Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1881 — LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION, [ARTICLE]

LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION,

A Review of John Wilkes Booth’s Conspiracy. Booth spent nearly the whole of the war time about Washington is dissipation, flirting and hotel society, and that streak of insanity remaining in his family, set on fire by dramatic ambition and romance, led him to contemplate the greatest personal act of the war, if he could find the proper tools to help him. Probably, if lie could have obtained some of the reckless Missourians with Quailtrell, or even some of Morgan’s men detailed to him from the Confederate army, "lie might have succeeded in taking off Lincoln*either alive or dead. He might have gagged the President, to render him, to all intents, a helpless piece of freight, though yet alive, and, by tearing up a bridge somewhere, or giving a false scent, have got a start of half an hour to an hour, and let the shades of night shut in himself and his prisoner, and then they would have ten or twelve hours of work.

As long as there was a Confederacy intact and offensive the problem of capturing Lincoln would stop at the Potomac l iver. There was lmt one obstacle on the road, and that was the eastern branch of the Potomac, in the fork of which lies Washington city. This stream, immediately opposite Washington, has two bridges, both guarded; but five miles above Washington the oasti rn branch was fordable. On the night of the murder Booth had no trouble in passing the most important of these bridges as late as 11 o’clock. Both lu; and Harold were allowed to go over and neither gave a pass, but the livery-stable keeper, hunting for the horse on which Harold rode, was stopped and told he could go over, but could not come back. Booth had to fall back on the Maryland element around him, as the Confederate Government did not entertain such an irregular proposition as his. About the last of October, 1864, Booth went to the house of Dr. Queen, several miles from Bryanstown, with a letter of instruction from Martin in Canada. Martin had been a blockade-run-ner in conjunction with Keith of ThomasHt’ii, who, years afterward, blew up a steamer at Bremen, Germany, with an infernal machine. Booth told Dr. Queen and Dr. Queen’s neighbors that he was going to buy land in Lower Maryland, tie was referred to Henry Mudd, father of| Dr. Mudd. This was Saturday, and the next day, Sunday, Dr. Queen and his son-in-law, John C. Thompson, took Booth to the Catholic Church at Bryanstown. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was standing in front of tiie church with others, and Booth was introduced to him by Thompson. Thus began the conspiracy, nearly six months before its finale. Booth went back to Dr. Queen’s that night, and stayed there till the next day, Monday. About the middle of December following he returned and stayed one night with Dr. Queen, and went away the next morning. How often he went to Dr. Mudd's only that person knows. Bryanstown, where Dr. Mudd resided, is about twenty-seven miles from Washington on .the regular stage road leading to Leonardstown and Point Lookout. Mudd’s was four miles north of Bryanstown. From Bryanstown to the nearest crossing on the Potomac, at Matthias point, is about sixteen miles, in the early part of the war around Bilyanstown was a portion of a rebel State guard, which, being run down by the Union forces, hid in the vicinity of Dr. Mudd’s house. Mudd was a slaveholder. He, Booth and Surratt were intimate at the National Hotel in Washington as early as January, 1867. David G. Harold was a vagrant druggist’s clerk in Washington, who was fond of gunning through Lower Maryland, and knew Surratt. Surratt had employed Atzerodt to cross to Virginia in a row-boat from below Port Tobacco.

Late in 1864, somewhat after Booth had met Dr. Mudd, Mrs. Surratt rented her tavern at Surrattsville and moved to Washington and opened a boardinghouse. She had an interesting daughter,- and was herself a rather comely widow about 40 years old. The ladies never bad such an elegant acquaintance as Booth, and he soon got a power over (hem and over their country friends. John Surratt was kept in Lower Maryland running the blockade, carrying the rebel mail and picking up a little money, and indulging in some visions of wealth to be got through Booth’s genius. Surratt made one or two visits to Richmond, and the rebel Secretary of State intrusted him with packages to Canada. Booth was a native of Harford county, Maryland, and had its local patriotism. He was an actor in Richmond at the time John Brown was hung, and went up to see the execution. There he met John T. Beall, who was afterward hung on Governor’s island, and their acquaintance was very confidential. Booth labored hard to have Beall pardoned by Lincoln, but ineffectually. Beall had been a pirate about the mouth of the Potomac at the beginning of the wYir, and afterward on the lakes, and was one of the set of young desperadoes in Canada, and he was hung on the 24th of February, 1865, on Governor’s island. About eight weeks after that Booth shot lan coin, and some say that his original ambition, to make him prisoner, had given way to revenge on Beall’s account. Booth, whose boyhood was mainly spent in Baltimore, had two schoolmates named Arnold and O’Laughlin, over whom he had a marked influence, and who were both impecunious and dissipated. He tempted them into his original scheme to capture Lincoln, but when they found it was to be a murder their ideas were confirmed that Booth was a crazy man, and they left him. A poor, vulgar, whisky-rid den scenesliitter at Ford’s Theater, named Spangler, was ultimately used for the assassination scheme by Booth. He tried to tempt several actors into the plot, no doubt desiring some intellectual associates, or men at least above the vulgar grade of his Marylanders. The man Powell who was tried under the name of Payne was a young rebel desperado from Georgia or Florida, who had probably been sent to Booth from among the guerrillas. He was the only one who •lid his part with the stolidness and obedience of a “Quantrell, a James or a Younger.” At Mrs. Surratt’s house in Washington all this junto were in the habit of meeting. They also met at a di inking house on Louisiana avenue, on Jhe wood 499?* Individual members

