Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Page A

waiting outside the Seward home, and there was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the bone that John Wilkes Booth had broken when he jumped to the stage. There were also Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, who had helped plan the scheme, and Edman Spangler, the carpenter who worked at Ford’s Theatre. The lone woman was the widowed Mary Surratt, whose Washington boardinghouse and Maryland tavern were linked to the conspirators. Also wanted was Surratt’s son John, who worked for the Confederate secret service; he had not been in Washington on the appointed evening and soon escaped to Canada, then to England, then Rome, then Egypt. But it was the man who pulled the trigger on Lincoln—still at large—who dominated the minds of mourners.
    In the immediate aftermath, gleeful Confederates had exalted John Wilkes Booth, with Rodney Dorman calling him a “great public benefactor” and others cheering him on and welcoming him to the South. At the same time, however, Confederates were careful to lay the blame squarely on Booth, keen to confine the guilt to a single perpetrator and his lone circle of collaborators. Even as rebels gloried in the killer’s actions, it was important to separate him from all who had fought for the just and noble cause of the Confederacy, and it was equally important to exempt themselves from Union wrath. One way to accomplish this was by casting Booth—despite his heroic status—as mentally unstable. A Georgia woman worried that the Yankees would blame the whole Confederacy when the assassination wasnothing more than the “crazy deed of a madman.” A New Orleans planter believed it had been an act of “some private revenge, and not at all political,” undertaken by a “crazy play Actor.” It was the “work of a lunatic,” others said, the efforts of a man “imbued with tyrannicidal monomania.” As for the larger conspiracy, it was the work of “a few poor fanatics” or “desperadoes.” 16
    A smaller number of Confederates removed Booth from their orbit entirely, instead implicating the Copperheads up north. “I do not believe this to be the work of Southerners,” asserted Cloe Whittle. “I believe it is Northern men who have done it.” A minority of Lincoln’s mourners likewise turned their anger on Copperheads, not only for their public expressions of glee but also as directly responsible for the crime. Caroline Dunstan placed at least some of the blame on the “Northern traitors” she saw around her in New York City. A white lieutenant with the U.S. Colored Troops noticed “how the soldiers curse the Copperheads at home,” and a white soldier named the “traitors up North” as “aiding the South every day,” sure they had “killed President Lincoln to aid this Rebelion.” John Burrud, the Englishman fighting with a New York regiment, peppered letters to his wife with especially intense anti-Copperhead rants. Familiar with Lincoln’s antagonists in his upstate hometown, Burrud claimed to hate Copperheads more even than he hated Confederates. The “meanest and most degraded Southern Rebel,” according to Burrud, was “a
Saint
compared with one of those Copperhead Pipers.” They were fools, idiots, reptiles, and “Black hearted Slavery loveing Demons,” every one of whom should be hanged and sent to hell for the atrocity of Lincoln’s assassination. If they had joined the Confederate army in the first place, Burrud seethed, Union forces could have “rid the Earth of Their poluted carcasses,” but the miscreants were too cowardly, and now Burrud wanted them exterminated (that word again). For their part, Copperheads unsurprisingly agreed with Confederates that the actions of John Wilkes Booth had nothing to do with anyone but himself. As one anti-Lincoln northerner told his friends, gathered at a New York City hotel on the day of Lincoln’s death, the assassin’s act was likely the consequence of a “drunken after dinner boast.” 17
    Confederates and Copperheads