American Brutus Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE - “BY GOD, THEN, IS JOHN BOOTH CRAZY?”

  TWO - “IT ALL SEEMS A DREAM—A WILD DREAM”

  THREE - “THE PRESIDENT’S CASE IS HOPELESS”

  FOUR - “ARREST EVERY MAN, WOMAN, OR CHILD ATTEMPTING TO PASS”

  FIVE - “A SINGULAR COMBINATION OF GRAVITY AND JOY”

  SIX - “HE WANTED TO BE LOVED OF THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE”

  SEVEN - “THE MAN OF GENIUS IN THE BOOTH FAMILY”

  EIGHT - “MY PROFESSION, MY NAME, IS MY PASSPORT”

  NINE - “I HAVE A GREATER SPECULATION.. THEY WON’T LAUGH AT”

  TEN - “YOU CAN BE THE LEADER ... BUT NOT MY EXECUTIONER”

  ELEVEN - “THERE IS GOING TO BE SOME SPLENDID ACTING TONIGHT”

  TWELVE - "SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!"

  THIRTEEN - “I BELIEVE HE WOULD HAVE MURDERED US, EVERY ONE”

  FOURTEEN - “LET THE STAIN OF INNOCENT BLOOD BE REMOVED FROM THE LAND”

  FIFTEEN - “I MUST FIGHT THE COURSE”

  SIXTEEN - “THESE PEOPLE AROUND HERE CONTRADICT EACH OTHER SO MUCH”

  SEVENTEEN - “NOTHING SHORT OF A MIRACLE CAN SAVE THEIR LIVES”

  CODA

  APPENDIX - BOOTH’S DIARY

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  FAMILY AND BACKGROUND

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Mary, Emily, and Brian

  and in memory of

  Michael E. Patten and Lea Anne Brown

  Praise for American Brutus

  “Booth’s scheme, as this book intricately reconstructs it, involved much more careful, long-range calculation than has previously been acknowledged. . . . Mr. Kauffman seriously challenges conventional wisdom.” —JANET MASLIN, The New York Times

  “Kauffman’s often minute-by-minute account of the night of [Lincoln’s assassination] and its confused aftermath is a wonder of modern scholarship, and his tracing of the histories and motivations of the oddball group of men who followed Booth down this path to destruction is first-rate. . . . [Booth] managed to weave a web of confusion that almost 150 years later has been fully unraveled only by Kauffman’s patient scholarship.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Kauffman tells his story with vigor and skill. . . . There can be no doubt that he has done a superb work of research and analysis.” —The Boston Globe (top ten nonfiction book of the year)

  “[The book] is a well-told story of America’s most famous tragedy, related in a manner that gives fresh meaning to each part of it. Along the way, Kauffman challenges a number of conspiracy theories, but his main purpose is to provide an accurate, compelling account of the assassination and its aftermath.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “In this crisp work of narrative, Kauffman corrects the record. . . . Like many assassins, Booth led perhaps too rich an interior life. In American Brutus, Kauffman captures it perfectly.” —Bloomberg News Service

  “[Kauffman] makes a good case for considering his book the last word on the nearly 140-year-old crime.” —Los Angeles Times

  “[American Brutus should] settle all the arguments that have raged for nearly a century and a half about Lincoln’s assassin and his cadre of pathetic lunatics and misfits. Kauffman has done incredibly detailed research and is able to trace Booth’s movements almost minute by minute. We know how the story ends, but he still manages to keep the reader in suspense.” —JONATHAN YARDLEY, The Washington Post (one of the best nonfiction books of the year)

  “The great values of Kauffman’s approach are dispassion and mastery of documented detail. Here is the best picture that today’s Americans can expect as to what happened, how, and why.” —Baltimore Sun

  “An exhaustive and well-written examination of Lincoln’s killer and the years leading to that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre.” —San Jose Mercury News

