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

by James L. Swanson

  Booth rallied and opened his eyes.

  “The damn rebel is still living!” a soldier cursed.

  “My hands,” Booth whispered. Baker clasped them, bathed the clammy flesh in cool water, and raised them up for Booth to see. For the last time John Wilkes Booth beheld the hands, now helpless, that had slain a president. Tenderly, Lucinda Holloway massaged his temples and forehead. Her fingertips felt the life draining out of him: “The pulsations in his temples grew weaker and weaker.”

  Mustering all his remaining strength, waning rapidly now, Booth looked at his hands and spoke again: “Useless, useless.”

  His breathing turned sporadic and labored, and he gasped for breath every few minutes. “His heart would almost die out; and then it would commence, and, by a few rapid beats, would make a slight motion again,” Baker observed.

  Booth’s lips turned purple and his throat swelled.

  He gasped.

  The rising sun nudged above the horizon and colored the eastern sky. In Albany, New York, mourners who had waited in line all night filed past Abraham Lincoln’s remains, displayed magnificently in the state Capitol’s Assembly Chamber. “During the still hours of the morning,” said one who witnessed the scene, “a sad procession moved through our streets to and from the Capitol. Aside from the slow tread of this procession, not a sound was to be heard.” That afternoon the funeral train would pull out of the station, heading west to the prairies. Lincoln would be home soon.

  Booth gasped again.

  His vision blurred.

  He could not breathe. He gasped a third time.

  The sun broke free from the horizon and flooded Garrett’s farm with light, which shone on Booth’s face. The soldiers tried to shield his eyes by draping clothes over the back of a chair that they set up on the porch between Booth and the sun.

  No, do not hide him from the light, Booth might have said, if he could still speak. When he was a boy, his bedroom at Bel Air faced the east and he told his dearest sister, Asia: “No setting sun view for me, it is too melancholy for me; let me see him rise.”

  The stage grew dark. His body shuddered. Then, no more. John Wilkes Booth was dead. The twelve-day chase for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin was over.

  Chapter Ten

  “So Runs the World Away”

  LUCINDA HOLLOWAY, CARESSING BOOTH’S HAIR, HAD WATCHED him die: “[G]asping three times and crossing his hands upon his breasts, he died just as the day was breaking.” She twisted a curl of his hair between her fingers and caught Dr. Urquhart’s eye. She did not need to ask. The doctor looked up, watching for his chance when Doherty, Baker, and Conger, distracted, glanced momentarily away from the assassin’s corpse. Quicker than their eyes could detect, Urquhart’s hand, grasping a pair of razor-sharp surgical scissors, reached down for Booth’s head. In an instant he snipped a lock of the rich, black hair and pressed it into Lucinda Holloway’s palm. As quickly, she clenched her fingers around the black curl into a tight fist to conceal the precious memento. She was not a craven relic hunter who lusted morbidly, like so many others, for bloody souvenirs of the great crime. No, to her the lock was a private, romantic keepsake of the luminous, dying star. If the soldiers saw what she had done, they would have overpowered her, prying open her balled fist and confiscating her treasure.

  Later, when the soldiers were gone, Lucinda entered the house and walked straight to the bookcase that held another prized relic—Booth’s field glasses. When no one was looking, she scratched her initials on the buckle of the shoulder strap, and then took the glasses to her mother’s house, a safe distance of several miles from Garrett’s farm.

  THE GARRETT MEN STOOD BY AS MUTE WITNESSES TO THE drama they had helped author. By locking Booth and Herold in their barn, they made it impossible for the assassin to make a run for it when the Sixteenth New York arrived. Had they captured a notorious murderer or betrayed an injured, helpless man? Even more, a man who had come under their hospitality. Did they deserve honor or opprobrium? The Garretts feared judgment under the old Southern code. Soon, they tried to rewrite the events of this night to cast their actions in a positive light. Ignoring the fact that they evicted Booth from their home on the night of April 25, the Garretts claimed that he had declined the bed on his last night, and that it was Booth who insisted on sleeping under the porch with the sharp-toothed dogs, or in the barn on the hard, wood planks. Conveniently, they overlooked the part of the story about just who locked Booth inside that barn.

