“Sic semper tyrannis!” Booth shouted after leaping onto the stage of Ford’s Theater from the presidential box, where he fired what would prove to be a fatal shot from a Derringer pistol into the head of President Abraham Lincoln. Fleeing on his broken leg through a stage door into an alley, he mounted a waiting horse and sped off into the night of April 14.
The operation to decapitate the Lincoln administration hit a snag when thirty-year-old George Atzerodt, tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson, got drunk at the Kirkwood Hotel, where he lodged. Instead of carrying out the attack, Atzerodt lost his nerve and wandered the streets of Washington that night. Piecing together clues, Federal detectives arrested him six days later at his cousin’s home in Germantown, Maryland.
After murdering Lincoln, Booth and fellow conspirator David Herold stealthily worked their way through the Secret Service’s covert line in southern Maryland. Stopping at Surratt’s tavern, they picked up a Spencer carbine, field glasses, and whiskey to numb Booth’s searing pain from his broken leg. Avoiding Federal patrols, they traveled to Samuel Mudd, a member of the Confederate Doctor’s Line, who set Booth’s broken bone. While Booth rested, the doctor and Herold rode out and surveyed the area, which was swarming with Federal troops hunting the two men. The group fled to Confederate sympathizer Samuel Cox’s home, Rich Hill, in the dead of night.
Coincidently, around the same time, “a portion of Mosby’s men, under a Captain Garland Smith, just on the edge of the farms [nearby Federal farms seized by the Federal government from Confederate sympathizers],” clashed with Captain F. F. Buckley’s Union cavalry. Buckley wrote on April 16, “I was overtaken by about thirty-five men of Garland Smith’s command and captured one prisoner. Some very heavy skirmishing took place about 10 o’clock near Mechanicsville, [Maryland], in which I lost one man. I had to fall back in consequence of not having men enough.”1
The purpose of the presence of Mosby’s men in southern Maryland on April 16 remains a mystery. Only a few miles from Booth’s escape route, were they an escort for Booth or, likely not having heard of Harney’s capture, were they there to escort Harney after his mission to blow up the White House? We cannot know for sure, but their presence speaks loudly about the Confederacy’s desperate last-minute attempt to destabilize the Lincoln administration.
To avoid the Union dragnet, Samuel Cox briefly harbored the fugitives and moved the conspirators into a dense pine thicket used by the Confederate Secret Service to hide agents. Thomas Jones, the chief Secret Service agent in southern Maryland, and a member of the Signal Corps,2 brought the men food and newspapers over the next several days. Instead of branding them heroes, media in the North and even in the South condemned the conspirators’ actions. Incensed by the reports, Booth wrote in his diary, “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”3
Booth and Herold hid in the pines for days until the Union patrols diminished, and authorities believed Booth had crossed the Potomac, leading Federals to search Virginia. Sensing an opportunity for escape, Jones escorted the men three and a half miles to the Potomac in the dead of night, but currents and tides forced them back to the Maryland side of the river, as Booth recounted in his diary: “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet and cold and starving.” Gunboats roamed the Potomac searching for the killer and, on that misty night, came very close to the two men but did not see them. Booth and Herold made landfall near Nanjemoy Creek, Maryland. Here the men approached a local farmer but received a cold reception. Booth wrote in his diary, “Tonight I try to escape these bloodhounds once more. Who, who can read this fate? I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. Oh, may He, may He spare me that and let me die bravely.”4
At sundown on April 22, the men once again attempted to cross the river in the small boat.
Northern authorities assumed Mosby’s involvement when they discovered that one of the conspirators was Ranger Lewis Powell. The War Department claimed to have evidence of Mosby’s involvement in the Lincoln conspiracy and stated, “The guerrilla chief, Mosby, will not be paroled.” Mosby had a price on his head. Whether the Federals considered him an outlaw or a soldier was unclear. Days earlier, General Hancock’s chief of staff wrote to Mosby informing him of Lee’s surrender, offering him the same conditions, and asking for a meeting with a Northern officer of equal rank to work out conditions. “It will be seen that there was considerable confusion as to Mosby’s exact status,” one Ranger later wrote, noting that the general “did not ask Colonel Mosby to surrender himself, but ‘the forces under his command.’ ”5
Days ticked by with no response from the Gray Ghost. If he would not surrender, Hancock prepared to attack, circulating a notice throughout the area urging residents and soldiers to cooperate in the restoration of peace, but also indicating that Mosby would not be included in the terms of surrender.
