The Lincoln Deception Page 3

  “My brother Lew,” the man said, leading him into the darkened room.

  Fraser followed and knelt next to the bed. He reached for the arm of Lew Evans. It was cold. The man shivered and his pulse was weak. “Hello, Doc,” he said. “Did it up right this time.” His breath smelled of whiskey, the only painkiller at hand.

  “Timber came down,” his brother explained, “square on the leg.”

  “I’ll have to pull aside the linen,” Fraser said.

  Lew Evans nodded. “Can you save it?”

  Fraser thought a quick thanks. The timber had pulverized the left leg, but at the shinbone. “You’ll have your knee, Mr. Evans, and with some practice you’ll dance again. But right now”—Fraser shifted to look into the man’s face—“I need to get you into the front room where I can work.” He gripped the man’s shoulder. “You look tough enough for this.”

  Fraser instructed the brother to clear the house, borrow another table for the front room so they could stretch the patient out, and start water boiling in neighbor houses. “We’ve done that, sir.” Fraser had not noticed the woman who spoke. She had a determined look. “We have sheets to drape the table.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You can assist me? It won’t bother you?”

  She nodded.

  It took almost an hour. A skilled surgeon, one who had done more than the six amputations Fraser had done, might have completed it in half the time. The woman, Mrs. Llewellyn Evans, followed instructions. She didn’t flinch. Though she was as thin as the rest, her hands were strong. Lew Evans, he thought, was a lucky man. In some ways.

  Fraser left laudanum with her, with careful instructions about the dosage. When he stepped from the house, the tension began to fall away. He wanted to sit down but saw no seat. He leaned against the wall of the cabin. Aware of the bloodstains on his cuff, he looked at the knot of men in the road.

  “Where’s the company now?” one was saying. “Evans is a foreman, one of their best, and can they be bothered to see how they’ve maimed him?”

  “Ach, they’ll maim us or kill us all, then ship in a load of hunkies and niggers to do the work for less.”

  The group fell quiet as they noticed Fraser. John Evans detached himself from it. “Will my brother be all right?”

  “I think so. It’ll take some weeks to heal. He’ll need crutches, and then a prosthetic leg—he should be able to tolerate one. There’s a man in Akron who’s good with them.”

  “And what does that cost?” the brother asked.

  “It depends, Mr. Evans. Let me write down his name.”

  They walked to Fraser’s gig. While Fraser wrote, Evans said in a low voice, “We can’t pay today, Doc. We have only scrip on the company store. But I’ll speak with them tomorrow about turning my pay over to you.”

  “Please, Mr. Evans,” Fraser said, “please do no such thing. You and your brother have cares enough. Please call on me if he doesn’t recover well.”

  “God bless you,” the man said. Fraser shook his hand.

  The horse chose the pace going home while the Evans family inhabited Fraser’s mind. Lew Evans couldn’t afford the artificial leg. If he could find work on one leg, he might live longer and healthier than if he had remained a miner with two. But if he found no work, the children would have to support the family. Mrs. Evans must already take in washing or sewing or do whatever she could. He blew out a long breath. He couldn’t save them from their lives.

  About halfway home, Fraser’s thoughts cycled back to the Lincoln case. There must have been a wider conspiracy beyond Booth’s ragtag crew. Mr. Bingham prosecuted the eight conspirators on the theory that the Confederate government organized and financed the plot. Three star witnesses testified that high Confederates approved the plot. On that theory, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was arrested and imprisoned for almost two years.

  Yet two of those star witnesses proved to be liars. Mr. Bingham had saved news stories about a congressional inquiry that revealed their perjury. The government, its case compromised, released Davis and never brought him to trial.

  This had Fraser thinking in circles and around corners. That Mr. Bingham relied on perjured testimony was disturbing. Yet the man from Cadiz had been thoroughly unmoved by the revelations that his witnesses were liars. To his dying day, as Fraser knew, Mr. Bingham considered the conspirators incontestably guilty. The old man’s conscience was easy over their fates.

