A Catholic Assassin & His Castrated Methodist Preacher Killer

Two weeks ago there was merited hoopla over Civil War commemorations, specifically the 150th anniversaries of Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination.  But neither, while momentous, fully ended the war.  Most Confederate forces were still at large, and the Confederate government, under a fleeing Jefferson Davis, still theoretically functioned.

Today, 150 years ago, the commander of most remaining Confederate forces, Joseph Johnston, whom Lee had tried to reach, finally surrendered to Sherman at Bennett House outside Durham, North Carolina.  It was a second and final attempt, as Sherman’s first terms were rejected by War Secretary Stanton as overly sweeping and generous.  Sherman in some ways surpassed his friend Grant’s strategic abilities, winning most of his victories by maneuver rather than bloodshed.  But Sherman lacked Grant’s measured political judgment.  He may have also over interpreted Lincoln’s final admonition, at his Hampton Roads summit with a Grant and Sherman, to “go easy” on the South.  In any case, Lincoln was now dead, and Stanton, with President Johnson, was less inclined towards generosity, especially after Lincoln’s murder, in which Confederate complicity was suspected.

Johnston, like Lee, was a Virginia patrician and Episcopalian.  His final foe, Sherman, born to Ohio Episcopalians, was adopted after his father’s death by a prominent Catholic family, later marrying their pious daughter, with one son entering the priesthood, to Sherman’s chagrin.  He was said to be religiously indifferent but reputedly, at the end, acceded to the last rites administered by his priestly son.  Johnston, who befriended his former adversary across the subsequent quarter century, attended Sherman’s New York funeral, as he had Grant’s.  Although elderly, he respectfully remained hatless in during the lengthy procession in the rain, which precipitated his death soon after.

Both Sherman and Grant, a semi-observant Methodist who believed in reconciliation, saluted Johnston’s military skill in their memoirs, although Johnston was best known for skillful retreats, unlike Lee’s more aggressive approach.  Lee did not live as long after the war, and, unlike Johnston, he declined to befriend his former foe, Grant, although he always respected Grant’s own generous surrender terms.  Grant as President summoned Lee to the White House once, exuding bonhomie, but Lee remained politely reserved.  Lee’s one time partisan leader, Mosby, more obligingly succumbed to Grant’s friendship after a White House confab, even becoming Republican, to the chagrin of many old cohorts.  Like Sherman, Mosby, baptized Episcopalian, was religiously ambivalent, but married to a devout Catholic woman.

Baptized Episcopalian but reputedly later becoming Catholic and shrewdly gaining co-conspirators among Maryland’s old Catholic families, John Wilkes Booth was a vainglorious actor turned war-time schemer who mostly worshipped himself.  He was shot dead 150 years ago today in a Virginia tobacco barn, surrounded by federal troops.  His last words were appropriately, “Useless, useless,” having lived long enough to read in the newspapers that the reviews of his final act, which he assumed would sanctify his destiny, were uniformly negative.  Lee himself would strongly denounce the assassination in a newspaper interview.  Ironically, Booth’s murderous impetuosity elevated his victim, slain on Good Friday, to a saint-like status, with even D.W, Griffith’s infamously pro-Klan “Birth of a Nation” film 50 years later portraying Lincoln as the “Great Heart.”

Booth was killed, against orders not to shoot, by a zealous and somewhat insane Methodist lay preacher named Boston Corbett, who had castrated himself before the war to avoid temptation.  He gained a sort of celebrity, which his mental instability, likely due to mercury poisoning from his work as hat maker, prevented him from fully exploiting, until he disappeared from history.

These dramatic events 150 years ago, unfolding like claps of lightning in a sudden storm, showcased evil, generosity and mundane human confusion.  Most of the major actors, responding to the knock of destiny, performed their duties during those final days admirably, understanding themselves, even if not personally devout, as agents of Providence. We continue to live in the shadow of their actions.