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
His dress, which we scarcely notice in the grander contrast of his pose
and stature, is an old shirt of woolen blue, with a white nap at the
button-holes, and upon his knees of black cloth he twirls, as if for
relaxation, between his powerful manacles, a soiled white
handkerchief--if from his mother, we conjecture, a gift to a bloodhound
from his dam. His heavy handcuffs make his broad shoulders more narrow.
Yet we can see by the outline of the sleeves what girth the muscles has,
and the hand at the end of his long and bony arm is wide and huge, as if
it could wield a claymore as well as a dirk. He also wears carpet
slippers, but his ankles are clogged with so heavy irons that two men
must carry them when he enters or leaves the dock. For this man there
can be no sentiment--no more than for a bull. The flesh on his face is
hard, as if cast, rather than generated, and while we see how he towers
above the entire court, we watch him in wonder, as if he were some
maniac denizen of a zone where men without minds grow to the stature and
power of fiends.
The face of Payne is not of the traditional southern peculiarities. He
resembles rather a Pennsylvania mountaineer than a Kentucky rustic.
Three weeks ago I gave, in an account of the conspiracy which many
gainsayed, but which the trial has fully confirmed, a sketch of this
man, to which I still adhere. He was furnished to Booth and John Surratt
from Canada; sent upon special service with his life in his hands; and
he faced the murder he was to commit like any prize-fighter. I pity
Beall, who died intelligently for a wretched essay against civilians,
that his biography and fate must be matched by this savage's!
Next to Payne, and crouching under him like a frog under a rock, is an
inconsiderable soldier, who chews his cud, and would cheerfully hang his
protege for the sake of being rid of him. My sympathies are entirely
enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted,
nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself,
but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies
him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to
this soldier as the point of his bayonet. I see what ails him.
He wants to swear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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