The Lincoln Deception

by David O. Stewart

  The veterans bore the coffin to the hearse and escorted it to the hillside cemetery, where they fired a three-volley military salute. Fraser lingered at the graveside after the ceremony, then drove his gig to his silent, empty home.

  Chapter 2

  The door to the big house swung open to reveal Emma Bingham. Two days after the funeral, she still looked worn.

  “Oh, Jamie,” she said with a small nod. She had pinned up her dark hair, but stray tendrils hung untended. The rims of her large eyes, inflamed by weeping, glowed red. Like any doctor, Fraser saw grief on a regular basis, but he had never grown easy with it. He shifted on his feet in the front hall, wishing to comfort Emma, yet also wishing to be somewhere else.

  “Will you see to your things?” Emma gestured to a coat rack mounted on the wall. Mr. Bingham’s topcoat still hung there.

  The married sister, Marie, waited for them in the parlor. She seemed in better spirits than Emma. Having a son and husband, even a ne’er-do-well husband, could provide emotional ballast. Also, Marie was always the bolder of the sisters.

  “Dr. Fraser,” Marie began after he sat. “As you might imagine, we have to deal with many realities following Father’s passing. This great house, which we cannot afford—which Father could not afford. All these things here. Through a long life one gathers many items, but Father was the most determined pack rat. Circulars for patent medicine, absurd items torn from newspapers, invoices from haberdashers, all were for him equally deserving of preservation—”

  “Marie,” Emma broke in, her gaze toward the floor but her jaw set, “Father was a man of history. His papers are important.” She lifted her eyes to Fraser. “Jamie, we have wondered if we could ask you to go through Father’s business papers—not the family letters, of course—and help organize them. Marie may be right. Many items may be of no real interest, but others doubtless are and should be saved. You know, there was his time in Congress, his time in Japan, his time in the army, his law practice, oh, so much.”

  “Yes,” Marie said briskly. “Emma and I are not students of history, so we would appreciate your help. Also, I must return to my family and Emma, well, dear Emma never really makes any progress through Father’s papers, now, do you, dear?” Emma stared at her hands in her lap. She bit her lower lip.

  “I would consider it an honor to assist you,” Fraser said, surprised by how interested he was. He might have to schedule his patients around this effort, but he felt sure he could. Few presented true emergencies. “Of course, I wouldn’t presume to dispose of any papers. Perhaps I could sort them into categories that we might agree on. You could determine where they should go after that.”

  “Oh, would you, Jamie?” Emma lifted her head. “Marie is right, of course. He retained many items of little importance, and I find it so sad to look through even them. I would feel far worse, though, if we disposed of something that might be significant.”

  “By any chance,” Fraser tried to keep any eagerness out of his voice, “are there papers from the trial of the Lincoln conspirators?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Marie said, “as well as from every alderman’s election in the eight counties of his congressional district, every piece of tariff legislation that was ever proposed, and every postmaster appointment in eastern Ohio since 1855. Why don’t we step into the library so you can see the size of the task?”

  Following the two women, Fraser paused at the threshold of Bingham’s work room. It looked as though a violent tide had swept in and quickly ebbed, leaving behind it the detritus of a life. Papers piled on the desk, a small table, and several armchairs. At least a dozen wooden crates stood in the room’s far corner, more papers visible through their slats.

  “R-r-r-eally,” he stammered out. “I had no idea . . .” He hovered at the doorway, leery of the maelstrom’s residue.

  “Father was a conscientious correspondent,” Emma said with a mix of pride and sadness. “Perhaps if you started next week, I would be better able to assist you. We could work together in the evenings. I could prepare supper for us.”

  Fraser wondered for a moment whether Emma, at least fifteen years older than he and still unmarried, viewed their age differential in the same way he did. He put the thought out of his mind. The woman was over fifty.

  He edged warily into the room. His hand fell on some papers on a side table and he lifted the top sheet. It was dated 1868 and was signed . . . the signature was difficult. He looked at the attached envelope.

  “This is from General Grant,” he said. “In his own hand?”

