Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth — Solution of the Conspiracy (1)

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.

] Washington, 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 bloody 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 assassination 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 multitude.

One man was its head and heart; its accessories were so numerous that the trouble is not whom to suspect, but whom not accuse.

Damning 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 assertion.

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 gratitude, as well as an impulse of mingled waywardness and gratitude, 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 bloody suggestion with dogged inflexibility, maintaining only one axiom above all the rest--that whatever minor parts might be enacted--Casca, Cassius, or what not--he was to be the dramatic Brutus, excepting that assassin'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 assertion 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 shipped, before the end of 1864, his theatrical wardrobe from Canada to Nassau.

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 assistants.

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 cocktails at the nearest bar.

Wilkes Booth had passed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink from the broader and ranker green-room of real life.

He assembled 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, dashing 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 Washington.

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 assassin of the Sewards, had no friends nor haunts in Washington.

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 assert 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 passed Washington.

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 Washington.

Doubtless by direct letter, or verbal instruction, he received a password 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 assurance 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 principal 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 Cęsar 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 assassin.

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 Washington 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 shore 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 Washington, 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 Washington 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 Washington, going meanderingly north.

Of this poet route Mrs. Surratt was a manageress; and John Lloyd, when he rented her hotel, assumed 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 Washington, 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 Washington 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.

It could not but have struck Booth that this isolated part of Maryland ignorant and rebel to the brim, without telegraph or railways, or direct stage routes, belted with swamps and broken by dense timber, afforded extraordinary opportunities for shelter and escape.

Only the coast survey had any adequate map of it; it was _ultima thule_ to all intents, and treason might subsist in welcome upon it for a thousand years.

When Booth cast around him for assistance, he naturally selected those men whom he could control.

The first that recommended himself was one Harold, a youth of inane and plastic character, carried away by the example of an actor, and full of execrable quotations, going to show that he was an imitator of the master spirit both in text and admiration.

This Harold was a gunner, and therefore versed in arms; he had traversed the whole lower portion of Maryland, and was therefore a geographer as well as a tool.

His friends lived at every farmhouse between Washington and Leonardsville, and he was respectably enough connected, so as to make his association creditable as well as useful.

Harold, whose picture I have seen, is a dull-faced, shallow boy, smooth-haired, and provincial; he had no money nor employment, except that he clerked for a druggist a while, until he knew Wilkes Booth, who looked at him only once, and bought his soul for a smile.

Harold was infatuated by Booth as a woman by a soldier.

He copied his gait and tone, adopted his opinions, and was unhappy out of his society.

Booth gave him money, mysteriously obtained, and together they made the acquaintance of young John Surratt, son of the conspiratress.

Young Surratt does not appear to have been a puissant spirit in the scheme; indeed, all design and influence therein was absorbed by Mrs. Surratt and Booth.

The latter was the head and heart of the plot; Mrs. Surratt was his anchor, and the rest of the boys were disciples to Iscariot and Jezebel.

John Surratt, a youth of strong Southern physiognomy, beardless and lanky, knew of the murder and connived at it.

"Sam" Arnold and one McLaughlin were to have been parties to it, but backed out in the end.

They all relied upon Mrs. Surratt, and took their "cues" from Wilkes Booth.

The conspiracy had its own time and kept its own counsel.

Murder except among the principals, was seldom mentioned except by genteel implication.

But they all publicly agreed that Mr. Lincoln ought to be shot, and that the North was a race of fratricides.

Much was said of Brutus, and Booth repeated heroic passages to the delight of Harold, who learned them also, and wondered if he was not born to greatness.