ASIA BOOTH GAVE BIRTH TO TWINS IN AUGUST 1865. ONE WAS a boy, but she dared not name him John. When he grew older, many remarked that he resembled his notorious uncle. Asia stayed married to John Sleeper Clarke, who prospered in England as a celebrated comedian, but who denied her a happy life. “He lives in mystery and silence as far as I am concerned,” Asia complained. “He lives a free going bachelor life and does what he likes.” In 1879 she wrote to her brother Edwin, “I am so tired of his dukelike haughtiness—his icy indifference, and so disgusted with the many false things he tells me.” She remembered her brother John’s prophetic warning before her marriage—she would only be Clarke’s stepping-stone. Now Clarke was famous in his own right, and Asia and her blackened name were no longer of any use to him. “It is marvelous how he hates me—the mother of nine babies—but I am a Booth—that is sufficient.”
Asia could keep a secret, too. Unbeknownst to John Sleeper Clarke, in 1874 she began writing a memoir to honor her dead brother. Fearing that her husband would burn the manuscript if he ever found it, she entrusted it to confidantes. It was not published until 1938, fifty years after her death, and sixty-four years after she wrote it. Her brother John had assassinated Abraham Lincoln seventy-four years ago. Asia Booth Clarke died in England on May 16, 1888, at the age of fifty-two. She had wanted to come home and rejoin her family in America. On June 1, she was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. She rests in the Booth family plot, near her brother John.
CLARA HARRIS AND HENRY RATHBONE MARRIED IN 1867, HAD three children, and moved to Hanover, Germany. No one ever blamed Rathbone for the night at Ford’s Theatre. He was a social guest, not Lincoln’s bodyguard. He wasn’t assigned the duty of protecting the president. And he didn’t see Booth until after the actor fired his pistol. Still, he was an army officer. And he was in the box. Fortunately for Rathbone, it did not become widely known that he had asked Dr. Leale to treat his wound before treating Lincoln’s. Nor did anyone suggest that he didn’t seem to fight quite as hard as Sergeant Robinson or the Seward boys. George Robinson had submitted himself repeatedly to the punishment of Powell’s knife, and the sergeant would not have abandoned his patient until Powell stabbed him to death. Rathbone, in contrast, had flinched upon first contact with Booth’s avenging blade. Perhaps he should have made Booth cut him again.
Clara would have been better off if John Wilkes Booth had stabbed her fiancé again and slain him at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. If Booth had served her that night, then she would have survived the night eighteen years later when, on December 23, 1883, Henry, after behaving oddly and menacing the children, murdered Clara in their home. In a bizarre, chilling reminder of Booth’s crime, Henry selected the assassin’s weapons of choice—the pistol and the knife. Rathbone shot his wife and then stabbed her to death. Then he tried to commit suicide with the same blade. It was a brutal, bloody crime that harkened back to the horrific scene in the president’s box. But this time Clara’s dress was drenched not with Henry’s blood, but her own. Henry never returned to America and lived out his remaining days in a German asylum.
BOSTON CORBETT’S LIFE UNFOLDED AS ODDLY AS ONE MIGHT have guessed. His fame lasted a season, climaxing with his appearance in a front-page woodcut in Frank Leslie’s, and his May 17 appearance as a witness at the conspiracy trial. Soon the fan letters dwindled to a trickle, then ceased. Photographers no longer begged to take his picture. On September 9, 1865, he wrote to Edward Doherty about his share of the reward, seeking advice on how best to pursue his claim: should he hire Doherty’s lawyer or find one of his own. On August 9, 1866, the U.S. Treasury issued him a warrant in the amount of $1,653.84. Corbett left the army, moved west, and got a job as assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives. That sinecure ended on the day in 1887 when he drew a revolver and held the legislature hostage at gunpoint. Confined to the Topeka asylum, he escaped in 1888, and then vanished from history. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him. Perhaps he ended his days still preaching warnings against “the snares of the evil one.”
