“We don’t wish to kill you,” Baker replied encouragingly. “We hope you will get well.”
Spreading a handkerchief on the porch, the detectives held Booth up and searched for spoils. Baker discovered the assassin’s compass, pipe, tobacco, and matches in the coat. Oddly Booth’s pocket also contained a handful of small onions. Conger found his diary, keys, and pocketknife, a small silver horseshoe charm, the Agnus Dei medal, the Montreal bank draft obtained in Canada the previous autumn, and a few greenbacks. The small amount of money they found led someone to observe that if that was all Booth had, he did not get rich for what he did. Conger also found cartes de visite of five women (one of Lucy Hale) and, on Booth’s undershirt, a diamond stickpin presented to the assassin by the minstrel Dan Bryant. Conger tied these items up in a bundle and stuffed them in his own pocket.
“Kill me,” Booth implored again in a whisper.
“No,” replied Conger.
One of the soldiers stated that “he never saw a man suffer more or die harder,” and through it all Booth could do nothing but lie there and endure it.57 His mind was clear. He was aware of his surroundings. He was conscious of his suffering. It was as if he had become a witness to his own execution.58 Soldiers wanting revenge had it that morning. A full pound of flesh.
What could be done for him was done. Brandy and ice were brought to the porch, and nursing devolved to the tender hands of Fannie Garrett and her sister Lucinda Holloway, while Fannie’s daughter Kate fetched items as needed. Aunt Lue bathed the grievously wounded man’s face.59 Booth was unable to swallow, so she pressed a linen cloth soaked with water and brandy to his lips. The assassin opened his eyes at her touch and attempted to smile.
Meanwhile Conger and Baker seated themselves on either side of the body, ready to hear any confession. Aunt Lue knelt nearby, wearing an apron as if she were about her housework. Richard and Robert lurked behind her, the latter having dressed so hurriedly that he had his pants on backward.60 Exhausted soldiers sagged on the waist-high porch or against its brick pillars. Herold was strapped to a locust tree in the yard, while the troopers’ horses stood tethered to the fence beyond him. The scene was completed by the elder Garrett, still in his nightclothes and guarded by two soldiers, sitting on a block of wood and fortunate that, as Booth’s host, it was his rear end and not his neck on the stump.
Shot at about 3:15 a.m., Booth clung tenaciously to life. Dawn came, then sunrise, and he held on. For most of the time his eyes were closed and his teeth were clenched in pain. He gasped as if trying to remove an obstruction from his throat. He talked little, and that almost all in the first hour, and his words were very faint. Once, hearing Baker mention Jett, he managed to say, “Did that man betray me?” “Hands,” he gasped on another occasion, and, when they were held up, mumbled, “Useless, useless.”61 These words have been interpreted as a jab at Herold, a refusal of water, a comment on his paralysis, even a self-criticism of his life. The soldiers who attended him found his remarks mostly incoherent and unintelligible. There was no need to ponder the meaning of one thing Booth muttered, however. “I die for my country. I did what I thought was best.”62
About 6:00 a.m., Dr. Charles Urquhart arrived from Port Royal. The old gentleman was flustered by what he saw. “He was used to war and bloodshed, but the scene seemed to startle him,” recalled Private Carl John Anton Steinbrigge, one of the command. Composing himself, Urquhart set to work, applying stimulants to his patient. With a fastidious touch he opened his box of surgical instruments. Producing a probe, the physician examined the wound, searching for the bullet. Baker told him he was wasting his time. The slug had traversed the neck. Urquhart’s initial optimism about Booth’s condition gave way immediately, and in a professorial manner he explained that the wound was mortal. Booth would die within the hour.63
As the end approached, the assassin’s skin became cool to the touch. His lips grew blue and drawn. Aunt Lue’s warming massages of his temples availed little; in fact, she could feel his pulse fade away. At times his heart stopped, as Booth courted death, only to have the beat return.
Lengthier and lengthier intervals passed between breaths—literal minutes, followed by a noisy desperate gasp. Booth’s body shut down. He asphyxiated. A spectral pallor took his face. Shortly after seven there was a shiver and a gurgle. Booth’s head pitched back, he seemed to collapse, and life fled. It was over.
