The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

i blut,tso of t Coo. o
Here began the first resolve, which, in its mere animal estate, may
name courage. Booth found that a tragedy in real life could no more be
enacted without greasy-faced and knock-kneed supernumeraries than upon
the mimic stage. Your "First Citizen,*' who swings a stave for Maro
Antony, and drinks hard porter behind the flies is very like the bravo of
real life, who murders between his cocktails at the nearest bar. Wilkes
Booth had passed the ordeal of a garlicky green-room, and did not shrink
from the broader and ranker green-room of real life. He assembled
around him, one by one, the cut-throats at whom his soul would have re
volted, except that he had become, by resolve, a cutthroat in himself.
About this time certain gentlemen in Canada began to be unenviably
known. I abstain from giving their names, because unaware of how fiar
they seconded -this crime, if at all. But they seconded as infamous things,
such as cowardly raids from neutral territory into the states, bank robbings,
lake pirating, city burning, counterfeiting, railway sundering, and the im
portation of yellow fever into peaceful and unoffending communities. I
make no charges against those whom. I do not know, but simply say that
the confederate agents, Jacob Tompson, Larry McDonald, Clement Clay,
and some others, had already accomplished enough villainy to make Wilkes
Booth, on the first of the present year, believe that he had but to seek an
interview with them.
lie visited the provinces once certainly, and three times it is believed,
stoppintig in Montreal at St. Lawrence Hall, and banking four hundred and
fifty-five dollars odd at the Ontario, bank. This was his own money. I
have myself seen his bank-book with the single entry of this amount. It
was found in the room of Atzerott, at Kirkwood's Hotel. From this visit,
whatever encouragement Booth received, he continued in systematic cor respondence with one or more of those agents down to the commission of
his crime. I dare not say hotr far each of these agents was implicated.
My personal conviction is that they were neither loth to the murder nor
astonished when it had been done. They had money with discretion from
the confederacy, though acting at discretion and outside of responsibility,
and always, at every wild adventure, they instructed their dupes that each
man took his life in his hand on every incursion into the north.' So Beale
took his, raiding on the great lakes. So Kennedy took his, on a midnight
bonfire-tramp into the metropolis. So took the St. Albans raiders their
lives in their palms, dashing into a peaceful town. And if these agents
entertained Wilkes Booth's suggestion at all they plainly told him that he
carried his life in his dagger's edge, and could expect from them neither
aid nor exculpation.
Some one or all of these agents furnished Booth with a murderer. -The
fellow Wood or Payne, who stabbed Mr. Seward and was caught at MIs.
Surratt's house in Washington. Hle was one of three Kentucky brothers,
all outlaws, and had himself, it is believed, accompanied one of his brothers,
who is known to have been at St. Albans on the day of the bank-delivery.
This Payne, besides being positively identified as the assassin of the
Sewards, had no friends nor haunts in Washington. Ile was simply a dis patched murderer, and after the night of the crime, struck northward of
the frontier, instead of southward in the company of Booth. The proo4
of this will follow in the course' of the article.
While I assert that the Canadian agents knew Booth and patted his back,
oalUing him, like Macbeth, the "prince of cut throats," I anim equally cer tain that Booth's project was unknown in Richmond. No word, nor writ,
ten!ine.-Po clue of ary,ort has been found attaching Booth to the contester
41