“I met Wilkes Booth in Montreal,” Gordon wrote, “and as he sympathized with the South in her struggle, we became intimate friends on a brief acquaintance.”45 Gordon was developing a plot to abduct Lincoln and hold him as a hostage to force peace talks. Booth had taken the overnight train up from New York to discuss the matter with Gordon and receive his benediction to pursue the project. Assassination was not discussed. The men parted with kind words and hearty handshakes, Gordon later acknowledging that he failed to see the desperate and revengeful spirit raging in his new associate.46 Their meeting would weigh on the consciences of those involved. Jacob Thompson told a confidential friend in postwar years “that he would be sorry to the day of his death that he ever had anything to do with the kidnapping plot, as he felt that possibly had it not been for such a thing, the assassination might not have occurred.”47
Booth traveled on to Boston and was there on April 5, 1865. “He was in a most unsettled frame of mind,” wrote his actor-friend McKee Rankin, who spoke with him at the Parker House.48 As the city celebrated the capture of Richmond two days earlier, Booth expended his energy in a basement shooting gallery near the hotel. He fired over his shoulder and under his arm, then capped the performance with an amazing throw shot between his legs. It hit the target dead center. Moody and misanthropic, Booth declared that he hoped to put his skills at the service of the faltering Confederacy.49 His fellow marksman Joseph H. Borland, a commercial traveler from Pittsburgh, had Southern sympathies of his own, and Booth confessed to him a hatred of Lincoln so intense that Borland said it had the feeling of insanity.50
The actor made two additional stops in Boston. Calling at Orlando Tompkins’s drugstore, Booth presented Lody (as he called him) with a bloodstone ring and a request that he wear it in remembrance of their friendship.51 “I may never see you again,” he told the druggist. It sounded like a farewell, as did a stop at the Boston Theatre, where Edwin was engaged.
“Well, Jim,” Booth said to Jim Brown as the young man sat with Edwin in his dressing room, “Richmond has fallen at last. What do you think of it?”
“Yes, poor Richmond,” replied Brown, who grew up in the city and had family there.
“[Are you] sorry, you rascal?” Edwin broke in. “You ought to be glad. It has been a great blessing to mankind that it has fallen.”52
Politics again. “You and I could never agree upon this question,” John said, his last words to his brother. “Goodbye, Ned.”53
One could not reason with Edwin, John complained to Chester over ale and Welsh rabbit at the House of Lords in New York. Booth was talking loudly, drinking heavily, and telling stories about his brother. He mentioned their terrible fight the previous summer when Edwin threw him out of the house for expressing his opinions. Months had passed, but that still rankled. How pathetic to be unable “to express my thoughts or sentiments even in my own home.”54 It was on this occasion that Booth also mentioned to Chester the opportunity he had had to kill the president on inauguration day.
Chester changed the topic to a ring that Booth kept kissing. Sam pried out the fact that Booth was engaged to be married, and he even learned Lucy Hale’s name. Since Booth had a reputation as a professional bachelor, Chester laughed at the thought—“I presumed that was another of his crazy ideas”—but Booth assured Sam that this was serious. Information about the engagement is conflicting. The final report from Boston said that John and Lucy broke up over his political extremism. This explained why Lucy was leaving her purported fiancé behind as she departed for Spain with her family. Their sailing date was announced as May 10, John’s twenty-seventh birthday.55 While this sounds like a breakup, Booth’s family believed otherwise. Asia understood that Lucy intended to return after one year and marry him, and she added that Edwin later received heartbreaking letters from Lucy expressing her devotion to John.56
Chester was ready for this peculiar outing to end. The tab was called for, and Chester offered to split the bill. Booth would not hear of it. “Petroleum pays for this,” he boasted.
