NO ONE EXPECTED BOOTH TO STOP RUNNING. SOON THE manhunters would track Booth to the Surrattsville tavern, and then to Doctor Mudd’s. But then the trail went cold. The assassin seemed to simply vanish. Back in Washington, the mood at the War Department turned foul. Had he done it? Had Lincoln’s murderer actually escaped?
Booth was a man of impulse and action, not patience and inertia, and he knew the river was tantalizingly close. He was eager to cross it, so that he and Davey could be among friends on the Virginia side this very night. And he was convinced he could be, if only Jones agreed to act decisively. Hiding in a pine thicket for days seemed to increase the danger of capture, not reduce it. Still he deferred to the river ghost’s judgment. Booth knew that he still had no choice. Thomas Jones was Booth’s only hope. If he and Herold defied Jones, if they left the pines that night and made a desperate run for the river on their own, they would almost certainly be captured or killed. Even if they made it to the riverbank, where would they find a boat? Jones was the only option. Moreover, something about Jones made Booth trust him. The operative’s laconic, steely, no-nonsense manner appealed to Booth, who fancied himself an astute judge of other men’s hearts. And Jones did know the surrounding terrain and the river as well as Booth knew the streets of Washington and the passageways of Ford’s Theatre. If this cunning, rebel nighthawk could not get Booth across, no one could.
Jones had spoken emphatically: “You must stay right here, however long, and wait till I can see some way to get you out.” But there would be no doctor. Jones explained that it was too dangerous to bring a local Maryland physician to the pines. Once Booth crossed the river he could seek a rebel doctor in Virginia. Booth and Herold surrendered to Jones’s plan and placed themselves in his hands. But the assassin had a few urgent questions. What did the people think? What could Jones tell him about what people were saying about the assassination? Jones assured him that most men of Southern sympathies were gratified by Booth’s act.
Booth wanted more. If it was not too much trouble, he asked, could Jones please bring some current Washington newspapers—say, yesterday’s Daily Morning Chronicle, the Evening Star, or the National Intelligencer—from Saturday, April 15, the day Lincoln died, or from today, the sixteenth, Black Easter? Incredibly, despite his pain, exhaustion, and dire, life-threatening predicament, the actor was eager to read his reviews. Booth was especially keen to pore over the Intelligencer and enjoy a particular article—the contents already quite familiar to him—he expected to find in its pages.
As Jones prepared to leave the thicket, he offered Davey Herold something of more practical use than newspapers—the location of a freshwater spring thirty to forty yards away. The assassins were thirsty, and the spring would sustain them while they waited to cross the river. Jones warned Herold to approach it cautiously because there was a little footpath near it that was used by the locals. Federal troops would never discover it, but better that no one, not even friendly Southerners, lay eyes on the fugitives.
Jones mounted his horse. They would go down to the river as soon as it was safe, he reiterated. Until then, he promised, he would not abandon the assassins. He would come to them every morning, carrying food and newspapers—and hope. Jones spurred his horse, navigated slowly through the pine trees, and vanished from sight. For the next twenty-four hours, until—or if—Jones returned on Monday morning, April 17, Booth and Herold were on their own.
RIDING HOME FROM THE PINE THICKET, THOMAS JONES CONtemplated the predicament he had just gotten himself into. When he awoke on the morning of April 16, he was just another veteran of Confederate service whose war had come to an end. All Jones wanted to do was lick his wounds, recover as best he could from his financial losses, and work his farm. But now, just a few hours later, he placed himself in greater peril than at any time during his years of secret, wartime exploits. Never had he been entrusted with a more dangerous, and as he would soon learn, valuable secret. An entire nation was demanding with one voice, “Where is John Wilkes Booth?” Thomas Jones was one of four men in the country, including the Coxes and their overseer, who knew the answer. Jones also knew something else. If Union troops caught him harboring the murderer of Abraham Lincoln, the best he could hope for was a long return visit to the Old Capitol prison. The more likely punishment was death. Jones had no illusions about how the North would view him: “I would be looked upon as the vile aider and abettor of a wretch stained with as dark a crime as the recording angel ever wrote down in the eternal book of doom.”
Jones’s impromptu plan had one overriding theme: do nothing to attract suspicion. That meant following his daily routines and doing nothing out of the ordinary. Getting the newspapers was easy enough. He collected them throughout the war and obtaining them now would not seem unusual. After all, everyone wanted to read the latest news about Lincoln’s assassination, and if federal troops caught him with several newspapers in his saddlebags, Jones could plead natural, innocent curiosity. The food would be harder to explain. Why was a local farmer riding around the countryside with a haversack or saddlebags stuffed with provisions? And how could Jones explain the copious bags of feed needed for Booth and Herold’s hungry horses? And what about the boat? He had to get it ready to be used at a moment’s notice. When the time came to flee to the river, Jones would have to rush to the pine thicket and get Booth and Herold moving fast. The previous day Jones had discovered two Union cavalrymen lurking near his little bateau at Pope’s Creek. Perhaps they were staking it out, waiting for Lincoln’s assassin to claim it. No, it was too dangerous to take a chance on the bateau. Fortunately for Booth and Herold, Thomas Jones possessed one last boat, an eleven-foot-long, lead-colored, flat-bottomed skiff hidden in marsh grass upstream from the bateau on Pope’s Creek. As far as he knew, Union troops hadn’t yet found the skiff.
Jones had to secure that second boat immediately: “Booth’s only chance for crossing the river depended upon my being able to retain possession and control of one of these two boats.” To formulate a plan, Jones summoned up all of his wartime experience in evading Union patrols. As soon as he arrived home Jones instructed his former slave Henry Woodland to take the skiff out every morning and fish for shad with the gill nets. By this time it was not unusual to see a black man fishing with nets on the river in southern Maryland, and Woodland wouldn’t attract much attention from Union patrols. Jones instructed Woodland to cast off from Pope’s Creek on Monday morning but not to row the boat back to the creek. Instead, he was to land at a place called Dent’s Meadow. Then, for the rest of the week, Woodland was to keep up that routine, casting off from Dent’s each morning, and landing there in the afternoon with his catch, taking care to conceal the boat from thieves. Jones never told Henry the special significance of Dent’s Meadow—the place he had chosen as the perfect location from which to take Booth and Herold across the river.
Jones considered the spot favorable terrain: “Dent’s meadow was then a very retired spot back of Huckleberry farm, about one and a half miles north of Pope’s Creek, at least a mile from the public road and with no dwelling house in sight. This meadow is a narrow valley opening to the river between high and steep cliffs that were then heavily timbered and covered by an almost impenetrable undergrowth of laurel. A small stream flows through the meadow, widening into a little creek as it approaches the river. It was from this spot I determined to make the attempt of sending Booth across to Virginia.” Jones had chosen the place, but now he had to await the right moment.
ON EASTER SUNDAY, BETWEEN 10:00 AND 11:00 A.M., GEORGE Atzerodt showed up at the home of Hezekiah Metz, about twenty-two miles from Washington, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Atzerodt joined Metz and three of his guests, Somerset Leaman, James E. Leaman, and Nathan Page, for the midday meal. Atzerodt was known to the people in these parts by another name, “Andrew Atwood.” Somerset had known him for years, and when Atzerodt arrived at Metz’s he teased him:
“Are you the man that killed Abe Lincoln?” The joke must have frozen the German in his tracks.
Atzerodt laughed and said, “Yes.”
“Well, Andrew,” Leaman continued, “I want to know the truth of it; is it so?” He asked if Lincoln had really been assassinated.
“Yes, it is so; and he died yesterday evening about 3 o’clock.”
Leaman asked if it was also true that Seward’s throat was cut, and two of his sons were stabbed.
“Yes,” Atzerodt replied, “Mr. Seward was stabbed, or rather cut at the throat, but not killed, and two of his sons were stabbed.”
Leaman asked if it was also true that General Grant had been murdered.
“No, I don’t know whether that is so or not; I don’t suppose it is so; if he had been, I should have heard it.”
At the dinner table James Leaman also asked about Grant, and Atzerodt replied: “No, I don’t suppose he was; if he was killed, he would have been killed probably by a man that got on the same car that Grant got on.” Atzerodt did not know it, but with those words he had just sealed his doom. After dinner, oblivious to the danger, he continued on to the home of his cousin, Hartman Richter, arriving there between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M.
sAMUEL MUDD DECIDED THAT HE COULD NOT LET EASTER Sunday, April 16, pass without doing something. By breakfast time, 7:00 A.M., Booth and Herold enjoyed a twelve-hour head start from his farm. If all had gone well, they should have reached William Burtles’s place well before sunrise. Although Mudd did not know it, the fugitives made even better progress by bypassing Burtles altogether and riding straight to Captain Cox’s.
Mudd considered his predicament. He could choose to do nothing, and wait for federal troops to visit his farm, but perhaps the soldiers might never come. Or they might. Someone might even tip them off. The doctor’s servants and former slaves knew he had taken in an injured patient the very night of Lincoln’s assassination. Some of them had even seen Booth while he rested in bed or hobbled around on his crutches. Too many people had seen Booth for Mudd to keep the visit a secret forever.
Several of Mudd’s neighbors were aware that he knew John Wilkes Booth. Worshippers had spotted them together last winter at St. Mary’s on two occasions. And how long would it be before the authorities interviewed George Gardiner, the man who sold Booth the one-eyed horse, or Thomas L. Gardiner, the youth who delivered the animal to the actor? Peter Trotter, the blacksmith, would surely remember the day when Mudd and Booth brought the handicapped mare over for a new set of horseshoes. Moreover, several witnesses had seen Mudd and Booth together in Washington. It was inevitable. At some point, probably soon, the soldiers or detectives would discover two things about Dr. Mudd: he had visitors on assassination night, and, even more damning, he had links to Booth.
