NO MORE DREAMS CAME TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN DURING THE night of his deep, last sleep at the Petersen house. His brain was dead and beyond the reach of any nocturnal imaginings. His soul would soon embark on the journey that he had traveled many times before in his recurring dream. Soon he would travel farther than he ever had before, finally reaching the indistinct shore that, to him, foretold the coming of great events.
By 4:00 A.M. Edwin Stanton was sure that he was dealing with a conspiracy. The evidence seized in Booth’s hotel room included a mysterious letter that seemed to foretell the assassination.
Hookstown, Balto Co.
March 27th, 1865.
Dear John:
Was business so important that you could not remain in Balto till I saw you. I came in as soon as I could, but found you had gone to W—n. I called to see Mike, but learned from his mother he had gone out with you and had not returned. I concluded therefore he had gone with you. How inconsiderate you have been. When I left you, you stated we would not meet in a month or so. Therefore I made application for employment, an answer to which I shall receive during the week. I told my parents I had ceased with you. Can I then under existing circumstances, come as you request. You know full well that the G t. suspicions something is going on there. Therefore, the undertaking is becoming more complicated. Why not for the present desist, for various reasons, which if you look into, you can readily see, without my making any mention thereof. You, nor any one can censure me for my present course. You have been its cause, for how can I now come after telling them I had left you. Suspicion rests upon me now from my whole family, and even parties in the country. I will be compelled to leave home nay how, and how soon I care not. None, no not one, were more in for the enterprise than myself, and to day would be there, had you not done as you have—by this I mean, manner of proceeding. I am, as you well know, in need. I am, you may say, in rags whereas to day I ought to be well clothed. I do not feel right stalking about with means, and more from appearances a beggar. I feel my dependence, but even all this would and was forgotten, for I was one with you. Time more propitious will arrive yet. Do not act rashly or in haste. I would prefer you first query, "go and see how it will be taken at R-d," and ere long I shall be better prepared to again be with you. I dislike writing, and would sooner verbally make known my views. Yet your non writing causes me thus to proceed. Do not in anger peruse this. Weigh all I have said, and as a rational man and a FRIEND, you can not censure or upbraid my conduct. I sincerely trust this nor aught else that shall or may occur, will ever be an obstacle to obliterate our former friendship and attachment. Write me to Balto as I expect to be about Wednesday or Thursday. Or if you can possibly come on, I will Tuesday meet you in Balto. At B, Ever I subscribe myself.
Your friend,
Sam.
The recovery of this letter, which Booth had carelessly—or possibly willfully, given his incriminating letter to the National Intelligencer—failed to destroy, was a stunning development. Stanton realized that it brimmed with clues: Booth had at least two conspirators named “Sam” and “Mike”; Sam was in Baltimore; the assassination was premeditated, planned before March 27; and the Confederacy might be involved. What else could “see how it will be taken in Richmond” mean?
The Daily Morning Chronicle, one of Washington’s major papers, described the frantic beginning of the manhunt:
No sooner had the dreadful event been announced in the street, than Superintendent Richards and his assistants were at work to discover the assassins. In a few moments the telegraph had aroused the … police force of the city…. Every measure of precaution was taken to preserve order in the city, and every street was patrolled. At the request of Mr. Richards General Augur sent horses to mount the police. Every road out of Washington was picketed, and every possible avenue of escape thoroughly guarded. Steamboats about to depart down the Potomac were stopped.
As it is suspected that this conspiracy originated in Maryland, the telegraph flashed the mournful news to Baltimore, and all the cavalry was immediately put upon active duty. Every road was picketed, and every precaution taken to prevent the escape of the assassins.
Stanton sent another telegram to General Dix telling him about the new evidence and updating him on Lincoln’s condition:
Washington City,
No.458 Tenth Street, April 15, 1865—4.10 A.M
Major General Dix:
The President continues insensible and is sinking. Secretary Seward remains without change. Frederick Seward’s skull is fractured in two places besides a severe cut upon the head The attendant is alive, but hopeless. Major Seward’s wounds are not dangerous
It is now ascertained with reasonable certainty that two assassins were engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the President the other a companion of his whose name is not known but whose description is so clear that he can hardly escape. It appears from a letter found in Booth’s trunk that the murder was planned before the 4th of March but fell through then because the accomplice backed out until Richmond could be heard from. Booth and his accomplice were at the livery stable at 6 this evening, and left there with their horse about 10 o’clock, or shortly before that hour. It would seem that they had for several days been seeking their chance, but for some unknown reason it was not carried into effect until last night. One of them has evidently made his way to Baltimore the other has not yet been traced.
At the Petersen house Dr. Abbott recorded melancholy statistics in the minutes he kept that night: “5:50 A.M., respiration 28, and regular sleeping.”
“6:00 A.M., pulse failing, respiration 28.”
At 6:00 A.M., a fainting sickness overcame Secretary of the Navy Welles He had been cooped up in the claustrophobic Petersen house all night. Welles rose from his bedside chair, where he had sat listening to the sound of Lincoln’s breathing. Welles needed fresh air and decided to go for a walk. When he got outside, stood on the top step, and looked down to the street, he witnessed a remarkable scene: thousands of citizens, keeping their all-night vigil for their dying president. Welles descended the turned staircase and walked among them. They recognized Lincoln’s bearded “Father Neptune,” and individual faces emerged from the crowd and spoke to him: “[They] stepped forward as I passed, to inquire into the condition of the President, and to ask if there was hope. Intense grief was on every countenance when I replied that the President could survive but a short time. The colored people especially—and there were at this time more of them, perhaps than of whites—were overwhelmed with grief.” After a while, Welles turned back: “It was a dark and gloomy morning, and rain set in before I returned to the house.” He wanted to be there at the end.
“6:30 A.M., still failing and labored breathing.”
“7:00 A.M., symptoms of immediate dissolution.”
In Maryland, at the same hour, Lieutenant Dana arrived in Piscataway Dana, although he held junior rank, had senior-level connections in Washington. His brother, Charles, was Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war and a confidant of Stanton. David Dana and his patrol from the Thirteenth New York Cavalry had left Washington two hours ago, at 5:00 A.M. As soon as he reached Piscataway, he telegraphed Washington to report the progress of his early-morning expedition. “I arrived at this place at 7 A.M., and at once sent a man to Chapel Point to notify the cavalry at that point of the murder of the President, with description of the parties who committed the deed. With the arrangements which have been made it is impossible for them to get across the river in this direction.” Dana had already gotten his first tip, and he relayed it to headquarters: “I have reliable information that the person who murdered Secretary Seward is Boyce or Boyd, the man who killed Captain Watkins in Maryland. I think it without doubt true.” Of course it wasn’t Less than nine hours into the manhunt, Dana was pursuing the kind of false lead that would come to bedevil the manhunters in the days ahead.
aT THE PETERSEN HOUSE, ABRAHAM LINCOLN BEGAN THE death struggle.
The end was coming on fast. Surgeon General Barnes placed his finger on Lincoln’s carotid artery; Dr. Leale placed his finger on the president’s right radial pulse; and Dr. Taft placed his hand over the heart. The doctors and nearly every man in the room fished out pocket watches on gold chains. It was 7:20 A.M., April 15, 1865. More than once, they thought that Lincoln had passed away. But the strong body resisted death and rallied again, as it had so many times through the long night.
It was 7:21 A.M. Death was imminent.
At 7:21 and 55 seconds, Abraham Lincoln drew his last breath.
His heart stopped beating at 7:22 and 10 seconds. It was over.
“He is gone; he is dead,” one of the doctors said. To the Reverend Dr. Gurley, the Lincoln family’s minister, it seemed that four or five minutes passed “without the slightest noise or movement” by anyone in the room. “We all stood transfixed in our positions, speechless, around the dead body of that great and good man.”
Edwin Stanton spoke first. He turned to his right and looked at Gurley. “Doctor, will you say anything?”
“I will speak to God,” replied the minister, “let us pray.” He summoned up such a stirring prayer that later no one, not even Gurley, could remember what he said. James Tanner tried to scribble down the words, but at this crucial moment the lead tip of his only pencil snapped and he wasn’t able to write any more.
Gurley finished and everyone murmured “Amen.” Then, no one dared to speak.
Again Stanton broke the silence. “Now he belongs to the angels.”
Edwin Stanton composed himself, reached for pen and paper, and wrote a single sentence. There was nothing else to say. It was the telegram that would, as soon as a messenger ran it over to the War Department for transmission, announce the sad news to the nation.
WASHINGTON CITY, April 15, 1865.
Major General Dix,
New York:
Abraham Lincoln died this morning at 22 minutes after 7 o’clock.