booth checked back into the National Hotel on April 8. In the parlor of the Surratt house he reacted excitedly to Weichmann’s jibe that the fall of Richmond meant the end of the Confederacy. “No, it is not gone up yet,” he argued. Taking out a map, Booth showed Weichmann the routes by which Lee and General Joseph Johnston, commander of a rebel army in North Carolina, could get to the mountains and continue the fight.57
Nevertheless, prospects were bleak, and Booth wept over the South’s reverses. Asked to take a drink by a friend, the actor readily agreed. “Anything to drive away the blues,” he said.58 His increased drinking, irritability, fatigue, restlessness, bouts of silence, and mood swings were classic signs of depression. So was his difficulty concentrating, shown when he asked Henry Merrick, a clerk at his hotel, whether the year was 1864 or 1865. The question was so absurd that Merrick thought Booth was joking.59 Booth also experienced sleep disturbances. One night McCullough was awakened by tears falling from the eyes of someone standing over him. It was Booth. “Why, what is the matter?” McCullough exclaimed. “My God,” Booth responded in a pathetic tone, “my God, how peacefully you were sleeping. I cannot sleep.”60
While Booth tended his torments, a “Mr. Kincheloe” passed the hours in a third-story room at the Herndon House near Ford’s Theatre. Surratt had arranged lodgings for this individual, whom he described to the landlady as a delicate gentleman whose uncertain health required that his meals be delivered to his room. The odd thing was that the purportedly enfeebled guest fell on his food like a hungry wolf. The waiter who brought the meals thought the man could have easily eaten a small pig, bones and all. The invalid, if he may be so described, was Lewis Powell, back from New York, and the delicacy of his situation was legal, not physical. Liable for arrest on a laundry list of charges, the young man sat and awaited his next misadventure with Booth.61
It was quick in coming. Powell was the only conspirator whose hatred of Lincoln approached his own, so Booth urged the hotheaded Southerner to murder the president. While later a prisoner, Powell informed Thomas T. Eckert, acting assistant secretary of war, that one night he armed himself for that purpose and hid in the shrubs along the brick walkway between the White House and the War Department. Seeing Lincoln approach in company, he fled. Booth suggested the direct approach. Send in a card requesting a moment of the president’s time, and when admitted, slay him on the spot. When Powell spurned the idea, the actor berated the combat veteran as a coward.62
The laurels of Brutus were costly, and there were moments when Booth seemed willing to let others earn them. Robert E. Farrell was a teenager from Canada who shared Booth’s love of horses. He fought on both sides during the war and was—like Powell—an alumnus of the fierce Mosby school of partisan warfare. Whether his presence in Washington was coincidental or part of some operation has never been determined. Farrell was to shoot Lincoln as the president rode by in a carriage. The young man proved capable of murder, as his later life showed, but he lost this opportunity when the president did not appear as expected.63 Farrell’s association with Booth escaped notice, but it explains an intriguing remark Powell made to Eckert. The young Floridian steadfastly refused to implicate others in his misfortune, saying of the federal dragnet only, “All I can say about that is that you have not got the one-half of them.”
if booth actually did read Plutarch, he might have remembered the ancient author’s admonition that the success of any great enterprise requires one indispensable ingredient—time. By April 1865, the clock had run out for the South. Richmond was taken, and Lee, pressed at every turn by Grant, fled west. Lincoln, who had been visiting with the army for the better part of two weeks, entered the shattered Southern capital on April 4. “This must be President Davis’ chair,” he said, sitting down at the desk of the fugitive Confederate chief executive.64 He returned to Washington by steamer on April 9 and during the night learned the news of Lee’s surrender. The following morning church bells rang
, and cannon at the forts encircling the city spread the word that the end was at hand. “The streets were in jubilee over the glorious news,” wrote Secretary Seward’s daughter Fanny in her diary. “All department employees had a holiday—happy people, marching about with flags and bands of music.”65 Bonfires and torches extended the glorious day into night for the crowds of excited citizens who surged along the avenues with shouts and serenades.
