ON THE NIGHT OF SATURDAY, APRIL 22, JOHN WILKES BOOTH and David Herold gathered themselves and made for their boat. They would have been in Virginia around fifty hours ago if they had crossed on the twentieth, and about twenty-six hours ago if they left Indiantown at the first opportunity, the night of the twenty-first. They compounded their original error by tarrying at Indiantown an extra day. All told, they had lost two days since they left Thomas Jones and had wasted more than thirty-six hours during their Indiantown diversion. If they had any hope of surviving the manhunt, they could not afford to squander any more time and make any more mistakes. They had endured so many setbacks: Booth’s debilitating injury; delays at Dr. Mudd’s and the pine thicket; the aborted river crossing; the Indiantown folly. These episodes robbed Booth and Herold of time, momentum, and mental fortitude.
When they climbed aboard the skiff and rowed out to the Potomac, they knew their lives depended on navigating a proper course to Machodoc Creek, Virginia. The first sign was not auspicious. Herold nearly rowed into trouble moments after getting under way: “That night, at sundown, we crossed the mouth of Nanjemoy Creek, [and] passed within 300 yards of a gunboat.” But the lead-colored skiff melted into the colors of the water, and the sailors failed to spot it. Lucky to escape the U.S. Navy vessel, Herold stuck to the proper course, and, after several hours, spotted the mouth of a creek on the horizon, off his right shoulder. He turned west and rowed in that direction. They landed the skiff and disembarked with their pistols, carbine, and blankets. At last, on the morning of Sunday, April 23, nine days after the assassination, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold set foot on Virginia soil.
They scanned the terrain for enemy soldiers or local, friendly Virginians. The creek looked deserted, and no one had seen them. But something was wrong. In a few seconds Booth and Herold realized their mistake. They had done it again. This was not Machodoc Creek. They were again in the wrong place.
Rowing south along the shore, David Herold had mistaken the mouth of Gambo Creek for Machodoc Creek and landed their boat prematurely. But the error did not approach the catastrophic proportions of their misguided landing at Nanjemoy Creek and Indiantown. From earlier trips to the region, Herold recognized exactly where they were. The Machodoc was just one mile southwest of the Gambo. It wouldn’t even be necessary to launch the skiff again. The Machodoc and Mrs. Quesenberry’s place were accessible by an overland route. Herold could walk there in less than half an hour. Booth’s leg made the brief journey impossible for him, so he waited near the boat while Herold sought out Mrs. Quesenberry. She certainly came well recommended, and Booth expected Davey to return soon with good news, food, and horses.
Herold arrived at the Quesenberry place around 1:00 P.M., Sunday, April 23. Elizabeth Quesenberry, a thirty-nine-year-old widow with three young daughters, was a remarkable woman. A figure of proper breeding and distinguished lineage, she served the Confederate signal agents and couriers who operated in the northern neck of Virginia. Like Sarah Slater, Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow, and innumerable other Southern women—including possibly the intriguing, alluring Branson sisters of Baltimore, Lewis Powell’s special friends—Elizabeth Quesenberry served the cause behind the scenes by aiding the work of the Confederate underground. The names of most of these women have been lost to history and Elizabeth’s would have faded from memory long ago had Lincoln’s assassin not come calling.
Bizarrely, false reports spread that morning that Booth was dressing as a woman. General James Barnes, commanding at Point Lookout, Maryland, forwarded an odd report to Stanton, explaining that he had just received the following dispatch from a Captain Willauer at Leonard-town: “Sergeant Bagley, of the mounted detachment stationed at Millstone Landing, informs me that J. Wilkes Booth was seen passing through Great Mills on foot about 9 o’clock this morning. He was dressed in woman’s attire. The sergeant and his men are in pursuit. I will send all the cavalry I have out immediately. Everything shall be done that can be done to secure him. The citizens recognized him as he was passing through.” Barnes informed Stanton, “Great Mills is situated at the head of Saint Mary’s River, about ten miles from Saint Inigoes and twenty from here.”
General Hancock spread the rumor by sending it to Major General Torbert at Winchester, Major General Emory at Cumberland, and General Stevens at Harper’s Ferry. Hancock ordered them to tell all their subordinate commanders along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and in West Virginia to the Kanawha that they must not relax their vigilance: “Booth has not yet been arrested, and it is thought that he may attempt to escape in disguise of a woman or otherwise through that portion of the country.”
Mrs. Quesenberry was not at home when Herold arrived. Instead, he found her fifteen-year-old daughter. The assassin’s emissary asked if her mother was there. No, replied the girl, she was away, but could be sent for. Please do, Herold requested. Booth’s young accomplice, in spite of his disheveled, unwashed, and unshaven state that made him unsuitable for polite conversation with proper young ladies, attempted to engage the teenager in social banter: “I suppose that you ladies pleasure a good deal on the river?”
“We have no boat,” the girl replied curtly.
In that case, Herold was pleased to inform her, he had a boat nearby at Gambo Creek and, if she liked, she could have it. The girl considered the meaning of the stranger’s odd offer.
As soon as Elizabeth Quesenberry returned, David Herold got down to business. Quesenberry maintained her guard: wartime experience taught her to be suspicious of strangers, especially ones who looked like Herold and who offered gifts of boats to teenage girls. Herold announced that Thomas Jones had sent him to her. That recommendation, plus a few choice details, persuaded her that this stranger really knew Jones and was not an undercover Union detective trying to entrap her. If Herold came from Jones, and Jones disclosed her name to him, she felt obligated to offer assistance. But what kind?