EDWIN M. STANTON
One by one those who were there at the end quietly filed out of the little back bedroom. Reverend Dr. Gurley and Robert Lincoln told Mary. She would not go to the death chamber; she could not bear it. She never saw her husband’s face again. Around 9:00 A.M. she left the Petersen house. As she descended the stairs, coachman Francis Burke, who had waited all night to take the president home, readied to carry the widowed first lady there. Before she got in the carriage, she glared at Ford’s Theatre across the street: “That dreadful house … that dreadful house,” she moaned.
The room was empty of all visitors now, save one. Edwin Stanton and the president were alone. The morning light streaming through the back windows raked across Lincoln’s still face. Stanton closed the blinds and approached the president’s body. He took from his pocket a small knife or pair of scissors and bent over Lincoln’s head. Gently he cut a generous lock of hair—more than one hundred strands—and sealed it in a plain, white envelope. Stanton signed his name in ink on the upper right corner, and then addressed the envelope: “To Mrs. Welles.” The lock was not for him, but a gift for Mary Jane Welles, wife of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and one of Mary Lincoln’s few friends in Washington. In 1862, Mrs. Welles had helped nurse Willie Lincoln, ill with typhoid fever, until his death on February 20. Then, in the aftermath, Mary Jane did double duty, continuing to nurse Tad, also ill, while also caring for Mary Lincoln, helpless in her grief. Nine months later, in November 1863, the Welleses’ three-year-old son died of diphtheria. With that loss, Mary Jane Welles and Mary Lincoln shared a sadness that brought them even closer. Within an hour of the assassination, Mary Lincoln had dispatched messengers to summon Mary Jane to her side. Stanton knew that if any woman in Washington deserved a sacred lock of the martyr’s hair it was Mary Jane Welles. Later, Mrs. Welles framed the cherished relic with dried flowers that had adorned the president’s coffin at the White House funeral. Lost in reverie, Lincoln’s god of war gazed down at his fallen chief and wept. Abraham Lincoln was gone. “To the angels.”
It was time to take him home. Stanton ordered soldiers to go quickly and bring what was necessary to transport the body of the slain president. He ordered another soldier to guard the door to the death room and to allow no one to enter and disturb the president’s body. When the soldiers returned from their errand and turned down Tenth Street, the crowd began to wail. The men carried a plain, pine box, the final refutation of their hopes. They knew already, of course, that the president was dead. They had seen the cabinet secretaries leave the house, and then Mary Lincoln. But the sight of the crude, improvised coffin made it too real. It was finished. The box looked like a shipping crate, not a proper coffin for a head of state. Lincoln would not have minded. He was always a man of simple tastes. This was the plain, roughly hewn coffin of a rail-splitter.
The men carried the box up the curving stairs and down the narrow hallway. Stanton supervised them as they rested the box on the floor. They unfurled an American flag and approached the president’s naked body. They wrapped him in the cotton bunting, and, if they followed custom, were careful to position the canton’s thirty-six, five-pointed stars over his face. These were the national colors of the Union. During the war Lincoln insisted that the flag retain its full complement of stars, refusing to acknowledge that the seceded states had actually left the Union. They lifted the president from the bed, placed him in the box, and screwed down the lid. The only sound in the room was the squeaking of the screws being tightened in their holes.
Stanton nodded in assent. In unison, the men bent down and inched their fingers under the bottom edges of the box; it had no pallbearers’ handles. They eased it up from the floor and began shuffling their feet down the narrow hallway to the front door. They carried the president into the street and loaded him onto the back of a simple, horse-drawn wagon. The driver snapped the reins and the modest procession, escorted by a small contingent of bareheaded officers on foot, took Abraham Lincoln home to the White House. There were no bands, drums, or trumpets, just the cadence of horses’ hooves and the footsteps of the officers. Lincoln would have liked the simplicity.
After Lincoln’s body was removed, Stanton and the other members of the cabinet—save Seward—met in the back parlor of the Petersen house. Andrew Johnson was not present when Lincoln died, so the cabinet sent to him an official, written notification of the president’s death and of his succession to the presidency. They urged that the new president be sworn in immediately, and Johnson sent back word that he would be pleased to take the oath of office at 11:00 A.M. in his room at the Kirkwood. In the late morning of April 15, Chief Justice Chase and the officials in attendance found a changed man. Six weeks ago, an intoxicated Johnson had embarrassed himself by giving a foolish, rambling speech on Inauguration Day. Lincoln forgave him and said no more about it. The morning of Lincoln’s death found Johnson sober, grave, dignified, and deeply moved. Given the tragic and unprecedented circumstances of his elevation to the presidency, it was decided collectively that it would not be appropriate for him to deliver a formal, public inaugural address.
Between the time Lincoln died and his body was removed from the Petersen house, the first newspaper account of the assassination hit the streets of Washington. The Daily Morning Chronicle announced the terrible news with a series of headlines: “MURDER OF President Lincoln. / ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE SECRETARY OF STATE. / MANNER OF ASSASSINATION / Safety of Other Members of the Cabinet. / Description of the Assassin / THE POLICE INVESTIGATION / THE SURGEONs’ LATEST REPORTS.”
Suspecting that the president’s entire cabinet had been marked for death, and hearing that a would-be assassin had been scared off from Stanton’s home, Chronicle reporters had rushed to all of their homes to discover whether they had been attacked, too:
It, therefore, is evident, that the aim of the plotters was to paralyze the country by at once striking down the head, the heart, and the arm of the country.
We went in search of the Vice-President, and found he was safe in his apartments at the Kirkwood. We called at Chief Justice Chase’s and learned there, that he too was safe. Secretaries Stanton, Welles, and Usher, and … the other members of the Cabinet, were with the President … and we are gratified to be able to announce that all the members of the Cabinet, save Mr. Seward, are unharmed.
This man Booth has played more than once at Ford’s theatre, and is, of course, acquainted with its exits and entrances, and the facility with which he escaped behind the scenes is well understood…. [Booth] has long been a man of intemperate habits and subject to temporary fits of great excitement. His capture is certain, but if he is true to his nature he will commit suicide, and thus appropriately end his career.
Over the next few days, newspapers in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago published reams of unsubstantiated gossip. They tantalized readers by claiming that particular arrests were only days—even hours—away; readers assumed that high-level leaders of the Confederacy, including President Jefferson Davis, who was still at large, would be named as conspirators. One Washington paper boasted that more than one hundred criminals would face trial, and another wrote that certainly twenty-one and perhaps even twenty-three would hang. The public devoured every word and clamored for more.
The news reached Elmira, New York, on the morning of April 15. John Cass, proprietor of a clothing store on the corner of Walter and Baldwin streets, took his morning paper, the Elmira Advertiser, at home, and by 7:30 A.M. he had read that the president had been assassinated but was still alive. He walked to the telegraph office opposite his store but there was no additional news. Then it came, a little after 9:00 A.M.; the president was dead. Cass crossed the street, and told his clerks to close for the day. Then he noticed a man crossing the street, making a beeline for Cass’s store. The man, dressed in a fashionable jacket that bespoke foreign tailoring, stepped inside. Cass thought he looked Canadian. The stranger asked for white shirts of a particular style and manufacturer. Cass, having none in stock, tried to interest the customer in other shirts. The man demurred, Cass recalled: “He examined them, but said he would rather have those of the make which he had been accustomed to wearing.”
Cass said he had just received some “very bad news.”
“What?” the customer asked.
“Of the death of Abraham Lincoln,” Cass said.
With that, John Surratt walked out of the store.
THE BACK BEDROOM OF THE PETERSEN HOUSE WAS EMPTY FOR the first time in twelve hours. Stanton left the room unguarded. Unlike Ford’s Theatre, the house where Lincoln died was not a crime scene. No one collected the bloody sheets, pillowcases, pillows, and towels as evidence of the great crime. Soon one of the boarders, a photographer named Julius Ulke, set up his camera in the corner of the room, facing the bed. The bloodied linens, bathed in morning light, were still wet. Ulke’s haunting photograph of the death chamber, lost for nearly a century, preserved a scene that words cannot adequately describe.
William Clark returned to the Petersen house and found his room in shambles. That night he climbed into Lincoln’s deathbed and fell asleep under the same coverlet that warmed the body of the dying president. Four days later, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, he wrote a letter to his sister, Ida F. Clark, in Boston:
Morning, April 15, 1865. Lincoln’s deathbed shortly after his body was taken home to the White House.
Since the death of our President hundreds daily call at the house to gain admission to my room.
I was engaged nearly all of Sunday with one of Frank Leslie’s Special Artists aiding him viz making a correct drawing of the last moments of Mr. Lincoln, as I knew the position of every one present he succeeded in executing a fine sketch, which will appear in their paper the last of this week. He intends, from this same drawing to have some fine large steel engravings executed. He also took a sketch of nearly every article in my room which will appear in their paper. He wished to mention the names of all in particularly of yourself, Clara and Nannie, but I told him he must not do that, as they were members of my family and I did not want them to be made so public. He also urged me to give him my picture or at least allow him to take my sketch, but I could not see that either.