THOMAS A. JONES KEPT THE SECRET OF THE PINE THICKET and Booth’s river crossing for eighteen years, until, in 1883, he divulged the tale to George Alfred Townsend. Later, Jones wrote a book about his adventures: “J. Wilkes Booth. An Account of His Sojourn in Southern Maryland after the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his Passage Across the Potomac, and his death in Virginia. By Thomas A. Jones. The only living man who can tell the story.” In 1893, he traveled north to Chicago to have his manuscript published there by a local printer, and he set up a stand to sell books at the World’s Columbian Exposition. According to legend, outraged Union veterans attacked the display and destroyed his stock of books. Today the slim volume, now a rare book, remains a priceless, firsthand account from the manhunt.
In an odd twist, Jones became an amateur dealer in Lincoln assassination memorabilia, scouting Washington and its environs for coveted objects he supplied to collectors. Twenty-five years after the assassination, he advised a customer that reward posters were impossible to find, and that an original April 14 Ford’s Theatre playbill for Our American Cousin could not be had for less than one hundred dollars. Jones trafficked in photos of the Petersen House and of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse, and he offered to locate photos of Boston Corbett. “I have had a good deal of work to do to get said pictures,” Jones advised one of his collectors. “You might have looked Washington over for six months and I doubt whether you could have found the pictures you will get through me.” Jones even tried to track down his battered old skiff, the one that carried Booth and Herold across the Potomac. That relic would make a sensational collector’s prize. The search turned up more rare photos. “When I had been looking around the City to see if I could find out any thing about the Boat that Booth went across the River in,” Jones explained, he found a soldier who told him that if he went to a “certain house” at the old arsenal, he would make an interesting discovery—four of Gardner’s photos of the hanging. “The house that the President died in is just the same as when the President died,” Jones informed a customer, except for Oldroyd’s sign out front. Thomas Jones died in March 1895. He was seventy-four years old.
OTHER SURVIVORS OF THE MANHUNT TRADED ON THEIR MEMories, too. In 1867, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker published a now forgotten and shabby book, History of the United States Secret Service, that was anything but a true history. Baker exaggerated not only his importance in the chase for Booth, but in the entire Civil War. He died in 1868.
His cousin Luther Byron Baker survived him and, by the late 1880s, went on the lecture circuit and became the most successful of the postassassination entrepreneurs. Armed with a professional manager, a variety of posters, and a four-page promotional brochure crammed with testimonials from satisfied customers, Baker delivered dozens of paid lectures over the next eight years until his death in May 1896, at age sixty-six.
At his lectures Baker sold a substantial souvenir: a large-format, seven-and-five-eighths-by-nine-inch, cardboard-backed, so-called combination picture that depicted Baker riding his horse “Buckskin,” the duo surrounded by images of Booth, Corbett, and Lincoln. A descriptive label pasted on the reverse, and written in the purported voice of Buckskin, described the horse’s participation in the manhunt. A concluding note, autographed by Baker, verified the animal’s story. It was one of the most fetching Lincoln assassination trinkets ever concocted. Death did not end Buckskin’s role as Baker’s lecture companion. A taxidermy student at the Michigan State Agricultural College stuffed him, and the venerable manhunter stood proudly—albeit mutely—onstage with Baker as an unforgettable prop.
JOHN H. SURRATT JR. ENJOYED LESS SUCCESS AS A LECTURER. “In 1870, five years after the assassination—and his mother’s hanging—and just three years after his own trial, Surratt tried to exploit his story on the lecture circuit.
He certainly had an amazing story to tell. After his mother’s hanging, John Surratt decided that fleeing to Europe offered him the best chance of survival. In September he traveled from St. Liboire to Montreal, moved on to Quebec, sailed to Liverpool, and continued to Rome, where, under the name “John Watson,” he joined the Papal Zouaves, the colorfully uniformed army of the Papal States. Surratt blended in with this Catholic milieu, and he felt safely beyond the reach of the MANHUNTERS. But in April 1866, around the first anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, a fellow Zouave who recognized Surratt informed on him. Booth’s coconspirator was arrested at Verdi on November 7. He escaped from Velletri prison the next day. While walking under guard near the edge of an overlook, Surratt glanced over the precipice. He saw jagged rocks twenty or thirty feet below, and, beyond them, a steep drop down a cliff. Before his guards could restrain him, Surratt, in an escape worthy of John Wilkes Booth, grabbed the balustrade, leaped over it, and tumbled to the rocks. Fortunately for Surratt, he landed uninjured. The rocks where he fell were the prison’s waste dump, and a voluminous, filthy pile of human excrement and garbage cushioned his fall.
