There was more. Stanton had to organize Lincoln’s majestic funeral and then send the body on an unprecedented national tour, on the way home to Springfield. He had to help plan the reconstruction of the South, manage the entire Union army, conduct the everyday but still vitally essential business of the War Department, decide what to do with Booth’s captured conspirators, and organize a military tribunal to try them. He had to investigate the crime, determine the nature and extent of Booth’s conspiracy, and send pursuers after the assassin and the rest of his gang. It was more than one mind, even Stanton’s brilliant and well-disciplined one, could handle. He had to delegate authority to a small circle of trusted subordinates.
When John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination and his escape he did not prepare for an extended campout under the stars. No, he had focused entirely on the need for speed and movement, not on cowering in the forest like a wounded animal, fearful that every passing sound meant that his hunters were about to grab him. Booth fled Ford’s Theatre like a pony express rider, traveling light for speed, unburdened by heavy equipment. Of course, an express rider carried the news: Booth fled from it. He disdained many of the ordinary accoutrements that a cavalryman took with him in the field: pistol belt, cartridge boxes, cap box, ample ammunition, carbine shoulder sling, field glasses, canteen, tin cup, eating utensils, rubberized gum blanket, wool blanket, saddlebags, provisions, and more. Booth had sacrificed necessities to achieve the sprinting speed his horse needed to get from Ford’s Theatre to the Eleventh Street Bridge.
This strategy worked superbly and ensured his quick escape from downtown Washington. But it left him ill prepared for the next, unanticipated phase of his journey: outdoor living in open country, the consequence of his broken leg and the dangerous, delaying detour to Dr. Mudd’s. Booth fled Ford’s Theatre wearing the equivalent of a modern-day business suit. The fabric of his black wool frock coat and trousers was coarser, sturdier, thicker, and a little warmer, but his fine suit remained unsuitable for camping out in the pine thicket. And Booth packed no change of clothing, so his garments soon became soiled. It was one of the first things Thomas Jones noticed about him. Indeed, with each passing day Booth and Herold became less presentable to strangers, ruining a key element of Booth’s trademark, winning style— his elegant, beautifully dressed appearance. They could not bathe, change clothes, or even wash the clothes on their backs, and they looked rougher—and smelled worse—every day. They looked like the fugitives they were. Beyond aesthetics, however, their vagabond, ruffian appearance jeopardized the friendly reception they expected to receive at proper Virginia households across the river.
Although Maryland’s mid-April spring climate that year was not cold, the nights were chilly and damp, especially for men with no overcoats. The weather wore on the assassins, sapping warmth from their shivering bodies. And the ground was uncomfortable. They had no proper bedding, just a blanket for each man, supplied by either Dr. Mudd or Captain Cox. At least Herold could stand up, walk about, and stretch his legs to relieve his cramped muscles. But Booth’s body ached and atrophied as he lay on the ground, shifting positions occasionally to ease his pain. As far as Thomas Jones could tell from his daily visits, Booth never rose from the ground during the time in the thicket.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 18, Jones paid his third call on the fugitives. This visit was briefer and less was said because Jones was in mortal danger. He risked his life every time he ventured into the thicket. Federal cavalrymen and U.S. detectives spread out along the nearby riverbanks and searched day and night for Booth. If soldiers caught Jones with the president’s murderer, they might shoot him on the spot or hang him from a pine tree. Soldiers had visited Huckleberry Farm several times, and even searched his home once. Now, Jones handed over the food and more newspapers quickly, then departed. Booth’s curiosity about the country’s reaction was insatiable, and he beseeched Jones to bring all the papers he could. Jones remembered the scene vividly: “He never tired of the newspapers. And there—surrounded by the sighing pines, he read the world’s condemnation of his deed and the price that was offered for his life.”
What he read stunned him. Whatever papers Booth held in his hands—the Daily Morning Chronicle, Evening Star, or National Intelligencer from Washington; the Sun from Baltimore; the Inquirer from Philadelphia; or the Herald, Tribune, or Times from New York City— they all reviled him for his loathsome act. Even worse, Booth witnessed the first draft of history transform Abraham Lincoln from a controversial and often unpopular war leader into America’s secular saint. Newspapers everywhere condemned the assassin in the most unsparing, unforgiving, vicious language imaginable. The accounts of the Seward attack sent Booth reeling. Had Powell gone insane? The indiscriminate viciousness of his coassassin’s assault shocked and revolted Booth. Yes, Seward had to go, and the early, erroneous news accounts reporting the secretary of state’s death delighted the actor. But the sons, the nurse, the messenger? At least Powell didn’t murder the girl. “Booth then,” Herold recalled, “made the remark that he was very sorry for the sons, but he only wished to God that Seward was killed.”
Booth wasn’t the only one of his coconspirators stunned by news accounts of the attempted murder of Seward. John Surratt, still in Elmira a few days after the assassination, bought, on April 17, several of the New York papers. What he read terrified him. The stories identified him as Seward’s assailant. “I could scarcely believe my senses. I gazed upon my name, the letters of which seemed to sometimes grow as large as mountains and then dwindle away to nothing.” It was time, Surratt concluded, to flee the country.
