Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

  I was moved to tears as they passed, saluting me—for in each of their faces I saw the face of a nameless victim crying out for justice; of a little girl passing by on the Old Cumberland Trail all those many years ago. On each of their faces I saw the anguish of the past, and the promise of the future.

  General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army on April 9th, 1865, effectively ending the Civil War. The following day, Abe received a letter in a familiar scrawl.

  Abraham,

  I beg you put enmity aside long enough to read a few words of congratulations.

  It brings me joy to report that our enemy has begun its exodus—many back to Europe, others to South America and the Orient, where they are less likely to be hunted. They have looked to the future, Abraham—and they have seen that America is now, and shall forever be, a nation of living men. Like your namesake, you have been a “father to many” these four long years. And like your namesake, God has asked impossible sacrifices of you. Yet you have endured it all as brilliantly as any man could have hoped. You have blessed the futures of those who share this time on earth, and those who have yet to live.

  She would be proud.

  Ever,

  —H

  As a boy, Abe had vowed to “kill every vampire in America.” While that had proven impossible, he’d done the next best thing: he’d driven the worst of them out of America. There was one vampire, however, who refused to leave… who believed that the dream of a nation of immortals was still within reach—so long as Abraham Lincoln was dead.

  His name was John Wilkes Booth.

  FIG. 3E - JOHN WILKES BOOTH (SEATED) POSES FOR A PORTRAIT WITH CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS IN RICHMOND, CIRCA 1863. IT IS ONLY KNOWN PICTURE OF BOOTH IN HIS TRUE VAMPIRE FORM.

  THIRTEEN

  Thus Always to Tyrants

  I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.

  —Abraham Lincoln, in a speech at Chicago, Illinois

  July 10th, 1858

  I

  On April 12th, 1865, a lone man walked across the White House lawn toward the towering columns of the South Portico—where, on clear spring afternoons such as this, the president himself could often be seen on the third-floor balcony. The man walked briskly, carrying a small leather attaché. The legislation that would create the Secret Service was sitting on Abraham Lincoln’s desk that Wednesday evening, and would remain there for the rest of his life.

  At three minutes before four o’clock, the man entered the building and gave his name to one of the butlers.

  “Joshua Speed, to see the president.”

  A lifetime of war had finally taken its toll on Abe. He’d felt increasingly weak since Willie’s death. Clouded and unsure. The lines in his face were deeper, and the skin beneath his eyes sagged so as to make him appear forever exhausted. Mary was nearly always depressed, and her rare moments of levity were spent on frenzied fits of decorating and redecorating, or on séances to “commune” with her beloved Eddy and Willie. She and Abe hardly spoke beyond simple civilities. Sometime between April 3rd and April 5th, during his journey downriver to inspect the fallen city of Richmond, the president scribbled the following poem in the margins of his journal.

  Melancholy,

  my old friend,

  visits frequent,

  once again.

  Desperate for distraction and companionship, Abe invited his old friend and fellow vampire hunter to spend a night at the White House. Upon being notified of Speed’s arrival, Abe politely excused himself from a meeting and hurried into the reception room. Speed recalled Abe’s entrance in a letter to fellow hunter William Seward after the president’s death.

  Placing his right hand upon my shoulder, the president paused momentarily as our faces met. I daresay he found mine surprised and saddened, for when I studied him, I saw a frailty that I had never encountered before. Gone was the broad-shouldered giant who could drive an ax clean through a vampire’s middle. Gone were the smiling eyes and confident air. In their place was a hunched, gaunt gentleman whose skin had taken on a sickly pallor, and whose features belonged to a man twenty years his senior. “My dear Speed,” he said, and took me into his arms.

  The two hunters dined alone, Mary having confined herself to bed with a headache. After dinner, they retired to Abe’s office, where they remained well into the early morning hours, laughing and reminiscing as if they were above the store in Springfield again. They spoke of their hunting days; of the war; of the rumors that vampires were fleeing America in droves. But most of all, they talked of nothing: their families; their businesses; the miracle of photography.

  It was precisely as I had hoped. My troubles were distant, my thoughts quieted, and I felt something like my old self again—if only for those ephemeral hours.

  Sometime well after midnight, after Abe had kept his friend laughing with his bottomless well of anecdotes, he told him about a dream. A dream that had been troubling him for days. In one of his final journal entries, Lincoln recorded it for posterity.

  There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along… I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers, “The president,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night.

