In the absence of ushers to protect the costly public property, the craze for mementoes had led to wanton vandalism, and it seemed natural and desirable that special officers should be assigned to the Executive Mansion. Late in November, the press began to report arrests. The National Republican stated that it had been requested to give notice that Marshal Lamon had detailed officers to the White House under orders to apprehend all persons detected in larcenies. Four members of the Metropolitan Police had, in fact, been assigned to duty there. However, their primary function was not to arrest memento seekers, but to protect the person of the President.
Two of them, on day duty from eight until four, guarded the approach to the official chamber or other room occupied by Mr. Lincoln, and accompanied him on his walks. The night shift, divided between the two remaining policemen, was charged with escorting the President to and from the War Department and the theatre, and patrolling the corridor outside his door while he slept.
Lincoln had a bodyguard at last, but the fact, masked by the publicity given to the vandals, was not generally understood. The policemen were armed with .38 Colt revolvers, but they were not in uniform. They did not walk behind the President, but at his side, like any casual friend or office seeker. Although they were inconspicuous, their presence must have been highly distasteful to Lincoln. Sometimes he succeeded in getting rid of the armed attendants at his elbow. Extraordinary pressure must have been used to induce him to consent to the arrangement at all.
Marshal Lamon’s anxiety about the President had flamed into acute alarm in the autumn. He was convinced that Lincoln’s life was in grave danger. Armed with pistols and bowie knives, Lamon had passed Election Night on the floor outside the President’s bedroom door. Even after the appointment of the bodyguard, the marshal frequently went to the White House during the night. Other measures for Lincoln’s protection were taken during the winter. Two policemen went on duty as doorkeepers, in place of Burns and old Edward. By cutting doors and constructing partitions, a private passageway was made on the second floor of the mansion, so that the President could pass from his bedroom to his office without meeting the crowds of strangers in the hall. Moreover, at the evening receptions, all persons were required to leave their wraps outside the Blue Room. Cloakrooms had been built in the corridor the preceding year, while the dining-room was fitted up for the ladies, but many people had preferred to retain their outer garments. When the new rule was introduced in January, Thomas Crook, a young policeman who had just joined the White House detail, was charged with enforcing it. Flabbergasted by the brilliance of the scene, he did not find his task an easy one. The innovation was resented by many of the guests, notably the lovely Mrs. William Sprague, who in a few months would become a mother.
Crook was well aware that the reason for the regulation was that weapons might easily be concealed in the folds of voluminous cloaks and shawls. No mention of solicitude for the President’s safety was made, however, in the press. Just as the Washington newspapers had veiled the purpose of the police detail at the White House, so they explained the compulsory removal of wraps as a matter of propriety. To enter the Blue Room divested of outer garments was, the Star declared, a rule of etiquette, and a mark of respect to the President and his lady.
To Marshal Lamon, the theatre appeared to be a place of especial danger for the President. Keeping a close watch on the White House, Lamon knew that Lincoln did not always take his bodyguard to the play, but went unattended on several occasions during the early winter. On a December night, Lamon’s exasperation at this carelessness reached a climax. The President had been at the theatre in company only with Charles Sumner and a foreign minister— “neither of whom,” as the District marshal heatedly wrote Lincoln at one-thirty in the morning, “could defend himself against an assault from any able-bodied woman in this city.” It was an angry and offended letter, in which Lamon stiffly offered to resign the marshalship, if the President doubted his honesty in warning him of danger.
It seems probable, though the evidence does not exist, that Lamon’s concern about the theatre was based on some warning contained in a secret service report. If it had no such basis, it was a curious coincidence that at this very time a young man was plotting to abduct the President from the theatre. It was a play actor’s idea, and the young man was a play actor—John Wilkes Booth. He was a Marylander, who sympathized with the South and was obsessed with hatred for Lincoln. Like everyone else, he knew that the great need of the Confederacy was man power. Grant, with reserves on which to call, had in the spring of 1864 adopted the ruthless policy of putting a complete stop to exchanges of prisoners of war. Booth had conceived the plan that, by kidnaping the President and turning him over to the Confederate authorities to be held as a hostage, he could force the Union to release its many thousands of Southern captives.
