by Tom Clancy
At the crack of the pistol Booth shouted, leaped a foot in the air, plunged forward, and fell face down on the hay, mortally wounded.
The roaring flames were moving rapidly now across the dry hay. Lieutenant Baker, eager to get the dying wretch out of the place before he was roasted, rushed into the flaming building and leaped upon him, wrenching his revolver from his clenched fist and pinioning his arms to his side for fear that he might merely be feigning death.
Quickly Booth was carried to the porch of the farmhouse, and a soldier mounted a horse and spurred down the dusty road three miles to Port Royal for a physician.
Mrs. Garrett had a sister, Miss Halloway, who was boarding with her and teaching school. When Miss Halloway realized that the dying man there under the honeysuckle vine on the porch was the romantic actor and great lover, John Wilkes Booth, she said he must be cared for tenderly, and she had a mattress hauled out for him to lie upon; and then she brought out her own pillow, put it under his head, and, taking his head upon her lap, offered him wine. But his throat seemed paralyzed, and he couldn't swallow. Then she dipped her handkerchief in water and moistened his lips and tongue time after time, and massaged his temples and forehead.
The dying man struggled on for two and a half hours, suffering intensely; begging to be turned on his face, his side, his back; coughing and urging Colonel Conger to press his hands down hard upon his throat; and crying out in his agony: "Kill me! Kill me!"
Pleading to have a last message sent to his mother, he whispered haltingly:
"Tell her ... I did .. . what I thought. . . was best . . . and that I died ... for my country."
As the end drew near, he asked to have his hands raised so he could look at them; but they were totally paralyzed, and he muttered:
"Useless! Useless!"
They were his last words.
He died just as the sun was rising above the tops of the venerable locust trees in the Garrett yard. His "jaw drew spasmodically and obliquely downward, his eyeballs rolled toward his feet and began to swell . . . and with a sort of gurgle, and sudden check, he stretched his feet and threw back his head." It was the end.
It was seven o'clock. He had died within twenty-two minutes of the time of day Lincoln had died; and "Boston" Corbett's bullet had struck Booth in the back of the head, about an inch below the spot where he himself had wounded Lincoln.
The doctor cut off a curl of Booth's hair, and gave it to Miss Halloway. She kept the lock of hair and the bloody pillowslip on which his head had lain—kept them and cherished them until, finally, in later years, poverty overtook her and she was obliged to trade half of the stained pillow-slip for a barrel of flour.
B
ooth had hardly ceased breathing before the detectives were kneeling to search him. They found a pipe, a bowie-knife, two revolvers, a diary, a compass greasy with candle drippings, a draft on a Canadian bank for about three hundred dollars, a diamond pin, a nail file, and the photographs of five beautiful women who had adored him. Four were actresses: Effie Ger-mon, Alice Grey, Helen Western, and "Pretty Fay Brown." The fifth was a Washington society woman, whose name has been withheld out of respect for her descendants.
Then Colonel Doherty jerked a saddle-blanket off a horse, borrowed a needle from Mrs. Garrett, sewed the corpse up in the blanket, and gave an old Negro, Ned Freeman, two dollars to haul the body to the Potomac, where a ship was waiting.
On page 505 of his book entitled the "History of the United States Secret Service" Lieutenant La Fayette C. Baker tells the story of that trip to the river:
When the wagon started, Booth's wound, now scarcely dribbling, began to run anew. Blood fell through the crack of the wagon, and fell dripping upon the axle, and spotting the road with terrible wafers. It stained the planks and soaked the blankets . . . and all the way blood dribbled from the corpse in a slow, incessant, sanguine exudation.
In the midst of all this an unexpected thing happened. Ned Freeman's old wagon, according to Baker, was "a ven shaky
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and absurd" contraption "which rattled like approaching dissolution." It not only "rattled like approaching dissolution," but under the strain and speed of the trip, the rickety old wagon actually began to dissolve there on the roadway. A king-bolt snapped, the wagon pulled apart, the front wheels tore away from the hind ones, the front end of the box fell to the ground with a thud, and Booth's body lurched "forward as if in a last effort to escape."
