The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth: Assassin of President Lincoln

THE ESCAPE AND SUICIDE OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH

..................

Assassin of President Lincoln

Finis Langdon Bates

LACONIA PUBLISHERS

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Copyright © 2016 by Finis Langdon Bates

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION

PREFACE

CHAPTER I.: LINCOLN—BOOTH

CHAPTER II.: JOHN ST. HELEN

CHAPTER III.: JOHN ST. HELEN LECTURES ROLAND REED

CHAPTER IV.: ST. HELEN’S ILLNESS

CHAPTER V.: ST. HELEN’S IDENTITY REVEALED

CHAPTER VI.: THE ASSASSINATION

CHAPTER VII.: THE MAN KILLED AT THE GARRETT HOME

CHAPTER VIII.: THE SEPARATION

CHAPTER IX.: THE PURSUIT OF BOOTH

CHAPTER X.: THE EAST POTOMAC BRIDGE

CHAPTER XI.: THE HAND OF SECRETARY STANTON

CHAPTER XII.: GEN. DANA IDENTIFIES BOOTH.

CHAPTER XIII.: A BALTIMOREAN STILL.

CHAPTER XIV.: INFORMING THE WAR DEPARTMENT THAT BOOTH LIVES.

CHAPTER XV.: GEN. ALBERT PIKE IDENTIFIES BOOTH.

CHAPTER XVI.: PRESS COMMENTS ON THE SUICIDE OF DAVID E. GEORGE.

CHAPTER XVII.: THESE ARE PICTURES OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

CHAPTER XVIII.: READING THE PALM OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

CHAPTER XIX.: JOSEPH JEFFERSON IDENTIFIES JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

CHAPTER XX.: JUNIUS BRUTUS BOOTH IDENTIFIES HIS UNCLE. JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

ESCAPE AND SUICIDE

OF

JOHN WILKES BOOTH,

ASSASSIN

OF

PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

BY

FINIS L. BATES.

DEDICATION

..................

TO THE ARMIES AND NAVIES of the late Civil War, fought between the States of North America, from 1861 to 1865, this book is dedicated.

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE

..................

IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS book I have neither spared time or money, since I became satisfied that John Wilkes Booth was not killed, as has been supposed, at the Garrett home in Virginia, on the 26th day of April, 1865, and present this volume of collated facts, which I submit for the correction of history, respecting the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the death or escape of John Wilkes Booth.

Personally, I know nothing of President Lincoln, and knew nothing of John Wilkes Booth until my meeting with John St. Helen, at my home in Texas, in the year 1872.

The picture which John St. Helen left with me for the future identification of himself in his true name and personality, was first identified by Gen. D. D. Dana, of Lubec, Maine, as John Wilkes Booth, January 17, 1898.

The second time by Junius Brutus Booth, the third, of Boston, Mass., (he being the oldest living nephew of John Wilkes Booth), on the 21st day of February, 1903, at Memphis, Tenn.

The third time by the late Joe Jefferson (the world’s famous Rip Van Winkle), at Memphis, Tennessee, on the 14th day of April, 1903, just thirty-eight years to a day from the date of the assassination of President Lincoln. I here make mention of this identification because of its importance. Among the personal acquaintances of John Wilkes Booth none would know him better than Mr. Jefferson, who was most closely associated with him for several years, both playing together on the same stage. I know of no man whose knowledge of Booth is more to be trusted, or whose words of identification will carry more weight to the world at large. While there are many other important personages equally to be relied upon that have identified his pictures there is none other so well known to the general public, having identified the picture taken of John St. Helen, in 1877, as being that of John Wilkes Booth—thus establishing the fact of actual physical proof that John Wilkes Booth was living in 1872, when I met him under the name of John St. Helen, as also when he had his picture taken and left with me in the late winter or early spring of 1878, twelve years after the assassination of President Lincoln.

It is well in this connection to call attention to other physical proofs of the identification of John Wilkes Booth by referring to the deformed right thumb, just where it joined the hand, and the mismatched brows, his right brow being arched and unlike the left. The deformity of the right thumb was caused by its having been crushed in the cogs of the machinery used for the hoisting of a stage curtain. The arched brow was caused by Booth being accidentally cut by McCullum with a sabre while they were at practice as the characters of Richard and Richmond, the point of McCullum’s sword cutting a gash through the right brow, which had to be stitched up, and in healing became arched. And especially attention is called to the identity of these marks in his pictures, more particularly the one at the age of 64, taken of him while he was dead and lying in the morgue. During life Booth carried a small cane between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand to conceal that defect; observe this cane in his hand, in the picture of him at the age of 27. These physical marks on Booth’s body settle without argument his identity. However, in all instances of investigation I have sought the highest sources of information and give the conclusive facts supported by physical monument and authentic record.

Wherefore, it is by this authority I state the verified truth with impartiality for the betterment of history, to the enlightment of the present and future generations of mankind, respecting the assassination of one of America’s most universally beloved Presidents and the fate of his assassin.

