Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  At eight o’clock, the funeral train pulled out of Washington on the slow and circuitous journey which would carry the prairie lawyer home to Springfield. By day and night, along the railroad tracks, in wayside stations and in the pomp and pageant of mourning cities, Lincoln’s countrymen would pour forth to do him honor. Seven million people would gaze on his coffin. Over a million and a half would have a fleeting glimpse of his face. Back to the capital, for twelve days more, would come the noise of a nation’s weeping. It would echo in a city distracted by changing events, by anger and excitement. On April 15, a new day had dawned in Washington and, after the lull of the obsequies, it blazed forth in noontide heat.

  The Republican radicals had wasted no time in hypocritical lamentation for Lincoln. The assassination had done them the double service of removing a merciful Chief Executive and inflaming the country to rage against the Confederacy. A few hours after Lincoln’s death, they had gathered in caucus to map out a stringent policy toward the South. The next day, the Committee on the Conduct of the War had called on the new President. “Johnson,” said Ben Wade, “we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.”

  In the first days after taking office, Johnson accepted Wade as his chief adviser. He was surrounded by anxious politicians, extremist and conservative alike, all frantically contending to influence him and win his favor. Before Lincoln’s body left Washington, Johnson was the center of visiting delegations of every kind. The growing crowds of courtiers and suppliants disgusted the friends of the late President. Johnson welcomed all comers, shook their hands, and repetitiously conveyed his view that treason was a crime, and crime must be punished. The radicals were confirmed in their first opinion, that the Tennessee Democrat’s accession seemed “a godsend to the country.”

  The last act of the rebellion was drawing to a close during the third week of April. In North Carolina, Joe Johnston’s war-weary soldiers had laid down their arms, and Sherman sent Grant the terms of the surrender. While they were in consonance with Lincoln’s ideas, Sherman had exceeded his authority by including political questions in the agreement. His action had a tang of military arrogance. Sherman was warm with pride in his army’s exploits, and believed that generals knew more than civilians about making peace, as well as war. Lincoln would have known how to deal with him firmly and tactfully, but Lincoln on April 21 was no more than a sacred image, receiving the reverent homage of Baltimore.

  The Cabinet, hastily convened, could not approve the terms. Grant himself did not; but he loved and honored Sherman, and listened with mounting indignation while Stanton denounced his friend. Here was no orderly process of correcting the error in judgment of a brilliant commander, second to none in his services to the Union. Stanton’s words were lurid with suspicion of Sherman’s motives, even with insinuations of treason.

  Attorney General Speed had apprehensions which were reminiscent of McClellan’s day—that Sherman, at the head of his army, designed to usurp the powers of the Government. The others did not go so far; but all had been influenced by Stanton. Welles later thought that he understood the reason for their unsteadiness of mind. They had been shocked by information which the War Secretary had recently given them, that there was proof that Jefferson Davis and other Southern officials were involved in the assassination conspiracy. Appalled at learning that high-minded men had connived at murder, the Cabinet was ready to believe anything.

  Stanton published the news of Johnston’s surrender simultaneously with the announcement that the terms had been rejected by the Government. The story was presented in a form so prejudicial to Sherman that he was unanimously condemned in the press. At best, he was depicted as a simpleton from whom concessions had been adroitly wheedled by the “arch-conspirators,” as all Southern leaders were now described. Grant, immediately sent to Sherman’s headquarters to supersede him, remained in the background, and Sherman concluded another agreement with Johnston on the same terms as those offered to Lee. But, in his moment of triumph, Sherman’s fame had been tarnished, and his great popularity impaired. Peace came at last, shabby and disfigured, under the new regime.

