“You say they are on the road to Port Royal?” Conger asked. “Yes, sir,” Jett verified.
Conger could not believe it: “I have just come from there.”
That news surprised the young Confederate: “I thought you came from Richmond: If you have come that way, you have come right past them. I cannot tell you whether they are there now or not.”
Perhaps, when the cavalry thundered past Garrett’s farm several hours ago on its way to Bowling Green, it had spooked Booth and Herold and prompted them to flee elsewhere. That was beyond Jett’s control, he made clear to Detective Baker. It was not his fault if the cavalry had scared off the assassins. The news stunned Baker. A few hours ago, he and the Sixteenth New York had ridden through Port Royal, and then past the farm. The fugitives, Baker guessed, must have heard the pounding hooves of their horses. Booth and Herold had been within his grasp and he had ridden right past them! At around midnight, Conger, Baker, and Doherty, hoping they were not too late, turned the troops around and galloped back to the farm.
Conger, Baker, Doherty, and Jett hurried out of the Star Hotel and mounted their horses. At about 12:30 A.M., Wednesday, April 26, the Sixteenth New York Cavalry headed for Garrett’s farm and, they hoped, a rendezvous with Lincoln’s assassin. Baker warned Jett not to try any tricks: “He shook hands with the Colonel, and promised on his honor as an officer and a gentleman that he would be true to us. We told him that if he deceived us, it would be death to him—we thinking that perhaps it might be his design to lead us into an ambuscade.”
After two hours in the saddle, Jett told Conger that he should slow the column: “We are very near there now to where we go through: let us stop here, and look around.” In the dark, Jett had trouble finding the gate to the road that led to Garrett’s house. Conger ordered the patrol to halt. He and Jett rode on alone. It is just a little way up, Willie reassured him. Conger trotted ahead of Jett. His eyes scanned the dark roadside but detected no opening. All Conger could see was a bushy, unbroken fence line skirting the road. He turned his horse around and retreated. There is no gate, he complained to Jett.
Then it is just a little farther up the road, Booth’s Judas promised. It is hard to judge these distances in the dark. They rode on three hundred yards more, and Baker spurred ahead from the main body to help Conger search for the gate. This time they found it. After unlatching it, Conger sent Baker ahead to find and open the second gate; Jett had told them that it would block their way. Baker vanished into the black night while Conger backtracked to fetch the cavalry. The detective asked Jett a final question: when the cavalry charges down that road, where should they look for the house?
As before, Jett obliged: “I took them to Garrett’s gate and directed them how to go into the house and they went in, leaving me at the gate.”
Conger ordered Jett and Rollins to remain at the gate, guarded by only one trooper. Soon Baker located the last roadside obstacle that separated them from Booth: “We found a gate, fastened by a latch, dismounted, opened the gate, and the command came through, and a charge was ordered.” The Sixteenth New York Cavalry raced up the dirt road and toward the farmhouse.
As the Sixteenth New York closed in on Booth and Herold, the nation did not hold its collective breath, awaiting the exciting climax of the manhunt. Nobody—not Stanton, his officers, the other pursuers, or the press—knew that Conger, Baker, and Doherty had tracked Lincoln’s assassin to Port Royal, and to the Garrett farm. Elsewhere, all over Virginia and Maryland, other manhunters, ignorant of what was happening at Garrett’s farm, continued the chase. In Maryland, S. H. Beckwith, the man whose tip had set in motion the sequence of events that led the Sixteenth New York to Booth’s hiding place, sent, at 1:30 A.M., April 26, another telegram to Major Eckert. The major did not receive it until 8:00 A.M. And Booth had escaped Maryland days ago.
Immediately after reporting to you to-day I proceeded with Major O’Beirne to Bryantown, thence to Turner’s house, where Booth and Herold were seen by two servants to inquire about food, then enter pine thicket about twenty rods distant from house and two miles north from Bryantown. Parties on the ground had been through, losing the track and accomplishing nothing. We at once penetrated the thicket and deployed. After following probable routes I struck the crutch track, and we followed it in a direction circling around toward the piece of timber from which they first issued far enough to justify the belief they are still in same vicinity from which they started, and that while the troops were searching the thicket where they were last seen, they, by taking course above described, gained time to temporarily conceal themselves again. It appears to us from all we can learn that troops have not been pushed through with much system. The colored troops, while deployed and advancing, upon hearing shout on one part line, made rush in that direction, leaving considerable space uncovered. Cavalry has been operating, and tonight has strong line of pickets around timber. I made map to-day for immediate use, but it would have assisted much if we had a county survey map and a compass. I left Major O’Beirne at Bryantown, where he was preparing to cooperate with others and make an early and systematic scouring.
