Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  This benefit and two others in 1865 for friends constituted the final stage appearances of John Wilkes Booth. His career was truly ending. He refused new engagements, turning away McVicker in Chicago and others. His thoughts were elsewhere.

  He left indelible memories behind, thought Charles Pike Sawyer, a veteran journalist who sat down during the hot Manhattan summer of 1930 to peck out on a rusty old typewriter “Sixty Years and More of Shakespeare,” his recollections of the New York stage.92 Sawyer had been in the audience for Julius Caesar that night. Now, wrapping up his career as the dramatic critic and music editor of the Evening Post, he found his memory of Booth’s Mark Antony ineffaceable. “His fine pose and manly figure with that unruly shock of black hair surmounting a finely cut face stamped him the great Roman. His piercing eyes still flash as he urges the mob on to fury.”

  Applying one of Antony’s lines to Booth’s own future, Sawyer concluded, “In the end it is a veritable demi-god who closes the scene with,

  ‘Mischief, thou art afoot.

  ‘Take thou what course thou wilt.’ ”

  8

  ....

  The Fiery Furnace

  booth took out a sheet of fine embossed paper. “Dearest Beloved Mother,” he wrote. It was time at last to retract his promise to Mary Ann to stay clear of the war, yet he was struggling as he always did when he took pen to hand. The proper words would not come. Characteristically, he included a line of apology to her for his inarticulateness.

  “I have always endeavored to be a good and dutiful son, and even now would wish to die sooner than give you pain,” he stated. “But, dearest Mother, though I owe you all, there is another duty, a noble duty, for the sake of liberty and humanity due to my country. For you alone have I struggled to fight this desire to be gone, but it seems that uncontrollable fate, moving me for its ends, takes me from you, dear Mother, to do what work I can for a poor, oppressed, downtrodden people. I cannot longer resist the inclination to go and share the sufferings of my brave countrymen, holding an unequal strife (for every right human and divine) against the most ruthless enemy the world has ever known.

  “You can answer for me, dearest Mother (although none of you think with me) that I have not a single selfish motive to spur me on to this. Nothing save the sacred duty I feel I owe the cause I love, the cause of the South, the cause of liberty and justice. So should I meet the worst, dear Mother, in struggling for such holy rights, I can say, “God’s will be done,” and bless him in my heart for not permitting me to outlive our dear bought freedom and for keeping me from being longer a hidden lie among my country’s foes.

  “Should the last bolt strike your son, dear Mother, bear it patiently and think that at the best life is short and not at all times happy. My Brothers and Sisters (Heaven protect them) will add my love and duty to their own, and watch you with care and kindness, till we meet again. And if that happiness does not come to us on earth, then may, O may it be with God. So then, dearest, dearest Mother, forgive and pray for me.”1

  Lacking the heart, and perhaps the courage, to deliver the letter, Booth folded it twice, sealed it inside an envelope addressed to Mary Ann, and put it among personal papers he kept in a safe in Asia’s Philadelphia home.2

  By Sunday, December 18, 1864, Booth was back in Charles County, Maryland, riding the countryside with young Billy Queen and swapping spurs with him as a token of friendship.3 The actor had been busy. While in the North Booth purchased arms for the plot. These included two of the impressive seven-shot Spencer carbines, three pistols, ammunition, knives, canteens, and two sets of handcuffs. Since this weighty arsenal might draw attention in transit, Booth left most of it with Arnold and O’Laughlen in Baltimore to bring into Washington discreetly.4

  Booth attended church with the Queens and met again with Samuel Mudd. After Mass the two went over to the hotel in Bryantown, where Mudd found a tall, well-built man with gray-brown eyes and florid complexion. This was Thomas Harbin, a former village postmaster. Mudd introduced Harbin to Booth and informed him that they wished to have a word. The trio headed upstairs to a private room.5

  Quiet and mild-mannered, the curly-headed Harbin looked innocuous, as any good secret agent should, but looks were deceiving. Harbin was the Confederacy’s principal spy in lower Maryland. He was the linchpin in a broad network of official and unofficial rebels on both sides of the Potomac. Such was the confidence placed in him that he carried messages into enemy lines for Jefferson Davis himself. Delivering a set of recent dispatches, Harbin had been surprised and surrounded in Bryantown by two dozen Union cavalrymen. Pistols blazing, “Bold Tom” shot his way through them and outran the lot.6 Here was no mimic hero. Here was the real thing. It would be of immeasurable assistance to secure the cooperation of a man like Harbin. He knew all the little tricks of the dangerous game Booth wished to play.

