On Monday morning, April 17, Thomas Jones appeared to go about his regular business. He tended to chores, ate his usual breakfast at the customary time, and made sure that Henry Woodland continued his daily fishing expeditions. At the pine thicket, Booth and Herold, awake for hours, wondered if their benefactor would return. Jones pulled on his baggy, deep-pocketed overcoat and thrust his arms through the sleeves. He grabbed some bread, butter, and ham, filled a flask with coffee, and stuffed everything into his pockets. He folded the newspapers, printed on soft, thick rag paper, and stashed them in his coat, too. Then, in a clever ruse, he carried a basket of corn on his arm to throw off any Union troops he might encounter. If stopped and questioned, he would claim that he was on his way to feed his hogs that ran free in the woods. A little before 10:00 a.m. Jones mounted his horse and rode toward the pine thicket.
About one hundred yards from Booth’s camp, Jones dismounted and led his horse forward on foot, then tied him. Just as he did the previous morning, Jones walked ahead slowly until, within earshot of the assassins, he whistled the secret melody. This time Booth and Herold welcomed him, not with a well-aimed carbine pointed at his heart, but with open arms. They had not eaten in almost thirty hours and eyed the contents of Jones’s pockets hungrily as he unloaded them. Booth especially wanted the other treats those pockets yielded—newspapers! At last, three long days after the assassination, he could read about his history-making actions and how they were reported to the nation.
Booth’s pleasure could not hide his worsening condition. The leg was bad, and Booth was obviously in more pain than when Jones first saw him twenty-four hours ago. The assassin said he was impatient to continue his escape across the river where he could find shelter indoors and see another doctor. Jones started explaining the situation again but became distracted when he heard a familiar and terrifying noise in the distance—clanking metal and horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Instantly Jones recognized the sound—cavalry sabers slapping the saddles of Union troops riding in their direction. It was too late for Herold and Jones to boost Booth up on the bay mare and gallop away, and a fight was out of the question: Booth couldn’t walk, Jones was unarmed, and Herold was untested in battle. Plus, with only two revolvers and a Spencer carbine, they couldn’t hold off a patrol of Union cavalry for long. The trio hugged the ground and held their breath. The horses, barreling down a road near the pine thicket, closed the distance. They got within two hundred yards. It was Booth’s closest brush with manhunters since he galloped down the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. Then, instead of veering into the pines, the troops stayed on the road, passed the thicket, and continued on until the sound of hoofbeats dwindled in the distance.
Jones locked eyes with Booth: “You see, my friend, we must wait.”
“Yes,” Booth conceded, “I leave it all with you.”
On the morning of the seventeenth another man waited, too. Troops had still not called on Dr. Mudd to pursue his tip— because they did not know about it. It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that George Mudd got around to riding to Bryantown. He asked to see the commanding officer and, introduced to Lieutenant Dana, divulged his cousin’s vague, one-day-old report about the two suspicious strangers. Then, in an unbelievable stroke of luck for Booth and Herold, Dana dismissed the news as stale and unimportant. He thanked George Mudd and sent him on his way. And, providentially for the assassins, Dana chose not to send troops to Samuel Mudd’s farm to investigate. Distracted by other leads, Dana ignored the one tip that placed Lincoln’s assassin—if only momentarily—within his reach.
When the soldiers had not come by that evening, Mudd relaxed. Perhaps, by this point, they would not come at all. According to Mudd’s calculations, Booth was long gone, probably even across the Potomac River into Virginia by now. With the assassin’s trail in Maryland running cold, the manhunters would soon depart Charles County and shift the action to places far from Bryantown and his farm.
According to premature reports in the newspapers, Booth had already moved on. The April 17 Chicago Tribune already had him cross the Potomac, reporting “it is now the general impression that the murderer Booth and his accomplices have escaped into Virginia. It is unlikely that a person so well known would attempt to travel through the north.” Of course the Tribune reported in the same issue: “Booth was captured this morning. The story is that his horse threw him and injured him so severely that he was obliged to seek relief on the Seventh Street road” on the outskirts of Washington. The April 17 New York Herald assured its readers, “Detectives are on the hunt. The most expert men in the profession, from New York and other cities are here for this purpose. Colonel L. C. Baker has arrived today, and is engaged in ferreting out the assassins. It is believed they will be caught within twenty-four hours.”
Thomas Jones had experienced enough excitement for one day. He agreed to return to the thicket around the same time next morning, Tuesday the eighteenth, carrying more food and newspapers, but he refused to bring horse feed again. Concealing the feedbags was impossible, and he could not carry enough, anyway, to sate the two ravenous horses. After two days without food, they had ferocious appetites—and they also made a lot of noise. Jones advised the men to get rid of the horses. They wouldn’t be needed to get to Dent’s Meadow, and they couldn’t be ferried across the river in a little rowboat. Better to dispose of them here and now, before the next cavalry patrol came by and they betrayed the site of the camp. Booth agreed: “If we can hear those horses, they can certainly hear the neighing of ours, which are uneasy from want of food and stabling.” David Herold reluctantly went along with this. He loved animals, but realized that, with Booth helpless on the ground, the deed fell to him. Jones said good-bye and left for Huckleberry.
