IN WASHINGTON, CLARA HARRIS, HER FATHER, AND Justice Cartter returned during daylight to the scene of the previous night’s crime. Together they scrutinized the locks on the doors leading to the president’s box, examined the little spot in the wall where Booth had scraped away the plaster, and peered through the hole through which the assassin espied Lincoln. At first they thought it was a bullet hole—evidence that Booth had shot at Lincoln blindly, the ball passing through the door before finding its target. Then they realized it was a peephole. They went into the box. The theatre was eerily quiet now and showed little evidence of the previous night’s mayhem—just some overturned chairs, scattered pieces of paper littering the floor, and the bare box, already stripped of its flags and bunting by souvenir hunters. The bloodstains were still there.
Stanton wanted to see the box, too, and so, like one of his detectives prowling for clues, he too retraced Booth’s steps to visualize each scene in the assassin’s script. He also wanted to see the play. Perhaps a reenactment of Our American Cousin would provide a vital, hitherto neglected clue. Stanton rounded up what cast members could be found, commandeered Ford’s, and ordered a surreal, private performance in the empty theatre. No one laughed this time at the once silly but forever-more riveting line: “You sockdologizing old mantrap.” When Stanton and his aides heard the words echo through the house, did their eyes dart involuntarily up to the president’s box? The run-through of the play confirmed it—Booth had cleverly timed his attack to coincide with Harry Hawk’s funny, solitary moment onstage.
Stanton was determined to preserve the scene of the crime. He ordered that it be surrounded by a twenty-four-hour guard. And he decided that he wanted photographs of the interior, to record exactly how it appeared at the moment of the assassination. He allowed Mathew Brady and his assistant to set up their big, wet-plate camera and make a series of exposures that, together, offered a panorama of the entire stage and its scenery during act 3, scene 2. Then Brady photographed the exterior of the president’s box, newly decorated with replacement flags and bunting for this purpose. He also photographed the approach to the box, and the outer door leading to the vestibule. The job challenged Brady’s skill. Photographing the vast interior, illuminated only by gaslight, and perhaps by whatever daylight reached the stage from opened doors and windows on the opposite end of the theatre facing Tenth Street, required long and careful exposures to allow the glass-plate negatives to absorb sufficient light to capture the necessary details.
BACK AT THE FARM, BOOTH AND HEROLD WAITED PATIENTLY for Dr. Mudd. But there was no sign of him. It was close to 6:00 in the evening and he still had not come home from Bryantown. What was taking him so long? Mudd’s tardiness was a good sign, though. If the doctor had betrayed Booth, the cavalry would have galloped to the farm two hours ago.
Finally, sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 P.M., a rider turned from the main road and approached the farm. It was Dr. Mudd. He was alone and brought no cavalry escort. Booth’s knowing judgment was correct—the doctor was no Judas. But he was angry.
Mudd rode up to his guests, dropped down from the saddle, and strode toward Booth. His face could not conceal his distress. He ordered Booth and Herold to leave his farm at once, and accused the actor of lying to him. Booth did not tell Mudd what he had done, and had put the doctor and his family in great danger.
Ignoring Mudd’s anger, Booth seized upon the priceless news that the doctor brought back from Bryantown. The president was dead, and the fame was his. Twenty hours after the assassination, Dr. Mudd had just given John Wilkes Booth the first official confirmation that he had killed Lincoln. True, the assassin did not see how he could have missed. But it had all happened so fast. Lincoln moved at the last moment, and then Rathbone attacked Booth, leaving the actor no time to pause and admire his handiwork. There was a chance that the wound was not fatal. There had been enough room for doubt that in Surrattsville, Booth had qualified his boast to John Lloyd, saying only that he was “pretty certain” he had assassinated the president.
Dr. Mudd was not as jubilant as his patient about this news. Booth might rejoice at the tyrant’s death, but Mudd was angry and afraid. By coming there, Booth had placed Mudd and his entire family in great danger. Yes, Mudd had agreed to facilitate the kidnapping of Abraham Lincoln, but no one had consulted him about murder. But now, by offering Booth his hospitality, he had unwittingly implicated himself in the most shocking crime of the Civil War, indeed, in all of American history—the murder of the president of the United States.