Herold revealed there were two of them. The other man, unable to walk, waited at Gambo Creek. Davey asked for food and transportation—either saddled horses or a wagon and team—to ride south. Suspecting or already knowing who Herold’s companion was, Quesenberry calculated that this was too big a job to handle alone. By now the news that Lincoln’s assassin was on the run had spread throughout the countryside of Virginia’s northern neck. Only a fool wouldn’t suspect that John Wilkes Booth was heading for the state. If he had not already crossed the Potomac, he would try soon, and his likely landing spot was somewhere nearby. And here, in Mrs. Quesenberry’s front yard, stood a suspicious young stranger, offering to give away his boat, and asking for horses. As an experienced Confederate agent, she knew what to do: summon help at once. She sent for Thomas Harbin, a leading Confederate agent in the area with the kind of experience to handle this delicate situation. Moreover, Harbin possessed two other equally important credentials. He was Thomas Jones’s brother-in-law. And he knew Booth. In December 1864, Dr. Mudd introduced Harbin to Booth at the Bryantown Tavern when the actor was organizing his plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.
Thomas Harbin responded promptly to Elizabeth’s summons, bringing along another operative, Joseph Baden. Herold explained the situation and asked for help. Quickly, Harbin decided upon the best strategy: go to Booth around sundown, feed him, and get him moving south as swiftly as possible. It was a race now. There was no more time to hide out in fixed positions, evading the manhunters by camouflage and cunning. Booth must make a run from northern Virginia, through the state’s interior, and then into the Deep South. Speed of movement was now the key, just like on the night of April 14 when Booth raced out of Washington.
MRS. QUESENBERRY PREPARED FOOD FOR THE FUGITIVES and turned it over to David Herold. She would not ride to Gambo Creek, and she never laid eyes on Booth. An operative never took unnecessary risks. But she did not need to meet Booth to help him. Herold could carry the food, and Harbin would arrange for the horses. Her work was done. Journeying to Gambo Creek personally might have indulged her personal curiosity, but it was not essential to the mission. Harbin mobilized a third operative, William Bryant, with instructions to saddle two horses and bring them to Gambo Creek. Booth, lame and stranded, could not come to them. Bryant needed to retrieve the assassin, get him in the saddle, and escort him to the next stop down the line. About an hour before sunset, Harbin and Herold called on Bryant’s place, north of Machodoc Creek and about three miles below Matthias Point. From here they rode to Booth’s hiding place near the Gambo. As they approached, Herold signaled the assassin not to shoot, just as Thomas Jones had signaled them in the pine thicket. Bryant and Herold lifted Booth into the saddle and the party rode to their next destination, the home of Dr. Richard Stuart, about eight miles from William Bryant’s place.
They arrived at Stuart’s after dark around 8:00 P.M., just as the doctor and his family were finishing supper. When the doctor went to the door, he found two men he knew, William Bryant and a man named Crisman, in the company of two strangers. David Herold was on foot and the rest were on horseback, Booth and Bryant riding a sorrel and a gray. Keeping close to his front door, Stuart spoke to the haggard pair:
“Who are you?”
“We are Marylanders in want of accommodations for the night,” Herold replied.
Stuart wasn’t interested: “It is impossible; I have no accommodations for anybody.”
Davey pleaded their case: his brother had broken his leg, and someone recommended they see Stuart for medical treatment and help on their journey.
Unmoved, Stuart’s answer was the same—no.
Well, wasn’t he a doctor? Herold demanded.
Stuart possessed a quick riposte for any question. “I am no surgeon. I am only a physician,” he begged off, implying that he knew nothing about broken bones, setting fractures, or making splints.
But the recommendation came from Dr. Mudd, Herold boasted.
Unimpressed, Stuart claimed he had never heard of him: “I don’t know Dr. Mudd—never saw him. I don’t know that I had ever heard of Dr. Mudd.” And anyway, “Nobody was authorized to recommend anybody to me.”
Booth did not speak, relying on Herold to press the matter: “If you listen to the circumstances of the case, you will be able to do it.”
Alarmed by the stranger’s persistence, Stuart rebuffed him: “I don’t want to know anything about you.”
Stuart agreed to give them some food, but that was all. He did not like their appearance or manner and was suspicious of their story: “I did not really believe he had a broken leg; I thought that it was all put on.” Their tale did not make sense. Herold claimed that they were Confederate soldiers eager to continue the war after Lee’s surrender: “We are Marylanders going to Mosby.” But Stuart knew that Mosby’s war was over: “Mosby has surrendered, I understand, you will have to get your paroles.” Obviously the strangers were lying.
Reluctantly, Stuart told them to come in the house for their meal. The sooner they ate, the quicker he could get rid of them. Herold walked in, and Booth followed on his crutches. Stuart’s three adult daughters and his son-in-law were seated at the table. The fugitives joined them and began their meal. Booth and Herold were an odd spectacle at Stuart’s fine table. How out of place these haggard travelers seemed. Or did they? Yes, Herold was obviously a callow, verbose youth of the common class. But Booth’s filthy clothes, unshaven face, and malodorous body could not camouflage who he really was. His cultivated manners, educated voice, and physical poise marked him as a gentleman. The dichotomy between Booth’s appearance and his status must have puzzled his well-born tablemates.
It also puzzled Dr. Stuart. While the strangers dined, the doctor remained outside, chatting with William Bryant: “It is very strange,” mused Stuart. “I know nothing about these men; I cannot accommodate them; you will have to take them somewhere else.” Bryant professed that he did not know their names, either, that they emerged from the marshes near his house and asked to be taken to Dr. Stuart’s. The doctor entered the house to check on his unwanted guests. When he stepped back outside, Bryant and the horses were gone! He exploited Stuart’s brief disappearance into the house to skedaddle and abandon the problem to the doctor. Bryant had done what the strangers asked; his job here was done.
