February 8, 2012 • 27 mins
Most people know the story of President Lincoln's assassination, but what happened afterward? In this podcast, we cover John Wilkes Booth's escape, his co-conspirators' attacks against other officials and the strange connections between Booth and Lincoln.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delating charcoateboarding and around Christmas.
This year. Listener Hillary sent us the book Assassination Vacation
(00:21):
by Sarah Vowel, about the assassinations of three US presidents, Lincoln, Garfield,
and McKinley. And before I started the book, I figured,
of those three, i'd probably know the most about Lincoln's assassination,
at least the scene for its theater, the circumstances Lincoln
shot point blank in the head, and the players involved,
(00:42):
the actor John Wilkes Booth and his motley crew of conspirators.
But I hadn't realized the entire breadth of the attack.
The attack on Lincoln was really just one part of
three planned assassinations that were supposed to go down that night.
And I hadn't realized the intensiveness of the man hunt
for Booth either, or the strange, sad stories about peripheral
(01:05):
figures involved, like Booth's brother, the President's son, the Lincoln
theater guest the night of the assassination. It really proved
to be a more in depth and more fascinating story
than I had imagined. So in this podcast, we're going
to talk about what happened the night of April fourteenth,
eighteen sixty five, at Ford's Theater, but also some of
the events that happened long before that and long after.
(01:28):
And if you're Lincoln buff we hope that you will
get to hear your favorite weird detail or conspiracy theory
about this. And if you're not, then you're probably going
to be in for some surprises. It's sometimes fascinating to
extend the story beyond the point that we're used to hearing,
which for most people is probably Booth jumping over the
railing of the President's box and escaping. But the first
(01:51):
semi surprise of this podcast is going to be that
John Wilkes Booth, who is now of course famous firstly
as an assassin and secondly as an actor, was really
a pretty big star. I always kind of imagined him
as a middling actor in that fact was emphasized, you know,
just to make it all the stranger that he was
an assassin. He was, however, a member of a great
(02:13):
theatrical family, albeit kind of a lesser member. But that's
just because the other family members were so famous. Booth
had been born in Maryland in eighteen thirty eight. He
was the ninth of ten children of Junius Brutus Booth,
who was an English actor very famous in England who
had moved to the United States in eighteen twenty one.
(02:34):
Booth Sr. Was one of the most famous Shakespearean actors
in the country, maybe second only to Edwin Forest he
might remember from last year's Astor Place riot, and partly
to keep Junius Brutus from getting too wild on the road,
he had a drinking problem. His three sons got into
theater two and the middle boy, Edwin, became a star
(02:57):
to really rival his father. We're going to talk about
him a bit more later. The youngest, meanwhile, John Wilkes,
had a rockier start with his theatrical career until he
joined a Shakespearean company based in Richmond, Virginia. Yeah. Once
with that company, he toured the country, including the South,
and became celebrated for his good looks and athletic acting.
(03:18):
But the intensity of Booth's political opinions made him a
bit of an odd ball. He was extremely pro slavery,
anti Lincoln, and an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. While
some of historians suggests Booth served as a Confederate agent
during the war. The only thing stopping him from taking
a more active role for his cause was a promise
that he made for his mother, though he wouldn't actually
(03:40):
enlist in the army. So by the autumn of eighteen
sixty four, Booth started making plans to kidnap President Lincoln,
drawing in other conspirators to meet at Mrs Mary Surratt's Washington,
d c. Boarding house, and Booth, for one, already had
a pretty good in with the President, despite his earlier
flings with actresses, including an incident reported by Thomas Lowry
(04:01):
in America Civil War when he actress Henrietta Irving tried
to stab Booth in the chest, grazing his face and
still lovers quarrel. Yes, he had away with the ladies,
I guess, but Booth's current girlfriend was the daughter of
an ardent abolitionist U S. Senator Lucy Hale, so with
Lucy as his date in his end to the Lincoln circle,
(04:22):
Booth even got a prime seat at Lincoln's second inaugural address,
ragging to a friend that he had had a really
great chance to kill the president. Then you can even
see Booth in the picture of Lincoln giving his address.
The kidnapping plans ultimately kept falling through, though, and soon
enough the motive to stage at kidnapping in the first
(04:43):
place disappeared. So the point of kidnapping instead of killing,
had been to exchange Lincoln for Confederate prisoners of war.
But on April nine, the war ended, so what are
you gonna do? Ironically, though, it was Lincoln's speech on
reconstruct Action, which took place just a few days after
that on the White House lawn that really fired up
(05:05):
Booth made him decide that he didn't want to give
up the plan of kidnapping. He wanted to escalate it
to something more. He had attended that speech with co
conspirator Louis Powell and left it swearing that it would
be Lincoln's last speech. So the right opportunity for Booth
came almost immediately when he read in the paper that
the President and Mrs Lincoln were due to attend a
(05:28):
performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in d
C the night of April fourteen. So, after months of
plotting for more elaborate scenarios he swung into action. He
lined up his co conspirators into a three pronged attack
which was meant to cripple the government. Powell, a former
Confederate soldier, would assassinate the Secretary of State William Seward
(05:50):
with the help of David Harold. George at Serat, a
German immigrant and former boatman for Confederate spies, would assassinate
Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Booth himself would assassinate Lincoln.
And all these attacks would take place at approximately ten
pm on that night. So the morning of the assassination,
Booth was spotted with Lucy Hale, whose father was probably
(06:12):
at that same time meeting with Lincoln about his new
appointment to Spain. Lucy Hill's father was looking to get
out of DC along with his daughter, get her away
from crazy actor Booth. But at about six pm that night,
Booth entered Ford's Theater, which was pretty empty at that point,
and tampered with the door to the President's box, fixing
(06:32):
it so that the outer door of the box could
be jammed from the inside. After that, he just had
hours to kill, you know, trying to pass his time.