Mudd decided to seize the initiative in a way calculated to throw suspicion off himself. Today he would inform on—but not actually betray—Lincoln’s assassin. Mudd crafted a simple but clever cover story. He would merely report that two strangers, a man with a broken leg and his youthful companion, had called at his home unexpectedly, in the predawn hours of April 15. He treated the injury, and the strangers did not stay long. He was suspicious of these men, he would say, and thus felt duty bound to report them to the Thirteenth New York Cavalry in Bryantown. Those were the bare bones.
Then Mudd added a clever touch. Instead of riding into Bryantown himself and facing the troops, he would ask his second cousin, Dr. George Mudd, a loyal Unionist, a species rare in these parts, to report the strangers on his behalf. He hoped that having this information come from the lips of a man above suspicion by the federal authorities would allow him to hide beneath his cousin’s Unionist coattails if the troops wanted to question him. George Mudd’s vague, secondhand report would contain so few details that it would hardly prompt the soldiers to leap into their saddles and gallop off after two strangers. No, the information would be useless until they followed the tip to its source, Samuel Mudd. Lieutenant Dana would have to send a patrol to Sam’s farm to press him for details about the strangers. All that would take time, which would give Booth even more time to put miles between himself and his pursuers.
After Easter services on the morning of the sixteenth, Mudd asked his cousin George the favor of passing his story on to the cavalry in Bryantown. Mudd returned home, with an immense feeling of relief. Now, when the soldiers came, it would be at his behest, and not because he had fallen under suspicion. Through the afternoon and into the evening, Mudd anticipated the arrival of the manhunters. But they did not come. Unbeknownst to him, cousin George failed to ride into Bryantown to report the strangers.
By the evening of April 16, Booth enjoyed a twenty-four-hour head start on any pursuers coming from Mudd’s farm. And thanks to George Mudd’s delay in filing his cousin’s report, Union troops, unaware that Booth had even been at Samuel Mudd’s, had not begun their pursuit from that place. From the viewpoint of anxious officials back in Washington—Secretary of War Stanton chief among them—the progress of the manhunt was even worse. John Wilkes Booth had assassinated the president almost forty-eight hours ago but the manhunters had no solid leads. Yes, the police, detectives, and military officers had discovered a number of leads on Booth’s cat’s-paws and conspirators, but none led to the assassin-in-chief.
Hats, Deringer pistols, abandoned knives, broken revolvers, jackets, one-eyed horses, bankbooks, mysterious letters, plugs of tobacco, hotel registers, notes to vice presidents, theatrical trunks, spurs, bridles, saddles, and eyewitness accounts were all fine clues that made the assassin and his accomplices seem tantalizingly vivid and near. These clues would make good evidence at a criminal trial as proofs of identity and guilt. The evidence collected on April 14 and 15 certainly confirmed that it was Booth who had shot Lincoln, and that he seemed to have not one, but several, coconspirators. And the contents of Atzerodt’s room at the Kirkwood—plus Booth’s note to Johnson—suggested that the vice president had also been marked for death. But all this evidence spoke to Booth’s guilt, not his escape plan. Only the “Sam” letter, which suggested that two accomplices lived in Baltimore, hinted at Booth’s possible destination. Booth could be anywhere. Sightings across the country of false Booths did not help the manhunters. With each passing hour Booth’s trail grew a little colder. Soon, he would vanish from sight, driving Stan-ton and his men into a frenzy. Booth’s expertise in eluding the MANHUNTERS augmented, by the hour, the government’s embarrassment over its failure to apprehend him.
On the night of April 16, Stanton had no idea of Booth’s whereabouts or destination. Yes, it was probably the assassin who gave the name “Booth” to Sergeant Cobb at the bridge and fled into Maryland. It was fortunate for Stanton that the persistent stable man Fletcher had chased Herold that far and revealed Booth’s crossing earlier than the manhunters would have otherwise discovered it. But where did he go after that? At 8:30 P.M. Quartermaster General Meigs telegrammed Colonel Newport, chief quartermaster at Baltimore, with new instructions for the hunt that revealed the manhunters’ confusion about Booth’s intentions: “The murderers of the President and Secretary of State have, it is believed, gone southeast, and will perhaps attempt to escape by water to the Eastern Shore, or to board some vessel waiting for them, or some vessel going to sea. The Potomac will be patrolled by steamers from Washington…. The object is to catch the murderers. Vigilance and speed.” Perhaps, Meigs feared, other conspirators awaited Booth at the shore with an oceangoing vessel, ready to put to sea and sail or steam all the way to France or England for sanctuary. During the war, Confederate blockade-runners had made the dangerous crossing scores of times. Perhaps one was anchored somewhere off the Maryland coast, ready to embark on one last, daring voyage.
ON MONDAY MORNING, APRIL 17, THOMAS JONES APPEARED TO go about his regular business. He tended to chores, ate his usual breakfast at the customary time, and made sure that Henry Woodland continued his daily fishing expeditions. At the pine thicket, Booth and Herold, awake for hours, wondered if their benefactor would return. Jones pulled on his baggy, deep-pocketed overcoat and thrust his arms through the sleeves. He grabbed some bread, butter, and ham, filled a flask with coffee, and stuffed everything into his pockets. He folded the newspapers, printed on soft, thick rag paper, and stashed them in his coat, too. Then, in a clever ruse, he carried a basket of corn on his arm to throw off any Union troops he might encounter. If stopped and questioned, he would claim that he was on his way to feed his hogs that ran free in the woods. A little before 10:00 A.M. Jones mounted his horse and rode toward the pine thicket.
About one hundred yards from Booth’s camp, Jones dismounted and led his horse forward on foot, then tied him. Just as he did the previous morning, Jones walked ahead slowly until, within earshot of the assassins, he whistled the secret melody. This time Booth and Herold welcomed him, not with a well-aimed carbine pointed at his heart, but with open arms. They had not eaten in almost thirty hours and eyed the contents of Jones’s pockets hungrily as he unloaded them. Booth especially wanted the other treats those pockets yielded—newspapers! At last, three long days after the assassination, he could read about his history-making actions and how they were reported to the nation.
Booth’s pleasure could not hide his worsening condition. The leg was bad, and Booth was obviously in more pain than when Jones first saw him twenty-four hours ago. The assassin said he was impatient to continue his escape across the river where he could find shelter indoors and see another doctor. Jones started explaining the situation again but became distracted when he heard a familiar and terrifying noise in the distance—clanking metal and horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Instantly Jones recognized the sound—cavalry sabers slapping the saddles of Union troops riding in their direction. It was too late for Herold and Jones to boost Booth up on the bay mare and gallop away, and a fight was out of the question: Booth couldn’t walk, Jones was unarmed, and Herold was untested in battle. Plus, with only two revolvers and a Spencer carbine, they couldn’t hold off a patrol of Union cavalry for long. The trio hugged the ground and held their breath. The horses, barreling down a road near the pine thicket, closed the distance. They got within two hundred yards. It was Booth’s closest brush with manhunters since he galloped down the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. Then, instead of veering into the pines, the troops stayed on the road, passed the thicket, and continued on until the sound of hoofbeats dwindled in the distance.
Jones locked eyes with Booth: “You see, my friend, we must wait.”
“Yes,” Booth conceded, “I leave it all with you.”
ON THE MORNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH ANOTHER MAN waited, too. Troops had still not called on Dr. Mudd to pursue his tip—because they did not know about it. It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that George Mudd got around to riding to Bryantown. He asked to see the commanding officer and, introduced to Lieutenant Dana, divulged his cousin’s vague, one-day-old report about the two suspicious strangers. Then, in an unbelievable stroke of luck for Booth and Herold, Dana dismissed the news as stale and unimportant. He thanked George Mudd and sent him on his way. And, providentially for the assassins, Dana chose not to send troops to Samuel Mudd’s farm to investigate. Distracted by other leads, Dana ignored the one tip that placed Lincoln’s assassin—if only momentarily—within his reach.
When the soldiers had not come by that evening, Mudd relaxed. Perhaps, by this point, they would not come at all. According to Mudd’s calculations, Booth was long gone, probably even across the Potomac River into Virginia by now. With the assassin’s trail in Maryland running cold, the manhunters would soon depart Charles County and shift the action to places far from Bryantown and his farm.
According to premature reports in the newspapers, Booth had already moved on. The April 17 Chicago Tribune already had him cross the Potomac, reporting “it is now the general impression that the murderer Booth and his accomplices have escaped into Virginia. It is unlikely that a person so well known would attempt to travel through the north.” Of course the Tribune reported in the same issue: “Booth was captured this morning. The story is that his horse threw him and injured him so severely that he was obliged to seek relief on the Seventh Street road” on the outskirts of Washington. The April 17 New York Herald assured its readers, “Detectives are on the hunt. The most expert men in the profession, from New York and other cities are here for this purpose. Colonel L. C. Baker has arrived today, and is engaged in ferreting out the assassins. It is believed they will be caught within twenty-four hours.”
THOMAS JONES HAD EXPERIENCED ENOUGH EXCITEMENT FOR one day. He agreed to return to the thicket around the same time next morning, Tuesday the eighteenth, carrying more food and newspapers, but he refused to bring horse feed again. Concealing the feedbags was impossible, and he could not carry enough, anyway, to sate the two ravenous horses. After two days without food, they had ferocious appetites—and they also made a lot of noise. Jones advised the men to get rid of the horses. They wouldn’t be needed to get to Dent’s Meadow, and they couldn’t be ferried across the river in a little rowboat. Better to dispose of them here and now, before the next cavalry patrol came by and they betrayed the site of the camp. Booth agreed: “If we can hear those horses, they can certainly hear the neighing of ours, which are uneasy from want of food and stabling.” David Herold reluctantly went along with this. He loved animals, but realized that, with Booth helpless on the ground, the deed fell to him. Jones said good-bye and left for Huckleberry.
