He read his Bible and wrote a final letter to his wife. The letter included his will. At 11:00 a.m. he was taken from the county jail through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers a few blocks away. He was taken to a small field where the gallows were. Among the soldiers in the crowd were future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth (Booth borrowed a militia uniform to watch the execution). The poet Walt Whitman, in "Year of Meteors", described watching the execution.