The theater's conductor, William Withers Jr. Who was pretty psyched
to have the song he had composed performed for the
President that night, was also killing time and spotted Booth
(06:52):
at an actor's bar nearby the theater, and according to
a Richard Sloan article in American Heritage, Withers even heard
somebody joke quote, oh, Booth will never be as great
an actor as his father, which sounds like fighting words
most of the time with Booth, but Booth just replied,
pretty coolly, quote, when I leave the stage for good,
(07:13):
I will be the most famous man in America. So
during the third act, Booth re entered the theater and
walked into the President's box. He waited for a line
in the play that he knew would get big laughs.
I mean, remember, he was an actor, so we would
have known that sort of thing. Then he bust into
the inner door and shot Lincoln in the back of
the head with a forty four caliber garranger. Booth had
(07:36):
been expecting General and Mrs Grant to also be in
the box, and that's what the papers had announced, so
that's pretty much what he thought was going to happen.
But the Grants had turned down the invite, and Booth
instead found the Union officer, Major Henry Rathbone and his
fiance Clara Harris. So Rathbone of course sees what has happened,
and he kind of tussles with Booth, getting slashed in
(07:57):
the arm, before Booth jumps over the boxes railing shouting
seek semper tierness, thus always to tyrants, and he caught
a spur on the American flag, landed on the stage
below and broke his leg. From there, the conductor Withers
ran into him again. Withers, who had taken an underground
passageway around to the stage to question why his special
(08:18):
song that he had written kept getting pushed back. He
heard a pistol shot the thump, and then found himself
face to face with Booth, a flashing mad Booth to
Booth managed to escape down the passage out to an
alley and then on horseback to Maryland. We're going to
pick up with him later. But what about the other conspirators,
(08:38):
because remember this was a three pronged attack. We know
things must have not worked out quite according to plan,
because Johnson did go on to become president, he lived,
and Seward went on to buy Alaska from Russia for
seven point two million dollars, something that was mocked at
the time called Steward's folly. But enough on that as At,
(08:59):
who was commission to kill the vice president just completely
chickened out. I think he went out drinking instead and
got nowhere near Johnson. Paul, though, did some pretty serious
damage to the Seward family. He arrived at their home
under the guise of a pharmacy delivery boy. Um. He
went into Seward's house where the Secretary of State was
(09:22):
laid up after a very serious carriage accident. He had
broken an arm and his jaw, and uh that those
injuries required pretty serious banishing to his face and head,
which is a key point here. So when Paul entered
the home and was trying to deliver his medicine, Seward's
son Frederick met him but wouldn't allow him upstairs to
(09:45):
deliver the items personally. So at that point Paul pulled
out a gun tried to shoot Frederick, but found that
his gun wouldn't fire and pistol whipped him instead. Then
he charged up the stairs started slashing Seward bedridden Sewar
with a bowie knife in front of Seward's daughter too,
until finally the military officer who had been assigned to
(10:08):
Seward during his convalescence grappled with Powell and uh Seward's
other son joined into um ended up getting injured. A
colleague of Seward's got injured to Powe really did some
serious damage, but did manage to escape. Nobody was killed
in this incident. Seward and his son's recovered um, but
(10:29):
his wife died just a few weeks after because of
the double shock of the carriage accident and then this violent,
bloody attack in her home. Just to return and kind
of pick up with the Lincoln portion of the story,
Lincoln meanwhile, is dying from head wound. The first doctor
on the scene was Charles save and Taft, who ordered
Lincoln to be removed to the nearest home. The president
(10:52):
was brought across the street to the lodging house of
William Peterson and placed diagonally across the bed because he
was too tall to just lie on it properly well.
The surgeon General cared for the president. Dr Taff stayed
in attendance, journaling the next morning that he had held
Lincoln's head almost all throughout the night. He talked about
how heavy it was to just hold it there all night.
(11:14):
The president was pronounced dead at two am, and then
the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton proclaimed, quote, now
he belongs to the ages. One of the more famous
quotes about Lincoln. In the president's pockets were a pocket knife,
two pairs of glasses, and a Confederate five dollar bill,
which I think is the most unusual item there. Okay,
(11:37):
so after the President dies, of course, the next day
was Easter Sunday, which was the absolute perfect time to
compare Lincoln's death to Jesus's sacrifice from pulpits across the country.
So everybody is talking about Lincoln and everybody is talking
about his assassin. After an autopsy, Lincoln lane state at
(11:58):
the White House and the Capital, but for being sent
on a thirteen day train trip back to Springfield with
plenty of open casket viewings. Um. Just a side note here.
Vale notes in her book that this was really great
publicity for the new trend in embalming, seeing the president
so many days after he had been killed. Meanwhile, as
the President's body is traveling around the search for Booth
(12:21):
and his accomplices, as heating up it's the largest manhunt
to that date, and it was helped along by the
Secretary of Wars one hundred thousand dollar reward, which incidentally
also helped shore of the historical record because, according to
a Smithsonian article by James Swanson, so many of Booth's
trackers documented the experience because they were trying to get
(12:41):
a piece of the rewards, so a lot of them did.
It was split up among many different people. But after
fleeing forwards Theater, Booth had met up with David Harold, who,
if you remember, was supposed to be on the Powell
Seward As fascination team. He had left Powell though behind
at the Seward house. Those two who high tailed it
for the Maryland home of Dr Samuel mud who set
(13:04):
Booth leg and then they spent five nights and five
days in the woods waiting to cross the Potomac into Virginia.
Had a little help though, yeah. A Confederate agent named
Thomas Jones brought them food and newspapers, and it was
a big disappointment when Booth read those papers. People hated him.
