Collateral damage: how a bungled and misguided assassination claimed an unintended victim

Most people know that John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln. What they may not know is that Booth had planned a triple assassination, to happen that same evening of 14 April 1865. The intention was that Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, and the Secretary of State, William Seward would also die. So within days of Robert Lee’s surrender of Confederate forces to Ulysses Grant, the top three politicians of the United States would be dead.

The man assigned to kill the Vice President chickened out, so nothing at all happened to him.

One Lewis Powell made a serious attempt to kill William Seward, however. Seward was in bed recovering from a serious carriage accident. Powell showed up pretending to be bringing medicine for him; when William’s son Frederick challenged him and insisted on taking the medicine into his father himself, Powell attempted to shoot him; however, his gun misfired so instead he beat him around the head with the gun butt, causing several fractures and leaving him critically injured.

Lithograph recreating Powell's attack on Frederick Seward

Powell then burst into Seward’s room, slashing at him several times with a Bowie knife. Seward fell out of his bed on the far side, and had the impression of being caught in rain, so thickly his own blood was falling.

In the end, Powell fled the house, leaving three other wounded people behind him, including Seward’s daughter and his nurse.

The entire assassination plot was one of the most misconceived plans in history. No one can say what would have happened had Lincoln not been murdered, but most leaders of the former Confederacy realised that his death would make things significantly worse for their States. Lincoln was committed to restoring the South to the Union as quickly and painlessly as possible; with him out of the way, far more radical and vindictive elements took charge. According to Carl Sandburg, in his outstanding biography of Lincoln, Confederate General Joseph Johnston told William Sherman, to whom he surrendered and from whom he learned of Lincoln’s death, that the assassination was “the greatest possible calamity to the South.”

Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina kept a diary of the Civil War in the South, from which Sandburg also quotes:

Lincoln, old Abe Lincoln, has been killed… Why? By whom? It is simply maddening… I know this foul murder will bring upon us worse miseries.

Booth was a devoted follower of the Confederacy, but not devoted enough to actually fight for it. He spent the years of the war on Union territory, plotting for his cause but otherwise living a comfortable life as an actor. He left taking action until the war was all but over, and made things far worse by doing so.

As for his accomplices, they failed entirely. Although Lewis Powell had injured five people, including Frederick who came close to death, they all survived.

Oddly, though, he claimed one life. Seward’s wife Frances had been in poor health. She spent the next weeks nursing her injured husband and son. The strain undermined her. On 21 June 1865, she died of a heart attack.

Booth was killed in a shootout with Federal troops soon after the assassination, but four others died on the gallows, including Powell. That didn’t happen until 7 July. So they survived Frances by nearly three weeks.

A sorry little story. But it seems to sum up fittingly a plot which was misguided from the outset, botched in its execution and dire in its unwanted consequences.

Art and the assassin. if only by association

The art of portraiture at first glance sounds monumentally dull.

Some worthy but undistinguished family with more money than aesthetic sense pays a painter to do them in oils, orders up a nice tree background, and smiles for the easel. They end up looking just as banal and dull as they probably were.

But that’s less true if the artist isn’t just painting to commission. And above all if he has real talent. As, for instance, if he’s John Singer Sargent. 

Well used to be, since John Singer Sargent’s been late for a while now.

Sargent’s remarkable ability emerges clearly from the exhibition of his works at the National Portrait Gallery, which deserves all the praise the Guardian gave it. Take, for example, the time when he was commissioned to do the portrait of a well-off lady, and then, struck by the looks of her son, asked to do his too. The result, his painting of W. Graham Robertson, is one of the most striking in the show.

W. Graham Robertson
in a picture made by the coat

The young man – he was 28 at the time though to me he looks younger – wasn’t particularly happy about posing in an overcoat in the summer. Yes, even in England, the weather can turn hot. Or at any rate, too warm for an overcoat. Sargent, however, replied “but the coat is the picture.” Certainly the coat makes the picture, and it makes it dramatically well.

Talking of drama, one of my favourite paintings was of one of the great Shakespearean actors of his time, Edwin Booth. This portrait too has a story. Booth complained that Sargent wasn’t producing a good likeness; the painter erased the head and started again. The result is powerfully effective: a look full of brooding intensity but also, with the pose, the theatricality of the actor.

The great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth
Unfortunate in having a notorious younger brother

But that particular painting had a far greater effect still on me. Because Edwin Booth was not only a star in his own right. He came from a family of great actors. The weakest of them was his youngest brother, known more for his extraordinary good looks than for his ability on stage. Those looks led to his briefly being known as the youngest star in the world. His limited talent, however, could not sustain him on the heights for long.

