American Brutus

by Michael W. Kauffman

  Booth could always claim his plot had been approved in Canada, and nobody could challenge him on that. Because of neutrality laws, Confederate commissioners in Canada had to disapprove, and anyone checking on Booth’s story would get the obligatory denial. What lent credibility to his approach was the fact that some of the officials in Montreal took a strong interest in prisoners of war. Since Booth’s plot emphasized the exchange, he could have argued that a common aim led him to seek help from north of the border.

  If Booth wanted to look like an insider, it would not have been hard to arrange. Confederate officials moved around freely in Montreal, and federal agents followed them at every step. It would be a simple matter to approach one of the commissioners in a hotel lobby and engage him in conversation. Spies and bystanders could hardly miss the fact that John Wilkes Booth, a noted celebrity, was talking to the Confederacy’s senior men. Their actual words were irrelevant; appearances alone would boost his claims of official support, and no amount of later checking in Richmond was likely to get at the truth.

  IN EARLY OCTOBER, Confederate Lt. Walter “Wat” Bowie led a small cavalry detachment to within a few miles of Annapolis, intending to capture Maryland governor Augustus Bradford. Bowie called off the attempt at the last minute, when he discovered that the governor had increased his security. Retreating through Montgomery County, his men tried to rob a country store, and local citizens fought back. The men escaped, but Bowie himself was fatally wounded in the skirmish.

  On October 19, Confederates tried another raid fifteen miles below the Canadian border, in St. Albans, Vermont. A party of twenty-two men rode into town and robbed three banks, taking two hundred thousand dollars and mortally wounding one citizen. A U.S. provost marshal chased them across the border, capturing fourteen of them in Canada and sparking an international outcry. The men were eventually surrendered to Canadian authorities, who charged them only with a violation of neutrality laws. All were acquitted. What saved the raiders was their status, under international law, as belligerents. They carried no official papers at the time of the raid, but authorities in Richmond sent blank commissions to Montreal, to be filled in for the defendants as needed.

  John Wilkes Booth arrived in Montreal just before the St. Albans raid and checked in to the St. Lawrence Hall on St. James Street. “The Hall” was probably the city’s finest hotel, and had come to be regarded as the local center of Confederate activities.24

  What he did there is still a matter of dispute. Witnesses in 1865 told of seeing Booth with various officials, talking openly about their plot against Lincoln. Not everyone has taken this testimony at face value; after all, it described a level of recklessness that defied common sense. But we know that Booth spent at least ten days in the city, and if he spoke with these men at all, they were probably not discussing anything so sensitive. Booth was supposedly seeking an interview with Marshal George P. Kane, but Kane was out of town. Instead, he spoke with Patrick C. Martin, a blockade-runner from Baltimore, whom Confederate officials regarded as a “slippery” character. Booth spent a great deal of time with Martin’s family, and made particular friends with his little girl, Margaret.

  When eventually he decided to return to the States, Booth persuaded Martin to write a letter of introduction to Kane, should he ever catch up with him, and another to Dr. William Queen, whom he had known in Charles County, Maryland. The letter to Kane was destroyed, and we do not have any idea of its contents. But we do know something about the letter to Queen; the doctor’s son-in-law testified that it mentioned only real estate. It was vague, as such things had to be. After all, Booth was a stranger in a city full of detectives, and Martin was no fool.25

  On October 27, Booth and Martin went to the Bank of Ontario to exchange some currency. Booth traded three hundred dollars in gold coins for sixty pounds sterling, and bought an exchange receipt for $455. After getting assurances that no one else could have access to his money, Booth left the bank and prepared for a trip back to the States. He left his wardrobe with Martin, and instructed him to ship it south by way of Nassau.26

  HARD WAR POLICIES and a general sense of desperation brought the November election to an unprecedented level of intensity. Much of the hatred, of course, was focused on Abraham Lincoln. As The New York Times said, “No living man was ever charged with political crimes of such multiplicity and such enormity as Abraham Lincoln. He has been denounced without end as a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, and destroyer of the liberties of his country. . . .” And that was the short list. The president was assailed from all sides, and not just in the Border States. In Syracuse, New York, Democrats marched through town carrying signs with some less than amiable sentiments: “A despot has his parasites, and liberty hath her avengers”; “Free ballots or free bullets. Crush the tyrant Lincoln before he crushes you”; and “If Seward ‘touches’ his bell again, the people will stretch his neck.” No electoral contest before or since has matched the level of abuse seen in 1864.27

  When it was over, Lincoln had carried more than 55 percent of the popular vote. Eleven states allowed absentee balloting, and those votes fell heavily in the president’s favor. This was quite a turnaround from the previous summer, when his opponent, General George McClellan, seemed assured of victory. The reversal of fortune came on September 2, when General William T. Sherman captured Atlanta. Sherman’s victory was seen as a possible turning point in the war, and it weakened the Democrats’ most potent argument: that Lincoln’s war measures, oppressive as they were, had not brought the nation any closer to military success.

