by Owen J. Hurd
“Let no man pray that John Brown be spared!” Beecher declared from his pulpit. “Let Virginia make him a martyr!” Sure, Brown’s attack was misguided, Beecher was saying, but “a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that, and round up Brown’s failure with a heroic success.” The court obliged, handing down a death sentence.
Brown’s execution had the desired effect. Even southerners present, like J. E. B. Stuart and Thomas (soon to be “Stonewall”) Jackson, admired Brown for mounting the scaffold in a calm, courageous manner. Just before he died, Brown handed a note to one of his jailers. In it, he predicted the inevitability of the Civil War, saying, “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.”
After the execution, Northern sentiment for John Brown blossomed, in large part thanks to the Concord Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau, who championed Brown’s courage and the nobility of his armed resurrection from the start. Ralph Waldo Emerson was soon swayed. The more famous and influential Emerson declared that Brown made “the gallows glorious like the cross.”
One group of people who Brown might have expected to stand by him during his imprisonment and trial were conspicuously silent. Like wavering disciples, most of the so-called Secret Six, a cabal of Northern abolitionists who helped fund and plan the Harpers Ferry Raid, acted as if they had had nothing to do with Brown and his plans to foment a slave insurrection. Samuel Howe, Franklin Sanborn, and George Stearns fled to Canada, while Gerrit Smith found refuge in an insane asylum. Only Theodore Parker, convalescing and then dying at a safe distance in Rome, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson stood firm in their support for Brown. Scolding Sanborn in a letter, Higginson wondered, “Is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Higginson was one of Brown’s supporters who tried to organize an escape for Brown and some of the other jailed conspirators, but each plan fell through, due to a lack of funds or feasibility.
Even though he acquitted himself better than most of the Secret Six, Higginson never forgave himself for his role in the Harpers Ferry raid. Not that he abandoned Brown the way some of the others had—more that he subconsciously knew that he was sending Brown into a suicide mission. Higginson attempted to make up for it, in part, by commanding the first all-black regiment of Union soldiers in the Civil War.
LOOSE ENDS
A third son, Owen Brown, escaped into the hills of Pennsylvania, along with six other Harpers Ferry conspirators. He died of pneumonia in California in 1889. Two of the fugitives who escaped with Owen Brown were later captured and hanged along with two others found guilty shortly after Brown’s execution.
The only black survivor of the raid, Osborne Perry Anderson, fought for the Union during the Civil War and later wrote a book about the Harpers Ferry raid.
Mrs. Brown never remarried. She moved to California with her daughters and got by fairly well. The people of Red Bluff, California, raised funds to build a house for them.
John Brown’s other surviving sons, Salmon and Jason, were a different story. They squandered money on foolish investments. Jason died of old age in Akron, Ohio, in 1912. Seven years later Salmon committed suicide.
The U.S. Marine Corps colonel who quelled John Brown’s armed insurrection later earned some fame in the Civil War as a Confederate general. His name was Robert E. Lee.
Another prominent actor in the Civil War drama also claimed to have played a role in the “capture and execution of John Brown.” While it’s true that John Wilkes Booth was present at Brown’s execution, he merely witnessed the event, having bribed some members of a local militia into letting him tag along with them.
One of the hostages John Brown took during the raid was Lewis W. Washington, a great-grandnephew of General George Washington. Washington’s descendent, a wealthy Virginia slave owner, survived the raid and later lent support to the Confederate war effort. After the war he was granted a pardon, based largely on the assistance of George Custer, a friend of Washington’s second wife.
Among the Bostonians raising funds to cover John Brown’s legal expenses was a descendent of Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall (also named Samuel Sewall).