  In the years ahead, they even invoked Edwin Booth’s name in defense of their family’s reputation. Edwin, a loyal Unionist, hated John’s deeds, but could not bring himself to hate his brother. Touched that the Garrett family took John in, and under the mistaken impression that they offered his misguided brother nothing but kindness and hospitality during the last two days of his life, Edwin wrote the Garretts a grateful letter: "Your family will always have our warmest thanks for your kindness to him whose madness wrought so much ill to us." If Edwin Booth had known the truth, that the Garretts had locked his brother in a barn like an animal, and helped prepare the funeral pyre, then Edwin, rather than lauding their kindness, might instead have wanted to come down to Port Royal and burn the rest of their farm down to the ground.

  Edwin Booth might not have been the only one. The newspapers and the public demonized the Garrett farmhouse and gave it human characteristics, just as they had done to Ford’s Theatre. George Alfred Townsend’s lurid characterization spoke for many: “In the pale moonlight … a plain old farmhouse looked grayly through its environing locusts. It was worn and whitewashed, and two-storied, and its half-human windows glowered down upon the silent cavalrymen like watching owls which stood as sentries over some horrible secret asleep within … in this house, so peaceful by moonlight, murder had washed its spotted hands, and ministered to its satiated appetite.”

  Journalist George Alfred Townsend’s

  thrilling account of the manhunt.

  Conger, Baker, and Doherty wanted to be absolutely certain, before they took the body back to Washington, that they had gotten their man, so they fished from their pockets carte-de-visite photos of Booth. Young Richard Garrett, mesmerized, watched the proceedings:

  “I saw it done … our whole family saw it done. [H]e was a strikingly handsome man with a face one could scarcely forget. The detectives had a printed description of him which they proceeded to verify after his death. It agreed in every particular, height, color of hair, eyes, size of hand … I saw the initials J.W.B. just where they were said to be. I saw the detectives place … the photograph of John Wilkes Booth … beside the face of the dead man we had known for two days, and [nothing] in the world could not persuade me that God ever made two men so exactly alike.”

  Lieutenant Doherty unrolled his scratchy, wool, regulation army blanket and ordered his men to lay Booth’s body upon it. He told the Garrett girls to go inside and bring him a thick sewing needle. Then he stitched the blanket around the assassin’s corpse, leaving one end open, like a sleeping bag, from which Booth’s feet protruded. They needed a wagon. Doherty’s men rustled up a local man and hired him to drive the corpse to Port Royal. The man brought the wagon to the Garretts’ front porch, where several soldiers heaved Booth in like a sack of corn. David Herold, whimpering, crying, pleading excuses that no one cared to hear, took it all in.

  George Alfred Townsend offered his readers an unforgettable picture of Booth’s ersatz hearse:

  A venerable old negro living in the vicinity had the misfortune to possess a horse. This horse was a relic of former generations, and showed by his protruding ribs the general leanness of the land. He moved in an eccentric amble, and when put upon his speed was generally run backward. To this old negro’s horse was harnessed a very shaky and absurd wagon, which rattled like approaching dissolution, and each part of it ran without any connection or correspondence with any other part. It had no tail-board, and its shafts were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer wa
s to be sent to the Potomac river…. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a fossil harness, and when it was backed to the Garrett’s porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides…. So moved the cavalcade of retribution, with death in its midst, along the road to Port Royal…. All the way the blood dribbled from the corpse in a slow, incessant, sanguine exudation.

  Booth’s funeral procession retraced the very route that he, David Herold, and their three young Confederate companions had followed from Port Royal to Garrett’s farm two days ago. No sobbing mourners watched this parade. The soldiers forced Herold to walk, but he complained mightily that his feet were killing him. They put him on a horse, tying his feet into the stirrups and his hands to the saddle. On the ride one of the soldiers chatted up Herold and scored a superb souvenir—he persuaded Booth’s companion to trade vests with him.

