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

by James L. Swanson

  For half an hour, between about 10:15 and 10:45 P.M., David Herold was a man with options. He could go home to his widowed mother’s house on Eighth Street, pretend that nothing had happened, and hope for the best, a risky strategy if the manhunters captured Booth, Powell, Atzerodt, Arnold, O’Laughlen, or the Surratts. Any one of them could implicate him. Even if they did not, too many people in Washington had seen him in Booth’s company too many times. Someone would remember that. It was only a matter of time before the police or soldiers came to question him. No, going home was a bad idea. Alternatively, he could run away and lose himself in the isolation of a small town or the anonymity of a big city like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Or he could outfit himself and take to the backwoods of Maryland for months, living by his wits and his hunting and fishing skills. Or he could cleave unto Booth, his master, who would soon approach the Navy Yard Bridge and then close in on their prearranged rendezvous point on the other side of the river.

  Between 10:20 and 10:30 P.M., Herold rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, leaving the Seward mansion behind, and now heading away from the Treasury building and approaching Fourteenth Street. At the same time, Fletcher was walking up Fourteenth toward Pennsylvania. Herold and Fletcher reached the intersection, near Willard’s hotel, simultaneously. Instinctively, Charlie pulled against the reins, trying to get off Pennsylvania and turn onto Fourteenth. Fletcher recognized the action—the horse was heading home. The roan, Fletcher knew, “was a horse very well acquainted with the stable,” and he “seemed as if he wanted to go to the stable.” Fletcher, eager to make that happen, prepared to dash after Herold and unseat him from the saddle: “I thought, if I could get close enough to him … I would take the horse away from him.” As Fletcher closed the distance Herold spotted him—“I expect he knew me by the light of the gas, the lamp from Willard’s corner,” Fletcher concluded. Herold yanked on the reins and spun Charlie around. Fletcher yelled at him to stop: “You get off that horse now! You have had that horse out long enough.”

  Herold didn’t say a word. Fletcher, on foot, watched helplessly as Herold “put spurs to the horse, and went, as fast as the horse could go, up Fourteenth Street.” Fletcher lost sight of him when Herold turned right on F Street from Fourteenth. It was about 10:25 P.M. The foreman hurried back to Naylor’s stable, saddled a mount, and went after Herold. Fletcher described his route of pursuit: “[I] went along … [Pennsylvania] Avenue until I came to Thirteenth Street; went up Thirteenth to E until I came to Ninth, and turned down Ninth Street to Pennsylvania Avenue again. I went along the avenue to the south side of the Capitol. I there met a gentleman, and asked him if he had passed any one riding on horseback. He said yes, and that they were riding very fast.”

  In a few minutes, Herold, mimicking Booth’s route, approached the bridgehead at Eleventh Street. Sergeant Cobb and his guards were not inclined to let another man pass.

  “I halted him,” Cobb reported, “and when challenged he answered ‘a friend.’ “The sergeant asked where he was going.

  “Home to White Plains.”

  Cobb vetoed Davey’s crossing: “You can’t pass it is after nine-o’clock, it is against the rules.”

  Herold challenged him back: “How long have these rules been out?” He hoped that pleading ignorance of the law might gain an exception.

  For a while, Cobb replied, unmoved: “Some time ever since I have been here.”

  Davey persisted: “I didn’t know that before.”

  Just as Cobb had questioned Booth, he asked Herold why he had left Washington so late: “Why weren’t you out of the city before?”

  Davey fabricated the perfect reply, one that any soldier might forgive: “I couldn’t very well, I stopped to see a woman on Capitol Hill and couldn’t get off before.”

  Herold waited for Cobb’s reply and did not ask him if another rider matching Booth’s description had crossed recently. Sergeant Cobb waved Herold across.

  Fifteen minutes later, a third rider approached the bridge. It was Fletcher. He wasn’t going to give up. “I followed on until I got to the Navy Yard bridge.” One of the soldiers stopped him and called for his sergeant. When Cobb emerged from the guardhouse Fletcher asked if a horse matching this description had crossed: “A light roan horse; black tail, black legs, black mane, and close on fifteen hands high.” The stolen animal had special characteristics: “He was a lady’s saddle-horse; and any one could ride him, he was so gentle and nice.” Then Fletcher described the saddle, bridle, and rider.

  “Yes, he has gone across the bridge,” Cobb replied.