  In his determination to implicate the Southern leaders, Stanton had the assistance of his former colleague in Buchanan’s Cabinet, Judge Advocate General Holt, head of the Bureau of Military Justice. Hints of the Government’s stand whipped up the ill feeling in Washington. Like a growling accompaniment to mourning, the mutter of hatred had penetrated the solemn lull of the obsequies. Twice during the week, the Chronicle had renewed its attack on the Confederate authorities, involving them in the assassination and calling for their blood as atonement for their crimes. Loyal citizens met to protest furiously against the marshals who had been selected for the funeral procession. It was asserted that many of them had been Lincoln’s enemies, while in a number of cases their “secret sympathies were understood to be with the infamous rebellion, the prime moving cause of the assassination of our President.” A committee was appointed to wait on Lamon, and found that he had left on the funeral train. He had also been away when the obnoxious list was prepared, and Deputy Marshal Phillips attempted to mollify the enraged unionists by taking full blame for the blunder and offering to resign.

  Soon after, Stanton publicly declared that Lincoln’s murder had been originated in Canada and approved in Richmond. On May 3, a Presidential proclamation announced the connivance of Jefferson Davis, Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay and other Southern gentlemen, and offered rewards for their arrest. The names of the officials were blazoned, like those of common criminals, opposite the prices set on their heads. Many, until then incredulous of their guilt, were convinced by the statement that the evidence was in the possession of the Bureau of Military Justice. Davis, for whom one hundred thousand dollars was offered, was the object of scathing attacks. “His unscrupulous hand,” said the Star, “has guided the assassin’s trigger and dagger. . . . The tragedy-cracked player who did the deed . . . . was no such criminal as was the cold-blooded politician who laid out the work.”

  In Washington, as elsewhere in the Union, the proclamation caused a thrill of horror, and inflamed the rage against the South. The shame of its association with crime had made the city vociferously loyal. The members of the city councils, wearing their mourning badges, had organized a group which was raising funds for a local monument to Lincoln. Washington, eager to bury its secessionist past in oblivion, was rudely jarred by the return of a host of former residents from Richmond, the disunionist émigrés of 1861. They did not appear to feel disgraced, but walked the streets with a comfortable air of home-coming—went into the departments, shook hands and received welcomes all around. The blood of loyal inhabitants boiled at the sight. A meeting of the Common Council was the scene of a violent altercation over “unscrupulous traitors and assassins who left their homes and business at the threshold of rebellion . . . . and now Judas-like return. . . .” It was proposed that the board resolve, for the preservation of the public peace, to warn such persons to stay away from Washington. The resolution, however, was referred to a committee. Some of the councilmen were opposed to it, while others thought it futile—“only puffing against the wind.” The Star took up the fight against the “National Volunteers Redivivus,” recalling their treacherous activities and railing against their “brassy impudence” in expecting “to be taken to the arms of loyal citizens whose throats they hoped to cut.” Sectional animosity raged in Washington, and a large mass meeting was held in front of the City Hall to protest against the presence of dangerous and defiant rebels.

  While pursuing his cherished plan of arraigning the Confederacy on a murder charge, Stanton had not neglected the actual perpetrators of the crimes. Behind the mourning scenes of the capital, the War Department had launched on a program of inquisition and terror, in which the Metropolitan Police and detectives from other cities participated. Prisons were filled with suspects and witnesses and their friends and relatives. The haul included liveryme
n who had rented horses to Booth and his associates; Ella Turner and other inmates of the fancy house on Ohio Avenue; the Ford brothers, and actors and employees of the theatre; Mrs. Surratt and her sister, and the two girls, Anna Surratt and Honora Fitzpatrick. The most important arrest, that of Lewis Paine, had been fortuitously made on the night of April 17, when he returned to the Surratt house after hiding out in the woods near Fort Lincoln. O’Laughlin had been picked up in Baltimore the same day, and Sam Arnold was taken into custody at Fort Monroe. Later in the week after the assassination, Atzerodt was arrested in his cousin’s house in Maryland. These four men and the sceneshifter, Spangler, were loaded with double irons and thrown into the hold of monitors anchored off the Navy Yard.

  The public, avidly curious about the inquiries and arrests, was able to learn almost nothing. Scanty newspaper reports testified to the censorship of the War Department. It was best for the ends of justice, said the Star, that no publicity be given to the facts elicited in the investigations. By publishing that Arnold and Atzerodt had been brought to Washington and committed to “a safe place,” newspapers earned a reprimand from the War Department, and in subsequent editions printed Colonel Eckert’s peremptory request that such publications be not made.

