Lincoln Part 58

At least one member of the crowd outside the White House that night recognized how much Lincoln was conceding to the Radicals. John Wilkes Booth fumed with hatred for the President. Born in Maryland in a slaveholding community, the twenty-six-year-old actor thought of himself as a Northerner who understood the South. He was a handsome, vain young man, the next-to-the-youngest son and his mother's darling in her brood of ten children. He grew up on the family farm near Bel Air, Maryland, to which his alcoholic and mentally unstable father repaired between bouts of acting, and in Baltimore. Erratic attendance at several private schools in the vicinity supplied him with a smattering of learning, some elements of military drill, and a conviction that he belonged to the Southern gentry.

He seemed destined for the theater. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his brother Edwin were great actors; his brother Junius Booth, Jr., was a major producer; and his brother-in-law was a noted comedian. From his debut at the age of seventeen Wilkes Booth was almost constantly on the stage. He had no training, and his early performances were crude and sometimes laughable. But he constantly improved as an actor, and he learned a formidable number of roles. He looked the part of the hero. Though he was only five feet eight inches tall, he held himself erect, and his broad chest contributed to the impression of greater height. Strikingly handsome, with curly black hair and a full mustache, he had a slightly exotic look, which women often found irresistible. "He had an ivory pallor that contrasted with his raven hair," one of them remembered, "and his eyes had heavy lids which gave him an Oriental touch of mystery."

It was in Southern theaters, notably in Richmond, that he first gained recognition. Southerners appreciated his flamboyant, athletic style of acting: the twelve-foot leaps he sometimes used to make his first appearance on stage, the duels that were so realistic that blood was shed, the impa.s.sioned love scenes. When he began playing Shakespearean roles, considered the real test of an actor in the 1850s, he reminded audiences of his father, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean performer of his generation, and of Edwin Forrest. Southern audiences preferred Wilkes Booth's portrayal of Hamlet as an unmistakably mad prince and of Richard III as a diabolical monster to the coolly intellectual characterizations offered by his older brother Edwin.

Offstage, Southerners found Wilkes Booth delightful, and they were charmed by his quick excitability, his love of fun, and his joyousness. "He was one of the best raconteurs to whom I ever listened," a fellow actor recalled. "As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic." Young Southern men were impressed by his ability to hold his liquor. His excellent manners won him access to social circles in the Deep South from which he had been excluded in Maryland, where people remembered that he was illegitimate. Deserting a first wife in England, his father had come to America with Mary Anne Holmes, who became the mother of John Wilkes Booth and his nine siblings.

Southerners also liked Wilkes Booth because he held conventional Southern views about slavery, which he considered "one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that G.o.d ever bestowed upon a favored nation." He firmly believed "the country was formed for the white, not for the black man." As sectional tensions mounted, he denounced what he called the treasonable activities of the abolitionist Republicans and called for retribution: "The South wants justice, has waited for it long, and she will wait no longer." Acting in a Richmond theater when he heard the news of John Brown's capture, he borrowed a uniform and went with the Richmond Grays to witness the execution of the old abolitionist.

When the war broke out, Booth made no attempt to conceal his sympathies for the Confederacy. "So help me holy G.o.d!" he swore to his sister, "my soul, life, and possessions are for the South." But he did not rush to enlist in the Confederate army, explaining to his brother Edwin, a loyal supporter of the North, that he had promised their mother to keep out of the quarrel. His contempt for President Lincoln was open. He was offended by "this man's appearance, his pedigree, his coa.r.s.e low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity" as much as he was by Lincoln's efforts "to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies."

Booth did little more than grumble about Lincoln until August or September 1864, when the reelection of the President seemed increasingly probable, but he then decided that something must be done to rid the country of this "false president," who clearly was "yearning for kingly succession." No doubt the chronic hoa.r.s.eness that was clouding his career as a theatrical star and the failure of his investments in Pennsylvania oil schemes to pay off contributed to his general unhappiness, which was now directed against the President. Exactly how Booth got in touch with the Confederate secret service is not known, but he had many contacts in the South, and the private funds he had used to buy quinine and other needed medicines to be smuggled into the Confederacy gave evidence of his good faith. Presently, after conferring with Southern agents in Maryland, in Boston, and in Canada, he came up with the scheme of kidnapping Lincoln, taking him behind the Confederate lines in Virginia, where he would be held hostage for the release of thousands of Southern soldiers languis.h.i.+ng in Northern prisons. It cannot be proved that any Confederate authority-much less the heads of the Confederate government-knew about, authorized, or even approved Booth's plan, though it is clear that, at least at the lower levels of the Southern secret service, the abduction of the Union President was under consideration. Indeed, Booth's scheme was very much like the one that Confederate authorities permitted Thomas N. Conrad to attempt in the fall of 1864.