So ultimately he could not rival his brother, the man in Sargent’s portrait, in fame. He did, however, overtake him, even overshadow him, in infamy.

For John Wilkes Booth, resplendent in looks but little else, was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

It was a chilling experience to stand in front of the portrait of his far more talented elder brother, and admire its execution.

It’s only a shame that when his brother dabbled in execution, he too succeeded.

Let them live, however vile

Nearly two thousand years ago, a group of aristocrats decided to defend the privileges that they and their ancestors had enjoyed for centuries, by striking down the military leader who seemed intent on putting an end to them.

On 15 March 44 BC, they mobbed Julius Caesar in the Roman forum and stabbed him to death. The assassination sealed their own destruction in the civil war that followed, along with the end of the republic they had been so keen to defend. For self-fulfilling prophecy, to say nothing of own-goals, the assassination of Julius Caesar is right up there with the all-time greats.

Just under a century and a half ago, a mediocre actor achieved far greater fame than he ever could on stage, by bursting into Abraham Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and shooting him in the head. To crown his act, John Wilkes Booth shouted ‘sic semper tyrannis’, the words Brutus is said to have proclaimed after killing Caesar, to signal that all tyrants would die. 

John Wilkes Booth.
May not have been much of an actor, but I wish he'd stuck to it.

As it happens, anyone less like a tyrant than Lincoln would be hard to imagine: his consummate skill was in persuading, cajoling or indeed buying (as the recent film Lincoln showed) enough support to compromise his way to success.

How might things have been, in the counter-factual hypothesis that Lincoln had survived? We can’t know, of course, but I guess that we might not have had to wait until Franklin Roosevelt to see a president re-elected to a third or fourth term of office. What effect that might have had on Lincoln and his commitment to good government and democratic principle it’s hard to say.

More significant would have been the effect on post-civil war reconstruction. My suspicion is that the reintegration of the southern States would have been quicker and more complete, and on the basis of a more rigorous equality among races. The fourteenth amendment freeing slaves was passed in 1865; a century later, their descendants were still battling – in many cases literally – for their civil rights. A lot of bloodshed might have been avoided.

So those were two successful assassinations that were wholly unsuccessful in achieving any useful aim.

On the other hand, there have been assassinations successfully avoided. For instance, late in the Second World War, the British Special Operations Executive launched a plan to murder Hitler. Who opposed these action men, the blowers-up of bridges, the killers of officials in occupied territory? The more established agents of conventional intelligence with their cooler heads. Why? They believed any replacement would run German military power more effectively than Hitler, lengthening the war and making victory less sure.

SOE: Bravest of the brave, but a little misguided over Hitler?

Why am I dealing with such morbid issues? Blame my youngest son Nicky who criticised me for talking too much about the natural death of Maggie Thatcher, having promised to stay silent on the subject. He insisted that I spend some time on violent political deaths, to make up for my inconsistency. 

As an inhabitant of Madrid, he’s particularly well placed to make that demand. I first got to know Spain well in the early nineties. Already then, I had trouble remembering that the country had been under the thumb of a thoroughly vile dictator, though he had died less than twenty years earlier. Indeed, in between, there had been the 1981 attempt by Antonio Tejero, latter-day John Wilkes Booth, to seize power by an armed attack on parliament. Friends in Barcelona described that terrible night in 1981, as they drove about the city to track each other down and try to decide what to do: to wait, to fight, to fly? But then in the small hours, the King finally broke his silence, and called out the army to put down the few rebel units, which it duly did, and the coup was over.

Antonio Tejero: misguided, wrong and thankfully a complete failure

So Spain was a strong enough democracy to resist even an armed attack.

Now would it have been the same had Franco been assassinated? That’s another counter-factual, but again I have little doubt over the broad outlines: Franco would have become a martyr, the far right would have been revived,  crushing repression would have been imposed and many opposition figures murdered or worse. I’m not at all sure that Spain would have been a democracy even today.

Killing an individual leader, however evil or incompetent, seems seldom to produce the desired result. Sometimes, as in the case of Hitler or Franco, it’s best to learn some patience and wait: the effect seems far more profound and longer-lasting.

That’s a lesson the West would do well to learn. There was such celebration over the execution of Saddam Hussein, but might he not have been dead by now anyway? Would things have been much worse? Or rather, when we look around the bloody, Iranian-dominated state Iraq has become, might they not have been a great deal better?