Assassination Vacation Read online

  The Lincoln Memorial is at its loveliest when the sun goes down. It glows. It’s quiet. There are fewer people and the people who are here at this late hour are reverent and subdued, but happy. The lights bounce off the marble and onto their faces so that they glow too, their cheeks burned orange as if they’ve had a sip of that good bourbon with the pretty label brewed near the Kentucky creek where Lincoln was born.

  I read the two Lincoln speeches that are chiseled in the wall in chronological order, Gettysburg first. Shuffling past the Lincoln statue, I pause under the white marble feet, swaying back and forth a little so it looks like his knees move. A moment of whimsy actually opens me up for the Second Inaugural, a speech that is all the things they say — prophetic, biblical, merciful, tough. The most famous phrase is the most presidential: with malice toward none. I revere those words. Reading them is a heartbreaker considering that a few weeks after Lincoln said them at the Capitol he was killed. But in my two favorite parts of the speech, Lincoln is sarcastic. He’s a writer. And in his sarcasm and his writing, he is who he was. He starts off the speech reminding his audience of the circumstances of his First Inaugural at the eve of war. It’s a (for him) long list, remarkably even-handed and restrained, pointing out that both the North and the South were praying to the same god, as if they were just a couple of football teams squaring off in the Super Bowl. Then things turn mischievous: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.” Know what that is? A zinger — a subtle, high-minded, morally superior zinger. I glance back at the Lincoln statue to see if his eyes have rolled. Then, at the end of this sneaky list of the way things were, he simply says, “And the war came.” Kills me every time. Four little words to signify four long years. To call this an understatement is an understatement. To read this speech is to see how Lincoln’s mind worked, to see how he governed, how he lived. There’s the narrative buildup, the explanation, the lists of pros and cons; he came late to abolitionism, sought compromise, hoped to save the Union without war, etc., until all of a sudden the jig is up. The man who came up with that teensy but vast sentence, And the war came, a four-word sentence that summarizes how a couple of centuries of tiptoeing around evil finally stomped into war, a war he says is going to go on “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” is the same chief executive who in 1863 signed the Emancipation Proclamation. I’ve seen that paper. It’s a couple of pages long. But after watching the slavery agony in 1776, I like to think of it as a postcard to Jefferson and Adams, another four-word sentence: Wish you were here.

  When I used to get to the end of the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln calls on himself and his countrymen “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace,” I always wondered how anyone who heard those words could kill the person who wrote them. Because that day at the Capitol, Booth was there, attending the celebration as Lucy Hale’s plus-one. In the famous Alexander Gardner photograph of Lincoln delivering the speech, you can spot Booth right above him, lurking. And what was Booth’s reaction to hearing Lincoln’s hopes for “binding up the nation’s wounds”? Booth allegedly told a friend, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the president, if I had wished, on Inauguration Day!”

  I used to march down the memorial’s steps mourning the loss of the second term Lincoln would never serve. But I don’t think that way anymore. Ever since I had to build those extra shelves in my apartment to accommodate all the books about presidential death — I like to call that corner of the hallway “the assassination nook” — I’m amazed Lincoln got to live as long as he did. In fact, I’m walking back to my room in the Willard Hotel, the same hotel where Lincoln had to sneak in through the ladies’ entrance before his first inauguration because the Pinkerton detectives uncovered a plot to do him in in Baltimore before he even got off the train from Springfield. All through his presidency, according to his secretary John Hay, Lincoln kept a desk drawer full of death threats. Once, on horseback between the White House and his summer cottage on the outskirts of town, a bullet whizzed right by his head. So tonight, I leave the memorial knowing that the fact that Lincoln got to serve his whole first term is a kind of miracle.