  Emma smiled. “Oh, yes, the general and Father were quite close.”

  Still holding the precious letter, Fraser cast his eye around the room, feeling a thrill at what might lie buried in these paper towers. Personal notes from presidents like Lincoln and Garfield, Hayes and McKinley. The last three were Ohio Republicans like Bingham. Or from leaders like Stanton or Secretary of State William Seward or Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, or from soldiers like Grant or Sherman. And perhaps the key to the secret told by Mrs. Surratt.

  From their first sortie into Mr. Bingham’s library, Fraser and Emma fell into a pattern. He arrived at five in the evening and began on papers she had arranged in rough chronological order. He sorted them by broad topics, such as family, Congress, antislavery efforts, and law practice. He kept separate piles of the correspondence with each of the great men of Mr. Bingham’s time. They ate at 6:30, then continued working until 9.

  Sometimes uncertain of the significance of a sheet before him, Fraser wished he had read more widely. In a pile of books he found a new volume titled “Who’s Who in America,” which helped with more recent letters. To interpret documents from earlier periods, Fraser scoured the library for other works that could help him. That was when he found the shelf devoted to the Lincoln assassination and those who had conspired against the president. There were books, newspaper cuttings, letters, magazine articles, and two trial transcripts, one from the trial of Mrs. Surratt and the other seven men, and one from the later, separate trial of Mrs. Surratt’s son.

  With Emma’s permission, Fraser began to borrow books on the Booth conspiracy. He read them at home late into the night, drinking coffee at his kitchen table. Since Ginny’s death, he slept in the sitting room, avoiding their bedroom and its ghosts, but the ghosts could find him in other rooms. Ginny was the sixth of eight in the hardworking Mosser clan, a farm family that spread through Harrison County. He had just delivered a crusading talk on vaccination to the local Grange. Accepting a coffee from a young woman almost his height, he was brought up short by the merry look in her eyes.

  “What?” he blurted.

  She cocked a hip and tilted her head to the side. “How long did you practice that speech?”

  His face burned. She leaned closer, her tray between them, a curious eyebrow raised. He started to laugh despite his embarrassment. “Was it that bad?” he asked.

  She turned away without answering, throwing him a grin over her shoulder. He could still see her there. How could that moment capture him so? Right then he wondered if she was the one. Now he knew there would be no other.

  After only a few days with Mr. Bingham’s papers, Fraser began to agree with sister Marie that most of them could be burnt without disappointing future historians. The work became drudgery, little wheat and abundant chaff. His late-night hours with the assassination volumes, however, were entirely different. He marveled at how much wasn’t known about the crime, even thirty-five years later. The questions about the conspiracy ignited parts of his brain that had grown dull with the loss of Ginny and the routine of medical practice.

  How did Booth find his many coconspirators? Why was Lincoln so unguarded in a public theater during a war? How had Booth found his escape route and remained free for so long after the assassination? Had Booth decided on his own to kill the president, or was he sponsored by others? Here were mysteries to solve, ones that had confounded many before him. But Fraser knew something that those earlier i
nvestigators hadn’t. He knew about Mrs. Surratt’s confession to Mr. Bingham. He itched to find answers to at least some of the questions.

  Always an early riser, Fraser began to read about the assassination in the mornings, too. The conspiracy was never far from his mind. While driving his buggy to a patient’s farm, he puzzled over Booth’s escape. As thousands of Union soldiers scoured southern Maryland for him, the assassin was at large for twelve days. During solitary lunches at his kitchen table, Fraser tried to imagine Booth’s character. An assassin, Fraser thought, should be anonymous and melt readily into a crowd. Yet Booth was a celebrity, handsome and flamboyant, a stage performer and a member of the nation’s most famous theatrical family. His father had been a matinee idol, as were two of his brothers. Not many Americans were as conspicuous as John Wilkes Booth was in 1865. And what of his shabby accomplices? Far from being Booth’s peers, most could not have appeared in polite society.