Stuart panicked. His eyes darted up the road and spotted Bryant two or three hundred yards away. Stuart started running and overtook Bryant: “You must take these men away,” he pleaded. “I can’t accommodate them.” Stuart dashed back into the house to roust his guests. They had been inside a quarter of an hour. They had enjoyed their promised meal. They must leave—now: “The old man is waiting for you; he is anxious to be off; it is cold; he is not well, and wants to go home.” Obeying, Booth and Herold rose from the table immediately and left the house without protest.
Once outside, they again asked Stuart for help: “It was after they got outside that they were so importunate that I should try to accommodate them.” If Stuart wouldn’t treat Booth’s injury or let them spend the night, wouldn’t he at least get them to Fredericksburg? Stuart rebuffed them again, offering only the possibility of help: “I told them that I had a neighbor near there, a colored man who sometimes hired his wagon, and probably he would do it if he was not very busy, and it would be no harm to try.”
By now Stuart knew exactly who his visitors were. Obviously, they were not Confederate soldiers. That feeble ruse collapsed under superficial examination. The lame man was a well-spoken gentleman, his garrulous boy companion of humbler origins. Judging by their appearance, they had been living outdoors, without shelter, for a week or two. They had traveled south from Maryland into Virginia. They were desperate. And one had a broken leg. They fit the profiles of two men known to the whole country by now. Who could these men be but John Wilkes Booth and David Herold? Stuart dared not speak their names, but his eagerness to eject them from his land shows that he knew how dangerous they could be to him and his family: “I was suspicious of them. I did not know but they might be some of the characters who had been connected with the vile acts of assassination … which I had heard of a few days before.”
Again Booth suffered “the cold hand they extend to me.” Bryant and his charges departed Cleydael and rode on to the home of Stuart’s “colored man,” William Lucas.
BRYANT, BOOTH, AND HEROLD APPROACHED THE HUMBLE Lucas cabin—a world removed from Dr. Stuart’s opulent Cleydael estate—around midnight. It was quiet and dark inside. William, his wife, and his son were asleep. Davey leaned in close to the crude, barred plank door. “Lucas!” he called sharply. Herold’s summons woke the dogs sleeping nearby, raising a chorus of barks. The hounds woke William Lucas, who, when he heard one of Bryant’s horses neighing in the yard, suspected that thieves were after his team. Then again he heard a strange voice: “Lucas.” He did not recognize the speaker and refused to unlock the door. “People had been shot that way,” he reasoned.
Lucas demanded that the voice identify itself. Instead, the speaker, unwilling to disclose his identity, and communicating as through a secret code, uttered the names of three men and asked if Lucas knew them, implying through attitude of voice that he should. He didn’t and became frightened. The strange voice must belong to a robber or a horse thief. There was no way that he would open his door to the mysterious, threatening stranger standing on the other side, inches away. The stranger called out a fourth name, William Bryant. Lucas knew this one, but what difference did that make? The stranger could have picked up the name anywhere. Then a second voice called out: Lucas. It is me, William Bryant. You know me. Relieved, Lucas unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped outside. Bryant and two strangers stepped forward.
“We want to stay here tonight,” the youngest member of the trio declared bluntly, omitting the courtesy of an introduction.
Bewildered by the unexpected request, and put off by Herold’s rudeness, Lucas resisted: “You cannot do it. I am a colored man and have no right to take care of white people; I have only one room in the house and my wife is sick.”
Herold became belligerent: “We are Confederate soldiers, we have been in service three years; we have been knocking about all night, and don’t intend to any longer … we are going to stay.”
Before Lucas could object again, Booth hobbled around him on his crutches, forced his way into the cabin, and claimed a chair.
Pursuing the lame man into his home, Lucas chastised them for their rudeness: “Gentlemen, you have treated me very badly.”
Booth, seething from Dr. Stuart’s rebuff, was in no mood for etiquette lessons from an impudent, free black man who did not know his place. How dare Dr. Stuart, lapsed gentleman, cast him into the night? Stuart had not heard the last from John Wilkes Booth. And how dare Stuart, adding insult to the injury, banish him to some Negro shack, degrading the great tragedian like a man of the lowest class and order, like some filthy beggar or runaway slave. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” Booth had declared in his secret political manifesto of 1864; “Nigger citizenship,” he spewed venomously in response to Lincoln’s April 11, 1865, speech. And now, here he sat, begging a black man for accommodations, and suffering insults in reply: Never!
Booth’s simmering blood boiled over in a way it had not since the assassination night. Still seated, the actor froze William Lucas with a hateful stare while dropping his hand to his waist, his fingers feeling for the handle of his knife. He had not unsheathed it in anger since he baptized its razor-sharp blade with Major Rathbone’s blood, now dried and still caked on the knife, partly obscuring its acid-etched, defiantly patriotic mottos. Booth could easily have cleansed the knife in Dr. Mudd’s washbasin, or in the freshwater spring at the pine thicket, but chose not to. Instead, he cherished its stained, mirrored surface like a relic of a martyred saint, a vivid, tangible memento of the assassination. He had lost the ultrasouvenir—his Deringer—when he grappled with Rathbone in the president’s box. But he still possessed the knife as a personal reminder that blood had been spilt, and there was no turning back: “I have done the deed,” in the words of Macbeth. The bloody keepsake resonated like a symbolic stigmata of wounds not suffered, but inflicted, by the assassin’s hand.
Booth’s hand rose from his waistband until the quickly moving blade caught William Lucas’s eye. “Old man, how do you like that?” Booth growled, waving the knife in the air.
