American Brutus

by Michael W. Kauffman

  With Edwin’s death, Joseph became the last surviving child of the elder Booth. Joe had received his medical degree after the war, and became an ear, nose, and throat specialist in New York. He married twice, but died childless in 1902.

  The old Ford’s Theatre building was repaired, and was used by various agencies until the Lincoln Museum was established there in 1930. In the 1960s, the National Park Service restored it to its 1865 appearance, and it is now an active theater as well as a museum. Like the Surratt House Museum and the Dr. Mudd House, it is dedicated to preserving the story of Booth’s conspiracy and his flight from Washington.5

  FOR MUDD, SPANGLER, ARNOLD, AND O’LAUGHLEN, life in the Dry Tortugas was unbelievably harsh. But it was not without hope. Only months after the so-called conspirators arrived at the prison, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that seemed closely related to their own situation. In the case of Lambdin P. Milligan and others, the Court declared that a military commission could not try civilians so long as the civilian courts were open and functioning. The decision was especially heartening to Mudd and his co-defendants because it so forcefully slapped down the argument John A. Bingham had made at their own trial: that of military necessity. “Martial law,” said the Court, “cannot arise from a threatened invasion. The necessity must be actual and present; the invasion real, such as effectually closes the courts and deposes the civil administration.” In writing the opinion, Justice David Davis, a friend and appointee of the late president, could not have been more emphatic:

  “No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man, than that any of [the Constitution’s] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads to anarchy or despotism, [and] the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence.” 6

  As the prisoners’ appeals moved through the system, Joseph Holt continued to pursue his theory that Jefferson Davis was behind the assassination. Now he was not alone. A committee of the House of Representatives was also investigating Davis, and its chairman urged the Johnson administration to take some sort of action in the case. Joseph Holt assured the committee that the evidence against Davis was solid, since he had obtained it through Sandford Conover and eight other witnesses. But Conover had already been exposed as a fraud; Holt knew that, and the rest of the country was about to find out. The committee subpoenaed Holt’s witnesses, and one of them balked. He admitted the whole case against Davis was a lie. It was built on perjury, concocted by Conover, and fed by him to a group of coached witnesses. Hauled before Congress, Conover (whose real name was Charles A. Dunham) repeated the story he had told at the conspiracy trial. For that, he was tried and convicted of perjury. Incredibly, the Judge Advocate General supported him, even in prison. When Dunham applied to the president for a pardon, Holt endorsed his application and praised him for his valuable service to the government.

  The committee’s response to all this was mixed. The majority report, written by George S. Boutwell, glossed over the perjury, but Andrew Jackson Rogers, of the Democratic minority, believed there was a conspiracy to frame Davis, and that Joseph Holt, knowingly or otherwise, was shielding the plotters. Ultimately it was a moot point. Jefferson Davis was released on bail in 1867, and was never tried. He was included in President Johnson’s sweeping Christmas pardons of 1868.

  Leniency was the last thing anyone expected of Andrew Johnson. But after becoming president, Johnson softened his stance on reconstruction, and that did not sit well with Radical Republicans. They led a drive to impeach Johnson, and by 1867, hundreds of Washington insiders had been sucked into the maelstrom. The movement even involved the hapless prisoners in the Dry Tortugas, who were asked to provide incriminating evidence against the president. They had none to give.

  Though the process failed to produce the “high crimes and misdemeanors” needed to remove Johnson, it did unearth some interesting revelations about the Lincoln assassination. In particular, it resurrected the long-forgotten fact that John Wilkes Booth had kept a diary during his flight from Washington. Members of Congress were dismayed at the War Department’s “suppression” of the diary, and they were stunned to learn, when it was finally shown to the public, that some of its pages were missing. Lafayette Baker swore the pages were there when he saw the book two years before.

