The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth

By George Alfred Townsend

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Title: The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth

Author: George Alfred Townsend

Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6628]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on January 5, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English


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THE LIFE, CRIME, AND CAPTURE

OF

JOHN WILKES BOOTH,

WITH A FULL SKETCH OF THE

Conspiracy of which he was the Leader,

AND THE

PURSUIT, TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF HIS ACCOMPLICES.


BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND,

A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.




[Illustration: THE LIFE, CRIME, AND CAPTURE OF John Wilkes Booth AND THE
PURSUIT, TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF HIS ACCOMPLICES.]




EXPLANATORY.

One year ago the writer of the letters which follow, visited the Battle
Field of Waterloo. In looking over many relics of the combat preserved
in the Museum there, he was particularly interested in the files of
journals contemporary with the action. These contained the Duke of
Wellington's first despatch announcing the victory, the reports of the
subordinate commanders, and the current gossip as to the episodes and
hazards of the day.

The time will come when remarkable incidents of these our times will be
a staple of as great curiosity as the issue of Waterloo. It is an
incident without a precedent on this side of the globe, and never to be
repeated.

Assassination has made its last effort to become indigenous here. The
public sentiment of Loyalist and Rebel has denounced it: the world has
remarked it with uplifted hands and words of execration. Therefore, as
long as history shall hold good, the murder of the President will be a
theme for poesy, romance and tragedy. We who live in this consecrated
time keep the sacred souvenirs of Mr. Lincoln's death in our possession;
and the best of these are the news letters descriptive of his
apotheosis, and the fate of the conspirators who slew him.

I represented the _World_ newspaper at Washington during the whole of
those exciting weeks, and wrote their occurrences fresh from the mouths
of the actors. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865,

By DICK & FITZGERALD,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the
Southern District of New York.




PREFATORY.

It has seemed fitting to Messrs. DICK & FITZGERALD to reproduce the
_World_ letters, as a keepsake for the many who received them kindly.
The Sketches appended were conscientiously written, and whatever
embellishments they may seem to have grew out of the stirring
events,--not out of my fancy.

Subsequent investigation has confirmed the veracity even of their
speculations. I have arranged them, but have not altered them; if they
represent nothing else, they do carry with them the fever and spirit of
the time. But they do not assume to be literal history: We live too
close to the events related to decide positively upon them. As a
brochure of the day,--nothing more,--I give these Sketches of a
Correspondent to the public.

G. A. T.




THE LIFE, CRIME, AND CAPTURE

OF

JOHN WILKES BOOTH.




LETTER I.

THE MURDER.


Washington, April 17.

Some very deliberate and extraordinary movements were made by a handsome
and extremely well-dressed young man in the city of Washington last
Friday. At about half-past eleven o'clock A. M., this person, whose name
is J. Wilkes Booth, by profession an actor, and recently engaged in oil
speculations, sauntered into Ford's Theater, on Tenth, between E and F
streets, and exchanged greetings with the man at the box-office. In the
conversation which ensued, the ticket agent informed Booth that a box
was taken for Mr. Lincoln and General Grant, who were expected to visit
the theater, and contribute to the benefit of Miss Laura Keene, and
satisfy the curiosity of a large audience. Mr. Booth went away with a
jest, and a lightly-spoken "Good afternoon." Strolling down to
Pumphreys' stable, on C street, in the rear of the National Hotel, he
engaged a saddle horse, a high-strung, fast, beautiful bay mare, telling
Mr. Pumphreys that he should call for her in the middle of the
afternoon.

From here he went to the Kirkwood Hotel, on the corner of Pennsylvania
avenue and Twelfth street, where, calling for a card and a sheet of
notepaper, he sat down and wrote upon the first as follows:

_For Mr. Andrew Johnson_:--

I don't wish to disturb you; are you at home?

J. W. Booth.

To this message, which was sent up by the obliging clerk, Mr. Johnson
responded that he was very busily engaged. Mr. Booth smiled, and turning
to his sheet of note-paper, wrote on it. The fact, if fact it is, that
he had been disappointed in not obtaining an examination of the
Vice-President's apartment and a knowledge of the Vice-President's
probable whereabouts the ensuing evening, in no way affected his
composure. The note, the contents of which are unknown, was signed and
sealed within a few moments. Booth arose, bowed to an acquaintance, and
passed into the street. His elegant person was seen on the avenue a few
minutes, and was withdrawn into the Metropolitan Hotel.

At 4 P. M., he again appeared at Pumphreys' livery stable, mounted the
mare he had engaged, rode leisurely up F street, turned into an alley
between Ninth And Tenth streets, and thence into an alley reloading to
the rear of Ford's Theater, which fronts on Tenth street, between E and
F streets. Here he alighted and deposited the mare in a small stable off
the alley, which he had hired sometime before for the accommodation of a
saddle-horse which he had recently sold. Mr. Booth soon afterward
retired from the stable, and is supposed to have refreshed himself at a
neighboring bar-room.

At 8 o'clock the same evening, President Lincoln and Speaker Colfax sat
together in a private room at the White House, pleasantly conversing.
General Grant, with whom the President had engaged to attend Ford's
Theater that evening, had left with his wife for Burlington, New-Jersey,
in the 6 o'clock train. After this departure Mr. Lincoln rather
reluctantly determined to keep his part of the engagement, rather than
to disappoint his friends and the audience. Mrs. Lincoln, entering the
room and turning to Mr. Colfax, said, in a half laughing, half serious
way, "Well, Mr. Lincoln, are you going to the theater with me or not?"
"I suppose I shall have to go, Colfax," said the President, and the
Speaker took his leave in company with Major Rathbone, of the
Provost-Marshal General's office, who escorted Miss Harris, daughter of
Senator Harris, of New York. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln reached Ford's Theater
at twenty minutes before 9 o'clock.

The house was filled in every part with a large and brilliantly attired
audience. As the presidential party ascended the stairs, and passed
behind the dress circle to the entrance of the private box reserved for
them, the whole assemblage, having in mind the recent Union victories,
arose, cheered, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and manifesting every
other accustomed sign of enthusiasm. The President, last to enter the
box, turned before doing so, and bowed a courteous acknowledgment of his
reception--At the moment of the President's arrival, Mr. Hawks, one of
the actors, performing the well-known part of Dundreary, had exclaimed:
"This reminds me of a story, as Mr. Lincoln says." The audience forced
him, after the interruption, to tell the story over again. It evidently
pleased Mr. Lincoln, who turned laughingly to his wife and made a remark
which was not overheard.

[Illustration: Scene of the Assassination.

_X_ President's Position. _A_ The course of the Assassin after the
Murder. _BB_ Movable partition not in use on the night of the
Assassination. _D_ Door through which the Assassin looked in taking aim.
_C_ Closed door through which pistol ball was fired.]


The box in which the President sat consisted of two boxes turned into
one, the middle partition being removed, as on all occasions when a
state party visited the theater. The box was on a level with the dress
circle; about twelve feet above the stage. There were two entrances--the
door nearest to the wall having been closed and locked; the door nearest
the balustrades of the dress circle, and at right angles with it, being
open and left open, after the visitors had entered. The interior was
carpeted, lined with crimson paper, and furnished with a sofa covered
with crimson velvet, three arm chairs similarly covered, and six
cane-bottomed chairs. Festoons of flags hung before the front of the box
against a background of lace.

President Lincoln took one of the arm-chairs and seated himself in the
front of the box, in the angle nearest the audience, where, partially
screened from observation, he had the best view of what was transpiring
on the stage. Mrs. Lincoln sat next to him, and Miss Harris in the
opposite angle nearest the stage. Major Rathbone sat just behind Mrs.
Lincoln and Miss Harris. These four were the only persons in the box.

The play proceeded, although "Our American Cousin," without Mr. Sothern,
has, since that gentleman's departure from this country, been justly
esteemed a very dull affair. The audience at Ford's, including Mrs.
Lincoln, seemed to enjoy it very much. The worthy wife of the President
leaned forward, her hand upon her husband's knee, watching every scene
in the drama with amused attention. Even across the President's face at
intervals swept a smile, robbing it of its habitual sadness.

About the beginning of the second act, the mare, standing in the stable
in the rear of the theater, was disturbed in the midst of her meal by
the entrance of the young man who had quitted her in the afternoon. It
is presumed that she was saddled and bridled with exquisite care.

Having completed these preparations, Mr. Booth entered the theater by
the stage door; summoned one of the scene shifters, Mr. John Spangler,
emerged through the same door with that individual, leaving the door
open, and left the mare in his hands to be held until he (Booth) should
return. Booth who was even more fashionably and richly dressed than
usual, walked thence around to the front of the theater, and went in.
Ascending to the dress circle, he stood for a little time gazing around
upon the audience and occasionally upon the stage in his usual graceful
manner. He was subsequently observed by Mr. Ford, the proprietor of the
theater, to be slowly elbowing his way through the crowd that packed the
rear of the dress circle toward the right side, at the extremity of
which was the box where Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and their companions were
seated. Mr. Ford casually noticed this as a slightly extraordinary
symptom of interest on the part of an actor so familiar with the routine
of the theater and the play.

The curtain had arisen on the third act, _Mrs. Mountchessington_ and
_Asa Trenchard_ were exchanging vivacious stupidities, when a young man,
so precisely resembling the one described as J. Wilkes Booth that be is
asserted to be the same, appeared before the open door of the
President's box, and prepared to enter.

The servant who attended Mr. Lincoln said politely, "this is the
President's box, sir, no one is permitted to enter." "I am a senator,"
responded the person, "Mr. Lincoln has sent for me." The attendant gave
way, and the young man passed into the box.

As he appeared at the door, taking a quick, comprehensive glance at the
interior, Major Rathbone arose. "Are you aware, sir," he said,
courteously, "upon whom you are intruding? This is the President's box,
and no one is admitted." The intruder answered not a word. Fastening his
eyes upon Mr. Lincoln, who had half turned his head to ascertain what
caused the disturbance, he stepped quickly back without the door.

Without this door there was an eyehole, bored it is presumed on the
afternoon of the crime, while the theater was deserted by all save a few
mechanics. Glancing through this orifice, John Wilkes Booth espied in a
moment the precise position of the President; he wore upon his wrinkling
face the pleasant embryo of an honest smile, forgetting in the mimic
scene the splendid successes of our arms for which he was responsible,
and the history he had filled so well.

The cheerful interior was lost to J. Wilkes Booth. He did not catch the
spirit of the delighted audience, of the flaming lamps flinging
illumination upon the domestic foreground and the gaily set stage. He
only cast one furtive glance upon the man he was to slay, and thrusting
one hand in his bosom, another in his skirt pocket, drew forth
simultaneously his deadly weapons. His right palm grasped a Derringer
pistol, his left a dirk.

Then, at a stride, he passed the threshold again, levelled his arm at
the President and bent the trigger.

A keen quick report and a puff of white smoke,--a close smell of powder
and the rush of a dark, imperfectly outlined figure,--and the
President's head dropped upon his shoulders: the ball was in his brain.

[Illustration: Map. The Theatre and its Surroundings.

_A_ Public School. _B_ Herndon House. _C_ Only vacant lot communicating
with the Alley. _D_ Only alley outlet to F street. _E_ Bank. _X_
Restaurant. _G_ Newspaper Office. _H_ Model House. _I_ House to which
the President was taken. _K_ Alley through which the Murderer escaped.]

The movements of the assassin were from henceforth quick as the
lightning, he dropped his pistol on the floor, and drawing a
bowie-knife, struck Major Rathbone, who opposed him, ripping through his
coat from the shoulder down, and inflicting a severe flesh wound in his
arm. He leaped then upon the velvet covered balustrade at the front of
the box, between Mrs. Lincoln and Miss Harris, and, parting with both
hands the flags that drooped on either side, dropped to the stage
beneath. Arising and turning full upon the audience, with the knife
lifted in his right hand above his head, he shouted "_Sic, semper
tyrannis_--Virginia is avenged!" Another instant he had fled across the
stage and behind the scenes. Colonel J. B. Stewart, the only person in
the audience who seemed to comprehend the deed he had committed, climbed
from his seat near the orchestra to the stage, and followed close
behind. The assassin was too fleet and too desperate, that fury
incarnate, meeting Mr. Withers, the leader of the orchestra, just behind
the scenes, had stricken him aside with a blow that fortunately was not
a wound; overturning Miss Jenny Gourlay, an actress, who came next in
his path, he gained, without further hindrance, the back door previously
left open at the rear of the theater; rushed through it; leaped upon the
horse held by Mr. Spangler, and without vouchsafing that person a word
of information, rode out through the alley leading into F street, and
thence rapidly away. His horse's hoofs might almost have been heard amid
the silence that for a few seconds dwelt in the interior of the theater.

[Illustration: _A_ Miss Laura Keene's Position. _D_ Movable partition
wall not in place on Friday. _P_ Position of the President. _X_ Flats.
_B_ Dark Passage-way--Position of Sentry. _E_ Exit, or Stage Door. _MM_
Entrance to Box. _CCC_ Entrance to Dress Circle, _H_ Position of Booth's
Horse.]

Then Mrs. Lincoln screamed, Miss Harris cried for water, and the full
ghastly truth broke upon all--"The President is murdered!" The scene
that ensued was as tumultuous and terrible as one of Dante's pictures of
hell. Some women fainted, others uttered piercing shrieks, and cries for
vengeance and unmeaning shouts for help burst from the mouths of men.
Miss Laura Keene, the actress, proved herself in this awful time as
equal to sustain a part in real tragedy as to interpret that of the
stage. Pausing one moment before the footlights to entreat the audience
to be calm, she ascended the stairs in the rear of Mr. Lincoln's box,
entered it, took the dying President's head in her lap, bathed it with
the water she had brought, and endeavoured to force some of the liquid
through the insensible lips. The locality of the wound was at first
supposed to be in the breast. It was not until after the neck and
shoulders had been bared and no mark discovered, that the dress of Miss
Keene, stained with blood, revealed where the ball had penetrated.

This moment gave the most impressive episode in the history of the
Continent.

The Chief Magistrate of thirty, millions of people--beloved, honored,
revered,--lay in the pent up closet of a play-house, dabbling with his
sacred blood the robes of an actress.

As soon as the confusion and crowd was partially overcome, the form of
the President was conveyed from the theater to the residence of Mr.
Peterson, on the opposite side of Tenth street. Here upon a bed, in a
little hastily prepared chamber, it was laid and attended by
Surgeon-General Barnes and other physicians, speedily summoned.

In the meanwhile the news spread through the capital, as if borne on
tongues of flame. Senator Sumner, hearing at his residence, of the
affair took a carriage and drove at a gallop to the White House, when he
heard where it had taken place, to find Robert Lincoln and other members
of the household still unaware of it. Both drove to Ford's Theater, and
were soon at the President's bedside. Secretary Stanton and the other
members of the cabinet were at hand almost as soon. A vast crowd,
surging up Pennsylvania avenue toward Willard's Hotel, cried, "The
President is shot!" "President Lincoln is murdered." Another crowd
sweeping down the avenue met the first with the tidings, "Secretary
Seward has been assassinated in bed." Instantly a wild apprehension of
an organized conspiracy and of other murders took possession of the
people. The shout "to arms!" was mingled with the expressions of sorrow
and rage that everywhere filled the air. "Where is General Grant?" or
"where is Secretary Stanton!" "Where are the rest of the cabinet?" broke
from thousands of lips. A conflagration of fire is not half so terrible
as was the conflagration of passion that rolled through the streets and
houses of Washington on that awful night.

The attempt on the life of Secretary Seward was perhaps as daring, if
not so dramatic, as the assassination of the President. At 9:20 o'clock
a man, tall, athletic, and dressed in light coloured clothes, alighted
from a horse in front of Mr. Seward's residence in Madison place, where
the secretary was lying, very feeble from his recent injuries. The
house, a solid three-story brick building, was formerly the old
Washington Club-house. Leaving his horse standing, the stranger rang at
the door, and informed the servant who admitted him that he desired to
see Mr. Seward. The servant responded that Mr. Seward was very ill, and
that no visitors were admitted. "But I am a messenger from Dr. Verdi,
Mr. Seward's physician; I have a prescription which I must deliver to
him myself." The servant still demurring, the stranger, without further
parley, pushed him aside and ascended the stairs. Moving to the right,
he proceeded towards Mr. Seward's room, and was about to enter it, when
Mr. Frederick Seward appeared from an opposite doorway and demanded his
business. He responded in the same manner as to the servant below, but
being met with a refusal, suddenly closed the controversy by striking
Mr. Seward a severe and perhaps mortal blow across the forehead with the
butt of a pistol. As the first victim fell, Major Seward, another and
younger son of the secretary, emerged from his father's room. Without a
word the man drew a knife and struck the major several blows with it,
rushing into the chamber as he did so; then, after dealing the nurse a
horrible wound across the bowels, he sprang to the bed upon which the
secretary lay, stabbing him once in the face and neck. Mr. Seward arose
convulsively and fell from the bed to the floor. Turning and brandishing
his knife anew, the assassin fled from the room, cleared the prostrate
form of Frederick Seward in the hall, descended the stairs in three
leaps, and was out of the door and upon his horse in an instant. It is
stated by a person who saw him mount that, although he leaped upon his
horse with most unseemly haste, he trotted away around the corner of the
block with circumspect deliberation.

Around both the house on Tenth street and the residence of Secretary
Seward, as the fact of both tragedies became generally known, crowds
soon gathered so vast and tumultuous that military guards scarcely
sufficed to keep them from the doors.