The horses had served them well. The white-starred bay that could move like a cat had saved Booth in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. She galloped superbly through downtown Washington, her hooves pounding distance between Booth and any pursuers during the thrilling, moonlit ride. The roan horse had made it possible for Herold to escape from the botched Seward assassination attempt. Now their reward for this faithful service was death. Davey untied both horses and led them by the reins to a quicksand morass about a mile from the pine thicket. Quickly, he shot each one in the head with a pistol or the carbine, and then sank their bodies, still accoutered with saddles, bits, bridles, stirrups, and all. There they rest in an unmarked grave, their skeletons undiscovered to this day.
Killing the horses was the third time since the assassination that David Herold gave up the chance to abandon John Wilkes Booth. On the night of April 14, he kept their rendezvous at Soper’s Hill when he could have fled and gone into hiding. On the fifteenth, when he rode from Dr. Mudd’s to the vicinity of Bryantown, he could have left Booth behind at the farm and kept riding. Now, in the pine thicket, all he had to do was kill one of the horses, mount the other, and gallop away. Without the lame actor—who, after all, was the main prey of the manhunters—Herold had a better chance of melting into the countryside.
Davey returned to the thicket and sat on the ground beside his master. Never during their escape were they more alone and vulnerable. If Union cavalry descended upon them now, they would not be able to make a run for it. Even two healthy, well-rested men, which Booth and Herold were not, could never outrun a mounted pursuit. And if Thomas Jones decided to abandon them, how would they find a boat to cross the river? They kept low to the ground and waited for nightfall.
Marooned in this desolate place, did Booth reminisce about happier days, when he and his beloved sister, Asia, played as carefree teenagers in the forests of Bel Air, Maryland? Once upon a time, before he became a famous actor and a denizen of America’s great cities, Booth loved to commune with nature. Asia’s bittersweet memories of their frolics haunted her in the days following the assassination: “In the woods he would throw himself face downward and nestle his nose close into the earth, taking long sniffs of ‘the earth’s healthy breath’ … [h]e declared this process of inhaling wholesome odors and rich scents was delightful … [h]e called it ‘burrowing,’ and he loved to nibble at sweet roots and twigs, so that I called him rabbit.”
As darkness fell for the second night over Booth’s lonely, pine thicket encampment, did he remember another night among the pines of another time and place, a magical Halloween eve with Asia that was eerily like this one? “It was a cold, dark night,” she reminisced, “with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth—which may be the odor of good men’s bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying—the aroma of the pines, and the rapturous sense of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing ‘Te Deum Laudamus.’”
There would be no joyous song tonight. Instead, Booth and Herold murmured quietly, most likely talking of their crimes and speculating on their fate. What would they do? What would tomorrow bring? When would they cross over the river and find rest on the other side? When Booth smelled the forested scent of the thicket, did its sweet, piney odor take him back to a time of youthful innocence and allow him, briefly, to forget murders and manhunts? In the black safety of the night, Booth and Herold rolled out their coarse, woolen blankets and slumbered, close to the earth.
IN WASHINGTON THAT NIGHT, THE INHABITANTS OF MARY Surratt’s boardinghouse prepared for bed, too. The manhunters had been here before. When detectives came to 541 H Street on April 14, just a few hours after the assassination, they left empty-handed. Their quarry, John H. Surratt, was not at home, and John Wilkes Booth was not found hiding there. But tonight the authorities came back, in the evening again, at a time when Mary and Anna Surratt and their boarders were likely to be home. The manhunters were desperate. Three days after the assassination, John Wilkes Booth was still on the run. They had uncovered plenty of clues to prove that he was the assassin, was the head of a conspiracy, and had probably fled south to Maryland, but they had no fresh clues about his present whereabouts. And Seward’s assassin remained a mystery man—Stanton did not even know his name. The War Department suspected John Surratt of the Seward attack but had no proof. Someone at that boardinghouse must know something about the assassination, Stanton and his subordinates reasoned. Booth had been a regular caller and was John Surratt’s friend. It was time to go back and squeeze harder. It was about 11:00 P.M. on April 17.
Colonel H. H. Wells sent Major H. W. Smith to the boardinghouse to arrest the residents and search the premises. When Smith arrived, he posted a few men outside and told the rest to follow him up the stairs to the front door. He rang the bell, and Mary Surratt came to an open window and asked, “Is that you, Mr. Kirby?” She thought it was a neighbor. Smith said it wasn’t Kirby and told her to open the door. When she did, Smith stepped into the hall.
“Are you Mrs. Surratt?”
“I am the widow of John H. Surratt.”
And, Smith continued, “the mother of John H. Surratt, Jr.?”
“I am.”
“I come to arrest you and all in your house, and take you, for examination, to General Augur’s headquarters.”
It was odd, Smith recalled later, that Mrs. Surratt “did not ask even for what she was arrested,” and that she “expressed no surprise or feeling at all.”
While Smith and his men questioned the residents and prepared to transport them by carriage to General Augur’s headquarters, another official arrived at about 11:30 P.M. It was R. C. Morgan, under War Department orders from Colonel Olcott to, as Morgan put it, “superintend the seizing of papers and the arrest of the inmates of the house.” By the time Morgan got there Smith and his team had already made the arrests, and the boarders were gathered in the parlor, ready to leave.
Morgan called for a carriage to transport the women, went back into the house, and closed the front door. Soon a man walking down H Street stopped at number 541, looked the house over, and walked up the front steps. He didn’t notice the men standing nearby in the street. He got to the front door and knocked, then rang the bell. Morgan and Captain Wermerskirch opened the door. Before them stood a large, powerful-looking man, toting a pickax. The man was dressed in a gray coat, black pantaloons, and a fine pair of boots, and he wore atop his head an odd little makeshift hat cut from a shirtsleeve. As soon as the man stepped into the hall Morgan shut the door behind him.
The man sensed that something was wrong.
“I guess I am mistaken.”
“Whom do you want to see?”
“Mrs. Surratt.”
“You are right: walk in.”
Morgan peppered the late-night caller with questions:
“I asked him what he came there at this time of night for. He said he came to dig a gutter: Mrs. Surratt had sent for him. I asked him when.
“In the morning,” the man replied. Morgan asked where he last worked. “Sometimes on I Street.”
Morgan asked where he boarded. “He said he had no boarding house; he was a poor man, who got his living with the pick.”
“How much do you make a day?” Morgan asked. “Sometimes nothing at all, sometimes a dollar, sometimes a dollar and a half.”
“Have you any money?” “Not a cent”
Morgan asked the man why he came at this time of night to work, and he replied that he called just to find out what time he should start work in the morning. The man claimed that he had no previous connection to Mrs. Surratt; she had seen him working in the neighborhood, knew he was a poor man, and offered him work. Morgan asked how old he was.
“About twenty.”
Where was he from?
“Fauquier County, Virginia.”
The man pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was an oath of allegiance to the Union, the type signed by former Confederate soldiers. Powell had signed it “L. Paine.” He had just stumbled into the War Department’s raid in progress. But Smith, Morgan, Wermerskirch, and the others didn’t realize it yet.
The officers noticed that his clothes, while soiled, were much too fine to belong to a day laborer. Their suspicions grew as the man stammered more excuses. William Seward’s assassin was a big, young, strong man, too.
Major Smith stepped to the doorway to the front parlor where Mary was sitting and asked her to come into the hall: “Mrs. Surratt, will you step here for a minute?” When she came out, Lewis Powell was standing no more than three paces from her, near a gaslight fixture, and, as Smith remembered, “the gas was turned on at full head.”
“Do you know this man? And did you hire him to come and dig a gutter for you?”
It was the man she knew as Reverend Wood! Mary must have shuddered at the sight of him. No, not him, she likely cried silently. Her eyes locked upon the stranger’s in recognition. Powell’s remarkable face was unforgettable, and he had been to her home at least twice before.
Mary raised her right hand as if swearing an oath. “Before God, sir, I do not know this man; and I have never seen him, and did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”
Powell looked at Mary and said nothing.
Lewis Powell had been caught in a lie. Soon, George Alfred Townsend would make fun of his transparent cover story: “That night he dug a trench deep and broad enough for them to lie in forever.” Now Powell was trapped in the house. The soldiers had closed the front door behind him; in moments they would try to seize and arrest him. But unless they all moved at once—took him by surprise, tackled him in unison—they might lose their advantage. Technically, Powell was unarmed. He had abandoned his broken revolver on Seward’s floor and his knife, which he had dropped on the street in front of the secretary’s house, was in the hands of the government. He carried no more than a workman’s tool. But his prodigious strength could turn that tool into a deadly weapon. The pickax’s oak butt was a stout club, and its twin, spear-tipped iron points deadly, stabbing prongs. In Powell’s hands this humble tool was the equivalent of a primitive, close-combat pole arm from the Middle Ages.
The odds seemed against him; five men against one, confined in a compact foyer. But the tight space favored Powell. The soldiers began to press closer, and the closer they got, the more harm he could do. They were all within his killing range now.
