by John Boyko
A few weeks later, on the Good Friday morning of April 14, the twenty-six-year-old visited the theatre to pick up his mail. While there, he learned that the president, his wife, and General and Mrs. Grant would be attending that evening’s performance of Our American Cousin. He went upstairs to check preparations on what would be the president’s private box, then hurried away.
Around 9:30 that evening, Booth dismounted his horse in the alley behind the theatre and asked a stagehand named Edman Spangler to hold the reins. He entered, and then left through a side exit to purchase a whiskey at Taltavull’s Star Saloon next door. When Booth returned to the theatre, he entered through the front door, stirring no suspicion from the doorman. He made his way upstairs to the back of the unguarded presidential box, where he waited patiently for the point in the play he knew quite well, when only one actor would be on stage.
Booth held a dagger in one hand and a single-shot derringer pistol in the other. Through a small hole in the door that he had drilled that afternoon, he could see President Lincoln and his wife and, because Grant could not attend, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, enjoying the play. When the moment was right, Booth quietly slid open the door, pointed the derringer at the back of the unsuspecting president’s head, and fired. Rathbone jumped to his feet and Booth slashed him with the dagger. Booth then yelled “Sic semper tyrannis” and leapt twelve feet to the stage below, breaking his fibula bone inches above his right ankle. To a stunned audience, he shouted, “The South shall be free,” and then hurried out the back door to his waiting horse. *
Pandemonium gripped the theatre. Two doctors joined the throng crowding around the unconscious president, and they agreed that the wound was mortal. Lincoln was carried through a chaotic crowd to the Peterson boarding house across 10th Street, where he was laid diagonally across a small bed.
Six blocks away, in his three-storey home overlooking Lafayette Square, Secretary of State William Seward was resting in bed, still recovering from the injuries he had sustained in the carriage accident. He wore a steel brace, painfully securing his broken jaw, and his fractured arm was hanging over the bedside. At about the time that Booth had left the saloon, a co-conspirator, the intimidatingly large and well-dressed Lewis Powell, knocked on Seward’s front door, claiming to be delivering medicine. He pushed past a servant and rushed to Seward’s third-floor room. Seward’s son Frederick stopped him at the bedroom door, and Seward’s daughter Fanny and army nurse George Robinson stepped out to see who was there. Fanny and Robinson left Frederick alone to deal with the visitor, at which point Powell suddenly pulled a revolver from beneath his overcoat and, when it misfired, smashed it against Frederick’s head. The horrible noise brought Fanny and Robinson back. Powell then attacked Robinson with a long Bowie knife, ran into Seward’s room, leapt onto the bed, and with Fanny screaming, began slashing at Seward. One blow nearly sliced off Seward’s cheek. Several more strikes sent blood spattering onto the bed and walls. The commotion roused another of Seward’s sons, Augustus, and he and the bleeding Robinson pulled Powell from the bed. But they could not hold him. Yelling “I am mad! I am mad!” Powell ran back outside to his partner, David Herold, who had been holding their horses. They dug in their spurs and vanished into the night. Seward lay crumpled on the floor, entangled in torn and blood-soaked nightclothes and sheets, gasping for air and barely conscious.
Minutes later, there was a knock on Edwin Stanton’s door. Two clerks who had been walking along 10th Street heard the shouts announcing Lincoln’s shooting and had run to tell the secretary of war. The gruff, magnificently bearded Stanton rose from his bed, got dressed, and came downstairs to the alarming news. He reacted stoically when the clerks added that, while rushing over they had also heard that Seward had been assaulted and possibly killed. It appeared that the government was under attack. But Stanton had earned his reputation as a tough, cool and decisive man, and those qualities would serve him and his country well in the minutes and hours to come.
Stanton called for guards to be placed at the homes of all cabinet secretaries and at the vice president’s rooms at the Kirkwood House Hotel, only two blocks from Ford’s Theatre. He then rushed to Seward’s house, where the gruesome scene left him staggered. It appeared, however, that the steel jaw brace had saved Seward’s life by deflecting what could have been fatal thrusts. General Montgomery Meigs, the army’s quartermaster general, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and the District of Columbia’s Supreme Court Justice David Carter had also been told of the attack and soon joined Stanton at Seward’s home.
