Blood and Daring (37 page)

Minutes later, there was a knock on Edwin Stanton’s door. Two clerks who had been walking along 10th Street heard the shouts announcing Lincoln’s shooting and had run to tell the secretary of war. The gruff, magnificently bearded Stanton rose from his bed, got dressed, and came downstairs to the alarming news. He reacted stoically when the clerks added that, while rushing over they had also heard that Seward had been assaulted and possibly killed. It appeared that the government was under attack. But Stanton had earned his reputation as a tough, cool and decisive man, and those qualities would serve him and his country well in the minutes and hours to come.

Stanton called for guards to be placed at the homes of all cabinet secretaries and at the vice president’s rooms at the Kirkwood House Hotel, only two blocks from Ford’s Theatre. He then rushed to Seward’s house, where the gruesome scene left him staggered. It appeared, however, that the steel jaw brace had saved Seward’s life by deflecting what could have been fatal thrusts. General Montgomery Meigs, the army’s quartermaster general, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and the
District of Columbia’s Supreme Court Justice David Carter had also been told of the attack and soon joined Stanton at Seward’s home.

Leaving Seward in the care of his doctor, the stalwart group risked the night and hurried to the Peterson house. Stanton pushed his way through the growing crowd standing silently in a cool rain and strode into the tiny bedroom where the president lay dying. When told that recovery was impossible, he slumped into a chair and, uncharacteristically, cried. In a moment, he stood, wiped his face, gathered himself and left for a back parlour where, for all intents and purposes, he stationed the government of the United States.

Stanton ordered telegraph communications to be set up from the Peterson house. Dispatches were written, more guards posted and General Grant recalled to Washington. All bridges leading from the city were to be closed and all ships on the Potomac and trains moving in and out of the capital stopped. While the Mexican border and eastern seaboard ports could remain open, Stanton had the Canadian border sealed. As interviews with witnesses began, it was quickly established that John Wilkes Booth had shot the president. No one could identify Seward’s assailant; nor could anyone guess if the night’s violence was over.

Washington’s police headquarters was just a few doors away, and detectives soon joined the cabinet secretaries, army officers and doctors crowding into the narrow, three-storey Peterson house. When told of the tragic events, Vice President Andrew Johnson pulled a dark hat low over his head and walked the two blocks from his hotel to the Peterson house, with only Provost Marshal Major James O’Beirne as protection against assassins who, for all they knew, lurked in every shadow. Johnson left a short while later for his more easily secured Kirkwood House suite. Stanton remained in charge and continued to sift clues, direct the investigation and manhunt, and issue government statements. Among the many leads that he received was word that a man named John Surratt had often been seen with Booth and lived a few blocks away at his mother’s H Street boarding house. Stanton ordered him arrested.

A group of detectives were soon at the Surratt house, where a boarder named Louis Weichmann told them that Surratt was not home. They nonetheless pushed their way in and searched the house. John’s mother, Mary, confessed to having recently seen Booth, but said her son had been away for some time in Montreal. With that admission, only hours after Booth’s fateful shot, Canada entered the picture.

Back at the Peterson house, Stanton was reminded that just hours before, Confederate agent Jacob Thompson had been spotted on his way out of the country, and Lincoln had refused to have him stopped. Stanton ordered Thompson’s arrest. With that order, Canada moved toward the picture’s foreground.

Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15. The news spread quickly around the world. John A. Macdonald issued no public statement. George Brown was devastated and sat alone in his study, where he composed a long and heartfelt eulogy for the
Globe
—the first issue to be published with a black border. His kind words were echoed in nearly every newspaper in Canada and the Maritimes. Special church services were held, and flags on public buildings and ships in harbour were pulled to half-staff. Later, when Lincoln’s funeral train made its way from Washington to Illinois, hundreds of Canadians crossed the border to pay their respects at Buffalo and then again at Detroit.