  “Thoroughly researched . . . In Kauffman’s vivid and often fresh telling, Booth was ruthless in pursuit of his goal. . . . What is so remarkable, as Kauffman amply demonstrates, is how close Booth actually came to killing the three leading executives of the United States.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “The reconstruction of Lincoln’s assassination is as spellbinding as a Law & Order episode. . . . Mr. Kauffman creates a gripping portrait of Booth, not as failed actor or Confederate agent, but as a glory-obsessed manipulator.” —The Dallas Morning News

  “Michael W. Kauffman’s American Brutus is several unlikely combinations rolled into one: a meticulous history with propulsive narrative power, a fresh take on one of the most examined events in American history, and the eminently rational and convincing product of a raging obsession.” —LAURA MILLER, Salon.com

  INTRODUCTION

  ON THE NIGHT OF APRIL 14, 1865, PRESIDENT ABRAHAM Lincoln was shot by an assassin as he sat in a Washington theater. At the same time, his secretary of state was savagely attacked in his home a few blocks away. Investigation revealed that other men had also been targeted: the vice president, secretary of war, and general in chief of the army. There were subsequent reports of germ warfare, of plans to burn ships and cities, and of a proposal to poison the New York City water supply. The prospect of further attacks kept the nation on edge, and every citizen was on the alert for any sign that terrorists were in their midst. Hundreds of suspects were rounded up on the vaguest suspicions, and some were arrested on looks alone. Of those, many were kept in isolation, bound and hooded, to await a trial by military tribunal. The reaction was unprecedented.

  Who did this, and why? How large a conspiracy was behind these attacks? Is this the end, or will more follow? How far can we bend the rule of law to find and punish the conspirators? These were the questions on everyone’s lips.

  Investigations in 1865 were crude by modern standards. Detectives did not have electronic money transfers, telephone records, or e-mail traffic to track the conspiracy to its roots. Nor did they have the time. After the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was killed and brought back to Washington, the government turned its attention to Confederate officials and the suspects they already had in custody.

  Since then, little has been done to investigate the full extent of the plot, to sort out the conspirators’ movements, or to explain the motives behind Lincoln’s killing. While new versions of the story are regularly published, they are never based on the best sources, and often rely heavily on the worst. None have critiqued the conspiracy trial with 1860s criminal law in mind. None have examined Booth’s mental state based exclusively on facts, as opposed to folklore. And none seem to have considered the key clues to the assassin’s own world: the views he espoused, the profession in which he worked, the society in which he moved. They have lifted him out of his own time and surroundings, as if such things were irrelevant. Borrowing heavily from other sources, they then repeat their same mistakes.

  The Lincoln conspiracy demands another look. Generations of readers have been fascinated by its drama, its intrigue, and especially by its leading character. John Wilkes Booth was a captivating person. Traveling in the highest social circles, with a roster of friends that included some of the most notable people of the era, he was remembered fondly even by Unionists. This, I think, is the real mystery of the case. How could this lover of nature, this gentle poet who touched so many hearts, who frolicked on the floor with his nieces and nephews, and who practiced sign language in order to converse with a deaf poetess—how could this man be the embodiment of evil, and the perpetrator of such a cold-blooded crime? This question lies at the heart of the story. Without examining it, we can never hope to understand the “on
e mad act” that played such a momentous role in the shaping of our nation.

  Many writers contend that Booth was not the guiding spirit of the plot, that he was little more than a rabid Southerner whose mind lost its balance as both the Confederacy and his professional career collapsed, and that he acted merely as a pawn, following the orders of a larger cabal. And though some authors have taken pains to find (or fabricate) a connection between him and some sponsoring organization, they have all failed to take even the most basic steps to sort out the movements of this criminal conspiracy. Invariably, they oversimplify, and in doing so, rob the story of its essential interest.

