American Brutus
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Johnson commented on his “arduous and embarrassing” duties in a June 18 letter to Rev. W. A. Buckingham, moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches in Boston. His letter was published in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer, June 21, 1865, 1.
James A. McDevitt in the Washington Star, April 14, 1894; the liquor ban was posted in the Washington Evening Star, April 15, 1865.
Gobright, 349. The Baltimore Sun, April 18, 1865, 1; Detective blotter, entry for April 15.
William Withers sworn statement, n.d. [April 15] taken by Nehemiah Miller, LAS 6:468, National Archives; Letter of William E. Morgan to Edwin Stanton, dated April 22. LAS 2:68. The accusation was not specific, but over the years, Withers told of being seriously wounded by Booth’s knife, and eventually he claimed to have received “a six-inch scar, which I carry to this day.” But Withers received a pension as former leader of the 62nd Pennsylvania’s Regimental Band, and in records of his physical exams, his doctors noted no scars on his body.
Fletcher gave several statements to the authorities, and he testified in the conspiracy trial. His most detailed account is the previously unknown claim he sent to Congress on May 17, 1866, for a portion of the reward money offered. This is in Record Group 233, House of Representatives, Thirty-ninth Congress, First Session, Committee of Claims file HR39A-H4.1. Some details here are taken from a memorandum in LAS 5:415 and from a letter to Edwin Stanton, sworn and dated September 23, 1865, in M-619, 456:297.
John C. Proctor, Sr., sworn affidavit dated May 13, 1865, in M-619, 456:579.
McDevitt in the Washington Evening Star, April 14, 1894. Richards in Louis J. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 177. The Surratt boardinghouse was built by Jonathan T. Walker in 1843. Surratt acquired it on December 6, 1853, from Augustus A. Gibson. Washington, D.C., Recorder of Deeds record for Lot 20, Square 454, in Liber JAS 70, folio 251. It is now the Wok ’n’ Roll Restaurant at 604 H Street.
Weichmann later recalled that he told Mrs. Surratt that detectives had come to search the place, and she said, “For God’s sake! let them come in. I expected the house to be searched.” Surratt Trial, 450.
Louis J. Weichmann mentioned Susan Mahoney’s place in the household in Surratt Trial, 398. He described the layout of the house in Surratt Trial, 376. Mahoney’s fiancé was not named, but Washington marriage records show that a black woman named “Susan Mahorney” married Samuel Jackson on April 27, 1865. The Holohan children were Charles and Mary.
Weichmann, 175–76, gives a slightly different version of this late-night raid, and I have taken most of the Mary Surratt quotes from this version. Otherwise, this account is from the testimony of John A. W. Clarvoe in Surratt Trial, 697–701, and from Weichmann’s testimony in Surratt Trial, 394.
This is based on Fletcher’s House claim, along with that of Charles Stowell, in the same file. Additional information comes from M-619, 456:303.
Unsigned order dated April 15, 1865, in National Archives, Record Group 393, Part 1, entry 6714, Letters Sent and Received by the 22nd Army Corps, Book 162, 224. One such order sent to Major George Worcester at Fort Baker was sent out at about midnight (ibid., Book 186).
O.R. I:46 (3), 778. Fry’s border guards were still on duty days after Booth’s death. See National Archives, Record Group 110, Records of the Provost Marshal General, entry 79, letter from S. B. Hayman to Fry, April 29, 1865.
Arrest of the Booth look-alike was reported in the Washington Evening Star, April 17,
, 2; The Navy Department telegram: National Archives, RG 45, on Microcopy M-149, 80:333.
Chapter 4: “Arrest every man, woman, or child attempting to pass”
James R. O’Beirne claim, filed with the House Military Affairs Committee, January 12,
House Committee of Claims, file HR39A-H4.1, in RG 233, National Archives.
The document was marked “Sent 3.20 a.m.” M-473, 88:999. Published in O.R. I:46 (3),
–81.
The Eastern Branch was a more common name for what is now called the Anacostia River. General DeRussy’s order is in RG 393, Part I, entry 5459, box 413, page 93. It was sent out at 3:00 A.M. on April 15. John J. Toffey letter to Joseph Holt, dated December 5, 1865, in M-619, 456:422.
This account comes mostly from Fletcher’s House claim. Some details are added from Fletcher’s claim to the War Department, in M-619, 456:304.