The room to which the President had been conveyed is on the first floor,
at the end of the hall. It is only fifteen feet square, with a Brussels
carpet, papered with brown, and hung with a lithograph of Rosa Bonheur's
"Horse Fair," an engraved copy of Herring's "Village Blacksmith," and
two smaller ones, of "The Stable" and "The Barn Yard," from the same
artist. A table and bureau, spread with crotchet work, eight chairs and
the bed, were all the furniture. Upon this bed, a low walnut
four-poster, lay the dying President; the blood oozing from the
frightful wound in his head and staining the pillow. All that the
medical skill of half a dozen accomplished surgeons could do had been
done to prolong a life evidently ebbing from a mortal hurt.

Secretary Stanton, just arrived from the bedside of Mr. Seward, asked
Surgeon-General Barnes what was Mr. Lincoln's condition. "I fear, Mr.
Stanton, that there is no hope." "O, no, general; no, no;" and the man,
of all others, apparently strange to tears, sank down beside the bed,
the hot, bitter evidences of an awful sorrow trickling through his
fingers to the floor. Senator Sumner sat on the opposite side of the
bed, holding one of the President's hands in his own, and sobbing with
kindred grief. Secretary Welles stood at the foot of the bed, his face
hidden, his frame shaken with emotion. General Halleck, Attorney-General
Speed, Postmaster-General Dennison, M. B. Field, Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury, Judge Otto, General Meigs, and others, visited the chamber
at times, and then retired. Mrs. Lincoln--but there is no need to speak
of her. Mrs. Senator Dixon soon arrived, and remained with her through
the night. All through the night, while the horror-stricken crowds
outside swept and gathered along the streets, while the military and
police were patrolling and weaving a cordon around the city; while men
were arming and asking each other, "What victim next?" while the
telegraph was sending the news from city to city over the continent, and
while the two assassins were speeding unharmed upon fleet horses far
away--his chosen friends watched about the death-bed of the highest of
the nation. Occasionally Dr. Gurley, pastor of the church where Mr.
Lincoln habitually attended, knelt down in prayer. Occasionally Mrs.
Lincoln and her sons, entered, to find no hope and to go back to
ceaseless weeping. Members of the cabinet, senators, representatives,
generals, and others, took turns at the bedside. Chief-Justice Chase
remained until a late hour, and returned in the morning. Secretary
McCulloch remained a constant watcher until 5 A. M. Not a gleam of
consciousness shone across the visage of the President up to his
death--a quiet, peaceful death at last--which came at twenty-two minutes
past seven A. M. Around the bedside at this time were Secretaries
Stanton, Welles, Usher, Attorney-General Speed, Postmaster-General
Dennison, M. B. Field, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Judge Otto,
Assistant Secretary of the Interior, General Halleck, General Meigs,
Senator Sumner, F. R. Andrews, of New-York, General Todd, of Dacotah,
John Hay, private secretary, Governor Oglesby, of Illinois, General
Farnsworth, Mrs. and Miss Kenny, Miss Harris, Captain Robert Lincoln,
son of the President, and Drs. E. W. Abbott, R. K. Stone, C. D. Gatch,
Neal Hall, and Leiberman. Rev. Dr. Gurley, after the event, knelt with
all around in prayer, and then, entering the adjoining room where were
gathered Mrs. Lincoln, Captain Robert Lincoln, Mr. John Hay, and others,
prayed again. Soon after 9 o'clock the remains were placed in a
temporary coffin and conveyed to the White House under a small escort.

In Secretary Seward's chamber, a similar although not so solemn a scene
prevailed; between that chamber and the one occupied by President
Lincoln, visitors alternated to and fro through the night. It had been
early ascertained that the wounds of the secretary were not likely to
prove mortal. A wire instrument, to relieve the pain which he suffered
from previous injuries, prevented the knife of the assassin from
striking too deep. Mr. Frederick Seward's injuries were more serious.
His forehead was broken in by the blow from, the pistol, and up to this
hour he has remained perfectly unconscious. The operation of trepanning
the skull has been performed, but little hope is had of his recovery.
Major Seward will get well. Mr. Hansell's condition is somewhat
doubtful.

Secretary Seward, who cannot speak, was not informed of the
assassination of the President, and the injury of his son, until
yesterday. He had been worrying as to why Mr. Lincoln did not visit him.
"Why does'nt the President come to see me?" he asked with his pencil.
"Where is Frederick--what is the matter with him?" Perceiving the
nervous excitement which these doubts occasioned, a consultation was
had, at which it was finally determined that it would be best to let the
secretary know the worst. Secretary Stanton was chosen to tell him.
Sitting down beside Mr. Seward's bed, yesterday afternoon, he therefore
related to him a full account of the whole affair. Mr. Seward was so
surprised and shocked that he raised one hand involuntarily, and
groaned. Such is the condition of affairs at this stage of the terror.
The pursuit of the assassins has commenced; the town is full of wild and
baseless rumors; much that is said is stirring, little is reliable. I
tell it to you as I get it, but fancy is more prolific than truth: be
patient! [Footnote: The facts above had been collected by Mr. Jerome B.
Stillion, before my arrival in Washington: the arrangement of them is my
own.]




LETTER II.

THE OBSEQUIES IN WASHINGTON.


Washington, April 19, (Evening).

The most significant and most creditable celebration ever held in
Washington has just transpired. A good ruler has been followed from his
home to the Capitol by a grand cortege, worthy of the memory and of the
nation's power. As description must do injustice to the extent of the
display, so must criticism fail to sufficiently commend its perfect
tastefulness, Rarely has a Republican assemblage been so orderly. The
funeral of Mr. Lincoln is something to be remembered for a _cycle_. It
caps all eulogy upon his life and services, and was, without exception,
the most representative, spontaneous, and remarkable testimonial ever
rendered to the remains of an American citizen.

The night before the funeral showed the probable character of the
cortege. At Willard's alone four hundred applications by telegraph for
beds were refused. As many as six thousand persons spent Tuesday night
in the streets, in depots and in outbuildings. The population of the
city this morning was not far short of a hundred thousand, and of these
as many at thirty thousand walked in procession with Mr. Lincoln's
ashes.

All orders of folks were at hand. The country adjacent sent in
hay-wagons, donkey-carts, dearborns. All who could slip away from the
army came to town, and every attainable section of the Union forwarded
mourners. At no time in his life had Mr. Lincoln so many to throng about
him as in this hour, when he is powerless to do any one a service. For
once in history, office-seekers were disinterested, and contractors and
hangers-on human. These came, for this time only, to the capital of the
republic without an axe to grind or a curiosity to subserve; respect and
grief were all their motive. This day was shown that the great public
heart beats unselfish and reverent, even after a dynasty of plunder and
war.

The arrangements for the funeral were made by Mr. Harrington,
Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury, who was beset by applicants for
tickets. The number of these were reduced to six hundred, the clergy
getting sixty and the press twenty. I was among the first to pass the
White House guards and enter the building.

Its freestone columns were draped in black, and all the windows were
funereal. The ancient reception-room was half closed, and the famous
East room, which is approached by a spacious hall, had been reserved for
the obsequies. There are none present here but a few silent attendants
of the late owner of the republican palace. Deeply ensconced in the
white satin stuffing of his coffin, the President lies like one asleep.
The broad, high, beautiful room is like the varnished interior of a
vault. The frescoed ceiling wears the national shield, some pointed
vases filled with flowers and fruit, and three emblazonings of gilt
pendant from which are shrouded chandeliers. A purplish gray is the
prevailing tint of the ceiling. The cornice is silver white, set off by
a velvet crimson. The wall paper is gold and red, broken by eight lofty
mirrors, which are chastely margined with black and faced with fleece.

Their imperfect surfaces reflect the lofty catafalque, an open canopy of
solemn alapaca, lined with tasteful satin of creamish lead, looped at
the curving roof and dropping to the four corners in half transparent
tapestry. Beneath the roof, the half light shines upon a stage of fresh
and fragrant flowers, up-bearing a long, high coffin. White lace of pure
silver pendant from the border throws a mild shimmer upon the solid
silver tracery hinges and emblazonings. A cross of lilies stands at the
head, an anchor of roses at the foot. The lid is drawn back to show the
face and bosom, and on the coffin top are heather, precious flowers, and
sprigs of green. This catafalque, or in plain words, this coffin set
upon a platform and canopied, has around it a sufficient space of
Brussels carpet, and on three sides of this there are raised steps
covered with black, on which the honored visitors are to stand.

The fourth side is bare, save of a single row of chairs some twenty in
number, on which the reporters are to sit. The odor of the room is fresh
and healthy; the shade is solemn, without being oppressive. All is rich,
simple, and spacious, and in such sort as any king might wish to lie.
Approach and look at the dead man.

Death has fastened into his frozen face all the character and
idiosyncrasy of life. He has not changed one line of his grave,
grotesque countenance, nor smoothed out a single feature. The hue is
rather bloodless and leaden; but he was alway sallow. The dark eyebrows
seem abruptly arched; the beard, which will grow no more, is shaved
close, save the tuft at the short small chin. The mouth is shut, like
that of one who had put the foot down firm, and so are the eyes, which
look as calm as slumber. The collar is short and awkward, turned over
the stiff elastic cravat, and whatever energy or humor or tender gravity
marked the living face is hardened into its pulseless outline. No corpse
in the world is better prepared according to appearances. The white
satin around it reflects sufficient light upon the face to show us that
death is really there; but there are sweet roses and early magnolias,
and the balmiest of lilies strewn around, as if the flowers had begun to
bloom even upon his coffin. Looking on uninterruptedly! for there is no
pressure, and henceforward the place will be thronged with gazers who
will take from the sight its suggestiveness and respect. Three years
ago, when little Willie Lincoln died, Doctors Brown and Alexander, the
embalmers or injectors, prepared his body so handsomely that the
President had it twice disinterred to look upon it. The same men, in the
same way, have made perpetual these beloved lineaments. There is now no
blood in the body; it was drained by the jugular vein and sacredly
preserved, and through a cutting on the inside of the thigh the empty
blood vessels were charged with a chemical preparation which soon
hardened to the consistence of stone. The long and bony body is now hard
and stiff, so that beyond its present position it cannot be moved any
more than the arms or legs of a statue. It has undergone many changes.
The scalp has been removed, the brain taken out, the chest opened and
the blood emptied. All that we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly
contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a
sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that
made this flesh vital, sentient, and affectionate is gone forever.

The officers present are Generals Hunter and Dyer and two staff
captains. Hunter, compact and dark and reticent, walks about the empty
chamber in full uniform, his bright buttons and sash and sword
contrasting with his dark blue uniform, gauntlets upon his hands, crape
on his arm and blade, his corded hat in his hands, a paper collar just
apparent above his velvet tips, and now and then he speaks to Captain
Nesmith or Captain Dewes, of General Harding's staff, rather as one who
wishes company than one who has anything to say. His two silver stars
upon his shoulder shine dimly in the draped apartment. He was one of the
first in the war to urge the measures which Mr. Lincoln afterward
adopted. The aids walk to and fro, selected without reference to any
association with the late President. Their clothes are rich, their
swords wear mourning, they go in silence, everything is funereal. In the
deeply-draped mirrors strange mirages are seen, as in the coffin scene
of "Lucretia Borgia," where all the dusky perspectives bear vistas of
gloomy palls. The upholsterers make timid noises of driving nails and
spreading tapestry; but save ourselves and these few watchers and
workers, only the dead is here. The White House, so ill-appreciated in
common times, is seen to be capacious and elegant--no disgrace to the
nation even in the eyes of those foreign folk of rank who shall gather
here directly.

As we sit brooding, with the pall straight before us, the funeral guns
are heard indistinctly booming from the far forts, with the tap of drums
in the serried street without, where troops and citizens are forming for
the grand procession. We see through the window in the beautiful spring
day that the grass is brightly green; and all the trees in blossom, show
us through their archways the bronze and marble statues breaking the
horizon. But there is one at an upper window, seeing all this through
her tears, to whom the beautiful noon, with its wealth of zephyrs and
sweets, can waft no gratulation. The father of her children, the
confidant of her affection and ambition, has passed from life into
immortality, and lies below, dumb, cold murdered. The feeling of
sympathy for Mrs. Lincoln is as wide-spread as the regret for the chief
magistrate. Whatever indiscretions she may have committed in the abrupt
transition from plainness to power are now forgiven and forgotten. She
and her sons are the property of the nation associated with its truest
glories and its worst bereavement. By and by the guests drop in, hat in
hand, wearing upon their sleeves waving crape; and some of them slip up
to the coffin to carry away a last impression of the fading face.

But the first accession of force is that of the clergy, sixty in number.
They are devout looking men, darkly attired, and have come from all the
neighboring cities to represent every denomination. Five years ago these
were wrangling over slavery as a theological question, and at the
beginning of the war it was hard, in many of their bodies, to carry
loyal resolutions, To-day there are here such sincere mourners as Robert
Pattison, of the Methodist church, who passed much of his life among
slaves and masters. He and the rest have come to believe that the
President was wise and right, and follow him to his grave, as the
apostles the interred on calvary. All these retire to the south end of
the room, facing the feet of the corpse, and stand there silently to
wait for the coming of others. Very soon this East room is filled with
the representative intelligence of the entire nation. The governors of
states stand on the dais next to the head of the coffin, with the varied
features of Curtin, Brough, Fenton, Stone, Oglesby and Ingraham. Behind
them are the mayors and councilmen of many towns paying their last
respects to the representative of the source of all municipal freedom.
To their left are the corporate officers of Washington, zealous to make
this day's funeral honors atone for the shame of the assassination. With
these are sprinkled many scarred and worthy soldiers who have borne the
burden of the grand war, and stand before this shape they loved in quiet
civil reverence.

Still further down the steps and closer to the catafalque rest the
familiar faces of many of our greatest generals--the manly features of
Augur, whose blood I have seen trickling forth upon the field of battle;
the open almost, beardless contour of Halleck, who has often talked of
sieges and campaigns with this homely gentleman who is going to the
grave. There are many more bright stars twinkling in contiguous shoulder
bars, but sitting in a chair upon the beflowered carpet is Ulysses
Grant, who has lived a century in the last three weeks and comes to-day
to add the luster of his iron face to this thrilling and saddened
picture. He wears white gloves and sash, and is swarthy, nervous, and
almost tearful, his feet crossed, his square receding head turning now
here now there, his treble constellation blazing upon the left shoulder
only, but hidden on the right, and I seem to read upon his compact
features the indurate and obstinate will to fight, on the line he has
selected, the honor of the country through any peril, as if he had sworn
it by the slain man's bier--his state-fellow, patron, and friend. Here
also is General McCallum, who has seamed the rebellious South with
military roads to send victory along them, and bring back the groaning
and the scarred. These and the rest are grand historic figures, worthy
of all artistic depiction. They have looked so often into the mortar's
mouth, that no bravo's blade can make them wince. Do you see the
thin-haired, conical head of the viking Farragut, close by General
Grant, with many naval heroes close behind, storm-beaten, and every inch
Americans in thought and physiognomy?

What think the foreign ambassadors of such men, in the light of their
own overloaded bodies, where meaningless orders, crosses, and ribbons
shine dimly in the funeral light? These legations number, perhaps, a
hundred men, of all civilized races,--the Sardinian envoy, jetty-eyed,
towering above the rest. But they are still and respectful, gathered
thus by a slain ruler, to see how worthy is the republic he has
preserved. Whatever sympathy these have for our institutions, I think
that in such audience they must have been impressed with the futility of
any thought that either one citizen right or one territorial inch can
ever be torn from the United States. Not to speak disparagingly of these
noble guests, I was struck with the superior facial energy of our own
public servants, who were generally larger, and brighter-faced, born of
that aristocracy which took its patent from Tubal Cain, and Abel the
goatherd, and graduated in Abraham Lincoln. The Haytien minister,
swarthy and fiery-faced, is conspicuous among these.

But nearer down, and just opposite the catafalque so that it is
perpendicular to the direction of vision, stand the central powers of
our government, its President and counsellors. President Johnson is
facing the middle of the coffin upon the lowest step; his hands are
crossed upon his breast, his dark clothing just revealing his plaited
shirt, and upon his full, plethoric, shaven face, broad and severely
compact, two telling gray eyes rest under a thoughtful brow, whose
turning hair is straight and smooth. Beside him are Vice-President
Hamlin, whom he succeeded, and ex-Governor King, his most intimate
friend, who lends to the ruling severity of the place a half Falstaffian
episode. The cabinet are behind, as if arranged for a daguerreotypist,
Stanton, short and quicksilvery, in long goatee and glasses, in stunted
contrast to the tall and snow-tipped shape of Mr. Welles with the rest,
practical and attentive, and at their side is Secretary Chase, high,
dignified, and handsome, with folded arms, listening, but
undemonstrative, a half-foot higher than any spectator, and dividing
with Charles Sumner, who is near by, the preference for manly beauty in
age. With Mr. Chase are other justices of the Supreme Court and to their
left, near the feet of the corpse, are the reverend senators,
representing the oldest and the newest states--splendid faces, a little
worn with early and later toils, backed up by the high, classical
features of Colonel Forney, their secretary. Beyond are the
representatives and leading officials of the various departments, with a
few odd folks like George Francis Train, exquisite as ever, and, for
this time only, with nothing to say.