Mosby finally responded. He sent a letter with four Rangers to be delivered in person to Hancock. The Rangers passed through the enemy pickets dressed in their finest uniforms, sitting high on their horses, with only a single white handkerchief on a stick as a sign of capitulation.
“What command, Major?”
“Mosby’s,” answered Aristides Monteiro, the Rangers’ battalion surgeon.
Rather than taunting or insults, a “loud and prolonged shout” sounded along the entire line of men. One battle-seasoned Pennsylvania veteran stepped forward and extended his hand, proclaiming, “Thank God! The war is over. I know the end has come when Mosby’s men surrender.”6
The astonished Monteiro later wrote, “Our surprise was complete when those men we had fought with such savage ferocity a few days before now shed tears of joy as they greeted us once more as members of the great national family.”7
But their celebration proved premature. Mosby’s letter informed Hancock that the partisan leader had not yet received official communication regarding the surrender of Lee’s army, “nor, in my opinion, has the emergency yet arisen which would justify the surrender of my Command. With no disposition, however, to cause the useless effusion of blood or to inflict on a war-worn population any unnecessary distress, I am ready to agree to a suspension of hostilities for a short time.”8
The Federals first escorted the Rangers to Colonel Marcus Reno’s accommodations. Reno offered them brandy and cigars and, at one point, asked them about a recent skirmish. “Will you be kind enough to tell me how many of your men were engaged in that fight?”9
Monteiro felt no hesitation, now that the war seemed to be concluding, in telling the general frankly that their force was minimal, only 128 on that occasion. “Twenty-eight thousand, you mean,” replied Reno.10 Union forces had falsely assumed Mosby had a more extensive command since, throughout the war, Mosby had successfully tied up and battled forces multiple times their number.
When the Rangers met with General Hancock, he greeted them warmly: “You have fought bravely and have nothing to be ashamed of. You have, like gallant soldiers, left your cause to the god of battles, and the arbitrament of the sword has decided against you. Let us once more kneel down at the same altar and be like brothers of the same household.”11
After reading Mosby’s letter, Hancock agreed to a truce until noon on Tuesday, April 18. On the eighteenth, Mosby arrived with approximately two dozen Rangers in Millwood, but he simply asked for an extension, having still not heard official news of Joseph Johnston’s surrender in North Carolina. Hancock agreed to an extension to April 20. Grant wrote to Hancock on April 19, “If Mosby does not avail himself of the present truce end it and hunt him and his men down. Guerrillas, after beating the armies of the enemy, will not be entitled to quarter.”12
At noon on the twentieth, Mosby and twenty Rangers arrived at the appointed brick building in Millwood, Virginia, to meet with the Federal officers. The two parties reached an impasse. The truce would not be extended. Mosby was not ready to surrender.
When the Federal commander told the partisan leader in no uncertain terms, “The truce is ended. We can have no further intercourse under its terms,” both men “appreciated the serious import of the moment.” Adding to the drama of the tense scene, a young Ranger, Johnny Heard, rushed in and interrupted the previously dignified meeting, exclaiming, “Colonel, the d—d Yankees have got you in a trap: there is a thousand of them hid in the woods right here.”13
Rising to his feet, placing his hand on his revolver, and looking directly at the Federal officers, Mosby said slowly, “If the truce no longer protects us, we are at your mercy; but we shall protect ourselves,” as he and his twenty men exited the room in “breathless silence.”14
On April 21, at Salem, Virginia, Mosby ordered his Rangers to form in a field one final time. He disbanded the men but never personally surrendered. “Mosby rode along the line, looking each man in the face, it was plain that his heart was breaking,”15 recalled Ranger John W. Munson. The Confederate leader could not bear to read the words he penned earlier at Glen Welby, so his officers read the words aloud to the men:
“Soldiers!
