What Booth said to Cox on the front porch of Rich Hill around 1:00 a.m. on April 16—as well as the conversations and plans that followed during the next few hours that the actor and Herold spent in the house—remain a mystery. Naturally, Cox and his son later denied that the assassin and his scout ever set foot in their home. When Oswell Swann swore that he saw Booth and Herold go inside, a faithful Cox slave, Mary Swann, called him a liar and backed up her captain. But given Booth’s state of mind, the precariousness of his position, and the extraordinary thing that the colonel and his son were about to do to help their guests, there is little doubt that Booth unburdened himself and confessed all to his hosts. The assassin of the president of the United States was in their midst, injured, desperate, and on the run from a frenzied manhunt. Father and son beheld the murderer, then decided to save him. Cox told Booth that there was only one man, a person of very special skills, who could get them across the Potomac into Virginia.
In the morning, after sunrise, they would summon him. But for now it was much too dangerous for Booth and Herold to remain at Rich Hill. Instead, Cox explained, he would hide them in a nearly impenetrable, heavily wooded pine thicket some distance from his house. No one would search for them there, Cox assured them, and it was extremely unlikely that any of the locals would stumble upon them. They were not to build a fire. Then, in the morning, someone would come for them. That person would signal them with a peculiar whistle as he approached. They were to beware anyone who failed to make that sound. After wolfing down the food that Cox offered, Booth and Herold mounted up for the ride to the pine thicket. Cox ordered his overseer, Franklin Robey, to take them there.
Oswell Swann still waited for them outside, perhaps hoping for an additional fee to guide the strangers to another destination. When Booth and Herold emerged from the house, Davey walked straight to his horse, neglecting the actor’s disability. Booth, standing beside his horse, impatient and helpless, chided him in an annoyed voice: “Don’t you know I can’t get on?” Davey came back and helped his master into the saddle. Booth paid Swann $12 for his services, and then, to throw suspicion off their hosts, he and Herold complained conspicuously about Cox’s lack of hospitality. “I thought Cox was a man of Southern feeling,” murmured Booth. If Swann took the bait, he went home believing that Cox had rebuffed his unwanted midnight callers. Just to be sure, David Herold threatened him: “Don’t you say anything—if you tell that you saw anybody you will not live long.” If their luck held, they would cross the river to Virginia sometime after nightfall on April 16, between sixteen and twenty-four hours from now. If, that is, they could survive just one more day in Maryland.
Booth and Herold entered the pines, dismounted, and tied off their horses. The animals had served them well, but they were hungry and thirsty and unused to spending the night outdoors and in the open. These were city stable horses that rented by the hour or the day, not expedition horses suited for days in the field. Exhausted, the two men unrolled their blankets on the damp earth, lay down, and gazed up at the immense black sky decorated by countless points of twinkling light. It would be morning in a few hours. If Colonel Cox’s word was true, it was safe to doze off until then.
The rising sun and chirping birds woke Booth and Herold early in the morning. Now they could do nothing but wait. Back at Rich Hill, Samuel Cox had to find out whether his man would actually help Booth and Herold. Cox instructed his eighteen-year-old son, Samuel Jr., to ride over to “Huckleberry” Farm, about four miles to the southeast, and bring the owner, Thomas A. Jones, to Rich Hill right away. Cox warned the boy to be cautious and told him that if anyone, especially soldiers, stopped and questioned him on the way and asked where he was going, he should tell the truth about his destination. But if asked why he was going there, then the youth must not disclose the reason. Instead, he should lie and say that he was heading to Huckleberry to ask Jones for some seed corn. It was planting season, and no one would suspect such an innocent request from one farmer to another.
