591. The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: Manhunt for the Killer (Part 2)

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History.

For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club.

That is therestishistory.com.

In business, every dollar counts.

So, Comcast Business is giving you a year of mobile on us with your internet service.

Save hundreds with the fastest mobile service with 5G cellular and Wi-Fi hotspots.

Get mobile on us and get one year on us.

Comcast Business, powering possibilities.

Ends 9-22-25, restrictions apply.

New mobile customers only with internet standard service or above.

Limited to value of one unlimited intro line apply via 12-month internet bill credits.

One discount per account.

Fast and mobile based on mobile Wi-Fi and cellular data and service areas.

UCLA Speed Test Intelligence 2H24.

Talk about stepping up!

It's time to level up your game, introducing the all-new ESPN app.

All of ESPN, all in one place.

Your home for the most live sports and the best championship moments.

The electricity is palpable.

Step up your game with no annual contract required.

It's the ultimate fan experience.

Level up for more on the ESPN app or at stream.espn.com.

Sign up now.

You're tuned into Auto Intelligence live from Auto Trader, where data, tools, and your preferences sync to make your car shopping smooth.

They're searching inventory.

Oh, yeah.

They find what you need.

They're going to find it.

They can make a budget for you, Polly, to help you succeed.

Pricing's precise and true.

So true.

Get smart at car shopping.

Just for you.

Oh, it's just for you.

Find your next ride at autotrader.com.

Powered by Auto Intelligence.

After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats, till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man's hand against me, I am here

in despair.

And why?

For doing what Brutus was honored for.

What made William tell a hero?

And yet I,

for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat.

My action was purer than either of theirs.

One hoped to be great himself.

The other had not only his country's, but his own wrongs to avenge.

I hoped for no gains.

I

knew no private wrong.

I

struck for my country and that alone.

A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hand they extend to me.

I do not repent the blow I struck.

I may before my God.

So that was John Wilkes Booth, great Shakespearean actor.

Dominic, you described him in the previous episode as being very much the Brian Blessed school of acting.

And he wrote that in his journal on the 21st of April, 1865, while he was on the run for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States.

And the murder of Lincoln, often framed as being one of the most consequential crimes in American history, people say that it changed the course of the destiny of the United States.

People ponder whether the dark and tragic story of American race relations throughout Reconstruction into the 1950s and 60s, might it have been different?

Might the story of the former rebel South have been transformed had Lincoln lived?

And I guess we'll be trying to answer those questions later in today's episode.

But for now, you left us at the end of the previous episode on an absolute cliffhanger.

President and Mrs.

Lincoln are sitting there enjoying a brilliant British comedy about an American hick who has come to lay claim to a stately home in England.

I mean, couldn't be more fun.

And then suddenly the party pooper, John Wilkes Booth, steps into

Lincoln's box.

Well, or does he leap, Tom?

Because we discussed before that he loves leaping and capering when he's on stage.

And that was the one thing I think that was missing from an excellent rendition of your reading from Booth's journal.

So just to remind people where we are, we are in Ford's Theatre on 10th Street in Washington, D.C.

on on the evening of Good Friday, the 4th of April 1865, five days after Robert E.

Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

The city is on fait.

Everybody's celebrating, gas illuminations, great flags everywhere, all this.

The theatre is very busy.

The people in the theatre, interestingly, there's politicians, there's tourists, there are a lot of soldiers, Union soldiers.

Some of them are actually people who were at Appomattox, who are now on leave, officers on leave, and have come to the city to celebrate.

A lot of them have been drawn to the theatre because they've heard that President and Mrs.

Lincoln are coming with General and Mrs.

Grant.

They didn't show up because they basically hate Mrs.

Lincoln.

Or maybe there's a more suspicious reason.

Yeah, Tom believes they're part of the conspiracy, which is an unusual view, but I'm happy to indulge it.

The Lincolns had arrived half an hour late.

They're in the presidential box decorated with American flags and a portrait of the tax traitor, George Washington.

And Dominic, it's about 12 feet above the stage, isn't it?

So

were you, for instance, to be very proficient at leaping, that might be a detail that would interest you.

Might be a temptation, mightn't it?

Just setting that up for later in the show.

So if you went into the box, you would see on your left Abraham Lincoln in a rocking chair, then his wife, Mary, in a smaller chair.

and their friend Clara Harris in an armchair and behind them lounging on the sofa, Clara Harris's fiancé, Major Rathbone.

Now, they have been enjoying the play a lot.

They've been laughing.

People have been watching Lincoln, of course, all the time.

And they've seen him sort of sometimes, you know, in a reverie, lost in thought.

Not surprising given the burdens he has to carry.

Can I just ask about Mrs.

Lincoln?

I mean, aside from the murder of her husband, does she enjoy the play?

I think she did enjoy the play.

People said they noticed her smiling a great deal.

And this is unusual from her because usually, as we discussed last time, she's something of a Spitfire, always haranguing the wives of generals and stuff and having tantrums and storming off.

So she she doesn't do any of that on this occasion, which is nice.

So it's a lovely evening out for her, I think, up to a certain point.

Twice, Lincoln is interrupted by messages during the play, and these are brought by a White House messenger called Charles Forbes, who is sitting outside the entrance to the box, but neither of them are important enough to draw him away.

So he's carrying on watching.

What a shame.

Now, a lot of the audience are watching Lincoln the whole time.

So on the far side of the dress circle, there is a local saloon owner called James Ferguson.

He's a huge Ulysses S.

Grant fan.

He was very excited about the thought of seeing Grant and was disappointed that he didn't turn up.

But he's been watching Lincoln's box through his girlfriend's opera glasses.

And so whenever Lincoln leans forward to see the play, this boat Ferguson can see him very clearly.

And just after 10 o'clock, Ferguson notices a man with dark hair and a thick moustache, a very smartly dressed man holding his hat in his hand, walking along the back of the circle towards the presidential box.

And the man gets to the door of the box and then he stops as if he's waiting for something.

This man is the man you ventriloquized so amusingly.

And that is John Wilkes Booth.

As we discussed last time, born in Maryland, a white supremacist, big fan of slavery, big fan of the Confederacy, well-known Shakespearean actor who has not fought for the South because he's a massive mummy's boy and promised his mother he wouldn't join the army.

But also because his career has been flourishing.

Yes, his career has been flourishing.

He's a successful actor.

He has been alarmed, horrified by the news of Lee's surrender, but he had learned earlier that day that Lincoln would be at the theatre.

We discussed last time he's hired a horse.

He's smuggled a package out of the city with Confederate agents.

And he has contacted three associates of his from a long-standing scheme to kidnap Lincoln.

And these associates were a German carriage repairman called George Azerot, a pharmacist assistant called David Herold, and a Confederate secret agent called Lewis Powell.

Now, I I said last time that he briefed them about the plan, but I didn't say what the plan was.

Now is the time to unveil, Tom, the conspiracy.

The plan is that Azerot will kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and Lewis Powell will kill Secretary of State William Seward.

In other words, their plan is to decapitate the Northern leadership.

Obviously, they don't think the Confederates are going to miraculously win the war, but maybe this will result in more favourable terms for the Confederacy now that the war is over.

