Now, read the beginning of the manifesto, and see how prophetic were his words of his coming infamy. If he expected so much for capturing the President merely, what of our execration at slaying him?
"Right or wrong, God judge me, not man. For be my motive good or bad, of one thing I am sure,the lasting condemnationof the North.
"I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression. For four years have I waited, hoped and prayed for the dark clouds to break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine.To wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead. My prayers have proved as idle as my hopes. God's will be done.I go to see and share the bitter end."
To wait longer would be a crime. Oh! what was the crimenotto wait! Had he only shared the bitter end, then, in the common trench, his memory might have been hidden. The end had come when he appeared to make of benignant victory a quenchless revenge. One more selection from his apostrophe will do. It suggests the manner of his death:
"They say that the South has foundthat'last ditch' which the North have so long derided. Should I reach her in safety, and find it true, I will proudly beg permission to triumph or die in that same 'ditch' by her side." The swamp near which he died may be called, without unseemly pun—a truth, not abon mot—the last ditch of the rebellion.
None of the printed pictures that I have seen do justice to Booth. Some of thecartes de visiteget him very nearly. He had one of the finest vital heads I have ever seen. In fact, he was one of the best exponents of vital beauty I have ever met. By this I refer to physical beauty in the Medician sense—health, shapeliness, power in beautiful poise, and seemingly more powerful in repose than in energy. His hands and feet were sizable, not small, and his legs were stout and muscular, but inclined to bow like his father's. From the waist up he was a perfect man; his chest being full and broad, his shoulders gently sloping, and his arms as white as alabaster, but hard as marble. Over these, upon a neck which was its proper column, rose the cornice of a fine Doric face, spare at the jaws and not anywhere over-ripe, but seamed with a nose of Roman model, the only relic of his half-Jewish parentage, which gave decision to the thoughtfully stern sweep of two direct, dark eyes, meaning to woman snare, and to man a search warrant, while the lofty square forehead and square brows were crowned with a weight of curling jetty hair, like a rich Corinthian capital. His profile was eagleish, and afar his countenance was haughty. He seemed throat full of introspections, ambitious self-examinings, eye-strides into the future, as if it withheld him something to which he had a right. I have since wondered whether this moody demeanor did not come of a guilty spirit, but all the Booths look so.
Wilkes spoke to me in Washington for the first time three weeks before the murder. His address was winning as a girl's, rising in effect not from what he said, but from how he said it. It was magnetic, and I can describe it therefore by its effects alone. I seemed, when he had spoken, to lean toward this man. His attitude spoke to me; with as easy familiarity as I ever observed he drew rear and conversed. The talk was on so trite things that it did not lie a second in the head, but when I left him it was with the feeling that a most agreeable fellow had passed by.
The next time the name of Wilkes Booth recurred to me was like the pistol shot he had fired. The right hand I had shaken murdered the father of the country.
Booth was not graceful with his feet, although his ordinary walk was pleasant enough. But his arms were put to artistic uses; not the baser ones like boxing, but all sorts of fencing, manual practice, and the handling of weapons.
In his dress, he was neat without being particular. Almost any clothes could fit him; but he had nothing of the exquisite about him; his neckties and all such matters were good without being gaudy. Nature had done much for him. In this beautiful palace an outlaw had builded his fire, and slept, and plotted, and dreamed.
I have heard it said that Booth frequently cut his adversaries upon the stage in sheer wantonness or bloodthirstiness. This is a mistake, and is attributable to his father, the elder Booth, who had the madness of confounding himself with the character. Wilkes was too good a fencer to make ugly gashes; his pride was his skill, not his awkwardness. Once
he was playing with John McCullough in the last act of "Richard." They were fighting desperately. Suddenly the cross-piece on the hilt of McCullough's sword flew off and cut the owner deeply in the forehead. Blood ran down McCullough's face, though they continued to struggle, and while, ostensibly, Booth was imitating a demon, he said in a half whisper:
"Good God, John, did I hurt you?"
And when they went off the stage, Booth was white with fear that he had gashed his friend.
As an actor, Booth was too energetic to be correct; his conception of Richard was vivid and original, one of the best that we have had, and he came nearer his father's rendering of the last act than any body we have had. His combat scene was terrific. The statement that his voice had failed has no valid foundation; it was as good when he challenged the cavalry-men to combat as in the best of his Thespian successes. In all acting that required delicate characterization, refined conception or carefulness, Booth was at sea. But in strong physical parts, requiring fair reading and an abundance of spring and tension, he was much finer than hearsay would have us believe.
HisRomeowas described a short time ago by the WashingtonIntelligenceras the most satisfactory of all renderings of that fine character. He played theCorsican Brothersthree weeks on a run in Boston. He playedPescaraat Ford's Theater—his last mock part in this world—on to-morrow (Saturday) night, six weeks ago.
He was fond of learning and reciting fugitive poems. His favorite piece was "The Beautiful Snow" comparing it to a lost purity. He has been known by gentlemen in this city to recite this poem with fine effect, and cry all the while. This was on the principle of "guilty people sitting at a play." His pocket-book was generally full of little selections picked up at random, and he had considerable delicacy of appreciation.
On the morning of the murder, Booth breakfasted with Miss Carrie Bean, the daughter of a merchant, and a very respectable young lady, at the National Hall. He arose from the table at, say eleven o'clock. During the breakfast, those who watched him say that he was lively, piquant and self-possessed as ever in his life.
That night the horrible crime thrilled the land. A period of crippled flight succeeded. Living in swamps, upon trembling hospitality, upon hopes which sank as he leaned upon them. Booth passed the nights in perilous route or broken sleep, and in the end went down like a bravo, but in the eyes of all who read his history, commanding no respect for his valor, charity for his motive, or sympathy for his sin.
The closing scenes of these terrible days are reserved for a second paper. Much matter that should have gone into this is retained for the present.
Washington, April 28—8 P. M.
A hard and grizzly face overlooks me as I write. Its inconsiderable forehead is crowned with turning sandy hair, and the deep concave of its long insatiate jaws is almost hidden by a dense red beard, which can not still abate the terrible decision of the large mouth, so well sustained by searching eyes of spotted gray, which roll and rivet one. This is the face of Lafayette Baker, colonel and chief of the secret service. He has played the most perilous parts of the war, and is the capturer of the late President's murderer. The story that I am to tell you, as he and his trusty dependents told it to me, will be aptly commenced here, where the net was woven which took the dying life of Wilkes Booth.
When the murder occured, Colonel Baker was absent from Washington, He returned on the third morning, and was at once besought by Secretary Stanton to join the hue and cry against the escaped Booth. The sagacious detective found that nearly ten thousand cavalry, and one-fourth as many policemen, had been meantime scouring, without plan or compass, the whole territory of Southern Maryland. They were treading on each other's heels, and mixing up the thing so confoundedly, that the best place for the culprits to have gone would have been in the very midst of their pursuers. Baker at once possessed himself of the little the War Department had learned, and started immediately to take the usual detective measures, till then neglected, of offering a reward and getting out photographs of the suspected ones. He then dispatched a few chosen detectives to certain vital points, and awaited results.
