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The conspiracy he wove around Lincoln took Booth the better part of two years, and the conspirators Booth recruited betrayed his cunning eye for specific talent: Lewis Powell, the Confederate soldier, who could break a poker with his bare hands and was cold-blooded enough for any murderous scheme; David Herold, the pharmacist's apprentice, who knew the woods and swamps of the Potomac estuary like the back of his hand; George Atzerodt, a waterman who ferried contraband across the Potomac to the Confederacy; Mary Surratt, who ran the boarding-house on H Street that served as a safe house for Confederate spies; and her son, John Surratt, the Confederate courier who slipped back and forth between Richmond and Montreal on cloak-and-dagger business.
Early in the plot, Booth planned to kidnap Lincoln, and had even waited in ambush two times, only to have some unforeseen circumstance unravel it all. Finally, after the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army, Booth concluded that the blow he must strike was not capture but death. And to the horrified astonishment of the nation, Booth succeeded in walking right into Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater without a person scarcely noticing, shooting the president in front of his wife and two guests, vaulting over the rail of the box to the stage, running out the back stage door, hopping onto his horse, and riding away to rendezvous with Herold. Powell, who had repeatedly cased the Seward house on Lafayette Square, nearly made it two that night, bursting into Seward's bedroom and slashing him within an inch of his life. Like Booth, Powell easily escaped. In fact, every member of Booth's conspiracy rode out of Washington with what amounts to insolent ease.
Once out of Washington, Booth and Herold struck southwards across the Potomac, following the customary rebel courier routes. Booth may have been looking to link up with other conspirators or Confederate secret service agents—to this day, we are not sure how large the Booth conspiracy was—and make his escape toward Mexico. But Booth had not planned on breaking his leg during the escape. Slowed down for days by his injury, he was finally surrounded in a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia, and shot when he refused to give himself up. Herold, Powell, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were finally arrested and hanged in July, after a trial by military commission which makes Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib look like a weekend at the shore.
Kauffman is reasonably well-known among the tight circles of Lincoln assassination buffs. He has long been associated with the Surratt Society, and even published a volume of essays culled from the society's journal, the Surratt Courier. This is, however, Kauffman's maiden voyage as a writer of a major book on Booth and the Lincoln assassination. It is certainly an impressive one. American Brutus is heart-poundingly well-written, and the footnotes alone are worth the price of the book, for the sheer entertainment of following Kauffman's path through the enormous mountains of Lincoln-assassination literature.
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