He thought that he would be considered a hero, the
(13:25):
destroyer of a tyrant, and he journaled all of these feelings,
complaining that people were talking about him as a quote
common cutthroat. Once in Virginia, Booth and Harold wound their
way to the farm of Richard Garrett, where they stayed
under assumed names. Though they must have seemed like desperate men,
the Garrets allowed them to sleep in their tobacco barn,
but actually locked them in at night so that they
(13:47):
wouldn't steal any horses. That night, Lieutenant Edward Doherty, in
charge of the sixteenth New York Cavalry, along with detectives
Luther Baker and Everton Conker, tracked the men to the farm.
The Garretts dog started barking at the sound of horses,
and so Booth and Harold of course woke up. They
tried to escape, but found themselves locked in, and by
(14:07):
the time they were trying to kick out aboard, the
farmhouse was surrounded. So old man Garrett and his sons
were pushed around a bit by the search party until
they admitted where the men were in the tobacco barn.
One of the sons was even forced to enter the
barn and try to disarm Booth. Nobody else wanted to
go in. Booth basically told him, you sold me out,
(14:29):
get out, or I'll kill you. But despite having a
whole cavalry, the law enforcement officers really kind of dithererd
about what to do, because they did have orders to
bring back Booth alive. He was, of course wanted for questioning,
but nobody wanted to get killed either, and everybody fully
expected that that would happen if they had a face
to face with the armed and desperate Booth. So their
(14:52):
solution was burned the barn. Harold begged to be let out,
and he eventually is let out. Booth, on the other hand,
poses kind of challenge to Baker, makes them a little
proposition combat on open ground Booth against the cavalry just
as long as they back up from the barn door.
He creepily mentions to Baker how honorable he's been the
(15:12):
whole time. He says, quote, Captain, I have had half
a dozen opportunities to shoot you, but I did not.
So at this point Baker realizes, oh, yeah, I'm holding
this candle. So he loses that target. You can see
him through the barn, the cracks in the barn wall. Yeah,
he gets rid of that, but he declines Booth's offer.
He says, quote, we did not come here to fight you.
(15:34):
We simply came to make you a prisoner. Booth reduces
the demands of his offer. At that point, he says
that he'll come out and fight if the men just
back off from the door just a little bit. Give
me a chance for my life, he says. But that
just was not happening. So Booth says, well, my brave
boys prepare stretcher for me. But the way it went
down was actually more like a bonfire. They finally sent
(15:55):
the bar set the barn on fire. The barn goes
up in flames really fast, and in the panic of
Booth trying to get out, he gets shot by a
sergeant Boston Corbett, who, as a side note, was possibly
a mad hatter. He did go insane, and it might
have been because of the mercury used in hat making.
Back to Booth, though, he was caught before he even
(16:17):
hit the ground from getting shot by Boston Corbett, and
he was presumed dead. In fact, though he was paralyzed
from the neck down. He could talk a little bit
and move his eyes, but he couldn't swallow the water
that was offered to him. He had to watch as
Colonel Everton Conger checked his pockets and remove money and
keys and tobacco in a compass. When Conger went into
(16:38):
an inner pocket, he found the diary Booth had been keeping,
you know, lamenting the fact he wasn't a national hero,
plus five photos of different ladies. One was a lesser
known actress, two were pretty famous leading ladies of the day.
One was a Subrette type actress who was married to
a violinist, and then the last one was Lucy Hales.
(17:00):
So I don't know if Lucy maybe had a surprise
when she heard the news he had five photos in
his pocket. But his official last words were tell mother,
I die for my country. But he also had a
few other last requests. He kept on asking to be
able to examine his lifeless hands. He begged the soldiers
to kill him. It sounds like a really gruesome, really
(17:23):
horrible death. He died by the morning of April. Booth's
body was secretly buried that then re entered a few
years later at a Stanley plot in Baltimore. But the
wild conspiracy theories began almost right away. The main one,
of course, was that Booth didn't die instead as the
theory goes, he escaped, took the name John st Helen,
(17:46):
and went west. He told a lawyer in Texas that
he was Booth, but left town in nineteen o three.
Then the lawyer saw clipping that a David E. George
committed suicide in Oklahoma and had confessed he was Booth
before dying. The lawyer recognized the photo as that of
none other than st Helen. George's body was mummified, which
(18:08):
I'm not sure quite why, and it toward freak shows
as Booth's body until at some point it went missing.
So the Baltimore City Circuit Court has been petitioned even
fairly recently, to have Booth's body exhumed, including by some
of Booth's own relatives, but they've declined for two reasons. One,
there's really not much basis for this claim. It's probably
(18:31):
Booth buried at the memorial. Secondly, though it would involve
exhuming a lot of the other Booths in the family plot,
almost all of those kids of Junius Brutus are buried there,
and it's not really clear where each individual family member
is located. So now that we at least kind of
no think we know what happened to Booth, what happened
(18:53):
to the rest of his companions while they were also
snatched up Over the time Harold surrendered at the barn.
As we mentioned, Powell, At Saarant and the boarding house
owner Mary Surat were taken in and those four were
all found guilty of murder and sentence to hang. Saurat's
sentence is still kind of controversial though, since while she
definitely knew about the kidnapping plan, she may not have
(19:15):
known everything about the murder also found guilty and sentenced
to prison. Where Dr Mud the guy who had set
boost leg, Samuel Arnold who had been in on the
kidnapping plot but had dropped out earlier, and Michael O'Laughlin,
who had also dropped out of the plot before it
turned to a murderous one. And then finally Edmund Spangler,
(19:37):
who had worked at Ford's Theater, got a six year sentence.
There's another conspirator, though, Mary Sarratt's son, John Surratt Jr.
Who wasn't caught for a remarkable twenty months. I mean,
consider again, this was the largest man hunt to date.
They were all out looking for this guy. When he
finally was apprehended. He wasn't even convicted of a crime,
(20:00):
So it's questionable whether John Sarot Jr. Was even in Washington,
d c. The night of the assassination, and of course
he denied it. But after it he fled to Montreal,
where he was hidden by a priest for a while
and eventually put on a boat to Liverpool, where he
made his way to Rome and, according to a Don
Bryson article in American Civil War, actually enlisted in the
(20:25):
Papal Infantry Guards there, which sounds pretty bizarre and surprising.