Booth was scarcely the figure of a conspirator. He looked handsome, vain, prosperous, exhibitionistic. As he strolled in and out of the National Hotel many feminine eyes followed him. He was twenty-six years old, with a dark romantic beauty that was fatal to women—the beauty of ivory skin, silky black hair and mustache, white teeth and lustrous, heavy-lidded eyes. In his dress, he was the picture of nonchalant dandyism. His loose greatcoat, with its flowing cape, was collared in fur. There was a velvet collar on his braid-bound jacket. He wore a seal ring on his little finger, and a stickpin was thrust in the center of his fine cravat. His hair was as perfectly waved as though he used a curling iron.
Fluttering, sighing ladies packed the theatres when John Wilkes Booth was on tour. There were showers of love letters in his mail. He carried the photographs of several lovely actresses in his pocket diary. He also had a photograph of Miss Bessie Hale, the plump, mature-looking daughter of the prominent Republican senator, John P. Hale, who had just failed of re-election in New Hampshire, and would shortly be appointed minister to Spain. Bessie was infatuated with Booth, and he had given his family to understand that they were engaged to be married. During his visits to Washington, he also found time for his mistress, Ella Turner, a blond, rather pretty little woman, whom he kept in her sister’s parlor house on Ohio Avenue. Booth did not carry her photograph, but Ella Turner loved him.
The actor was not a soft and lazy Lothario. He was an athlete—a fencer, an expert horseman and a crack pistol shot—and his big, powerful hands contrasted oddly with his fine-drawn head and face. Men, as well as women, felt Booth’s fascination. In spite of his fits of temper and love of playing practical jokes, he was popular among his fellow-actors. Bartenders liked a word with young Mr. Booth, who enjoyed his glass of brandy and was always ready to stand treat. Doormen and stagehands and hotel clerks were attracted by his winning manners.
In his profession, both because of his own overweening aspirations and the high standard expected of him, John Wilkes Booth had suffered the handicap of his famous name. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, had been the greatest tragedian of his day. Both of his older brothers, Edwin and Junius Brutus, Junior, were prominent in the theatre, when John Wilkes started his career. He showed signs of brilliant talent, but he was too vain and undisciplined for study, and vaulted brashly into stardom. Metropolitan audiences raised their eyebrows, but on the road he played to packed houses and earned a large income, about twenty thousand a year. People in the provinces got their money’s worth from his romantic looks, impassioned gestures and ranting eloquence, from his spectacular sword play and the great, bounding leaps by which he was fond of entering the stage.
Before the war, he had been very popular in the South. Folk in Richmond had cheered him in 1859, when he put on a militia uniform and went to stand guard while old John Brown was hanged. It was, however, the only time that Booth wore a uniform. He was one of many natives of the Union’s border slave States who sentimentalized over the Confederacy without caring to join its fortunes. There was nothing out of the way in a Marylander who hated the Republican administration, and no one paid much attention to Booth’s excited talk.
His first professional appearance in Washington was made in April of 1863, when he played a week’s engagement at Grover’s Theatre, billed as “The Youngest ‘Star’ in the World.” His opening in Richard III, a role in which his father had been famous, was greeted with unbounded applause by a fashionable audience. At that time, the Washington newspapers had no dramatic critics, and touted all entertainments which were advertised in their columns. Business was sufficiently good to warrant Booth in prolonging his stay, for at the end of his brief engagement at Grover’s he leased the inconvenient old Washington Theatre and starred, under his own management, for two weeks more.
The following November, he again appeared in Washington, playing for two weeks at Ford’s. He offered a familiar dramatic diet: Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Apostate, The Lady of Lyons, The Marble Heart, The Robbers. His engagement was hailed by the Star as “brilliant and lucrative.”