As in the United States, however, not everyone in Canada mourned the president’s death. From Montreal, United States consul general John Potter reported to the State Department that news of Lincoln’s shooting had sparked celebrations among the city’s many Confederate agents and sympathizers. He told of a special dinner having been held at St. Lawrence Hall to hail Lincoln’s death, with toasts drunk to his passing. More ominously, the consul general stated that he had just been informed that before the assassination, Confederates were heard bragging that Lincoln would not live another week. Potter also informed the State Department that the previous October, Montreal’s St. Lawrence Hall had welcomed John Wilkes Booth, who stayed in the city for two weeks and spoke with many well-known Canadian-based Confederates.
¹
Stanton’s Department of War agent,
Colonel Lafayette Baker, dispatched a number of Washington detectives to Montreal to investigate.
²
In a subsequent letter to Seward, Potter provided more detail about those he called the Confederate’s Canadian Cabinet: “There are many facts which tend to prove that these persons were not only cognizant of the conspiracy but the conspiracy was planned in this city.”
³

Three hours after Lincoln died, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as America’s seventeenth president in his Kirkwood House sitting room. Johnson was born in North Carolina to illiterate and poverty-stricken parents. He made a little money as a tailor and, after his wife taught him to read, served five terms as a Democratic congressman. He was elected to the Senate in 1857. Johnson remained loyal to the Union when Sumter’s guns forced a choice, and when Grant’s armies took the state in 1862, Lincoln appointed him Tennessee’s military governor. In 1864, Lincoln ran for re-election as the leader of the National Union Party, a coalition of Republicans and like-minded Democrats. In an attempt to demonstrate reconciliation with the South, the party convention in Baltimore chose Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate. Many doubted Johnson because he was from the South and others disliked his gruff manner. Anger and bitterness seemed to motivate his decisions. He saw opponents as enemies and compromise as weakness. Johnson did himself no favours when he appeared drunk at the inauguration and delivered a slurring, ramble of a speech while some laughed and Lincoln hung his head. One thing that few people worried about was whether the stocky, barrel-chested Johnson would be tough with the South or those responsible for the terrible Good Friday crimes. He told those who came to wish him well, “When you ask me what I would do, my reply is, I would arrest them; I would try them; I would convict them; and I would hang them.”
⁴

It happened just like that. Only days after the murder, detectives arrested Mary Surratt. Lewis Powell had the bad luck of showing up at the boarding house at the moment of her arrest and was taken too. Edman Spangler, to whom Booth had handed his horse, and Samuel Arnold, who was implicated by a note addressed to him and found in Booth’s belongings, were also arrested. Three days later, detectives arrested George
Atzerodt, who had taken a room directly above Johnson’s in the Kirkwood House in order to carry out his part of Booth’s plan to assassinate the vice president. Atzerodt had lost his nerve and spent the night drinking and wandering the streets. Dr. Samuel Mudd had been in contact with Booth and the others before the assassination, and mended Booth’s leg afterward. Detectives took him to jail too.

John Surratt could not be found. It was later established that for some time he had been a courier and spy as one of Thompson’s Canadian-based Confederate agents. In Montreal and Washington, he had become involved with Booth and others in a plot to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond. The president was to be swapped for a return of Confederate prisoners and a declaration allowing the South and slavery to stand. On March 17, they had gathered on the road often taken by Lincoln to the Soldiers’ Home, where he liked to get away from the constant flow of White House callers. Lincoln did not show up.

After the failed kidnap attempt, Booth kept contact with the others, but Surratt left to resume his work out of Canada. He signed into Montreal’s St. Lawrence Hall on April 6. Shortly afterward he was asked to investigate the viability of springing the twelve thousand Confederates from the deplorable conditions of New York’s Elmira Prison. Surratt was there when he heard news of the assassination, and fled immediately back to Montreal. He was hidden by a Catholic priest named Father Charles Boucher in the village of St. Libone, forty-five miles north of the city. Surratt spent three months there, but when suspicions arose that he had been spotted, he was moved to Murray Bay, an even more remote community on the St. Lawrence, and later back to Montreal, where he stayed with another priest. In September, Surratt was helped to disguise himself and escape on the
Peruvian
, bound for Liverpool.
⁵