The first of these was the capture of Atzeroth. Others, like the taking of Dr. Mudge, simultaneously occured. But the district supected being remote from the railway routes, and broken by no telegraph station, the colonel, to place himself nearer the theater of events, ordered an operator, with the necessary instrument, to tap the wire running to Point Lookout, near Chappells Point, and send him prompt messages.
The same steamer which took down the operator and two detectives. brought back one of the same detectives and a negro. This negro, taken to Colonel Baker's office, stated so positively that he had seen Booth and another man cross the Potomac in a fishing boat, while he was looking down upon them from a bank, that the colonel, was at first skeptical; but when examined the negro answered so readily and intelligently, recognizing the men from the photographs, that Baker knew at last that he had the true scent.
Straightway he sent to General Hancock for twenty-five men, and while the order was going, drew down his coast survey-maps. With that quick detective intuition amounting almost to inspiration, he cast upon the probable route and destination of the refugees, as well as the point where he would soonest strike them. Booth, he knew, would not keep along the coast, with frequent deep rivers to cross, nor, indeed, in any direction east of Richmond, where he was liable at any time to cross our lines of occupation; nor, being lame, could he ride on; horseback, so as to place himself very far westward of his point of debarkation in Virginia. But he would travel in a direct course from Bluff point, where he crossed to Eastern Tennessee, and this would take him through Port Royal on the Rappahannock river, in time to be intercepted there by the outgoing cavalry men.
When, therefore, twenty-five men, under one Lieutenant Dougherty, arrived at his office door, Baker placed the whole under control of his former lieutenant-colonel, E. J. Conger, and of his cousin, Lieutenant L. B. Baker—the first of Ohio, the last of New-York—and bade them go with all dispatch to Belle Plain on the Lower Potomac, there to disembark, and scour the country faithfully around Port Royal, but not to return unless they captured their men.
Conger is a short, decided, indomitable, courageous fellow, provincial in his manners, but fully understanding his business, and collected as a housewife on Sunday.
Young Baker is large and fine-looking—a soldier, but no policeman—and he deferred to Conger, very properly, during most of the events succeeding.
Quitting Washington at 2 o'clock P. M. on Monday, the detectives and cavalrymen disembarked at Belle Plain, on the border of Stafford county, at 10 o'clock, in the darkness. Belle Plain is simply the nearest landing to Fredericksburg, seventy miles from Washington city, and located upon Potomac creek. It is a wharf and warehouse merely, and here the steamer John S. Ide stopped and made fast, while the party galloped off in the darkness. Conger and Baker kept ahead, riding up to farm-houses and questioning the inmates, pretending to be in search of the Maryland gentlemen belonging to the party. But nobody had seen the parties described, and, after a futile ride on the Fredericksburg road, they turned shortly to the east, and kept up their baffled inquiries all the way to Port Conway, on the Rappahannock.
On Tuesday morning they presented themselves at the Port Royal ferry, and inquired of the ferry-man, while he was taking them over in squads of seven at a time, if he had seen any two such men. Continuing their inquiries at Port Royal, they found one Rollins a fisherman, who referred them to a negro named Lucas, as having driven two men a short distance toward Bowling Green in a wagon. It was found that these men answered to the description, Booth having a crutch as previously ascertained.
The day before Booth and Harold had applied at Port Conway for the general ferry-boat, but the ferryman was then fishing and would not desist for the inconsiderable fare of only two persons, but to their supposed good fortune a lot of confederate cavalrymen just then came along, who threatened the ferryman with a shot in the head if he did not instantly bring across his craft and transport the entire party. These cavalrymen were of Moseby's disbanded command, returning from Fairfax Court House to their homes in Caroline county. Their captain was on his way to visit a sweetheart at Bowling Green, and he had so far taken Booth under his patronage, that when the latter was haggling with Lucas for a team, he offered both Booth and Harold the use of his horse, to ride and walk alternately.
In this way Lucas was providentially done out of the job, and Booth rode off toward Bowling Green behind the confederate captain on one and the same horse.
So much learned, the detectives, with Rollins for a guide, dashed off in the bright daylight of Tuesday, moving southwestward through the level plains of Caroline, seldom stopping to ask questions, save at a certain halfway house, where a woman told them that the cavalry party of yesterday had returned minus one man. As this was far from circumstantial, the party rode along in the twilight, and reached Bowling Green at eleven o'clock in the night.
This is the court-house town of Caroline county—a small and scattered place, having within it an Ancient tavern, no longer used for other than lodging purposes; but here they hauled from his bed the captain aforesaid, and bade him dress himself. As soon as he comprehended the matter he became pallid and eagerly narrated all the facts in his possession. Booth, to his knowledge, was then lying at the house of one Garrett, which they had passed, and Harold had departed the existing day with the intention of rejoining him.
Taking this captain along for a guide, the worn out horsemen retraced, though some of the men were so haggard and wasted with travel that they had to be kicked into intelligence before they could climb to their saddles. The objects of the chase thus at hand, the detectives, full of sanguine purpose; hurried the cortege so well along that by 2 o'clock early morning, all halted at Garrett's gate. In the pale moonlight three hundred yards from the main road, to the left, a plain old farmhouse looked grayly through its environing locusts. It was worn and whitewashed, and two-storied, and its half-human windows glowered down upon the silent cavalrymen like watching owls, which stood as sentries over some horrible secret asleep within. The front of this house looked up the road toward the Rappahannock, but did not face it, and on that side a long Virginia porch protruded, where, in the summer, among the honeysuckles, the humming bird flew like a visible odor. Nearest the main road, against the pallid gable, a single-storied kitchen stood, and there were three other doors, one opening upon the porch, one in the kitchen gable, and one in the rear of the farmhouse.
Dimly seen behind, an old barn, high and weather-beaten, faced the roadside gate, for the house itself lay to the left of its own lane; and nestling beneath the barn, a few long corn-cribs lay with a cattle shed at hand. There was not a swell of the landscape anywhere in sight. A plain dead level contained all the tenements and structures. A worm fence stretched along the road broken by two battered gate posts, and between the road and the house, the lane was crossed by a second fence and gate. The farm-house lane, passing the house front, kept straight on to the barn, though a second carriage track ran up to the porch.
[Illustration: Plan of Garrett's House.
ADoor through which the dying man was brought.BCorner at which the barn was fired.CSpot in the barn on which Booth stood.DPoint where Corbett fired.EPorch where Booth died.GDoor at which Lieutenant Baker knocked.HShed.IKitchen.]
It was a homely and primitive scene enough, pastoral as any farm boy's birth-place, and had been the seat of many toils and endearments. Young wives had been brought to it, and around its hearth the earliest cries of infants, gladdening mothers' hearts, had made the household jubilant till the stars came out, and were its only sentries, save the bright lights at its window-panes as of a camp-fire, and the suppressed chorusses of the domestic bivouac within, where apple toasting and nut cracking and country games shortened the winter shadows. Yet in this house, so peaceful by moonlight, murder had washed its spotted hands, and ministered to its satiated appetite. History—present in every nook in the broad young world—had stopped, to make a landmark of Garrett's farm.
