Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

by James L. Swanson

  “The most beautiful black eyes in the world.”

  John Wilkes Booth at the height of his fame.

  By the time Booth arrived at Ford’s, the president’s messenger had come and gone. Sometime between noon and 12:30 P.M. as he sat outside on the top step in front of the main entrance to Ford’s reading his letter, Booth heard the galvanizing news. In just eight hours the subject of all of his brooding, hating, and plotting would stand on the very stone steps where he now sat. This was the catalyst Booth needed to prompt him to action. Here. Of all places, Lincoln was coming here. Booth knew the layout of Ford’s intimately: the exact spot on Tenth Street where Lincoln would step out of his carriage; the place the president sat every time he came to the theatre; the route through the theatre that Lincoln would walk and the staircase he would ascend to the box; the dark, subterranean passageway beneath the stage; the narrow hallway behind the stage that led to the back door that opened to Baptist Alley; and how the president’s box hung directly above the stage. Booth had played here before, most recently in a March 18 performance as Pescara in The Apostate.

  And Booth, although he had never acted in it, also knew Our American Cousin—its duration, its scenes, its players, and, most important, as it would turn out, the number of actors onstage at any given moment during the performance. It was perfect. He would not have to hunt Lincoln. The president was coming to him. But was there enough time to make all the arrangements? The checklist was substantial: horses; weapons; supplies; alerting his fellow conspirators; casing the theatre; so many other things. He had only eight hours. But it was possible. If luck was on his side, there was just enough time. Whoever told Booth about the president’s theatre party had unknowingly activated in his mind an imaginary clock that, even as he sat on the front step of Ford’s, chuckling aloud as he read his letter, began ticking down, minute by minute. He would have a busy afternoon.

  aT THE EXECUTIVE MANSION, ABRAHAM LINCOLN ATE breakfast with his family and planned his day. The president’s eldest son, Robert, a junior officer on General Grant’s staff, was home from the war. Robert had been at Appomattox, and his father was eager to hear details of Lee’s surrender. Lincoln had scheduled a meeting with Grant at 9:00 A.M. at the White House. He wanted to talk more with Robert, so he postponed the meeting and sent a messenger over to the Willard Hotel with a handwritten note for his special guest: “General Grant, Please call at 11. A.M. to-day instead of 9. as agreed last evening. Yours truly, A. Lincoln.” The president decided that Grant should join the cabinet meeting set for that later hour.

  At the cabinet meeting Lincoln was jubilant—everyone in attendance, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and the secretaries of the Treasury, the Interior, and the Post Office and the attorney general—noticed Lincoln’s good mood. Welles, a faithful diarist, preserved an account of the gathering. Lincoln expected more good news from other battle fronts.

  “The President remarked that it would, he had no doubt, come soon, and come favorable, for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War. Generally the news has been favorable which succeeded this dream, and the dream itself was always the same. I inquired what this remarkable dream could be. He said it related to your (my) element, the water; that he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore. That he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.”

  General Grant interrupted Lincoln and joked that Stone River was no victory, and that “a few such fights would have ruined us.”

  “I had,” the president continued, “this strange dream again last night, and we shall, judging from the past, have great news very soon. I think it must be from Sherman. My thoughts are in that direction, as are most of yours.”

  Lincoln had always believed in, and sometimes feared, the power of dreams. On June 9, 1863, while he was visiting Philadelphia, he sent an urgent telegram to Mary Lincoln at the White House, warning of danger to their youngest son: “Think you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him.” And in April 1848, when he was a congressman in Washington, he wrote to Mary about their oldest son, Robert: “I did not get rid of the impression of that foolish dream about dear Bobby till I got your letter.”

