Free of the stage, he could now atone. Did he do so from a simple sense of duty? Or was it more complex—a sort of self-conscious performance with himself as star? These opposing viewpoints will be endlessly debated. One thing will not. John Wilkes Booth had reached a turning point. He would stop playing history. From now on he would make it.
7
....
Mischief, Thou Art Afoot
samuel b. arnold idled away the warm summer. Finding farm work monotonous, he intended to spend his time in pursuit of big-city pleasures. As the hard-living Arnold knew from personal experience, these were considerable in Baltimore. Starting his rounds one day after breakfast, he reached his father’s house about noon, where he found his brother William. A habitué of the Holliday Street Theatre, Willie had news. John Wilkes Booth was at the Barnum City Hotel and wished to see him.1
A dozen years had passed since Arnold and Booth were classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. The two had not seen each other in all that time. Arnold remembered Booth well, however. Like his classmates, he had witnessed his old school chum’s rise to stardom. So it was with a light step that he made his way that day in early August 1864 to the Barnum. Arnold had not “the remotest idea of the result which would follow the visit,” he recalled in a memoir published in 1902. “I merely called upon him as a companion and friend of my boyhood.”
Booth received him warmly. The pair sat at a table, the actor calling for cigars and wine. Smoking and drinking, they talked of old times and of the less happy days of the present. Booth remarked that he had heard Arnold had been in the Confederate army.
As Booth spoke, Arnold could scarcely believe the transformation that had taken place in his friend. “Instead of gazing upon the countenance of the mild and timid schoolmate of former years, I beheld a deep thinking man of the world before me, with highly distinguishing marks of beauty, intelligence, and gentlemanly refinement, different from the common order of man and one possessing an uninterrupted flow of conversational power.”
What Arnold had become over the years was not as apparent. Taller than the actor and well built, with dark brown hair and gray eyes, Arnold had a frank, open face. He gave the impression of being “a good man in a knock-down, quite a fighting man,” thought a Baltimore acquaintance. Not so evident were the psychological scars that Arnold bore. He had enlisted with the rebels in May 1861, serving until discharged for ill health that fall. After a convalescence at home, he returned south in 1862, met up with an older brother who was a Confederate captain, and served the Southern war effort as a civilian clerk until returning to Maryland a final time in February 1864, to attend to his seriously ill mother. During his absence, the war had changed many attitudes in the state, and the proud ex-soldier was mortified by the coldness and hostility with which former friends received him. He resented their behavior bitterly. Now at loose ends as an occasional farmhand, Arnold was a troubled veteran in need of friendship.2 Booth’s kindness and gracious manners infatuated him completely.
There was a knock at the hotel-room door, and Michael O’Laughlen was admitted. O’Laughlen was Booth’s close friend and confidant, whose acquaintance, going back to childhood days on North Exeter Street, antedated even Arnold’s. A former Confederate soldier who had returned home when ill in 1862, he was twenty-four (Booth was now twenty-six, Arnold twenty-nine). With black hair, mustache, and imperial, O’Laughlen possessed “a warm, friendly disposition and a fine comprehensive intellect,” wrote a friend. Genteel in appearance, he did not have the look of a doer of daring deeds, but he was pluckish and smart, a keen observer, and talented with his hands. Although he and Arnold were both Baltimoreans and had served together in the 1st Maryland Volunteer Infantry, CSA, a regiment engaged at Bull Run in 1861, they were strangers to each other.3 Booth introduced the two, and O’Laughlen joined the festivities.
“We drank and freely conversed together about the war,” Arnold recalled, “the present condition of the South and the non-exchange of prisoners.” It was common practice to exchange captured soldiers in the early years of the war. The practice gave a boost to Southern manpower, however, and rebel abuse of the system led the federal government to limit it in the autumn of 1863. On April 17, 1864, General U. S. Grant declared a formal stop to exchanges except in certain hardship cases, and he reaffirmed the policy on August 18, stating that it fed men to the Confederate army and prolonged the war. U.S. military prisons, stretching from Camp Douglas at Chicago to Fort Pickens, Florida, bulged with nearly sixty-six thousand rebel prisoners, a number nearly as large as the size of the Confederacy’s principal fighting force, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Southern need for these men was critical. During the summer Lee was desperate enough to authorize an attack on Point Lookout Prison, a camp in southern Maryland where nearly fifteen thousand rebel soldiers were held.4 If exchanges could only be revived, Arnold reasoned, “it would strengthen the force of the Confederate army and be the means of filling up to some extent their depleted ranks.”