In the dead stillness, Baker dismounted and forced the outer gate; Conger kept close behind him, and the horsemen followed cautiously. They made no noise in the soft clay, nor broke the all-foreboding silence anywhere, till the second gate swung open gratingly, yet even then nor hoarse nor shrill response came back, save distant croaking, as of frogs or owls, or the whizz of some passing night-hawk. So they surrounded the pleasant old homestead, each horseman, carbine in poise, adjusted under the grove of locusts, so as to inclose the dwelling with a circle of fire. After a pause, Baker rode to the kitchen door on the side, and dismounting, rapped and halloed lustily. An old man, in drawers and night-shirt, hastily undrew the bolts, and stood on the threshold, peering shiveringly into the darkness.
Baker seized him by the throat at once, and held a pistol to his ear. "Who—who is it that calls me?" cried the old man. "Where are the men who stay with you?" challenged Baker. "If you prevaricate you are a dead man!" The old fellow, who proved to be the head of the family, was so overawed and paralysed that he stammered, and shook, and said not a word. "Go light a candle," cried Baker, sternly, "and be quick about it." The trembling old man obeyed, and in a moment the imperfect rays flared upon his whitening hairs and bluishly pallid face. Then the question was repeated, backed up by the glimmering pistol, "where are those men?" The old man held to the wall, and his knees smote each other. "They are gone," he said. "We hav'n't got them in the house, I assure you that they are gone." Here there were sounds and whisperings in the main building adjoining, and the lieutenant strode to the door. A ludicrous instant intervened, the old man's modesty outran his terror. "Don't go in there," he said, feebly; "there are women undressed in there." "Damn the women," cried Baker; "what if they are undressed? We shall go in if they haven't a rag." Leaving the old man in mute astonishment, Baker bolted through the door, and stood in an assemblage of bare arms and night robes. His loaded pistol disarmed modesty of its delicacy and substituted therefor a seasonable terror. Here he repeated his summons, and the half light of the candle gave to his face a more than bandit ferocity. They all denied knowledge of the strangers' whereabouts.
In the interim Conger had also entered, and while the household and its invaders were thus in weird tableaux, a young man appeared, as if he had risen from the ground. The muzzles of everybody turned upon him in a second; but, while he blanched, he did not lose loquacity. "Father," he said, "we had better tell the truth about the matter. Those men whom you seek, gentlemen, are in the barn, I know. They went there to sleep." Leaving one soldier to guard the old man—and the soldier was very glad of the job, as it relieved him of personal hazard in the approaching combat—all the rest, with cocked pistols at the young man's head, followed on to the barn. It lay a hundred yards from the house, the front barndoor facing the west gable, and was an old and spacious structure, with floors only a trifle above the ground level.
The troops dismounted, were stationed at regular intervals around it, and ten yards distant at every point, four special guards placed to command the door and all with weapons in supple preparation, while Baker and Conger went direct to the portal. It had a padlock upon it, and the key of this Baker secured at once. In the interval of silence that ensued, the rustling of planks and straw was heard inside, as of persons rising from sleep.
At the same moment Baker hailed:
"To the persons in this barn. I have a proposal to make; we are about to send in to you the son of the man in whose custody you are found. Either surrender to him your arms and then give yourselves up, or we'll set fire to the place. We mean to take you both, or to have a bonfire and a shooting match."
No answer came to this of any kind. The lad, John M. Garrett, who was in deadly fear, was here pushed through the door by a sudden opening of it, and immediately Lieutenant Baker locked the door on the outside. The boy was heard to state his appeal in under tone. Booth replied:
"Damn you. Get out of here. You have betrayed me."
At the same time he placed his hand in his pocket as for a pistol. A remonstrance followed, but the boy slipped quickly over the reopened portal, reporting that his errand had failed, and that he dared not enter again. All this time the candle brought from the house to the barn was burning close beside the two detectives, rendering it easy for any one within to have shot them dead. This observed, the light was cautiously removed, and everybody took care to keep out of its reflection. By this time the crisis of the position was at hand, the cavalry exhibited very variable inclinations, some to run away, others to shoot Booth without a summons, but all excited and fitfully silent. At the house near by the female folks were seen collected in the doorway, and the necessities of the case provoked prompt conclusions. The boy was placed at a remote point, and the summons repeated by Baker:
"You must surrender inside there. Give up your arms and appear. There is no chance for escape. We give you five minutes to make up your mind."
A bold, clarion reply came from within, so strong as to be heard at the house door:
"Who are you, and what do you want with us?"
Baker again urged: "We want you to deliver up your arms and become our prisoners."
"But who are you?" hallooed the same strong voice.
Baker.—"That makes no difference. We know who you are, and we want you. We have here fifty men, armed with carbines and pistols. You cannot escape."
There was a long pause, and then Booth said:
"Captain, this is a hard case, I swear. Perhaps I am being taken by my own friends." No reply from the detectives.
Booth—"Well, give us a little time to consider."
[Illustration: Garrett's House, Where Booth Died—Sketched by W. N.Walton, for "Harper's Weekly" for May 30th, 1865]
Baker—"Very well. Take time."
Here ensued a long and eventful pause. What thronging memories it brought to Booth, we can only guess. In this little interval he made the resolve to die. But he was cool and steady to the end. Baker, after a lapse, hailed for the last time.
"Well, we have waited long enough; surrender your arms and come out, or we'll fire the barn."
Booth answered thus: "I am but a cripple, a one-legged man. Withdraw your forces one hundred yard from the door, and I will come. Give me a chance for my life, captain. I will never be taken alive."
Baker—"We did not come here to fight, but to capture you. I say again, appear, or the barn shall be fired."
Then with a long breath, which could be heard outside, Booth cried in sudden calmness, still invisible, as were to him his enemies:
"Well, then, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me."
There was a pause repeated, broken by low discussions within between Booth and his associate, the former saying, as if in answer to some remonstrance or appeal, "Get away from me. You are a damned coward, and mean to leave me in my distress; but go, go. I don't want you to stay. I won't haveyoustay." Then he shouted aloud:
"There's a man inside who wants to surrender."
Baker—"Let him come, if he will bring his arms."
Here Harold, rattling at the door, said: "Let me out; open the door; I want to surrender."
Baker—"Hand out your arms, then."
Harold—"I have not got any."
Baker—"You are the man that carried the carbine yesterday; bring it out."
Harold—"I haven't got any."
This was said in a whining tone, and with an almost visible shiver. Booth cried aloud, at this hesitation: "He hasn't got any arms; they are mine, and I have kept them."
Baker—"Well, he carried the carbine, and must bring it out."
Booth—"On the word and honor of a gentleman, he has no arms with him.They are mine, and I have got them."
At this time Harold was quite up to the door, within whispering distance of Baker. The latter told him to put out his hands to be handcuffed, at the same time drawing open the door a little distance. Harold thrust forth his hands, when Baker, seizing him, jerked him into the night, and straightway delivered him over to a deputation of cavalrymen. The fellow began to talk of his innocence and plead so noisily that Conger threatened to gag him unless he ceased. Then Booth made his last appeal, in the same clear unbroken voice:
"Captain, give me a chance. Draw off your men and I will fight them singly. I could have killed you six times to-night, but I believe you to be a brave man, and would not murder you. Give a lame man a show."
