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

by James L. Swanson

  Paralysis of the entire body was immediate, and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.

  Stanton had decided that a written record of the autopsy was insufficient. He summoned the celebrated photographer Alexander Gardner, Mathew Brady’s rival and a favorite of President Lincoln’s, to photograph Booth’s corpse as it lay naked, stretched out on a board on the deck of the ironclad. Stanton also allowed Gardner to photograph the conspirators imprisoned on the ironclads Montauk and Saugus. Gardner took multiple images of Arnold, O’Laughlen, Spangler, Atzerodt, and Herold, each wearing an unusual type of handcuff called “Lilley irons,” joined by a solid bar that prevented the prisoners from bringing their hands together. They would see Gardner again soon, when he took their final portraits. Gardner took special interest in Lewis Powell, picturing him in a number of poses that he soon reproduced as cartes-de-visite for public sale. But, on Stanton’s orders, there would be no public viewing of the autopsy images. Harper’s Weekly based a single, discreet woodcut on one of the horrific images, but the original glass plates and paper prints of Stanton’s trophy photographs vanished 140 years ago, almost as soon as they were taken, and have never been seen again.

  The prominent sculptor Clark Mills, who had recently fashioned a plaster life mask of Lincoln in March 1865, sought permission to make a death mask of his assassin. He wanted to come aboard the Montauk, slather Booth’s face with wet plaster and, once it dried, pry the mask from the assassin’s countenance. Mills went too far for the secretary of war. According to a newspaper account, “Mr. Stanton, not deeming him over loyal, replied: ‘You had better take care of your own head.’ “Death masks, Stanton perhaps reasoned, were best suited for honoring great men, not their murderers.

  Stanton certainly hoped that, like the autopsy photographs, Booth’s body would vanish. Scoop-seeking reporters lusted to unearth the last great episode of the twelve-day manhunt, the disposal of the assassin’s remains.

  “What,” Townsend probed Lafayette C. Baker, “have you done with the body?”

  Colonel Baker uttered a typically portentous, self-dramatizing reply: “That is known to only one man living besides myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpet comes shall the grave of Booth be discovered.”

  “And,” Townsend confidentially advised his readers, “this is true.”

  In the days following the close of the manhunt, all the major American newspapers damned John Wilkes Booth with parting epithets. The most vivid among them was penned by George Alfred Townsend:

  Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer; two men were in it, they carried the body off into the darkness, and out of that darkness it will never return…. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation,—annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but we shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation’s head rests somewhere in the elements, and that is all; but if the indignant seas or the profaned turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to tell the history of a young and once promising life—USELESS! USELESS!

  But Lafayette Baker had lied to Townsend. The second manhunt for John Wilkes Booth—the one for his corpse—had only begun. To prevent Booth’s grave from becoming a shrine, and his body a holy relic of the Lost Cause, sailors from the Montauk, accompanied by the Bakers, had pretended to row his body out to deep water and bury it at sea, so weighted down that it could never rise. The press swallowed the bait, and one newspaper, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News, even published a front-page woodcut illustrating the faux, watery burial. What really happened was far less dramatic. Lafayette Baker, Luther Baker, and two sailors from the Montauk took Booth’s body from the gunboat and laid it on the floor of a rowboat. The sailors shoved off from the ironclad’s low-riding deck, and rowed away from the Navy Yard, down the Potomac’s eastern branch. Booth was on the river again, seven days after Thomas Jones led him to its banks. The sailors made for an army post at Greenleaf’s Point called the Old Arsenal, or the Old Penitentiary, a complex of substantial brick buildings and a courtyard surrounded by a high brick wall. They pulled in to a little wood wharf attached to the arsenal. Lafayette Baker stepped onto the wharf and, leaving his cousin in charge of the corpse, walked to the fort to find Major Benton, the ordnance officer Stanton had chosen to put Booth in the grave. Benton and Baker returned to the wharf, looked at the body, and, Luther Baker recalled, “talked the matter over.” Benton knew just the place to bury him.