Booth recruited for his plot two of his boyhood friends from Baltimore, Samuel B. Arnold and Michael O'Laughlin. Expecting to take the President across the Potomac below Was.h.i.+ngton, he added the Prussian-born George A. Atzerodt from Port Tobacco, Maryland, because he had ferried Confederate spies across the river and knew all the creeks and inlets. John H. Surratt, who had repeatedly served as a courier between secessionist sympathizers in Baltimore and Southern authorities in Richmond, added firsthand knowledge of the Confederate underground that was active in southern Maryland, and his mother, Mary Surratt, who may or may not have known the plots that were being hatched, offered headquarters for the conspirators in the inn she owned at Surrattsville, Maryland, and in the boardinghouse she opened on H Street in Was.h.i.+ngton. For brute strength needed to overcome any resistance on the part of the President, Booth enrolled the burly, violent Lewis Paine (or "Payne," or "Powell," or "Wood," as he variously called himself), who had served in Mosby's Confederate Rangers before taking the oath of allegiance to the Union cause. And finally he allowed the young druggist's clerk, David E. Herold, to join the group; Herold was a trifler who gave the appearance of being not very bright but, as an avid bird hunter, he was supposed to know the poorly mapped roads below Was.h.i.+ngton. It was a loose, informally organized group, tied together only by devotion to the Confederate cause, personal attachment to Booth, and the considerable amounts of money that the actor paid to house and feed his team in Was.h.i.+ngton.

During the fall and winter of 1864, while Booth was recruiting his band of conspirators, he spent much time studying the maps and exploring the roads in Charles County, Maryland, in order to plan for carrying the kidnapped President across the Potomac. The whole venture, despite its deadly seriousness, had a theatrical quality about it, and at times Booth, who had trouble separating fantasy from reality, seemed to be playing one of his more melodramatic theatrical roles. To make sure that n.o.body misunderstood the script that he was following, he took time to write an impa.s.sioned letter explaining his actions in advance, which he sealed and entrusted to his brother-in-law. "There is no time for words," he a.s.serted-only to run on for some thirteen hundred words attacking Lincoln, defending the South, and announcing that he intended "to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much misery." He signed the doc.u.ment, "A Confederate at present doing duty on his own responsibility." Then he paused and struck through "at present."

How much of this was playacting is hard to determine. Certainly Booth's first plan, to capture Lincoln while he was attending Ford's Theatre on January 18, bind him and lower him from the box to the stage, and then carry him off to the Confederacy was pure theater, more akin to farce than to tragedy. Only an inferior playwright could conceive a scenario in which the powerful six-foot-four-inch Lincoln could be bound and gagged while a thousand spectators quietly watched the abduction. The plan was never tried, because the President stayed at home on this stormy night.

A more practicable plan for abducting the President, similar to that of Conrad, the Confederate agent, was to capture him while he was riding in his carriage on the outskirts of the city. Learning that Lincoln planned to attend a performance of Still Waters Run Deep at the Campbell Hospital, near the Soldiers' Home, on March 17, the conspirators decided to intercept the President, overpower him and his coachman, and rush him through southeastern Maryland and across the Potomac. At the last minute the attempt had to be aborted when Booth learned that Lincoln had remained in the city to review a returning regiment of Indiana volunteers rather than attend the play.

Instead of discouraging Booth, these failures led him to contemplate a new course of action. As early as March 4-even before the failure of the kidnapping scheme-he had begun to think of a.s.sa.s.sination rather than abduction. Standing in the rotunda of the Capitol as Lincoln pa.s.sed through to the portico, where he gave his second inaugural address, Booth reflected on the excellent chance he had to kill the President if he wished.

The failure of the abduction scheme made that wish an obsession. Because the collapse of the Confederacy removed the source of any orders or suggestions for his conspiracy, Booth was now acting entirely on his own, and there was nothing to curb his fervid imagination. Drinking very heavily at this time, he increasingly came to think of himself as not just a self-appointed Confederate secret agent but as the reincarnation of one of the tragic theatrical heroes whose lines he mouthed so eloquently. Sometimes he fancied himself a present-day William Tell. More often he saw himself as Brutus, striking down the despotic Caesar. Always he brought death to the tyrant.