It was too late for parley. All this time Booth's voice had sounded from the middle of the barn.
Ere he ceased speaking, Colonel Conger, slipping around to the rear, drew some loose straws through a crack, and lit a match upon them. They were dry and blazed up in an instant, carrying a sheet of smoke and flame through the parted planks, and heaving in a twinkling a world of light and heat upon the magazine within. The blaze lit up the black recesses of the great barn till every wasp's nest and cobweb in the roof was luminous, flinging streaks of red and violet across the tumbled farm gear in the corner, plows, harrows, hoes, rakes, sugar mills, and making every separate grain in the high bin adjacent, gleam like a mote of precious gold. They tinged the beams, the upright columns, the barricades, where clover and timothy, piled high, held toward the hot incendiary their separate straws for the funeral pile. They bathed the murderer's retreat in beautiful illumination, and while in bold outline his figure stood revealed, they rose like an impenetrable wall to guard from sight the hated enemy who lit them. Behind the blaze, with his eye to a crack, Conger saw Wilkes Booth standing upright upon a crutch. He likens him at this instant to his brother Edwin, whom he says he so much resembled that he half believed, for the moment the whole pursuit to have been a mistake. At the gleam of the fire Wilkes dropped his crutch, and, carbine in both hands, crept up to the spot to espy the incendiary and shoot him dead. His eyes were lustrous like fever, and swelled and rolled in terrible beauty, while his teeth were fixed, and he wore the expression of one in the calmness before frenzy. In vain he peered with vengeance in his look; the blaze that made him visible concealed his enemy. A second he turned glaring at the fire, as if to leap upon it and extinguish it, but it had made such headway that this was a futile impulse and he dismissed it. As calmly as upon the battlefield a veteran stands amidst the hail of ball and shell, and plunging iron, Booth turned at a man's stride, and pushed for the door, carbine in poise, and the last resolve of death, which we name despair, set on his high, bloodless forehead.
As so he dashed, intent to expire not unaccompanied, a disobedient sergeant at an eye-hole drew upon him the fatal bead. The barn was all glorious with conflagration and in the beautiful ruin this outlawed man strode like all that, we know of wicked valor, stern in the face of death. A shock, a shout, a gathering up of his splendid figure as if to overtip the stature God gave him, and John Wilkes Booth fell headlong to the floor, lying there in a heap, a little life remaining.
"He has shot himself!" cried Baker, unaware of the source of the report, and rushing in, he grasped his arms to guard against any feint or strategy. A moment convinced him that further struggle with the prone flesh was useless. Booth did not move, nor breathe, nor gasp. Conger and two sergeants now entered, and taking up the body, they bore it in haste from the advancing flame, and laid it without upon the grass, all fresh with heavenly dew.
"Water," cried Conger, "bring water."
When this was dashed into his face, he revived a moment and stirred his lips. Baker put his ear close down, and heard him say:
"Tell mother—and die—for my country."
They lifted him again, the fire encroaching in hotness upon them and placed him on the porch before the dwelling.
A mattrass was brought down, on which they placed him and propped his head, and gave him water and brandy. The women of the household, joined meantime by another son, who had been found in one of the corn cribs, watching as he said, to see that Booth and Harold did not steal the horses, were nervous, but prompt to do the dying man all kindnesses, although waived sternly back by the detectives. They dipped a rag in brandy and water, and this being put between Booth's teeth he sucked it greedily. When he was able to articulate again, he muttered to Mr. Baker the same words, with an addenda. "Tell mother I died for my country. I thought I did for the best." Baker repeated this, saying at the same time "Booth, do I repeat it correctly." Booth nodded his head. By this time the grayness of dawn was approaching; moving figures inquisitively coming near were to be seen distinctly, and the cocks began to crow gutturally, though the barn was a hulk of blaze and ashes, sending toward the zenith a spiral line of dense smoke. The women became importunate that the troops might be ordered to extinguish the fire, which was spreading toward their precious corn-cribs. Not even death could banish the call of interest. Soldiers were sent to put out the fire, and Booth, relieved of the bustle around him, drew near to death apace. Twice he was heard to say, "kill me, kill me." His lips often moved but could complete no appreciable sound. He made once a motion which the quick eye of Conger understood to mean that his throat pained him. Conger put his finger there, when the dying man attempted to cough, but only caused the blood at his perforated neck to flow more, lively. He bled very little, although shot quite through, beneath and behind the ears, his collar being severed on both sides.
A soldier had been meanwhile despatched for a doctor, but the route and return were quite six miles, and the sinner was sinking fast. Still the women made efforts to get to see him, but were always rebuffed, and all the brandy they could find was demanded by the assassin, who motioned for strong drink every two minutes. He made frequent desires to be turned over, not by speech, but by gesture, and was alternately placed upon his back, belly and side. His tremendous vitality evidenced itself almost miraculously. Now and then, his heart would cease to throb, and his pulses would be as cold as a dead man's. Directly life would begin anew, the face would flush up effulgently, the eyes open and brighten, and soon relapsing, stillness re-asserted, would again be dispossessed by the same magnificent triumph of man over mortality. Finally the fussy little doctor arrived, in time to be useless. He probed the wound to see if the ball were not in it, and shook his head sagely, and talked learnedly.
Just at his coming Booth had asked to have his hands raised and shown him. They were so paralyzed that he did not know their location. When they were displayed he muttered, with a sad lethargy, "Useless, useless." These were the last words he ever uttered. As he began to die the sun rose and threw beams into all the tree-tops. It was of a man's height when the struggle of death twitched and fingered in the fading bravo's face. His jaw drew spasmodically and obliquely downward; his eyeballs rolled to-ward his feet, and began to swell; lividness, like a horrible shadow, fastened upon him, and, with a sort of gurgle and sudden check, he stretched his feet and threw his head back and gave up the ghost.
They sewed him up in a saddle blanket. This was his shroud; too like a soldier's. Harold, meantime, had been tied to a tree, but was now released for the march. Colonel Conger pushed on immediately for Washington; the cortege was to follow. Booth's only arms were his carbine knife, and two revolvers. They found about him bills of exchange, Canada money, and a diary. A venerable old negro living in the vicinity had the misfortune to possess a horse. This horse was a relic of former generations, and showed by his protruding ribs the general leanness of the land. He moved in an eccentric amble, and when put upon his speed was generally run backward. To this old negro's horse was harnessed a very shaky and absurd wagon, which rattled like approaching dissolution, and each part of it ran without any connection or correspondence with any other part. It had no tail-board, and its shafts were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent to the Potomac river, while the man he had murdered was moving in state across the mourning continent. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a set of fossil harness, and when it was backed to Garrett's porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides. Harold's legs were tied to stirrups, and he was placed in the centre of four murderous looking cavalrymen. The two sons of Garrett were also taken along, despite the sobs and petitions of the old folks and women, but the rebel captain who had given Booth a lift, got off amidst the night's agitations, and was not rearrested. So moved the cavalcade of retribution, with death in its midst, along the road to Port Royal. When the wagon started, Booth's wound till now scarcely dribbling, began to run anew. It fell through the crack of the wagon, dripping upon the axle, and spotting the road with terrible wafers. It stained the planks, and soaked the blankets; and the old negro, at a stoppage, dabbled his hands in it by mistake; he drew back instantly, with a shudder and stifled expletive, "Gor-r-r, dat'll never come off in de world; it's murderer's blood." He wrung his hands, and looked imploringly at the officers, and shuddered again: "Gor-r-r, I wouldn't have dat on me fur tousand, tousand dollars." The progress of the team was slow, with frequent danger of shipwreck altogether, but toward noon the cortege filed through Port Royal, where the citizens came out to ask the matter, and why a man's body, covered with sombre blankets, was going by with so great escort. They were told that it was a wounded confederate, and so held their tongues. The little ferry, again in requisition, took them over by squads, and they pushed from Port Conway to Bell Plain, which they reached in the middle of the afternoon. All the way the blood dribbled from the corpse in a slow, incessant, sanguine exudation. The old negro was niggardly dismissed with two paper dollars. The dead man untied and cast upon the vessel's dock, steam gotten up in a little while, and the broad Potomac shores saw this skeleton ship flit by, as the bloody sun threw gashes and blots of unhealthy light along the silver surface.
