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

by James L. Swanson

  Jones’s impromptu plan had one overriding theme: do nothing to attract suspicion. That meant following his daily routines and doing nothing out of the ordinary. Getting the newspapers was easy enough. He collected them throughout the war and obtaining them now would not seem unusual. After all, everyone wanted to read the latest news about Lincoln’s assassination, and if federal troops caught him with several newspapers in his saddlebags, Jones could plead natural, innocent curiosity. The food would be harder to explain. Why was a local farmer riding around the countryside with a haversack or saddlebags stuffed with provisions? And how could Jones explain the copious bags of feed needed for Booth and Herold’s hungry horses? And what about the boat? He had to get it ready to be used at a moment’s notice. When the time came to flee to the river, Jones would have to rush to the pine thicket and get Booth and Herold moving fast. The previous day Jones had discovered two Union cavalrymen lurking near his little bateau at Pope’s Creek. Perhaps they were staking it out, waiting for Lincoln’s assassin to claim it. No, it was too dangerous to take a chance on the bateau. Fortunately for Booth and Herold, Thomas Jones possessed one last boat, an eleven-foot-long, lead-colored, flat-bottomed skiff hidden in marsh grass upstream from the bateau on Pope’s Creek. As far as he knew, Union troops hadn’t yet found the skiff.

  Jones had to secure that second boat immediately: “Booth’s only chance for crossing the river depended upon my being able to retain possession and control of one of these two boats.” To formulate a plan, Jones summoned up all of his wartime experience in evading Union patrols. As soon as he arrived home Jones instructed his former slave Henry Woodland to take the skiff out every morning and fish for shad with the gill nets. By this time it was not unusual to see a black man fishing with nets on the river in southern Maryland, and Woodland wouldn’t attract much attention from Union patrols. Jones instructed Woodland to cast off from Pope’s Creek on Monday morning but not to row the boat back to the creek. Instead, he was to land at a place called Dent’s Meadow. Then, for the rest of the week, Woodland was to keep up that routine, casting off from Dent’s each morning, and landing there in the afternoon with his catch, taking care to conceal the boat from thieves. Jones never told Henry the special significance of Dent’s Meadow—the place he had chosen as the perfect location from which to take Booth and Herold across the river.

  Jones considered the spot favorable terrain: “Dent’s meadow was then a very retired spot back of Huckleberry farm, about one and a half miles north of Pope’s Creek, at least a mile from the public road and with no dwelling house in sight. This meadow is a narrow valley opening to the river between high and steep cliffs that were then heavily timbered and covered by an almost impenetrable undergrowth of laurel. A small stream flows through the meadow, widening into a little creek as it approaches the river. It was from this spot I determined to make the attempt of sending Booth across to Virginia.” Jones had chosen the place, but now he had to await the right moment.

  ON EASTER SUNDAY, BETWEEN 10:00 AND 11:00 A.M., GEORGE Atzerodt showed up at the home of Hezekiah Metz, about twenty-two miles from Washington, in Montgomery County, Maryland. Atzerodt joined Metz and three of his guests, Somerset Leaman, James E. Leaman, and Nathan Page, for the midday meal. Atzerodt was known to the people in these parts by another name, “Andrew Atwood.” Somerset had known him for years, and when Atzerodt arrived at Metz’s he teased him:

  “Are you the man that killed Abe Lincoln?” The joke must have frozen the German in his tracks.

  Atzerodt laughed and said, “Yes.”

  “Well, Andrew,” Leaman continued, “I want to know the truth of it; is it so?” He asked if Lincoln had really been assassinated.

  “Yes, it is so; and he died yesterday evening about 3 o’clock.”

  Leaman asked if it was also true that Seward’s throat was cut, and two of his sons were stabbed.

  “Yes,” Atzerodt replied, “Mr. Seward was stabbed, or rather cut at the throat, but not killed, and two of his sons were stabbed.”

  Leaman asked if it was also true that General Grant had been murdered.

  “No, I don’t know whether that is so or not; I don’t suppose it is so; if he had been, I should have heard it.”