Lincoln’s Richmond tour provoked Booth. For some reason, he believed the president threw a leg ostentatiously over the arm of Davis’s chair and fouled his office by spitting tobacco juice, neither true. A few days later, when prisoners from the rebel capital arrived in Washington, one group marching past the War Department was stoned and abused by onlookers. Police broke up the assault and scattered the culprits, but Booth was enraged over the mistreatment of these defenseless men. He spoke of it with great bitterness and excitement on the morning of the assassination.66
Distressing as these events were, the news from Appomattox was a catastrophe. “Lee should never have given up his sword,” he declared to Harry Ford. “I don’t like the way he surrendered.” Since Lee received the sword for the defense of Virginia in a solemn ceremony at the Capitol in Richmond, he told Harry, he should have died upon it. The actor spoke of Lee as if he were now an enemy, telling a friend “the whole Southern Confederacy was managed by a set of cowards.”67
Booth, with Powell and Herold in tow, joined a throng besieging the executive mansion on the evening of Tuesday, April 11.68 “It was a dark night and rain was falling,” recalled Joshua Brigham, one of two thousand people in the audience to hear the president’s first formal response to the rebel collapse. “Hundreds of umbrellas massed together made an imperfect covering for the shivering crowd. The dim lights from the outdoor gas jets and from the mansion gave a weird appearance to the occasion, and the hollow sound of raindrops falling upon the canopy of umbrellas accentuated the strangeness of the scene.”69
Around 8:00 p.m. Lincoln emerged at a second-story window under the north portico of the mansion. “The White House was brilliantly illuminated, and the figure of the President stood out in full relief to the immense crowd below, who stood in the darkness to listen to his speech,” wrote Clara Harris, the daughter of a New York senator who stood with Mrs. Lincoln at a nearby window.70 Shoot him, Booth ordered Powell. “No, I will not do it,” Powell replied. Booth argued that the crowd, which filled the north lawn and stretched back onto Pennsylvania Avenue, was so large he could escape detection. Insisting it was too risky, Powell walked off.
If the audience contained any rabble wanting rousing, they were disappointed. Lincoln had no stump speech for them. His agile mind was already at work on postwar problems, and he served up common sense on his reconstruction efforts in Louisiana. After the ordeal of the past four years, however, nothing could be amiss between orator and audience on this long-awaited night. The celebrants would have cheered if Lincoln merely thrust an arm out the window. It was victory’s sweet moment. “Gloom had given way to light and hope,” wrote a Chicago reporter. “The Union had been preserved, and it was a triumph for Abraham Lincoln if for any man.”71 The president, recalled T. R. Fitch of Boston, appeared, “through the mist of my moistened eyes, in a halo of glory.” The rays of light streaming from the large window through the evening’s mist seemed to give Lincoln a divine aura.72
To avoid any misunderstanding of his views, Lincoln prepared written remarks. He read them by the light of a candle held by Noah Brooks; Tad, at his father’s feet, collected the pages as the president dropped them. Among the vexing issues upon which Lincoln touched was black voting. It would have been morally indefensible for the government to deny suffrage to African American soldiers, who helped preserve the nation, when peace would bring demands to reenfranchise their former masters, who sought to divide it. Aware of that fact and recognizing the dissatisfaction of some “that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man” in Louisiana, Lincoln stated, “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”
Lincoln’s remarks snapped the last line holding Booth to the ground. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth muttered to Herold. “Now, by God! I’ll put him through.” From this moment on, Herold later told his attorney Frederick Stone, Booth was determined to kill the president. It would only be a matter of opportunity. When the two of them caught up with Powell, Booth uttered a prophecy of his own. “That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Race was consuming him. “We are all slaves now,” he informed Harry Ford and two staffers in the box office of the theater the next day. Booth had always viewed African Americans with a dismissive condescension, but he was completely unsettled by the change in their status produced by the war. He was shamed, he told Harry, to see black soldiers guarding prisoners passing through Washington in transit to camps in the North. “We are all slaves now.”