FINIS L. BATES.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF

THE UNITED STATES,

AND

JOHN WILKES BOOTH, THE ACTOR.

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

BY JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

CHAPTER I.

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LINCOLN—BOOTH

PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN near Salem, Kentucky, United States of America, in a log cabin, on the 12th day of February, 1809, of humble parentage, and was president of the Northern Federal States of America, after the secession of the Southern States, beginning March 4th, 1861, whereby was brought about a temporary dissolution of the Union of the United States of America, when the political issues of the rights of States to withdraw and secede from the Union of States and the constitutional right slavery of the black race, as had been promulgated since, before and beginning with the independence of, and federation of the American Colonies; afterward transformed into sovereign State governments.

When, for the settlement of these issues appeal was had to the bloody arbitrament of battle, in the Civil War fought between the Federal States on the one side, with Abraham Lincoln as President and commander-in-chief of the Federal Army and Navy, with his site of government at Washington, D. C. and Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern seceded States, called the Confederate States of America, and commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the Southern Confederate States, with his site of government at the city of Richmond, and capital of the State of Virginia, situated approximately one hundred miles to the south from Washington City.

Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated President of the Federal States, at Washington, D. C. March 4th, 1861, and remained President until he received his mortal wound at the hands of his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, while seated with a party of friends in a private box attending Ford’s Theater, in Washington, D. C. on the evening of the 14th day of April, 1865, and died from his wound on the early morning of April the 15th, 1865.

Mr. Lincoln was a lawyer pre-eminent in his profession, and had never associated himself with any church organization, and, in fact, was a deist, as also a firm believer in dreams, and to him they were presentiments forecasting coming events.

John Wilkes Booth was born near the city of Baltimore, on a farm, in the State of Maryland, in the year 1838, and was at the time of the assassination of President Lincoln about 27 years of age, and famous as an actor. He came from a family distinguished as actors and politicians in England as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being descended from Burton Booth, the most popular actor with the English royalty known to history, and pronounced of all actors the greatest Macbeth the world has ever produced.

Henry Booth, Earl of Warrington, was his great great-uncle, and John Wilkes, the Democratic reformer, in that he caused the extension of the franchise or right of ballot, to the common people of England, and who was at one time Lord Mayor of London, was his great-great-grandfather on his great-grandmother’s side. While John Wilkes of England was distinguished for his great mental ability, he was equally distinguished for being the ugliest man in all England, while his wife was the most beautiful woman England had produced to her day.

John Wilkes Booth gets his name of John Wilkes from his great-great-grandfather, and his strikingly handsome personality from his great-great-grandmother. Thus it is said that John Wilkes Booth is given to the world from an ancestry known to England in their day as the Beauty and Beast.

John Wilkes Booth was a partisan in his sympathies for the success of the Southern Confederate States in the Civil War, bold and outspoken in his friendship for the South and his well wishes for the triumph of the Southern cause. In politics a Democrat, and by religion a Catholic, and a son of Junius Brutus Booth, the first, who was known to all men of his day as the master of the art of dramatic acting, being himself descended from the Booth family of actors in England, pre-eminently great as tragedians since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

CHAPTER II.

..................

JOHN ST. HELEN

I HAVE LONG HESITATED TO give to the world the true story of the plot first to kidnap and finally assassinate President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and others, as related to me in 1872, and at other times thereafter, by one then known to me as John St. Helen, but in truth and in fact, as afterward developed, John Wilkes Booth himself, in person telling this story more than seven years after the assassination of President Lincoln, and the supposed killing of Booth at the Garret home, in Virginia. Far removed from the scene of his crime, he told me the tale of his dastardly deed at Grandberry, Hood county, Texas, a then comparative frontier town of the great Western empire of these American States.

This story I could not accept as a fact without investigation, believing, as the world believed, that John Wilkes Booth had been killed at the Garret home in Virginia on or about the 26th day of April, 1865, by one Boston Corbett, connected with the Federal troops in pursuit of him, after he (Booth) had been passed through the Federal military lines which formed a complete cordon surrounding the City of Washington, D. C. on the night of and after the assassination of President Lincoln. But after many years of painstaking and exhaustive investigation, I am now unwillingly, and yet unanswerably, convinced that it is a fact that Booth was not killed, but made good his escape by the assistance of some of the officers of the Federal Army and government of the United States, located at Washington—traitors to President Lincoln, in whose keeping was his life—co-operating with Capt. Jett and Lieuts. Ruggles and Bainbridge, of the Confederate troops, belonging to the command of Col. J. S. Mosby, encamped at Bowling Green, Virginia. And the correctness of these statements, as well as to my convictions, the readers of this story must witness for or against the conclusion reached, for it is to the American people that I appeal that they shall hear the unalterable facts to the end that they may bear testimony with me to the civilized world that the death of America’s martyred President, Lincoln, was not avenged, as we have been persuaded to believe, and that it remained the pleasure of the assassin to take his own life as how and when it best pleased him, conscious of his great individual crime and the nation’s loss by the death of President Lincoln, the commission of which crime takes rank among the epochs of time equaled only by the crucifixion of Christ and the assassination of Caesar; in the contemplation of which the physical man chills with indignant emotions and the cold blood coursing his viens makes numb the fingers recording the crime that laid President Lincoln in the silent halls of death and made Tad fatherless. But the truth will be told, if needs be, with tremors and palsied hands, in the triumph of right and the exposure of the guilty ones whose crimes blacken history’s page and to associate their names through all coming centuries with Brutus, Marc Antony and Judas Iscariot, if they are to be condemned in the story that is to be told.

