Manhunt

by James L. Swanson

  In other words, Booth was saying that a feast seems grudgingly and mercenarily given unless it is repeatedly graced with assurances of welcome. Plain eating is best done in one’s own domestic setting; on more social occasions, the spice to a feast is ceremony; gatherings are too unadorned without it.

  Booth’s two drafts differed little. The chief differences were in the sums of money Booth offered and the closing salutations. First Booth wrote “$5.00.” On second thought he cut the sum in half. And perhaps he intended the smaller amount to augment the greater insult. Booth closed the first draft with “Most respectfully, your obedient servant.” The actor judged that salutation too respectful to the unworthy doctor and substituted the less florid “Yours respectfully.”

  How strange, too, that in Booth’s last writings—his journal entries and his final letter—he quoted from his victim’s favorite texts. The cadences of the King James Bible resonated in many of Abraham Lincoln’s finest writings, and his love of Shakespeare knew no bounds. During private, social evenings at the White House, the president often sat by the fire and read his aloud to his small, intimate circle of friends. In a letter to the celebrated actor James Henry Hackett, Lincoln expounded on his favorites: “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”

  It was Macbeth that Lincoln chose to read aloud to his guests on a Potomac cruise aboard the River Queen on Sunday five days before the assassination. One of the president’s companions described that memorable performance:

  On Sunday, April 9th, we were steaming up the Potomac. That whole day the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects. Mr. Lincoln read to us for several hours passages taken from Shakespeare. Most of these were from “Macbeth,” and, in particular, the verses which follow Duncan’s assassination. I cannot recall this reading without being awed at the remembrance, when Macbeth becomes king after the murder of Duncan, he falls prey to the most horrible torments of mind. Either because he was struck by the weird beauty of these verses, or from a vague presentiment coming over him, Mr. Lincoln paused here while reading, and began to explain to us how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim; and he read over again the same scene.

  Gleeful at the prospect of taking symbolic revenge against Stuart, Booth folded two and a half dollars into a small, tight square and then wrapped his letter around the money. He called Charlie Lucas over and handed him the insulting ensemble. If only he could see Stuart’s face when the old doctor read his rebuke, Booth gloated.

  Charlie Lucas braked the wagon to a stop in front of the home of William Rollins, a former Port Conway store owner who made his living by fishing and farming. Booth and Herold did not know him. Rollins was in his backyard preparing his fishing nets and did not see the wagon’s approach. When he walked around his house, he recognized William Lucas’s horses. Then he saw the two strangers, David Herold standing at the gate, and another man sitting in the wagon. Herold asked an old man sitting nearby for some water, and the fellow filled a tin dipper to the rim and passed it to Herold. As Davey began walking to the wagon, the cup spilled over: “It is too full,” he called out to Booth. “I’ll drink some of it.”

  Thirsty, Booth yelled back, “Bring it down here.”

  Still holding the dipper, Herold turned to Rollins and asked if he knew anybody who could take them to Orange Court House. When Rollins said no, Herold asked if he would take them at least part of the way. Rollins offered to drive them to Bowling Green, about fifteen miles distant, for a fee. Intrigued, Herold invited Rollins to come over to the wagon and meet his friend. “This man says he has a wagon and will take us to Bowling Green for ten dollars,” Herold reported, as he climbed aboard Lucas’s wagon and surrendered the refreshing cup. Booth asked Rollins to confirm the distance, and the fisherman added, tantalizingly, that the Fredericksburg and Richmond railroad was just two and a half miles from there.

  Then, improvidently, Herold asked if there was a hotel nearby where Booth could lay up his injured leg for a couple of days. He should have known there was no time for that. Perpetuating their masquerade as Confederate soldiers, Herold volunteered the familiar story: his companion had been wounded near Petersburg. Rollins told them about a hotel at Bowling Green. Then Booth switched subjects, inquiring whether Rollins would take him and Davey across the Rappahannock, only two or three hundred yards wide at this point, and land them on the other side at Port Royal. Rollins offered to do it for the same price that the ferry operating between Port Conway and Port Royal charged— ten cents one way. He would be happy to transport them in his boat after he went down to the river and put out his fishing nets. The tide was about to rise, and that meant prime fishing time.

