Other survivors of the manhunt traded on their MEMORIES, too. In 1867, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker published a now forgotten and shabby book, History of the United States Secret Service, that was anything but a true history. Baker exaggerated not only his importance in the chase for Booth, but in the entire Civil War. He died in 1868.
His cousin Luther Byron Baker survived him and, by the late 1880s, went on the lecture circuit and became the most successful of the post-assassination entrepreneurs. Armed with a professional manager, a variety of posters, and a four-page promotional brochure crammed with testimonials from satisfied customers, Baker delivered dozens of paid lectures over the next eight years until his death in May 1896, at age sixty-six.
At his lectures Baker sold a substantial souvenir: a large-format, seven-and-five-eighths-by-nine-inch, cardboard-backed, so-called combination picture that depicted Baker riding his horse “Buckskin,” the duo surrounded by images of Booth, Corbett, and Lincoln. A descriptive label pasted on the reverse, and written in the purported voice of Buckskin, described the horse’s participation in the manhunt. A concluding note, autographed by Baker, verified the animal’s story. It was one of the most fetching Lincoln assassination trinkets ever concocted. Death did not end Buckskin’s role as Baker’s lecture companion. A taxidermy student at the Michigan State Agricultural College stuffed him, and the venerable manhunter stood proudly—albeit mutely—onstage with Baker as an unforgettable prop.
John H. Surratt Jr. enjoyed less success as a lecturer. 1870, five years after the assassination—and his mother’s hanging—and just three years after his own trial, Surratt tried to exploit his story on the lecture circuit.
He certainly had an amazing story to tell. After his mother’s hanging, John Surratt decided that fleeing to Europe offered him the best chance of survival. In September he traveled from St. Liboire to Montreal, moved on to Quebec, sailed to Liverpool, and continued to Rome, where, under the name “John Watson,” he joined the Papal Zouaves, the colorfully uniformed army of the Papal States. Surratt blended in with this Catholic milieu, and he felt safely beyond the reach of the man-hunters. But in April 1866, around the first anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, a fellow Zouave who recognized Surratt informed on him. Booth’s coconspirator was arrested at Verdi on November 7. He escaped from Velletri prison the next day. While walking under guard near the edge of an overlook, Surratt glanced over the precipice. He saw jagged rocks twenty or thirty feet below, and, beyond them, a steep drop down a cliff. Before his guards could restrain him, Surratt, in an escape worthy of John Wilkes Booth, grabbed the balustrade, leaped over it, and tumbled to the rocks. Fortunately for Surratt, he landed uninjured. The rocks where he fell were the prison’s waste dump, and a voluminous, filthy pile of human excrement and garbage cushioned his fall.
Surratt fled the Papal States and crossed into the Kingdom of Italy. Proceeding to Naples, and impersonating a Canadian citizen, he tricked the British consul into gaining him passage on a steamer headed for Alexandria, Egypt. But when Surratt disembarked on November 23, 1866, American officials were waiting for him. He was seized and shipped back to America on a U.S. Navy warship. John Surratt landed at the Washington Navy Yard on February 19, 1867, and was imprisoned immediately. His trial before a civil court, and not the military tribunal that condemned his mother, lasted from June through August 1867. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and he was released. He was charged again in June 1868, but in November the charges were dismissed. John Surratt was a free man. His mother was dead, he had been exposed as a leader in a plot to kidnap President Lincoln, and he had earned the reputation of a coward who had abandoned his mother to die. But at least he was alive. If he had been captured in 1865 and tried by military tribunal, he certainly would have been convicted, and would likely have been executed.
Surratt got up a talk, went to Rockville, Maryland, and on December 6, 1870, made his first public appearance trading on his friendship with John Wilkes Booth and his involvement in the kidnapping plot. Surratt had the audacity to lecture in New York City at The Cooper Union, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s triumphant February 1860 address that propelled him to the presidency. Emboldened, he decided to return to the scene of the crime, Washington. He had large, attractively designed posters printed to advertise his appearance at the Odd Fellows Hall on Seventh Street, above D, on December 30, 1870. His mother’s boardinghouse and Ford’s Theatre were just a few blocks away. But it was too soon. Citizens complained and, despite Surratt’s boast in his poster that, “all reports to the contrary notwithstanding,” he would “most positively” deliver his lecture, the event was canceled. A reporter found him hiding in a hotel room. John Surratt never lectured again. The last survivor of Booth’s conspirators, he died in April 1916.