Everybody has a great desire to obtain some memento from my room so that whoever comes in has to be closely watched for fear they will steal something.
I have a lock of his hair which I have had neatly framed, also a piece of linen with a portion of his brain, the pillow case upon which he lay when he died and nearly all his wearing apparel but the latter I intend to send to Robt Lincoln as soon as the funeral is over, as I consider him the one most justly entitled to them
The same matrass is on my bed, and the same coverlit covers me nightly that covered him while dying.
Enclosed you will find a piece of lace that Mrs. Lincoln wore on her head during the evening and was dropped by her while entering my room to see her dying husband. It is worth keeping for its historical value.
William Petersen, the previous night merely the anonymous owner of one of several hundred equally anonymous boardinghouses scattered throughout the nation’s capital, had become, by early morning, proprietor of the famous “house where Lincoln died.” That unwelcome honor—and the rabid attention of newspaper reporters and curiosity seekers—displeased him. In particular Petersen resented the implication that the president had died dishonorably, not at the Executive Mansion, but in a shabby boardinghouse. Lincoln would not have complained. Eighteen years ago he began his Washington career in another boardinghouse not much different from the one where it ended. Elected to Congress in 1846, Lincoln came to Washington for the first time in 1847 and moved into Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse across the street from the Capitol not far from First and East Capitol streets. There was no shame in it then. Lincoln would have felt no shame in dying in one now.
LITTLE MORE THAN AN HOUR BEFORE LINCOLN DIED, GEORGE Atzerodt arose from his humble quarters at the Pennsylvania House and left the hotel. A servant just back from fetching a carriage to take a woman to the 6:15 A.M. train ran into him outside:
“What brings you out so early this morning?”
“Well,” Atzerodt replied, “I have got business.”
When Atzerodt walked past Creaser’s house on F Street, between Eighth and Ninth streets, opposite the Patent Office, and along Booth’s escape route just two blocks from Ford’s Theatre, he tossed his knife under a wood carriage step, into the gutter. A few minutes later, an eagle-eyed woman looking out a third-story window in the building next to Creaser’s shoe store saw it there and sent a black woman to get it. But the woman did not want the knife in her house so a passerby, William Clendenin, volunteered to take the clue, still in its sheath, to Almarin C. Richards, the chief of police.
The night before, the authorities had done little to pursue Booth during the first hour after the assassination. At Ford’s Theatre the immediate concern was the condition of the president, not the whereabouts of Booth. But by early morning, Stanton had summoned the iron will for which he was renowned and planned the manhunt. The government—Vice President Johnson and the cabinet—had survived the night; no more assassinations had occurred; and no invading army stormed the capital. Stanton coordinated—or at least tried to—the efforts of the local police force, detectives, and the army.
From New York City came another offer of help, twelve hours after Stanton had asked its chief of police to send his finest detectives to Washington. On April 15, at 1:40 P.M., Stanton received a telegram from Detective H. S. Olcott, proposing to join the manhunt: “If Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan or I or any of my employees can serve you and the country in any way, no matter what, or anywhere, we are ready.” John Wilkes Booth was still at large. He had escaped the first, frantic night of the manhunt. Now it might not be so easy to capture him quickly. Stanton reached for Olcott’s helping hand, telegraphing a prompt reply: “I desire your services. Come to Washington at once, and bring your force of detectives with you.” Olcott hurried to move that night: “I leave at midnight with such of my men as live in town. The rest will follow forthwith.”
That afternoon Stanton also summoned Lieutenant Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, head of the self-styled “National Detective Police,” and one of his favorites.
WAR DEPARTMENT
Washington City, April 15,1865—3:20 P.M.
Col. L C. BAKER,
New York:
Come here immediately and see if you can find the murderers of the President.
EDWINM. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
Stanton vowed to apprehend Booth and all those who conspired with him to commit what became known as “the great crime.” Southern leaders feared that Stanton might accuse them of complicity in the murder. One of them, Governor F. H. Pierpont of Virginia, sent a message to the War Department pleading that his state was blameless, and condemning Booth for shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” at Ford’s Theatre: “Loyal Virginia sends her tribute of mourning for the fall of the Nation’s President by the hands of a dastardly agent of treason, who dared to repeat the motto of our State at the moment of the perpetration of his accursed crime.”
Soldiers, policemen, and private detectives fanned out over Washington, Maryland, and Virginia in pursuit of the actor and his accomplices. On assassination night John H. Surratt was named as one of Booth’s possible accomplices and was the first suspect in the Seward knife attack. But when soldiers had searched for him at his mother’s boardinghouse a few hours after Lincoln was shot, he was not there. Stanton declared the search and capture of John Wilkes Booth to be the nation’s top priority. Booth and his conspirators had to be caught before they disappeared into the Deep South, where they would find succor in the heart of the stricken Confederacy. On the morning of April 15, the nation held its collective breath and with one voice asked, “Will Booth be taken?”
IT WAS A DANGEROUS TIME TO BE A FRIEND OF JOHN Wilkes Booth. On the night of the fourteenth, when the actors huddled backstage at Ford’s Theatre a few minutes after Lincoln was shot, John Matthews feared the worst. “There were shouts of ‘burn’ and ‘hang’ and ‘lynch’” coming from the audience, he recalled, and then Matthews made a discovery that put him in fear for his life.
When taking off my coat the letter which Booth had given me dropped out of the pocket. I had forgotten about it. I said “Great God! There is the letter that John gave me in the afternoon.” It was in an envelope, sealed and stamped for the post office. I opened it, and glanced hastily over the letter. I saw it was a statement of what he was going to do. I read it very hurriedly. It was written in a sort of patriotic strain, and was to this effect; That he had for a long time devoted his money, his time, and his energies to the accomplishment of an end; that a short time ago he had been worth so much money—twenty or thirty thousand dollars, I think—all of which he had spent furthering this enterprise; but that he had been baffled. It then went on: “The moment has come at last when my plans must be changed. The world may censure me for what I am about to do; but I am sure posterity will justify me.” Signed. “Men who love their country more than gold or life: J. W. Booth, Payne, Atzerodt, and Herold.”
In the crowded dressing rooms, surrounded by excited actors running amok, Matthews read Booth’s letter. No one paid attention to the piece of paper he clutched in his hands. He read it a second time and then asked himself, “What shall I do with this letter?” The audience in the theatre had not stopped shouting. Matthews considered handing the letter over to the authorities. The roar of the mob persuaded him otherwise. “If this paper is found on me,” Matthews reasoned, “I will be compromised—no doubt lynched on the spot.” Even if he survived the night, he knew that the letter’s brush would tar him forever: “I will be associated with the letter, and suspicions will grow out of it that can never be explained away, and I will be ruined.” He knew what he had to do to protect himself: “I burned it up.”
Matthews was not alone. On the night of April 14, others in Washington attempted to obliterate evidence of their connection to Lincoln’s assassin. And the next morning, as news of Lincoln’s death spread across the nation, many other letters written in Booth’s hand certainly perished in flames. Indeed, fewer than one hundred of Booth’s letters and manuscripts survived the tumultuous days that followed the assassination. One of his paramours even sought to destroy herself. Ella Turner, a petite, sensual, redheaded prostitute, placed Booth’s photo under her pillow, saturated a piece of cloth with chloroform, pressed the poisonous anesthetic to her delicate face, and tried to fill her lungs with a fatal dose. At 11:00 A.M. on April 15, residents of her house found her in her room, collapsed on her bed, unconscious but alive. Several doctors were summoned. The press got hold of the story, and the Washington Evening Star published the lurid details of her rescue: “Proper remedies were immediately applied, when she soon aroused and asked for Booth’s picture, which she had concealed under the pillow of her bed, at the same time remarking to the physicians that she ‘did not thank them for saving her life.’ “Soon she came to her senses and chose to survive her lover’s crime.
Booth’s female correspondents had more to worry about than the letters he had sent to them. They could dispose of those documents easily enough. But what about the love notes that they had mailed to him, and that were in his possession? Many women—single, engaged, and married—had written incriminating letters to their idol offering to surrender whatever pleasures he chose to take from them. George Alfred Townsend penned an unforgettable vignette of a typical case:
The beauty of this man and his easy confidentiality, not familiar, but marked by a mild and even dignity, made women impassioned of him. He was licentious as men, and particularly as actors go, but not a seducer, as far as I can learn. I have traced one case in Philadelphia where a young girl who had seen him on stage became enamored of him.
