25

I HAVE TOO GREAT A SOUL TO DIE LIKE A CRIMINAL

When David Herold caught up with John, the two fugitives headed southeast to Surrattsville (now Clinton, Maryland). Riding hard, at midnight they reined in at Mary Surratt’s tavern, ten miles from Washington, to pick up the guns and field glasses hidden there. Mary Surratt’s telling Lloyd to have the “shooting irons” ready when John came for them later that night would go far to convict her as one of John’s accomplices.¹

In pain from his broken leg, John stayed saddled while Herold pounded on the door and retrieved the ammunition, guns, and field glasses—as well as a bottle of whiskey—from Lloyd. Herold handed one of the carbines up to John. John shook his head. He needed both hands to hold on to his spirited horse. They each took a long swallow from the whiskey bottle and headed out. As they were leaving, Herold boasted to Lloyd, “I will tell you some news. I am pretty certain we have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.”²

The two fugitives headed for Port Tobacco, intending to cross from there into Virginia, but the pain in John’s leg had become excruciating. Instead, John remembered Dr. Mudd and turned south to his home, far out of the way.

It was a fatal decision. Had John continued on to Port Tobacco some thirty miles further, he would have reached it by sunrise and crossed the Potomac River into Virginia long before their pursuers could have caught up to him. A day or two later, John would have been deep in the South where he could expect help as he and Herold made their way to Mexico.

Four hours later, around 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, John and Herold rode up at Dr. Mudd’s house. Mudd cut John’s boot from his leg, slipped off his stocking, and felt along the leg. John’s fibula, one of the bones in his leg, was fractured about two inches above his ankle. In Mudd’s judgment, “it was as slight a breaking as it could possibly be.” After applying a makeshift splint, he told one of his servants to make a crutch. John and Herold stayed the night. In the morning John shaved off his mustache, breakfasted, and rested while Mudd left for Bryantown to procure a buggy for his injured patient. He was unable to find one but undoubtedly heard the news of the assassination. He was relieved when the two men said they were leaving. If they were taken prisoner at his home, he would be arrested as one of the conspirators. John paid him twenty-five dollars and set off for the Potomac River, about twenty miles away.³

When Dr. Mudd was later questioned he claimed he had not recognized the fugitive. The military tribunal didn’t believe him. Dr. Mudd had met with John on at least three occasions. He was found guilty of aiding and abetting John but not of being personally involved in the assassination, and he was sentenced to life with hard labor at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles off Key West. He missed being hanged by one vote.⁴

Several miles after leaving Dr. Mudd’s, the fugitives lost their way near the Zekiah Swamp. Around nine o’clock that night, they encountered Oswald Swann, a black tobacco farmer, who gave them food and whiskey and guided them to Rich Hill, the home of Samuel Cox, four miles from the Potomac River.

Cox was a wealthy land owner and a prominent member of the Confederate underground in southern Maryland. The two men had not met before, but by then Cox had heard the news that John Wilkes Booth had killed Lincoln. Cox knew he would be risking arrest if John were caught at his house. Federal troops had been seen combing the area, looking for the fugitives. Cox gave them some food but refused to let them stay in his house. He told his overseer, Franklin Robey, to take them to a gully in the woods about a mile away. Later that morning he sent Robey to relocate them to another spot in a dense pine thicket another half mile away on his neighbor’s property. If John were caught, the neighbor, not Cox, would be arrested.⁵ Cox then summoned Thomas Jones, about three miles away. Jones was a Confederate courier and did not shy away from helping the fugitives. While he made arrangements for getting the fugitives across the Potomac River, he brought them food, blankets, and newspapers.⁶

Far from the hero he imagined he would be for killing Lincoln, John was shocked to read in the newspapers that he was a pariah. Shivering under a blanket in the woods for the next five days, waiting for Jones to get them across the river, John put his thoughts down in a red leather pocket diary:

           I am here in despair. . .hunted like a dog . . . wet, cold and starving. . .every mans [sic] hand against me . . . And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for, [for] what made [William] Tell a hero. . . .[I] am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs . . . I hoped for no gain. . .I struck for my country and that alone. . .I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. . .I cannot repent it. . .our country owed all her trouble to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.⁷

After several mishaps, on April 23, 1865, the fugitives crossed the Potomac River into Virginia and made their way to Port Conway where they met William Storke Jett and two other Confederate soldiers, Major M. B. Ruggles and Lieutenant A. R. Bainbridge. The three men, former members of Colonel John Singleton Mosby’s cavalry, were waiting to take the ferry across the Rappahannock River to Port Royal.

Herold introduced himself as David E. Boyd and John as his brother, James William Boyd. James, he said, had been wounded in the leg while escaping from prison where they had been held for some time.⁸ Jett and the others became suspicious Herold was hiding something. Never one to keep a secret, Herold soon bragged, “we are the assassinators of the President. . .Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed the President.”⁹

While they were talking, John hobbled over to the group on his rough-hewn crutch. He was no longer the handsomest man in America. He was wearing his now seedy, black slouch hat, dark clothes, a cavalry boot on one foot, and a black stocking on the other, inside a shoe cut away at the top. His injured leg was noticeably swollen. His face was haggard. He was bearded, not having shaved for several days. His eyes were sunken, but they still had their peculiar bright glow.

