In other accounts, authors have focused only on the simplest parts of the story, drawing on secondary sources and ignoring the rich source of primary documents housed in various archives.7 Once told, this simple story of Lincoln’s murder has been retold again and again by replowing the same furrows. Errors of one author soon become incorporated into the works of subsequent authors until repeated so many times they become an integral part of the story. This method of replowing has resulted more in historical fiction than truthful history and left us with many misconceptions. Thus John Wilkes Booth was a madman who acted as a puppet for others; the man cornered in the Virginia barn and killed by army pursuers was not Booth but an innocent bystander who was substituted for Lincoln’s killer; Mary Surratt, the keeper of a boarding house frequented by Booth and his cohorts, was an innocent victim of a vengeful government; the military trial that tried Lincoln’s killers was an illegal tribunal that sought vengeance, not justice; Booth and his co-conspirators were simply a gang of semi-intelligent miscreants who are described as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”8 The most widely held and egregious myth is that Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the Charles County physician who set Booth’s broken leg, was an innocent man persecuted for simply following his Hippocratic Oath. None of these commonly held beliefs are true.
Booth was fully rational, and while he received important help from powerful interests, he was no puppet. He died in a tobacco barn twelve days into his attempted escape. Both Dr. Mudd and Mary Surratt were complicit in Booth’s conspiracy and were tried before a legally constituted court whose jurisdiction was later upheld by two Federal courts. Mudd was, in fact, the key connection that resulted in Booth’s being able to assemble an important group of co-conspirators. Whatever shortcomings Booth and his cohorts had, they could shoot straight enough to murder the president of the United States, nearly murder the secretary of state, and throw the country, if only for a short period, into chaos.
The most persistent of all of the many myths associated with Lincoln’s assassination is the myth first promulgated by Otto Eisenschiml, an organic chemist turned avocational historian. In 1937 Eisenschiml published an account of Lincoln’s assassination that was the first to put forward the theory that Stanton was behind Lincoln’s murder.9 By carefully manipulating the data and using titillating innuendo, Eisenschiml caught the imagination of a conspiracy-prone public. For the next sixty years Eisenschiml’s false theories remained a prominent part of the Lincoln story. Today they form the major basis for the television industry’s “documentary” reports on Lincoln’s death.
Even those who reject Eisenschiml’s silly theories of government complicity in Lincoln’s murder still believe in a government conspiracy to falsely try and convict certain individuals who they believe had no part in the crime. Principal among these wrongly convicted individuals is Samuel Mudd. As recently as 1997, a United States congressman delivered a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives declaring that “there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that [Dr. Samuel Alexander] Mudd was either a coconspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln or even aware of the events which had occurred earlier that evening on Friday, April 14, 1865.” The congressman concluded his misinformed remarks by urging all of his colleagues to join him “in ensuring that history is recorded accurately.”10 As this book will show, the evidence that Dr. Mudd was a co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth both before and after Booth’s murder of Lincoln is substantial and convincing. Only by adhering to the facts contained in the documentary record will the congressman and others ensure “that history is recorded accurately.”
That a subject can be so widely written about and so misrepresented is in itself an interesting phenomenon. Left to nonprofessional historians (and politicians) the story of Lincoln’s murder has failed to receive the critical attention usually associated with the research of professional historians. As with all such generalizations, however, this one has its exception. Among the most important research into Lincoln’s assassination in this century is that of three nonprofessional historians, William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David W. Gaddy. In 1988 these authors published the results of their careful research into the Confederate Secret Service and its association with Booth in a book titled Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.11 No account of Lincoln’s murder is complete without considering their work. Using many previously untapped primary records, these authors conducted extensive research into the subject of the Confederate Secret Service, and came to the conclusion that high-ranking Confederate officials supported John Wilkes Booth in a conspiracy aimed at capturing Lincoln, a conspiracy that evolved into a plan to create chaos by assassinating President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
In Come Retribution, Tidwell and his coauthors attempt to show that Jefferson Davis and other members of his cabinet had targeted Lincoln in retaliation for a Union military action aimed at Davis and certain cabinet officials. This military action, which has come to be known as the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid, ended in failure, achieving none of its objectives. Nevertheless, the fact that it happened at all was a major break in the code of conduct between the two warring nations.
In early 1864 Lincoln had received distressing reports about the deplorable conditions of Union prisoners and was anxious for their liberation. Lincoln also learned that the Confederate government was planning to remove the prisoners to Andersonville in Georgia. If action were not undertaken soon these prisoners would be beyond the reach of any Union army and all hope for their safe return would pass. A military raid was proposed that had three objectives: to free the Union prisoners, to destroy public buildings and various military facilities including arsenals and railroad equipage, and “to capture some of the leaders of the rebellion” and carry them to Washington.
