Avenging the President: Lew Wallace and Abraham Lincoln

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attended a performance of the popular play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Just five days before, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. With the war all but over, the president had joined in the joyful mood that had swept the capital upon hearing of Lee’s surrender. “I never felt so happy in my life,” Lincoln told his wife.

Arriving at the theater after the play had started, Lincoln and his wife settled into the presidential box to enjoy the comedy, which featured famed actress Laura Keene. Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, his fiancée, accompanied the Lincolns that night. (General Grant and his wife had been invited to attend the play, but they declined the offer in order to visit their children.) As the presidential party watched the action on stage, John Wilkes Booth, a successful actor and strong supporter of the South, slipped unseen into the box where the president sat. Booth placed his derringer pistol against the back of Lincoln’s head and fired.

Making his escape, Booth slashed Major Rathbone with a dagger he held in his left hand before leaping to the stage below, breaking his leg in the process. The astonished crowd heard the well-known actor call out the State of Virginia’s motto, “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants). Others heard him say “The South is avenged!” Six soldiers carried the critically wounded president—the first in the country’s history to be assassinated—out of the theater to a nearby boardinghouse. Lincoln never regained consciousness, and at 7:22 a.m. the next morning, surrounded by doctors and members of the government, he died at the age of fifty-six.

Twelve days after the assassination, Union troops finally found and surrounded Booth, who had taken refuge in a Virginia barn. The soldiers set the barn on fire to force the killer out. One of the soldiers shot Booth as he crept toward the door armed with a carbine. Before he died, Booth said: “Tell my mother—tell my mother that I did it for my country—that I die for my country.” As those nearby helped raise his hands so he could see them, Booth uttered his final words: “Useless. Useless.”

Booth had not acted alone in killing the president. He had gathered around him a band of followers who planned at first to kidnap Lincoln and hold him in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners of war. When that plot failed, the new plan called for Booth to murder the president, Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Payne) to kill Secretary of State William Seward, and George Atzerodt to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson. Although Atzerodt failed to follow through with his assignment, Powell did stab Seward as he lay in bed at his home recovering from a carriage accident. Seward survived Powell’s vicious attack, during which several members of the household were injured.

As a shocked nation attempted to deal with the dreadful news coming from Washington, General Lew Wallace of Indiana was on his way back to his military post in Baltimore, Maryland, following a mission to Mexico on behalf of Lincoln and Grant. The government of Mexico under President BenitoJuarez had been pushed out of power by troops sent by French ruler Louis Napoléon III, who had placed Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian in charge of the country. Wallace had gone to Mexico to attempt to convince Confederate forces in the region to rejoin the Union, help push the French out of Mexico, and restore Juarez’s government to its rightful place. Union officials had also feared that Confederate troops might flee to Mexico and join with the French or establish an independent empire.

Before his death, Lincoln had met with Wallace and approved the mission, but expressed some concern about angering the French. “I suppose it is right,” Lincoln told Wallace, “we should help the oppressed.” Still, the president had warned the Hoosier general to be careful. Although Wallace had established contact with General José María Carvajal, one of Juarez’s commanders, he had been unable to convince Confederate leaders to agree to the plan. Wallace made it back to Baltimore in time to oversee the display of thes casket as part of the president’s funeral train journey from Washington to Lincoln’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.

In early May Wallace received orders to join other Union officers as judges on a military commission authorized by the new president, Andrew Johnson, to try those charged with plotting to kill Lincoln and other government officials. The finding of the commission would be final, with no chance for appeal except directly to President Johnson.

The North wanted vengeance for the dead president. Government officials also wanted quick action. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles noted in his diary that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had told him he wanted those responsible for the assassination “to be tried and executed before President Lincoln was buried.” The eight persons on trial at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington were Powell, Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold, Edman Spangler, David Herold, Michael O’Laughlin, Dr. Samuel Mudd, and Mary Surratt. Another person involved in the plot, John Surratt, Mary Surratt’s son, fled the country.

Mary Surratt, who ran a boardinghouse where the conspirators met, and Dr. Mudd, who treated Booth’s broken leg, were charged with aiding those planning the killing. Arnold and O’Laughlin were accused of being involved in the assassination plot. Powell, Atzerodt, Spangler, and Herold were indicted for their participation in the attacks on government officials. During their confinement, many of the prisoners were shackled and had to wear heavy cloth hoods over their heads.

At first, the military commission met in secret. Only later did the government agree to open the trial to selected members of the public and press. Those who wanted to attend had to receive a special pass from Major General David Hunter, who served as president of the commission. Hundreds of witnesses appeared before the commission on behalf of the prosecution and defense from May 9 to June 29. During the long, hot days of testimony, Wallace, the only lawyer among the army officers on the commission, passed the time by making sketches of the commission members, the spectators, and all of the defendants except for Mary Surratt, who spent most of the trial with her face hidden by a veil.

Those on trial for the Lincoln assassination had few of the legal rights afforded to defendants today, and some of the evidence presented by the government had been fabricated. Still, the attorneys for those on trial presented a spirited defense that may have won some of the commission to their side. In a June 26 letter to his wife, Wallace wrote that if the commission voted then, “three, if not four, of the eight will be acquitted.” 

The prosecution, however, continued to hammer away at the accused, even attempting to involve leaders of the Confederacy (especially Jefferson Davis) in the plot. On June 29 the commission met in secret to make its decision. It took the commission only a day and a half to reach a verdict—guilty for all. Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were sentenced to death and were hanged on July 7 at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary.

At the time of the trial, only a few voices were raised in protest in the North. One newspaper, the New York World, dismayed by what went on, lashed out at the commission for its “heat and intolerance.” Although debate still rages today on the fairness of the Lincoln conspirators’ trial, Wallace never expressed any doubts about the verdict decided by the commission. In 1895 he wrote that the trial “was perfect in every respect. No judicial inquiry was ever more fairly conducted.”