Mudd continued to demand that Booth and Herold leave his farm at once. A patrol from the Thirteenth New York Cavalry might descend upon them without warning within the hour. Were federal troops to discover Lincoln’s assassin hiding out in his home, Dr. Mudd feared he would suffer terrible consequences. The only way to avert that disaster was to make Booth and Herold saddle their horses and ride away.
But Mudd was still sympathetic to the assassin’s plight. He was no fan of Abraham Lincoln, the Union, or the black man, and he would have rejoiced at the kidnapping of the president. Booth may have abused his hospitality, but not enough to make Mudd betray him. He assured Booth that, as long as he and Herold agreed to leave now, he would still help them.
First, he gave them the names of two trustworthy Maryland Confederate operatives, William Burtles and Captain Samuel Cox. Then Mudd explained the route to the next stop on their underground rebel railroad. They must travel southeast in a wide arc to swing around and below Bryantown to avoid the troops there. Then, turning west, they would find Burtles’s place, “Hagen’s Folly,” about two miles due south of Bryantown. Cox’s farm was several miles southwest from Burtles’s, and from there the two men would be within striking distance of the Potomac River and, on its western bank, Virginia. Mudd gave Booth the name of a doctor on the Virginia side in case his leg continued to trouble him.
Mudd promised Booth that he would not betray him. He would not ride back to Bryantown this evening and report that Lincoln’s assassin came calling in the dead of night. Dr. Mudd would hold his tongue and give Booth a head start. If the soldiers came to question him, he would say only that two strangers in need of medical assistance stopped briefly at his farm. Then he would send the manhunters in the wrong direction.
Davey helped Booth mount his horse, eased him onto the saddle, and handed him the crude but sturdy crutches Samuel Mudd and John Best fashioned for him. The actor balanced the sticks horizontally across his saddle, thrust the toe of his right boot through the stirrup, and then gingerly slipped his other foot, sheathed in an unlaced, loose-fitting brogan, into the left stirrup. The shoe was a parting gift from Dr. Mudd—Booth would never have squeezed his left foot into his other boot. He abandoned the luxurious, expensive piece of footwear, now scarred by Mudd’s scalpel, on the bedroom floor. Awkwardly his hands manipulated the crutches and reins at the same time. Herold vaulted into the saddle with ease. Samuel Mudd, relieved by their departure and by his own escape from near disaster, watched them ride off to the southeast until they vanished from sight.
It was around 7:00 P.M., April 15, fifteen hours since David Herold pounded on Mudd’s door and just over twenty-one hours since John Wilkes Booth shot the president. As dusk faded to dark, Booth and Herold continued south, careful to watch the western horizon, on their right, for signs of cavalry out of Bryantown. They had a long night’s ride ahead of them. But they had survived until the sunset of the first day.
Back at his farm, Dr. Mudd went about his usual end-of-the-day business. In the hours that followed Booth’s departure, a peaceful quiet settled over his place. Horses stabled, servants done with their chores, his own work completed, and his family safe behind locked doors, Mudd contemplated his encounter with history, and danger. Bedtime approached, and no soldiers had come. He and Frances turned down the lamps. Tonight no strangers—assassins or manhunters—materialized in the night to awaken him suddenly from his dreams. He, too, had survived this day.
aLTHO
UGH DR. MUDD HAD IDENTIFIED THE ROUTE THEY must take, Booth and Herold got lost anyway. Fortunately, they found a local man, Oswell Swann, half black and half Piscataway Indian, wandering about on foot. Swann knew the territory. He had heard about the president’s murder, but showed no alarm when two strangers on horseback approached him in the dark, asking if he knew the way to William Burtles’s. They offered Swann $2 to serve as their guide, asked if he had any whiskey, and told him to go to his cabin and get his horse. Then, inexplicably, for reasons he never revealed, Booth changed his mind. Forget Burtles, the assassin said, and take us straight to Captain Cox. Booth offered him an extra $5. Swann agreed.
The swamp angel Oswell Swann earned his pay this night. Booth and Herold, free of the muck, snakes, and wild, overgrown vegetation of the infernal Zekiah morass, returned to the civilization of cultivated Maryland fields and familiar farmhouses. Swann had guided them safely to the very doorstep of Captain Samuel Cox, master of Rich Hill. It was between midnight and 1:00 A.M. of the new day, April 16, Easter Sunday, approximately twenty-six hours since the assassination, and seventeen hours since Abraham Lincoln died.