  This election made Abraham Lincoln the first president in thirty-two years to win a second term. His lopsided victory in the face of such vocal opposition left many to assume he had simply rigged the process, and there was nothing anyone could do to get him out of office.28

  Actually, there was one way. Government sources reported that after the election, newspapers in Richmond began to discuss the idea of assassination. Editorials pointed out how vulnerable the president would be on inauguration day. The Richmond Enquirer cited some examples of tyrannicide, casting it in a positive light and asking, rhetorically, whether anyone in the South had the courage to risk his own life in the interests of his country. 29

  ON A VISIT TO PHILADELPHIA , John Wilkes Booth ranted about the election. “That sectional candidate should never have been president,” he insisted. “He was smuggled through Maryland to the White House. Maryland is true to the core—every mother’s son. Look at the cannon on the heights of Baltimore. It needed just that to keep her quiet. . . .” Asia listened patiently to her brother’s tirade. She knew he needed to let off steam, but his views might get him arrested anywhere else. Even here, he didn’t dare raise his voice. He paced the room and jabbed at the air, spitting out his thoughts in a forced whisper. “He is walking in the footprints of old John Brown, but no more fit to stand with that rugged old hero,” he said. “Great God, no! . . . He is Bonaparte in one great move, that is, by overturning this blind Republic and making himself a king. This man’s reelection which will follow his success, I tell you—will be a reign! . . . You’ll see—you’ll see—that re-election means succession.”30

  As shrill as it sounded, Booth’s opinion was hardly unique. Democrats had always bristled at the administration’s hard-fisted approach. If this nation can be saved only by oppression, they wondered, then what is the point of saving it? The boundaries and symbols may remain, but what really mattered—the freedom of expression, and the permanence of constitutional guarantees—would still have been lost. It would take years for Southerners to appreciate the position in which Lincoln found himself. For every person who wanted him to back off, at least one other argued that he did not go far enough. John W. Forney, of the Philadelphia Press, actually criticized him for failing to encourage slave insurrections. General David Hunter urged a policy of “arming all the negroes and burning the house and other property of every slave holder.” Radicals in Congress ar
gued for the extermination of all Southerners, or at the very least, dire punishments for them. All across the North, editors and politicians clamored for a harder, more vigorous prosecution of the war, and to them, Abraham Lincoln seemed too weak for the job. Masterfully, he threaded his way through both camps, taking a moderate stand that looked extreme only from either end.31

  That people could see Lincoln in such wildly varying ways is perhaps the key to our fascination with him. Everything about him blended one characteristic with its polar opposite—a trait that carried over even to his personal appearance. Sylvanus Cadwallader captured Lincoln’s essential irony when he described him as “a long, gaunt, bony looking man with a queer admixture of the comical and the doleful . . . that reminded one of a professional undertaker cracking a dry joke. . . .” The president’s politics and personal traits were no less mixed: he liberated millions, but was reviled as an oppressor; he was a gentle, fun-loving man with a brutal approach to war.32

  Even his most rabid opponent would have had to admit, in hindsight, that Lincoln handled his dilemma with consummate skill. He sought and won congressional approval for all his emergency measures, and he never made a move without bipartisan involvement. In fact, his most controversial measures were implemented by prewar Democratic politicians. Secretary Stanton himself was a Democrat.

  BOOTH DID NOT RETURN to the stage that fall, but spent his time planning the president’s abduction. He must have had serious concerns about transporting Lincoln to the Confederate capital. Richmond was more than 120 miles away, and it would not be easy to get there safely with a high-profile hostage. Northern Virginia was heavily occupied, so a direct route was out of the question. A detour through the Shenandoah Valley would add days to the trip. By default, then, the only viable option was to go through Southern Maryland. Booth would have to use a Confederate courier route.

  Common wisdom said that everyone along that path was a rebel. In all five counties of Southern Maryland, only twelve people had voted for Lincoln in 1860. Of these, half came from Charles County, where a citizens’ committee asked one Nathan Burnham, a “black Republican emissary,” to leave the area by January 1 or be escorted out. Allegedly, the only Republican in St. Mary’s County was hanged. Because it was so close to Washington, the region was of special concern to the federal government. They flooded the area with spies and cavalry. Hostility and paranoia followed them at every step.

  Politics and geography led almost naturally to the growth of a smuggling industry there. Farther south were millions of people who had been deprived by the war of everyday items that only Northern suppliers could provide. One had to run the blockade to meet those needs, and often made a huge profit doing it. Those who crossed the Potomac carried on their trade to an extent that one general found “simply incredible.” The business was conducted by ordinary citizens and had little to do with the official operation of the Confederate Signal Service, which sent mail and agents across the lines. But their routes overlapped. One ran north and south, through an area called Nanjemoy in central Charles County. Another ran parallel to it, following the Zekiah Swamp south, to a little hamlet called Allen’s Fresh. Though the Federals knew about these lines, they deliberately left them open so that their own operatives could infiltrate the other side.33

  There were many places in Charles County for smugglers to hide. High bluffs and deep ravines alternated on the riverbanks, and shallow streams snaked across the flats west of the Port Tobacco River. A boat could be hidden anywhere in the marshes, or even on the open water. Some were fitted with plugs so they could be sunk, temporarily, just out of sight. The Potomac Flotilla, created to stem the problem, did little more than slow it down, and as many as sixty people crossed in a single night. At fifty dollars per passenger, the money was too good for smugglers to refuse.