The horses had served them well. The white-starred bay that could move like a cat had saved Booth in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. She galloped superbly through downtown Washington, her hooves pounding distance between Booth and any pursuers during the thrilling, moonlit ride. The roan horse had made it possible for Herold to escape from the botched Seward assassination attempt. Now their reward for this faithful service was death. Davey untied both horses and led them by the reins to a quicksand morass about a mile from the pine thicket. Quickly, he shot each one in the head with a pistol or the carbine, and then sank their bodies, still accoutered with saddles, bits, bridles, stirrups, and all. There they rest in an unmarked grave, their skeletons undiscovered to this day.
Killing the horses was the third time since the assassination that David Herold gave up the chance to abandon John Wilkes Booth. On the night of April 14, he kept their rendezvous at Soper’s Hill when he could have fled and gone into hiding. On the fifteenth, when he rode from Dr. Mudd’s to the vicinity of Bryantown, he could have left Booth behind at the farm and kept riding. Now, in the pine thicket, all he had to do was kill one of the horses, mount the other, and gallop away. Without the lame actor—who, after all, was the main prey of the manhunters—Her-old had a better chance of melting into the countryside.
Davey returned to the thicket and sat on the ground beside his master. Never during their escape were they more alone and vulnerable. If Union cavalry descended upon them now, they would not be able to make a run for it. Even two healthy, well-rested men, which Booth and Herold were not, could never outrun a mounted pursuit. And if Thomas Jones decided to abandon them, how would they find a boat to cross the river? They kept low to the ground and waited for nightfall.
Marooned in this desolate place, did Booth reminisce about happier days, when he and his beloved sister, Asia, played as carefree teenagers in the forests of Bel Air, Maryland? Once upon a time, before he became a famous actor and a denizen of America’s great cities, Booth loved to commune with nature. Asia’s bittersweet memories of their frolics haunted her in the days following the assassination: “In the woods he would throw himself face downward and nestle his nose close into the earth, taking long sniffs of ‘the earth’s healthy breath’. . . [h]e declare
d this process of inhaling wholesome odors and rich scents was delightful . . . [h]e called it ‘burrowing,’ and he loved to nibble at sweet roots and twigs, so that I called him rabbit.”
As darkness fell for the second night over Booth’s lonely, pine thicket encampment, did he remember another night among the pines of another time and place, a magical Halloween eve with Asia that was eerily like this one? “It was a cold, dark night,” she reminisced, “with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth—which may be the odor of good men’s bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying—the aroma of the pines, and the rapturous sense of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing ‘Te Deum Laudamus.’”
There would be no joyous song tonight. Instead, Booth and Herold murmured quietly, most likely talking of their crimes and speculating on their fate. What would they do? What would tomorrow bring? When would they cross over the river and find rest on the other side? When Booth smelled the forested scent of the thicket, did its sweet, piney odor take him back to a time of youthful innocence and allow him, briefly, t o forget murders and manhunts? In the black safety of the night, Booth and Herold rolled out their coarse, woolen blankets and slumbered, close to the earth.
In Washington that night, the inhabitants of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse prepared for bed, too. The manhunters had been here before. When detectives came to 541 H Street on April 14, just a few hours after the assassination, they left empty-handed. Their quarry, John H. Surratt, was not at home, and John Wilkes Booth was not found hiding there. But tonight the authorities came back, in the evening again, at a time when Mary and Anna Surratt and their boarders were likely to be home. The manhunters were desperate. Three days after the assassination, John Wilkes Booth was still on the run. They had uncovered plenty of clues to prove that he was the assassin, was the head of a conspiracy, and had probably fled south to Maryland, but they had no fresh clues about his present whereabouts. And Seward’s assassin remained a mystery man—Stanton did not even know his name. The War Department suspected John Surratt of the Seward attack but had no proof. Someone at that boardinghouse must know something about the assassination, Stanton and his subordinates reasoned. Booth had been a regular caller and was John Surratt’s friend. It was time to go back and squeeze harder. It was about 11:00 p.m. on April 17.
Colonel H. W. Wells sent Major W. H. Smith to the boardinghouse to arrest the residents and search the premises. When Smith arrived, he posted a few men outside and told the rest to follow him up the stairs to the front door. He rang the bell, and Mary Surratt came to an open window and asked, “Is that you, Mr. Kirby?” She thought it was a neighbor. Smith said it wasn’t Kirby and told her to open the door. When she did, Smith stepped into the hall.