A once stalwart Brown supporter, James Redpath, soon veered drastically in his sympathies relating to the issue of slavery. Though he aided Brown’s activities in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry and also wrote a worshipful biography of John Brown, Redpath later coauthored the memoirs of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
At about 10:15 p.m., April 14, 1865, a lead bullet fired from John Wilkes Booth’s derringer flattened itself within Abraham Lincoln’s skull. The wound would prove fatal nine hours later. Almost simultaneously, Lewis Powell burst into Secretary of State William Seward’s sickroom, stabbing him in the face and neck. As part of the coordinated attack, coconspirator George Atzerodt was supposed to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. He went to a tavern and got drunk instead.
Within three months, almost all of the perpetrators of our nation’s first presidential assassination were dead or imprisoned. John Wilkes Booth and David Herold rode furiously out of Washington, to the house of Dr. Samuel Mudd, where the doctor set Booth’s badly broken leg, injured in his leap from balcony to stage. For the next five days, Booth and Herold hid out in the thick woods of Maryland, waiting for the right time to cross the Potomac River into Virginia. Maryland farmer Thomas Jones brought the assassin provisions and also gave him a boat, with which Booth and Herold arrived on the Virginia side of the Potomac on April 23. Several days later, federal soldiers tracked the two fugitives to a tobacco shed on the Garrett Farm in Virginia. When soldiers set fire to the wood structure, Herold surrendered, but Booth was determined to make a dramatic exit. An overzealous Union soldier, ignoring orders to bring Booth back alive, poked his gun through a crack in the shed and shot him in the back of the neck. Paralyzed and dying, Booth uttered his last words, “Useless, useless.”
Herold was transported back to Washington, DC, where he was reunited in prison with fellow conspirators Powell, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, as well as Dr. Mudd, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and Edman Spangler. On July 7, 1865, the first four of the assailants found summary justice at the end of the hangman’s noose. Convicted of lesser charges, Mudd, O’Laughlen, Arnold, and Spangler were shipped off to Fort Jefferson on a desolate remote island in the Dry Tortugas, about seventy miles west of Key West. An outbreak of yellow fever provided an unwelcome means of clemency for O’Laughlen, who died, but it also led to early pardons for the remaining three prisoners, in part because of the medical treatment Dr. Mudd provided to fever-stricken prisoners and guards alike. In all, these conspirators served less than four years in prison for their roles in President Lincoln’s assassination.
At least two conspirators got away. A reputed Confederate supporter, Jones was arrested but released for lack of evidence. For eighteen years, he kept the secret of Booth’s whereabouts during the so-called lost week. In 1883 he sold the story of his role in Booth’s escape to journalist and author George Alfred Townsend for $60. Jones also wrote his own account of his exploits: J. Wilkes Booth: An Account of His Sojourn in Southern Maryland after the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, His Passage Across the Potomac, and His Death in Virginia. The book was published in 1893. He was seen peddling copies at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Jones died the following year.
Another conspirator, John Surratt, slipped into Canada and eventually made his way to Europe, seeking anonymity in an unlikely place: as a member of the Vatican’s papal guards. Ratted out by a suspicious fellow guard, Surratt was arrested but made a second escape, this time by leaping off a seaside cliff into a garbage dump. He scurried to Naples and boarded a steamer to Alexandria, Egypt, where he was again apprehended—still conspicuously clad in his papal guard uniform. Surratt was shipped back to the United States to face justice. But the slippery Surratt had one more escape left in him—a slow, exceedingl
y mundane one made via the judicial system. Surratt may have been a well-known associate of John Wilkes Booth and the child of convicted conspirator Mary Surratt, but the prosecution could provide no evidence that he helped plan the assassination or that he was even in Washington, DC, on the night of the assassination. (In fact, he had been in Elmira, New York, planning a jailbreak for Confederates held in a Union prison.) Two trials later Surratt was freed in November 1868, three and a half years after Lincoln’s assassination.
At one point Surratt set out on a lecture tour, but an engagement in Washington, DC, almost resulted in a riot. The event was canceled, and Surratt slipped into middle-class obscurity, working for most of his remaining days as an auditor at the Baltimore Steam Packet Company. The last surviving member of the assassination plot, Surratt died in 1916.