of this crowd would call on Booth at the National Hotel, where he boarded. Mrs. Surratt’s house in Washington was in a particularly isolated yet central portion of the town, on the edge ot Judiciary square, which was then a mere common, and beyond, toward the eastern branch, the country was all goose pasture, without graded streets, and cut up by army teams. Mrs. Surratt’s part in the business was allowing both herself and her house to be used by spies and assassins, while she was living in the Federal lines under protection, and her family had taken the oath and they received passes and safeguards. It seems probable that JBooth hastily resolved to kill Lincoln on the particular day it was accomplished, and had only that day to do his work j so he laid hands on what tools were near by.. |Atzerodt, Payne and Harold were in the city. He hired horses for them from the livery-stables as soon as he heard Lincoln was to be at the theater. John Surratt was off in Canada, and he was making his way back at the time of the murder. Booth’s baseness consisted in going to Mrs. Surratt’s house and getting her to do liis errands, accessory to the assassination, at Surrattsville that afternoon. He gave her the money to hire a buggy and take a field-glass out with her, and tell her tenant to be up at midnight and have a bottle of whisky ready, as the guns

previously deposited at the tavern would bo called for about that hour The foolish woman, probably enamored of the man, did his behest. She got a clerk who boarded Ai lief house to drive her all that ten miles over the bids to Surrattsville and back again, and he had to give the testimony against her. She started out about 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and did not reach Washington again till nearly 9 o’clock at night. Ten minutes after she returned some one rang her door-bell and she attended to it in person. The boarder thinks it was Booth, who had come to see if she had performed her errand and if everything on the road was clear. In an hour or so afterward the President was shot. If Surratt had returned to Washington city either at the time of the trial before the military commission, or before the time fixed for his mother’s execution, her life would have been spared. But he remained on the south side of the St. Lawrence river, within a few miles of Montreal, hidden in a house, and never stood forth to save her. President Johnson, therefore, refused to grant her pardon, and she was hung with Atzerodt, who was to have murdered President Johnson ; Harold, the companion of Booth’s flight, and Payne, who stabbed Mr. Seward. Regrets were felt that a woman should suffer so ignominiously, and President Johnson and Judge Advocate Holt long afterward had a sharp controversy on the subject. Both were Southern Unionists—Holt, a native of Kentucky, and Johnson from Tennessee.

The question now occurs as to how Booth was to get himself off after he had accomplished the forty miles to the Potomac river, Virginia having disbanded her troops in the meantime. The public will observe that it was only on the 12th of April that the army of Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Mr. Lincoln was murdered on the night of the 14th of April. It was not till the 18th of April that the remaining great army of the Confederacy surrendered in North Carolina. Booth, therefore, believed he would have an armed Confederacy to escape to. His feelings, intensified by the surrender of Lee on the 12th, which he did not know of till the 13tli, were brought locally upon the purpose on the morning of the 14tli, when he heard that Lincoln was to visit the theater in honor of Lee’s surrender. For six months Booth had studied all these roads and avenues of escape, and had spent nearly ail the money that he possessed in keeping his band together, and there was still a chance that Joe Johnston would hold out, or at any rate there would be a guerrilla warfare through the mountains, and the Confederates would rally again in the Gulf States or Texas. No doubt he said to himself, “I will kill this man in the very moment of his celebrating Gen. Lee’s conquest, and it will be an easy thing for me to reach the Potomac before next morning and fall in with the disbanded Confederates, who are going to their homes, and they will pass me along to the mountains, and I can work my way into * Mexico, or, at the worst, surrender with the rest.” Booth had scarcely any education, except that of a man of the world; knew nothing of law, particularly of international law, and had never heard of any body being hung in the war except his friend, John Beall, and the hotel bummer Kennedy. He was desperate, dissipated, out of pocket, and had nursed up this conspiracy until it possessed his intellect. He saw it all slipping away, and he resolved to deal a blow. His plan was to shoot Mr. Lincoln after Mrs. Surratt had come back from Surrattsville, show himself to the audience as the histrionic avenger, vanish through the theater and have the scenes bar the w’ay behind him, and go out the back door

