John Wilkes Booth’s escape and disappearance unfolded as though scripted not by a master criminal, but by a master dramatist. Each additional day of Booth’s absence from the stage intensified the story’s dramatic arc. In his absence his bit players, minor characters, supporting cast, and costars built up the drama: actors, stagehands, and theatre owners thrown behind bars; Booth’s suicidal lover exposed; his other lovers in hiding; the suspicious widow Mary Surratt seized during a late-night raid, along with her entire household; the maniacal and merciless Lewis Powell taken on her doorstep; Edman Spangler released, then taken again; Sam Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen clapped in irons; detectives in hot pursuit of bungling vice-presidential assassin George Atzerodt, capturing him the morning of the twentieth; Dr. Samuel Mudd under unshakable suspicion. Each day the public expected the morning and evening papers to carry news of yet another astounding arrest or shocking revelation. Events conspired toward an inexorable climax, awaiting only the stage star’s return to the action. On the night of April 20, Thomas Jones set him on that course. Although the lost week discouraged Booth, it also gave him hope. Languishing in the pine thicket had prevented his capture. He did not know who the manhunters were, how many of them there were, or what search plan they followed, but he had felt their presence, vague, hovering, and near. Though he never saw them, and heard them but once, the day that a cavalry patrol rode past the thicket, he knew from the newspapers that the War Department was mounting a major effort against him. Jones could do what Booth could not—move among the manhunters, watch their movements, eavesdrop on their conversations, and even speak to them. God—or fate—delivered unto him a guardian angel, a man of Southern honor and the old code who, by risking his own life, saved Booth’s. God willing, prayed the assassin, other men like Thomas Jones awaited his arrival on the other side in old Virginia. Such men were better than gold, and he only needed to find a few.
Thomas Jones never saw John Wilkes Booth or David Herold—or his boat—again. As soon as the wide waters of the Potomac swallowed all sight and sound of the two men, Jones ascended the steep terrain above the launching point, retrieved his horse by the fence, and rode back to the safety of Huckleberry. The roads were deserted, ensuring no one would be able to testify later to his whereabouts that night. When he got home, he unsaddled his horse, climbed into bed, and took quiet satisfaction in the success of his most spectacular mission. One clever man had just thwarted the will and resources of a nation. For five days and four nights, from the morning of Sunday, April 16, through the evening of Thursday, April 20, while a frustrated, avenging nation scoured the country for Lincoln’s assassin, Jones had concealed, sheltered, and sustained the most hated, wanted man in America. And on that dark Thursday night, while army cavalry and navy gunboats continued the furious search, intent on preventing Booth and his loyal cat’s-paw from crossing the Potomac, Jones launched them on their voyage across the waters to the dark, indistinct shore on the other side. They should be landing in Virginia right about now, thought Jones, as he drifted off to sleep. But while Jones slept more quietly and peacefully than he had in weeks, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold were rowing in the wrong direction!
By Thursday, April 20, Samuel A. Mudd hadn’t been sleeping very well since he had been questioned by Lieutenant Lovett three days before. The experience had left him unnerved. The detectives, rather than expressing gratitude, had behaved diffidently, and seemed to treat him with suspicion. Mudd worried about what he had told them—and even more about the vital information he withheld. Maybe he should have revealed that he had met John Wilkes Booth before. But he had no opportunity to remedy this because Alexander Lovett and the detectives did not return. And surely, Dr. Mudd reasoned, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold must have not only crossed the Potomac by now, but pushed deep into Virginia. The soldiers and detectives must be concentrating the hunt there now, many miles and a wide river away from Bryantown.
On the morning of Friday, April 21, Dr. Mudd ate breakfast, went about his customary farm work, and left for his fields. The manhunt was now seven days old, and there were no real leads. Without solid leads, with no prospects for capturing Booth anytime soon, the authorities remembered Samuel Mudd. In Washington, Colonel H. H. Wells decided to come down to Bryantown to coordinate the search personally. It was time for him to meet this suspicious doctor that Lieutenant Lovett had told him about.
