George Atzerodt

• 1. Introduction

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  George Atzerodt booked room 126 at the Kirkwood House on the morning of the 14th of April 1865. The hotel was where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying. Atzerodt had one assignment: kill Johnson. At 10:15 PM, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater. That was the signal. Atzerodt went to the bar instead and drank until he could not function. He wandered the streets until dawn, at some point dropping his knife into a gutter. Days later, a military tribunal charged him with conspiracy in the assassination of a president. How does a man find himself assigned to murder the Vice President of the United States? And when his nerve finally fails, what remains?

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• 2. From Saxony to Maryland

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  George Andrew Atzerodt was born on the 12th of June 1835, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, in what is now part of Unstruttal. He arrived in the United States in 1843 at the age of eight. As an adult, he settled in Port Tobacco, Maryland, and opened a carriage repair business. That business failed. He was a Confederate sympathizer, and despite spending most of his life in the United States, he never became fluent in English. In January 1865, John Surratt introduced him to John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C. By March, Atzerodt was attending planning sessions to discuss seizing President Lincoln while he attended a play at a hospital. He later admitted at his trial that he had been a willing participant in that scheme. The kidnapping plot never came to fruition. Booth shifted the plan toward assassination. According to the prosecution, he arranged for all the conspirators to strike on a single night. Lewis Powell was among those assigned a separate target.

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• 3. Evidence Left Behind

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  Military police searched Atzerodt's hotel room on April 15 and found it had not been slept in. Under his pillow lay a loaded revolver, and investigators discovered a concealed Bowie knife as well as a bank book belonging to Booth. The previous evening, Atzerodt had asked the hotel bartender about Vice President Johnson's exact whereabouts. An alert woman on the streets had also seen what Atzerodt had done and immediately reported it to the police. By morning, a hotel employee came forward to report a "suspicious looking man in a gray coat." Lewis Powell, meanwhile, had carried out his own attack on Secretary of State William Seward. Atzerodt alone had not acted. He evaded capture for six days. Police arrested him on April 20 at the home of his cousin, Hartman Richter, in Germantown, Maryland.

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• 4. Defense and Confession

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  Atzerodt's trial opened on the 1st of May 1865. His defense attorney, Captain William Doster, made an unusual argument. In his opening statement, Doster declared he would prove Atzerodt was "a constitutional coward." Doster argued that a man so thoroughly frightened could never have carried out the killing. Booth, he suggested, had probably never truly assigned Atzerodt any such duty at all. The tribunal was not persuaded. After his conviction, a minister named Reverend Butler came to Atzerodt's cell. Atzerodt confessed to Butler. He told the minister that he had not learned about the shift from kidnapping to assassination until two hours before the shooting. He also claimed that Booth had originally intended David Herold to carry out the killing of Johnson, not Atzerodt. Booth's preference for Herold, Atzerodt said, came down to Herold having "more pluck." Atzerodt's role, in this telling, was simply to follow Herold and, in Booth's own words, "give him more courage."

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• 5. The Gallows

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  On the 7th of July 1865, Atzerodt was hanged in Washington, D.C., alongside three other convicted conspirators. Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, and David Herold died with him that day. His remains were re-interred in Glenwood Cemetery in 1869. In the decades since, dramatizations have returned to his story. The television series Timeless featured him in a season one episode called "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln," with Travis MacDonald in the role. In that version, Atzerodt attempts to kill Johnson but is stopped by Rufus and other soldiers and then arrested. The series Manhunt cast Tommie Turvey as Atzerodt. That dramatization compressed the timeline, showing him arrested on the night of the assassination itself rather than six days afterward. Neither version included his final recorded words. "May we all meet in the other world," Atzerodt said. "God take me now."

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