All the way associate with the carcass, went Harold, shuddering in so grim companionship, and in the awakened fears of his own approaching. ordeal, beyond which it loomed already, the gossamer fabric of a scaffold. He tried to talk for his own exoneration, saying he had ridden, as was his wont, beyond the East Branch, and returning, found Booth wounded, who begged him to be his companion. Of his crime he knew nothing, so help him God, &c. But nobody listened to him. All interest of crime, courage, and retribution centered in the dead flesh at his feet. At Washington, high and low turned out to look on Booth. Only a few were permitted to see his corpse for purposes of recognition. It was fairly preserved, though on one side of the face distorted, and looking blue like death, and wildly bandit-like, as if beaten by avenging winds.
Yesterday the Secretary of War, without instructions of any kind, committed to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, of the secret service, the stark corpse of J. Wilkes Booth. The secret service never fulfilled its volition more secretively. "What have you done with the body?" said I to Baker. "That is known" he answered, "to only one man living besides myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpeter comes shall the grave of Booth be discovered." And this is true. Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation's head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and once promising life—useless! useless!
[The annexed Letter, which has been cavilled at, as much as copied, is a rationale of the Conspiracy, combined from the Government's own officers. When it was written it was believed to be true: the evidence at the trial has confirmed much of it: I reprint it to show how men's ingenuities were at work to account for the conception and progress of the Plot.]
Washington, May 2.
Justice and fame are equally and simultaneously satisfied. The President is not yet in his sarcophagus, but all the conspirators against his life, with a minor exception or two, are in their prison cells waiting for the halter.
The dark and bloody plot against a good ruler's life is now so fully unraveled that I may make it plain to you. There is nothing to be gained by further waiting; the trials are proceeding; the evidence is mountain high. Within a week the national scaffold will have done its work, and be laid away forever. This prompt and necessary justice will signal the last public assassination in America. Borgia, and Medici, and Brinvilliers, have left no descendants on this side of the world.
The conspiracy was both the greatest and the smallest of our cycle. Narrowed in execution to a few, it was understood and connived at by a multitude. One man was its head and heart; its accessories were so numerous that the trouble is not whom to suspect, but whom not accuse. Damning as the result must be to the character of our race, it must be admitted, in the light of facts, that Americans are as secretive and as skillful plotters as any people in the world. The Rye House plot, never fully understood; the many schemes of Mazzini, never fastened upon him sufficiently well for implication, yield in extent, darkness and intricacy, to the republican plot against the President's life and those of his counselors. The police operations prove that the late murder as not a spasmodic and fitful crime, but long premeditated, and carried to consummation with as much cohesion and resolution as the murder of Allessandro de Medici or Henri Quatre.
I have been accused of cannonizing Booth. Much as I denounce and deprecate his crime—holding him to be worthy of all execration, and so seeped in blood that the excuses of a century will fail to lift him out of the atmosphere of common felons—I still, at every new developement, stand farther back in surprise and terror at the wonderful resources and extraordinary influence of one whom I had learned to consider a mere Thespian, full of sound, fury, and assertion.
Strange and anomalous as the facts may seem, John Wilkes Booth was the sole projector of the plot against the President which culminated in the taking of that good man's life. He had rolled under his tongue the sweet paragraphs of Shakspeare refering to Brutus, as had his father so well, that the old man named one son Junius Brutus, and the other John Wilkes, after the wild English agitator, until it became his ambition, like the wicked Lorenzino de Medici, to stake his life upon one stroke for fame, the murder of a ruler obnoxious to the South.
That Wilkes Booth was a southern man from the first may be accounted for upon grounds, of interest as well as of sympathy. It is insidious to find no higher incentive than appreciation, but on the stage this is the first and last motive; and as Edwin Booth made his success in the North and remained steadfast, Wilkes Booth was most truly applauded in the South, and became rebel. A false emotion of gratitude, as well as an impulse of mingled waywardness and gratitude, set John Wilkes's face from the first toward the North, and he burned to make his name a part of history, cried into fame by the applauses of the South.
He hung to his bloody suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest—that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin's negativeness. In other words, the idea was to be his own, as well us the crowning blow.
Booth shrank at first from murder, until another and less dangerous resolution failed. This was no less than the capture of the President's body, and its detention or transportation to the South. I do not rely on this assertion upon his sealed letter, where he avows it; there has been found upon a street within the city limits, a house belonging to one Mrs. Greene; mined and furnished with underground apartments, manacles and all the accessories to private imprisonment. Here the President, and as many as could be gagged and conveyed away with him, were to be concealed in the event of failure to run them into the confederacy. Owing to his failure to group around him as many men as he desired, Booth abandoned the project of kidnapping; but the house was discovered last week, as represented, ready to be blown up at a moment's notice.
It was at this time that Booth devised his triumphant route through the South. The dramatic element seems to have been never lacking in his design, and with all his base purposes he never failed to consider some subsequent notoriety to be enjoyed. He therefore shipped, before the end of 1864, his theatrical wardrobe from Canada to Nassau. After the commission of his crime he intended to reclaim it, and "star" through the South, drawing money as much by his crime as his abilities.
When Booth began "on his own responsibility," to hunt for accomplices, he found his theory at fault. The bold men he had dreamed of refused to join him in the rash attempt at kidnapping the President, and were too conscientious to meditate murder. All those who presented themselves were military men, unwilling to be subordinate to a civilian, and a mere play-actor, and the mortified bravo found himself therefore compelled to sink to a petty rank in the plot, or to make use of base and despicable assistants. His vanity found it easier to compound with the second alternative than the first.
Here began the first resolve, which, in its mere animal estate, we may name courage. Booth found that a tragedy in real life could no more be enacted without greasy-faced and knock-kneed supernumeraries than upon the mimic stage. Your "First Citizen," who swings a stave for Marc Antony, and drinks hard porter behind the flies is very like the bravo of real life, who murders between his cocktails at the nearest bar. Wilkes Booth had passed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink from the broader and ranker green-room of real life. He assembled around him, one by one, the cut-throats at whom his soul would have revolted, except that he had become, by resolve, a cut-throat in himself.