  After the meeting adjourned, the president followed his usual routine: receiving a variety of friends, supplicants, and favor seekers; reading his mail; and catching up on correspondence and paperwork. He was eager to wind up business by 3:00 P.M. for an appointment he had with his wife, Mary. There was something he wanted to tell her.

  aT THE THEATRE, HENRY CLAY FORD WROTE OUT AN ADVERtisement to place in the evening papers, which would start coming off the press at around 2:00 P.M. He delivered the notice to the Evening Star personally and sent another via messenger to at least two of the other papers. That afternoon an advertisement appeared in the Evening Star: “LIEUT. GENERAL GRANT, PRESIDENT and Mrs. Lincoln have secured the State Box at Ford’s Theatre TO NIGHT, to witness Miss Laura Keene’s American Cousin.” Around 1:00 P.M., Ford walked next door and delivered notice in person to his neighbor James P. Ferguson at his restaurant at 452 Tenth Street, one door north of the theatre.

  “Your favorite, General Grant, is going to be in the theatre tonight; and if you want to see him,” Ford cautioned, “you had better to go get a seat.”

  Ferguson took advantage of the tip: “I went and secured a seat directly opposite the President’s box, in the front of the dress circle.” Ferguson booked seats 58 and 59 at the front corner of the house near stage right. The restaurateur didn’t want the best view of the play, but the best view of Lincoln and Grant.

  James Ford walked to the Treasury Department a few blocks away to borrow several flags to decorate the president’s box. Returning to the theatre, his arms wrapped around a bundle of brightly colored cotton and silk bunting, he bumped into Booth, who had just left Ford’s, at the corner of Tenth and Pennsylvania, where they exchanged pleasantries. Booth saw the red, white, and blue flags, confirmation of the president’s visit tonight.

  A few blocks away, on D Street near Seventh, at J. H. Polkinhorn and Son, Printers, pressmen began setting the type for the playbill that would advertise tonight’s performance. Once newsboys hit the streets with the afternoon and evening papers, the ad for Our American Cousin caught the eye of many Washingtonians eager to see General Grant.

  Dr. Charles A. Leale, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. Army surgeon on duty at the wounded commissioned officers’ ward at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, heard that President Lincoln and General Grant would be attending the play. He decided to attend. Three days prior, on the night of April 11, Leale, while taking a walk on Pennsylvania Avenue, encountered crowds of people walking toward the White House. He followed them there and arrived just as Lincoln commenced his remarks. Leale was moved: “I could distinctly hear every word he uttered, and I was profoundly impressed with his divine appearance as he stood in the rays of light which penetrated the windows.” The news that Lincoln was coming to Ford’s Theatre gave the surgeon “an intense desire again to behold his face and study the characteristics of the ‘Savior of his Country.’”

  Lincoln’s box at Ford’s was festooned with flags and a framed engraving of George Washington. The box office manager prepared for a run on tickets when he went on duty at 6:30 P.M.

  Later, witnesses remembered seeing Booth at several places in the city that day, but none of his movements created suspicion. Why should they? Nothing Booth did seemed out of the ordinary that afternoon. He talked to people in the street. He arranged to pick up his rented horse. Between 2:00 and 4:00 P.M., Booth rode up to Ferguson’s restaurant, stopping just below the front door. Ferguson stepped outside onto his front porch and found his friend sitting on a small, bay mare. James L. Maddox, property man at Ford’s, stood beside the horse, one hand on its mane
, talking to Booth. “See what a nice horse I have got!” boasted the actor. Ferguson stepped forward for a closer look. “Now, watch,” said Booth, “he can run just like a cat!” At that, Ferguson observed, Booth “struck his spurs into the horse, and off he went down the street.”

  At about 4:00 P.M., Booth returned to the National Hotel, walked to the front desk, and spoke to clerks George W. Bunker and Henry Merrick. Three days later a New York Tribune reporter described the encounter:

  [He] made his appearance at the counter … and with a nervous air called for a sheet of paper and an envelope. He was about to write when the thought seemed to strike him that someone around him might overlook his letter, and, approaching the door of the office, he requested admittance. On reaching the inside of the office, he immediately commenced his letter. He had written but a few words when he said earnestly, “Merrick, is the year 1864 or ‘65?” “You are surely joking, John,” replied Mr. Merrick, “you certainly know what year it is.” “Sincerely, I am not,” he rejoined, and on being told, resumed writing. It was then that Mr. Merrick noticed something troubled and agitated in Booth’s appearance, which was entirely at variance with his usual quiet deportment. Sealing the letter, he placed it in his pocket and left the hotel.