  The jostling wagon disturbed Booth’s clotted wound, noted Townsend. “When the wagon started, Booth’s wound till now scarcely dribbling, began to run anew. It fell through the crack of the wagon, dripping upon the axle, and spotting the road with terrible wafers.” It was an eerie re-creation of the street scene in front of Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, when drops of Abraham Lincoln’s blood and brains drizzled onto the mud underfoot. Townsend relished the phenomenon of Booth’s flowing blood as the stigmata of a cursed corpse: “It stained the planks and soaked the blankets; and the old negro, at a stoppage, dabbled his hand in it by mistake, he drew back instantly, with a shudder and stifled expletive, ‘Gor-r-r, dat’ll never come off in de world; it’s murderer’s blood.’ He wrung his hands, and looked imploringly at the officers, and shuddered again: ‘Gor-r-r, I wouldn’t have dat on me fur thousand, thousand dollars.’”

  After Luther Baker and Ned Freeman crossed the Rappahannock, they drove Booth’s body from Port Conway toward Belle Plaine. Three miles north of that location, Baker haled the John S. Ide, which had transported the Sixteenth New York Cavalry to Belle Plaine on the twenty-fourth. There was no wharf above Belle Plaine, so Baker unloaded Booth’s corpse from Freeman’s wagon, put it in a small boat, and rowed to the Ide.

  THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WERE EXACTLY what Conger, Baker, Doherty, and the men of the Sixteenth New York had in mind. Indeed, as news of the assassin’s death spread, manhunters across Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia fantasized about the same thing: That War Department broadside dated April 20, 1865, and its astounding proclamation—“$100,000.00 REWARD! The murderer of our late, beloved President Is Still At Large.” Booth was dead. Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, Sam Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, Ned Spangler, and David Herold had all been arrested. It was only a matter of time before the U.S. government began writing checks—to someone.

  Conger’s plan worked. He had arrived in Washington before Booth’s body, and now he could claim the credit of being the first to tell Edwin Stanton the news. He rushed from the wharf to Colonel Baker’s office, where he broke the news. “He came into the back office,” Baker stated, “and said to me that he had got Booth.” Conger told the story of Garrett’s farm, unfolded his handkerchief, and showed Baker what he had—the effects taken from Booth’s body. The two detectives jumped in a buggy and, about 5:00 P.M., drove to the War Department to tell Stanton the news. But the secretary had left his office for the day. They drove on to Stanton’s home, leaped out of the buggy, and ran to the front door. They found Stanton in the parlor reclining on a lounge resting, but not asleep. “We have got Booth,” Baker told him. Stanton covered his eyes with his hands, paused, and stood up. Conger and Baker laid out Booth’s effects on a table. Stanton picked up the diary and, Baker recalled, “after looking at it for some time, he handed it back to me.” “Then,” continued Baker, Stanton picked up the “little pocket compass.” In the quiet of his parlor, Stanton had received the news—Booth had been taken, he was dead, and the manhunt for Lincoln’s assassin was over. The secretary of war wasn’t ready to celebrate yet. He wanted to be sure that the body being brought to Washington was really John Wilkes Booth. Conger unrolled the handkerchief containing the treasures he had stripped from Booth’s still living body and shared his booty with Stanton. Persuasive evidence, Stanton must have concurred, but he had to be absolutely certain. He decided to convene an inquest aboard the Montauk as soon as Booth’s body arrived in Washington. Witnesses would give notarized statements. An autopsy would be performed. Then Stanton could be sure.

  In Washington, the steamer John S. Ide rendezvoused off the U.S. Navy Yard with an ironclad gunboat—the Montauk—the same vessel that Abraham and Mary Lincoln visited during their carriage ride on the afternoon of the assassination. Stanton took immediate steps to confirm the identity of the man killed at Garrett’s farm. At first glance, Booth was barely recognizable. He had shaved off his moustache, and his injury, the psychological stress of the manhunt, and twelve hard days of living mostly outdoors had taken their toll, reported Townsend, on his hitherto magnificent appearance. “It was fairly preserved, though on one side the face distorted, and looking blue-like death, and wildly bandit-like, as if bearen by avenging angels.” The War Department wanted to quash the birth of any Booth survival myths. Edwin Stanton had already scrutinized all of the personal effects collected at Garrett’s farm: the photos of the girlfriends; the pocket compass that pointed Booth south to imagined safety; the leather-bound pocket calendar. As Stanton turned the pages, he made a startling discovery—Booth had used the calendar as an impromptu diary, and in it he recorded his motive for killing Lincoln, and the turmoil of the manhunt. Only one man, Stanton knew, could have authored these fevered words: Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. Stanton announced the news to the nation:

