I
John
Wilkes Booth was the hero of his own production. He was puzzled why no one else
saw him as a hero. He was particularly disturbed that since he had crossed into
the Confederacy he had been shunted from place to place --- Mrs. Quisenberry
had refused to take him in, then Dr. Stewart, then the Peyton sisters. His one
refuge had been the Nigger cabin of
the Lucases, and he’d had to fight to get it. Now he was holed up in a drafty
tobacco barn after having been evicted from the Garrett farmhouse.
His
leg was driving him crazy with pain. He’d probably be lame for the rest of his
life, no thanks to Dr. Stewart, he thought angrily. And Herold had turned out
to be a liability, a man who drank too much, talked too freely, and complained
constantly. He thought about shooting Herold but for the moment he needed him
to get around.
Days
of being on the run had acclimatized Booth to waking up on a hair trigger. So
when he heard raised voices in the night at the Garrett farmhouse he was
instantly alert. It was 2:00 A.M.
Several
hundred yards away, the Garretts were entertaining some unwanted night callers.
***
“Open
this door or we shall break it down!” bellowed Byron Baker, a Federal detective
attached to the 16th New York Cavalry.
“What
do you want?” Richard Garrett said, opening his front door a crack.
For
an answer, several troopers shoved the door hard, sending Garrett flying. In a
moment, Garrett found himself in a heap on his own kitchen floor with a Navy
revolver at his temple. “Now answer this man’s questions,” hissed the trooper
holding the gun, “or I will decorate this house with your brains.”
“This
man” --- Baker indicated the roughed-up Willie Jett --- “says he led two
fugitives here. One of them is a lame man. His name is John Wilkes Booth. And
he is the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. Where is he?”
Garrett
stalled. “They were here, but they left.
Earlier today.”
“Where
did they go?” Baker demanded.
“Into
the woods.”
“A
lame man in the woods? How?”
“He
has a crutch.”
“A crutch, eh?” Boyd looked hard at Garrett (as a matter of fact, Booth did have a crutch, made for him by Dr. Mudd). “I think you’re a liar.” He turned to the trooper holding Garret down at gunpoint. “Bring this man outside.”
Garrett
was dragged to his porch.
Baker
directed a cavalryman to throw a rope over a sturdy tree limb. “Now, Ma’am,” he
told the terrified Mrs. Garrett. “I am going to stretch your husband’s neck
until he tells me what I want to know. Then, after he talks, I am going to
leave him dangling. Right in front of you.” Mrs. Garrett started to cry.
“Make
a noose!” Baker roared. A soldier started on the ropework.
Jack
Garrett, who had come running at the sound of the ruckus, interrupted. “Father,
they have a whole Regiment here. I’m going to tell them the truth. Please don’t
hurt my father, sir. The men you are looking for are in the tobacco barn, and
they are armed.” He explained that they
were unwelcome guests.
“Keep
an eye on these people,” Baker snapped at two troopers. “Men, bring your guns.”
***
Tobacco
barns are built for curing tobacco. In order to do so, the tobacco needs to be
exposed to the air. The walls of a tobacco barn are typically slatted, not
solid, and it was through these slats that Booth and Herold could see the
approaching Federal troops.
“Keep quiet!” Booth ordered Herold at
knifepoint. “Quiet and they’ll go away!”
He pulled out a pistol.
Jack
Garrett pushed the barn door open. “Gentlemen, the Federal cavalry is here. I
suggest you give yourselves up.”
Herold
rose as if to go, but Booth called out from a shadow that he had done nothing wrong
and would not surrender.
Baker
entered the barn carrying a candle lantern.
“You will surrender, or I will
burn this building down on top of your heads,” he said, shaking the candle
lantern for emphasis. “You have ten minutes to make up your minds.”
“I
want a fair fight,” Booth said irrationally. “Let me come outside and we can
shoot it out.”
That
stopped everyone in their tracks for a moment. Then Baker said, “This is no game.
Give it up, or I will burn this barn.”
“You
are not being fair,” Booth complained.
Baker
dropped the candle lantern. The dry hay on the floor began to burn quickly, and
the flames licked at the wall and spread with amazing speed. In just a few
moments the barn was blazing.