And Dominic, there is no hint that this is coming from the Confederate leadership itself.

People have talked a lot about this.

Some historians think perhaps there is some greater involvement with the Confederate sort of secret service.

No smoking gun.

No, there's never been a smoking gun.

And I think it's very unlikely that Jefferson Davis or the Confederate absolute high command would have authorized this, actually, because I think they know at this point the war is over.

So there's nothing in it for them?

Not really.

So let's return to that scene outside the box.

The messenger Charles Forbes is still there, the White House messenger.

John Wilkes Booth arrives at the box and he hands Forbes a card.

We don't know what was on the card, but we do know Booth is, of course, very well known.

So Forbes probably assumed that the Lincolns had asked to see him or that, you know, a well-known actor arrives at the president's box.

Let's say, I don't know, Matthew McFadden arrives at Keir Starmer's box.

Does Keir Starmer have any cultural enthusiasms at all?

Probably not.

I think if they're famous, he does.

Really?

I've been very clear about this, Tom.

I'm very clear.

I love Taylor Swift.

I will accept a freebie to go and see her.

Brilliant to have Keir Starmer on the show.

Actually, he was on your brother's podcast, wasn't he?

He was.

My favourite war film is The Longest Day.

Is that what he said?

No, I can't remember what it was.

Bridge too far.

He'd surely not express a preference out of terror that he'd say the wrong thing.

Right.

Anyway,

Charles Forbes allows Booth to open the outer door.

And so now Booth goes in.

He's in this little vestibule outside Lincoln's box.

He bars the outer door behind him with a piece of wood.

And then he puts his eye to a peephole into Lincoln's box.

Now, it's often said that he had bored the peephole earlier that day.

In fact, there is a very, very detailed and actually brilliant book on John Wilkes Booth by Michael Kaufman called American Brutus.

One for you, Tom.

And in that book, Kaufman quotes the son of the theatre manager Harry Ford, who wrote in 1962 that Booth had nothing to do with this peephole.

It was always there, that the theatre manager had bored it himself so that bodyguards, if they were there, could see into the presidential box and that Lincoln's entourage could see what he was up to.

Anyway, Booth looks through this hole and you can see there are four people in the box.

There's Lincoln, the rocking chair, there's Mary, there's Clara Harris, there's Major Rathbone on this sofa.

And now Booth waits.

He doesn't go in.

He has thought about this quite carefully.

He has an escape plan.

He knows the moment he wants to strike.

Because he's an actor, he knows this play very well.

He knows there will be a perfect moment when there's going to be a great punchline.

The stage will be almost deserted.

Everybody will be laughing and he can make his move.

And this is the hilarious stretch of dialogue that you rendered in the previous episode, but it's so funny that I think we should hear it again.

Oh, wonderful.

So it's 10.15.

We're act three, scene two.

And Harry Hawke.

Maybe Tom, you'd like to do Harry Hawke, and I'll play Mrs.

Mount Chessington.

So Harry Hawke is playing the American cousin, and he's arguing with this woman called Mrs.

Mount Chessington, so Lady Bracknell figure.

And she storms off the stage and she says, I am aware, Mr.

Trenchard, you are not used to the manners of good society.

Don't throw the manners of good society, eh?

Well, I guess you knew enough to turn you inside out, old gal.

You soctologising old men trap you.

And everybody roars with laughter at this absolutely tremendous repartee.

As they would.

It is at that moment, Tom, that John Wilkes Booth, he opens the door of the box.

He takes out a Derringer pistol from his pocket.

He takes a single step towards Abraham Lincoln's rocking chair.

He levels it at the back of Lincoln's head and he fires.

Point blank range.

Point blank range.

Now, as soon as the shot rings out, Major Rathbone leaps to his feet.

He suddenly realizes what's happening.

There's a dark figure in the box.

He lunges towards the figure and then he shrinks back because he sees the glint of a knife in Booth's other hand.

And Booth, too, is fired with one hand and then with the other hand, he strikes with the dagger into Rathbone's arm and he slices through his arm.

Rathbone falls backwards towards the sofa.

This is all in a second.

The two women are so stunned.

They're obviously deafened by the shot and just amazed.

They have not really reacted.

So this is when Booth pulls off the really sort of remarkable bit of his plan.

He strides past them to the rail of the box.

He puts one hand on the rail and then he vaults over the rail, down 12 feet and lands on the stage.

Now it's often said that he caught a spur in his boot on one of the flags decorating the box.

Actually, only one witness, this bloke that I mentioned earlier with the opera glasses, James Ferguson, he's the only person who said he saw this happen.

Nobody else said they saw it.

Does he hurt himself at all?

Yes.

So he definitely does.

Some accounts say because he did this, caught his spur, he then fell very awkwardly onto the stage.

I think if you'd caught your spur, you'd fall much more awkwardly than he falls.

I think he falls, he lands slightly awkwardly.

It's quite a big drop, and he effectively fractures his leg, as we will discover.

But the interesting thing is at this point, there are many, many accounts of what happened from witnesses at the time.

None of them tell the same thing.

So for people who listen to our JFK series, who were struck by the discrepancies in the eyewitness account, this is exactly the same thing as it is so often in history.

There's nothing unique about the Kennedy murder.

People didn't even agree on what Booth said.

Harry Hawke, the actor, who was just about to walk off stage, he was convinced that as Booth was preparing to jump, he shouted the words sic semper tyrannis.

Hawke said, then he jumped onto the stage.

He straightened up, he raised his dagger over his head, and he shouted, the South shall be free.

But other witnesses said, no, that's not right at all.

He only shouted, sic semper tyrannis, so always to tyrants, once he'd landed on the stage.

And other people said, well, no, he didn't say that at all.

He said the south shall be avenged.

Or some people just said, he said, I've done it, and then ran off the stage.

So, you know, if you read a definitive account, you know, you paid your money and takes your choice, really.

There's no reason to trust one version rather than another.

I suppose the one big difference with the Kennedy assassination is that if he shot Lincoln at point-blank range, there's no question about who did it and where the bullet came from.

Exactly, not at all.

The only thing that everybody agrees, everyone really agrees, is that once he's landed on the stage and said whatever he said, he turned, he ran into the wings, into the darkness, and he vanished from sight.

So he ran, but he's fractured his leg, perhaps?

Or so he's fired by adrenaline or fired by adrenaline, I think.

Because as you'll find out, he doesn't just run, he then rides for hours.

So we'll pick up when John Wilkes Booth's story in the second half, but for now, let's stay in the theatre.

Most people's reaction is total shock and confusion.

Now, at first, most people thought it was part of the play, or they thought it was a slightly

tasteless stunt to mark Abraham Lincoln's presence.

Or a lot of people actually said, I thought something had fallen over at the back.

I heard a big bang and I thought something had fallen over in the auditorium, had a bit of the stage fallen over.

You know, who knows what it was.

The theater staff who have been half watching through kind of windows and things, they were stunned when they saw Booth of all people on stage.

One of them actually burst out.

He said, by God, is John Booth crazy?

So it's kind of like Brad Pitt suddenly appearing on the stage and waving a gun.

Exactly.

Now then they heard people screaming from the president's box.

When people hear screaming, then they panic and people start to run.

