American Brutus

by Michael W. Kauffman

  A few detainees got a great deal of attention even though nothing was proved against them. João Celestino, a Portuguese ship captain, was one such person. Celestino was known for his rabid political views, and government informants considered him perfectly capable of plotting against the president. But after his highly publicized arrest, detectives failed to connect him with Booth, and no charges were filed. The case of Benjamin Ficklin was similar. Ficklin, a blockade-runner, traded Southern cotton in the European markets. He was arrested after a man in Philadelphia reported him as a suspicious character “presenting the appearance of a refined pirate.” It was subsequently discovered that he had once crossed the Potomac with Atzerodt, and that he had visited the Kirkwood House on April 14. He claimed that in both instances the timing was coincidental, and he insisted that he had traveled to the South with Lincoln’s blessing. He suggested his captors confirm this with the president’s friend Orville Hickman Browning. Apparently someone checked, and Ficklin was released.

  Captain Edwin Bedee, 12th New Hampshire, presented a unique case. Bedee had been present at Ford’s on the night of the assassination, and had made his way into the president’s box immediately afterward. One of the doctors there handed him some papers that had been taken from Mr. Lincoln’s pockets, and told him to deliver them to the White House. Apparently the papers disappeared, and Stanton ordered Bedee to stand trial for theft. 14

  Detention was always a harrowing experience, but occasionally it was physically hazardous as well. When Lieutenant Dana sent three men to Washington under heavy guard, word got out that two of them were Booth and Surratt. A crowd quickly formed around them, jeering and throwing stones. Their escorts managed to hold off the mob with muskets, but by the time they arrived at the Old Capitol, guards and prisoners alike were badly bruised and cut.

  No suspect drew more attention than the tall, dark-haired man who had been arrested at the Surratt boardinghouse. Government investigators were burning to learn all they could about him, but without his cooperation, they didn’t even know his name. All they had was a certificate found in his pocket verifying that “L. Paine” of Fauquier County, Virginia, had taken the oath of allegiance. Everyone assumed that this was an alias. So in the absence of solid information, speculation filled the void, and guessing his identity became a great sport. Some people claimed that the suspect himself didn’t know who he was, that he had been stolen from his parents in infancy. He was reported to be a nephew of Robert E. Lee, and a former nanny of the Lee family almost identified him as such. Prosecutors believed he was related to the Paynes of Kentucky, three of whom were thought to have taken part in the St. Albans raid. An assistant U.S. marshal was assigned to look into the matter, but found no connection. Nonetheless, War Department investigators got into the habit of calling him “Payne,” and he was eventually tried under that name. Strangely, nobody seems to have considered that he might be one of the Paynes of Fauquier County, Virginia.15

  The morning after Powell’s capture, Augustus Seward was brought on board the Saugus to identify him. The suspect was ordered to stand up, and Seward grabbed him by the clothes as he had done on the night of the assault. He had no trouble identifying him as the attacker. The size, the proportions, and the beardless face were a perfect match, and when the prisoner repeated the words, “I’m mad, I’m mad!” Seward recognized the same voice, “varying only in the intensity.” When Seward was finished, Colonel Wells removed the prisoner’s clothing and questioned him about the stains on his coat. Wells found his explanations unconvincing. Pointing out a bloodstain on the shirt, he asked, “What do you think now?” Powell had no response.16

  EDWIN STANTON AND GENERAL GRANT were in conference at the War Department when a messenger interrupted with news that the Baltimore American had printed Sam Arnold’s confession. Stanton was furious. Provost Marshal McPhail had said nothing about taking a confession, and he certainly hadn’t admitted giving one to the press. So he fired off an angry letter to McPhail: “Your conduct in detaining Arnold and having an examination of him before reporting to this Department is strongly condemned and will be dealt with as it merits when I get the facts. You will stop all examination and publication and turn him (Arnold) over to General Wallace.”