  After a week of immersion in the facts of the case, Fraser felt he was on a first-name basis with the central players in the tragedy. He resolved to organize what he knew, to shape it into a full picture of the terrible events surrounding April 14, 1865, when Booth sneaked into the theater and shot Lincoln from behind. Fraser began taking notes. He constructed a chronological list of important events, plus a separate list of each conspirator and witness, recording their qualities and histories.

  Fraser learned to mistrust the yellow, brittle newspaper stories about the conspiracy. They were too often wrong or incomplete. He pored over the transcript of the first trial, held before a commission of nine army officers. The transcript should include the most complete information, incorporating evidence and argument from both sides. He took pride in reading Mr. Bingham’s fiery speeches, especially his closing address. With his soaring command of the language, Mr. Bingham roasted the contemptible criminals before him. Fraser imagined his friend’s eye flashing with righteous rage as he demanded the ultimate punishment.

  The assassination began to take shape in his mind as a planetary system with the charismatic Booth at its center. Raised in the border state of Maryland, Booth became devoted to the cause of the South even though the rest of his family was solidly pro-Union.

  In Booth’s planetary system, four conspirators revolved most closely around the actor. They were the ones who were in on the dirty work of the fateful night. First came Booth’s escort, the weaselly Davey Herold, a hunter and outdoorsman. Herold met Booth after the assassin slew Lincoln, then slashed an army officer sitting with the president, then leaped to the stage shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”)—Virginia’s motto and Booth’s rationale for his butchery. For almost two weeks, Herold shepherded the assassin through southern Maryland and Virginia, concealing him from the thousands hunting him.

  Next was the furious monster who went by the name of Lewis Paine. Large and powerful, Paine was the only conspirator with battlefield experience. He tore the heart out of the family of Secretary of State Seward. Wielding a long, vicious knife, Paine ripped open Seward’s face and arm, stabbed a male nurse and one of Seward’s sons, and broke the skull of his other son. Leaving a home drenched with the blood of four ravaged men, Paine slid into the shadows of the Washington night, evading capture for three days.

  The third was the pathetic Atzerodt, a German immigrant. Sent to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his hotel room, the goateed waterman tried to stoke his courage with liquor but never even confronted his target. Atzerodt slunk off to Germantown, Maryland, where he was tracked down and arrested.

  The fourth conspirator close to Booth was the most unusual one, a widow fifteen years older than the others. Mrs. Mary Surratt was not part of the killing. In Andrew Johnson’s words, she “kept the nest that hatched the egg” of assassination. Photographs showed her as sternly handsome, framed in dark hair. Her boarding house in Northwest Washington was the physical heart of the plot, the rendezvous site for Booth, Atzerodt, Paine, and her son, John Harrison Surratt. The facilitator’s role was familiar for her. Until the autumn of 1864, her tavern in southern Maryland served as a depot for Confederate spies and blockade runners. Indeed, her son, John, though only twenty-one, was a Confederate courier for the last two years of the war, carrying messages for spymasters in Richmond. Mrs. Surratt also stashed rifles and whiskey for Booth for his flight through southern Maryland.

  Those four—Herold, Paine, Atzerodt, and Mrs. Surratt—were hanged after the military commission pronounced them guilty.

  Two other conspirators figured in Booth’s getaway. Ned Spangler held Booth’s horse at the theater while the actor shot the president. Dr. Samuel Mudd sheltered the assassin during his flight, treated his broken ankle, and lied about both when questioned.

  The last two conspirators—Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen—had the least connection to the fateful night. Both were part of Booth’s initial plan, hatched in the fall of 1864, to kidnap Lincoln and trade him for Confederate prisoners of war, or even to use Lincoln as a bargaining chip to end the war. When the kidnapping plot failed in mid-March 1865, it mutated into one to kill the president and other top Union officials. O’Laughlen was at the house of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on the night before the assassination, and was with Booth the next day. The prosecutors accused him of aiming to kill General Grant but presented little evidence to support the accusation.

  Samuel Arnold’s connection was thinnest of all. Like O’Laughlen, he was part of the original kidnapping plot. Eighteen days before the assassination, Arnold urged Booth to abandon all plans against Lincoln. No evidence placed Arnold in Washington on April 14.