She sent him bouquets, notes, photographs and all the accessories of an intrigue. Booth, to whom such things were common, yielded to the girl’s importunities at last and gave her an interview. He was surprised to find that so bold a correspondent was so young, so fresh, and so beautiful. He told her therefore, in pity, the consequences of pursuing him; that he entertained no affection for her, though a sufficient desire, and that he was a man of the world to whom all women grew fulsome in their turn.
“Go home,” he said, “and beware of actors. They are to be seen, not to be known.”
The girl, yet more infatuated, persisted. Booth, who had no real virtue except by scintillations, became what he had promised, and one more soul went to the isles of Cypress.
On April 14, and for weeks to come, more than one woman prayed that Booth had destroyed her letters before he killed the president. Fortune spared the reputations of the assassin’s admirers—not one of their love letters was discovered and published during the manhunt. But when news of the assassination reached Boston, a singular young girl decided to cherish, and not obliterate, her intimate bond to Lincoln’s killer.
They had met in Boston the previous year, during Booth’s successful, monthlong theatrical engagement at the Boston Museum. It was an astonishing run—between April 25 and May 28, 1864, Booth, onstage almost every night, performed the greatest roles in the Shakespearean canon—Richard III, Hamlet, Romeo, Othello, Shylock, and Macbeth. He met her sometime during that month in Boston. Her name was Isabel Sumner. The daughter of a respectable merchant family, she possessed an intelligent face, a slender frame, and ravishing beauty. She was sixteen years old, and Booth proposed that they become lovers. He was smitten immediately, and pursued Isabel with an ardor uncommon for a man who was used to having women throw themselves at him. “God bless this sweet face before me,” he cooed in a letter written as he gazed at the photograph she had given him. “It would move me to do anything.”
The stage star courted the teenage beauty in a series of emotionally uninhibited letters that made him sound like a teenager: “I LOVE YOU … in the fountain of my heart a seal is set to keep its waters, pure and bright for thee alone.” Booth gave Isabel a signed photograph of himself, a lock of his hair, and a ring. Why did the debauched, worldly actor so crave this innocent, young girl? Booth answered the question himself in a letter: “I will … never, never cease to think of you as something pure and sacred, A bright and happy dream, from which I have been awoke to Sadness.”
When Isabel learned that Lincoln’s assassin was her lover, she could not bring herself to destroy John’s letters and gifts. Instead, she hid them for the next sixty-two years, until her death in 1927. As best as anyone could remember, she never spoke the name John Wilkes Booth again. Fortunately for Isabel Sumner, Booth did not carry her photo in his wallet the night he left the National Hotel to murder Abraham Lincoln. Neither Stanton’s detectives nor the newspapers discovered her, and her connection to Booth stayed a secret for the next one hundred and thirty years.
FRANCES MUDD ROSE AT 6:00 A.M. AND CALLED FOR HER SERvants to get breakfast ready. At 7:00 A.M., Mrs. Mudd woke her husband. David Herold, after only two hours of rest, shambled downstairs. John Wilkes Booth, his mind and body still spent from his great day, stayed in bed. He had ridden too far from Washington to hear the ringing bells of the city’s churches and firehouses tolling in mourning. Dr. Mudd invited Herold to join his family for breakfast. Frances prepared a plate of food for Booth and told a servant to carry it upstairs and set it on his bedside table.
Herold questioned Mudd about his local contacts, especially those who lived close to the river. Davey’s evident knowledge of the area prompted Frances Mudd to inquire if he lived in their county.
“No, ma’am,” he replied, “but I have been frolicking around for five or six months.”
Amused by his boyish demeanor, Frances teased him: “All play and no work makes Jack a bad boy. Your father ought to make you go to work.”
“My father is dead,” Herold responded, “and,” he added jauntily, “I am ahead of the old lady.”
As he bantered at the breakfast table, the good-natured Davey Herold appeared oblivious to the grave peril he faced. He was running for his life, but Frances Mudd observed that “he seemed not to have a care in the world.” Before Mudd left the house, Herold asked him for two favors. “After breakfast, when I was about to leave for my farm-work, this young man asked me if I had a razor about the house, that his friend desired to take a shave, as perhaps he would feel better.” The doctor provided a straight razor, soap, and water. And, wondered Davey, could Mudd make a pair of crutches for Booth, nothing fancy, just something simple for him “to hobble along with”? The physician, handy with wood and tools, complied: “I got two arm pieces and whittled them out as best I could.” Then Mudd took the pieces to one of his hired men, an old Englishman named John Best, and, using a saw and an auger, “he and I made a rude pair of crutches out of a piece of plank” and sent them to Booth.
When breakfast was finished, Herold went back to bed. Lieutenant Dana and the Thirteenth New York Cavalry patrol left Piscataway and pressed on toward Bryantown. Frances Mudd did not hear a sound from Herold or Booth for the next four hours until around noon, when Davey came down to devour his second meal of the day. While Herold dined, the Thirteenth New York reached Bryantown around noon. David Dana’s men were just a few miles from Dr. Mudd’s. This was the closest the manhunters had gotten to Booth since the assassination. As before, Booth stayed in bed. The servant who brought him dinner found Saturday morning’s breakfast tray, its food untouched, still sitting on the bedside table. Improvidently, Booth skipped the midday meal, too. He must have been famished, and who knew when his next meal might come?
BY 8:00 A.M. GEORGE ATZERODT HAD MADE IT TO GEORGEtown. He showed up at Matthews & Co.’s store at 49 High Street and paid a call on an acquaintance, John Caldwell. Atzerodt said that he was going to the country and asked Caldwell if he wanted to buy his watch. “I told him that I had a watch of my own, and did not want another.” Then Atzerodt asked for a loan of $10. Caldwell refused. “I told him that I did not have any money to spare.” Atzerodt unbelted his revolver and offered it to Caldwell. “Lend me $10.00, and take this as security, and I will bring the money or send it to you next week.” The storekeeper looked the weapon over. “I thought the revolver was good security for the money, and I let him have the money, expecting him to pay it back…. I did not inquire of him why it was loaded and capped.” Atzerodt left the store and continued on his journey. He had decided to leave Washington. He knew a place where he thought he would be safe.
aT THE EXECUTIVE MANSION THE SOLDIERS CARRIED THE president’s temporary coffin to the second-floor guest bedroom for the autopsy. Cutting open Abraham Lincoln’s brain and body served little purpose. The surgeons knew what killed him—a single bullet through the brain. They were hiding their voyeurism behind the camouflage of scientific inquiry. Their chosen surgeon reached for his saws and knives while his brother physicians watched. And they wanted the bullet. The nation could hardly bury its martyred Father Abraham with a lead ball lodged in his brain. They cut it out, marked it as evidence, and preserved it for history. When they were finished Mary Lincoln sent a request: Please cut a lock of his hair for her. His blood, according to a newspaper report, was drained from his corpse by the embalmer—the same mortuary artist who preserved the little body of Willie Lincoln in 1862—transferred to glass jars, and “sacredly preserved.”
Gideon Welles, at the White House to check on his wife, Mary Jane, while she cared for Mrs. Lincoln, descended the staircase, accompanied by Attorney General James Speed. At the foot of the stairs, they found Tad Lincoln staring out of a window. Welles never forgot the sight of the grieving boy: “‘Tad’ … seeing us, cried aloud his tears, ‘O, Mr. Welles, who killed my father?’ “It was more than the navy secretary could bear. All through the previous night, and while he had watched the president die that morning, Welles had suppressed his emotions. Now, standing beside little Tad, he lost all composure and poured forth his tears.
aT DR. MUDD’S KITCHEN TABLE, DAVEY ASKED HIM WHERE he could get his hands on a buggy or carriage to transport Booth. Mudd suggested that Davey ride with him to his father’s place and try there first. Thomas Davis, the hired hand in charge of Mudd’s horses, saddled their mounts.
Frances Mudd was concerned that Booth had not eaten all day, and just as her husband and David Herold were leaving, she asked if she could visit him. “Yes, certainly you can,” Dr. Mudd replied. She arrayed a tray with savory fare—“some cake, a couple of oranges, and some wine”—and carried it upstairs. Placing the tray on the table, she asked Booth how he was feeling.
“My back hurts me dreadfully,” he complained. “I must have hurt it when the horse fell and broke my leg.”
Booth declined the cake and wine and pleaded for brandy instead. Frances regretted that they had none but offered as a substitute “some good whiskey”—his spirit of choice at the Star Saloon and Surratt’s tavern. Strangely, he declined the whiskey, too.
Mrs. Mudd apologized: “I guess you think I have very little hospitality; you have been sick all day and I have not been up to see you.” Once more she asked Booth if she could do anything for him. He spoke no more, and she left the room.
