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

by James L. Swanson

  Booth was a thrill seeker, and perhaps he wanted to enhance his excitement by risking the use of a single-shot pistol. Or did he believe it more heroic, honorable—even gentlemanly—to take his prey with a single bullet? Perhaps he preferred a stylish coup de grâce to blazing away at Lincoln with a six-shooter.

  Given Washington’s damp spring air and Booth’s knowledge that he would have just one shot, he probably did not arm the pistol with a fresh copper cap and black powder charge until late in the afternoon. Better to be sure than rely on a stale load that might have been languishing in the barrel for weeks. Before wrapping the bullet with a small swatch of cloth wadding and ramming the round down the barrel, did he roll the ball between his fingertips, scrutinizing it for flaws in the casting and perhaps contemplating how this little round, dull gray one-ounce piece of metal would soon change history?

  Before leaving the National, Booth slid the knife and pistol into his pockets and gathered the rest of his belongings. He planned to travel light tonight, without baggage. In addition to the weapons and his garments—a black felt slouch hat, black wool frock coat, black pants, big, knee-high black leather riding boots with spurs—he took only a velvet-cased compass, keys, a whistle, a datebook, a pencil, some money, a bank draft or bill of exchange, a small switchblade, and a few other small items including carte-de-visite photographs of five of his favorite girlfriends. His valise and big traveling trunk would have to stay behind; he would not be coming back. About 7:00 P.M., room clerk George Bunker saw Booth leave the National for the last time that day:

  “He spoke to me and went off.”

  WHEN MARY SURRATT AND LOUIS WEICHMANN ARRIVED IN Surrattsville, John Lloyd wasn’t there. He had gone to pick up some foodstuffs. Mary waited for him. She could not leave without delivering Booth’s message. When Lloyd returned he parked his wagon near the wood yard, climbed down, and began unloading his cargo of fish and oysters. Mary walked over to him.

  “Talk about the devil, and his imps will appear,” she teased her tenant.

  “I was not aware that I was a devil before.”

  “Well, Mr. Lloyd,” Mary went on once she was sure that she was out of Weichmann’s earshot, “I want you to have those shooting-irons ready; there will be parties here to-night who will call for them.”

  She handed him the package wrapped in newspaper. The evening callers will want this too, she explained. And, she added, give them a couple bottles of whiskey. Her mission accomplished, Mary prepared to drive back to Washington. But the front spring bolts of her buggy had broken, and the spring had become detached from the axle. Lloyd tied them tightly with cord—the best he could do without proper spare parts. After Mrs. Surratt departed, Lloyd followed her instructions. He carried the package upstairs, unwrapped it, and discovered Booth’s field glasses. Then he went to the unfinished room where, several weeks ago, John Surratt had shown him how to conceal two Spencer carbines under the joists. Lloyd retrieved them and placed them in his bedchamber. He had been drinking, and he was tired. Indeed, he confessed, “I was right smart in liquer that afternoon, and after night I got more so. I went to bed between 8 and 9 o’clock, and slept very soundly until 12 o’clock.”

  aT THE HERNDON HOUSE AT THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF Ninth and F streets, around the corner from Ford’s, at around 8:00 P.M. Booth presided over a conclave of some of the coconspirators he had assembled over the previous months to strike against President Lincoln. He must have hoped that this would be their last meeting before a great success. They had failed at least once before and then dispersed amid suspicion and fear. Tonight they needed to get ready for action in less than two hours. It was not the first time they had assembled to move against the president. Beginning in 1864, the last full year of the Civil War, the young stage star had marshaled his cash, celebrity, and connections in service of a bold plan. He hatched a harebrained scheme to kidnap President Lincoln, spirit him to Richmond, hold him as a hostage for the Confederacy, and turn the tide of the war. The origins of the plot remain murky. From the time of Lincoln’s election in 1860, there arose several conspiracies to kidnap or murder him. Secessionist hotheads began posting numerous death threats to Springfield before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, and some even sent him jars of poisoned fruit. In the notorious Baltimore plot of 1861, local rebels schemed to assassinate the president-elect when his railroad train passed through the city en route to Washington for his inauguration. But Detective Allan Pinkerton thwarted the scheme by persuading Lincoln to pass through Baltimore incognito hours ahead of schedule. Other Lincoln haters threatened to assassinate him on the East Front of the Capitol the moment he commenced reading his inaugural address. During the war, several Southern military officers, as well as a handful of officials in the Confederate Secret Service, considered various actions against Lincoln. At some point, John Wilkes Booth came into contact with these circles and operatives, in Canada, New York City, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.