Good Friday 1865 was America’s darkest day since the unexpected death of George Washington on December 14, 1799, sixty-six years earlier, a moment that elderly Washingtonians recalled from their youth. The Sunday following Lincoln’s death was Easter, and it would be forever known as “Black Easter” to those who lived through it. The Sunday Morning Chronicle summed up the mood of the nation when it said the murder transformed “a season of rejoicing to mourning,” and there arose “a wail throughout the land.” Across the land ministers stayed up late Saturday night and by candle, lamp, or gaslight scratched out the final phrases of fresh sermons they began composing as soon as they heard, on the morning of the fifteenth, the terrible news.
In the early hours of Black Easter, Booth and Herold sought their salvation, not in a church, but at the door of a faithful Confederate. If Cox turned them away, Christ’s dying words on Good Friday’s cross, “it is finished,” would describe their fate. The assassins were still too far north. Booth’s broken leg bone and the unplanned medical detour to Dr. Mudd’s farm cost them not only fifteen precious hours but took them to the east, out of their way, so that their escape timetable was now almost a day behind schedule.
Booth and Herold approached the Cox house. They decided to use the same strategy they used at the Surrattsville tavern: Booth would hang back in the shadows while Herold did the talking, but with Captain Cox they would not immediately blurt out their secret. If necessary, they were willing to beg for their lives. Cox was their last hope in Maryland, and there was no turning back if he refused them. David Herold dismounted, walked up the front piazza of the finely built, expansive farmhouse, and sounded the knocker. Booth remained on his horse under the cover of a shaggy ailanthus tree in the yard. Cox poked his head out from a second-story window and asked, “Who’s there?” Herold refused to give his name, unsure if he could trust the captain. He disclosed only that he accompanied a man who needed help. Cox spotted Booth lurking under the tree’s shadow, hiding from the moonlight. Herold asked if they could come in.
Suspicious but intrigued enough to come downstairs, Cox opened the door and appraised the worn-out, crazy-eyed man standing before him. The callow-looking stranger seemed more like a boy than a man. The wily farmer’s eyes scanned the vicinity. Perhaps Herold was an outlaw and his plea was a trick to let other desperadoes rush the house. Uneasy, and sensing that the stranger held back his real story, Cox began shutting the door. Desperate, Booth dismounted with some difficulty and hobbled up the porch to the door. In great pain, he pleaded with Cox for aid. According to the captain’s son, “it was there by a brilliant moon that Cox saw the initials ‘J.W.B.’ tattooed on his arm.” And it was there that the honey-tongued thespian, as he did with Sergeant Cobb at the Navy Yard Bridge, again used his seductive art to win over a man to his cause. Cox swung open the door and invited the fugitives into his home. To the nation, Black Easter dawned as a day of great mourning; to John Wilkes Booth, it began as a day of salvation.
What Booth said to Cox on the front porch of Rich Hill around 1:00 A.M. on April 16—as well as the conversations and plans that followed during the next few hours that the actor and Herold spent in the house—remain a mystery. Naturally, Cox and his son later denied that the assassin and his scout ever set foot in their home. When Oswell Swann swore that he saw Booth and Herold go inside, a faithful Cox slave, Mary Swann, called him a liar and backed up her captain. But given Booth’s state of mind, the precariousness of his position, and the extraordinary thing that the captain and his son were about to do to help their guests, there is little doubt that Booth unburdened himself and confessed all to his hosts. The assassin of the president of the United States was in their midst, injured, desperate, and on the run from a frenzied manhunt. Father and son beheld the murderer, then decided to save him. Cox told Booth that there was only one man, a person of very special skills, who could get them across the Potomac into Virginia.
In the morning, after sunrise, they would summon him. But for now it was much too dangerous for Booth and Herold to remain at Rich Hill. Instead, Cox explained, he would hide them in a nearly impenetrable, heavily wooded pine thicket some distance from his house. No one would search for them there, Cox assured them, and it was extremely unlikely that any of the locals would stumble upon them. They were not to build a fire. Then, in the morning, someone would come for them. That person would signal them with a peculiar whistle as he approached. They were to beware anyone who failed to make that sound. After wolfing down the food that Cox offered, Booth and Herold mounted up for the ride to the pine thicket. Cox ordered his overseer, Franklin Robey, to take them there.