But Saratt finally revealed his identity. He had a hard
time keeping that information to himself, and the Vatican agreed
to extradite him, but before that could actually happen, he
escaped from six Papal soldiers, made his way to Naples
(20:46):
and then got on a ship to Alexandria, Egypt, where
he finally got off the ship and ran into the
American authorities. So after they caught him, you know, the U. S.
District attorney desperately wanted to convict Surat, but the prosecution
was pretty weak and the trial ended in a hung jury.
An attempt to re indict him on the same charges
(21:08):
was eventually dismissed after the statute of limitations on those
charges had passed, those throughout went free. Kind of one
of the stranger sides of the whole Lincoln conspiracy story. Okay,
so what about some of the lesser known victims of
this assassination, including Lincoln's theater guests who we mentioned briefly. Well,
(21:29):
Major Henry Rathbone, who tried to stop Booth from escaping
and was stabbed in the arm, was still blamed for
not stopping the killer. It started to drive him insane.
This is the guilt from this. Eventually, he and Clara
married and they had children and moved to Germany, but
he ended up shooting and killing her, and he was
actually going to try to kill their children too, before
(21:50):
a nanny stopped him. There is also one final twist
to this whole story, and it involves an old, seemingly
nonsensical game type statement, and that is Booth saved Lincoln's life. Okay,
so we're not trying to make some sort of commentary
on Lincoln's reputation through the ages or something having to
(22:11):
do with his being assassinated. It's actually a fact Booth
saved Lincoln's life, but it's a different booth and a
different Lincoln, so it's pretty well known how much family
tragedy Mrs Lincoln faced. Only one of her four sons
lived to adulthood, so when her eldest son, Robert, came
of age to fight in the Civil War, Mrs Lincoln,
(22:31):
having already lost two of her boys, refused to let
him go fight. The President was kind of embarrassed by it,
but Robert instead went off to college and only joined
up the army in February eighteen sixty five, and even
then in a pretty cushy position. He was a member
of General Grant's staff. He got to see Lee's surrender.
He wasn't really in too much danger At one point
(22:54):
in college, though, about eighteen sixty three or eighteen sixty four,
somewhere in there, he was traveling from New York to
d C. When his train stopped in Jersey City. Robert
later recalled that a crowd was standing on the platform
waiting to buy sleeping car places. When the train began
to move, he somehow got knocked over and dropped in
the gap between the platform and the train, so he
(23:18):
couldn't move. He could have been crushed. I mean, it
sounds just like a horrifying, scary situation. Suddenly he felt
someone grab his collar and haul him up, and that
person was Edwin Booth, who was, of course a super
famous actor. It would be almost as if Brad Pitt
came in and saved your life. That was the comparison
I was thinking of, if you suddenly are lifted out
(23:39):
of the train pit and you're looking at one of
the most famous people of your day. Unlike his younger brother,
though Edwin Booth was a supporter of the Union in
Lincoln and considerably more even tempered, he had kind of
gone off the rails earlier in life and had ended
up missing his wife's death in eighteen sixty three because
he was a drunk. So he had really sobered up
(24:02):
and kind of had much more moderate opinions than thumb
members of his family. Um, he did learn whose life
he had said that he'd saved the president's son when
he got a letter from a friend who was on
Grant staff who had heard Robert Lincoln telling the story.
As anybody would like, this super famous actor saved my
life recently. Isn't that an interesting story? So after John
(24:24):
Wilkes Booth assassinated the president. Edwin Booth felt particularly devastated
the loss of a leader he admired, the family, shame
it caused, and fear that he'd never be able to
work again. Booth did make a successful return to the
stage in January eighteen sixty six and his signature role
of Hamlet, and went on to found the Players in
New York City with Mark Twain and General Sherman, but
(24:47):
the knowledge that he had helped save A Lincoln helped
get him through the worst months after the assassination. We
do have one last spooky tidbit for you, though, relating
to both Edwin Booth and Lincoln's assassinated aation during Edwin's
eighteen nine funeral, Ford's Theater collapsed. It wasn't rebuilt until
(25:07):
the nineteen sixties, and though it's under operation as a
historical site. So I think that's a good point to
transition to listener mail. So I thought this one would
be appropriate since we last heard from listener Hillary, who's
sending us postcards through her tour of Europe, when she
(25:29):
mentioned she has a violin from the Civil War era,
so she especially likes Civil War aerotopics. Her latest postcard
is from Madrid, and she wrote after the concert she
played there, they're playing Prokofiev's Violin can sherre to number one.
She said that her teacher met that composer over that piece,
(25:49):
and his second violin can Share too was premiered in
the hall where she played, so there were all sorts
of historical connections. Again, I really like relating modern cultural
events like this to historical ones. It's pretty nay yes,
and I continue to get even more jealous. I just
love ma Drid. I know one of my favorite places.
Sounds like it would be a nice place to play
violin too. Yeah, just about it. Just do anything. So
(26:12):
thank you, Hillary. We do enjoy getting your updates from
your travels, and we enjoy hearing from all of you guys,
so please continue spending a suggestion. I think booth was
suggested Edwin Booth was suggested pretty recently today. I think
it was today. It's so weird when we get requests
on to day that we're actually recording the podcast of
(26:35):
whatever the request is. Are not as spooky as the
theater falling down on the day of a funeral, But
still I do wonder if people can like read our
minds or from saying when it's happening, we hope not to,
but continues sending its suggestions. We get so many of
our ideas from you guys. And remember that now we're
at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com instead of how
(26:58):
stepworks dot Com. We have changed email addresses. We do, however,
have the same Twitter account at missed in History and
the same Facebook. And if you want to learn a
little bit more about some other things that happened during
the Civil War era, maybe you're a buff like Hillary is,
We have an article called how the Emancipatient Proclamation worked.