If Powell chose to fight, the clock would start ticking at the first blow If he was quick, he could administer a second, skull-smashing strike by the time their hands reached for their holster flaps, and perhaps manage even a third swing of the pick before the survivors could draw, cock, and raise their revolvers. If Powell were lucky, he might deliver a fourth blow before a soldier could jerk the trigger and get off the first panicked, hurried shot. If the bullet went wild, or hit him but failed to kill him instantly, Powell could respond with a fifth, mighty swing of the ax.
He could do all of this in less than ten seconds and when it was over, he could, just as he had at Seward’s, step past the broken bodies of men with crushed skulls and gaping wounds and walk out Mrs. Surratt’s front door into the night. Powell glared at the soldiers. He could swing that ax quicker than they could draw their pistols. It was his move.
Then the mighty Lewis Powell did something extraordinary. Inexplicably, meekly, without protest, he surrendered without a fight.
The soldiers arrested Powell, Mary Surratt, her daughter Anna, Louis Weichmann, a friend of John Surratt’s, and the rest of the boarders, including the terrified little Miss Appolonia Dean, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl who lived alone without her parents at Mary Surratt’s.
The soldiers searched the house and uncovered, or so they believed, additional incriminating evidence: photographs of Confederate generals—one of President Jefferson Davis, some stray small-arms ammunition, a bullet mold. And the coup de grâce—a picture of John Wilkes Booth, hidden behind a picture frame.
Powell and Mary Surratt were taken to General Augur’s headquarters for questioning. Before leaving the boardinghouse, Mary Surratt begged Colonel Wells to allow her to say a prayer. She fell to her knees and prayed silently.
If Lewis Powell had not blundered into the government’s hands this night, he might have escaped Washington and vanished from history. Instead, the government celebrated his capture as the first major break in the manhunt. The capture of Seward’s assassin on the third night since Good Friday was a triumph, secondary in importance only to finding the archfiend, John Wilkes Booth. Rival Washington photographers salivated at the prospect of taking the first photos of Lewis Powell and selling copies to a public desperate for news and images of the great crime. But Stanton wasn’t quite ready to grant permission. With Booth, Herold, Atzerodt, and John Surratt still at large, forcing Powell to pose for souvenir photos while the manhunt was still under way might come across as an act of premature celebration. There would be time later for photos—of all of them.
Wells tried to question Powell but the laconic assassin refused to cooperate. The colonel noticed bloodstains on his shirt cuffs.
“What do you think of that?” Wells taunted him.
“That’s not blood,” Powell weakly claimed.
Within hours of Powell’s arrest, William Bell, Seward’s servant, identified Powell as the knife-wielding maniac. And when Gus Seward came to see him, he was instructed to grab hold of Powell just as he had during the attack. Then Wells ordered Powell to say two words to Gus: “I’m mad.” Yes, Seward, affirmed, this was the man.
Henry Wells wanted to interrogate Mary shortly after her arrest so she would have little time to reflect, and to craft well-rehearsed answers to his questions. Perhaps the experienced lawyer and officer was expecting an easily intimidated woman whom he could browbeat into revealing all she knew about her son, about John Wilkes Booth, and about the other conspirators. If so, Wells was wrong. Mary Surratt proved his match, behaved coolly, and divulged no clues to help the manhunters track Booth. At the outset, she admitted freely facts that she was sure Wells already knew from other sources, especially her connection to Booth: “[Booth] has been coming to our house about two months; sometimes he called twice a day; we found him very much a gentleman. I think my son invited him home…. My son is a country-bred young gentleman. I was not surprised that he should make the acquaintance of such a man as Mr. Booth because I consider him capable of forming acquaintances in the best society.” Wells began the interrogation:
“What was it that brought your son and J. Wilkes Booth together?”
“Has not the question occurred to you since the murder?”
“Yes, Sir; but I could not account for it, and I think no one could be more surprised than we were that he should be guilty of such an act.”
Wells questioned her about John Surratt’s connection to Booth’s other conspirators.
“Don’t you know of his making the acquaintance of a Mr. Atzerodt?”
“He was a German, I think. The name he gave me was ‘Port Tobacco.’ He remained only part of a week, when I found some liquor in his room; no gentleman can board with me who keeps liquor in his rooms.”
Wells shifted the interrogation to the subject of Lewis Powell. The colonel suspected that he had visited the boardinghouse recently posing as a minister named “Wood.”
“What was the name of the other young man?”
“I think his name was Wood.”
Wells showed her a photograph of David Herold and she denied knowing him. That much was true. Neither Booth nor John Surratt had ever brought Herold to the boardinghouse. Wells continued to play cat and mouse with Mary, inviting her to name other visitors to her home and implying that she might as well tell him because he already knew the answers. “I assure you on the honor of a lady that I would not tell you an untruth.” Unimpressed, Wells countered, “I assure you, on the honor of a gentleman, I shall get this information from you.” But Wells wasn’t getting anywhere. He took a break. “Reflect a moment, and I will send for a glass of water for you,” he told Mary. After an aide served her, Wells asked a number of apparently innocuous questions about horses before shifting suddenly to the real subject of his interest—Lewis Powell.
“Did you meet the young man arrested this evening within two or three days and make an arrangement with him to come to your house this evening.”
“No, Sir; the ruffian that was in my door when I came away? He was a tremendous hard fellow with a skull cap on, and my daughter commenced crying, and said these gentlemen [Major Smith’s raiding party] came to save our lives. I hope they arrested him.”
“He tells me now that he met you in the street and you engaged him to come to your house.”
“Oh! Oh! It is not so, Sir; for I believe he would have murdered everyone, I assure you.”
“When did you see him first?”
“Just as the carriage drew up, he rang the door bell, and my daughter said, ‘Oh! There is a murderer.’”
Perhaps Wells appreciated the ironic truth of Mary Surratt’s statement. Indeed, she was correct. Powell was a killer, but one who posed no threat to Mary Surratt, her daughter, or the occupants of H Street. During her interview with Colonel Wells, Mary stonewalled the experienced investigator and served Booth well. Yes, she had admitted the Atzerodt connection, but the manhunters had known about that for three days. On the night of the assassination, John Fletcher had identified Atzerodt’s bridle and recognized the one-eyed horse, and detectives had also connected him to Booth from their search of the German’s room at the Kirkwood House. But Mary Surratt did not tell Henry Wells about Booth’s April 14 visit to her, the field glasses, her carriage ride to Surrattsville, the “shooting irons”—or that she had seen Lewis Powell before.
The interrogation over—for now—Wells refused to allow Mary to return home. He told her that she was still under arrest, and that he was sending her to the Old Capitol prison, where she would join the many other suspects and witnesses arrested after the president’s murder. Although she did not suspect it this night, Mary Surratt would never see her boardinghouse again.
Monday, April 17, closed as the most successful day in the three-day-old manhunt. Earlier that day government agents arrested Samuel Arnold in Baltimore. On April 14, detectives had ransacked Booth’s room at the National, on Sixth and Pennsylvania, a short walk from Ford’s Theatre. The “Sam” letter, discovered within hours of the assassination, had, along with a detective’s tip, led to Arnold’s arrest. Arnold, age thirty-one, a former schoolmate of Booth’s and a Confederate army veteran, confessed that he’d participated in Booth’s earlier scheme to kidnap the president, but he denied any involvement in or knowledge of the assassination. He argued that the “Sam” letter, rather than proving his guilt, was evidence that he had quit the conspiracy weeks before the assassination.
Michael O’Laughlen, age twenty-eight, another of Booth’s boyhood friends and also a former Confederate soldier from Baltimore and participant in the kidnapping plot, was also seized on April 17. Provost Marshal McPhail knew O’Laughlen’s family, and Michael turned himself in to “spare his mother.” After O’Laughlen’s arrest, Charles Dana telegraphed McPhail in Baltimore with instructions on how to transport him to Washington: “Bring [him] here in the train which leaves Baltimore at 6 P.M. Have him in double irons, and use every precaution against escape, but as far as possible avoid everything which can lead to suspicion on the part of the people on the train and give rise to an attempt to lynch the prisoner. A carriage will be in waiting at the depot to convey him to the place of confinement.”
Edman Spangler, the thirty-nine-year-old Ford’s Theatre stagehand who briefly held the reins of Booth’s horse, had been arrested on April 15, and was then released, only to be rearrested on April 17 along with Arnold, O’Laughlen, and Powell. In Spangler’s room, detectives made what they thought was an ominous discovery: a long coil of strong rope. Was it for Booth to rappel down from Lincoln’s box to the stage? Under any other circumstance, a rope is an innocent stagehand’s accessory, but in the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder, it led to Spangler’s arrest. Poor Spangler had nothing to do with the assassination—or the earlier kidnapping plot. But his long association with Booth, the rope, holding the bay mare’s reins, and the allegation by another theatre employee that Spangler said not to tell pursuers which way Booth went down the alley, earned him a cell in the Old Capitol prison. Many other people in the theatre were rounded up, including the Fords. Edwin Stanton declared the theatre a lair to which Lincoln had been lured, and surely those connected to it must have conspired with the assassin. How else could Booth have escaped so smoothly and easily? The theatre building itself was “arrested” by the government—it was ordered closed and was eventually confiscated from the Fords.
These were not the only arrests. The dragnet rounded up more than one hundred suspects: Junius Booth, one of the assassin’s brothers; a strange Portuguese sea captain named Celestino; various Confederate sympathizers and agents; and others who expressed disloyal sentiments.
