The Lincoln Deception (3 page)

The last two conspirators—Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen—had the least connection to the fateful night. Both were part of Booth's initial plan, hatched in the fall of 1864, to kidnap Lincoln and trade him for Confederate prisoners of war, or even to use Lincoln as a bargaining chip to end the war. When the kidnapping plot failed in mid-March 1865, it mutated into one to kill the president and other top Union officials. O'Laughlen was at the house of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on the night before the assassination, and was with Booth the next day. The prosecutors accused him of aiming to kill General Grant but presented little evidence to support the accusation.

Samuel Arnold's connection was thinnest of all. Like O'Laughlen, he was part of the original kidnapping plot. Eighteen days before the assassination, Arnold urged Booth to abandon all plans against Lincoln. No evidence placed Arnold in Washington on April 14.

The four lesser conspirators—Arnold, O'Laughlen, Spangler, and Mudd—went to prison at the pestilential Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, a sweltering hole surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico. O'Laughlen died of fever there. In early 1869, President Johnson pardoned and released the other three.

One prominent conspirator was never convicted. Following the assassination, young John Surratt sped to Canada, where Catholic priests hid him. With more priestly assistance, Surratt reached Vatican City in Rome where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves, a contingent of guards. When a fellow Marylander revealed Surratt's presence to American diplomats, he fled to Egypt. He was seized on an Alexandria dock in late 1866, still wearing the baggy trousers and brocade jacket of his Zouave uniform. Tried in a Washington, DC, federal court, not before a military commission, Surratt won a hung jury and went free when the government declined to try him again. Newspaper articles attributed the jury deadlock to pro-Southern sympathies. Fraser could think of no better explanation.

The key witness at both trials was Louis Weichmann, a young friend of John Surratt's who boarded at Mrs. Surratt's house on H Street, east of Seventh Street. Weichmann described meetings among the conspirators at the house, particularly between Booth and Mrs. Surratt. The friendship between those two intrigued Fraser. What did the dashing young actor have in common with the Catholic widow in her early forties? Yet she seemed to be Booth's closest confidante among the conspirators. The others were beneath Booth. Atzerodt and Herold were no more than toadies. Lewis Paine represented brute force. Fraser imagined that Mrs. Surratt and her son dealt with Booth as equals, perhaps owing to their shared connection with the Confederate secret service.

Late one night, seated in his kitchen with a cold cup of coffee before him, reading yet another book on the conspiracy, Fraser returned to an idea that gnawed at him. During the trial, Mr. Bingham repeatedly claimed that the Confederate government was behind the assassination, but he never backed up the accusation. After the trial, critics scoffed at Mr. Bingham's claim. Fraser decided that was the most important question. Was Booth's planetary system part of an even larger system? Was Booth doing the bidding of others?

If Fraser could figure that out, he could vindicate Mr. Bingham. Fraser would like to do that, but there was more to it. Working on the assassination, he felt something he couldn't remember feeling: that he was part of the cause his father died for. Having tasted that feeling, he hungered for more of it.

C
areening along ten miles of bad roads from Cadiz to Adena, Fraser mused that it was too nice a day to lose a leg. Spring had finally come to eastern Ohio, but in the coal mines every season was dangerous. The telegram said:
MINE ACCIDENT. LEG CRUSHED. COME SOONEST
. Please, he silently asked the god of spring, make it below the knee. He shouted for the horse to pull harder up the hill. He didn't like to use the stick, but he did like to go fast, and now he had to. “Hah,” he cried. “Hup! Hup!”

The mine, a new one, was east of Adena. The line of miners' shacks was uphill from the gash in the earth that swallowed the men every morning. He pulled up at a cabin where people spilled out the door and into the road, just before the mine works. A man reached for the horse's halter.

“Don't let him eat the grass,” Fraser called. The soot-covered growth could foul the animal's digestion for days. He unloaded his regular bag and his surgical bag, the one with the saw and chloroform mask. His surgical tools were no better, he thought with disgust, than those used in the time of Mary Surratt and John Wilkes Booth.

At six feet tall, Fraser loomed over the miners and their families. Their clothes, all in shades of gray, hung from gaunt frames. Their skin and hair had a smudgy, subterranean look. He nodded greetings to those he passed, not pausing to shake hands. He could hardly perform surgery after shaking hands that were never clean.

“I'm Dr. Fraser from Cadiz,” he said at the door, but they knew who he was.

“John Evans, Doctor.” Several stepped aside for a wiry man with a thick brush of curly hair. He strode from the opening to a rear room. The air in the shack was moist, the smells sour.

“Mr. Evans.” Fraser looked round for what he would need. Two chairs, a basin. The table was too small. Water was heating on a coal-fired stove. “The patient?”

“My brother Lew,” the man said, leading him into the darkened room.

Fraser followed and knelt next to the bed. He reached for the arm of Lew Evans. It was cold. The man shivered and his pulse was weak. “Hello, Doc,” he said. “Did it up right this time.” His breath smelled of whiskey, the only painkiller at hand.