Close by the corpse sit the relatives of the deceased, plain, honest,
hardy people, typical as much of the simplicity of our institutions as
of Mr. Lincoln's self-made eminence. No blood relatives of Mr. Lincoln
were to be found. It is a singular evidence of the poverty of his
origin, and therefore of his exceeding good report, that, excepting his
immediate family, none answering to his name could be discovered. Mrs.
Lincoln's relatives were present, however, in some force. Dr. Lyman
Beecher Todd, General John B. S. Todd, C. M. Smith, Esq., and Mr. N. W.
Edwards, the late President's brother-in-law, plain, self-made people
were here and were sincerely affected. Captain Robert Lincoln sat during
the services with his face in his handkerchief weeping quietly, and
little Tad his face red and heated, cried as if his heart would break.
Mrs. Lincoln, weak, worn, and nervous, did not enter the East room nor
follow the remains. She was the chief magistrate's lady yesterday;
to-day a widow bearing only an immortal name. Among the neighbors of the
late President, who came from afar to pay respect to his remains, was
one old gentleman who left Richmond on Sunday. I had been upon the boat
with him and heard him in hot wrangle with some officers who advised the
summary execution of all rebel leaders. This the old man opposed, when
the feeling against him became so intense that he was compelled to
retire. He counselled mercy, good faith, and forgiveness. To-day, the
men who had called him a traitor, saw him among the family mourners,
bent with grief. All these are waiting in solemn lines, standing erect,
with a space of several feet between them and the coffin, and there is
no bustle nor unseemly curiosity, not a whisper, not a footfall--only
the collected nation looking with awed hearts upon eminent death.

This scene is historic. I regret that I must tell you of it over a
little wire, for it admits of all exemplification. In this high,
spacious, elegant apartment, laughter and levee, social pleasantry and
refined badinage, had often held their session. Dancing and music had
made those mirrors thrill which now reflect a pall, and where the most
beautiful women of their day had mingled here with men of brilliant
favor, now only a very few, brave enough to look upon death, were
wearing funeral weeds. The pleasant face of Mrs. Kate Sprague looks out
from these; but such scenes gain little additional power by beauty's
presence. And this wonderful relief was carved at one blow by John
Wilkes Booth.

The religious services began at noon. They were remarkable not only for
their association with the national event, but for a tremendous
political energy which they had. While none of the prayers or speeches
exhibited great literary carefulness, or will obtain perpetuity on their
own merits, they were full of feeling and expressed all the intense
concern of the country.

The procession surpassed in sentiment, populousness, and sincere good
feeling, anything of the kind we have had in America. It was several
miles long, and in all its elements was full and tasteful. The scene on
the avenue will be alway remembered as the only occasion on which that
great thoroughfare was a real adornment to the seat of government. In
the tree tops, on the house tops, at all the windows, the silent and
affected crowds clustered beneath half-mast banners and waving crape, to
reverentially uncover as the dark vehicle, bearing its rich
silver-mounted coffin, swept along; mottoes of respect and homage were
on many edifices, and singularly some of them were taken from the play
of Richard III., which was the murderer's favorite part The entire width
of the avenue was swept, from curb to curb, by the deep lines.

The chief excellence of this procession was its representative nature.
All classes, localities and trades were out. As the troops in broad,
straight columns, with reversed muskets, moved to solemn marches, all
the guns on the fortifications on the surrounding hills discharged
hoarse salutes--guns which the arbiter of war whom they were to honor
could hear no longer. Every business place was closed. Sabermen swept
the street of footmen and horsemen. The carriages drove two abreast.

Not less than five thousand officers, of every rank, marched abreast
with the cortege. They were noble looking men with intelligent faces,
and represented the sinews of the land, and the music was not the least
excellent feature of the mournful display. About thirty bands were in
the line, and these played all varieties of solemn marches, so that
there were continual and mingling strains of funeral music for more than
three hours. Artillery, consisting of heavy brass pieces, followed
behind. In fact, all the citizen virtues and all the military enterprise
of the country were evidenced. Never again, until Washington becomes in
fact what it is in name, the chief city of America, shall we have a
scene like this repeated--the grandest procession ever seen on this
continent, spontaneously evoked to celebrate the foulest crime on
record. If any feeling of gratulation could arise in so calamitous a
time, it would be, that so soon after this appalling calamity the nation
calmly and collectedly rallied about its succeeding rulers, and showed
in the same moment its regret for the past and its resolution for the
future. To me, the scene in the White House, the street, and the capitol
to-day, was the strongest evidence the war afforded of the stability of
our institutions, and the worthiness and magnanimous power of our
people.

The cortege passed to the left side of the Capitol, and entering the
great gates, passed to the grand stairway, opposite the splendid dome,
where the coffin was disengaged and carried up the ascent. It was posted
under the bright concave, now streaked with mournful trappings, and left
in state, watched by guards of officers with drawn swords. This was a
wonderful spectacle, the man most beloved and honored in the ark of the
republic. The storied paintings representing eras in its history were
draped in sable, through which they seemed to cast reverential glances
upon the lamented bier. The thrilling scenes depicted by Trumbull, the
commemorative canvases of Leutze, the wilderness vegetation of Powell,
glared from their separate pedestals upon the central spot where lay the
fallen majesty of the country. Here the prayers and addresses of the
noon were rehearsed and the solemn burial service read. At night the
jets of gas concealed in the spring of the dome were lighted up, so that
their bright reflection masses of burning light, like marvelous haloes,
upon the little box where so much that we love and honor rested on its
way to the grave. And so through the starry night, in the fane of the
great Union he had strengthened and recovered, the ashes of Abraham
Lincoln, zealously guarded, are now reposing. The sage, the citizen, the
patriot, the man, has reached all the eminence that life can give the
worthy or the ambitious. The hunted fugitive who struck through our
hearts to slay him, should stand beside his stately bier to see how
powerless are bullets and blades to take the real life of any noble man!




LETTER III.

THE MURDERER.


Washington, April 27th.

Justice is satisfied, though blinder vengeance may not be. While the
illustrious murdered is on the way to the shrine, the stark corpse of
his murderer lies in the shambles. The one died quietly, like his life;
the other died fighting, like his crime. And now that over all of them
the darkness and the dew have descended, the populace, which may not be
all satisfied, may perhaps be calmed. No triumphal mourning can add to
the President's glory; no further execration can disturb the assassin's
slumbers. They have gone for what they were into history, into
tradition, into the hereafter both of men and spirits; and what they
were may be in part concluded. Mr. Lincoln's career passes, in extent,
gravity, and eventful association, the province of newspaper biography;
but Booth is the hero of a single deed, and the delineation of him may
begin and be exhausted in a single article. I have been at pains, since
the day of the President's obsequies, to collect all valid information
on the subject of his assassin, in anticipation of the latter's capture
and death. Now that these have been consummated, I shall print this
biography.

The elder Booth in every land was a sojourner, as all his fathers were.
Of Hebrew descent, and by a line of actors, he united in himself that
strong Jewish physiognomy which, in its nobler phases, makes all that is
dark and beautiful, and the combined vagrancy of all men of genius and
all men of the stage. Fitful, powerful, passionate, his life was a
succession of vices and triumphs. He mastered the intricate characters
of dramatic literature by intuition, rather than by study, and produced
them with a vigor and vividness which almost passed the depicting of
real life. The stage on which he raved and fought became as historic as
the actual decks of battle ships, and his small and brawny figure comes
down to us in those paroxysms of delirious art, like that of _Harold, or
Richard, or Prince Rupert_. He drank to excess, was profligate but not
generous, required but not reliable, and licentious to the bounds of
cruelty. He threw off the wife of his bosom to fly from England with a
flower-girl, and, settling in Baltimore, dwelt with his younger
companion, and brought up many children, while his first-possessed went
down to a drunken and broken-hearted death. He himself, wandering
westward, died on the way, errant and feverish, even in the closing
moments. His widow, too conscious of her predecessor's wrongs, and often
taunted with them, lived apart, frugal and discreet, and brought her six
children up to honorable maturity. These were Junius Brutus, Edwin
Forrest (though he drops the Forrest for professional considerations),
John Wilkes, Joseph, and the girls. All of the boys are known to more or
less of fame; none of them in his art has reached the renown of the
father; but one has sent his name as far as that of the great playwright
to whom they were pupils; wherever Shakspeare is quoted, John Wilkes
Booth will be named, and infamously, like that Hubert in "King John,"
who would have murdered the gentle Prince Arthur.

It may not be a digression here to ask what has become of the children
of the weird genius I have sketched above. Mrs. Booth, against whom
calumny has had no word to say, now resides with her daughters in
Nineteenth street, New-York. John S. Clarke dwells in princely style in
Philadelphia, with the daughter whom he married; he is the business
partner of Edwin Booth, and they are likely to become as powerful
managers as they have been successful "stars." Edwin Booth, who is said
to have the most perfect physical head in America, and whom the ladies
call the beau ideal of the melancholy Dane, dwells also on Nineteenth
street. He has acquired a fortune, and is, without doubt, a frankly
loyal gentleman. He could not well be otherwise from his membership in
the Century Club where literature and loyalty, are never dissolved.
Correct and pleasing without being powerful or brilliant, he has led a
plain and appreciated career, and latterly, to his honor, has been
awakening among dramatic authors some emulation by offering handsome
compensations for original plays. Junius Brutus Booth, the oldest of
them all, most resembles in feature his wild and wayward father; he is
not as good an actor as was Wilkes, and kept in the West, that border
civilization of the drama; he now lies, on a serious charge of
complicity, in Capitol Hill jail. Joseph Booth tried the stage as an
utility actor and promptly failed. The best part he ever had to play was
_Orson_ in the "Iron Chest," and his discomfiture was signal; then he
studied medicine but grew discouraged, and is now in California in an
office of some sort. A son of Booth by his first wife became a first
class lawyer in Boston. He never recognized the rest of the family.
Wilkes Booth, the third son, was shot dead on Wednesday for attempting
to escape from the consequences of murder. Such are the people to whom
one of the greatest actors of our time gave his name and lineaments. But
I have anticipated the story:

Although her family was large, it was not so hard sailing with Mrs.
Rosalie Booth as may be inferred. Her husband's gains had been variably
great, and they owned a farm of some value near Baltimore. The boys had
plain but not sufficient schooling, though by the time John Wilkes grew
up Edwin and Junius were making some little money and helping the
family. So Wilkes was sent to a better school than they, where he made
some eventful acquaintances. One of these won his admiration as much in
the playground as in subsequent life upon the field of battle; this was
Fitzhugh Lee, son of the great rebel chieftain. I have not heard that
Lee ever had any friendship for young Wilkes, but his port and name were
enough to excite a less ardent imagination--the son of a soldier already
great, and a descendant of Washington. Wilkes Booth has often spoken of
the memory of the young man, envied his success, and, perhaps, boasted
of more intimacy than he ever had. The exemplars of young Wilkes, it was
soon seen, were anything but literary. He hated school and pent-up life,
and loved the open air. He used to stroll off to fish, though that sort
of amusement was too sedentary for his nature, but went on fowling
jaunts with enthusiasm. In these latter he manifested that fine nerve,
and certain eye, which was the talk of all his associates; but his
greatest love was the stable; He learned to ride with his first pair of
boots, and hung around the grooms to beg permission to take the nags to
water. He grew in later life to be both an indurated and a graceful
horseman. Toward his mother and sisters he was affectionate without
being obedient. Of all the sons, Wilkes was the most headstrong
in-doors, and the most contented away from home. He had a fitful
gentleness which won him forgiveness, and of one of his sisters he was
particularly fond, but none had influence over him. He was seldom
contentious, but obstinately bent, and what he willed, to did in
silence, seeming to discard sympathy or confidence. As a boy he was
never bright, except in a boy's sense; that is, he could run and leap
well, fight when challenged, and generally fell in with the sentiment of
the crowd. He therefore made many companions, and his early days all
passed between Baltimore city and the adjacent farm.

I have heard it said as the only evidence of Booth's ferocity in those
early times that he was always shooting cats, and killed off almost the
entire breed in his neighbourhood. But on more than one occasion he ran
away from both school and home, and once made the trip of the Chesapeake
to the oyster fisheries without advising anybody of his family.

While yet very young, Wilkes Booth became an habitue at the theater. His
traditions and tastes were all in that direction. His blood was of the
stage, like that of the Keans, the Kembles, and the Wallacks. He would
not commence at the bottom of the ladder and climb from round to round,
nor take part in more than a few Thespian efforts. One night, however, a
young actor, who was to have a benefit and wished to fill the house,
resolved for the better purpose to give Wilkes a chance. He announced
that a son of the great Booth of tradition, would enact the part of
Richmond, and the announcement was enough. Before a crowded place, Booth
played so badly that he was hissed. Still holding to his gossamer hopes
and high conceit, Wilkes induced John S. Clarke, who was then addressing
his sister, to obtain him a position in the company of the Arch Street
Theater at Philadelphia.

For eight dollars a week, Wilkes Booth, at the age of twenty-two,
contracted with William Wheatley to play in any piece or part for which
he might be cast, and to appear every day at rehearsal. He had to play
the _Courier_ in Sheridan Knowles's "Wife" on his first night, with five
or ten little speeches to make; but such was his nervousness that he
blundered continually, and quite balked the piece. Soon afterward he
undertook the part of one of the Venetian comrades in Hugo's "Lucretia
Borgia," and was to have said in his turn--

"Madame, I am Petruchio Pandolfo;" instead of which he exclaimed:

"Madame, I am Pondolfio Pet--, Pedolfio Pat--, Pantuchio Ped--; damn it?
what am I?"

The audience roared, and Booth, though full of chagrin, was compelled to
laugh with them.

The very next night he was to play _Dawson_, an important part in
Moore's tragedy of "The Gamester." He had bought a new dress to wear on
this night, and made abundant preparation to do himself honor. He
therefore invited a lady whom he knew to visit the theater, and witness
his triumph. But at the instant of his appearance on the stage, the
audience, remembering the Petruchio Pandolfo of the previous night,
burst into laughter, hisses, and mock applause, so that he was struck
dumb, and stood rigid, with nothing whatever to say. Mr. John Dolman, to
whose _Stukely_ has played, was compelled, therefore, to strike _Dawson_
entirely out of the piece.

These occurrences nettled Booth, who protested that he studied
faithfully but that his want of confidence ruined him. Mr. Fredericks
the stage manager made constant complaints of Booth, who by the way, did
not play under his full name, but as Mr. J. Wilkes--and he bore the
general reputation of having no promise, and being a careless fellow. He
associated freely with such of the subordinate actors as he liked; but
being, through Clarke, then a rising favourite, of better connections,
might, had he chosen, advanced himself socially, if not artistically.
Clarke was to have a benefit one evening, and to enact, among other
things, a mock _Richard III_., to which he allowed Wilkes Booth to play
a real _Richmond_. On this occasion, for the first time, Booth showed
some energy, and obtain some applause. But, in general, he was stumbling
and worthless I myself remember, on three consecutive nights, hearing
him trip up and receive suppressed hisses. He lacked enterprise; other
young actors, instead of waiting to be given better parts, committed
them to memory, in the hope that their real interpreter might not come
to hand. Among these I recall John McCullough, who afterwards became
quite a celebrated actor. He was getting, if I correctly remember, only
six dollars a week, while Booth obtained eight. Yet Wilkes Booth seemed
too slow or indifferent to get on the weather side of such chances. He
still held the part of third walking gentleman, and the third is always
the first to be walked off in case of strait, as was Wilkes Booth. He
did not survive forty weeks engagement, nor make above three hundred
dollars in all that time. The Kellers arrived; they cut down the
company, and they dispensed with Wilkes Booth. He is remembered in
Philadelphia by his failure as in the world by his crime.

About this time a manager named Kunkle gave Booth a salary of twenty
dollars a week to go to the Richmond Theater. There he played a higher
order of parts, and played them better, Winning applauses from the easy
provincial cities, and taking, as everywhere the ladies by storm. I have
never wondered why many actors were strongly predisposed toward the
South. There, their social status is nine times as big as with us. The
hospitable, lounging, buzzing character of the southerner is entirely
consonant with the cosmopolitanism of the stage, and that easy
"hang-up-your-hatativeness," which is the rule and the demand in
Thespianship. We place actors outside of society, and execrate them
because they are there. The South took them into affable fellowship, and
was not ruined by it, but beloved by the fraternity. Booth played two
seasons in Richmond, and left in some esteem.

When the John Brown raid occured, Booth left the Richmond Theater for
the scene of strife in a picked company with which he had affiliated for
some time. From his connection with the militia on this occasion he was
wont to trace his fealty to Virginia. He was a non-commissioned officer,
and remained at Charleston till after the execution, visiting the old
pike man in jail, and his company was selected to form guard around the
scaffold when John Brown went, white-haired, to his account. There may
be in this a consolation for the canonizers of the first arm-bearer
between the sections, that one whose unit swelled the host to crush out
that brave old life, took from the scene inspiration enough to slay a
merciful President in his unsuspecting leisure. Booth never referred to
John Brown's death in bravado; possibly at that gallows began some such
terrible purpose as he afterward consummated.

It was close upon the beginning of the war when Booth resolved to
transform himself from a stock actor to a "star." As many will read this
who do not understand such distinctions, let me preface it by explaining
that a "star" is an actor who belongs to no one theater, but travels
from each to all, playing a few weeks at a time, and sustained in his
chief character by the regular or stock actors. A stock actor is a good
actor, and a poor fool. A star is an advertisement in tights, who grows
rich and corrupts the public taste. Booth was a star, and being so, had
an agent. The agent is a trumpeter who goes on before, writing the
impartial notices which you see in the editorial columns of country
papers and counting noses at the theater doors. Booth's agent was one
Matthew Canning, an exploded Philadelphia lawyer, who took to managing
by passing the bar, and J. Wilkes no longer, but our country's rising
tragedian. J. Wilkes Booth, opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in his
father's consecrated part of _Richard III_. It was very different work
between receiving eight dollars a week and getting half the gross
proceeds of every performance. Booth kept northward when his engagement
was done, playing in many cities such parts as _Romeo_, the _Corsican
Brothers_, and _Raphael_ in the "_Marble Heart_;" in all of these he
gained applause, and his journey eastward, ending in eastern cities like
Providence, Portland, and Boston was a long success, in part deserved.
In Boston he received especial commendation for his enactment of
_Richard_.