  In late 1864 and early 1865 Booth organized his own little band of conspirators, loyal to him and not Richmond, to plot against the president. He recruited a gang who, after he clothed and fed them, plied them with drink, and allowed them to bask in his fame and favor, would, he hoped, follow him anywhere—even into a plot to kidnap the president of the United States. But big talk was cheap in wartime Washington and as late as January 1865, with the Confederacy in danger of imminent collapse, not one of the several overlapping conspiracies had ever attempted decisive action against Abraham Lincoln.

  Booth and his gang of acolytes—Lewis Powell, David Herold, John H. Surratt Jr., Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, and George Atzerodt, plus others lost to history who drifted in and out of his orbit—would change that by kidnapping the president.

  O’Laughlen, born in 1834, had known Booth since 1845, when their families lived across the street from each other in Baltimore. In 1861, the first year of the war, Michael enlisted in the First Maryland Infantry, but soon illness ended his military service. Restless, and looking for excitement, he signed on to the plot. Samuel Arnold, who was thirty-one, met Booth in 1848 when they were students at St. Timothy’s Hall, a boys’ school near Baltimore. He joined the First Maryland too in April 1861, but after the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861 he was, like O’Laughlen, discharged. Arnold’s family operated a prominent Baltimore bakery at the corner of Fayette and Liberty streets. In August 1864, Booth wrote to Sam, suggesting they meet. They hadn’t seen each other since 1852, thirteen years ago. Arnold visited Booth’s room at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, where the actor offered him cigars and wine, and introduced him to O’Laughlen. Arnold joined the conspiracy. But Booth needed to recruit more men than these two boyhood chums, who possessed scant military experience. An introduction to John Harrison Surratt Jr., a wily, twenty-year-old courier for the Confederate Secret Service who lived in Washington at his mother’s boardinghouse, gave Booth the men he needed. Surratt had traveled the rebel underground’s secret routes to the South, essential knowledge if they were going to transport Lincoln across Union lines. Surratt brought George Atzerodt into the plot. George, a hard-drinking, twenty-nine-year-old Prussian immigrant who worked as a carriage painter in Port Tobacco, Maryland, knew boats and the waters of Charles County. David Herold, a twenty-two-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who lived with his mother near the Washington Navy Yard, joined the conspiracy. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman who knew the country through which they would have to carry the president. Lewis Powell, twenty-one-year-old son of a Baptist minister, enlisted in May 1861 as a private in the Second Florida Infantry. An attractive, well-muscled six-footer, Powell exemplified the best that the Confederate army could muster. A loyal, obedient, and hard-fighting soldier, he saw plenty of action until he was wounded and taken prisoner at Gettysburg in July 1863. Paroled, he made his way to Baltimore and fell into the orbit of Surratt and Booth. Powell had the size and strength necessary to physically subdue Abraham Lincoln.

  On March 17, 1865,
Booth and his coconspirators planned to, like eighteenth-century British highwaymen, ambush Lincoln’s carriage on a deserted road as he rode back to the Executive Mansion after attending a performance of the play Still Waters Run Deep at Campbell Military Hospital. They would seize the president at gunpoint and make him their hostage. Booth’s intelligence sources proved faulty, however, and Lincoln did not attend. Instead, unbelievably, while Booth and his gang lurked on the Seventh Street road on the outskirts of the city, several miles from downtown Washington, Lincoln was giving a speech at Booth’s own hotel, the National. What a chance that would have presented, the actor mourned. If only the kidnapping plot had worked. Then there would be no torchlight parades, thunderous cannonades, mobs serenading Lincoln at the Executive Mansion, citywide illuminations, or children scampering through the streets holding colorful little paper flags decorated with red, white, and blue stars and stripes and elephants and imprinted with slogans like “Richmond Has Fallen” and “We Celebrate the Fall of Richmond.” He could—should—have prevented all of this, he admonished himself.