Although the arrest of one suspect after another filled the headlines, Booth and Herold had vanished. The New York Herald reported Booth sitting nonchalantly aboard a train to Philadelphia; Washington papers argued Booth was hiding in the capital. One of the most famous and recognizable men in America remained free. The American people demanded vengeance. Across the country, mobs beat suspected Booth sympathizers, and in several cases murdered them. A Union soldier named John F. Madlock, an officer of the U.S. Colored Cavalry in Port Hudson, Louisiana, wrote “a man who rejoiced at Lincoln’s death received 16 bullets in his carcass … served him right.” Vigilante groups and soldiers forced Booth sympathizers to wear crude, hand-painted wooden signs around their necks reading “assassination sympathizer.” According to the Daily Morning Chronicle, in nearby Baltimore, an unidentified group of men set upon a photographic studio when rumors spread that the owner sold prints of the infamous actor.
The tumultuous news of the assassination raced the breadth of the nation by telegraph and soon reached U.S. Army posts in California. In San Francisco, General McDowell issued an order to arrest anyone who spoke against Lincoln.
Head Quarters Department of the Pacific
San Francisco, Cal., April 17, 1865.
GENERAL ORDERS,
No. 27
It has come to the knowledge of the Major-General commanding that there have been found within the Department persons so utterly infamous as to exult over the assassination of the President. Such persons become virtually accessories after the fact, and will at once be arrested by any officer or provost marshal or member of the police, having knowledge of the case.
Any paper so offending or expressing any sympathy in any way whatever with the act, will be at once seized and suppressed.
BY COMMAND OF MAJOR GENERAL McDOWELL:
R. C. DRUM,
Assistant Adjutant General
In Grass Valley, California, a minister wrote a letter to a friend back east describing the violence that followed the arrival of the news: “When the news came of the assassination of Lincoln the excitement was tremendous! Several men were shot right down dead by the Copperheads! And others were killed by Republicans in self defense! I loaded my double guns, with four small balls to each barrel and kept it in my study ready for any emergency. I thought I would pray God have mercy on our Country, but I would have a little lead for the Rebels!”
In Illinois, a U.S. Marine wrote a letter to his mother in Lockport, New York, describing the danger to those who spoke against Lincoln.
Mound City, Ill.
April 18th, 1865
Dear Mother,
We are all in an uproar in this place about the death of the president and one or two has been shot in this place for using disloyal sentiments and there will be more shot if they do not keep their mouths shut. I hope that the president will hang every one of them now and not leave one just exterminate the whole race. It is not safe for any one to be out after dark in this place although I am up all hours of the night… it will not do to use any disloyal sentiments where we can hear it or they would get smacked very quick. I was in hopes that the war was nearly over but as things look I am afraid it has just begun but I hope not… it was hard for Lincoln to die now when he was just on the eve of seeing this rebellion trodden under foot when every body was rejoicing in his administration and when every thing looked bright for him. I would like to have my say with that Booth. I’ll bet he never would want to kill another president. I would take a pair of shears and cut him in pieces as you would cut a piece of cloth. Then I would dig out his eyes and then pour in boiling hot oil. I’d fix him well… mother give my love to all the folks and believe me your affectionate son.
Wesley Severs
U.S. Marine Barracks
Mound City, Ill
Booth’s escape incensed, but also thrilled, the nation. Photographs of him became so popular that soon the government banned their sale. Impossible to enforce, Stanton had the order rescinded. Ads appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s, and other newspapers that shamelessly offered Booth photos for sale—alongside mourning ribbons, badges, and photos of the martyred president. In Boston, a lithography company commissioned an artist to create a handsome bust portrait of the assassin that it sold in two sizes—small carte-de-visite form for the family album, and as a large print suitable for framing. Other printers rushed out less flattering products—fantasy prints of Satan whispering in Booth’s ear moments before he shot Lincoln, and of Booth riding furiously through a swamp infested with alligators and monsters. A carte-de-visite reproduced an allegorical painting titled The Assassin’s Vision, depicting Booth fleeing Washington, the great dome visible in the distant background, and multiple images of Lincoln’s ghost sprouting in the trees above him. A Boston publisher released a piece of sheet music—“The Assassin’s Vision Ballad/Words and music by J. W. Turner”—to accompany the eerie artwork. It was the first song written about John Wilkes Booth and the manhunt.
“The Assassin’s Vision.” Lincoln’s ghost haunts the fleeing Booth.
The Assassin rode on his fiery steed, His murd’rous work was done—
In the darksome night with fleeting speed, Through woods his courser run!
As he hurried away from the scene of death, On his brow were looks of despair:
Before him! around him! The evening’s breath Told him God’s vengeance was there!
The pale moon beamed as onward he fled, The stars looked down from on high,
The hills and valleys were crimson red As blood to the murd’rer’s eye!
He shuddered! he trembled! And oft looked around, And dreary seemed each passing breeze,
And lo! the assassin at ev’ry bound Saw a vision appear in the trees.
Heaven had witnessed! He could not escape! The assassin’s fate was sealed—
“Vengeance is mine!” saith God in his might, As the vision that night revealed.
The assassin rode on with trembling and fear, And mournfully murmur’d the breeze;
Before! around him! All vivid and drear, The vision appeared in the trees.
Edwin Stanton needed help. By the third day it had become obvious that he could not devote his time and brainpower exclusively to the manhunt. He had a lot on his mind. The president’s murder was not only a national tragedy, but also a deep personal loss to the secretary. Ever since the wild carriage ride on the night of the fourteenth, and his first sight of his friend in the deathbed, Stanton had used his iron will to suppress his powerful emotions. He had almost broken down at the Petersen house after Lincoln died, but his brain was able to rule his heart. There were other concerns. He had a war to win. Just because Lee had surrendered did not mean that the Civil War was over. Strong Confederate armies remained in the field in North Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere, and their generals had not followed Lee’s example. Jefferson Davis was still at large, the subject of another sensational manhunt. And like the search for Booth, the manhunt for Davis had failed. Soon the conflict might degenerate into a brutal, guerrilla war that might take years to win. And without Lincoln at his side, Stanton had to go on alone. The new president was not ready to assume the role of commander in chief.
There was more. Stanton had to organize Lincoln’s majestic funeral and then send the body on an unprecedented national tour, on the way home to Springfield. He had to help plan the reconstruction of the South, manage the entire Union army, conduct the everyday but still vitally essential business of the War Department, decide what to do with Booth’s captured conspirators, and organize a military tribunal to try them. He had to investigate the crime, determine the nature and extent of Booth’s conspiracy, and send pursuers after the assassin and the rest of his gang. It was more than one mind, even Stanton’s brilliant and well-disciplined one, could handle. He had to delegate authority to a small circle of trusted subordinates.
WHEN JOHN WILKES BOOTH PLANNED THE ASSASSINATION and his escape he did not prepare for an extended campout under the stars. No, he had focused entirely on the need for speed and movement, not on cowering in the forest like a wounded animal, fearful that every passing sound meant that his hunters were about to grab him. Booth fled Ford’s Theatre like a pony express rider, traveling light for speed, unburdened by heavy equipment. Of course, an express rider carried the news: Booth fled from it. He disdained many of the ordinary accoutrements that a cavalryman took with him in the field: pistol belt, cartridge boxes, cap box, ample ammunition, carbine shoulder sling, field glasses, canteen, tin cup, eating utensils, rubberized gum blanket, wool blanket, saddlebags, provisions, and more. Booth had sacrificed necessities to achieve the sprinting speed his horse needed to get from Ford’s Theatre to the Eleventh Street Bridge.
This strategy worked superbly and ensured his quick escape from downtown Washington. But it left him ill prepared for the next, unanticipated phase of his journey: outdoor living in open country, the consequence of his broken leg and the dangerous, delaying detour to Dr. Mudd’s. Booth fled Ford’s Theatre wearing the equivalent of a modern-day business suit. The fabric of his black wool frock coat and trousers was coarser, sturdier, thicker, and a little warmer, but his fine suit remained unsuitable for camping out in the pine thicket. And Booth packed no change of clothing, so his garments soon became soiled. It was one of the first things Thomas Jones noticed about him. Indeed, with each passing day Booth and Herold became less presentable to strangers, ruining a key element of Booth’s trademark, winning style—his elegant, beautifully dressed appearance. They could not bathe, change clothes, or even wash the clothes on their backs, and they looked rougher—and smelled worse—every day. They looked like the fugitives they were. Beyond aesthetics, however, their vagabond, ruffian appearance jeopardized the friendly reception they expected to receive at proper Virginia households across the river.
Although Maryland’s mid-April spring climate that year was not cold, the nights were chilly and damp, especially for men with no overcoats. The weather wore on the assassins, sapping warmth from their shivering bodies. And the ground was uncomfortable. They had no proper bedding, just a blanket for each man, supplied by either Dr. Mudd or Captain Cox. At least Herold could stand up, walk about, and stretch his legs to relieve his cramped muscles. But Booth’s body ached and atrophied as he lay on the ground, shifting positions occasionally to ease his pain. As far as Thomas Jones could tell from his daily visits, Booth never rose from the ground during the time in the thicket.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 18, Jones paid his third call on the fugitives. This visit was briefer and less was said because Jones was in mortal danger. He risked his life every time he ventured into the thicket. Federal cavalrymen and U.S. detectives spread out along the nearby riverbanks and searched day and night for Booth. If soldiers caught Jones with the president’s murderer, they might shoot him on the spot or hang him from a pine tree. Soldiers had visited Huckleberry Farm several times, and even searched his home once. Now, Jones handed over the food and more newspapers quickly, then departed. Booth’s curiosity about the country’s reaction was insatiable, and he beseeched Jones to bring all the papers he could. Jones remembered the scene vividly: “He never tired of the newspapers. And there—surrounded by the sighing pines, he read the world’s condemnation of his deed and the price that was offered for his life.”
