As if any one of them can substitute for John! As if even all together they can conjure half of Mother’s love for him! As if he doesn’t know that he’s consigned Rosalie, for the rest of her life, to try to be enough for Mother and to fail.
The second letter is addressed To Whom It May Concern. “This country was formed for the white not the black man,” John says.
And looking upon African slavery from the same stand-point, held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one, have ever considered it, one of the greatest blessings （both for themselves and us,） that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power. Witness their elevation in happiness . . . no one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition . . .
* * *
—
Like Mother, Edwin finds it impossible to sleep alone. His friend William Bispham shares his bed at night. During the day, Edwin stays inside, afraid to be seen in public. After dark, he walks the streets with Bispham and Aldrich. Everyone who loves him is afraid that he will drink, but he doesn’t.
He speaks often of the day he saved Robert Lincoln at the train station. The story, which he’d hardly remembered, has become one of his great comforts.
He tells Bispham he doesn’t know when it all went wrong for John. He was a loving child and so full of fun. They’d all adored him. He wonders what Father would have said. June writes with his usual stolid pragmatism that he expects they all will recover in time with the exception of Mother, who will clearly never recover.
At the suggestion of Thomas Aldrich, Edwin writes an autobiography of his childhood as a gift to Edwina, who has been with Asia since before the assassination. This fills a few days. As soon as he finishes, he destroys it.
He writes letters.
He writes to Asia daily: “。 . . imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”
He writes to Adam that he takes comfort in the knowledge that one great heart will never forsake him. He doesn’t mean Adam though no heart is more his than Ad’s. He means Blanche Hanel.
He writes to the American people:
. . . It has pleased God to lay at the door of my afflicted family the life-blood of our great, good and martyred President. Prostrated to the very earth by this dreadful event, I am yet too sensible that other mourners fill the land. To them, to you, one and all go forth our deep unutterable sympathy; our abhorrence and detestation for this most foul and atrocious of crimes . . .
He receives letters.
Blanche Hanel writes to end their engagement.
The American people write, one at a time and anonymously, that his life is forfeit; there is a bullet waiting for him, they hate the very name of Booth, and that his next performance will be a tragedy.
* * *
—
The family exists in a kind of twilight where the full dark can’t come on until they know where John is and what will happen to him.
iii
June and Sleeper are arrested together at the Clarke house in Philadelphia on suspicion of conspiracy. They’re taken in handcuffs to Washington and the Old Capitol Prison, where they share a cell. Sleeper spends one month there, June two. Roaches and rats, June says, and intolerable heat. And interrogations.
Others have been arrested as well. Michael O’Laughlen and Samuel Arnold are also in custody here. Each withdrew from the plot when John moved the planned kidnapping from some remote country lane to Ford’s Theatre, where, he said, Lincoln would be subdued, handcuffed, and lowered on ropes from his box to the stage. This was a preposterous plan—suicidal, Arnold told him—and the fact that John couldn’t see that shook them. They were both out by the time the kidnapping became an assassination.
As a result, they’ll escape the noose. Instead, along with Dr. Mudd, they’ll be sent to the prison of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, where O’Laughlen, the little boy who once trailed after John and the Bully Boys up and down Exeter Street, will die of yellow fever.
Also arrested: George Atzerodt, an immigrant from Prussia, whose mission on the 14th was to kill the vice president. He’d lost his nerve and spent the night drinking instead.
A Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, nicknamed Lewis the Terrible for his savagery, and sent by John to kill the Secretary of State. Seward had already been hurt in a carriage accident and was in bed under a doctor’s care, when Powell forced his way in. He beat one of Seward’s sons senseless with his pistol, stabbed another. He struck Fanny, Seward’s lovely daughter, with his fist, climbed onto Seward’s bed, and stabbed him five times in the neck and face. He left six people bleeding, then ran from the house, shouting, “I’m mad! I’m mad!” only to discover that David Herold, the twenty-three-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who was supposed to be waiting with the horses, had already fled.
Everyone in the Seward household will survive. Atzerodt, Powell, and Herold will not. They will hang, along with Mary Surratt, at whose boardinghouse the plotting is suspected of taking place.
* * *
—
As to June and Sleeper:
The government has letters from June to John about the oil business, which in June’s case means the oil business, but amongst co-conspirators has meant the plot. The government has nothing on Sleeper beyond Asia’s concealment of John’s comings and goings, but this seems to be enough to hold him. June is philosophical. Sleeper is furious. Why is he locked up when Edwin is not?
Asia is kept out of prison by her pregnancy. She remains under house arrest, an agent placed inside to watch her every move. This agent wants to add his wife to the household. He’s disturbed that Asia isn’t crying. He thinks she needs a woman’s sympathy. Asia needs nothing of the kind.
She needs her mother. She’s learned that she’s carrying twins and either from that or the tragedy her life has become, the pregnancy is at risk. The nurse who’s been tending her refuses now to do so because she’s a Booth. Her doctor sends word that he’s too frightened to come. Only Becky, the nursemaid, has been willing to stay. Asia is all but alone except for the children and the federal agents.
Probably nothing else could have gotten Mother out of bed. On hearing of Asia’s distress, she rises silently, packs her bag, and asks Edwin to take her to the train. She’s on her way to Philadelphia when she learns that John is dead. Sitting, looking out the window, pretending she sees the fields and copses, the towns and churches, the whole brutal charade passing, while the other passengers whistle and cheer.
iv
There are so many times John Wilkes Booth could have died. He could have drowned while at St. Timothy’s Hall; he could have frozen while fetching a cow. Matthew Canning’s bullet could have severed his femoral artery. Secessionists could have murdered him in Montgomery, Alabama. He could have been killed in the New York draft riots. He could have died of St. Anthony’s fire.
Instead it happens thirteen days too late and in this way: He’s fled with David Herold who, having abandoned Powell at the Sewards’， reconnoitered with John. They’re tracked to a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, before dawn on April 26th. Herold surrenders, but John won’t come out. He seems to think he should be given a sporting chance. “Be fair and give me a show. Draw your men off fifty yards,” he shouts, a courtesy he didn’t extend to Lincoln. Nor is it given to him.