  After reaching home, Fraser had a supper of bread and cheese, then spread his notes across the table. He wanted to review the different conspiracy theories for the assassination. He didn’t really buy any of them.

  He started with the obvious question, cui bono—who benefits? Who benefitted from Lincoln’s death? The ready answer was Andrew Johnson, who vaulted into the presidency when Lincoln died. So was Johnson behind Booth’s plot? Booth had called on the vice president at his hotel on the day before the assassination ; Johnson was not in, so Booth left his card with the hotel clerk. And on the fateful evening of April 14, no actual attempt was made on Johnson’s life, though George Atzerodt was assigned to kill him. Was Atzerodt acting out a ruse designed to draw attention away from Johnson’s role as criminal mastermind?

  Some claimed that Johnson’s performance as president reinforced this theory. Johnson had battled against Reconstruction, straining to preserve the South in largely the same condition it had been before the war except for the end of slavery. He supported new techniques for oppressing the former slaves, denying them voting rights and legal rights and land. Why not a plot between the Confederacy and Johnson to give the South a victorious peace?

  A congressional committee, stuffed with Johnson’s political enemies, had inquired deeply into this theory and come up empty-handed. No connections could be found between Johnson and the Confederacy. Although Johnson governed in a stunningly pro-Southern fashion after the war, he fiercely opposed the Confederacy during the fighting. It was simply Johnson’s good luck that his assigned assassin, Atzerodt, had no stomach for the business.

  Another theory proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church lurked behind Booth’s plot. The Surratts were devout Catholics, as was Dr. Mudd. When John Surratt fled after the assassination, Catholic priests concealed him in Canada and Europe. Then he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves, a decidedly exotic destination for a young American in 1865. Yet that was all the evidence in support of the Catholic Church theory. Indeed, that theory seemed to consist principally of a deep-seated hostility to the papacy. Those who blamed Andrew Johnson could at least point to superficially plausible motives: his own advancement and his postwar protection of the South. The Catholic Church theorists could recite no motive at all. What did the Pope or his minions stand to gain from the death of Abraham Lincoln?

  The lone-madman theory, which Fraser liked no better, had been pronounced in two books by George Townsend, a writer honored by Mr. Bingham at a dinner in Cadiz only two years before. Fraser had liked Townsend well enough over dinner but found his books superficial. If Townsend was right that the assassination was the work of the mad genius Booth, then Mrs. Surratt could have made no shocking revelation to Mr. Bingham, because there was nothing to know beyond the incontestable—that Booth shot Lincoln.

  Fraser resolved to apply a maxim from a Sherlock Holmes story: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Though he loved the Holmes stories, he resented the portrayal of Dr. Watson as dim-witted. Fraser thought the habits of mind of medical men were well-matched to the disciplined investigation of a mystery. What is diagnosis but the solution of a mystery, often based on slender evidence?

  He turned to the slippery question of motive. While a single assassin might be a madman, a conspiracy involves rational thought. Henchmen, even unappetizing ones, must be given reasons for joining a conspiracy, then must be coordinated intelligently.

  The personal passions that can lead to murder—hate or greed—seemed not to fit the Lincoln case. Bo
oth and his associates could have hated Lincoln, who was a hardfisted opponent dedicated to defeating the Confederacy. But surely the complex plot of April 14, with its multiple targets, embodied more than a simple act of hatred.

  Fraser also doubted greed was the motive. A financial motive might grow out of the Northern blockade, which reduced Southerners to desperate schemes to smuggle cotton and tobacco past Union warships. A witness at the conspiracy trial said he spent days at the Surratt tavern in March 1865, waiting for cotton that Atzerodt was to sneak across the Potomac River. Although Fraser felt ill-equipped to evaluate such a commercial question, he did not see how material gain could justify the risks associated with killing the president. There were less dangerous ways to make money.