Lieutenant Baker abandoned the rickety old death-car, commandeered another wagon from a neighboring farmer, pitched Booth's body into that, hurried on to the river, and stowed the corpse aboard a government tug, the John S. Ide, which chugged away with it to Washington.
At dawn the next morning the news spread through the city: Booth had been shot. His body was lying that very minute on the gunboat Montauk, riding at anchor in the Potomac.
The capital was thrilled, and thousands hurried down to the river, staring in grim fascination at the death-ship.
In the middle of the afternoon Colonel Baker, chief of the Secret Service, rushed to Stanton with the news that he had caught a group of civilians on board the Montauk, in direct violation of orders, and that one of them, a woman, had cut off a lock of Booth's hair.
Stanton was alarmed. "Every one of Booth's hairs," he cried, "will be cherished as a relic by the rebels."
He feared that they might become far more than mere relics. Stanton firmly believed that the assassination of Lincoln was part of a sinister plot conceived and directed by Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the Confederacy. And he feared that they might capture Booth's body and use it in a crusade to fire the Southern slaveholders to spring to their rifles once more and begin the war all over again.
He decreed that Booth must be buried with all possible haste, and buried secretly; he must be hidden away and blotted out of existence, with no trinket, no shred of his garments, no lock of his hair, nothing left for the Confederates to use in a crusade.
Stanton issued his orders; and that evening, as the sun sank behind a fiery bank of clouds, two men—Colonel Baker and his cousin, Lieutenant Baker—stepped into a skiff, pulled over to the Montauk, boarded her, and did three things in plain sight of the gaping throng on the shore:
First, they lowered Booth's body, now incased in a pine gun-
box, over the side of the ship and down into the skiff; next, they lowered a huge ball and heavy chain; then they climbed in themselves, shoved off, and drifted downstream.
The curious crowd on the shore did precisely what the detectives had expected them to do: they raced along the bank, shoving, splashing, talking excitedly, determined to watch the funeral ship and see where the body was sunk.
For two miles they kept even with the drifting detectives. Then darkness crept up the river, clouds blotted out the moon and the stars, and even the sharpest eyes could no longer make out the tiny skiff in midstream.
By the time the detectives reached Geeseborough Point, one of the loneliest spots on the Potomac, Colonel Baker was sure that they were completely hidden from view; so he headed the skiff into the great swamp that begins there—a malodorous spot, rank with rushes and slough weeds, a burial-ground where the army cast its condemned horses and dead mules.
Here, in this eerie morass, the two detectives waited for hours, listening to find out if they had been followed; but the only sounds they could hear were the cry of bullfrogs and the ripple of the water among the sedges.
Midnight came; and, with breathless quiet and the utmost caution, the two men rowed stealthily back up-stream, fearing to whisper, and dreading even the lisping of the oars and the lapping of the water at the gunwales.
They finally reached the walls of the old penitentiary, rowed to a spot where a hole had been chopped in the solid masonry near the water's edge to let them in. Giving the countersign to the officer who challenged them, they handed over a white pine casket with the name "John Wilkes Booth" printed on the lid; and, half an hour later, it wa
s buried in a shallow hole in the southwest corner of a large room in the government arsenal where ammunition was stored. The top of the grave was carefully smoothed over, so that it looked like the rest of the dirt floor.
By sunrise the next morning excited men with grappling-hooks were dragging the Potomac, and raking and prodding among the carcasses of dead mules in the great swamp behind Geeseborough Point.
All over the nation millions were asking what had been done with Booth's body. Only eight men knew the answer—eight loyal men who were sworn never to disclose the secret.
In the midst of all this mystery, wild rumors sprang into existence and newspapers broadcast them over the land. Booth's head and heart had been deposited in the Army Medical Museum at Washington—so said the "Boston Advertiser." Other papers stated that the corpse had been buried at sea. Still others declared it had been burned; and a weekly magazine published an "eye-witness" sketch, showing it being sunk in the Potomac at midnight.