  In fact, McPhail had forbidden the publication of sensitive information, but the papers had simply ignored him. Stanton would see that it didn’t happen again, and he had General Augur’s adjutant issue a warning that henceforth, anyone in the government who leaked information would be treated as a hindrance to the investigation. McPhail took it personally, and indignantly demanded a chance to clear his name. He spent the entire night composing a defense of his actions, and he supplemented it with a letter from C. C. Fulton, editor of the American, who denied that McPhail had been his source. Fulton said that Arnold’s statement was “floating everywhere,” and anyone in Baltimore could get it. Inexplicably, that seemed to placate the secretary. 17

  THE IDENTIFICATION of “Paine” as Seward’s assailant did not let George Atzerodt or John Surratt off the hook. Arnold had implicated them both, and both were still eagerly sought as suspects in the conspiracy. Surratt had been in Elmira, New York, on April 14, and on hearing the news, he took the short route to Canada. George Atzerodt was still in the Washington area. Francis Curran, the driver of the Rockville stage, knew Atzerodt and saw him on the day after the shooting, riding in a buggy near Rockville with a man named William R. Gaither. Curran’s report was the first hint of Atzerodt’s whereabouts after he had left the capital. Subsequently, detectives learned that he had continued to stumble northward. After a brief ride with Gaither, he spent Saturday night at Clopper’s Mill, near Seneca Creek. Then, on Sunday morning, he walked a few miles north to Germantown, where the trail grew cold for a time.18

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, began with the firing of guns. This was a national day of mourning, and hourly tributes were sounded in every place an artillery unit could be found. A funeral service would take place in the White House, followed by a trip to the Capitol, where the president’s remains would lie on public display. Beyond that, plans were still uncertain. Mrs. Lincoln insisted her husband be interred in Illinois, but she had not selected a specific burial site. She would not do so until more than a week later, when the funeral train was already well on its way west.

  Window shades were drawn in the Executive Mansion, and the gaslight was dimmed. Hundreds of officials and guests filed in, many of them tiptoeing, as if afraid to break the silence. All were ushered into the East Room, where a grand catafalque sat between the two massive chandeliers, now hung in black. It was an elaborate platform, with steps on all sides and an arched canopy of black velvet and crape above. Its four supporting posts were draped in black, with festoons and satin rosettes. Next to each post stood a soldier from the Guard of Honor, a special detachment of men selected from the Veterans’ Reserve Corps. Along with nine generals, those chosen few would accompany the remains at all times from here to the grave.

  Six hundred tickets had been issued, and by eleven A.M. the room was full. Upholsterers were not even finished tidying up for the service, and they had to drive in the last few nails on their way out. At front and center were the late president’s relatives, or more correctly, those of his wife. Captain Robert Todd Lincoln sat among them, weeping quietly. His little brother, Tad, clung to him and sobbed. Their mother, prostrate with grief, did not attend.

  On top of the bier lay three wreaths, and at its head stood a cross of white flowers. The coffin itself was made of mahogany, with eight silver handles, a lead lining, and a white satin interior. The outside was finished in black broadcloth, with a winding vein of silver tacks punctuated by silver stars. The upper part of the lid was open, and the head and shoulders of the deceased were open to full view. Below was a plate with this inscription:

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

  SIXTEENTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,

  BORN FEBRUARY 12, 1809.

  DIED APRIL 15, 1865.

 
; Mr. Lincoln was dressed in his inaugural suit, and one observer thought he looked “quiet and natural, not like one who is sleeping, but one absent.” He was “the perfect shell of the great man,” whose empty expression was devoid of its customary lightheartedness. His face had a leaden pallor, and death had not smoothed his features. The right eye remained black and swollen—a reminder of Friday night’s horrors.