“I have summoned you together for the last time. The vision we have cherished of a free and independent country has vanished, and that country is now the spoil of the conqueror. I disband your organization in preference to surrendering it to our enemies. I am no longer your Commander. After an association of more than two eventful years, I part from you with a just pride in the fame of your achievements and a grateful recollection of your generous kindness to myself. And at this moment of bidding you a final adieu, accept the assurance of my unchanging confidence and regard. Farewell. John S. Mosby, Colonel.”16
Many Rangers openly wept as they shook hands with Mosby, who stood on the side of a road near the field. He informed the men that “they could do whatever they chose.”17 Most would seek parole with General Hancock in Winchester and make an oath of allegiance to the Union.
The Rangers’ former nemesis and Lewis Powell’s prisoner, Richard Blazer, now provost marshal and in failing health from his months confined by the Confederacy, greeted the men after being released in a prisoner exchange. Syd Ferguson, who pursued Blazer in the long ride from the field at Kabletown and personally captured the Ohioan, embraced him. The two enemies “met and hugged each other like long lost brothers,” Munson recalled.18 Mosby and Blazer would later become friends: reconciliation and forgiveness.
Another band of Rangers, up to fifty men, stayed by Mosby, including Ranger John Munson. “Knights Errant in a new Crusade,”19 the group headed South—toward the Confederate forces led by General Joseph Johnston—and John Wilkes Booth.
Avoiding gunboats, Booth and David Herold rowed across the Potomac in the middle of the night on April 22–23 and made landfall in Virginia. Confederate Secret Service agent Thomas Harbin arranged for a local farmer, William Bryant, to furnish the men with horses and escort them to Dr. Richard Stuart. A Confederate and enslaver, Stuart harbored agents and had spent time in a Union prison. After dark on April 23, Bryant brought the two men to Stuart’s home. Herold pleaded for medical assistance, stating his brother (Booth) had a broken leg, but Stuart dismissed the plea, saying he was not a surgeon. At some point, the men exclaimed, “We are Marylanders & want to go to Mosby.”20 Their declaration could have implied they had prior arrangements with the Rangers. The men asked if they could stay in Stuart’s stately summer home, Cleydael, but the doctor told them he had no room and palmed them off on his neighbor, William Lucas, a free-born Black farmer who might provide shelter and a ride to their next destination.
Lucas’ dogs barked at a rap on the door, followed by “a strange voice” calling for Lucas. The farmer opened the door, terrified by the unexpected late-night visitors. Herold asked to stay the night. The men claimed to be Confederate soldiers. Lucas protested and said they could not stay. Booth pulled out a Bowie knife in a threatening manner and asked, “Old man, how do you like that?” Lucas responded, “I do not like that at all; I was always afraid of a knife.”21 The next morning, after a quick breakfast, Lucas’ son drove Booth and Herold in their family wagon to Port Conway, Virginia, in the Northern Neck. Before departing, Booth penned a sarcastic note, quoting Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Stuart’s dismissive inhospitality had stuck in Booth’s craw; “The sauce in meat is ceremony, meeting were bare without it.”22 Signing it “Stranger,” he included $2.50 and asked Lucas to deliver it to Stuart. Lucas’ son, driving a wagon pulled by two wretched-looking horses, dropped them off at a dilapidated building, the residence of an old fisherman, William Rollins, with ties to the Confederate signal service. Booth paid the boy for the ride and their hospitality.