Though split in their sympathies to the Confederacy and Union, all members of the Booth family suffered for their association to the assassin. Booth’s sister, Asia Booth Clark, moved to England with her husband, a renowned comic actor, and wrote two biographies of her famous acting family as well as a sympathetic memoir of her brother John, which was hidden away and published posthumously, seventy-three years after the assassination.
The eldest Booth sibling, Edwin, was forever haunted, and initially stigmatized, by his brother’s horrendous act. An even more famous stage actor than John Wilkes, Edwin suffered public insults and was even shot at during a Chicago performance of Richard II. As the years progressed, the famed Shakespearean actor experienced a professional and personal renaissance. By the time he died in 1893, Edwin Booth—a friend of president-elect Grover Cleveland, no less—was so thoroughly respected and loved that his funeral drew thousands, including:
actors, artists, men of letters, men whose names are known as foremost in their professions on both sides of the Atlantic, men of millions, men whom the great crowd outside the quaint churchyard pushed and squeezed and craned their necks to see—all were there to join in the ceremony…of the greatest Hamlet of them all.
In one of those queer historical coincidences, on the same day as Edwin Booth’s funeral, tragedy struck at the site of Lincoln’s assassination. Ford’s Theatre, which the War Department had purchased in 1866 and transformed into office space, collapsed under the weight of thirty years’ worth of records, killing twenty-two and injuring another sixty-eight.
For Mary Lincoln, life after the assassination was a barely tolerable series of tragedies and indignities. Not only was she widowed under the most horrific of circumstances but she was also broke. Her creditors were closing in, but her husband’s estate was tied up in court. More gallingly, whereas government pensions and private foundations were taking care of generals—Grant alone was given two houses—no one was stepping forward to help the former first lady. Her only consolations were her two remaining children, Robert and Tad. Before long Robert fell from favor. First, he married a strong-willed woman. Second, he scolded his mother for begging Congress for a pension but more mortifyingly for conducting a public auction of her old clothes. Third, he had the audacity to question her outlandish shopping habits, a chronic problem of hers that had recently become an obsessive compulsion.
After an extended estrangement, spent mostly in Europe with her beloved Taddie, Mary returned to Chicago in 1871 to meet her first grandchild. Almost as soon as they arrived, on July 15, Tad died at the age of eighteen, probably of medullary thyroid cancer. Then, in 1875, a mere decade after she was widowed, the nation’s former first lady—beset by financial insecurity, loneliness, and paranoia—was branded a lunatic and imprisoned in a mental hospital. Worst of all, it was her son Robert who had orchestrated her commitment. One suicide attempt and a short stay at an asylum later, Mary was out on her own again.
On the positive side, she did come into some money, as her late husband’s estate was finally settled. The financial freedom enabled her to shop and travel (far away from Robert, “that wretched young man”). She died on July 16, 1882, at her sister’s house in Springfield, Illinois. The family rummaged through sixty-four trunks of clothing and baubles but was unable to find a single appropriate dress in which to bury her.
Lincoln’s assassination traumatized many others, including the two closest witnesses, Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, the man Booth stabbed in the presidential balcony, before leaping to the stage. The couple married in 1867 and later moved to Germany. Moody, temperamental, and insanely jealous in the years after the assassination, Rathbone made a lousy husband and father. On Christmas Eve 1883, Rathbone staged a bizarre reenactment of Lincoln’s assassination, shooting his wife and stabbing himself. As he had eighteen years earlier, Rathbone survived the stab wound, but once again the gunshot victim succumbed. Rathbone was committed to an insane asylum, where he lived out the remainder of his life.
Robert Lincoln’s life after the assassination was that of a living, breathing bad luck charm. Despite professional success and vast wealth, he managed to figure in several of the worst tragedies of the late nineteenth century. His Chicago mansion was one of the thousands of homes destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. He also served as a legal adviser to railway tycoon George Pullman during the deadly rail strike of 1894, later taking over as president of the Pullman Palace Car Company after the owner’s death. Most ominously, Robert Lincoln played a role in the country’s first three presidential assassinations. He was bedside when his father died; he was present in 1881 when Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield; and he was in attendance at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.
