Manhunt (54 page)

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 ANTI
quarians 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.

T
ODAY YOU CAN DRIVE THERE FROM
W
ASHINGTON
, 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.”