into the alley where his horse was waiting, and then mount and ride to the navy yard bridge, where he was to meet Harold, and in the morning, before day, he would be at Dr. Mudd’s. Meantime Atzerodt was to stab Johnson at the Kirkwood House, and Payne to stab Seward, and these two were to cross the upper bridge of the eastern branch, which would compel them to make a detour of three or four miles, but they would join him either at Surrattsville or at Mudd’s, and then the four were to take to the water, cross into King George’s county, Va., and by 10 o’clock next morning the Rappahannock river would be between them and the Potomac. The fortifications of Washington would be forty or fifty miles behind them to the northeast, the army of Grant was away down below the Appomattox river, and there was an open and friendly country to go through to escape to Southwestern Virginia and Tennessee. This was probably Booth’s programme. But Atzerodt was a coward and a vagrant, and he got drunk, talked the murder, rode his horse around town, and, instead of joining Booth, he ran away up into Western Maryland among the native Dutch of his connections, and was caught there some time afterward. Harold waited for Booth somewhere about Capitol hill, and they crossed the Eastern branch bridge almost within sight of each other. Payne undertook to find the upper* bridge, but in the night, the roads cut up and leading in every direction by reason of the military encampments, he eould not find the lane leading to the bridge, and finally, seeing that he could not catch Booth, he returned to Mrs. Surratt’s house three nights after the murder. Mr. Lincoln had been killed Friday, and on Monday night, about midnight, Payne repaired back to this doomed woman’s. It is probable that on Saturday, Sunday and Monday he had been trying to make connections with Booth, but the whole country being up, and Lower Maryland filled with soldiery, and he, perhaps, unacquainted with the country, he knew not what to do with himself, and came back to Mrs. Surratt’s to see if he could make connection with John Surratt, whom he knew to be on the way back from Canada. Mrs. Surratt, though very well acquainted with him, denied with uplifted hands ever having seen him, and this was another thread in the rope to hang her to the gallows. Booth crossed the lower, or navy yard, bridge before 11 o’clock Friday night. He and Harold rode with such speed over thq high hills that a little after midnight they were at Surrattsville. When Harold went into the tavern he aroused the drunken landlord, Lloyd, who had been drunk at Upper Marlborough court all day, flarolq staid; “Lloyd, for

God’s sake make haste and get them things.” “Mrs. Surratt had told me, said the landlord, “to give the carbines, whisky and field-glasses to whoever called for them. John Surratt deposited the carbines there a considerable time before. A rope and a monkey-wrench had also been deposited, but they were not asked for, further showing that the murder was a different scheme from that of the capture. There was now nobody to bind, and no vehicle to screw up. Booth and Harold stood there five minutes on the green before the tavern, and took a drink from the whisky bottle, and Booth boastingly cried out that they had assassinated the President and Seward. In the early morning Booth rode to Mudd’s house. Mudd says that at 4 o’clock he went to the window and saw Booth sitting on a horse and a talkative young man holding that horse and another horse from which he had dismounted. It is well known, in his vain performance in jumping from the private box, Booth had fractured his leg. This leads to the doubt as to whether Booth had intended originally to stop at Mudd’s house at all. He might have designed passing to the west of Mudd’s house, which was out of his plain course to the Potomac, but when he broke his leg it was inevitable that he must stop at Mudd’s to have it set. Mudd set the limb and made a crutch for Booth, and tried to get a carriage for the party, but the situation was very grave. Some time during the Saturday, probably late in the afternoon, Booth and Harold rode their horses in Zekiali’s swamp, and rode out again to the road and started for the Potomac. Dr. Mudd told of Mr. Lincoln’s murder before the news reached Bryanstown. The accident to Booth’s leg was a serious thing. It is a local belief in Lower Maryland that a Mr. Cox, a rich man of rebel affiliation, allowed Booth and Harold to be fed by a white man in the woods on his farm, where they had some kind of bush protection. There was no certain account of the two men from that Saturday, April 15, until the following Monday week, when Booth and Harold appeared; in Virginia. It is understood that Booth’s illness and helpless cowardice kept them risnucrß on the Maryland side, and Ik y made repeated efforts to cross the broad river, but in the darkness, or rain, or wind, were blown to adjacent parts of the Maryland shore. Others think they went directly to Virginia. They lodged there at one Dr. Stuart’s on Monday one week after the murder, on Matthias point, and Stuart would not invite them in, but sent them food to the barn. Booth wrote him an indignant letter, copying it out of his diary where ho composed it. The two men now struck across the country, as if they were going to Lynchburg. Tne line of their short progress, if produced, would pass along the railroad and turnpike of Southwestern Virginia to Cumberland Gap and East Tennessee.

