One mile down Pennsylvania Avenue, so close he can almost hear the beloved strains of “Dixie” being belted out so heretically by a Yankee band, the twenty-six-year-old actor stands alone in a pistol range. The smell of gunpowder mixes with the fragrant pomade of his mustache. His feet are set slightly wider than shoulder width, his lean athletic torso is turned at a right angle to the bull’s-eye, and his right arm is extended in a line perfectly parallel with the floor. In his fist he cradles the sort of pint-sized pistol favored by ladies and cardsharps.
He fires.
Booth scrutinizes the target. Satisfied, he reloads his single-shot .44-caliber Deringer. His mood is a mixture of rage and despondence. Things have gone to hell since Lee surrendered. Richmond is gone, and with it the Confederate leadership. The “secesh” community—those southern secessionist sympathizers living a secret life in the nation’s capital—is in disarray. There’s no one to offer guidance to Booth and the other secret agents of the Confederacy.
At this point, there are at least four Confederate groups conspiring to harm the president. Two are plotting a kidnapping, one is planning to smuggle dress shirts infected with yellow fever into his dresser drawers, and another intends to blow up the White House.
Booth is part of a kidnapping conspiracy. He prefers the term “capture.” Kidnapping is a crime, but capturing an enemy during a time of war is morally correct. The Confederate government has strict rules governing its agents’ behavior. If Booth does indeed get the chance, he is allowed to capture the president, truss him like a pig, subject him to a torrent of verbal and mental harassment, and even punch him in the mouth, should the opportunity present itself. The one thing he is not allowed to do is engage in “black flag warfare.”
Or in a word: murder.
Booth wonders if the restriction against black flag warfare still applies. And, if not, what he should do about it. That’s why he’s at the range. He has a major decision to make. Shooting helps him think.
Booth fires again. The split-second bang fills him with power, drowning out the celebrations and focusing his mind. Again, he tamps in a ball and a percussion cap.
There is a darkness to Booth’s personality, born of the entitlement that comes with celebrity. He is a boaster and a liar, fond of embellishing stories to make himself sound daring and adventurous. He is cruel and mercurial. He is a bully, eager to punish those who don’t agree with his points of view. Outside of his love for his mother, Booth is capable of doing anything to satisfy his own urges.
Booth is also a white supremacist. His most closely guarded secret is that he has temporarily given up the profession of acting to fight for the pro-slavery movement. The abolition movement, in Booth’s mind, is the real cause of the Civil War, a serpent that must be crushed. Enslavement of blacks is part of the natural order, Booth believes, and central to the South’s economy. Blacks, he maintains, are third-class citizens who should spend their lives working for the white man. Not only does this life fulfill them, but they are begging for correction when they step out of line. “I have been through the whole south and have marked the happiness of master and man,” Booth writes. “I have seen the black man whipped. But only when he deserved much more than he received.”
As a teenager, Booth was traumatized when runaway slaves killed a schoolmate’s father. He is willing to swear an oath that this sort of violence will happen on a much larger scale if the South loses the war. Newly freed slaves will slaughter southern white men, rape their women and daughters, and instigate a bloodbath unlike any other in recorded history.
The only way to prevent that is to reinstate slavery by winning the Civil War.
It crushes Booth to think that the South has lost. He shuts the idea out of his mind. Lee’s surrender, Booth believes, was a gross error in judgment. Even the great Marse Robert is allowed an occasional lapse.
Booth takes solace in the 146,000 Confederate troops spread out from North Carolina to Texas that have refused to lay down their weapons. So long as those men are willing to fight, the Confederacy—and slavery—will live on.
And now, Booth will give them another reason to fight.
That he was born just south of the Mason-Dixon Line and nearly a northerner means nothing. Booth nurtures a deep hatred for his father and the nation’s father figure, Abraham Lincoln. Booth was jealous of his father, an accomplished actor who never acknowledged his young son’s talent. Booth’s paternal loathing has now been transferred to the president; it flared to full burn when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Booth could have enlisted in the war. But soldiering, even for the Confederate cause, is far too mundane for his flamboyant personality. He cares little about battles won or lost, or battlefields hundreds of miles from the fancy hotels he calls home. Booth is fighting the Civil War on his terms, using his talents, choreographing the action like a great director. The grand finale will be a moment straight from the stage, some stunning dramatic conclusion when antagonist and protagonist meet face-to-face, settling their differences once and for all. The antagonist, of course, will win.
That antagonist will be Booth.
And what could be more dramatic than kidnapping Lincoln?
The plan is for Booth to gag and bind him, then smuggle him out of Washington, D.C., into the hands of Confederate forces. The president of the United States will rot in a rat-infested dungeon until slavery has been reinstated. Booth will sit before him and deliver a furious monologue, accusing Lincoln of stupidity and self-importance. It doesn’t matter that Lincoln won’t be able to talk back; Booth has no interest in anything the president has to say.