  On his way out of the National, Booth asked George Bunker if he was planning on seeing Our American Cousin at Ford’s, and urged Bunker to attend: “There is going to be some splendid acting tonight.”

  Around 4:00 P.M., the actor John Matthews, who would be playing the part of Mr. Coyle in tonight’s performance, met Booth on horseback on Pennsylvania Avenue, at the triangular enclosure between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, not far from the Willard Hotel. “We met,” recalled Matthews, “shook hands, and passed the compliments of the day.” A column of Confederate prisoners of war had just marched past, stirring up a dust cloud in their wake.

  “John, have you seen the prisoners?” Matthews asked. “Have you seen Lee’s officers, just brought in?”

  “Yes, Johnny, I have.” Booth raised one hand to his forehead in disbelief and then exclaimed, “Great God, I have no longer a country!”

  Matthews, observing Booth’s “paleness, nervousness, and agitation,” asked, “John, how nervous you are, what is the matter?”

  “Oh no, it is nothing. Johnny, I have a little favor to ask of you, will you grant it?”

  “Why certainly,” Matthews replied. “What is it?”

  “Perhaps I may have to leave town tonight, and I have a letter here which I desire to be published in the National Intelligencer; please attend to it for me, unless I see you before ten o’clock tomorrow; in that case I will see to it myself.” Matthews accepted the sealed envelope and slipped it into a coat pocket.

  As Booth and Matthews talked, Matthews spotted General Grant riding past them in an open carriage with his baggage. He appeared to be leaving town.

  “There goes Grant. I thought he was to be coming to the theatre this evening with the President.”

  “Where?” Booth exclaimed.

  Matthews recalled: “I pointed to the carriage; he looked toward it, grasped my hand tightly, and galloped down the avenue after the carriage.”

  When Booth caught up to the Grants and rode past their carriage, Julia Grant thought of something that had happened earlier in the day. She was at lunch at the Willard Hotel with General Rawlins—one of Grant’s top aides—Mrs. Rawlins, and the Rawlinses’ daughter, when four men entered the dining room and occupied a nearby table. One of the men would not stop staring at her, and Julia and Mrs. Rawlins both found the whole group “peculiar.” Now, a few hours later, Booth reminded her of the unpleasant incident when he caught up to their carriage. “As General Grant and I rode to the depot, this same dark, pale man rode past us at a sweeping gallop on a dark horse…. He rode twenty yards ahead of us, wheeled and returned, and as he passed us both going and returning, he thrust his face quite near the General’s and glared in a disagreeable manner.” She was sure that it was the same man from Willard’s.

  The sight of the Grants must have disappointed Booth. Their carriage, loaded with baggage, was heading toward the train station. They were leaving town. They must have canceled their engagement at Ford’s Theatre. If General Grant was not attending Our American Cousin tonight, did that mean the Lincolns had canceled, too? Curtain call, approximately 8:30 P.M., was in less than five hours, and John Wilkes Booth did not know whether the Lincolns still planned to attend the play or who might be in the box with them.

  Booth rode over to the Kirkwood House, where he accomplished his strangest errand of the day. The Kirkwood was the residence of the new vice president, Andrew Johnson, former military governor of Tennessee. Johnson did not own a house in Washington, and the job did not include official quarters, so he lodged at a hotel. Johnson’s room was unguarded, and, if Booth had wanted to, he could have walked upstairs and knocked on the door. But he did not want to see the vice president. He just wanted to leave him a note. Booth approached the front desk and requested a small, blank calling card. He wrote a brief note and handed it to the desk clerk, who placed it in Johnson’s mail slot. The mysterious message, which soon became the object of intense speculation, read: “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.”