  At the dinner table James Leaman also asked about Grant, and Atzerodt replied: “No, I don’t suppose he was; if he was killed, he would have been killed probably by a man that got on the same car that Grant got on.” Atzerodt did not know it, but with those words he had just sealed his doom. After dinner, oblivious to the danger, he continued on to the home of his cousin, Hartman Richter, arriving there between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M.

  sAMUEL MUDD DECIDED THAT HE COULD NOT LET EASTER Sunday, April 16, pass without doing something. By breakfast time, 7:00 A.M., Booth and Herold enjoyed a twelve-hour head start from his farm. If all had gone well, they should have reached William Burtles’s place well before sunrise. Although Mudd did not know it, the fugitives made even better progress by bypassing Burtles altogether and riding straight to Captain Cox’s.

  Mudd considered his predicament. He could choose to do nothing, and wait for federal troops to visit his farm, but perhaps the soldiers might never come. Or they might. Someone might even tip them off. The doctor’s servants and former slaves knew he had taken in an injured patient the very night of Lincoln’s assassination. Some of them had even seen Booth while he rested in bed or hobbled around on his crutches. Too many people had seen Booth for Mudd to keep the visit a secret forever.

  Several of Mudd’s neighbors were aware that he knew John Wilkes Booth. Worshippers had spotted them together last winter at St. Mary’s on two occasions. And how long would it be before the authorities interviewed George Gardiner, the man who sold Booth the one-eyed horse, or Thomas L. Gardiner, the youth who delivered the animal to the actor? Peter Trotter, the blacksmith, would surely remember the day when Mudd and Booth brought the handicapped mare over for a new set of horseshoes. Moreover, several witnesses had seen Mudd and Booth together in Washington. It was inevitable. At some point, probably soon, the soldiers or detectives would discover two things about Dr. Mudd: he had visitors on assassination night, and, even more damning, he had links to Booth.

  Mudd decided to seize the initiative in a way calculated to throw suspicion off himself. Today he would inform on—but not actually betray—Lincoln’s assassin. Mudd crafted a simple but clever cover story. He would merely report that two strangers, a man with a broken leg and his youthful companion, had called at his home unexpectedly, in the predawn hours of April 15. He treated the injury, and the strangers did not stay long. He was suspicious of these men, he would say, and thus felt duty bound to report them to the Thirteenth New York Cavalry in Bryantown. Those were the bare bones.

  Then Mudd added a clever touch. Instead of riding into Bryantown himself and facing the troops, he would ask his second cousin, Dr. George Mudd, a loyal Unionist, a species rare in these parts, to report the strangers on his behalf. He hoped that having this information come from the lips of a man above suspicion by the federal authorities would allow him to hide beneath his cousin’s Unionist coattails if the troops wanted to question him. George Mudd’s vague, secondhand report would contain so few details that it would hardly prompt the soldiers to leap into their saddles and gallop off after two strangers. No, the information would be useless until they followed the tip to its source, Samuel Mudd. Lieutenant Dana would have to send a patrol to Sam’s farm to press him for details about the strangers. All that would take time, which would give Booth even more time to put miles between himself and his pursuers.

  After Easter services on the morning of the sixteenth, Mudd asked his cousin George the favor of passing his story on to the cavalry in Bryantown. Mudd returned home, with an immense feeling of relief. Now, when the soldiers came, it would be at his behest, and not because he had fallen under suspicion. Through the afternoon and into the evening, Mudd anticipated the arrival of the manhunters. But they did not come. Unbeknownst to him, cou
sin George failed to ride into Bryantown to report the strangers.

  By the evening of April 16, Booth enjoyed a twenty-four-hour head start on any pursuers coming from Mudd’s farm. And thanks to George Mudd’s delay in filing his cousin’s report, Union troops, unaware that Booth had even been at Samuel Mudd’s, had not begun their pursuit from that place. From the viewpoint of anxious officials back in Washington—Secretary of War Stanton chief among them—the progress of the manhunt was even worse. John Wilkes Booth had assassinated the president almost forty-eight hours ago but the manhunters had no solid leads. Yes, the police, detectives, and military officers had discovered a number of leads on Booth’s cat’s-paws and conspirators, but none led to the assassin-in-chief.

