The sins of the son

In the spring of 1865 Washington was celebrating victory in a bitterly fought civil war. It had begun in 1861 when six southern states had seceded from the Union, setting up the separate Confederate state with its capital in Richmond. For Southerners, the Union threatened to abolish the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery without which, they held, the whole agrarian society of the south would collapse in ruins. They were fighting for survival. On 9 April 1865 the main army of the Confederates surrendered. Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, was seen by Confederates as the political architect and living symbol of their defeat.

On the evening of 14 April John Wilkes Booth burst into Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, shooting the President at short range. Booth, a handsome ladykiller, was a celebrated actor; as actors sometimes do, he saw himself as performing a heroic role offstage. By 1865 his hatred of Lincoln had become obsessional. He must be put out of the way. After shooting him he leapt out of the box on to the stage, breaking his leg. Astonishingly he evaded his pursuers for several days, his leg set by a Confederate doctor, to be shot escaping from a burning barn.

Thus he could not be tried in person by the military commission set up to investigate those responsible for Lincoln’s assassination. Nor could John Surratt, long suspected by the Union authorities of being a Confederate spy and courier, who was Booth’s friend and closest associate. With safe houses provided by Confederate sympathisers and Catholic priests he escaped to Canada. In the absence of the two main conspirators the military commission was left with the task of trying Booth’s accomplices.