  Although his panicked followers scattered after that ludicrous failure, Booth hoped to try again, but events overtook him just eighteen days later when Richmond fell, and six days after that when Lee surrendered. Dejected, Booth remonstrated himself for not acting more boldly, even fantasizing aloud that he should have shot the president at the Capitol on inauguration day, March 4, 1865, an event he attended with his fiancée, Lucy Hale, daughter of U.S. Senator John Parker Hale. “What an excellent chance I had, if I wished, to kill the President on Inauguration day!” he boasted later to a friend.

  Lincoln’s April 11 speech provoked more violent talk. The president’s proposal for a limited black suffrage had enraged the actor, a passionate devotee of white supremacy. But Booth did nothing. If he was serious about assassinating Lincoln, all he had to do was stroll over to the Executive Mansion, announce that the famous and talented thespian John Wilkes Booth wished to see the president, await his turn—which nearly always resulted in a private talk with Lincoln—and then shoot him at his desk. Incredibly, presidential security was lax in that era, even during the Civil War, and almost anyone could walk into the Executive Mansion without being searched and request a brief audience with the president. It was a miracle that no one had yet tried to murder Lincoln in his own office.

  There can be no doubt that Booth had been fantasizing about killing Abraham Lincoln. But was he serious, or was it merely extravagant but harmless bravado? Booth had never killed a man. Was he capable of doing it? On April 13, on the afternoon of illumination day, Booth took what might have been his first step toward answering that question. He visited Grower’s Theatre, along with Ford’s one of the two most popular establishments in the city. He asked the manager, C. Dwight Hess, if he had invited the president to attend a performance of Aladdin!, the current production. No, he had forgotten, Hess replied, but he would attend to it now. Lincoln did not come to Grover’s. That night, Booth, as he had on countless previous nights, drank away the blues, watched the illumination, and before collapsing in his bed, wrote his mother a letter.

  Booth’s gang was not at full strength on April 14. Rebel courier John Surratt was in Elmira, New York, and it was impossible to command his return on a few hours’ notice. Surratt had been away since March 25, the day he left for Richmond. The Confederacy’s days were numbered, but Secretary of State Judah Benjamin had a final mission for the courier: Go North once more, pass undetected through Union territory, cross the border into Canada, and deliver dispatches to General Edwin Gray Lee, a cousin of Robert E. Lee, and head of Confederate Secret Service operations in Montreal. Surratt left Richmond on March 31 and on April 6 checked in at St. Lawrence Hall, unofficial headquarters of the South’s covert operations there. Lee gave Surratt another mission: Go to New York to spy on the Union’s prisoner-of-war camp at Elmira, in preparation for a raid to break out the Confederate soldiers languishing there. Surratt arrived in Elmira on April 13 and devoted the next two days to spying and shopping. He drew detailed sketches of the prison, counted the guards, tallied their small arms and cannon, and estimated the number of prisoners. He also made time for a personal mission. Surratt, a fastidious dresser—although not in the same league as Booth—visited clothiers in search of suits and shirts. On April 14, while Booth was planning the assassination, Surratt’s most pressing concern was finding some fresh, white shirts to spruce up his wardrobe.

  Booth’s boyhood chums, Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen, were not on hand to help with the assassination either. Arnold was back home in Baltimore. O’Laughlen was somewhere in Washington but not under Booth’s command. O’Laughlen had taken in the illumination with friends and then gone on a drinking spree. Later, evidence suggested that he might have met secretly with Booth in the actor’s hotel room sometime on the thirteenth or fourteenth.