Out of the welter of contradiction and confusion another rumor arose: the soldiers had shot the wrong man, and Booth had escaped.
Probably this rumor arose because Booth dead looked so different from Booth alive. One of the men Stanton ordered to go aboard the gunboat Montauk on April 27, 1865, and identify the body, was Dr. John Frederick May, an eminent physician of Washington. Dr. May said that when the tarpaulin that covered the remains was removed—
to my great astonishment, there was revealed a body in whose lineaments there was to me no resemblance to the man I had known in life. My surprise was so great that I at once said to General Barnes: "There is no resemblance in that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be that of him." ... It being afterwards, by my request, placed in a sitting position, standing and looking down upon it, I was finally enabled to imperfectly recognize the features of Booth. But never in a human being had a greater change taken place, from the man whom I had seen in the vigor of life and health, than in that of the haggard corpse which was before me, with its yellow and discolored skin, its unkempt and matted hair, and its whole facial expression sunken and sharpened by the exposure and starvation it had undergone.
Other men who saw the corpse did not recognize Booth even "imperfectly," and they told their doubts about the city. And the rumor traveled fast.
Matters were not helped by the secrecy with which the Government guarded the body, the speed and mystery of its burial, and Stanton's refusal to give out any information or to deny ugly tales.
The "Constitutional Union," a paper published in the capital, said the entire performance was a hoax. Other papers joined in
the cry. "We know Booth escaped," echoed the "Richmond Examiner." The "Louisville Journal" openly contended that there had been something rotten in the whole show, and that "Baker and his associates had wilfully conspired to swindle the United States Treasury."
The battle raged bitterly; and, as usual in such cases, witnesses sprang up by the hundreds, declaring that they had met Booth and talked to him long after the shooting affray at the Garrett barn. He had been seen here, there, and everywhere: fleeing to Canada, dashing into Mexico, traveling on ships bound for South America, hurrying to Europe, preaching in Virginia, hiding on an island in the Orient.
And so was born the most popular and persistent and mysterious myth in American history. It has lived and thrived for almost three quarters of a century; and, to this day, thousands of people believe it—many of them people of unusual intelligence.
There are even some learned men of the colleges who profess to believe the myth. One of the most prominent churchmen in this country has gone up and down the land, declaring in his lectures to hundreds of audiences that Booth escaped. The author, while writing this chapter, was solemnly informed by a scientifically trained man that Booth had gone free.
Of course, Booth was killed. There can be no doubt of it. The man who was shot in Garrett's tobacco barn used every argument he could think of to save his life; and he had a splendid imagination; but, in his most desperate moments, it never occurred to him to deny that he was John Wilkes Booth. That was too absurd, too fantastic, to try even in the face of death.
And to make doubly sure that it was Booth who had been killed, Stanton sent ten men to identify the corpse after it reached Washington. One, as we have already recorded, was Dr. May. He had cut "a large fibroid tumor" from Booth's neck, and the wound in healing had left "a large and ugly scar." Dr. May, who identified him by that scar says:
From the body which was produced by the captors, nearly every vestige of resemblance of the living man had disappeared. But the mark made by the scalpel during life remained indelible in death, and settled beyond all ques-
tion at the time, and all cavil in the future, the identity of the man who had assassinated the President.
Dr. Merrill, a dentist, identified the body by a filling he had recently put into one of Booth's teeth.
Charles Dawson, a clerk in the National Hotel, where Booth had stopped, identified the dead man by the initials "J. W. B." tattooed on Booth's right hand.
Gardner, the well-known Washington photographer, identified him; and so did Henry Clay Ford, one of Booth's most intimate friends.
When Booth's body was dug up by order of President Andrew Johnson, on February 15, 1869, it was identified again by Booth's close friends.
Then it was taken to Baltimore to be reburied in the Booth family plot in Greenmount Cemetery; but before it was re-buried, it was identified again by Booth's brother and mother, and friends who had known him all his life.
