Assassination Vacation (6 page)

O
n April 14, 1865, after President Lincoln RSVP’d for
Our American Cousin,
the theater manager draped an American flag in front of the presidential box. After Booth shot Lincoln and stabbed Henry Rathbone, Booth’s spur caught on the flag as he jumped to the stage. The fall damaged Booth’s leg but not his flair for drama.
“Sic semper tyrannis!”
he shouted. The state motto of Virginia, it means “Thus always to tyrants.” Then, his horse waiting, Booth escaped, meeting up with co-conspirator David Herold. They were to ride through Maryland, toward the safety that was Virginia.

One Saturday morning, my friend Klam, who lives here in D.C., picks me up to drive Booth’s escape route. One of John Wilkes Booth’s many faults is that he did not have the decency to die within walking distance of a Metro stop. I don’t have a driver’s license (phobia). So Klam is one of the many friends and family members I am always cajoling into chauffeuring me to glitzy assassination-related destinations. Plus, I purposefully invited along as many people I care about who would say yes because I thought it would keep me from objectifying my historical dead bodies. Like, if I were in the presence of loved ones whose deaths I dread, then I would be more likely to remember the grief of the loved ones of the dead presidents. I thought of it as the
Hamlet
approach. In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer barrel. But when Hamlet is shown the skull of his old friend Yorick, the prince becomes unspeakably sentimental and sad because he knew him.

Klam is a writer who used to be a high school English teacher. I explain the above scenario, telling him that I’m Hamlet (without the suicidal tendencies) and he’s Yorick’s skull. I ask if he minds.

“I won’t hold it against you unless you say I was driving and the rustling sound of my adult diapers was deafening.” So, for the record, the rustling was rather faint, like riding shotgun next to a delicate hummingbird, a delicate hummingbird who, hearing his passenger’s rhetorical question about why Booth had assassinated Lincoln to supposedly save the South instead of enlisting in the Confederate army, answers, “I totally get that impulse to do something big. It’s why I quit short stories to write a novel.”

Our first stop is the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland. You wouldn’t know it from looking, but this old wooden house isn’t just a tourist trap for the historically curious. It’s the Vatican of the Lincoln assassination subculture, hosting symposia, publishing scholarly books and journals.

Like a scene from a Western, Booth and Herold stopped here to pick up whiskey and guns. We came here to take a tour from a woman in period costume. Wearing a homemade hoop skirt, she’s polite and welcoming, serene.

Having been around the block with regards to historical house tours, I have learned I learn more if I just clam up and listen. I’ve learned that the people who volunteer to preserve and interpret at such places are mostly local heroes who care deeply about their hometowns and the people who lived there before them. I have also learned that the people who spend a lot of time in these old houses care very much about the houses themselves — their architectural adornments, the household items that indicate past customs and ways of life. Though they’re often dressed up in old-timey costumes, historical house guides often remind me of those modern painters who insisted a painting is first and foremost paint on canvas, not a picture of the world. A lot of house tours are about the thingness of things. For instance, when one visits Jefferson Davis’s White House of the Confederacy in Richmond one learns that his bed was so short because most people back then slept sitting up; one doesn’t hear much about how on earth Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved. And when one visits Andrew Jackson’s house in Nashville, one is more likely to hear about the painstaking restoration of the wallpaper and nothing much about how Jackson’s policies sent one’s Cherokee ancestors on the Trail of Tears. And though our lovely hoopskirt wearer addresses the dastardly Booth in the tavern part of the house, she spends as much time walking us through the Surratt household’s typical laundry day.

In the dining room, our guide shows us some heavy rocks of bread. Klam is for some reason very interested in the bread. She is delighted by his curiosity and rewards him with their name. “Maryland beaten biscuits,” they’re called. She tells him that she herself has baked the biscuits on occasion. And right when he starts pumping her for her recipe, I look at this pleasingly matronly woman in a hoopskirt tell my friend how to bake Maryland beaten biscuits, and I notice my friend is wearing an orange T-shirt emblazoned with the words
PORN FREAK REHAB.