Around 8:00 a.m., Samuel Cox Jr. arrived at Huckleberry, just as Confederate agent and river boatman Thomas A. Jones finished his breakfast. The secret service veteran spent his entire life trailblazing through the fields, thickets, and forests of rural Maryland and navigating its streams, marshes, and rivers. During the war he had ferried hundreds of men, and the occasional female spy like the beautiful Sarah Slater, across the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. On some nights Jones organized not one but two trips across the Potomac in a small rowboat. In addition, he transported the Confederate mail between the two states and sent south fresh Union newspapers that provided intelligence to Richmond and were scrutinized by the highest leaders of the Confederacy. Jones was an indispensable, mysterious, and laconic secret agent fighting the shadow war along the watery borders between Union and rebel territory. The Union army had never caught him in action—he was a river ghost to the boys in blue. “Not one letter or paper was ever lost,” he boasted. And his mastery of the river was so complete that he was even able to calculate the most propitious time, almost down to the minute, to begin a trip across. “I had noticed that a little before sunset, the reflection of the high bluffs near Pope’s Creek extended out into the Potomac till it nearly met the shadows cast by the Virginia woods, and therefore, at that time of evening it was very difficult to observe as small an object floating in the river as a rowboat.”
Jones’s service to the Confederacy had cost him dearly. Suspected of disloyal activity, federal forces arrested and jailed him for months at the Old Capitol prison in Washington. Then his beloved wife died. He had to sell his other farm at Pope’s Creek, and when he went to Richmond at the beginning of April 1865 to collect the money owed to him by the Confederate government, he discovered that the army had evacuated the city and Jones went unpaid. He lost $2,300 due for three years’ service, and, even worse, upon the collapse of the Confederacy, he lost the $3,000 he had invested in Confederate bonds at the beginning of the war. All of this meant that Thomas Jones needed as much money as he could lay his hands on.
The Cox boy dutifully mentioned the seed corn, but once he saw that Jones was alone, he whispered the true nature of his mission. His father wanted to see Jones at once. “Some strangers were at our house last night,” the boy said. Jones’s eyes lit up—could he mean the heroes who assassinated President Lincoln? The report electrified Jones. The day before, on the evening of Saturday, April 15, around the time that Booth and Herold left the sanctuary of Dr. Mudd’s and undertook the next leg of their escape, Jones happened to be visiting his former farm at Pope’s Creek. Two Union soldiers rode up and asked what appeared to be an innocent question. Who owned that little boat down in the creek? For Jones the war ended when Richmond fell on April 3 and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on the ninth. There would be no more secret river crossings, no more thrilling escapes from Union army and navy pursuers, no more mysterious signal lights flashed across the water from one state to another. The war was over, and Jones saw no need for any prolonged cunning. He told the soldiers that the boat was his.
His response prompted a strange but vaguely worded warning from one of the soldiers. “You had better keep an eye to it. There are suspicious characters somewhere in the neighborhood who will be wanting to cross the river, and if you don’t look sharp you will lose your boat.”
Since when did Union soldiers care whether a Southern farmer in disloyal territory lost his rowboat? There was more to this.
“Indeed,” replied Jones. “I will look after it. I would not like to lose it, as it is my fishing boat and the shad are beginning to run.”
The soldiers whispered to each other, then seemed to nod in agreement. The one who asked about the boat turned to Jones. “Have you heard the news, friend?”
No, he had not, replied Jones.
“Then I will tell you. Our President was assassinated at 10 o’clock last night.”
Jones uttered an ambiguous exclamation. “Is it possible!”<
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Yes, the soldier answered, “and the men who did it came this way.”
Now, a day later, Jones felt it in his bones: Colonel Cox wanted to see him about something connected to the assassination.
Jones saddled up and accompanied young Cox to Rich Hill. Although he had questions, Jones spoke little during the ride. His wartime experiences taught him to never talk about dangerous subjects except when absolutely necessary. Once they got to Rich Hill, Colonel Cox could do the talking; Jones would do the listening. Until then, the riders trotted northeast quietly, their silence broken only by harmless remarks about the weather or the condition of the roads. When Jones arrived at Rich Hill at about 9:00 a.m., he saw Colonel Cox waiting outside at the front gate. Jones dismounted, and Cox led him to an open place where no one could hide and eavesdrop on their conversation. An experienced secret agent, Jones sensed that Cox wanted to tell him something important. But his experience also counseled him to let his friend tell him in his own way, at his own pace. They spoke in pleasantries for several minutes, until Cox could avoid the subject no more. “Tom, I had visitors about four o’clock this morning.”