Although Mudd had been a reluctant witness when interviewed on April 18, he did provide some useful information. Thanks to the doctor, the hunters knew that Booth was not traveling alone, but with a younger man, almost certainly David Herold. And they knew that Booth suffered from a broken leg and impaired mobility. And thanks to Mudd, they knew that the assassin had shaved his signature moustache. Indeed, based on Mudd’s information, the War Department revised Stanton’s April 20 proclamation to the nation. The first three printings of the reward poster stated that Booth wore “a heavy black moustache.” Soon the War Department revised the text and printed a fourth edition, adding the phrase “which he may have shaved off.”
Lieutenant Lovett and company set out from Bryantown to question Mudd again and bring him in to see Colonel Wells. When Lovett arrived in the morning, the doctor was out again. Frances sent for her husband. When Mudd arrived, Lovett intercepted him in the yard and escorted him inside. The officer told Mudd to bring him the razor that he lent to the stranger. And the men were strangers, Mudd reminded Lovett. But the doctor started to recall other details. The man with the broken leg was armed: “The injured man had a pair of revolvers.” Mudd said he had forgotten to tell them that on Tuesday. Frances Mudd reported that the stranger wore a false beard—she saw it become partly detached from his face when he walked down the stairs.
Pistols? False beards? Lieutenant Lovett said that he and his men would have to search the house. Oh, that’s right, Mudd recalled, the injured stranger left one of his boots behind. Mudd explained how he had cut it off the man’s swollen leg. The boot—hidden under the stranger’s bed in the second-floor front room—was produced for Lovett’s inspection. The officer peered down the tube until something caught his eye. He rolled the leather down a little and there it was—handwriting, in black ink. It was the name of a bootmaker in New York. Dr. Mudd interjected at once that he had not noticed the writing before. Next to the manufacturer’s mark was more writing, the name of the owner. Lovett read the name. He knew it. His heart raced as he stared at the incontrovertible proof—“J. Wilkes.”
Lovett took Mudd back to Bryantown to face Colonel Wells. On the ride over, Lovett continued to question Mudd, and the doctor continued to divulge hitherto unmentioned details. Lovett asked whether the strangers “had much money about them.” Yes, Mudd confessed, Booth had a thick roll of cash—“considerable greenbacks.” Lovett turned and addressed one of his men: Show him the photograph, he ordered. The detective withdrew from his pocket a small carte-de-visite and held up the image of John Wilkes Booth for Mudd’s inspection. No, that wasn’t the man, Mudd insisted, though it does, he added cryptically, look a little like him across the eyes.
Mudd and Lovett rode along for a few minutes without speaking. Then, the officer noticed that the doctor “seemed to turn very pale, and blue about the lips, like a man that is frightened of something.” Samuel Mudd was terrified. The authorities, he feared, would discover his terrible secret very soon. Perhaps Colonel Wells, waiting in Bryantown to confront him, already knew it. Things might go better for him, he convinced himself, if he volunteered the truth—at least a carefully edited portion of it—now. Mudd steered his horse close to Lovett’s and spoke as calmly and nonchalantly as a man facing the hangman’s noose could muster: he knew John Wilkes Booth. He had met him last fall.
Lovett reeled at the explosive revelation, and at the matter-of-fact manner by which Dr. Mudd conveyed it. Yes, continued the doctor, he had met Booth last year—in November or December—when the actor traveled through the neighborhood looking for real estate. Mudd said he ha
d been introduced to Booth at church and had helped him buy a horse.
At Bryantown, Mudd repeated to Colonel Wells the same story that he told Lieutenant Lovett several times. The men were strangers to him: “I never saw either of the parties before, nor can I conceive of who sent them to my house.” The young man said his name was “Henson,” and the injured one said his was “Tyson” or “Tyser,” Mudd could not remember which. Wells picked up Mudd’s furtive scent right off. He asked if the injured stranger looked like Booth. No, replied Mudd. Wells found it odd that Mudd failed to recognize a man—especially one so celebrated—that he had met before, and not briefly. After all, Mudd and Booth had met at church in broad daylight, they had shopped for horses together, they had visited the blacksmith, and Booth had slept at Mudd’s home.
