Manhunt

by James L. Swanson

  Unseen by Booth, Sergeant Boston Corbett watched the assassin’s every move inside the barn: “Immediately when the fire was lit . . . I could see him, but he could not see me.” Corbett had, by stealth, without Booth seeing him, walked up to one side of the barn and peeked between one of the four-inch gaps that separated each of the barn wall’s vertical boards. As the flames grew brighter, Corbett could see Booth clearly: the assassin “turn[ed] towards the fire, either to put the fire out, or else to shoot the one who started it, I do not know which; but he was then coming right towards me . . . a little to my right,—a full breast view.” Now Booth was within easy range of Corbett’s pistol. But the sergeant held his fire: “I could have shot him . . . but as long as he was there, making no demonstration to hurt any one, I did not shoot him, but kept my eye upon him steadily.” He saw Booth reach the middle of the barn and face the door.

  Outside the barn, Conger, Baker, and Doherty, and the cavalrymen posted near the door tensed for action. No man could endure those hot flames and choking smoke for long, and they expected the door to swing open at any moment and see Booth emerge, either with his hands up or his pistols blazing.

  Corbett’s eyes followed their prey as Booth got closer to the door. By now the sergeant had drawn his pistol. Booth moved again and leveled the carbine against his hip, as though he was preparing to bring it into firing position. Corbett poked the barrel of his revolver through the slit in the wall and aimed it at Booth. The sergeant described what happened next:

  “Finding the fire gaining upon him, he turned to the other side of the barn and got towards where the door was; and, as he got there, I saw him make a movement towards the floor. I supposed he was going to fight his way out. One of the men who was watching told me that [Booth] aimed his carbine at him. He was taking aim with the carbine, but at whom I could not say. My mind was upon him attentively to see that he did no harm; and, when I became impressed that it was time, I shot him. I took steady aim on my arm, and shot him through a large crack in the barn.”

  The soldiers surrounding the barn heard one shot. Instantly Booth dropped the carbine and crumpled to his knees. His brain commanded movement but his body disobeyed. He could not rise. He could not lift his arms. He could not move at all.

  Like sprinters cued by a starting gun, Baker rushed into the barn with Conger at his heels. Baker caught Booth before he toppled over and Conger seized the assassin’s pistol, which the actor grasped so tightly that the detective had to twist it to pry it out of his hand.

  “It is Booth, certainly,” Conger cried jubilantly.

  Baker glared disapprovingly: “What on earth did you shoot him for?”

  “I did not shoot him,” Conger protested, “he has shot himself!” Conger stared at the assassin: “Is he dead? Did he shoot himself?”

  “No, he did not, either,” said Baker.

  Conger raised Booth up and asked, “Where is he shot?” Conger searched for the wound: “Where-about is he shot?—in the head or neck?” Conger examined Booth’s neck and found a hole where blood was running out. “Yes sir,” Conger deduced, “he shot himself.”

  “No he did not,” Baker insisted.

  As soon as Lieutenant Doherty heard the shot he ran for the barn, dragging David Herold with him. By the time they entered, the two detectives and several soldiers were hovering over Booth in the middle of a burning barn, and carrying on an animated argument about the origin of the wound. There were better places to continue the debate, suggested Conger: “Let us carry him out of here: this place will soon be burning.” They lifted Booth from the floor, carried him under the locust trees a few yards from the door, and laid him on the grass.

  Doherty took Herold with him out of the barn. The sight of his master on the ground, apparently dead, threw Davey into a panic of irrational babbling: “Let me go away; let me go around here,” he pleaded.

  “I will not leave; I will not go away.” Herold’s whining would not have surprised Lewis Powell, who called him a “little blab.” “I was never satisfied with him myself,” Powell told Major Eckert, “and so expressed myself to Booth.”

  “No sir,” responded the lieutenant.

  Feigning ignorance, Davey asked him, “Who is that that has been shot in the barn?”