“Timber came down,” his brother explained, “square on the leg.”

“I'll have to pull aside the linen,” Fraser said.

Lew Evans nodded. “Can you save it?”

Fraser thought a quick thanks. The timber had pulverized the left leg, but at the shinbone. “You'll have your knee, Mr. Evans, and with some practice you'll dance again. But right now”—Fraser shifted to look into the man's face—“I need to get you into the front room where I can work.” He gripped the man's shoulder. “You look tough enough for this.”

Fraser instructed the brother to clear the house, borrow another table for the front room so they could stretch the patient out, and start water boiling in neighbor houses. “We've done that, sir.” Fraser had not noticed the woman who spoke. She had a determined look. “We have sheets to drape the table.”

“Fine,” he said. “You can assist me? It won't bother you?”

She nodded.

It took almost an hour. A skilled surgeon, one who had done more than the six amputations Fraser had done, might have completed it in half the time. The woman, Mrs. Llewellyn Evans, followed instructions. She didn't flinch. Though she was as thin as the rest, her hands were strong. Lew Evans, he thought, was a lucky man. In some ways.

Fraser left laudanum with her, with careful instructions about the dosage. When he stepped from the house, the tension began to fall away. He wanted to sit down but saw no seat. He leaned against the wall of the cabin. Aware of the bloodstains on his cuff, he looked at the knot of men in the road.

“Where's the company now?” one was saying. “Evans is a foreman, one of their best, and can they be bothered to see how they've maimed him?”

“Ach, they'll maim us or kill us all, then ship in a load of hunkies and niggers to do the work for less.”

The group fell quiet as they noticed Fraser. John Evans detached himself from it. “Will my brother be all right?”

“I think so. It'll take some weeks to heal. He'll need crutches, and then a prosthetic leg—he should be able to tolerate one. There's a man in Akron who's good with them.”

“And what does that cost?” the brother asked.

“It depends, Mr. Evans. Let me write down his name.”

They walked to Fraser's gig. While Fraser wrote, Evans said in a low voice, “We can't pay today, Doc. We have only scrip on the company store. But I'll speak with them tomorrow about turning my pay over to you.”

“Please, Mr. Evans,” Fraser said, “please do no such thing. You and your brother have cares enough. Please call on me if he doesn't recover well.”

“God bless you,” the man said. Fraser shook his hand.

 

The horse chose the pace going home while the Evans family inhabited Fraser's mind. Lew Evans couldn't afford the artificial leg. If he could find work on one leg, he might live longer and healthier than if he had remained a miner with two. But if he found no work, the children would have to support the family. Mrs. Evans must already take in washing or sewing or do whatever she could. He blew out a long breath. He couldn't save them from their lives.

About halfway home, Fraser's thoughts cycled back to the Lincoln case. There must have been a wider conspiracy beyond Booth's ragtag crew. Mr. Bingham prosecuted the eight conspirators on the theory that the Confederate government organized and financed the plot. Three star witnesses testified that high Confederates approved the plot. On that theory, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was arrested and imprisoned for almost two years.

Yet two of those star witnesses proved to be liars. Mr. Bingham had saved news stories about a congressional inquiry that revealed their perjury. The government, its case compromised, released Davis and never brought him to trial.

This had Fraser thinking in circles and around corners. That Mr. Bingham relied on perjured testimony was disturbing. Yet the man from Cadiz had been thoroughly unmoved by the revelations that his witnesses were liars. To his dying day, as Fraser knew, Mr. Bingham considered the conspirators incontestably guilty. The old man's conscience was easy over their fates.

After reaching home, Fraser had a supper of bread and cheese, then spread his notes across the table. He wanted to review the different conspiracy theories for the assassination. He didn't really buy any of them.

He started with the obvious question,
cui bono
—who benefits? Who benefitted from Lincoln's death? The ready answer was Andrew Johnson, who vaulted into the presidency when Lincoln died. So was Johnson behind Booth's plot? Booth had called on the vice president at his hotel on the day before the assassination ; Johnson was not in, so Booth left his card with the hotel clerk. And on the fateful evening of April 14, no actual attempt was made on Johnson's life, though George Atzerodt was assigned to kill him. Was Atzerodt acting out a ruse designed to draw attention away from Johnson's role as criminal mastermind?

Some claimed that Johnson's performance as president reinforced this theory. Johnson had battled against Reconstruction, straining to preserve the South in largely the same condition it had been before the war except for the end of slavery. He supported new techniques for oppressing the former slaves, denying them voting rights and legal rights and land. Why not a plot between the Confederacy and Johnson to give the South a victorious peace?

A congressional committee, stuffed with Johnson's political enemies, had inquired deeply into this theory and come up empty-handed. No connections could be found between Johnson and the Confederacy. Although Johnson governed in a stunningly pro-Southern fashion after the war, he fiercely opposed the Confederacy during the fighting. It was simply Johnson's good luck that his assigned assassin, Atzerodt, had no stomach for the business.