Leaving Seward in the care of his doctor, the stalwart group risked the night and hurried to the Peterson house. Stanton pushed his way through the growing crowd standing silently in a cool rain and strode into the tiny bedroom where the president lay dying. When told that recovery was impossible, he slumped into a chair and, uncharacteristically, cried. In a moment, he stood, wiped his face, gathered himself and left for a back parlour where, for all intents and purposes, he stationed the government of the United States.
Stanton ordered telegraph communications to be set up from the Peterson house. Dispatches were written, more guards posted and General Grant recalled to Washington. All bridges leading from the city were to be closed and all ships on the Potomac and trains moving in and out of the capital stopped. While the Mexican border and eastern seaboard ports could remain open, Stanton had the Canadian border sealed. As interviews with witnesses began, it was quickly established that John Wilkes Booth had shot the president. No one could identify Seward’s assailant; nor could anyone guess if the night’s violence was over.
Washington’s police headquarters was just a few doors away, and detectives soon joined the cabinet secretaries, army officers and doctors crowding into the narrow, three-storey Peterson house. When told of the tragic events, Vice President Andrew Johnson pulled a dark hat low over his head and walked the two blocks from his hotel to the Peterson house, with only Provost Marshal Major James O’Beirne as protection against assassins who, for all they knew, lurked in every shadow. Johnson left a short while later for his more easily secured Kirkwood House suite. Stanton remained in charge and continued to sift clues, direct the investigation and manhunt, and issue government statements. Among the many leads that he received was word that a man named John Surratt had often been seen with Booth and lived a few blocks away at his mother’s H Street boarding house. Stanton ordered him arrested.
A group of detectives were soon at the Surratt house, where a boarder named Louis Weichmann told them that Surratt was not home. They nonetheless pushed their way in and searched the house. John’s mother, Mary, confessed to having recently seen Booth, but said her son had been away for some time in Montreal. With that admission, only hours after Booth’s fateful shot, Canada entered the picture.
Back at the Peterson house, Stanton was reminded that just hours before, Confederate agent Jacob Thompson had been spotted on his way out of the country, and Lincoln had refused to have him stopped. Stanton ordered Thompson’s arrest. With that order, Canada moved toward the picture’s foreground.
Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15. The news spread quickly around the world. John A. Macdonald issued no public statement. George Brown was devastated and sat alone in his study, where he composed a long and heartfelt eulogy for the Globe—the first issue to be published with a black border. His kind words were echoed in nearly every newspaper in Canada and the Maritimes. Special church services were held, and flags on public buildings and ships in harbour were pulled to half-staff. Later, when Lincoln’s funeral train made its way from Washington to Illinois, hundreds of Canadians crossed the border to pay their respects at Buffalo and then again at Detroit.
As in the United States, however, not everyone in Canada mourned the president’s death. From Montreal, United States consul general John Potter reported to the State Department that news of Lincoln’s shooting had sparked celebrations among the city’s many Confede
rate agents and sympathizers. He told of a special dinner having been held at St. Lawrence Hall to hail Lincoln’s death, with toasts drunk to his passing. More ominously, the consul general stated that he had just been informed that before the assassination, Confederates were heard bragging that Lincoln would not live another week. Potter also informed the State Department that the previous October, Montreal’s St. Lawrence Hall had welcomed John Wilkes Booth, who stayed in the city for two weeks and spoke with many well-known Canadian-based Confederates.1 Stanton’s Department of War agent, Colonel Lafayette Baker, dispatched a number of Washington detectives to Montreal to investigate.2 In a subsequent letter to Seward, Potter provided more detail about those he called the Confederate’s Canadian Cabinet: “There are many facts which tend to prove that these persons were not only cognizant of the conspiracy but the conspiracy was planned in this city.”3
