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

by James L. Swanson

  Jones feared the next house even more because its owner, John Ware, kept several dogs. Jones walked past Ware’s gate and listened. Not hearing a sound, he continued past the house and whistled, fearing that he might arouse a pack of barking dogs. Not one hound rose up at the signal. Finally, Jones reached the end of the public road and led Booth and Herold, their nerves seriously frayed, on to the safety of his farm. It was between nine and ten o’clock. By then, “the night had grown inky dark. No rain was falling, but the dampness clung to every thing and fell in drops upon us as we made our way among the trees.” Jones halted his party under two pear trees near his stable, about fifty yards from the house.

  Booth craved the shelter—even for just a few minutes—of a roof over his head and the warming glow of a fire in the hearth and assumed that Jones would usher them into his home before the last rush to the river. “Wait here,” Jones said, “while I go in and get you some supper, which you can eat here while I get something for myself.”

  Booth’s heart sank and he pleaded, “Oh, can’t I go in and get some of your hot coffee?”

  “My friend, it wouldn’t do,” answered Jones. “Indeed it would not be safe. There are servants in the house who would be sure to see you and then we would all be lost. Remember, this is your last chance to get away.”

  Booth knew Jones was right. Soon enough, on the Virginia side, shelter, a fire, and a bed awaited him. Jones, knowing how Booth suffered from his broken leg and from living outdoors, hated to turn him down: “It cut me to the heart when this poor creature, whose head had not been under a roof, who had not tasted warm food, felt the glow of a fire, or seen a cheerful light for nearly a week, there in the dark, wet night at my threshold, made this piteous request.”

  Jones slipped into his house through the kitchen, where Henry Woodland was at the table eating a late supper. Jones collected his wits and pretended that this was just another typical spring night at Huckleberry, and not the climactic hour of a day that saw him spying on Union troops, galloping to rescue Lincoln’s assassin and his companion, leading them on a perilous night ride, and posting them outside his farmhouse, not more than fifty yards from his kitchen table.

  “How many shad did you catch?” Jones queried Henry.

  The fishing was good, he replied: “I caught about seventy, master.”

  Then Jones zeroed in with the critical question that would decide everything that night: “Did you bring the boat to Dent’s Meadow, and leave it there, Henry?”

  The lives of John Wilkes Booth and David Herold depended on the answer. “Yes, master.”

  Concealing his delight, Jones carried on innocently: “We had better get out another net tomorrow. The fish are running well.”

  Jones proceeded to his dining room, where his supper waited on the table. In front of several family members, and without exchanging a word with any of them, he scooped up enough food for two men and carried it out of the house: “They knew better than to question me about anything in those days,” Jones recalled. On his way out, Jones snatched a candle and slipped it into one of his coat pockets.

  After Booth and Herold wolfed down their supper, the first time they had enjoyed more than one meal a day since their confinement in the pine thicket, Herold and Jones got Booth back into the saddle and headed to the river, about one mile distant. Jones walked ahead of them, whistling for them to come up through the open fields. Three hundred yards from the river they came to a wood fence too high for the horse to step over and too well built to dismantle easily. From here the crippled actor would have to struggle to the river on foot. Herold and Jones helped Booth dismount, and he winced in pain as they lifted him over the fence. Leaving the horse behind, Jones and Herold, along with the makeshift crutches provided by Dr. Mudd, supported Booth’s weight between them as they stepped carefully down the steep and narrow path that led to the boat. What if it was gone? Jones worried. Unless Union troops had stumbled upon it within the last several hours, it should be just a few yards ahead where Henry Woodland left it. As they inched toward Dent’s Meadow, Booth’s senses must have come alive—he could hear the river’s current lapping its banks. Jones heard it, too: “As we approached we could hear its sullen roar … a mournful sound coming through the darkness.”