The Sixteenth New York did not need compasses or survey maps. Only a few hundred yards separated them from Booth now.
THE DOGS HEARD IT FIRST. RISING FROM THE SOUTHWEST. Distant sounds, yet inaudible to human ears, of metal touching metal; of a hundred hooves sending vibrations through the earth; of deep, labored breathing from tired horses; of faint human voices. These early warning signs alerted the dogs sleeping under the Garretts’ front porch. At the farm John Garrett, corn-house sentinel, was already awake and became the first one there to hear their approach. William Garrett, lying on a blanket a few feet from his brother, heard them, too.
It was dark and still inside the farmhouse. Old Richard Garrett and the rest of his family had gone to bed hours ago.
All was quiet, too, in the tobacco barn. It was well past midnight, and the Garretts’ unwitting prisoners were asleep. As far as John and William could observe from their hiding place, neither Booth nor Herold stirred during the night, realized their predicament, and tried to escape their rustic jail. The horses were safe, and the suspicious Boyd cousins were trapped. The barking dogs and the clanking, rumbling sound finally woke up Booth. Recognizing the unique music of cavalry on the move, the assassin knew he had only a minute or two to react before it was too late.
Booth woke up Davey fast. The cavalry is here, Booth hissed in a low whisper. The assassin’s groggy companion snapped to attention. They snatched up their weapons and rushed to the front of the barn. “We went right up to the barn door and tried to get out,” recalled Davey, “but found it was locked.” The Garretts had imprisoned them! Booth wasted no time and began trying to pry the lock from its mountings. Every second was precious: they had to flee the barn before Union troops surrounded it. Booth guessed that the riders would move on the farmhouse first. He and Herold had to clear out of the tobacco barn before the cavalrymen turned their attention to the outbuildings. No doubt the treacherous Garrett boys would guide the Yankees to the right one.
Booth wheeled around one hundred and eighty degrees. “Come on!” he called to Davey. The assassin scampered fifty feet to the back wall. “[W]e went directly to the back end of the barn, and we tried to kick a board off so we could crawl out,” witnessed Herold. Booth, impaired by his injury, and hobbled by his crutches, could not leverage his full weight on his left foot to swing a powerful kick with the right. He struck weakly. The board did not give. Davey fared no better. “Let’s kick together!” Booth proposed. They aimed their kicks to strike one board together. Still the iron nails held tight as though cemented into the framing. David Herold was getting worried: “Although we did, our kicks did not do the work.”
THE UNION COLUMN RACED UP THE ROAD AND THREW A CORdon around the Garrett farmhouse. Edward Doherty, Luther Baker, and Everton Conger dropped from their saddles, leapt up the porch, and pounded on the door. Awakened by the commotion, Rich
ard Garrett climbed from his bed and walked downstairs in his nightclothes.
DAVID HEROLD PANICKED: “YOU HAD BETTER GIVE UP,” HE urged Booth.
No, no, the actor declared, “I will suffer death first.”
DOHERTY, BAKER, AND CONGER WAITED IMPATIENTLY ON THE front porch, and the trio pounced as soon as old man Garrett opened the door.
Conger barked first: “Where are the two men who stopped here at your house?”
Startled, Richard Garrett replied vaguely: “They have gone.” “Gone where?” Conger demanded. “Gone to the woods,” explained Garrett.
“What!” Luther Baker interrupted mockingly, “a lame man gone into the woods?”
Well, he had crutches, old Garrett pointed out.
“Will you show me where they are?” Baker continued.
“I will,” Garrett promised, “but I will want my pants and boots.”
Garrett’s interrogators refused to let him back into the house to dress, so his family passed his clothes and boots to him through the door. There on the front porch, in full view of the soldiers, he dressed himself.
