The President had been shot at the back of the head, on the left side; the bullet passed through the brain, and stopped just short of the left eye. Unconsciousness of course came instantaneously. He was carried to a room in a house opposite the theatre, and there he continued to breathe until twenty-two minutes after seven o'clock in the morning, at which moment he died.
The man Booth, who had done this deed of blood and madness, was an unworthy member of the family of distinguished actors of that name. He was young, handsome, given to hard drinking, of inordinate vanity, and of small capacity in his profession; altogether, he was a disreputable fellow, though fitted to seem a hero in the eyes of the ignorant and dissipated classes. Betwixt the fumes of the brandy which he so freely drank and
the folly of the melodramatic parts which he was wont to act, his brain became saturated with a passion for notoriety, which grew into the very mania of egotism. His crime was as stupid as it was barbarous; and even from his own point of view his achievement was actually worse than a failure. As an act of revenge against a man whom he hated, he accomplished nothing, for he did not inflict upon Mr. Lincoln so much as one minute of mental distress or physical suffering. To the South he brought no good, and at least ran the risk of inflicting upon it much evil, since he aroused a vindictive temper among persons who had the power to carry vindictiveness into effect; and he slew the only sincere and powerful friend whom the Southerners had among their conquerors. He passed a miserable existence for eleven days after the assassination, moving from one hiding-place to another, crippled and suffering, finding concealment difficult and escape impossible. Moreover, he had the intense mortification to find himself regarded with execration rather than admiration, loathed as a murderer instead of admired as a hero, and charged with having wrought irreparable hurt to those whom he had foolishly fancied that he was going to serve conspicuously. It was a curious and significant fact that there was among the people of the North a considerable body of persons who, though undoubtedly as shocked as was every one else at the method by which the President had been eliminated from the political
situation, were yet well pleased to see Andrew Johnson come into power;[[84]] and these persons were the very ones who had been heretofore most extreme in their hostility to slavery, most implacable towards the people of the Confederacy. There were no persons living to whom Booth would have been less willing to minister gratification than to these men. Their new President, it is true, soon disappointed them bitterly, but for the moment his accession was generally regarded as a gain for their party.
Late on April 25 a squad of cavalry traced Booth to a barn in Virginia; they surrounded it, but he refused to come out; thereupon they set fire to it, and then one of them, Boston Corbett, contrary to orders, thrust his musket through a crevice and fired at Booth. Probably he hit his mark, though some think that the hunted wretch at this last desperate moment shot himself with his own revolver. Be this as it may, the assassin was brought forth having a bullet in the base of his brain, and with his body below the wound paralyzed. He died on the morning of April 26.
While the result of Booth's shot secured for him that notoriety which he loved, the enterprise
was in fact by no means wholly his own. A conspiracy involving many active members, and known also to others, had been long in existence. For months plans had been laid and changed, and opportunities had been awaited and lost. Had the plot not been thus delayed, its success might have done more practical mischief. Now, in addition to what the plotters lost by reason of this delay, only a part of their whole great scheme was carried out. At the same time that the tragedy was enacting at Ford's Theatre an assault was perpetrated upon Mr. Seward, who was then confined to his bed by hurts lately received in an accident. The assassin gained admission into the house under pretense of bringing medicine; thus he reached the bedroom, and at once threw himself upon the secretary, whom he stabbed about the face and neck; then encountering in turn two sons of Mr. Seward and two men nurses, he wounded them all more or less seriously, and escaped. But much as had been done, as much or more was left undone; for there can be little doubt that the plot also included the murder of the Vice-President, General Grant, and Secretary Stanton; the idea being, so far as there was any idea or any sense at all in the villainy, that the sudden destruction of all these men would leave the government with no lawful head, and that anarchy would ensue.
Not many days elapsed before the government had in custody seven men, Herold, Spangler,
Payne, O'Laughlin, Arnold, Atzerodt, and Mudd, and one woman, Mary E. Surratt, all charged with being concerned in the conspiracy. But though they had been so happily caught, there was much difficulty in determining just how to deal with them. Such was the force of secession feeling in the District of Columbia that no jury there could be expected to find them guilty, unless the panel should be packed in a manner which would be equally against honesty and good policy. After some deliberation, therefore, the government decided to have recourse to a military commission, provided this were possible under the law, and the attorney-general, under guise of advising the administration, understood distinctly that he must find that it was possible. Accordingly he wrote a long, sophistical, absurd opinion, in which he mixed up the law of nations and the "laws of war," and emerged out of the fog very accurately at the precise point at which he was expected to arrive. Not that fault should be found with him for performing this feat; it was simply one of many instances, furnished by the war, of the homage which necessity pays to law and which law repays to necessity. That which must be done must also be stoutly and ingeniously declared to be legal. It was intolerable that the men should escape, yet their condemnation must be accomplished in a respectable way. So the Military Commission was promptly convened, heard the evidence which could be got together at such short