  “Did he stay long here?” “Did he tell you his name?”

  “Yes,” Cobb divulged, “he said his name was Smith.”

  Fletcher wanted to chase Herold into Maryland, and asked Cobb if he could continue the pursuit.

  “Yes, you can cross the bridge; but you cannot return back.” Those were the rules, Cobb insisted. He had already bent them twice. He would not do it again.

  Fletcher wanted to return to Washington tonight. Dejected, the self-appointed manhunter gave up. “If that is so, I will not go.” He turned around and rode back to the city. When he got to Third Street he looked at his watch. It was 11:50 P.M. He stopped at another stable, Murphy’s, and the foreman told him the news: “You had better keep in, for President Lincoln is shot and Secretary Seward almost dead.” Fletcher returned to Naylor’s, put up his horse, and, at about 1:30 A.M., sat down in front of the office window. He didn’t know that his private manhunt had almost captured one of the accomplices of Lincoln’s killer.

  Somewhere east of the Capitol building, Lewis Powell was not having as easy a time as Booth and Herold in fleeing the city. He had evaded William Bell and the others, and no one was chasing him now. But he did not know where he was. It got worse. He had lost or abandoned his surest and swiftest means of escape, the one-eyed horse that Booth bought for his gang. As midnight approached on the night of April 14, Lewis Powell was in trouble: he was a solitary figure standing in the moonlight, lost and unarmed, and wearing a coat stained with another man’s blood. He did not know where to go or what to do. For the next two nights he slept in a tree. Without Booth to command him, he became confused and began thinking about some of the places he knew in Washington, places where Booth had taken him before. There was one in particular. He might be safe there—if he could just remember the address.

  In Surrattsville, Maryland, thirteen miles southeast of Washington, John Lloyd, the proprietor of Surratt’s tavern, retired for the night. He had been pretty tight in liquor that evening—really since the afternoon, if he were to be honest about it—and he was tired. Although Mary Surratt had told him that afternoon to expect some nighttime callers, they had never shown up. It made no difference to him.

  Several miles south of Surrattsville, on an isolated farm near Bryantown, Maryland, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, his wife, and their four young children were also in bed. Beantown, where Booth told Sergeant Cobb he was headed, was not far away.

  aBRAHAM LINCOLN SLEPT, TOO. MORE THAN FIFTEEN MINutes after he was shot, he still lay prone on the floor of boxes seven and eight at Ford’s Theatre. Although Dr. Leale had averted the president’s immediate death and stabilized his patient, the novice surgeon wasn’t sure what to do next. Lincoln could not be left to die on the floor of a theatre gone mad. As Leale contemplated his next move, a woman rushed through Ford’s to get to the president. She knew that history was being made in that box, and she had convinced herself that she must be part of it. From her vantage point onstage, she saw that swift passage through the main floor was impossible. She would have to push through the throng on the main floor, and then go up the stairs against a panicked mob coursing down them. They might sweep her off her feet and crush her. But her expert knowledge of the theatre’s architecture allowed her to bypass almost the entire audience that stood between her and Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Gourlay, father of the actress Jennie Gourlay, led Keene to the box. Carrying a pitcher of water that would serve a
s her passport to the president’s box—she dare not spill it—she slipped through a door near the stage and scurried up a hidden staircase that took her straight up to a private office near the box. In less than a minute, she traversed the entire length of Ford’s and emerged on the second floor on the same side as Lincoln’s box. She fought her way to the door, through the vestibule, and into the box. No one thought to bar the way to the great actress Laura Keene, star of tonight’s performance.

  The scene riveted Keene and excited her theatrical instincts. Mesmerized by the image of the stricken president, Keene imagined a fantastic tableaux with her as its central figure. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, impossible to resist. Might she, the actress asked Dr. Leale, cradle the dying president’s head in her lap? It was a shocking request, and of no possible physical comfort or medical benefit to Lincoln. Under normal circumstances, its brazenness would have provoked the volcanic Mary Lincoln into paroxysms of jealous anger. Recently Mary had embarrassed herself and her husband when she raged viciously in public against the lovely wife of General Ord. Mrs. Ord’s crime? Riding too close to President Lincoln during a military review, and, in Mary’s opinion, masquerading as the first lady. To all who witnessed it, the ugly incident opened a portal into the workings of Mary Lincoln’s troubled and sometimes pathetic mind. But now, delirious with grief and fear, Mary Lincoln, sitting on the sofa a few feet away, uttered no objection to Keene’s intimate request. She probably did not even hear it. Dr. Leale consented.

