The cause of Booth’s excruciating agony, a leg broken two inches above the ankle, was also the cause of his current predicament. Had his spur not caught on the flag adorning the box at Ford’s Theater, the actor’s great escape to friends farther south not only would have been possible, but, given his intelligence, daring, and athletic ability, it also would have been probable. From there, perhaps Spain, a nation that had no extradition treaty with the United States, and a nation that Booth’s fiancée, Lucy Hale, was scheduled to soon reach, where her father served as ambassador to the royal court.3 But the tiny spur had snagged the flag, sending the actor crashing to the stage, and all his elaborate plans went for naught. Now he lay crippled and weakened, and capture and death was only a matter of time.
Joining Booth in the dismal surroundings was young David Herold. Adored and feted by thousands of America’s finest, Booth now found his life in the hands of a shallow, simpleminded twenty-two-year-old jokester and braggart. Herold’s worship of the stage idol easily outweighed what little good sense he possessed about getting involved in the murder of an American president. Star-struck by Booth’s status, Herold was enlisted by Booth not because of his weaknesses but because of his strengths: The young man was an excellent outdoorsman and knew lower Maryland like the back of his hand.4
Whatever David Herold was or wasn’t, his loyalty to Booth was never doubted. If not for the frivolous youth, the hunt for an assassin with a broken leg would have ended soon after it began. Navigating the tangled countryside by night, safely hiding his friend by day, young Herold begged or bought bread from farms, as well as secured whiskey to deaden his hero’s mind-splitting pain. Of those residing along the escape route who suspected Booth’s presence, not one attempted to collect the reward money.5
Grateful as Booth was for the fidelity of Marylanders, and comforting as his companion’s attentions were, the actor was absorbed by only one thought: “What do the people say?” What impact had his daring deed had upon the nation, North and South? Was the Confederacy emboldened by the stroke? Was that beleaguered nation encouraged to fight on now that their persecutor was dead? Did the North rejoice? Were the enslaved millions there grateful that the tyrant of the past four years had finally been laid low? Would they now end the war and grant the South its independence? And was he, John Wilkes Booth, now hailed as the hero of the land, a modern-day Brutus or William Tell? As the hours slipped to days, the assassin, though wracked with pain, became mad to know what impact his act had upon the people.
One day, as the two lay concealed in their hiding place, a noise sounded closer than usual. Grabbing his carbine, Herold quietly left to investigate.
“As I drew near the hiding place of the fugitives,” remembered Thomas Jones, “I stopped and gave the signal.”
In a few moments, the secret whistle drew David Herold from the thicket with his weapon leveled squarely at Jones. “Who are you, and what do you want?” Herold demanded.
“I’m a friend. You have nothing to fear.”
Watching Jones closely, the young man finally lowered his rifle and led him through the woods. Asked by the landowner to slip into the swamp and aid Booth’s escape to Virginia, Jones had agreed.
“[F]ully realizing the risk I was undertaking,” Jones said later, “I did not hesitate. . . . [T]he $300,000 reward [sic], or even $3,000,000, would not have caused me to turn traitor to the southern Confederacy, the people I loved.”6
At length, the two men entered a small clearing. Thomas Jones:
He was lying on the wet, cold ground, his head supported by his hand. His weapons of defense were close beside him; an old blanket was partly drawn over him. His slouch hat and crutch were lying by him, he was exceedingly pale, and his features bore traces of intense suffering. . . . Murderer though I knew him to be . . . I determined to do all I could to get him into Virginia, and so assured him. . . . He held out his hand and thanked me.7
Booth then asked the question he had been hoping to ask for days: “What does the world beyond this swamp think?”
Jones acknowledged that the Southerners he had spoken with were elated by the news. But when, on the following day Jones brought the latest newspapers, Booth saw to his utter chagrin that, far from being hailed in the North as a deliverer from despotism, he was instead being cast into hell as a monster, a maniac, and a fool. With a mental anguish greater, if possible, than his physical pain, Booth read the horrifying words.
“God only knows what incentive impelled this devil to the commission of this horrid and damning crime,” raged the St. Louis Republican. “But one thing is certain—no man has ever been so effectually damned to everlasting fame as J. Wilkes Booth, the perpetrator of this cowardly, dastardly crime.”8
“If there was a political motive in the act, it was the act of an idiot,” a New York reporter added. “He has ennobled the victim of his rage, as a martyr for all history. . . . Whether he be political maniac or conspirator, or worked out some personal idea of fanaticism or revenge, he has done that which . . . makes him accursed forever.”9
Such a reaction might be expected in the North. But even in his beloved South, although many praised him in secret and carried his photograph, others in the occupied nation now reviled him in public.