About ten miles from Matthias point is King George’s Court House, and five miles further on is Port Conway, on the Rappahannock river, opposite, a large hamlet called Port Royal, on the south bank. Booth and Harold, therefore, traveled in a straight line about thirtymiles after leaving Dr. Mudd’s, April 15, until April 25, when they were found without hoYses, trying to get across the Rappahannock ferry to Port Conway. It is said that their horses have never been‘found. Some have thought that they were laden with stones and shot in the river ; others think that implicated rebels buried these horses t > keep the vultures off and prevent detec tion. Quite probably they were found loose, stolen and sold in Baltimore. A negro, on the Maryland side, hail given information at Chappei’s point that he had seen two men crossing the river in a boat, and it was telegraphed to Washington. Baker, the chief Government detective, looked at his coastsurvey map and saw that he could head off any such party by sending a steamer down to Belle Plaine or to Acquia creek and there disembarking them, where they would be only six or seven miles from the Rappahannock river, and about ten miles from Port Conway.

A steamer was at once dispatched with these men. Monday night they landed in Virginia, sixty miles below Washington city, and on Tuesday morning came to Port Royal ferry. They found that the previous day a negro had brought from the direction of the Potomac two men in an old wagon to Port Conway, and that one of them was lame. They said that some disbanded Confederate cavalry of Mosby’s command had befriended these two men, got them across the Rappahannock and had gone toward Bowling Green, the county seat of Caroline, the next county to the west. The pursuers at once crossed the Rappahannock, in sight of President Madison’s birth-place, and on Tuesday nigh; arrived in Bowling Green, a mere hamlet, and, hauling the principal Confederate of the party out of his bed, made him tell what he had done with the two fugitives. By this time the whole country was filled with the pallor of the great tragedy, and the Confederates had discovered it to be as deplorable a thing as the Federals had. Mosby’s cavalryman, therefore, pioneered the men back to Garrett’s farm, in Caroline county, where Booth had hidden himself in a barn. His Confederate friends had tried to have him taken care of in Port Royal without success. To show the trifling character of Harold, when he had put Booth iu Garrett’s house, he went up to Bowling Green alone the next day, Tuesday, and spent the day talking and drinking with his new friends. A few hours afterward, when he and Booth had returnee from the house to the barn, it was surrounded by the cavalry. Harold was so scared that he gave himself up, and they sent him in to make Booth give up his arms, but Booth cursed him for a coward, and saw his last time had come. After some bravado of offering to “ fight the whole command fair,” he told them to get a stretcher ready for him. They fired the barn by pulling the straw through the cracks, and saw him stauding there in the illumination leaning on the crutch Dr. Mudd had made for him, and trying to get a sight on somebody whom he could kill. At that moment a nervous or willful sergeant among the soldiers fired at Booth and struck him in the back of the neck, producing paralysis of the spinal cord. One of the detectives rushed in and seized him, yet alive, and pulled him out of the combustion and laid him on the grass. On Wednesday morning, about 7 o’clock, he died on the porch at Garrett’s house, muttering a few words to the effect that he had died for his country, and wanted his mother to know that he thought he was right; even these words were very indistinct, as he could only whisper. He was heard distinctly to say, however, in his intense suffering, “ Kill me ! kill me ! ” A doctor arrived from Belle Plaine before he died. He was sewed up in a saddleblanket, put on a rattle-trap negro wagon and hauled to Port Royal and Belle Plaine, reacl ing the latter place in the middle of the afternoon of April 26, Wednesday. A part of the remains were buried near the other conspirators in the penitentiary yard at Arsenal point. The cartilage which was struck by the soldier’s ball is in the Army and Navy Medical Musenm. Most of the body was disinterred before the close of Johnson’s administration and put under the monument of the Booth family at Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore. On the 7th of July, - about three months afterward, Harold was hung on the same gallowß with Mrs. Surratt, Payne and Atzerodt. Dr. Mudd was sent to Dry Tortugas with Spangler, O’Laughlin and Arnold. He behaved ycry wolj during the yellow feyer at that

port and was pardoned; two of the other persons died from the results of dissipation.— George Alfred Townsend.