When Samuel Mudd and David Herold arrived at Oak Hill, his father’s farm a few miles to the east, Dr. George Mudd was not at home. Sam’s younger brother, Henry Lowe Mudd Jr., advised them that all the carriages but one were broken down and in need of repair. He could not let them have the good carriage without their father’s permission because tomorrow was Easter Sunday, and the elder Mudd might need it. Herold suggested that they ride on to Bryantown and try their luck there. Samuel Mudd agreed, and they spurred their horses on at an unhurried pace. When they got within sight of the edge of town, Davey yanked back hard on the reins and brought his horse to a dead stop. He could not believe what he saw, several hundred yards ahead. Mounted men, wearing dark blue shell jackets trimmed with yellow piping. Yankee cavalry. Manhunters.
Herold had just spotted the vanguard of the Thirteenth New York Cavalry. Ordered to pursue John Wilkes Booth from Washington, Dana had led his troops into Bryantown, a well-known locale of Confederate intrigue, commandeered the tavern, and occupied the town. Dana intended to establish a command center there, and from Bryantown launch cavalry patrols through the surrounding countryside, in pursuit of the Lincoln and Seward assassins.
Herold made a quick decision. He didn’t need that carriage after all, he told Mudd. Booth can still ride a horse. Before the troops could spot them, Davey turned his horse around and galloped immediately back to Mudd’s farm to warn Booth. Puzzled by Davey’s skedaddling (Booth hadn’t told the doctor yet that he was Lincoln’s assassin), Mudd continued into Bryantown at a leisurely pace, just as he had done countless times on a quiet Saturday afternoon.
Mudd went about his business, purchasing supplies—calico and pepper from Mr. Beans’s store—and iron nails from another establishment. He greeted friends and neighbors he passed in the street, as always. But a strange, wild atmosphere hung over Bryantown. “The town was full of soldiers and people coming and going all the while,” noted one of the manhunters, Colonel H. H. Wells. The determined cavalrymen’s faces glowered with anger and the seriousness of their purpose. Mudd wondered what had happened.
Then somebody blurted it out. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated in Washington last night. He died early this morning. The cavalry is here in pursuit of the assassin who escaped. Detectives and soldiers are going to turn over Charles County hunting for the murderer. Did Mudd’s mind flash back to the 4:00 A.M. knock on his door? Could it be?
Who killed the president? the citizens demanded of the soldiers. The secret was impossible to keep. It was the actor. Booth. Edwin Booth? voices in the crowd wondered aloud. No, not Edwin, but his brother John, the soldiers told them. Lincoln’s assassin was John Wilkes Booth.
Mudd displayed no outward signs of alarm. And no eyes fixed him with accusing stares. He remained calm and did not, by word or deed, betray the terrible secret known, at this moment, to him alone: America’s most wanted man was hiding in his house, less than five miles away. The Thirteenth New York could be there in half an hour.
Back at Mudd’s farm, David Herold jumped off his horse and scurried to the house. Frances was in the kitchen supervising the servants as they prepared the next day’s Easter Sunday dinner. Davey, spying her through a window, tapped on the pane and she opened the front door. She asked Herold if he had found a carriage. “No, ma’am,” Davey replied. “We stopped over at the Doctor’s father’s and asked for his carriage, but tomorrow being Easter Sunday, his family had to go to church, and he could not spare it. I then rode some distance down the road with the Doctor, and then concluded to return and try the horses.” Herold was convincing enough that he aroused no suspicion in Mrs. Mudd.
Davey excused himself and hurried upstairs. Booth was still in bed, but he wouldn’t be for long. The cavalry is here, Davey warned his master; they are at Bryantown, just down the road. Herold explained how he turned back, and how Dr. Mudd rode into town. Booth sat up immediately. Davey helped him out of bed and Booth propped himself up on the crutches. Frances was alerted by the creaky floorboards above her head—“I heard them moving around the room and in a short time they came down”—and waited for them at the foot of the stairs. As Booth hobbled on his crutches, his right leg encased in his knee-high riding boot and his left foot bare, and a brace of heavy, holstered revolvers belted around his waist, his face presented a “picture of agony” to Frances Mudd. She implored Davey to leave Booth there to rest, but the young man reassured her: “If he suffers much we won’t go far. I will take him to my lady-love’s, not far from here.”
It was around 3:00 P.M., Saturday, April 15, and Booth was in grave danger. Only one man, Samuel Mudd, stood between him and disaster. Over in nearby Bryantown, Mudd had the power to end the manhunt that afternoon. All Dr. Mudd needed to do was tell the soldiers. He could do it with a few well-chosen words: John Wilkes Booth and an accomplice are hiding at my farm; he’s in the front bedroom on the second floor; he has a broken leg; he cannot run away; I’ll take you there now. All he had to do was speak those words, and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd would become, overnight, a national hero.
Booth faced the most difficult choice of his escape. Should he leave Mudd’s farm at once or wait for the doctor to return? Both options presented risks. Mudd’s farm was in the land of the great Zekiah swamp, and he and Davey did not know the ground. A wrong turn might trap them in the notorious, fearful morass. Moreover, although Booth knew that rebel operatives lived nearby, including William Burtles, he did not know the way to their homes. If he and Davey fled now, it would put them on the roads in broad daylight without knowing where to go.
Waiting for Dr. Mudd to come home presented great risks, too. If the doctor had betrayed him to the troops in Bryantown, Booth was a dead man. If they did not kill him on the spot at Mudd’s farm, then the manhunters would escort their captured prey back to Washington for a hanging. Booth had seen that once before. He had to decide now. Yes, perhaps he should have taken Mudd into his confidence. It would have been better for the doctor to have heard the truth from him rather than from the soldiers in town. Still, Booth concluded, Mudd would not betray him. Instead of fleeing the farm immediately, he waited for the doctor’s return.
Booth’s assessment of Mudd’s character proved true. When the doctor finished his business in Bryantown, he got on his horse and, ignoring the troopers he passed on the way, rode calmly out of town. He decided to protect Booth and said nothing to anyone. But he had some choice words to say to Booth face-to-face.
IN WASHINGTON, CLARA HARRIS, HER FATHER, AND Justice Cartter returned during daylight to the scene of the previous night’s crime. Together they scrutinized the locks on the doors leading to the president’s box, examined the little spot in the wall where Booth had scraped away the plaster, and peered through the hole through which the assassin espied Lincoln. At first they thought it was a bullet hole—evidence that Booth had shot at Lincoln blindly, the ball passing through the door before finding its target. Then they realized it was a peephole. They went into the box. The theatre was eerily quiet now and showed little evidence of the previous night’s mayhem—just some overturned chairs, scattered pieces of paper littering the floor, and the bare box, already stripped of its flags and bunting by souvenir hunters. The bloodstains were still there.
Stanton wanted to see the box, too, and so, like one of his detectives prowling for clues, he too retraced Booth’s steps to visualize each scene in the assassin’s script. He also wanted to see the play. Perhaps a reenactment of Our American Cousin would provide a vital, hitherto neglected clue. Stanton rounded up what cast members could be found, commandeered Ford’s, and ordered a surreal, private performance in the empty theatre. No one laughed this time at the once silly but forever-more riveting line: “You sockdologizing old mantrap.” When Stanton and his aides heard the words echo through the house, did their eyes dart involuntarily up to the president’s box? The run-through of the play confirmed it—Booth had cleverly timed his attack to coincide with Harry Hawk’s funny, solitary moment onstage.
Stanton was determined to preserve the scene of the crime. He ordered that it be surrounded by a twenty-four-hour guard. And he decided that he wanted photographs of the interior, to record exactly how it appeared at the moment of the assassination. He allowed Mathew Brady and his assistant to set up their big, wet-plate camera and make a series of exposures that, together, offered a panorama of the entire stage and its scenery during act 3, scene 2. Then Brady photographed the exterior of the president’s box, newly decorated with replacement flags and bunting for this purpose. He also photographed the approach to the box, and the outer door leading to the vestibule. The job challenged Brady’s skill. Photographing the vast interior, illuminated only by gaslight, and perhaps by whatever daylight reached the stage from opened doors and windows on the opposite end of the theatre facing Tenth Street, required long and careful exposures to allow the glass-plate negatives to absorb sufficient light to capture the necessary details.
BACK AT THE FARM, BOOTH AND HEROLD WAITED PATIENTLY for Dr. Mudd. But there was no sign of him. It was close to 6:00 in the evening and he still had not come home from Bryantown. What was taking him so long? Mudd’s tardiness was a good sign, though. If the doctor had betrayed Booth, the cavalry would have galloped to the farm two hours ago.
Finally, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 P.M., a rider turned from the main road and approached the farm. It was Dr. Mudd. He was alone and brought no cavalry escort. Booth’s knowing judgment was correct—the doctor was no Judas. But he was angry.