About this time certain gentlemen in Canada began to be unenviably known. I abstain from giving their names, because unaware of how far they seconded this crime, if at all. But they seconded as infamous things, such as cowardly raids from neutral territory into the states, bank robbings, lake pirating, city burning, counterfeiting, railway sundering, and the importation of yellow fever into peaceful and unoffending communities. I make no charges against those whom I do not know, but simply say that the confederate agents, Jacob Tompson, Larry McDonald, Clement Clay, and some others, had already accomplished enough villainy to make Wilkes Booth, on the first of the present year, believe that he had but to seek an interview with them.
He visited the provinces once certainly, and three times it is believed, stopping in Montreal at St. Lawrence Hall, and banking four hundred and fifty-five dollars odd at the Ontario bank. This was his own money. I have myself seen his bank-book with the single entry of this amount. It was found in the room of Atzerott, at Kirkwood's Hotel. From this visit, whatever encouragement Booth received, he continued in systematic correspondence with one or more of those agents down to the commission of his crime. I dare not say how far each of these agents was implicated. My personal conviction is that they were neither loth to the murder nor astonished when it had been done. They had money with discretion from the confederacy, though acting at discretion and outside of responsibility, and always, at every wild adventure, they instructed their dupes that each man took his life in his hand on every incursion into the north. So Beale took his, raiding on the great lakes. So Kennedy took his, on a midnight bonfire-tramp into the metropolis. So took the St. Albans raiders their lives in their palms, dashing into a peaceful town. And if these agents entertained Wilkes Booth's suggestion at all they plainly told him that he carried his life in his dagger's edge, and could expect from them neither aid nor exculpation.
Some one or all of these agents furnished Booth with a murderer. The fellow Wood or Payne, who stabbed Mr. Seward and was caught at Mrs. Surratt's house in Washington. He was one of three Kentucky brothers, all outlaws, and had himself, it is believed, accompanied one of his brothers, who is known to have been at St. Albans on the day of the bank-delivery. This Payne, besides being positively identified as the assassin of the Sewards, had no friends nor haunts in Washington. He was simply a dispatched murderer, and after the night of the crime, struck northward of the frontier, instead of southward in the company of Booth. The proof, of this will follow in the course of the article.
While I assert that the Canadian agents knew Booth and patted his back, calling him, like Macbeth, the "prince of cut-throats," I am equally certain that Booth's project was unknown in Richmond. No word, nor written line, no clue of any sort has been found attaching Booth to the confederate authorities. The most that can be urged to meet preposterous claims of this sort is, that out of the rebellion grew the murder; which is like attributing the measles to the creation of man. But McDonald and his party had money at discretion, and under their control the vilest fellows on the continent. Their personal influence over those errant ones amounted to omnipotence. Most of the latter were young and sanguine people, like Beale and Booth; their plots were made up at St. Catharine's, Toronto, and Montreal, and they have maintained since the war began, rebel mail routes between Canada and Richmond, leading directly passed Washington.
If Booth received no positive instructions, he was at any rate adjudged a man likely to be of use, and therefore introduced to the rebel agencies in and around Washington. Doubtless by direct letter, or verbal instruction, he received a password to the house of Mrs. Surratt.
Half applauded, half rebuffed by the rebel agents in Canada, Booth's impressions of his visit were just those which would whet him soonest for the tragedy. His vanity had been fed by the assurance that success depended upon himself alone, and that as he had the responsibility he would absorb the fame; and the method of correspondence was of that dark and mysterious shape which powerfully operated upon his dramatic temperament.
What could please an actor, and the son of an actor, better than to mingle as a principal in a real conspiracy, the aims of which were pseudo-patriotic, and the end so astounding that at its coming the whole globe would reel. Booth reasoned that the ancient world would not feel more sensitively the death of Julius Cęsar than the new the sudden taking off of Abraham Lincoln.
And so he grew into the idea of murder. It became his business thought. It was his recreation and his study. He had not worked half so hard for histrionic success as for his terrible graduation into an assassin. He had fought often on the boards, and seen men die in well-imitated horror, with flowing blood upon his keen sword's edge, and the strong stride of mimic victory with which he flourished his weapon at the closing of the curtain. He embraced conspiracy like an old diplomatist, and found in the woman and the spot subjects for emulation.
Southeast of Washington stretches a tapering peninsula, composed of four fertile counties, which at the remote tip make Point Lookout, and do not contain any town within them of more than a few hundred inhabitants. Tobacco has ruined the land of these, and slavery has ruined the people. Yet in the beginning they were of that splendid stock of Calvert and Lord Baltimore, but retain to-day only the religion of the peaceful founder. I mention it is an exceptional and remarkable fact, that every conspirator in custody is by education a Catholic. These are our most loyal citizens elsewhere, but the western shore of Maryland is a noxious and pestilential place for patriotism. The county immediately outside of the District of Columbia, to the south, is named Prince Gorgia's and the pleasantest village of this county, close to Washington, is called Surrattsville. This consists of a few cabins at a cross-road, surrounding a fine old hotel, the master whereof, giving the settlement his name, left the property to his wife, who for a long time carried it on with indifferent success. Having a son and several daughters, she moved to Washington soon after the beginning of the war and let the tavern to a trusty friend—one John Lloyd. Surrattsville has gained nothing in patronage or business from the war, except that it became at an early date, a rebel postoffice. The great secret mail from Matthias Creek, Virginia, to Port Tobacco, struck Surrattsville, and thence headed off to the east to Washington, going meanderingly north. Of this poet route Mrs. Surratt was a manageress; and John Lloyd, when he rented her hotel, assumed the responsibility of looking out for the mail, as well the duty of making Mrs. Surratt at home when she chose to visit him.
So Surrattsville only ten miles from Washington, has been throughout the war a sect of conspiracy. It was like a suburb of Richmond, reaching quite up to the rival capital; and though the few Unionists on the peninsula knew its reputation well enough, nothing of the sort came out until the murder.
Treason never found a better agent than Mrs. Surratt. She is a large, masculine, self-possessed female, mistress of her house, and as lithe a rebel as Belle Boyd or Mrs. Greenhough. She has not the flippantry and menace of the first, nor the social power of the second; but the rebellion has found no fitter agent.
At her country tavern and Washington home Booth was made welcome, and there began the muttered murder against the nation and mankind.
The acquaintance of Mrs. Surratt in Lower Maryland undoubtedly suggested to Booth the route of escape, and made him known to his subsequent accomplices. Last fall he visited the entire region, as far as Leonardstown, in St. Mary's county, professing to be in search of land but really hunting up confederates upon whom he could depend. At this time he bought a map, a fellow to which I have seen among Atzerott's effects, published at Buffalo for the rebel government, and marking at hap-hazard all the Maryland villages, but without tracing the highroads at all. The absence of these roads, it will be seen hereafter, very nearly misled Booth during his crippled flight.