  “Hush,” the actor whispered to Harbin as he motioned him along the hallway. “Silence.”

  What melodrama! thought the veteran agent as he watched Booth pace about nervously to examine the hall and exits.

  “Mr. Booth has engaged me,” declared Mudd, getting down to business. “We want you to join!”

  Booth then outlined the abduction scheme to Harbin. As he spoke, Harbin realized the stranger was a serious person. “He knew Lincoln well, and described him to me,” Harbin recalled. “He hated him.” Booth explained that he and his associates planned to seize Lincoln. They intended to take him over the Potomac the same night, thwarting all effective pursuit. Harbin was not needed for the capture. But would he meet them on the road and keep the party moving south?7

  Harbin was an exceptionally private individual, according to his friends. He would later be so alarmed at his possible liability for the death of Lincoln that it was said he fled to Europe to escape the aftermath. It was not until a few months before his death in 1885 that he consented to an interview with George Alfred Townsend. “Harbin was a cool man who had seen many liars and rogues go to and fro in that illegal border [region],” Townsend wrote, and he was rightly wary of the exotic Booth. It was clear that the actor drank too much. He was “possibly crazy” as well. But Harbin was a Southerner. When Townsend spoke to the ex-spy at his home twenty years after the war, he noticed hanging on Harbin’s wall something one rarely saw. It was an engraving of Jefferson Davis taking the inaugural oath as president of the Confederate States of America.

  Harbin pledged his cooperation.

  While this was happy news, Mudd had begun to share Harbin’s reservations about Booth, and these were reinforced that evening when their new friend, unannounced and uninvited, showed up at Mudd’s door. The doctor had mentioned there might be some good horses for sale in the neighborhood, and Booth came to investigate.8 He arrived quite late. Dinner was already over and the house crowded with guests. Nevertheless, it would have been poor manners to turn Booth, standing in his overcoat, back into the winter darkness, so Mudd yielded to the conventions of hospitality and invited Booth to stay overnight. The actor joined the family banter until bedtime was called at about 9:30.9

  “Pushy,” thought Mudd, who felt imposed upon by this incident. His wife, Frances, also grew unhappy with “the handsome face” when she discovered a letter in a woman’s hand that Booth inadvertently left behind the following day. She found its contents unflattering to the actor’s moral character.

  After breakfast on Monday, December 19, 1864, Booth and Mudd called on George Gardiner, who lived on the adjoining farm. Booth told Gardiner that he wanted to buy a buggy horse. Gardiner recommended one of two mares. Declining the suggestion, Booth selected a large brown saddle horse, rather old and blind in the right eye but “a very fine mover,” thought Mudd. Booth paid eighty dollars for the horse, and Gardiner’s nephew Thomas agreed to deliver it to him at the Bryantown stable the next morning.10

  Peter Trotter was pounding a bar of glowing iron thirty years later when a correspondent for the Philadelphia Press sought a word with the blacksmith on the to
pic of Booth’s visit to Bryantown.

  “Yes, I shod Booth’s horse for him,” said Trotter. “He stood around while I was at work. He was a dark, handsome man. I’ll bet he was a great one with the women.” The actor had little to say to Trotter, a Scottish immigrant, although he did manage some charm for the locals who soon collected around him in Trotter’s shop. By the time he purchased a saddle for the brown horse from Henry A. Turner, a clerk in the village store, he had fallen quiet again.11

  Mudd performed another service for the abduction plot on December 23 in Washington. He agreed to introduce Booth to John H. Surratt, a Confederate courier. The two set out up Seventh Street toward the Surratt home. It was a delightful night for a stroll. The weather was pleasant, and the shop windows along their way were gaily decorated for the holiday season. Booth and Mudd had not gone far, however, when they chanced upon Surratt and his college friend Louis Weichmann walking past them on the sidewalk. Introductions were made, and at Booth’s suggestion the quartet headed for Booth’s room at the National Hotel, Surratt and Mudd arm in arm, Booth and Weichmann trailing.12

  At the hotel Booth pulled a call bell, ordered refreshments, and bade his guests make themselves comfortable. Room number 84 was large and well kept, with a center table and chairs, writing desk, and settee. Senator Morton S. Wilkinson of Minnesota had recently occupied it. The senator, a member of the Manufactures Committee, had left a pile of published government reports and pamphlets on a shelf. Booth picked up several of these. “Congressional documents!” he laughed. “What a good read I shall have when I am left to myself!”