Surratt fled the Papal States and crossed into the Kingdom of Italy. Proceeding to Naples, and impersonating a Canadian citizen, he tricked the British consul into gaining him passage on a steamer headed for Alexandria, Egypt. But when Surratt disembarked on November 23, 1866, American officials were waiting for him. He was seized and shipped back to America on a U.S. Navy warship. John Surratt landed at the Washington Navy Yard on February 19, 1867, and was imprisoned immediately. His trial before a civil court, and not the military tribunal that condemned his mother, lasted from June through August 1867. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and he was released. He was charged again in June 1868, but in November the charges were dismissed. John Surratt was a free man. His mother was dead, he had been exposed as a leader in a plot to kidnap President Lincoln, and he had earned the reputation of a coward who had abandoned his mother to die. But at least he was alive. If he had been captured in 1865 and tried by military tribunal, he certainly would have been convicted, and would likely have been executed.
Surratt got up a talk, went to Rockville, Maryland, and on December 6, 1870, made his first public appearance trading on his friendship with John Wilkes Booth and his involvement in the kidnapping plot. Surratt had the audacity to lecture in New York City at The Cooper Union, the site of Abraham Lincoln’s triumphant February 1860 address that propelled him to the presidency. Emboldened, he decided to return to the scene of the crime, Washington. He had large, attractively designed posters printed to advertise his appearance at the Odd Fellows Hall on Seventh Street, above D, on December 30, 1870. His mother’s boardinghouse and Ford’s Theatre were just a few blocks away. But it was too soon. Citizens complained and, despite Surratt’s boast in his poster that, “all reports to the contrary notwithstanding,” he would “most positively” deliver his lecture, the event was canceled. A reporter found him hiding in a hotel room. John Surratt never lectured again. The last survivor of Booth’s conspirators, he died in April 1916.
The aftermath of Powell’s knife.
sECRETARY OF STATE WILLIAM SEWARD AND HIS sons survived their wounds. For the rest of his life, until his death in 1872, William Seward preferred to turn the scarred half of his face away from the camera and pose in profile. A rare frontal portrait reveals how he carried Lewis Powell’s terrible, disfiguring mark. Frederick recovered his senses after his grievous head wound, and he lived another fifty years. But, in a family tragedy, death soon claimed the Seward women. In June 1865, Frances died at age fifty-nine. Her weak constitution had succumbed to the stressful assassination attempt. But at least William Seward had been prepared for the possibility of his wife’s death. The next year he endured a staggering loss. His brave daughter, Fanny, who had fearlessly challenged Lewis Powell that awful, bloody night, left the world on October 29, 1866. Seward called her death his “great unspeakable sorrow.” Her passing, he wrote, left his dreams for the future “broken and destroyed forever.” Fanny was twenty-one years old. She would have been a wonderful writer.
sAMUEL ARNOLD LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO WRITE HIS MEMoirs, and the Baltimore American newspaper serialized the manuscript in 1902. By then he was the sole surviving defendant from the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial of 1865, and the only one who had ever written a full account of Booth’s kidnapping plot. He was also the only one who lived long enough to see the new century. He died on September 1, 1906. Arnold joined John Wilkes Booth and Michael O’Laughlen at Green Mount Cemetery.