Secretary of State William Seward and his sons survived their wounds. For the rest of his life, until his death in 1872, William Seward preferred to turn the scarred half of his face away from the camera and pose in profile. A rare frontal portrait reveals how he carried Lewis Powell’s terrible, disfiguring mark. Frederick recovered his senses after his grievous head wound, and he lived another fifty years. But, in a family tragedy, death soon claimed the Seward women. In June 1865, Frances died at age fifty-nine. Her weak constitution had succumbed to the stressful assassination attempt. But at least William Seward had been prepared for the possibility of his wife’s death. The next year he endured a staggering loss. His brave daughter, Fanny, who had fearlessly challenged Lewis Powell that awful, bloody night, left the world on October 29, 1866. Seward called her death his “great unspeakable sorrow.” Her passing, he wrote, left his dreams for the future “broken and destroyed forever.” Fanny was twenty-one years old. She would have been a wonderful writer.
•••
Samuel Arnold lived long enough to write his memoirs, and the Baltimore American newspaper serialized the manuscript in 1902. By then he was the sole surviving defendant from the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial of 1865, and the only one who had ever written a full account of Booth’s kidnapping plot. He was also the only one who lived long enough to see the new century. He died on September 1, 1906. Arnold joined John Wilkes Booth and Michael O’Laughlen at Green Mount Cemetery.
Dr. Mudd returned to his farm in 1869, happy to be free of the black prison guards he despised. Soon Ned Spangler journeyed there, and Mudd took him in until Ned’s death on February 7, 1875. Samuel Mudd passed on in 1883. Before he died, he confessed privately to Samuel Cox Jr. the truth about the night of April 14, 1865: Mudd admitted that he had known all along that the injured stranger at his door was John Wilkes Booth. After the doctor’s death, one of his lawyers confirmed it. In 1906, Samuel Mudd’s daughter published a collection of his letters, and in 1936, a Hollywood motion picture, The Prisoner of Shark Island, portrayed Mudd as an innocent country doctor obeying his Hippocratic oath, deceived by Lincoln’s assassin. That false image took hold in the popular mind, and, to this day, many Americans still believe the myth that Dr. Mudd and his descendants have toiled assiduously for more than a century to perpetuate.
Edwin M. Stanton died in 1869, the same year that John Wilkes Booth escaped the secret grave to which Lincoln’s secretary of war had condemned him. After the manhunt and conspiracy trial, Stan-ton’s career went into eclipse under the controversial, impeachment-tainted Johnson presidency. When Johnson tried to fire him, Stanton refused to surrender his War Department office. General Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, and in December he nominated Stanton to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Lincoln’s right hand died later that month before he could join the court.
Stanton lived long enough to see much of the work of the manhunt undone. Public sympathy for Mary Surratt bloomed; he was accused of suppressing and tampering with Booth’s diary, and Congress investigated; he saw Booth, Surratt, Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and O’Laughlen emerge from their graves; saw the three survivors Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler pardoned; and saw the fugi
tive John Surratt Jr., who had escaped him in April of 1865, captured, tried, and freed. Perhaps it was best that Stanton did not live to see Surratt dare to boast of his role in the great crime and attempt to profit from the murder of Stanton’s commander in chief—and friend.
Stanton’s sudden death—he was only fifty-five—troubled Robert Lincoln and took him back four years, to the rear bedroom of the Petersen House. As soon as Robert heard the sad news, he sent a letter to Stanton’s son: “I know that it is useless to say anything . . . and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth, I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.” Edwin Stan-ton was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, not far from the stone chapel where Abraham Lincoln held a small funeral service for his son Willie. Few people visit his grave. If you drive down R Street, you can see it from your car: the weathered, white obelisk just a few yards behind the formidable, spike-topped iron fence, standing sentinel over his rest.