“Are you Mrs. Surratt?”
“I am the widow of John H. Surratt.”
And, Smith continued, “the mother of John H. Surratt, Jr.?”
“I am.”
“I come to arrest you and all in your house, and take you, for examination, to General Augur’s headquarters.”
It was odd, Smith recalled later, that Mrs. Surratt “did not ask even for what she was arrested,” and that she “expressed no surprise or feeling at all.”
While Smith and his men questioned the residents and prepared to transport them by carriage to General Augur’s headquarters, another official arrived at about 11:30 p.m. It was R. C. Morgan, under War Department orders from Colonel Olcott to, as Morgan put it, “superintend the seizing of papers and the arrest of the inmates of the house.” By the time Morgan got there Smith and his team had already made the arrests, and the boarders were gathered in the parlor, ready to leave.
Morgan called for a carriage to transport the women, went back into the house, and closed the front door. Soon a man walking down H Street stopped at number 541, looked the house over, and walked up the front steps. He didn’t notice the men standing nearby in the street. He got to the front door and knocked, then rang the bell. Morgan and Captain Wermerskirch opened the door. Before them stood a large, powerful-looking man, toting a pickax. The man was dressed in a gray coat, black pantaloons, and a fine pair of boots, and he wore atop his head an odd little makeshift hat cut from a shirtsleeve. As soon as the man stepped into the hall Morgan shut the door behind him.
The man sensed that something was wrong.
“I guess I am mistaken.”
“Whom do you want to see?”
“Mrs. Surratt.”
“You are right: walk in.”
Morgan peppered the late-night caller with questions:
“I asked him what he came there at this time of night for. He said he came to dig a gutter: Mrs. Surratt had sent for him. I asked him when.
“In the morning,” the man replied.
Morgan asked where he last worked.
“Sometimes on I Street.”
Morgan asked where he boarded. “He said he had no boarding house; he was a poor man, who got his living with the pick.”
“How much do you make a day?” Morgan asked.
“Sometimes nothing at all, sometimes a dollar, sometimes a dollar and a half.”
“Have you any money?”
“Not a cent.”
Morgan asked the man why he came at this time of night to work, and he replied that he called just to find out what time he should start work in the morning. The man claimed that he had no previous connection to Mrs. Surratt; she had seen him working in the neighborhood, knew he was a poor man, and offered him work. Morgan asked how old he was.
“About twenty.”
Where was he from?
“Fauquier County, Virginia.”
The man pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was an oath of allegiance to the Union, the type signed by former Confederate soldiers. Powell had signed it “L. Paine.” He had just stumbled into the War Department’s raid in progress. But Smith, Morgan, Wermerskirch, and the others didn’t realize it yet.
The officers noticed that his clothes, while soiled, were much too fine to belong to a day laborer. Their suspicions grew as the man stammered more excuses. William Seward’s assassin was a big, young, strong man, too.
Major Smith stepped to the doorway to the front parlor where Mary was sitting and asked her to come into the hall: “Mrs. Surratt, will you step here for a minute?” When she came out, Lewis Powell was standing no more than three paces from her, near a gaslight fixture, and, as Smith remembered, “the gas was turned on at full head.”
“Do you know this man? And did you hire him to come and dig a gutter for you?”
It was the man she knew as Reverend Wood! Mary must have shuddered at the sight of him. No, not him, she likely cried silently. Her eyes locked upon the stranger’s in recognition. Powell’s remarkable face was unforgettable, and he had been to her home at least twice before.
Mary raised her right hand as if swearing an oath. “Before God, sir, I do not know this man; and I have never seen him, and did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”
Powell looked at Mary and said nothing.
Lewis Powell had been caught in a lie. Soon, George Alfred Townsend would make fun of his transparent cover story: “That night he dug a trench deep and broad enough for them to lie in forever.” Now Powell was trapped in the house. The soldiers had closed the front door behind him; in moments they would try to seize and arrest him. But unless they all moved at once—took him by surprise, tackled him in unison—they might lose their advantage. Technically, Powell was unarmed. He had abandoned his broken revolver on Seward’s floor and his knife, which he had dropped on the street in front of the secretary’s house, was in the hands of the government. He carried no more than a workman’s tool. But his prodigious strength could turn that tool into a deadly weapon. The pickax’s oak butt was a stout club, and its twin, spear-tipped iron points deadly, stabbing prongs. In Powell’s hands this humble tool was the equivalent of a primitive, close-com
bat pole arm from the Middle Ages.
The odds seemed against him; five men against one, confined in a compact foyer. But the tight space favored Powell. The soldiers began to press closer, and the closer they got, the more harm he could do. They were all within his killing range now.
Manhunt Page 20