References to the weather are taken from ship logs of the Potomac Flotilla in RG 45, National Archives, and from observations of the Signal Corps in Washington. Soldiers who communicated by flag were especially dependent on weather, and their logbooks made frequent references to visibility. For example, April 14–15 entries in RG 393, Part 1, entry 5459, Messages Sent and Received by the Signal Corps, book 413:92; Leale report.
Stanton’s placing of Grant in charge of security, in O.R. I:46 (3), 757; Grant telegram from Newark, dated April 15, in the National Archives, RG 393, Part 1, entry 2343, Letters Received by the 8th Army Corps, box 8; Clearing the way at Havre de Grace was from 1st Lt. H. E. Hazen, ibid.; The picket system discussed in an April 15 letter to Gen. Lockwood by Assistant Adjutant General Samuel B. Lockwood, ibid.
Most of these items were deemed irrelevant to the investigation, and were set aside. They were microfilmed in LAS 2:290–378. Those set aside as important will be discussed below.
LAS 2:294. The address was 71 West 45th Street, New York. Its significance has not been determined.
The original is in LAS 15:343. When Arnold suggests Booth meet him “in Balto, at B——,” he refers to Barnum’s Hotel. The letter was dated on the twenty-seventh, but the envelope was not postmarked until the thirtieth.
Leale report; Taft notes. Leale’s report, written two years after the fact, mentions nothing of Dr. Taft, and seems to run this sequence of events together. It is all given more explicitly in the Taft notes. Though even contemporary accounts disagreed on the path of the bullet, again I accept Dr. John K. Lattimer’s conclusion that the ball rested above the right eye. Lattimer and Laidlaw, 440.
Letter of James A. Tanner to Hadley Walch, April 17, 1865. The bedside details are from Mrs. Dixon’s letter to her sister, May 1, 1865.
O.R. I:46 (3), 775.
According to the (Washington) Daily Constitutional Union of April 15, “The Metropolitan Police saw two men riding rapidly towards the Anacostia bridge at 11 o’clock.” This seems to have been forgotten, and no record of the sighting exists in official files. The exchange of horses was a favorite theory of some officials. It was reported in The New York Times, April 16, 1865, 1. Newspapers seemed to favor the theory that decoys had been sent out over the city. See The Baltimore Sun, April 18, 1865, 1.
Court-martial hearing of Lewis Chubb, 13th Michigan Light Artillery, case MM2513, RG 153, National Archives.
O.R. I:46 (3), 776. It should also be noted that standard times did not exist until 1873, so local time varied from one city to another. General Henry H. Lockwood, in Baltimore, received several copies of the same order, and in exasperation, he sent back an itemized list of the places his men already patrolled. Lockwood’s memo shows how thorough the army’s efforts were. Letters Received by the Eighth Army Corps, RG 393, Part I, entry 2343, box 8. Sent 5:00 A.M. April 15.
Leale report; Taft notes.
Bushrod M. Reed in M-619, 456:565.
Accounts of Lincoln’s instructions are in Seward at Washington, 274. Telegrams from Stanton, or at Stanton’s direction, went out at 4:10 and 4:40 A.M. ordering the arrest of Thompson. M-473, 88:1001.
Original, marked “Sent 4.44 a.m.,” is in M-473, 88:1000; O.R. I:46 (3), 781.
David T. Z. Mindich, “Building the Pyramid: A Cultural History of ‘Objectivity’ in American Journalism, 1832–1894,” doctoral dissertation in the American Studies Program, New York University, 1996, 100–115. Mindich points out that journalists were not influenced by Stanton’s use of the inverted pyramid, as they did not begin using it un
til many years later.
Statements of Herbert T. Staples, 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, in LAS 6:157, and of Charles Ramsell, LAS 6:116; Ramsell in Surratt Trial, 498.
The only known sample of this original reward poster is in the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, DC. The story of its creation was told secondhand by Hack’s former colleagues at The Washington Times in that paper’s edition of February 12, 1937, 8. I have corrected some details to conform to the contemporary record.
Stowell statement in M-619, 456:505.
R. Chandler, Assistant Adjutant General, to Maj. George Worcester, April 15, 1865. National Archives RG 393, Part 2, entry 6714, book 186. Dana arranged for a detail of ten more men to meet him later in the morning. Dana to Joseph Holt, October 3, 1865, in M-619, 458:467.
Woodward, United Service, 476.
