Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy

by O'Reilly, Bill

  The evidence is, in fact, erroneous. It refers to a group of men smuggled into Virginia on Easter Sunday, not Booth and Herold. Lafayette Baker immediately reacts, however, sending twenty-five members of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry by the steamship John S. Ide from Washington downriver to Belle Plain, Virginia. All of the men have volunteered for the mission. The senior officers are Baker’s cousin Lieutenant Luther Baker and Colonel Everton Conger, a twenty-nine-year-old, highly regarded veteran of the Civil War.

  Lafayette Baker sees them off. “I want you to go to Virginia and get Booth,” he says and then puts his cousin in charge, despite the lower rank.

  The Ide pushes back at two P.M., for a four-hour voyage. It arrives at the simple wharf and warehouse along the shore just after dark. The men immediately spur their horses down the main road of Belle Plain, Virginia, and then into the countryside, knocking on farmhouse doors and questioning the occupants. They stop any and all riders and carriages they encounter, pressing hard for clues as to Booth’s whereabouts.

  But nobody has seen Booth or Herold—or, if they have, they’re not talking. By morning the cavalry squad is in Port Conway, more than ten miles inland from the Potomac. Exhausted, their horses wrung out from the long night, the soldiers are starting to feel as if this is just another futile lead. Conger has promised them all an equal share of the more than $200,000 in reward money awaiting those who capture Booth. This spurred them to ride all night, but now the prize seems unattainable. They are growing fearful that the Ide will return to Washington without them, leaving them to wait days for another ship.

  During their trip south, Lieutenant Luther Baker made the rather wise decision to give the command back to Conger. “You have been over the ground,” he told the veteran.

  Then, just as they are about to give up and go home, on the shores of the Rappahannock River, at a ferry crossing known as Port Royal, two men positively identify photographs of Booth and Herold. They passed through the previous day and were traveling with a small group of Confederate veterans.

  By this time, the twenty-five cavalry soldiers are exhausted, “so haggard and wasted with travel that had to be kicked into intelligence before they could climb to their saddles,” Lieutenant Baker will later recall.

  But climb into their saddles they do, for hours and hours of more searching.

  At two o’clock in the morning, at a handsome whitewashed farm three hundred yards off the main road, they finally come to a halt. The ground is soft clay, so their horses’ hooves make no sound. The soldiers draw their carbines from their scabbards as Lieutenant Baker dismounts and opens the property’s main gate. He has no certain knowledge of anything nefarious. It is just a hunch.

  Fanning out, the riders make a circle around the house and barn.

  In a very few minutes, Lieutenant Baker’s hunch will make history.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 1865

  GARRETT FARM, VIRGINIA

  DUSK TO DAWN

  Until just a few hours ago, John Wilkes Booth was happier and more content than at any time since killing Lincoln. His broken leg notwithstanding, his three days in Virginia, with its pro-Confederate citizens and custom of hospitality, have made him think that escape is a likely possibility. He even disclosed his identity to a group of former southern soldiers he met along the road. To everyone else who’s asked, he’s a former soldier who was injured at Petersburg and is on his way home.

  He’s spent the last day at the farmhouse of Richard Garrett, whose son John just returned home from the war. The Garretts do not know Booth’s true identity and believe his story about being a former soldier. He’s enjoyed hot meals and the chance to wash and sleep. But an hour before sunset came word that Federal cavalry were crossing the ferry over the Rappahannock River.

  Booth reacted to the news with visible fear. The Garretts, seeing this, grew suspicious and insisted that both men leave. Booth and Herold refused, though not in a belligerent manner. Not knowing what to do and not wanting to create a problem with the two armed strangers, John Garrett sent them to sleep in the barn. Now Booth and Herold hide in a forty-eight-by-fifty-foot wooden structure, filled with hay and corn. Tobacco-curing equipment is stored inside, and thick cedar beams provide sturdy structural support. Worried that Booth and Herold plan to steal their horses and escape in the night, John and his brother William sleep outside the barn, armed with a pistol.