A century later, at another cemetery, misguided ANTIQUARIANS buried Lewis Powell’s remains with honors. His body had vanished long ago. Disinterred from the old arsenal in 1869, Powell was reburied in Holmead Cemetery in Washington. Soon that burial ground went defunct, and Powell’s corpse, or so it was thought, became lost. In fact, his body, or at least a portion of it, went temporarily to the Army Medical Museum, and then ended up in the anthropological collections of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1993, somebody discovered his head, still neatly labeled, at the national museum. Powell sympathizers gained possession of the skull, transported it to his native Florida, sealed it in a miniature, hatbox-size coffin, and buried it on November 11—Veterans Day—1994. Powell’s headless skeleton was never found, and his bones lie moldering in some unknown grave—or perhaps in the labyrinthine storage vaults of the Smithsonian. And so Seward’s violent assassin rests, if not in peace, then in pieces.
Today you can drive there from Washington, D.C., in a couple of hours. Several landmarks point the way: an antebellum brick row house in the middle of Washington’s Chinatown; a Civil War era roadside tavern in Clinton, Maryland; a modest farmhouse hidden nearly from view in the Maryland countryside; an old hotel in Bryan-town, Maryland; several nondescript homes in Virginia, their century-and-a-half-old clapboards covered by cheap aluminum siding. When you arrive at Garrett’s farm, there isn’t much to see. A few scattered trees survive from the dark forest that once grew there. The farmhouse overlooking the tobacco barn where it happened perished from rot and neglect long ago. Relic hunters, like locusts in a wheat field, carried off every last fragment of board and timber that time hadn’t ravaged. Some of them have even driven shovels into the site of the burning barn, in hopes of excavating charred embers from the earth.
If you go in summer when the grass is tall, it’s hard to spot the iron pipe and homemade tag that somebody pounded into the ground to mark the spot where the farmhouse once stood. But if you go in the spring, perhaps on April 26, the anniversary, you’ll see it—the place where, in the middle of the night, the chase for Lincoln’s killer came to an end.
The place where it began still stands in Washington, looming over Tenth Street. After the assassination, Ford’s Theatre survived arson, abandonment, and disaster. Stanton vowed that the site of Lincoln’s murder must never again serve as a house of laughter and public entertainment. He surrounded the theatre with guards, ordered it closed, and confined John T. Ford in the Old Capitol prison for thirty-nine days. Some cabinet members objected to the confiscation, but Stanton was adamant: that “dreadful house” would never open again. Others agreed—there were at least two attempts to burn it down. And the Army and Navy Journal spoke for many in applauding Stanton’s decisiveness. If Ford “did not know enough, of himself, to close its career as a playhouse, it is fortunate that there is a man in Washington competent and spirited enough to give the instruction.” Then the government relented and, on July 7, 1865—the day that Powell, Surratt, Herold, and Atzerodt went to the gallows—gave the theatre back to John Ford. When he announced his intention to reopen it, the public was outraged, and Ford received a number of threats. “You must not think of opening tomorrow night,” warned one letter. “I can assure you that it will not be tolerated. You must dispose of the property in some other way. Take even fifty thousand for it and build another and you will be generously supported. But do not attempt to open it again.” The anonymous threat was signed by “One of many determined to prevent it.”
It was too much for Stanton. He seized Ford’s Theatre again in the name of public safety. The government sentenced the building to death as a playhouse, and paid a contractor $28,500 to gut the interior. All evidence of its appearance on the night of April 14, 1865—the gaslights, the decorations, the furniture, the stage, and the president’s box—vanished, either destroyed or carted away. By late November 1865, a little more than seven months after the assassination, the once beautiful theatre had been defaced beyond recognition and relegated to a drab, three-floor office building. The Record and Pension Bureau of Stanton’s War Department moved in and crammed the space with government clerks and tens of thousands of pounds of files. In 1866, the government bought Ford’s Theatre from John Ford for $100,000. In 1867, the top floor became the new home of the Army Medical Museum for the next twenty years, as if this place had not already seen enough horror and death. One day, on June 9, 1893, somebody filed one piece of paper too many, and the excessive load of tons of documents and office equipment caused all the floors to collapse, crushing twenty-two clerks to death, and crippling or injuring sixty-eight more.