At Port Conway, several riders crested a hill and approached Booth and Herold, who were on a landing near the Rappahannock River, waiting for Rollins to take them across the waterway and help them get to Bowling Green, Virginia. Mosby’s Rangers Lieutenant Mortimer Ruggles, Private Absalom Bainbridge, and Private Willie Jett approached the two men. Ruggles was the son of a general and the second in command of Captain Thomas Nelson Conrad’s spy unit. Months earlier, Conrad had staked out the White House, carefully recording Lincoln’s movements as part of the kidnapping operation. Recently, and nearby, Conrad had been arrested by Union authorities. The spymaster could not furnish Northern authorities with a good reason for being there. Ruggles gave Booth Conrad’s horse, Old Whitie, to ride. Booth made an immediate impression on Ruggles, as the Ranger revealed, “He was without a doubt disappointed at the reception he met in Virginia, and said he was prepared to meet any fate. The calm courage of the man while racked by suffering, impressed me in spite of myself, for there was no braggadocio about him; simply a determination to submit to the inevitable, parleying when it should become necessary to do so.”23
All three of Mosby’s men later claimed they met Booth by mere coincidence. It is more likely the group was sent to locate the assassin. Later, newspapers around the country quoted Jett alleging Mosby’s approval of Booth by supposedly stating, “By God I could take that man in my arms.”24
There is another good reason for the Rangers’ encounter with Booth. According to William Tidwell’s research, Mosby had a large stay-behind group of men and a reception group to escort either Booth or Harney. Piecing together parole lists, Tidwell was able to determine that scores of Rangers remained in the area during the time of Booth’s escape, so the trio encountering him may well not have been coincidental.25 As the former intelligence officer summed it up, “Multiple coincidences, they imply the existence of some central direction in the Northern Neck dedicated to the protection of John Wilkes Booth.”26
The Rangers agreed to accompany Booth and Herold across the river and find them a safe haven. Ruggles brought Booth and Herold to loyal Southerners, the Garretts, and fed the family a story that Booth and Herold were wounded Confederate soldiers who needed a place to rest for a few days.
With Booth ensconced at the Garretts’, Jett, in a hurry to see his girlfriend, took off for Bowling Green, Virginia. En route, he stopped at a rundown tavern with a seedy reputation known fittingly as the Trap. Later, piecing together clues from various sightings, Federal detectives arrested Jett in Bowling Green and forced him to escort them back to Booth’s hiding place.
On April 26, detectives and a Union cavalry troop guided by Jett approached the Garrett house. Decades later, Ruggles wrote, “I met a soldier of my command … who said, ‘the town is full of Yankees in search of Booth.’ ” The Confederate officer rushed back to the house and found Booth lying on the front lawn. Booth recognized the Ranger and asked, “Well, boys, what’s in the wind now?” Ruggles told him to run and hide in the ravine behind the house, as Yankees were headed his way. Booth then turned to Ruggles and said, “I’ll do as you say, boys, right off. Ride on! Good-by! It will never do for you to be found in my company.” Booth then turned and said, biting his lip in “desperate resolve, ‘rest assured of one thing, good friend, John Wilkes Booth will never be taken alive.’ ”27 Federal troops surrounded the Garretts’ barn, where Booth had hidden, and set it ablaze to coax his surrender.
Disobeying orders not to open fire, Sergeant Thomas H. “Boston” Corbett, of the 16th New York Cavalry, spied Booth through a crack in the wall in the barn and allegedly fired the bullet that felled him. Accounts differ on where the gunshot originated, but Corbett came forward after the fracas and claimed he fired on Booth in self-defense. A year earlier, Corbett and his unit had been battling Mosby and he had been captured by the Rangers and sent to Andersonville, spending several miserable months in the camp before his release in an eventual prisoner exchange. Known for his bizarre behavior, the result of his being a proverbial “mad hatter” due to exposure to mercury nitrate in his prewar career as a milliner, Corbett castrated himself, before the war, with a pair of scissors to avoid sexual temptation after being propositioned by prostitutes.28
Detectives found on Booth’s person a diary that included a bank draft he had obtained in Montreal in October. Mysteriously, many pages were ripped from the diary. The bullet severed the assassin’s spinal cord. He suffered an excruciating death, fully conscious until the end, whispering, “Kill me.”29
Only twenty-five miles away, Mosby and what was left of his command rested—and possibly waited. Mosby would have had compelling reasons to desire Booth’s escape or even death. His reputation was at stake, and links to the assassination had become toxic. But word of Booth’s death and of Johnston’s surrender to Sherman on April 26 reached Mosby around April 27 when he received a copy of the Richmond Whig. With the news, Mosby disbanded the remaining men in his command. The Gray Ghost would then lie low for several months. He not only had a price on his head but was motivated not to have any connection with the conspirators as the military trial was about to commence. On June 17, with the trial nearly over and any direct links connecting Mosby and the Rangers to the assassination seemingly avoided, Mosby turned himself in to the authorities at Lynchburg. He would always fervently deny any involvement in the assassination but was never confronted with probing questions about his possible links to the abduction of the president.
