Perhaps, like me, you wonder what happened to some of the people who played a part in this day of April 14, 1865. I will tell you, in no set order, the little that I know:
Surgeon General Barnes lived long enough to minister to the assassinated President Garfield. Andrew Johnson lived ten years. William H. Seward recovered, and died in 1872 of natural causes. He was seventy-one. James Speed, Lincoln’s old friend, resigned as Attorney General in a year.
Stanton was forced from his post by Johnson and begged to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. The appointment arrived as he was on his deathbed in 1869. The Secretary of the Interior, John Usher, resigned in a month. Gideon Welles lived to be seventy-six years old. General Augur, who had been in Grant’s class at West Point, retired from the army and lived to see the start of the Spanish-American War. Schuyler Colfax became Vice President of the United States and was later involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal. William H. Crook, the guard, lived a great number of years and wrote his memoirs.
Thomas Eckert, who could break pokers over his arm, became a general, retired, became head of a big commercial telegraph company, and lived until 1910. The owner of Ford’s Theatre, John T. Ford, was thrown into prison, but was later released for lack of evidence. The government confiscated his theater, but he forced it to pay $100,000 for the house. Twenty-eight years later, the floors of Ford’s collapsed, killing more than a score of government workers. Today, rebuilt, the theater is a national museum.
Ulysses S. Grant, in time, became President of the United States, had a poor term of office, became a tool of Wall Street operators, and wrote extensive memoirs to keep from dying penniless in 1885.
Bessie Hale, the Senator’s daughter who loved John Wilkes Booth, later married William Eaton Chandler, who was not an actor. Clara Harris was killed by her husband, Major Henry Rathbone, who, in turn, lived out his days in an insane asylum. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon, who might have saved Lincoln, regretted all his days (and they covered the next twenty-eight years) that he was in Richmond the night the President was shot.
George Atzerodt was caught, tried and hanged. So were Lewis Paine and David Herold. Booth was cornered in a Virginia barn and shot. For years afterward there were stories that it wasn’t Booth who was shot, but the stories were wrong. It was Booth and, years later, when the government removed his body from under a stone floor in a prison, and sent it home, the Booth family identified the remains as those of John Wilkes Booth and buried him in the family plot.
Mrs. Mary E. Surratt was tried, convicted and hanged for conspiracy. On a hot July day, a government employee held an umbrella over her head before the trap was sprung. On the morning of the hanging, her daughter Anna tried to see President Johnson to beg for mercy for her mother. Anna was kept from seeing the President by Preston King of New York and Senator James H. Lane of Kansas. Six months later, King tied a bag of shot around his neck and jumped off a Hoboken ferry; eight months after that, Senator Lane shot himself.
Dr. Samuel Mudd was tried for conspiracy and convicted. So were Sam Arnold, Mike O’Laughlin and Ned Spangler, the horse holder. All four were sentenced to Albany (New York) Penitentiary. Secretary Stanton, who felt that they had got off lightly, removed them to Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas Prison, off Key West, Florida. There, in August, 1867, yellow fever broke out and, when the prison doctor died, Dr. Mudd volunteered his services. He saved the lives of soldiers and prisoners, but Mike O’Laughlin died. The officers of the post appealed for a pardon for Mudd and it was granted in February 1869. Arnold and Spangler were freed with him and, realizing that Ned Spangler was dying of tuberculosis, Dr. Mudd took him home to Bryantown with him, and cared for him until he died.
John Lloyd and Louis Wiechman became the government’s star witnesses against Mrs. Surratt. Lloyd claimed he was threatened with death unless he testified against her. Wiechman claimed that Stanton promised him a job for his work as a witness, and for a time he worked in the Philadelphia customs house. He was later fired. When he died, he kept repeating that he was on his deathbed and he would still say that he told the truth at the trial of Mrs. Surratt.
John Surratt ran to Canada, thence to Europe, and was discovered two years later working as a Zouave forty miles from the Vatican. He was brought back, tried, and eventually released. He made money giving lectures on the assassination of Lincoln.
Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln, perhaps the most pathetic of all the people who figured in this day, was certified as a “lunatic”* in Cook County, Illinois, ten years after the death of her husband. It was Robert’s sad duty to sign the commitment papers. She was released a year later, and spent the last months of her life (1882) in a darkened room dressed in widow’s weeds. In 1871, Tad died.
The last of the survivors, Robert Todd Lincoln, died at the age of eighty-three, in 1926.