  Booth wanted to cross at once. As soon as the nets are set, Rollins reiterated. Frustrated, Booth tried to entice him with more money: “I don’t want to be lying over here. We’ll pay you more than the ferriage.” The actor could not persuade him. The tide was rising now, and the fisherman wasn’t going to miss out on a good catch. At that moment three mounted figures appeared on the hill just above Port Conway, about fifty yards from the river, and surveyed the town. They were soldiers. And a wagon down by the wharf, parked in front of William Rollins’s house, caught their eye.

  The men spurred their horses and descended slowly to Port Con-way. When they got within twenty yards of the wagon, Herold jumped out and thrust his hand inside the breast of his coat. One of the men noticed Davey’s clumsy, obvious move immediately. He had seen men draw pistols before. Another member of the trio took note of the wagon, which was drawn, he thought, “by two very wretched looking horses.” Then they looked over to the man sitting in the wagon: “[He] was dressed in a dark suit that looked seamed and ravelly, as if from rough contact with thorny undergrowth. On his head was a seedy looking black slouch hat, which he kept well pulled down over his forehead . . . his beard, of a coal-black hue, was of about two weeks’ growth and gave his face an unclean appearance.”

  On Monday, April 24, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd saw soldiers, too. There would be no more questions today, no additional searches of the house and outbuildings, no marathon, cat-and-mouse interrogations at Bryantown. The soldiers came to his farm to arrest him and take him away to Washington. There he would languish, locked up in the fearsome Old Capitol prison, across the street from the great dome, shining symbol of the Union that he, John Wilkes Booth, and all the others, had tried to topple. Confined incommunicado, Samuel A. Mudd waited to learn what terrible price the government would seek to exact from him.

  Booth and Herold had been dreading this moment, if not at Port Conway, then somewhere along their escape route. It was only a matter of time. Their first encounter with soldiers was inevitable. Fate chose Port Conway. Booth and Herold tensed for action. As the riders approached, Herold walked toward them, creating distance between them and Booth, and all the while scrutinizing their uniforms and equipment. Their jackets did not look blue. Davey, adopting his usual, disarming manner of the friendly sidekick, called out to the men: “Gentlemen, whose command do you belong to?”

  One of them, an officer, responded: “To Mosby’s command.”

  Herold was relieved. They were Confederates!

  These men weren’t just everyday soldiers. Even though two of them were eighteen years old and one was nineteen years old, First Lieutenant Mortimer B. Ruggles, Private Absalom R. Bainbridge, and Private William S. Jett were veterans of one of the Confederacy’s most elite, renowned cavalry units, commanded by the legendary John Singleton Mosby. Herold was elated: “If I am not inquisitive,” he asked Ruggles, “can I ask you where you are going?”

  William Jett jumped in: “That is a secret. Nobody knows where we are going because I never tell anybody.” And who was asking? The
y decided to turn the tables on the stranger and asked him to what command did he belong?

  Davey performed well: “We belong to A. P. Hill’s Corps; I have my wounded brother a Marylander who was wounded in the fight below Petersburg.”

  Where is this wound? queried Jett.

  “In the leg.” Jett pursued the interrogation and requested their names.

  “Our name is Boyd; his name is James William Boyd and mine is David E. Boyd.” Herold assumed the guise of an enthusiastic Confederate, a militant bitter-ender, zealous to continue the fight, wherever it was. “Come gentlemen I suppose you are all going to the Southern Army,” Herold ventured confidentially, adding that “we are also anxious to get over there ourselves and wish you to take us along with you.”

