Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth

by Alford, Terry

  The Booth family had intended to bury John in Baltimore Cemetery. The elder Booth was buried there under a handsome stele Edwin had had erected in 1858. Grandfather Richard was there, too. But Green Mount was a more attractive place. It was a new “rural cemetery.” This did not mean that it was located in the country, rather that, in contrast with crowded urban and church cemeteries, it was a place with spacious landscaped grounds and affecting commemorative monuments conducive to a sense of peace and reflection. Chartered in 1838, the year of John’s birth, Green Mount had a pastoral beauty overseen by an attractive Gothic Revival chapel on a hill. People strolled its tree-lined paths as if it were a public park.

  Mary Ann purchased a double lot, roughly thirty by forty feet, in the Dogwood section of Green Mount on June 13, 1869.36 Junius Sr. and old Richard were unearthed from their places of rest and reburied here.37 At Rose’s request, dear old Aunty Rogers told Weaver how to locate the graves of the children at the farm, and he exhumed the dust of Frederick, Elizabeth, and little Mary Ann. Placed in a common coffin, their traces were brought to the city.38 The father’s large monument was also moved to Green Mount and reerected. On the reverse surface of the stele a stonecutter added the name “John Wilkes” in one-and-a-half-inch-tall sans serif font. The names of the Harford children and of Henry, who died in London in 1836, were incised below his.

  Despite these preparations, several former rebels who welcomed Booth home to Baltimore feared he would be denied Christian burial. As the story goes, the bevy of ex-Confederates who visited Weaver’s included the journalist Foard, an infantry veteran and clerk in the Treasury Department in Richmond; John W. McCoy, manager of a rebel gunpowder firm in North Carolina; Henry C. Wagner, Booth’s friend who gave the first musical performance of the rebel hymn “Maryland, My Maryland”; Thomas W. Hall, editor of Baltimore’s The South newspaper and Confederate major; and William M. Pegram, Southern cavalryman, aide to J. E. B. Stuart, and former resident of the Old Capitol Prison.39 It was said that they decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by Pegram and Wagner, a party of Southerners removed the remains from the vault at night, carried them by torchlight to the Booth lot, and buried them in an unmarked location.40 This story would be repeated well into the twentieth century by historians, but it was entirely fanciful.

  The uneasy pilgrimage of John Wilkes Booth ended less dramatically on June 26, 1869. The cloudless summer day was oppressively hot, with a temperature in the low nineties, when shortly after noon a closed carriage swung through the Tudor-style gateway of Green Mount and stopped just past the great elms.41 Out stepped Mrs. Booth, Edwin, June, and Rose. (Asia was with Clarke in England, where they immigrated the previous year; Joe’s whereabouts are unknown.) Mary Ann wore deep mourning as dictated by Victorian custom. The black crepe of her dress was so dull it reflected no light, an apt metaphor for her sorrow. “The mother was much overcome,” stated a reporter for the New York Clipper, “and the family much stricken.”

  About fifty family friends, mostly ladies, were gathered at the gravesite. The faithful John Mathews stood among them.42 The sympathy of the attendees was palpable. “Oh, Poor John,” wrote Aunty Rogers, who seemed to know their thoughts. “Dear boy, good boy. Sorryfull for such a Hansom boy [as] he was to let the enemy of souls Cheat him out of so much pleasure, as he could have done so much good in this world for he was A gentleman. Poor fellow. I hope the lord had mercy on his soul. It may be that [his] act and his suffering brought him to the savour. The lord herd the Cryes of the thief on the Cross.”

  Six pallbearers drawn principally from Baltimore theatrical circles removed the body from the vault and carried it down the hill to the gravesite. None of these men had been a particular friend of the deceased except Samuel Linton, whose supper table in an apartment at the Holliday Theatre often accommodated a merry Booth.43 The group carried the casket to the southeast face of the obelisk. Below the names of John and his siblings an open grave yawned. The excavation was lined with brick, a customary precaution to keep the ground from sinking. A seven-foot stone slab resting nearby would be placed over the brickwork after the casket was lowered to help maintain an even appearance at the site.44