“I do not like it at all!” pleaded Lucas, who was always terrified of knives.
Booth was one provocation away from unwinding another powerful, arcing swing of the blade, but he calmed himself. Murdering a black family in their cabin was sure to attract unwanted attention. And Booth considered himself in a class above the common cutthroat. As he argued in his datebook, his motives were purer than those of Brutus or William Tell. Booth still burned at a world turned upside down, but reason dictated that he use, and not kill, William Lucas.
The actor sheathed the knife and assumed a less threatening guise. The point had been made, and Booth did not need to brandish the pistols and carbine. In the cabin’s dim light, Lucas saw them clearly enough. Booth informed Lucas what they really wanted: “We were sent here, old man; we understand you have good teams.” So it was the horses, Lucas thought, just as he feared when he heard the strange voice outside his door. Lucas pleaded with Booth to leave his horses alone, explaining that he had hired hands coming Monday to plant corn. Convinced that the strangers would try to steal the horses, Lucas spoke evasively and claimed that the animals were far away, in the pasture. It would be hard searching for them in the dark. Booth turned to Herold and closed the matter: “Well, Dave, we will not go on any further, but stay here and make this old man get us this horse in the morning.” William Bryant, his task done, rode away, abandoning Lucas and his family to the strangers he had brought into their cabin.
Lucas was terrified to be alone with them and, fearing Booth’s knife slitting his throat while he slept, he surrendered his cabin: “I was afraid to go to sleep and my wife and I went out on the step and stayed there the rest of the night.”
In the morning, a little after 6:00, Booth and Herold ordered Lucas to get the horses. They hitched them to his wagon and climbed aboard. For the last time, Lucas beseeched them: were they really going to take his horses and not pay him? Feeling generous, Booth asked what price he charged for a ride to Port Conway, a small town on the Rappahannock River about ten miles away. Ten dollars in gold coins or $20 in greenbacks, quoted Lucas. But Booth and Herold were obviously taking a one-way trip; how would he get his horses and wagon back? He asked them to take his twenty-one-year-old son Charles along for the ride so the boy could bring the team home. Booth said no, but Herold, in rare dissent from his master, yielded: “Yes, he can go, as you have a large family and a crop on hand and you can have your team back again.”
It was settled. Within minutes William Lucas would be free of Lincoln’s assassins, patiently awaiting, with an extra $20 in his pocket, Charlie’s return with the horses in a few hours. Then Lucas, still smarting from the indignity of his midnight eviction, made a mistake. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He taunted the strangers about the Confederacy’s defeat: “I thought you would be done pressing horses in the Northern Neck,” he added, “since the fall of Richmond.” Lucas’s insolence enraged Booth, causing an eruption of his volcanic temper. Richmond? Did this damned black rascal dare mention Richmond? Asia Booth Clarke knew her brother’s sensitivity on that subject. She described how their brother Junius, walking with Wilkes “one night … in the streets of Washington … beheld the tears run from his eyes as he turned his face towards Richmond, saying brokenly, ‘Virginia—Virginia.’ It was like the wail of a Roman father over his slaughtered child. This idealized city of his love had deeper hold upon his heart than any feminine beauty.”
Ignorant of Booth’s passion, Lucas could not have uttered a more dangerous provocation. Asia, however, recognized that the city’s fall the week prior to Lincoln’s assassination helped spur her brother to commit his great crime: “[T]he fall of Richmond rang in with maddening, exasperating clang of joy, and that triumphant entry into the fallen city … breathed air afresh upon the fire which consumed him.” If Richmond’s fall could provoke John Wilkes Booth to murder the president of the United States, how might Lucas’s blasphemous slander provoke the assassin to punish him?
Booth’s pitiless black eyes burned through Lucas like searing coals: “Repeat that again,” he dared Lucas. One more insult, and Booth was ready to draw one of his revolvers and shoot the old man on the spot. Lucas knew he had made a terrible mistake. He had pushed Booth too far, and the actor was ready to explode in violence. Wisely, the old man backed off: “I said no more to him.” Young Charlie Lucas climbed aboard the wagon and seized the reins, signaling his readiness to serve Booth and Herold by driving them to Port Conway or—at this tense moment—any place they wanted to go. Wordlessly, Booth reached under his coat and pulled out, not a revolver, but a wad of cash. Peeling off $20 in paper currency, he bent low and handed the money to Mrs. Lucas.
As the wagon rolled away around 7:00 A.M., it came to Booth; he knew how to deal with Dr. Stuart.
They reached Port Conway around noon, and Charlie steered the wagon toward the ferry landing, near the home of William Rollins. Booth asked Charlie to wait a few minutes before driving his father’s wagon home. The actor wanted to write a letter to Dr. Stuart, and he wanted Charlie to deliver it.
A letter? John Wilkes Booth was running for his life. He didn’t know where the manhunters were. The newspapers he read did not reveal their unit designations, their strength of numbers, or their search assignments. In his ignorance, and to ensure his survival, Booth had to assume that he might encounter Union troops and detectives at any moment, anywhere along his route. They might be behind him or lying in wait ahead of him. He was always in danger. Conceivably every minute might count, and even a slight delay might make the difference between freedom and death. Incredibly, foolishly, with his life at stake, Booth took time to indulge his undisciplined, theatrical impulses. He insisted on having the last word and upbraiding Stuart for his appalling, shameful manners. He opened his 1864 date book to a blank page and began writing feverishly. After finishing the note, he read it over and, dissatisfied, ripped it out and tucked it out of sight inside one of the book’s interior flaps. He started over, composed another note, and carefully removed the page.