You can find that by searching on our homepage at
(27:21):
www dot how Stuff works dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works
iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm delating charcoateboarding and around Christmas.
This year. Listener Hillary sent us the book Assassination Vacation
(00:21):
by Sarah Vowel, about the assassinations of three US presidents, Lincoln, Garfield,
and McKinley. And before I started the book, I figured,
of those three, i'd probably know the most about Lincoln's assassination,
at least the scene for its theater, the circumstances Lincoln
shot point blank in the head, and the players involved,
(00:42):
the actor John Wilkes Booth and his motley crew of conspirators.
But I hadn't realized the entire breadth of the attack.
The attack on Lincoln was really just one part of
three planned assassinations that were supposed to go down that night.
And I hadn't realized the intensiveness of the man hunt
for Booth either, or the strange, sad stories about peripheral
(01:05):
figures involved, like Booth's brother, the President's son, the Lincoln
theater guest the night of the assassination. It really proved
to be a more in depth and more fascinating story
than I had imagined. So in this podcast, we're going
to talk about what happened the night of April fourteenth,
eighteen sixty five, at Ford's Theater, but also some of
the events that happened long before that and long after.
(01:28):
And if you're Lincoln buff we hope that you will
get to hear your favorite weird detail or conspiracy theory
about this. And if you're not, then you're probably going
to be in for some surprises. It's sometimes fascinating to
extend the story beyond the point that we're used to hearing,
which for most people is probably Booth jumping over the
railing of the President's box and escaping. But the first
(01:51):
semi surprise of this podcast is going to be that
John Wilkes Booth, who is now of course famous firstly
as an assassin and secondly as an actor, was really
a pretty big star. I always kind of imagined him
as a middling actor in that fact was emphasized, you know,
just to make it all the stranger that he was
an assassin. He was, however, a member of a great
(02:13):
theatrical family, albeit kind of a lesser member. But that's
just because the other family members were so famous. Booth
had been born in Maryland in eighteen thirty eight. He
was the ninth of ten children of Junius Brutus Booth,
who was an English actor very famous in England who
had moved to the United States in eighteen twenty one.
(02:34):
Booth Sr. Was one of the most famous Shakespearean actors
in the country, maybe second only to Edwin Forest he
might remember from last year's Astor Place riot, and partly
to keep Junius Brutus from getting too wild on the road,
he had a drinking problem. His three sons got into
theater two and the middle boy, Edwin, became a star
(02:57):
to really rival his father. We're going to talk about
him a bit more later. The youngest, meanwhile, John Wilkes,
had a rockier start with his theatrical career until he
joined a Shakespearean company based in Richmond, Virginia. Yeah. Once
with that company, he toured the country, including the South,
and became celebrated for his good looks and athletic acting.
(03:18):
But the intensity of Booth's political opinions made him a
bit of an odd ball. He was extremely pro slavery,
anti Lincoln, and an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. While
some of historians suggests Booth served as a Confederate agent
during the war. The only thing stopping him from taking
a more active role for his cause was a promise
that he made for his mother, though he wouldn't actually
(03:40):
enlist in the army. So by the autumn of eighteen
sixty four, Booth started making plans to kidnap President Lincoln,
drawing in other conspirators to meet at Mrs Mary Surratt's Washington,
d c. Boarding house, and Booth, for one, already had
a pretty good in with the President, despite his earlier
flings with actresses, including an incident reported by Thomas Lowry
(04:01):
in America Civil War when he actress Henrietta Irving tried
to stab Booth in the chest, grazing his face and
still lovers quarrel. Yes, he had away with the ladies,
I guess, but Booth's current girlfriend was the daughter of
an ardent abolitionist U S. Senator Lucy Hale, so with
Lucy as his date in his end to the Lincoln circle,
(04:22):
Booth even got a prime seat at Lincoln's second inaugural address,
ragging to a friend that he had had a really
great chance to kill the president. Then you can even
see Booth in the picture of Lincoln giving his address.
The kidnapping plans ultimately kept falling through, though, and soon
enough the motive to stage at kidnapping in the first
(04:43):
place disappeared. So the point of kidnapping instead of killing,
had been to exchange Lincoln for Confederate prisoners of war.
But on April nine, the war ended, so what are
you gonna do? Ironically, though, it was Lincoln's speech on
reconstruct Action, which took place just a few days after
that on the White House lawn that really fired up
(05:05):
Booth made him decide that he didn't want to give
up the plan of kidnapping. He wanted to escalate it
to something more. He had attended that speech with co
conspirator Louis Powell and left it swearing that it would
be Lincoln's last speech. So the right opportunity for Booth
came almost immediately when he read in the paper that
the President and Mrs Lincoln were due to attend a
(05:28):
performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in d
C the night of April fourteen. So, after months of
plotting for more elaborate scenarios he swung into action. He
lined up his co conspirators into a three pronged attack
which was meant to cripple the government. Powell, a former
Confederate soldier, would assassinate the Secretary of State William Seward
(05:50):
with the help of David Harold. George at Serat, a
German immigrant and former boatman for Confederate spies, would assassinate
Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Booth himself would assassinate Lincoln.
And all these attacks would take place at approximately ten
pm on that night. So the morning of the assassination,
Booth was spotted with Lucy Hale, whose father was probably
(06:12):
at that same time meeting with Lincoln about his new
appointment to Spain. Lucy Hill's father was looking to get
out of DC along with his daughter, get her away
from crazy actor Booth. But at about six pm that night,
Booth entered Ford's Theater, which was pretty empty at that point,
and tampered with the door to the President's box, fixing
(06:32):
it so that the outer door of the box could
be jammed from the inside. After that, he just had
hours to kill, you know, trying to pass his time.