  The army once sent an entire division to clean out the area, but the raids and arrests only stiffened the farmers’ will to resist. In 1862, after six months of frustration, the Federals brought in someone who knew how to fight dirty: Col. Lafayette C. Baker, provost marshal of the War Department. Baker took a hard-fisted approach to disloyalty. His spies quickly spread out over the county, breaking up boats, pillaging houses, threatening citizens, and frightening slaves into betraying their masters. They showed little regard for civil rights or the rules of evidence, and were almost universally hated for it. Their unseen presence made life unsettling for everyone, and clannishness became a way of life—not only on the underground network, but everywhere around it. Outsiders were looked upon with a great deal of suspicion.34

  Such was the character of life in Southern Maryland by November 1864. On the eleventh of that month, John Wilkes Booth took the Leonardtown stage from Washington to the village of Bryantown, in Charles County. Stopping at Burch’s Tavern, he asked how he might get in touch with Dr. William H. Queen. Dr. Queen was an elderly man who lived about six miles to the south. Since Booth had not made arrangements to get there, he checked in to the tavern, and the next morning, Dr. Queen’s son Joseph came through town and picked Booth up.

  Patrick Martin’s letter of introduction got Booth in the door. Though the letter mentioned only real estate, it was all Booth needed to familiarize himself with the region and its people. Indeed, real estate was the perfect cover story. It helped Booth obtain the names of landowners, as well as all the factors that affected property values: proximity to roads, traffic flow, and access to the rivers. Any prospective farmer would want to know such things. But so would a smuggler.

  There was no need for Booth to divulge his real intentions. Being an outsider, he knew that these people would be suspicious of him. Perhaps when he got to know them better he could gently make inquiries about getting across the river. Though crossings were commonplace, they were still illegal, and people spoke of them with a certain level of discretion. The tacit understanding was that people went to Virginia for the usual reasons: to deliver mail, messages, or minor forms of contraband. A guarded inquiry might draw out all the information Booth needed, and he wouldn’t have to be specific about his own plans. To do otherwise would have been absurd.

  Booth spent that Saturday with the Queens, and the night as well. He talked with the doctor and his family about casual subjects, and about his oil speculations. He claimed he had made a good deal of money from them, and now he hoped to do the same in land. He asked Queen’s son-in-law, John C. Thompson, about roads in the area, but Thompson was from Georgia and knew little about Charles County. He knew that, in general, the best land might sell for fifty dollars an acre, while unimproved tracts could go for as little as five. Beyond that, he had no answers.

  Two days after Booth returned to Washington, he realized that something was missing. He always kept a pistol in his carpetbag, but on his way to Bryantown, he had given it to the stage driver for safekeeping. The driver was supposed to take it back to the city and leave it with someone Booth knew. Apparently, he forgot. So on Tuesday, Booth wrote to the tavern keeper in Bryantown, hoping to find the stage driver:

  Washington, Nov. 14th

  J. D. Burch, Esq.

  Dear sir.

  Hope I shall see you again ere long. Our friend of the stage last Friday never left what I gave to his charge. You know what I had to take from my carpet-bag. Its not worth more than $15, but I will give him $20 rather than lose it, as it has saved my life two or three times. He has left the city. If you would be kind enough to get it from him and send it to me I will reimburse you for any outlay. And will never forget you. If you should ever recover it, either send, or give it to our friend, co. Fayette st. Where if you wish you can write me.

  Remember me to all the friends I met while in your country.

  I am yours truly

  J. Wilkes Booth

  That Booth had been in a few life-and-death scrapes would be news indeed—if it had actually happened. But even those he confided in, such as Junius and Asia, never mentioned anything of the sort. He seemed to be crafting an image as a man of m
ystery—perhaps a Confederate agent. Like his boasts of success in oil, it was a charade, but one he would find useful in the coming months.35

  Booth deposited fifteen hundred dollars in Jay Cooke’s Washington bank, then headed for New York. Conspiracy theorists have suggested he got the money from Confederates in Canada. But after making twentyfive to thirty thousand dollars a year as an actor, he could easily have funded the plot on his own. He probably kept his money in Philadelphia and drew from that account while passing through on the way back from Canada. In light of subsequent developments, it made perfect sense that he would transfer his money to a Washington bank.36

  EVEN AS THE PLOT against Lincoln took shape, presidential security remained of no more than passing interest to those in power. When the new federal budget was passed in the fall, it included funds to pay for a security force at the Executive Mansion. The idea had come from Benjamin B. French, commissioner of public buildings, who was fed up with vandalism in the White House. Visitors had peeled wallpaper from the walls, drapes had been cut to pieces, and an entire lace curtain had vanished, no doubt into the carpetbag of some tourist. Losses of this kind made the place unsightly and had cost the government more than anyone was willing to pay, especially in wartime. So in November, Police Superintendent William B. Webb assigned four of his most intimidating men to work as plainclothes officers in the mansion. Their forty-dollar-a-month salaries were to be reimbursed by the Interior Department.37