Arnold had no idea of Booth’s views on the war when he entered the actor’s room, but he was rapidly enlightened. “For the success of the Southern cause every pulsation of his heart throbbed,” wrote Arnold years later. Booth was Southern to the core, and that went to the point of their reunion. He had an extraordinary proposal to make—“to undertake the abduction of Abraham Lincoln, convey him to Richmond, turn him over to the Confederate States government, to be held as a hostage for the exchange of prisoners.” Booth felt it was perfectly honorable to the South “to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much of misery.”5
It is impossible to determine how Booth got this idea. Clearly it was not unique to him. Confederate General Bradley T. Johnson made plans to abduct Lincoln in June of the same year as part of operations in the Washington area. His effort was capsized by larger military events. It has never been shown that Booth knew anything of Johnson’s plan.6 Booth’s idea may perhaps be traced back to wild talk by Southern hotheads during the secession winter of 1860–61 that President James Buchanan “was to be kidnapped and made off with [to] throw the country into confusion and revolution, defeating the inauguration of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans.”7
The notion of abducting Buchanan antedates even that, however, and involves a figure of great personal significance to Booth. Hugh Forbes, an associate of John Brown, speculated on the éclat that would have been produced if Brown and his crew “made in the night a descent on the White House and carried off the President to parts unknown before the marines could have had time to open their eyes.”8 Forbes’s statement was reported widely in the New York Times and elsewhere. One wonders if Booth, fascinated by Brown and details of his quixotic raid, knew of the idea. George A. Townsend, Booth’s biographer, seldom failed to mention the inspiration the actor took from Brown. Suffice it to say that no one needed to suggest an abduction plot to Booth or recruit him for it. Such an idea, in the air as it were, might occur naturally to an individual with what Arnold termed Booth’s “visionary mind.” Added Arnold: “He alone was the moving spirit.”
Arnold does not share his immediate reaction to Booth’s proposal, but John H. Surratt Jr., who would join the abduction team in December, did. “I was amazed—thunderstruck—and in fact I might also say frightened at the unparalleled audacity of this scheme,” he recalled in an 1870 lecture. Nevertheless, “I was led on,” Surratt continued, “by a sincere desire to assist the South in gaining her independence.” The goal of independence resonated deeply among some Marylanders. When Surratt informed a sympathetic postwar audience in Rockville, Maryland, that he agreed to help Booth because he “had no hesitation in taking part in anything honorable that might tend towards the accomplishment of that object,” he was greeted with tremendous applause from his listeners.9 Arnold wrote similarly that “patriotism was the motive that prompted me in joining the scheme, not profit.” He felt “the contemplated design within itself was purely humane and patriotic
in its principles” if it would liberate prisoners, shorten the war, or advance the Southern cause. Lincoln, the federal commander in chief, was a legitimate military target, after all. As a reasonably neutral observer, the theater impresario John T. Ford, later put it, the plan could be seen as a fair stroke in war.10
Booth explained to Arnold and O’Laughlen that the president was known to visit wounded soldiers at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital across the Eastern Branch (or Anacostia) River in Washington. Lincoln was often accompanied only by his carriage driver. And the president was exposed even more frequently on trips to the Soldiers’ Home, a government facility for invalid and disabled soldiers three miles north of the city. A Gothic cottage there, located on a hilltop, provided an escape from the heat, humidity, and crowds of the city and served as a presidential retreat. Lincoln and his family spent a considerable amount of time at the cottage each summer and fall. The president commuted to the White House by carriage or horseback in the morning and returned late in the day. Lincoln’s route along Seventh Street Road, leading from Washington to the Soldiers’ Home, took him through relatively secluded farm country, often in the dim twilight.11 On one of these trips, Booth said excitedly, the three young Southerners could pounce on him, “take him, coachman and all, drive through the lower counties of Maryland, place him in a boat, cross the Potomac to Virginia, and thence convey him to Richmond.”12