While Surratt was hurrying back to his Canadian friends, the days after the assassination saw a massive manhunt for Lincoln’s killer. Jottings that Booth made in an appointment book while on the run reveal him as a man who, after a week, had grown hungry, dirty, tired and dispirited.
⁶
On April 24, with a scrap of rumour that Booth was in Virginia, the 16th
New York Regiment’s first lieutenant Edward P. Doherty was ordered to assemble his best men to pursue and capture him. Doherty was born in Canada East and had moved to New York in 1860, where days after Lincoln’s first call for troops he had joined the 71st Volunteers. He had seen action in a number of battles and in the autumn of 1863 had been assigned to defend Washington.

Doherty and twenty-six men, accompanied by detectives Everton Conger and Luther Baker, took a steamship to Belle Plain, Virginia, and questioned everyone they encountered. They followed a trail of clues to Jack Garrett’s farm, where Booth and David Herold were found hiding in a barn. Doherty ordered it surrounded and sent a reluctant Garrett inside to convince them to surrender. When Booth refused to give himself up, sticks and pine twigs were thrown against the walls with the threat to fire the barn. Garrett and Herold emerged with their hands in the air. With Booth still inside, Doherty’s men set the barn ablaze. Sgt. Boston Corbett had crept to the back and could see Booth through gaps in the barn board. Without Doherty’s order, and with flames consuming the barn and Booth walking menacingly toward the door with a rifle in hand, Corbett aimed his .44 Colt revolver and shot him.
^*

Lincoln’s assassin was dragged from the burning barn and for two hours he lingered in agony on a bed pulled onto Garrett’s front porch. Seconds before drawing his last breath, he whispered, “Useless. Useless.”
⁷
Booth’s body was returned to Washington where, for a time, it was buried beneath the floor of the Washington Arsenal. Doherty, meanwhile, would be cheated out of the largest portion of the reward money by the more ambitious detectives.

While Booth was being hunted, the intense questioning of his compatriots suggested that authorities believed the assassination had been an elaborate conspiracy involving not only Canadian-based Confederates but possibly Jefferson Davis himself. Kentucky lawyer and former secretary of
state Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt led the investigation. Holt was a brigadier general and had been a friend and political ally of Stanton since they served together in President Buchanan’s cabinet. He was also respected and feared as a smart and ruthless lawyer. Holt and Stanton had a hand in the composition and release of President Johnson’s first public proclamation regarding the assassination of Lincoln and attempt on Seward’s life, which was released on May 2. It reflected their conviction that Canada was at the bottom of the tragedy and stirred up the already virulent anti-Canadian sentiment across America.
⁸
Reprinted in newspapers across Canada, the Maritimes and the United States, the proclamation said in part:

The new president offered a $100,000 reward for Davis, $10,000 for Cleary and $25,000 for the others. Johnson’s proclamation made evident to all that Canada’s involvement in the Civil War had not ended with the Appomattox handshake. Two Montreal newspapers carried identical editorials in response to the proclamation, criticizing Johnson for trying to drag Canada into the assassination and for claiming, with no evidence, that American criminals were being hidden in Canada. It also suggested that the only man to have benefitted from Lincoln’s murder was President Johnson himself, and that a note Booth had sent to Johnson’s hotel on the day of the murder was proof that perhaps he should be the one under investigation.
^10
*
Jacob Thompson wrote a letter from Europe that was published in the
Globe
, the
New York Tribune
and elsewhere denying any involvement in the assassination: “I aver upon honor that I have never known, or conversed, or held communication, either directly or indirectly with Booth … or with any of his associates, so far as I have seen them named. I knew nothing of their plans.… I know there is not half the ground to suspect me than there is to suspect President Johnson himself.”
¹¹
Tucker and Clay wrote similar letters and, like Thompson, challenged Johnson to produce evidence to prove that Booth had planned the assassination with them in Montreal.
¹²
But American investigators were gathering evidence that seemed to prove just that: Lincoln’s murder had indeed been planned in Montreal.