Three hours after Lincoln died, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as America’s seventeenth president in his Kirkwood House sitting room. Johnson was born in North Carolina to illiterate and poverty-stricken parents. He made a little money as a tailor and, after his wife taught him to read, served five terms as a Democratic congressman. He was elected to the Senate in 1857. Johnson remained loyal to the Union when Sumter’s guns forced a choice, and when Grant’s armies took the state in 1862, Lincoln appointed him Tennessee’s military governor. In 1864, Lincoln ran for re-election as the leader of the National Union Party, a coalition of Republicans and like-minded Democrats. In an attempt to demonstrate reconciliation with the South, the party convention in Baltimore chose Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate. Many doubted Johnson because he was from the South and others disliked his gruff manner. Anger and bitterness seemed to motivate his decisions. He saw opponents as enemies and compromise as weakness. Johnson did himself no favours when he appeared drunk at the inauguration and delivered a slurring, ramble of a speech while some laughed and Lincoln hung his head. One thing that few people worried about was whether the stocky, barrel-chested Johnson would be tough with the South or those responsible for the terrible Good Friday crimes. He told those who came to wish him well, “When you ask me what I would do, my reply is, I would arrest them; I would try them; I would convict them; and I would hang them.”4
It happened just like that. Only days after the murder, detectives arrested Mary Surratt. Lewis Powell had the bad luck of showing up at the boarding house at the moment of her arrest and was taken too. Edman Spangler, to whom Booth had handed his horse, and Samuel Arnold, who was implicated by a note addressed to him and found in Booth’s belongings, were also arrested. Three days later, detectives arrested George Atzerodt, who had taken a room directly above Johnson’s in the Kirkwood House in order to carry out his part of Booth’s plan to assassinate the vice president. Atzerodt had lost his nerve and spent the night drinking and wandering the streets. Dr. Samuel Mudd had been in contact with Booth and the others before the assassination, and mended Booth’s leg afterward. Detectives took him to jail too.
John Surratt could not be found. It was later established that for some time he had been a courier and spy as one of Thompson’s Canadian-based Confederate agents. In Montreal and Washington, he had become involved with Booth and others in a plot to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. The president was to be swapped for a return of Confederate prisoners and a declaration allowing the South and slavery to stand. On March 17, they had gathered on the road often taken by Lincoln to the Soldiers’ Home, where he liked to get away from the constant flow of White House callers. Lincoln did not show up.
After the failed kidnap attempt, Booth kept contact with the others, but Surratt left to resume his work out of Canada. He signed into Montreal’s St. Lawrence Hall on April 6. Shortly afterward he was asked to investigate the viability of springing the twelve thousand Confederates from the deplorable conditions of New York’s Elmira Prison. Surratt was there when he heard news of the assassination, and fled immediately back to Montreal. He was hidden by a Catholic priest named Father Charles Boucher in the village of St. Libone, forty-five miles north of the city. Surratt spent three months there, but when suspicions arose that he had been spotted, he was moved to Murray Bay, an even more remote community on the St. Lawrence, and later back to Montreal, where he stayed with another priest. In September, Surratt was helped to disguise himself and escape on the Peruvian, bound for Liverpool. 5
While Surratt was hurrying back to his Canadian friends, the days after the assassination saw a massive manhunt for Lincoln’s killer. Jottings that Booth made in an appointment book while on the run reveal him as a man who, after a week, had grown hungry, dirty, tired and dispirited.6 On April 24, with a scrap of rumour that Booth was in Virginia, the 16th New York Regiment’s first lieutenant Edward P. Doherty was ordered to assemble his best men to pursue and capture him. Doherty was born in Canada East and had moved to New York in 1860, where days after Lincoln’s first call for troops he had joined the 71st Volunteers. He had seen action in a number of battles and in the autumn of 1863 had been assigned to defend Washington.
Doherty and twenty-six men, accompanied by detectives Everton Conger and Luther Baker, took a steamship to Belle Plain, Virginia, and questioned everyone they encountered. They followed a trail of clues to Jack Garrett’s farm, where Booth and David Herold were found hiding in a barn. Doherty ordered it surrounded and sent a reluctant Garrett inside to convince them to surrender. When Booth refused to give himself up, sticks and pine twigs were thrown against the walls with the threat to fire the barn. Garrett and Herold emerged with their hands in the air. With Booth still inside, Doherty’s men set the barn ablaze. Sgt. Boston Corbett had crept to the back and could see Booth through gaps in the barn board. Without Doherty’s order, and with flames consuming the barn and Booth walking menacingly toward the door with a rifle in hand, Corbett aimed his .44 Colt revolver and shot him.*
Lincoln’s assassin was dragged from the burning barn and for two hours he lingered in agony on a bed pulled onto Garrett’s front porch. Seconds before drawing his last breath, he whispered, “Useless. Useless.”7 Booth’s body was returned to Washington where, for a time, it was buried beneath the floor of the Washington Arsenal. Doherty, meanwhile, would be cheated out of the largest portion of the reward money by the more ambitious detectives.