The trio discussed the idea through most of the afternoon, debating bridges to cross and measures to foil pursuit. They drank as they talked. Predictably, the more they drank, the more promising the scheme appeared. Arnold would claim in later years that he drank too much to consider the matter properly. He gave statements in 1865, 1867, and 1902 on his plotting with Booth. He mentioned the drinking in all three, but only in one did he bring up another highly pertinent topic. What if Lincoln resisted? What if he attempted to flee? What if he were injured, wounded, or even killed in a melee? Joseph W. Taylor, a Confederate officer, had presented a Lincoln abduction plan to Jefferson Davis in 1862. Davis listened but rejected the proposal. He explained that if physical harm befell Lincoln, the reaction in the North and overseas would be counterproductive to Southern interests.13 In Arnold’s 1902 recollections he wrote, “There was no violence contemplated in the execution of the design other than the seizure. Violence would have been in flat contradiction to [Booth’s] avowed purpose and the object to be attained.” Arnold was a battered old man when he wrote these sentences and may be suspected of seeking some measure of exoneration with an insincere afterthought. Subsequent events make clear, however, this was truly how Arnold and even Booth saw the project at this time. If they struck a blow both sufficiently daring and unexpected, Davis’s concerns would never arise.
Booth returned repeatedly in his conversation to the ease with which the abduction could be accomplished. In doing so the actor displayed from the outset a failure to appreciate the time, expense, and frustrations that would invariably beset any such undertaking. For one thing, Lincoln was not as accessible as Booth imagined. The president did travel occasionally without a military escort, but these were spur-of-the-moment occasions offering no opportunity for an orchestrated ambush. Lincoln was far more likely to be heavily guarded. The poet Walt Whitman saw the presidential entourage passing to and fro and observed that Lincoln was always accompanied closely by “twenty-five or thirty cavalry, with sabres drawn and held upright over their shoulders.”14 Waiting to receive Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home was an entire infantry company detailed as guard. Such security seemed oppressive to Lincoln. “I do not myself see the necessity of having soldiers traipsing around after me wherever I go,” he said, “but [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton, who knows a great deal more about such things than I do, seems to think it necessary, and he may be right.”15 As the fighting front moved farther away from Washington in 1864, Lincoln managed to evade his escort from time to time. Then, about a week after Booth’s meeting with Arnold and O’Laughlen, an unknown assailant shot the silk hat off the president’s head one night as Lincoln, riding alone, turned his horse from the Seventh Street Road toward the Soldiers’ Home. The incident was hushed up, but “after that the President never rode alone,” recalled John W. Nichols, one of the Lincoln bodyguards.16
If Booth knew any of these details, his enthusiasm seemed a match for them, and his sincerity showed when he told the men that he would bankroll the abduction effort personally. “He showed me the different entries in his diary of what his engagements paid him in his profession,” Arnold wrote, “and I judged from what I have heard his income therefrom to be from $25,000 to $30,000.” If money was in supply, however, time was not. The abduction had to be undertaken before the presidential election of November 8 returned Lincoln, an implacable foe of Southern independence, to a second term in the White House. “The enterprise being deemed feasible and productive of good, we jointly entered into the plan as an act of honorable purpose, humanity and patriotism,” wrote Arnold. Booth, Arnold, and O’Laughlen took “an oath of secrecy and good faith,” binding themselves “not to divulge [their plan] to a living soul.”
It was late when the meeting broke up. Booth informed his friends that he would go north to wind up his business and personal affairs. They should hold themselves ready. He would return to Baltimore in one month to set the plan in motion.