  The four lesser conspirators—Arnold, O’Laughlen, Spangler, and Mudd—went to prison at the pestilential Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a sweltering hole surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico. O’Laughlen died of fever there. In early 1869, President Johnson pardoned and released the other three.

  One prominent conspirator was never convicted. Following the assassination, young John Surratt sped to Canada, where Catholic priests hid him. With more priestly assistance, Surratt reached Vatican City in Rome where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves, a contingent of guards. When a fellow Marylander revealed Surratt’s presence to American diplomats, he fled to Egypt. He was seized on an Alexandria dock in late 1866, still wearing the baggy trousers and brocade jacket of his Zouave uniform. Tried in a Washington, DC, federal court, not before a military commission, Surratt won a hung jury and went free when the government declined to try him again. Newspaper articles attributed the jury deadlock to pro-Southern sympathies. Fraser could think of no better explanation.

  The key witness at both trials was Louis Weichmann, a young friend of John Surratt’s who boarded at Mrs. Surratt’s house on H Street, east of Seventh Street. Weichmann described meetings among the conspirators at the house, particularly between Booth and Mrs. Surratt. The friendship between those two intrigued Fraser. What did the dashing young actor have in common with the Catholic widow in her early forties? Yet she seemed to be Booth’s closest confidante among the conspirators. The others were beneath Booth. Atzerodt and Herold were no more than toadies. Lewis Paine represented brute force. Fraser imagined that Mrs. Surratt and her son dealt with Booth as equals, perhaps owing to their shared connection with the Confederate secret service.

  Late one night, seated in his kitchen with a cold cup of coffee before him, reading yet another book on the conspiracy, Fraser returned to an idea that gnawed at him. During the trial, Mr. Bingham repeatedly claimed that the Confederate government was behind the assassination, but he never backed up the accusation. After the trial, critics scoffed at Mr. Bingham’s claim. Fraser decided that was the most important question. Was Booth’s planetary system part of an even larger system? Was Booth doing the bidding of others?

  If Fraser could figure that out, he could vindicate Mr. Bingham. Fraser would like to do that, but there was more to it. Working on the assassination, he felt something he couldn’t remember feel
ing: that he was part of the cause his father died for. Having tasted that feeling, he hungered for more of it.

  Chapter 3

  Careening along ten miles of bad roads from Cadiz to Adena, Fraser mused that it was too nice a day to lose a leg. Spring had finally come to eastern Ohio, but in the coal mines every season was dangerous. The telegram said: MINE ACCIDENT. LEG CRUSHED. COME SOONEST. Please, he silently asked the god of spring, make it below the knee. He shouted for the horse to pull harder up the hill. He didn’t like to use the stick, but he did like to go fast, and now he had to. “Hah,” he cried. “Hup! Hup!”

  The mine, a new one, was east of Adena. The line of miners’ shacks was uphill from the gash in the earth that swallowed the men every morning. He pulled up at a cabin where people spilled out the door and into the road, just before the mine works. A man reached for the horse’s halter.

  “Don’t let him eat the grass,” Fraser called. The soot-covered growth could foul the animal’s digestion for days. He unloaded his regular bag and his surgical bag, the one with the saw and chloroform mask. His surgical tools were no better, he thought with disgust, than those used in the time of Mary Surratt and John Wilkes Booth.

  At six feet tall, Fraser loomed over the miners and their families. Their clothes, all in shades of gray, hung from gaunt frames. Their skin and hair had a smudgy, subterranean look. He nodded greetings to those he passed, not pausing to shake hands. He could hardly perform surgery after shaking hands that were never clean.

  “I’m Dr. Fraser from Cadiz,” he said at the door, but they knew who he was.

  “John Evans, Doctor.” Several stepped aside for a wiry man with a thick brush of curly hair. He strode from the opening to a rear room. The air in the shack was moist, the smells sour.

  “Mr. Evans.” Fraser looked round for what he would need. Two chairs, a basin. The table was too small. Water was heating on a coal-fired stove. “The patient?”