I have looked over this play, his best and favorite one, to see how
closely the career of the crookback he so often delineated resembled his
own.

How like that fearful night of _Richard_ on Bosworth field must have
been Booth's sleep in the barn at Port Royal, tortured by ghosts of
victims all repeating.

    "When I was mortal my anointed body
    By thee was punched full of deadly holes:
    Think on the Tower and me! Despair and die!"

Or this, from some of Booth's female victims:

    "Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
    I that was washed to death with fulsome wine;
    Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrayed to death:
    To-morrow in the battle think on me; despair and die!"

These terrible conjurations must have recalled how aptly the scene as
often rehearsed by Booth, sword in hand, where, leaping from his bed, he
cries in horror:

    "Give me another horse! bind up my wounds!
    Have mercy, Jesu! Soft! I did but dream.
    Oh! coward conscience how thou dost afflict me!
    The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight!
    Cold, flareful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
    What do I fear? Myself! there is none else by:
    Is there a murderer here? No!--Yes!--I am!
    Then fly,--what from myself?

              *       *       *       *       *

    My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
    And every tongue brings in a several tale.
    And every tale condemns me for a villain!
    Perjury, perjury in the highest degree:
    Murder, stern murder in the direst degree:
    All several sins, all used in each degree.
    Throng to the bar, crying all, _Guilty! guilty!_"

By these starring engagments, Booth made incredible sums. His cashbook,
for one single season, showed earnings deposited in bank of twenty-two
odd thousand dollars. In New York he did not get a hearing, except at a
benefit or two: where he played parts not of his selection. In
Philadelphia his earlier failure predisposed the people to discard him,
and they did. But he had made enough, and resolved to invest his
winnings, The oil fever had just begun; he hired an agent, sent him to
the western districts and gave him discretionary power; his investments
all turned out profitable.

Booth died, as far as understood without debts. The day before the
murder he paid an old friend a hundred dollars which he had borrowed two
days previously. He banked at Jay Cook's in Washington, generally; but
turned most of his funds into stock and other matters. He gave eighty
dollars eight month's ago for a part investing with others in a piece of
western oil land. The certificate for this land he gave to his sister.
Just before he died his agent informed him that the share was worth
fifteen thousand dollars. Booth kept his accounts latterly with great
regularity, and was lavish as ever, but took note of all expenditures,
however irregular. He was one of those men whom the possession of money
seems to have energized; his life, so purposeless long before, grew by
good fortune to a strict computation with the world. Yet what availed so
sudden reformation, and of what use was the gaining of wealth, to throw
one's life so soon away, and leap from competence to hunted infamy.

The beauty of this man and his easy confidentiality, not familiar, but
marked by a mild and even dignity, made many women impassioned of him.
He was licentious as men, and particularly as actors go, but not a
seducer, so far as I can learn. I have traced one case in Philadelphia
where a young girl who had seen him on the stage became enamored of him.

She sent him bouquets, notes, photographs and all the accessories of an
intrigue. Booth, to whom such things were common, yielded to the girl's
importunities at last and gave her an interview. He was surprised to
find that so bold a correspondent was so young, so fresh, and so
beautiful. He told her therefore, in pity, the consequences of pursuing
him; that he entertained no affection for her, though a sufficient
desire, and that he was a man of the world to whom all women grew
fulsome in their turn.

"Go home," he said, "and beware of actors. They are to be seen, not to
be known."

The girl, yet more infatuated, persisted. Booth, who had no real virtue
except by scintillations, became what he had promised, and one more soul
went to the isles of Cyprus.

In Montgomery, if I do not mistake, Booth met the woman from whom he
received a stab which he carried all the rest of his days. She was an
actress, and he visited her. They assumed a relation creditable only in
_La Boheme_, and were as tender as love without esteem can ever be. But,
after a time, Booth wearied of her and offered to say "good by." She
refused--he treated her coldly; she pleaded--he passed her by.

Then, with a jealous woman's frenzy, she drew a knife upon him and
stabbed him in the neck, with the intent to kill him. Being muscular, he
quickly disarmed her, though he afterward suffered from the wound
poignantly.

Does it not bring a blush to our faces that a good, great man, like he
who has died--our President--should have met his fate from one so inured
to a life of ribaldry? Yet, only such an one could have been found to
murder Abraham Lincoln.

The women persecuted Booth more than he followed them. He was waylaid by
married women in every provincial town or city where he played. His face
was so youthful, yet so manly, and his movements so graceful and
excellent, that other than the coarse and errant placed themselves in
his way. After his celebrated Boston engagement, women of all ages and
degrees pressed in crowds before the Tremont House to see him depart.
Their motives were various, but whether curiosity or worse, exhibiting
plainly the deep influence which Booth had upon the sex. He could be
anywhere easy and gentlemanly, and it is a matter of wonder that with
the entry which he had to many well-stocked homes, he did not make
hospitality mourn and friendship find in his visit shame and ruin. I
have not space to go into the millionth catalogue of Booth's intrigues,
even if this journal permitted further elucidation of so banned a
subject. Most of his adherents of this class were, like Heine's Polish
virgins, and he was very popular with those dramatic ladies--few, I hope
and know, in their profession--to whom divorce courts are superfluous.
His last permanent acquaintance was one Ella Turner, of Richmond, who
loved him with all the impetuosity of that love which does not think,
and strove to die at the tidings of his crime and fight. Happy that even
such a woman did not die associated with John Wilkes Booth. Such
devotion to any other murderer would have earned some poet's tear. But
the daisies will not grow a whole rod from _his_ grave.

Of what avail, may we ask, on the impossible supposition that Booth's
crime could have been considered heroic, was it that such a record
should have dared to die for fame? Victory would have been ashamed of
its champion, as England of Nelson, and France of Mirabeau.

I may add to this record that he had not been in Philadelphia a year, on
first setting out in life, before getting into a transaction of the kind
specified. For an affair at his boarding-house he was compelled to pay a
considerable sum of money, and it happily occurred just as he was to
quit the city. He had many quarrels and narrow escapes through his
license, a husband in Syracuse, N. Y., once followed him all the way to
Cleveland to avenge a domestic insult.

Booth's paper "To Whom it may Concern" was not his only attempt at
influential composition. He sometimes persuaded himself that he had
literary ability; but his orthography and pronunciation were worse than
his syntax. The paper deposited with J. S. Clarke was useful as showing
his power to entertain a deliberate purpose. It has one or two smart
passages in it--as this:

"Our once bright red stripes look like _bloody gashes_ on the face of
heaven."

In the passages following there is common sense and lunacy:

"I know how foolish I shall be deemed for undertaking such a step as
this, where, on the one side, I have many friends and everything to make
me happy, where my profession _alone_, has gained me an income of _more
than_ twenty thousand dollars a year, and where my _great personal
ambition_ in my profession has such a great field for labor. On the
other hand, the South have never bestowed upon me one kind word; a place
now where I have no friends, except beneath the sod; a place where I
must either become a private soldier or a beggar. To give up all of the
_former_ for the _latter_, besides my mother and sisters, whom I love so
dearly (although they so widely differ with me in opinion) seems insane;
but God is my judge."

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 condemnation_ of 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 crime _not_ to 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 found _that_ '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 a _bon mot_--the last ditch of the rebellion.

None of the printed pictures that I have seen do justice to Booth. Some
of the _cartes de visite_ get 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.

His _Romeo_ was described a short time ago by the Washington
_Intelligencer_ as the most satisfactory of all renderings of that fine
character. He played the _Corsican Brothers_ three weeks on a run in
Boston. He played _Pescara_ at 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.




LETTER IV.

THE ASSASSIN'S DEATH.


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.

_A_ Door through which the dying man was brought. _B_ Corner at which
the barn was fired. _C_ Spot in the barn on which Booth stood. _D_ Point
where Corbett fired. _E_ Porch where Booth died. _G_ Door at which
Lieutenant Baker knocked. _H_ Shed. _I_ Kitchen.]

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 have _you_ stay." 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!




LETTER V.

A SOLUTION OF THE CONSPIRACY.

[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 Cæsar 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 was _ultima thule_ to 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.

But when the negro, in the dusk of the morning, looked after them as he
receded, he saw that both horses' heads were turned once more toward
Coxe's, and it was this man, doubtless, who harbored the fugitives from
Sunday to Thursday, aided, possibly, by such neighbors as the Wilsons
and Adamses.

At the point where Booth crossed the Potomac the shores are very
shallow, and one must wade out some distance to where a boat will float.
A white man came up here with a canoe on Friday, and tied it by a stone
anchor. Between seven and eight o'clock it disappeared, and in the
afternoon some men at work in Virginia, saw Booth and Harold land, tie
the boat's rope to a stone, and fling it ashore, and strike at once
across a ploughed field for King George Court House. Many folks
entertained them without doubt, but we positively hear of them next at
Port Royal Ferry, and then at Garrett's farm.

I close this article with a list of all who were at Garrett's farm on
the death of Booth.

    1. E. J. Conger, \ Detectives.
    2. Lieut. Baker, /
    3. Surgeon from Port Royal,
    4. Four Garrett daughters.
    5. Harold, Booth's accomplice,

_Soldiers_.--Company H, Sixteenth New-York Volunteer Cavalry, Lieutenant
Ed. P. Doherty commanding: Corporals A. Neugarten, J. Waly, M. Hornsby:
Privates J. Mellington, D. Darker, E. Parelays, W. Mockgart;
Corporals--Zimmer (Co. C), M. Taenaek; Privates H. Pardman, J. Meiyers,
W. Burnn, F. Meekdank, G. Haich, J. Raien, J. Kelly, J. Samger (Co. M),
G. Zeichton,--Steinbury, L. Sweech (Co. A), A. Sweech (Co. H), F.
Diacts; Sergeant Wandell; Corporals Lannekey, Winacky; Sergeant Corbett
(Co. L).

Sergeant Corbett, who shot Booth, was the only man of the command
belonging to the same company with Lieutenant Doherty, Commandant.




LETTER VI.

THE DETECTIVES' STORIES.


Washington, May 2--P. M.

The police resources of the country have been fairly tested during the
past two weeks. Under the circumstances, the shrewdness and energy of
both municipal and national detectives have been proven good. The latter
body has had a too partial share of the applause thus far, while the
great efforts of our New-York and other officers have been overlooked.
In the crowning success of Doherty, Conger, and Baker on the Virginia
side of the water we have forgotten the as vigorous and better sustained
pursuit on the Maryland side.

Yet the Secretary of War has thanked all concerned, especially referring
to many excellent leaders in the long hunt through Charles and St.
Mary's counties. Here the military and civil forces together amounted to
quite a small army, and constituted by far the largest police
organization ever known on this side of the Atlantic.

I think the adventures and expedients of these public servants worthy of
a column. It would be out of all proportion to pass them by when we
devote a dozen lines to every petty larceny and shoplifting.

On the Friday night of the murder the departments were absolutely
paralyzed. The murderers had three good hours for escape; they had
evaded the pursuit of lightning by snapping the telegraph wires, and
rumor filled the town with so many reports that the first valuable
hours, which should have been used to follow hard after them, were
consumed in feverish efforts to know the real extent of the
assassination.

Immediately afterwards, however, or on Saturday morning early, the
provost and special police force got on the scent, and military in
squads were dispatched close upon their heels.

Three grand pursuits wore organized: one reaching up the north bank of
the Potomac toward Chain bridge, to prevent escape by that direction
into Virginia, where Mosby, it was suspected, waited to hail the
murderers;

A second starting from Richmond, Va., northward, forming a broad
advancing picket or skirmish line between the Blue Ridge and the broad
sea-running streams;

A third to scour the peninsula towards Point Lookout.

The latter region became the only one well examined; the northern
expedition failed until advised from below to capture Atzerott, and
failed, to capture Payne. Yet there were cogent probabilities that the
assassin had taken this route; far Mosby would have given them the right
hand of fellowship.

When that guerrilla heard of Booth's feat, said Captain Jett, he
exclaimed:

"Now, by----! I could take that man in my arms."

Washington, as a precautionary measure, was doubly picketed at once; the
authorities in all northern towns advised of the personnel of the
murderer, and requests made of the detective chiefs in Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and New-York, to forward to Washington without delay their
best decoys.

A court of inquiry was organized on the moment, and early in the week
succeeding rewards were offered. An individual, and not the government,
offered the first rewards.

There were two men without whom the hunt would have gone astray many
times.

John S. Young, chief of the New-York detective force, a powerful and
resolute man, whose great weight and strength are matched by boundless
energy, and both subordinate to a head as clear as the keen and
searching warrant of his eye. This man has been in familiar converse
with every rebel agent in the Canadas, and is feared by them as they
fear the fates of Beall and Kennedy. Without being a sensationist, he
has probably rendered the cleverest services of the war to the general
government. They sent for him immediately after the tragedy, and he
stopped on the way for his old police companion, Marshal Murray. The
latter's face and figure are familiar to all who know New-York; he
resembles an admiral on his quarter-deck; he is a detective of fair and
excellent repute, and has a somewhat novel pride in what he calls "the
most beautiful gallows in the United States."

These officials were ordered to visit Colonel Ingraham's office and
examine the little evidence on hand. They and their tried officers
formed a junction on Sunday afternoon with the large detective force of
Provost-Marshal Major O'Bierne. The latter commands the District of
Columbia civil and military police. He is a New-Yorker and has been shot
through the body in the field.

The detective force of Young and Murray consisted of Officers Radford,
Kelso, Elder, and Hoey, of New-York; Deputy-Marshal Newcome, formerly of
THE WORLD'S city staff; Officers Joseph Pierson and West, of Baltimore.

Major O'Bierne's immediate aids were Detectives John Lee, Lloyd,
Gavigan, Coddingham, and Williams.

A detachment of the Philadelphia detective police, force--Officers
Taggert, George Smith, and Carlin, reporting to Colonel Baker--went in
the direction of the North Pole; everybody is on the _que vive_ for
them.

To the provost-marshal of Baltimore, MacPhail, who knew the tone and
bearing of the country throughout, was joined the zealous co-operation
of Officer Lloyd, of Major O'Bierne's staff, who had a personal feeling
against the secessionists of lower Maryland; they had once driven him
away for his loyalty, and had reserved their hospitality for assassins.

Lieutenant Commander Gushing, I am informed, also rendered important
services to the government in connection with the police operations.
Volunteer detectives, such as Ex-Marshal Lewis and Angelis, were
plentiful; it is probable that in the pitch of the excitement five
hundred detective officers were in and around Washington city. At the
same time the secret police of Richmond abandoned their ordinary
business, and devoted themselves solely to this overshadowing offense.

No citizen, in these terrible days, knows what eyes were upon him as he
talked and walked, nor how his stature and guise were keenly scanned by
folks who passed him absent-faced, yet with his mental portrait
carefully turned over, the while some invisible hand clutched a
revolver, and held a life or death challenge upon his lips.

The military forces were commanded by Colonel Welles, of the Twenty
sixth Michigan regiment, whose activity and zeal were amply sustained by
Colonel Clendenning, of the Eighth Illinois cavalry, probably the finest
body of horse in the service.

The first party to take the South Maryland road was dispatched by Major
O'Bierne, and commanded by Lieutenant Lovett, of the Veteran Reserves.
It consisted of twenty-five cavalry men, with detectives Cottingham,
Lloyd, and Gavigan; these latter, with the lieutenant, kept well in
advance. They made inquiries of a soothing and cautious character, but
saw nothing suspicious until they arrived at Piscataway, where an
unknown man, some distance ahead, observed them, and took to the woods.
This was on Sunday night, forty hours after the murder.

Guided by Officer Lloyd, the little band dashed on, arriving at
Bryantown on Tuesday. Here they arrested John Lloyd, of the hotel at
Surrattsville, of whom they had previously inquired for the murderers,
and he had said positively that he neither knew them nor had seen
anybody whatever on the night of the crime. He was returning in a wagon,
with his wife, whom he had ordered, the day before, to go on a visit to
Allen's Fresh, The Monday afterward he started to bring her back. This
woman, frightened at the arrest, acknowledged at once that in her
husband's conduct there was some inexplicable mystery. He was taciturn
and defiant as before, until confronted by some of his old Union
neighbors.

The few Unionists of Prince George's and Charles counties, long
persecuted and intimidated, now came forward and gave important
testimony.

Among these was one Roby, a very fat and very zealous old gentleman,
whose professions were as ample as his perspiration. He told the
officers of the secret meetings for conspiracy's, sake at Lloyd's Hotel,
and although a very John Gilpin on horseback, rode here and there to his
great loss of wind and repose, fastening fire-coals upon the guilty or
suspected.

Lloyd was turned over to Mr. Cottingham, who had established a jail at
Robytown; that night his house was searched, and Booth's carbine found
hidden in the wall. Three days afterward, Lloyd himself confessed--and
his neck is quite nervous at this writing.

This little party, under the untiring Lovett, examined all the
farm-houses below Washington resorting to many shrewd expedients, and
taking note of the great swamps to the east of Port Tobacco; they
reached Newport at last and fastened tacit guilt upon many residents.

Beyond Bryantown they overhauled the residence of Doctor Mudd and found
Booth's boot. This was before Lloyd confessed, and was the first
positive trace the officers had that they were really close upon the
assassins.