  Congressman Ben Butler was livid. “Who spoliated that book?” he thundered. “Who suppressed that evidence?” Butler noted that Booth himself had described the assassination as a last-minute contingency, and he wondered who had coaxed him to change his plan from kidnapping to murder. He was sure that those missing pages would reveal “who it was that could profit by assassination [and] who it was expected by Booth to succeed to Lincoln if the knife made a vacancy.”7

  Lafayette Baker was among those questioned in the impeachment hearings. Baker was still miffed at having to plead, just like everyone else, for a share in the reward for Booth’s capture. He wasted no time bolstering his claim with the publication of History of the United States Secret Service. This imaginative memoir gave a bloated and often fictional account of Baker’s wartime service. In it, he claimed that he had been the first to issue a reward offer, the first to distribute Booth’s photograph, and the first to organize a systematic search for the fugitives. He said that Mary Surratt had confessed her guilt to him personally, and he claimed his detectives had found Booth precisely where he had told them to look.

  Reviewers were not fooled, and most agreed with the critic who wrote, “We presume that Baker told more falsehoods in the interest of the government than any man living, and he proposes to make double profit out of them by recounting his success, like other heroes. . . .”

  Baker’s book had described the midnight burial of Booth as a top-secret affair that only he and a few men from the prison staff knew anything about. But when questioned in the impeachment hearings, he was forced to admit that he wasn’t actually present when the burial took place, and he didn’t even know where it had occurred. And though the detective vouched for the overall accuracy of his book, he admitted it was ghost-written, and he had not actually read it. The admission must have embarrassed his many patrons in Congress, and one member was moved to remark, “It is doubtful whether he [Baker] has in any one thing told the truth, even by accident.” Nevertheless, the memoirs of Lafayette Baker are repeated as truth, even to this day.8

  Baker was one of hundreds involved in the fight for a portion of the reward money, and the vast majority of claimants had no prayer of success. An entire company of cavalrymen applied for a share, and based their claim on a fruitless search in the neighborhood of Surrattsville. William M. Runkel sought payment for the capture of Atzerodt, though all he had done was transcribe the prisoner’s interrogation.

  When the War Department announced it would receive claims, battle lines were instantly drawn between the soldiers who were present at Booth’s final standoff and the detectives who had gone to the scene with them. Byron Baker and Edward Doherty both professed to have shown the fisherman William Rollins the photographs that would put them on Booth’s trail. But Rollins himself did not support either claim; he said that it was Everton Conger who first questioned him. In response, Doherty accused Conger of confusing the witness, and he produced affidavits from several of his soldiers, who said that Doherty had questioned the fisherman at a time when Conger was sound asleep.

  The fight was no less acrimonious when it moved to Congress. Members had chosen sides, and partisans spread stories that further muddied the picture of what had happened on April 26.9

  On April 18, 1866, an army panel recommended that Edward Doherty be awarded $7,500 for leading the pursuit of Booth. They recommended that Conger and Baker be given $4,000 each, with a little less to Lafayette Baker. The remainder, they said, should be divided among the cavalry soldiers in proportion to rank. But
a congressional committee urged that the lion’s share—$17,500 each—be given to Lafayette Baker and Everton Conger instead. They recommended giving $5,000 to Byron Baker and half that amount to Lieutenant Doherty. Partisans of both sides nearly came to blows, and after some tense negotiations, they finally reached a compromise. On July 28, 1866, Congress passed an appropriation bill that followed U.S. Navy guidelines for the distribution of war prizes. They gave $15,000 to Everton Conger and $5,250 to Lieutenant Doherty. Lafayette Baker got only $3,750, and his cousin, Luther Byron Baker, received an even $3,000. Each of the soldiers was awarded $1,654.