Dated Monday, April 24, 1865, Booth’s caustic rebuke assumed Shakespearean pretensions:
Dear Sir:
Forgive me, but I have some little pride. I hate to blame you for your want of hospitality: you know your own affairs. I was sick and tired, with a broken leg, in need of medical advice. I would not have turned a dog from my door in such a condition. However, you were kind enough to give me something to eat, for which I not only thank you, but on account of the reluctant manner in which it was bestowed, feel bound to pay for it. It is not the substance, but the manner in which a kindness is extended, that makes one happy for the acceptance thereof. The sauce in meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it. Be kind enough to accept the enclosed two dollars and a half (though hard to spare) for what we have received.
Yours respectfully, STRANGER.
Booth judged Stuart guilty of committing the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society—inhospitality. It was the sort of accusation that, leveled at a more leisurely time, might trigger a duel. Indeed, had Booth more time, he might have tried to soliloquize the doctor in person. Booth’s letter climaxed with an insulting rebuke of offering to pay a petty sum of cash in exchange for Stuart’s grudging hospitality. Thespian to the end, Booth invoked Shakespeare to dramatize his point, drawing his letter’s penultimate “ceremony” line from Macbeth, act 3, scene 4. There, Lady Macbeth, speaking at the haunted banquet that followed her husband’s murder of Duncan in his sleep, opined on, of all things, proper hospitality: “The feast is sold / That is not often vouched, while ‘tis a-making, / ‘Tis given with welcome. To feed were best at home; / From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony. / Meeting were bare without it.” Booth quoted the obscure phrase from memory nearly perfectly, committing only the minor error of writing “in” instead of “to” “meat.”
In other words, Booth was saying that a feast seems grudgingly and mercenarily given unless it is repeatedly graced with assurances of welcome. Plain eating is best done in one’s own domestic setting; on more social occasions, the spice to a feast is ceremony; gatherings are too unadorned without it.
Booth’s two drafts differed little. The chief differences were in the sums of money Booth offered and the closing salutations. First Booth wrote “$5.00.” On second thought he cut the sum in half. And perhaps he intended the smaller amount to augment the greater insult. Booth closed the first draft with “Most respectfully, your obedient servant.” The actor judged that salutation too respectful to the unworthy doctor and substituted the less florid “Yours respectfully.”
How strange, too, that in Booth’s last writings—his journal entries and his final letter—he quoted from his victim’s favorite texts. The cadences of the King James Bible resonated in many of Abraham Lincoln’s finest writings, and his love of Shakespeare knew no bounds. During private, social evenings at the White House, the president often sat by the fire and read his aloud to his small, intimate circle of friends. In a letter to the celebrated actor James Henry Hackett, Lincoln expounded on his favorites: “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”
It was Macbeth that Lincoln chose to read aloud to his guests on a Potomac cruise aboard the River Queen on Sunday five days before the assassination. One of the president’s companions described that memorable performance:
On Sunday, April 9th, we were steaming up the Potomac. That whole day the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects. Mr. Lincoln read to us for several hours passages taken from Shakespeare. Most of these were from “Macbeth,” and, in particular, the verses which follow Duncan’s assassination. I cannot recall this reading without being awed at the remembrance, when Macbeth becomes king after the murder of Duncan, he falls prey to the most horrible torments of mind. Either because he was struck by the weird beauty of these verses, or from a vague presentiment coming over him, Mr. Lincoln paused here while reading, and began to explain to us how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim; and he read over again the same scene.
Gleeful at the prospect of taking symbolic revenge against Stuart, Booth folded two and a half dollars into a small, tight square and then wrapped his letter around the money. He called Charlie Lucas over and handed him the insulting ensemble. If only he could see Stuart’s face when the old doctor read his rebuke, Booth gloated.
Charlie Lucas braked the wagon to a stop in front of the home of William Rollins, a former Port Conway store owner who made his living by fishing and farming. Booth and Herold did not know him. Rollins was in his backyard preparing his fishing nets and did not see the wagon’s approach. When he walked around his house, he recognized William Lucas’s horses. Then he saw the two strangers, David Herold standing at the gate, and another man sitting in the wagon. Herold asked an old man sitting nearby for some water, and the fellow filled a tin dipper to the rim and passed it to Herold. As Davey began walking to the wagon, the cup spilled over: “It is too full,” he called out to Booth. “I’ll drink some of it.”
Thirsty, Booth yelled back, “Bring it down here.”
Still holding the dipper, Herold turned to Rollins and asked if he knew anybody who could take them to Orange Court House. When Rollins said no, Herold asked if he would take them at least part of the way. Rollins offered to drive them to Bowling Green, about fifteen miles distant, for a fee. Intrigued, Herold invited Rollins to come over to the wagon and meet his friend. “This man says he has a wagon and will take us to Bowling Green for ten dollars,” Herold reported, as he climbed aboard Lucas’s wagon and surrendered the refreshing cup. Booth asked Rollins to confirm the distance, and the fisherman added, tantalizingly, that the Fredericksburg and Richmond railroad was just two and a half miles from there.
Then, improvidently, Herold asked if there was a hotel nearby where Booth could lay up his injured leg for a couple of days. He should have known there was no time for that. Perpetuating their masquerade as Confederate soldiers, Herold volunteered the familiar story: his companion had been wounded near Petersburg. Rollins told them about a hotel at Bowling Green. Then Booth switched subjects, inquiring whether Rollins would take him and Davey across the Rappahannock, only two or three hundred yards wide at this point, and land them on the other side at Port Royal. Rollins offered to do it for the same price that the ferry operating between Port Conway and Port Royal charged—ten cents one way. He would be happy to transport them in his boat after he went down to the river and put out his fishing nets. The tide was about to rise, and that meant prime fishing time.