So there's a bit of a stampede.

Some people are charging onto the stage, trying to get onto the stage after John Wilkes Booth.

Some people are just running out of the theater because they think there's a general attack.

Other people are trying to get into Lincoln's box.

In the box, Mary Lincoln is bent over her husband.

She's sobbing.

She's saying, talk to me, talk to me, all this.

She's slumped in his chair.

Are you going to say something horrid about her now?

Or are you going to feel a measure of pity for this poor woman?

No, I feel sorry for her.

I feel sorry for her.

She's not really well treated, actually, as Lincoln is dying, as we shall see.

You feel sorry for her, don't you, Tom?

I do.

Yeah.

Lovely.

Reflects very well on you.

Major Rathbone is in shock.

Well, he's had his arm chopped off, hasn't he?

Basically.

It's a big slice down his arm and there's blood soaking into his sleeve.

Now, even though he's losing a lot of blood, he has the presence of mind to try and open the door of the box, and he realizes that Booth has jammed it.

So there are other people hammering on the door.

So between them, they manage to get the door open.

And people burst into the box.

Now, one of them is a young doctor who's only been qualified for a few weeks, I think, called Charles Leal.

He's in his 20s.

And he's joined by an older doctor from the army, a Signal Corps surgeon called Charles Taft.

Leal, the younger man, is the first to Lincoln's body.

And he finds the president, his comatosis unconscious, he's breathing, very laboured breathing.

And interestingly, although it's point-blank range, Leal can't actually find the wound at first because it's only a small pistol.

At first, because everybody had seen Booth lifting, waving this bloody knife on stage, they assume that Lincoln has been stabbed.

And it's interesting that, isn't it?

I'd never thought that.

But of course, Caesar had been murdered with a dagger.

Yeah.

So for a Shakespeare actor to stand on a stage and wave a dagger is much more natural than for him to say to wave a gun.

Yeah, I guess so.

I guess so.

I hadn't thought that, actually, that that's the thing that he waves.

The semiotics of it is much more Shakespearean.

It is.

Absolutely.

It is much more classical.

So with some soldiers, Leo gets Lincoln to the floor.

They still can't find the wound.

They're cutting off his shirt, assuming he's been stabbed.

And then Leal runs his hand through Lincoln's hair and he finds a bullet hole at the back of his head, quite a small bullet hole with a swelling around it.

And the blood's already started to clot.

And as Leal ruffles through kind of Lincoln's hair, the clot opens up and blood pours out.

But at that point, Lincoln starts to breathe more easily.

Now, at this point, the soldiers are already saying, we've got to get the president back to the White House.

And the surgeon, the army surgeon, Dr.

Taft, steps in.

He says, listen, I know what I'm talking about.

We cannot take him there.

You can't move him a long way.

Where we should take him is the nearest house.

And they want to do this because they feel it would be vulgar for a president to die in a theater.

They already know he's he's basically dead.

This is so interesting.

This is Michael Kaufman's theory because Kaufman points out at this point, just to be clear, both of these doctors are in no doubt whatsoever that Lincoln is a dead man.

There is no way if you've been shot in the back of the head, a point blank range, that you will possibly survive.

So So they know he's dying, but they don't want him to die on Good Friday in a playhouse.

It's so indecorous.

Indecorous is the word, yeah.

So they organise a bearer party and they take Lincoln out of the box, down the stairs, through the sort of foyer and across the road to the nearest house, which is a lodging house, ironically, obviously because it's close to the theatre, very popular with actors.

run by a German tailor called William Peterson.

And they take him to a back bedroom on the ground floor.

And Lincoln is such a long man, a very tall man, that he won't fit on the bed, so they have to lie him kind of diagonally across the bed.

Now,

Mary Lincoln kind of trails behind them.

She's in a total daze, not surprisingly, in a state of shock.

So are Clara Harris and this poor bloke, Major Rathbone, who's basically comes very close to death because Booth had actually severed an artery.

And has his arm been patched up by this point?

His arm is eventually patched up.

But actually, Mary Lincoln could never look at Clara and Major Rathbone again, I think.

She associated them with that night.

Anyway,

the soldiers eventually get Mary Lincoln across the street.

And for a time, she just stands on her own in the front parlour, kind of just standing in shock.

I feel really sorry for her.

She's lost her son.

Now she's lost her husband.

And all you can do is moan about the fact that she's occasionally a little bit sniffy about very attractive women riding with her husband.

I'm totally team Mrs.

Lincoln.

I moaned in the last episode, but not in this one.

She goes down the hall to her husband.

People described her sobbing in, in quote, extreme anguish.

There's blood and brain tissue slowly leaking out of his head, but she's kissing his head nonetheless, and she's begging him to speak.

Now, at this point, tons of people have crowded into the room.

Above all, the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who takes charge.

They all are very clear at this point that Lincoln will die.

They call for his son, Robert.

who's 21, his oldest son.

He's been serving on General Grant's staff as an army captain.

He breaks down, but he he feels he has to sort of present a stoical, you know, he mans up, as it were.

He's now the head of the house.

Head of the house.

And he composes himself and he actually says, I want to get one of my mother's friends, who's a senator's wife called Elizabeth Dixon, to come over here and calm my mother down.

But Mary keeps kind of...

bursting back into the room and begging her husband to wake up and live for the sake of the children, which is actually what Franz Ferdinand said to Sophie, if you remember, when they were dying in Sarajevo.

Now we have the doctor's notes, one of the doctor's notes.

He made quite detailed notes of Lincoln's sort of decline across the night.

He was very quiet.

He's just, he's unconscious, breathing with great difficulty.

They're really just all waiting for the end.

They called for a chaplain from the Senate, the Senate chaplain who's called Dr.

Gurley, and he said his last prayers at half past three, but Lincoln lived for another three hours or so.

At seven o'clock in the morning, his breathing became very ragged, and they all knew the end was near.

And at that point, Mary came back in.

She realized he was about to die and she had a kind of shrieking fit and threw herself onto the ground and Edwin Stanton who does not share your view I think it's fair to say of Mrs Lincoln he went ballistic and he shouted take that woman out and do not let her in here again oh right so his his approach to the grieving widow is very much yours

I've never been in that circumstance with a grieving widow Tom I mean I mean I hope for the sake of a grieving widow that That you're not.

Mrs.

Dixon took Mary out.

Mary is sobbing very loudly and actually blaming herself.

She says, oh my God, and have I given my husband to die?

Because of course she'd persuaded him to go to the theatre.

Yeah.

It's a tragic story.

I think she's the real hero of this.

Well, we'll see.

7.22, Lincoln takes his final breath.

And then that's the end.

And Edwin Stanton, with properly Hollywood flair, just says, now he belongs to the ages.

So obviously rehearsed.

Captain, my captain.

Yeah.

Mary's out of the room at this point.

The chaplain goes into the parlour to tell Mary the news and she shrieks at him.

She says, why didn't you let me know that he was dying?

Why didn't you tell me?

Girlie says to her, Your friends thought it wasn't best.

You must be resigned to the will of God.

You must be calm and trust in your God and in your friends.

Now, Tom, you feel very sorry for Mary, but I have to say, after this, she slightly disgraces herself because when she moves out of the White House, she steals 70 packing cases worth of stuff.