  Booth doesn’t realize the Garrett brothers are outside guarding the barn; nor does he know that the cavalry is surrounding the house. All he is sure of is that at two A.M. the dogs begin barking. Then a terrified John Garrett steps into the barn and orders the men to give up their weapons. The building is surrounded, he tells them.

  “Get out of here,” Booth cries, “or I will shoot you. You have betrayed me.”

  Garrett flees, locking the barn door behind him. Booth and Herold are now trapped inside, with no idea how many men are out there. Then Herold says he wants out. He’s sick of this life and wants to go home. He’s done nothing wrong and wishes to proclaim his innocence.

  “Captain,” Booth calls out, not knowing the proper rank to use. “There is a man here who very much wants to surrender.”

  Then he turns to Herold in disgust: “Go away from me, damned coward.”

  Herold exits through the main door, wrists first. He is immediately taken away and arrested by the soldiers.

  Lieutenant Baker calls to Booth, telling him that the barn will be set on fire within moments unless Booth surrenders. “Well, Captain,” Booth cries out, his old sense of the dramatic now fully returned, “you may prepare a stretcher for me. Draw up your men. Throw open the door. Let’s have a fair fight.”

  Then Booth hears the crackle of burning straw and smells the sickly sweet wood smoke of burning cedar. “One more stain on the old banner!” he yells, doing his best to sound fearless. No one quite knows what that statement means.

  He looks across the barn and sees Lieutenant Baker opening the door. The actor hefts his loaded carbine, preparing to take aim.

  Just as Abraham Lincoln felt a slight instant of pain and then nothing at all when Booth shot him, now Booth hears the crack of a rifle and feels a jolt in his neck, and then nothing. Sergeant Boston Corbett has fired a bullet and it slices through Booth’s spinal cord and paralyzes him from the neck down. John Wilkes Booth collapses to the floor of the barn, the flames now climbing higher and higher all around him.

  Boston Corbett, in his own way, is as much a zealot as Booth. Only his passion is religion. Incredibly, years before, Corbett cut off his own testicles with a pair of scissors after experiencing a moment of lust. Booth has now been shot by a man very much like himself: a rebellious fanatic. Corbett actually disobeyed orders when taking aim at the actor. Baker and Conger pull John Wilkes Booth from the barn moments before it is completely engulfed in flames. The actor is still alive.

  As with Lincoln, the decision is made not to transport him, for any movement will surely kill the actor. But he is dead by morning anyway. His limp body is hurled into the back of a garbage wagon.

  The flight—and life—of John Wilkes Booth has come to an end. He is just twenty-six years old.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  FRIDAY, JULY 7, 1865

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  DAWN

  Two and a half months later, the rounding up of Lincoln’s killers has become a national pastime. Secretary of War Stanton has personally taken charge of identifying the larger conspiracy that has grown out of Booth’s single gunshot, pushing Lafayette Baker from the limelight. While some in the Confederate South now call Booth a martyr and hang pictures of him in their homes as they would for any family member, northerners are even more determined to see every last one of his co-conspirators found—and killed. The jails are full of men and women who have been trapped in the spider’s web of the Stanton investigation. Some have absolutely nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, like James Pumphrey, the Confederate-sympathiz
ing owner of a stable, who spent a month behind bars. No one is immune from suspicion. Federal agents scour their list of suspects, making sure no one is overlooked. One missing suspect is twenty-one-year-old John Surratt, whose mother, Mary, provided Booth and his conspirators with weapons and lodging.

  Mary herself sits inside the old Arsenal Penitentiary awaiting her fate. She’s been locked up since her arrest on April 17. The trial of all the co-conspirators, including Mary, began on May 10, and some 366 witnesses were called before it was over, seven weeks later. From the beginning, the public viewed all the conspirators as clearly criminals. Certainly the drunken George Atzerodt and the brutish thug who attacked the Sewards, Lewis Powell, look the part. But Mary Surratt is different. Standing five foot six, with a buxom figure and a pretty smile that captivates some of the journalists in attendance, Mary has initially engendered some sympathy, and many Americans wonder if her life should be spared.