Some weeks later Arnold was threshing wheat in a neighbor’s field when he was handed a letter from Booth. Inside was twenty dollars, leading Arnold to remark that he was now “flush.” With some pride Arnold showed Booth’s letter to Littleton Newman, a coworker, who read several lines and failed to grasp their meaning.
“I handed it back to him and asked him what it meant,” Newman said.
Arnold replied enigmatically that “something big would take place one of these days.”17
shortly after his return to Edwin’s house in New York, John fell ill with erysipelas, a streptococcal infection, in the right elbow. The course of the disease is sudden fever, powerful chills, and a spreading zone of swollen, burning hot, and tender skin that appears brilliantly red. Edema follows, along with weakness, headaches, loss of appetite, and restlessness. In the nineteenth century the disease could be highly dangerous.
John fainted from the pain of the attack. June picked him up and carried him to bed. Asia, there on a visit from Philadelphia, was struck by how pallid her prostrate brother looked. She recalled that “as he lay there in his shirt-sleeves so pale and death-like, we all felt how wondrously beautiful he was.” As a premonition of John’s death, which none of the family was to witness, “we were to ponder it all our lives.”18
Physicians of the day divided erysipelas into two categories. Simple erysipelas produced fever, slight acceleration of pulse, and reddened swelling. It was treated by bleeding, purging the bowels, and applying cold or evaporating lotions to the affected area. Phlegmonous erysipelas was more serious, causing high fever, nausea, vomiting, and an acutely painful zone of swelling. If the condition grew grave, gangrene and symptoms familiar in cases of typhoid fever might appear and the patient sink into an often-fatal coma. An aggressive treatment of bleeding, active cathartics, dressings of the diseased area with nitrate of silver, blistering of the surrounding tissues, and opiates to rest the sufferer was undertaken. In extreme cases amputation of the affected limb might be necessary as a lifesaving measure.19
Booth appears to have had the more serious stage of the disease. He suffered the intense pain characteristic of phlegmonous erysipelas and displayed suppuration, “the burrowing of pus among the muscles [below the skin].” It was advisable in such cases to cut the skin and draw the pus out. On or about August 28, 1864, a Dr. Smith called on Booth and “cut in my arm about two inches long,” the actor wrote Isabel Sumner. “I am sure I will be in bed all day tomorrow.”20 In healthy young men of Booth’s age—for example, soldiers infected during the trauma of gunshot wounds—the disease lasted on average from nine to eleven days. June noted in his diary that John was ill
for three weeks, another indication of the severity of the attack.21
John’s extended convalescence permitted him to discuss the war in detail with his eldest brother. Devotedly neutral, June implored John to stay clear of the trouble and let events take their course. “He would listen,” the older brother wrote, “but would not change his ideas.”22 Nevertheless, because June heard him out respectfully, the younger brother was touched by his fraternal interest.
With Edwin it was a different story. That brother, long exasperated with John’s politics, laughed in his face whenever the younger brother frothed up on politics. Little could have been more hurtful to John, who craved Edwin’s respect. Edwin, a Unionist, declared, “If each wish of mine could lead an army, the C. S. of A. would swing as high as Haman.” Unsurprisingly, political disagreements with John finally grew violent.23 An explosive argument occurred between them toward the end of August 1864. “There were stormy words between the two brothers,” Asia noted, “the first, and, I believe, the last unkind ones that ever passed between them.”24 It commenced at breakfast one morning, was briefly adjourned, then renewed with a fury a short time later.25 Incensed, Edwin ordered him out of the house. Finally back on his feet from the illness, John left in a rage.
This “severe family quarrel,” as Junius characterized it, became a watershed moment in John’s life. Most writers point out political differences between the brothers, but few have paid proper attention to the consequences of this single transformative encounter. In a statement given to federal authorities in 1865, June said John later told him that as a result of this quarrel, he decided to leave the North. He would ship his theatrical wardrobe south and play there in the future. He even intended to dispose of all of his property, “for he did not mean to take anything he made in the North” with him. In this way he could wash his hands of the time he had spent there. He would go south and, as June phrased it portentously, “commence the world anew.”
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 24