“I suppose you have been told who I am?” he asked. Ruggles nodded. Shifting his weight onto his crutch, John yanked his gun from his belt.

“I am worth $100,000 to the man who captures me,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice.¹⁰ The three men replied they didn’t sanction his killing Lincoln, but “were not men to take ‘blood money.’”

John put his gun back in his belt. Ruggles hoisted John onto his horse, and they all crossed the river. After landing, Jett led them a short way to the home of William Peyton, a Port Royal friend of his. Peyton wasn’t home but his daughter was. Jett asked her to take care of the wounded man travelling with him until the day after tomorrow when he would return for him. Miss Peyton agreed at first, but on seeing the seedy, unshaven man she changed her mind. She protested the impropriety of keeping a man in the house with her alone. She suggested Jett take him to the Garrett house down the road.

Richard H. Garrett’s farmhouse was a large wooden framed building with broad porches on every side. It rested on a little hill with rolling fields spread out in every direction. Jett introduced himself as a local boy. He had a wounded Confederate soldier with him, he said, by the name of John W. Boyd, who was on his way home and needed to rest because of his wound. Could Garrett take care of him for a day or two until Jett would return for him?

The Garretts hadn’t heard about the assassination and took Jett at his word. Jett went on to Bowling Green while Ruggles and Bainbridge continued on their journey home. Before they left, John told Ruggles and Bainbridge that whatever happened, he would not be taken alive.¹¹

Colonel Everton Conger, Lieutenant Luther Baker, and a twenty-six-man detachment from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry led by Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty were in hot pursuit of the fugitives. They had tracked them down to Port Conway where they were informed that Willie Jett and some Confederates had escorted two other men, one with a crutch, across the river not very long before and that Jett was going to see his girlfriend in Bowling Green, fifteen miles away.

After crossing over to Port Royal, Conger and his men sped down the road to Bowling Green. Without knowing it, they passed right by John and Herold at the Garrett farm. Jett was taken prisoner without a fight. Threatened with hanging, Jett told Conger John was at the Garrett farm. Conger ordered him to show them the way.¹²

The Garretts still didn’t know the real identity of their guests, but Garrett’s oldest son, Jack, was beginning to suspect they were not who they said they were. The second night of their stay, Jack told them they had to sleep in the barn instead of the house. Fearing the two strangers might steal their horses in the early morning, he locked them in.¹³

Around 2:00 a.m. on April 26, 1865, the federals were outside the Garrett farm. Doherty’s men were exhausted. They had been chasing John for two days without sleep and with very little food. Energized at the prospect of finally capturing Booth, not to mention the reward money, they took down the outside fence and surrounded the house.

Once the men were in place, Conger pounded on the Garrett’s front door. The first one out was Richard Garrett. Conger demanded to know where the two visitors were. Garrett dissembled, first claiming they were gone and rambling about how they had come without his consent and that he hadn’t wanted them to stay. Conger ordered one of the cavalrymen to bring a lariat rope and threatened to hang Garrett if he didn’t tell him where they’d gone. One of Garrett’s sons hurriedly intervened for his father and told them the men Conger was looking for were in the barn.

With Doherty’s cavalrymen positioned around the barn, Baker ordered John and Herold to come out. John clung to the remote possibility that the men outside were in fact Southerners. “For whom do you take me?” John shouted through the door.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Baker shouted back. “Come out!”

John shouted back he would come out if they were friends, but not if they were foes.

Conger was growing impatient. “If you don’t come out,” he shouted, “I’ll burn the building.”

“If you will withdraw your men in line one hundred yards from the door, I will come out and fight you,” he challenged.

Baker would have none of it. They had not come to fight, he shouted back; they’d come to take him prisoner.

Peering through the slats outside, David Herold saw the soldiers piling hay against the barn. He told John he wanted to give himself up. John called him a damned coward. “Surrender if you want, but I will fight and die like a man.”

“There’s a man in here [who] wants to come out,” John shouted to his captors.

“You had better follow his example and come out!” Conger shouted back.

“No. I have not made up my mind,” John answered. Then, as if it was all a stage drama, John again challenged his captors to fight outside. Conger replied that they were there to take John prisoner.

At that point, Herold shouted he was coming out. As soon as he exited the barn, he was seized and tied to a tree.

Conger ordered the troopers to put more hay against the barn. “We will fire the barn in two minutes if you do not come out,” he shouted.

“Well, my brave boys,” John shouted back, “prepare a stretcher for me.”

Conger set the hay on fire. “It blazed very rapidly,” Conger later recalled, “lit right up at once.”