  Most pundits now agree that the conspiracy’s original intent had been to capture the president. The public first assumed that Confederate officials had urged Booth to do so. Later accounts averred that a coup within the Lincoln administration, led by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, had set the plan in motion. At various times the Catholic Church, the secret Knights of the Golden Circle, and unnamed Jewish bankers were also blamed for the killing. The literature has come full circle, and in recent years has implicated Confederate leaders once more. Each of these theories was constructed using dubious reasoning rather than hard evidence. None gave much weight to the temper of the times.

  The shooting of Abraham Lincoln came at a critical juncture: millions in the North were rejoicing, and their brethren in the South had just begun to accept the inevitability of defeat. Win or lose, a sense of relief was finally setting in, and attention turned once more to a future that had to be brighter than the recent past. The assassination changed everything. Lincoln supporters were stunned and outraged at what seemed a senseless act of revenge. His opponents, put on the defensive, had to disavow the killing or maintain a respectful silence. Even those who understood Booth’s motives dared not explain them, lest they appear to excuse his crime.

  Newspapers were constrained by many factors. The press conference had not yet been invented, and ambush-style interviews were out of the question. Most journalists considered themselves passive observers, not detectives, and few thought to contact witnesses, investigators, or families of the accused. Leaked affidavits, government press releases, and unchecked rumors were their main sources. While these helped flesh out the story, they were often inaccurate and misleading.

  Most of the evidence was in federal hands, and the government did relatively little to analyze it. In any event, its detectives might not have been up to the task. They were not experts in criminal profiling or the forensic sciences. None were trained investigators in any modern sense, and most had been farmers, sign hangers, tinners, or merchants just a few years before. They lacked the resources, the experience, and by some accounts even the ordinary brainpower needed to perform an in-depth study of this monumental crime. The most prominent investigators were not even in Washington at the time of the shooting, and in some cases it took the War Department more than a full day to locate them. Once on the case, each went his own way in a mad scramble to catch up. They ignored potential witnesses, took few notes, and lost some of the most important evidence in the case. They rarely consulted one another on what questions to ask, so their interrogations were disorganized and incomplete. Some even spread false rumors to throw others off course.

  No single person was assigned to keep track of the leads, the witnesses, and the available resources. Cavalry raids and search patrols were almost never coordinated. The city was not sealed off for hours after the shooting. Booth’s photograph was not distributed until more than a day had passed. The next best thing—a verbal description—caused hundreds of innocent men to be arrested simply because they fit the bill. Though today we would deem this a slapdash investigation, bear in mind that the world was a different place in 1865. Even after years of reflection, most investigators remained proud of their work. By their standards, they had done well.

  The detectives’ notes were not much more than a pile of scribbles, memos, and fragmentary statements. While prosecutors had a difficult chore in making sense of it all, they were in a better position than the historians who followed; later researchers would no longer have access to witnesses or evidence lost in the interim. Indeed, many of the documents used in the conspiracy trial have subsequently disappeared. Some were lent to the district attorney’s office for the 1867 trial of John Surratt, and they never made it back. Others disappeared after a House committee borrowed them for the Andrew Johnson impeachment hearings. Thousands of useful items had never been given to prosecutors in the first place. They went instead to the Adjutant General’s office, to the House committee of claims, or to the private collections of those who had found or produced them.

  Most trial papers, however, remained in the War Department’s possession. They were tucked away until the 1930s, unknown to all but a few, while researchers turned to aging witnesses for the “best” accounts of what had transpired in the spring of ’65. Thousands of these recollections found their way into newspapers over the years, and no editor could resist passing them along as a genuine slice of history. While inconsistent with one another and often distorted by the failings of memory, these first-person accounts are still the most widely used sources of information on the Lincoln assassination.

  It has become the custom in historical writing to assert that only the most reliable government documents have been used. This promise is an empty one, and in practice it has always been abandoned at the first opportunity. The truth is, even the best sources—those first-person sworn statements given just after the event—do not tell the whole story. The thoughts and concerns of ordinary people, the waves of terror that gripped the city, and the details of how a particular official heard the news are not the sorts of things one finds in official records. Even a detailed chronology of Booth’s plot must be pieced together from scattered bits of information—not all of it reliable. Here, regrettably, intuition and guess-work become a necessary part of the process.

