Every family tells its stories. We Garretts — my name comes from my paternal grandmother — like to tell how an enterprising Virginian squatting on grandma’s land took advantage of the fertile soil to plant a lucrative cash crop: marijuana. There’s also the one about the local drunk who would take potshots at the house.
But our most exciting story reaches its sesquicentennial this week. It involves the capture and death of John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett farm.
Much of the tale is well known. After Booth murdered Lincoln on April 14, 1865, he and an accomplice fled south through Maryland and crossed the Potomac into Virginia. Ten days later, they stopped at the first farm on the road past Port Royal, Virginia — the farm of Richard H. Garrett, my four-times-great grandfather.
These were the boonies. So the Garretts hadn’t yet heard of Lincoln’s death. Disguised as a Confederate soldier homeward bound for Maryland, Booth begged to stay a few days. “You who know anything of Virginia,” Garrett’s son recounted, “know that there could be but one response to such a request.”
The first night passed without incident. But on April 25, Booth began to act strangely. He brought out a map and traced a trip from Charleston to Texas to Mexico — not Maryland. Later, when a cavalry detachment trotted down the nearby road, he panicked and hid in the woods.
Booth’s feeble explanations unsettled his hosts. “I am afraid these men will get us into trouble,” Garrett told his sons. “You had better watch them tonight.” They put Booth and his accomplice in the barn and made arrangements for their departure the next day.
Late that night, though, Union troops tracked him to the farm. They dragged old Garrett out of the house and threatened him with the noose. In the meantime, soldiers found the fugitives in the barn. The accomplice surrendered as the soldiers parleyed with a recalcitrant Booth. “Boys, bring a stretcher,” he said, “I will never surrender. Another stain on the glorious old-banner!” So the troops set the barn afire.
In the light of the flames, the soldiers saw Booth standing on crutches and clutching his carbine. One of Garrett’s sons reports, “He was as beautiful as the statue of a Greek god and as calm in that awful hour.”
Orders were to take Booth alive, but as the blaze grew, one sergeant disobeyed. He shot Booth, falsely claiming that the assassin had aimed his carbine at the captain. The bullet severed his spine and paralyzed him from the neck down. The soldiers then sent two Garrett boys to drag Booth from the conflagration. “Captain,” Booth said once laid in the house, “it is hard that this man’s property should be destroyed. He does not know who I am.” These words saved Garrett from the gallows.
Booth’s tale ended there, but for the Garretts it continued.
They were poor farmers. The crippling loss of the barn only began my ancestor’s troubles. Southerners accused him of betraying Booth for Union cash. Northerners denounced him for knowingly harboring the assassin. The government refused to reimburse the cost of the barn or the furniture stored inside it.
So the farm fell into ruin. Neighbors abandoned him. His children left to find work in Tennessee, North Carolina, and elsewhere. “A lonely grave, a desolate and decaying homestead, a scattered family,” Garrett wrote late in life, “bear mute testimony to the wrong done us not only by the Government, but by our friends.”
The house and barn are gone now. Where the Garretts once made their lives, there stands only a sign off a backwoods highway. “This is the Garrett place where John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Lincoln, was cornered by Union soldiers and killed, April 26th, 1865. The house stood a short distance from this spot.” The story only survives with my family through the yellowed newspaper clippings in the attic of my great-aunt — our amateur historian.
For the Garretts, who now spread from California to Wisconsin to Florida, this tale reminds us of the most tragic period in America’s story. In Booth’s defiant bravery among the flames, we remember the false heroism of the South’s unjust war. In Garrett’s misfortune, we remember the suffering of the common Southerner, fighting for his home and returning to it with tattered clothes and worthless money — if at all.
But most important, Garrett’s suffering because of Booth reminds us of the tremendous cost of Lincoln’s death. As one of Garrett’s sons later wrote, “We are beginning to learn what we did not then suspect, that the rugged, uncouth, unassuming man had in him the marks of true greatness and had in him the tender heart of a little child. Yes, it was a mad, useless, cruel deed, cruel to him, cruel to those who loved him, and to the South which so much needed then his clear brain and tender heart.”