Conger decided to play the old man’s game, at least momentarily: “Well, sir, whereabouts in the woods have they gone?”
Garrett began a long-winded story of how the men came there without his consent, that he did not want them to stay, and that …
Enough, Conger interrupted: “I do not want any long story out of you: I just want to know where these men have gone.”
Richard Garrett was afraid, and he babbled his defensive monologue all over again. Conger had heard enough. He turned from the door and spoke gravely to one of his men: “Bring in a lariat rope here, and I will put that man up to the top of one of those locust trees.” Even under the threat of hanging, marveled Conger, Garrett “did not seem inclined to tell.” A soldier went to get the hemp persuader.
John Garrett emerged from the corn house, walked up to the nearest cavalryman, and asked whom they were pursuing. “That I cannot tell you,” the trooper answered mysteriously, telling another soldier to take John to the house. When they got near the house, John saw Doherty, Conger, and Baker on the front porch talking to his father. Spotting John Garrett, Conger bellowed to his soldier escort, “Where did you get this man from?” John Garrett spoke up and came to the rescue of his tongue-tied father.
“Don’t hurt the old man: He is scared. I will tell you where the men are you want to find,” he said.
“That is what I want to know,” said an exasperated Conger. “Where are they?”
Before John had time to answer, Doherty seized him by the collar, pushed him down the steps, put a revolver to his head, and ordered him to tell him where the assassins were.
“In the barn,” John Garrett cried out. The two men are in the barn.
Not good enough, warned Conger: “There are three rooms around here, the tobacco-house and two corn houses; if you don’t tell me the exact house he is in, your life will pay the forfeit.”
They are in the tobacco barn, divulged Garrett.
“Show me the barn,” Doherty commanded.
BOOTH AND HEROLD HEARD THE SOLDIERS RUSH AND SURround the barn. Maybe stealth could save them just once more, like it had served them in the pine thicket. Booth hushed Herold to remain silent and motionless: “Don’t make any noise,” he whispered, “maybe they will go off thinking we are not here.” Conger, close to the barn now, heard someone moving around inside, rustling the hay. It was David Herold walking about, failing to heed Booth’s orders to take cover and, stupidly, revealing that they were in the barn.
THE LEADERS OF THE SIXTEENTH NEW YORK EXPEDITION WERE not done with John Garrett. They had a special mission for him. Luther Baker summoned John to his side and pointed to the tobacco house: “You must go in to the barn, and get the arms from those men.” Garrett objected to the suicidal plan. Ignoring his reaction, Baker went on: “They know you, and you can go in.” Yes, Booth and Herold did know John Garrett—as the man who ordered them out of his house, refused them the comfort of a bed, and locked them in the barn. That is precisely why he refused Baker’s request. He had seen Booth’s weapons and knew he would not hesitate to exact vengeance for Garrett’s inhospitality and betrayal. No, he would not be the assassin’s last victim.
Perhaps Garrett did not understand, Baker explained to him, that this mission was not optional: “I want you to go into that barn and demand the surrender of the arms that man has and bring them out to me. Unless you do it, I will burn your property.” Baker didn’t mean just the tobacco barn. He meant it all—house, barn, corn houses, and stables. Either John went in, or Baker would “end this affair with a bonfire and shooting match.”
By now William Garrett had also emerged from the cover of the corn house and joined his brother near the tobacco barn. William, who had imprisoned the fugitives, pulled the key from his pocket and surrendered it to Baker.
Baker stepped forward and shouted to John Wilkes Booth: “We are going to send this man, on whose premises you are, in to get your arms; and you must come out, and deliver yourselves up.” Booth said nothing. It might be a trick, he considered. He readied himself for a dismounted charge by more than twenty cavalrymen the moment the door opened. Baker, key in hand, strode right up to the barn door. He stood within close range of Booth’s pistols now. Baker inserted the key, turned the lock, and, slowly, opened the door a little. Booth remained invisible, hiding just several yards away in the black, inner recesses of the barn. He saw movement. He held his pistols tightly, fingers in the trigger guards, thumbs ready to cock the hammers of the single-action Colts. But he held his fire. Baker seized John Garrett and half guided, half pushed him through the door and closed it behind him.
