The Booth Conspiracy

Most people know the story of President Lincoln's assassination, but what happened afterward? In this podcast, we cover 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 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delaney Charcoateboarding and around Christmas this year,
listener Hillary sent us the book Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel,

(00:22):
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 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.

(00:47):
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.
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

(01:09):
theater guests. 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
to talk about what happened the night of April fourteenth,
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

(01:30):
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
to extend the 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

(01:53):
be that John Wilkes Booth, who is now of course
famous firstly as an assassin and secondly as an actor,
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.

(02:16):
But that's just because the other family members were so famous.
Booth had been born in Maryland in eighteen thirty eight.
He was the ninth of ten children of Junius Brutus Booth,
who was an English actor very famous in England who
had moved to the United States in eighteen twenty one.
Booth Sr. Was one of the most famous Shakespearean actors

(02:38):
in the country, maybe second only to Edwin Forest he
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 two and the middle boy, Edwin, became a star
to really rival his father. We're going to talk about

(02:59):
him a bit more later. The youngest, meanwhile, John 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

(03:22):
bit of an odd ball. He was extremely pro slavery,
anti Lincoln, and an ardent supporter 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,

(03:43):
Booth started making plans to kidnap President Lincoln, drawing in
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 he actress Henrietta Irving tried to stab Booth

(04:05):
in the chest, grazing his face and stays, yes, he
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 inaugurlar address, ragging to a

(04:27):
friend that he had had a really great chance to
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 at kidnapping in the first place disappeared. So
the point of kidnapping instead of killing had been to

(04:47):
exchange Lincoln for Confederate prisoners of war. But on April
nine sixty the war ended, so what are you gonna do? Ironically, though,
it was Lincoln's speech on reconstruct Action, which took place
just a few days after that on the White House
lawn that really fired up Booth made him decide that

(05:07):
he didn't want to give up the plan of kidnapping.
He wanted to escalate it to something more. He had
attended 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 due to attend a performance of Our American Cousin

(05:30):
at Ford's Theater in d C the night of April fourteen. So,
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,

(05:53):
a German immigrant and former boatman for Confederate spies, would
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

(06:15):
appointment to Spain. Lucy Hill's father was looking to get
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

(06:38):
hours to kill, you know, trying to pass his time.
The theater's conductor, William Withers Jr. Who was pretty paked
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

(07:00):
somebody joke quote, oh, Booth will never be as great
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

(07:20):
walked into the President's box. He waited for a line
in the play that he knew would get big laughs.
I mean, remember, he was an actor, so we 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

(07:42):
that's pretty much what he thought was going to happen.
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 that's 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 tierness, thus always to tyrants, and he caught

(08:05):
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 flashing mad Booth to

(08:28):
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

(08:51):
seven point two million dollars, something that was mocked at
the time called Seward's folly. But enough on that Atserat,
who was commission to kill the vice president, just completely
chickened out. I think he went out drinking instead and
got nowhere near Johnson Powell, though, did some pretty serious
damage to the Seward family. He arrived at their home

(09:15):
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 jaw, and uh that those
injuries required pretty serious banishing to his face and head,
which is a key point here. So when Paul entered

(09:37):
the home and was trying to deliver his medicine, Seward's
son Frederick met him but wouldn't allow him upstairs to
deliver the items personally. So at that point Paul 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 Bedrooden Sewar

(10:00):
with a bowie knife in front of Seward's daughter too,
until finally the military officer who had been assigned to
Seward during his convalescence grappled with Powell and uh Seward's
other son joined into um ended up getting injured. A
colleague of Seward's got injured to Powe really did some

(10:21):
serious damage, but did manage to escape. Nobody was killed
in this incident. Seward and his son's recovered um, but
his wife died 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,

(10:42):
Lincoln meanwhile, is dying from head wound. The first doctor
on the scene was Charles sab and Taft, who ordered
Lincoln to be removed to the nearest home. The president
was brought across 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 Taff stayed

(11:04):
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 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

(11:29):
pocket knife, two pairs of glasses, and a Confederate five
dollar bill, which I think is the most unusual item there. Okay,
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.

(11:50):
So everybody is talking about Lincoln and everybody is talking
about his assassin. After an autopsy, Lincoln lane state at
the White House and the Capital the for being sent
on a thirteen day train trip back to Springfield with
plenty of open casket viewings. Um just to sign note here.
Vale notes in her book that this was really great

(12:10):
publicity for the new trend in embalming, seeing the president
so many days after he had been killed. Meanwhile, as
the President's body is traveling around the search for Booth
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 of the historical record because, according

(12:34):
to a Smithsonian article by James Swanson, so many of
Booth's trackers documented the experience because they were trying to
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

(12:56):
though behind at the Seward house. Those two who high
tailed it for the Maryland home of Dr Samuel Mud
who set Booth leg and then they spent five nights
and five days in the woods waiting to cross the
Potomac into Virginia. They had a little help, though, yeah.
A Confederate agent named Thomas Jones brought them food and newspapers,

(13:18):
and it was a big disappointment when Booth read those papers.
People hated him. He thought that he would be considered
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

(13:41):
seemed like desperate men, the Garretts allowed them to sleep
in their tobacco barn, but actually locked them in at
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 Conquer, tracked the
men to the farm. The Garretts dog started barking at
the sound of horses, and so Booth and Harold of

(14:03):
course woke up. They tried to escape, but found themselves
locked in, and by the time they were trying to
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 were
in the tobacco barn. One of the sons was even
forced to enter the barn and try to disarm Booth.

