American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [8]
Unlike the assassins a century later, Booth was well-known around the country. He was an American matinee idol who made the then-princely sum of about $20,000 a year at the peak of his theater career. Lincoln even saw him once in a play at Ford’s Theatre called The Marble Heart, and was so impressed he asked to meet Booth backstage. Booth declined. 1 Maybe he already had something else in mind.
As Lincoln once put it, “There are a thousand ways to getting at a man if it is desired that he should be killed.” As early as when he took the train to Washington for his inauguration, a paramilitary group was prepared to kill him when his train stopped in Baltimore. The plan was discovered and Lincoln warned ahead of time, so he was already tucked away in a hotel in Washington. But he still resisted the idea of having bodyguards. 2
The next plot we know about involved biological warfare. That’s right, it’s not a new idea. A group in Canada—which was a haven for Confederate spies—had the notion to spread clothing infected with yellow fever into certain Northern population centers. Lincoln was to receive a poisoned expensive dress shirt from an anonymous admirer. The whole scheme was pretty hare-brained and never got off the ground, but the Confederate leadership apparently knew about it and didn’t bat an eye before it fell apart. 3
Things got serious after some papers were found on the body of a Colonel Dahlgren, who was killed on a raid while trying to free some Union prisoners. The papers said that, once the Union made it into the Confederate capital, Richmond, “it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and cabinet killed.” 4 Of course, this could have been a made-up excuse. But Jefferson Davis is said to have had his agents prowling around the White House area by September 1864, monitoring Lincoln’s movements. They were looking to kidnap the president and hold him hostage.
Booth hooked up with the conspirators somewhere around this time, after he joined a rebel spy network called Knights of the Golden Circle. 5 His first scheme was to abduct Lincoln from the presidential box at Ford’s Theater, but the president didn’t show up that night. Then, when Booth found out about Lincoln planning to visit some convalescing soldiers at a hospital on a sparsely traveled road, they decided to try to nab him from his carriage. Again, Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute. Instead—talk about ironies!—he went to give a speech at a ceremony held in the same hotel where Booth was living! 6
As late as the end of March 1865, Booth still had a kidnap operation in mind. In one of the books I read about the assassination, it was speculated that “the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender may well have caused Booth to conclude that capturing Lincoln no longer had a strategic purpose.” 7 Then there was another plot that didn’t involve Booth—to blow up the White House during a meeting of the cabinet.
On the night of April 14, Booth met with three of his coconspirators around eight o’clock. This was the first any of them knew about something other than a kidnapping. George Atzerodt was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson; Lewis Powell, accompanied by David Herold, was to take out Secretary of State William Seward at his home. They were all to make their escape from the Capitol on horseback into Confederate territory. 8
The story goes that, before he went into the theater, Booth went to bolster his courage in a nearby bar, where a drunken customer told him: “You’ll never be the actor your father was.” 9 To which Booth replied: “When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America.”
Now here’s the strange part. For Booth to fulfill his mission, “it required information that could only have come from the highest sources in Washington.”10 In the first place, Lincoln’s attending a play that night hadn’t been publicly announced. Carrying a single-shot derringer pistol and a knife, Booth had to walk through a crowded theater and then pass through two