John did not have many choices. No matter what, he would not allow himself to be taken alive, paraded through Washington, and made to sit shackled in silence, enduring insults, a trial with an inevitable verdict, and inevitable death by hanging.

John had not forgotten the sad spectacle of John Brown’s hanging. Brown had died bravely. John respected that. But he had died a shameful death. John had watched the condemned man climb the platform, his hands bound behind him, the hood drawn over his head and the noose looped around his neck. He had seen the body drop through the floor, spasmodically jerk, then dangle until the rope was cut.

John would not let that happen to him. “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal,” he had written in his diary.¹⁴ He would not shame his family with a criminal’s death—especially his mother. He knew intuitively what she would want. In fact, his mother confessed a hope he would kill himself and spare the family the disgrace of his being hanged as a criminal.¹⁵

Burning to death was too horrible an option. Brutus had fallen on his own sword rather than be taken alive. Could he do anything less?

Conger peered through a crack between the wooden beams as the flames engulfed the barn. Seeing John start for the door at the other side of the barn, he ran around the outside. Just as Conger was halfway around, he heard the blast of a pistol.¹⁶

The shot struck John in the neck, severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him. No one knows for sure who fired the shot.¹⁷ John vowed never to be taken alive. The only way to be sure that would never happen was to take his own life.¹⁸ Most historians, however, believe Sergeant Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett’s claim that he shot Booth. Although ordered to take him alive, Corbett, a self-castrated religious zealot, said he shot Booth through a large crack in the barn because he believed Booth was about to shoot one of the civilian detectives attached to his unit. “Providence,” Corbett said, “directed my hand.”¹⁹

Fatally wounded, unable to move, John was dragged from the burning barn onto the Garrett porch begging, “Kill me! Kill me!”

Baker replied he would do no such thing and sent for a doctor. Seventy-one-year-old Dr. Charles Urquhart from nearby Port Royal arrived within the hour. Urquhart did not need more than a few minutes to conclude the wound was fatal. He gave John an hour to live and went home.

While John was close to death on the Garrett porch, Everton Conger went through his pockets. Inside was a compass, a small pipe, shavings to make a fire with, a file, a spur, a stick pin inscribed “Dan Bryant to J.W.B.,” a candle, a money order from a Canadian bank, about one hundred dollars in U.S. currency, a pocket diary, and five photos.

Conger glanced at the five photos (of Alice Gray, Helen Western, Fanny Brown, Effie Germon, and Lucy Hale) tucked into John’s diary but didn’t give them more than a passing look. He put them back inside the diary and rode off with John’s possessions to hand them over to Lafayette C. Baker, head of the War Department’s National Detective Police. Baker in turn brought the diary and photos to Secretary of War Stanton.

Stanton rarely if ever went to the theatre. He would not have recognized the photos of the four actresses. But he might have recognized the photo of the daughter of a prominent senator who had just been appointed minister to Spain. He sequestered the diary and photos in the War Department. Stanton was not about to enhance the assassin’s reputation by linking him to a prominent family, especially the family of a senator.

Stanton handed the diary and the photos over to Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt with an order not to introduce the diary or mention the photos at the conspiracy trial. The diary never came to light until two years later at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. When it was examined, forty-three pages were missing, adding fuel to the unquenchable conspiracy-theory fire.²⁰ It would be another ten years before anyone bothered to try to identify the five women in the photos.

John lingered on in agony for three more hours, pleading to be killed. Close to death he gasped, “Tell. . .my mother. . .I died . . . for . . . my . . . country.”²¹

Unable to move, John asked that his paralyzed hands be lifted to his face. With glazed eyes, he tried to focus on the palms from which the gypsy had long ago predicted he would come to an untimely end. “Useless, useless,” he muttered.²²

At around 7:15 a.m., on April 26, 1865, John Wilkes Booth died.

Lieutenant Doherty took the saddle blanket from his horse, ordered Mrs. Garrett to bring him a darning needle, and sewed John’s body inside. They hoisted it onto a wagon, and Lieutenant Baker brought the body to the USS Montauk at the Washington Navy Yard where several people who had known John identified the body.

Dr. John Frederick May, the doctor who had operated on John’s neck to remove a tumor in 1863, was one of those examining the body. Dr. May’s first impression was that the corpse bore no resemblance to the man he had treated. He asked that the body be turned over so that he could get a better look at the dead man’s neck. Seeing the scar where he had operated, he nodded. It was Booth, he said, but “his appearance is so much altered . . . looks older . . . more freckled.” Years later, May stated that the right leg was the one broken, not the left. May’s comments about the body and the contradiction about the injured leg would add to a popular urban legend that John had escaped and that the man who died at the Garrett farm was an imposter.

To frustrate any possibility of John’s resting place becoming a shrine for the South, Stanton ordered his body buried in secret in an unmarked grave in Washington’s Old Arsenal Penitentiary. It remained there until 1869 when President Andrew Johnson granted Edwin permission to remove it for reburial in the Booth family plot in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.