I do not recall anything more wild and startling than this vague and
dangerous exploration of a dimly known, hostile, and ignorant country.
To these few detectives we owe much of the subsequent successful
prosecution of the pursuit. They were the Hebrew spies.

By this time the country was filling up with soldiers, but previously a
second memorable detective party went out under the personal command of
Major O'Bierne. It consisted, besides that officer, of Lee, D'Angellia,
Callahan, Hoey, Bostwick, Hanover, Bevins, and McHenry, and embarked at
Washington on a steam-tug for Chappell's Point. Here a military station
had long been established for the prevention of blockade and
mail-running across the Potomao. It was commanded by Lieutenant Laverty,
and garrisoned by sixty-five men. On Tuesday night, Major O'Bierne's
party reached this place, and soon afterwards, a telegraph station was
established here by an invaluable man to the expedition, Captain
Beckwith, General Grant's chief cypher operator, who tapped the Point
Lookout wire, and placed the War Department within a moment's reach of
the theater of events.

Major O'Bierne's party started at once over the worst road in the world
for Port Tobacco.

If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port
Tobacco. From this town, by a sinuous creek, there is flat boat
navigation to the Potomac, and across that river to Mattox's creek.
Before the war Port Tobacco was the seat of a tobacco aristocracy and a
haunt of negro traders. It passed very naturally into a rebel post for
blockade-runners and a rebel post-office general. Gambling, corner
fighting, and shooting matches were its lyceum education. Violence and
ignorance had every suffrage in the town. Its people were smugglers, to
all intents, and there was neither Bible nor geography to the whole
region adjacent. Assassination was never very unpopular at Port Tobacco,
and when its victim was a northern president it became quite heroic. A
month before the murder a provost-marshal near by was slain in his
bed-chamber. For such a town and district the detective police were the
only effective missionaries. The hotel here is called the Brawner House;
it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in
that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar's crib,
talking robbery between their cups; its dining-room is dark and
tumble-down, and the _cuisine_ bears traces of Caffir origin; a barbecue
is nothing to a dinner there. The Court House of Port Tobacco is the
most superflous house in the place, except the church. It stands in the
center of the town in a square, and the dwellings lie about it closely,
as if to throttle justice. Five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco;
life there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the
adjacent swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when
iguanadons and pterodactyls and pleosauri ate each other.

Into this abstract of Gomorrah the few detectives went like angels who
visited Lot. They pretended to be enquiring for friends, or to have
business designs, and the first people they heard of were Harold and
Atzerott. The latter had visited Port Tobacco three weeks before the
murder, and intimated at that time his design of fleeing the country.
But everybody denied having seen him subsequent to the crime.

Atzerott had been in town just prior to the crime. He had been living
with a widow woman named Mrs. Wheeler, by whom he had several children,
and she was immediately called upon by Major O'Bierne. He did not tell
her what Atzerott had done, but vaguely hinted that he had committed
some terrible crime, and that since he had done her wrong, she could
vindicate both herself and justice by telling his whereabouts. The woman
admitted that Atzerott had been her bane, but she loved him, and refused
to betray him.

His trunk was found in her garret, and in it the key to his paint shop
in Port Tobacco. The latter was fruitlessly searched, but the probable
whereabouts of Atzerott in Mongomery county obtained, and Major O'Bierne
telegraphing there immediately, the desperate fellow was found and
locked up. A man named Crangle who had succeeded Atzerott in Mrs.
Wheeler's pliable affections, was arrested at once and put in jail. A
number of disloyal people were indicated or "spotted" as in no wise
angry at the President's taking off, and for all such a provost prison
was established.

[Illustration: Maryland.]

A few miles from Port Tobacco dwelt a solitary woman, who, when
questioned, said that for many nights she had heard, after she had
retired to bed, a man enter her cellar and lie there all night,
departing before dawn. Major O'Bierne and the detectives ordered her to
place a lamp in her window the next night she heard him enter, and at
dark they established a cordon of armed officers around the place. At
midnight punctually she exhibited the light, when the officers broke
into the house and thoroughly searched it, without result. Yet the woman
positively asserted that she had heard the man enter.

It was afterward found that she was of diseased mind.

By this time the military had come up in considerable numbers, and Major
O'Bierne was enabled to confer with Major Wait, of the Eighth Illinois.

The major had pushed on Monday night to Leonardstown, and pretty well
overhauled that locality.

It was at this time that preparations were made to hunt the swamps
around Chapmantown, Beantown, and Allen's Fresh. Booth had been entirely
lost since his departure from Mudd's house, and it was believed that he
had either pushed on for the Potomac or taken to the swamps. The
officers sagaciously determined to follow him to the one and to explore
the other.

The swamps tributary to the various branches of the Wicomico river, of
which the chief feeder is Allen's creek, bear various names, such as
Jordan's swamp, Atchall's swamp, and Scrub swamp. There are dense
growths of dogwood, gum, and beech, planted in sluices of water and bog;
and their width varies from a half mile to four miles, while their
length is upwards of sixteen miles. Frequent deep ponds dot this
wilderness place, with here and there a stretch of dry soil, but no
human being inhabits the malarious extent; even a hunted murderer would
shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only
denizens; sometimes the coon takes refuge in this desert from the
hounds, and in the soil mud a thousand odorous muskrats delve, with now
and then a tremorous otter. But not even the hunted negro dares to
fathom the treacherous clay, nor make himself a fellow of the slimy
reptiles which reign absolute in this terrible solitude. Here the
soldiers prepared to seek for the President's assassin, and no search of
the kind has ever been so thorough and patient. The Shawnee, in his
strong hold of despair in the heart of Okeefeuokee, would scarcely have
changed homes with Wilkes Booth and David Harold, hiding in this inhuman
country.

The military forces deputed to pursue the fugitives were seven hundred
men of the Eighth Illinois cavalry, six hundred men of the Twenty-second
Colored troops, and one hundred men of the Sixteenth New York. These
swept the swamps by detachments, the mass of them dismounted, with
cavalry at the belts of clearing, interspersed with detectives at
frequent intervals in the rear. They first formed a strong picket cordon
entirely around the swamps, and then, drawn up in two orders of battle,
advanced boldly into the bogs by two lines of march. One party swept the
swamps longitudinally, the other pushed straight across their smallest
diameter.

A similar march has not been made during the war; the soldiers were only
a few paces apart, and in steady order they took the ground as it came,
now plunging to their arm-pits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now
hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by Regions of wood ticks,
now tempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and
plunging to the tip of the skull in poison stagnation; the tree boughs
rent their uniforms; they came out upon dry land, many of them without a
rag of garment scratched, and gashed, and spent, repugnant to
themselves, and disgusting to those who saw them; but not one trace of
Booth or Harold was any where found. Wherever they might be, the swamps
did not contain them.

While all this was going on, a force started from Point Lookout, and
swept the narrow necks of Saint Mary's quite up to Medley's Neck. To
complete the search in this part of the country, Colonel Wells and Major
O'Bierne started with a force of cavalry and infantry for Chappel Point;
they took the entire peninsula as before, and marched in close skirmish
line across it, but without finding anything of note. The matter of
inclosing a house was by cavalry advances, which held all the avenues
till mounted detectives came up. Many strange and ludicrous adventures
occured on each of these expeditions. While the forces were going up
Cobb's neck, there was a counter force coming down from Allen's Fresh.

Major O'Bierne started for Leonardstown with his detective force, and
played off Laverty as Booth, and Hoey as Harold. These two advanced to
farm-houses and gave their assumed names, asking at the same time for
assistance and shelter. They were generally avoided, except by one man
named Claggert, who told them they might hide in the woods behind his
house. When Claggert was arrested, however he stated that he meant to
hide them only to give them up. While on this adventure, a man who had
heard of the reward came very near shooting Laverty. The ruse now became
hazardous and the detectives resumed their real characters.

I have not time to go into the detail of this long and excellent hunt.
My letter of yesterday described how the detectives of Mr. Young and
Marshal Murray examined the negro Swan, and traced Booth to the house of
Sam Coxe, the richest rebel in Charles county. There is a gap in the
evidence between the arrival of Booth at this place and his crossing the
Potomac above Swan Point, in a stolen or purposely-provided canoe. But
as Coxe's house is only ten miles from the river, it is possible that he
made the passage of the intermediate country undiscovered.

One Mills, a rebel mail-carrier, also arrested, saw Booth and Harold
lurking along the river bank on Friday; he referred Major O'Bierne to
one Claggert, a rebel, as having seen them also; but Claggert held his
tongue, and went to jail. On Saturday night, Major O'Bierne, thus
assured, also crossed the Potomac with his detectives to Boon's farm,
where the fugitives had landed. While collecting information here a
gunboat swung up the stream, and threatened to fire on the party.

It was now night, and all the party worn to the ground with long travel
and want of sleep. Lieutenant Laverty's men went a short distance down
the country and gave up, but Major O'Bierne, with a single man, pushed
all night to King George's court-house, and next day, Sunday,
re-embarked for Chappell's Point. Hence he telegraphed his information,
and asked permission to pursue, promising to catch the assassins before
they reached Port Royal.

This the department refused. Colonel Baker's men were delegated to make
the pursuit with the able Lieutenant Doherty, and. O'Bierne, who was the
most active and successful spirit in the chase, returned to Washington,
cheerful and contented.

At Mrs. Burratt's Washington house, at the Pennsylvania Hotel,
Washington, and at Surrattsville, the Booth plot was almost entirely
arranged. These three places will be relics of conspiracy forever.

Harold said to Lieutenant Doherty, after the latter had dragged him from
the barn.

"Who's that man in there? It can't be Booth; he told me his name was
Loyd."

He further said that he had begged food for Booth from house to house
while the latter hid in the woods.

The confederate captain, Willie Jett, who had given Booth a lift behind
his saddle from Port Royal to Garrett's farm, was then courting a Miss
Goldmann at Bowling Green; his traveling companions were Lieutenants
Ruggles and Burbridge.

Payne, the assassin of the Sewards, was arrested by Officers, Sampson,
of the sub-treasury, and Devoe, acting under General Alcott. The latter
had besides, Officers Marsh and Clancy (a stenographer).

The reward for the capture of Booth will be distributed between very
many men. The negro, Swan, will get as much of it, as he deserves. It
amounts to about eighty thousand dollars, but the War Department may
increase it at discretion. The entire rewards amount to a hundred and
sixty odd thousand. Major O'Bierne should get a large part of it as
well.

This story which I must close abruptly, deserves to be re-written, with
all its accessory endeavours. What I have said is in skeleton merely,
and far from exhaustive.




LETTER VII.

THE MARTYR.


Washington, May 14.

I am sitting in the President's office. He was here very lately, but he
will not return to dispossess me of this high-backed chair he filled so
long, nor resume his daily work at the table where I am writing.

There are here only Major Hay and the friend who accompanies me. A
bright-faced boy runs in and out, darkly attired, so that his fob-chain
of gold is the only relief to his mourning garb. This is little Tad.,
the pet of the White House. That great death, with which the world
rings, has made upon him only the light impression which all things make
upon childhood. He will live to be a man pointed out everywhere, for his
father's sake; and as folks look at him, the tableau of the murder will
seem to encircle him.

The room is long and high, and so thickly hung with maps that the color
of the wall cannot be discerned. The President's table at which I am
seated, adjoins a window at the farthest corner; and to the left of my
chair as I recline in it, there is a large table before an empty grate,
around which there are many chairs, where the cabinet used to assemble.
The carpet is trodden thin, and the brilliance of its dyes is lost. The
furniture is of the formal cabinet class, stately and semi-comfortable;
there are book cases sprinkled with the sparse library of a country
lawyer, but lately plethoric, like the thin body which has departed in
its coffin. They are taking away Mr. Lincoln's private effects, to
deposit them wheresoever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the
place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from
which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the
maps; they are from the coast survey and engineer departments, and
exhibit all the contested grounds of the war: there are pencil lines
upon them where some one has traced the route of armies, and planned the
strategic circumferences of campaigns. Was it the dead President who so
followed the march of empire, and dotted the sites of shock and
overthrow?

Here is the Manassas country--here the long reach of the wasted
Shenandoah; here the wavy line of the James and the sinuous peninsula.
The wide campagna of the gulf country sways in the Potomac breeze that
filters in at the window, and the Mississippi climbs up the wall, with
blotches of blue and red to show where blood gushed at the bursting of
deadly bombs. So, in the half-gloomy, half-grand apartment, roamed the
tall and wrinkled figure whom the country had summoned from his plain
home into mighty history, with the geography of the republic drawn into
a narrow compass so that he might lay his great brown hand upon it
everywhere. And walking to and fro, to and fro, to measure the destinies
of arms, he often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to
ask if his life were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous
issues, or whether it was not all a fever-dream, snatched from his sofa
in the routine office of the Prairie state.

There is but one picture on the marble mantel over the cold grate--John
Bright, a photograph.

I can well imagine how the mind of Mr. Lincoln often went afar to the
face of Bright, who said so kindly things of him when Europe was mocking
his homely guise and provincial phraseology. To Mr. Lincoln, John Bright
was the standard-bearer of America and democracy in the old world. He
thrilled over Bright's bold denunciations of peer and "Privilege," and
stretched his long arm across the Atlantic to take that daring Quaker
innovator by the hand.

I see some books on the table; perhaps they have lain there undisturbed
since the reader's dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual,
a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, "Orpheus C. Kerr," and "Artemus
Ward." These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard
day's labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his
partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of
Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken
shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped
Heights of Arlington, reaching down to the shining river side. These
scenes he looked at often to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and
often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation
abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this
room and its close applications in the _abandon_ of the theater.

I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes--to slay this public
servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We
worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.

Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat--a
room more narrow but as long--and opposite this adjacent office, a
second door, directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private
passage to his family quarters. This passage is his only monument in the
building; he added nor subtracted nothing else; it tells a long story of
duns and loiterers, contract-hunters and seekers for commissions,
garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure and talkers
without conscience. They pressed upon him through the great door
opposite his window, and hat in hand, come courtsying to his chair, with
an obsequious "Mr. President!"

If he dared, though the chief magistrate and commander of the army and
navy, to go out of the great door, these vampires leaped upon him with
their Babylonian pleas, and barred his walk to his hearthside. He could
not insult them since it was not in his nature, and perhaps many of them
had really urgent errands. So he called up the carpenter and ordered a
strategic route cut from his office to his hearth, and perhaps told of
it after with much merriment.

Here should be written the biography of his official life--in the room
where have concentrated all the wires of action, and where have
proceeded the resolves which vitalized in historic deeds. But only the
great measures, however carried out, were conceived in this office. The
little ones proceeded from other places..

Here once came Mr. Stanton, saying in his hard and positive way:

"Mr. Lincoln, I have found it expedient to disgrace and arrest General
Stone."

"Stanton," said Mr. Lincoln, with an emotion of pain, "when you
considered it necessary to imprison General Stone, I am glad you did not
consult me about it."

And for lack of such consultation, General Stone, I learn, now lies a
maniac in the asylum. The groundless pretext, upon which he suffered the
reputation of treason, issued from the Department of War--not from this
office.

But as to his biography, it is to be written by Colonel Nicolay and
Major Hay. They are to go to Paris together, one as attache of legation,
the other as consul, and while there, will undertake the labor. They are
the only men who know his life well enough to exhaust it, having
followed his official tasks as closely as they shared his social hours.

Major Hay is a gentleman of literary force. Colonel Nicolay has a fine
judgment of character and public measures. Together they should satisfy
both curiosity and history.

As I hear from my acquaintances here these episodes of the President's
life, I recall many reminiscences of his ride from Springfield to
Harrisburg, over much of which I passed. Then he left home and became an
inhabitant of history. His face was solid and healthy, his step young,
his speech and manner bold and kindly. I saw him at Trenton stand in the
Legislature, and say, in his conversational intonation:

"We may have to put the foot down firm."

How should we have hung upon his accents then had we anticipated his
virtues and his fate.

Death is requisite to make opinion grave. We looked upon Mr. Lincoln
then as an amusing sensation, and there was much guffaw as he was
regarded by the populace; he had not passed out of partisan ownership.
Little by little, afterward, he won esteem, and often admiration, until
the measure of his life was full, and the victories he had achieved made
the world applaud him. Yet, at this date, the President was sadly
changed. Four years of perplexity and devotion had wrinkled his face,
and stooped his shoulders, and the failing eyes that glared upon the
play closed as his mission was completed, and the world had been
educated enough to comprehend him.

The White House has been more of a Republican mansion under his control
than for many administrations. Uncouth guests came to it often, typical
of the simple western civilization of which he was a graduate, and while
no coarse altercation has ever ensued, the portal has swung wide for
five years.

A friend, connected with a Washington newspaper, told me that he had
occasion to see Mr. Lincoln one evening, and found that the latter had
gone to bed. But he was told to sit down in the office, and directly the
President entered. He wore only a night shirt, and his long, lank
hirsute limbs, as he sat down, inclined the guest to laughter. Mr.
Lincoln disposed of his request at once, and manifested a desire to
talk. So he reached for the cane which my friend carried and conversed
in this manner:

"I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My
favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself.
There's a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don't you think so? You
have seen these fishing poles that fit into a cane? Well, that was an
old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I
'spose they use'em yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a
young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one's hand will
change his appearance? Old women and witches would'nt look so without
sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that."

In this way my friend, who is a clerk, in a newspaper office, heard the
President talk for an hour. The undress of the man and the witness of
his subject would be staples for merriment if we did not reflect that
his greatness was of no conventional cast, that the playfulness of his
nature and the simplicity of his illustration lightened public business
but never arrested it.