In the spring of 1872 I was entering the threshold of manhood, a lawyer yet in my teens, in the active practice of my profession, having settled at Grandberry, the county site of Hood county, in the State of Texas, near the foothills of the Bosque mountains. Among my first clients in this locality was a man who had been indicted by the grand jury of the Federal Court, sitting at Tyler, Smith county, Texas, for selling tobacco and whiskey at Glenrose Mills, situated in Hood county, twenty miles to the southwest of Grandberry, who had failed first to obtain a license, as required by the Federal statutes, as a privilege for carrying on such business. The penalty for the violation of this law being punishable as a misdemeanor by a fine and imprisonment, or either fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of the court. Hood county at this time was well out on the frontier of the State, and the country to within a few miles of Grandberry was frequently raided by the savage Comanche Indians.

Glenrose Mills was located immediately on the Bosque river, which flows at the base of the Bosque mountains, while at this point on the river was located a mill run by water power from the falls of the river, and on the bank of the river was located two or three small log houses, together with the old mill house constituting the buildings of the place called Glenrose Mills. One of these log houses was used as a storehouse by the man known to me as John St. Helen, which place, or house, however, for a year or so prior to St. Helen’s occupancy had been occupied as a store by a merchant doing a general mercantile business, in a small way, carrying with his line of goods tobacco and whiskey for the retail trade, as did St. Helen in this place, as his successor in business at Glenrose Mills. The former merchant having removed from Glenrose Mills to Grandberry, opened up his business in the latter place before and continued his business in Grandberry after St. Helen had begun business at Glenrose. St. Helen occupied this log house not only as a store, but the back part of the same as living apartments for himself and a negro man servant, or porter, he having no family or known relatives or intimate friends within the time he was doing business at this house in Glenrose. For some reason unknown to me and my client, the merchant at Grandberry and former merchant at Glenrose had been indicted for having done business at Glenrose—selling tobacco and whiskey in the house occupied by St. Helen, in violation of the laws of the United States, as mentioned. This client had been arrested by the United States marshal and had given bond for his appearance at Tyler, Texas, to answer the United States government on a charge in two cases of selling tobacco and whiskey without first obtaining a privilege license, as required by law.

On ascertaining this state of facts, I sought St. Helen, with whom I had at this time only a casual acquaintance, and learned from him that he (St. Helen) was as a matter of fact doing business at Glenrose Mills, in the house formerly occupied by my client, the then merchant of Grandberry, who had been doing business at this stand, selling, among other articles of merchandise, tobacco and whiskey, and that he had done so without a license, as required by the government of the United States, and was so doing this business at the time, as alleged in the indictment against the Grandberry merchant, so that I insisted, as a means of protection to my client, that St. Helen should attend the Federal Court as a witness for the defendant, to testify to this state of facts, showing that the defendant merchant had been wrongfully indicted, confessedly so by St. Helen, who was at this time doing the very business of which my client was charged, without first having a license (for which my client had been indicted), and for which he was to stand trial in a short time before the Federal Court at Tyler. While St. Helen admitted his guilt and the innocence of my client, he declined to attend the court in any capacity on behalf of my client, without at this time giving to me any satisfactory reason as to why he would not do so, and when he was informed with more earnestness than was reasonably polite that any and all the known processes of the law of the Federal Court would be called into requisition to compel his attendance on the court, as he had been requested to do, and if need be witnesses would go before the Federal grand jury to have him indicted for the offense with which my client was wrongfully charged. St. Helen asked time to consider the matter, promising to act honorably in the affair, to the complete protection of the wronged man, conditioned that he (St. Helen) should be protected from indictment and from any other process which would carry him before the Federal Court. With this agreement we separated for the few intervening days requested by him.

At this interview it was plainly to be seen that St. Helen was sorely troubled and seemed to think his final determination in the matter would be fraught with the greatest consequences to himself, much more, I thought, than was due to the apprehension of a possible conviction for the charges alleged against my client. But upon consideration of the matter I was led to the conclusion that his restless and uneasy manner was due to his long outdoor life on the plains, and that by force of habit he had acquired that restless and hunted, worried expression constantly on his face, while the flashes which came from his keen, penetrating black eyes spoke of desperation and capacity for crime. All this time his breath came hard, almost to a wheeze, superinduced by excitement, or what seemed to