  The trio pressed forward, until they began to see the outline of a dull gray shape emerge from the darkness. At last! Booth’s spirits soared at the sight of the humble craft. His broken leg, the scourging newspaper accounts, and the monotony of the pine thicket had worn down his optimism. Seeing the skiff must have aroused an excitement in him that he had not experienced since his triumphant ride across the Navy Yard Bridge, the first key milestone in his escape after fleeing Ford’s Theatre. Crossing the Potomac from Maryland to Virginia would be the second. Jones waded into the shallows and brought in the boat.

  He and Herold helped Booth struggle into the craft, seating him at the stern. They laid the weapons and crutches on the wood hull planks with a dull thud. They handed him a single oar to steer. Herold climbed aboard, settled into the bow seat to row, and seized the other two oars, locking them into place. Jones hunkered down, produced the candle from his coat, and told Booth to bring out his pocket compass. The actor snapped open the square, velvet-lined case while Jones, concealing the candle under an oilcloth coat, ignited a match and lit the wick. Their faces inches apart, Jones, clenching the dripping candle over the protective glass cover that shielded the magnetized, dancing needle, showed Booth the true course to steer. “Keep to that,” he promised, “and it will bring you into the Machodoc Creek.” Jones handed Booth the candle, cautioning him to hide its faint glow during the crossing, and then gave Booth his final gift, the name of a contact on the other side: “Mrs. Quesenberry lives near the mouth of this creek. If you tell her you come from me I think she will take care of you.”

  Jones grabbed the stern firmly and began pushing Booth and Herold gently into the Potomac. Booth turned suddenly and spoke: “Wait a minute, old fellow.” The grateful assassin thrust a fistful of Union greenbacks at Jones. Jones rebuffed the gesture, protesting that he had not helped him for money. He agreed to accept just eighteen dollars, the price he paid for the boat a year ago in Baltimore.

  Choked with emotion, Booth understood that he would never see Jones again: “God bless you, my dear friend, for all you have done for me. Good-bye, old fellow.”

  Jones shoved them off, and Herold gripped the oars and stroked toward the Virginia shore, two miles distant. The river was dark as India ink and the boat soon vanished against the black, glass-smooth surface of the powerful current moving under a moonless night. Who can tell, wondered Jones, what thoughts possessed Booth as he entrusted himself “to the mercies of the dark water.”

  More certain is the significance of the pine-thicket days—John Wilkes Booth’s “lost week”—in the twelve-day chase for Lincoln’s killer. Booth and Herold spent more than one-third of the entire manhunt in the pine thicket. It was in the pines where Booth confronted the nation’s reaction to him and his crime, where news of Powell’s mad attack shocked his conscience, where he learned his manifesto would not be published and his voice would be silenced, where he realized that, although he performed the great crime magnificently, he failed to plan properly for the next act, the denouement of a successful, untroubled escape, and where he learned that he had made Abraham Lincoln a martyred hero greater than the living president had ever been in life. The assassin’s mysterious disappearance also affected the nation. In vanishing, he drove the manhunters to distraction, shook the people’s confidence in their government, attained the reputation of a devious, master criminal, and fueled rumors of a massive conspiracy. How else could one man, the most wanted man in American history, escape justice?