  Incredulous, Doherty cut him off: “Why, you know well who it is!”

  Herold elaborated his alibi: “No, I do not. He told me his name was Boyd.”

  Doherty had heard enough: “It is Booth; and you know it.”

  Davey persisted in his denials: “No; I did not know it; I did not know that it was Booth.” In captivity, the assassin’s disciple denied him thrice.

  From under the locust trees, Conger looked back at the barn. If they could save it, perhaps they might preserve vital evidence of the crime: “I went back into the barn immediately to see if the fire could be put down, and tried somewhat myself to put it down; but I could not, it was burning so fast; and there was no water, and nothing to help with.” John Garrett ran into the barn and joined the effort, rallying several troopers by yelling, “Boys, let us extinguish the fire.” Like Conger, he surrendered to the inevitable: “The soldiers ran and threw furniture and stuff on the fire, but it was too late.”

  Conger left the barn and went back to the locust trees. Gazing down on Booth’s broken body, “I supposed him to be dead. He had all the appearance of a dead man.” But, like the stricken William Seward, who looked to his doctor like “an exsanguinated corpse,” John Wilkes Booth’s life force rallied. He opened his eyes and moved his lips.

  Conger called for water, and a soldier offered the contents of his tin, government-issue canteen. Baker produced a crude tin cup, an indispensable utensil common to the baggage of nearly every soldier, North and South, in the war. They splashed some of the cool, reviving water on Booth’s face, and he tried to speak. They poured a little into his mouth, and he spit it out. The assassin could not swallow the liquid: he was almost completely paralyzed. Again he moved his lips and tried to speak. With great concentration and labored effort, Booth’s vocal cords emitted a barely audible whisper. For the first time in his life, the great thespian and raconteur was at a loss for words, his great stage voice silenced by the bullet that had passed through his neck and spinal column.

  Conger and Baker bent down close to Booth’s reclining body, tilted their heads, and jutted their ears close to his mouth. Booth formed words with his lips but produced no sounds. Finally, after several attempts, Lincoln’s assassin spoke: “Tell mother, I die for my country.” It was hard to hear his faint voice above the roar of the crackling fire, the shouts of the men, and the neighing, snorting horses. Conger wanted desperately to confirm the accuracy of what Booth had said. These might be the assassin’s historic last words, and they must be reported to the nation exactly as Booth said them. Moreover, Secretary of War Stan-ton would demand a full accounting of the events at Garrett’s barn, including Booth’s every word.

  Enunciating each syllable slowly and clearly so that Booth could understand him, Conger repeated the phrase verbatim: “Is that what you say?” the detective asked.

  “Yes,” faintly whispered the assassin.

  The tobacco barn was now fully ablaze, and the inferno radiated an intense, searing heat that threatened to combust the locust trees where Booth and his captors reposed. The horses, even though the soldiers had picketed or tied them a good distance away before firing the barn, were growing increasingly restive as the flames intensified. The detectives shouted for everyone to retreat to the Garrett house. Several men seized Booth by the arms, shoulders, and legs, raised his limp body from the ground, and marched in quick time to the farmhouse. They climbed up the stairs and laid Booth flat on the wood-planked piazza, near the bench where, over the past two days, he had sat, smoked, napped, conversed, and planned the next leg of his escape. Blood, seeping from the entry and exit wounds in his neck, pooled under his head and stained several of the floorboards. To relieve Booth’s suffering, the Garrett girls
carried an old straw mattress from the house and laid it on the porch. Conger and the others folded the soft, pliable bedding in half and laid Booth’s head and shoulders on it. Lucinda Holloway carried out a pillow and, gently, placed it under his head.

  Doherty brought David Herold to the porch and gave him an order: “Come stand by the house.” The officer did not have any wrist or leg irons to shackle Davey, so he improvised with a material that every cavalry unit rode with in ample supply: rope. Doherty bound Herold’s hands with a picket rope and tied him to a locust tree about two yards from where Booth’s body lay. Doherty kept Davey tied there until they were ready to return to Washington. This position, only six feet from Booth’s body, gave Herold a front-row seat for the climax of the chase for Lincoln’s killer.