“Our expressions of disgust for the dastardly wretch who could have conceived and executed such a diabolical deed can scarcely be uttered,” former South Carolina governor William Aiken announced to a large crowd in Charleston.10
Wrote another Southerner, expressing the fears of many:
This is not the assassination of President Lincoln and Secretary Seward only; it is the assassination of the whole South. . . . We had come to look on the restoration of the Union as a foregone conclusion, and the whole South was on the eve of accepting the fact. We should have been friends and brothers once more but for this. . . . Now, God help us all! . . . Damned to the bottomless pit of hell the men who plotted and carried it out!11
Although he did not regret his action and would gladly have struck again if need be, Booth could see at a glance that his efforts had gone for nothing and all his hopes had been dashed.
“And there—surrounded by the sighing pines—he read the world’s just condemnation of his deed and the price that was offered for his life,” remembered Thomas Jones with a note of sadness.12
As the dismal days in Maryland passed, while waiting to cross the wide Potomac into Virginia after an earlier unsuccessful attempt, Booth was left with little more than his thoughts and his diary:
Friday 21—
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 mans hand against me, I am here in despair. 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. . . . 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. . . . I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me. . . . I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. Oh may he, may he spare me that and let me die bravely. . . . So ends all. For my country I have given up all that makes life sweet and Holy [and] brought misery on my family.13
The “misery” that the assassin feared he had caused his family was, alas, all too true. Soon after the murder, government agents and police had swarmed over the Booth homes.
“All written or printed material found in our possession, everything that bore his name was given up, even the little picture of himself hung over my babies bed in the nursery,” said Asia of her home in Philadelphia. “Not a vestige remains of aught that belonged to him; his books of music were stolen, seized, or savagely destroyed.”14
“Enraged and furious,” more invaders returned to search and ransack the house. When they
finally departed, a heavy surveillance was kept on the residence, and the family’s mail was opened.15
Worse than the brutal invasion of her home was the heap of calumny directed at the family. Asia continues:
North, East and West the papers teemed with the most preposterous adventures, and eccentricities, and ill deeds of the vile Booth family. The tongue of every man and woman was free to revile and insult us. Every man’s hand was against us; if we had friends they condoled with us in secret; none ventured near.16
Especially bitter to Asia was the sudden demand of her actor husband, John Clarke, for a divorce. Such a separation, insisted Clarke, was his “only salvation now.”17
“I can give you no idea of the desolation which has fallen upon us,” Asia wrote a friend. “I seem completely numbed and hardened in sorrow.”18
After narrowly escaping Cincinnati with his life, the eldest brother, Junius, Jr., fled to Philadelphia. Finding the atmosphere in the “City of Brotherly Love” every bit as menacing as Ohio, Junius slipped from the metropolis and took a room in the country. Although no mobs followed, there was no peace for the Booth brother, either. “He paces his room and pulls his hair like a man deranged,” revealed a witness.19
Junius’s brother Edwin was also locked in his own personal hell. Perhaps the most sensitive of all the siblings, Edwin was so troubled and weighed down with gloom that he swore he would forsake his calling, vowing never to set foot on a stage again. It was just as well, advised a vindictive Philadelphia journalist, as “no man bearing the name of the criminal shall, within our lifetime, be permitted to appear before an American audience.”20 Despite his well-known love of Lincoln and his unswerving devotion to the Union, Edwin was questioned closely about the assassination and even had his luggage searched in Boston.21 Ironically, it was Edwin who had, but the month before in New Jersey, saved the son only to see a brother slay the father.22
[A] group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. . . . [T]here was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless . . . [when] my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him.23
The grateful young man was none other than Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the American president.
Adding to Edwin’s misery was a heartbreaking letter from John’s fiancée, Lucy Hale. “The poor little girl to whom he had promised so much happiness,” wrote Edwin, was utterly devastated by the unbelievable news.24 Now, himself shattered to his very core, Edwin hoped only for the peace of oblivion. Wrote the actor “to the people of the United States”:
Prostrated to the very earth by this dreadful event. . . . this most foul and atrocious of crimes. . . . I shall struggle on, in my retirement, with a heavy heart, an oppressed memory and a wounded name . . . to my too welcome grave.25
Of all those close to Wilkes, none felt the pain more sharply than Mary Ann Booth. Her dark-eyed, dark-haired Johnny, a child of love and light, her favorite son, now a felon, an assassin, a hunted fugitive without a safe haven or tender hand—the widow’s heart bled a river of sorrow, her grief beyond measure. Added to the woman’s already unbearable agony were the hateful words aimed at her and her family.