After the war, Grant befriended Mosby, protecting him from potential Federal harassment and giving him an exemption from arrest. Mosby became Grant’s Republican campaign manager in Virginia during the 1868 presidential election. He disavowed the Lost Cause and expressed disapproval of those who denied the role of slavery in the war, but he was not ashamed of having fought for his country. His principles generated hatred from some of his men. The former guerrilla leader received death threats, and one attempt was made to assassinate him near the train station in Warrenton.
Mosby returned to practicing law and was later appointed consul of Hong Kong, where he rooted out corruption and protected women who immigrated to the United States. His final position was US attorney for the Department of Justice. Mosby continued to influence lives while living in California. He spent time with a young George Patton Jr. on their family ranch in San Gabriel.30 America’s greatest guerrilla warfare practitioner’s lightning attacks and cavalry tactics undoubtedly had an impact on the young Patton’s mind as he developed his own tank and maneuver warfare tenets. Mosby remained true to his principles and would retain a mystique and gravitas—forever the Gray Ghost.
Powell and the other Lincoln assassination conspirators faced swift justice. The government opted for a military tribunal led by General “Black Dave” Hunter and other general officers, including hero of Washington, General Lew Wallace. Federal detectives and the prosecutors knew the Confederate Secret Service had played a crucial role in the conspiracy and set out to prove their case. Whether Booth and Powell received specific orders from Jefferson Davis or the Confederate Secret Service to murder the president and secretary of state or acted on their own remains a mystery to this day. Although this book does not attempt to solve that mystery, the evidence of the Secret Service’s complicity seems overwhelming, especially given the other assassination attempt and the kidnapping operation staffed and funded by the service. In the days before his execution, Powell maintained he was a soldier and working for the Secret Service. Crucially, the prosecution decided to try to prove the Confederates planned to assassinate Lincoln rather than to prove the Secret Service operation to kidnap the president. The government relied heavily on two witnesses, Dr. James B. Merritt and Charles A. Dunham (a.k.a. Sanford Conover, James Watson Wallace), to testify they heard George Sanders, Jacob Thompson, and other Confederates discuss plans for assassination. Dunham mixed fact and fiction, so it was hard to discern the truth in his testimony. Both men were proven liars in court and likely double agents, and portions of their testimony were deemed false during the trial. Puppet master George Sanders of the Confederate Secret Service in Montreal likely coached Dunham to perjure himself so that the deception could be revealed in order to blow up the Federal case. They printed handbills and a statement in the Montreal Evening Telegraph refuting the testimony point by point.31
The tainted testimony destroyed the government’s case against the Secret Service and Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials. The Secret Service’s plot to blow up the White House never entered the trial and would only come to light decades after the war.