  WAR DEPARTMENT

  Washington, D.C., April 27, 1865

  Major General Dix, New York:

  J. Wilkes Booth and Harrold were chased from the swamp in St. Mary’s county, Maryland, and pursued yesterday morning to Garrett’s farm, near Port Royal, on the Rappahannock, by Colonel Baker’s forces.

  The barn in which they took refuge was fired. Booth, in making his escape, was shot through the head and killed, lingering about three hours, and Harrold taken alive.

  Booth’s body and Harrold are now here.

  EDWINM. STANTON

  Secretary of War

  News of the arrival of Booth’s body spread quickly through the capital, and hundreds of spectators rushed to the river for a glimpse of the dead assassin. “At Washington,” George Alfred Townsend reported, “high and low turned out to look on Booth. Only a few were permitted to see his corpse for purposes of recognition.” A Chicago Tribune correspondent confirmed, with palpable disappointment, that “it seems that the authorities are not inclined to give the wretched carcass the honor of meeting the public gaze.”

  News of Booth’s death traveled across the nation by telegraph, and newspapers everywhere rushed to print with excited stories filled with the details of the manhunt’s climax at Garrett’s farm. As soon as the news reached Philadelphia, T. J. Hemphill of the Walnut Theatre knew what had to be done. When he called at Asia Booth Clarke’s home, she received him at once. Asia knew from the very sight of him what must have happened. “The old man stood steadying himself by the center table; he did not raise his eyes, his face was very pale and working nervously. The attitude and pallor told the news he had been deputed to convey.” Asia spoke first.

  “Is it over?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Taken?” “Yes.”

  “Dead?” “Yes, madam.”

  Asia, pregnant with twins, collapsed onto a sofa. If one of her new babies was a boy, she had planned to name him John. “My heart beat like strong machinery, powerful and loud it seemed. I lay down with my face to the wall, thanking God solemnly, and heard the old man’s sobs choking him, heard him go out, and close the street door after him.”

  On the Montauk, several men who
knew Booth in life, including his doctor and dentist, were summoned aboard the ironclad to witness him in death. It was all very official. The War Department even issued an elaborate receipt to the notary who witnessed the testimony. During a careful autopsy, surgeons noted a distinctive old scar on his neck and the tattoo—“JWB”—that Booth had marked on his hand when he was a boy. The cause of death was easy to prove: gunshot via a single bullet through the neck. As proof the surgeons excised the vertebrae it had passed through and also removed part of Booth’s thorax and pickled the bone and tissue in a neatly labeled glass specimen jar. Booth’s vertebrae repose today in a little-known medical museum, one attraction among thousands in a hideous collection devoted to documenting the wounds of the American Civil War. The surgeon general’s handwritten autopsy report was clinical and brief, but betrayed the emotion of the hour. In his letter to Edwin Stanton, Dr. Barnes assured the secretary of war that John Wilkes Booth had suffered:

  I have the honor to report that in compliance with your orders, assisted by Dr. Woodward, USA, I made at 2 P.M. this day, a postmortem examination of the body of J. Wilkes Booth, lying on board the Monitor Montauk off the Navy Yard.

  The left leg and foot were encased in an appliance of splints and bandages, upon the removal of which, a fracture of the fibula (small bone of the leg) 3 inches above the ankle joint, accompanied by considerable ecchymosis, was discovered.

  The cause of death was a gun shot wound in the neck—the ball entering just behind the sterno-cleido muscle—21½ inches above the clavicle—passing through the bony bridge of the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae—severing the spinal chord [sic] and passing out through the body of the sterno-cleido of right side, 3 inches above the clavicle.