  Benton ordered some of his men to carry Booth’s body into the fort. They dropped it in a rectangular, wood musket crate, and screwed down the lid. Somebody wrote Booth’s name on top. Then they buried the assassin in a secret, unmarked grave at the Old Arsenal penitentiary, the site chosen by Edwin Stanton as the unconsecrated burial ground for John Wilkes Booth, and for several of his conspirators who would soon join him in the grave. Stanton kept the only key. “I gave directions that he should be interred in that place, and that the place should be kept under lock and key,” Stanton said. He wanted to be sure that “the body might not be made the subject of glorification by disloyal persons and those sympathizing with the rebellion,” or “… the instrument of rejoicing at the sacrifice of Mr. Lincoln.” Stanton wanted to keep the worshipers and relic hunters at bay: “The only object was to place his body where it could not be made an improper use of until the excitement had passed away.” Booth had escaped once before on assassination night, but he would not escape Stanton again.

  Booth’s death did not end the manhunt for those who had come in contact with the assassin during his escape. If they thought Boston Corbett had saved them, they were wrong. Stanton wasn’t finished with them. His April 20 proclamation had made that clear: “All persons harboring or secreting the said persons … or aiding or assisting their concealment or escape, will be treated as accomplices in the murder of the President … and shall be subject to … the punishment of DEATH.” Stanton sent more patrols into Maryland and Virginia to track down everyone who he knew, or suspected, had seen or helped Booth during his twelve days on the run. Thomas Jones, Captain Cox, the Garrett sons, and many more were seized and taken to the Old Capitol prison. Then, curiously, within weeks, Stanton freed them all. He decided to put only eight defendants on trial—Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, Edman Spangler, and Samuel Mudd. Not one person who helped Booth and Herold in Maryland or Virginia, aside from Dr. Mudd, was punished for aiding Lincoln’s assassin. They returned to their homes and families and, for years to come, whispered secret tales of their deeds during the great manhunt.

  Several days after Booth’s burial, Luther Baker, in a coda to the manhunt, journeyed again to Garrett’s farm. It was after sunset. The charred remnants of the cedar posts, boards, and planks that had burned so brightly on the early morning of April 26 had cooled. Baker walked amidst the ruins: “Just before dark I went out to where the barn was burned, thinking I might find some remains … I poked around in the ashes and found some melted lead (it seemed he had some cartridges with him) and pieces of the blanket Herold had.”

  Another hunt—the one for the reward money—began before Booth’s body cooled in the grave. With Booth dead, and his chief accomplices under arrest, awaiting trial for the murder of the president and the attempted assassin
ation of William Seward, it was time to cash in. Hundreds of manhunters rushed to claim a portion of the $100,000 reward. Tipsters with the slightest—or no—connection to the events of April 14 to 26, 1865, angled for their rewards. Among the rival detectives, army officers, enlisted men, policemen, and citizens, the competition was brutal. Applicants exaggerated their roles, downplayed their rivals, and concocted fabulous lies to enhance their stake. In a long affidavit supporting his claim, Lafayette Baker boasted that he was the first to distribute photos of Booth, Herold, and Surratt. Lieutenant Doherty asked soldiers under his command to write affidavits to support his version of the events at Garrett’s farm.

  At first, Lafayette Baker’s intrigues paid off handsomely—$17,500, an impressive sum considering that the salary of the president of the United States was $25,000. Colonel Conger got the same as Baker; Luther Baker got $5,000; and Lieutenant Doherty, commander of the Sixteenth New York Garrett’s farm patrol, got only $2,500. Together, the Baker cousins outmaneuvered their rivals and monopolized $22,500, nearly one-quarter of the entire $100,000 reward. Loud, indignant complaints forced Congress to investigate the matter. Claims were reevaluated, reports were published by the Government Printing Office, and all the while, the manhunters lobbied greedily for their money. Booth would have likely enjoyed the grotesque spectacle of this bickering for blood money over the bodies of a dead president and his assassin.