  Hats, Deringer pistols, abandoned knives, broken revolvers, jackets, one-eyed horses, bankbooks, mysterious letters, plugs of tobacco, hotel registers, notes to vice presidents, theatrical trunks, spurs, bridles, saddles, and eyewitness accounts were all fine clues that made the assassin and his accomplices seem tantalizingly vivid and near. These clues would make good evidence at a criminal trial as proofs of identity and guilt. The evidence collected on April 14 and 15 certainly confirmed that it was Booth who had shot Lincoln, and that he seemed to have not one, but several, coconspirators. And the contents of Atzerodt’s room at the Kirkwood—plus Booth’s note to Johnson—suggested that the vice president had also been marked for death. But all this evidence spoke to Booth’s guilt, not his escape plan. Only the “Sam” letter, which suggested that two accomplices lived in Baltimore, hinted at Booth’s possible destination. Booth could be anywhere. Sightings across the country of false Booths did not help the manhunters. With each passing hour Booth’s trail grew a little colder. Soon, he would vanish from sight, driving Stan-ton and his men into a frenzy. Booth’s expertise in eluding the MANHUNTERS augmented, by the hour, the government’s embarrassment over its failure to apprehend him.

  On the night of April 16, Stanton had no idea of Booth’s whereabouts or destination. Yes, it was probably the assassin who gave the name “Booth” to Sergeant Cobb at the bridge and fled into Maryland. It was fortunate for Stanton that the persistent stable man Fletcher had chased Herold that far and revealed Booth’s crossing earlier than the manhunters would have otherwise discovered it. But where did he go after that? At 8:30 P.M. Quartermaster General Meigs telegrammed Colonel Newport, chief quartermaster at Baltimore, with new instructions for the hunt that revealed the manhunters’ confusion about Booth’s intentions: “The murderers of the President and Secretary of State have, it is believed, gone southeast, and will perhaps attempt to escape by water to the Eastern Shore, or to board some vessel waiting for them, or some vessel going to sea. The Potomac will be patrolled by steamers from Washington…. The object is to catch the murderers. Vigilance and speed.” Perhaps, Meigs feared, other conspirators awaited Booth at the shore with an oceangoing vessel, ready to put to sea and sail or steam all the way to France or England for sanctuary. During the war, Confederate blockade-runners had made the dangerous crossing scores of times. Perhaps one was anchored somewhere off the Maryland coast, ready to embark on one last, daring voyage.

  ON MONDAY MORNING, APRIL 17, THOMAS JONES APPEARED TO go about his regular business. He tended to chores, ate his usual breakfast at the customary time, and made sure that Henry Woodland continued his daily fishing expeditions. At the pine thicket, Booth and Herold, awake for hours, wondered if their benefactor would return. Jones pulled on his baggy, deep-pocketed overcoat and thrust his arms through the sleeves. He grabbed some bread, butter, and ham, filled a flask with coffee, and stuffed everything into his pockets. He folded the newspapers, printed on soft, thick rag paper, and stashed them in his coat, too. Then, in a clever ruse, he carried a basket of corn on his arm to throw off any Union troops he might encounter. If stopped and questioned, he would claim that he was on his way to feed his hogs that ran free in the woods. A little before 10:00 A.M. Jones mounted his horse and rode toward the pine thicket.

  About one hundred yards from Booth’s camp, Jones dismounted and led his horse forward on foot, then tied him. Just as he did the previous morning, Jones walked ahead slowly until, within earshot of the assassins, he whistled the secret melody. This time Booth and Herold welcomed him, not with a well-aimed carbine pointed at his heart, but with open arms. They had not eaten in almost thirty hours and eyed the contents of Jones’s pockets hungrily as he unloaded them. Booth especially wanted the other treats those pockets yielded—newspapers! At last, three long days after the assassination, he could read about his history-making actions and how they were reported to the nation.