  Booth struggled out of the wagon, propped himself up on his crutches, and began walking toward them.

  Mosby’s men thought Herold was odd and overeager and did not reply to him or dismount their horses. Guessing that this was the opportune moment for some social lubrication, Davey played host: “Come gentlemen, get down; we have got something to drink here; we will go and take a drink.”

  Jett declined curtly: “Thank you Sir, I never drink anything.” Jett rode about twenty yards away from Herold, dismounted, and tied his horse to a gate. Ruggles and Bainbridge dismounted and sat on Rollins’s steps.

  As soon as Jett rejoined the group, Herold tapped him on the shoulder and asked if they could speak privately. They walked to the wharf, and Herold proposed a plan: “I take it for granted that you are raising a command to go south to Mexico and I want you to let us go with you.”

  Real soldiers did not talk this way, Jett knew: “I was thrown aback that such an idea should have entered any man’s head.” The verbose “David E. Boyd,” if that was his true name, was holding something back. “I cannot go with any man that I do not know anything about,” Jett explained. He stared Herold down and asked a simple question: “Who are you?”

  “We are,” Herold spouted excitedly in a trembling voice, “the assassinators of the president.” Herold pointed to where Booth stood some yards off. “Yonder is the assassinator! Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed the president.”

  Dumbstruck, Private William Jett did not say a word. Interpreting Jett’s silence as a sign of disbelief, Herold asked him if he had noticed Booth’s indelible proof of identity—the initials “JWB” tattooed on his left hand. Ruggles walked up to Herold and Jett, but Jett found that all he could do was mumble to his friend “here is a strange thing.” Then they told Ruggles the stunning news. Booth was just a few feet away, swinging forward on the crutches. Within seconds they were face-to-face with Lincoln’s assassin, his marked hand hidden discreetly by a shawl.

  “I suppose you have been told who I am?” Booth asked.

  Ruggles was transfixed: “Instantly he dropped his weight back upon his crutch, and drawing a revolver said sternly, with the utmost coolness, ‘Yes, I am John Wilkes Booth, the slayer of Abraham Lincoln, and I am worth just $175,000 to the man who captures me.’”

  “Do you wish to go over the river now, sir?” an approaching voice interrupted. It was William Rollins, back from setting his nets. He had walked to his house, gotten his coat, and called down to Booth at the ferryboat landing where the assassin stood with Herold and the soldiers.

  “Yes,” Booth shouted back.

  “Come on then,” Rollins beckoned.

  But Booth hesitated and inched closer to Herold and the soldiers.

  Rollins shouted out to Booth again: “If you wish to go over the river, come on.”

  Herold spoke for his master: “If you are in a hurry go on; we are not going over now.” Instead, the fugitives huddled with Ruggles, Jett, and Bainbridge, concocting an alternative scheme. They told the trio that they wanted to throw themselves entirely upon their protection. Jett agreed to help, and Ruggles vouchsafed their fidelity: “We were not men to take ‘blood money.’” The soldiers promised to accompany the assassins across the river in the ferryboat and help them on the other side.

  Booth had won their loyalty not by mesmerizing them with the riveting story of how he had struck down the president, but with his laconic, stoic demeanor. The assassin confided to William Jett that he thought the murder “was nothing to brag about,” and the soldier agreed: “I do not either.” Ruggles noticed about Booth the same thing his comrades did—the actor was in agony, but he took it like a man: “I noticed that his wounded leg was greatly swollen, inflamed, and dark, as from bruised blood, while it seemed to have been wretchedly dressed, the splints being simply pasteboard rudely tied about it. That he suffered intense pain all the time there was no doubt, though he tried to conceal his agony, both physical and mental.”

  Booth’s confession took them by surprise, and the fact that they were standing in the presence of—and even conversing with—Lincoln’s assassin stunned them. But Ruggles could not help admiring him: “[T]he coolness of the man won our admiration; for we saw that he was wounded, desperate, and at bay. His face was haggard, pinched with suffering, his dark eyes sunken, but strangely bright.”

