February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
He’d spent the last two years of his life in a military prison at Fort Jefferson in Florida. His crime? The Irish American Confederate from Maryland was one of the eight persons convicted of conspiring to kill President Abraham Lincoln. Four had been hanged, but O’Laughlin and three others received sentences of life imprisonment.
Michael O’Laughlin was born in Baltimore in 1840. Little is known of his childhood except that he grew up on the same street as Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and that he later became a skilled ornamental plasterer. Although a border state with little vested interest in upholding the lower South’s slave-based plantation economy, Maryland was largely pro-Confederate when the Civil War began in April 1861. Even though the state did not secede, O’Laughlin joined the Confederate army. He served until June 1862 when poor health forced him to be discharged. Returning to Baltimore, he found work at his brother’s feed store.
In 1864 O’Laughlin was recruited by his old friend, John Wilkes Booth, to participate in a conspiracy to kidnap President Lincoln. Although many at the time of the assassination thought Booth was an agent of the Confederate government, historians today generally agree that he acted as a freelance conspirator. One of the famous trio of Booth brother actors (Edwin and Junius), John Wilkes Booth was a staunch defender of slavery, southern nationalism, and once the war began, the Confederacy.
By early 1865, as the Confederate cause grew increasingly hopeless, Booth had assembled a cast of eight co-conspirators. His plot originally called for Lincoln to be kidnapped and then exchanged for a large number of captured southern army officers. Their plan to seize his carriage on St. Patrick’s Day, 1865 while it was en route to a play was foiled when Lincoln canceled his plans to attend. While they waited for their next opportunity, Booth upgraded the plot from kidnapping to assassination, apparently after hearing Lincoln announce on April 11 that he supported voting rights for some African Americans.
“That is the last speech he will ever make,” Booth declared.
What happened next is well known. On April 14, President Lincoln and his wife attended a play at Ford’s Theater. Midway in the production, Booth slipped into the Lincoln box and shot the President in the head. He then leapt to the stage, shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannus! (As Always to Tyrants!), and fled. Meanwhile, co-conspirator Lewis Powell made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward. A third co-conspirator, George Atzerodt, was allegedly charged with killing vice-president Andrew Johnson, but apparently lost his nerve. O’Laughlin had arrived in Washington the day before, but what role, if any, he was to play in the assassination was never made clear.
Lincoln died the next morning at 7:22 a.m. By then a massive manhunt was well underway. O’Laughlin returned to Baltimore that morning and turned himself in to authorities two days later on April 17, 1865. Seven more alleged conspirators were captured over the next few weeks. Booth was killed on April 26 in a shootout at a barn in Port Royal, VA.
There was considerable debate within the Johnson administration over what form of trial the alleged conspirators should face. Several cabinet officials called for a civilian trial, but Johnson, his Attorney General, and other key figures demanded a military tribunal, arguing that Lincoln was the Commander-in-Chief of the Union army. A nine-man military tribunal began hearing testimony on May 10. Most of the accused, including O’Laughlin, admitted to participating in the plot to kidnap Lincoln, but denied any connection to the assassination. Booth, Powell, and Atzerodt, they charged, had acted on their own.
The case against O’Laughlin alleged that his role in the conspiracy was to kill Gen. Ulysses S. Grant who was scheduled to attend the play with the Lincolns. The prosecution produced several telegrams from Booth to O’Laughlin that cryptically hinted at some sort of plot (most likely the kidnapping). One witness testified that on the day of the assassination he accompanied O’Laughlin to the National Hotel where Booth was staying and that O’Laughlin sent “some cards to Mr. Booth’s room.” O’Laughlin’s defense attorney argued that all the evidence produced related to the kidnap plot, not the assassination. In addition, he noted that O’Laughlin had ample evidence to show that he was drinking with friends on the night of the assassination and thus played no role in it.
But the public mood at the time of the trial (held only weeks after the assassination) left little doubt about the results. All eight were found guilty. David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt (at whose boarding house the plotters met) were hanged on July 7. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, the doctor who set Booth’s broken leg hours after the assassination, Samuel Arnold, and O’Laughlin were given life sentences, while Edman Spangler received a six-year sentence.
O’Laughlin spent two years in the grim military prison at Fort Jefferson in Florida. He contracted yellow fever on September 19 and received medical care from Dr. Mudd, but died on the 23rd. Unfortunately for O’Laughlin, had he survived the illness and lived two more years he might have gained his freedom, because in 1869 President Andrew Johnson pardoned Spangler, Arnold, and Mudd.
Sources: William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (1983) and Edward Steers, Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (2001). Learn more at www.edwardtodonnell.com/irish.htm.
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