Lincoln's address on April 11 triggered Booth's s.h.i.+ft from thought to action. In the crowd outside the White House that evening, he heard the President recommend suffrage for blacks who were educated or had served in the Union armies. "That means n.i.g.g.e.r citizens.h.i.+p," the actor muttered, and he vowed, "That is the last speech he will ever make." He urged Lewis Paine to shoot the President on the spot. When Paine refused, Booth turned in disgust to his other companion, David Herold, and exclaimed, "By G.o.d, I'll put him through."

IV

Lincoln, of course, knew nothing of these plots as he continued to plan for a speedy restoration of the Union under lenient terms of reconstruction. But he found few were ready to follow his lead. In Virginia, Campbell and his a.s.sociates in the Virginia legislature seemed to be dragging their feet. On April 6 the President had authorized them to meet, but nothing much happened. During the next three days, while fighting continued, Campbell took time to const.i.tute a committee of the legislators; the committee took time to compose an address; the military took time to approve the address and then it had to be published in the newspapers; it took more time to a.s.sure the members of the legislature that they would be given safe-conduct and provided with transportation to Richmond. Lacking any sense of urgency, Campbell took an increasingly enlarged view of his role in the negotiations, calling for an armistice-something that Lincoln had explicitly refused-and suggesting peace negotiations with the Confederate legislature of South Carolina as well as that of Virginia. It seems not to have occurred to him that Lee's surrender on April 9 made his activities largely irrelevant.

Along with foot-dragging from the Confederates, Lincoln had to deal with opposition in the North. Radicals overwhelmingly rejected the compromises he had offered in his April 11 speech. One of Sumner's abolitionist correspondents in Boston thought that it again demonstrated Lincoln's "backwardness" and argued that "it will be wicked and blasphemous for us as a nation to allow any distinction of color whatever in the reconstructed states." Sumner agreed. He rejected Lincoln's egg-and-fowl metaphor for the Louisiana government-an image the President was particularly pleased with-noting grimly that only crocodiles emerge from crocodile eggs. By failing to adopt "a just and safe system" of reconstruction-meaning one that enfranchised all the freedmen-the President was going to promote "confusion and uncertainty in the future-with hot controversy." "Alas! Alas!" he grieved.

The President's immediate advisers also objected to the proposed meeting of the Virginia legislators, which seemed much less urgent after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He had deliberately not broached the subject in the cabinet meeting before he gave his speech, but some of the members knew about the plan because Charles A. Dana, who was with the President at City Point, sent Stanton detailed reports on Lincoln's meetings with Campbell. Stanton apparently leaked news of the Virginia peace negotiations to Speed and Dennison, and he possibly also informed Chief Justice Chase.

On April 12, when Lincoln brought the question of Virginia reconstruction before the cabinet, n.o.body favored his plan. Afterward both Stanton and Speed had private interviews with the President in order to express their marked dissatisfaction and irritation with the proposal. In a second conversation that afternoon at the War Department, Stanton vehemently argued against "allowing the rebel legislature to a.s.semble, or the rebel organizations to have any partic.i.p.ation whatever in the business of reorganization," and he warned that Lincoln's action "would put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring trouble with Congress; [and] that the people would not sustain him."

With Seward bedridden, Lincoln thought his strongest supporter would be Gideon Welles, but the Secretary of the Navy, to his surprise, also objected to "the policy of convening a Rebel legislature." The President explained that all he was trying to do was "to effect a reconciliation as soon as possible, and he should not stickle about forms, provided he could attain the desired result." But Welles was not convinced. "As we had never recognized any of [the Confederate] organizations as possessing validity during the war," he argued, "it would be impolitic, to say the least, to now recognize them and their governments as legal." Besides, he pointed out, there already was a Unionist government of Virginia, headed by Francis Pierpont.

Rather feebly the President countered that the Pierpont government "could be considered legal, but public sentiment or public prejudice must not be overlooked." But Welles's argument registered, and shortly afterward, when Pierpont came to the White House for a conference, Lincoln a.s.sured him, "I intended to recognize the restored government, of which you were head, as the rightful government of Virginia."

With all his advisers opposed to the rea.s.sembling of the Virginia legislature, the President concluded, as he told Welles, that "he had perhaps made a mistake, and was ready to correct it if he had." He decided to get out of the Virginia scheme with the best grace he could. If he had blundered, because of insufficient preparation and imprecise directives, he could blame the Southerners for dilatoriness and misinterpretation of his orders. On April 12 he wired General Weitzel that Campbell had exceeded his authority. Reminding the general that he had permitted the calling not of the legislature but of "the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion," Lincoln denied that he had ever intended to recognize them "as a rightful body"; they were only a group of influential individuals who had the power to withdraw Virginia support from resistance to the United States. Their action was not needed now, "particularly as Gen. Grant has since captured the Virginia troops, so that giving a consideration for their withdrawal is no longer applicable." "Do not now allow them to a.s.semble," he directed Weitzel; "but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes." Consequently Lincoln never made the announcement to the people of the South, promised in his speech of April 11.

