With his simple plan, Jones confounded the whole manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. A lone Confederate agent, without resources and nearly penniless, had just checkmated the frantic pursuit by thousands of men being orchestrated from Washington by Secretary of War Stan-ton.
Stanton may have lost Booth’s trail in the pines, but he was closing in on the author of the notorious “Sam” letter found in Booth’s room at the National the night of the assassination. On the afternoon of April 16, Charles Dana received a telegram from Provost Marshal James McPhail in Baltimore: “I have traced Samuel Arnold to Fortress Monroe. Will send two men for him who know him personally. Send me a telegraph order to make arrest at fortress. Telegraphing for arrest may flush it.” Dana replied within fifteen minutes: “Arrest Samuel Arnold, suspected of being concerned in the murder of the President.” The hunt for Booth’s old school chum was on.
The same day, April 16, Confederate Lieutenant General R. S. Ewell sent a remarkable letter to U. S. Grant, signed by him and also on behalf of sixteen other Confederate generals. They didn’t kill Lincoln, Ewell swore. He expressed “unqualified abhorrence and indignation for the assassination of the President of the United States.. . . No language can adequately express the shock produced upon myself, in common with all the other general officers confined here with me, by the occurrence of this appalling crime, and by the seeming tendency in the public mind to connect the South and Southern men with it.. . . [W]e are not assassins, not the allies of assassins, be they from the North or from the South.”
Stanton, along with most government and military officials, as well as the American people, still blamed the Confederacy for Lincoln’s murder. Booth, it was widely believed, acted merely as its agent. But if it was not true, perhaps the resources of the Confederacy could be deployed to assist in the manhunt. In a startling move, Stanton considered enlisting the Confederacy’s legendary “gray ghost” and cavalry genius, John Singelton Mosby, in the manhunt. On April 16 Stanton telegrammed instructions to General Hancock, soon to parley over surrender terms with Mosby at Winchester, Virginia: “In holding an interview with Mosby it may be needless to caution an old soldier like you to guard against surprise or danger to yourself; but the recent murders show such astounding wickedness that too much precaution cannot be taken. If Mosby is sincere he might do much toward detecting and apprehending the murderers of the President.”
“That Vile Rabble of Human Bloodhounds”
No one expected Booth to stop running. Soon the manhunters would track Booth to the Surrattsville tavern, and then to Doctor Mudd’s. But then the trail went cold. The assassin seemed to simply vanish. Back in Washington, the mood at the War Department turned foul. Had he done it? Had Lincoln’s murderer actually escaped?
Booth was a man of impulse and action, not patience and inertia, and he knew the river was tantalizingly close. He was eager to cross it, so that he and Davey could be among friends on the Virginia side this very night. And he was convinced he could be, if only Jones agreed to act decisively. Hiding in a pine thicket for days seemed to increase the danger of capture, not reduce it. Still he deferred to the river ghost’s judgment. Booth knew that he still had no choice. Thomas Jones was Booth’s only hope. If he and Herold defied Jones, if they left the pines that night and made a desperate run for the river on their own, they would almost certainly be captured or killed. Even if they made it to the riverbank, where would they find a boat? Jones was the only option. Moreover, something about Jones made Booth trust him. The operative’s laconic, steely, no-nonsense manner appealed to Booth, who fancied himself an astute judge of other men’s hearts. And Jones did know the surrounding terrain and the river as well as Booth knew the streets of Washington and the passageways of Ford’s Theatre. If this cunning, rebel nighthawk could not get Booth across, no one could.
Jones had spoken emphatically: “You must stay right here, however long, and wait till I can see some way to get you out.” But there would be no doctor. Jones explained that it was too dangerous to bring a local Maryland physician to the pines. Once Booth crossed the river he could seek a rebel doctor in Virginia. Booth and Herold surrendered to Jones’s plan and placed themselves in his hands. But the assassin had a few urgent questions. What did the people think? What could Jones tell him about what people were saying about the assassination? Jones assured him that most men of Southern sympathies were gratified by Booth’s act.