But Mudd protested that he never got a good look at the stranger: “I did not see his face at all,” he said. The man “had a heavy shawl on all the
A photograph issued to one of the manhunters, defaced with sentiments of the moment.
time,” and he raised it to conceal the lower half of his face. Even when the man got into bed, “he had very little to say,” and he kept “his cloak thrown around him and seemed inclined to sleep.”
In that case, wondered Wells, how was Mudd able to provide such an accurate description of the stranger? The doctor’s report was remarkably well observed: “He had a pretty full forehead and his skin was fair. He was very pale when I saw him, and appeared as if accustomed to in-door rather than out-door life.” Moreover, the man had a moustache and a “long, heavy beard”; it was even longer than Colonel Wells’s own substantial one, Mudd asserted. But unfortunately, Mudd apologized, he could not determine whether it was a natural or artificial beard. Finally, Mudd confirmed, the man did shave off the moustache after he was given the razor. The doctor even described the qualities of the stranger’s hair. And he saw the eyes. All very interesting details about a face Mudd claimed he never saw.
Yes, Mudd admitted, he had met Booth before, but he swore that the injured man was not Lincoln’s assassin. And, he added, not only did the man in the photo not look like the stranger, he did not even look like John Wilkes Booth! “A photograph of Booth was . . . shown me by a detective, but I did not observe any resemblance between the two men, though I must say that I have very often been shown likenesses of intimate friends, and failed to recognize them by their pictures.”
One of the detectives interrupted the interrogation to give Wells a piece of evidence no one had told him about—John Wilkes Booth’s boot, fresh from Mudd’s farmhouse. Wells stared at the boot and, frustrated, feigning concern for the doctor’s well-being, issued a warning: “I said it seemed to me that he was concealing the facts, and that I did not know whether he understood that that was the strongest evidence of his guilt that could be produced at that time, and that might endanger his safety.”
It was now midafternoon. Wells had been at Mudd for three hours straight and still could not break him. “He did not seem unwilling to answer a direct question that I asked; but I discovered almost immediately, that, unless I did ask the direct question, important facts were omitted.” Wells pressed on relentlessly. His strategy was not to threaten the doctor overtly, but to keep him talking for several hours until he wore him down. The doctor offered gossipy, trivial details of no value to the manhunters: “They paid me $25.00 for my services, which they rather pressed me to accept. I told them a small fee would answer.” Although the men stayed at his place for fifteen hours, Mudd claimed that he hardly spoke to them at all: “I had very little conversation with these men during the day.”
Wells wondered if Mudd had noticed Booth’s prominent tattoo, the initials “JWB” inked boldly between the thumb and forefinger of the actor’s left hand. Cleverly, the doctor denied seeing the hand at all: “My examination was quite short . . . I did not observe his hand to see whether it was small or large.” Or, implicitly, whether it was tattooed. Mudd repeated his tale about sending Booth and Herold off in the direction of Piney Chapel: “Before they left they inquired the way to Rev. Mr. Wilmer’s . . . he is regarded by neighbors as a Union man.” In any event Mudd did not see which way they went: “I did not see the parties when they left in the afternoon . . . I did not go out.” And, by the way, “I have always called myself a Union man, though I have never voted with the administration party.”
Mudd cautioned Wells that the pale stranger was well armed, but said nothing about Davey’s Spencer carbine: “The injured man had a belt with two revolvers in it concealed under his clothing, which I discovered when he got into bed after having his wound dressed.” It was late in the afternoon. Wells had questioned Dr. Mudd—and the doctor had parried him—for close to six hours. The colonel produced another carte-de-visite photograph of Lincoln’s assassin and told Mudd to look at it carefully. Do you or do you not recognize him as the stranger? Wells demanded. No, that was not the man. On second thought, Mudd admitted it. He said that he realized it just now. Yes, the stranger was John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln’s assassin had taken refuge at his farm. And, either intentionally or unwittingly, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd had helped him escape.