She steals the silver, the spoons, the carpets, and the curtains.

She is, in fact, the Lobelia Sackville Baggins of American history.

I think that's harsh.

I actually looked up

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.

Yeah, go on.

No, no, about Mrs.

Lincoln in the Bodley.

And I read that she wore mourning for the rest of her life, like Queen Victoria.

And Queen Victoria wrote a very sympathetic letter to her.

And I think it reflects well on Queen Victoria that she was sympathetic, unlike you, who has compared her to one of the less appealing figures from Lord of the Rings.

And I think listeners will draw their own conclusions from this.

Queen Victoria would have changed the tune if she'd found out that stuff about the silver.

If she'd known about the flipping spoons, she'd have changed her mind.

I don't think so.

For me, you say she's the real victim.

For me, the saddest part is actually Tad or Taddy, their son.

Taddy was 12.

We talked about him in the last episode.

He had a cleft palate, very serious problems with his speech.

So he's had a kind of rough deal generally.

He's only recently celebrated his 12th birthday, and he didn't come with them to the play because it's a very boring play for a 12-year-old.

His tutor had taken him to another theatre to see Aladdin.

And

at one point, Mary said, oh, let's send for Taddy because his father loves Taddy so much.

He will wake up when he hears Taddy's voice.

But then she thought better of it.

Oh, no, poor Taddy.

You know, he'll be too upset.

Now, Taddy.

It's a terrible scene.

He's at Aladdin when the theatre managers stop the play and announce that the president has been shot.

I mean, imagine being Taddy.

He is hysterical, of course, and he's taken back to the White House in floods of tears.

He seems to have convinced himself overnight that his father would live.

So when people start returning to the house the next day, he's saying, where's my pa?

Where's my pa?

And the chaplain, Reverend Gurley, says, Taddy, your pa is dead.

And Taddy breaks down.

Oh, my father is dead.

What shall I do?

Oh, he says, he's begging his mother, don't die, Ma, don't die.

I'll be left alone.

I'll be left alone.

And the next day, well-wishers are descending on the house.

And Taddy said to one of them, do you think my father has gone to heaven?

I have not a doubt of it, the well-wisher said.

And Taddy said, then I'm glad he's gone there, for he never was happy after he came here to Washington.

This was not a good place for him.

So,

just to tie up this bit of the story.

For the next few days, there were crowds and crowds of people sobbing outside the White House.

The Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Wells, who's a brilliant source on this, was struck above all by the African Americans, by the black people in the crowds.

Their hopeless grief affects me more than almost anything else.

Those strong and brave men wept when I met them.

Lincoln's funeral was held in the East Room of the White House on the 19th of April, which was actually the anniversary of the very first deaths in the Civil War.

deaths which happened when a mob in Baltimore had attacked troops that were heading south to the front from Massachusetts.

Lincoln's body lay in state in the Capitol.

It was escorted by the 22nd United States Coloured Infantry.

Again, Gideon Wells wrote about the grief of the black people in the crowd.

He said, bewailing the loss of him whom they regarded as a benefactor and a father.

And then his body left the Capitol two days later for the journey by rail to his home state of Illinois, again escorted by black troops.

And the black troops were so grief-stricken.

that sort of VIPs, many of them were moved to tears.

The rail journey took two weeks and it was retracing deliberately the journey that Lincoln had made when he became president in 1861.

Five million people lined the tracks or queued up to see the coffin when it stopped in various cities.

People would wave flags, they'd sing hymns, they lit bonfires, but above all, people are struck by the number of sort of onlookers in floods and floods of tears.

And Dominic, can I ask?

Yeah.

The fact that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday,

do people draw the obvious parallel?

Of course.

Lots of stuff about him being a Christ-like figure.

Absolutely.

So there's a kind of religious dimension to all of this.

There is a religious dimension.

And of course, for example, we talked about African-American mourners.

You know, African-American culture is absolutely steeped in scripture at this point in the 19th century.

So yes, very much.

But also the sense of life coming from death, perhaps.

I guess so.

I guess so.

At last, on the 3rd of May, 1865, the train carrying Abraham Lincoln pulls into Springfield, Illinois, and for the last time, he has come home.

Goodness, Dominic.

What a dry eye in the house.

But while all this has been going on, there's a manhunt going on as well.

I'm presuming that, Dominic, that we will come to this story and the remarkable fate of John Wilkes Booth, and most excitingly of all, the reappearance on the rest is history of a top eunuch.

So all of that is coming.

after the break.

This episode is brought to you by Surfshark.

Now, had Mary Queen of of Scots been just a little bit more careful with her correspondence, then she might well have avoided becoming a cautionary tale of treason.

So she slipped her ciphered letters into beer barrels.

Methods today have changed, but the risk of interception, of course, always remains.

Your information is more vulnerable than ever, and perhaps especially when it's online.

Trackers and advertisers and apps collecting your data all the time.

And if you're using public Wi-Fi, then your activity can be monitored by anyone who is sharing the network that you are on.

And this is where Surfshark comes in.

It's a VPN that encrypts your internet connection, thereby keeps your personal data secure.

So you can also change your digital location, giving you access to your favorite sites and streaming services wherever you are.

So protect your data, browse securely from anywhere, no cipher, no courier, certainly no beer barrel required.

Go to surfshark.com/slash T-R-I-H or you can use the code T-R-I-H at the checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN plus a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Did you know you lose 91 days a year to scrolling?

That's your entire summer.

Gone.

So this summer, log off and show up with friends and some ice cold Heinekens.

Then instead of commenting on your crew's stories, he'll be making memories with them.

Sorry, social media.

The scrolling ends and the fun begins with cold Heinekens and good friends.

Heineken, social networking since 1873.

Available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken.com.

Must be 21 plus to purchase.

Enjoy Heineken responsibly.

Hello, I'm William Durimple.

And I'm Anita Arnand, and we're the hosts of another goal hanger show, Empire.

And we are here to tell you about a recent series we've done on partition.

On the 14th and 15th of August, 1947, Pakistan and India announced their independence from the British Empire.

But as these nations gained their freedom, their rushed and violent division resulted in the deaths of well over a million people and the forced migration of over 14 million more.

It's a piece of South Asian history that many people are familiar with, but in this series we want to explore it alongside four less well-known partitions which continued to affect the region in monumental ways.

Yeah, you're quite right.

In one episode, we dissect how Dubai almost became part of modern India.

And in another we're going to unpack the history behind the headlines about the conflict in Kashmir.

We also explore how the separation of Burma from India is linked to the origin of the Rohingya genocide and how East and West Pakistan separated in 1971 to create Bangladesh.

So if you'd like to hear more about the five partitions that completely transformed modern Asia and how the weight of the memory of partition has been passed down through the generations.

We've left a clip of the series at the end of this episode for you to listen to.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History.

And this is the second presidential assassination we've done on the show.

We've done JFK already.

And when we did that, Some of our American listeners, I think in particular, complained that you had treated the conspiracy theories with such contempt.

Now, I have already suggested for this an excellent conspiracy theory that Ulysses S.

Grant, who very suspiciously bailed out of the evening that Saul Lincoln shot at the theater, that he might have been behind it.