Another gentleman, whom I know, visited the President in high dudgeon
one night. He was a newspaper proprietor and one of his editors had been
arrested.

"Mr. Lincoln," he said, "I have been off electioneering for your
re-election, and in my absence you have had my editor arrested. I won't
stand it, sir. I have fought better administrations than yours."

"Why, John," said the President, "I don't know much about it. I suppose
your boys have been too enterprizing. The fact is, I don't interfere
with the press much, but I suppose I am responsible."

"I want you to order the man's release to-night," said the applicant. "I
shan't leave here till I get it. In fact, I am the man who should be
arrested. Why don't you send me to Capitol Hill?"

This idea pleased the President exceedingly. He laughed the other into
good humor.

"In fact," he said, "I am under restraint here, and glad of any pretext
to release a journalist."

So he wrote the order, and the writer got his liberty.

It must not be inferred from this, however, that the President was a
devotee to literature. He had no professional enthusiasm for it. The
literary coterie of the White House got little flattery but its members
were treated as agreeable citizens and not as the architects of any
body's fortune.

Willis went there much for awhile, but yielded to his old habit of
gossiping about the hall paper and the teapots. Emerson went there once,
and was deferred to us if he were anything but a philosopher. Yet he so
far grasped the character of his host as to indite that noble
humanitarian eulogy upon him, delivered at Concord, and printed in the
WORLD. It will not do to say definitely In this notice how several
occasional writers visited the White House, heard the President's views
and assented to them and afterward abused him. But these attained no
remembrance nor tart reproach from that least retaliatory of men. He
harbored no malice, and is said to have often placed himself on the
stand-point of Davis and Lee, and accounted for their defection while he
could not excuse it.

He was a good reader, and took all the leading NEW YORK dailies every
day. His secretaries perused them and selected all the items which would
interest the President; these were read to him and considered. He bought
few new books, but seemed ever alive to works of comic value; the vein
of humor in him was not boisterous in its manifestations, but touched
the geniality of his nature, and he reproduced all that he absorbed, to
elucidate some new issue, or turn away argument by a laugh.

As a jester, Mr. Lincoln's tendency was caricatured by the prints, but
not exaggerated. He probably told as many stories as are attributed to
him. Nor did he, as is averred, indulge in these jests on solemn
occasions. No man felt with such personal intensity the extent of the
casualties of his time, and he often gravely reasoned whether he could
be in any way responsible for the bloodshed and devastation over which
it was his duty to preside.

An acquaintance of mine--a private--once went to him to plead for a
man's life. He had never seen the man for whom he pleaded, and had no
acquaintance with the man's family. Mr. Lincoln was touched by his
disinterestedness, and said to him:

"If I were anything but the President, I would be constantly working as
you have done."

Whenever a doubt of one's guilt lay on his mind, the man was spared by
his direct interference..

There was an entire absence in the President's character of the heroic
element. He would do a great deed in _deshabille_ as promptly as in full
dress. He never aimed to be brilliant, unconsciously understanding that
a great man's brilliancy is to be measured by the "wholeness" and
synthetic cast of his career rather than by any fitful ebullitions. For
that reason we look in vain through his messages for "points." His point
was not to turn a sentence or an epigram, but to win an effect,
regardless of the route to it.

He was commonplace in his talk, and Chesterfield would have had no
patience with him; his dignity of character lay in his uprightness
rather than in his formal manner. Members of his government often
reviewed him plainly in his presence. Yet he divined the true course,
while they only argued it out.

His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no
prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a
practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but
Moreau--not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin.

His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal
grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him
upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father
as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last
day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture
of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the
President.

So dwelt the citizen who is gone--a model in character if not in
ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White
House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought
worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he
has bent so often,--in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in
the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing
upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and
close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations,
of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table
the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory.




LETTER VIII.

THE TRIAL.


Washington, May 26.

The most exciting trial of our times has obtained a very meager
commemoration in all but its literal features. The evidence adduced in
the course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its
far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the
extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of
the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the
artists.

Now that the evidence is growing vapid, and the obstinacy of the
military commission has lost its coarse zest, we may find enough readers
to warrant a fuller sketch of the conspirators' prison.

About a mile below Washington, where the high Potomac Bluffs meet the
marshy border of the Eastern branch, stands the United States arsenal, a
series of long, mathematically uninteresting brick buildings, with a
broad lawn behind them, open to the water, and level military plazas, on
which are piled pyramids of shell and ball, among acres of cannon and
cannon-carriages, and caissons. A high wall, reaching circularly around
these buildings, shows above it, as one looks from Washington, the
barred windows of an older and more gloomy structure than the rest,
which forms the city front of the group of which it is the principal.
This was a penitentiary, but, long ago added to the arsenal, it has been
re-transformed to a court-room and jail, and in its third, or uppermost
story, the Military Commission is sitting.

The main road to the arsenal is by a wide and vacant avenue, which abuts
against a gate where automaton sentries walk, but the same gate can best
be reached on foot by the shores of the Potomac, in the sight, of the
forts, the shipping, and Alexandria.

The scene at the arsenal in time of peace is common-place enough, except
that across the Eastern Branch the towers of the lunatic asylum, perched
upon a height, look down baronially; but this trial of murderers has
made the spot a fair.

A whole company of volunteers keeps the gate, through which are passing
cabs, barouches, officers' ambulances, and a stream of folks on foot;
while farther along almost a regiment crosses the drive, their huddled
shelter tents extending entirely across the peninsula. These are playing
cards on the ground, and tossing quoits, and sleeping on their faces,
while a gunboat watches the river front, and under a circular wall a
line of patrols, ten yards apart, go to and fro perpetually.

It is 10 o'clock, and the court is soon to sit. Its members ride down in
superb ambulances and bring their friends along to show them the majesty
of justice. A perfect park of carriages stands by the door to the left,
and from these dismount major-generals' wives, in rustling silks;
daughters of congressmen, attired like the lilies of the milliner;
little girls who hope to be young ladies and have come with "Pa," to
look at the assassins; even brides are here, in the fresh blush of their
nuptials, and they consider the late spectacle of the review as good as
lost, if the court-scene be not added to it. These tender creatures have
a weakness for the ring of manacles, the sight of folks to be suspended
in the air, the face of a woman confederate in blood.

They chat with their polite guides, many of whom are gallant captains,
and go one after another up the little flight of steps which leads to
the room of the officer of the day.

He passes them, if he pleases, up the crooked stairways, and when they
have climbed three of these, they enter a sort of garret-room, oblong,
and plastered white, and about as large as an ordinary town-house
parlor.

Four doors open into it--that by which we have entered, two from the
left, where the witnesses wait, and one at the end, near the left far
corner, which is the outlet from the cells.

A railing, close up to the stairway door, gives a little space in the
foreground for witnesses; two tables, transverse to this rail, are for
the commission and the press, the first-named being to the right;
between these are a raised platform and pivot arm-chair for the witness;
below are the sworn phonographers and the counsel for the accused, and
then another rail like that separating the crowd from the court, holds
behind it the accused and their guards.

These are they who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths.
They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench
with their backs against the wall,--ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and
the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a
moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the
reporters, introduced there by a fussy usher, and through four windows
filters the imperfect daylight, making all things distinguishable, yet
shadowy. The _coup d'oeil_ of this small and crowded scene is lively as
a popular funeral.

There is the witness with raised hand, pointing toward heaven, and
looking at Judge Holt. The gilt stars, bars, and orange-colored sashes
of the commission; the women's brilliant silks and bonnets; the crowding
spectators, with their brains in their eyes; the blue coats of the
guards; the working scribes; and last of all the line of culprits, whose
suspected guilt has made them worthy of all illustration.

Between the angle of the wall and the studded door, under the heavy bar
of dressed stone which marks above the thickness of the gaol, sits all
alone a woman's figure, clothed in solemn black. Her shadowy skirt hides
her feet, so that we cannot see whether they are riveted; her sleeves of
sable sweep down to her wrist, and dark gloves cover the plumpness of
her hand, while a palm-leaf fan nods to and fro to assist the obscurity
of her vail of crape, descending from her widow's bonnet.


A solitary woman, beginning the line of coarse indicted men, shrinking
beneath the scornful eyes of her sex, and the as bold survey of men more
pitiful, may well excite, despite her guilt, a moment of sympathy.

Let men remember that she is the mother of a son who has fled to save
his forfeit life by deserting her to shame, and perhaps, to death. Let
women, who will not mention her in mercy, learn from her end, in all
succeeding wars, to make patriotism of their household duties and not
incite to blood.

Mrs. Surratt is a graduate of that seminary which spits in soldiers
faces, denounces brave generals upon the rostrum, and cries out for an
interminable scaffold when all the bells are ringing peace.

How far her wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder
rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from
mothers at large--to twist her own bow-string rather than build his
gibbet.

Beneath her shadowy bonnet, over her fan-tip, we see two large, sad
eyes, rising and falling, and now and then when the fan sways to and
fro, the hair just turning gray with trouble, and the round face growing
wan and seamed with terrible reflection, are seen a moment crouching
low, as if she would wish to grovel upon the floor and bury her forehead
in her hands.

Yet, sometimes, across Mrs. Surratt's face a stealthiness creeps--a sort
of furtive, feline flashing of the eye, like that of one which means to
leap sideways. At these times her face seems to grow hard and colorless,
as if that tiger expression which Pradier caught upon the face of
Brinvilliers and fastened into a masque, had been repeated here. Not to
grow mawkish while we must be kind, let us not forget that this woman is
an old plotter. If she did not devise the assassination, she was privy
to it long. She was an agent of contraband mails--a bold, crafty,
assured rebel--perhaps a spy--and in the event of her condemnation, let
those who would plead for her spend half their pity upon that victim
whose heart was like a woman's, and whose hand was merciful as a
mother's.

Before the door sits an officer, uncovered, who does not seem to labor
under any particular fear, chiefly because the captives are ironed to
immovability, and he stares and smiles alternately, as if he were
somewhat amiable and extremely bored.

Next to the officer is a shabby-looking boy, whose seat is by the right
jamb of the jail door. Of all boys just old enough to feel their oats,
this boy is the most commonplace. His parents would be likely to have no
sanguine hopes of his reaching the presidency; for his head indicates
latent dementia, and a slice or two from it would recommend him, without
exanimation, to the school for the feeble-minded. Better dressed, and
washed, and shaved, he might make a tolerable adornment to a hotel door,
or even reach the dignity of a bar-keeper or an usher at a theatre. But
that this fellow should occupy a leaf in history and be confounded with
a tragedy entering into the literature of the world, reverses manifest
destiny, and leaves neither phrenology nor physiognomy a place to stand
upon.

Come up! Gall, Spurzheim, and Lavater, and remark his sallow face,
attenuated by base excesses! Do you know any forehead so broad which
means so little? the oyster could teach this man philosophy! His chin is
sharp, his eyes are blank blue, his short black hair curls over his
ears, and his beard is of a prickly black, with a moustache which does
not help his general contemptibleness. A dirty grayish shirt without a
linen collar, is seen between the lapels of the greasy and dusty cloth
coat, sloping at the shoulders; and under his worn brown trowsers, the
manacle of iron makes an ugly garter to his carpet clipper.

This is David Harold, who shared the wild night-ride of Booth, and
barely escaped that outlaw's death in the burning barn.

He stoops to the rail of the dock, now and then, to chat with his
attorney, and a sort of blank anxiety which he wears, as his head turns
here and there, shifts to a frolicking smile. But a woman of unusual
attractions enters the court, and Harold is much more interested in her
than in his acquittal.

Great Caesar's dust, which stopped a knot-hole, has in this play boy an
inverse parallel. He was at best hostler to a murderer, and failed in
that. His chief concern at present is to have somebody to talk to; and
he thinks upon the whole, that if an assassination is productive of so
little fun, he will have nothing to do with another one.

That Harold has slipped into history gives us as much surprise as that
he has yet to suffer death gives us almost contempt for the scaffold.
But if the scaffold must wait for only wise men to get upon it, it must
rot. Your wise man does no murder in the first place, and if so, in the
second, he dodges the penalty. In this world, Harold, idiotcy is oftener
punished than guilt.

That Booth should have used Harold is very naturally accounted for.
Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them.
Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an
eagle and be screamed at now and then.

At the right hand side of Harold sits a soldier in blue, who is
evidently thinking about a game of quoits with his comrades in the jail
yard; he wonders why lawyers are so very dry, and is surprised to find a
trial for murder as tedious as a thanksgiving sermon.

But on the soldier's other hand is a figure which makes the center and
cynosure of this thrilling scene. Taller by a whole head than either his
companions or the sentries, Payne, the assassin, sits erect, and flings
his barbarian eye to and fro, radiating the tremendous energy of his
colossal physique.

He is the only man worthy to have murdered Mr. Seward. When against the
delicate organization, the fine, subtle, nervous mind of the Secretary
of State, this giant, knife in hand, precipitated himself, two forms of
civilization met as distinctly as when the savage Gauls invaded the
Roman senate.

Lawlessness and intelligence, the savage and the statesman, body and
mind, fought together upon Mr. Seward's bed.

The mystery attending Payne's home and parentage still exists to make
him more incomprehensible. Out of the vague, dim _ultima thule_, like
those Asiatic hordes which came from nowhere and shivered civilization,
Payne suddenly appeared and fought his way to the _sanctum sanctorum_ of
law. I think his part in the assassination more remarkable than Booth's,
The latter's crime was shrewdly plotted, as by one measuring
intelligence with the whole government. But Payne did not think--he only
struck!

With this man's face before me as I write, I am reminded of some Maori
chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion.
His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer
would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a
character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is
full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex
at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly
parted, is at the summit so disturbed that tufts of it rise up like Red
Jacket's or Tecumseh's; but the head is kept well up, and rests upon a
wonderfully broad throat, muscular as one's thigh, and without any
trace, as he sits, of the protuberance called Adam's apple. Withal, the
eye is the man Payne's power. It is dark and speechless, and rolls here
and there like that of a beast in a cage which strives in vain to
understand the language of its captors. It seems to say, if anything,
that, it has no sympathy with anybody approximate, and has submitted,
like a lion bound, to the logic of conviction and of chains.

Payne looks at none of his fellow-prisoners: assassins caught seldom
cares to recognise each other; for while there is faithfulness among
thieves, there is none among murderers. His great white eyeball never
roves to anybody's in the dock, nor theirs to his. He has confessed his
crime and they know it; so they have no mutual hope; they listen to the
evidence because it concerns them; ho looks at it only, because it
cannot save him. He is entirely beardless, yet in his boyish chin more
of a man physically than the rest, combined.

While I watch this man I am constantly repeating to myself that stanza
of Bryant's:

  "Upon the market place he stood,--
  A man of giant frame,
  Amid the gathering multitude
  That shrank to hear his name;
  All proud of step and firm of limb,
  His dark eye on the ground--
  And silently they gazed on him,
  As on a lion bound."

His dress, which we scarcely notice in the grander contrast of his pose
and stature, is an old shirt of woolen blue, with a white nap at the
button-holes, and upon his knees of black cloth he twirls, as if for
relaxation, between his powerful manacles, a soiled white
handkerchief--if from his mother, we conjecture, a gift to a bloodhound
from his dam. His heavy handcuffs make his broad shoulders more narrow.
Yet we can see by the outline of the sleeves what girth the muscles has,
and the hand at the end of his long and bony arm is wide and huge, as if
it could wield a claymore as well as a dirk. He also wears carpet
slippers, but his ankles are clogged with so heavy irons that two men
must carry them when he enters or leaves the dock. For this man there
can be no sentiment--no more than for a bull. The flesh on his face is
hard, as if cast, rather than generated, and while we see how he towers
above the entire court, we watch him in wonder, as if he were some
maniac denizen of a zone where men without minds grow to the stature and
power of fiends.

The face of Payne is not of the traditional southern peculiarities. He
resembles rather a Pennsylvania mountaineer than a Kentucky rustic.

Three weeks ago I gave, in an account of the conspiracy which many
gainsayed, but which the trial has fully confirmed, a sketch of this
man, to which I still adhere. He was furnished to Booth and John Surratt
from Canada; sent upon special service with his life in his hands; and
he faced the murder he was to commit like any prize-fighter. I pity
Beall, who died intelligently for a wretched essay against civilians,
that his biography and fate must be matched by this savage's!

Next to Payne, and crouching under him like a frog under a rock, is an
inconsiderable soldier, who chews his cud, and would cheerfully hang his
protege for the sake of being rid of him. My sympathies are entirely
enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted,
nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself,
but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies
him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to
this soldier as the point of his bayonet. I see what ails him.

He wants to swear.

A beam running overhead divides the court lengthwise in half, and as the
prisoners sit at the end of the court, the German Atzerott, or Adzerota,
has a place just beneath the beam. This is very ominous for Atzerott.
The filthiness of this man denies him sympathy. He is a disgusting
little groveler of dry, sandy hair, oval head, ears set so close to the
chin that one would think his sense of hearing limited to his jaws, and
a complexion so yellow that the uncropped brownness of his beard does
not materially darken it. He wears a grayish coat, low grimy shirt, and
the usual carpet slippers of threadbare red over his shifting and
shiftless feet. His head is bent forward, and seems to be anxiously
trying to catch the tenor of the trial. Many persons outside of the
court, Atzerott, are equally puzzled!