The theater's conductor, William Withers Jr. Who was pretty psyched
to have the song he had composed performed for the
President that night, was also killing time and spotted Booth
(06:52):
at an actor's bar nearby the theater, and according to
a Richard Sloan article in American Heritage, Withers even heard
somebody joke quote, oh, Booth will never be as great
an actor as his father, which sounds like fighting words
most of the time with Booth, but Booth just replied,
pretty coolly, quote, when I leave the stage for good,
(07:13):
I will be the most famous man in America. So
during the third act, Booth re entered the theater and
walked into the President's box. He waited for a line
in the play that he knew would get big laughs.
I mean, remember, he was an actor, so we would
have known that sort of thing. Then he bust into
the inner door and shot Lincoln in the back of
the head with a forty four caliber garranger. Booth had
(07:36):
been expecting General and Mrs Grant to also be in
the box, and that's what the papers had announced, so
that's pretty much what he thought was going to happen.
But the Grants had turned down the invite, and Booth
instead found the Union officer, Major Henry Rathbone and his
fiance Clara Harris. So Rathbone of course sees what has happened,
and he kind of tussles with Booth, getting slashed in
(07:57):
the arm, before Booth jumps over the boxes railing shouting
seek semper tierness, thus always to tyrants, and he caught
a spur on the American flag, landed on the stage
below and broke his leg. From there, the conductor Withers
ran into him again. Withers, who had taken an underground
passageway around to the stage to question why his special
(08:18):
song that he had written kept getting pushed back. He
heard a pistol shot the thump, and then found himself
face to face with Booth, a flashing mad Booth to
Booth managed to escape down the passage out to an
alley and then on horseback to Maryland. We're going to
pick up with him later. But what about the other conspirators,
(08:38):
because remember this was a three pronged attack. We know
things must have not worked out quite according to plan,
because Johnson did go on to become president, he lived,
and Seward went on to buy Alaska from Russia for
seven point two million dollars, something that was mocked at
the time called Steward's folly. But enough on that as At,
(08:59):
who was commission to kill the vice president just completely
chickened out. I think he went out drinking instead and
got nowhere near Johnson. Paul, though, did some pretty serious
damage to the Seward family. He arrived at their home
under the guise of a pharmacy delivery boy. Um. He
went into Seward's house where the Secretary of State was
(09:22):
laid up after a very serious carriage accident. He had
broken an arm and his jaw, and uh that those
injuries required pretty serious banishing to his face and head,
which is a key point here. So when Paul entered
the home and was trying to deliver his medicine, Seward's
son Frederick met him but wouldn't allow him upstairs to
(09:45):
deliver the items personally. So at that point Paul pulled
out a gun tried to shoot Frederick, but found that
his gun wouldn't fire and pistol whipped him instead. Then
he charged up the stairs started slashing Seward bedridden Sewar
with a bowie knife in front of Seward's daughter too,
until finally the military officer who had been assigned to
(10:08):
Seward during his convalescence grappled with Powell and uh Seward's
other son joined into um ended up getting injured. A
colleague of Seward's got injured to Powe really did some
serious damage, but did manage to escape. Nobody was killed
in this incident. Seward and his son's recovered um, but
(10:29):
his wife died just a few weeks after because of
the double shock of the carriage accident and then this violent,
bloody attack in her home. Just to return and kind
of pick up with the Lincoln portion of the story,
Lincoln meanwhile, is dying from head wound. The first doctor
on the scene was Charles save and Taft, who ordered
Lincoln to be removed to the nearest home. The president
(10:52):
was brought across the street to the lodging house of
William Peterson and placed diagonally across the bed because he
was too tall to just lie on it properly well.
The surgeon General cared for the president. Dr Taff stayed
in attendance, journaling the next morning that he had held
Lincoln's head almost all throughout the night. He talked about
how heavy it was to just hold it there all night.
(11:14):
The president was pronounced dead at two am, and then
the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton proclaimed, quote, now
he belongs to the ages. One of the more famous
quotes about Lincoln. In the president's pockets were a pocket knife,
two pairs of glasses, and a Confederate five dollar bill,
which I think is the most unusual item there. Okay,
(11:37):
so after the President dies, of course, the next day
was Easter Sunday, which was the absolute perfect time to
compare Lincoln's death to Jesus's sacrifice from pulpits across the country.
So everybody is talking about Lincoln and everybody is talking
about his assassin. After an autopsy, Lincoln lane state at
(11:58):
the White House and the Capital, but for being sent
on a thirteen day train trip back to Springfield with
plenty of open casket viewings. Um. Just a side note here.
Vale notes in her book that this was really great
publicity for the new trend in embalming, seeing the president
so many days after he had been killed. Meanwhile, as
the President's body is traveling around the search for Booth
(12:21):
and his accomplices, as heating up it's the largest manhunt
to that date, and it was helped along by the
Secretary of Wars one hundred thousand dollar reward, which incidentally
also helped shore of the historical record because, according to
a Smithsonian article by James Swanson, so many of Booth's
trackers documented the experience because they were trying to get
(12:41):
a piece of the rewards, so a lot of them did.
It was split up among many different people. But after
fleeing forwards Theater, Booth had met up with David Harold, who,
if you remember, was supposed to be on the Powell
Seward As fascination team. He had left Powell though behind
at the Seward house. Those two who high tailed it
for the Maryland home of Dr Samuel mud who set
(13:04):
Booth leg and then they spent five nights and five
days in the woods waiting to cross the Potomac into Virginia.
Had a little help though, yeah. A Confederate agent named
Thomas Jones brought them food and newspapers, and it was
a big disappointment when Booth read those papers. People hated him.
He thought that he would be considered a hero, the
(13:25):
destroyer of a tyrant, and he journaled all of these feelings,
complaining that people were talking about him as a quote
common cutthroat. Once in Virginia, Booth and Harold wound their
way to the farm of Richard Garrett, where they stayed
under assumed names. Though they must have seemed like desperate men,
the Garrets allowed them to sleep in their tobacco barn,
but actually locked them in at night so that they
(13:47):
wouldn't steal any horses. That night, Lieutenant Edward Doherty, in
charge of the sixteenth New York Cavalry, along with detectives
Luther Baker and Everton Conker, tracked the men to the farm.