  John Wilkes Booth’s escape and disappearance unfolded as though scripted not by a master criminal, but by a master dramatist. Each additional day of Booth’s absence from the stage intensified the story’s dramatic arc. In his absence his bit players,
minor characters, supporting cast, and costars built up the drama: actors, stagehands, and theatre owners thrown behind bars; Booth’s suicidal lover exposed; his other lovers in hiding; the suspicious widow Mary Surratt seized during a late-night raid, along with her entire household; the maniacal and merciless Lewis Powell taken on her doorstep; Edman Spangler released, then taken again; Sam Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen clapped in irons; detectives in hot pursuit of bungling vice-presidential assassin George Atzerodt, capturing him the morning of the twentieth; Dr. Samuel Mudd under unshakable suspicion. Each day the public expected the morning and evening papers to carry news of yet another astounding arrest or shocking revelation. Events conspired toward an inexorable climax, awaiting only the stage star’s return to the action. On the night of April 20, Thomas Jones set him on that course. Although the lost week discouraged Booth, it also gave him hope. Languishing in the pine thicket had prevented his capture. He did not know who the manhunters were, how many of them there were, or what search plan they followed, but he had felt their presence, vague, hovering, and near. Though he never saw them, and heard them but once, the day that a cavalry patrol rode past the thicket, he knew from the newspapers that the War Department was mounting a major effort against him. Jones could do what Booth could not—move among the manhunters, watch their movements, eavesdrop on their conversations, and even speak to them. God—or fate—delivered unto him a guardian angel, a man of Southern honor and the old code who, by risking his own life, saved Booth’s. God willing, prayed the assassin, other men like Thomas Jones awaited his arrival on the other side in old Virginia. Such men were better than gold, and he only needed to find a few.

  THOMAS JONES NEVER SAW JOHN WILKES BOOTH OR DAVID Herold—or his boat—again. As soon as the wide waters of the Potomac swallowed all sight and sound of the two men, Jones ascended the steep terrain above the launching point, retrieved his horse by the fence, and rode back to the safety of Huckleberry. The roads were deserted, ensuring no one would be able to testify later to his whereabouts that night. When he got home, he unsaddled his horse, climbed into bed, and took quiet satisfaction in the success of his most spectacular mission. One clever man had just thwarted the will and resources of a nation. For five days and four nights, from the morning of Sunday, April 16, through the evening of Thursday, April 20, while a frustrated, avenging nation scoured the country for Lincoln’s assassin, Jones had concealed, sheltered, and sustained the most hated, wanted man in America. And on that dark Thursday night, while army cavalry and navy gunboats continued the furious search, intent on preventing Booth and his loyal cat’s-paw from crossing the Potomac, Jones launched them on their voyage across the waters to the dark, indistinct shore on the other side. They should be landing in Virginia right about now, thought Jones, as he drifted off to sleep. But while Jones slept more quietly and peacefully than he had in weeks, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold were rowing in the wrong direction!

  BY THURSDAY, APRIL 20, SAMUEL A. MUDD HADN’T BEEN sleeping very well since he had been questioned by Lieutenant Lovett three days before. The experience had left him unnerved. The detectives, rather than expressing gratitude, had behaved diffidently, and seemed to treat him with suspicion. Mudd worried about what he had told them—and even more about the vital information he withheld. Maybe he should have revealed that he had met John Wilkes Booth before. But he had no opportunity to remedy this because Alexander Lovett and the detectives did not return. And surely, Dr. Mudd reasoned, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold must have not only crossed the Potomac by now, but pushed deep into Virginia. The soldiers and detectives must be concentrating the hunt there now, many miles and a wide river away from Bryantown.

  On the morning of Friday, April 21, Dr. Mudd ate breakfast, went about his customary farm work, and left for his fields. The manhunt was now seven days old, and there were no real leads. Without solid leads, with no prospects for capturing Booth anytime soon, the authorities remembered Samuel Mudd. In Washington, Colonel H. H. Wells decided to come down to Bryantown to coordinate the search personally. It was time for him to meet this suspicious doctor that Lieutenant Lovett had told him about.

  Although Mudd had been a reluctant witness when interviewed on April 18, he did provide some useful information. Thanks to the doctor, the hunters knew that Booth was not traveling alone, but with a younger man, almost certainly David Herold. And they knew that Booth suffered from a broken leg and impaired mobility. And thanks to Mudd, they knew that the assassin had shaved his signature moustache. Indeed, based on Mudd’s information, the War Department revised Stanton’s April 20 proclamation to the nation. The first three printings of the reward poster stated that Booth wore “a heavy black moustache.” Soon the War Department revised the text and printed a fourth edition, adding the phrase “which he may have shaved off”

