The Lincoln Assassination Conspirators: Their Confinement and Execution, as Recorded in the Letterbook of John Frederick Hartranft

1. John Frederick Hartranft

John Frederick Hartranft The general who guarded—and some say coddled—the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspirators, but then coolly sent them to their death on the gallows, was born on December 16, 1830, in tiny New Hanover Township, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. John Frederick Hartranft grew up in the rural hamlets that modern tourists now call Pennsylvania Dutch country—so named because it was, more precisely, a haven for German immigrants (the family was originally called “Herterranft”). He lived first in the village of Gilbertsville and then in nearby Boyertown, where the future Union officer’s father became an innkeeper, and later a real estate speculator.1 Ultimately the family moved on to Norristown, which today is a western suburb of Philadelphia. After some local schooling, Hartranft was sent to study at the nearby Treemount Seminary, where he earned praise for gentlemanly demeanor from its headmaster, even if he did not distinguish himself there as a scholar. Still, the serious young man went off for further education at Marshall College in Mercersberg , and then, at age twenty, transferred to Union College in Schenectady, New York. Three years later, he earned an engineering degree and returned home to Pennsylvania to begin a career as a surveyor’s apprentice with the Water Gap Railroad in Easton. It seemed, until then, a rather ordinary, quietly ambitious, small-town American life. 1 1. A. M. Gambone, Major-General John Frederick Hartranft: Citizen Soldier and Pennsylvania Statesman (Baltimore: Butternut and Blue, 1995), 5. Gambone’s is the one standard biography of Hartranft, and this essay owes an inestimable debt throughout to the author’s groundbreaking scholarship. 4 the story Evidently, engineering did not much suit Hartranft—though it would undoubtedly help later, just as it would benefit many other army men during the Civil War, in sustaining his military career. Engineers—like Hartranft’s future commanding general, George B. McClellan—were much coveted by the army. With his now-prosperous father’s encouragement—and influence—“Fred” Hartranft also became a county deputy sheriff, a political appointment that was secured because of the elder Hartranft’s growing influence in the local Democratic Party. Fred, newly married, apparently liked the intersection between professional and political life, and doubtless his interest in the latter fueled his decision to study law with a local attorney (only a fraction of aspiring attorneys attended formal law schools in the mid-nineteenth century). Hartranft was officially admitted to the Pennsylvania bar on October 24, 1860. That very same day, half a continent west in Illinois, another lawyer was busy defending himself against a charge that he had contributed money to finance the recently executed abolitionist John Brown’s failed 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. “I never gave fifty dollars, nor one dollar, nor one cent, for the object you mention, or any such object,” wrote the lawyer with evident indignation. His name was Abraham Lincoln.2 Just two weeks later, after a roiling statewide campaign that pitted Hartranft’s Democrats against the rising Republicans in the Keystone State, Lincoln won a decisive victory in Pennsylvania and handily defeated three opponents in the national race for the presidency. Lincoln never campaigned in Pennsylvania (or anywhere else for that matter, staying close to home throughout the contest), but Hartranft probably “saw” the Republican nominee on the countless engravings and lithographs that were published to introduce him to voters that fall. Indeed, one of them, an engraving by Philadelphia printmaker Samuel Sartain, had been issued specifically for circulation in the “swing” state of Pennsylvania, to make the homely Republican nominee look handsome “whether the original would justify it or not.” Judging by the outcome on Election Day, the print could not have hurt.3 2. Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 4:131. 3. John G. Nicolay to Therena Bates, August 26, 1860 (typed copy by Helen Nicolay), Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Ind. The Sartain engraving, based on a miniature painting from life by John Henry Brown that, in turn, owed a debt to an Ambrotype photograph by Preston Butler, can be seen in Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 64. john frederick hartranft 5 Politically ambitious, and no doubt disappointed at the outcome, young...