  I have presented the case as it developed in 1865. Though I have occasionally resorted to more recent recollections to fill in the blanks, I have avoided using any quote, fact, or anecdote that is incompatible with the earliest sources. I’ve paid particular attention to the context in which a statement was written. To me, it matters a great deal whether someone provided information while defending himself, talking with a friend, speculating, or trying to shore up a claim for reward money. The words used by other writers have often turned out to be those of a third party—such as a detective or soldier—and not of the subject named in the document.

  Even the best sources do not amount to much unless they are organized. For that, I turned to modern technology. Though I bought my first computer for its word processing capabilities, I soon began experimenting with a database program in hopes of storing and working with historical information. I used microfilm purchased from the National Archives, inputting synopses of each and every document found in the eleven-thousand-page Lincoln Assassination Suspects file. Through trial and error, I found ways to organize and sort this data by hundreds of different criteria. I could call up everything that happened in Surrattsville, in chronological order, during any time covered in the records. I could quickly find any event that involved, say, George Atzerodt, and I could sort those entries by date, by place, or by the names of other people mentioned in the same context. I could list all the arrests of suspects, all of Booth’s arrests, all financial dealings, and all references to his horse, his health, or the quality of his voice. Without being sorted or analyzed, all these government records meant very little.

  The event-based system I designed was far different from the statistical models used by most historians, and it may actually be unique in the way it applies technology to the study of historical developments. Most important, it works. It brought to the fore new relationships among the plotters, unnoticed patterns in Booth’s behavior, and a fresh significance to events I once considered unimportant. All this has given me a clearer picture of the Booth conspiracy—including inci
dents no writer had previously noticed. I found recruiting trips, secret meetings, and a dozen visits by Booth to New York City—which suggest a Northern connection that, in light of this long neglect, may never be explained. By sorting events over time, I could see how one conspirator fades from the scene while another is shoved into his place. I got a sense of how much work and money went into the plot. I noticed how carefully choreographed the scheme really was. But most surprising of all, I learned how Booth managed to organize and run a dangerous plot—undetected—in the face of unprecedented government paranoia.

  Misdirection was Booth’s secret weapon. It was not only a form of life insurance, but it helped him place attention just where he wanted it. Through lies and false insinuations, he crafted the impression that his conspiracy against Lincoln was larger than it actually was. He did this to boost his credibility, to confuse potential witnesses, to prod his cohorts into action, and to entrap anyone who might potentially betray his trust.

  It seems clever in retrospect, but it wasn’t hard to do. He told friends he was heading for New York when he was actually going to Washington. He claimed to have struck it rich in the oil business, though he never made a cent. He implied he was working with Confederate agents, but his only contacts were personal. He stretched the facts at every phase of the plot. On stage or off, he was always an actor.

  I once thought of Booth as a tragic figure, torn between competing ideals and led by hubris and emotion to commit one of history’s greatest blunders. He was a traitor and a patriot; a villain to some and a hero to others. But there was more to Booth behind his carefully constructed wall of lies. He was more cunning and complex than I had ever imagined. He wasn’t just caught in the middle; he worked his way there, playing one side against the other and taking full advantage of their mutual distrust. He was a manipulator, not a pawn.

  The pattern of his lies calls into question almost everything Booth said about the plot, and about all those involved. It certainly puts a different spin on the case of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Much has been written about Mudd, and lately his detractors seem to have gotten the upper hand. But they have built their case on faulty assumptions. They assume the literal truth of every damaging statement, though it may be hearsay twice removed. They consider all proffered information accurate, even when it was recorded many years after the fact. They seem to think that Booth was reckless with sensitive information, that he was scrupulously honest, and that he was a monumentally poor judge of his cohorts. The facts simply don’t support that view.