Booth wanted more. If it was not too much trouble, he asked, could Jones please bring some current Washington newspapers—say, yesterday’s Daily Morning Chronicle, the Evening Star, or the National Intelligencer—from Saturday, April 15, the day Lincoln died, or from today, the sixteenth, Black Easter? Incredibly, despite his pain, exhaustion, and dire, life-threatening predicament, the actor was eager to read his reviews. Booth was especially keen to pore over the Intelligencer and enjoy a particular article—the contents already quite familiar to him—he expected to find in its pages.
As Jones prepared to leave the thicket, he offered Davey Herold something of more practical use than newspapers—the location of a freshwater spring thirty to forty yards away. The assassins were thirsty, and the spring would sustain them while they waited to cross the river. Jones warned Herold to approach it cautiously because there was a little footpath near it that was used by the locals. Federal troops would never discover it, but better that no one, not even friendly Southerners, lay eyes on the fugitives.
Jones mounted his horse. They would go down to the river as soon as it was safe, he reiterated. Until then, he promised, he would not abandon the assassins. He would come to them every morning, carrying food and newspapers—and hope. Jones spurred his horse, navigated slowly through the pine trees, and vanished from sight. For the next twenty-four hours, until—or if—Jones returned on Monday morning, April 17, Booth and Herold were on their own.
Riding home from the pine thicket, Thomas Jones contemplated the predicament he had just gotten himself into. When he awoke on the morning of April 16, he was just another veteran of Confederate service whose war had come to an end. All Jones wanted to do was lick his wounds, recover as best he could from his financial losses, and work his farm. But now, just a few hours later, he placed himself in greater peril than at any time during his years of secret, wartime exploits. Never had he been entrusted with a more dangerous, and as he would soon learn, valuable secret. An entire nation was demanding with one voice, “Where is John Wilkes Booth?” Thomas Jones was one of four men in the country, including the Coxes and their overseer, who knew the answer. Jones also knew something else. If Union troops caught him harboring the murderer of Abraham Lincoln, the best he could hope for was a long return visit to the Old Capitol prison. The more likely punishment was death. Jones had no illusions about how the North would view him: “I would be looked upon as the vile aider and abettor of a wretch stained with as dark a crime as the recording angel ever wrote down in the eternal book of doom.”
Jones’s impromptu plan had one overriding theme: do nothing to attract suspicion. That meant following his daily routines and doing nothing out of the ordinary. Getting the newspapers was easy enough. He collected them throughout the war and obtaining them now would not seem unusual. After all, everyone wanted to read the latest news about Lincoln’s assassination, and if federal troops caught him with several newspapers in his saddlebags, Jones could plead natural, innocent curiosity. The food would be harder to explain. Why was a local farmer riding around the countryside with a haversack or saddlebags stuffed with provisions? And how could Jones explain the copious bags of feed needed for Booth and Herold’s hungry horses? And what about the boat? He had to get it ready to be used at a moment’s notice. When the time came to flee to the river, Jones would have to rush to the pine thicket and get Booth and Herold moving fast. The previous day Jones had discovered two Union cavalrymen lurking near his little bateau at Pope’s Creek. Perhaps they were staking it out, waiting for Lincoln’s assassin to claim it. No, it was too dan
gerous to take a chance on the bateau. Fortunately for Booth and Herold, Thomas Jones possessed one last boat, an eleven-foot-long, lead-colored, flat-bottomed skiff hidden in marsh grass upstream from the bateau on Pope’s Creek. As far as he knew, Union troops hadn’t yet found the skiff.
Jones had to secure that second boat immediately: “Booth’s only chance for crossing the river depended upon my being able to retain possession and control of one of these two boats.” To formulate a plan, Jones summoned up all of his wartime experience in evading Union patrols. As soon as he arrived home Jones instructed his former slave Henry Woodland to take the skiff out every morning and fish for shad with the gill nets. By this time it was not unusual to see a black man fishing with nets on the river in southern Maryland, and Woodland wouldn’t attract much attention from Union patrols. Jones instructed Woodland to cast off from Pope’s Creek on Monday morning but not to row the boat back to the creek. Instead, he was to land at a place called Dent’s Meadow. Then, for the rest of the week, Woodland was to keep up that routine, casting off from Dent’s each morning, and landing there in the afternoon with his catch, taking care to conceal the boat from thieves. Jones never told Henry the special significance of Dent’s Meadow—the place he had chosen as the perfect location from which to take Booth and Herold across the river.