Oswell Swann still waited for them outside, perhaps hoping for an additional fee to guide the strangers to another destination. When Booth and Herold emerged from the house, Davey walked straight to his horse, neglecting the actor’s disability. Booth, standing beside his horse, impatient and helpless, chided him in an annoyed voice: “Don’t you know I can’t get on?” Davey came back and helped his master into the saddle. Booth paid Swann $12 for his services, and then, to throw suspicion off their hosts, he and Herold complained conspicuously about Cox’s lack of hospitality. “I thought Cox was a man of Southern feeling,” murmured Booth. If Swann took the bait, he went home believing that Cox had rebuffed his unwanted midnight callers. Just to be sure, David Herold threatened him: “Don’t you say anything—if you tell that you saw anybody you will not live long.” If their luck held, they would cross the river to Virginia sometime after nightfall on April 16, between sixteen and twenty-four hours from now. If, that is, they could survive just one more day in Maryland.
BOOTH AND HEROLD ENTERED THE PINES, DISMOUNTED, and tied off their horses. The animals had served them well, but they were hungry and thirsty and unused to spending the night outdoors and in the open. These were city stable horses that rented by the hour or the day, not expedition horses suited for days in the field. Exhausted, the two men unrolled their blankets on the damp earth, lay down, and gazed up at the immense black sky decorated by countless points of twinkling light. It would be morning in a few hours. If Captain Cox’s word was true, it was safe to doze off until then.
The rising sun and chirping birds woke Booth and Herold early in the morning. Now they could do nothing but wait. Back at Rich Hill, Samuel Cox had to find out whether his man would actually help Booth and Herold. Cox instructed his eighteen-year-old son, Samuel Jr., to ride over to “Huckleberry” Farm, about four miles to the southeast, and bring the owner, Thomas A. Jones, to Rich Hill right away. Cox warned the boy to be cautious and told him that if anyone, especially soldiers, stopped and questioned him on the way and asked where he was going, he should tell the truth about his destination. But if asked why he was going there, then the youth must not disclose the reason. Instead, he should lie and say that he was heading to Huckleberry to ask Jones fo
r some seed corn. It was planting season, and no one would suspect such an innocent request from one farmer to another.
Around 8:00 A.M., Samuel Cox Jr. arrived at Huckleberry, just as Confederate agent and river boatman Thomas A. Jones finished his breakfast. The secret service veteran spent his entire life trailblazing through the fields, thickets, and forests of rural Maryland and navigating its streams, marshes, and rivers. During the war he had ferried hundreds of men, and the occasional female spy like the beautiful Sarah Slater, across the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. On some nights Jones organized not one but two trips across the Potomac in a small rowboat. In addition, he transported the Confederate mail between the two states and sent south fresh Union newspapers that provided intelligence to Richmond and were scrutinized by the highest leaders of the Confederacy. Jones was an indispensable, mysterious, and laconic secret agent fighting the shadow war along the watery borders between Union and rebel territory. The Union army had never caught him in action—he was a river ghost to the boys in blue. “Not one letter or paper was ever lost,” he boasted. And his mastery of the river was so complete that he was even able to calculate the most propitious time, almost down to the minute, to begin a trip across. “I had noticed that a little before sunset, the reflection of the high bluffs near Pope’s Creek extended out into the Potomac till it nearly met the shadows cast by the Virginia woods, and therefore, at that time of evening it was very difficult to observe as small an object floating in the river as a rowboat.”
Jones’s service to the Confederacy had cost him dearly. Suspected of disloyal activity, federal forces arrested and jailed him for months at the Old Capitol prison in Washington. Then his beloved wife died. He had to sell his other farm at Pope’s Creek, and when he went to Richmond at the beginning of April 1865 to collect the money owed to him by the Confederate government, he discovered that the army had evacuated the city and Jones went unpaid. He lost $2,300 due for three years’ service, and, even worse, upon the collapse of the Confederacy, he lost the $3,000 he had invested in Confederate bonds at the beginning of the war. All of this meant that Thomas Jones needed as much money as he could lay his hands on.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Page 17