  To Fraser, one feature of Booth’s plot seemed most important: its breathtaking scope. Though Booth’s coconspirators proved unequal to their tasks, the plan involved nothing less than the decapitation of the United States Government. The president was to die. So was the vice president, along with the Secretary of State and the senior general of the army. That was not the act of a deranged mind. Rather, it was a policy. Was the plot an act of war by the Confederate government? That had been Mr. Bingham’s theory and he never abandoned it. The timing of the assassination weighed against it. The assassination occurred so late that it was hardly likely to save the Confederacy. Five days before, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. Other Confederate armies were melting away, their soldiers headed home. Yet only the Confederate government had so strong an interest in striking that powerful blow against the entire United States Government.

  Confederates from Jefferson Davis on down had denied any involvement in Booth’s plot. For Fraser, those denials didn’t butter a lot of parsnips. What else could they say? Accused of a heinous crime, denial is the only sensible response for guilty and innocent alike.

  A Southern spy, Thomas Conrad, had claimed after the war that the Confederate secret service planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, just as Booth intended to. If Booth was acting for the Confederacy in the kidnapping, wasn’t it logical that he was ordered to convert the plot to one of assassination?

  Booth, of course, was the key. He wasn’t just a Confederate sympathizer. He was a Confederate agent. In October 1864, he traveled to Montreal to meet with Confederates who were plotting invasions of the North. After his death, investigators found in his trunk the key to a cipher used by Confederate agents to encode secret messages. Only a Confederate agent would have that cipher. And when Samuel Arnold wrote to Booth about the assassination plot in late March 1865, he urged, “Go and see how it will be taken in R——d”—Richmond! Also, Booth traveled twice to Southern Maryland before the assassination, each time finding Confederate agents like the Surratts. After the assassination, he found more agents to aid him during his flight. Only an agent could find so many other agents.

  As the conspiracy’s leader, Booth would know who was pulling the strings behind it, but that trail ran cold when he died. Dead men tell no tales. The killing of Booth itself seemed suspicious. He was shot as he stood alone in a burning barn, surrounded by Union soldiers. The sergeant who pulled the trigger claimed that Booth was about to shoot at the soldiers. Yet how much risk can a man in a burning barn pose to men safely outside and able to take cover? It was certainly convenient that Booth never could tell his story.

  What of the Surratts? In a lecture delivered in 1870, John Surratt described himself as a Confederate agent, carrying messages between Richmond and Washington and New York and Canada. Like other Confederate agents, he used his mother’s tavern in Surrattsville as a way station. Booth stopped at that tavern as he fled Washington after the assassination. But then Surratt was spirited out of the country and later out of the hemisphere. That, too, was convenient. Had someone been tidying up loose ends?

  And Mrs. Surratt? She aided Confederate agents for years, then moved to Washington in the autumn of 1864, when Booth was organizing his conspiracy to kidnap President Lincoln. Did she move to the city to establish her boarding house as the hub for Booth’s scheme, much as her rural tavern was the hub for Confederate spies? She conferred with Booth frequently. Her son or Booth might have told her something about the conspiracy that Mr. Bingham, when he learned of it, thought might destroy the republic.

  After two long nights of wrestling with these questions, the answers seeming to be just beyond his grasp, Fraser gave it up. He was a country doctor who happened to have access to John Bingham’s library. Better-informed people had tried for decades to solve the riddle of the Lincoln conspiracy. Why should he be the one to slice the Gordian knot?

  The earth was warming. The forsythia had bloomed and greened. Now the azalea was coming in. The farmers of Harrison County were plowing and planting. With a shock, Fraser realized that it was April 14, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. He left his examining room in the afternoon and slowly walked through Cadiz, enjoying the birdsong and buds on trees. When the news of Lincoln’s assassination reached Cadiz in 1865, the ancestors of those birds had sung the same songs, and those same trees had brought out their leaves.

  The next day was Easter, April 15, the day Lincoln died. It was time for new life. Fraser needed to slough off the past and reenter his world. He should say a prayer for Lew Evans, too.