Robert Lincoln died on July 26, 1926, at the age of eighty-two. Plans were being made to transport his body to Springfield, where he was to join his son, mother, father, and three brothers at Oak Ridge Cemetery’s Lincoln Memorial Tomb. But it was not to be. Robert’s wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln, overruled her husband’s wishes and decided to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery instead. Because she planned to be buried beside her husband, perhaps Mary Harlan Lincoln found the prospect of spending eternity so near her mother-in-law unappealing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DISASTER RELIEF
DISASTERS have a way of bringing out the best and worst in people. In the following entries, you’ll see how a fire, a flood, and an earthquake triggered massive outpourings of sympathy in various forms of relief aid. But these disasters also stoked smoldering class anxieties, resulting in fear, distrust, and even violence. Ultimately, though, lessons were learned, and the three stricken cities—Chicago, Johnstown, and San Francisco—rebuilt themselves in grander fashion and with safeguards in place to prevent future disasters. However, the damage to some individuals’ reputations and fortunes were beyond recovery.
Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow Exonerated
When the Great Chicago Fire swept away two-thirds of the burgeoning Midwestern city on October 8 and 9, 1871, it became the most devastating urban catastrophe in U.S. history. An unstoppable wall of flames bulldozed the city, consuming almost $200 million in property and terrorizing countless citizens. Considering the scale of destruction, a surprisingly small number of people lost their lives. Including the missing, who were presumed to be completely incinerated or perhaps trapped under tons of debris, the death toll was set at approximately three hundred.
The fire left a hundred thousand Chicagoans homeless, but not the O’Learys, owners of the barn where the fire originated. Although the barn was a total loss—including the cow that allegedly kicked over the lamp—the arid southwesterly winds sent all the destruction north and east of their home and detached boardinghouse. The fact that Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s house survived the devastating fire did not add to their popularity among newly homeless Chicagoans. Nor did the rumor that the fire was the result of a careless, nocturnal milking session.
Whether the product of neighborhood rumormongers or of an imaginative journalist, the story of the O’Leary cow and the lamp was first publ
ished in the October 9 Chicago Evening Journal. In the days after the fire, reporters from various newspapers descended on the O’Leary home, seeking to verify the story. What they found was a proud and willful woman who steadfastly denied any knowledge of how the fire began in the family’s southwest side barn. Yes, the fire started in the barn, and yes, the family owned several cows, which Mrs. O’Leary milked twice daily, but never at night. Mrs. O’Leary had fed the family’s horse at seven o’clock, she said, and then retired the animal to the barn. That was two hours before the fire, and she had no lamp with her at the time. The O’Learys went to bed sometime between seven-thirty and eight o’clock that Sunday night, a fact that was corroborated by a neighbor who attempted to pay them an evening social call. It was this man, Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan, who later testified that he noticed the smoke coming from the barn at a quarter to nine.
An official fire department inquiry failed to pinpoint the true cause of the fire, but thanks to the persistent legend of the cow kicking over the lantern, Mrs. O’Leary suffered perennially. Reporters hounded her on every anniversary of the fire. They called her an old Irish hag—even though she was in her forties at the time of the fire. They accused her of being on the dole—even though she earned her living by selling the milk of her family’s five cows and through rental income, and her husband, Patrick, worked as a deliveryman. They concocted stories about how she may have intentionally started the fire in vengeance after being denied aid by the church.
No matter how hard they tried in the years after the fire, reporters failed to get Mrs. O’Leary to comment or pose for a photograph. There is no known photographic image of Catherine O’Leary, but there is at least one amusing forgery, in which an old, stern-faced Caucasian woman stands beside a cow—actually, the bovine impostor was a handy steer, most likely fetched from one of the nearby stockyards.