While Booth was being hunted, the intense questioning of his compatriots suggested that authorities believed the assassination had been an elaborate conspiracy involving not only Canadian-based Confederates but possibly Jefferson Davis himself. Kentucky lawyer and former secretary of state Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt led the investigation. Holt was a brigadier general and had been a friend and political ally of Stanton since they served together in President Buchanan’s cabinet. He was also respected and feared as a smart and ruthless lawyer. Holt and Stanton had a hand in the composition and release of President Johnson’s first public proclamation regarding the assassination of Lincoln and attempt on Seward’s life, which was released on May 2. It reflected their conviction that Canada was at the bottom of the tragedy and stirred up the already virulent anti-Canadian sentiment across America.8 Reprinted in newspapers across Canada, the Maritimes and the United States, the proclamation said in part:
Whereas it appears, from evidence in the bureau of military justice that the atrocious murder of the late President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of the Honourable William H. Seward, Secretary of State, were incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Virginia; Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, Beverly [sic] Tucker, George Saunders [sic], William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United States, harbored in Canada.9
The new president offered a $100,000 reward for Davis, $10,000 for Cleary and $25,000 for the others. Johnson’s proclamation made evident to all that Canada’s involvement in the Civil War had not ended with the Appomattox handshake. Two Montreal newspapers carried identical editorials in response to the
proclamation, criticizing Johnson for trying to drag Canada into the assassination and for claiming, with no evidence, that American criminals were being hidden in Canada. It also suggested that the only man to have benefitted from Lincoln’s murder was President Johnson himself, and that a note Booth had sent to Johnson’s hotel on the day of the murder was proof that perhaps he should be the one under investigation.10*Jacob Thompson wrote a letter from Europe that was published in the Globe, the New York Tribune and elsewhere denying any involvement in the assassination: “I aver upon honor that I have never known, or conversed, or held communication, either directly or indirectly with Booth … or with any of his associates, so far as I have seen them named. I knew nothing of their plans.… I know there is not half the ground to suspect me than there is to suspect President Johnson himself.”11 Tucker and Clay wrote similar letters and, like Thompson, challenged Johnson to produce evidence to prove that Booth had planned the assassination with them in Montreal.12 But American investigators were gathering evidence that seemed to prove just that: Lincoln’s murder had indeed been planned in Montreal.
MACDONALD GOES TO LONDON
On the day that President Johnson officially implicated Canada in Lincoln’s assassination, John A. Macdonald was in London, England. Governor General Monck had been looking forward to being a part of the Canadian delegation and to visiting his Irish home and family. However, with Lincoln’s murder, the uncertainty that followed, and Macdonald’s absence abroad, Colonial Secretary Cardwell had ordered Monck to stay in Canada to deal with whatever might come.13 Four days after the killing, Macdonald and Brown left Monck behind and sailed out of New York harbour aboard the China.
The ice had thawed between the two former rivals, but they would never be friends. They would never really understand each other. In fact, although Macdonald was Canada’s most well-known and powerful political leader, few really understood him at all. Born in Scotland, Macdonald had moved to Canada when he was five. The family settled near Kingston, where his alcoholic father continued his habit of failing in every business venture to which he turned his hand. When only fifteen, Macdonald began articling at a law office, and five years later he was running his own firm. An intelligent, hard-working, ambitious young man, he was soon a successful corporate lawyer and businessman who would enjoy directorships in a number of financial institutions and gather investments in land, banks, railways, and road and shipping companies. In the 1850s, a business partner’s bad decisions and untimely death cut Macdonald’s success short. That calamity was followed by the long and deep international recession. Business problems coupled with an insufficient and unreliable income would plague him for the rest of his life.