The Garretts dog started barking at the sound of horses,
and so Booth and Harold of course woke up. They
tried to escape, but found themselves locked in, and by
(14:07):
the time they were trying to kick out aboard, the
farmhouse was surrounded. So old man Garrett and his sons
were pushed around a bit by the search party until
they admitted where the men were in the tobacco barn.
One of the sons was even forced to enter the
barn and try to disarm Booth. Nobody else wanted to
go in. Booth basically told him, you sold me out,
(14:29):
get out, or I'll kill you. But despite having a
whole cavalry, the law enforcement officers really kind of dithererd
about what to do, because they did have orders to
bring back Booth alive. He was, of course wanted for questioning,
but nobody wanted to get killed either, and everybody fully
expected that that would happen if they had a face
to face with the armed and desperate Booth. So their
(14:52):
solution was burned the barn. Harold begged to be let out,
and he eventually is let out. Booth, on the other hand,
poses kind of challenge to Baker, makes them a little
proposition combat on open ground Booth against the cavalry just
as long as they back up from the barn door.
He creepily mentions to Baker how honorable he's been the
(15:12):
whole time. He says, quote, Captain, I have had half
a dozen opportunities to shoot you, but I did not.
So at this point Baker realizes, oh, yeah, I'm holding
this candle. So he loses that target. You can see
him through the barn, the cracks in the barn wall. Yeah,
he gets rid of that, but he declines Booth's offer.
He says, quote, we did not come here to fight you.
(15:34):
We simply came to make you a prisoner. Booth reduces
the demands of his offer. At that point, he says
that he'll come out and fight if the men just
back off from the door just a little bit. Give
me a chance for my life, he says. But that
just was not happening. So Booth says, well, my brave
boys prepare stretcher for me. But the way it went
down was actually more like a bonfire. They finally sent
(15:55):
the bar set the barn on fire. The barn goes
up in flames really fast, and in the panic of
Booth trying to get out, he gets shot by a
sergeant Boston Corbett, who, as a side note, was possibly
a mad hatter. He did go insane, and it might
have been because of the mercury used in hat making.
Back to Booth, though, he was caught before he even
(16:17):
hit the ground from getting shot by Boston Corbett, and
he was presumed dead. In fact, though he was paralyzed
from the neck down. He could talk a little bit
and move his eyes, but he couldn't swallow the water
that was offered to him. He had to watch as
Colonel Everton Conger checked his pockets and remove money and
keys and tobacco in a compass. When Conger went into
(16:38):
an inner pocket, he found the diary Booth had been keeping,
you know, lamenting the fact he wasn't a national hero,
plus five photos of different ladies. One was a lesser
known actress, two were pretty famous leading ladies of the day.
One was a Subrette type actress who was married to
a violinist, and then the last one was Lucy Hales.
(17:00):
So I don't know if Lucy maybe had a surprise
when she heard the news he had five photos in
his pocket. But his official last words were tell mother,
I die for my country. But he also had a
few other last requests. He kept on asking to be
able to examine his lifeless hands. He begged the soldiers
to kill him. It sounds like a really gruesome, really
(17:23):
horrible death. He died by the morning of April. Booth's
body was secretly buried that then re entered a few
years later at a Stanley plot in Baltimore. But the
wild conspiracy theories began almost right away. The main one,
of course, was that Booth didn't die instead as the
theory goes, he escaped, took the name John st Helen,
(17:46):
and went west. He told a lawyer in Texas that
he was Booth, but left town in nineteen o three.
Then the lawyer saw clipping that a David E. George
committed suicide in Oklahoma and had confessed he was Booth
before dying. The lawyer recognized the photo as that of
none other than st Helen. George's body was mummified, which
(18:08):
I'm not sure quite why, and it toward freak shows
as Booth's body until at some point it went missing.
So the Baltimore City Circuit Court has been petitioned even
fairly recently, to have Booth's body exhumed, including by some
of Booth's own relatives, but they've declined for two reasons. One,
there's really not much basis for this claim. It's probably
(18:31):
Booth buried at the memorial. Secondly, though it would involve
exhuming a lot of the other Booths in the family plot,
almost all of those kids of Junius Brutus are buried there,
and it's not really clear where each individual family member
is located. So now that we at least kind of
no think we know what happened to Booth, what happened
(18:53):
to the rest of his companions while they were also
snatched up Over the time Harold surrendered at the barn.
As we mentioned, Powell, At Saarant and the boarding house
owner Mary Surat were taken in and those four were
all found guilty of murder and sentence to hang. Saurat's
sentence is still kind of controversial though, since while she
definitely knew about the kidnapping plan, she may not have
(19:15):
known everything about the murder also found guilty and sentenced
to prison. Where Dr Mud the guy who had set
boost leg, Samuel Arnold who had been in on the
kidnapping plot but had dropped out earlier, and Michael O'Laughlin,
who had also dropped out of the plot before it
turned to a murderous one. And then finally Edmund Spangler,
(19:37):
who had worked at Ford's Theater, got a six year sentence.
There's another conspirator, though, Mary Sarratt's son, John Surratt Jr.
Who wasn't caught for a remarkable twenty months. I mean,
consider again, this was the largest man hunt to date.
They were all out looking for this guy. When he
finally was apprehended. He wasn't even convicted of a crime,
(20:00):
So it's questionable whether John Sarot Jr. Was even in Washington,
d c. The night of the assassination, and of course
he denied it. But after it he fled to Montreal,
where he was hidden by a priest for a while
and eventually put on a boat to Liverpool, where he
made his way to Rome and, according to a Don
Bryson article in American Civil War, actually enlisted in the
(20:25):
Papal Infantry Guards there, which sounds pretty bizarre and surprising.
