Mourning Lincoln by Martha Hodes Page B

alike must have found some relief in the fact that most of Lincoln’s mourners trained a good portion of their wrath on Booth. Editors at the
San Francisco Elevator
called him vile and awretch, but mourners didn’t need journalists to tell them that—they readily cast the assassin as a scoundrel, a fiend, a dog, and a demon. To capture John Wilkes Booth alive was the hope of many mourners, since death was a “gift to martyrs,” and it was the president who should be martyred, not his murderer. The bereaved wanted to see Booth suffer, and with blood boiling (mourners invoked that phrase to describe their anger), they devised the means. Like many, seventeen-year-old Clara Allen believed that hanging would be too mild and that Booth should be “tortured in some way.” Outside Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, people were already exchanging suggestions for the particulars: Hang him from the first lamppost available or cut him to pieces before a lamppost could even be found. Flog him. Shoot him like a dog. Burn him alive slowly. Hang him until almost dead, then “resuscitate him and repeat the procedure for several days.” In Cincinnati, where another Booth brother was appearing at the opera house, the theater had to be closed on the morning of Lincoln’s death, in the face of a furious mob, as Junius Brutus Booth Jr. hurried out of town on an early train. 18
    The War Department printed up “wanted” posters for John Wilkes Booth, promising a reward of a hundred thousand dollars, but imagining one’s own participation in Booth’s torment offered special satisfaction beyond a monetary reward. Troops gathered around campfires, conjuring their actions should they personally catch the guilty party. Some wanted to operate the hangman’s noose themselves. A white soldier wanted to chain up Booth and place four black men ready to brand him with hot irons if he tried to sleep, “till he died dead,” while Billy Patterson of the Seventeenth Maine wanted to “fry his liver before his very eyes.” Such scenes were influenced by popular travel accounts that purported to disclose the brutal violence of honor and vengeance in the southern backwoods, entertaining readers with depictions of gouged eyes and severed limbs. John Worthington, an upstate New York banker, bested all the soldiers’ plans for Booth when he told his sister that he wanted to “tear him slowly in pieces, kill him by inches, pull out his toe-nails & pick out his rascally eyes with a fork. Cut out his tongue, break his arms & leg’s & at last hang him on a nail by one eyelid.” 19
    Although Lincoln’s mourners envisioned such tortures for Booth in particular, they did not confine their vindictive thoughts to the killer and his immediate circle, not by far. Rather, the Confederacy as a whole had emboldened Booth to commit the deed, and as a rational criminal, he had acted in the spirit of the rebels, including the violation of law and the U.S. Constitution. From Virginia, black Civil War correspondent Thomas Morris Chester explained the assassination as “another one of the infamous crimes which logically followed the efforts of treason to dismember the Union.” According to a Maryland Unionist, Booth had been spurred on by all who had ever prayed for Lincoln’s death, even by anyone who had ever so much as called the president a despot. In the pages of her spare diary, African American servant and night-school student Emilie Davis called Booth the “Confederate villain,” thereby plainly associating him with the rebels, and white schoolgirl Sarah Putnam likewise named all Confederates as guilty when she wrote, “The rebels only hurt their own cause when they assassinated dear old Lincoln.” 20

    The War Department’s “wanted” poster promised a reward for the capture of the assassin of the “late beloved President,” displaying an image of John Wilkes Booth, along with conspirators John Surratt and David Herold (with both their