Herold
ran toward the door crying out that he was giving up, that he was unarmed, that
he had killed no one, and that he didn’t want to burn to death. “Let me out!”
he screamed.
Behind
him, Booth called him a “damned coward,” and raised his Spencer carbine.
Whether he intended to shoot Herold in the back or shoot his way out, or go out
in a blaze of glory no one knows. Seeing
the raised gun, Sergeant Boston Corbett fired at Booth with a .44 revolver,
striking him in the right side of his neck. Booth went down like a poleaxed
steer.
Several
of the troopers dashed into the flaming barn to grab the prostrate Booth. He
managed to say dramatically, “Tell my mother I died for my country.”
But
Booth didn’t die. He lingered pathetically, paralyzed from the neck down. The
men carried him to the Garrett’s front porch where the noosed rope lay,
forgotten. After an hour of struggling to breathe, he asked Baker to kill him.
“Oh, no,” Baker answered. “We want you to get well.”
“Then we’ll kill you,” a
trooper added.
A
doctor was called, who pronounced Booth’s wound mortal. It was only a matter of
time, but how much time?
It
turned out to be hours. Sometime after dawn (was it 7:22 A.M.?) Booth finally
asked one of the soldiers to raise his hands up so he could see them. He could
barely speak, but managed to rasp, “Useless . . . useless . . .” before he fell
silent for the last time; and soon after, John Wilkes Booth, the man who
murdered Abraham Lincoln, breathed his last. It was, by chance, his twenty-seventh birthday.
II
John
Wilkes Booth followed his victim into the Great Beyond eleven days after
Lincoln’s death. His was the second violent death to come to an occupant of the
Presidential Box, but not the last.
Major
Henry Rathbone, Booth’s slashing victim, and Miss Clara Harris finally did wed
in 1867. It was not a happy marriage, though it produced three children.
Rathbone was tormented by his inability to save President Lincoln’s life that
night, and suffered from chronic depression and nervous exhaustion all his life
--- what we would today call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). His
condition was not helped by the public opprobrium he faced as “the man who let
Lincoln die.” His military career was
stalled, and he was never promoted beyond Major. Eventually he was appointed
Consul to a small German state, and the family relocated overseas.
Clara
too suffered from PTSD, and became emotionally volatile and difficult. Henry
was convinced she was having sexual affairs, though the evidence of any adultery is
unclear. On December 23, 1883, Henry Rathbone shot and stabbed Clara to death,
and then murdered their children. He attempted suicide by stabbing himself in
the abdomen seven times, but survived. Committed to the Hildesheim Institute
For The Criminally Insane, he died there in 1911.
Mary
Lincoln, whose mental state was always in question, became a hermit after
Lincoln’s death, living in darkened rooms with the shades drawn. Tad Lincoln
died young, at age 18, in 1871, and Mary deteriorated even further. There were
several suicide attempts. In 1875, she became hysterical, believing for no reason that her
last son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was dying. Robert had her committed to Bellevue
(Illinois) Asylum; although she managed her release in 1876, Robert then had
himself appointed her Conservator. The two never spoke again. He did allow her to move to France, where she
lived on a small pension awarded her by Congress (she had lobbied for a Survivor’s
Pension as the widow of the slain Commander-in-Chief during wartime). She
returned to Springfield in 1880, and died, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage,
in 1882, at age 63.
Although Robert Todd Lincoln had no love for the law, he prospered in it. He also prospered in politics, becoming the de facto leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. He served as Secretary of War (Edwin Stanton’s old job) from 1881 to 1885, and was briefly Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was often opposed to the Progressive policies of President Theodore Roosevelt and his own father’s former private secretary, now Secretary of State, John Hay.
Robert
Todd Lincoln, who was at his father’s bedside when President Lincoln died, was
present for two other Presidential assassinations. He was standing next to
President James A. Garfield in 1881, when Garfield was shot by Charles Giteau;
and he was in the group of men traveling with President William McKinley, when
McKinlety was shot by Leon Czgolsz. After McKinley’s shooting, Robert Lincoln
refused to attend any more Presidential appearances. “Give him my regrets,” he
would say, “but I’m sure he will understand.”
Robert
Todd Lincoln died in 1926.
III
Stoneman’s
Great Raid ends with the sacking of Asheville, North Carolina.