  Once Booth was on the porch, Conger observed, he “REVIVED considerably. He could then talk so as to be intelligibly understood, in a whisper; [but] he could not speak above a whisper.” The great, theatrical, tenor voice that once projected beyond the proscenium arch and filled the halls of Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Richmond had been hushed and could no longer be heard past the first row.

  Booth whispered for water and Conger and Baker gave it to him. He asked them to roll him over and turn him facedown. Booth was in agony and wanted to shift positions but was helpless to move himself. Conger thought it a bad idea to roll him over: “You cannot lie on your face.” Then at least turn him on his side, the assassin pleaded. They did, but Conger saw that the move did not relieve Booth’s suffering: “We turned him upon his side three times.. . . He could not lie with any comfort, and wanted to be turned immediately back.” Baker noticed it, too: “He seemed to suffer extreme pain whenever he was moved, and would scowl, and would several times repeat ‘Kill me.’”

  Booth wanted to cough but the bullet had severed the communication between his brain and his throat. He asked Conger to put his hand upon his throat, and press down. The detective complied, but nothing happened.

  “Harder,” Booth instructed Conger.

  “I pressed down as hard as I thought necessary, and he made very strong exertions to cough, but was unable to do so—no muscular exertion could be made.”

  Conger, guessing that Booth feared some asphyxiating obstruction was stuck in his throat, told Booth to let him inspect it: “Open your mouth, and put out your tongue, and I will see if it bleeds.” Conger reassured Booth: “There is no blood in your throat; it has not gone through any part of it there.”

  “Kill me,” Booth implored the soldiers. “Kill me, kill me!”

  “We don’t want to kill you,” Conger comforted him, “we want you to get well.”

  Conger spoke sincerely. They wanted Booth alive so they could bring him back to Washington as a prize for Edwin Stanton. Stanton and others were certain that Booth was merely the agent of a Confederate conspiracy. Indeed, President Andrew Johnson would soon issue another reward proclamation, this one for Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials, naming them as assassination conspirators. Davis, currently the object of another manhunt, had fled Richmond for the Confederate interior as part of a desperate attempt to continue the war using Southern armies that had not yet surrendered to Union forces. Sam Arnold and Mike O’Laughlen had already confessed everything they knew about the plot. If Booth talked, too, he might give invaluable testimony that implicated the highest officials of the Confederacy.

  But thanks to somebody under his command, it was obvious to Conger that John Wilkes Booth was not going back to Washington alive. Who fired that shot? Conger demanded to know. Baker asked him if he knew who did it.

  “No, but I will,” vowed Conger.

  Conger walked away in search of the trigger-happy trooper. He returned soon but, it appeared to Baker, empty-handed.

  “Where is the man?”

  Conger laughed aloud and replied, “I guess we had better let Providence and the Secretary of War take care of him.”

  Conger explained to the puzzled Baker what had happened. When he went off to find Booth’s killer, Boston Corbett came forward, snapped to attention, saluted Conger, and proclaimed, “Colonel, Providence directed me.”

  Corbett made the same confession to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Doherty. “Providence directed my hand.” Corbett claimed that he had not shot Booth for vengeance, but because he believed the assassin was about to open fire on the soldiers. He did it to protect the lives of his fellow troopers, he insisted. And, Corbett continued, he did not intend to kill Booth. He only wanted to inflict a disabling wound to render the assassin helpless, for capture. And he did not violate any orders from his superiors. The men of the Sixteenth New York had not been ordered to hold their fire. Indeed, Conger, Baker, and Doherty had failed to give them any orders at all on the subject. Corbett exercised his own discretion as a noncommissioned officer and shot Booth: “It was not through fear at all that I shot him, but because it was my impression that it was time the man was shot; for I thought he would do harm to our men in trying to fight his way out of that den if I did not.”