  But Mary’s physical appearance, like that of her co-conspirators, began to change as the trial stretched into its sixth and seventh weeks. She suffered severe cramping, excessive menstruating and constant urinating from a disease known as endometriosis. She was barely tended to by her captors, or given the freedom to properly care for herself. Her cell was called “barely habitable” by one eyewitness, and court proceedings were stopped on more than one occasion due to her condition.

  The other conspirators underwent physical change for a very different reason. Stanton insisted they wear a thick padded hood over the heads. Extra cotton padding was placed over the lids, pressing hard against the eyeballs. There was just one hole, but it didn’t line up evenly with the mouth, making eating and breathing a challenge. Underneath the hoods the heat was intense, and the air stifling. All the sweating and the bloating of the skin from the heavy hoods conspired to make each conspirator look more and more swollen and rabid with each passing day. Over time they resembled not so much men, but crazed apparitions.

  After deliberating for three days, the nine-member jury finds Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold guilty. They will be hanged. As for Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Ned Spangler, and Samuel Arnold, their punishment will be the remote penitentiary of Fort Jefferson in the Gulf of Mexico.

  Guilty! Sentenced to hang (left column): Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt (not pictured). Sentenced to prison (right column): Samuel Arnold, Ned Spangler, Michael O’Laughlen, and Dr. Samuel Mudd (not pictured)

  There is no one willing to speak up for the men who will hang. But Mary Surratt’s priest comes to her defense. So does her daughter, Anna—though not her missing son, John. Mary Surratt’s attorney frantically works to get an audience with President Andrew Johnson so that he might personally intervene on her behalf. Her supporters say she was just a lone woman trying to make ends meet by providing weapons for Booth and his conspiracy and point out that she didn’t pull the trigger and was nowhere near Ford’s Theatre.

  There is hope. Not much, but a little. The other three sentenced to hang are all part of Booth’s inner circle. Not so with Mary Surratt. Although Johnson will not speak to him, her attorney continues to argue to the fringe of President Johnson’s outer circle, those who actively prevent him from speaking with the president, that her life should be spared.

  Mary Surratt spends the night of July 6 in prayer, asking God to spare her life.

  In the morning, she refuses breakfast, and even at ten A.M., when her visitors are told to leave so that her body can be prepared, Mary is still hoping. She wears a black dress and veil. Her ankles and wrists are manacled. And then she is marched out into a blazing summer sun. She looks up at the ten-foot-high gallows, newly built for the execution of her and the other conspirators. She sees the freshly dug graves beneath the gallows—the spot where her body will rest for all eternity.

  Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold climb the gallows staircase. They are seated in chairs on the platform at the top. Their hands and arms are tied to their bodies—the men’s with ropes, Mary’s with white cloth. Their legs are tied together at the ankles and knees so that they won’t kick wildly after the hangman springs the door.

  “Mrs. Surratt is innocent!” Powell cries out, just before a white cotton hood is placed over his head.

  Outside the prison, Mary’s supporters gather. Time is short. But there is still hope. Soldiers stand atop the penitentiary walls, just in case a last-minute rider approaches with a pardon. Inside the penitentiary, one hundred civilians have won the right to watch Lincoln’s killers die. The muggy air is thick with anticipation.

  All it takes is one word from President Johnson. Mary Surratt continues to pray.

  “Please don’t let me fall,” she says to an executioner, getting vertigo as she looks down on the crowd from atop the tall, unstable gallows. He puts the white hood over her head, and then she stands alone, terrified that she might topple forward over the edge of the gallows before the pardon can arrive.

  The death sentences are read in alphabetical order by General Winfield Scott Hancock, another old friend of Generals Grant and Lee from their days in Mexico.

  Each trapdoor is held in place by a single post. At the bottom of the scaffold stand four hand-selected members of the armed forces. It is their job to kick away the posts on the signal from the hangman. Suddenly, that signal is given.