IV
Abraham
Lincoln’s Funeral Train arrived in Albany, New York at around 11:00 P.M. for
the eighth of his funerals (including the public, private, and departure ones
in Washington D.C.). The President’s body was placed in the New York State
Capitol Building.
Public
viewing of the remains began at 1:15 a.m. on April 26th. Mourners passed the
open coffin at a rate of about one per second for twelve full hours. The line
of mourners who did not manage to get
inside the Capitol was one mile long when the doors closed.
The
viewing was followed by the funeral procession, which included all of New York
State’s leading politicians. During the procession, the news spread that John
Wilkes Booth had been killed, grimly raising the spirits of the participants.
The
Funeral Train departed for Buffalo at 4:00 P.M.
V
The
list of accused Lincoln conspirators grew significantly in the eleven days
following the President’s death:
1.
John
Wilkes Booth, now deceased.
2. David Herold, who was
captured with Booth.
3.
Lewis
Powell, the attempted murderer of the Sewards.
4.
Edmund
Spangler, a Ford’s Theatre employee, accused of aiding in Booth’s escape.
5. George Atzerodt, who
declined to kill Andrew Johnson on the night of April 14th.
6. Samuel Arnold, a friend
of Booth’s, who had received “suspicious” correspondence from the actor, and
was unlucky enough to know all the other conspirators.
7. Michael O’Laughlen,
recruited during Booth’s attempt to kidnap the President in March, and who may
have been tasked with killing Edwin Stanton but failed.
8. Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had
set Booth’s leg.
9.
Mary
Surratt, who owned the Washington boardinghouse and the Maryland tavern where
the conspirators frequently met.
10. John
Surratt, whereabouts unknown, the son of Mary Surratt, and a known Confederate
agent.
11. Jefferson Davis,
President of the Confederate States of America.
Some
of the named conspirators were indicted for being part of Booth’s earlier
kidnapping plot, and protested their innocence of having conspired to kill
President Lincoln.
Mudd,
for one, insisted that he had done nothing more than exercise the Hippocratic
Oath.
Spangler
had been arrested on the word of a witness who testified that he had heard
Spangler say, “Let him go” as Booth ran out the back door of Ford’s Theatre.
Samuel
Arnold, who admitted he moved in the same circles as Booth, claimed that he was
just the unlucky recipient of odd, indecipherable notes from the killer.
Herold,
Atzerodt, and O’Laughlen all claimed they had hurt nobody.
Mary
Surratt insisted she had had no part in any plot and was under arrest for the
supposed crimes of her absent son, who was innocent anyway.
Jefferson
Davis, not in custody, had been implicated in the assassination upon the
furious insistence of Edwin M. Stanton, who had placed a price (as Varina Davis
had feared he would) of $100,000.
Rewards
were also posted for several Confederate agents, including Jacob C. Thompson,
the Confederate spymaster in Montreal.
On
this day, Stanton orders that the conspirators in custody, each of whom is
already in solitary confinement, be fitted with black hoods to obscure any
light, and that they are to wear them at all times, even while sleeping. Their hands are manacled with a device used in insane asylums, allowing no use of their hands. They cannot even feed themselves. Kept in tiny cells in the bowels of the ironclads U.S.S. MONTAUK and U.S.S. SAUGUS, there is not even room to lie down to sleep. They are forced to sit in their own excrement in total blackness for days on end.
VI
Joseph
E. Johnston, once the Senior Headquarters General of the United States of
America, and now the Senior General of the Confederate States of America,
receives word at dawn that General Braxton Bragg C.S.A. has laid down his arms upon
his own volition, and surrendered his Command to U.S. authorities.
If
Johnston had any lingering doubts about what he was about to do they fled at
this news.
At
midmorning, with only five hours left to go before the cease-fire expires
Joseph E. Johnston met with William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place for
the third time. Even as the two men met, Philip Sheridan was coming toward
Greensboro with cavalry, and leading a fully-manned infantry Corps. The clock
was ticking loudly.
The
two men met alone but for the company of General John Schofield U.S.A., who
made was to ultimately make suggestions as to some supplemental surrender terms
in the final Agreement that would be reached this day, and penned the document.
No one transcribed Johnston and Sherman’s conversation. But it can be imagined:
“General,
I want to thank you for seeing me again.”