  Six days after the assassination, Mr. Stanton proclaimed rewards of fifty thousand dollars for Booth, and twenty-five thousand each for Herold and Atzerodt. Liberal rewards were also offered for information conducing to the arrests. The anxiety under which the War Secretary was laboring was revealed in the language of his proclamation. It dramatically opened with the words, “The Murderer of our Beloved President is still at large!” It closed with an appeal that “the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land,” and exhorted “all good citizens to aid public justice. . . .”

  This proclamation also announced the harsh authority which the War Department would exercise in the coming trials. Stanton’s statement, that all persons harboring or aiding Booth, Atzerodt or Herold would be subject to trial before a military commission and to the punishment of death, forecast the grim fate in store for the accused conspirators themselves. The War Secretary had no intention of relinquishing them to the delays and uncertainties of separate trials by jury in the civil courts of the District. He did not hesitate to prejudge the accused, referring to them as “the above-named criminals” and “the murderers.”

  The delay in finding Booth was a cause of frantic exasperation, not only to Stanton, but to the people. Flickering rumors of his capture repeatedly lighted up excitement in the capital. As one after another they proved to be false, the despairing belief spread that the large search parties were incompetent, and the assassin had escaped. It was not known that, in jumping from the box at Ford’s, Booth had caught his spur in the Treasury flag, and had landed on the stage with a jarring fall which broke his leg. He had been forced to turn out of his way to have the bone set by his Maryland acquaintance, Dr. Samuel Mudd. Almost helplessly crippled, he hid out for many days with Herold in southern Maryland before he succeeded in crossing the Potomac to Virginia.

  One cause for the inefficiency of the search was the lack of co-operation among the pursuing forces. Soldiers, police and detectives, organized into a number of independent expeditions, jealously guarded important clues from the knowledge of their competitors. Stanton’s offer of prize money sharpened their rivalry, and cupidity brought new batches of detectives, as well as ex-soldiers and adventurers, posting to the capital to join the man hunt.

  Immediately after the assassination, Stanton had sent an urgent summons to Colonel Baker, who was on business in New York. Baker said that the War Secretary tearfully greeted him with the words, “My entire dependence is upon you.” He did not, however, give any coordinating authority to Baker, who entered the field merely as another investigator. He was cold-shouldered at Augur’s headquarters, where he was informed that a positive clue had been obtained and that his services were not required.

  Baker did not explain why Stanton tolerated this insolence to the head of the War Department’s detective force. According to his two most trusted subordinates, his cousin, Lieutenant L. B. Baker and Lieutenant-Colonel E. J. Conger, their chief was obliged to take up the case from the beginning, “with such slender information as was then in the personal possession of the Secretary of War.” Information was slender on the day after Lincoln’s death, but there is something ludicrous in the implication that Stanton was also being snubbed by Augur and his officers.

  Colonel Baker did not make much progress during the first week. He sent a few detectives on an unavailing trip to lower Maryland, and he circulated some hand bills, containing photographs and descriptions of Booth and Surratt, and offering a reward of thirty thousand dollars, of which twenty thousand was the amount already announced by the Washington city authorities. Other cities and States were also publishing rewards, and Baker’s hand bills were entirely overshadowed by the large sums offered by the War Department.

  On Monday, April 24, Baker had information that Booth and Herold had crossed the Potomac, and were in Virginia. The source of this knowledge is mysterious. It certainly did not come from the anonymous colored man, to whom it was ascribed in Baker’s own fishy story. However, the Washington provost marshal, Major James R. O’Beirne, who was in charge of one of the search parties, was hot on Booth’s trail in Virginia. O’Beirne was at this time recalled, and Baker took charge of the pursuit. The detective chief sent for Conger and L. B. Baker, both of whom had been officers in the First District Cavalry. Pointing out on a map the place where the fugitives had crossed and the route which, with “quick detective intuition,” he expected them to take, he ordered his subordinates to leave by boat for Belle Plain, and scour the country around Port Royal on the Rappahannock. A supporting force of soldiers was necessary, and Colonel Baker was assigned a detachment of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry. Eager, not only for a personal triumph but for a generous cut of the reward, he took the precaution of placing the expedition under the command of Conger and L. B. Baker.