  II

  John Wilkes Booth loathed sunlight. It irritated his skin; overwhelmed his eyes. It made the fat, pink faces of boastful Northerners blinding as they passed him on the street, crowing about Union victories, celebrating the end of the “rebellion.” You have no idea what this war is about. The twenty-six-year-old had always preferred the darkness—even before he became its servant. His home had always been the stage. Its braided ropes and velvet curtains. Its warm, gaslight glow. Theater had been the center of his life, and it was a theater he entered just before noon to collect his mail. There would no doubt be letters from admiring fans—perhaps someone who had witnessed his legendary Marc Antony in New York, or thrilled to his more recent Pescara in The Apostate, performed on the very boards now beneath his boots.

  The backstage loading door had been opened to allow daylight in, as had the exits in the rear of the house, but Ford’s Theater remained mostly dark. The first and second balconies were draped in shadow, and every time Booth’s heel landed on the stage, the resulting echoes filled the emptiness. There was no place more pleasing—more natural to him than this. Booth would often pass the daylight hours in darkened theaters, sleeping on a catwalk, reading in an upper balcony by candlelight, or rehearsing for an audience of ghosts. An empty theater is a promise. Isn’t that what they said? An empty theater is a promise unfulfilled. In a few hours, everything around him would be light and noise. Laughter and applause. Colorful people packed together in their colorful finery. Tonight, the promise would be fulfilled. And then, after the curtain came down and the gaslights were snuffed out, there would be darkness again. That was the beauty of it. That was theater.

  Booth noticed a pair of men working in the stage left boxes, about ten feet above his head. They were removing the partition between two smaller boxes in order to make a single large one, no doubt for a person of some import. He recognized one of the stagehands as Edmund Spangler, a callused, red
-faced old acquaintance and frequent employee. “And who are to be your honored guests, Spangler?” Booth asked. “The president and first lady, sir—accompanied by General and Mrs. Grant.”

  Booth hurried out of the theater without another word. He never collected his mail.

  There were friends to be contacted, plans to be drawn up, weapons to be readied—and so little time to do it all. So little time, but such an opportunity! He made straight for Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse.

  Mary, a plain, plump, dark-haired widow, was Booth’s former lover and an ardent Southern sympathizer. She’d met him years before, when he’d been a guest at her family’s tavern in Maryland. Though fourteen years his senior, she’d fallen passionately in love with the young actor, and the two had carried on an affair. After her husband died, Mary sold the tavern and moved to Washington, where she opened a small boardinghouse on H Street. Booth was a frequent guest—but in recent years, he’d seemed less interested in “matters of the flesh.” Mary’s feelings for him, however, remained unchanged. So when Booth asked her to ride out to the old tavern and tell its current owner, John Lloyd, to “make ready the shooting irons,” she didn’t hesitate. Booth had left a cache of weapons with Lloyd weeks before, in preparation for a failed plot to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Confederate prisoners. Now he would use the same weapons to take a more direct approach.

  Mary’s love for Booth would prove her undoing. For delivering his message, she would hang three months later.

  While Mary was on her fatal errand, Booth visited the homes of Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt in quick succession. Both had been involved in his failed kidnapping plot, and both would be needed to carry out the audacious plan that was still taking shape in his head. Atzerodt, an older, rough-looking German immigrant and carriage repairman, was an old acquaintance of Booth’s. The boyishly handsome Powell, not yet twenty-two years old, was a former rebel soldier, member of the Confederate Secret Service, and friend of the Surratts. A meeting was arranged for seven that evening. Booth gave no reason for it.

  He merely told the men to be on time, and to bring their nerve.

  III

  Abe was in fine spirits.

  “Laughter shook his office door all morning,” wrote Nicolay years later. “At first I mistook the sound for something else—so accustomed had I grown to the president’s cheerlessness.” Hugh McCullough, Treasury Secretary, remembered “I never saw Mr. Lincoln so merry.” Abe had been buoyed by the reunion with his hunters, and by the telegrams flying out of the war office on an almost hourly basis. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses Grant five days earlier at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, effectively bringing the war to a close. Jefferson Davis and his government were on the run.

  In order to personally congratulate Ulysses Grant on his brilliant defeat of Robert E. Lee, the Lincolns had invited him and his wife to the theater that evening. There was a new comedy at Ford’s, and a few hours of carefree laughter was exactly what the president and Mrs. Lincoln needed. However, the general had respectfully declined, as he and Julia were to leave Washington by train that evening. This set off a flurry of replacement invitations, all of which were promptly (and respectfully) declined for one reason or another. “One would think that we were inviting them to an execution,” Mary is reported to have remarked during the course of the day. It mattered little to Abe. No amount of rejection—respectful or otherwise—could sully his mood that warm Good Friday afternoon.

  I am strangely buoyant. [Speaker of the House Schuyler] Colfax called this morning to discuss reconstruction, and upon observing me for a quarter hour, paused and asked if I had eschewed my coffee for a Scotch—such was my disposition. Neither the Cabinet nor [Vice President Andrew] Johnson were successful in their efforts to dampen my spirits today (though both tried mightily to do so). However, I dare not speak of this happiness aloud, for Mary would surely see such boastfulness as a bad omen. It has long been her nature—and mine—to distrust these moments of quiet as prelude to some unforeseen disaster. And yet the trees bloom beautifully today, and I cannot help but take note.