In the middle of a spiel about the sort of gentleman who dropped by the tavern to imbibe a glass or two with his fellows, our guide is called outside briefly to answer a coworker’s question. Klam whispers, “You know what those guys would do? They’d sit around talking about whores. Then they’d spit and crap in the field. Then they’d rape a slave.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s what she was about to say, Porn Freak.”

I used to think John Waters movies were on the outlandish side until I came to Maryland. Klam and I stop for lunch at a dark roadside joint that feels like more of a throwback than the Surratt House ever could. The vegetable of the day is succotash to give you an idea. Technically, it’s a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.

I can never make up my mind whether Maryland is offbeat or just off-putting. I probably would have felt that way if I were passing through in the 1860s too. While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was
the
border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.

Listen to its state song. Sung to the tune of the German Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” was written as the Civil War was breaking out in 1861. The first line goes, “The despot’s heel is on thy shore.” Who is the despot? The new president, Lincoln, who, it’s worth remembering, had to sneak into Washington for his inauguration so as to avoid the assassins waiting to jump him in Baltimore, a city which, in the song, is rhymed with “patriotic gore,” commemorating the blood spilled on its streets on April 19, 1861, when a mob of local secessionists attacked a Massachusetts regiment passing through town. “Maryland, My Maryland,” the song says, “spurns the Northern scum!” The song also calls for seceding from the Union, to stand by its sister state Virginia, going so far as to allude to that state’s motto,
Sic semper tyrannis:

Virginia should not call in vain,

Maryland!

She meets her sisters on the plain —

Sic semper!
’tis the proud refrain

Sic semper,
of course, was the proud refrain hollered by Maryland’s own John Wilkes Booth after making good on shooting the aforementioned “despot” Lincoln at war’s end. One might think that a state song hinting at presidential assassination would have eerie echoes when that state’s native son assassinated said president and therefore it might be headed for the title of “state song emeritus,” the dustbin into which Virginia herself tossed its racist favorite “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” But “Maryland, My Maryland” did not become the official state song until 1939. Despite the occasional nice try to ditch it, it remains the state song to this day.

All of which could just be written off as harmless symbolism, almost laughable anachronism. However, careful readers who are also symbolism devotees would have noticed that the date in 1861 when the Baltimore mob clashed with the Massachusetts soldiers was April 19 — Patriot’s Day — the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, when the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War. It is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was wearing a T-shirt. On the back of the T-shirt, perhaps as a nod commemorating Patriot’s Day, was the famous quote from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” On the front of McVeigh’s shirt was a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Printed under Lincoln’s face was the caption
“Sic semper tyrannis.”
McVeigh ordered his shirt from a catalog sent out to subscribers of
Southern Partisan,
the pro-Confederate magazine. As if McVeigh wearing the shirt isn’t disgusting enough, the catalog sold out of most sizes of the shirt
after
McVeigh made the news. People actually heard that a mass murderer responsible for 168 deaths was wearing clothing celebrating another murder and they wanted to dress up like him. According to media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, by December of that year, the catalog reassured
Partisan
readers who had ordered the shirt:

Due to a surprising demand for our anti-Lincoln T-shirt, our stock has been reduced to odd sizes. If the enclosed shirt will not suffice, we will be glad to refund your money or immediately ship you another equally militant shirt from our catalog.

And if the shirts were too big or too small, the readers could have cheered themselves up with one of the fetching, one-size-fits-all bumper stickers like “Clinton’s military: a gay at every porthole, a fag in every foxhole.”

If the shirt’s popularity with readers of
Southern Partisan,
a magazine on the fringes, seems just that — on the fringes — three years after McVeigh inspired the shirt’s commercial success, a Missouri senator would do an interview with the magazine announcing, “Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I’ve got to do more. We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.” And if that random senator still seems on the fringe, what with representing Missouri and/or kookily complaining about Jeff Davis’s bad rap, it’s worth noting that three years after saying that, the Missouri senator, John Ashcroft, became the attorney general of the United States, which is to say, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in all the land.