(14:25):
Nobody else wanted to go in. Booth basically told him
he sold me out, get out, or I'll kill you.
But despite having a whole cavalry, the law enforcement officers
really kind of dizzerd 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

(14:47):
if they had a face to face with the armed
and desperate Booth. So their solution was burned the barn.
Harold begged to be let out, and he eventually is
let out. Booth, on the other hand, poses 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

(15:10):
to Baker how honorable he's been the whole time. He says, quote, Captain,
I have had half a dozen opportunities to shoot you,
but I did 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

(15:33):
here to fight you. We simply came to make you
a prisoner. Booth reduces the demands 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

(15:55):
finally sent the bar set the barn on fire. The
barn goes up in 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

(16:16):
he even hit the ground from getting shot by Boston Corbett,
and he was presumed dead. 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 removed money
and keys and tobacco in a compass. When Conger went

(16:38):
into an inner pocket, he found the diary Booth had
been keeping, you know, lamenting the fact 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

(16:59):
was Lucy Hales. So I don't know if Lucy maybe
had a surprise when she heard the news 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

(17:19):
begged the soldiers to kill him. It sounds like a
really gruesome, really horrible death. He died by the morning
of April. Booth's body was secretly buried that then reentered
a few years later at a Stanley plot in Baltimore.
But the wild conspiracy theories began almost right away. The
main one, of course, was that Booth didn't die. Instead,

(17:41):
as the theory goes, he escaped, took the name John
st Helen and went west. He told a lawyer in
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

(18:03):
of none other than st Helen. George's body was mummified,
which I'm not sure quite why, and it toward freak
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,

(18:27):
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

(18:47):
is located. So now that 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, and Powell At, Surat, and the boarding
house owner Mary Surratt were taken in and those four
were all found guilty of murder and sentence to hang.

(19:09):
Surat's sentence is still kind of controversial 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 Booth leg, Samuel Arnold who had been in on
the kidnapping plot but had dropped out earlier, and Michael O'Laughlin,

(19:30):
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 Surratt Jr.
Who wasn't caught for a remarkable twenty months. I mean,
consider again, this was the largest man hunt to date.

(19:53):
They were all out looking for this guy. When he
finally was apprehended, he wasn't even convicted of crime. So
it's questionable whether John Throughout 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

(20:14):
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
that Suratt finally revealed his identity. He had a hard
time keeping that information to himself, and the Vatican agreed

(20:37):
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

(21:01):
was pretty weak and the trial ended in a hung jury.
An attempt to rein indict him on the same charges,
was eventually dismissed after the statute of limitations on those
charges had passed, though 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

(21:24):
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

(21:44):
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

(22:07):
sort of commentary on Lincoln's reputation through the ages or
something having 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,

(22:29):
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.

(22:51):
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

(23:14):
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

(23:36):
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

(23:59):
because he was who drunk. So he had really sobered
up and kind of had much more moderate opinions than
thumb members of his family. Um, he did learn whose
life he saved, that he'd saved the President's son when
he got a letter from a friend who had fall
on Grant Staff, who had heard Robert Lincoln telling the story.
As anybody would like, this super famous actor saved my life. Recently,

(24:21):
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,

(24:42):
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 a 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 assassinate nation. During Edwin's eighteen ninety

(25:02):
three funeral, Ford's Theater collapsed, It wasn't rebuilt until the
nineteen sixties, and now it's under operation as a historical site.
All right, So let's take a listen to our listener
mail for the day. So I thought this one would
be appropriate since we last heard from listener Hillary, who's

(25:25):
sending us postcards through her tour of Europe, when she
mentioned she has a violin from the Civil War era,
so she especially likes Civil War era topics. Her latest
postcard is from Madrid, and she wrote after the concert
she played there, they're playing Prokopiev's Violin Can Share to
a number one. She said that her teacher met that

(25:48):
composer over that piece, and his second Violin can Share
Too was premiered in the hall where she played, so
there were all sorts of historical connections. Again, I really
like relating modern cultural events like this to historical It's
pretty neat, yes, and I continue to get even more jealous.
I just love the Drid, I know, one of my
favorite places. It sounds like it would be a nice

(26:08):
place to play violin too. Yeah, or do just about it,
just do anything. So thank you, Hillary. We do enjoy
getting your updates from your travels, and we enjoy hearing
from all of you guys, so please continue sending a suggestion.
I think Booth was suggested Edwin Booth was suggested pretty

(26:28):
recently today. I think it was today. It's so weird
when we get requests on a day that we're actually
recording the podcast of whatever the request is. Are not
as spooky as the theater falling down on the day
of the funeral. But still I do wonder if people
can like read our minds or frothing when it's happening.
Not I hope not to, but continues sending its suggestions.

(26:51):
We get so many of our ideas from you guys.
We're at History Podcasts at Discovery dot com. And if
you want to learn a little bit more about some
other things that happened during the Civil War era, maybe
you're a buff like Hillary is, we have an article
called how the Emancipation Proclamation worked, and you can find
that by searching on our homepage at www dot how

(27:12):
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