Mudd rode up to his guests, dropped down from the saddle, and strode toward Booth. His face could not conceal his distress. He ordered Booth and Herold to leave his farm at once, and accused the actor of lying to him. Booth did not tell Mudd what he had done, and had put the doctor and his family in great danger.
Ignoring Mudd’s anger, Booth seized upon the priceless news that the doctor brought back from Bryantown. The president was dead, and the fame was his. Twenty hours after the assassination, Dr. Mudd had just given John Wilkes Booth the first official confirmation that he had killed Lincoln. True, the assassin did not see how he could have missed. But it had all happened so fast. Lincoln moved at the last moment, and then Rathbone attacked Booth, leaving the actor no time to pause and admire his handiwork. There was a chance that the wound was not fatal. There had been enough room for doubt that in Surrattsville, Booth had qualified his boast to John Lloyd, saying only that he was “pretty certain” he had assassinated the president.
Dr. Mudd was not as jubilant as his patient about this news. Booth might rejoice at the tyrant’s death, but Mudd was angry and afraid. By coming there, Booth had placed Mudd and his entire family in great danger. Yes, Mudd had agreed to facilitate the kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln, but no one had consulted him about murder. But now, by offering Booth his hospitality, he had unwittingly implicated himself in the most shocking crime of the Civil War, indeed, in all of American history—the murder of the president of the United States.
Mudd continued to demand that Booth and Herold leave his farm at once. A patrol from the Thirteenth New York Cavalry might descend upon them without warning within the hour. Were federal troops to discover Lincoln’s assassin hiding out in his home, Dr. Mudd feared he would suffer terrible consequences. The only way to avert that disaster was to make Booth and Herold saddle their horses and ride away.
But Mudd was still sympathetic to the assassin’s plight. He was no fan of Abraham Lincoln, the Union, or the black man, and he would have rejoiced at the kidnapping of the president. Booth may have abused his hospitality, but not enough to make Mudd betray him. He assured Booth that, as long as he and Herold agreed to leave now, he would still help them.
First, he gave them the names of two trustworthy Maryland Confederate operatives, William Burtles and Captain Samuel Cox. Then Mudd explained the route to the next stop on their underground rebel railroad. They must travel southeast in a wide arc to swing around and below Bryantown to avoid the troops there. Then, turning west, they would find Burtles’s place, “Hagen’s Folly,” about two miles due south of Bryantown. Cox’s farm was several miles southwest from Burtles’s, and from there the two men would be within striking distance of the Potomac River and, on its western bank, Virginia. Mudd gave Booth the name of a doctor on the Virginia side in case his leg continued to trouble him.
Mudd promised Booth that he would not betray him. He would not ride back to Bryantown this evening and report that Lincoln’s assassin came calling in the dead of night. Dr. Mudd would hold his tongue and give Booth a head start. If the soldiers came to question him, he would say only that two strangers in need of medical assistance stopped briefly at his farm. Then he would send the manhunters in the wrong direction.
Davey helped Booth mount his horse, eased him onto the saddle, and handed him the crude but sturdy crutches Samuel Mudd and John Best fashioned for him. The actor balanced the sticks horizontally across his saddle, thrust the toe of his right boot through the stirrup, and then gingerly slipped his other foot, sheathed in an unlaced, loose-fitting brogan, into the left stirrup. The shoe was a parting gift from Dr. Mudd—Booth would never have squeezed his left foot into his other boot. He abandoned the luxurious, expensive piece of footwear, now scarred by Mudd’s scalpel, on the bedroom floor. Awkwardly his hands manipulated the crutches and reins at the same time. Herold vaulted into the saddle with ease. Samuel Mudd, relieved by their departure and by his own escape from near disaster, watched them ride off to the southeast until they vanished from sight.
It was around 7:00 P.M., April 15, fifteen hours since David Herold pounded on Mudd’s door and just over twenty-one hours since John Wilkes Booth shot the president. As dusk faded to dark, Booth and Herold continued south, careful to watch the western horizon, on their right, for signs of cavalry out of Bryantown. They had a long night’s ride ahead of them. But they had survived until the sunset of the first day.
Back at his farm, Dr. Mudd went about his usual end-of-the-day business. In the hours that followed Booth’s departure, a peaceful quiet settled over his place. Horses stabled, servants done with their chores, his own work completed, and his family safe behind locked doors, Mudd contemplated his encounter with history, and danger. Bedtime approached, and no soldiers had come. He and Frances turned down the lamps. Tonight no strangers—assassins or manhunters—materialized in the night to awaken him suddenly from his dreams. He, too, had survived this day.
aLTHOUGH DR. MUDD HAD IDENTIFIED THE ROUTE THEY must take, Booth and Herold got lost anyway. Fortunately, they found a local man, Oswell Swann, half black and half Piscataway Indian, wandering about on foot. Swann knew the territory. He had heard about the president’s murder, but showed no alarm when two strangers on horseback approached him in the dark, asking if he knew the way to William Burtles’s. They offered Swann $2 to serve as their guide, asked if he had any whiskey, and told him to go to his cabin and get his horse. Then, inexplicably, for reasons he never revealed, Booth changed his mind. Forget Burtles, the assassin said, and take us straight to Captain Cox. Booth offered him an extra $5. Swann agreed.
The swamp angel Oswell Swann earned his pay this night. Booth and Herold, free of the muck, snakes, and wild, overgrown vegetation of the infernal Zekiah morass, returned to the civilization of cultivated Maryland fields and familiar farmhouses. Swann had guided them safely to the very doorstep of Captain Samuel Cox, master of Rich Hill. It was between midnight and 1:00 A.M. of the new day, April 16, Easter Sunday, approximately twenty-six hours since the assassination, and seventeen hours since Abraham Lincoln died.
Good Friday 1865 was America’s darkest day since the unexpected death of George Washington on December 14, 1799, sixty-six years earlier, a moment that elderly Washingtonians recalled from their youth. The Sunday following Lincoln’s death was Easter, and it would be forever known as “Black Easter” to those who lived through it. The Sunday Morning Chronicle summed up the mood of the nation when it said the murder transformed “a season of rejoicing to mourning,” and there arose “a wail throughout the land.” Across the land ministers stayed up late Saturday night and by candle, lamp, or gaslight scratched out the final phrases of fresh sermons they began composing as soon as they heard, on the morning of the fifteenth, the terrible news.
In the early hours of Black Easter, Booth and Herold sought their salvation, not in a church, but at the door of a faithful Confederate. If Cox turned them away, Christ’s dying words on Good Friday’s cross, “it is finished,” would describe their fate. The assassins were still too far north. Booth’s broken leg bone and the unplanned medical detour to Dr. Mudd’s farm cost them not only fifteen precious hours but took them to the east, out of their way, so that their escape timetable was now almost a day behind schedule.
Booth and Herold approached the Cox house. They decided to use the same strategy they used at the Surrattsville tavern: Booth would hang back in the shadows while Herold did the talking, but with Captain Cox they would not immediately blurt out their secret. If necessary, they were willing to beg for their lives. Cox was their last hope in Maryland, and there was no turning back if he refused them. David Herold dismounted, walked up the front piazza of the finely built, expansive farmhouse, and sounded the knocker. Booth remained on his horse under the cover of a shaggy ailanthus tree in the yard. Cox poked his head out from a second-story window and asked, “Who’s there?” Herold refused to give his name, unsure if he could trust the captain. He disclosed only that he accompanied a man who needed help. Cox spotted Booth lurking under the tree’s shadow, hiding from the moonlight. Herold asked if they could come in.
Suspicious but intrigued enough to come downstairs, Cox opened the door and appraised the worn-out, crazy-eyed man standing before him. The callow-looking stranger seemed more like a boy than a man. The wily farmer’s eyes scanned the vicinity. Perhaps Herold was an outlaw and his plea was a trick to let other desperadoes rush the house. Uneasy, and sensing that the stranger held back his real story, Cox began shutting the door. Desperate, Booth dismounted with some difficulty and hobbled up the porch to the door. In great pain, he pleaded with Cox for aid. According to the captain’s son, “it was there by a brilliant moon that Cox saw the initials ‘J.W.B.’ tattooed on his arm.” And it was there that the honey-tongued thespian, as he did with Sergeant Cobb at the Navy Yard Bridge, again used his seductive art to win over a man to his cause. Cox swung open the door and invited the fugitives into his home. To the nation, Black Easter dawned as a day of great mourning; to John Wilkes Booth, it began as a day of salvation.