Booth wanted to cross at once. As soon as the nets are set, Rollins reiterated. Frustrated, Booth tried to entice him with more money: “I don’t want to be lying over here. We’ll pay you more than the ferriage.” The actor could not persuade him. The tide was rising now, and the fisherman wasn’t going to miss out on a good catch. At that moment three mounted figures appeared on the hill just above Port Conway, about fifty yards from the river, and surveyed the town. They were soldiers. And a wagon down by the wharf, parked in front of William Rol-lins’s house, caught their eye.
The men spurred their horses and descended slowly to Port Conway. When they got within twenty yards of the wagon, Herold jumped out and thrust his hand inside the breast of his coat. One of the men noticed Davey’s clumsy, obvious move immediately. He had seen men draw pistols before. Another member of the trio took note of the wagon, which was drawn, he thought, “by two very wretched looking horses.” Then they looked over to the man sitting in the wagon: “[He] was dressed in a dark suit that looked seamed and ravelly, as if from rough contact with thorny undergrowth. On his head was a seedy looking black slouch hat, which he kept well pulled down over his forehead … his beard, of a coal-black hue, was of about two weeks’ growth and gave his face an unclean appearance.”
ON MONDAY, APRIL 24, DR. SAMUEL A. MUDD SAW SOLDIERS, too. There would be no more questions today, no additional searches of the house and outbuildings, no marathon, cat-and-mouse interrogations at Bryantown. The soldiers came to his farm to arrest him and take him away to Washington. There he would languish, locked up in the fearsome Old Capitol prison, across the street from the great dome, shining symbol of the Union that he, John Wilkes Booth, and all the others, had tried to topple. Confined incommunicado, Samuel A. Mudd waited to learn what terrible price the government would seek to exact from him.
BOOTH AND HEROLD HAD BEEN DREADING THIS MOMENT, IF not at Port Conway, then somewhere along their escape route. It was only a matter of time. Their first encounter with soldiers was inevitable. Fate chose Port Conway. Booth and Herold tensed for action. As the riders approached, Herold walked toward them, creating distance between them and Booth, and all the while scrutinizing their uniforms and equipment. Their jackets did not look blue. Davey, adopting his usual, disarming manner of the friendly sidekick, called out to the men: “Gentlemen, whose command do you belong to?”
One of them, an officer, responded: “To Mosby’s command.”
Herold was relieved. They were Confederates!
These men weren’t just everyday soldiers. Even though two of them were eighteen years old and one was nineteen years old, First Lieutenant Mortimer B. Ruggles, Private Absalom R. Bainbridge, and Private William S. Jett were veterans of one of the Confederacy’s most elite, renowned cavalry units, commanded by the legendary John Singleton Mosby. Herold was elated: “If I am not inquisitive,” he asked Ruggles, “can I ask you where you are going?”
William Jett jumped in: “That is a secret. Nobody knows where we are going because I never tell anybody.” And who was asking? They decided to turn the tables on the stranger and asked him to what command did he belong?
Davey performed well: “We belong to A. P. Hill’s Corps; I have my wounded brother a Marylander who was wounded in the fight below Petersburg.”
Where is this wound? queried Jett.
“In the leg.” Jett pursued the interrogation and requested their names.
“Our name is Boyd; his name is James William Boyd and mine is David E. Boyd.” Herold assumed the guise of an enthusiastic Confederate, a militant bitter-ender, zealous to continue the fight, wherever it was. “Come gentlemen I suppose you are all going to the Southern Army,” Herold ventured confidentially, adding that “we are also anxious to get over there ourselves and wish you to take us along with you.”
Booth struggled out of the wagon, propped himself up on his crutches, and began walking toward them.
Mosby’s men thought Herold was odd and overeager and did not reply to him or dismount their horses. Guessing that this was the opportune moment for some social lubrication, Davey played host: “Come gentlemen, get down; we have got something to drink here; we will go and take a drink.”
Jett declined curtly: “Thank you Sir, I never drink anything.” Jett rode about twenty yards away from Herold, dismounted, and tied his horse to a gate. Ruggles and Bainbridge dismounted and sat on Rollins’s steps.
As soon as Jett rejoined the group, Herold tapped him on the shoulder and asked if they could speak privately. They walked to the wharf, and Herold proposed a plan: “I take it for granted that you are raising a command to go south to Mexico and I want you to let us go with you.”
Real soldiers did not talk this way, Jett knew: “I was thrown aback that such an idea should have entered any man’s head.” The verbose “David E. Boyd,” if that was his true name, was holding something back. “I cannot go with any man that I do not know anything about,” Jett explained. He stared Herold down and asked a simple question: “Who are you?”
“We are,” Herold spouted excitedly in a trembling voice, “the assassinators of the president.” Herold pointed to where Booth stood some yards off. “Yonder is the assassinator! Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed the president.”
Dumbstruck, Private William Jett did not say a word. Interpreting Jett’s silence as a sign of disbelief, Herold asked him if he had noticed Booth’s indelible proof of identity—the initials “JWB” tattoed on his left hand. Ruggles walked up to Herold and Jett, but Jett found that all he could do was mumble to his friend “here is a strange thing.” Then they told Ruggles the stunning news. Booth was just a few feet away, swinging forward on the crutches. Within seconds they were face-to-face with Lincoln’s assassin, his marked hand hidden discreetly by a shawl.
“I suppose you have been told who I am?” Booth asked.