  Before departing on the ferry, Herold and Jett walked back to Rollins’s place, found him outside, and made a curious request: did he have a bottle of ink? Rollins led them into the house, took a small bottle from the mantel, and laid it on the table. Jett sat in a chair, set out a piece of paper, and began writing. Herold told Jett to let him do it, and Jett tore off the part of the paper he had already written on. Herold copied it, writing five or six lines. They had forged an army parole document for Jett in case he encountered Union troops.

  The ferryboat had almost reached the Port Conway side of the river.

  Time to cross over to Port Royal. Herold picked up his carbine, wound the white, cotton sling around his shoulders, and again told Rollins that he and his friend did not need a ride: “I have met with some friends out here and they say it is not worth while to hire a wagon to go on to Bowling Green, as we can all go along together and ride and tie.” As Davey gathered his blanket, Rollins, admiring its luxurious shag finish on one side, made the oddest compliment.

  “That’s a very nice concern you’ve got there,” he said.

  “Yes, a lady in Maryland gave me that,” Herold acknowledged proudly.

  James Thornton, a free black man who operated the ferry for its owner, Champe Thornton, piloted the craft to the wharf. David Herold dismissed the wagon and Charlie Lucas turned his team around and headed for home. Herold reminded him to deliver Mr. Boyd’s letter to Dr. Stuart. Booth explained to Ruggles that he was unable to walk anymore, so the lieutenant lifted him onto his horse and prepared to board. James Thornton opened the gate and ushered the waiting customers— five men and three horses—aboard. To Thornton, the strangers appeared unremarkable—just another band of bedraggled rebels heading home after losing the war.

  Herold, Jett, and Bainbridge stepped onto the fl at, wood planks of the ferry’s bottom, the two Confederates leading their horses by the reins. Ruggles, also on foot, carried Booth’s crutches, Herold carried the carbine, and Booth had the pistols and knife. Ruggles noticed that Major Rathbone’s blood was still on the blade. Around his neck Booth suspended the field glasses from a leather strap joined by an adjustable metal buckle. Ignoring ferry rules, the assassin, who wanted to avoid the searing pain that accompanied every mount and dismount of the horse, refused to get out of the saddle and he rode Ruggles’s horse right onto the barge. Mounted men made the ferry top-heavy, but Thornton let Booth’s infraction slide. Later, after it was all over, showman P. T. Barnum offered Ruggles a nice price for the saddle graced by John Wilkes Booth’s posterior during the short ferry trip.

  With his passengers all aboard, Thornton cut loose from the wharf and eased the slow-moving, awkward craft across the Rappahannock to the old, dilapidated colonial town of Port Royal. During the crossing the men hardly spoke, not wanting the colored man to learn anything about them. Bainbridge became suspicious of Thorn
ton, anyway: “The ferryman eyed us all very closely and we said but very little.” Bainbridge unglued his eyes from Thornton and witnessed, as the actor towered over them, a memorable scene: “Booth sat squarely on his horse, looking expectantly towards the opposite shore.” As soon at they landed and Thornton opened the gate, Booth spurred Ruggles’s horse onto the wharf.

  The assassin was in good spirits again, and he laughed as Herold and their new friends gathered around him to celebrate the successful crossing. Broaching the humble Rappahannock was no great feat in itself, but it represented the culmination of this phase of the escape. Booth and Herold had crossed the mighty Potomac, escaped from Maryland, landed in Virginia, found—finally, after suffering bitter disappointments—loyal Confederate comrades, and passed safely south through the state’s northern neck. Now, south of the Rappahannock, John Wilkes Booth looked forward to a swift journey through open country, to the interior of the Old Dominion. Overcome with emotion, Booth sang out: “I’m safe in glorious old Virginia, thank God!”