Normally Jones possessed the talent to remain stone silent and let another man talk, but now he could not restrain himself. He blurted out, “Who were they, and what did they want?”
“They want to get across the river,” Cox explained. He paused, then spoke in a whisper. “Have you heard that Lincoln was killed Friday night?”
Yes, Jones replied, telling Cox about his encounter with the two soldiers.
For a full minute Cox did not speak. Then he broke the silence: “Tom, we must get those men who were here this morning across the river.”
Jones’s intuition was right—not only did Cox want to see him about the assassination, the killers were here! With that, Cox opened the flood-gates and told Jones everything about the late-night visit from Booth and Herold. “Tom, you must get him across.”
Jones was no coward—four years of loyal, dangerous service to the Confederacy had proved that. But the war was over. Jones mulled the situation over: “I knew that to assist in any way the assassin of Mr. Lincoln would be to put my life in jeopardy. I knew that the whole of southern Maryland would soon be—nay, was even then—swarming with soldiers and bloodhounds on the trail, eager to avenge the murder of their beloved president and reap their reward. I hesitated for a moment as I weighed these matters.”
Cox implored him a third time: “Tom, can’t you put these men across?”
Jones made up his mind. “I will see what I can do, but the odds are against me. I must see these men; where are they?”
Where was John Wilkes Booth? That is exactly what the entire country—Stanton and his men in Washington, soldiers and detectives in the field, sailors on the rivers and at sea, the American people everywhere, and, of course, the newspapers—wanted to know. And when would he be captured? The daily papers were filled with ridiculous predictions. On April 16, the Chicago Tribune, several hundred miles away from the center of action in Washington, announced that Lincoln’s assassin would be taken momentarily: “The escape of the paracide, Booth, and his confederates can only be for a few days or hours. Millions of eyes are in vigilant search of them, and soon they will be in the hands of justice . . . no place on this side of perdition can shelter them.” Except for a pine thicket, perhaps. Ignorant of the situation, optimistic editors in faraway Chicago predicted Booth’s “quick capture and hanging.” Then, to hedge their bets, they published an absurd and contradictory headline: “The Assassin Arrested, or Still at Large.” Was he still on the run, the Tribune asked, or was there any truth to the “unconfirmed report that Booth was arrested at 9:00 a.m. near Fort Hastings on the Bladensburg Road,” when the foolish assassin “approached our pickets boldly.”
The April 16 edition of the New York Herald shared the Chicago Tribune’s optimism: “The most expert detectives in the country are engaged in the investigation, and no pains, labor, skill or expense will be spared in its prosecution.”
Captain Cox told Thomas Jones that his overseer Franklin Robey had guided Booth and Herold in the middle of the night to a pine thicket about a mile west of his house. Lincoln’s killer was there now, waiting for someone to come and rescue him. Cox gave Jones the whistle code, a trio of varying notes, and cautioned him to approach the fugitives warily. Heavily armed and skittish, they might kill him. “Take care how you approach them. They are fully armed and might shoot you through mistake.”
Alone, Jones rode west toward his unsought rendezvous with Lincoln’s assassin. The sun was at his back. That would make him a more difficult target.
Soon after he entered the pines, Jones saw movement. It was not the fugitives. Instead, he found an unattended bay mare, with black legs, mane, and tail, and a white star on her forehead. The horse, fitted with a saddle and bridle, wandered around and grazed in a small clearing made some time previously for a tobacco bed. Jones tied the animal to a tree and pressed forward. Quietly, he inched deeper into the woods. The pines were thick now, and Jones could not see more than thirty or forty feet in front of him. He’d better give the signal soon, he thought, before he caught the two men by surprise and they shot him. Jones stopped in his tracks and whistled an odd mix of notes, like an intoxicated bluebird.