  Lieutenant Lovett and company set out from Bryantown to question Mudd again and bring him in to see Colonel Wells. When Lovett arrived in the morning, the doctor was out again. Frances sent for her husband. When Mudd arrived, Lovett intercepted him in the yard and escorted him inside. The officer told Mudd to bring him the razor that he lent to the stranger. And the men were strangers, Mudd reminded Lovett. But the doctor started to recall other details. The man with the broken leg was armed: “The injured man had a pair of revolvers.” Mudd said he had forgotten to tell them that on Tuesday. Frances Mudd reported that the stranger wore a false beard—she saw it become partly detached from his face when he walked down the stairs.

  Pistols? False beards? Lieutenant Lovett said that he and his men would have to search the house. Oh, that’s right, Mudd recalled, the injured stranger left one of his boots behind. Mudd explained how he had cut it off the man’s swollen leg. The boot—hidden under the stranger’s bed in the second-floor front room—was produced for Lovett’s inspection. The officer peered down the tube until something caught his eye. He rolled the leather down a little and there it was—handwriting, in black ink. It was the name of a bootmaker in New York. Dr. Mudd interjected at once that he had not noticed the writing before. Next to the manufacturer’s mark was more writing, the name of the owner. Lovett read the name. He knew it. His heart raced as he stared at the incontrovertible proof—“J. Wilkes.”

  Lovett took Mudd back to Bryantown to face Colonel Wells. On the ride over, Lovett continued to question Mudd, and the doctor continued to divulge hitherto unmentioned details. Lovett asked whether the strangers “had much money about them.” Yes, Mudd confessed, Booth had a thick roll of cash—“considerable greenbacks.” Lovett turned and addressed one of his men: Show him the photograph, he ordered. The detective withdrew from his pocket a small carte-de-visite and held up the image of John Wilkes Booth for Mudd’s inspection. No, that wasn’t the man, Mudd insisted, though it does, he added cryptically, look a little like him across the eyes.

  Mudd and Lovett rode along for a few minutes without speaking. Then, the officer noticed that the doctor “seemed to turn very pale, and blue about the lips, like a man that is frightened of something.” Samuel Mudd was terrified. The authorities, he feared, would discover his terrible secret very soon. Perhaps Colonel Wells, waiting in Bryantown to confront him, already knew it. Things might go better for him, he convinced himself, if he volunteered the truth—at least a carefully edited portion of it—now. Mudd steered his horse close to Lovett’s and spoke as calmly and nonchalantly as a man facing the hangman’s noose could muster: he knew John Wilkes Booth. He had met him last fall.

  Lovett reeled at the explosive revelation, and at the matter-of-fact manner by which Dr. Mudd conveyed it. Yes, continued the doctor, he had met Booth last year—in November or December—when the actor traveled through the neighborhood looking for real estate. Mudd said he had been introduced to Booth at church and had helped him buy a horse.

  At Bryantown, Mudd repeated to Colonel Wells the same story that he told Lieutenant Lovett several times. The men were strangers to him: “I never saw either of the parties before, nor can
I conceive of who sent them to my house.” The young man said his name was “Henson,” and the injured one said his was “Tyson” or “Tyser,” Mudd could not remember which. Wells picked up Mudd’s furtive scent right off. He asked if the injured stranger looked like Booth. No, replied Mudd. Wells found it odd that Mudd failed to recognize a man—especially one so celebrated—that he had met before, and not briefly. After all, Mudd and Booth had met at church in broad daylight, they had shopped for horses together, they had visited the blacksmith, and Booth had slept at Mudd’s home.

  But Mudd protested that he never got a good look at the stranger: “I did not see his face at all,” he said. The man “had a heavy shawl on all the time,” and he raised it to conceal the lower half of his face. Even when the man got into bed, “he had very little to say,” and he kept “his cloak thrown around him and seemed inclined to sleep.”

  A photograph issued to one of the manhunters,