  Two days later, Conger reported back. In Baker’s ear, he whispered a few words which sent the imperturbable chief of detectives springing to his feet and across the room. Calling a carriage, the two men quickly drove to Stanton’s house. The War Secretary was lying on a sofa, when Baker rushed into the room. “We have got Booth,” he cried.

  Stanton put his hands over his eyes, and lay for a moment in silence. Then he arose and coolly put on his coat. Baker was arranging some articles on a table: two pistols, a knife, a tallow-encrusted compass, a pipe and a small red-leather diary. These were, he explained, the things found on Booth’s body. Thus the War Secretary learned that Lincoln’s assassin had not been taken alive.

  Colonel Conger related the story of the preceding night, when Booth and Herold had been surrounded in a tobacco barn on a farm near Port Royal. One dead and the other a prisoner, they were being brought to Washington on a steamer, which Stanton instructed Baker to meet at Alexandria. Late that night, Herold joined O’Laughlin, Atzerodt and Spangler on the monitor Montauk. The body, sewn in a gray army blanket, was placed on a bench on the forward deck. Downstream, the monitor Saugus held Paine and Arnold, as well as Dr. Mudd, who had recently been arrested, and Mrs. Surratt, who had been transferred from the Old Capitol.

  While Baker was stealing off to Alexandria, Washington had been thrown into an uproar by a rumor that Booth, disguised as a Negro woman on crutches, had entered a building near the Kirkwood House. Soldiers made a house-to-house search of the neighborhood. The story that Booth had injured his leg was being buzzed about Washington, which understood that he had been hurt in falling from his horse. Another leakage of inaccurate official information appeared in the description of his dress, for the War Department had been told that Booth was disguised as a woman.

  Next morning, Washington gasped at the headlines, and avidly read the story of Baker’s successful pursuit, and Booth’s ignominious end in the burning barn. That the assassin had been
shot was the cause of general disappointment. Vengeance would have been better satisfied with a living captive. The crowds which rushed to the Navy Yard were strictly excluded. Stanton dreaded that Booth’s corpse might be made “a subject of glorification by disloyal persons,” and had ordered Baker to place a strong guard on the Montauk to prevent Southern sympathizers from securing relics. Barnes, Holt, Eckert and a few other officials were permitted to go aboard. There was an autopsy, and the body was formally identified, photographed and sewn into a sack.

  Baker said that, in spite of all precautions, “persons of high position, and some of secession proclivities” succeeded in boarding the Montauk. Returning after an absence on shore, the detective chief found them gathered around Booth’s body. The seam of the sack had been ripped open, and a lady was in the act of cutting off a lock of the actor’s black, curling hair. Baker forcibly wrested the souvenir from her hands, and cleared the visitors from the deck.

  Even this dramatic incident would scarcely account for Stanton’s excessive anxiety to hide Booth’s remains. As though in superstitious fear that the corpse might arise and strike again, the War Secretary ordered an immediate, secret burial. With his cousin, the lieutenant, Colonel Baker snatched the body so suddenly from the Montauk that the officers were taken completely by surprise. Not even the commandant of the Navy Yard was informed of the removal, and the box in which he had been ordered to seal the remains was left on board the vessel.

  A shallow hole was scraped in the floor of a ground-floor room of the old Penitentiary, used since the outbreak of war as a storehouse for ammunition and other Arsenal property. At midnight, by the light of a single lantern flickering over gun boxes and packing cases, Booth’s body was dropped in the hole. After the dirt had been packed down and smoothed over, there was no trace of the interment. The storage room was locked, and the key was delivered to Mr. Stanton. The few men who knew of the burial place were sworn to secrecy.