SYMHC Classics: The Booth Conspiracy

This 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers John Wilkes Booth's escape, his co-conspirators' attacks against other officials, and the strange connections between Booth and Lincoln.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. We have had a number of requests
coming lately for episodes on various people who were connected
to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. We don't have full
on biographies of all of those folks, but a lot
of the names that have come up are pulled together
in this previous episode on the Booth conspiracy, so we

(00:22):
are sharing that one today. Yeah. This episode is from
previous hosts Sarah and Deblina, and it first came out
on February Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,

(00:44):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Chuckerboarding and around Christmas this year, listener Hillary sent
us the book Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel, about the
assassinations of three U S 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

(01:07):
the scene for its theater, the circumstances Lincoln shot point
blank in the head, and the players involved. 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.

(01:29):
And I hadn't realized the intensiveness of the man hunt
for Booth either, or the strange, sad stories about peripheral
figures involved, like Booth's brother, the President's son, the Lincoln's
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

(01:51):
to talk about what happened the night of April four,
eighteen sixty five, at Ford's Theater, but also some of
the events that happened long before that and long after.
And if you're a 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

(02:12):
to extend a 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 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,

(02:32):
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 theatrical family, albeit kind of a lesser member,
but that's just because the other family members were so famous.

(02:52):
Booth had been born in Maryland in eighteen thirty eight.
He was the ninth of ten children of Genius Brutus Booth,
who was an English actor very famous in England who
had moved to the United States in eighteen twenty one.
Boost Senior was one of the most famous Shakespearean actors
in the country, maybe second only to Edwin Forest. He

(03:14):
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 too, and the middle boy, Edwin, became a
star to really rival his father. We're going to talk
about him a bit more later. The youngest. Meanwhile, John

(03:35):
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.
But the intensity of Booth's political opinions made him a
bit of an odd ball. He was extremely pro slavery,

(03:57):
anti Lincoln, and an ardent porter of the Confederacy. While
some historians suggest 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 so he wouldn't actually enlist
in the army. So by the autumn of eighteen sixty four,
Booth started making plans to kidnap President Lincoln, drawing in

(04:20):
other conspirators to meet at Mrs Mary Sarat'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 in America Civil
War when the actress Henrietta Irving tried to stab Booth
in the chest, grazing his face and still, yes, he

(04:41):
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 and
his ind to the Lincoln circle, Booth even got a
prime seat at Lincoln's second inaugural address, bragging to a
friend that he had had a really great chance to

(05:03):
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 a kidnapping in the first place disappeared. So
the point of kidnapping instead of killing, had been to
exchange Lincoln for Confederate prisoners of war. But on April nine,

(05:25):
the war ended, so what are you gonna do? Ironically, though,
it was Lincoln's speech on reconstruction, which took place just
a few days after that on the White House lawn
that really fired up 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

(05:46):
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
you to attend a performance of Our American Cousin at
Ford's Theater in d C the night of April fourteen. So,

(06:06):
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 with the help of David Harold. George at Serat,
a German immigrant and former boatman for Confederate spies, would

(06:29):
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
at that same time meeting with Lincoln about his new
appointment to Spain. Lucy Hill's father was looking to get

(06:51):
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
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.

(07:14):
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
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

(07:35):
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,
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

(07:56):
in the play that he knew would get big laughs.
I mean, remember, he was an actor, so he 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
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,

(08:16):
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
the arm before Booth jumps over the boxes railing shouting
seeks semper Tyrannus thus always to tyrants, and he caught

(08:38):
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 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 slashing man add booth to

(09:01):
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,
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

(09:24):
seven point two million dollars, something that was mocked at
the time called Seward's folly. But enough on that Atzerot,
who was commissioned to kill the vice president, just completely
chickened out. I think he went out drinking instead and
got nowhere near Johnson. Paolo did some pretty serious damage

(09:44):
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 laid
up after a very serious carriage accident. He had broken
an arm and his awe and uh that those injuries
required pretty serious banging to his face and head, which

(10:06):
is a key point here, So when Powell entered the
home and was trying to deliver his medicine, Seward's son Frederick,
met him but wouldn't allow him upstairs to deliver the

(10:26):
items personally. So at that point Powell 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 Seward with a
bowie knife in front of Seward's daughter too, until finally
the military officer who had been assigned to Seward during

(10:50):
his convalescence grappled with Powell and uh Seward's other son
joined into um ended up getting injured a colleague Seward's
got injured to power really did some serious damage, but
did manage to escape. Nobody was killed in this incident.
Seward and his son's recovered um, but his wife died

(11:11):
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 Saban Taft, who ordered Lincoln to be
removed to the nearest home. The president was brought across

(11:34):
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. While the surgeon General
cared for the president. Dr Taft 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. The president

(11:55):
was pronounced dead at seven 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,

(12:18):
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

(12:39):
the White House and the Capital before 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 of traveling around the search for Booth