DR MUDD RETURNED TO HIS FARM IN 1869, HAPPY TO BE FREE of the black prison guards he despised. Soon Ned Spangler journeyed there, and Mudd took him in until Ned’s death on February 7, 1875. Samuel Mudd passed on in 1883. Before he died, he confessed privately to Samuel Cox Jr. the truth about the night of April 14, 1865: Mudd admitted that he had known all along that the injured stranger at his door was John Wilkes Booth. After the doctor’s death, one of his lawyers confirmed it. In 1906, Samuel Mudd’s daughter published a collection of his letters, and in 1936, a Hollywood motion picture, The Prisoner of Shark Island, portrayed Mudd as an innocent country doctor obeying his Hippocratic oath, deceived by Lincoln’s assassin. That false image took hold in the popular mind, and, to this day, many Americans still believe the myth that Dr. Mudd and his descendants have toiled assiduously for more than a century to perpetuate.
EDWIN M. STANTON DIED IN 1869, THE SAME YEAR THAT JOHN Wilkes Booth escaped the secret grave to which Lincoln’s secretary of war had condemned him. After the manhunt and conspiracy trial, Stan-ton’s career went into eclipse under the controversial, impeachment-tainted Johnson presidency. When Johnson tried to fire him, Stanton refused to surrender his War Department office. General Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, and in December he nominated Stanton to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Lincoln’s right hand died later that month before he could join the court.
Stanton lived long enough to see much of the work of the manhunt undone. Public sympathy for Mary Surratt bloomed; he was accused of suppressing and tampering with Booth’s diary, and Congress investigated; he saw Booth, Surratt, Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and O’Laughlen emerge from their graves; saw the three survivors Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler pardoned; and saw the fugitive John Surratt Jr., who had escaped him in April of 1865, captured, tried, and freed. Perhaps it was best that Stanton did not live to see Surratt dare to boast of his role in the great crime and attempt to profit from the murder of Stanton’s commander in chief—and friend.
Stanton’s sudden death—he was only fifty-five—troubled Robert Lincoln and took him back four years, to the rear bedroom of the Petersen House. As soon as Robert heard the sad news, he sent a letter to Stanton’s son: “I know that it is useless to say anything … and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth, I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.” Edwin Stan-ton was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, not far from the stone chapel where Abraham Lincoln held a small funeral service for his son Willie. Few people visit his grave. If you drive down R Street, you can see it from your car: the weathered, white obelisk just a few yards behind the formidable, spike-topped iron fence, standing sentinel over his rest.
a CENTURY LATER, AT ANOTHER CEMETERY, MISGUIDED ANTIquarians buried Lewis Powell’s remains with honors. His body had vanished long ago. Disinterred from the old arsenal in 1869, Powell was reburied in Holmead Cemetery in Washington. Soon that burial ground went defunct, and Powell’s corpse, or so it was thought, became lost. In fact, his body, or at least a portion of it, went temporarily to the Army Medical Museum, and then ended up in the anthropological collections of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1993, somebody discovered his head, still neatly labeled, at the national museum. Powell sympathizers gained possession of the skull, transported it to his native Florida, sealed it in a miniature, hatbox-size coffin, and buried it on November 11—Veterans Day—1994. Powell’s headless skeleton was never found, and his bones lie moldering in some unknown grave—or perhaps in the labyrinthine storage vaults of the Smithsonian. And so Seward’s violent assassin rests, if not in peace, then in pieces.
TODAY YOU CAN DRIVE THERE FROM WASHINGTON, D.C., IN A couple of hours. Several landmarks point the way: an antebellum brick row house in the middle of Washington’s Chinatown; a Civil War era roadside tavern in Clinton, Maryland; a modest farmhouse hidden nearly from view in the Maryland countryside; an old hotel in Bryantown, Maryland; several nondescript homes in Virginia, their century-and-a-half-old clapboards covered by cheap aluminum siding. When you arrive at Garrett’s farm, there isn’t much to see. A few scattered trees survive from the dark forest that once grew there. The farmhouse overlooking the tobacco barn where it happened perished from rot and neglect long ago. Relic hunters, like locusts in a wheat field, carried off every last fragment of board and timber that time hadn’t ravaged. Some of them have even driven shovels into the site of the burning barn, in hopes of excavating charred embers from the earth.