Despite the tainted testimony, special judge advocate on the trial John A. Bingham summed up Davis’ and the Confederate Secret Service’s guilt in the operation to kill Lincoln in his final argument before the court: “What more is wanting? Surely no word further need be spoken to show that John Wilkes Booth was in this conspiracy; that John Surratt was in this conspiracy; and that Jefferson Davis and his several agents named, in Canada, were in this conspiracy.… Whatever may be the conviction of others, my own conviction is that Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty of this conspiracy as John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound on Abraham Lincoln.”32 Also entered into evidence at the trial was Davis’ reaction when he received a telegram, while moving from one temporary capital to another, notifying him that Lincoln had been assassinated. Davis hatefully responded, “Well, General, I don’t know; if it were to be done at all, it were better that it were well done; and if the same had been done to Andy Johnson, the beast, and to Secretary Stanton, the job would then be complete.”33
Bingham also tied Davis’ guilt to an October 13, 1864, ciphered letter from the Secret Service in Canada that stated, “Their friends would be set to work as he had directed,” which corresponded to Booth’s arrival and meetings with the Secret Service in Canada and the beginning of Booth’s mission to kidnap the president. Bingham explained, “The letter in cipher found on Booth’s possession is translated here by the use of the cipher machine [also found in Booth’s trunk] now in court [the machine was set to the code, “Come retribution”] which, as the testimony of [one of the witnesses] shows, he brought from the rooms of Davis’ state department in Richmond.” Bingham asked two simple questions: “Who gave Booth this secret cipher? Of what use was it to him if he was not in confederation with Davis?”34
Merritt’s and Dunham’s perjury did not affect the fate of the eight conspirators.
From the time of their arrest until the trial, most of the prisoners were shackled with iron balls and chains and forced to wear canvas hoods that covered their faces and heads, as ordered by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
Lewis Powell’s guilt in attempting to murder Secretary of State Seward was almost undeniable, but his fellow conspirators’ guilt was harder to prove. Powell remained tight-lipped and did not reveal much; and his lawyer claimed insanity as a defense. Interestingly, Atzerodt’s attorney held up his client’s well-known cowardice against the charge of attempting to kill Vice President Johnson, telling the commission that he could never have committed the crime and was unlikely to have been assigned it. Herold, the defense claimed, was a youth, impressionable “wax in the hands of a man like Booth.”35 And while Mary Surratt’s boarding house was considered “the nest that hatched the egg,” the prosecution still needed to prove collaboration on the innkeeper’s part, not just association, with the conspirators. Multiple witnesses, however, helped bridge that gap for many of the commission members.
The seven-week-long trial by a nine-member military commission ended after the jurors’ one-day deliberation. They condemned Powell, Surratt, Atzerodt, and Herold “to be hanged by the neck until he [or she] be dead”36 and the other four conspirators to lesser sentences. Surratt would be the first woman executed by the US government, despite five of the commission members requesting that President Johnson reduce her sentence because of her sex and age.
Ominously, in the final hours before his death, Powell highlighted the role of the Secret Service, who financed and organized the operation he was a part of, cryptically stating: “You have not got the half of them.”37 The Ranger also nobly pleaded for Mary Surratt’s life, claiming she did not know of the conspirators’ plans. On July 7, 1865, the four convicted prisoners met their death at the gallows constructed for them in the Old Arsenal building. Powell faced death bravely, tilting his head back to accept the hangman’s noose. Captain Christian Rath placed and tightened the hemp near his Adam’s apple and said, “I want you to die quick, Paine [sic].”
“You know best, Captain,” Powell said under the hood covering his head.
“Thank you; goodbye,”38 were Powell’s final words as his body dropped from the scaffold. However, he died hard, writhing in pain, jerking and convulsing for many minutes at the end of the rope. Powell’s spiritual adviser watched in horror but, when reflecting on Powell’s final minutes on earth, observed, “At least [he] gave to it something of dignity* by calmness, modesty and silence.”39
From their headquarters at St. Lawrence Hall, George Sanders and the leadership of the Confederate Secret Service in Canada completed their final mission—to build a myth that Booth had nothing to do with them or they with the assassination by demonstrating the Federal star witnesses were perjurers. It can be argued that the myth continues to this day. Many believe Booth was a madman and that he and Powell acted alone and had minimal ties to the Secret Service. After successfully destroying the government’s case against the Confederacy, Thompson and Sanders absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the remaining Confederate Secret Service fund and fled to Europe to live in exile. The men were joined by Confederate secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin, who burned the Secret Service files before departing from Richmond. The Confederate spymaster would make his own dramatic escape. Disguised as a Frenchman trying to buy land, he traveled to Florida and secured passage on a blockade running ship bound for the Caribbean. The Union navy intercepted and boarded the ship. To avoid detection, he donned an apron, smeared himself with grease, and impersonated a cook. The ship was carrying rice and sponges, which got wet, expanded, and blew apart the hull of the ship, sinking it, but he was rescued by British lighthouse ship Georgia, which brought him to Bimini.40 Fate was not finished with the elusive Confederate. The European-bound steamer he was on caught fire. After great difficultly, the crew extinguished the flames, and Benjamin eventually made it to England, where he lived out his final days as a barrister.