I've also suggested that maybe Jefferson Davis was behind it.

I mean, Andrew Johnson, the vice president who now becomes president.

Maybe he was behind it.

So lots of conspiracy theories to deal with here.

What do you say to them?

I don't think we need them, Tom, because we have a conspiracy already.

There absolutely was a conspiracy in this case, and we don't need to put more people in it because we know who was in it.

But it's kind of all fun to do that, isn't it?

I suppose it is.

I mean, to pile people into it.

But just to deal with the conspiracy that actually existed.

So the others definitely didn't exist.

No, I don't think they did.

I think the one possibility is that there were more people who knew about it in the sort of Confederacy.

In the Confederacy.

Because there is a link to kind of the Confederate Secret Service in Washington, isn't there?

There's a sort of underworld of Confederate sympathizers and agents.

And as we will see, they do help the conspirators.

So definitely there is a little network.

How far it goes is hard to say.

The plan, as I've said, was to decapitate the American government.

Now, it didn't work out quite as John Wilkes Booth had hoped.

So one bloke, George Azerot, who was the German repairman, he was supposed to kill Vice President Johnson.

He went to Johnson's hotel.

He thought he'd have a quick drink to stiffen his nerves.

And then he just thought, actually, Soda, I'll just stay in the bar.

He completely loses his nerve.

He just spends the evening drinking in the bar.

And then he wanders the streets.

He tries to throw his knife away.

He's spotted by a woman throwing a knife down the drain or something.

And a few days later, he's arrested.

Now, the other bit of the conspiracy was much more successful.

This was the Maryland pharmacist's assistant David Herold and the Confederate secret agent Lewis Powell.

They went to Lafayette Square, which is the house of Secretary of State William Seward.

Seward had had a carriage accident and he's recovering in bed.

Lewis Powell manages to bluff his way inside.

He says to the staff, I'm bringing medicine for Seward from his personal doctor.

He goes up to his bedroom.

He pulls out his knife.

He slashes at Seward's neck.

But

Seward is partly protected because he's wearing a kind of neck brace sort of splint arrangement because of his carriage accident.

So he's protected from the knife wound.

There's then an awful lot of scuffling.

And stabbing, I gather.

Because again, was i was just looking at this in the in the break yeah apparently he stabs five people exactly exactly he's just stab stab stab more people are piling into the room and this by powell is like scuffling his way down back down the stairs he manages to get out of the house and he leaves the house with the excellent phrase he's shouting i'm mad

i'm mad and do you think he is no i but i think it works because he does get out of the house oh that's why he's saying it it's not a confession no i don't think so have you ever read that story about um I don't know whether they can repeat this on the show.

Anthony Burgess, you know, Anthony Burgess.

Yeah, the novelist.

Once said to King's Lamis, are you not worried about being attacked in London by ruffians, by muggers?

And King's Lamis said, no.

And Burgess said, well, I've got a brilliant plan.

If ever I'm attacked by muggers, I think about this all the time.

He said, I carry a sword stick with me.

And if anyone approaches me in the street, I draw the sword stick and I shout at people,

I've got cancer.

Goodness, I should try that when I walk down Brixton Hill.

Exactly, you should.

Yeah, I do that all the time.

Right, so anyway, Lewis Powell has got out shouting, I'm mad, and he lurks around the city in a very ill-advised way.

I think it's fair to say, and was arrested on the evening, the 17th, so just a few days later.

Now, all three of these men were convicted and hanged, as was Mary Surratt, the woman who ran the Confederate safe house.

in Washington.

And she's apparently the first woman to be executed in American history.

Really?

Apparently so.

What have they been doing for all those previous decades?

Why had they not executed more women?

So women had been incredibly well-behaved until that point.

Or dealt with very softly.

Yeah, dealt with very softly.

Right.

Well, John Wilkes Booth is not hanged, unlike this woman.

So what happened to him?

As you said earlier, there's obviously no doubt that he's Lincoln's killer.

He's shot him in full view of all these people and then jumped onto the stage.

Many of these people actually know him by sight.

Right away, therefore, the police are looking for him.

They know he almost certainly would have gone south because any sane person would have tried to cross the Potomac River into Virginia and then to go south in Virginia and to get past the Union lines into the Confederacy.

But that's where he obviously goes wrong, isn't it?

He should have headed for Canada because that's the last thing his pursuers would have expected him to do.

That's true.

Head to like the home of abolitionism, Massachusetts or something.

Yeah.

That would surprise people.

Anyway, even before midnight and the night of Lincoln's assassination, the Union Army commanders have sent orders to mobilize troops around the city to seal off the roads leading south, intercept river traffic, and so on.

The Secretary of War, Stanton, sends a dispatch to the newspapers and he sends instructions to the front lines.

Don't let anybody pass through the front lines of Virginia.

They produce wanted posters.

You can see them online.

The price on Booth's head was $100,000, an astronomical amount of money in those days.

Let the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land by the arrest arrest and punishment of the murderers.

All this kind of thing.

But the days go by and there is no sign of him.

So what has happened to him?

Well, we actually know what happened to him.

They don't know, but we know.

When Booth had left the stage, he had gone down this unlit passage that led to the back door of the theatre.

Of course, he knew the theatre really well, so he knows where he's going.

Now, remember, I said before that he had rented this mare, and the mare, this horse, is waiting for him in the alley behind the theatre and dominic also in the previous episode we mentioned how some really top american names will be featuring in the second episode yeah and listeners should prepare themselves for what is to come yeah booth before going to the theatre he'd approached a stage carpenter called ned spangler and said but there's better could you hold my

and spangler said all right and then as soon as booth was out of sight spangler didn't want her to get rid of this horse and he gave the horse to a junior person at the theatre called called

Peanut Burrows.

So Peanut Burrows is now looking after this horse.

Anyway, Booth bursts out of the back door of the theatre, sort of out of the fire exit.

The horse is waiting, then is startled and tries to kind of pull away, but Booth manages to kind of clamber into the saddle anyway.

And it's a very sort of cinematic moment.

Just as the first pursuers are coming out of the door behind him, he spurs the horse and rides off down this alley into the darkness.

And he clearly travelled traveled very quickly because by about 11.30, he has reached the wooden drawbridge across the Anacostia River, which is by the U.S.

Naval Yard.

The bridge was guarded by Union troops.

Now, under wartime regulations, because remember, one of the really remarkable things about the American Civil War is that the Union capital, Washington, is effectively a front-line city.

So because of the wartime regulations, there was a curfew and you couldn't enter or leave the city after nine o'clock at night.

So Booth turns up at 11.40 and a guy called Sergeant Silas Cobb is called out and told there's a rider trying to get across the bridge.

And Booth gives his name.

He says, my name is Booth.

I live in Charles County, Maryland, and I want to go across the bridge home.

And Cobb says,

what about the curfew?

Do you not know about the curfew?

And by this point, there isn't a kind of telegraph or anything.

So they haven't been notified.

No, they haven't been notified exactly.

And Booth says, oh, I didn't know about the curfew.

I haven't been into town for ages.

So I didn't know about it.

Now, Sergeant Cobb hesitates.

He finds it weird that the horse has been ridden very hard.