But Saratt finally revealed his identity. He had a hard
time keeping that information to himself, and the Vatican agreed
to extradite him, but before that could actually happen, he
escaped from six Papal soldiers, made his way to Naples
(20:46):
and then got on a ship to Alexandria, Egypt, where
he finally got off the ship and ran into the
American authorities. So after they caught him, you know, the U. S.
District attorney desperately wanted to convict Surat, but the prosecution
was pretty weak and the trial ended in a hung jury.
An attempt to re indict him on the same charges
(21:08):
was eventually dismissed after the statute of limitations on those
charges had passed, those throughout went free. Kind of one
of the stranger sides of the whole Lincoln conspiracy story. Okay,
so what about some of the lesser known victims of
this assassination, including Lincoln's theater guests who we mentioned briefly. Well,
(21:29):
Major Henry Rathbone, who tried to stop Booth from escaping
and was stabbed in the arm, was still blamed for
not stopping the killer. It started to drive him insane.
This is the guilt from this. Eventually, he and Clara
married and they had children and moved to Germany, but
he ended up shooting and killing her, and he was
actually going to try to kill their children too, before
(21:50):
a nanny stopped him. There is also one final twist
to this whole story, and it involves an old, seemingly
nonsensical game type statement, and that is Booth saved Lincoln's life. Okay,
so we're not trying to make some sort of commentary
on Lincoln's reputation through the ages or something having to
(22:11):
do with his being assassinated. It's actually a fact Booth
saved Lincoln's life, but it's a different booth and a
different Lincoln, so it's pretty well known how much family
tragedy Mrs Lincoln faced. Only one of her four sons
lived to adulthood, so when her eldest son, Robert, came
of age to fight in the Civil War, Mrs Lincoln,
(22:31):
having already lost two of her boys, refused to let
him go fight. The President was kind of embarrassed by it,
but Robert instead went off to college and only joined
up the army in February eighteen sixty five, and even
then in a pretty cushy position. He was a member
of General Grant's staff. He got to see Lee's surrender.
He wasn't really in too much danger At one point
(22:54):
in college, though, about eighteen sixty three or eighteen sixty four,
somewhere in there, he was traveling from New York to
d C. When his train stopped in Jersey City. Robert
later recalled that a crowd was standing on the platform
waiting to buy sleeping car places. When the train began
to move, he somehow got knocked over and dropped in
the gap between the platform and the train, so he
(23:18):
couldn't move. He could have been crushed. I mean, it
sounds just like a horrifying, scary situation. Suddenly he felt
someone grab his collar and haul him up, and that
person was Edwin Booth, who was, of course a super
famous actor. It would be almost as if Brad Pitt
came in and saved your life. That was the comparison
I was thinking of, if you suddenly are lifted out
(23:39):
of the train pit and you're looking at one of
the most famous people of your day. Unlike his younger brother,
though Edwin Booth was a supporter of the Union in
Lincoln and considerably more even tempered, he had kind of
gone off the rails earlier in life and had ended
up missing his wife's death in eighteen sixty three because
he was a drunk. So he had really sobered up
(24:02):
and kind of had much more moderate opinions than thumb
members of his family. Um, he did learn whose life
he had said that he'd saved the president's son when
he got a letter from a friend who was on
Grant staff who had heard Robert Lincoln telling the story.
As anybody would like, this super famous actor saved my
life recently. Isn't that an interesting story? So after John
(24:24):
Wilkes Booth assassinated the president. Edwin Booth felt particularly devastated
the loss of a leader he admired, the family, shame
it caused, and fear that he'd never be able to
work again. Booth did make a successful return to the
stage in January eighteen sixty six and his signature role
of Hamlet, and went on to found the Players in
New York City with Mark Twain and General Sherman, but
(24:47):
the knowledge that he had helped save A Lincoln helped
get him through the worst months after the assassination. We
do have one last spooky tidbit for you, though, relating
to both Edwin Booth and Lincoln's assassinated aation during Edwin's
eighteen nine funeral, Ford's Theater collapsed. It wasn't rebuilt until
(25:07):
the nineteen sixties, and though it's under operation as a
historical site. So I think that's a good point to
transition to listener mail. So I thought this one would
be appropriate since we last heard from listener Hillary, who's
sending us postcards through her tour of Europe, when she
(25:29):
mentioned she has a violin from the Civil War era,
so she especially likes Civil War aerotopics. Her latest postcard
is from Madrid, and she wrote after the concert she
played there, they're playing Prokofiev's Violin can sherre to number one.
She said that her teacher met that composer over that piece,
(25:49):
and his second violin can Share too was premiered in
the hall where she played, so there were all sorts
of historical connections. Again, I really like relating modern cultural
events like this to historical ones. It's pretty nay yes,
and I continue to get even more jealous. I just
love ma Drid. I know one of my favorite places.
Sounds like it would be a nice place to play
violin too. Yeah, just about it. Just do anything. So
(26:12):
thank you, Hillary. We do enjoy getting your updates from
your travels, and we enjoy hearing from all of you guys,
so please continue spending a suggestion. I think booth was
suggested Edwin Booth was suggested pretty recently today. I think
it was today. It's so weird when we get requests
on to day that we're actually recording the podcast of
(26:35):
whatever the request is. Are not as spooky as the
theater falling down on the day of a funeral, But
still I do wonder if people can like read our
minds or from saying when it's happening, we hope not to,
but continues sending its suggestions. We get so many of
our ideas from you guys. And remember that now we're
at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com instead of how
(26:58):
stepworks dot Com. We have changed email addresses. We do, however,
have the same Twitter account at missed in History and
the same Facebook. And if you want to learn a
little bit more about some other things that happened during
the Civil War era, maybe you're a buff like Hillary is,
We have an article called how the Emancipatient Proclamation worked.
You can find that by searching on our homepage at
(27:21):
www dot how Stuff works dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works
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