The Judges of the Secret Court (23 page)

They sewed the body in a sack, slung it over the saddle of one of the horses, and jogged back to Washington. The men were dead tired and didn't have much to say. Neither did Herold. He could see the sewed-up sack in front of him, slapping against the flanks of the pack horse.

At Washington Herold was sent to the Old Capitol Prison, and Booth's body to the ironclad
Montauk
, the boat on which Lincoln had taken his last constitutional, two weeks before. There doctors came aboard to identify the corpse.

They had trouble in doing so. Dr. May, who had once treated Booth, found it hard to recognize the body. He remembered Booth as being white skinned and muscular. This man was emaciated and had freckles on his hands. But it was Booth, all right. The freckles were premature liver spots, signs of senility. Such things could appear as a result of extreme stress. There were cases on record. Shock can sometimes produce the symptoms of senility.

There was also trouble about getting the corpse out of the way, for crowds lined the river in an effort to catch a glimpse of it. Booth had fame of a sort, and at the War Department it was feared that someone might try to dig him up again. Therefore a dummy burial was performed, from a ship sent down the Potomac, and the body itself was hustled into an anonymous grave in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison. No one was supposed to know that had been done, but of course the prisoners knew. Prisoners always know such things. Stanton had arrested everyone. He would let no one out of his net. And with Herold his menagerie was complete. It was time, now, for the show.

Mrs. Booth received the news of Booth's death the day of his burial. Asia was ill and had sent for her. Launt Thomas was driving her to the ferry for Jersey City, where the rail terminus was. Hearing the newsboys shouting the news in the streets, he slammed down the carriage windows and drew the curtains, talking as loudly as he could to drown out the shouting. He was a family friend. But of course he could not drown out that cry. It could be heard on every corner.

When the carriage arrived at the ferry slip, he settled Mary Ann into a quiet corner on deck, and made the trip with her across that seagull madding water. No one recognized her, for she wore a widow's veil. At the train he bought a paper and gave it to her, folded. Better she learn the news from a paper at least given to her by a friend, than from a paper bought from a stranger.

“You will need all your courage. The paper in your hand will tell you what, unhappily, we must all wish to hear,” he told her. “John Wilkes is dead.”

She did not lift her veil. She did not move. “Thank God,” she said. Death was the only mercy he or they could possibly have expected. But it was not until the train was well into the countryside that she opened the paper.

“Tell Mother I died for my country,” she read. But whose country was that? Not hers. She was not sure. A grief like this had no natural outlet. She sat motionless. It could only be lived with.

Asia, in Philadelphia, had much the same reaction, but being younger, had not Mary Ann's self-control. She was bed-ridden. Life had levelled her. It was old Mr. Hemphill, one of Clarke's employees, who had the decency to bring her the news, though he could not come out with it. But she guessed why he was there.

“Is it over?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yes, madam.”

She was so relieved she was almost happy. She turned her face to the wall and wept. She was so very glad for Johnny. Of the others, she did not think at all.

It was Edwin, as usual, who had to deal with the others.

So, though he did not much like the job, he sat down and dealt with them. That was his way. Yet, if anyone had praised him for doing so, he would have been surprised. It was Junius, in that family, who had the reputation for being practical, not he. He was merely the one who earned money, and until this terrible thing, had hoped to become an artist. As he had said, “In America art degenerates below the standard even of a trade.” So it was up to him to do odd jobs for the family. To them that was all he was good for. He was their odd job man.

“There is no solidity in Love, no truth in Friendship, no steadiness in Marital Faith,” Asia wrote him. He would not have gone quite that far, but Asia had provocation. Her nurse patriotically refused to tend her through her pregnancy. Her doctor was nervous about being seen making house visits. Clarke had denounced her, publicly and privately. Only a minor actress she scarcely knew, a woman named Effie Germon, good in comedy parts, had asked if she might be of help. As Asia said, it was enough almost to revive belief in human goodness. Almost, but of course not quite.