Lincoln keeps a summer residence three miles outside Washington, at a place called the Soldiers’ Home. Seeking respite from the Washington humidity or just to get away from the office seekers and politicos permeating the White House year-round, the president escapes there alone on horseback most evenings. From George Washington onward, presidents of the United States have usually been comfortable traveling with an entourage. But Lincoln, who enjoys his solitude, has no patience for that.
The president thinks his getaways are secret, but men like Booth and the members of the Confederate Secret Service are always watching. Booth’s original mission, as defined by his southern handlers, was to capture Lincoln while he rode on the lonely country road to the Soldiers’ Home.
Booth tried and failed twice. Now he has a new plan, one that preys on Lincoln’s fondness for the theater. He will grab him in mid-performance, from the presidential box at a Washington playhouse.
The scheme, however, is so crazy, so downright impossible that none of his co-conspirators will go along with it.
One of them has even backed out completely and taken the train home. It is as if Booth has rehearsed and rehearsed for a major performance, only to have the production canceled moments before the curtain rises. He has poured thousands of dollars into the plan. Some of that money has come from his own pocket; most has been supplied by the Confederacy. And now the scheme will never come to pass.
Booth fires at the bull’s-eye.
The Deringer is less than six inches long, made of brass, with a two-inch barrel. It launches a single large-caliber ball instead of a bullet and is accurate only at close range. For this reason it is often called a “gentleman’s pistol”—small and easily concealed in a pocket or boot, the Deringer is ideal for ending an argument or extracting oneself from a dangerous predicament but wholly unsuited for the battlefield. Booth has purchased other weapons for his various plots, including the cache of revolvers and long-bladed daggers now hidden in his hotel room. But the Deringer with the chocolate-colored wooden grip is his personal favorite. It is not lost on him that the pistol’s primary traits—elegance, stealth, and the potential to produce mayhem—match those of its owner.
Booth is almost out of ammunition. He loads his gun for one last shot, still plotting his next course of action.
He is absolutely certain he can kidnap Lincoln.
But as Booth himself would utter while performing Hamlet, there’s the rub.
If the war is over, then kidnapping Lincoln is pointless.
Yet Lincoln is still the enemy. He always will be.
So if Booth is no longer a kidnapper, then how will he wage war? This is the question that has bothered him all night.
Booth fires his last shot, slides the Deringer into his pocket, and storms out the door, only to once again find the streets full of inebriated revelers. Outraged, he steps into a tavern and knocks back a drink. John Wilkes Booth thinks hard about what comes next. “Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done,” he tells himself.
Until now, Booth has taken orders from Confederate president Jefferson Davis, currently in hiding. It was Davis who, nearly a year ago, sent two agents to Montreal with a fund of $1 million in gold. That money funded various plots against Lincoln. But Davis is done, fleeing to North Carolina in a train filled with looted Confederate gold, most likely never to return. Booth alone must decide for himself what is wrong and what is right.
From this moment forward he will live and breathe and scheme in accordance with his brand-new identity, and his new mission. The time has come for black flag warfare.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1865
WASHINGTON, D.C.
NIGHT
Booth’s Washington residence is the National Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth. Just around the corner is James Pumphrey’s stable, where he often rents a horse. The actor feels perfectly at home at Pumphrey’s, for the owner is also known to be a Confederate sympathizer. Now, well past eight, and with no streetlights beyond the city limits, the night is far too dark for a ride into the country. But a half-drunk Booth needs to get on a horse now—right now—and gallop through Washington, D.C., reassuring himself that he has a way out of the city after putting a bullet in Abraham Lincoln.
I am the man who will end Abraham Lincoln’s life. That thought motivates Booth as he walks. He returns to the idea over and over again. He is thrilled by the notion, not bothered in the least by his ability to make the mental jump from the passive violence of kidnapping to cold-blooded murder. I will kill the president of the United States.
Booth ruminates without remorse. Of course, killing a man is immoral. Even Booth knows that.
This is wartime. Killing the enemy is no more illegal than capturing him.
The actor thinks of Lincoln’s second inaugural and how he stood so close to Lincoln on that day. I could have shot him then, if I had wished.
Booth regrets the lost opportunity, then sets it aside. There will be another chance—and this time he will stand even closer, so close he can’t miss. So close he will see the life drain from Lincoln’s eyes.
It occurs to him that no American president has ever been assassinated. I will be the first man to ever kill a president. He is now even more dazzled by his own violent plan.
The United States is just three months shy of being eighty-nine years old. There are thirty-six states in the Union, thanks to Nevada’s recent admission. Lincoln is the sixteenth president. Two have passed away from illness while in office. None of them, as Booth well knows, has died by someone else’s hand. If successful in his assassination attempt, the actor will achieve the lasting recognition he has always craved.
For a nation founded by rebellion and torn open by a civil war, the citizens of the United States have been remarkably nonviolent when confronted with politicians they despise. Only one American president was the target of an assassin. And that was Andrew Jackson, the man whose politics sowed the seeds of Confederate rebellion thirty years earlier.
