The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes BoothTownsend, George Alfred
History
The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth
Townsend, George Alfred
Assassins -- United States -- Biography; Booth, John Wilkes, 1838-1865; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Assassination
The dead man
untied and cast upon the vessel's dock, steam gotten up in a little
while, and the broad Potomac shores saw this skeleton ship flit by, as
the bloody sun threw gashes and blots of unhealthy light along the
silver surface.
All the way associate with the carcass, went Harold, shuddering in so
grim companionship, and in the awakened fears of his own approaching.
ordeal, beyond which it loomed already, the gossamer fabric of a
scaffold. He tried to talk for his own exoneration, saying he had
ridden, as was his wont, beyond the East Branch, and returning, found
Booth wounded, who begged him to be his companion. Of his crime he knew
nothing, so help him God, &c. But nobody listened to him. All interest
of crime, courage, and retribution centered in the dead flesh at his
feet. At Washington, high and low turned out to look on Booth. Only a
few were permitted to see his corpse for purposes of recognition. It was
fairly preserved, though on one side of the face distorted, and looking
blue like death, and wildly bandit-like, as if beaten by avenging winds.
Yesterday the Secretary of War, without instructions of any kind,
committed to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, of the secret service, the
stark corpse of J. Wilkes Booth. The secret service never fulfilled its
volition more secretively. "What have you done with the body?" said I to
Baker. "That is known" he answered, "to only one man living besides
myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is
sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpeter comes shall the grave
of Booth be discovered." And this is true. Last night, the 27th of
April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men
were in it they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that
darkness it will never return. In the darkness, like his great crime,
may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to
that worse than damnation,--annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze
about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have
opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give
its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white
above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible,
unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as
if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation's
head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the
indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from
their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who
do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered
be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and
once promising life--useless! useless!
LETTER V.
A SOLUTION OF THE CONSPIRACY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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