If you go in summer when the grass is tall, it’s hard to spot the iron pipe and homemade tag that somebody pounded into the ground to mark the spot where the farmhouse once stood. But if you go in the spring, perhaps on April 26, the anniversary, you’ll see it—the place where, in the middle of the night, the chase for Lincoln’s killer came to an end.
The place where it began still stands in Washington, looming over Tenth Street. After the assassination, Ford’s Theatre survived arson, abandonment, and disaster. Stanton vowed that the site of Lincoln’s murder must never again serve as a house of laughter and public entertainment. He surrounded the theatre with guards, ordered it closed, and confined John T. Ford in the Old Capitol prison for thirty-nine days. Some cabinet members objected to the confiscation, but Stanton was adamant: that “dreadful house” would never open again. Others agreed—there were at least two attempts to burn it down. And the Army and Navy Journal spoke for many in applauding Stanton’s decisiveness. If Ford “did not know enough, of himself, to close its career as a playhouse, it is fortunate that there is a man in Washington competent and spirited enough to give the instruction.” Then the government relented and, on July 7, 1865—the day that Powell, Surratt, Herold, and Atzerodt went to the gallows—gave the theatre back to John Ford. When he announced his intention to reopen it, the public was outraged, and Ford received a number of threats. “You must not think of opening tomorrow night,” warned one letter. “I can assure you that it will not be tolerated. You must dispose of the property in some other way. Take even fifty thousand for it and build another and you will be generously supported. But do not attempt to open it again.” The anonymous threat was signed by “One of many determined to prevent it.”
It was too much for Stanton. He seized Ford’s Theatre again in the name of public safety. The government sentenced the building to death as a playhouse, and paid a contractor $28,500 to gut the interior. All evidence of its appearance on the night of April 14, 1865—the gaslights, the decorations, the furniture, the stage, and the president’s box—vanished, either destroyed or carted away. By late November 1865, a little more than seven months after the assassination, the once beautiful theatre had been defaced beyond recognition and relegated to a drab, three-floor office building. The Record and Pension Bureau of Stanton’s War Department moved in and crammed the space with government clerks and tens of thousands of pounds of files. In 1866, the government bought Ford’s Theatre from John Ford for $100,000. In 1867, the top floor became the new home of the Army Medical Museum for the next twenty years, as if this place had not already seen enough horror and death. One day, on June 9, 1893, somebody filed one piece of paper too many, and the excessive load of tons of documents and office equipment caused all the floors to collapse, crushing twenty-two clerks to death, and crippling or injuring sixty-eight more.
Restored in the 1960s to its former glory, Ford’s Theatre lives again as both a museum and a working playhouse. Presidents come here again for annual galas, though none sits in the president’s box. The restoration was intended as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, but Ford’s has also, inevitably, become a memorial to his assassin. The theatre is dressed to appear just as it did on the night of April 14, 1865. The state box is festooned with flags, and the framed engraving of George Washington that hangs from the front of the box is the actual one that witnessed Booth’s leap to the stage. You can follow Booth’s steps up the curving staircase, retrace his path to the box, enter the vestibule, and re-create his view of Lincoln’s rocking chair. You can sit in the audience and, while listening to a National Park Service historian lecture on the assassination, you can stare up at the box and imagine Booth suspended momentarily in midair, at the apex of his leap.
John Wilkes Booth would have loved it: An entire museum—one of the most popular in America—devoted to his crime. “I must have fame,” he once exhorted himself, “fame.” He has it at Ford’s Theatre, his enduring monument where he is always onstage, forever famous. His fame is of a peculiar kind. Booth was reviled as a fiend during the manhunt. The newspaper editorials, letters from private citizens, mob violence, and the treatment of his body are proof enough of that. Yes, in some quarters there were those who hated Lincoln and admired Booth, but the devotees of the cult of “Our Brutus” dared not express public sympathy for the assassin. Then, over time, something changed. Booth became part of American folklore and his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero—the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin. Booth is not celebrated for the murder, but he has in some way been forgiven for it. What else can explain the presence of large street banners, decorated with the assassin’s photo, hanging from lampposts along his F Street escape route, directing tourists to Ford’s Theatre? In comparison, the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene.