  Mary Surratt’s D.C. boardinghouse, where John Wilkes Booth gathered his co-conspirators to plot Lincoln’s death, is now a Chinese restaurant called Wok & Roll. I place an order for broccoli and bubble tea, then squint at an historic marker in front of the restaurant quoting Andrew Johnson that this was “the nest in which the egg was hatched.” For her southern hospitality, Mrs. Surratt, who owned this boardinghouse as well as the tavern in Maryland where Booth would proceed after shooting Lincoln, would become the first woman executed by the U.S. government. She was hanged, along with George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Lewis Powell, in 1865. Here in her former boardinghouse sat Booth, Atzerodt, Herold, and Powell, along with Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin, and Mary’s weasel son John, who would hightail it to Europe after the assassination, leaving his mom to get strung up in his stead.

  The plot to murder Abraham Lincoln started out as a plot to kidnap him, or rather it was one of several such kidnapping schemes. In their landmark study Come Retribution, William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David Winfred Gaddy make a convincing case that John Wilkes Booth was a member of the Confederate Secret Service throughout the Civil War. Booth claimed to have been running messages and medicine across the lines for years, often traveling to and from Canada to confer with Confederate spooks up there. Booth was able to do this, to move freely between North and South, because he was a nationally famous actor, just as movie stars today get whisked through airport security while the rest of us stand in long lines taking off our shoes. The Confederates were shrewd to take advantage of Booth’s fame. There is a lesson here for the terrorists of the world: if they really want to get ahead, they should put less energy into training illiterate ten-year-olds how to fire Kalashnikovs and start recruiting celebrities like George Clooney. I bet nobody’s inspected that man’s luggage since the second season of ER.

  Tidwell, Hall, and Gaddy also persuasively and intriguingly argue that the plan to kidnap Lincoln had its origins as a retaliatory measure after it was discovered that Lincoln had authorized the capture of Jefferson Davis. Also, knowing how the Confederate ranks were thinning, General Grant had put a stop to prisoner of war exchanges. The South needed their dwindling stock of soldiers back more than the North. And so the notion of kidnapping President Lincoln and exchanging him for southern POWs seemed logical and appealing, though by most accounts Davis himself seemed most aware of the consequences — that odds are, kidnapping the president of the United States is going to get said president killed. Even Davis thought himself above such dishonorable unpleasantness.

  Then, on April 9, 1865, Appomattox. The war was winding down and the POWs would soon go home. Kidnapping Lincoln no longer served much purpose. There’s no real consensus among historians as to when exactly the kidnapping plan turned into an assassination plot. It seems likely that Booth changed his mind first and then egged on his partners in crime. Booth and Powell were there on the White House lawn on April 11 — a mere two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to U. S. Grant — when Lincoln gave his speech on reconstruction. To me, this speech is unsatisfying, proposing to extend the right to vote to “very intelligent” blacks and/or those who fought for the Union — black men it goes without saying. But to Booth this halfhearted suggestion was the revelation of an electoral apocalypse. He told Powell, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by god, I will put him through. That will be the last speech he will ever make.” It was.

  Booth’s plan was to kill the nation’s top three leaders so the federal government would dissolve into chaos. Booth would shoot Lincoln. George Atzerodt was to murder Vice President Johnson. (He chickened out at the last minute, so Johnson would live long enough to be
impeached.) Lewis Powell was in charge of offing Secretary of State Seward. Booth’s shooting of Lincoln tends to upstage these secondary assassination plots, but the Seward episode is especially action-packed.

  Around the same time Booth was at Ford’s Theatre, Powell went to Seward’s house on Lafayette Square. Seward was upstairs asleep in his sickbed, recovering from a well-publicized carriage accident a few days before in which he broke his jaw and an arm. Fanny Seward, his daughter, and soldier George Robinson were in the room watching over him.

  Powell knocked on the door, talking his way in by claiming to be delivering medicine. He insisted on giving a pharmacist’s package to Seward himself. Seward’s son Frederick refused to let the stranger up the stairs. In her diary, Fanny, who had remained upstairs with her father, wrote, “Very soon, I heard the sounds of blows…sharp and heavy, with lighter ones in between.” Powell had tried to shoot Frederick Seward, but his gun wouldn’t fire. So Powell pistol-whipped him instead.