Diary of Benjamin B. French, entry for April 15, 1865, 386–87, Manuscripts Division,
brary of Congress. As this entry indicates, the Capitol was left open, even overnight. This was the standard practice with public buildings, including the White House.
Ferguson passed the story about Spangler on to police a few days later. LAS 5:385. Detective Sergeant Charles Skippon brought Spangler and Rittersback to the station house on E Street. The arrest and interrogation were described by Spangler himself while locked up in the Carroll Annex. John T. Ford Papers, MS 371, at the Maryland Historical Society. A brief reference to the interrogation appears in the police detective blotter, RG 351, Entry 126, in the National Archives.
Spangler to Justice Olin, April 15, LAS 6:201; Spangler memo in Ford Papers; William P. Wood memorandum on Rittersback, LAS 6:48
Dr. Abbott’s detailed accounting of the president’s vital signs is in The New York Times, April 15, 1865, 1; Brooke Stabler in LAS 6:122; the note itself is in LAS 15:306. It has always been misquoted, even in verbatim trial transcripts, as “Atzerodt” rather than “Azworth,” but the latter is the only name Stabler ever heard applied to the suspect.
Dr. Taft said that he stood with his hand over the president’s heart, closely observing the time on the surgeon general’s watch. Breathing stopped at 7:21:55, and the heartbeat stopped fifteen seconds later. Taft notes, McGill University.
Chapter 5: “A singular combination of gravity and joy”
San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle, April 17, 1865, 2; The Chicago Tribune was typical in laying blame at the door of its competitors. On April 29, 1865, the Tribune’s editor called the Chicago Times a “vile manufacturer of Booths,” and said that the Times’s editors were just as responsible for the killing as Booth.
Mrs. Elijah Rogers, a longtime neighbor of the Booths, responded to a series of inquiries about the family by Dr. William Stump Forwood, of the Harford County Historical Society, in 1886–87. Mrs. Rogers told of the beech spring and the log house in her letter of August 16, 1886. Almost all information about Junius and Mary Ann’s first home in Harford County can be traced to Mrs. Rogers’s letters. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, cataloged as the Junius Brutus Booth Family Papers.
Junius Jr. was born in Charleston, SC, before his parents ever came to Maryland. Rosalie was born on the Hall farm before her family purchased the adjoining land. Joseph was born in a house on High Street, Baltimore. New York Sun, June 9, 1893, 7. According to Asia Booth Clarke, the household included her aunt, Jane Booth Mitchell, and her aunt’s ten children. By 1850, they had moved to Baltimore, where the census showed only five children: George, twenty-five; Robert, nineteen; Maria, fifteen; Charlotte, thirteen; and Richard, eleven. Richard Booth eventually moved out to live with the Woolsey family nearby. He died alone on December 29, 1839. In her privately printed book, Personal Recollections of the Elder Booth (London, n.d.), 19–21, Asia Booth Clarke discussed her eccentric uncle, Jimmy Mitchell, who lived with the family for a time. “His children married and died around him; on the latter occasions he never failed to publish the honor of his ancestry . . . and boasted a title in his own family.” I am indebted to Stephen M. Archer for telling me about this little-known source. Research by Mary Beth Jameson shows that Mitchell’s father was Sir Robert Mitchell, a fellow of the Royal Antiquarian Society. The Baltimore Sun, April 4, 1855, 2.
Following is the order of their birth: Junius Jr., born December 22, 1821; Rosalie Ann, born July 5, 1823; Henry Byron, born 1825, died December 28, 1836; Mary Ann, born 1827, died 1833; Frederick, born 1829, died 1833; Elizabeth, born 1831, died 1833; Edwin, born November 13, 1833; Asia, born November 19, 1835; John Wilkes, born May 10, 1838; Joseph Adrian, born February 8, 1840.
Dr. William Stump Forwood, unpublished manuscript on the Booth family, in the Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, 146.
In Personal Recollections, 34, Asia Booth Clarke discusses her family’s dealings with slavery. In a letter to William Winter dated July 17, 1886, Edwin Booth reminisced about the servants in the family. He quoted his sister Rosalie as saying that their father had bought a young woman “because he could not hire an obedient one, but as she threatened to beat Mother’s brains out with a fence-rail, he gave her free papers three days after purchase & sent her away.” Quoted by Daniel J. Watermeier, ed., in Between Actor and Critic: Selected Letters of Edwin Booth and William Winter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 274–75. Annie Hall, who died in July 1904, told stories of the Booths that were incorporated into a book written by Ella V. Mahoney, who lived in Tudor Hall for seventy years. Ella V. Mahoney, Sketches of Tudor Hall and the Booth Family (Bel Air, MD: Tudor Hall, 1925).