Asia Booth foresaw the trajectory of her brother’s fame, and she tried to help set it in motion in her secret book. To Asia, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth were paired, tragic figures destined to die and bring about a transcendent healing between North and South. Her brother “‘saved his country from a king,’ but he created for her a martyr…. He set the stamp of greatness on an epoch of history, and gave all he had to build this enduring monument to his foe … [t]he South avenged the wrongs inflicted by the North. A life inexpressibly dear was sacrificed wildly for what its possessor deemed best. The life best beloved by the North was dashed madly out when most triumphant. Let the blood of both cement the indissoluble union of our country.”
The legend of John Wilkes Booth began within weeks of the manhunt and his death at Garrett’s farm. A minister in Texas wrote a poem honoring Booth. In New York City, on May 24, 1865, less than a month after Booth’s death, a publisher announced the release of Dion Haco’s novel The Assassinator, the first fictional account of the murder and manhunt. A clever blending of facts drawn from newspaper accounts, invented dialogue, and fantasy scenes, Haco sensationalized Booth’s life and implicated the sad, suicidal Ella Turner in the plot against Lincoln. Ella, “an impetuous and wilful creature,” wrote Haco, pursued Booth as her lover: “My determination is fixed to have that man.” She sensed that the actor was a man of destiny: “Ella saw that his piercing black eyes were lit up almost with a supernatural light. He seemed to be peering through the dim vista of the future and reading from its pages his name.” Haco’s purple prose led Booth inexorably to the manhunt’s climax at Garrett’s barn: “before him a sea of flame, ready to engulf him; beyond the grave a greater sea of flame awaiting him.” The novel closed with lurid details of the assassin’s autopsy, titillating its readers with fantastic images of the corpse’s mutilation: “the head and heart taken from it to be deposited in the Medical Museum,” with the headless and heartless trunk “consigned to the care of the secret agents.” The novel leaves poor Ella, alone and bereft, clutching her assassin-lover’s photo, “covering it with kisses.”
Before the year was out, artists had memorialized Lincoln’s assassin in wax and in heroically sized oil paintings. A poster for “Terry’s Panorama of the War!” advertised “a stupendous work of art” that depicted “startling, terrible and bloody scenes” fresh from the “carnival of treason” by the celebrated artist H. L. Tyng of Boston. The ad promised the viewer a series of paintings, each one seven feet wide and fifteen to twenty feet tall. “Assassination of Lincoln! And Secretary Seward! Life-Size Portrait of Booth, The Assassin!”—all for the modest admission fee of 25 cents for adults and 15 cents for children.
Another art exhibition, “Col. Orr’s Grand Museum,” outdid even Terry’s Panorama. “The Assassination!” screamed the headline of a poster advertising a traveling wax museum of murder. The sculptor, “Sig. Vanodi the greatest living worker in wax,” boasted the broadside, had created life-size figures of “President Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln, Secretary Seward and Booth and Payne, the Assassins!” The exhibitor gave potential customers fair warning: “The figures have now been com-pleted—under the magic touch of the Artist, they spring into an existence almost real … so natural, perfect and life like, that as we gaze upon the assassins we shudder, lest again some fiendish deed be enacted.” Orr constructed a replica of the president’s box, seated the wax Lincolns in it, and positioned the assassin behind them: “Booth,” the poster promised, “is made to preserve the precise attitude in which he leveled his weapon at the head of the president and fired the murderous shot.” Additional wax tableaux depicted the capture of Herold and the shooting of Booth.