What he read stunned him. Whatever papers Booth held in his hands—the Daily Morning Chronicle, Evening Star, or National Intelligencer from Washington; the Sun from Baltimore; the Inquirer from Philadelphia; or the Herald, Tribune, or Times from New York City—they all reviled him for his loathsome act. Even worse, Booth witnessed the first draft of history transform Abraham Lincoln from a controversial and often unpopular war leader into America’s secular saint. Newspapers everywhere condemned the assassin in the most unsparing, unforgiving, vicious language imaginable. The accounts of the Seward attack sent Booth reeling. Had Powell gone insane? The indiscriminate viciousness of his coassassin’s assault shocked and revolted Booth. Yes, Seward had to go, and the early, erroneous news accounts reporting the secretary of state’s death delighted the actor. But the sons, the nurse, the messenger? At least Powell didn’t murder the girl. “Booth then,” Herold recalled, “made the remark that he was very sorry for the sons, but he only wished to God that Seward was killed.”
Booth wasn’t the only one of his coconspirators stunned by news accounts of the attempted murder of Seward. John Surratt, still in Elmira a few days after the assassination, bought, on April 17, several of the New York papers. What he read terrified him. The stories identified him as Seward’s assailant. “I could scarcely believe my senses. I gazed upon my name, the letters of which seemed to sometimes grow as large as mountains and then dwindle away to nothing.” It was time, Surratt concluded, to flee the country.
Booth searched the papers frantically for the article he wrote—his self-justification for killing the president—for publication in the Intelligencer. On the afternoon of the assassination, he had presented it to his actor friend John Matthews in a sealed, addressed envelope for delivery the next day. Incredibly, not one newspaper published or even mentioned his manuscript. So he wrote another one.
Booth drew from his pocket a small datebook for the previous year, 1864. Although obsolete, the book, bound in worn, black covers, contained a number of unused pages. Booth thumbed through it until he reached a blank page, which he annotated “Ti Amo/April 13–14 Friday the Ides.” Then, in a cramped, hurried hand, unlike his usual expansive style, he began his manifesto.
“Until today nothing was ever THOUGHT of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart. I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A Col. was at his side. I shouted Sic semper BEFORE I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill; Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it WAS. This forced Union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to out-live my country. This night (before the deed), I wrote a long article and left it for one of the Editors of the National Intelligencer, in which I fully set forth our reasons for our proceedings. He or the Govmt …”
At that moment, in midsentence, something—perhaps an interruption by David Herold, an alarming noise in the distance, or the black fall of the night—compelled Booth to stop writing, and his manuscript ends abruptly. Booth was wrong when he accused the newspaper or the government of suppressing his manifesto. He thought that he could trust John Matthews to deliver it. He didn’t consider that his friend, terrified of being connected to Lincoln’s assassin, might read the letter and then destroy it.
When Booth wasn’t writing in his little notebook or reading the newspapers, what did he do while in the pine thicket? There was nothing left but talk. Booth and Herold didn’t say much in front of Thomas Jones, confining their conversations to practical matters like food and newspapers, Booth’s need for medical assistance, and their prospects for a timely river crossing. That suited Jones fine. He was not a big talker or the inquisitive type and, prudently, he preferred to spend as little time as necessary at the fugitives’ hiding place. According to Jones, Booth did not draw him into abstract political discussions, try to impress him with exhilarating, firsthand tales of the fatal shot, his dramatic stage leap, or the unforgettable ride out of Washington—nor did he attempt to justify the assassination. He told Jones that he murdered Abraham Lincoln, that he didn’t regret it, and that was that. Booth and Herold kept their own counsel about how they intended to escape after crossing the Potomac, or what their final destination was, if they even had one.
When alone with Herold, however, Booth could unburden himself. No doubt he reassured Herold about the very things he most needed to convince himself—they would cross the Potomac, they would find succor in Virginia, they would survive. And no doubt Booth regaled Davey with repeated tellings of the assassination drama. And if the newspapers wouldn’t let Booth tell the nation his noble motives for his crime, he could rehearse them over and over before his captive audience of one. To Herold it did not matter what Booth said. The impressionable youth had not joined the conspiracy for ideological reasons. He had been drawn into the actor’s orbit by Booth’s charisma, not his hatred of Lincoln. He was simply happy to abide in the presence of his hero, enjoying the actor’s private, undivided attention. Although they had known each other for more than a year, they had never spent this much time together. After sharing the star with the other conspirators, and with his many friends and fans, Herold felt privileged to have him to himself. Stranded in the pine thicket, Herold became, by default, the cynosure of Booth’s attention. It was like having the great actor stage a marathon performance just for him. The future was unknown. But Booth was certain that David Herold would never abandon him.
Jones sensed Booth’s growing impatience and decided to ride over to the town of Port Tobacco on a scouting mission to find out how many Union troops were combing the area. A few weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend damned the town as a rebel cesspool of corruption: “If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port Tobacco…. Before the war [it] was the seat of a tobacco aristocracy and a haunt of Negro traders. It passed very naturally into a rebel post for blockade-runners and a rebel post-office general. Gambling, corner fighting, and shooting matches were its lyceum education. Violence and ignorance had every suffrage in the town … five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco; life there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the adjacent swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when iguanadons and pterodactyls and pleosauri ate each other … into this abstract of Gomorrah the few detectives went like angels who visited Lot.” Indeed, the town was the stomping ground of the dissolute George Azterodt, Booth’s coconspirator and pathetic failed assassin of Vice President Andrew Johnson. He was so associated with this place that he actually went by the nickname “Port Tobacco.”
As Jones rode into Port Tobacco, Union troops finally ventured out from Bryantown to Samuel Mudd’s farm. It was noon on Tuesday, April 18, and the manhunt was at a standstill. That morning Lieutenant Alexander Lovett accompanied by detectives William Williams, Simon Gavacan, and Joshua Lloyd, and by nine soldiers from the Provisional Cavalry, had arrived in Bryantown. As David Dana and Alexander Lovett discussed their progress, Dana mentioned Dr. George Mudd’s secondhand tale of the two strangers. Intrigued, Lovett decided to follow it up. The last verified sighting of John Wilkes Booth had occurred four days ago, around midnight on Friday, April 14, when Booth and Herold stopped at Surratt’s tavern to collect the “shooting irons” and field glasses from John Lloyd. Indeed, it was Lieutenant Lovett who rode to the tavern, questioned Lloyd, and took him into custody. Given the dearth of hot leads, George Mudd’s tip, Lovett decided, was worth pursuing. He sent for the doctor.
As soon as George Mudd arrived, soldiers brought him into the inn for questioning. Lovett took him “up into a room in the hotel, and asked him to make a statement of what he heard.” It did not take Lovett long to ascertain that the doctor was almost useless. He knew no details, and he had never laid eyes on the two strangers himself. All he knew was what his cousin told him, and that wasn’t much: two men called at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s late on the night of the assassination, and Sam found them suspicious. He asked George to tell the soldiers.
Lovett decided to pursue the lead to its source, and he ordered his detectives and cavalrymen to mount up. Taking George Mudd with them, they rode to Samuel Mudd’s farm. When they arrived at noon, Frances Mudd greeted George and the strangers and explained that her husband was away working in the fields. Lovett asked her to send for him. Until then, the officer suggested, perhaps she could answer a few questions.
aROUND THE TIME THAT LOVETT AND THE DETECTIVES WERE questioning Mrs. Mudd, Thomas Jones put on his best impassive face, sauntered through the door of Port Tobacco’s Brawner Hotel, and descended the creaky stairs to the basement. There, noted George Alfred Townsend, “it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar’s crib, talking robbery between their cups.” It was market day, and a lot of men and lots of gossip were circulating in town. Jones’s simple strategy was to “mingle with the people and listen.” An army detective, Captain Williams, eyed Jones and offered him a drink. Somebody in this vice-saturated, ramshackle, rebel town must know something about the assassins, Williams persuaded himself. Jones nodded and tightened his fist around the glass. Before he could raise it and wet his lips, Williams faced him, stared him in the eye, and boasted: “I will give one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who will give me the information that will lead to Booth’s capture.”
“That is a large sum of money and ought to get him,” conceded Jones, who then added cryptically, “if money can do it.”
Jones needed cash desperately, and he knew what that money could buy him. In 1865, when a Union army private earned thirteen dollars a month and the president of the United States received an annual salary of twenty-five thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars was a stupendous fortune. Jones thought about the wife and farm he lost, the time the Union stole from him while he was in the Old Capitol prison, the money owed to him by the Confederacy, and the uncertain economy of the defeated South. And he wasn’t getting any younger—soon he would be forty-five years old. He had every reason in the world to divulge Booth’s hiding place and seize that reward money. But he didn’t say anything. Booth’s instincts about Jones’s character proved correct. Jones was a man of true Southern feeling who could not be bought. Indeed, his explanation reads like a coda of the antebellum South: “Had I, for MONEY, betrayed the man whose hand I had taken, whose confidence I had won, and to whom I promised succor, I would have been, of all traitors, the most abject and despicable. Money won by such vile means would have been accursed and the pale face of the man whose life I had sold, would have haunted me to my grave. True, the hopes of the Confederacy WERE like autumn leaves when the blast has swept by. True, the little I had accumulated through twenty years of unremitting toil WAS irrevocably lost. But, thank God, there was something I still possessed—something I could still call my own, and its name was Honor.”
sUMMONED FROM THE FIELDS, AN ANXIOUS SAMUEL MUDD returned to his farmhouse and found the cavalry patrol waiting for him. It did not look good: nine uniformed soldiers, plus four men wearing civilian clothes. Many of the men, including Lieutenant Lovett, had shed their blue army officers’ uniforms and donned civilian clothes as a disguise to blend in with the populace and obtain leads by stealth and guile. Some even assumed false identities, posing as Confederates, or as friends of Booth, in an attempt to persuade assassination sympathizers to let down their guard.