The death watch concluded, Doherty asked for a needle and began fashioning a coarse gray shroud of two blankets sewn together like a sack.64 Conger departed to carry the news to Washington. Baker went about securing a wagon to bring the body along as soon as possible. The doctor clipped a lock of hair from Booth’s forehead and handed it to Aunt Lue. “A sweet memento,” she thought.65
It was morning, a clear warm morning, and time for breakfast at the farm, time for hot biscuits and good country butter all around.
Herold—God bless him—ate heartily.66
to first class boy Fred Oatley, nestled in his hammock beneath the spar deck, it sounded as if elephants were tramping across the iron face of the USS Mahopac.67 Curious, he jumped up to observe the heavyweights. Brigadier General Joseph Holt, Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. Congressman John A. Bingham, Republican stalwart from Ohio. Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, head of the National Detective Police. Dr. Joseph Barnes, Surgeon-General of the United States. Major Thomas T. Eckert, Stanton confidante and chief of the War Department telegraph office. Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had dispatched these men to the Washington Navy Yard to examine the remains of Booth, which reposed on the nearby Montauk.68 Since one reached the Montauk by use of the Mahopac’s small cutter, Oatley was pressed into duty as ferryman for the officials.
Surgeon General Barnes stepped onto the deck of the Montauk as if he owned it. Without reporting his presence, showing his authority, or displaying any other regard for military etiquette, the physician walked directly to the carpenter’s bench that served as Booth’s bier. Taking a knife, he cut away the wrappings around the corpse.69
“That’s it,” said Patrick Stafford, one of the Montauk’s firemen standing nearby. “That’s Booth.”
“Look at that,” said Dr. George B. Todd, the vessel’s surgeon, pointing to the marks on Booth’s left hand. “What do you make that out to be?”
Stafford leaned in to take a look, then straightened up. “J.W.B.”70
Barnes had doubts that the soldiers had caught their man, however, and a close look at what the New York newspapers delighted to call “the whilom fop” hardly reassured him.71 The owner of this body was no dandy. He looked as if he had been flushed out of a gutter. His clothing was soiled. His remains smelled. His hair was ineptly clipped and badly matted. There was no mustache at all, just a stubble of beard. And that face! It was wild and worn and older than its years. The lower part was discolored by extravasation of blood. Curiously, it was freckled.
Hundreds of other people wanted a look-see as well. Most were turned away at the Navy Yard gate, but dozens got their opportunity. A stream of officers, sailors, marines, yard employees, carpenters hammering on a coffin, mechanics working on an engine, and lucky civilian visitors all pressed toward the afterdeck. Despite the efforts of Barnes to prevent souvenir taking, several got close enough to obtain items from the body, such as Acting Master William Crowninshield, who secured a lock of hair for his sister Mary.72
The identity of the corpse was soon established. Seaton Munroe, lawyer and man-about-town, got aboard the Montauk because his brother Frank was a Marine Corps captain. Eckert invited him back to see the body. “I was soon gazing at the remains which needed no long inspection to enable me to recognize them,” Munroe wrote. When Eckert realized that the attorney knew Booth socially, he escorted him to the ship’s cabin to give a statement to the military commissioners. “I am confident that it is the dead body of J. Wilkes Booth,” he told Holt and company. Before he left the Montauk, Munroe saw Herold, shackled hand and foot, emerge from a
hatchway en route to have his photograph taken.73
Dr. John Frederick May, the most important of five official witnesses, was less certain than Munroe about the body’s identity, at least initially. He knew Booth, having removed the fibroid tumor from Booth’s neck in 1863. The handsome patient came to May’s office daily thereafter to have the wound dressed, and the men became friendly. Booth presented him with complimentary tickets, and May, who admired the acting of Booth’s father, attended a performance.
The doctor was dumbfounded when Barnes pulled back the tarpaulin covering the body. He would write, “Never in any human being had a greater change taken place, from the man I had seen in the vigor of life and health, than that of the haggard corpse which was before me, with its yellow and discolored skin and its whole facial expression sunken and sharpened by the exposure and starvation it had undergone!”74
“There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth,” May exclaimed to Surgeon General Barnes. “I cannot identify this body.”