So you were asking, could Booth run with his fractured leg?

Not only can he run, he can gallop.

He has ridden the horse hard, but he's struck by the fact that Booth is very well turned out.

He actually comments on his nicely sort of quaffed hair and his manicured nails.

His pomaded moustache.

Exactly.

And so Cobb says, well, this guy's obviously, you know, he wouldn't lie.

And he says, all right, fine, go across.

But you have to walk your horse across the bridge, which Booth does.

A few moments later, a second horseman arrives.

This is Booth's co-conspirator, the pharmacist bloke, David Herold.

And he says, I'm going home to Charles County, funnily enough, as well.

And Cobb at this point thinks, this is kind of peculiar.

And he says to this bloke, well, why didn't you leave earlier?

And Herold says, you know, there's been a lot of parties in the city.

I stopped to see a woman on Capitol Hill and I couldn't get off before.

And the sergeant thinks, actually, do you know what that is quite plausible you know everyone's having a party he might have shacked up with some woman and you're not going to make it up and also the war's kind of over like who cares lee has been beaten so it doesn't really matter and so he lets them go and so by midnight both of them across the anacosta river and they're heading into southern maryland now the first place they head for It's the tavern owned by this Confederate agent or suspected Confederate agent, Mary Surratt.

And it's in the village of Surrattsville, which has, I believe, since been renamed Clinton because they didn't want to name it after Confederate traitors.

Now, remember, Booth had given her a package earlier that day, and now he picks it up from the tavern, and it contains some binoculars and two carbines, rifles.

This is very Lee Harvey Oswald, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

People are always carrying curtain rods in America, that's racist.

They love it.

They love it.

Ridiculous names and like brown paper packages that could be rifles.

Now, the thing about Booth's leg, his leg is now causing him great pain.

And about four o'clock in the morning, he goes to call on a local doctor called Samuel Mudd.

Of course he is.

Who's a keen Confederate supporter and was part of his kidnapping scheme.

And Mudd says, oh my goodness, you fractured your calf bone.

And he makes a splint and he gets him some crutches.

And he says, you two, like Booth and Harold, can sleep in my house.

Then the next day, a Saturday, Mudd gets up and he goes and does some errands and he hears in the town or the village, Abraham Lincoln has been murdered.

And he obviously puts two and two together.

He comes back to the house and he says, You guys have got to go.

Like, I can't have you here any longer.

They set off through the countryside.

Remember that Booth is kind of limping in on crutches part of the time.

He's still got his opera cloak on.

Yeah, still dressed as the phantom of the opera.

They get lost in a swamp and they end up having to beg, ironically, a freed black man called Oswald Swan to help them and guide them through this swamp.

And they pay him $12 to guide them to a plantation house owned by another Confederate bloke that they know.

And there, this bloke who owns the plantation gets his overseer to take them to a pine thicket in the swamp.

Has there been a film about this?

Surely, I think there's been a series, a Netflix series or something of that kind.

I must watch it.

I bet there should clearly be another one, a better one, because this is a great story.

So they hide in this pine thicket and basically their friends and Confederate agents are trying to figure out how to get them across the Potomac River into Virginia.

So they wait in this thicket for about four days and nights, I think.

And a local Confederate agent called Thomas Jones pitches up every now and again with food and in particular with newspapers.

So Booth has not been able to, you know, like any good actor.

He's obsessed with his reviews.

He wants to read what people have written about him in the papers.

And he had written a letter to the newspapers explaining his reasons that he was the American Brutus.

And he's absolutely furious that they haven't printed it.

They haven't given him the airtime, as it were.

And it's at this point that he writes his first journal entry.

So

this is not the one that you read.

It's an earlier one.

And he explains, you know, why he did what he did.

He said, our cause being lost, something decisive and great must be done.

But its failure was owing to others who did not strike for their country with a heart.

I struck struck boldly and not as the papers say.

So he's already defending himself against the critics.

I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends.

Now here's an interesting thing.

I shouted six semper before I fired.

Not afterwards.

Every other account says he shouted six sempa to Iranis after he fired.

So do you think his memory is playing tricks on him or possibly his memory is playing tricks on him.

Yeah, exactly.

In jumping, I broke my leg.

I passed all his pickets.

I rode sixty miles that night with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump.

I can never repent it.

Our country owed all her trouble to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.

There is a definite air of sort of hysteria, I think, about this entry.

You know, he's not thinking terribly clearly, I think it's fair to say.

Thursday the 20th.

Thomas Jones, the Confederate agent, his reports that Union troops are now scouring the woods in a nearby county, and he tells them they have to move.

They have to go across the river.

He's got a fishing boat down on the Potomac.

And he pushes them off into the night on this fishing boat.

It's very foggy.

The Potomac at this point is very wide.

And they get completely lost.

They row all night.

And then they land.

And then when the day comes, they realize they're basically back where they started, but further away.

And they're still on the wrong side of the river.

So the next night, Friday the 21st, Saturday the 22nd, they have another go and they manage to row across this time and they land.

Of course, they land somewhere called Gambo Creek in Virginia.

In the meantime, this is when Booth has written that second journal entry that you read so splendidly.

So the tone here, I think,

you did it in a very bulliant

style.

Right, blessed style.

I think it's fair to say.

But actually, I think he's very bedraggled and miserable at this point.

All this stuff about being hunted by like a dog.

and all this.

So I didn't think through what his motivation was.

Yeah.

It wasn't method acting.

No.

Daniel Day-Lewis wouldn't approve of that at all.

No, he wouldn't.

I should have prepared for it by spending a week being hunted by dogs through brushwood.

And then I could have done it justice.

Oh, I've let you down, Dominic.

I'm really sorry.

You should have recorded the previous episode, which we've just done, in character as John Wilkes Booth to prepare you.

I should have done.

Damn.

So anyway, he feels very sorry for himself.

I'm abandoned with the curse of Cain upon me.

When if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness.

And then he says, I have too great a soul to die like a criminal.

He thinks a lot of himself, I think it's fair to say.

He does.

So for two days, they continue south.

And on the Sunday night, the 23rd, he lets himself down, behaves very poorly.

What do you mean he lets himself down?

He's just shot Abraham Lincoln.

Of course he's let himself down.

I think worse of him for this, actually.

I think worse of him for this.

You see, he arrives at the cabin of a freed black family called the Lucases, and he and Harold Herold threaten the father, William Lucas, at knife point and drive the whole family into the woods so they can sleep in their cabin.

That is poor.

It is poor.

But I mean, at least he doesn't kill William Lucas.

I agree.

He's not coming across well from this.

It reflects really badly on him.

It reflects really badly.

Yeah, I accept that.

The next day, Monday the 24th, he and Herold meet three Confederate soldiers who lead them to a tobacco farm inevitably called Locust Hill.

This is the world's most American story.

It is.

Locust Hill, and it's owned by a man who actually has a reasonable name, Richard Garrett.

That's disappointing.

Booth says, oh, I'm a wounded Confederate soldier.

And Garrett says, fine, you can stay.

Herold actually goes off with his other Confederate soldiers into the nearby town, which is called Bowling Green.

So Garrett doesn't say, if you're a Confederate soldier, why are you wearing evening dress?