It could not but have struck Booth that this isolated part of Maryland ignorant and rebel to the brim, without telegraph or railways, or direct stage routes, belted with swamps and broken by dense timber, afforded extraordinary opportunities for shelter and escape. Only the coast survey had any adequate map of it; it wasultima thuleto all intents, and treason might subsist in welcome upon it for a thousand years.
When Booth cast around him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control. The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration. This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed the whole lower portion of Maryland, and was therefore a geographer as well as a tool. His friends lived at every farmhouse between Washington and Leonardsville, and he was respectably enough connected, so as to make his association creditable as well as useful.
Harold, whose picture I have seen, is a dull-faced, shallow boy, smooth-haired, and provincial; he had no money nor employment, except that he clerked for a druggist a while, until he knew Wilkes Booth, who looked at him only once, and bought his soul for a smile. Harold was infatuated by Booth as a woman by a soldier. He copied his gait and tone, adopted his opinions, and was unhappy out of his society. Booth gave him money, mysteriously obtained, and together they made the acquaintance of young John Surratt, son of the conspiratress.
Young Surratt does not appear to have been a puissant spirit in the scheme; indeed, all design and influence therein was absorbed by Mrs. Surratt and Booth. The latter was the head and heart of the plot; Mrs. Surratt was his anchor, and the rest of the boys were disciples to Iscariot and Jezebel. John Surratt, a youth of strong Southern physiognomy, beardless and lanky, knew of the murder and connived at it. "Sam" Arnold and one McLaughlin were to have been parties to it, but backed out in the end. They all relied upon Mrs. Surratt, and took their "cues" from Wilkes Booth.
The conspiracy had its own time and kept its own counsel. Murder except among the principals, was seldom mentioned except by genteel implication. But they all publicly agreed that Mr. Lincoln ought to be shot, and that the North was a race of fratricides. Much was said of Brutus, and Booth repeated heroic passages to the delight of Harold, who learned them also, and wondered if he was not born to greatness.
In this growing darkness, where all rehearsed cold-hearted murder, Wilkes Booth grew great of stature. He had found a purpose consonant with his evil nature and bad influence over weak men; so he grew moodier, more vigilant, more plausible. By mien and temperament he was born to handle a stiletto. We have no face so markedly Italian; it would stand for Caesar Borgia any day in the year. All the rest were swayed or persuaded by Booth; his schemes were three in order:
1st. To kidnap the President and Cabinet, and run them South or blow them up.
2d. Kidnapping failed, to murder the President and the rest and seek shelter in the confederate capital.
3d. The rebellion failed, to be its avenger, and throw the country into consternation, while he escaped by the unfrequented parts of Maryland.
When this last resolution had been made, the plot was both contracted and extended. There were made two distinct circles of confidants—those aware of the meditated murder, and those who might shrink from murder, though willing accessories for a lesser object. Two colleagues for blood were at once accepted—Payne and Atzerott.
The former I have sketched; he is believed to have visited Washington once before, at Booth's citation; for the murder was at first fixed for the day of inauguration. Atzerott was a fellow of German descent, who had led a desperate life at Port Tobacco, where he was a house-painter. He had been a blockade-runner across the Potomac, and a mail-carrier. When Booth and Mrs. Surratt broke the design to him, with a suggestion that there was wealth in it, he embraced the offer at once, and bought a dirk and pistol. Payne also came from the North to Washington, and, as fate would have it, the President was announced to appear at Ford's theater in public. There the resolve of blood was reduced to a definite moment.
On the night before the crime Booth found on whom he could rely. John Surratt was sent northward by his mother on Thursday. Sam Arnold and McLaughlin, each of whom was to kill a cabinet officer, grew pigeon-livered and ran away. Harold true to his partiality, lingered around Booth to the end; Atzerott went so far as to take his knife and pistol to Kirkwood's, where President Johnson was stopping, and hid them under the bed. But either his courage failed, or a trifling accident deranged his plan. But Payne, a professional murderer, stood "game," and fought his way over prostrate figures to his sick victim's bed. There was great confusion and terror among the tacit and rash conspirators on Thursday night. They had looked upon the plot as of a melodrama, and found to their horror that John Wilkes Booth meant to do murder.
Six weeks before the murder, young John Surratt had taken two splendid repeating carbines to Surrattville and told John Lloyd to secret them.
The latter made a hole in the wainscotting and suspended them from strings, so that they fell within the plastered wall of the room below. On the very afternoon of the murder, Mrs. Surratt was driven to Surrattsville, and she told John Lloyd to have the carbines ready because they would be called for that night. Harold was made quartermaster, and hired the horses. He and Atzerott were mounted between 8 o'clock and the time of the murder, and riding about the streets together.
The whole party was prepared for a long ride, as their spurs and gauntlets show. It may have been their design to ride in company to the Lower Potomac, and by their numbers exact subsistence and transportation; but all edifices of murder lack a corner stone. We only know that Booth ate and talked well during the day; that he never seemed so deeply involved in 'oil,' and that there is a hiatus between his supper here and his appearance at Ford's theater.
Lloyd, I may interpolate, ordered his wife a few days before the murder to go on a visit to Allen's Fresh. She says she does not know why she was so sent away, but swears that it is so. Harold, three weeks before the murder, visited Port Tobacco, and said that the next time the boys heard of him he would be in Spain; he added that with Spain there was no extradition treaty. He said at Surrattsville that he meant to make a barrel of money, or his neck would stretch.
Atzerott said that if he ever came to Port Tobacco again he would be rich enough to buy the whole place.
Wilkes Booth told a friend to go to Ford's on Friday night and see the best acting in the world.
At Ford's theater, on Friday night, there were many standers in the neighborhood of the door, and along the dress circle in the direction of the private box where the President sat.
The play went on pleasantly, though Mr. Wilkes Booth an observer of the audience, visited the stage and took note of the positions. His alleged associate, the stage carpenter, then received quiet orders to clear the passage by the wings from the prompter's post to the stage door. All this time, Mr. Lincoln, in his family circle, unconscious of the death that crowded fast upon him, watched the pleasantry and smiled and felt heartful of gentleness.
Suddenly there was a murmur near the audience door, as of a man speaking above his bound. He said:
"Nine o'clock and forty-five minutes!"
These words were reiterated from mouth to mouth until they passed the theater door, and were heard upon the sidewalk.
Directly a voice cried, in the same slightly-raised monotone:
"Nine o'clock and fifty minutes!"
This also passed from man to man, until it touched the street like a shudder.
"Nine o'clock and fifty-five minutes!" said the same relentless voice, after the next interval, each of which narrowed to a lesser span the life of the good President.
Ten o'clock here sounded, and conspiring echo said in reverberation:
"Ten o'clock!"
So like a creeping thing, from lip to lip, went:
"Ten o'clock and five minutes."
(An interval.)
"Ten o'clock and ten minutes!"
At this instant Wilkes Booth appeared in the door of the theater, and the men who had repeated the time so faithfully and so ominously scattered at his coming, as at some warning phantom. Fifteen minutes afterwards the telegraph wires were cut.
All this is so dramatic that I fear to excite a laugh when I write it.But it is true and proven, and I do not say it but report it.