  Byron Baker was furious, and he vented his anger on the humble, unassuming Sgt. Boston Corbett. He had always resented the public’s adulation of Corbett, and after the reward fight, he began a deliberate campaign to knock the sergeant off his pedestal. Baker began by spreading the story that the cavalry had been instructed to take Booth alive, and that Corbett shot him in violation of those orders. The more Baker told the story, the more elaborate it became. He claimed that Everton Conger was so incensed, he had threatened to send Corbett back to Washington in irons (which, in any event, they didn’t have). That seemed to have no effect on Corbett’s reputation, so Baker changed tack, and insinuated that Booth might actually have shot himself. Even though the trajectory of the bullet ruled out suicide, many people believed Baker’s revision, and it is even accepted to a large degree today. It survives in spite of Everton Conger’s sworn statement, which said that Corbett had fired the shot. “[He] had no orders either to fire or not to fire,” said Conger. “The sergeant told me ‘I went to the barn, looked through a crack, saw Booth coming towards the door, sighted at his body, and fired.’ He said he was afraid Booth would shoot somebody or get away.”10

  Lafayette Baker, disgraced and stripped of his power, died in 1868. Though he left a small estate, his real legacy was the cloud of disinformation that has perhaps forever confused what really happened in 1865. No other figure in this story came to so ignominious an end as the fabled National Detective chief.

  Joseph Holt and David Hunter remained in government service for many years, and they both retired late in life. The Mary Surratt controversy never went away, and Judge Holt spent the rest of his life fending off criticism. In 1873, Andrew Johnson accused him of concealing the clemency petition from him, and Holt responded indignantly with a letter campaign and a published “vindication” in pamphlet form. He also assured the public that Mary Surratt had not been manacled, that her counsel had not been driven away, and that witnesses had not been intimidated.

  As Father Walter said, Mary Surratt had become “a kind of martyr,” and nobody wanted to appear insensitive to her family and defenders. But officially, the government conceded no wrongdoing in her prosecution. Joseph Holt would always consider her “the master spirit among them all,” and detectives who had worked her case agreed with Andrew Johnson, who said that Mrs. Surratt had “kept the nest that hatched the egg.” In fact, official animosity carried over to the next generation; when a young chemist married Anna Surratt in 1869, he was summarily dismissed from his job in the government.11

  EDWIN STANTON WAS APPOINTED to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1869, but died before assuming office. Partisans of Mrs. Surratt would falsely claim that he had slit his own throat. Stanton’s colleague in the Cabinet, William H. Seward, returned to work in October 1865, but his wounds never fully healed. He died in 1872, leaving the purchase of Alaska— “Seward’s Folly”—as his most famous achievement. His son Frederick recovered from Powell’s attack and lived productively for another fifty years minus one day. Private George Foster Robinson, the nurse who struggled to protect the Sewards, was commissioned an officer in the army. In 1871, the Treasury Department struck a medal to commemorate his heroic conduct on the night of April 14.

  On July 5, 1865, President Johnson created the United States Secret Service, and he appointed William P. Wood as its first chief. The agency would one day be responsible for protecting the president, but not until 1901, after three of them had been assassinated.

  Col. Henry H. Wells served a term as military governor of Virginia, then set up a private law practice in Washington. Col. Henry S. Olcott returned to New York and founded the Theosophical Society. By the time of his death in 1907, he was known as one of the world’s great religious leaders.

  While most members of the military commission returned to the field as professional soldiers, Lew Wallace remained in uniform for just one more assignment. He served as president of the military commission that tried and condemned Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville prison. After practicing law for a number of years in Indiana, Wallace was appointed to serve as the territorial governor of New Mexico, and later as ambassador to Turkey. He was best known as a writer, and his most famous work is the novel Ben-Hur.

  Thomas M. Harris was the only member of the Hunter commission to write a book about the case. By the time The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln was published in 1892, a large segment of the public had become convinced that Mary Surratt was a victim of “judicial murder,” and Harris was quite unprepared for the wave of attacks that greeted his book. In response, he lashed out at Mrs. Surratt’s partisans, and at Catholics in general. He claimed that Pope Pius IX had been responsible for Lincoln’s death, and asserted the common belief that Booth and all of his conspirators were Roman Catholics. In truth, only Mudd and the Surratts were of the faith. But even with its false underpinnings, the theory of papal involvement persisted. The last of several books on the subject was published in 1963.12

  Mary Todd Lincoln did not leave the White House until May 22, and her subsequent life is a tale of debts, tragedy, and personal estrangement. For a time she lived beyond her means, and sold off her old clothes to cover the costs of an extravagant lifestyle. She took her young son Tad to Germany for a few years, and not long after their return in 1871, Tad died of pleurisy. He was only sixteen. Consumed with grief and increasingly eccentric in her behavior, Mrs. Lincoln grew estranged from her surviving son, Robert. At his instigation, she was put on trial for insanity. Committed to a private sanitarium, she was released after a second trial, then moved to France. When she returned in 1881, she was broken in health and spirit. She died the following year in Springfield, Illinois.