  Cigars and wine arrived, along with milk punch, a concoction of brandy and milk flavored with sugar and nutmeg. Brandy was always Booth’s drink of choice.

  After some socializing, Mudd rose and went out the door into a dim passageway, calling Booth after him. In a few moments they returned to ask Surratt to join them. Several more minutes passed before the three returned. Mudd apologized to Weichmann for leaving him alone, explaining that he and Booth were dickering over the price of Mudd’s farm, which the actor wished to purchase.

  Booth, Mudd, and Surratt gathered at the center table. Booth pulled an envelope and pencil from his pocket and drew a series of lines, probably roads in southern Maryland leading to the river. A conversation ensued. Weichmann, on the settee by the window, understood their talk was private and made no attempt to overhear it. He merely noticed that as Booth drew, Mudd and Surratt looked on intently.

  Mudd was expecting friends from Baltimore, so the party adjourned to his hotel, the Pennsylvania House, several blocks away. Weichmann, a government clerk, was dressed in the blue uniform of the War Department Rifles, a regiment organized from among the employees of the different bureaus for the defense of Washington. When Mudd joined him on a couch to chat about current events, a revealing game began. Mudd, the embittered ex-slave-owner, spoke like a Union man, remembered Weichmann, while the doctor thought the clerk sounded more like a Southerner than he did.13

  The men were disguising themselves from each other, but these were uncertain times. Whom could one trust? Mudd still had his doubts about Booth, and he whispered a warning to Surratt.

  There seemed little concern there, however. Sitting together before a blazing fire, Booth and Surratt were having a merry time. The actor—handsome, faultlessly dressed, and “a man of the world and a gentleman,” thought Weichmann—retrieved letters and photographs from his pocket and, sharing them with his companion, regaled him with stories. Surratt, tossing his head in the air, replied with laughter. “Very lively there,” observed Weichmann jealously. Booth was the first to depart, but not before arranging to see Surratt again.

  Six feet tall, with a goatee and light brown hair, John Surratt had a face distinguished by a prominent forehead and sharp aquiline nose. His piercing, rather sunken gray eyes bespoke a certain cunning.14 He was well educated, having attended St. Charles College west of Baltimore, a Catholic institution preparing students for seminary and the priesthood.15 Lacking the call for that vocation, Surratt left school in the summer of 1862 at about the time of his father’s death in order to help his mother, Mary, operate the family tavern and farm in Prince George’s County. Their red-colored frame house, which also served as the neighborhood post office, sat on the road from Washington to Bryantown. Booth passed by it on his trips to see Mudd and the Queens.

  “I was a red-hot rebel and dearly loved my native state,” Surratt recalled in an 1898 interview in the Washington Post. These opinions led to his dismissal from the postmastership he inherited from his father. He passed time hauling the farm’s produce for sale in Washington, but an inevitable process occurred. The family tavern, sitting on the smuggler’s highway to Richmond, was a way station for the illegal and the disloyal. Surratt found himself delivering rebel mail, handling contraband goods, and ferrying people across the Potomac. When Weichmann saw his formerly boyish-looking friend for the first time after half a year of this roving life, he was surprised at the brusque air and bronzed appearance of the ex-classmate.