  Dr. Charles Urquhart, a local physician summoned by Doherty and Baker, arrived on the scene and examined Booth for ten or fifteen minutes. His new patient lapsed in and out of consciousness during the examination. Distracted and confused by the surreal scenes, the befuddled Urquhart said that the wound was nonfatal, then reversed his diagnosis: the wound was mortal; it was impossible for Booth to recover.

  Several soldiers compared the location of Booth’s fatal wound with the location of Lincoln’s wound. Perhaps, they marveled, God’s justice directed Corbett’s bullet to the back of the assassin’s head. Corbett, too, wondered at the coincidence: “[W]hile Booth’s body lay before me, yet alive, but wounded, and when I saw that the bullet had struck him just back of the ear, about the same spot that his bullet hit Mr. Lincoln, I said within myself, ‘what a fearful God we serve.’” Later, Corbett recalled a prayer he had led at a chapel in Washington before he joined the manhunt: “O Lord, lay not innocent blood to our charge, but bring the guilty speedily to punishment.”

  Booth noticed Willie Jett standing nearby. After Booth had been shot, the trooper guarding him near the roadside gate brought him up to the house. The sight of the unfaithful young Confederate agitated Booth.

  “Did that man betray me?” Booth asked Conger.

  Conger evaded the question: “We have taken him prisoner.”

  “Did Jett betray me?” Booth asked Baker.

  “Oh,” answered Baker, “never mind anything about Jett.”

  Conger began rifling Booth’s pockets, turning them inside out. “[H]e looked up,” admitted Conger, “and knew what was being done.” Conger unfolded a handkerchief and laid it neatly next to Booth. On it he placed the contents of the assassin’s pockets. “I took his diary, these bills of exchange, money, keys, compass, shavings, tobacco, and a little knife.” From Booth’s undershirt he yanked a special prize: a handsome stickpin, “a stone set in jet and gold,” Conger described it, engraved “Dan Bryant to J.W. Booth.” Two years earlier the famous blackface comedian and Booth had exchanged gifts: Booth gave Bryant a fl ask, and Bryant gave Booth this pin.

  Kneeling at Booth’s side, Lucinda Holloway ministered to the dying star. As she gazed upon his face—“luminous” is how she remembered it for the rest of her life—Booth stuck out his tongue. He was thirsty. As strangers at Golgotha did for Christ on Good Friday’s cross, Lucinda answered his plea: “I took my handkerchief and dipped it in water and moistened his lips. I again moistened his lips and he repeated his message to his mother. Soon he gasped, and I again moistened his lips and tongue a third time.”

  Booth rallied and opened his eyes.

  “The damn rebel is still living!” a soldier cursed.

  “My hands,” Booth whispered. Baker clasped them, bathed the clammy flesh in cool water, and raised them up for Booth to see. For the last time John Wilkes Booth beheld the hands, now helpless, that had slai
n a president. Tenderly, Lucinda Holloway massaged his temples and forehead. Her fingertips felt the life draining out of him: “The pulsations in his temples grew weaker and weaker.”

  Mustering all his remaining strength, waning rapidly now, Booth looked at his hands and spoke again: “Useless, useless.”

  His breathing turned sporadic and labored, and he gasped for breath every few minutes. “His heart would almost die out; and then it would commence, and, by a few rapid beats, would make a slight motion again,” Baker observed.

  Booth’s lips turned purple and his throat swelled.

  He gasped.

  The rising sun nudged above the horizon and colored the eastern sky. In Albany, New York, mourners who had waited in line all night filed past Abraham Lincoln’s remains, displayed magnificently in the state Capitol’s Assembly Chamber. “During the still hours of the morning,” said one who witnessed the scene, “a sad procession moved through our streets to and from the Capitol. Aside from the slow tread of this procession, not a sound was to be heard.” That afternoon the funeral train would pull out of the station, heading west to the prairies. Lincoln would be home soon.