As Colonel Wells brought the interview to a close around 6:00 p.m. on Friday, April 21, he mentioned a little formality that he would take care of. To avoid confusion, and to make things clear, he would write out a statement of Mudd’s testimony. The doctor was free to go. But would he please return to Bryantown on Saturday to sign it? As Mudd departed, Colonel Henry Wells spoke ominously: “One of the strongest circumstances against you is, that you have failed to give early information, as you might have done, in this matter.”
Mudd, exhausted by the morning’s questioning by Lieutenant Lovett, followed by six more hours with Colonel Wells, rode home. He had accomplished his mission. Tonight, in a few hours, Booth and Her-old would land safely in Virginia, far from the reach of Colonel Wells, Lieutenant Lovett and his detectives, and Lieutenant Dana and the Thirteenth New York Cavalry. They had lost the assassin’s scent and would never pick it up again. Unless other manhunters picked up Booth’s trail soon and continued the chase, he would escape. Soon, unless somebody stopped him, John Wilkes Booth would vanish into the Deep South. Once that happened, Union forces would never find him. Mudd had played a large role in helping Booth escape Maryland. Soon, however, he would pay a terrible price for his lies.
once John Wilkes Booth attempted to cross the Potomac on Thursday the twentieth, and finally reached Virginia early on Sunday the twenty-third, the sanctuary of Thomas Jones’s Huckleberry did not survive long undisturbed. Union detectives suspected that a man of Jones’s reputation must know something about Booth’s escape and they arrested him. But they had no evidence, and, true to his character, he volunteered nothing. The troops confined Jones at the Bryan-town Tavern, locking him up in a second-floor, back bedroom. Like the Surratt Tavern, the Bryantown establishment served as a way station for mysterious, wartime Confederate intrigues.
The detectives didn’t know it, but they had, in a sense, conveyed Thomas Jones to a scene of the crime. At this very tavern, in a first-floor parlor below the bedroom that served as the river ghost’s ersatz jail, John Wilkes Booth met with Samuel Mudd and rebel agent Thomas Harbin when the actor plotted his madcap scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. The detectives also ensnared Captain Cox in their dragnet. Oswell Swann, who guided the fugitives to Rich Hill early on Easter morning, Sunday, April 16, gave information against the captain. Cox insisted that when the two strangers came to his door, he dismissed them and ordered them on their way. But Swann disputed him and swore that Cox invited the criminals into his home, where they spent several hours. The detectives locked up Cox with Jones and posted two guards outside their door. Before they went to sleep on the floor, their heads resting on their saddles, Cox turned to his good friend and experienced secret agent for advice. “What shall I do, Tom?” he whispered in the dark. “Stick to what you have said,” counseled Jones, “and admit nothing else.”
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The detectives, frustrated at their lack of progress, tried to trick Jones into confessing by loitering in the yard below his bedroom window and talking loudly about his forthcoming and imminent hanging. Still Jones would not talk. Even when transferred to the dreaded Old Capitol prison, site of his former, devastating incarceration, and current home to John T. Ford, Junius Brutus Booth, John Sleeper Clarke, and many others ensnared by the manhunt, he refused to provide any information about John Wilkes Booth. During the wagon ride from Bryantown to Washington, an unsubtle government agent had tried, once again, to loosen his captive’s tongue with alcohol. Detective Franklin genially offered a bottle of whiskey, which Jones pretended to drink. When the officer saw that his prisoner refused to get drunk, he cursed him all the way to the capital.
The detectives failed to realize it, but when they arrested Jones, they also captured an eyewitness who possessed intimate knowledge of how he helped Booth and Herold. But they could never make her talk. Jones was forced to leave her behind in Bryantown, but he laughed at the detectives’ ignorance about their valuable prize—his horse: “This mare was the same one Booth had ridden from the pines to the river that memorable . . . night. She was a flea-bitten gray, named Kit. Had her complicity been known, what an object of interest she would have been.” Instead, Kit lived out the rest of her days in quiet anonymity.
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