The Sunday Chronicle, however, was then beginning to print occasional pieces of dramatic criticism, the best of which were signed Bizarre. This was the pseudonym of a witty and erudite old gentleman who aroused great irritation among simple-minded playgoers by his sarcasms about the “moral drama” and the low standards of taste among Westerners employed as Treasury clerks. Bizarre hailed Booth’s advent with skepticism. “We do not regard Mr. Booth as an eminent tragedian,” he wrote on November 1, 1863; “we can scarcely call him a tragedian. Unless he has improved very much since we last saw him, he is little more than a second-class actor, who, as the possessor of a great name, and with a fine presence, sweet voice, and much natural and uncultivated ability, has seen proper to come upon the stage as a representative of tragedy. It is possible that Mr. Booth will in time become a great actor. . . .”
A week later, the critic had not revised his opinion. He commended Booth’s performance as Shylock in the trial scene, and thought that it showed him to be an actor of promise, in spite of his traditional, violent and noisy rendition of the other scenes of The Merchant. Bizarre was disgusted by the introduction of sentimental modern songs into the production. “Mr. Booth,” he satirically observed, “might make a greater success in Richard III, if he permitted his Richmond to sing ‘When this cruel war is over’ on the morning of the battle. . . .”
Bizarre, however, was a voice crying in the wilderness. Booth ranted and bounded before packed houses during his two weeks at Ford’s.
A year later, when he returned to the capital, he had no professional engagement there, and was making few appearances anywhere. His brother, Junius Brutus, more successful as a manager than as a tragedian, had just completed an engagement at Ford’s. All over the North, theatre business was booming, and John Wilkes had to answer many questions about his absence from the stage. He talked grandly about his investments in oil lands, and his friends hooted with laughter, for these risky speculations had become a stock joke of the day. In fact, though Booth had bought land in western Pennsylvania, it was entirely valueless, and he had closed out his holdings. He had at first hoped to bring off his abduction plot before the election, and talked of seizing the President on the road to the Soldiers’ Home. However, while he was settling his business affairs, the Lincoln family returned to the White House for the winter.
All during the winter, Booth made the National his headquarters, leaving on occasional trips to Maryland and New York, but always returning to Washington. One of the places he visited was Charles County in lower Maryland. The old stage road which ran through Charles County had been since 1861 the main route traversed by Confederate spies, mail carriers and blockade-runners on their way between the capital and the secret ferries on the Potomac. Booth made many inquiries among the local residents about roads, relay stations and ferries. It was a district of Southern sympathizers, formerly prosperous slaveholders, and some of them were undoubtedly informed of Booth’s abduction scheme. He talked, however, of investing in land and buying horses, and did actually purchase one horse through the good offices of Dr. Samuel Mudd, a gentlemanly physician of the region, whose acquaintance Booth made at church.
In the meantime, he was forming a band of conspirators. If there were prominent Washington secessionists among them, their names are unknown. Booth’s closest associates were a shabby group of men, over whom he was able to maintain an ascendancy by fanatical determination and the promise of pecuniary rewards from a grateful Confederacy. The first two whom he interested in his scheme were friends of his Maryland school days, Confederate deserters in poor circumstances, on whom Booth flashed back in an aura of money and success. Samuel Arnold was a decent-appearing clerk, who, for want of other employment, was working off and on as a laborer on his brother’s farm in Maryland. Michael O’Laughlin was a dark, slender fellow, who looked like a Cuban. With his long black hair and whiskers and his loud and fashionable clothes, O’Laughlin made a dashing appearance, but he was engaged in the humdrum occupation of taking orders for his brother’s feed business in Baltimore, and his prospects were no brighter than Arnold’s.
On one of his trips to Charles County, Booth probably heard of John Surratt as a man well informed about the underground route to Richmond. Surratt was a tall, sandy-haired, foolhardy boy of twenty, another Marylander, who had served since the autumn of 1861 as a spy and dispatch carrier for the Confederacy. Recently, he had moved to Washington with his mother and younger sister, Anna. Mrs. Surratt, left a widow, had leased her Maryland property, a village tavern some thirteen miles from Washington, and set up a boarding-house in the capital. It was a small, drab-painted, high-stooped house on H Street, and Mrs. Surratt had no trouble in filling its few rooms. John took a job clerking in the Adams Express Company; but he was unstable and adventure-loving, and Booth was able to talk him into joining the conspiracy. Soon after the New Year, Surratt gave up his job, and devoted all his time to the plans for Lincoln’s abduction.