On February 6, 1864, Brigadier General Isaac Wistar led a large body of Union cavalry on a special raid aimed at the lightly defended capital of Richmond. The Confederate military received advance word of Wistar’s raid, and he was stopped before he could breech the outer defenses of Richmond. The raid had to be aborted. Lincoln was clearly disappointed at Wistar’s failure.
Three weeks later, a second raid was mounted by Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick commanding the Third Division, Cavalry Corps, of the Army of the Potomac. This operation was to consist of two parts: Kilpatrick with 3,500 troopers would attack Richmond from the north entering the city while Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, son of Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, would lead a select group of 500 troopers around Richmond entering from the south. Dahlgren and his men would liberate the Union prisoners held in the Confederate prison camp on Belle Isle in the James River and escort them into Richmond. But something new had been added. Dahlgren carried papers that read, “The men must keep together and well in hand, and once in the city it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and Cabinet killed.”
Kilpatrick’s attack was quickly blunted and repelled. Dahlgren, unable to reach Belle Isle and cross the rain-swollen James River, abandoned his plan to enter the city from the south. Dahlgren tried to escape with his small band of men eastward to the safety of General Butler’s army on the Peninsula. Ambushed by Confederate cavalry, Dahlgren was killed, and the papers on his body calling for the burning of the city and killing of Davis were discovered.
On hearing the content of the Dahlgren orders, Davis believed that Lincoln had authorized the raid and its objectives, including Davis’s assassination. In his memoirs, Davis pointedly wrote about Dahlgren and his failed raid: “The enormity of his offenses was not forgotten.”12 The Confederate leaders felt that Lincoln had violated the civilized laws of war and in doing so had lost whatever protection he had under those laws. If Jefferson Davis was fair game, then Abraham Lincoln was fair game. The effect of the raid removed whatever restraints had existed on “black flag warfare.”13
According to the authors of Come Retribution, the Confederacy
retaliated with its own plan. Initially, the plan was to capture Lincoln and bring him to Richmond where he would serve as the ultimate bargaining chip in negotiations over prisoner exchange and a cessation of hostilities. In his confession made at the Arsenal prison on May 1, George A. Atzerodt, one of Booth’s cohorts, told of an alternative “project” to blow up the White House and kill Lincoln.14 The origins and details of this scheme are murky, but a team from the Torpedo Bureau in Richmond was sent to join John S. Mosby’s cavalry a few days before Richmond fell on April 3. The team carried supplies described as “ordnance” and was headed by an explosives expert, Thomas F. Harney. The plan fell apart when Harney and his assistants were captured on April 10 in a cavalry skirmish in Fairfax County, Virginia, about fifteen miles from Washington.15
The book immediately became controversial and was criticized by some members of the historical fraternity as lacking documentary proof. These historians felt the authors of Come Retribution had overreached in their effort to link officials of the Confederacy to Booth’s plans and actions. Prominent among their views was the belief that an assassination effort by either side was unthinkable under the moral constraints of the period.16 The perception at the time, and still prevalent today, was of a war fought by gentlemen guided by the highest moral standards and civility. Premeditated violence directed against the civilian leaders of a nation was simply not in the American character.
The authors of Come Retribution acknowledge their evidence is largely circumstantial, but point out that clandestine operations leave few paper trails for future historians to follow. Their research explained a Confederate Secret Service not previously appreciated or understood. By carefully pulling together many small pieces of information the authors tell their story. Like so many seemingly random dots in a child’s puzzle, pieces of unconnected information lay scattered across the landscape of Lincoln’s murder. By connecting all of the dots with one continuous line, the authors were able to come up with a pattern they believed pointed directly to Confederate Secret Service agents who were operating out of Canada and southern Maryland. These authors believe the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid gave Jefferson Davis and his advisors ample motivation to retaliate against Lincoln for his perceived offenses.
But Jefferson Davis did not fire the fatal bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth did. If Jefferson Davis and those around him had targeted the removal of Lincoln as their only hope of success, what motivation did John Wilkes Booth and those instrumental in his plot have? What passion caused Booth to risk so much and to eventually give his life? That is one of the central questions that this book addresses. It is a question previous authors have misinterpreted in attempting to describe the underlying events associated with Lincoln’s murder.
Previous studies have isolated Lincoln’s murder from the historical events leading up to it. History, however, does not exist as a series of isolated events like so many sound bites in a newscast. It is a continuum of seemingly unrelated and distant events that every so often come together in one momentous collision in time. Like a great asteroid colliding with earth, the small leaden bullet that crashed into Lincoln’s brain gave rise to an ominous cloud that spread across the American landscape leaving its fallout on subsequent generations.