  The journal entry was dated April 14th, 1865. It was the last Abe would ever make.

  By late afternoon, with the day’s official business done, the president prepared to take a late afternoon carriage ride with his wife. Though not as jovial as her husband, Mary also seemed to be in unusually good spirits, and she’d asked Abe to join her for a “brief turn about the yard.” As the president stepped out of the North Portico, a one-armed Union soldier (who’d been waiting there most of the day in hopes of such an encounter) shouted, “I would almost give my other hand if I could shake that of Abraham Lincoln!” Abe approached the young man and extended his hand. “You shall do that, and it shall cost you nothing.”

  IV

  Booth arrived in Lewis Powell’s rented room at seven o’clock sharp, accompanied by a short, nervous twenty-two-year-old pharmacist named David Herold, whom he’d met through Mary Surratt. Atzerodt was already there. Booth wasted no time.

  In a few hours, the four of them would bring the Union to its knees.

  At precisely ten o’clock, Lewis Powell was to kill Secretary of State William Seward, who was currently bedridden after falling from a carriage. Powell, who was unfamiliar with Washington, would be led to Seward’s house by the nervous pharmacist. After the secretary was dead, the two conspirators would ride across the Navy Yard Bridge and into Maryland, where they would meet up with Booth. At the same time, Atzerodt was to shoot Vice President Andrew Johnson in his room at the Kirkwood House, before joining the others in Maryland. As for Booth, he would return to Ford’s Theater. There, he would kill the president with a single-shot derringer pistol before plunging a knife into General Grant’s heart.

  With the Union government decapitated, Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet would have time to reorganize. Confederate generals like Joseph E. Johnston, Meriwether Thompson, and Stand Watie, whose armies were fighting valiantly against the Yankee devils even now, would be able to rearm. From Maryland, Booth and his three companions would continue south, relying on the kindness of their fellow sympathizers for food and shelter while the Union pursued them. As news of their deeds spread, a chorus of joyful voices would ring from Texas to the Carolinas. The tide would turn. They would all be hailed as heroes, and John Wilkes Booth would be called “the Savior of the South.”

  Atzerodt protested, insisting that he’d agreed to a kidnapping, not a murder. Booth launched into a stirring speech. There is no record of what he said—only that it was soaring and thoroughly convincing. Probably it contained references to Shakespeare. Certainly it had been rehearsed for this very occasion. Whatever Booth’s words, they worked. Atzerodt reluctantly agreed to go forward. But what the apprehensive German didn’t know—what none of the living conspirators would ever know, even as they climbed the thirteen steps to their deaths—was the truth behind the young actor’s hatred of Lincoln.

  On the surface, it made no sense. John Wilkes Booth had been called the “handsomest man in America.” Audiences packed theaters all over the country to watch him perform. Women trampled one another to catch a glimpse of him. He’d been born into the nation’s preeminent acting family, and made his professional debut as a teenager. Unlike his famous older brothers Edwin and Junius, who were actors in the classic sense, John was raw and instinctive—leaping about the stage, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Every word, no matter how innocuous, seems spoken in anger,” wrote a reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “and yet one cannot help but be captivated by it. There is an almost ethereal quality to the gentleman.”

  One night, following a performance of Macbeth at the Richmond Theater, Booth reportedly took six young ladies back to his boardinghouse and wasn’t seen for three days. He was rich. He was adored. He was doing what he loved. John Wilkes Booth should have been the happiest man alive.

  But he wasn’t alive.

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

&nb
sp; That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

  And then is heard no more. It is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing. *

  When he was thirteen years old, Johnny Booth paid an old gypsy woman to read his palm. He’d always been obsessed with fate, particularly his own—due in large part to a story often told by his eccentric mother. “On the night you were born,” she’d say, “I asked God for a sign of what awaited my newborn son. And God saw fit to answer.” For the rest of her life, Mary Ann Booth would swear that flames had suddenly leapt from the hearth of their fireplace and formed the word “country.” Johnny spent countless hours pondering the meaning of it. He knew that something special awaited him. He could feel it.

  “Oh… a bad hand,” the gypsy said at once, recoiling slightly. “Sorrow and trouble… sorrow and trouble, wherever I look.” Booth had come expecting a glimpse of his future greatness. What he got were forecasts of doom. “You’ll die young,” said the gypsy, “but not before amassing a thundering crowd of enemies.” Booth protested. She was wrong! She had to be wrong! The gypsy shook her head. Nothing could prevent it….