Jones considered the spot favorable terrain: “Dent’s meadow was then a very retired spot back of Huckleberry farm, about one and a half miles north of Pope’s Creek, at least a mile from the public road and with no dwelling house in sight. This meadow is a narrow valley opening to the river between high and steep cliffs that were then heavily timbered and covered by an almost impenetrable undergrowth of laurel. A small stream flows through the meadow, widening into a little creek as it approaches the river. It was from this spot I determined to make the attempt of sending Booth across to Virginia.” Jones had chosen the place, but now he had to await the right moment.
On Easter Sunday, between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., George Atzerodt showed up at the home of Hezekiah Metz, about twenty-two miles from Washington, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Atzerodt joined Metz and three of his guests, Somerset Leaman, James E. Leaman, and Nathan Page, for the midday meal. Atzerodt was known to the people in these parts by another name, “Andrew Atwood.” Somerset had known him for years, and when Atzerodt arrived at Metz’s he teased him:
“Are you the man that killed Abe Lincoln?” The joke must have frozen the German in his tracks.
Atzerodt laughed and said, “Yes.”
“Well, Andrew,” Leaman continued, “I want to know the truth of it; is it so?” He asked if Lincoln had really been assassinated.
“Yes, it is so; and he died yesterday evening about 3 o’clock.”
Leaman asked if it was also true that Seward’s throat was cut, and two of his sons were stabbed.
“Yes,” Atzerodt replied, “Mr. Seward was stabbed, or rather cut at the throat, but not killed, and two of his sons were stabbed.”
Leaman asked if it was also true that General Grant had been murdered.
“No, I don’t know whether that is so or not; I don’t suppose it is so; if he had been, I should have heard it.”
At the dinner table James Leaman also asked about Grant, and Atzerodt replied: “No, I don’t suppose he was; if he was killed, he would have been killed probably by a man that got on the same car that Grant got on.” Atzerodt did not know it, but with those words he had just sealed his doom. After dinner, oblivious to the danger, he continued on to the home of his cousin, Hartman Richter, arriving there between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.
Samuel Mudd decided that he could not let Easter Sunday, April 16, pass without doing something. By breakfast time, 7:00 a.m., Booth and Herold enjoyed a twelve-hour head start from his farm. If all had gone well, they should have reached William Burtles’s place well before sunrise. Although Mudd did not know it, the fugitives made even better progress by bypassing Burtles altogether and riding straight to Captain Cox’s.
Mudd considered his predicament. He could choose to do nothing, and wait for federal troops to visit his farm, but perhaps the soldiers might never come. Or they might. Someone might even tip them off. The doctor’s servants and former slaves knew he had taken in an injured patient the very night of Lincoln’s assassination. Some of them had even seen Booth while he rested in bed or hobbled around on his crutches. Too many people had seen Booth for Mudd to keep the visit a secret forever.
Several of Mudd’s neighbors were aware that he knew John Wilkes Booth. Worshippers had spotted them together last winter at St. Mary’s on two occasions. And how long would it be before the authorities interviewed George Gardiner, the man who sold Booth the one-eyed horse, or Thomas L. Gardiner, the youth who delivered the animal to the actor? Peter Trotter, the blacksmith, would surely remember the day when Mudd and Booth brought the handicapped mare over for a new set of horseshoes. Moreover, several witnesses had seen Mudd and Booth together in Washington. It was inevitable. At some point, probably soon, the soldiers or detectives would discover two things about Dr. Mudd: he had visitors on assassination night, and, even more damning, he had links to Booth.
Mudd decided to seize the initiative in a way calculated to throw suspicion off himself. Today he would inform on—but not actually betray—Lincoln’s assassin. Mudd crafted a simple but clever cover story. He would merely report that two strangers, a man with a broken leg and his youthful companion, had called at his home unexpectedly, in the predawn hours of April 15. He treated the injury, and the strangers did not stay long. He was suspicious of these men, he would say, and thus felt duty bound to report them to the Thirteenth New York Cavalry in Bryantown. Those were the bare bones.