  Congress adjusted the figures and finally, more than one year after the manhunt, the U.S. Treasury issued warrants to disburse the reward. Congress cut Conger’s share from $17,500 to $15,000 and raised Doherty to a more generous $5,250. But the Bakers suffered badly. Lafayette Baker, who was not present at Garrett’s farm, saw his share reduced from $17,500 to $3,750, while Luther Byron Baker’s share was cut from $5,000 to $3,000. God may have guided Boston Corbett’s hand at Garrett’s farm, but the Almighty did not intervene to line the eccentric sergeant’s pocket. He received the same payout as every enlisted man and noncommissioned officer there—$1,653.84.

  Conger, Doherty, the Bakers, and the twenty-six men—two sergeants, seven corporals, and seventeen privates—from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry were not the only ones to enjoy a payday for Booth’s capture and Herold’s arrest. James O’Beirne, H. H. Wells, George Cot-tingham, and Alexander Lovett were awarded $1,000 each for their roles in the manhunt.

  And then there were the other rewards. Nine men received bounties for the capture of George Atzerodt. Sergeant Zachariah Gemmill got the most—$3,598.54—and seven others won subordinate rewards of $2,878.78 each. James W. Purdum, the citizen whose tip contributed to the German’s arrest, was paid the same. Major E. R. Artman, 213th Pennsylvania Volunteers, received $1,250.

  Ten claimants split the reward money set aside for the arrest of Lewis Powell. Compared with what some other manhunters received for less hazardous work, the bounty for capturing the dangerous Seward assassin was not generous. Major H. W. Smith got the most, $1,000, and the other participants—Detective Richard Morgan, Eli Devore, Charles H. Rosch, Thomas Sampson, and William Wermerskirch—were paid $500 each. Citizens John H. Kimball and P. W. Clark also received $500 each, and two women, Mary Ann Griffin and Susan Jackson—“colored”—received the smallest rewards paid to anyone who shared in the bounty, just $250 each.

  The reward payments totaled $104,999.60, and the Treasury Department issued warrants “in satisfaction of all claims,” to the dissatisfaction of the many claimants—officers, soldiers, detectives, government officials, citizens, and crackpots—who dreamed of cashing in on Stanton’s April 20 proclamation, but who got nothing.

  Richard Garrett also made a claim against the government, not for helping capture Booth and Herold, but for the damage that the MANHUNTERS did to his property. His inventory was extensive. Two thousand dollars for one “tobacco house … framed on heavy cedar posts, plank floor throughout … furnished with all the fixtures for curing tobacco, including prize-press and sticks for hanging tobacco.” Then there were the contents, for which Garrett demanded $2,670: “One wheat-threshing machine (150); two stoves (25); one set large dining room tables (mahogany or walnut) (50); ten walnut chairs, cushioned seats (40); one feather bed (15); one shovel (1); two axes (3); five bushels sugar-corn seed (7.50); five hundred pounds hay (10).”

  In addition, Garrett wanted $21.00 for the fifteen bushels of corn and 300 pounds of hay consumed by the horses of the Sixteenth New York. The government actually considered his claim, issued an official report, and refused to pay him a cent, reasoning that he had, after all, been disloyal to the Union.

  Boston Corbett did enjoy additional compensation—fame. The public celebrated him as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” Citizens deluged him with fan mail, and he faithfully answered their letters, sometimes offering biographical tidbits, religious counsel, or occasionally a coveted, firsthand account of the events at Garrett’s farm. To the delight of autograph seekers, Corbett made a point of signing these letters with his full name, rank, and unit. The following letters are typical.

  Clarendon Hotel/Washington, D.C./May 61865 My dear young friend I must give you an answer for you ask so pretty. May God Bless And Protect You and keep you from the snares of the Wicked One Who so prevailed with him who took the life of Our President. The Scripture says, Resist the Devil And he will flee from you… Boston Corbett/Sergt. Co. L. 16th N.Y. Cav.