What he considered a temporary setback did not dishearten him, and he continued to plan a speedy restoration of the Confederate states to the Union on the most generous terms. This was the princ.i.p.al subject of discussion in the cabinet meeting on Friday, April 14, which General Grant attended. The President was in great form. Speed thought he had never seen him in better spirits, and Stanton remarked he was "grander, graver, more thoroughly up to the occasion than he had ever seen him." According to Frederick W. Seward, who attended in place of his injured father, all members expressed "kindly feeling toward the vanquished, and [a] hearty desire to restore peace and safety at the South, with as little harm as possible to the feelings or the property of the inhabitants." The cabinet quickly agreed on the importance of promptly restoring normal commercial relations with the former Confederate states and of abolis.h.i.+ng, as soon as possible, all the military and Treasury regulations that had been necessary during the war to govern trade with the South. With obvious pleasure the President responded to a pet.i.tioner who asked for a pa.s.s to permit him to travel to Virginia: "No pa.s.s is necessary now to authorize any one to go to and return from Petersburg and Richmond. People go and return just as they did before the war."

How the Southern states were to be governed during the transition from disunion to loyalty remained to be settled. Lincoln had now given up the idea of temporarily working with the rebel legislatures, admitting to the cabinet that he "had perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction." But he felt strongly that the reorganization of these states could not be directed from Was.h.i.+ngton. "We can't undertake to run State governments in all these Southern States," he told the cabinet. "Their people must do that,-though I reckon that at first some of them may do it badly."

Stanton brought up a plan for the appointment of military governors, who would rule under martial law in the South until civilian rule could be reestablished. Under his proposal, which he had submitted to the President the previous day and had also discussed with Grant, the military authorities would preserve order and enforce the laws while the several executive departments resumed their normal functions in the South: the Treasury Department would proceed to collect the revenues; the Interior Department would set its Indian agents, surveyors, and land and pension agents to work; the Postmaster General would reestablish post offices and mail routes, and so on. This was, Lincoln noted approvingly, "substantially, in its general scope, the plan which we had sometimes talked over in Cabinet meetings," and it would bear further study. But Stanton also called for a single military governor for Virginia and North Carolina, and Welles strongly objected to the eradication of state boundaries and stressed the commitment that the administration had made to the Pierpont regime in Virginia.

Tactfully Lincoln handled the disagreement among his advisers by asking Stanton to revise his proposal, making separate plans for Virginia and North Carolina, which required different treatment. As to the former, the President said, "We must not... stultify ourselves as regards Virginia, but we must help her." Declaring that he had not yet had a chance to study the details of Stanton's proposal, he urged all the members to think carefully about the subject of reconstruction, because "no greater or more important one could come before us, or any future Cabinet."

It was providential, he observed, that the administration could settle on a plan for reconstruction without interference from "the disturbing elements" of Congress, which was in recess. "If we were wise and discreet," the President told his cabinet, "we should reanimate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union reestablished, before Congress came together in December." "We could do better," he a.s.sured his advisers; "accomplish more without than with them." "There were men in Congress," he observed, "who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not partic.i.p.ate."

The discussion then drifted to the military situation, and everybody wanted to hear Grant's account of the surrender at Appomattox. Asking what terms had been extended to the common soldiers in the rebel army, Lincoln beamed when Grant said, "I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more." Cabinet members wanted to know whether there was any news from Sherman in North Carolina. Grant replied that he was expecting word momentarily. Lincoln remarked that he was confident that there soon would be good news, since the previous night he had had the recurrence of a dream: he was on the water, and "he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and... he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite sh.o.r.e." This dream, he said, had come to him before nearly every important Union victory-Antietam, Gettysburg, Stones River, Vicksburg, Fort Fisher, and so on.

Grant, who had no faith in superst.i.tions and dreams, interjected that Stones River was certainly no Northern victory. Looking at the general curiously, Lincoln continued that, judging from the past, the dream meant that there would be good news soon. "I think it must be from Sherman," he said. "My thoughts are in that direction as are most of yours."