  Powell ran up the stairs with the bleeding Fred on his heels. The two burst into Secretary Seward’s room. Powell sliced at Seward with a Bowie knife. Fanny screamed. Robinson jumped Powell, pulling him off Seward. Powell decided to escape, hitting and slicing at the air willy-nilly. By the time he made it down the stairs and out the door, Powell had stabbed or pummeled Seward’s other son Augustus and one of Seward’s colleagues from the State Department. According to Fanny, “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it…it was on everything. The bed had been covered with blood — the blankets and sheet chopped with several blows of the knife.”

  Seward lived. He stayed on in Washington to serve as Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state. After that he retired to his home in Auburn, in western New York. That house is now a museum in his honor.

  The most riveting artifact at the William Seward House is part of the sheet from Seward’s bed the night of the assassination. It’s slashed and bloodstained. Considering that it is a memento of the worst night of their lives, I asked the museum director, Peter Wisbey, why the Sewards saved the bloodstained sheet.

  The Sewards held on to everything, he says, adding, “I think saving the sheet was an act of family history preservation — especially since the assassination attempt had such dire consequences for so many of the family members.” (Technically, everyone whom Powell attacked lived, though Seward’s face would bear the scar from Powell’s knife for the rest of his life, his son Fred would have a painful convalescence, and his wife, Frances, would die a few weeks after the attack, having never recovered from the shock.)

  On February 12, my friend Bennett and I get up very early to make the six-thirty train to Washington to attend the Lincoln’s Birthday wreath ceremony the National Park Service puts on at the Lincoln Memorial every year. The ceremony is very cold and very long — mostly elderly volunteers from archaic organizations placing donut-shaped flower arrangements at the Lincoln statue’s feet. And because he had been such a good sport about getting up so early, I want to make it up to Bennett. After lunch at Old Ebbitt Grill, I settle up the bill and tell him, “I have a surprise for you.”

  I lead him around the corner to the Court of Claims Building. In the courtyard, past the fountain, I point at a plaque, chirping, “Ta-da! This was the site of Secretary of State Seward’s house where he was stabbed in bed the night Lincoln was shot!”

  Bennett looks at the plaque, then back at me, wondering, “This is my surprise? A plaque about Seward?”

  “Uh-huh!”

  He doesn’t say anything for a while, just stands there reading the plaque, shaking his head. It says,

  On this site Commodore John Rodgers built an elegant house in 1831. In it on April 14, 1865, an attempt was made to assassinate W. H. Seward, Secretary of State, by one of the conspirators who murdered Abraham Lincoln the same night.

  Bennett looks at me, rolls his eyes, and silently trudges out of the courtyard.

  I can theoretically grasp that a person might not get excited about a two-dimensional engraving attached to a government building marking the spot where the man who negotiated the purchase of Alaska was knifed by a friend of John Wilkes Booth. But this person? The person who was up for taking a six-thirty train in order to get to a Lincoln’s 195th birthday wreath ceremony? The person who, come to think of it, also went with me to Gettysburg for the 137th anniversary of the reading of the Gettysburg Address? The person who was so excited when we went to the Reagan Presidential Library even though I found it a little disappointing in terms of scholarship? Who three hours earlier, as we were walking past the Library of Congress, pointed at some wormy stonework and taught me the word “vermiculation”? The person with whom I have spent Saturday night at the chess club chatting with a man who went to Reykjavik with Bobby Fischer for his match against Boris Spassky?

  I pride myself on knowing my audience, so I’m shaken by Bennett’s indifference. As he trudges out of the courtyard I harangue him with what I think are other juicy facts about buildings on Lafayette Square, such as, “Right next door: Mark Hanna’s house!”

  “Who was he?”

  “Only William McKinley’s best friend!” Surprisingly, this info also bombs.

