The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth Part 5

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 l.u.s.trous 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d 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 rus.h.i.+ng in, he grasped his arms to guard against any feint or strategy. A moment convinced him that further struggle with the p.r.o.ne 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 gra.s.s, 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 mattra.s.s 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 c.o.c.ks 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, 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-a.s.serted, 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 Was.h.i.+ngton; 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 pet.i.tions 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 s.h.i.+pwreck 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 n.i.g.g.ardly 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 sh.o.r.es saw this skeleton s.h.i.+p flit by, as the b.l.o.o.d.y sun threw gashes and blots of unhealthy light along the silver surface.

All the way a.s.sociate with the carca.s.s, went Harold, shuddering in so grim companions.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d, &c. But n.o.body listened to him. All interest of crime, courage, and retribution centered in the dead flesh at his feet. At Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 carca.s.s 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 d.a.m.nation,--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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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.]

Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 mult.i.tude. One man was its head and heart; its accessories were so numerous that the trouble is not whom to suspect, but whom not accuse.

d.a.m.ning 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 a.s.sertion.

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 grat.i.tude, as well as an impulse of mingled waywardness and grat.i.tude, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest--that whatever minor parts might be enacted--Casca, Ca.s.sius, or what not--he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that a.s.sa.s.sin'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 a.s.sertion 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 s.h.i.+pped, before the end of 1864, his theatrical wardrobe from Canada to Na.s.sau. 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 a.s.sistants. 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 c.o.c.ktails at the nearest bar.

Wilkes Booth had pa.s.sed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink from the broader and ranker green-room of real life. He a.s.sembled 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, das.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 a.s.sa.s.sin of the Sewards, had no friends nor haunts in Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 a.s.sert 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 pa.s.sed Was.h.i.+ngton.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton. Doubtless by direct letter, or verbal instruction, he received a pa.s.sword 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 a.s.surance 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Caesar 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 a.s.sa.s.sin. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, going meanderingly north. Of this poet route Mrs. Surratt was a manageress; and John Lloyd, when he rented her hotel, a.s.sumed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.