  Surratt, when engaged on these clandestine missions, avoided anything that appeared furtive.16 He dressed as an ordinary business traveler, rode the trains, and dined in the hotels. He hid dispatches in his boot heels or between buggy planks. Surratt carried one set of messages to agents in Canada concealed inside a copy of James Redpath’s biography of John Brown. The book was an excellent hiding place. No self-respecting rebel would be thought capable of touching Redpath’s abolitionist eulogy. Passing time in traveling, Surratt opened the book and started reading. As he later told a friendly audience to uproarious laughter, “I learned, to my utter amazement, that John Brown was a martyr sitting at the right hand of God.”17

  The greatest danger the twenty-year-old faced in all this work was getting over the Potomac. Since the river was heavily patrolled, Surratt preferred to make the attempt on dark or rainy nights. As a precaution against capture by prowling federal gunboats, he weighted secret messages and towed them in the water astern his boat so that, if overhauled, he could sink the dispatches quickly.

  “It was a fascinating life to me,” he said in 1870. “It seemed as if I could not do too much or run too great a risk.” He was never apprehended, and his self-confidence grew. “Never in my life did I come across a more stupid set of detectives than those generally employed by the U.S. Government.”

  Anxious over her son’s perilous life, Mary Surratt leased out the tavern and moved the family to a home on H Street NW in Washington. The country place provided a bare living, and, burdened by her late husband’s debts, she felt the opportunities for herself, John, and her daughter, Anna, would be superior in the city.18 At least a change of residence would remove her son from the disordered countryside. The Surratt town house opened for boarders, Weichmann moved in, and John sought employment with the Adams Express Company, a business that shipped boxes and packages to soldiers at the front.19

  Surratt estimated that in all his derring-do he had been shot at a score of times by cannon and rifle. He had always been lucky—until now. Earlier in the week Booth, returning to Washington from Bryantown on the one-eyed horse, had taken a wrong turn and rode miles out of his way, arriving in the city exhausted. He simply did not know this area well enough to use it as an escape route for a captured Lincoln. On the other hand, Surratt boasted that he knew “every cross road, bypath, and hiding place in Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland.” Added to that, he was an expert rider and marksman, he was unmarried, and he had a home in the city. Booth intended to have this young daredevil.

  A series of meetings between the two men followed.20 These were highly vexatious. Booth attempted to draw information from Surratt without revealing his purpose. Surratt determined to give nothing away until he understood what Booth really wanted. Surratt still feared that he might be a spy. To Booth, at this point, Surratt was only a friend of Harbin’s who was a friend of Mudd’s who was a friend of Thompson’s who was a friend of Quee
n’s who was a friend of Martin’s who was a friend of Kane’s.

  Exasperated, Surratt finally exclaimed, “You know well I am a Southern man. If you cannot trust me, we will separate.”

  His hand called, Booth could delay no longer. He spoke of the suffering of Southern soldiers in Northern prisons and of the critical need of the South for these men. He had an undertaking at hand that would lead to their exchange. These words were followed by a long and, it seemed to Surratt, an ominous pause.

  “Well, sir, what is your proposition?” demanded Surratt, breaking the silence.

  Booth rose and looked under the bed, inside the wardrobe, out the door, and down the passage. “We have to be careful. Walls have ears.” Drawing his chair close to Surratt, he whispered, “It is to kidnap President Lincoln and carry him off to Richmond.”

  “Kidnap President Lincoln?” Surratt shot back. He laughed nervously. “It is not feasible, and in the second place you do not realize the danger.”

  “I don’t consider that for a moment,” Booth countered. The actor then launched into a detailed exposition of his plot. Surratt listened, increasingly impressed by the planning Booth had done. He had thought the scheme through, from the topic of Lincoln’s movements in the city down to the roles individual conspirators would play. And, just as he had with Sam Arnold, the actor stressed the relative ease with which the abduction could be accomplished.

  When Booth finished his presentation, Surratt could see it might be doable, but “I confess I stood aghast at the proposition.” He told Booth, “Inside of an hour, or, at the most, two hours, from the time we get possession of Mr. Lincoln’s person the entire country will be in a furore.”

  Surratt thought the matter over for several days. He had the same reservations as Harbin. The courier wrote, “I looked upon Booth from the start as a hot-headed, visionary man,” sincere in wanting to aid the South but of unsettled mind. Nevertheless, the war was at a crisis point. Something momentous had to be done. Maybe Booth’s scheme was practical. It also seemed honorable. “Where is there a young man in the North with one spark of patriotism in his heart who would not have with enthusiastic ardor joined in any undertaking for the capture of Jefferson Davis and brought him to Washington?” Surratt asked in a public lecture in 1870.