Meanwhile, in Charles County Maryland, Klam and I have finished lunch at Chez Succotash and are ready to resume the John Wilkes Booth escape route. About ninety minutes into the roughly ten-mile drive from the restaurant to the Dr. Samuel A. Mudd House, I become convinced of Mudd’s guilt. Klam and I, armed with one road atlas, two historical maps of John Wilkes Booth’s route, an old article from the
Washington Post
travel section, directions from various locals gassing up their cars, and six printouts from MapQuest.com, are lost for two hours. Mudd’s house in rural Maryland is so hard to find, even in the daylight, even with a lap full of maps, that I don’t see how Booth and Herold, who were horseback riding under the influence of the whiskey they acquired at the Surratt Tavern, could have found Mudd’s house in the middle of the night if they didn’t know exactly where they were going, and whom they could trust.

Booth arrived at Mudd’s house in the middle of the night, seeking medical care for his broken leg. Days later, when Mudd was arrested for aiding and abetting the assassin, the doctor claimed that he didn’t recognize the actor, that he was then unaware that Lincoln lay dying, and that in caring for a wounded man, even one who had just fatally wounded the president, Mudd was simply doing his Hippocratic duty. Though Mudd was convicted anyway, and shipped to the Fort Jefferson prison off the coast of Florida, he stuck to this story until the day he died. The mystery — did he or didn’t he? — might have died with him but for the impressive tenacity of his grandson Richard Mudd.

Richard Mudd, who died in 2002 at the age of 101, was one of the greatest PR men of the twentieth century, doggedly lobbying to clear his grandfather’s name. Two presidents who didn’t agree on much concurred on Mudd. Though Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan concluded that the full presidential pardon Mudd received from Andrew Johnson in 1869 (for his heroic doctoring during a yellow fever outbreak at the prison) trumped all further presidential action, both Carter and Reagan wrote open letters to Richard Mudd expressing their faith in Dr. Mudd’s innocence in the conspiracy. Carter wrote to Richard Mudd that he hoped to “restore dignity to your grandfather’s name and clear the Mudd family name of any negative connotation or implied lack of honor,” which Richard Mudd’s distant cousin, journalist Roger Mudd, read on the evening news. Reagan wrote, “I came to believe as you do that Dr. Samuel Mudd was indeed innocent of any wrongdoing.”

So there are two factions — those who believe Mudd was innocent and punished for simply doing his job, and those who believe Mudd was in bed with Booth from the get-go. I believe Mudd was guilty of conspiring with Booth in the original plot to kidnap Lincoln. And for history buffs leaning toward Mudd’s guilt, or any fan of what I like to call the Emphasis Added School of History, Edward Steers’s book
His Name Is Still Mudd: The Case Against Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd
is both useful and appealing.

Steers recounts that Booth and Mudd were seen in public together on two occasions prior to the assassination, damning evidence the prosecution used to convict Mudd in 1865. Steers also brings up relatively new evidence, not unearthed from an archive until 1975, that Booth’s co-conspirator George Atzerodt confessed that before the assassination, Booth had sent supplies ahead to Mudd’s home. Moreover, the author persuasively argues that Mudd acted as Booth’s “recruiter,” introducing him to Confederate Secret Service agents, including John Surratt. Steers asserts that the historical record is silent on whether or not Mudd was in on the assassination, but he does point out that Mudd probably knew that his involvement in the original kidnapping plot was damning enough, and that if the doctor turned over the assassin to the authorities, the assassin would have implicated the doctor for sure. As Steers puts it, “To give up Booth, Booth would have surely given up Mudd.” Which is why, when the authorities questioned Mudd, Mudd played dumb, claiming that he didn’t recognize Booth because Booth was wearing a fake beard at the time — lame.