He writes letters.
He writes to Asia daily: “. . . imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”
He writes to Adam that he takes comfort in the knowledge that one great heart will never forsake him. He doesn’t mean Adam though no heart is more his than Ad’s. He means Blanche Hanel.
He writes to the American people:
. . . It has pleased God to lay at the door of my afflicted family the life-blood of our great, good and martyred President. Prostrated to the very earth by this dreadful event, I am yet too sensible that other mourners fill the land. To them, to you, one and all go forth our deep unutterable sympathy; our abhorrence and detestation for this most foul and atrocious of crimes . . .
He receives letters.
Blanche Hanel writes to end their engagement.
The American people write, one at a time and anonymously, that his life is forfeit; there is a bullet waiting for him, they hate the very name of Booth, and that his next performance will be a tragedy.
* * *
—
The family exists in a kind of twilight where the full dark can’t come on until they know where John is and what will happen to him.
iii
June and Sleeper are arrested together at the Clarke house in Philadelphia on suspicion of conspiracy. They’re taken in handcuffs to Washington and the Old Capitol Prison, where they share a cell. Sleeper spends one month there, June two. Roaches and rats, June says, and intolerable heat. And interrogations.
Others have been arrested as well. Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold are also in custody here. Each withdrew from the plot when John moved the planned kidnapping from some remote country lane to Ford’s Theatre, where, he said, Lincoln would be subdued, handcuffed, and lowered on ropes from his box to the stage. This was a preposterous plan—suicidal, Arnold told him—and the fact that John couldn’t see that shook them. They were both out by the time the kidnapping became an assassination.
As a result, they’ll escape the noose. Instead, along with Dr. Mudd, they’ll be sent to the prison of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where O’Laughlen, the little boy who once trailed after John and the Bully Boys up and down Exeter Street, will die of yellow fever.
Also arrested: George Atzerodt, an immigrant from Prussia, whose mission on the 14th was to kill the vice president. He’d lost his nerve and spent the night drinking instead.
A Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, nicknamed Lewis the Terrible for his savagery, and sent by John to kill the Secretary of State. Seward had already been hurt in a carriage accident and was in bed under a doctor’s care, when Powell forced his way in. He beat one of Seward’s sons senseless with his pistol, stabbed another. He struck Fanny, Seward’s lovely daughter, with his fist, climbed onto Seward’s bed, and stabbed him five times in the neck and face. He left six people bleeding, then ran from the house, shouting, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” only to discover that David Herold, the twenty-three-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who was supposed to be waiting with the horses, had already fled.
Everyone in the Seward household will survive. Atzerodt, Powell, and Herold will not. They will hang, along with Mary Surratt, at whose boardinghouse the plotting is suspected of taking place.
* * *
—
As to June and Sleeper:
The government has letters from June to John about the oil business, which in June’s case means the oil business, but amongst co-conspirators has meant the plot. The government has nothing on Sleeper beyond Asia’s concealment of John’s comings and goings, but this seems to be enough to hold him. June is philosophical. Sleeper is furious. Why is he locked up when Edwin is not?
Asia is kept out of prison by her pregnancy. She remains under house arrest, an agent placed inside to watch her every move. This agent wants to add his wife to the household. He’s disturbed that Asia isn’t crying. He thinks she needs a woman’s sympathy. Asia needs nothing of the kind.
She needs her mother. She’s learned that she’s carrying twins and either from that or the tragedy her life has become, the pregnancy is at risk. The nurse who’s been tending her refuses now to do so because she’s a Booth. Her doctor sends word that he’s too frightened to come. Only Becky, the nursemaid, has been willing to stay. Asia is all but alone except for the children and the federal agents.
Probably nothing else could have gotten Mother out of bed. On hearing of Asia’s distress, she rises silently, packs her bag, and asks Edwin to take her to the train. She’s on her way to Philadelphia when she learns that John is dead. Sitting, looking out the window, pretending she sees the fields and copses, the towns and churches, the whole brutal charade passing, while the other passengers whistle and cheer.
iv
There are so many times John Wilkes Booth could have died. He could have drowned while at St. Timothy’s Hall; he could have frozen while fetching a cow. Matthew Canning’s bullet could have severed his femoral artery. Secessionists could have murdered him in Montgomery, Alabama. He could have been killed in the New York draft riots. He could have died of St. Anthony’s fire.
Instead it happens thirteen days too late and in this way: He’s fled with David Herold who, having abandoned Powell at the Sewards’, reconnoitered with John. They’re tracked to a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, before dawn on April 26th. Herold surrenders, but John won’t come out. He seems to think he should be given a sporting chance. “Be fair and give me a show. Draw your men off fifty yards,” he shouts, a courtesy he didn’t extend to Lincoln. Nor is it given to him.
A torch is thrown inside the barn. The straw catches immediately, illuminating the scene as clearly as if he were onstage. “I saw him standing upright,” one Colonel Conger says later, “leaning on a crutch. He looked so like his brother Edwin I believed for a moment the whole pursuit to have been a mistake.”
He’s shot through the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett on instructions from God. “Tell my mother I die for my country,” John says. But when the dying takes more than three hours, he says, “Please kill me now.”
* * *
—
His diary, found on his body, becomes part of the court record.
On April 21st, he wrote:
After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat . . .