雙語·林肯傳 28

28

In 1863 a group of Virginia slave barons formed and financed a secret society the object of which was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; and in December, 1864, an advertisement appeared in a newspaper published in Selma, Alabama, begging for public subscriptions for a fund to be used for the same purpose, while other Southern journals offered cash rewards for his death.

But the man who finally shot Lincoln was actuated neither by patriotic desires nor commercial motives. John Wilkes Booth did it to win fame.

What manner of man was Booth? He was an actor, and nature had endowed him with an extraordinary amount of charm and personal magnetism. Lincoln's own secretaries described him as “handsome as Endymion on Latmos, the pet of his little world.” Francis Wilson, in his biography of Booth, declares that “he was one of the world's successful lovers.... Women halted in the streets and instinctively turned to admire him as he passed.”

By the time he was twenty-three, Booth had achieved the status of a matinee idol; and, naturally, his most famous role was Romeo. Wherever he played, amorous maidens deluged him with saccharine notes. While he was playing in Boston huge crowds of women thronged the streets in front of the Tremont House, eager to catch but one glimpse of their hero as he passed. One night a jealous actress, Henrietta Irving, knifed him in a hotel room, and then tried to commit suicide; and the morning after Booth shot Lincoln, another of his sweethearts, Ella Turner, an inmate of a Washington “parlor house,” was so distressed to learn that her lover had turned murderer and fled the city, that she clasped his picture to her heart, took chloroform, and lay down to die.

But did this flood of female adulation bring happiness to Booth? Very little, for his triumphs were confined almost wholly to the less discriminating audiences of the hinterland, while there was gnawing at his heart a passionate ambition to win the plaudits of the metropolitan centers.

But New York critics thought poorly of him, and in Philadelphia he was hooted off the stage.

This was galling, for other members of the Booth family were famous on the stage. For well-nigh a third of a century, his father, Junius Brutus Booth, had been a theatrical star of the first magnitude. His Shakesperian interpretations were the talk of the nation. No one else in the history of the American stage had ever won such extraordinary popularity. And the old man Booth had reared his favorite son, John Wilkes, to believe that he was to be the greatest of the Booths.

But the truth is that John Wilkes Booth possessed very little talent, and he didn't make the most of the trifling amount he did have. He was good-looking and spoiled and lazy, and he refused to bore himself with study. Instead, he spent his youthful days on horseback, dashing through the woods of the Maryland farm, spouting heroic speeches to the trees and squirrels, and jabbing the air with an old army lance that had been used in the Mexican War.

Old Junius Brutus Booth never permitted meat to be served at the family table, and he taught his sons that it was wrong to kill any living thing—even a rattlesnake. But John Wilkes evidently was not seriously restrained by his father's philosophy. He liked to shoot and destroy. Sometimes he banged away with his gun at the cats and hound dogs belonging to the slaves, and once he killed a sow owned by a neighbor.

Later he became an oyster pirate in Chesapeake Bay, then an actor. Now, at twenty-six, he was a favorite of gushing highschool girls, but, in his own eyes, he was a failure. And besides, he was bitterly jealous, for he saw his elder brother, Edwin, achieving the very renown that he himself so passionately desired.

He brooded over this a long time, and finally decided to make himself forever famous in one night.

This was his first plan: He would follow Lincoln to the theater some night; and, while one of his confederates turned off the gas-lights, Booth would dash into the President's box, rope and tie him, toss him onto the stage below, hustle him through a back exit, pitch him into a carriage, and scurry away like mad in the darkness.

By hard driving, he could reach the sleepy old town of Port Tobacco before dawn. Then he would row across the broad Potomac, and gallop on south through Virginia until he had lodged the Commander-in-Chief of the Union Army safely behind the Confederate bayonets in Richmond.

And then what?

Well, then the South could dictate terms and bring the war to an end at once.

And the credit for this brilliant achievement would go to whom? To the dazzling genius John Wilkes Booth. He would become twice as famous, a hundred times as famous as his brother Edwin. He would be crowned in history with the aura of a William Tell. Such were his dreams.

He was making twenty thousand dollars a year then in the theater, but he gave it all up. Money meant little to him now, for he was playing for something far more important than material possessions. So he used his savings to finance a band of Confederates that he fished out of the backwash of Southern sympathizers floating around Baltimore and Washington. Booth promised each one of them that he should be rich and famous.

And what a motley crew they were! There was Spangler, a drunken stage-hand and crab-fisherman; Atzerodt, an ignorant house-painter and blockade-runner with stringy hair and whiskers, a rough, fierce fellow; Arnold, a lazy farm-hand and a deserter from the Confederate Army; O'Laughlin, a livery-stable worker, smelling of horses and whisky; Surratt, a swaggering nincompoop of a clerk; Powell, a gigantic penniless brute, the wild-eyed, half-mad son of a Baptist preacher; Herold, a silly, giggling loafer, lounging about stables, talking horses and women, and living on the dimes and quarters given him by his widowed mother and his seven sisters.

With this supporting cast of tenth-raters, Booth was preparing to play the great role of his career. He spared neither time nor money in planning the minutest details. He purchased a pair of handcuffs, arranged for relays of fast horses at the proper places, bought three boats, and had them waiting in Port Tobacco Creek, equipped with oars and rowers ready to man them at a moment's notice.

Finally, in January, 1865, he believed that the great moment had come. Lincoln was to attend Ford's Theater on the eighteenth of that month, to see Edwin Forrest play “Jack Cade.” So the rumor ran about town. And Booth heard it. So he was on hand that night with his ropes and hopes—and what happened? Nothing. Lincoln didn't appear.

Two months later it was reported that Lincoln was going to drive out of the city on a certain afternoon to attend a theatrical performance in a near-by soldiers' encampment. So Booth and his accomplices, mounted on horses and armed with bowieknives and revolvers, hid in a stretch of woods that the President would have to pass. But when the White House carriage rolled by, Lincoln was not in it.

Thwarted again, Booth stormed about, cursing, pulling at his raven-black mustache, and striking his boots with his ridingwhip. He had had enough of this. He was not going to be frustrated any longer. If he couldn't capture Lincoln, by God, he could kill him.

A few weeks later Lee surrendered and ended the war, and Booth saw then that there was no longer any point in kidnapping the President; so he determined to shoot Lincoln at once.

Booth did not have to wait long. The following Friday he had a hair-cut, and then went to Ford's Theater to get his mail. There he learned that a box had been reserved for the President for that night's performance.

“What!” Booth exclaimed. “Is that old scoundrel going to be here to-night?”

Stage-hands were already making ready for a gala performance, draping the left-hand box with flags against a background of lace, decorating it with a picture of Washington, removing the partition, doubling the space, lining it with crimson paper and putting in an unusually large walnut rocking-chair to accommodate the President's long legs.

Booth bribed a stage-hand to place the chair in the precise position that he desired; he wanted it in the angle of the box nearest the audience, so that no one would see him enter. Through the inner door, immediately behind the rocker, he bored a small peep-hole; then dug a notch in the plastering behind the door leading from the dress-circle to the boxes, so that he could bar that entrance with a wooden plank. After that Booth went to his hotel and wrote a long letter to the editor of the “National Intelligencer,” justifying the plotted assassination in the name of patriotism, and declaring that posterity would honor him. He signed it and gave it to an actor, instructing him to have it published the next day.

Then he went to a livery-stable, hired a small bay mare that he boasted could run “l(fā)ike a cat,” and rounded up his assistants and put them on horses; gave Atzerodt a gun, and told him to shoot the Vice-President; and handed a pistol and knife to Powell, ordering him to murder Seward.

It was Good Friday, ordinarily one of the worst nights of the year for the theater, but the town was thronged with officers and enlisted men eager to see the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and the city was still jubilant, celebrating the end of the war. Triumphal arches still spanned Pennsylvania Avenue, and the streets were gay with dancing torch-light processions, shouting with high elation to the President as he drove by that night to the theater. When he arrived at Ford's the house was packed to capacity and hundreds were being turned away.

The President's party entered during the middle of the first act, at precisely twenty minutes to nine. The players paused and bowed. The brilliantly attired audience roared its welcome. The orchestra crashed into “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln bowed his acknowledgment, parted his coat-tails, and sat down in a walnut rocking-chair upholstered in red.

On Mrs. Lincoln's right sat her guests: Major Rathbone of the Provost-Marshal General's office and his fiancee, Miss Clara H. Harris, the daughter of Senator Ira Harris of New York, blue-bloods high enough in Washington society to meet the fastidious requirements of their Kentucky hostess.

Laura Keene was giving her final performance of the celebrated comedy “Our American Cousin.” It was a gay and joyous occasion; and sparkling laughter rippled back and forth across the audience.

Lincoln had taken a long drive in the afternoon, with his wife; she remarked afterward that he had been happier that day than she had seen him in years. Why shouldn't he be? Peace. Victory. Union. Freedom. He had talked to Mary that afternoon about what they would do when they left the White House at the close of his second term. First, they would take a long rest in either Europe or California; and when they returned, he might open a law office in Chicago, or drift back to Springfield and spend his remaining years riding over the prairie circuit that he loved so well. Some old friends that he had known in Illinois had called at the White House, that same afternoon, and he had been so elated telling jokes that Mrs. Lincoln could hardly get him to dinner.

The night before, he had had a strange dream. He had told the members of his Cabinet about it that morning: “I seemed to be in a singular and indescribable vessel,” he said, “that was moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore. I have had this extraordinary dream before great events, before victories. I had it preceding Antietam, Stone River, Gettysburg, Vicksburg.”

He believed that this dream was a good omen, that it foretold good news, that something beautiful was going to happen.

At ten minutes past ten Booth, inflamed with whisky, and dressed in dark riding-breeches, boots, and spurs, entered the theater for the last time in his life—and noted the position of the President. With a black slouch hat in his hand, he mounted the stairs leading to the dress-circle, and edged his way down an aisle choked with chairs, until he came to the corridor leading to the boxes.

Halted by one of the President's guards, Booth handed him his personal card with confidence and bravado, saying that the President wished to see him; and, without waiting for permission, pushed in and closed the corridor door behind him, wedging it shut with a wooden upright from a music-stand.

Peeping through the gimlet-hole that he had bored in the door behind the President, he gaged the distance, and quietly swung the door open. Shoving the muzzle of his high-calibered derringer close to his victim's head, he pulled the trigger and quickly leaped to the stage below.

Lincoln's head fell forward and then sidewise as he slumped in his chair.

He uttered no sound whatever.

For an instant the audience thought that the pistol-shot and the leap to the stage were a part of the play. No one, not even the actors themselves, suspected that the President had been harmed.

Then a woman's shriek pierced the theater and all eyes turned to the draped box. Major Rathbone, blood gushing from one arm, shouted: “Stop that man! Stop him! He has killed the President!”

A moment of silence. A wisp of smoke floating out of the Presidential box. Then the suspense broke. Terror and mad excitement seized the audience. They burst through the seats, wrenching the chairs from the floor, broke over railings, and, trying to clamber upon the stage, tore one another down and trampled upon the old and feeble. Bones were broken in the crush, women screamed and fainted, and shrieks of agony mingled with fierce yells of “Hang him!”... “Shoot him!”... “Burn the theater!”

Some one shouted that the playhouse itself was to be bombed. The fury of the panic doubled and trebled. A company of frantic soldiers dashed into the theater at double-quick, and charged the audience with muskets and fixed bayonets, shouting: “Get out of here! Damn you, get out!”

Physicians from the audience examined the President's wound; and, knowing it to be fatal, refused to have the dying man jolted over the cobblestones back to the White House. So four soldiers lifted him up—two at his shoulders and two at his feet—and carried his long, sagging body out of the theater and into the street, where blood dripping from his wound reddened the pavement. Men knelt to stain their handkerchiefs with it—handkerchiefs which they would treasure a lifetime, and, dying, bequeath as priceless legacies to their children.

With flashing sabers and rearing horses, the cavalry cleared a space; and loving hands bore the stricken President across the street to a cheap lodging-house owned by a tailor, stretched his long frame diagonally across a sagging bed far too short for him, and pulled the bed over to a dismal gas-jet that flickered yellow light.

It was a hall room nine by seventeen feet in size, with a cheap reproduction of Rosa Bonheur's painting of “The Horse Fair” hanging above the bed.

The news of the tragedy swept over Washington like a tornado; and, racing in its wake, came the impact of another disaster: at the same hour of the attack on Lincoln, Secretary Seward had been stabbed in bed and was not expected to live. Out of these black facts, fearsome rumors shot through the night like chain-lightning: Vice-President Johnson had been slain. Stanton had been assassinated. Grant shot. So ran the wild tales.

People were sure now that Lee's surrender had been a ruse, that the Confederates had treacherously crept into Washington and were trying to wipe out the Government with one blow, that the Southern legions had sprung to arms again, that the war, bloodier than ever, was starting once more.

Mysterious messengers dashed through the residence districts, striking the pavement two short staccato raps, thrice repeated—the danger-call of a secret society, the Union League. Awakened by the summons, members grasped their rifles and rushed wildly into the street.

Mobs with torches and ropes boiled through the town, howling: “Burn the theater!”... “Hang the traitor!”... “Kill the rebels!”

It was one of the maddest nights this nation has ever known!

The telegraph flashed the news, setting the nation on fire. Southern sympathizers and copperheads were ridden on rails and tarred and feathered; the skulls of some were crushed with paving-stones. Photograph galleries in Baltimore were stormed and wrecked because they were believed to contain pictures of Booth; and a Maryland editor was shot because he had published some scurrilous abuse of Lincoln.

With the President dying; with Johnson, the Vice-President, sprawled on his bed stone-drunk and his hair matted with mud; with Seward, Secretary of State, stabbed to the verge of death, the reins of power were grasped immediately by Edward M. Stanton, the gruff, erratic, and tempestuous Secretary of War.

Believing that all high officers of the Government were marked for slaughter, Stanton, in wild excitement, dashed off order after order, writing them on the top of his silk hat as he sat by the bedside of his dying chief. He commanded guards to protect his house and the residences of his colleagues; he confiscated Ford's Theater and arrested every one connected with it; he declared Washington to be in a state of siege; he called out the entire military and police force of the District of Columbia, all the soldiers in the surrounding camps, barracks, and fortifications, the Secret Service men of the United States, the spies attached to the Bureau of Military Justice; he threw pickets around the entire city, fifty feet apart; he set a watch at every ferry, and ordered tugs, steamers, and gunboats to patrol the Potomac.

Stanton wired the chief of police in New York to rush him his best detectives, telegraphed orders to watch the Canadian border, and commanded the President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway to intercept General Grant in Philadelphia and bring him back to Washington at once, running a pilot locomotive ahead of his train.

He poured a brigade of infantry into lower Maryland, and sent a thousand cavalrymen galloping after the assassin, saying over and over: “He will try to get South. Guard the Potomac from the city down.”

The bullet that Booth fired pierced Lincoln's head below the left ear, plowed diagonally through the brain, and lodged within half an inch of the right eye. A man of lesser vitality would have been cut down instantly; but for nine hours Lincoln lived, groaning heavily.

Mrs. Lincoln was kept in an adjoining room; but every hour she would insist on being brought to his bedside, weeping and shrieking, “O my God, have I given my husband to die?”

Once as she was caressing his face and pressing her wet cheek against his, he suddenly began groaning and breathing louder than ever. Screaming, the distraught wife sprang back and fell to the floor in a faint.

Stanton, hearing the commotion, rushed into the room, shouting, “Take that woman away, and don't let her in here again.”

Shortly after seven o'clock the groaning ceased and Lincoln's breathing became quiet. “A look of unspeakable peace,” wrote one of his secretaries who was there, “came over his worn features.”

Sometimes recognition and understanding flash back into the secret chambers of consciousness immediately before dissolution.

In those last peaceful moments broken fragments of happy memories may have floated brightly through the deep hidden caverns of his mind—vanished visions of the long ago: a log fire blazing at night in front of the open shed in the Buckhorn Valley of Indiana; the roar of the Sangamon plunging over the mill-dam at New Salem; Ann Rutledge singing at the spinning-wheel; Old Buck nickering for his corn; Orlando Kellogg telling the story of the stuttering justice; and the law office at Springfield with the ink-stain on the wall and garden seeds sprouting on top of the bookcase....

Throughout the long hours of the death-struggle Dr. Leale, an army surgeon, sat by the President's bedside holding his hand. At twenty-two minutes past seven the doctor folded Lincoln's pulseless arms, put half-dollars on his eyelids to hold them shut, and tied up his jaw with a pocket handkerchief. A clergyman offered a prayer. Cold rain pattered down on the roof. General Barnes drew a sheet over the face of the dead President; and Stanton, weeping and pulling down the windowshades to shut out the light of the dawn, uttered the only memorable sentence of that night: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

The next day little Tad asked a caller at the White House if his father was in heaven.

“I have no doubt of it,” came the reply.

“Then I am glad he has gone,” said Tad, “for he was never happy after he came here. This was not a good place for him.”