Ruggles was transfixed: “Instantly he dropped his weight back upon his crutch, and drawing a revolver said sternly, with the utmost coolness, ‘Yes, I am John Wilkes Booth, the slayer of Abraham Lincoln, and I am worth just $175,000 to the man who captures me.’”
“Do you wish to go over the river now, sir?” an approaching voice interrupted. It was William Rollins, back from setting his nets. He had walked to his house, gotten his coat, and called down to Booth at the ferryboat landing where the assassin stood with Herold and the soldiers.
“Yes,” Booth shouted back.
“Come on then,” Rollins beckoned.
But Booth hesitated and inched closer to Herold and the soldiers. Rollins shouted out to Booth again: “If you wish to go over the river, come on.”
Herold spoke for his master: “If you are in a hurry go on; we are not going over now.” Instead, the fugitives huddled with Ruggles, Jett, and Bainbridge, concocting an alternative scheme. They told the trio that they wanted to throw themselves entirely upon their protection. Jett agreed to help, and Ruggles vouchsafed their fidelity: “We were not men to take ‘blood money.’ “The soldiers promised to accompany the assassins across the river in the ferryboat and help them on the other side.
Booth had won their loyalty not by mesmerizing them with the riveting story of how he had struck down the president, but with his laconic, stoic demeanor. The assassin confided to William Jett that he thought the murder “was nothing to brag about,” and the soldier agreed: “I do not either.” Ruggles noticed about Booth the same thing his comrades did—the actor was in agony, but he took it like a man: “I noticed that his wounded leg was greatly swollen, inflamed, and dark, as from bruised blood, while it seemed to have been wretchedly dressed, the splints being simply pasteboard rudely tied about it. That he suffered intense pain all the time there was no doubt, though he tried to conceal his agony, both physical and mental.”
Booth’s confession took them by surprise, and the fact that they were standing in the presence of—and even conversing with—Lincoln’s assassin stunned them. But Ruggles could not help admiring him: “[T]he coolness of the man won our admiration; for we saw that he was wounded, desperate, and at bay. His face was haggard, pinched with suffering, his dark eyes sunken, but strangely bright.”
Before departing on the ferry, Herold and Jett walked back to Rol-lins’s place, found him outside, and made a curious request: did he have a bottle of ink? Rollins led them into the house, took a small bottle from the mantel, and laid it on the table. Jett sat in a chair, set out a piece of paper, and began writing. Herold told Jett to let him do it, and Jett tore off the part of the paper he had already written on. Herold copied it, writing five or six lines. They had forged an army parole document for Jett in case he encountered Union troops.
The ferryboat had almost reached the Port Conway side of the river.
Time to cross over to Port Royal. Herold picked up his carbine, wound the white, cotton sling around his shoulders, and again told Rollins that he and his friend did not need a ride: “I have met with some friends out here and they say it is not worth while to hire a wagon to go on to Bowling Green, as we can all go along together and ride and tie.” As Davey gathered his blanket, Rollins, admiring its luxurious shag finish on one side, made the oddest compliment.
“That’s a very nice concern you’ve got there,” he said.
“Yes, a lady in Maryland gave me that,” Herold acknowledged proudly.
James Thornton, a free black man who operated the ferry for its owner, Champe Thornton, piloted the craft to the wharf. David Herold dismissed the wagon and Charlie Lucas turned his team around and headed for home. Herold reminded him to deliver Mr. Boyd’s letter to Dr. Stuart. Booth explained to Ruggles that he was unable to walk anymore, so the lieutenant lifted him onto his horse and prepared to board. James Thornton opened the gate and ushered the waiting customers—five men and three horses—aboard. To Thornton, the strangers appeared unremarkable—just another band of bedraggled rebels heading home after losing the war.
Herold, Jett, and Bainbridge stepped onto the flat, wood planks of the ferry’s bottom, the two Confederates leading their horses by the reins. Ruggles, also on foot, carried Booth’s crutches, Herold carried the carbine, and Booth had the pistols and knife. Ruggles noticed that Major Rathbone’s blood was still on the blade. Around his neck Booth suspended the field glasses from a leather strap joined by an adjustable metal buckle. Ignoring ferry rules, the assassin, who wanted to avoid the searing pain that accompanied every mount and dismount of the horse, refused to get out of the saddle and he rode Ruggles’s horse right onto the barge. Mounted men made the ferry top-heavy, but Thornton let Booth’s infraction slide. Later, after it was all over, showman P. T. Barnum offered Ruggles a nice price for the saddle graced by John Wilkes Booth’s posterior during the short ferry trip.
With his passengers all aboard, Thornton cut loose from the wharf and eased the slow-moving, awkward craft across the Rappahannock to the old, dilapidated colonial town of Port Royal. During the crossing the men hardly spoke, not wanting the colored man to learn anything about them. Bainbridge became suspicious of Thornton, anyway: “The ferryman eyed us all very closely and we said but very little.” Bainbridge unglued his eyes from Thornton and witnessed, as the actor towered over them, a memorable scene: “Booth sat squarely on his horse, looking expectantly towards the opposite shore.” As soon at they landed and Thornton opened the gate, Booth spurred Ruggles’s horse onto the wharf.
The assassin was in good spirits again, and he laughed as Herold and their new friends gathered around him to celebrate the successful crossing. Broaching the humble Rappahannock was no great feat in itself, but it represented the culmination of this phase of the escape. Booth and Herold had crossed the mighty Potomac, escaped from Maryland, landed in Virginia, found—finally, after suffering bitter disappointments—loyal Confederate comrades, and passed safely south through the state’s northern neck. Now, south of the Rappahannock, John Wilkes Booth looked forward to a swift journey through open country, to the interior of the Old Dominion. Overcome with emotion, Booth sang out: “I’m safe in glorious old Virginia, thank God!”