  Present at the Herndon House were Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. Booth had put Powell up at the Herndon, and he sent Herold over to the Kirkwood House, Atzerodt’s hotel, to summon him to the meeting. Before returning to the Herndon, Herold went up to Atzerodt’s room and placed a revolver, knife, and a coat there. Then both men rendezvoused with Booth and Powell. Booth spoke in a confidential tone barely above a whisper. No one in the halls or in an adjoining room must overhear what he was about to say. The cause was almost lost, stated Booth. Capturing the president would no longer be enough to turn the tide of the war. It would take something bolder, something so daring and shocking that he had never even thought of it before. They would target not only President Lincoln, but also Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. The secretary of state was not, after the vice president, next in line for the presidency. But Seward, a longtime abolitionist, was viewed as a forceful advocate of Lincoln’s policies, including the suppression of dissent, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the imprisonment without trial of several thousand citizens suspected of disloyalty. Booth had had his eye on General Grant, too, but unfortunately Grant broke his engagement with the president. Booth probably told his gang that he had spotted the Grants in their carriage earlier that afternoon, heading toward the train station. Perhaps it was for the best. The commanding general might have been accompanied by an entourage of staff officers, messengers, and other factotums. No, Booth explained, they would not kidnap Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. How could a skeleton crew of only four conspirators possibly kidnap three men in different parts of the city?

  But Booth did have just enough men to accomplish another mission. “Booth proposed,” Atzerodt recalled, “that we should kill the president.” It would, said Booth, “be the greatest thing in the world.” Tonight, at exactly 10:00 P.M., they would strike simultaneously and murder Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. Armed with a revolver and a knife, George Atzerodt’s assignment was to assassinate the vice president in his residence at the Kirkwood House. “You must kill Johnson,” Booth told him. Powell, also armed with a revolver and a knife, would murder the secretary of state in his bed at his mansion. David Herold would accompany Powell, direct him to Seward’s home, and then guide the assassin, unfamiliar with the capital’s streets, out of the city. Booth claimed the greatest prize for himself. He would slip into Ford’s Theatre and assassinate the president in the middle of the play. Powell and Herold, Booth’s two most loyal servants, agreed to the plan. Atzerodt noticed that Powell “had a wild look in his eyes.” Atzerodt balked at his assignment. He would not do it, he said. “Then we will do it,” Booth said, “but what will become of you?” Kidnapping was one thing, but murder? Booth threatened him, implying that he might as well do it because if he didn’t, Booth would implicate him anyway and get him hanged. The actor promised him “if I did not I would suffer for it,” and said he would blow Atzerodt’s brains out. The German did not know it, but Booth had implicated all of them several hours ago when he entrusted that sealed envelope to John Matthews. In his letter to the National In
telligencer, not only did Booth justify the triple assassination, he signed his cocon-spirators’ names to the document:

  For a long time I have devoted my energies, my time and money, to the accomplishment of a certain end. I have been disappointed. The moment has arrived when I must change my plans. Many will blame me for what I am about to do, but posterity, I am sure, will justify me. Men who love their country better than gold and life.

  John W. Booth, Payne, Herold, Atzerodt.

  Atzerodt’s reluctance jeopardized the entire enterprise. If he left that meeting and went to the authorities, Booth, Powell, and Herold would be finished. Guards would rush to protect those marked for death, and the conspirators would be hunted down. “You had better come along and get your horse,” Booth suggested. Booth adjourned the meeting.

  aT THE EXECUTIVE MANSION, THE LINCOLNS WERE BEHIND schedule. It was past 8:00 P.M. and they still had not gotten into their carriage. As the curtain rose at Ford’s, coachman Francis Burke and valet Charles Forbes were waiting atop the carriage box. The Lincolns’ private, afternoon carriage ride and absence from the mansion had frustrated several politicians who wanted to see the president, and they would not be denied.

  Earlier that afternoon, Lincoln was happy to be free of them and all the burdens of his office. It was one of the happiest days of his life. At breakfast his eldest son, Robert, regaled his parents with his personal observations of Lee’s surrender. For once, the cabinet meeting was free of crises, battle news, casualty figures, and innumerable problems requiring the president’s immediate attention. Victory had elated him, and ever since Lee’s surrender Lincoln had been more buoyant than at any other time during his presidency. He expected more good news from General Sherman about the expected surrender of Confederate General Joe Johnston’s army.