Asia Booth Clarke, The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke, edited by Eleanor Farjeon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938), 41–43.
Archer, 238; Asia Booth Clarke, The Elder and the Younger Booth (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1881), 98.
Spirit of the Times, April 5, 1851, quoted in Archer, 324, n.47; Walt Whitman letter to Edwin Booth, August 21, 1884, published in Edward Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman: The Correspondence (New York: New York University Press, 1961), vol. 3, 88. The listing of books is from Clarke, Personal Recollections, 37–38.
The notion of cigar-induced insanity is in The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 26, 1865, 1.
The Baltimore Sun, May 3, 1838, 2. I can find no record of an explanation offered for Booth’s absence, but note that this occurred a week before the birth of John Wilkes Booth. Perhaps Mary Ann’s health became a pressing concern to the expectant father.
Charleston Courier, March 12, 1838; The Baltimore Transcript, quoted in the Georgetown Metropolitan, April 11, 1836. Transcript in the Stanley Kimmel Collection, Merle Kelce Library, University of Tampa; “Stories About Booth,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 21, 1865, 1. Stephen M. Archer has suggested that pain resulting from an infection may have exacerbated the problem. Archer, 239.
For advice about flies: Clarke, Personal Recollections, 25; Diary of Dr. James Rush, entry for September 28, 1835, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia.
Clarke, Personal Recollections, 28–29.
William Purdie Treloar, Wilkes and the City (London: John Murray, 1917), 14. Treloar gives an excellent overview of Wilkes’s career. Despite the heroic efforts of genealogists, no direct connection has been confirmed between Richard’s mother, Elizabeth Wilkes, and “the agitator.” However, letters to John Wilkes from both Richard Booth and his father, John, mention a family connection. Perception may be more important here than fact. I am indebted to Nancy Williams and Carita Curtis for their information on the family of John Wilkes, from whom they are descended.
The letter to Jones, dated November 5, 1832, is in The Players, New York; The friendship with Jackson is mentioned in Asia Booth Clarke, Booth Memorials: Passages, Incidents, and Anecdotes in the Life of Junius Brutus Booth (the Elder) (New York: Carleton, 1866), 91, 110. Actor Charles Pope later described the odd sight of Junius Booth and Sam Houston as they strolled around Washington together. See “The Eccentric Booths,” Ne
w York Sun, March 28, 1897, clipping in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Booth gave Andrew Jackson a pair of Egyptian mummies, though as historian John C. Brennan once told me, the gift was puzzling in light of General Jackson’s fondness for “shooting people and producing his own cadavers.” They were subsequently given to the Smithsonian Institution, though no record of the donation can be found there. Edwin’s description of his father is in Watermeier, 274. The threatening letter is in the Andrew Jackson Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, microfilm reel 46.
My friend Stephen M. Archer believes the “Brutus” came from another pseudonym used occasionally by one of the men suspected of being the author of the “Junius” letters. I believe Richard named his son for Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the Tarquins from Rome, and Marcus Junius Brutus, whose assassination of Caesar was supposed to restore the Republic. Algernon Sydney Booth died at the age of five, and daughter Jane later became Mrs. James Mitchell. Another John Wilkes Booth lived in London in the 1790s, and he appears to have been a nephew of Richard Booth.
Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore in the Nation, 1789–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 161–65. “Family flour” was made from a new strain of wheat that kept better in hotter climates.
Names of boys on Exeter Street are given in “The Civil War Note-book of Washington Hands,” unpublished manuscript, Maryland Historical Society. Testimony of Philip H. Maulsby tells of the connection between Booth and the O’Laughlens through a school run by a Mr. Smith. Maulsby had many relatives in Bel Air, and was married to a sister of the O’Laughlen boys. Poore, 2:226.
Walter Edgar McCann, “The Booth Family in Maryland,” Our Newsman, n.d., 410, copy provided by Stephen M. Archer; The ( New York) Weekly Press, June 7, 1893, 2; Boston Transcript, July 7, 1923; George L. Stout’s Recollections, Baltimore American, July 27, 1902. Stuart Robson in “May’s Dramatic Encyclopedia,” unpublished manuscript by Alonzo May, in the Maryland Historical Society, Jacket 16, 28.