Mudd dismounted his horse, greeted the inquisitors, and quickly rehearsed his cover story one last time. He had had three days to concoct it. If he stuck to the story, behaved naturally, and did nothing to arouse suspicion, all would be well.
Sam told them what happened: two strangers on horseback came near daybreak, one had a broken leg, and he set the bone. The injured man rested on the sofa in the first-floor parlor. He did not mention that Booth went upstairs. The strangers did not stay long, Mudd assured the officer. Pointedly, Lovett asked Mudd if he knew the men. No, the doctor replied, they were complete strangers to him. He “knew nothing of them” and they stayed only a short time, he emphasized. Lovett thought that Mudd looked worried: “He seemed very much excited, and he got as pale as a sheet of paper when he was asked about it, but admitted it,—that there had been two strangers there.” Sam’s laconic manner—he offered few details—and guilty body language aroused Lovett’s suspicion: “He did not seem to care about giving any satisfaction.” Mudd volunteered trivial tidbits, including that he had had a pair of crutches made for the injured man. And they left on horseback. Of course they did, Lovett must have thought. Didn’t they arrive on horses?
While Lovett continued to question Mudd, Detective Joshua Lloyd began searching the barn and outbuildings for signs of John Wilkes Booth.
Lovett asked Mudd to describe the strangers. The doctor spoke vaguely, providing little more than estimates of height, body weight, and approximate age. The descriptions were similar to those of Booth and Herold, convincing Lovett that the fugitives had been here. Dr. Mudd then said why he’d suspected the strangers—the injured one asked for a razor, soap, and water, and then he shaved off his moustache. Several troopers standing nearby grunted in agreement about the suspicious nature of the shave. Lovett asked Mudd if the man also had a beard: “Oh, yes, a long pair of whiskers!” the doctor exclaimed. Lovett knew that John Wilkes Booth did not have a long beard. No one who saw the assassin at Ford’s Theatre mentioned a beard. And Booth could not have grown one in just four short days.
Mudd claimed that the strangers asked for directions to Parson Wilmer’s place at Piney Chapel, west of his farm. That was an odd destination for Lincoln’s assassin. Wilmer was a loyal Unionist and was considered to be above reproach by federal authorities. Lovett dismissed the tip as a clumsy ruse.
Detective Lloyd returned to the house. The barn and outbuildings were clear, he reported.
After questioning Samuel Mudd for about an hour, Lieutenant Lovett and his patrol left by 1:30 P.M. on Tuesday, April 18. If the doctor thought that he had cleared himself, he was wrong. As the troops and detectives rode away, Alexander Lovett reached the opposite conclusion: “I had my mind made up to arrest him when the proper time should come.” Although Lovett thought that Mudd had lied about Booth’s alleged destination, he remained duty bound to follow up the doctor’s tip: “I went to Mr. Wilmer’s and searched his house,—a thing I did not like to do. I was satisfied before I searched that there was nothing there, because I knew the man by reputation. I was satisfied it was only a blind to throw us that way.”
In his first encounter with the manhunters, Dr. Mudd had served John Wilkes Booth well. He denied knowing the injured stranger. He lied about the beard. He failed to warn the troops that Booth and Herold were well armed. And he planted a false lead to misdirect the soldiers to search to the west, when Booth rode southeast. But what had this cost him? He had crossed the point of no return—and was on record now. He had given aid and comfort to Abraham Lincoln’s killers. At this moment, on the afternoon of April 18, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was in more peril than Booth and Herold, who were ensconced in the relative safety of the pine thicket.
ON APRIL 18, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE CONTINUED TO POUR into Washington, D.C., to see Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession, scheduled for the next day. As soon as the War Department announced the events planned for April 19, the Willard Hotel received four hundred telegrams begging for room reservations. Every hotel in the city sold out, compelling thousands of visitors to sleep on the streets and in the parks. By now black crepe and bunting had replaced the ephemeral, patriotic signs and banners that had adorned the city the week before. Gideon Welles noted in his diary the transformation: “Every house, almost, has some drapery, especially the homes of the poor. Profuse exhibition is displayed on the public buildings and the dwellings of the wealthy, but the little black ribbon or strip of cloth from the hovel of the poor negro or the impoverished white is more touching.”
On the morning of April 19, the most solemn day in the history of the nation began with the president’s funeral in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. Workmen labored through the previous night to construct wood risers to accommodate the six hundred invited guests. Disabled by grief, Mary Lincoln was not among them. She remained secluded in the family quarters, sending her sons, Robert and Tad, downstairs as her representatives. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, who prayed over Lincoln’s corpse at the Petersen house, presided this day.
On Pennsylvania Avenue tens of thousands of people jostled for position on both sides of the street to view the funeral catafalque when six magnificent white horses drawing Abraham Lincoln’s body made the turn from Fifteenth Street onto the avenue. Nimble children scooted up trees for the best view, and at the hotels, restaurants, stores, and offices lining the avenue every building wept with black crepe, and it seemed that mourners had flung open every single window, poking their heads through to watch the procession below.
The procession rolled slowly forward, the beat of the march measured by muffled bass and tenor drums swathed in crepe. Lincoln’s funeral procession was the saddest, most profoundly moving spectacle ever staged in the history of the Republic. There was more. At the U.S. Capitol, in the rotunda beneath the Great Dome, a catafalque waited to receive Lincoln’s coffin. Thousands of citizens had already waited hours in line to view Father Abraham. The newspapers said that it would be an open casket. Lincoln had been shot through the head, but the bullet did not disfigure his face, aside from the plum-colored bruising in the vicinity of his right eye socket. The undertaker’s artistry had taken care of that. When the funeral was over, the procession done, and the viewing concluded, the president’s body would be placed aboard a special train that would carry him home to Springfield.
Only one thing detracted from the sacredness of this day. The murderer, John Wilkes Booth, was still at large. Throughout the solemnities of April 19, no minister or government official mentioned the assassin’s name in public. To speak it would desecrate the memory of the honored dead. But the specter of Booth festered, if not on the tongue, then in the mind. It had been five days since Good Friday. Easter had come and gone. And still, Lincoln’s killer was free, mocking the manhunters. Something had to be done. Tomorrow, after the president’s body left Washington, Edwin Stanton would take an unprecedented step. He planned to issue a dramatic proclamation to the American people that combined an incredible reward with a terrifying threat. But Stanton could not take a break from the hunt. On the morning of the funeral, before the noon service in the East Room, he sent a message to General Hancock at Winchester retracting his flirtation three days ago about enlisting Confederate General Mosby in the manhunt: “There is evidence that Mosby knew of Booth’s plan, and was here in this city with him; also that some of the gang are endeavoring to escape by crossing the upper Potomac to get with Mosby or the secesh there. Atzerodt, or Port Tobacco as he is called, is known to have gone to Rockville Saturday to escape in that direction.”
In New Orleans, the famous detective Allan Pinkerton did not hear about the assassination until the morning of Lincoln’s funeral. News had failed to reach the city until five days after the shooting. Pinkerton loathed being away from the action, and he sent a grandiose and ill-timed telegram to Stanton angling for a starring role in the manhunt:
This morning’s papers contain the deplorable intelligence of the assassination of President Lincoln and Secretary Seward. Under the providence of God, in February, 1861,1 was enabled to save him from the fate he has now met. How I regret that I had not been near him previous to this fatal act. I might have been the means to arrest it. If I can be of any service please let me know. The service of my whole force, or life itself, is at your disposal, and I trust you will excuse me for impressing upon you the necessity of great personal caution on your part. At this time the nation cannot spare you.
Pinkerton’s self-promotion and obsequious flattery fell flat. And New Orleans was a long way from Washington. Booth had already been on the run for five days, and it would take Pinkerton several days to travel to Washington. Stanton already had a few thousand manhunters in the field. He did not need Pinkerton or his vaunted, all-seeing eye. The detective whose motto was “we never sleep” had managed to sleep five nights before informing himself of the most important news of the war.
WHILE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MOURNERS VIEWED LINCOLN’S remains in Washington on April 19, manhunters prepared to raid the Philadelphia home of the assassin’s sister, Asia Booth Clarke. It was all the fault of her husband, John Sleeper Clarke. On Sunday the sixteenth, Asia remembered that some time ago John Wilkes had entrusted her with some personal papers to safeguard in her vault. When she unlocked the vault and opened her brother’s envelopes, she discovered a number of documents, including two amazing letters. One was a tender, intimate letter to their mother that prepared her for his sacrifice to the cause:
I have always endeavored to be a good and dutiful son, and even now would wish to die sooner than give you pain. But, dearest Mother, though I owe you all, there is another duty, a noble duty, for the sake of liberty and humanity due to my country. For four years I have lived (I may say) A slave in the North (a favored slave it’s true, but no less hateful to me on that account), not daring to express my thoughts or sentiments… but it seems that uncontrollable fate, moving me for its ends, takes me from you, dear Mother, to do what work I can for a poor, oppressed, downtrodden people…. And should the last bolt strike your son, dear Mother, bear it patiently and think at the best life is short.
Booth’s second letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” was his political manifesto that described his love for the Confederacy, his hatred of Lincoln, and his scorn for the black man. In the aftermath of the assassination, the text was incriminating, sensational, and even explosive:
Right or wrong, God judge me, not man. For be my motive good or bad, of one thing I am sure, the lasting condemnation of the North.