David Herold, “scarcely more than a boy,” Jones thought, rose from the brush and aimed his Spencer carbine at him. The weapon was cocked and ready to fire. “Who are you, and what do you want,” demanded Herold. He brandished the weapon menacingly.
“I come from Cox,” Jones replied. “He told me I would find you here. I am a friend; you have nothing to fear from me.”
Herold stared at Jones, then, satisfied, relaxed his tense grip on the Spencer and spoke curtly. “Follow me.” He guided Jones thirty yards deeper into the pines, through thick undergrowth, to a man partly concealed by the brush. Jones’s excitement grew. He was about to discover the answer to the question that, for the past thirty-six hours, possessed an entire nation—where was John Wilkes Booth?
“This friend comes from Captain Cox,” said Herold, looking down to a man on the ground.
Nearly overcome by a mixture of thrill and fear, Jones saw John Wilkes Booth for the first time. “He was lying on the ground with his head supported by his hand. His carbine, pistols and knife were close behind him. A blanket was drawn partly over him. His slouch hat and crutch were lying by him. He was dressed in dark—I think black— clothes . . . travel-stained . . . though he was exceedingly pale and his features bore the evident trace of suffering, I have seldom, if ever, seen a more strikingly handsome man.”
Prior to meeting Booth, Jones had little enthusiasm for this risky scheme. Yes, he had promised Cox that he would help, and he would never go back on his word to his old friend. But he did not relish the duty. Meeting the assassin changed everything.
“His voice was pleasant,” noted Jones. “Though he seemed to be suffering intense pain from his broken leg, his manner was courteous and polite,” he observed with approval. Booth, even in these dire circumstances, remembered how to please an audience, and Jones was smitten. “But sooner had I seen him in his helpless and suffering condition than I gave my whole mind to the problem of how to get him across the river. Murderer though I knew him to be, his condition so enlisted my sympathy in his behalf that my horror of his deed was almost forgotten in my compassion for the man, and I felt it my bounden duty to do all I could to aid him; and I made up my mind, be the consequences to me what they might, from that time forth my every energy should be bent to the accomplishment of what then seemed to be the well-nigh hopeless task of getting him to Virginia.”
Booth confided what Jones already knew—he had killed Lincoln. The assassin conceded that the odds were against him. “He said he knew the United States Government would use every means in its power to secure his capture.” But, vowed the actor, his aroused black eyes glowing with their signature brightness, “John Wilkes Booth will never be taken
alive.” Thomas Jones was sure he meant it.
Jones proposed a plan. He would do all he could to get Booth and Herold across to Virginia, but they must leave it to him to decide when and how they would make the attempt. Patience was essential. Jones was willing to assume great personal risk, but not to lead a blatantly suicidal mission. “You must stay right here, however long, and wait till I can see some way to get you out; and I do not believe I can get you out until this hue and cry is somewhat over. Meantime, I will see that you are fed.” Jones hoped that the soldiers and detectives scouring the area would give up soon and ride on to new territory once they concluded that Booth was not hiding nearby.
Until then, Booth and Herold must not leave the pine thicket, make noise, or do anything that might let anyone know they were there. Jones said they had to wait for exactly the right moment to cross the Potomac. They needed a dark night, smooth water, deserted riverbanks, and the departure of many of the soldiers and detectives who had already followed Booth south into Maryland. That might take days. Jones persuaded Booth and Herold to adopt his ingenious, counterintuitive plan. The best way for them to escape, Jones reasoned, was to stop running from their pursuers and to go into hiding. Manhunters were already concentrating south of Washington. Soon federal forces would join David Dana and infest Charles County. It was smarter to try to escape by standing still, letting the manhunters sweep through the region, before they moved on to search elsewhere.
Manhunt Page 18