  Lincoln Barracks/Washington D.C./May 11th 1865 Dear Sir, In answer to Your request I would say that Booth was Shot on the Morning of the 26th of April 1865 Near Port Royal, Virginia at which place we Crossed the Rappahannock in Pursuit. He lived but a short time after he was Shot, Perhaps 3 hours, and at about Seven O’clock that Morning he died. Yours Truly/Boston Corbett/Sergt. Co. L. 16th N.Y. Cavalry.

  Incredibly, Corbett also corresponded with the assassin’s family. Corbett’s letter, long lost, its contents unknown, exists only as a shadow in Asia Booth Clarke’s memoir of her brother: “We regard Boston Corbett as our deliverer, for by his shot he saved our brother from an ignominious death…. I returned Boston Corbett’s letter to him; he did not request it exactly, but I thought it honorable to do so and safer at the time not to retain it…. He is still living, but I know he is not happy…. May he have no regret.”

  Photographer Mathew Brady scored a coup over his rival Alexander Gardner. Although Gardner had won the right to photograph the conspirators in irons on the navy ironclads, and also Booth’s autopsy, Brady secured an exclusive sitting with the man of the hour. Always alert to the commercial possibilities of his art, Brady arranged Corbett in a variety of poses: seated and standing, reading a book and looking at the camera, armed and unarmed. Brady even persuaded Lieutenant Doherty to join the session for a standing, double portrait with Corbett, each man decked out in full cavalry regalia. The greater the number of poses Brady could induce Corbett to assume, the more cartes-de-visite he could sell to a besotted public. Some lucky fans even got Corbett to autograph his photo for their albums. When he appeared in public, reported one newspaper, “he has been greatly lionized, and on the streets was repeatedly surrounded by citizens, who occasionally manifested their appreciation by loud cheers.”

  A few dissenting voices, including the editors of the Chicago Tribune, wondered why the men of the Sixteenth New York had to kill the assassin: “The general regret is that Booth was not taken alive, and the general disposition to complain that he might have been if a combined rush of twenty-eight men surrounding them had been made.”

  The man of the hour, Booth’s killer, Boston Corbett (top). Blood money—Corbett’s share of the $100,000 reward (bottom).

  Beyond the reward money, Corbett profited little from his fame. Relic hunters offered fantastic sums for his Colt revolver, up to $1,000, but he refused to part with it. It wasn’t his to sell: the weapon had been purchased by the War Department and issued to the sergeant along with his uniform, saber, and other equipment. Then, not long after he shot Booth, somebody stole it from him, and it hasn’t been seen since.


  Boston Corbett was never punished for shooting Booth. He had violated no orders, and no one could prove that his true motive was anything other than protecting his men. He had the reputation of a good soldier. Luther Baker remembered that “he attended to his duties as a soldier very strictly, and seemed to have a good deal of dignity among the men.” But Baker also recalled something else about the eccentric, self-castrating, hard-fighting sergeant: “I noticed from the first that he had an odd expression.”

  TWO AND A HALF MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH OF JOHN WILKES Booth at Garrett’s farm, at around 11:00 A.M. on July 6, 1865, the clock began ticking down on one of the most dramatic events in the history of Washington, the epilogue of the manhunt for Lincoln’s killers. It began when Major General Winfield Scott Hancock rode to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, now Fort Leslie McNair, carrying four sealed envelopes from the War Department. They were addressed neatly in a clerk’s hand to four prisoners who had languished in solitary confinement at the arsenal.

  Hancock handed the envelopes to Major General John F. Hartranft, commandant of the prison. Hartranft accepted the mail grimly. He suspected, without even breaking the seals, what the envelopes contained, and the unpleasant duty that awaited him. Together, Hartranft and Hancock marched to the prison building and, walking down a long corridor from cell to cell, delivered the envelopes to their recipients—Lewis Powell, Mary Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt.

  Torn open in fearful haste, the envelopes contained death warrants. Having been found guilty by a military commission of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William Seward, the letters informed Powell, Surratt, Herold, and Atzerodt that they were to be put to death by hanging.