What Booth said to Cox on the front porch of Rich Hill around 1:00 A.M. on April 16—as well as the conversations and plans that followed during the next few hours that the actor and Herold spent in the house—remain a mystery. Naturally, Cox and his son later denied that the assassin and his scout ever set foot in their home. When Oswell Swann swore that he saw Booth and Herold go inside, a faithful Cox slave, Mary Swann, called him a liar and backed up her captain. But given Booth’s state of mind, the precariousness of his position, and the extraordinary thing that the captain and his son were about to do to help their guests, there is little doubt that Booth unburdened himself and confessed all to his hosts. The assassin of the president of the United States was in their midst, injured, desperate, and on the run from a frenzied manhunt. Father and son beheld the murderer, then decided to save him. Cox told Booth that there was only one man, a person of very special skills, who could get them across the Potomac into Virginia.
In the morning, after sunrise, they would summon him. But for now it was much too dangerous for Booth and Herold to remain at Rich Hill. Instead, Cox explained, he would hide them in a nearly impenetrable, heavily wooded pine thicket some distance from his house. No one would search for them there, Cox assured them, and it was extremely unlikely that any of the locals would stumble upon them. They were not to build a fire. Then, in the morning, someone would come for them. That person would signal them with a peculiar whistle as he approached. They were to beware anyone who failed to make that sound. After wolfing down the food that Cox offered, Booth and Herold mounted up for the ride to the pine thicket. Cox ordered his overseer, Franklin Robey, to take them there.
Oswell Swann still waited for them outside, perhaps hoping for an additional fee to guide the strangers to another destination. When Booth and Herold emerged from the house, Davey walked straight to his horse, neglecting the actor’s disability. Booth, standing beside his horse, impatient and helpless, chided him in an annoyed voice: “Don’t you know I can’t get on?” Davey came back and helped his master into the saddle. Booth paid Swann $12 for his services, and then, to throw suspicion off their hosts, he and Herold complained conspicuously about Cox’s lack of hospitality. “I thought Cox was a man of Southern feeling,” murmured Booth. If Swann took the bait, he went home believing that Cox had rebuffed his unwanted midnight callers. Just to be sure, David Herold threatened him: “Don’t you say anything—if you tell that you saw anybody you will not live long.” If their luck held, they would cross the river to Virginia sometime after nightfall on April 16, between sixteen and twenty-four hours from now. If, that is, they could survive just one more day in Maryland.
BOOTH AND HEROLD ENTERED THE PINES, DISMOUNTED, and tied off their horses. The animals had served them well, but they were hungry and thirsty and unused to spending the night outdoors and in the open. These were city stable horses that rented by the hour or the day, not expedition horses suited for days in the field. Exhausted, the two men unrolled their blankets on the damp earth, lay down, and gazed up at the immense black sky decorated by countless points of twinkling light. It would be morning in a few hours. If Captain Cox’s word was true, it was safe to doze off until then.
The rising sun and chirping birds woke Booth and Herold early in the morning. Now they could do nothing but wait. Back at Rich Hill, Samuel Cox had to find out whether his man would actually help Booth and Herold. Cox instructed his eighteen-year-old son, Samuel Jr., to ride over to “Huckleberry” Farm, about four miles to the southeast, and bring the owner, Thomas A. Jones, to Rich Hill right away. Cox warned the boy to be cautious and told him that if anyone, especially soldiers, stopped and questioned him on the way and asked where he was going, he should tell the truth about his destination. But if asked why he was going there, then the youth must not disclose the reason. Instead, he should lie and say that he was heading to Huckleberry to ask Jones for some seed corn. It was planting season, and no one would suspect such an innocent request from one farmer to another.
Around 8:00 A.M., Samuel Cox Jr. arrived at Huckleberry, just as Confederate agent and river boatman Thomas A. Jones finished his breakfast. The secret service veteran spent his entire life trailblazing through the fields, thickets, and forests of rural Maryland and navigating its streams, marshes, and rivers. During the war he had ferried hundreds of men, and the occasional female spy like the beautiful Sarah Slater, across the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. On some nights Jones organized not one but two trips across the Potomac in a small rowboat. In addition, he transported the Confederate mail between the two states and sent south fresh Union newspapers that provided intelligence to Richmond and were scrutinized by the highest leaders of the Confederacy. Jones was an indispensable, mysterious, and laconic secret agent fighting the shadow war along the watery borders between Union and rebel territory. The Union army had never caught him in action—he was a river ghost to the boys in blue. “Not one letter or paper was ever lost,” he boasted. And his mastery of the river was so complete that he was even able to calculate the most propitious time, almost down to the minute, to begin a trip across. “I had noticed that a little before sunset, the reflection of the high bluffs near Pope’s Creek extended out into the Potomac till it nearly met the shadows cast by the Virginia woods, and therefore, at that time of evening it was very difficult to observe as small an object floating in the river as a rowboat.”
Jones’s service to the Confederacy had cost him dearly. Suspected of disloyal activity, federal forces arrested and jailed him for months at the Old Capitol prison in Washington. Then his beloved wife died. He had to sell his other farm at Pope’s Creek, and when he went to Richmond at the beginning of April 1865 to collect the money owed to him by the Confederate government, he discovered that the army had evacuated the city and Jones went unpaid. He lost $2,300 due for three years’ service, and, even worse, upon the collapse of the Confederacy, he lost the $3,000 he had invested in Confederate bonds at the beginning of the war. All of this meant that Thomas Jones needed as much money as he could lay his hands on.
The Cox boy dutifully mentioned the seed corn, but once he saw that Jones was alone, he whispered the true nature of his mission. His father wanted to see Jones at once. “Some strangers were at our house last night,” the boy said. Jones’s eyes lit up—could he mean the heroes who assassinated President Lincoln? The report electrified Jones. The day before, on the evening of Saturday, April 15, around the time that Booth and Herold left the sanctuary of Dr. Mudd’s and undertook the next leg of their escape, Jones happened to be visiting his former farm at Pope’s Creek. Two Union soldiers rode up and asked what appeared to be an innocent question. Who owned that little boat down in the creek? For Jones the war ended when Richmond fell on April 3 and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on the ninth. There would be no more secret river crossings, no more thrilling escapes from Union army and navy pursuers, no more mysterious signal lights flashed across the water from one state to another. The war was over, and Jones saw no need for any prolonged cunning. He told the soldiers that the boat was his.
His response prompted a strange but vaguely worded warning from one of the soldiers. “You had better keep an eye to it. There are suspicious characters somewhere in the neighborhood who will be wanting to cross the river, and if you don’t look sharp you will lose your boat.”
Since when did Union soldiers care whether a Southern farmer in disloyal territory lost his rowboat? There was more to this.
“Indeed,” replied Jones. “I will look after it. I would not like to lose it, as it is my fishing boat and the shad are beginning to run.”
The soldiers whispered to each other, then seemed to nod in agreement. The one who asked about the boat turned to Jones. “Have you heard the news, friend?”
No, he had not, replied Jones.
“Then I will tell you. Our President was assassinated at 10 o’clock last night.”
Jones uttered an ambiguous exclamation. “Is it possible!”
Yes, the soldier answered, “and the men who did it came this way.”
Now, a day later, Jones felt it in his bones: Captain Cox wanted to see him about something connected to the assassination.
Jones saddled up and accompanied young Cox to Rich Hill. Although he had questions, Jones spoke little during the ride. His wartime experiences taught him to never talk about dangerous subjects except when absolutely necessary. Once they got to Rich Hill, Captain Cox could do the talking; Jones would do the listening. Until then, the riders trotted northeast quietly, their silence broken only by harmless remarks about the weather or the condition of the roads. When Jones arrived at Rich Hill at about 9:00 A.M., he saw Captain Cox waiting outside at the front gate. Jones dismounted, and Cox led him to an open place where no one could hide and eavesdrop on their conversation. An experienced secret agent, Jones sensed that Cox wanted to tell him something important. But his experience also counseled him to let his friend tell him in his own way, at his own pace. They spoke in pleasantries for several minutes, until Cox could avoid the subject no more. “Tom, I had visitors about four o’clock this morning.”
Normally Jones possessed the talent to remain stone silent and let another man talk, but now he could not restrain himself. He blurted out, “Who were they, and what did they want?”
“They want to get across the river,” Cox explained. He paused, then spoke in a whisper. “Have you heard that Lincoln was killed Friday night?”
Yes, Jones replied, telling Cox about his encounter with the two soldiers.
For a full minute Cox did not speak. Then he broke the silence: “Tom, we must get those men who were here this morning across the river.”
Jones’s intuition was right—not only did Cox want to see him about the assassination, the killers were here! With that, Cox opened the floodgates and told Jones everything about the late-night visit from Booth and Herold. “Tom, you must get him across.”