Clarke and Junius Brutus had been let out of prison. Junius was tranquil enough. If the world had frozen over, Junius would have been tranquil. But Clarke was furious. The Booths were all Iagos, he told Asia, male and female. He demanded a divorce. Divorce from her was his only salvation, now. He almost hoped the child she was carrying miscarried. It was half a Booth. For that reason, if it did not miscarry now, it would be sure to do so later.

Then he went out and left her. She could only write to Edwin. Though she had once treated him badly enough, by refusing to receive his first wife, and by denouncing her as a cheap actress, Edwin, she knew, would not hold that against her.

Nor did he. But he remembered it. His poor dead Mary was still the only woman he cared about. Edwina, her daughter, was with Asia, and he did not even dare to go fetch her home until the public outcry against them all died down. Not even friends quite made up for the malice of the world. Yet at least John Wilkes could not bring any more ignominy upon them now. Like the others, he was glad Johnny was dead.

So was Stanton.

Stanton was setting up the trial of the conspirators; and it would have been inconvenient to have the chief conspirator there to deny what Stanton had decided was the truth of the matter. On the 28th of April, for similar reasons, he had issued an order that all prisoners were to have canvas bags fastened over their heads, for better security against conversation with them. They were to have a hole to breathe and eat through, but no holes for their eyes. Payne was to be secured to prevent self-destruction. Security was his passion, and to maintain security, one must have a plot against it. He wanted no one to deny that plot. He had the prisoners transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, from the various cells in which, until now, he had secluded them.

A curious man, Mr. Stanton, in appearance, since he was so short, rather like a devil doll turned schoolteacher. People said he was completely disinterested, since graft meant nothing to him. Unfortunately power meant a great deal. He did not bother to go home any more at night. He slept on a cot in the War Department instead. He could not bear to be away from the source of power. He was a bully with a low pitched, silky voice. The more of a bully he became, the better modulated and the softer the voice. He was also a coward. He did not like to see his victims. Though he had set up the Old Capitol Prison as an
oubliette
, he never went there. The lowest he descended into his own sewers, was to have his informers brought upstairs to see him.

The best of these was Mrs. Surratt's lodger, Weichmann. He did not stoop to giving Weichmann instructions as to what to say, for he had a horror of known perjury. But he made it plain to the poor, snivelling, self-seeking creature what would happen to him if he didn't say the right things. Weichmann would do as he was told. As for suborning him, there was nothing wrong with that. That was an act in the public interest. It would promote security. So Stanton, one of the new men, those selfless figures who want nothing for themselves but the prerogatives of their office, in which, soft shelled themselves and weak, they lurk like cuttlefish, ready to grasp anything that comes by to nourish their enormous self-importance.

He was not concerned with good and evil. He was concerned with maintaining order in the State; that was his duty, and no one could maintain that so well as he. Thus he was glad Booth was dead. There was no telling what these spies and conspirators might know, and there were some things Stanton did not wish to have known. At times it had been necessary for him to intrigue against and to deceive Lincoln, just as he would have to do against Johnson, for the good of the State and of the War Department. Now the man was dead and deified already, anything blurted out about that would do no good, only harm. Besides, he was a coward.

His power sprang from that system of arbitrary arrest which resulted from the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. To such powers as he derived from that illegality, he had added his own secret service and complete control over public communications. As he had once told the British Ambassador, he could arrest anyone, and no power on earth, except that of the President, could release them. Could the Queen of England, he had asked the Ambassador, do so much?

Not that he did not have a sense of humour. Three times a week he did his own marketing. It was one of his few pleasures to bumble through the produce stalls, with a servant behind him to carry the basket. When a Confederate sympathizer tried to cheat him on lettuces, he playfully threatened the man with the Old Capitol Prison. Old Madison, his Negro, did the same. That made vegetables much cheaper and shopping much faster. The Old Capitol Prison settled everything.