The mythologizing of Lincoln’s assassin continued in the years ahead. In 1868, Dunbar Hylton published a 108-page poem about him, “The Præsidicide.” The same year, in New Orleans, a publisher released a sympathetic piece of sheet music—“Our Brutus”—emblazoned with a handsome, full-page lithograph of the assassin. Soon a myth arose that the man killed at Garrett’s farm was not John Wilkes Booth, and that the actor had escaped and fled to the American West, where he lived under a false name. The truth that Booth had died near Port Royal, Virginia, on April 26, 1865, could not suppress the bizarre stories. By the close of the ninteenth century, several men had claimed to be Booth. A lawyer named Finis Bates claimed that the assassin was his client, and in 1903 he published a wildly popular book titled The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. When this false Booth died, allegedly by his own hand, his mummy was exhibited for years at traveling carnivals. It survives to this day, hidden in a private collection. In 1937, a woman wrote a preposterous book claiming that Booth had survived the night at Garrett’s farm, lived a secret life, and fathered a child. The proof? Why, the author was the assassin’s granddaughter, of course.
The survival myth of John Wilkes Booth, roaming across the land, evokes the traditional fate of the damned, of a cursed spirit who can find no rest. There is no doubt that Booth was the man who died at Garrett’s farm. But America’s first assassin, who took Father Abraham in his prime, who left a nation bereft, and who robbed us of the rest of the story, haunts us still.
John Wilkes Booth did not get what he wanted. Yes, he did enjoy a singular success: he killed Abraham Lincoln. But in every other way, Booth was a failure. He did not prolong the Civil War, inspire the South to fight on, or overturn the verdict of the battlefield, or of free elections. Nor did he confound emancipation, resuscitate slavery, or save the dying antebellum civilization of the Old South. Booth failed to overthrow the federal government by assassinating its highest officials. Indeed, he failed to murder two of the three men he had marked for death on that “moody, tearful night.” He did not become an American hero, but he elevated Lincoln to the American pantheon. And, in his greatest failure, Booth did not survive the manhunt. His was not a suicide mission. He wanted desperately to live, to escape, to bask in the fame and glory he was sure would be his. He got his fame, but at the price of his life. But he lived long enough to recognize his failures, and endure the public condemnation of his act. When he leaped to the stage and shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” he must have thought that his immortality as a Southern patriot was sealed. But his last words survive as his true epitaph: “Useless, useless.”
History in wax tableaux of assassination.
Booth may have died at Garrett’s farm, but from that burning barn the assassin’s malevolent spirit arose to linger over the land for more than a century. When marauding night riders wearing masks and white robes rose up against Reconstruction, Booth rode with them, murmuring “this country was formed for the white, not the black man.” When men with burning crosses and rope nooses terrorized generations, the spirit of Booth stood by, scorning “nigger suffrage.” And when an eloquent man stepped onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel the day after he gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a vengeful Booth was there, muttering, “that is the last speech he will ever give.”
If Booth could return today to the scene of his crime and visit, as almost one million Americans do every year, the basement museum at Ford’s Theatre, he might conclude, from what he found there, that it was, once again, April 14, 1865. Here he would find, preserved in a condition as immaculate as the day he last touched them, protected in climate-controlled, shatterproof glass display cases, the prized relics of the assassination: The original door to the president’s box, its peephole still luring curious eyes; the wood music stand he used to bar the door; his revolvers and knives; the Spencer carbine that he and David Herold picked up during their midnight run to Surratt’s tavern; his whistle and keys; the photos of his sweethearts; and his notorious pocket calendar diary, its pages still open, as if awaiting a final entry.
When the tourists who come here marvel at Booth’s implements of violence and death—none more popular than the Deringer pistol that killed President Lincoln—they usually neglect a less thrilling relic. Few visitors bend down, peer through the glass case at a little shelf set near the ground, and scrutinize a small, everyday object resting in its velvet-lined box. It is Booth’s pocket compass, more evocative of his desperate, twelve-day flight from the manhunt than any relic that survived him.
This is the compass that guided him during his dangerous days on the run; that he and Thomas Jones cradled by candlelight as they plotted Booth’s course across the wide and black waters of the Potomac; that each day gave him hope as it pointed the way South to his final destination; that he played with on the Garrett lawn to the children’s delight; and that the detectives plundered from his pocket as he lay dying at Garrett’s farm. Today, almost a century and a half since the great chase for Lincoln’s killer began, its blued steel needle still dances on its spindle, still pointing the way South.