From as much examination of this man as his insignificance permits, I
should call him a "gabby" fellow--loud of resolution, ignoble of effort.
Over his lager no man would be braver. His face is familiar to me from a
review of those detective cabinets usually called "Rogues' Galleries."
As a "sneak thief" or "bagman," I should convict him by his face; the
same indictment would make me acquit him instantly of assassination. In
this estimate I rely upon evidence as well as upon appearance. Atzerott
swaggered about Kirk wood's Hotel asking for the Vice-President's room;
Payne or Booth would have done the murder silently. Nobody pities a
dirty man. The same arts of dress and cleanliness which please ladies
influence juries.

Next to Atzerott sits a soldier--a very jolly and smooth faced
soldier--who at one time hears a witness say something laughable. The
soldier immediately grins to the farthest point of his scalp. But he is
chagrined to find that the joke is too trivial to admit of a laugh of
duration. Very few jokes before the present court do so. But this
soldier being of long charity and excellent patience, awaits the next
joke like a veteran under orders, and reposes his chin upon the dock as
if aware that between jokes there was ample time for a nap.

The next prisoner to the right is O'Laughlin. He is a small man, about
twenty-eight years of age, attired in a fine, soiled coat, but without
white linen upon either his bosom or neck, and handcuffs rest hugely
upon his mediocrity. His moustache, eye-brows, and hair are regular and
very black. He does not look unlike Booth, though he seems to have
little bodily power, and he is very anxious, as if more earnest than any
of the rest, to have a fair lease upon life. His countenance is not
prepossessing, though he might be considered passably good looking in a
mixed company.

Between O'Laughlin and the next prisoner, Spangler, sits a soldier in
ultramarine--a discontented soldier, a moody, dissatisfied, and
arbitrary soldier. His definition of military justice is like the boy's
answer at school to the familiar question upon the Constitution of the
United States:

"What rights do accused persons enjoy ?"

The boy wrote out, very carefully, this answer:

"Death by hanging."

The boy would have been correct had the question applied to accused
persons before a court-martial.

Spangler, the scene-shifter and stage-carpenter, has the face and
bearing of a day-laborer. His blue woollen shirt does not confuse him,
as he is used to it. He has an oldish face, wrinkled by fearful
anticipations, and his hair is thin. He is awkwardly built, and watches
the trial earnestly, as if striving to catch between the links of
evidence vistas of a life insured. This man has a simple and pleading
face, and there is something genial in his great, incoherent
countenance. He is said to have cleared the stage for Booth's escape,
but this is indifferently testified to. He had often been asked by Booth
to take a drink at the nearest bar. Persons who drink assure me that the
greatest mark of confidence which a great man can show a lesser one is
to make that tender; this, therefore, explains Booth's power over
Spangler.

Spangler is the first scene-shifter who may become a _dramatis personæ_.

A soldier sits between Spangler and Doctor Mudd. The soldier would like
Spangler to get up and go away, so that he could have as much of the
bench as he might sleep upon. This particular soldier, I may be
qualified to say, would sleep upon his post.

Doctor Mudd has a New England and not a Maryland face. He compares, to
those on his left, as Hyperion to a squatter. His high, oval head is
bald very far up, but not benevolently so, and it is covered with light
red hair, so thin as to contrast indifferently with the denseness of his
beard and goatee. His nose would be insignificant but for its sharpness,
and at the nostrils it is swelling and high-spirited. His eyes impinge
upon his brows, and they are shining and rather dark, while the brows
themselves are so scantily clothed with hair that they seem quite naked.
Mudd is neatly dressed in a green-grass duster, and white bosom and
collar; if he had no other advantages over his associates these last
would give it to him. He keeps his feet upon the rail before him in true
republican style, and rolls a morsel of tobacco under his tongue.

The military commission works as if it were delegated not to try, but to
convict, and Dr. Mudd, if he be innocent, is in only less danger than if
he were guilty. He has a sort of home-bred intelligence in his face, and
socially is as far above his fellows as Goliah of Gath above the rest of
the Philistines.

On the right of Doctor Mudd sits a soldier, who is striving to look
through his legs at the judge-advocate, as if taking a sort of secret
aim at that person, with the intent to fetch him down, because he makes
the trial so very dry, and the soldier so very thirsty.

The last man, who sits on the extreme right of the prisoners, is Mr.
Sam. Arnold. He is, perhaps, the best looking of the prisoners, and the
least implicated. He has a solid, pleasant face; has been a rebel
soldier, foolishly committed himself to Booth, with perhaps no intention
to do a crime, recanted in pen and ink, and was made a national
character. Had he recanted by word of mouth he might have saved himself
unpleasant dreams. This shows everybody the absurdity of writing what
they can so easily say. The best thing Arnold ever wrote was his letter
to Booth refusing to engage in murder. Yet this recantation is more in
evidence against than then his original purpose.

Arnold looks out of the window, and feels easy.

The reporters who are present are generally young fellows, practical and
ardent, like Woods, of Boston; Colburn, of THE WORLD; and Major Poore,
who has been the chronicler of such scenes for twenty years. Ber.
Pitman, one of the authors of phonetic writing, is among the official
reporters, and the Murphies, who could report the lightning, if it could
talk, are slashing down history as it passes in at their ears and runs
out at their fingers' ends.

The counsel for the accused strike me as being commonplace lawyers. They
either have no chance or no pluck to assert the dignity of their
profession. Reverdy Johnson is not here. The first day disgusted him, as
he is a practitioner of _law_. Yet the best word of the trial has been
his:

"I, gentlemen, am a member of that body of legislators which creates
courts-martial and major-generals!"

The commission has collectively an imposing appearance: the face of
Judge Holt is swarthy; he questions with slow utterance, holding the
witness in his cold, measuring eye. Hunter, who sits at the opposite end
of the table, shuts his eyes now and then, either to sleep or think, or
both, and the other generals take a note or two, and watch for occasions
to distinguish themselves.

Excepting Judge Holt, the court has shown as little ability as could be
expected from soldiers, placed in unenviable publicity, and upon a duty
for which they are disqualified, both by education and acumen. Witness
the lack of dignity in Hunter, who opened the court by a coarse allusion
to "humbug chivalry;" of Lew. Wallace, whose heat and intolerance were
appropriately urged in the most exceptional English; of Howe, whose
tirade against the rebel General Johnson was feeble as it was
ungenerous! This court was needed to show us at least the petty tyranny
of martial law and the pettiness of martial jurists. The counsel for the
defence have just enough show to make the unfairness of the trial
partake of hypocrisy, and the wideness of the subjects discussed makes
one imagine that the object of the commission is to write a cyclopedia,
and not to hang or acquit six or eight miserable wretches.




LETTER IX.

THE EXECUTIONS.


Washington, Friday, July 7th.

The trial is over; four of the conspirators have paid with their lives
the penalty of the Great Conspiracy; the rest go to the jail, and with
one exception for the remainder of their lives.

Whatever our individual theories may be, the great crime is ended, and
this is the crowning scene:

It was a long and dusty avenue, along which rambled soldiers in bluishly
white coats, cattle with their tongues out, straying from the herd, and
a few negroes making for their cabins, which dotted the fiery and vacant
lots of the suburbs. At the foot of this avenue, where a lukewarm river
holds between its dividing arms a dreary edifice of brick, the way was
filled with collected cabs, and elbowing people, abutting against a
circle of sentinels who kept the arsenal gate. The low, flat, dust-white
fields to the far left were also lined with patrols and soldiers lying
on the ground in squads beside their stacked muskets. Within these a
second blue and monotonous line extended. The drive from the arsenal
gate to the arsenal's high and steel-spiked wall was beset by companies
of exacting sabremen, and all the river bank to the right was edged with
blue and bayonets. This exhibition of war was the prelude to a very
ghastly but very popular episode--an execution. Three men and a woman
were to be led out in shackles and hung to a beam. They had conspired to
take life; they had thrilled the world with the partial consummation of
their plot; they were to reach the last eminence of assassins, on this
parched and oppressive noon, by swinging in pinioned arms and muffled
faces in the presence of a thousand people.

The bayonets at the gate were lifted as I produced my pass. It was the
last permission granted. In giving it away the General seemed relieved,
for he had been sorely troubled by applications. Everybody who had
visited Washington to seek for an office, sought to see this expiation
also. The officer at the gate looked at my pass suspiciously. "I don't
believe that all these papers have been genuine," he said. Is an
execution, then, so great a warning to evil-doers, that men will commit
forgery to see it?

I entered a large grassy yard, surrounded by an exceedingly high wall.
On the top of this wall, soldiers with muskets in their hands, were
thickly planted. The yard below was broken by irregular buildings of
brick. I climbed by a flight of rickety outside stairs to the central
building, where many officers were seated at the windows, and looked
awhile at the strange scene on the grassy plaza. On the left, the long,
barred, impregnable penitentiary rose. The shady spots beneath it were
occupied by huddling spectators. Soldiers were filling their canteens at
the pump. A face or two looked out from the barred jail. There were many
umbrellas hoisted on the ground to shelter civilians beneath them.
Squads of officers and citizens lay along the narrow shadow of the
walls. The north side of the yard was enclosed on three sides by columns
of soldiers drawn up in regular order, the side next to the penitentiary
being short to admit of ingress to the prisoner's door; but the opposite
column reached entirely up to the north wall.

Within this enclosed area a structure to be inhabited by neither the
living nor the dead was fast approaching completion. It stood gaunt,
lofty, long. Saws and hammers made dolorous music on it. Men, in their
shirt sleeves, were measuring it and directing its construction in a
business way. Now and then some one would ascend its airy stair to test
its firmness; others crawled beneath to wedge its slim supports, or
carry away the falling debris.

Toward this skeleton edifice all looked with a strange nervousness. It
was the thought and speculation of the gravest and the gayest.

It was the gallows.

A beam reached, horizontally, in the air, twenty feet from the ground;
four awkward ropes, at irregular intervals, dangled from it, each noosed
at the end. It was upheld by three props, one in the center and one at
each end. These props came all the way to the ground where they were
morticed in heavy bars. Midway of them a floor was laid, twenty by
twelve feet, held in its position on the farther side by shorter props,
of which there were many, and reached by fifteen creaking steps, railed
on either side. But this floor had no supports on the side nearest the
eye, except two temporary rods, at the foot of which two inclined beams
pointed menacingly, held in poise by ropes from the gallows floor.

And this floor was presently discovered to be a cheat, a trap, a
pitfall.

Two hinges only held it to its firmer half. These were to give way at
the fatal moment, and leave only the shallow and unreliable air for the
bound and smothering to tread upon.

The traps were two, sustained by two different props.

The nooses were on each side of the central support.

Was this all?

Not all.

Close by the foot of the gallows four wooden boxes were piled upon each
other at the edge of four newly excavated pits, the fresh earth of which
was already dried and brittle in the burning noon.

Here were to be interred the broken carcasses when the gallows had let
go its throttle. They were so placed as the victims should emerge from
the gaol door they would be seen near the stair directly in the line of
march.

And not far from these, in silence and darkness beneath the prison where
they had lain so long and so forbodingly, the body of John Wilkes Booth,
sealed up in the brick floor, had long been mouldering. If the dead can
hear he had listened many a time to the rattle of their manacles upon
the stairs, to the drowsy hum of the trial and the buzz of the garrulous
spectators; to the moaning, or the gibing, or the praying in the bolted
cells where those whom kindred fate had given a little lease upon life
lay waiting for the terrible pronouncement.

It was a long waiting, and the roof of a high house outside the walls
was seen to be densely packed with people. Others kept arriving moment
by moment; soldiers were wondering when the swinging would begin and
officers arguing that the four folks "deserved it, damn them!" Gentlemen
of experience were telling over the number of such expiations they had
witnessed. Analytic people were comparing the various modes of shooting,
garroting, and guillotining. Cigars were sending up spirals of soothing
smoke. There was a good deal of covert fear that a reprieve might be
granted. Inquires were many and ingenuous for whisky, and one or two
were so deeply expectant that they fell asleep.

How much those four dying, hoping, cringing, dreaming felons were
grudged their little gasp of life! It was to be a scene, not a
postponement or a prolongation. "Who was to be the executioner?" "Why
had not the renowned and artistic Isaacs been sent for from New York?"
"Would they probably die game, or grow weak-kneed in the last
extremity?" Ah, the gallows' workmen have completed the job! "Now then
we should have it."

Still there was delay. The sun peeped into the new-made graves and made
blistering hot the gallows' floor. The old pump made its familiar music
to the cool plash of blessed water. The grass withered in the fervid
heat. The bronzed faces of the soldiers ran lumps of sweat. The file
upon the jail walls looked down into the wide yard yawningly. No wind
fluttered the two battle standards condemned to unfold their trophies
upon this coming profanation. Not yet arrived. Why? The extent of grace
has almost been attained. The sentence gave them only till two o'clock!
Why are they so dilatory in wishing to be hanged?

Suddenly the wicket opens, the troops spring to their feet, and stand at
order arms, the flags go up, the low order passes from company to
company; the spectators huddle a little nearer to the scaffold; all the
writers for the press produce their pencils and note-books.

First came a woman pinioned.

A middle-aged woman, dressed in black, bonnetted and veiled, walking
between two bare-headed priests.

One of these held against his breast a crucifix of jet, and in the folds
of his blue-fringed sash he carried an open breviary, while both of them
muttered the service for the dead.

Four soldiers with musket at shoulder, followed, and a captain led the
way to the gallows.

The second party escorted a small and shambling German, whose head had a
long white cap upon it, rendering more filthy his dull complexion, and
upon whose feet the chains clanked as he slowly advanced, preceded by
two officers, flanked by a Lutheran clergyman, and followed, as his
predecessor, by an armed squad.

The third, preacher and party, clustered about a shabby boy, whose limbs
tottered as he progressed.

The fourth, walked in the shadow of a straight high stature, whose tawny
hair and large blue eye were suggestive rather of the barbarian striding
in his conqueror's triumph, than the assassin going to the gallows.

All these, captives, priests, guards, and officers, nearly twenty in
all, climbed slowly and solemnly the narrow steps; and upon four arm
chairs, stretching across the stage in the rear of the traps, the
condemned were seated with their spiritual attendants behind them.

The findings and warrants were immediately read to the prisoners by
General Hartrauft in a quiet and respectful tone, an aid holding an
umbrella over him meantime. These having been already published, and
being besides very uninteresting to any body but the prisoners, were
paid little heed to, all the spectators interesting themselves in the
prisoners.

There was a fortuitous delicacy in this distribution, the woman being
placed farthest from the social and physical dirtiness of Atzerott, and
nearest the unblanched and manly physiognomy of Payne.

She was not so pale that the clearness of her complexion could not be
seen, and the brightness of the sun made her vail quite transparent. Her
eyes were seen to be of a soft gray; her brown hair lay smoothly upon a
full, square forehead; the contour of her face was comely, but her teeth
had the imperfectness of those of most southern women, being few and
irregular. Until the lips were opened she did not reveal them. Her
figure was not quite full enough to be denominated buxom, yet had all
the promise of venerable old age, had nature been permitted its due
course. She was of the medium height, and modest--as what woman would
not be under such searching survey? At first she was very feeble, and
leaned her head upon alternate sides of her arm-chair in nervous spasms;
but now and then, when a sort of wail just issued from her lips, the
priest placed before her the crucifix to lull her fearful spirit. All
the while the good fathers Wigett and Walter murmured their low, tender
cadences, and now and then the woman's face lost its deadly fear, and
took a bold, cognizable survey of the spectators. She wore a robe of
dark woolen, no collar, and common shoes of black listing. Her general
expression was that of acute suffering, vanishing at times as if by the
conjuration of her pride, and again returning in a paroxysm as she
looked at the dreadful rope dangling before her. This woman, to whom,
the priests have made their industrious moan, holding up the effigy of
Christ when their own appeals became of no avail, perched there in the
lofty air, counting her breaths, counting the winkfuls of light,
counting the final wrestles of her breaking heart, had been the belle of
her section, and many good men had courted her hand. She had led a
pleasant life, and children had been born to her--who shared her
mediocre ambition and the invincibility of her will. If the charge of
her guilt were proven, she was the Lady Macbeth of the west.

But women know nothing of consequences. She alone of all her sex stands
now in this thrilled and ghastly perspective, and in immediate
association with three creatures in whose company it is no fame to die:
a little crying boy, a greasy unkempt sniveller, and a confessed
desperado. Her base and fugitive son, to know the infamy of his
cowardice and die of his shame, should have seen his mother writhing in
her seat upon the throne his wickedness established for her.

Payne, the strangest criminal in our history, was alone dignified and
self possessed. He wore a closely-fitting knit shirt, a sailor's straw
hat tied with a ribbon, and dark pantaloons, but no shoes. His collar,
cut very low, showed the tremendous muscularity of his neck, and the
breadth of his breast was more conspicuous by the manner in which the
pinioned arms thrust it forward. His height, his vigor, his glare made
him the strong central figure of this interelementary tableaux. He said
no word; his eyes were red as with the penitential weeping of a
courageous man, and the smooth hardness of his skin seemed like a
polished muscle. He did not look abroad inquisitively, nor within
intuitively. He had no accusation, no despair, no dreaminess. He was
only looking at death as for one long expected, and not a tremor nor a
shock stirred his long stately limbs; withal, his blue eye was milder
than when I saw him last, as if some bitterness, or stolidness, or
obstinate pride had been exorcised, perhaps by the candor of confession.
Now and then he looked half-pityingly at the woman, and only once moved
his lips, as if in supplication. Few who looked at him, forgetful of his
crime, did not respect him. He seemed to feel that no man was more than
his peer, and one of his last commands was a word of regret to Mr.
Seward.

I have a doubt that this man is entirely a member of our nervous race. I
believe that a fiber of the aboriginal runs through his tough sinews. At
times he looked entirely an Indian. His hair is tufted, and will not lie
smoothly. His cheek-bones are large and high set. There is a tint in his
complexion. Perhaps the Seminole blood of his swampy state left a trace
of its combative nature there.