“Of
course, General.”
The
two men undoubtedly shook hands. Johnston’s palm may have been sweating
slightly as he said, “I am disappointed that your Government saw fit to reject
the terms of the Eighteenth --- ”
“I
have no authority, it seems, to treat with political matters,” Sherman said
with a growl in his voice.
“That
seems so. However, let the civil authorities sort that out. I see no point in
more effusions of blood --- ” Johnston said.
“On
that we can agree,” Sherman answered quickly.
“---
such bloodlettings will have no purpose. Given the present conditions under
which the Confederate States of America exist, I believe it is the Government’s
only remaining task to secure a just peace.”
“On
that too we can agree,” Sherman said, relief entering his voice.
“I
will be forthright. My Government has ordered me to continue fighting. But to
do so will be to spread ruin throughout the South. Fighting is impracticable.
It would be the greatest of crimes for us to continue the war.” Johnston took a
breath. “When I attempted to present these objections to my Government I
discovered that they have decamped, to South Carolina I would presume.
Therefore, I am no longer in contact with my Government, just as General Lee
was not at Appomattox, and I am taking it upon my own authority, just as General
Lee did, to proffer the surrender of the Army of Tennessee,” Johnston
explained.
“The
terms will be those that were agreed to at Appomattox?” Sherman confirmed.
“Yes.
However, there is one complicating factor, General Sherman.”
“And
that is?”
“I
am also overall Commander of the Military Department of the South, and I am
offering to surrender all troops within my Department.”
“And
that would be --- ?”
“All
troops within North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, excepting
those in independent Commands, and those with whom I cannot communicate.”
Sherman
was shocked into silence for a long moment. “How many men would you assume to
be under your direct command?”
“One
hundred thousand.”
Sherman
was staggered, but he had a task to complete. “And the independent Commands?”
“I
will contact Generals Hampton and Forrest. I cannot guarantee their agreeance.
Also, there are isolated commands and units, and I am unsure how many have
turned to marauding and bushwhacking. More than I would like, I’m sure.”
“Once
the fighting ends it will be the responsibility of the civil authorities to
address the question of bushwhackers,” Sherman said positively. “At that point
they will become common criminals.”
The
two Generals sat down over a copy of the Appomattox terms. Most were quickly
agreed upon, but it was decided to forego any ceremonial stacking of arms,
though the heavy ordnance was to be turned over to the nearest Federal
authorities. The men would collect their paroles from these same authorities. Given
that the Agreement would cover all the South, in all its local conditions,
Sherman decided to allow the men to keep their rifles.
“President
Lincoln himself said at Hampton Roads that the rifles might be needed to shoot
crows. General Grant and Admiral Porter were present when that was said, and I
am certain they will support me in this,” Sherman said. It was also a slap at Stanton.
“If
I might make a suggestion, General Sherman?”
“Yes,
General Schofield?”
“Might
I recommend that transportation home be provided via the U.S.M.R.R. to any man
that wants it? I know that there have been complaints about Lee’s men just
wandering the countryside trying to get home. And this is a much larger
surrender, sir.”
“An
excellent idea. And open the Commissary to the paroled men. They may take home as much food as they can carry.
We’ve done much damage to the South, and who knows if these men will be able to
put in a crop this year? We don’t want a
famine. Give them wagons if they are traveling in groups. Give them farming
implements. Each man is to have ten days’ rations for himself at a
minimum.”
“That
is extremely generous of you, General Sherman,” Johnston said with great
relief.
“I
want to relieve want, General, and to encourage the inhabitants, North and
South, to renew their peaceful pursuits and to restore the relations of friendship
among our fellow citizens and countrymen.” Sherman explained, writing it all
out as what became known as Special Field Orders Number 65.
It
was the largest single surrender of the Civil War, encompassing over 89,000
soldiers from the North Carolina / Virginia border to the Florida Keys and from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi.
Unlike
Appomattox, there were no grand paintings made, no iconic swords displayed.
There were just two men quietly talking at a rickety wooden table in a
nondescript cabin.
But
now it was almost all over. Johnston shook hands gravely with Sherman. He was
to write a letter two days later to the man who became his lifelong friend:
“The enlarged patriotism
exhibited in your orders reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as
the misfortune of my life, that of having to encounter you in the field.”
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