Jackson was leaving a funeral in the Capitol Building on January 30, 1835, when a British expatriate fired at him twice. Unfortunately for the mentally unbalanced Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be the king of England, both his pistols misfired. The bullets never left the chamber. Congressman Davy Crockett wrestled Lawrence to the ground and disarmed him, even as Jackson beat the would-be assassin with his cane.
Jackson was also the first and only American president to suffer bodily harm at the hands of a citizen, when a sailor discharged from the navy for embezzlement punched Jackson at a public ceremony in 1833. Robert Randolph fled the scene. Jackson, ever the warrior, refused to press charges.
These are the only acts of presidential insurrection in the nation’s entire history. The American people are unique in that their considerable political passion is expressed at the ballot box, not through violence directed at their leaders, whom they can vote out of office. If judged only by this yardstick, the Democratic experiment undertaken by Americans four score and nine years ago seems to be working.
Maybe this is why Lincoln rides his horse alone through Washington or stands fearlessly on the top deck of a ship in a combat zone. The president tries to convince himself that assassination is not part of the American character, saying, “I can’t believe that anyone has shot, or will deliberately shoot at me with the purpose of killing me.”
A wider look at human history suggests otherwise. Tribal societies murdered their leaders long before the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was slain by his advisers in 1324 B.C. Stabbing and beating were the earliest methods of assassination. The Moabite king Eglon was disemboweled in his chambers, his girth so vast that the killer lost the knife in the folds of his fat. Over time, well-known historical figures such as Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) and perhaps even Alexander himself were assassinated. And politically motivated killing was not limited to Europe or the Middle East—records show that assassination had long been practiced in India, Africa, and China.
And then, of course, there was Julius Caesar, the victim of the most famous assassination in history. The Roman ruler was stabbed twenty-three times by members of the Roman Senate. Of the two stab wounds to his chest, one was the blow that killed him. The killing took place during a lunar cycle known as the ides, fulfilling a prophecy by a local soothsayer.
The truth is that Lincoln, despite what he says, secretly believes he will die in office. He is by far the most despised and reviled president in American history. His closest friend and security adviser, the barrel-chested Ward Hill Lamon, preaches regularly to Lincoln about the need for improved security measures. More tangibly, there is a packet nestled in a small cubby of Lincoln’s upright desk. It is marked, quite simply, “Assassination.” Inside are more than eighty death threats. Every morning, sitting in his office to conduct affairs of state, Lincoln’s eyes cannot help but see those letters. “God damn your god damned old hellfire god damned soul to hell,” reads one letter. “God damn you and your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell.”
“The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable,” Lincoln has admitted to an artist who came to paint his portrait, “but they have ceased to give me any apprehension.
“I know I am in danger, but I am not going to worry over little things like these.”
Rather than dwell on death, Lincoln prefers to live life on his own terms. “If I am killed I can die but once,” he is fond of saying, “but to live in constant dread is to die over and over again.”
While the war still raged he told the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Whichever way the war ends, I have the impression that I shall not last long after it is over.”
A small number of assassins are delusional or impulsive killers, but on the whole, the successful assassin stalks his target, planning every detail of the crime. This means knowing the victim’s habits, schedule, nuances, and security detail. Only then can the two most complex and dangerous tasks be successfully executed.
The first involves the shooting—and in 1865 it must be a shooting, because there is little likelihood of getting close enough to stab a major political figure. The assassin must figure out the when and where (a large crowd is ideal); determine how to get in and out of the building or ceremony; and cho
ose the perfect weapon.
Second is the escape. A successful assassin is a murderer. A perfect assassination, however, means getting away from the scene of the murder without being caught. This is even more of a long shot than the crime itself. Plenty of men in those large crowds will want to play the hero. They will tackle and subdue the assailant without fear for their own lives. And even if an assassin eludes those crowds, he must escape the city in which it takes place, and then the country, until arriving at some foreign location of true refuge.
As Booth strolls to Pumphrey’s, he carries a map in his coat pocket showing the location of General Joe Johnston and his Confederate holdouts, who are hiding in North Carolina. Booth knows the map by heart. He can pinpoint the precise route Johnston must take to evade the Federal troops and reignite the war. To Booth, the map is much more than a detailed depiction of contours and boundaries. It is also a glimmer of hope, reminding him that the noble cause is alive and well, and why he must do what he must do.
His mind wanders to his buggy, of all things. Booth bought it to transport Lincoln after the kidnapping. Now it serves no purpose. Booth makes a mental note to put the buggy up for sale. But in an instant, his thoughts revert back to President Lincoln, who now has only five days to live.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1865
WASHINGTON, D.C.
NIGHT
Booth turns onto C Street and then out of the cold, wet night into James Pumphrey’s stable. His clothes are damp. He smells of drink and tobacco. A quick glance around the stalls shows that most of the horses are already rented out for the evening. Pumphrey may be a Confederate sympathizer and a full-fledged member of the secessionist movement, but he has no qualms about making an honest buck off this night of Union celebration.
Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy Page 9