Payne was a preacher's son, and not the worst graduate of his class. His
real name is Lewis Thornton Powell.

He died without taking the hand of any living friend.

Even the squalid Atzerott was not so poor. I felt a pity for his
physical rather than his vital or spiritual peril. It seemed a
profanation to break the iron column of his neck, and give to the worm
his belted chest.

But I remember that he would have slain a sick old man.

The third condemned, although whimpering, had far more grit than I
anticipated; he was inquisitive and flippant-faced, and looked at the
noose flaunting before him, and the people gathered below, and the
haggard face of Atzerott, as if entirely conscious and incapable of
abstraction.

Harold would have enjoyed this execution vastly as a spectator. He was,
I think, capable of a greater degree of depravity than any of his
accomplices. Atzerott might have made a sneak thief, Booth a forger, but
Harold was not far from a professional pickpocket. He was keen-eyed,
insolent, idle, and, by a small experience in Houston street, would have
been qualified for a first-class "knuck." He had not, like the rest, any
political suggestion for the murder of the heads of the nation; and upon
the gallows, in his dirty felt hat, soiled cloth coat, light pantaloons
and stockings, he seemed unworthy of his manacles.

A very fussy Dutchman tied him up and fanned him, and he wept
forgetfully, but did not make a halt or absurd spectacle.

Atzerott was my ideal of a man to be hung--a dilution of Wallack's
rendering of the last hours of Fagan, the Jew; a sort of sick man, quite
garrulous and smitten, with his head thrown forward, muttering to the
air, and a pallidness transparent through his dirt as he jabbered
prayers and pleas confusedly, and looked in a complaining sort of way at
the noose, as if not quite certain that it might not have designs upon
him.

He wore a greyish coat, black vest, light pantaloons and slippers, and a
white affair on his head, perhaps a handkerchief.

His spiritual adviser stood behind him, evidently disgusted with him.

Atzerott lost his life through too much gabbing. He could have had
serious designs upon nothing greater than a chicken, but talked
assassination with the silent and absolute Booth, until entrapped into
conspiracy and the gallows, much against his calculation. This man was
visited by his mother and a poor, ignorant woman with whom he cohabited.
He was the picture of despair, and died ridiculously, whistling up his
courage.

These were the dramatis personæ, no more to be sketched, no more to be
cross-examined, no more to be shackled, soon to be cold in their
coffins.

They were, altogether, a motley and miserable set. Ravaillae might have
looked well swinging in chains; Charlotte Corday is said to have died
like an actress; Beale hung not without dignity, but these people,
aspiring to overturn a nation, bore the appearance of a troop of
ignorant folks, expiating the blood-shed of a brawl.

When General Hartrauft ceased reading there was momentary lull, broken
only by the cadences of the priests.

Then the Rev. Mr. Gillette addressed the spectators in a deep impressive
tone. The prisoner, Lewis Thornton Powell, otherwise Payne, requested
him to thus publicly and sincerely return his thanks to General
Hartrauft, the other officers, the soldiers, and all persons who had
charge of him and had attended him. Not one unkind word, look, or
gesture, had been given to him by any one. Dr. Gillette then followed in
a fervent prayer in behalf of the prisoner, during which Payne's eyes
momentarily filled with tears, and he followed in the prayer with
visible feeling.

Rev. Dr. Olds followed, saying in behalf of the prisoner, David E.
Harold, that he tendered his forgiveness to all who had wronged him, and
asked the forgiveness of all whom he had wronged. He gave his thanks to
the officers and guards for kindnesses rendered him. He hoped that he
had died in charity with all men and at peace with God. Dr. Olds
concluded with a feeling prayer for the prisoner.

Rev. Dr. Butler then made a similar return of thanks on behalf of George
A. Atzerott for kindness received from his guards and attendants, and
concluded with an earnest invocation in behalf of the criminal, saying
that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin, and asking that God
Almighty might have mercy upon this man.

The solemnity of this portion of the scene may be imagined, the several
clergyman speaking in order the dying testament of their clients, and
making the hot hours fresh with the soft harmonies of their
benedictions.

The two holy fathers having received Mrs. Surratt's confession, after
the custom of their creed observed silence. In this, as in other
respects, Mrs. Surratt's last hours were entirely modest and womanly.

The stage was still filled with people; the crisis of the occasion had
come; the chairs were all withdrawn, and the condemned stood upon their
feet.

The process of tying the limbs began.

It was with a shudder, almost a blush, that I saw an officer gather the
ropes tightly three times about the robes of Mrs. Surratt, and bind her
ankles with cords. She half fainted, and sank backward upon the
attendants, her limbs yielding to the extremity of her terror, but
uttering no cry, only a kind of sick groaning, like one in the weakness
of fever, when a wry medicine must be taken.

Payne, with his feet firmly laced together, stood straight as one of the
scaffold beams, and braced himself up so stoutly that this in part
prevented the breaking of his neck.

Harold stood well beneath the drop, still whimpering at the lips, but
taut, and short, and boyish.

Atzerott, in his grovelling attitude, while they tied him began to
indulge in his old vice of gabbing. He evidently wished to make his
finale more effective than his previous cowardly role, and perhaps was
strengthening his fortitude with a speech, as we sometimes do of dark
nights with a whistle.

"Gentlemen," he said, with a sort of choke and gasp, "take ware." He
evidently meant "beware," or "take care," and confounded them.

Again, when the white death-cap was drawn over his face, he continued to
cry out under it, once saying, "Good bye, shentlemens, who is before me
now;" and again, "May we meet in the other world." Finally he drifted
away with low, half-intelligible ebullitions, as "God help me," "oh!
oh!" and the like.

The rest said nothing, except Mrs. Surratt, who asked to be supported,
that she might not fall, but Harold protested against the knot with
which he was to be dislocated, it being as huge as one's double fist.

In fact all the mechanical preparations were clumsy and inartistic, and
the final scenes of the execution, therefore, revolting in the extreme.
When the death-caps were all drawn over the faces of the prisoners, and
they stood in line in the awful suspense between absolute life and
immediate death, a man at the neck of each adjusting the cord, the knot
beneath the ears of each protruded five or six inches, and the cord was
so thick that it could not be made to press tightly against the flesh.

So they stood, while nearly a thousand faces from window, roof, wall,
yard and housetop, gazed, the scaffold behind them still densely packed
with the assistants, and the four executioners beneath, standing at
their swinging beams. The priests continued to murmur prayers. The
people were dumb, as if each witness stood alone with none near by to
talk to him.

An instant this continued, while an officer on the plot before, motioned
back the assistants, and then with a forward thrust of his hand,
signaled the executioners.

The great beams were darted against the props simultaneously. The two
traps fell with a slam. The four bodies dropped like a single thing,
outside the yet crowded remnant of the gallows floor, and swayed and
turned, to and fro, here and there, forward and backward, and with many
a helpless spasm, while the spectators took a little rush forward, and
the ropes were taut as the struggling pulses of the dying.

Mrs. Surratt's neck was broken immediately; she scarcely drew one
breath. Her short woman's figure, with the skirts looped closely about
it, merely dangled by the vibration of her swift descent, and with the
knot holding true under the ear, her head leaned sideways, and her
pinioned arms seemed content with their confinement.

Payne died a horrible death; the knot slipped to the back of his neck,
and bent his head forward on his breast, so that he strangled as he drew
his deep chest almost to his chin, and the knees contracted till they
almost seemed to touch his abdomen. The veins in his great wrists were
like whip-cords, expanded to twice their natural dimensions, and the
huge neck grew almost black with the dark blood that rushed in a flood
to the circling rope. A long while he swayed and twisted and struggled,
till at last nature ceased her rebellion and life went out unwillingly.

Harold also passed through some struggles. It is doubtful that his neck
was broken. The perspiration dripped from his feet, and he swung in the
hot noon just living enough to make death irritable.

Atzerott died easily. Life did not care to fight for his possession.

The two central figures lived long after the two upon the flanks.

There they hung, bundles of carcass and old clothes, four in a row, and
past all conspiracy or ambition, the river rolling by without a sound,
and men watching them with a shiver, while the heat of the day seemed
suddenly abated, as if by the sudden opening of a tomb.

The officers conversed in a half-audible tone; the reporters put up
their books; the assistants descended from the gallows; and the medical
men drew near. No wind stirred the unbreathing bodies, they were stone
dead.

The bodies were allowed to hang about twenty minutes, when surgeon Otis,
U. S. V., and Assistant Surgeons Woodward and Porter, U. S. A., examined
them and pronounced all dead. In about ten minutes more a ladder was
placed against the scaffold preparatory to cutting the bodies down. An
over-zealous soldier on the platform reached over and severed the cord,
letting one body fall with a thump, when he was immediately ordered down
and reprimanded. The body of Atzerott was placed in a strong white pine
box, and the other bodies cut down in the following order, Harold,
Powell, and Mrs. Surratt.

The carcasses thus recovered were given over to a squad of soldiers and
each placed in a pine box without uncovering the faces. The boxes were
forthwith placed in the pits prepared for them, and directly all but the
memory of their offense passed from the recording daylight.

In the gloomy shadow of that arsenal lies all the motive, and essay of a
crime which might have changed the destinies of our race. It will be
forever a place of suspicion and marvel, the haunted spot of the
Capitol, and the terror of all who to end a fancied evil, cut their way
to right with a dagger.




EXTRA MURAL SCENES.


As everything connected with this expiation will be greedily read I
compile from gossip and report a statement of the last intramural hours
of the prisoners.

During the morning a female friend of Atzerott, from Port Tobacco, had
an interview with him--she leaving him about eleven o'clock. He made the
following statement:

He took a room at the Kirkwood House on Thursday, in order to get a pass
from Vice-President Johnson to go to Richmond. Booth was to lease the
Richmond theater and the President was to be invited to attend it when
visiting Richmond, and captured there. Harold brought the pistol and
knife to the room about half-past two o'clock on Friday. He (Atzerott)
said he would have nothing to do with the murder of Johnson, when Booth
said that Harold had more courage than Atzerott, and he wanted Atzerott
to be with Harold to urge him to do it. There was a meeting at a
restaurant about the middle of March, at which John Surratt, O'Laughlin,
Booth, Arnold, Payne, Harold and himself were present, when a plan to
capture the President was discussed. They had heard the President was to
visit a camp, and they proposed to capture him, coach and all, drive
through long old fields to "T. B.," where the coach was to be left and
fresh horses were to be got, and the party would proceed to the river to
take a boat. Harold took a buggy to "T. B." in anticipation that Mr.
Lincoln would be captured, and he was to go with the party to the river.
Slavery had put him on the side of the South. He had heard it preached
in church that the curse of God was upon the slaves, for they were
turned black. He always hated the nigger and felt that they should be
kept in ignorance. He had not received any money from Booth, although he
had been promised that if they were successful they should never want,
that they would be honored throughout the South, and that they could
secure an exchange of prisoners and the recognition of the confederacy.

Harold slept well several hours, but most of the night he was sitting
up, either engaged with his pastor, Rev. Mr. Olds, of Christ Church, or
in prayer. His sisters were with him from an early hour this morning to
twelve o'clock; they being present when he partook of the sacrament at
the hands of Dr. Olds. The parting was particularly affecting. Harold
conversed freely with them, and expressed himself prepared to die.

Powell conversed with Dr. Gillette and Dr. Striker on religious topics
during the morning, sitting erect, as he did in the court-room. From his
conversation it appears that he was raised religiously, and belonged to
the Baptist church until after the breaking out of the rebellion. He
appeared to be sincerely repentant, and in his cell shed tears freely.
He gave his advisers several commissions of a private character, and
stated that he was willing to meet his God, asking all men to forgive,
and forgiving all who had done aught against him. Colonel Doster, his
counsel, also took leave of him during the morning, as well as with
Atzerott.

Mrs. Surratt's daughter was with her at an early hour. One of her male
friends also had an interview with her, and received directions
concerning the disposition of her property. During the night and morning
she received the ministrations of Revs. J. A. Walter and B. F. Wigett,
and conversed freely with them, expressing, while protesting her
innocence, her willingness to meet her God. Her counsel, Messrs. Aiken &
Clampitt, took leave of her during the morning.

A singular feature of this execution was the arrest of General Hancock
this morning, who appeared in court, to answer a writ of _habeas
corpus_, with a full staff. It is well to notice that this execution by
military order has not, therefore, passed without civil protest.
President Johnson extended to General Hancock the right conferred upon
the President by Congress of setting aside the _habeas corpus_.

As usual in such executions as this, there were many stirring outside
episodes, and much shrewd mixture of tragedy and business. A
photographer took note of the scene in all its phases, from a window of
a portion of the jail. Six artists were present, and thirty seven
special correspondents, who came to Washington only for this occasion.

The passes to the execution were written not printed, and, excepting the
bungling mechanism of the scaffold, the sorrowful event went off with
more than usual good order. Every body feels relieved to night, because
half of the crime is buried.

On Monday, Mudd, Arnold, O'Laughlin, and Spangler, will go northward to
prison. The three former for life, the last for six years.

Applications for pardon were made yesterday and to-day to President
Johnson, by Mrs. Samuel Mudd, who is quite woe-begone and disappointed,
in behalf of her husband, by the sisters of Harold, and by Miss Ann
Surratt. Harold's sisters, dressed in full mourning and heavily veiled,
made their appearance at the White House, for the purpose of interceding
with the President in behalf of their brother. Failing to see the
President, they addressed a note to Mrs. Johnson, and expressed a hope
that she would not turn a deaf ear to their pleadings. Mrs. Johnson
being quite sick, it was deemed expedient by the ushers not to deliver
the note, when, as a last expedient, the ladies asked permission to
forward a note to Mrs. Patterson, the President's daughter, which
privilege was not granted, as Mrs. Patterson is also quite indisposed
to-day. The poor girls went away with their last hope shattered.

The misery of the pretty and heart-broken daughter of Mrs. Surratt is
the talk of the city. This girl appears to have loved her mother with
all the petulant passion of a child. She visited her constantly, and
to-day made so stirring an effort to obtain her life that her devotion
takes half the disgrace from the mother. She got the priests to speak in
her behalf. Early to-day she knelt in the cell at her mother's feet, and
sobbed, with now and then a pitiful scream till the gloomy corridors
rang. She endeavored to win from Payne a statement that her mother was
not accessory, and, as a last resort, flung herself upon the steps of
the White-House, and made that portal memorable by her filial tears.
About half-past 8 o'clock this morning, Miss Surratt, accompanied by a
female friend, again visited the White-House, for the purpose of
obtaining an interview with the President. The latter having given
orders that he would receive no one to-day, the door-keeper stopped Miss
Surratt at the foot of the steps leading up to the President's office,
and would not permit her to proceed further. She then asked permission
to see General Muzzy, the president's military secretary, who promptly
answered the summons, and came down stairs where Miss Surratt was
standing. As soon as the general made his appearance, Miss Surratt threw
herself upon her knees before him, and catching him by the coat, with
loud sobs and streaming eyes, implored him to assist her in obtaining a
hearing with the President. General Muzzy, in as tender a manner as
possible, informed Miss Surratt that he could not comply with her
request, as President Johnson's orders were imperative, and he would
receive no one. Upon General Muzzy returning to his office, Miss Surratt
threw herself upon the stair steps, where she remained a considerable
length of time, sobbing aloud in the greatest anguish, protesting her
mother's innocence, and imploring every one who came near her to
intercede in her mother's behalf.

While thus weeping she declared her mother was too good and kind to be
guilty of the enormous crime of which she was convicted, and asserted
that if her mother was put to death she wished to die also. She was
finally allowed to sit in the east room, where she lay in wait for all
who entered, hoping to make them efficacious in her behalf, all the
while uttering her weary heart in a woman's touching cries: but at last,
certain of disappointment, she drove again to the jail and lay in her
mother's cell, with the heavy face of one who brings ill-news. The
parting will consecrate those gloomy walls. The daughter saw the mother
pinioned and kissed her wet face as she went shuddering to the scaffold.
The last words of Mrs. Surratt, as she went out of the jail, were
addressed to a gentleman whom she had known.

"Good-bye, take care of Annie."

To-night there is crape on the door of the Surratt's, and a lonely lamp
shines at a single window, where the sad orphan is thinking of her
bereavement.

The bodies of the dead have been applied for but at present will not
given up.

Judge Holt was petitioned all last night for the lives and liberties of
the condemned, but he was inexorable.

The soldiers who hung the condemned were appointed against their will. I
forbear to give their names as they do not wish the repute of
executioners. They all belonged to the Fourteenth Veteran Reserve
Infantry.

Here endeth the story of this tragedy upon a tragedy. All are glad that
it is done. I am glad particularly. It has cost me how many journeying
to Washington, how many hot midnights at the telegraph office, how many
gallops into wild places, and how much revolting familiarity with blood.

The end has come. The slain, both good and evil, are in their graves,
out of the reach of hangman and assassin. Only the correspondent never
dies. He is the true Pantheist--going out of nature for a week, but
bursting forth afresh in a day, and so insinuating himself into the
history of our era that it is beginning to be hard to find out where the
event ends and the writer begins.

Next week Ford's Theater opens with the "Octoroon." The gas will be
pearly as ever; the scenes as rich. The blood-stained foot-lights will
flash as of old upon merry and mimicking faces. So the world has its
tragic ebullitions; but its real career is comedy. Over the graves of
the good and the scaffolds of the evil, sits the leering Momus across
whose face death sometimes brings sleep, but never a wrinkle.






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