Then Mudd added a clever touch. Instead of riding into Bryantown himself and facing the troops, he would ask his second cousin, Dr. George Mudd, a loyal Unionist, a species rare in these parts, to report the strangers on his behalf. He hoped that having this information come from the lips of a man above suspicion by the federal authorities would allow him to hide beneath his cousin’s Unionist coattails if the troops wanted to question him. George Mudd’s vague, secondhand report would contain so few details that it would hardly prompt the soldiers to leap into their saddles and gallop off after two strangers. No, the information would be useless until they followed the tip to its source, Samuel Mudd. Lieutenant Dana would have to send a patrol to Sam’s farm to press him for details about the strangers. All that would take time, which would give Booth even more time to put miles between himself and his pursuers.
After Easter services on the morning of the sixteenth, Mudd asked his cousin George the favor of passing his story on to the cavalry in Bryantown. Mudd returned home, with an immense feeling of relief. Now, when the soldiers came, it would be at his behest, and not because he had fallen under suspicion. Through the afternoon and into the evening, Mudd anticipated the arrival of the manhunters. But they did not come. Unbeknownst to him, cousin George failed to ride into Bryan-town to report the strangers.
By the evening of April 16, Booth enjoyed a twenty-four-hour head start on any pursuers coming from Mudd’s farm. And thanks to George Mudd’s delay in filing his cousin’s report, Union troops, unaware that Booth had even been at Samuel Mudd’s, had not begun their pursuit from that place. From the viewpoint of anxious officials back in Washington—Secretary of War Stanton chief among them—the progress of the manhunt was even worse. John Wilkes Booth had assassinated the president almost forty-eight hours ago but the manhunters had no solid leads. Yes, the police, detectives, and military officers had discovered a number of leads on Booth’s cat’s-paws and conspirators, but none led to the assassin-in-chief.
Hats, Deringer pistols, abandoned knives, broken revolvers, jackets, one-eyed horses, bankbooks, mysterious letters, plugs of tobacco, hotel registers, notes to vice presidents, theatrical trunks, spurs, bridles, saddles, and eyewitness accounts were all fine clues that made the assassin and his accomplices seem tantalizingly vivid and ne
ar. These clues would make good evidence at a criminal trial as proofs of identity and guilt. The evidence collected on April 14 and 15 certainly confirmed that it was Booth who had shot Lincoln, and that he seemed to have not one, but several, coconspirators. And the contents of Atzerodt’s room at the Kirkwood—plus Booth’s note to Johnson—suggested that the vice president had also been marked for death. But all this evidence spoke to Booth’s guilt, not his escape plan. Only the “Sam” letter, which suggested that two accomplices lived in Baltimore, hinted at Booth’s possible destination. Booth could be anywhere. Sightings across the country of false Booths did not help the manhunters. With each passing hour Booth’s trail grew a little colder. Soon, he would vanish from sight, driving Stan-ton and his men into a frenzy. Booth’s expertise in eluding the man-hunters augmented, by the hour, the government’s embarrassment over its failure to apprehend him.
On the night of April 16, Stanton had no idea of Booth’s whereabouts or destination. Yes, it was probably the assassin who gave the name “Booth” to Sergeant Cobb at the bridge and fled into Maryland. It was fortunate for Stanton that the persistent stable man Fletcher had chased Herold that far and revealed Booth’s crossing earlier than the manhunters would have otherwise discovered it. But where did he go after that? At 8:30 p.m. Quartermaster General Meigs telegrammed Colonel Newport, chief quartermaster at Baltimore, with new instructions for the hunt that revealed the manhunters’ confusion about Booth’s intentions: “The murderers of the President and Secretary of State have, it is believed, gone southeast, and will perhaps attempt to escape by water to the Eastern Shore, or to board some vessel waiting for them, or some vessel going to sea. The Potomac will be patrolled by steamers from Washington.. . . The object is to catch the murderers. Vigilance and speed.” Perhaps, Meigs feared, other conspirators awaited Booth at the shore with an oceangoing vessel, ready to put to sea and sail or steam all the way to France or England for sanctuary. During the war, Confederate blockade-runners had made the dangerous crossing scores of times. Perhaps one was anchored somewhere off the Maryland coast, ready to embark on one last, daring voyage.
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