  Laura Keene knelt beside Lincoln and formed her lap into a natural pillow. She lifted his head, exposing the bloodstained linen handkerchief that Dr. Leale had placed below the wound. Leale removed it, and Keene rested Lincoln’s head in her lap. Bloodstains and tiny bits of gray matter oozed onto the cream silk fabric, spreading and adding color to the frock’s bright and festive red, yellow, green, and blue floral pattern. The wound did not bleed profusely, and of the trio of dresses bloodied that night, Laura’s dress alone was spared the drenching that saturated the garments of Fanny Seward and Clara Harris.

  Fanny’s and Clara’s dresses did not survive. But Laura Keene, like a Victorian bride who lovingly preserved her wedding dress as a sacred memento of her happiest day, cherished the blood- and brain-speckled frock from this terrible night. In the days ahead, people begged to see the dress, to caress its silken folds, and to marvel at the stains and the scenes of high drama they evoked. Soon it became the object of morbid curiosity. Others even asked Keene to model the dress and made surreptitious attempts to cut coveted swatches as bizarre keepsakes. In time, Keene banished the haunted artifact from her sight. But she could not bear to destroy it and instead exiled it into the care of her family so that she would never have to look at it again. The dress vanished long ago, but miraculously a few remnants—five treasured swatches—survived. Their gay floral pattern remains almost as bright as the day the dress was fashioned nearly a century and a half ago by Jamie Bullock of Chicago. But long ago the stains, once red, faded to a rust-colored, pale brown. Laura Keene became forever known for the Pietà-like improvisational scene she staged in the president’s box. We remember her not for her deep talent, diverse repertoire, or lifetime of great performances, but for a single unscripted act that played out for only a few minutes in the box at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Her great contemporaries from the nineteenth-century American stage have faded into oblivion, forgotten by all except a tiny fraternity of theater scholars. But Keene’s name lives on, forever linked to Abraham Lincoln’s by the macabre, supporting role she played that night.

  Her presence in the box also highlighted an uncomfortable fact. She was an actress, this was a theatre, and it was Good Friday, the most solemn day on the Christian calendar. But the president of the United States was not worshiping in church. Instead, he was dying on the floor of a secular and morally illicit landmark. The great Civil War journalist George Alfred Townsend spoke for many when he wrote, “The Chief Magistrate of thirty millions of people—beloved, honored, revered,—lay in the pent up closet of a play-house, dabbling with his sacred blood the robes of an actress.”

  Indeed, in two days a number of ministers would admonish Lincoln in their Sunday sermons for spending Good Friday in a theatre. So did John Wilkes Booth’s devoted sister, Asia Booth Clarke: “It was the moan of the religious people, the one throb of anguish to hero-worshippers, that the President had not gone first to a place of worship or have remained at home on this jubilant occasion. It desecrated his idea to have his end come in a devil’s den—a theatre…. That fatal visit to the theatre had no pity in it; it was jubilation over fields of unburied dead, over miles of desecrated homes.”

  THE SCENE IN THE PRESIDENT’s BOX WOULD HAVE AMUSED Asia’s brother John. Leave it to Laura Keene to try to upstage his spectacular performance. Just like an actress to ride his coattails. Now safely across the Eleventh Street Bridge, Booth looked toward Maryland and plunged ahead into the dark. Of his three cohorts, he needed Davey Herold the most right now, more than Atzerodt or Powell. Once Booth escaped downtown Washington, reached the city limits, and crossed the river into Maryland, he sidestepped immediate danger. The countryside was dark and quiet, with few travelers using the empty roads. He trotted over the route he had rehearsed over the previous year for the kidnapping plot. No need to gallop now, with no pursuers in sight when Sergeant Cobb let him pass. Better to let the horse rest and regain her strength for later. As Booth rode on, he searched the horizon for Soper’s Hill, the chosen rendezvous place. In daylight it seemed simple, but nightfall had leveled the hills. Alone in the country, he was out of his milieu. Booth was a creature of the city and its fancy hotel lobbies, hard liquor saloons, oyster bars, back alleys, and gaslit shadows. He did not have the skills he’d need to survive in the coming days, those of outdoorsman, hunter, or river boatman. But Herold was all of those things, and that’s why Booth chose him, above all the others, to guide him.