A shock went through the crowd. May, the most highly regarded surgeon in the nation’s capital, was an individual of exceptional integrity. His words had weight. Detective John L. Smith, who happened to be a brother-in-law of Atzerodt, felt certain it was Booth, but May’s positive tone alarmed him. “We all thought there must have been a great blunder somewhere,” he recalled.
Barnes responded excitedly, “You have been his physician, doctor. Are there not some marks on his body? Is there not some physical peculiarity that you have noticed in the past that might serve as a mark?”75
May reflected for a moment, then asked, “Is there a scar upon the back of its neck?” Shortly after the operation Booth’s wound tore open under the clutches of an actress during a performance. It left a large cicatrix formed by the process of granulation. Describing the injury to Barnes before looking at it, May said it would appear as an ugly scar or a burn rather than a proper surgical incision. Barnes discovered the mark on the neck precisely where May stated it would be found. “You have described the scar as well as if you were looking at it,” remarked the surgeon general.
At May’s request the body was placed in a sitting position. He studied the face. Slowly, inescapably, the familiar features came into focus.
“It is the body of J. Wilkes Booth. I have no doubt.”76
The day was pleasant. It had none of the summer sizzle that could turn the iron plate of the Montauk into a griddle, but for the convenience of the official party an awning had been stretched overhead between Booth’s catafalque and the hazy sky.77 Under it, at 2:00 p.m., Surgeon General Barnes handed his hat to his steward and began the autopsy. First, he removed the dressing around the body’s left leg. Marine Private Henry Landes, eyeing the soiled pasteboard, took out his pocketknife.78 Other hungry hands moved toward the bandages Mrs. Mudd had prepared and the pins her husband used to secure them. “Gentlemen,” directed the doctor sharply, “you will please not take anything from this body.”79
Swollen and black to the knee, Booth’s leg looked dreadful. A small artery had ruptured, resulting in considerable hemorrhaging under the skin.80 Reporters who spoke with Surgeon General Barnes also stated that the fractured bone had cut its way through the flesh and protruded. The wound had become gangrenous, and “Booth could not have lived many days more in any event,” five or so in the opinion of one.81 Barnes mentioned nothing about this in his official statement, however.
The corpse was raised again so that Barnes and his assistant, Dr. J. J. Woodward, could measure the wound to the half inch. Then the body was reclined and a narrow piece of board put under the shoulders so that the head hung down backward, exposing the neck. Woodward opened his large postmortem case.82 From its ghastly assortment of saws, hooks, hammers, and scalpels, he took dissecting scissors and a spine chisel and went to work. The neck was opened and the affected vertebrae excised. “Mutilated bone and viscera and blood-stained rags” was all Munroe’s glimpse showed him and all he wished to see. It looked like a decapitation. “First man I seen without a head,” Private Landes wrote imperturbably in his diary.83
The doctors duly noted the obvious. Booth was killed by a bullet fired at a distance of a few yards. The ball fractured the vertebrae and perforated the spinal cord, traveling through the neck with a slight inclination downward and to the rear. The large blood vessels were untouched. General paralysis was immediate, and death from asphyxia followed in course.84
“Booth must have suffered as much as if he had been broken on the wheel,” observed Woodward.85
Now it was time for some official souvenir taking. Vertebrae three to five, as well as a piece of whitish spinal cord, were wrapped in stout brown paper, destined for the Army Medical Museum. Surgeon General Barnes gave George Hallowell, his messenger, a piece of muscle tissue with embedded bone fragments.86
Snick! Barnes heard the grit of a busy pair of scissors. Wheeling around, he discovered Marine Sergeant John M. Peddicord standing close to the body, and he sent the soldier a withering look. Peddicord, reasoning happily that a prohibition against gentlemen taking mementoes did not apply to enlisted men like himself, had grabbed the scissors from the autopsy table and snipped a strand of hair from the top of Booth’s head. Perhaps it was Peddicord’s somber face that saved him, perhaps his quick thinking, but the result was an amusing bit of theater. “You men get back there!” exclaimed the sergeant, cleverly deflecting attention from himself, and he turned about to chase away several sailors who had approached the bench. Barnes returned to conference with the other officers. His steward, who observed the episode as he cleaned the autopsy instruments, simply giggled.87 The body was resewn into its shroud.