To carry the kidnapers and their captive across the Potomac, Surratt suggested George Atzerodt, one of the secret ferrymen on the underground route. He was a droll, disreputable little German-American, who worked at the trade of carriage maker at the Maryland town of Port Tobacco, and was eager to earn a large fee for a night’s work. Booth also annexed a Washington acquaintance of the Surratts, an idling, rosy-cheeked boy named Davy Herold. He had worked off and on as a pharmacist’s assistant, and had once charged up a bottle of castor oil for Mr. Lincoln. Simple and immature, with his buck teeth perpetually exposed in a silly smile. Davy had nothing to offer but a good knowledge of the Maryland countryside, where he had often gone on shooting trips.
In laying his plans to kidnap the President from the theatre, Booth had several reasons for preferring Ford’s to Grover’s. He had played in both Washington houses, but his relation with the first was closer because of his friendship with John T. Ford, under whose management he had appeared in other cities. Booth was also friendly with Ford’s younger brother, Harry Clay, and was on agreeable terms with the employees and stock-company actors at the Tenth Street playhouse. He had, moreover, plausible excuses for frequently visiting the theatre, since his mail was addressed there and he kept two horses in a small stable which he had rented in the back alley.
Booth badly wanted an accomplice on the stage, and tried to induce a friend named Chester, who was an actor in Edwin Booth’s company in New York, to get a job at Ford’s. He offered to pay Chester’s salary, if Ford would engage him. However, Chester was a family man, and wanted no part in the conspiracy, and he did not come to Washington.
Among the stagehands at Ford’s, Booth had a humble admirer, a carpenter who had worked on the elder Booth’s house in Maryland when John Wilkes was a boy. This man, Edward Spangler, was now middle-aged—a hard-drinking, good-natured fellow, who had helped to repair the stable in the back alley, and looked after Booth’s horses. The actor did not pay Spangler for his hostler’s work, but the two were often seen drinking together, like cronies. There is no evidence that Spangler knew anything about the ab
duction plot; but Booth must have been glad of his devotion and counted on it to serve him in a crisis.
By early January, Booth had brought Arnold and O’Laughlin to Washington, but he was unable to infuse them with enthusiasm for abducting the President from the theatre. Arnold was vehemently opposed to the plan, and tried to talk Booth out of it. On two occasions, he claimed that favorable opportunities were lost for kidnaping Lincoln on a country road, because of Booth’s obsession with the theatre. He was still sufficiently under the actor’s influence to pass most of his time loitering in Washington. Booth was irritated by Arnold’s criticisms and introduced neither of his boyhood friends into the Surratt boardinghouse, to which he frequently went to confer with John. Mrs. Surratt had become very fond of the fascinating actor, who caused quite a flutter among the ladies in her simple parlor. It is probable that she knew something of the reason for the long secret discussions between him and her son. She was a kind, motherly woman, a pious Roman Catholic; but she was firmly devoted to the Confederacy, and had an older son in its army, and her sympathies would naturally have been drawn to a project for helping the South.
One of the boarders at Mrs. Surratt’s was a War Department clerk, Louis Weichmann, who worked in the office of the Commissary General of Prisoners. He was a big, timid, scholarly student for the Roman Catholic priesthood, who had been at school with John Surratt, and shared his bed at the H Street house. Weichmann’s job entailed membership in the War Department Rifles, but he did not appear to be out of place in the secessionist atmosphere of the boardinghouse. Although he was a native of Pennsylvania, he was pining to go to Richmond to continue his theological studies. Sojourning blockade-runners found him a safe and congenial companion. He himself admitted that he “talked secesh very often . . . . for buncombe. . . .” He was friendly with Atzerodt, often going out with the Confederate ferryman, and even lending him his clothes.
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