  The trapdoors swing open. Mary Surratt, like the others, drops six feet in an instant. But unlike the others’, her neck does not break, and she does not die right away. The forty-two-year-old mother and widow, whose son would not come to her rescue out of fear for his own life, swings for five long minutes before her larynx is crushed and her body stops fighting for air.

  Stanton lets the bodies dangle in the wind for twenty more minutes before pronouncing that he is satisfied. The corpses are buried in the hard prison yard.

  Mary Surratt becomes the first and only woman ever hanged by the United States government.

  AFTERWORD

  The saga of Lincoln’s assassination went on long after he died. Indeed, it continues to this day, as historians and amateur sleuths alike debate a never-ending list of conspiracy theories.

  The full truth may never be known.

  As for the other key figures in the dramatic events of April 1865, their fates are now part of the historical record.

  The body of John Wilkes Booth was returned to Washington on the John S. Ide. Booth’s dentist and his personal physician were both brought on board and testified that the body was that of Booth. It was photographed, and then the surgeon general, Joseph Barnes, who had tended to Lincoln in the president’s final hours, performed an autopsy while the ship was sailing. The cause of death was determined to be a “gunshot wound in the neck,” with the added notation that paralysis was immediate after Booth was shot, “and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.”

  Dr. Barnes removed the third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae from Booth’s neck. These clearly showed the path of the bullet as it entered, then exited the body. The vertebrae are now housed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the National Museum of Health and Medicine—although they are not on public display. Dr. Barnes then turned his completed autopsy over to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who also took control of the photographs made of the corpse, and of Booth’s diary, which was handed to him by Lafayette C. Baker.

  Curiously, the photographs soon disappeared. And when Baker was later called upon to verify that Booth’s diary actually belonged to the killer, he was astonished to see that “eighteen leaves,” or pages, had been cut from the journal—allegedly by Secretary Stanton. Neither the photographs nor the missing pages have ever been found, casting more suspicion on Stanton’s possible role in a conspiracy.

  The secretary of war wished the Booth situation to be handled with as little public outcry as possible, and this meant forbidding a publi
c funeral. On Stanton’s orders, Lafayette Baker staged a mock burial, wrapping the body in a horse blanket and publicly hurling it into the Potomac. However, this was just a ruse to conceal the body’s actual location. After the crowd on shore watched Baker dump a weighted object into the river, the ship traveled around a bend to the site of the old penitentiary, on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal. The assassin was buried in an anonymous grave beneath the prison’s dirt floor, his body concealed inside the gun box that served as his casket. When, two years later, the penitentiary was shuttered and leveled, Booth’s remains were moved to the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, where they remain to this day.

  Despite all evidence that Booth is actually dead and was buried in the grave bearing his name, various legends have maintained that he escaped into the South and lived a long life. In December 2010, Booth’s descendants agreed to exhume the remains of Edwin Booth to see if DNA from his body is a match for the DNA in the vertebrae housed at Walter Reed. As the chief historian for the Navy Medical Department noted, “If it compares favorably, then that’s the end of the controversy. If it doesn’t match, you change American history.” As of this writing, the outcome of that investigation is still pending.

  Mary Lincoln never recovered from Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She insisted on wearing only the color black for the rest of her life. Mary lingered in the White House for several weeks after the shooting, then returned home to Illinois, where she spent her time answering the many letters of condolence she had received from around the world, and also lobbying Congress for a pension. This was granted in 1870, for the sum of $3,000 per year. However, just when it appeared that Mary was recovering from her considerable grief, in 1871 her eighteen-year-old son, Tad, died of a mysterious heart condition. This brought on a downward spiral of mental instability, dramatized in spending sprees, paranoia, and delusions—once she almost jumped out of a building after wrongly believing she saw flames consuming the structure. Her only remaining son, Robert, had her committed to a mental institution in 1875. She spent a year there, during which she engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the Chicago Tribune that so embarrassed Robert he had her released. Mary moved to the south of France for four years, living in exile in the town of Pau before returning to Springfield. She died in 1882, at the age of sixty-three. She is buried alongside her husband.