More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Booth could roast alive in the tobacco barn if he chose, but not him. “You don’t choose to give yourself up, let me go out and give myself up,” Herold proposed. “No, you shall not do it,” Booth growled in a low voice, so that the soldiers hovering on the other side of the boards could not hear him.
Herold started for the door, but Booth menaced him: “[H]e threatened to shoot me and blow his brains out,” Herold complained.
“I am going,” insisted Davey. “I don’t intend to be burned alive.” Booth relented. Forcing Davey to share his fate would serve no purpose. And it would be wrong.
to deny his young follower the chance to live. When others had betrayed Booth, Herold had stuck by him. It was harsh to call him “coward” now. This was the last act. It was time to claim center stage alone. The actor called out to Baker: “Oh Captain—there is a man here who wants to surrender awful bad.”
This back-and-forth bickering over the arms devolved into comedy, with one officer and two detectives proving themselves too incompetent to consummate the peaceful, willing surrender of Lincoln’s assassin and his guide.
gentlemen.” As this wore on, Booth reminded the nitpicking officers that “There is a man in here who wants to come out.”
Then, in the last seconds before David Herold left the barn, Booth whispered the last words exchanged between them: “When you go out, don’t tell them the arms I have.”
So far the operation at Garrett’s farm was no model of a small unit action. One army officer and two military detectives vying for the command of twenty-six enlisted men had barely accomplished the surrender of the assassin’s harmless cat’s-paw.
They demanded that Herold turn over at least one of the weapons, but Booth claimed property rights over the arms and released Davey to them empty-handed. Now he had all the guns, and, in addition, like Jim Bowie at the Alamo twenty-nine years before, a deadly knife for the close combat of last resort.
One of Doherty’s sergeants, Boston Corbett, volunteered for a suicide mission: he would slip into the barn alone and fight Booth man-to-man: “I offered to Mr. Conger, the detective officer, and to Lieut. Doherty, separately, to go into the barn and take him or fight him—saying if he killed me his weapons would then be empty, and they could easily take him alive.” Three times Corbett volunteered to charge in alone; and each time Doherty vetoed that harebrained scheme and ordered Corbett back to his position.
Baker declined the glove: “We did not come here to fight you, we simply came to make you a prisoner. We do not want any fight with you.”
He wanted the assassin alive to interrogate him and expose fully the secrets of his grand conspiracy.
If Booth was dead, that would satisfy the nation’s lust for vengeance, but not Stanton’s curiosity. It was far better, the secretary of war believed, to take Booth alive.
Booth made a halfhearted attempt to suppress the flames by overturning a table upon them, but that only fueled the rapidly advancing inferno.
He had three choices: stay in the barn and burn alive; raise a pistol barrel—probably the .44 caliber with its heavier round to do the job right—to his head and blow out his brains; or script his own blaze of glory by hobbling out the front door and doing battle with the manhunters, welcoming death but risking capture.
Booth vowed to himself. Richard III did not commit suicide, Macbeth did not die by his own hand, not Brutus, nor Tell. Neither would he. No, no, he must fight the course. And if he must perish, he would die in full struggle against his enemies.
The spectacle of a trial would put him on public display for the amusement of the gentlemen of the press and the idle curiosity seekers sure to flock to the proceedings. But he would not command the courtroom as his stage.
In the theatre of Booth’s trial, the main character would be mute.
This shameful death of a common criminal was not for him.
watched the assassin’s every move inside the barn: “Immediately when the fire was lit … I could see him, but he could not see me.” Corbett had, by stealth, without Booth seeing him, walked up to one side of the barn and peeked between one of the four-inch gaps that separated each of the barn wall’s vertical boards.
Now Booth was within easy range of Corbett’s pistol. But the sergeant held his fire: “I could have shot him … but as long as he was there, making no demonstration to hurt any one, I did not shoot him, but kept my eye upon him steadily.”
My mind was upon him attentively to see that he did no harm; and, when I became impressed that it was time, I shot him. I took steady aim on my arm, and shot him through a large crack in the barn.”
“It is Booth, certainly,” Conger cried jubilantly. Baker glared disapprovingly: “What on earth did you shoot him for?” “I did not shoot him,” Conger protested, “he has shot himself!” Conger stared at the assassin: “Is he dead? Did he shoot himself?” “No, he did not, either,” said Baker.
Gazing down on Booth’s broken body, “I supposed him to be dead. He had all the appearance of a dead man.” But, like the stricken William Seward, who looked to his doctor like “an exsanguinated corpse,” John Wilkes Booth’s life force rallied. He opened his eyes and moved his lips.
Again he moved his lips and tried to speak. With great concentration and labored effort, Booth’s vocal cords emitted a barely audible whisper. For the first time in his life, the great thespian and raconteur was at a loss for words, his great stage voice silenced by the bullet that had passed through his neck and spinal column.
Finally, after several attempts, Lincoln’s assassin spoke: “Tell mother, I die for my country.”
These might be the assassin’s historic last words, and they must be reported to the nation exactly as Booth said them. Moreover, Secretary of War Stanton would demand a full accounting of the events at Garrett’s barn, including Booth’s every word.
They climbed up the stairs and laid Booth flat on the wood-planked piazza, near the bench where, over the past two days, he had sat, smoked, napped, conversed, and planned the next leg of his escape.
“He seemed to suffer extreme pain whenever he was moved, and would scowl, and would several times repeat ‘Kill me.’
He asked Conger to put his hand upon his throat, and press down. The detective complied, but nothing happened. “Harder,” Booth instructed Conger. “I pressed down as hard as I thought necessary, and he made very strong exertions to cough, but was unable to do so—no muscular exertion could be made.”
“Kill me,” Booth implored the soldiers. “Kill me, kill me!” “We don’t want to kill you,” Conger comforted him, “we want you to get well.”
Davis, currently the object of another manhunt, had fled Richmond for the Confederate interior as part of a desperate attempt to continue the war using Southern armies that had not yet surrendered to Union forces.
When he went off to find Booth’s killer, Boston Corbett came forward, snapped to attention, saluted Conger, and proclaimed, “Colonel, Providence directed me.”
Corbett claimed that he had not shot Booth for vengeance, but because he believed the assassin was about to open fire on the soldiers. He did it to protect the lives of his fellow troopers, he insisted. And, Corbett continued, he did not intend to kill Booth. He only wanted to inflict a disabling wound to render the assassin helpless, for capture. And he did not violate any orders from his superiors. The men of the Sixteenth New York had not been ordered to hold their fire. Indeed, Conger, Baker, and Doherty had failed to give them any orders at all on the subject.
Dr. Charles Urquhart, a local physician summoned by Doherty and Baker, arrived on the scene and examined Booth for ten or fifteen minutes. His new patient lapsed in and out of consciousness during the examination. Distracted and confused by the surreal scenes, the befuddled Urquhart said that the wound was nonfatal, then reversed his diagnosis: the wound was mortal; it was impossible for Booth to recover.
Corbett, too, wondered at the coincidence: “[W]hile Booth’s body lay before me, yet alive, but wounded, and when I saw that the bullet had struck him just back of the ear, about the same spot that his bullet hit Mr. Lincoln, I said within myself, ‘what a fearful God we serve.’
“Did Jett betray me?” Booth asked Baker. “Oh,” answered Baker, “never mind anything about Jett.”
Tenderly, Lucinda Holloway massaged his temples and forehead. Her fingertips felt the life draining out of him: “The pulsations in his temples grew weaker and weaker.”
Then, no more. John Wilkes Booth was dead. The twelve-day chase for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin was over.
In an instant he snipped a lock of the rich, black hair and pressed it into Lucinda Holloway’s palm.
No, to her the lock was a private, romantic keepsake of the luminous, dying star. If the soldiers saw what she had done, they would have overpowered her, prying open her balled fist and confiscating her treasure.
By locking Booth and Herold in their barn, they made it impossible for the assassin to make a run for it when the Sixteenth New York arrived.
corn. David Herold, whimpering, crying, pleading excuses that no one cared to hear, took it all in.
On the ride one of the soldiers chatted up Herold and scored a superb souvenir—he persuaded Booth’s companion to trade vests with him.
Conger’s plan worked. He had arrived in Washington before Booth’s body, and now he could claim the credit of being the first to tell Edwin Stanton the news.
In the quiet of his parlor, Stanton had received the news—Booth had been taken, he was dead, and the manhunt for Lincoln’s assassin was over. The secretary of war wasn’t ready to celebrate yet. He wanted to be sure that the body being brought to Washington was really John Wilkes Booth.
As Stanton turned the pages, he made a startling discovery—Booth had used the calendar as an impromptu diary, and in it he recorded his motive for killing Lincoln, and the turmoil of the manhunt. Only one man, Stanton knew, could have authored these fevered words: Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.
As soon as the news reached Philadelphia, T. J. Hemphill of the Walnut Theatre knew what had to be done. When he called at Asia Booth Clarke’s home, she received him at once. Asia knew from the very sight of him what must have happened.
Asia spoke first. “Is it over?” “Yes, madam.” “Taken?” “Yes.” “Dead?” “Yes, madam.” Asia, pregnant with twins, collapsed onto a sofa.
Then they buried the assassin in a secret, unmarked grave at the Old Arsenal penitentiary, the site chosen by Edwin Stanton as the unconsecrated burial ground for John Wilkes Booth, and for several of his conspirators who would soon join him in the grave.