V

Absorbing as were the prospects for victory and peace, they did not occupy all the President's time even on so eventful a day. He had been up since seven o'clock, dealing with routine business, such as the appointment of one William T. Howell as Indian agent in Michigan. After breakfast, where he heard details of Lee's surrender at Appomattox from Robert, who was just back from Grant's army, the President went back to his office to face the endless line of visitors and pet.i.tioners who were waiting for him. In the next two hours he had a conversation with Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and Representative Cornelius Cole about California and the Western territories; a brief talk with William A. Howard, the postmaster of Detroit; a conference with Senator J. A. J. Creswell of Maryland, about patronage; an audience with John P. Hale, whom he had recently appointed minister to Spain; and an interview with Charles M. Scott, a Mississippi riverboat pilot whose cotton had been confiscated by the Confederates. After slipping away for a brief visit to the War Department in the hope of receiving more news from the armies, Lincoln returned to the White House in time for the cabinet meeting at eleven. After the cabinet meeting, too busy to have lunch, the President ate an apple as he went back to his office. There he held more interviews, read more pet.i.tions, signed more papers.

This was proving to be the usual exhausting day of a busy Chief Executive, but Lincoln, now that the long ordeal of war was over, handled his duties expeditiously and efficiently. Indeed, since the news of Lee's surrender, his a.s.sociates found he acted like a different man. "His whole appearance, poise, and bearing had marvelously changed," Senator Harlan recalled. "He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction. His conversation was, of course, correspondingly exhilarating."

At three o'clock he broke away from his desk to take a ride with Mary in an open carriage. As they started out, she asked whether he wanted any guests to accompany them, but he said, "No-I prefer to ride by ourselves to day." They drove about the city and went out to the Navy Yard, in southeastern Was.h.i.+ngton, where the President chatted with several of the sailors and went aboard the Montauk, a monitor that had been hit forty-seven times during the a.s.sault on Charleston harbor. Throughout the afternoon he was "cheerful-almost joyous," his wife recalled, and his spirits were so high that she said to him, laughing, "Dear Husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness."

"And well I may feel so, Mary," he responded, "I consider this day, the war, has come to a close." He then added, in what was as close to a reprimand as he ever offered to his wife, "We must both, be more cheerful in the future-between the war and the loss of our darling Willie-we have both, been very miserable."

Back at the White House, Lincoln found still more visitors, and he had a long chat with Governor Richard J. Oglesby and General Isham Haynie, both of Illinois, to whom he read so many chapters of the Nasby Letters that he had to be summoned several times to dinner. The meal was served early, because the Lincolns had promised to attend a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. By this time Mary had developed a headache and was inclined to stay at home, but her husband said that he must attend. The evening newspapers had carried an announcement that he would be present and tickets had been sold on the basis of that expectation. Anyway, he added, if he remained at the White House, he would have to receive company all evening and would get no rest. Even as the Lincolns prepared to get in their carriage, he had to deal with yet more callers. Just as they were leaving, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold walked up. "Excuse me now," Lincoln said. "I am going to the theatre. Come and see me in the morning."

VI

Lincoln's advisers urged him not to go to the theater. Before leaving on a mission to Richmond, Lamon, who often served as a presidential bodyguard, begged him, "Promise me you will not go out at night while I am gone, particularly to the theater." But the President had so often heard the marshal on this subject that, as Lamon said later, he "thought me insane upon the subject of his safety," and he would only pledge, "Well, I promise to do the best I can toward it." Stanton, too, repeatedly warned Lincoln against mingling with promiscuous crowds at the theater. The occasion this evening was more dangerous than most, because it had been widely advertised that General Grant, fresh from his victories in Virginia, would join the President in the state box at Ford's Theatre.

The Lincolns had trouble making up a theater party on April 14, perhaps because it was Good Friday. They invited the Stantons, but the Secretary of War refused because, he said, "Mr. Lincoln ought not to go-it was too great an exposure." Anyway, Mrs. Stanton disliked Mrs. Lincoln. After initially accepting a verbal invitation, Grant also declined. Julia Grant, who remembered all too well Mary Lincoln's behavior during her visit to City Point, was unwilling to be confined for hours in a box at the theater with a woman of such uncertain temper. She decided to visit her children in Burlington, New Jersey, and the general, always glad of an excuse to escape the limelight, asked to be excused so that he could join her. Governor Oglesby and General Haynie were asked, but they had a meeting to attend. Lincoln invited Howard, the Detroit postmaster, but he was leaving Was.h.i.+ngton that evening. William H. Wallace, governor of Idaho Territory, and his wife also declined.