  Back home in New York, I’m not ready to give up on making a case for the Seward plaque. I love that thing. I e-mail Bennett the next morning that the Court of Claims Building, where the Seward plaque is hung, was designed by John Carl Warnecke, the architect who helped Jacqueline Kennedy with her historic preservation crusade to save Lafayette Square. After JFK was killed, Mrs. Kennedy hired Warnecke to design his grave at Arlington. In the process (I guess there’s nothing more romantic than poring over graveyard designs), she and Warnecke fell in love. She was having an affair with the man in charge of her slain husband’s tomb. For some reason, Bennett seems to think this sex and death gossip is more interesting than the Seward plaque.

  “Seward plaque,” by the way, has become our synonym for disappointment. When I break it to Bennett that I’m having trouble getting Fiddler on the Roof tickets, a musical he’s keen on seeing because it reminds him of his grandmother’s flight from the shtetl, he answers, “Whatever. I can take it. My people have been getting Seward plaqued for millennia.”

  Underneath the plaque about Powell’s attack, there’s another Seward plaque commemorating March 30, 1867, when Seward, by then Andrew Johnson’s secretary of state, signed the treaty with Russia to purchase what is now the state of Alaska, though it would be disparaged as “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox” for years.

  In 1869, Seward took a trip to Alaska to see what he had bought. One of the stops on his tour was Tongass Island, where the Tlingit tribe threw him one of their famous potlatches, a ceremony of gift giving.

  A totem pole commemorates that night. Nowadays, the Seward pole stands in Saxman Village outside of Ketchikan. When I visited the village, my tour guide, Bill, explained that, unbeknownst to Seward, a potlatch is not a one-night party. Chief Ebbit of the Tlingits sent Seward on his way with “four or five skiploads of gifts — totem poles, canoes. Seward went off with a smile and a wave.” After three years went by, Bill continues, Chief Ebbit was still waiting for Seward to come back and return the favor. Bill sums up the point of the potlatch as, “Let’s say I give you a Volkswagen. Then you give me a Jaguar.” Chief Ebbit never got his Jag. So after seven years of waiting in vain for a return on his investment, the chief commissioned a shame pole in Seward’s honor. That is why the little Seward on top of the Seward totem pole has red paint on his face.

  Seward’s neighbor in the Saxman Native Village Totem Park is his old boss, Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln totem pole here is a spruced-up replica of the weathered original in a museum up in Juneau. Here’s one story about the pole: After the U.S. purchase of Alaska, an American military cutter came across two factions of warring Tlingits. The winners were about to enslave the losers.

  Alaska natives, especially the warlike Tlingit tribes, were unapologetically brutal slave mongers of o
ne another. An Englishman traveling among them while Alaska was still a Russian outpost once described a sort of slave potlatch in which two native slave owners, trying to prove their social status the way massive quantities of blankets would be given away in a potlatch, started shooting their slaves in a deadly spree of one-upmanship. When ten of the slaves were lying there dead, their owners just walked off and left them on the ground because it was considered crass behavior to touch the corpse of a slave. So the Englishman buried the dead slaves himself.

  Slavery, it’s worth remembering, wasn’t a European import, but native to American shores. Most of the American Indians enslaved one another as war booty. Then the southeastern tribes, aping their southern white neighbors, owned black slaves, took their slaves west with them when the U.S. government removed them to Oklahoma. This is actually why I’m technically eligible for membership in the Daughters of the Confederacy — because my slave-owning Indian great-grandfather fought in Arkansas at the Battle of Pea Ridge with the Cherokee Mounted Volunteers in the Confederate Army. And while I am not proud of this Indian slavery footnote — it sickens me — I do not mind bringing it up because it illustrates that American Indians aren’t just sappy cartoons of goodness as seen in the famous 1970s TV commercial in which garbage makes an Indian cry. I inherited my family’s copy of Laws of the Cherokee Nation, published in 1875, and there is, for instance, a statute outlawing murder, presumably because even the oh-so-noble Cherokee were capable of homicide. Same thing with the Tlingit and their neighbors. They weren’t just woodcarvers. They were fighters, fighters with flaws.