  The service was multidenominational, and the Reverend Dr. Phineas D. Gurley delivered the eulogy. “It was a cruel, cruel hand, that dark hand of the assassin, which smote our honored, wise, and noble President, and filled the land with sorrow,” he said. “But above and beyond that hand, there is another which we must see and acknowledge. It is the chastening hand of a wise and a faithful Father.” Dr. Gurley said that in human suffering there was a greater purpose, and that our national sorrow might be “a sanctified sorrow” that would someday bring joy through a better world.19

  After the service, the coffin was placed in an elaborate hearse and drawn by six gray horses to the Capitol. Five thousand marchers accompanied it down Pennsylvania Avenue, and an immense crowd of spectators watched from every window, rooftop, and sidewalk along the route. They stood twelve deep on the avenue, and each had a good view of the coffin as it sat on the hearse, eight feet above the ground. A canopy of black crape adorned with a gilt eagle hung above it, and a lantern was mounted on each side. The Guard of Honor marched beside it, followed by the dead president’s own horse and its two grooms. When the strains of the funeral dirge and the thump of muffled drums died away, one could actually hear the rustling of branches in the trees, so quiet and still did the crowd remain. Washington had never experienced anything like it.

  Edwin Stanton had been planning this funeral since Sunday, and he had given a great deal of thought to the composition of the march to the Capitol. He was especially anxious that African Americans be given a prominent place in the procession, and one of the first steps he took was to order the 22nd United States Colored Troops in from Petersburg. They arrived shortly before the march began. Though all of the armed services took part, the cortège was predominantly civilian. Many organizations were represented, but one group—the Treasury employees—stood out above them all. They were marching behind their prized possession, the Treasury Guard flag torn by Booth as he leaped to the stage.

  Apparently, anyone who could scrape together an organization could be included in the parade, and clubs such as the Sons of Temperance and the Fenian Brotherhood shared places of honor with the heads of departments and justices of the Supreme Court. Hundreds of marshals took part as well, and some participants, in retrospect, were offended by most of the appointments. When an investigation revealed that only sixteen of the two hundred marshals had supported the late president, the man who chose them was encouraged to resign from government service.

  The procession was so enormous that a single formation of soldiers stretched down the avenue for two miles. All were supposed to begin marching at the boom of a signal cannon near St. John’s Church, on the north side of Lafayette Park. But only minutes before the gun was to be fired, an officer of the Signal Corps realized how close they were to the home of Secretary Seward. He didn’t want to frighten the household, after all they had been through, so he expressed his concerns to higher authority, and a new plan was hurriedly devised. A battery was thrown into place at City Hall, twelve blocks to the east, and soldiers posted at two-block intervals relayed its signal visually to army headquarters on Seventeenth Street. The impromptu system worked without a hitch.20

  NEWS OF THE PRESIDENT’S DEATH was still trickling down through the military ranks, and everywhere it went, a wave of rumors followed. At Fortress Monroe, for example, word went around that Booth had sent Sam Arnold down to blow up the fort. Such stories enraged the soldiers and made them eager to seek vengeance. In Morehead City, North Carolina, Private John Walter Lee wrote that his fellow soldiers were ready to “wipe and exterminate every traitor from the United States.” And that was fine with him. “If they have killed Abraham Lincoln,” he wrote, “they have lost their best friend and I fear they will feel it too—for we are not yet through with them.”

  Soldiers typically assumed that the Confederates had killed Lincoln to reinvigorate their war effort. They knew better than anyone else that the war was not yet over. Though Robert E. Lee had surrendered his own men, the rebels still had four other generals and more than ninety-one thousand troops in the field. None were closer to Washington than the men under Joseph E. Johnston, and they were hundreds of miles away. Even as they retreated through North Carolina, their commanding general was trying to negotiate terms with the opposing commander, William Tecumseh Sherman.21

  For his part, General Sherman expressed confidence that Confederate army officers had nothing to do with Lincoln’s death. “I believe the assassination will do more harm to the South than any event of the war,” he wrote. “I doubt if the Confederate military authorities had any more complicity with it than I had.” But of the civilian authorities, he was not so sure. Stanton’s early dispatches on the shooting had given Sherman the false impression that the attack had been set for Inauguration Day. That, he said, betrayed a political motive. He wouldn’t put anything past Confederate civilians.