Detective Luther Baker was on the Montauk giving the commissioners a statement of events at the farm. When he finished, Colonel Baker, his boss, pulled him aside. “Stanton wants me to dispose of Booth’s body,” said the senior man, who was also the detective’s cousin. “He doesn’t care where it is put, only so that it will not be found until Gabriel blows his horn. He don’t want the Rebs to get it and make an ado over it.”88
The colonel was impatient to get going. Abruptly, and with little civility to his Navy Yard hosts, he took the corpse and moved it to a rowboat. Conspicuously, a heavy ball and chain were also put aboard. Onlookers concluded that the body was about to be sunk in the Eastern Branch of the Potomac. That impression seemed confirmed when Baker left the assassin’s coffin behind. Throughout the day much interest attended the construction of this box.89 Workmen scrambled for the privilege of driving a nail into its dressed pine surface. So many took part in this ritual that the nails, driven together, formed thick black bands around the sides and ends of the box. But what need was there for a coffin if Booth would be anchored to the river bottom?
A touch of the oars sped the Bakers’ small vessel onto the river. Spectators, expecting to see the body dumped, followed eagerly along the shore to witness the historic event. They had no way of knowing that the boat’s actual destination was the nearby Washington Arsenal, clearly visible from the Navy Yard, and the Bakers made every effort to conceal the fact.90 The officers ordered their four-man crew, borrowed from the Montauk, to head in one direction, then veer off in another. At last a marsh cut off the crowd’s pursuit, and the boat—unobserved—reached the area of the large horse depot at Giesboro Point, where the Eastern Branch joins the main course of the Potomac.
“It was a moonless and starless night,” Detective Baker recalled. “We quietly ran our boat into a cove in the river bank and rested our oars. Old, condemned government horses were brought here and killed. We did not think any boat that might be following us would come to this dismal slaughter ground. All was still on the river. No sounds came to our ears but the hoarse croak of the bullfrog. Presently we began pulling slowly back [upriver]. Soon, against the clouded sky, we could discern the grim old penitentiary walls. We were before a door, seemingly let into the solid wall and almost at the water’s edge.”
Baker’s recollec
tions, given soberly in lectures to audiences in the 1880s, were hokum. The officers removed the corpse from the Montauk before 3:00 p.m. and, even with their deceptive navigation, covered the mile and a quarter to the Arsenal well before dark. They found no “door-of-the-damned” gaping along the Potomac like Traitor’s Gate on the Thames. Quite the contrary. They pulled up to a pier at which stood an attractive summer house set scenically on the river for the enjoyment of officers and their families. Booth’s remains were off-loaded—none too gently—into a corner of this arborlike structure.
Ellen Scott, who lived on the Arsenal grounds, was fishing with two girlfriends when the launch arrived. Major James G. Benton, the post’s commandant, was also on the scene and saw at once that the inquisitive Ellen knew who was inside the bundle. “Do not mention it to anyone,” he ordered.91
The Arsenal stood on Greenleaf Point at the southern end of the city.92 During the war its large workshops churned out a variety of ordnance for the armed forces. The facility expanded in 1862 when the adjacent Washington Penitentiary was closed, its inmates sent elsewhere, and its massive three-story brick building transferred to the Arsenal as an arms warehouse. This old prison was to be Booth’s new home, and the colonel set off with Benton to make arrangements. Detective Luther Baker was left to watch with the body—and the girls.
Night fell, and the last workmen left for the day. When all was quiet, Dr. George L. Porter, the post’s medical officer, came to the dock.93 He was joined by E. M. Stebbins, the Arsenal’s storekeeper, and four enlisted men. One of the soldiers led a team and cart; another held a lantern. The remaining two men entered the summer house to retrieve Booth’s body. Groaning at the unexpectedly heavy weight of their parcel, they hauled it out and deposited it in the back of the wagon. With Porter and the light-bearer leading the way, the small party set out toward the old prison. The soldiers marched on either side of the cart, and Stebbins brought up the rear.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 42