  He visited a boardinghouse at 541 H Street, a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre, to pay what looked like an innocent social call on the proprietor, Mary E. Surratt, a forty-two-year-old Maryland widow and the mother of his friend John Harrison Surratt Jr., a Confederate courier. Over the last several months, Booth had become a frequent caller at Mrs. Surratt’s town house. Her son John wasn’t home—he was out of the city on rebel business—and would not be back tonight. Mary told Booth that she was riding out that afternoon to her country tavern in Surrattsville, Maryland, several miles south of Washington, and Booth asked if she would mind delivering a small package wrapped in newspaper to her destination. Conveniently, Booth had the package with him.

  There was one more thing. Booth informed Mary that he would be riding out of Washington this evening. Sometime that night, he said, he would stop at her tavern to pick up not only this package, but also the guns, ammunition, and other supplies that her son John had secreted there for him. Booth asked Mary to tell the tavern keeper John Lloyd—a heavy-drinking former Washington policeman to whom she had rented her country place—to get everything ready for the actor’s visit this evening. She agreed, and soon she and one of her boarders, Louis Weichmann, an old school chum of John Surratt’s, drove down to Surrattsville by carriage.

  Booth returned to Ford’s Theatre around 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., where Edman “Ned” Spangler, a scene shifter and stagehand—“stage carpenter,” he called himself—saw the actor come up behind the theatre through Baptist Alley, named for the church that once occupied the site. Spangler had known Booth and his family for about a dozen years and had done odd jobs for them, most recently helping the actor outfit a small, private stable in the alley behind Ford’s, about fifty yards from the back door. Spangler had seen Booth use a variety of horses: tonight he rode what Ned described as “a little bay mare.” Booth and Spangler walked to the stable, where the actor removed the saddle and the yellow-trimmed saddlecloth. He didn’t like the look of the cloth, he told Ned, and said he might use his shawl instead. Booth asked Ned not to remove the mare’s bridle. “She is a bad little bitch,” Booth said, and she should remain bridled. Booth locked the stable door, took the key, and went for a drink.

  At some point, most likely by late afternoon or early evening, Booth must have secluded himself, probably in room 228 at the National, and made his final preparations. There were two elements, practical and psychological. First, the weapons. Booth chose as his primary weapon a .44-caliber, single-shot, muzzle-loading percussion cap pistol manufactured by Henry Deringer of Philadelphia. It was a small, short-barreled, pocket-size handgun designed for stealth and concealment, not combat, and favored by gamblers and other unsavory types. Unlike military pistols
such as the .44-caliber Colt or Remington Army revolvers, or the lighter-weight .36-caliber Colt Navy revolver, all of which could fire up to six rounds before reloading, the Deringer could be fired just once. Reloading was a laborious process that called for two hands and twenty to forty seconds. Booth knew that his first shot would be his last. If he missed, he wouldn’t have time to reload. Because the Deringer fired a round ball and not a rifled conical bullet, it was most effective at short range. Its big .44-caliber ball, weighing in at nearly an ounce, was a solid, deadly round.

  If Booth missed, or failed to inflict a fatal wound with the pistol, he would turn to his secondary, backup weapon, a “Rio Grande Camp Knife,” a handsome and extremely sharp type of Bowie knife. Booth left behind no explanation for why he chose the Deringer over a revolver. Pistols misfire occasionally. Either the copper percussion cap might fail to spark, or the black powder in the barrel might be spoiled from dampness and fail to ignite. Three decades earlier, on January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence, a crazed, unemployed British house painter who fancied himself of royal blood, failed to assassinate Andrew Jackson on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol when not one, but both, of his single-shot, black powder, percussion cap pistols misfired. And even if Booth’s pistol worked, how certain was he that he could kill Lincoln with one shot? Plenty of veteran combat soldiers who had survived multiple gunshot wounds were getting drunk in the saloons of Washington that night. Booth couldn’t have chosen the Deringer because he could not obtain a revolver. He had already purchased at least four, and if he did not have any in his hotel room within easy reach, he could have gone out and bought another one. In the war capital of the Union, thousands of guns, including small, lightweight pocket-sized revolvers, were for sale in the shops of Washington.