John Garrett stood alone, in the dark, at the mercy of Lincoln’s killer. He spoke timidly to the unseen fugitives, reporting that “the barn was surrounded, that resistance was useless, and that [you] had better come out and deliver [yourself] up.”
A growling, tenor voice, dripping with malice, echoed from the darkness in reply: “You have implicated me.”
Garrett tried to reason with them: “Gentlemen, the cavalry are after you. You are the ones. You had better give yourselves up.”
Then, like a ghostly apparition, John Wilkes Booth’s pale, haunting visage emerged from the void, like a luminous portrait floating on a black canvas. Then he exploded: “Damn you! You have betrayed me! If you don’t get out of here I will shoot you! Get out of this barn at once!” Garrett glimpsed Booth’s right hand in motion. The assassin, while cursing Garrett, slowly reached behind his back for one of his revolvers.
Like Harry Hawk had done on the stage of Ford’s Theatre after Booth jumped from the president’s box, a terrified John Garrett turned and ran, escaped the barn, and nearly leapt into Conger’s arms. Booth was going to kill him, Garrett pleaded.
Conger was skeptical: “How do you know he was going to shoot you?”
Because, Garrett claimed in a tremulous voice, “he reached down to the hay behind him to get his revolver.” He had come out of the barn just in time, he insisted.
Finally, at the climax of a twelve-day manhunt that had gripped the nation, a heavily armed patrol of Sixteenth New York Cavalry had actually cornered Lincoln’s assassin. The situation demanded decisive action, but, at the critical moment, Conger and the others hesitated. Instead of ordering their men to rush the barn and take Booth, they decided to talk him out, and then they delegated the job to a solitary, unarmed man, a civilian—and an ex-rebel soldier, no less—to negotiate Booth’s surrender. It was a clear abdication of command responsibility. Twenty-six cavalrymen, each armed with a six-shot revolver, not counting other weapons, could pour a fusillade of 156 conical lead pistol bullets into the barn before having to reload. In response, Booth could fire a mere 12 rounds from the revolvers and 7 from the Spencer carbine. He wouldn’t have time to reload. Or the troops could, without warning, before they fired a shot, charge the barn and try to take Booth by surprise. In the
dark, and in the few seconds before they seized him, Booth could not pick off more than a few of them before he was subdued. Stanton wanted Booth alive for questioning.
Why did they hesitate? If brave Union men could charge Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and suffer several thousand casualties, and if the valiant regiments of the Army of Northern Virginia could make the disastrous, suicidal Pickett’s charge on the third day at Gettysburg, why couldn’t twenty-six soldiers, under the cloak of darkness, charge two civilians hiding in a barn? Surely the honor of capturing Lincoln’s assassin was worth the risk of a few casualties.
Even after John Garrett’s ill-advised, failed mission, Doherty, Conger, and Baker dithered, pursuing a strategy of talk, not action. The trio deputized Baker as their spokesman. Baker shouted an ultimatum to the occupants: “I want you to surrender. If you don’t, I will burn this barn down in fifteen minutes.” If the fugitives refused to come out voluntarily, he resolved, then the flames would drive them out. Baker, Conger, and Doherty awaited an answer. It was 2:30 A.M., Wednesday, April 26. From the time the Sixteenth New York arrived at Garrett’s farm until this moment, the fugitives had not spoken one word to their pursuers. Then came the first contact.
A voice speaking from inside the barn bellowed three pointed questions: “Who are you?” “What do you want?” “Whom do you want?”
It was John Wilkes Booth. The assassin stepped to the front of the tobacco barn and peered through a space between two boards, eyeballing his counterpart, whom he took, mistakenly, as an army captain.
“We want you,” Baker replied, “and we know who you are. Give up your arms and come out!”
Booth stalled to preserve his options: “Let us have a little time to consider it.”
Surprisingly, Baker agreed to the delay: “Very well.”
Ten or fifteen minutes elapsed without communication between the parties. But the manhunters maintained a keen vigil on all four of the barn walls to ensure that their prey did not slip out unnoticed through a crevice between the boards.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Page 33