It is doubtful whether any other man who ever lived has been as carefully identified in death as Booth was.
And yet the false legend lives on. During the eighties, many people believed that the Rev. J. G. Armstrong of Richmond, Virginia, was Booth in disguise, for Armstrong had coal-black eyes, a lame leg, dramatic ways, and wore his raven hair long to hide a scar on the back of his neck—so people said.
And other "Booths" arose, no less than twenty of them.
In 1872 a "John Wilkes Booth" gave dramatic readings and sleight-of-hand performances before the students of the University of Tennessee; married a widow; tired of her; whispered that he was the real assassin; and, stating that he was going to New Orleans to get a fortune that awaited him, he disappeared, and "Mrs. Booth" never heard of him again.
In the late seventies a drunken saloon-keeper with the asthma, at Granbury, Texas, confessed to a young lawyer named Bates that he was Booth, showed an ugly scar on the back of his neck, and related in detail how Vice-President Johnson had persuaded him to kill Lincoln and promised him a pardon if he should ever be caught.
A quarter of a century passed; and, on January 13, 1903, a drunken house-painter and dope-fiend, David E. George, killed himself with strychnine in the Grand Avenue Hotel in Enid, Oklahoma. But before he destroyed himself, he "con-
fessed" that he was John Wilkes Booth. He declared that after he shot Lincoln, his friends had hidden him in a trunk and got him aboard a ship bound for Europe, where he lived for ten years.
Bates, the lawyer, read about this in the papers, rushed to Oklahoma, looked at the body, and declared that David E. George was none other than the asthmatic saloon-keeper of Granbury, Texas, who had confessed to him twenty-five years before.
Bates had the undertaker comb the corpse's hair just as Booth had worn his; wept over the remains; had the body embalmed; took it back to his home in Memphis, Tennessee, and kept it in his stable for twenty years, while trying to palm it off on the Government and claim the huge reward that had been offered—and paid—for the capture of Booth.
In 1908 Bates wrote a preposterous book entitled: "The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth, or the First True Account of Lincoln's Assassination, Containing a Complete Confession by Booth, Many Years after His Crime." He sold seventy thousand copies of his sensational paper-back volume; created a considerable stir; offered his mummified "Booth" to Henry Ford for one thousand dollars; and finally began exhib
iting it in side-shows throughout the South, at ten cents a look.
Five different skulls are now being exhibited in carnivals and tents as the skull of Booth.
A,
fter she left the White House Mrs. Lincoln got into serious difficulties, and made an exhibition of herself that became national gossip.
In matters of household expense she was excessively penurious. It had long been customary for the Presidents to give a number of state dinners each season. But Mrs. Lincoln argued her husband into breaking the tradition, saying that these dinners were "very costly"; that these were war-times and public receptions would be more "economical."
Lincoln had to remind her once that "we must think of something besides economy."
When it came, however, to buying things that appealed to her vanity—such as dresses and jewelry—she not only forgot economy, but seemed bereft of all reason and indulged in a fantastic orgy of spending.
In 1861 she had come off the prairie, confidently expecting that as "Mrs. President" she would be the center of the glittering constellation of Washington society. But to her amazement and humiliation she found herself snubbed and ostracized by the haughty aristocrats of that Southern city. In their eyes, she, a Kentuckian, had been untrue to the South: she had married a crude, awkward "nigger-lover" who was making war upon them.
Besides, she had almost no likable personal qualities. She was, it must be admitted, a mean, common, envious, affected, mannerless virago.
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Unable to attain social popularity herself, she was bitterly jealous of those who had achieved it. The then reigning queen of Washington society was the renowned beauty Adele Cutts Douglas, the woman who had married Mrs. Lincoln's former sweetheart, Stephen A. Douglas. The glamorous popularity of Mrs. Douglas and Salmon P. Chase's daughter, inflamed Mrs. Lincoln with envy, and she resolved to win social victories with money—money spent on clothes and jewelry for herself.