Perhaps every good man has a bad man to do his dirty work, for since corruption is the price of order, how should a good man keep himself unsullied, otherwise? Every Lincoln has a Stanton. But Lincoln had been shrewd enough to control the man. Now Lincoln was gone. Stanton missed the tug of war between them, but apart from that these days he scarcely gave Lincoln a thought. He had no time. He was too busy with the coming trial. He was anxious about procedure. He even accepted advice, a thing he seldom did, though with a petulant expression. His great soft womanly eyes, behind his spectacles, were full of reproach when he was contradicted, but still, he did listen.

He was always reluctant to let go anybody who had fallen into his prisons, but on advice, he let some of them go. Dr. Stewart was exonerated by Booth's note; Mrs. Quesenberry was a harmless old woman, and if prosecuted, would attract too much sympathy from the press. Mr. Cox's nigger girl swore herself blue that Mr. Booth had not been there. How otherwise could she swear, for she did not want Massa Cox strung up; but there was no way of shaking her story. The actors had to be let go. There was no point in keeping Ford, the owner of the theatre, on display. But he did not like it. He had too few people left to accuse. And now Baker said he had made a deal with that silly young Confederate cavalry man, Jett. He would have to be let off, too. And there
had
to be a trial. He was left only with Mrs. Surratt, Dr. Mudd, Payne, Atzerodt, Herold, Arnold, Spangler, and O'Laughlin.

Mrs. Surratt did not bother him. That John Surratt, her son, could not be rounded up was infuriating. The woman had a neck. She could hang as well as anybody else. Weichmann said she was guilty. That shrinking fool could now go out and say so in court. Stanton would let the daughter and Miss Fitzpatrick off. That was clemency enough.

He turned his attention to the choice of a military commission to try them. To prove that the murder was the result not of his own carelessness, but of the immensity of the plot, he threw everything into the proceedings, and he would need men who could stomach what they were fed. That the trial would be held before a military court, not a civil, and that therefore, there would be no jury, would be some help, but he chose his men carefully. He had not been a public prosecutor in his youth for nothing. When he had finished his list of the judges he was satisfied. Soldiers will do as they are told, and as for the civilian members, Burnett and Bingham, they had too wobbly a record to show mercy to others now. The way to show innocence in this world, is to prove someone else guilty, and they had their orders and would obey them. General Wallace, of course, was honest, but he was also a pious fool, he gave the panel of judges a certain distinction, and could be led by them. As for the others, Holt, the leader, was in his pocket, and the rest were straw men. Stanton was ready. It would be an excellent show, but since he knew how it would end, he was now free to turn, with a little relaxed smile, to more important matters.

In Springfield, the funeral train had arrived a little late, at nine o'clock in the morning. Even in death, there were so many demands upon the President's time, all that long journey of seventeen hundred miles.

The procession at Springfield was unostentatious, for Springfield was where he had come from, but it was splendid enough, for Springfield was also the place where they had known him, and where the Todds lived, a place of a certain clapboard and wooden column elegance, despite its mud.

Over his catafalque, in the State House, were lettered his own words, spoken at Philadelphia in 1861. “Sooner than surrender these principles, I would be assassinated on the spot.” No doubt they expressed what the
New York World
meant, when speaking, the day of his death, of the quaint and uncouth nature of his rhetoric. He should, of course, have said “rather”. But he had not, and now he was dead.

The lying in state was the same as elsewhere, and yet not quite the same. The crowds filed by, saw that face which, ravaged by the demands made upon him in life, was no less ravaged by being exposed to his admirers so often in death. Minute guns sounded, as though to bring rain. There was a choir and a band, a rendition of “Peace, Troubled Soul”, and the coffin was closed for the last time. The party then processed to Oak Ridge Cemetery, where, as at the cities on his route, the Last Inaugural was read, with malice towards none.

The grave was temporary.

The malice was to come.

Edwin said nothing. He wanted to see no one. But as usual he did his best. Though he had sworn never to enter Washington City again, he went down to consult with Defence Counsel. He was only too eager to help those poor people his brother had led astray. The Defence wished him to say that Wilkes had such power over the minds of others that he had rendered the defendants temporarily insane. Edwin did not believe that, but he agreed to say so, if it would help. Unfortunately a good man is not the same thing as a good witness. The Defence decided not to call him.