of the bullet as it entered, then exited the body. The vertebrae are now kept at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Dr. Barnes then turned over his completed autopsy to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who also took control of the photographs made of the corpse and of Booth’s diary, which was handed to him by Lafayette Baker.

  The secretary of war wished the Booth situation to be handled with as little public outcry as possible, and this meant forbidding a public funeral. On Stanton’s orders, Lafayette Baker staged a mock burial, wrapping the “body” in a horse blanket and publicly hurling it into the Potomac. However, this was just a trick to conceal the body’s actual location. After the crowd onshore watched Baker dump a weighted object into the river, the ship traveled around a bend to the site of the old jail, on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal. The assassin was buried inside a gun box that served as his casket. In 1869, President Johnson ordered that the bodies of the conspirators be given to their families for reburial. Booth’s remains were moved to his family’s plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.

  Despite all evidence that Booth is actually dead and is buried in the grave bearing his name, various legends have maintained that he escaped into the South and lived a long life. In December 2010, descendants of John’s older brother, Edwin, agreed to dig up his remain see if DNA from his body is a match for the DNA in the vertebrae housed at Walter Reed. As the chief historian for the Navy Medical Department noted, “If it compares favorably, then that’s the end of the controversy. If it doesn’t match, you change American history.” As of this writing, the outcome of that investigation is still pending.

  * * *

  Mary Lincoln never recovered from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She lingered in the White House for several weeks after the shooting, then returned home to Illinois, where she spent her time answering the many letters of condolence
she received from around the world, and lobbying Congress for a pension. This was granted in 1870, for the sum of $3,000 per year.

  In 1871, just when it appeared that Mary was recovering from her considerable grief, her eighteen-year-old son, Tad, died of a mysterious heart condition. This brought on a downward spiral of mental instability. Her only remaining son, Robert, had her committed to a mental institution in 1875. She spent a year there, during which she engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the Chicago Tribune newspaper that so embarrassed Robert, he had her released. Mary moved to the south of France for four years, living in exile in the town of Pau before returning to Springfield. She died in 1882, at the age of sixty-three, and is buried next to her husband.

  * * *

  Robert Todd Lincoln went on to a stellar career as an attorney and then public official. He served as secretary of war from 1881 to 1885, during the James Garfield and Chester Arthur administrations, and served as U.S. minister (as ambassadors were then called) to Great Britain from 1889 to 1893, under Benjamin Harrison. Although he was not present at Ford’s Theatre when his father was assassinated, he was an eyewitness to Garfield’s assassination in 1881 and was nearby when President William McKinley was assassinated, in 1901.

  A photograph of Robert Todd Lincoln at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on May 30, 1922. He was seventy-nine years old.

  Robert Todd Lincoln died at his home in Vermont at the age of eighty-two, though not before attending the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1922. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

  * * *

  Laura Keene would regret cradling Lincoln’s head in her lap that night in Ford’s Theatre. The assassination linked her troupe with the killing, and the attendant notoriety was hard on her already floundering career. The actress was eminently resourceful, however, and left America to tour through England before returning in 1869 to manage the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She later lectured on the fine arts and published a weekly art journal. Laura Keene died of tuberculosis on November 4, 1873, in Montclair, New Jersey. She was believed to be forty-seven, although she was often vague about her actual birthdate and may have been three years older.