The underpinning of the plot to assassinate Lincoln was the institution of slavery. Opposition to slavery had formed the Republican Party. In 1860 that party made Abraham Lincoln its candidate for president of the United States. Secession was the direct result of his election. The Southern States seceded from the Union because of Lincoln’s stand against slavery with the hope that they would be allowed to go their own way. That hope failed to materialize, and when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 the Confederacy found itself isolated from any hope of European support, all because of Lincoln and his policies. Southern independence would not happen because of Lincoln’s unwavering determination to reunite the country and wipe out the national curse of slavery in the process. Lincoln’s resolute stance caused some in the South to conclude that the only answer lay in removing him from his “throne of power”—if not by the ballot, then by the bullet.
The murder of Abraham Lincoln was a cataclysmic event in American history. It had its origins early in the seventeenth century when the first African was brought ashore in bondage. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery in the 1600s started America on a dangerous course from which it did not know how to recover. It grew slowly at first, and then more rapidly until all of the fury and rage surrounding the peculiar institution exploded from the muzzle of a two-inch barrel and smashed into the brain of the man who brought it to an end.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln is an oft-told story. But it is a story, as historian William Hanchett has written, that “has been described rather than explained.”17 And when explained, it is usually from the perspective of a deranged actor who struck from some mythical concept of revenge. This is not only too simple an explanation, it is flat-out wrong. Booth was neither mad nor alone in his act of murder. Alone he might never have accomplished his deed. Booth received important help from several people not the least of whom was Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the Charles County physician who history has come to believe was the innocent victim of a vengeful government. Mudd’s role was as a member of the Confederate clandestine apparatus that operated so successfully in southern Maryland. This is yet another instance where historians have failed to examine the primary record carefully. Had they done so they would have concluded that Dr. Mudd was not only a co-conspirator of Booth, but a pivotal figure in helping Booth assemble his team of cohorts. Booth’s ability to elude the authorities during his escape and to get as far as the Garrett farm can also be laid directly at Mudd’s feet. Booth benefited more from the help Dr. Mudd gave to him than from any other person connected with Lincoln’s murder.
Booth also benefited greatly from the Confederate leadership in Richmond. Whether he was an agent of that leadership or simply a beneficiary can be debated. But in putting together his plans to strike at Lincoln, Booth was aided by key members of the Confederate underground at every step. After capture turned to assassination, that same Confederate apparatus used all of its resources to help Booth in his attempt to escape. If it had not been for key members of the Confederate underground, Booth would never have made his way as far as he did or for as long as he did.
The underlying motive that caused the Southern leadership and men like John Wilkes Booth to risk all in their effort to “get” Lincoln was a common belief that slavery was an essential part of the cultural and economic success of the United States. Booth was a White supremacist. Those who joined with him in his plot to remove Lincoln were also White supremacists whose greatest fear was the emancipation of the Black man. Abraham Lincoln was the architect of those emancipation policies.
While historians have recognized that Booth was a racist who hated Lincoln, they have never connected his racism, or that of his associates, directly to Booth’s conspiracy to remove Lincoln as president. In Booth’s logic, Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln were despots of a feather. Caesar was murdered for taking away the civil liberties of his fellow citizens, while Abraham Lincoln was murdered for trying to extend civil liberties to his fellow citizens. In Booth’s mind, there was no difference. Both were tyrants who deserved killing.
When Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865, he held a small derringer in his hand. While it was Booth’s hand that held the gun, there were many fingers on the trigger. This book is an effort to explain who those people were and why they were so willing to help pull the trigger that changed the course of American history, and in telling this story, to correct the many misconceptions and false theories that have found their way into one of the most important events in the nation’s history.
Part One
A Divided House
Let my enemies prove to the country that the destruction of slavery is not necessary to the
restoration of the Union.
Abraham Lincoln, 1864
This country was formed for the white not for the black man.
John Wilkes Booth, 1864
CHAPTER ONE
The Apotheosis
Now he belongs to the ages.
Edwin McMasters Stanton
The voice came over the loudspeaker announcing that the next talk on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln would begin in two minutes. Like ants drawn to sugar, the crowd of tourists began streaming toward the orchestra section of the theater from many directions. Some had been looking at the special box where the president sat that fateful night. Others were downstairs in the exhibit area, viewing the various artifacts that explained the who and why of his death. Still others had been browsing the small gift shop that carried books and memorabilia about the sixteenth president.
Blood on the Moon Page 2