  Chapter 4

  Fraser took a deep breath. By any objective standard, he wasn’t that high off the ground, barely at the top of a ten-foot ladder. He reached to his right and scooped the matted leaves and seeds from the gutter. His heart raced. A drop of sweat trickled between his shoulder blades. This was ridiculous. It was mid-May, not warm enough to be sweating. His neighbors had long since cleaned out their gutters. Fraser couldn’t let this foolish anxiety keep him from such a simple task. People worked on ladders every day. He reached for the leaves to the left of his ladder and dropped them to the ground.

  Now he faced the devil’s decision of gutter cleaning. Should he reach farther on either side, perhaps tilting the ladder and crashing earthward? Or should he, like a coward, slowly descend to the ground, move the ladder down the roof line, then carefully probe for two level spots where he could replant the ladder’s legs, then rescale the heights? And again? And again?

  Sighing with annoyance, Fraser let his right toe dangle until it brushed the rung below. He had at least another hour of struggling with his damnable weakness. He had no idea why he dreaded heights. He always had. But he wouldn’t give in to it.

  “Excuse me. Sir?” The deep voice came from his left and behind, from the front walk. Fraser didn’t care to engage in conversation while dangling from the ladder.

  “On my way,” he called, descending more quickly than he liked. His stomach muscles relaxed when his back foot touched ground.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked as he turned around. His smile included a measure of relief.

  He faced a light-skinned Negro of middle years, his hair and mustache shot through with gray. The man was as tall as Fraser and a trace thicker. He wore a formal black suit. He met Fraser’s gaze like a white man. Stepping over to the walk where the man stood, Fraser placed the face and the suit. “You were at John Bingham’s funeral,” he said. “You’re Speed Cook, aren’t you?”

  “I did attend Mr. Bingham’s service,” the man said, “and that’s my name.”

  After wiping his hand on his trousers, Fraser shook the man’s hand. “That was the perfect name for you. I watched you in the town games—You were fast!”

  “The name ain’t for being fast. It’s short for Speedwell, one of the ships the pilgrims came over on.” Fraser looked blankly at him so the man explained. “Speedwell, it was the second ship that sailed for Plymouth Rock.”

  “I don’t remember that. So you’re named for a ship took the pilgrims to freedom?”

  “No, Speedwell turned back, never got here. It was my daddy’s idea. Neither have we.”

  “You played for Steubenville, right? And then in college?”


  Cook nodded, “At Oberlin, then for the university up to Michigan, then pro ball, too, until they run us Negroes out.”

  “I read about that,” Fraser said. “Wasn’t right.” After a moment, he asked, “I can do something for you?”

  “I just moved to Steubenville when my father, Isaiah Cook, took sick.”

  “I heard about that. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. A lady visiting from Maryland, she’s related to my wife, she took a spill off our wagon this morning. Her arm’s broke. Doc Marcotte’s away and Doc Grimes, the new man, he doesn’t treat colored. I set the arm best I could—you know my father did some of that before he took to the pulpit. She’s doing poorly, running a fever. Maybe I did something wrong. I’d rather a real doctor looked at it.”

  “Well, let’s see,” Fraser said, “Steubenville’s twenty miles and it’s already four o’clock.” Nodding up at the darkening sky, he added, “Looks like a storm, too, and I got a bad wheel on my rig.”

  “I know how far it is,” Cook said. “I just came from there.” Fraser scratched an ear and thought about his planned evening with long-neglected medical journals. Cook added, “Like I said, this lady’s poorly. If the weather turns, we’ll put you up, then ride you back here in the morning.” After a beat he added, “They say you see colored.”

  “ ’Course I do,” Fraser said, his mind made up. “What’d you say her name is? Where’s she from in Maryland?”

  “She’s Rachel Lemus, from right next to Washington, D.C.”

  “What name?”

  “Rachel Lemus.”

  Maybe the name was common among the colored in Maryland. Fraser took a hard look at Speed Cook. Cook returned it. He seemed a prideful man. “All right, then,” Fraser said. “Let me get some things together.”

  Fraser took his time packing an overnight bag, then checking his medical bag. He grabbed some of the aspirin powder that just came in from Boston. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was good for, but the early reports were promising. Maybe it would help Rachel Lemus.