Booth searched the papers frantically for the article he wrote—his self-justification for killing the president—for publication in the Intelligencer. On the afternoon of the assassination, he had presented it to his actor friend John Matthews in a sealed, addressed envelope for delivery the next day. Incredibly, not one newspaper published or even mentioned his manuscript. So he wrote another one.
Booth drew from his pocket a small datebook for the previous year, 1864. Although obsolete, the book, bound in worn, black covers, contained a number of unused pages. Booth thumbed through it until he reached a blank page, which he annotated “Ti Amo/April 13–14 Friday the Ides.” Then, in a cramped, hurried hand, unlike his usual expansive style, he began his manifesto.
“Until today nothing was ever THOUGHT of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart. I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A Col. was at his side. I shouted Sic semper BEFORE I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill; Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it WAS. This forced Union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to out-live my country. This night (before the deed), I wrote a long article and left it for one of the Editors of the National Intelligencer, in which I fully set forth our reasons for our proceedings. He or the Govmt . . .”
At that moment, in midsentence, something—perhaps an interruption by David Herold, an alarming noise in the distance, or the black fall of the night—compelled Booth to stop writing, and his manuscript ends abruptly. Booth was wrong when he accused the newspaper or the government of suppressing his manifesto. He thought that he could trust John Matthews to deliver it. He didn’t consider that his friend, terrified of being connected to Lincoln’s assassin, might read the letter and then destroy it.
When Booth wasn’t writing in his little notebook or reading the newspapers, what did he do while in the pine thicket? There was nothing left but talk. Booth and Herold didn’t say
much in front of Thomas Jones, confining their conversations to practical matters like food and newspapers, Booth’s need for medical assistance, and their prospects for a timely river crossing. That suited Jones fine. He was not a big talker or the inquisitive type and, prudently, he preferred to spend as little time as necessary at the fugitives’ hiding place. According to Jones, Booth did not draw him into abstract political discussions, try to impress him with exhilarating, firsthand tales of the fatal shot, his dramatic stage leap, or the unforgettable ride out of Washington—nor did he attempt to justify the assassination. He told Jones that he murdered Abraham Lincoln, that he didn’t regret it, and that was that. Booth and Herold kept their own counsel about how they intended to escape after crossing the Potomac, or what their final destination was, if they even had one.
When alone with Herold, however, Booth could unburden himself. No doubt he reassured Herold about the very things he most needed to convince himself—they would cross the Potomac, they would find succor in Virginia, they would survive. And no doubt Booth regaled Davey with repeated tellings of the assassination drama. And if the newspapers wouldn’t let Booth tell the nation his noble motives for his crime, he could rehearse them over and over before his captive audience of one. To Herold it did not matter what Booth said. The impressionable youth had not joined the conspiracy for ideological reasons. He had been drawn into the actor’s orbit by Booth’s charisma, not his hatred of Lincoln. He was simply happy to abide in the presence of his hero, enjoying the actor’s private, undivided attention. Although they had known each other for more than a year, they had never spent this much time together. After sharing the star with the other conspirators, and with his many friends and fans, Herold felt privileged to have him to himself. Stranded in the pine thicket, Herold became, by default, the cynosure of Booth’s attention. It was like having the great actor stage a marathon performance just for him. The future was unknown. But Booth was certain that David Herold would never abandon him.
Jones sensed Booth’s growing impatience and decided to ride over to the town of Port Tobacco on a scouting mission to find out how many Union troops were combing the area. A few weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend damned the town as a rebel cesspool of corruption: “If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port Tobacco. . . . Before the war [it] was the seat of a tobacco aristocracy and a haunt of Negro traders. It passed very naturally into a rebel post for blockade-runners and a rebel post-office general. Gambling, corner fighting, and shooting matches were its lyceum education. Violence and ignorance had every suffrage in the town . . . five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco; life there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the adjacent swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when iguanadons and pterodactyls and pleosauri ate each other . . . into this abstract of Gomorrah the few detectives went like angels who visited Lot.” Indeed, the town was the stomping ground of the dissolute George Azterodt, Booth’s co-conspirator and pathetic failed assassin of Vice President Andrew Johnson. He was so associated with this place that he actually went by the nickname “Port Tobacco.”
As Jones rode into Port Tobacco, Union troops finally ventured out from Bryantown to Samuel Mudd’s farm. It was noon on Tuesday, April 18, and the manhunt was at a standstill. That morning Lieutenant Alexander Lovett accompanied by detectives William Williams, Simon Gavacan, and Joshua Lloyd, and by nine soldiers from the Provisional Cavalry, had arrived in Bryantown. As David Dana and Alexander Lovett discussed their progress, Dana mentioned Dr. George Mudd’s secondhand tale of the two strangers. Intrigued, Lovett decided to follow it up. The last verified sighting of John Wilkes Booth had occurred four days ago, around midnight on Friday, April 14, when Booth and Herold stopped at Surratt’s tavern to collect the “shooting irons” and field glasses from John Lloyd. Indeed, it was Lieutenant Lovett who rode to the tavern, questioned Lloyd, and took him into custody. Given the dearth of hot leads, George Mudd’s tip, Lovett decided, was worth pursuing. He sent for the doctor.