  Now that Booth had slowed down, the pain in his left leg bloomed under the moonlight. Near desperation after his hard ride, he gazed into the horizon just before midnight—he was about eight miles from Washington’s city limits. Davey and the others might be a few minutes ahead or behind him, depending on exactly how they had timed their attacks on Seward and Johnson. Booth saw nothing ahead of him. When he turned to look behind him, he heard a noise trailing in the distance. Horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Was it the first warning of a cavalry patrol in hot pursuit? As the noise increased in volume, it sounded, to Booth’s relief, like one horse, not many. Then his solitary pursuer came within sight—a small man on a large gray horse. His eyes held Booth’s for a long, suspicious moment, then relief trickled down the wounded assassin’s spine. It was David Herold.

  The actor was jubilant. He was on safe ground, and now he had his guide. Maryland, although it did not secede from the Union in 1861, remained a hotbed of secessionism. Maryland was as Confederate as a state could be without actually joining the Confederacy. If Maryland had become the twelfth star on the Confederate flag, the Union would have been in grave danger. Washington, D.C., would be surrounded by rebel states, isolated from the rest of the North. Thousands of its citizens joined the Confederate army, marching off to war to the tune of “Maryland, My Maryland.” Rebel spies and couriers infested the state, and James McPhail, the U.S. Army provost marshal stationed there, had his hands full suppressing Confederate schemes in Baltimore. It was in Baltimore that the citizens plotted to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in February 1861 when he traveled through their city on the way to his inauguration, and a Baltimore mob had attacked Union troops—the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry—as the unit marched through the city. It was from Maryland that Booth drew several of the conspirators for his kidnapping plot. And it was in Bel Air that Booth grew from boy to young adult. Maryland was his ground, and, he was certain, its people would shelter him and wish him Godspeed on his journey to the Deep South.

  Booth and Herold spurred their horses, riding sou
theast to their first safe house just a few miles away in Maryland. Booth likely grilled Herold with questions: Why was he alone? Where is Powell? Did he kill Seward? Had he seen Atzerodt? Did he murder Vice President Johnson? No, Herold would have answered, he hadn’t seen Atzerodt since the conspirators broke up earlier in the evening to carry out the three assassinations. He had no idea whether Johnson was dead. Herold recounted what had happened at the Seward residence: the entry plan worked perfectly, and Powell and his little package were admitted to the mansion. All seemed quiet in the house. Herold heard no gunshots. About ten minutes later, a black servant ran out the front door into the street screaming “murder,” and then a girl threw open an upstairs window and started yelling, too.

  This news seemed to prove to Booth that the faithful Powell had carried out his mission. But the actor must have been displeased with Herold for abandoning Powell, for whom he had a special fondness. And Powell would have come in handy if they had to do to any fighting during their escape. Booth guessed that Powell, who never learned the geography of the capital city, was a lost man. Herold explained how he almost got caught, not by the police or the army, but by John Fletcher, the stable man who rented Herold his horse. Booth certainly told Herold of his success at Ford’s Theatre. This was the assassin’s first opportunity to describe his deed, and the irrepressible thespian in him probably laid it on thick.

  BETWEEN 11:30 P.M. AND MIDNIGHT, GEORGE ATZERODT appeared on Sixth Street, without his horse, and boarded a streetcar headed for the Navy Yard. By chance, one of the passengers was someone he’d known for the past seven or eight years, a man named Washington Briscoe. Atzerodt failed to recognize him until Briscoe spoke to him. Briscoe asked him if he’d heard the news—Lincoln had been assassinated. Yes, he had, George replied. Atzerodt asked if he could spend the night at Briscoe’s store at the Navy Yard. When Briscoe said no, Atzerodt became agitated: “His manner was excited, and he was very anxious to sleep there; he urged me to let him.” Briscoe explained that someone else was already sleeping there, too, and he could not impose upon the man. Atzerodt stayed on the car and got off with Briscoe on I Street, near Briscoe’s store. He asked a third time if he could spend the night. Briscoe refused again, but he waited with Atzerodt at the corner of I and Garrison streets for the streetcar to return. George told Briscoe that he was heading to the Pennsylvania House, also known as the Kimmell House, on C Street. Atzerodt got on the next car and headed back to downtown Washington. He still had his room key to the Kirkwood in his pocket. When he left there, he failed to surrender it to a front-desk clerk.