(13:02):
and his accomplices as heating up. It's the largest man
hunt to that date, and it was helped along by
the Secretary of Wars one hundred thousand dollar reward, which
incidentally also helped shore up 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

(13:22):
get 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 assassination team. He had left Powell
though behind, at the Seward House. Those two high tailed
it for the Maryland home of Dr. Samuel mud who

(13:45):
set 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

(14:05):
a hero, the 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

(14:27):
night so that they wouldn't steal any horses. That night,
Lieutenant Edward Dougherty, in charge of the sixteenth New York Cavalry,
along with detectives Luther Baker and Everton Coner, tracked the
men to the farm. The Garrett's 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 the time they were trying to

(14:50):
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 and
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
he sold me out, get out, or I'll kill you.

(15:12):
But despite having a whole cavalry, the law enforcement officers
really kind of dithered 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 solution was burned the barn.

(15:35):
Harold begged to be let out, and he eventually is
let out. Booth, on the other hand, poses a 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 whole time.
He says, quote, Captain, I have had half a dozen

(15:57):
opportunities to shoot you, but I 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. We simply
came to make you a prisoner. Booth reduces the demands

(16:18):
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 the bar
set the barn on fire. The barn goes up in

(16:39):
flames really fast, and in the panic of Booth trying
to get out, he gets shot by a sergeant Boston Corbett,
who as a sad 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 hit the ground
from getting shot by Boston Corbett, and he was presumed dead.

(17:03):
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 an inner pocket, he found the
diary Booth had been keeping, you know, lamenting the fact

(17:24):
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 Hale. So I don't know if
Lucy maybe had a surprise when she heard the news

(17:45):
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 horrible death. He died by the

(18:07):
morning of April. Booth's body was secretly buried, but then
re entered a few years later at his family 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 and went west. He told a lawyer in

(18:29):
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 I'm not sure quite why, and it toured freak

(18:52):
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,

(19:16):
there's really not much basis for this claim. It's probably
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

(19:36):
is located. So now, but we at least kind of
no think we know what happened to Booth, what happened
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 Surat 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

(19:58):
sentence is still kind of kind troversial, though, since while
she definitely knew about the kidnapping plan, she may not
have 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,

(20:19):
who had also dropped out of the plot before it
turned to a murderous one. And then finally Edmund Spangler,
who had worked at Ford's theater, got a six year sentence.
There's another conspirator, though, Mary Sarratt's son, John Sarratt Jr.
Who wasn't caught for a remarkable twenty months. I mean,
consider again, this was the largest man hunt to date.

(20:42):
They were all out looking for this guy. When he
finally was apprehended, he wasn't even convicted of a crime.
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

(21:02):
and eventually put on a boat to Liverpool, where he
made his way to Rome and, according to a Don
Bryson article in America's Civil War, actually enlisted in the
Papal Infantry Guards there, which sounds pretty bizarre and surprising.
But sarat finally revealed his identity. He had a hard
time keeping that information to himself, and the Vatican agreed

(21:26):
to extradite him, but before that could actually happen. He
escaped from six Papal soldiers, made his way to Naples,
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

(21:50):
was pretty weak and the trial ended in a hung jury.
An attempt to re indict him on the same charges
was eventually dismissed after this statute of limitations on those
charges had passed, So 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

(22:12):
this assassination, including Lincoln's theater guests who we mentioned briefly. Well,
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

(22:33):
he ended up shooting and killing her, and he was
actually going to try to kill their children too, before
a nanny stopped him. There is also one final twist
to this whole story, and it involves an old, seemingly
nonsensical word game type statement, and that is, Booth saved
Lincoln's life. Okay, so we're not trying to make some

(22:56):
sort of commentary on Lincoln's reputation through the ages or
something have to 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,

(23:18):
came of age to fight in the Civil War, Mrs Lincoln,
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.

(23:40):
He wasn't really in too much danger. At one point
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

(24:03):
the gap between the platform and the train, so he
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

(24:25):
I was thinking of, if you suddenly are lifted out
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 um kind of
gone off the rails earlier in life, and had ended
up missing his wife's death in eighteen sixty three because

(24:48):
he was too drunk, so he had really sobered up
and kind of had much more moderate opinions than some
members of his family. Um, he did learn whose life
he'd saved, 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.

(25:10):
Isn't that an interesting story? So after John 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,

(25:31):
and went on to found the Players in New York
City with Mark Twain and General Sherman, But the knowledge
that he had helped save 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 assassination. During Edwin's funeral Ford's Theater collapsed.

(25:55):
It wasn't rebuilt until the nineteen sixties, and now it's
under a ration as a historical site. Thank you so
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have
heard an email address or a Facebook you are l

(26:16):
or something similar over the course of today's episode, since
it is from the archive that might be out of date. Now,
you can email us at history podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
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(26:41):
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