  Booth’s pleasure could not hide his worsening condition. The leg was bad, and Booth was obviously in more pain than when Jones first saw him twenty-four hours ago. The assassin said he was impatient to continue his escape across the river where he could find shelter indoors and see another doctor. Jones started explaining the situation again but became distracted when he heard a familiar and terrifying noise in the distance—clanking metal and horses’ hooves pounding the earth. Instantly Jones recognized the sound—cavalry sabers slapping the saddles of Union troops riding in their direction. It was too late for Herold and Jones to boost Booth up on the bay mare and gallop away, and a fight was out of the question: Booth couldn’t walk, Jones was unarmed, and Herold was untested in battle. Plus, with only two revolvers and a Spencer carbine, they couldn’t hold off a patrol of Union cavalry for long. The trio hugged the ground and held their breath. The horses, barreling down a road near the pine thicket, closed the distance. They got within two hundred yards. It was Booth’s closest brush with manhunters since he galloped down the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. Then, instead of veering into the pines, the troops stayed on the road, passed the thicket, and continued on until the sound of hoofbeats dwindled in the distance.

  Jones locked eyes with Booth: “You see, my friend, we must wait.”

  “Yes,” Booth conceded, “I leave it all with you.”

  ON THE MORNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH ANOTHER MAN waited, too. Troops had still not called on Dr. Mudd to pursue his tip—because they did not know about it. It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that George Mudd got around to riding to Bryantown. He asked to see the commanding officer and, introduced to Lieutenant Dana, divulged his cousin’s vague, one-day-old report about the two suspicious strangers. Then, in an unbelievable stroke of luck for Booth and Herold, Dana dismissed the news as stale and unimportant. He thanked George Mudd and sent him on his way. And, providentially for the assassins, Dana chose not to send troops to Samuel Mudd’s farm to investigate. Distracted by other leads, Dana ignored the one tip that placed Lincoln’s assassin—if only momentarily—within his reach.

  When the soldiers had not come by that evening, Mudd relaxed. Perhaps, by this point, they would not come at all. According to Mudd’s calculations, Booth was long gone, probably even across the Potomac River into Virginia by now. With the assassin’s trail in Maryland running cold, the manhunters would soon depart Charles County and shift the action to places far from Bryantown and his farm.

  According to premature reports in the newspapers, Booth had already moved on. The April 17 Chicago Tribune already had him cross the Potomac, reporting “it is now the general impression that the murderer Booth and his accomplices have escaped into Virginia. It is unlikely that a person so well known would attempt to travel through the north.” Of course the Tribune reported in the same issue: “Booth was captured this morning. The story is that his horse threw him and injured him so severely that he was obliged to seek relief on the Seventh Street road” on the outskirts of Washington. The April 17 New York Herald assured its readers, “Detectives are on the hunt. The most expert men in the profession, from New York and other cities are here for this purpose. Colonel L. C. Baker has arrived today, and is engaged in ferreting out the assassins. It is believed they will be caught within twenty-four hours.”

  THOMAS JONES HAD EXPERIENCED ENOUGH EXCITEMENT FOR
one day. He agreed to return to the thicket around the same time next morning, Tuesday the eighteenth, carrying more food and newspapers, but he refused to bring horse feed again. Concealing the feedbags was impossible, and he could not carry enough, anyway, to sate the two ravenous horses. After two days without food, they had ferocious appetites—and they also made a lot of noise. Jones advised the men to get rid of the horses. They wouldn’t be needed to get to Dent’s Meadow, and they couldn’t be ferried across the river in a little rowboat. Better to dispose of them here and now, before the next cavalry patrol came by and they betrayed the site of the camp. Booth agreed: “If we can hear those horses, they can certainly hear the neighing of ours, which are uneasy from want of food and stabling.” David Herold reluctantly went along with this. He loved animals, but realized that, with Booth helpless on the ground, the deed fell to him. Jones said good-bye and left for Huckleberry.

  The horses had served them well. The white-starred bay that could move like a cat had saved Booth in the alley behind Ford’s Theatre. She galloped superbly through downtown Washington, her hooves pounding distance between Booth and any pursuers during the thrilling, moonlit ride. The roan horse had made it possible for Herold to escape from the botched Seward assassination attempt. Now their reward for this faithful service was death. Davey untied both horses and led them by the reins to a quicksand morass about a mile from the pine thicket. Quickly, he shot each one in the head with a pistol or the carbine, and then sank their bodies, still accoutered with saddles, bits, bridles, stirrups, and all. There they rest in an unmarked grave, their skeletons undiscovered to this day.