  None of those closest to Jefferson Davis believed he would have approved of Lincoln’s assassination. Davis had a grudging respect for Lincoln, and more important, a seething hatred for the man who would replace him. As everyone knew, Andrew Johnson was a Southerner who had remained loyal to the North, and for that, Jefferson Davis regarded him as a traitor to his own state. Johnson was known as a hard-liner on reconstruction, and was one of the last men Davis wanted to deal with in the days ahead. Moreover, state-sponsored assassination would have jeopardized the Southern president’s fondest dream—recognition of the Confederacy as an independent nation.

  Davis and his Cabinet had been on the run since fleeing from Richmond on April 3. On the nineteenth, his party reached Charlotte, North Carolina, and stopped at the home of Lewis Bates, a Massachusetts native living at Tryon and Fourth streets. News of Lincoln’s death arrived in town just as they did, and telegrapher John C. Courtney rushed to the Bates house with the message. Davis had just addressed a crowd when Courtney handed him the note. He read it to himself, then handed it off to an aide, saying, “This contains very astounding intelligence.” An aide read it to the crowd, but Davis himself said nothing. After shaking a few hands, he stepped inside the house to confer with his inner circle.

  According to those present, Davis was skeptical of the news, but admitted that anything was possible. “I certainly have no special regard for Mr. Lincoln,” he said, “but there are a great many men of whose end I would much rather [hear] than his. . . . I fear it will be disastrous to our people.” He and his advisers assumed they would be blamed for the assassination, but had no illusions about changing public opinion. 22

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON, the tugboat William Fisher brought five of James O’Beirne’s men to Chapel Point, below Port Tobacco. Two disembarked at the landing there, and the other three stayed on the ship until the next stop. They all hit the countryside, working their way into areas where a person might find passage to Virginia. In order to keep a low profile and gather better intelligence on their quarry, some pretended to be refugees, and others just claimed they needed a boat ride across the river. Officer Michael O’Callaghan went to Port Tobacco, where he kept an eye on some of Atzerodt’s friends. Charles Bostwick and Lorenzo DeAngelis worked the same area, pretending to look for their horses—a bright bay and a roan—which had been stolen. They wanted to enlist the help of a local constable, but decided against it after hearing that he was tied up in the plot. On Wednesday evening, Officer Edward McHenry stopped at the home of a farmer named Claggett, near the Banks O’Dee. While having supper with the family, McHenry learned that two men had crossed to Virginia in a rowboat on Sunday morning, four days before. He had failed to mention that to anyone for a c
ouple of days. 23

  DEVELOPMENTS IN THE INVESTIGATION left John L. Smith with a sinking feeling. As a deputy U.S. marshal, Smith was expected to make an all-out effort to track down Booth’s conspirators. But one of those people was his own brother-in-law, George Atzerodt. To Smith’s superiors, having a relative of Atzerodt’s on staff was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he possessed some valuable insights on the man’s habits. But on the other, his personal feelings might cloud his judgment. Like John Atzerodt, who worked for Provost Marshal McPhail, Smith had no choice but to contribute all he could to the investigation. In the eyes of his colleagues, he had something to prove. So over the protests of his wife, Katherine, he decided to search for the suspect at the homes of relatives. He left for Montgomery County on the nineteenth, but his pursuit was stalled by a sudden downpour.

  On the surface, it seems as if Atzerodt had a plausible escape strategy. While Booth and Herold disappeared into Southern Maryland, he went in the opposite direction, toward the northwest. They ended up in two different worlds. Along Booth’s route, government informants feared for their lives. But the people Atzerodt encountered were eager to help authorities. Many had developed a good rapport with the Yankees and considered themselves strong allies in the Union war effort. James W. Purdom was one such person. When Purdom heard a disloyal remark, he reported it.

  On April 19, Purdom learned that a man named Andrew Atwood had made suspicious remarks at the home of Hezekiah Metz. According to Purdom’s source, someone brought up the assassination while having supper, and Atwood stopped eating, threw down his knife and fork, and got up from the table, saying, “If the fellow that had promised to follow Grant had done his duty, we would have got General Grant, too.” Nobody there knew that Atwood was really Atzerodt, but a few suspected that he was involved in Booth’s plot.