  The Reverend Thomas U. Dudley, minister of Christ Church, where the Booths had been nominal members during their Baltimore residence, was asked to perform the service. Because he was otherwise engaged, Dudley turned the request over to his ministerial colleague and houseguest Fleming James, a recent graduate of seminary. Both men were Richmond natives with Confederate credentials, and neither saw anything amiss in reading the burial order. Indeed, James, said to have been present at Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, did not hide his Southern feelings even in New York City, where he served as assistant pastor at St. Luke’s Hospital. The young minister was present in gown and surplice.45

  The service commenced at one o’clock. “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, in his wise providence, to take out of this world the soul of our deceased brother, we therefore commit his body to the ground,” intoned James as he stood at the head of the grave.46 The service, taken from the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, was simple and unostentatious but thoroughly impressive, thought Foard. The day’s work cost James his Manhattan pastorate, as he would be forced out by hospital authorities and turn to the more congenial climate of Baltimore as rector at St. Mark’s.47

  “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead.”

  John’s remains were lowered into the grave. The box containing the children, their names engraved on a silver plate, was laid on top of his coffin. Mary Ann stood at the mouth of the grave, watching and sobbing as she clung to June’s arm. After the spade men filled the grave, several women came forward and distributed bouquets over it.48

  The government did not order the family to leave the grave unmarked. This oft-told story seemed credible to the public because of the stigma attached to an uncommemorated resting place. Such was the criminal’s end as a reward for a life of shame, a life unworthy of remembrance. But the absence of a headstone on John’s burial spot was due entirely to Edwin’s wishes. The older brother had the lot beautified with flowers and arbor vitae trees. In time he permitted the planting of small rosebushes at the head and foot of his brother’s grave. A one-foot-tall wooden cross was erected there. But Edwin was dead set against any permanent memorial. Henry W. Mears, a Weaver employee, discussing general lot improvements with the brother several years later, asked him, “And John Wilkes’ grave? What about John Wilkes?” He regretted the words as soon as he said them. A shade came over Edwin’s face. There was a pause. “Let it remain as it is. Place no mark there,” said Edwin.49

  All was done as Edwin wished. But if he meant to keep the grave’s location hidden from the public, he failed. The site of John’s green and narrow bed became the worst-kept secret in Baltimore. The grave was easy for interested parties to find.

  In the early summer of 1870, the following year, family and friends of Confederate soldiers buried at Green Mount came to the cemetery to garland the graves of their dead. The Baltimore American reported that “the grave that exceeded all the rest in its profuse decorations was that of J. Wilkes Booth.” A pyramid of flowers covered his mound. The adjacent graves of Booth’s father and grandfather bore not a single petal, indicating this tribute had not been placed by family members. These flowers were placed by strangers. “This was the day set apart to do honor to the Southern soldiers,” the story concluded, “and if the richness and profusion of the emblems is to be taken as the measure of affection in which the deceased soldier is held, John Wilkes Booth is the greatest hero of them all.”50

  the federal government did a satisfactory job identifying Booth’s body when it arrived in Washington, but then it made a major mistake. Secretary of War Stanton kne
w that “every hair of his head would be a valued relic to the sympathizers with the south,” and he directed that the remains be secretly buried. Colonel Lafayette Baker, boarding the Montauk to carry out the secretary’s orders, was incensed to see people—including known secessionists—taking souvenirs from the body. He had to twist a lock of Booth’s hair from the hand of one woman who refused to relinquish it. The indignant colonel determined to put the body—and hopefully all thought of it—beyond the reach of rebel idolaters, so he misled the public about the disposition of the remains.51 He told Townsend, whose reports on the assassination were the most widely read in the nation, that he sank the body in the Potomac. Frank Leslie published in his popular illustrated New York newsweekly a dramatic engraving of Baker dumping the corpse into the river.52

  Baker hoped the matter would rest there, but the fact that Booth was gone before most people knew he was even in town made the government’s haste look suspicious. Why the hurry? Were Stanton and Baker, both highly controversial figures, hiding something? Speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate in July 1866, Garrett Davis of Kentucky said, “I have never seen myself any satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed. I want it proved that Booth was in that barn. Why was not his body brought up publicly to Washington and exposed to the gaze of the multitude, that it might be identified? Why so much secrecy about it? It may be he is dead, but there is a mystery and a most inexplicable mystery to my mind about the whole affair. He may come back some of these days and murder someone else.”53 Such silliness amused the soldiers who ran Booth to ground. Returning to Washington by boat with the body in April 1865, Private Andrew Wendell and his fellow cavalrymen had filed past the corpse to inspect their handiwork. “Some people—and big people—said we had the wrong man and that Booth wasn’t dead,” Wendell told a reporter in 1908. “He was dead enough when we looked at him.”54