  Mrs. Lincoln was still abroad when a ghoulish attempt was made to steal her husband’s remains. A couple of career criminals devised a plan to remove the president’s coffin from the still-unfinished tomb in Springfield and leave behind a demand for $200,000 in ransom and the release of a friend from prison. They made their move on the night of November 7, 1876, unaware that an associate had tipped off the government. Federal agents swarmed the tomb, and shots were fired. In the confusion, the grave robbers escaped. Though they were eventually caught, they could be tried only for damaging the outer coffin, valued at $75. Each was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail.13

  In 1878, a Chicago newspaper broke the startling news that Robert Todd Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth had competed for the affections of “Bessie” Hale. The paper offered the opinion that this rivalry assigned “a new motive for Booth’s action in regard to President Lincoln.” A subsequent issue of the paper printed a denial of the story by Robert himself— which was followed, in turn, by a disavowal of the denial. Though Robert had known Lucy Hale, there was nothing to suggest anything more serious than a friendship.

  Robert later served as secretary of war under three presidents. He stood by the deathbed of President Garfield in 1881, and of President McKinley in 1901. Both had been assassinated.

  Miss Hale eventually married William Eaton Chandler, who became a senator from New Hampshire and later secretary of the navy. He and Lucy had a son and, apparently, a dismal life together. She died in 1915. 14

  DR. LUKE PRYOR BLACKBURN, who had been accused of waging germ warfare, was elected governor of Kentucky in 1879. During his brief term in office, he created the state’s university and reformed its prison system.

 
; Most minor suspects in the assassination faded into obscurity, but Dr. Francis Tumblety, who had been arrested as a possible associate of David Herold’s, resurfaced in London years later as a prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings. Press coverage of his case brought to light some chilling details, such as Tumblety’s violent hatred for women and his gruesome collection of wombs that he kept in jars. Unfortunately, those stories could all be traced back to one Charles A. Dunham, the convicted perjurer who once went by the name of Sandford Conover.15

  Boston Corbett was a more recognizable figure than Dunham. The little sergeant became a Methodist minister in New Jersey, then moved after a few years to Cloud County, Kansas. Death threats followed him wherever he went, and by the mid-1880s, Corbett had become increasingly paranoid and obsessed with protecting himself from “Booth’s avengers.” His neighbors eventually got rid of him by securing his appointment as assistant doorkeeper to the state legislature. His conduct in Topeka was no less erratic. On February 15, 1887, Corbett “adjourned” the House at gun-point. He was taken into custody, tried, and committed to an institution for life. He escaped after only a few months, and seemingly vanished without a trace. Years later, someone tried to draw on Corbett’s pension, but he proved to be an impostor and was prosecuted. The real Corbett never reappeared.

  Of all those touched by the assassination, none had a more tragic story than Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the young couple who accompanied the Lincolns on that fateful night. Major Rathbone resigned from the army in 1867 and married Clara a few days later. Like Boston Corbett, he became increasingly erratic over the years, and eventually he moved with Clara and their three children to Hanover, Germany. On the night of December 23, 1883, Rathbone began acting strangely. He tried to enter his children’s room, but Clara, sensing trouble, ordered their nurse to lock them in their bedroom. Henry followed his wife into their own room, pulled out a revolver, and shot her three times in the chest. He then stabbed her to death, and, turning the knife on himself, inflicted five chest wounds that nearly ended his own life. He was declared criminally insane, and spent the rest of his life at St. Michael’s asylum in Hildesheim.16