Yeah, why are you dressed like the Phantom of the Opera?

No, he doesn't.

Actually, and at first it's lovely.

Sweetness and light.

So Booth has a nice rest.

he has a nice breakfast, and then he plays with Garrett's children on the lawn.

So maybe his leg is a bit better.

But then things start to unravel.

Herold and the soldiers come back to the Garrett farm, to Locust Hill, and they say there's Union cavalry in the area.

And Booth panics and he rushes off to hide in the woods.

And at this point, the Garrett family become very suspicious.

If he's just an ordinary Confederate soldier.

You know, why would he have panicked and run away to the woods?

The war's kind of over.

You know, it's very low risk.

strange behavior.

When he finally emerges, they say, are you really in the Confederate Army?

He says, oh, yeah, I was in, this is where his acting skills come in.

He says, I was in Captain Robinson's company of the 30th Virginia.

But as luck would have it, Richard Garrett's son, Jack, is a Confederate soldier, and he knows that unit.

And he knows there is no such captain.

So they have a massive argument.

And the Garretts eventually say, right, okay, you guys can stay one more night.

We're not going to have you in the house.

You can stay in the tobacco barn.

But the Garretts now think that these blokes are probably horse thieves.

So they lock the barn door once Booth and Herald are inside.

Now, meanwhile, in the nearby town...

What's the nearby town called Dominic?

Bowling Green.

It's unbelievable.

Officers of the National Detective Police and a detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry have arrived to hunt for the fugitives.

And they talk to these three Confederate soldiers who had helped Booth and Herold and basically get the truth out of them.

It takes them two hours to ride to Locust Hill Farm, and they arrive at about two in the morning.

They surround the house, they drag the Garretts out of bed, and they basically say to Richard Garrett, if you don't tell us where these guys are, we will hang you right here.

Jack Garrett, this Confederate soldier, who's still wearing his Confederate uniform, comes out and he says, Father, just tell them.

So they go to the barn and the detectives send Jack Garrett to to speak to the fugitives.

Say, come out.

They won't come out.

Then the chief of the detectives, who's called Luther Byron Baker, he shouts into the barn.

He says, surrender, come out.

And if you don't come out, I'll burn this barn down.

You've got 15 minutes.

Herold wants to give up.

Booth says, no, no, don't give up.

Don't give up.

Whispering to him.

Luther Byron Baker says, I'm going to start burning this barn down.

And Booth shouts back.

He says, Captain, that's rather rough.

I'm nothing but a cripple.

I have but one leg.

You ought to give me a chance for a fair fight.

And Baker says, listen, you've got five minutes and I'm going to burn this bloody barn down.

Booth is playing for time, making all sorts of complaints and stuff, and eventually they pile brushwood against the barn and one of them sets it alight.

At this point, Herald panics.

He runs to the door.

Let me out, let me out.

He manages to get out and the troopers grab him and tie him up.

So now there's just Booth.

And Booth, remember, has a rifle.

He has one of his rifles from the tavern.

The fire is spreading now across the barn.

Spreads to the rafters.

The barn is lit up with this weird glow.

And through the cracks in the timbers, the soldiers can see Booth.

As Michael Kaufman says in his book, he's trapped like a wild animal, kind of darting around looking for a place to escape.

And Dominic, it is at this point

that the moment long-term fans of the West's history have been looking forward to.

Yeah.

Because it is now

that one of history's top 10 eunuchs

makes his appearance in this series.

Yes, Sergeant Boston Corbett.

Which you would say is an amazing, I mean, it's a classic American name, but actually is English.

He's a Londoner.

The distinctive thing about Boston Corbett, so he's a trooper there with the cavalry, is that he is literally as mad as a hatter.

Because he is a hatter, right?

He had worked as a milliner in New York and he'd been driven mad by the mercury.

I think they used mercury for fur, didn't they?

To cure the fur in hats.

We did an episode on that.

Yeah.

And he became a religious maniac.

That is to say, a Methodist.

Apologies to any Methodist listeners for Dominic's abuse.

While pursuing his Methodism in Boston, Massachusetts, he castrated himself with a pair of scissors, didn't he?

He did.

So, I mean, it's a whole scissors theme actually in our show, because remember Charles XII of Sweden cut his own foot open with some scissors.

But this is much more extreme.

He unmanned himself with these scissors.

Then he enlisted in the Union Army, became a prisoner of war at Andersonville Prison, great sort of notorious Confederate prison camp.

And then he was exchanged just in time to serve in the detachment sent to capture Booth.

So Boston Corbett is looking through the cracks in the timbers and he sees Booth raise his rifle and move towards the door.

Now almost certainly Booth was surrendering, was planning to surrender, I think.

The barn is on fire.

Boston Corbett just fired.

He fired through the gaps in the timbers, his revolver, and Booth is down.

There's never been any kind of notion that he's a kind of Jack Ruby figure

employed to silence him.

Working for Mrs.

Ulysses S.

Grant.

That's not part of conspiracy theory law.

I think only by you, Tom.

Yeah, I mean, write in, if there is a conspiracy theory along that line.

This is American history.

Therefore, there are almost certainly some mad theories out there, I would imagine.

Anyway, maybe that bloke they carry out is not John Wilkesmeath.

Maybe the real John Wilkesmooth is somewhere else.

Who knows?

Anyway, they carry him out.

Boston Corbett has shot him in the neck.

The bullet went through his neck and through his spinal column.

So he's dying.

One of the detectives who has the excellent name, Everton Conker.

Everton Conker.

Oh, what is it with these names?

There's a eunuch and now there's somebody with the name of Conker.

Boston Corbett and Everton Conger.

There's far too many surnames in those names.

That's four people.

They could be a crime-fighting duo.

The eunuch and the conquer.

Solving crimes in Reconstruction America.

Okay, Everton Conger kneels over him.

The booth whispers.

Tell my mother that I did it for my country.

Tell my mother that I die for my country.

So he's a mummy's boy right to the end.

And it took hours for him to die.

He kept repeating that line about his mother and his country.

But then as dawn breaks, again, perfect for a Hollywood cinematographer, as dawn breaks, he whispers, useless, useless.

And then he dies.

That's the end of John Wilkes Booth.

Now, the thing is,

his story is so rich, actually.

This book that I mentioned by Michael Kaufman, American Brutus, is brilliant.

He thinks the key to Booth is that he was an actor, that basically he lived in a world of make-believe, that his identity as a southern gentleman was a complete fiction.

He'd never lived in the south properly.

He came from a border state.

He'd never had a great success in the south.

All his success was in the north.

So he's basically a Yankee.

Yeah, but he's invented this fantasy life for himself.

And as Kaufman says, he constructed a dramatic persona for himself rather than accept the truth that he was a hot-headed loser who only talked while others gave their lives.

His title is American Brutus.

And of course, the great irony is that John Wilkes Booth dreamt of being Brutus, but it never occurred to him that Brutus was a failure.

Yeah.

That Brutus turned Caesar into a martyr, and that actually his actions hastened the end of the Roman Republic, that he destroyed his own cause.

And of course, that's what John Wilkes Booth does to some degree.

Now, the real question that hangs over all this is, which is a shame to be asking this question after we've spent a lot of time on this.