Another theory proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church lurked behind Booth's plot. The Surratts were devout Catholics, as was Dr. Mudd. When John Surratt fled after the assassination, Catholic priests concealed him in Canada and Europe. Then he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves, a decidedly exotic destination for a young American in 1865. Yet that was all the evidence in support of the Catholic Church theory. Indeed, that theory seemed to consist principally of a deep-seated hostility to the papacy. Those who blamed Andrew Johnson could at least point to superficially plausible motives: his own advancement and his postwar protection of the South. The Catholic Church theorists could recite no motive at all. What did the Pope or his minions stand to gain from the death of Abraham Lincoln?

The lone-madman theory, which Fraser liked no better, had been pronounced in two books by George Townsend, a writer honored by Mr. Bingham at a dinner in Cadiz only two years before. Fraser had liked Townsend well enough over dinner but found his books superficial. If Townsend was right that the assassination was the work of the mad genius Booth, then Mrs. Surratt could have made no shocking revelation to Mr. Bingham, because there was nothing to know beyond the incontestable—that Booth shot Lincoln.

Fraser resolved to apply a maxim from a Sherlock Holmes story: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Though he loved the Holmes stories, he resented the portrayal of Dr. Watson as dim-witted. Fraser thought the habits of mind of medical men were well-matched to the disciplined investigation of a mystery. What is diagnosis but the solution of a mystery, often based on slender evidence?

He turned to the slippery question of motive. While a single assassin might be a madman, a conspiracy involves rational thought. Henchmen, even unappetizing ones, must be given reasons for joining a conspiracy, then must be coordinated intelligently.

The personal passions that can lead to murder—hate or greed—seemed not to fit the Lincoln case. Booth and his associates could have hated Lincoln, who was a hardfisted opponent dedicated to defeating the Confederacy. But surely the complex plot of April 14, with its multiple targets, embodied more than a simple act of hatred.

Fraser also doubted greed was the motive. A financial motive might grow out of the Northern blockade, which reduced Southerners to desperate schemes to smuggle cotton and tobacco past Union warships. A witness at the conspiracy trial said he spent days at the Surratt tavern in March 1865, waiting for cotton that Atzerodt was to sneak across the Potomac River. Although Fraser felt ill-equipped to evaluate such a commercial question, he did not see how material gain could justify the risks associated with killing the president. There were less dangerous ways to make money.

To Fraser, one feature of Booth's plot seemed most important: its breathtaking scope. Though Booth's coconspirators proved unequal to their tasks, the plan involved nothing less than the decapitation of the United States Government. The president was to die. So was the vice president, along with the Secretary of State and the senior general of the army. That was not the act of a deranged mind. Rather, it was a
policy.
Was the plot an act of war by the Confederate government? That had been Mr. Bingham's theory and he never abandoned it. The timing of the assassination weighed against it. The assassination occurred so late that it was hardly likely to save the Confederacy. Five days before, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. Other Confederate armies were melting away, their soldiers headed home. Yet only the Confederate government had so strong an interest in striking that powerful blow against the entire United States Government.

Confederates from Jefferson Davis on down had denied any involvement in Booth's plot. For Fraser, those denials didn't butter a lot of parsnips. What else could they say? Accused of a heinous crime, denial is the only sensible response for guilty and innocent alike.

A Southern spy, Thomas Conrad, had claimed after the war that the Confederate secret service planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, just as Booth intended to. If Booth was acting for the Confederacy in the kidnapping, wasn't it logical that he was ordered to convert the plot to one of assassination?

Booth, of course, was the key. He wasn't just a Confederate sympathizer. He was a Confederate agent. In October 1864, he traveled to Montreal to meet with Confederates who were plotting invasions of the North. After his death, investigators found in his trunk the key to a cipher used by Confederate agents to encode secret messages. Only a Confederate agent would have that cipher. And when Samuel Arnold wrote to Booth about the assassination plot in late March 1865, he urged, “Go and see how it will be taken in R——d”—Richmond! Also, Booth traveled twice to Southern Maryland before the assassination, each time finding Confederate agents like the Surratts. After the assassination, he found more agents to aid him during his flight. Only an agent could find so many other agents.

As the conspiracy's leader, Booth would know who was pulling the strings behind it, but that trail ran cold when he died. Dead men tell no tales. The killing of Booth itself seemed suspicious. He was shot as he stood alone in a burning barn, surrounded by Union soldiers. The sergeant who pulled the trigger claimed that Booth was about to shoot at the soldiers. Yet how much risk can a man in a burning barn pose to men safely outside and able to take cover? It was certainly convenient that Booth never could tell his story.

What of the Surratts? In a lecture delivered in 1870, John Surratt described himself as a Confederate agent, carrying messages between Richmond and Washington and New York and Canada. Like other Confederate agents, he used his mother's tavern in Surrattsville as a way station. Booth stopped at that tavern as he fled Washington after the assassination. But then Surratt was spirited out of the country and later out of the hemisphere. That, too, was convenient. Had someone been tidying up loose ends?