Jones was no coward—four years of loyal, dangerous service to the Confederacy had proved that. But the war was over. Jones mulled the situation over: “I knew that to assist in any way the assassin of Mr. Lincoln would be to put my life in jeopardy. I knew that the whole of southern Maryland would soon be—nay, was even then—swarming with soldiers and bloodhounds on the trail, eager to avenge the murder of their beloved president and reap their reward. I hesitated for a moment as I weighed these matters.”
Cox implored him a third time: “Tom, can’t you put these men across?”
Jones made up his mind. “I will see what I can do, but the odds are against me. I must see these men; where are they?”
WHERE WAS JOHN WILKES BOOTH? THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT the entire country—Stanton and his men in Washington, soldiers and detectives in the field, sailors on the rivers and at sea, the American people everywhere, and, of course, the newspapers—wanted to know. And when would he be captured? The daily papers were filled with ridiculous predictions. On April 16, the Chicago Tribune, several hundred miles away from the center of action in Washington, announced that Lincoln’s assassin would be taken momentarily: “The escape of the paracide, Booth, and his confederates can only be for a few days or hours. Millions of eyes are in vigilant search of them, and soon they will be in the hands of justice … no place on this side of perdition can shelter them.” Except for a pine thicket, perhaps. Ignorant of the situation, optimistic editors in faraway Chicago predicted Booth’s “quick capture and hanging.” Then, to hedge their bets, they published an absurd and contradictory headline: “The Assassin Arrested, or Still at Large.” Was he still on the run, the Tribune asked, or was there any truth to the “unconfirmed report that Booth was arrested at 9:00 A.M. near Fort Hastings on the Bladensburg Road,” when the foolish assassin “approached our pickets boldly.”
The April 16 edition of the New York Herald shared the Chicago Tribune’s optimism: “The most expert detectives in the country are engaged in the investigation, and no pains, labor, skill or expense will be spared in its prosecution.”
CAPTAIN COX TOLD THOMAS JONES THAT HIS OVERSEER FRANKlin Robey had guided Booth and Herold in the middle of the night to a pine thicket about a mile west of his house. Lincoln’s killer was there now, waiting for someone to come and rescue him. Cox gave Jones the whistle code, a trio of varying notes, and cautioned him to approach the fugitives warily. Heavily armed and skittish, they might kill him. “Take care how you approach them. They are fully armed and might shoot you through mistake.”
Alone, Jones rode west toward his unsought rendezvous with Lincoln’s assassin. The sun was at his back. That would make him a more difficult target.
Soon after he entered the pines, Jones saw movement. It was not the fugitives. Instead, he found an unattended bay mare, with black legs, mane, and tail, and a white star on her forehead. The horse, fitted with a saddle and bridle, wandered around and grazed in a small clearing made some time previously for a tobacco bed. Jones tied the animal to a tree and pressed forward. Quietly, he inched deeper into the woods. The pines were thick now, and Jones could not see more than thirty or forty feet in front of him. He’d better give the signal soon, he thought, before he caught the two men by surprise and they shot him. Jones stopped in his tracks and whistled an odd mix of notes, like an intoxicated bluebird.
David Herold, “scarcely more than a boy,” Jones thought, rose from the brush and aimed his Spencer carbine at him. The weapon was cocked and ready to fire. “Who are you, and what do you want,” demanded Herold. He brandished the weapon menacingly.
“I come from Cox,” Jones replied. “He told me I would find you here. I am a friend; you have nothing to fear from me.”
Herold stared at Jones, then, satisfied, relaxed his tense grip on the Spencer and spoke curtly. “Follow me.” He guided Jones thirty yards deeper into the pines, through thick undergrowth, to a man partly concealed by the brush. Jones’s excitement grew. He was about to discover the answer to the question that, for the past thirty-six hours, possessed an entire nation—where was John Wilkes Booth?
“This friend comes from Captain Cox,” said Herold, looking down to a man on the ground.
Nearly overcome by a mixture of thrill and fear, Jones saw John Wilkes Booth for the first time. “He was lying on the ground with his head supported by his hand. His carbine, pistols and knife were close behind him. A blanket was drawn partly over him. His slouch hat and crutch were lying by him. He was dressed in dark—I think black—clothes … travel-stained … though he was exceedingly pale and his features bore the evident trace of suffering, I have seldom, if ever, seen a more strikingly handsome man.”
Prior to meeting Booth, Jones had little enthusiasm for this risky scheme. Yes, he had promised Cox that he would help, and he would never go back on his word to his old friend. But he did not relish the duty. Meeting the assassin changed everything.
“His voice was pleasant,” noted Jones. “Though he seemed to be suffering intense pain from his broken leg, his manner was courteous and polite,” he observed with approval. Booth, even in these dire circumstances, remembered how to please an audience, and Jones was smitten. “But sooner had I seen him in his helpless and suffering condition than I gave my whole mind to the problem of how to get him across the river. Murderer though I knew him to be, his condition so enlisted my sympathy in his behalf that my horror of his deed was almost forgotten in my compassion for the man, and I felt it my bounden duty to do all I could to aid him; and I made up my mind, be the consequences to me what they might, from that time forth my every energy should be bent to the accomplishment of what then seemed to be the well-nigh hopeless task of getting him to Virginia.”
Booth confided what Jones already knew—he had killed Lincoln. The assassin conceded that the odds were against him. “He said he knew the United States Government would use every means in its power to secure his capture.” But, vowed the actor, his aroused black eyes glowing with their signature brightness, “John Wilkes Booth will never be taken alive.” Thomas Jones was sure he meant it.
Jones proposed a plan. He would do all he could to get Booth and Herold across to Virginia, but they must leave it to him to decide when and how they would make the attempt. Patience was essential. Jones was willing to assume great personal risk, but not to lead a blatantly suicidal mission. “You must stay right here, however long, and wait till I can see some way to get you out; and I do not believe I can get you out until this hue and cry is somewhat over. Meantime, I will see that you are fed.” Jones hoped that the soldiers and detectives scouring the area would give up soon and ride on to new territory once they concluded that Booth was not hiding nearby.
Until then, Booth and Herold must not leave the pine thicket, make noise, or do anything that might let anyone know they were there. Jones said they had to wait for exactly the right moment to cross the Potomac. They needed a dark night, smooth water, deserted riverbanks, and the departure of many of the soldiers and detectives who had already followed Booth south into Maryland. That might take days. Jones persuaded Booth and Herold to adopt his ingenious, counterintuitive plan. The best way for them to escape, Jones reasoned, was to stop running from their pursuers and to go into hiding. Manhunters were already concentrating south of Washington. Soon federal forces would join David Dana and infest Charles County. It was smarter to try to escape by standing still, letting the manhunters sweep through the region, before they moved on to search elsewhere.
With his simple plan, Jones confounded the whole manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. A lone Confederate agent, without resources and nearly penniless, had just checkmated the frantic pursuit by thousands of men being orchestrated from Washington by Secretary of War Stan-ton.
sTANTON MAY HAVE LOST BOOTH’S TRAIL IN THE PINES, BUT he was closing in on the author of the notorious “Sam” letter found in Booth’s room at the National the night of the assassination. On the afternoon of April 16, Charles Dana received a telegram from Provost Marshal James McPhail in Baltimore: “I have traced Samuel Arnold to Fortress Monroe. Will send two men for him who know him personally. Send me a telegraph order to make arrest at fortress. Telegraphing for arrest may flush it.” Dana replied within fifteen minutes: “Arrest Samuel Arnold, suspected of being concerned in the murder of the President.” The hunt for Booth’s old school chum was on.
The same day, April 16, Confederate Lieutenant General R. S. Ewell sent a remarkable letter to U. S. Grant, signed by him and also on behalf of sixteen other Confederate generals. They didn’t kill Lincoln, Ewell swore. He expressed “unqualified abhorrence and indignation for the assassination of the President of the United States…. No language can adequately express the shock produced upon myself, in common with all the other general officers confined here with me, by the occurrence of this appalling crime, and by the seeming tendency in the public mind to connect the South and Southern men with it…. [W]e are not assassins, not the allies of assassins, be they from the North or from the south.”
Stanton, along with most government and military officials, as well as the American people, still blamed the Confederacy for Lincoln’s murder. Booth, it was widely believed, acted merely as its agent. But if it was not true, perhaps the resources of the Confederacy could be deployed to assist in the manhunt. In a startling move, Stanton considered enlisting the Confederacy’s legendary “gray ghost” and cavalry genius, John Singelton Mosby, in the manhunt. On April 16 Stanton telegrammed instructions to General Hancock, soon to parley over surrender terms with Mosby at Winchester, Virginia: “In holding an interview with Mosby it may be needless to caution an old soldier like you to guard against surprise or danger to yourself; but the recent murders show such astounding wickedness that too much precaution cannot be taken. If Mosby is sincere he might do much toward detecting and apprehending the murderers of the President.”