Harry, who enjoyed twitting Booth, replied that his comment made no sense. Hadn’t Lee himself wanted black soldiers for the Confederate army? “If a man were to go out and insult a nigger now,” retorted Booth, “he would be knocked down by the nigger, and nothing would be done to the nigger.” Thomas Raybold, who helped out with ticket sales at the theater, interjected that in that case he should not insult one. When Booth kept harping on the topic, the men turned their attention elsewhere, and the actor wandered away.73
“Booth’s hobby” was what Mathews called Booth’s morbid fixation on Lincoln. The hobby deserved a far more menacing name. “Somebody ought to kill the old scoundrel,” Booth said to E. A. Emerson the day before the assassination. As he held Emerson’s cane at either end behind his head and across his shoulders, he snapped it to pieces in a violent motion.74 Booth would pay Lincoln for betraying the prewar Union. And, as his cry of revenge at the theater would indicate, he also intended to punish the North as a whole. “What I want, and I am as good a Union man as anyone, is peace,” he said. “I can’t see why there should be such great rejoicing.”75 The North’s gloating was a contemptible kick of a wounded brother. Why should it celebrate while others wept? Why should it not share the pain and humiliation he and others like him felt? “It’s impolitic to goad an enemy to madness,” he wrote in a rare moment of self-awareness.76
Despite his obsession with Lincoln, Booth was still rational enough to understand that the president’s death must be part of a greater whole if it were to help the remnants of the rebellion. On Thursday, April 13, 1865, Booth pushed his way into the office of C. D. Hess, manager of Grover’s Theatre, and urged him to invite Lincoln and his key subordinates to a performance. Booth seemed particularly anxious “that Mr. Lincoln should be attended by his cabinet advisors,” Hess recalled. Booth’s manner was uncharacteristically intrusive—he interrupted the reading of a play—but it reminded Hess that he had intended to invite the president for the night of April 14. The manager wrote an invitation addressed to Mrs. Lincoln, as was his custom, and a messenger, Thomas Quantrille, set out with it to the White House.77
Sending Atzerodt to snoop around the Kirkwood House, where Vice President Johnson lived, Booth and Powell scouted the home of Secretary of State Seward on Lafayette Square near the White House. Seward had fractured his jaw and broken an arm in a nasty carriage accident on April 5. He was confined to bed, and George F. Robinson, a convalescent soldier, was assigned as his night nurse. Robinson noticed Powell at the dining room window and investigated. The young Southerner explained that he wished to know how Seward was feeling, leading Robinson to conclude he was just a solicitous family friend.78 Meanwhile, Booth was cooing questions and pitching woo to Margaret Coleman, Seward’s housekeeper. She was a pretty Irish lass, and Booth was of a mind to give her his diamond pin. Margaret rather liked Powell’s looks, however. “As big as two men,” she said, “he was very handsome.”79
A grand illumination of the capital occurred Thursday night. Fireworks boomed, flags wav
ed, bands played, and steam fire-engine whistles screamed. By prearrangement, lanterns, lamps, and gas jets were turned on at government offices, hotels, shops, and homes throughout the city. At City Hall as many as sixty tallow candles decorated some individual windows. The word PEACE dazzled forth in fiery letters on the front of the War Department building. Other buildings were similarly illuminated, many with patriotic mottoes or devices. Two dozen large bonfires added further brilliance to the scene. The principal avenues looked like rivers of flame to the thousands of admiring men, women, and children who moved along them. “The city was literally a blaze of light from eight to ten o’clock in the evening,” one reporter observed. To soldiers stationed at the circle of lonely forts surrounding the city, “it must have seemed as though Washington was on fire.”80
Booth was stupefied by the celebration. He told a fellow guest at the National that he hoped the candles would start fires and burn every house in the city to the ground. “I would rejoice at the sight,” he said, adding self-consciously, “I guess I’m a little desperate. Do you know I feel like mounting my horse and tearing up and down the streets, waving a Rebel flag in each hand?”81 He gave his mother a more restrained reaction. “Everything was bright and splendid,” Booth wrote her in a letter headed two o’clock on the morning of April 14. “More so in my eyes if it had been a display in a nobler cause. But so goes the world. Might makes right.”82
It has never been determined where Booth spent that night, if he slept at all. He breakfasted late at his hotel. About noon he appeared at Ford’s to check his mail. Harry Ford was at the lobby door. Seeing him approach, Harry declared loudly enough for all to hear, “Here is a man that don’t like General Lee.” Booth rose readily to the bait and said again that Lee should not have surrendered. “General Lee is a good general,” Ford snapped, “and I guess he knows what he ought to do.”
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 34