As soon as George Mudd arrived, soldiers brought him into the inn for questioning. Lovett took him “up into a room in the hotel, and asked him to make a statement of what he heard.” It did not take Lovett long to ascertain that the doctor was almost useless. He knew no details, and he had never laid eyes on the two strangers himself. All he knew was what his cousin told him, and that wasn’t much: two men called at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s late on the night of the assassination, and Sam found them suspicious. He asked George to tell the soldiers.
Lovett decided to pursue the lead to its source, and he ordered his detectives and cavalrymen to mount up. Taking George Mudd with them, they rode to Samuel Mudd’s farm. When they arrived at noon, Frances Mudd greeted George and the strangers and explained that her husband was away working in the fields. Lovett asked her to send for him. Until then, the officer suggested, perhaps she could answer a few questions.
Around the time that Lovett and the detectives were questioning Mrs. Mudd, Thomas Jones put on his best impassive face, sauntered through the door of Port Tobacco’s Brawner Hotel, and descended the creaky stairs to the basement. There, noted George Alfred Townsend, “it has a bar in the nethermost cellar, and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of some burglar’s crib, talking robbery between their cups.” It was market day, and a lot of men and lots of gossip were circulating in town. Jones’s simple strategy was to “mingle with the people and listen.” An army detective, Captain Williams, eyed Jones and offered him a drink. Somebody in this vice-saturated, ramshackle, rebel town must know something about the assassins, Williams persuaded himself. Jones nodded and tightened his fist around the glass. Before he could raise it and wet his lips, Williams faced him, stared him in the eye, and boasted: “I will give one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who will give me the information that will lead to Booth’s capture.”
“That is a large sum of money and ought to get him,” conceded Jones, who then added cryptically, “if money can do it.”
Jones needed cash desperately, and he knew what that money could buy him. In 1865, when a Union army private earned thirteen dollars a month and the president of the United States received an annual salary of twenty-five thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars was a stupendous fortune. Jones thought about the wife and farm he lost, the time the Union stole from him while he was in the Old Capitol prison, the money owed to him by the Confederacy, and the uncertain economy of the defeated South. And he wasn’t getting any younger—soon he would be forty-five years old. He had every reason in the world to divulge Booth’s hiding place and seize that reward money. But he didn’t say anything. Booth’s instincts about Jones’s character proved correct. Jones was a man of true Southern feeling who could not be bought. Indeed, his explanation reads like a coda of the antebellum South: “Had I, for MONEY, betrayed the man whose hand I had taken, whose confidence I had won, and to whom I promised succor, I would have been, of all traitors, the most abject and despicable. Money won by such vile means would have been accursed and the pale face of the man whose life I had sold, would have haunted me to my grave. True, the hopes of the Confederacy WERE like autumn leaves when the blast has swept by. True, the little I had accumulated through twenty years of unremitting toil WAS irrevocably lost. But, thank God, there was something I still possessed—something I could still call my own, and its name was Honor.”
•••
Summoned from the fields, an anxious Samuel Mudd returned to his farmhouse and found the cavalry patrol waiting for him. It did not look good: nine uniformed soldiers, plus four men wearing civilian clothes. Many of the men, including Lieutenant Lovett, had shed their blue army officers’ uniforms and donned civilian clothes as a disguise to blend in with the populace and obtain leads by stealth and guile. Some even assumed false identities, posing as Confederates, or as friends of Booth, in an attempt to persuade assassination sympathizers to let down t
heir guard.
Mudd dismounted his horse, greeted the inquisitors, and quickly rehearsed his cover story one last time. He had had three days to concoct it. If he stuck to the story, behaved naturally, and did nothing to arouse suspicion, all would be well.
Sam told them what happened: two strangers on horseback came near daybreak, one had a broken leg, and he set the bone. The injured man rested on the sofa in the first-floor parlor. He did not mention that Booth went upstairs. The strangers did not stay long, Mudd assured the officer. Pointedly, Lovett asked Mudd if he knew the men. No, the doctor replied, they were complete strangers to him. He “knew nothing of them” and they stayed only a short time, he emphasized. Lovett thought that Mudd looked worried: “He seemed very much excited, and he got as pale as a sheet of paper when he was asked about it, but admitted it,—that there had been two strangers there.” Sam’s laconic manner— he offered few details—and guilty body language aroused Lovett’s suspicion: “He did not seem to care about giving any satisfaction.” Mudd volunteered trivial tidbits, including that he had had a pair of crutches made for the injured man. And they left on horseback. Of course they did, Lovett must have thought. Didn’t they arrive on horses?
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