The full extent of Copperhead leader Clement Laird Vallandigham’s seditious dealings with the Confederate Secret Service was not revealed until long after the war. In the fall of 1864, an undercover Federal agent had infiltrated the Sons of Liberty, and several ringleaders of the movement were arrested and ultimately tried by military tribunal. Testimony in the trial proved Vallandigham to be the leader of the movement. In 1866 the US Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that military tribunals had no power to try civilians outside a war zone and when civilian courts were open. Vallandigham and many others would escape justice. With the war over, he jumped back into politics, ran on an anti-Reconstruction platform for the Democratic seat for Ohio in the Senate, and lost. The gifted fifty-year-old lawyer went back into private law practice. While conducting a demonstration during his defense of a client who killed a man in a barroom brawl, he accidentally shot and killed himself after drawing and firing what he thought was an unloaded pistol.
One conspirator who evaded the hangman’s noose was John Surratt. Shortly before the assassination, the Confederate Secret Service agent fled first to Richmond and then to case Elmira Federal Prison, in western New York (for a possible prison break), but quickly fled to Montreal. He was accompanied by agent Sarah Slater. Federal detectives theorized Slater may have been assigned the mission to courier the orders to Surratt and Booth to assassinate the president.41 The often-veiled spy vixen known as the French Woman disappeared and was never heard from again.42
Aided by Sanders and others, Surratt went into hiding first in Canada. With Federal detectives hot on his trail and a $25,000 bounty on his head, he donned glasses, dyed his hair, and fled across the Atlantic to Liverpool. Surratt stayed on the run, showing up in Italy next, where he joined the Papal Zouaves, an infantry unit dedicated to defending the papal state. Surratt assumed the alias surname of Watson. One of Surratt’s acquaintances from Maryland traveled to Italy and joined the Papal Zouaves to capture him and collect the reward money. But Surratt, a former postmaster, intercepted a letter detailing the plans for his arrest. He fled again, but Italian authorities seized him and allegedly threw the spy in a prison cell perched at a height of more than 200 feet, from which he managed to escape. According to one account, Surratt executed a daring escape by jumping out the window as two men standing on a narrow ledge twenty-eight feet below “with an outstretched blanket broke the fall.”43 However, it is much more likely that Surratt escaped with the assistance of his guards by crawling through a sewer. An account of Surratt’s escape appeared in a newspaper account: “He had lowered himself into the sewer and had made his way out at an opening into the neighboring rivulet.… As soon as the Lieutenant heard of the escape, he ordered the entire party [of guards] to be put under arrest. Still, I remember that a smile of satisfaction seemed to play around his lips, and there is no doubt in my mind that he secretly rejoiced at what had occurred.”44
On the run, Surratt boarded a steamship headed for Alexandria and was arrested in Egypt in November 1866. US authorities detained the conspirator, still wearing his Papal Zouaves uniform, and brought him back to the United States, where he stood trial in a civilian court in 1867 and a hung jury allowed him to walk away a free man.
* The government did not afford the same dignity to Powell. His skull was unceremoniously dumped in a wooden box, where it lay for decades. In 1991 a researcher at the Smithsonian found Powell’s skull and finally returned it to his family, who laid it to rest next to his mother in Geneva Cemetery, Seminole County, Florida.