  The belief that Booth escaped his captors took root, defying common sense. It allowed some Southerners to feel that although they might have lost the war, they got in the last punch by putting Lincoln into the ground. “We greeted his death in a spirit of reckless hate,” wrote Booth’s Richmond friend John S. Wise. “We had seen his face over the coffins of our brothers and relatives and friends, in the flames of Richmond, in the disaster at Appomattox. We were desperate and vindictive.”55 The belief that Booth killed the president and got away with it doubled the delight of Lincoln haters, believed Walter Benn, who performed with Booth at the Boston Museum. While he scoffed at the notion that Booth survived Garrett’s barn, Benn acknowledged that the assassin did live on “in haunting thought, in wild erratic memory.”56

  By 1885, twenty years after Booth’s death, the escape story had developed considerable texture. The influential Atlanta Constitution reported from sources in Alabama that Booth had hired an Irishman to take his place on his flight from Ford’s Theatre. Misidentified as Booth, the unfortunate substitute was killed at Garrett’s. Willie Jett knew the truth, but he hated Lincoln and was paid to keep his mouth shut. Meanwhile, the story continued, Booth was hiding in the Washington foundry of Clark Mills, the sculptor who created the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson across from the White House in President’s Park. Booth was later heard from in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was arrested for public drunkenness. Despite the fact that this event was reported in the local newspapers, he was allowed to escape and flee to France. Later he visited Japan. Wherever he went, he sent photographs of himself in native costume to friends in the United States to assure them of his well-being. As of October 1885, when this article was published, Booth was said to be alive and well. “He is in the service of the Khedive of Egypt and owns over one hundred camels.”57

  John T. Ford hated such talk. “If you listen to idle gabble and wild assertions, a hundred Wilkes Booths are wandering mysteriously over the American continent,” he grumbled at the time. “The talk is a silly and at times a wicked falsehood.”58

  The escaped Booth was initially an icon of the Lost Cause, a postwar cultural movement that sought meaning in the defeat of Confederacy. It took on an added dimension when the story moved west and merged with the tradition of celebrating the fugitive outlaw and the wandering desperado. John St. Helen, a saloonkeeper in Granbury, Texas, purportedly confessed to being Booth before disappearing in the 1870s. David E. George, an Oklahoma inebriate, made a similar statement before committing suicide in 1903. A Tennessee lawyer, Finis L. Bates, claimed that St. Helen and George were the same person and that the Booth mystery had finally been solved. Despite the fact that George was taller than Booth, had different eye color, and lacked the identifying neck scar, bullet wound, tattoo, and slightly bowed legs, he was close enough for the credulous Bates, who took George’s mummified body and displayed it at carnivals.59 The exhibit joined no fewer than five alleged skulls of Booth already touring the country.60

  The various survival stories, added to the loss of knowledge inevitable with the passage of time, confused the public enough by 1911 for the journalist Edward Freiberger to write in the Washington Post: “Although there are 90,000,000 people in the United States, not 500 could tell you what became of the body of the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Some will tell you that John Wilkes Booth was burned to ashes in the Virginia barn in which he was captured. Others will express the opinion that the remains of the misguided actor were cut to pieces and mysteriously dropped into the sea. Then, to add interest to the mystery, someone will claim to have positive information that Wilkes Booth is still alive and living comfortably and quietly in any one of a dozen cities—Louisville, Denver, San Francisco, Albuquerque, New Orleans, or Montreal.”61 The escape hypothesis was so ridiculous to Freiberger’s colleague Isaac Markens that he satirized the mythmakers by assuring them that “Booth lived for many years and enjoyed life. In London one day and Paris the next, he journeyed on the Nile, took in the Pyramids and the Sphinx, kissed the Blarney stone, and, in his native land, was frequently seen at Saratoga, Coney Island, Yellowstone Park. He chauffeured his machine through Dixieland in winter and New England in summer.”62