So did it matter?

Is it of any importance?

And of course, a lot of American listeners will say that it mattered enormously because as with John F.

Kennedy, you know, with John F.

Kennedy, there is this sort of fantasy.

If Kennedy lives, you don't get Vietnam.

You don't get the Vietnam War, and there's sort of a darker turn of the late 60s and Nixon and everything that follows.

And the fantasy that's so common in Lincoln's death is Lincoln lives and the South is beaten, but Lincoln controls Reconstruction.

Black Americans are given the vote.

The Confederates never regain control of the southern states.

There is no segregation.

The Jim Crow laws of the 20th century.

that actually all is sweetness and light.

And personally, I find this unbelievably unconvincing and implausible.

I think, first of all, because like the Kennedy sort of fantasies, it massively exaggerates the power of the presidency.

What actually happens is Reconstruction ends up being a huge power struggle between the White House and Congress, which Congress actually wins.

And Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, ends up being impeached.

So there's a real irony there that Lincoln is murdered for being a tyrant, for being a Caesar.

Yeah.

But there's actually the problem that he would have faced is that he's not nearly autocratic enough.

Exactly.

And that actually, as soon as the war was over, Congress would have sought to roll back a lot of his, what they saw as his more imperial powers.

The second thing, I think the sort of fantasy tributes Lincoln with superhuman political skills that no human being ever possessed.

Because Lincoln is a lame duck president and he's already facing massive opposition in Congress.

Now, a lot of people expect that from the Democrats who think he's a dictator.

But the really interesting thing that I think would surprise a lot of listeners is the opposition from radicals in his own party.

So this is an extraordinary thing that when he dies, a lot of the keenest abolitionists in the Republican Party are actually delighted.

They held a meeting after his death and the Indiana congressman George Julian recorded, quote, the universal feeling that his death is a godsend.

Because many of them think quite wrongly that his vice president will do a better job.

But I mean, imagine if you'd had...

I don't know, members of the FBI or the CIA meeting up and saying that Kennedy's death was a godsend.

Yeah.

You would suspect a conspiracy.

You think the Radical Republicans killed Abraham Lincoln?

The whole thing is just spiraling out of control here.

I mean, actually, if you want the evidence, Tom.

So Zachariah Chandler, senator from Michigan.

God continued Mr.

Lincoln in office as long as he was useful and then substituted a better man to finish the work.

Benjamin Wade, senator from Ohio.

By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government.

Mr.

Lincoln had too much of human kindness in him to deal with these infamous traitors.

In other words, the radical Republicans are much less on Lincoln's team than we often think, and they would probably have fallen out with him in the next few months or years over Reconstruction.

But the biggest thing, actually,

the issue of the South and racism, white supremacy, it can't be fixed by one man.

Because it would have taken, I think, a long-term military regime in the southern states, committed to black equality, to change things.

And the North was never, ever going to accept such a political and financial commitment.

The White South would always have resisted.

There would always have been power military groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

And we actually know from Lincoln's public statements, that's the reason I mentioned them in the first episode.

He's desperate to get the White South integrated as quickly as possible to return to what he sees as harmony and reconciliation.

So the destiny of the United States as a continental power, even to Lincoln, is more significant than establishing racial equality?

Yes, I would say so, actually.

Now, I don't say that to diminish him.

He's a practical politician.

He's choosing from different priorities.

I think he is committed to racial equality, but gradually.

And I think he would have found the challenge just as complex and demanding as his successors did, as Ulysses S.

Grant did, actually, when he became president.

So in a way, you can argue that as with Kennedy, his killer actually does him a real favor.

You know, John Wilkes Booth turns him into a martyr because there's nothing the world likes more than a kind of slain hero, right?

As you implied in the first episode, there's nothing you enjoy more than an idol with feet of clay.

Yeah.

But what we've just been talking about in the relation to Lincoln, do you think that diminishes him?

Does that diminish his reputation or not?

Do you think Lincoln deserves the kind of the reputation that he has, not just in America, but really across the world?

Yeah, I think he does actually.

Michael Burlinghame, in this book that I've mentioned a few times, brilliant biography, he says Lincoln, you know, had a personality that you very rarely find in politics, somebody who is firmly committed to a vision, who has the practical pragmatic skills in order to achieve it, but is a fully kind of realized human being, reflective, humble,

thoughtful, with a kind of wry sense of his own place in the grand scheme of things.

You know, not without ego, of course, none of us are, but he's able to hold his ego in check.

A really impressive person, I would say.

I don't know huge amounts about his life,

but everything that I read about him, two things strike me.

One is that he has this incredible ability that all the really great, morally profound American politicians have had.

So we did series on Martin Luther King.

Lincoln has this ability to kind of channel a spirit of biblical prophecy and associate it with a brighter future for America.

Yeah.

But also he seems to be fun.

Yeah.

He's an engaging, amusing person.

Yes.

And that combination of biblical prophet and somebody who would be fun to be with, you know they don't always gel let's put it like that yeah you're absolutely right and actually you mentioned daniel jay lewis so tabby our producer loves the lincoln film and actually persuaded me to watch it a few weeks ago and daniel jay lewis does bring this out in the steven spielberg film there is a kind of whimsy to him a folksiness sometimes folksiness can be very annoying but i think it's not terribly annoying in this film i think the last word should go to somebody who's one of lincoln's great contemporaries somebody who wasn't american you know didn't actually know that much about america but um was undoubtedly a great figure And that person, oddly, I think Michael Birlingham quotes him in his book, is Tolstoy.

So for the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909, the New York World sent a reporter to Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyena, to ask Tolstoy, because they said he's the world's greatest writer.

Let's see what he's got to say about Lincoln.

And this is what Tolstoy said.

He said, of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history, Lincoln is the only real giant.

Alexander, Frederick the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone, even Washington.

Frankly, I wouldn't put Washington in that list, because you know my views on Washington with his other people's teeth in his mouth.

Even Washington, they stand in greatness of character, in depth and feeling, and in certain moral power far behind Lincoln.

He came through many hardships and much experience to the realization that the greatest human achievement is love.

He was what Beethoven was in music, Dante in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Christ in the philosophy of life.

There's your Christ comparison, Tom.

Lincoln was a man of whom a nation has a right to to be proud.

He was a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations.

He lived and died a hero, and as a great character, he will live as long as the world lives.

What a tone to end on.

Thank you, Dominic.

That was fascinating.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Hi, it's William Drimple here again from Empire, another goal hanger podcast.

Here's the clip from our recent series on the five partitions that created modern Asia.

And it was deeply emotional.

Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations.

Because he was always saying, you know, my family doesn't have archives, etc.

We lost everything in partition, and there's nothing that we have from Bela to show where we came from.

But so he wanted to pick up something from Bela and make it into heirlooms for the next generations.

You know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of Bela with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again.

And, you know, even if his kids can never visit Bela, they'll always have a piece of Bela with them.

This connection with earth, dharthi, you know, they call it dharti in India.

And zameen is the Urdu word for exactly the same thing.

But it is much more than just the earth.

It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from.

And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth.

And I have one too, you know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of earth and brought it back with me because I thought, you know,

this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on.

To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.