Or was he? There was something about young Willie Jett that Booth did not know. Had he known it, the assassin would have fled from this boy’s company faster than he had galloped away from Ford’s Theatre. Booth might have even shot him for it. On the surface, the thing seemed innocuous, even innocent. Neither Booth nor Jett knew it yet, but their meeting had set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the actor’s downfall.
For now all was well and Jett led the caravan a few blocks to the Port Royal home of Randolph Peyton. Jett knew him and thought he would take them in. Before Jett approached the house, Booth asked him to continue the ruse and introduce him as a wounded Confederate soldier named James Boyd. Peyton’s two spinster sisters, Sarah Jane and Lucy, answered the door. Jett asked if they would be kind enough to give shelter for two nights to a wounded Confederate soldier and his brother. The Peytons agreed to take the strangers in, and Jett beckoned Booth to come forward. Booth hobbled inside and reclined on a chaise lounge. It was the first time he had stretched out on a piece of furniture since he napped on the upholstered, black horsehair sofa in Dr. Mudd’s front parlor. After a few minutes Sarah Jane called Jett aside. She wanted to speak to him alone in the parlor. On second thought, she explained, this man could not stay here. Her brother Randolph was away at his farm and would not be back tonight. It was not right, without their brother at home, to permit strangers to sleep in the same house with two unmarried women. Regrettably, Sarah Jane informed Jett, she must rescind her premature offer of hospitality. She hated to say no to a wounded Confederate soldier, but in her brother’s absence, she had no choice.
Jett accepted the refusal graciously. Making a scene would do no good. He asked if the Peytons’ neighbors across the street, the Catlitts, might take in Mr. Boyd. Sarah Jane said she did not know. Jett elected to try but discovered that, like Randolph Peyton, Mr. Catlitt was not home. Sarah Jane made a helpful suggestion: “You can get him in anywhere up the road—Mr. Garrett’s or anywhere else.” Jett agreed to try. At around 1:00 P.M. he helped Booth rise from the Peytons’ chaise lounge and stand up on his crutches. As they walked outside, Jett called to their comrades: “Boys, ride on further up to road.” After putting Booth on Ruggles’s horse, the men doubled up on the two remaining animals, Herold riding behind Jett, and Ruggles behind Bainbridge.
THREE AND A HALF MILES AWAY, RICHARD H. GARRETT PREsided over his five-hundred-acre farm, Locust Hill. It was a happy time. His two eldest sons, both in Confederate service, had just come home from the war. The caravan of riders, pacing slowly from Port Royal to the southwest, arrived in the late afternoon. David Herold jumped off Jett’s horse as soon as they passed the gate, and loitered near the road with Bainbridge, who dismounted and gave his horse to Booth. Jett, Booth, and Ruggles rode on to the house. As he had with Miss Sarah Jane Peyton, Booth asked Jett to introduce him by his pseudonym. Willie Jett introduced himself to Mr. Garrett from the saddle and then presented James Boyd: “Here is a wounded Confederate soldier that we want you to take care of for a day or so: will you do it?”
Garrett thought of his sons, who had returned safely just a few days ago. He would return that blessing with a kindness: “Yes, certainly I will.”
Around three o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, April 24, John Wilkes Booth had found refuge for the night. And he had survived another day.
Booth got down from Ruggles’s horse. Their mission accomplished, the Confederates wanted to push on. Jett and Ruggles bade the assassin a quick farewell—“we will see you again”—and trotted away from Locust Hill, leading Bainbridge’s riderless horse by the reins. Unbeknownst to Booth, Willie Jett had no intention of returning to Garrett’s farm or of ever seeing the assassin again. When Jett and Ruggles reached the gate, they reined their horses to a stop. Bainbridge mounted up and David Herold clambered on, riding double with him. Davey wanted to accompany them to Bowling Green to purchase, of all things, a new pair of shoes. He decided to spend the night with the young Confederates and rejoin Booth tomorrow, April 25, at Garrett’s farm.
Almost like a jealous younger brother showing off, Herold boasted to Jett that he, too, had a tattoo, just like Booth. Indeed, Booth had only one, but Davey had two. He rolled up both coat sleeves above the elbow and displayed a heart and anchor on his right arm and his initials, “DEH,” on his left. Jett noticed that the “H,” although still legible, was blurry: during his idle time in the pine thicket Davy had rubbed it for hours, trying desperately to erase the identifying mark with friction and heat.
The presence of Booth, Jett, and Ruggles in the Garretts’ front yard had provoked a dog’s bark, and the sound alerted John M. Garrett, one of Richard’s sons, who was lying down in an upstairs bedroom. John had joined the Confederate army at the beginning of the war in 1861, serving first in the Fredericksburg Artillery and then in Lightfoot’s Battalion. He was active for the duration until Lee’s surrender on April 9, when he returned to the family farm. Looking out the window a little after 3:00 P.M., he saw a man with two crutches, who was leaning on only one. The man was wrapped in a gray shawl and was standing near his father, while two men on horseback were talking. In a few minutes, the mounted men rode off, taking the lame man’s horse with them. John watched as his father and the stranger walked toward the house. It all seemed normal enough, and John Garrett returned to his bed.
Booth and old man Garrett lounged on the front porch, which extended along the length of the house. In about half an hour, a little after 3:30 P.M., John Garrett came downstairs and walked out the front door to spend the evening with a neighbor. His father introduced him to James Boyd. Neither father nor son suspected that Boyd was anyone other than who he said he was—a simple Confederate veteran, making his way home.