  Undeterred, Bates and his successors exhibited the mummy at sideshows throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Mr. George, brown as a hickory nut, was displayed in a setting with faux Egyptian columns, suggesting the wisdom and authenticity of the ages, while above the body was a sign with the words “For the Correction of History.” The Reverend Clarence True Wilson, a Methodist minister interested with the story, gave it what feeble intellectual cover he could in his position as a nationally known prohibition advocate.63 A second escaped Booth was featured in the 1977 book and film The Lincoln Conspiracy. In this laughable historical muddle Booth fled to Europe after a bizarre plot in which the assassin conspired against Lincoln on the orders of the president’s own top subordinates.64

  In May 1995 the escape theorists finally had their hour. They prevailed on several distant Booth family descendants (including a great-great-granddaughter of Edwin) to ask for an exhumation and formal identification of John’s body. Green Mount Cemetery refused the request, claiming that the story of Booth’s escape was a hoax and that an exhumation would violate its obligation to respect the repose and protection at law and equity afforded to the remains of the dead. A four-day trial in Baltimore City Circuit Court resulted, litigating the escape theory. The national media flocked to Booth’s hometown to cover an event made memorable by its gathering of forensic experts, anthropologists, folklorists, historians, actors, assassination buffs, a Lincoln impersonator, a mummy expert, and a brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy.

  Legends of an escaped Booth, all proper in their way as local tall tales, did not fare well as fact against the phalanx of historians that Green Mount assembled on its behalf. The cemetery’s witnesses demonstrated conclusively that Booth died in 1865 and was interred in Green Mount four years later. Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan agreed with this view and, understanding that the remains would be in an unsuitable condition for examination due to soil and water conditions at the s
ite, ruled against the petitioners. A three-judge panel of the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland upheld Kaplan’s verdict in 1996. Its decision ended the case and let John Wilkes Booth remain where his mother placed him on that hot summer afternoon in 1869. He rests there today.65

  “I think the escape crowd enjoyed their day in the sun less than they expected,” chuckled James O. Hall, elder statesman of Green Mount’s team of expert witnesses, when the verdict was announced. Hall recalled a statement of Prince Nicholas Romanoff, a cousin of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, when DNA testing in 1994 revealed that the woman who claimed for decades to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the czar’s youngest daughter, was an imposter. “People look for exceptional events to change the past,” Romanoff said. “But history is brutally effective in its solutions, and brutally simple.”66

  “i knowed they’d kill him,” the seventy-six-year-old Sarah Bush Lincoln said when the news of her stepson’s assassination reached her cabin on the Illinois prairie. “I ben awating fur it.”67

  Many others had long feared such a tragedy and wondered only about the timing of it. What possible benefit could the act have for the cause Booth espoused? “Had this taken place a year or two ago when the rebels might possibly have turned the temporary derangement of our national machinery to their advantage, it would seem probable, but now, when all is lost, when there is no hope, it staggers belief,” Navy Assistant Paymaster William F. Keeler wrote to his wife.68 Why didn’t Booth see this, wondered Carl Schurz, a major general in the Union army? “Nothing could have been more obvious to any sane mind,” he wrote. “This crime could not possibly be of the least benefit to the Southern people in their desperate straits, but would only serve to inflame the feelings of their victorious adversaries against them.”69

  To make matters worse for the rebels, “they have killed their best friend,” wrote Charles Deamude, a corporal in Company K, 150th Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, the day after Lincoln’s death.70 Most white Southerners did not agree with that assessment, at least immediately. John S. Wise, one of Virginia’s fieriest rebels, rejoiced at the news of Lincoln’s death. “In mature years I have been ashamed of what I felt and said when I heard of that awful calamity,” he wrote in his book The End of an Era (1899). “Time taught us that Lincoln was a man of marvelous humanity.”71 With Lincoln dead, and the experience of Reconstruction a bitter postscript, it was easier for Southerners like Wise to adopt a friendly perspective on the late president. The belief that Lincoln would have rolled their way on postwar issues was wishful thinking, but few seemed to doubt it. The Georgia editor James Ryder Randall wrote ten years after the war, “The killing of Lincoln was a blunder as well as a crime for he was an amiable and kind hearted man animated by a sincere love of the union but without malice to any who fought against it. He would not have sanctioned the adoption of harsh measures against the Southern people. He was powerful enough with his party to have defeated proscription and, if his life had not been taken, there is every reason to believe the southern people would not have endured many of the evils which they have been afflicted with since the termination of the war.”72