I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression. For four years I have waited, hoped and prayed, for the dark clouds to break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine. To wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead… God’s will be done. I go to see, and share the bitter end.
I have ever held the South were right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln four years ago, spoke plainly, war—war upon Southern rights and institutions. His election proved it …
People of the North, to hate tyranny, to love liberty, and justice, to strike at wrong and oppression, was the teaching of our fathers…
This country was formed for the white, not for the black man …
My love… is for the South alone. Nor do I deem it a dishonor, in attempting to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much misery.
A Confederate, doing duty upon his own responsibility.
J Wilkes Booth
Improvidently, John Sleeper Clarke brought the documents to John Millward, the U.S. marshal in Philadelphia, and then showed them to an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. Clarke, with little concern for the welfare of his pregnant wife or the rest of the Booth family, tried to protect himself by publicizing the manuscripts. Millward forbade publication of the letter to Booth’s mother, fearing it might elicit sympathy for the assassin. But he allowed the Inquirer to publish the manifesto, which it did on April 19, under a series of excited headlines: “Letter of John Wilkes Booth”; “Proof that he Meditated His Crime Months Ago”; “Confesses That He was Engaged in a Plot to Capture and Carry Off the President”; “A Secession Rhapsody.”
Clarke’s foolish act provoked the opposite of its intended effect. Like a fire bell in the night, the document summoned swarms of detectives to his door. Asia was furious: “Mr. J. S. Clarke thoughtlessly gave that enclosed letter alluding to a kidnapping scheme to Mr. Stockton, his personal friend and the reporter of a daily paper, and, as every shred of news was voraciously accepted, the letter was published, and arrests followed in quick succession.” It was only Clarke’s first betrayal. He was ashamed of the Booth name now. Soon he would tell Asia that they must divorce to save his reputation and acting career. John Wilkes Booth had never liked his brother-in-law. Indeed, when Clarke proposed to Asia, Booth warned her that Clarke was an opportunist who sought to exploit their name to further his own stage career. “Always bear in mind that you are a professional stepping-stone,” Booth warned her. “Our father’s name is a power … in the land. It is dower enough for a struggling actor.”
John Sleeper Clarke did not deflect suspicion—he excited it. What else, government detectives wondered, might the bowels of that Philadelphia mansion give up in addition to the assassin’s stunning declaration? Asia described the frenzied manhunters: “It was like the days of the Bastille in France. Arrests were made suddenly and in dead of night…. Detectives, women and men, decoys, and all that vile rabble of human bloodhounds infested the city.” John Sleeper Clarke was seized, taken to Washington, and imprisoned in the Old Capitol for a month.
Asia described how detectives swarmed her home: “This unfortunate publication, so useless now when the scheme had failed—and it led to no fresh discoveries—brought a host of miseries, for it not only served for food to newsmongers and enemies, but it directed a free band of male and female detectives to our house…. My house, which was an extensive (MYSTERIOUSLY BUILT, it was now called) old mansion, was searched; then, without warning, surprised by a full body of police, surrounded, and searched again. We were under hourly surveillance from outside … our letters were few, but they were opened, and no trouble taken to conceal that they had been read first.”
Edwin Booth wrote frequently to his sister during the manhunt. “Think no more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as soon he must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”
The authorities ransacked the house and confiscated anything connected to John Wilkes Booth, including family books, photographs, and documents that had nothing to do with the assassination. Asia catalogued the violations. “All information contained in his criticisms, letters, playbills and theatrical records, has been lost in the general destruction of papers and effects belonging to Wilkes Booth. All written or printed material found in our possession, everything that bore his name was given up, even the little picture of himself, hung over my babies’ beds in the nursery. He had placed it there himself saying, ‘Remember me, babies, in your prayers.’ Not a vestige remains of aught that belonged to him; his books of music were stolen, seized, or savagely destroyed.”
In Maryland, in the early-morning hours of April 20, two separate teams of manhunters were planning another raid and were closing in on George Atzerodt. He had spent the last four nights at Hartman Rich-ter’s place, heedless of the great peril he faced. He didn’t know that Booth had signed the conspirators’ names to an assassins’ declaration—luckily for him John Matthews had destroyed it—but he should have suspected by now that detectives would have searched his room at the Kirkwood and discovered his connection to Booth, and thus the others. He should have fled but instead, foolishly, he tarried at his cousin’s. Hartman Richter remembered George’s casual behavior. “He remained at my house from Sunday till Thursday morning, and occupied himself with walking about, working in the garden a little, and going among the neighbors. He did not attempt to get away, or hide himself.”
Nor did he attempt to be discreet. His Easter dinner conversation about the assassination, especially his strange comment about a man following Grant onto the train, seemed too knowing to one of Hezekiah Metz’s guests, Nathan Page. Three days later, on Wednesday, April 19, Page mentioned the suspicious story to a local Union informant, James Purdum. Purdum passed the tip to Union forces at Monocacy Junction, and when Captain Solomon Townsend of the First Delaware Cavalry heard it, he took action. Townsend ordered Sergeant Zachariah W. Gemmill to pick up Purdum as a guide, go to the Richters’, and arrest Atzerodt.
A second group of manhunters also targeted the Richter place on the morning of April 20. James L. McPhail, the highly effective U.S. Army provost marshal of Maryland, was also in pursuit. McPhail had been active in the manhunt since the night of Lincoln’s assassination, when Stanton suspected that Booth might be headed to Baltimore. McPhail had already contributed to the arrests of Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen on April 17. And unfortunately for George Atzerodt, his brother John, and his brother-in-law, John L. Smith, both served on McPhail’s staff. John Atzerodt was a patriot and felt duty bound to help McPhail capture his fugitive brother. He reported that George was known to visit their cousin Hartman Richter in Montgomery County. Perhaps, John suggested, McPhail might find him there. The provost marshal ordered detectives to raid Richter’s place.
But Sergeant Gemmill and six cavalrymen under his command got there first, at about 4:00 A.M. Gemmill knocked on the door, and, before Richter would open it, he asked twice who it was. Gemmill was impatient: “I told him to come and see.” When Richter came to the door, Gemmill asked him if a man named Atwood—the alias that Atzerodt used at Metz’s place—was there. The man had been there, Richter said, but he had left for Frederick, Maryland. When Gemmill said that he would search the house anyway, Richter admitted that Atzerodt was upstairs in bed. Richter’s wife chimed in that there were three men up there. Gemmill, holding a candle or lamp, went upstairs with two cavalrymen. They found the hapless Atzerodt in bed. He surrendered meekly, not even asking why he was being taken.
Soon, under questioning by Provost Marshal McPhail, Atzerodt confessed. McPhail didn’t even have to squeeze him. Atzerodt had asked for the meeting. George told him about the room at the Kirkwood House and the coat, the pistol, and the knife. They all belonged to David Herold, Atzerodt claimed. He described how he threw his knife away in the streets of Washington the morning Lincoln died and how he had pawned his pistol in Georgetown. He revealed the kidnapping plot and how it progressed into murder. He described the conspirators’ final meeting at the Herndon House. And he implicated Mary Surratt and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Atzerodt’s capture was a coup. Now the War Department, in addition to seizing Mary Surratt, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen, had in its clutches two of the four men—Powell and Atzerodt—who were actually present at the Herndon House assassination conference.
On the morning of April 20, as Stanton was putting the finishing touches on his proclamation, before sending it to the printer to produce as large broadsides for public posting, and to publish in the newspapers, word reached the War Department that the manhunters had captured George Atzerodt, the vice president’s would-be assassin. The foolish German’s laundry list of carelessness—abandoning incriminating evidence at the Kirkwood, negligently disposing of his knife, pawning his pistol, and speaking knowingly about the assassination—created a road map of guilt that led Sergeant Gemmill to the slumbering Atzerodt. How characteristic that he was Booth’s only conspirator captured unawares in his bed. Newspaper woodcuts gleefully depicted the humiliating circumstances.
The April 20 proclamation offered a $25,000 reward for Atzerodt. Just before it went to press, Edwin Stanton revised it, deleting the just-captured Atzerodt and substituting the name of John Surratt, Mary’s missing son. Soon his proclamation hit the streets, offering an unprecedented reward of $100,000 for Lincoln’s killers, and threatening with death anyone who gave them aid or comfort. The earlier reward offers of $10,000 on April 15 and $30,000 on April 16 had failed to turn up Booth. Stanton hoped that his new, stupendous offer would motivate Booth’s hunters—and his helpers.
War Department, Washington, April 20, 1865
$100,000 REWARD!
THE MURDERER
of our late beloved President, Abraham Lincoln,
IS STILL AT LARGE.
$50,000 REWARD
Will be paid by this Department for his apprehension, in addition to any reward offered by Municipal Authorities or State Executives.
$25,000 REWARD
Will be paid for the apprehension of JOHN H. SURRATT, one of Booth’s accomplices.
$25,000 REWARD
Will be paid for the apprehension of David C. Harold, another of Booth’s accomplices.
LIBERAL REWARDS will be paid for any information that shall conduce
to the arrest of either of the above-named criminals, or their accomplices.
All persons harboring or secreting the said persons, or either of them, or aiding or assisting their concealment or escape, will be treated as accomplices in the murder of the President and the attempted assassination of the Secretary of State, and shall be subject to trial before a Military Commission and the punishment of DEATH.
Let the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land by the arrest
and punishment of the murderers.
All good citizens are exhorted to aid public justice on this occasion. Every
man should consider his own conscience charged with this solemn duty, and
rest neither night nor day until it be accomplished.
EDWIN M. STANTON, Secretary of War.