Restored in the 1960s to its former glory, Ford’s Theatre lives again as both a museum and a working playhouse. Presidents come here again for annual galas, though none sits in the president’s box. The restoration was intended as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, but Ford’s has also, inevitably, become a memorial to his assassin. The theatre is dressed to appear just as it did on the night of April 14, 1865. The state box is festooned with flags, and the framed engraving of George Washington that hangs from the front of the box is the actual one that witnessed Booth’s leap to the stage. You can follow Booth’s steps up the curving staircase, retrace his path to the box, enter the vestibule, and re-create his view of Lincoln’s rocking chair. You can sit in the audience and, while listening to a National Park Service historian lecture on the assassination, you can stare up at the box and imagine Booth suspended momentarily in midair, at the apex of his leap.
John Wilkes Booth would have loved it: An entire museum—one of the most popular in America—devoted to his crime. “I must have fame,” he once exhorted himself, “fame.” He has it at Ford’s Theatre, his enduring monument where he is always onstage, forever famous. His fame is of a peculiar kind. Booth was reviled as a fiend during the manhunt. The newspaper editorials, letters from private citizens, mob violence, and the treatment of his body are proof enough of that. Yes, in some quarters there were those who hated Lincoln and admired Booth, but the devotees of the cult of “Our Brutus” dared not express public sympathy for the assassin. Then, over time, something changed. Booth became part of American folklore and his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero—the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin. Booth is not celebrated for the murder, but he has in some way been forgiven for it. What else can explain the presence of large street banners, decorated with the assassin’s photo, hanging from lampposts along his F Street escape route, directing tourists to Ford’s Theatre? In comparison, the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene.
Asia Booth foresaw the trajectory of her brother’s fame, and she tried to help set it in motion in her secret book. To Asia, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth were paired, tragic figures destined to die and bring about a transcendent healing between North and South. Her brother “ ‘saved his count
ry from a king,’ but he created for her a martyr. . . . He set the stamp of greatness on an epoch of history, and gave all he had to build this enduring monument to his foe . . . [t]he South avenged the wrongs inflicted by the North. A life inexpressibly dear was sacrificed wildly for what its possessor deemed best. The life best beloved by the North was dashed madly out when most triumphant. Let the blood of both cement the indissoluble union of our country.”
The legend of John Wilkes Booth began within weeks of the manhunt and his death at Garrett’s farm. A minister in Texas wrote a poem honoring Booth. In New York City, on May 24, 1865, less than a month after Booth’s death, a publisher announced the release of Dion Haco’s novel The Assassinator, the first fictional account of the murder and manhunt. A clever blending of facts drawn from newspaper accounts, invented dialogue, and fantasy scenes, Haco sensationalized Booth’s life and implicated the sad, suicidal Ella Turner in the plot against Lincoln. Ella, “an impetuous and wilful creature,” wrote Haco, pursued Booth as her lover: “My determination is fixed to have that man.” She sensed that the actor was a man of destiny: “Ella saw that his piercing black eyes were lit up almost with a supernatural light. He seemed to be peering through the dim vista of the future and reading from its pages his name.” Haco’s purple prose led Booth inexorably to the manhunt’s climax at Garrett’s barn: “before him a sea of flame, ready to engulf him; beyond the grave a greater sea of flame awaiting him.” The novel closed with lurid details of the assassin’s autopsy, titillating its readers with fantastic images of the corpse’s mutilation: “the head and heart taken from it to be deposited in the Medical Museum,” with the headless and heartless trunk “consigned to the care of the secret agents.” The novel leaves poor Ella, alone and bereft, clutching her assassin-lover’s photo, “covering it with kisses.”
Manhunt Page 40