“Could any person that would commit such a deed have any human blood in his veins?” ran a typical comment. “Was he born of woman or devil?”26
For Mary Ann Booth, only death could now stop the sorrow.
In Washington, another woman prayed for the deliverance of death.
As workmen sawed and hammered below, erecting the catafalque for her husband’s state funeral on April 19, above, Mary Lincoln suffered the tortures of the damned. Unstable in the best of times, the former first lady had now, noted a visitor, become totally “unhinged.”27 One moment she was hysterical and screaming, the next delirious and groaning. Those intrepid individuals who visited the woman all found her inconsolable.28
Elizabeth Blair Lee was one of many forced to hear the painful details:
She had her hand on his arm when he was shot[.] he never quivered—the flash of the pistol made her hold him tighter & when she first saw him after it—the “head had drooped upon his chest.” . . . She addresses him in sleep & in her delirium from raging fever in terms & tones of the tenderest affection—She constantly refers to his religious faith—but never to her own.29
When friends tried to steer Mary’s thoughts elsewhere, the attempts were only partially successful. Again and again, the woman would return to the last painful moments until she was once more wracked with sorrow.30 So intense and fatiguing were the sessions that those who sought to console the widow referred to their time spent as having “served together,” as if veterans of some ghastly conflict.31
“I shall return there again this evening & shall continue to go as long as I find I can stand it,” admitted Elizabeth Lee. “I feel great pity for her now—it is a terrible thing to fall from such a height to one of loneliness & poverty.”32
Deeply in debt, with no way now to repay it, thoughts of the future only added to Mary’s insanity. Placing her fingers in her ears that she might not hear the workmen below, the woman nevertheless could not escape the sounds.33
“[E]very plank that dropped gave her a spasm,” wrote a witness, “and every nail that was driven seemed to her like a pistol shot.”34
On Monday night, April 17, those transporting her husband’s body down to the catafalque for the ceremony on the following day kindly removed their shoes as they passed Mary’s room lest she hear and begin screaming.35
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE MID-WEEK SABBATH
AT NOON ON APRIL 19, the doors to the White House were closed, and the formal funeral for Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, began. Because of space limitations in the East Room, only a relatively small group of individuals could be accommodated. In the twenty-four hours preceding the official ceremony, however, an estimated thirty thousand citizens had passed the body while it lay in state.1 Few anticipated such numbers, or the mania of the people to gain a glimpse of the murdered president. The “rush & jam” to enter was so great, in fact, that guards were hard-pressed to hold the crowds back.2
Into this crush of all ages, sexes, and races, “we were obliged to force our way,” wrote Helen McCalla in her diary:
Ladies fainted near us, and children screamed, and a violent shower marred the scene, but we had to endure it, being—to say the truth—determined to enter the President’s House, after waiting for over two hours near the gate. . . . Upon entering, we marched in a slow, silent procession through the Reception Room, into the East Room, where the remains were lying in state, but we were not permitted to wait a moment near the corpse, so that it was impossible to obtain a satisfactory view.3
What little the viewers did see of the late American leader was generally agreeable and what many had hoped to see. Gone were the protruding eyes that nearly sprang from their sockets; also mercifully missing was the ghastly discoloration of the face. The president, noted Orville Browning, looked “as natural as life, and [as] if in a quiet sleep.”4
Most others, such as a correspondent for the New York World, also thought Lincoln lay as if resting. “The hue is rather bloodless and leaden; but he was always sallow,” the journalist noted. “The dark eyebrows seem abruptly arched. . . . The mouth is shut, like that of one who had put the foot down firm, and so are the eyes, which look as calm as slumber.”5
Unlike others who gazed upon the “sleeping” figure, the New York co
rrespondent spoke with embalmers and knew that the present image was but an illusion:
There is now no blood in the body; it was drained by the jugular vein and sacredly preserved, and through a cutting on the inside of the thigh the empty blood-vessels were charged with a chemical preparation which soon hardened to the consistency of stone. The long and bony body is now hard and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any more than the arms or legs of a statue. . . . The scalp has been removed, the brain scooped out, the chest opened and the blood emptied. All this we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble.6
At length, public viewing of the body was reportedly cut short when it became known that the continual shuffling of feet below had so crazed Mary Lincoln that she did not even recognize her little son, Tad.7 Nor was Mary present when the funeral services began at noon in the East Room. Although there were numerous flowers and floral arrangements, which gave the room a fresh smell, music was noticeably lacking. Additionally, the room was so heavily festooned with black material that to some the affair seemed oppressively somber.8 Among the political and military men attending—including the normally unkempt General Grant, now looking odd in his dress uniform—only the foreign dignitaries, resplendent in colorful, courtly costumes, disturbed a scene dominated by black.9
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