All evil deeds go wrong. While the click of the pistol, taking the President's life, went like a pang through the theater, Payne was spilling blood in Mr. Seward's house from threshold to sick chamber. But Booth's broken leg delayed him or made him lose his general calmness and he and Harold left Payne no to his fate.
I have not adverted to the hole bored with a gimlet in the entry door of Mr. Lincoln's box, and cut out with a penknife. The theory that the pistol-ball of Booth passed through this hole is exploded. And the stage carpenter may have to answer for this little orifice with all his neck. For when Booth leaped from the box he strode straight across the stage by the footlights, reaching the prompter's post, which is immediately behind that private box opposite Mr. Lincoln. From this box to the stage door in the rear, the passage-way leads behind the ends of the scenes, and if generally either closest up by one or more withdrawn scenes, or so narrow that only by doubling and turning sidewise can one pass along. On this fearful night, however, the scenes were so adjusted to the murderer's design that he had a free aisle from the foot of the stage to the exit door.
Within fifteen minutes after the murder the wires were severed entirely around the city, excepting only a secret wire for government uses, which leads to Old Point. I am told that by this wire the government reached the fortifications around Washington, first telegraphing all the way to Old Point, and then back to the outlying forts. This information comes to me from so many creditable channels that I must concede it.
Payne, having, as he thought, made an end of Mr. Seward—which would have been the case but for Robinson, the nurse—mounted his horse, and attempted to find. Booth. But the town was in alarm, and he galloped at once for the open country, taking as he imagined, the proper road for the East Branch. He rode at a killing pace, and when near Fort Lincoln, on the Baltimore pike, his horse threw him headlong. Afoot and bewildered, he resolved to return to the city, whose lights he could plainly see; but before doing so ho concealed himself some time, and made some almost absurd efforts to disguise himself. Cutting a cross section from the woolen undershirt which covered his muscular arm, he made a rude cap of it, and threw away his bloody coat. This has since been found in the woods, and blood has been found also on his bosom and sleeves. He also spattered himself plentifully with mud and clay, and, taking an abandoned pick from the deserted intrenchments near by, he struck at once for Washington.
By the providence which always attends murder, he reached Mrs. Surratt's door just as the officers of the government were arresting her. They seized Payne at once, who had an awkward lie to urge in his defense—that he had come there to dig a trench. That night he dug a trench deep and broad enough for both of them to lie in forever. They washed his hands, and found them soft and womanish; his pockets contained tooth and nail brushes and a delicate pocket knife. All this apparel consorted ill with his assumed character. He is, without doubt, Mr. Seward's attempted murderer.
Coarse, and hard, and calm, Mrs. Surratt shut up her house after the murder, and waited with her daughters till the officers came. She was imperturbable, and rebuked her girls for weeping, and would have gone to jail like a statue, but that in her extremity, Payne knocked at her door. He had come, he said, to dig a ditch for Mrs. Surratt, whom he very well knew. But Mrs. Surratt protested that she had ever seen the man at all, and had no ditch to clean.
"How fortunate, girls," she said, "that these officers are here; this man might have murdered us all."
Her effrontery stamps her as worthy of companionship with Booth. Payne has been identified by a lodger of Mrs. Surratt's, as having twice visited the house under the name of Wood. The girls will render valuable testimony in the trial. If John Surratt were in custody the links would be complete.
Atzerott had a room almost directly over Vice-President Johnson's. He had all the materials to do murder, but lost spirit or opportunity. He ran away so hastily that all his arms and baggage were discovered; a tremendous bowie-knife and a Colt's cavalry revolver were found between the mattresses of his bed. Booth's coat was also found there, showing conspired flight in company, and in it three boxes of cartridges, a map of Maryland, gauntlet for riding, a spur and a handkerchief marked with the name of Booth's mother—a mother's souvenir for a murderer's pocket!
Atzerott fled alone, and was found at the house of his uncle in Montgomery county. I do not know that any instrument of murder has ever made me thrill as when I drew this terrible bowie-knife from its sheath. Major O'Bierne, of New-York, was the instigator of Atzerott's discovery and arrest.
I come now to the ride out of the city by the chief assassin and his dupe. Harold met Booth immediately after the crime in the next street, and they rode at a gallop past the Patent Office and over Capitol Hill.
As they crossed the Eastern branch at Uniontown, Booth gave his proper name to the officer at the bridge. This, which would seem to have been foolish, was, in reality, very shrewd. The officers believed that one of Booth's accomplices had given this name in order to put them out of the real Booth's track. So they made efforts elsewhere, and so Booth got a start. At midnight, precisely, the two horsemen stopped at Surrattsville, Booth remaining on his nag while Harold descended and knocked lustily at the door. Lloyd, the landlord, came down at once, when Harold pushed past him into the bar, and obtained a bottle of whiskey, some of which he gave to Booth immediately. While Booth was drinking, Harold went up stairs and brought down one of the carbines. Lloyd started to get the other, but Harold said:
"We don't want it; Booth has broken his leg and can't carry it."
So the second carbine remained in the hall, where the officers afterward found it.
As the two horsemen started to go off, Booth cried out to Lloyd:
"Do you want to hear some news?"
"I don't care much about it," cried Lloyd, by his own account.
"We have murdered," said Booth, "the President and Secretary of State!"
And with this horrible confession, Booth and Harold dashed away in the midnight, across Prince George's county.
On Saturday, before sunrise, Booth and Harold, who had ridden all night without stopping elsewhere, reached the house of Dr. Mudd, three miles from Bryantown. They contracted with him for twenty-five dollars in greenbacks to set the broken leg. Harold, who knew Dr. Mudd, introduced Booth under another name, and stated that he had fallen from his horse during the night. The doctor remarked of Booth that he draped the lower part of his face while the leg was being set; he was silent, and in pain. Having no splits in the house, they split up an old-fashioned wooden band-box and prepared them. The doctor was assisted by an Englishman, who at the same time began to hew out a pair of crutches. The inferior bone of the left leg was broken vertically across, and because vertically it did not yield when the crippled man walked upon it.
The riding boot of Booth had to be cut from his foot; within were the words "J. Wilkes." The doctor says he did not notice these, but that visual defect may cost him his neck. The two men waited around the house all day, but toward evening they slipped their horses from the stable and rode away in the direction of Allen's Fresh.
Below Bryantown run certain deep and slimy swamps, along the belt of these Booth and Harold picked up a negro named Swan, who volunteered to show them the road for two dollars; they gave him five more to show them the route to Allen's Fresh, but really wished, as their actions intimated, to gain the house of one Sam. Coxe, a notorious rebel, and probably well advised of the plot. They reached the house at midnight. It is a fine dwelling, one of the best in Maryland. And after hallooing for some time, Coxe came down to the door himself. As soon as he opened it and beheld who the strangers were, he instantly blew out a candle he held in his hand, and without a word pulled them into the house, the negro remaining in the yard. The confederates remained in Coxe's house till 4 A. M., during which time, the negro saw them drink and eat heartily; but when they reappeared they spoke in a loud tone, so that Swan could hear them, against the hospitality of Coxe. All this was meant to influence the darkey; but their motives were as apparent as their words. He conducted them three miles further on, when they told him that now they knew the way, and giving him five dollars more—making twelve in all—told him to go back.