“Booth did not seem to run very fast,” said the actor John L. Debonay, standing at the first entrance on stage left, not far from where Booth fell. “He seemed to be stooping a little [as he went].” “He stalked in the old fashion tragedy stalk, moving the leg more from the hip than the knee,” thought the playwright A. R. Cazauran.111
Almost to a person playgoers thought they were witnessing an innovation in the evening’s entertainment. They sat perfectly still, “so still you could have heard the rustle of a kerchief,” continued Cazauran. The scene was a front scene, set as close to the audience as possible, and it brought Booth near the footlights.112 As he reached center stage, his face turned toward them. He flung his arm dramatically overhead. The wide blade of his knife reflected the light of the gas jets as if it had been a diamond. His eyes glittered brightly.113
“The South is avenged!” he cried. Lowering his head, he continued his flight. “In a very stagy stride, still pale, serious, and intense, he went right across the stage,” said Charles Hamlin, seated just beyond the orchestra railing.114
“Stop that man!” Rathbone cried shrilly from the box. “Stop him!” Hawk was the only person in a position to do so, but that actor, certain only that Booth was coming at him with a knife, had another idea. “I ran,” Hawk explained unheroically.115
Unimpeded, the assassin continued, “staggering across the stage in a tragic manner,” declared the bartender James P. Ferguson, who had watched the tragedy unfold from a catbird’s seat in the front of the dress circle directly opposite the State Box. Looking up, Booth noticed his friend. As their eyes met, Booth shook his knife over his head once more and exalted breathlessly, “I—I—I have done it!”116
Fleeing to the first entrance, Booth came upon Laura Keene and William J. Ferguson rehearsing their lines at the prompter’s desk. Without pause he pushed between them. “His lips were drawn against his teeth, and he was panting,” recalled young Ferguson.117 Backpedaling, Ferguson imagined as he retold the story that he felt the assassin’s hot breath on his cheek. Keene seemed in a daze as she bumped hands with Booth as he passed.
Booth came to the north wall of the theater after hurrying through the first entrance as rapidly as he could. He threw out both hands to steady himself briefly on its brick, then turned right into a passageway leading directly back to the alley door. This passage was always kept clear during Our American Cousin, in which the ladies appeared in full dress, for it was very narrow. It was three feet wide, even less in places, and two people could not pass along it side by side.118
Unexpectedly a figure in a blue-black swallowtail coat filled the passage near the alley exit. The orchestra leader, William Withers, ignorant of what had transpired, chatted with Jeannie Gourlay, his girlfriend. Withers’s back was to Booth.
“Let me pass! Let me pass!” cried the assassin.
Withers looked around and saw Booth rushing at him. “If I live a thousand years, I will never forget that ten seconds of my life spent between John Wilkes Booth and his liberty,” said the maestro. “His face was wild and haggard, his hair stood on end, and his eyes were bolting from his head.”
“Let me pass!” Booth repeated. Withers did not move. “I was completely paralyzed. I was glued to the floor, dumbfounded and speechless.”
The men collided. Withers spun around. “Damn you!” said Booth, and he swept his knife twice in Withers’s direction. With a ripped collar and a slight flesh wound to the neck, the music man sprawled to the floor, very content to be there.119
Passing through the stage door into the alley, Booth looked for his horse. He had left her with Spangler, but there stood Joseph Burroughs, the theater’s bill-carrier and flunky, with the reins. The pistol shot had roused Burroughs from his lounging spot on a carpenter’s bench, and he was ambling up to the door with the animal when it flew open.
“Give me that horse!” cried Booth. Burroughs complied, but as Booth seized the reins, the smallish teenager stood on helpfully holding the bridle. Booth reached out and smacked him in the chest with the butt of his knife. The blow sent Burroughs flying, but it was not malicious. “He was merely pushing me away,” Burroughs later told authorities.120
Booth now commenced the painful task of mounting with a broken leg. His horse’s skittishness compounded the challenge. Burroughs described the little bay as “very spirited, very uneasy, scratching against the bench.” The mare’s stamping was so distinct it drew the attention of Mary Jane Anderson, gawking out the window of her tenement on the alley.121 Booth was unfamiliar with the animal, a horse he had rented that afternoon when his favorite sorrel was unavailable.
To Anderson it appeared that Booth mounted instantly. To Burroughs his difficulty was apparent.122 To Booth himself the process seemed interminable. “Nearly five minutes,” he told Herold, an absurd exaggeration explainable only by the anxiety he felt at the firestorm on his heels.123
Spooked by the excitement and by Booth’s awkward ascent, the restless animal circled hard to the left as the powerfully built assassin struggled up. It seemed for a moment that Booth would lose control of her. Such was the hope of Joseph B. Stewart, an audience member who emerged from the door in pursuit of the fugitive. But, as Stewart grudgingly acknowledged, “Booth maintained his reason nor did his wonderful nerve desert him.”124 Shortening the right rein, Booth forced her back and skillfully headed her up. Heavily spurred, the horse lunged forward. Booth crouched over the saddle, and the bay dashed off, flinging dirt from her hooves into Stewart’s face. The rattling of her feet on the stones of the alley echoed in the moonlit pathway. In seconds horse and rider were gone.
Back inside the theater, the frightful shrieks of Mrs. Lincoln and cries for water and a surgeon awoke the audience to the tragedy. “Perhaps you can judge of the scene that followed, but I doubt it,” Wesley Batchelder, seated in the dress circle, wrote his mother. The audience broke and parted like a wave on a rock. Some spectators sat stunned. Some hurried from the building. Others, transfixed in the aisles, spoke in frightened whispers, while a few cried for vengeance and threatened to burn the theater. The bolder members of the audience swarmed the stage, where the players, creeping out from the wings, huddled together in alarm. Absolute chaos, thought Kathryn Evans, who played a maid in the evening’s production.
The tumult fell to a hush as the gravely wounded president was carried to the door of the box. A funereal procession assembled. Wailing, Mrs. Lincoln looked ghastly in her blood-covered dress. “For God’s sake, gentlemen, let the poor lady pass,” someone shouted to the pressing crowd. Clara Harris looked equally dreadful, her dress, hands, and face speckled with gore. Rathbone, his countenance deathly, was shaken, wounded, and deeply agitated.
Charles H. Jones was a young navy sailmaker with a reverence for Lincoln so profound that he had yet to grasp the reality of the situation. “Do you think it is serious?” he asked Rathbone.
“Serious?!” replied Rathbone incredulously. “Look!” he cried, thrusting out his gore-flecked hand. “That is his brain!”125
11
....
Exit Booth
sergeant silas t. cobb’s war to save the Union was ending with a whimper, not a bang. He had been a bootmaker before the conflict, and he would resume his trade when it was over, but for the present he was master of a rough-hewn structure of bark-covered timbers from which he and a tiny detail of Massachusetts soldiers served out their enlistments at the Washington end of the Navy Yard Bridge across the Anacostia River. This guardhouse, to honor it with a name, had loopholes through which Cobb and his men could fire on rebel raiders.1 None ever came, and at this point in time none ever would, so the sergeant and his squad had little to fear or indeed to do except wave through army wagons, poke into produce trucks, and check the passes of fellow soldiers with guilty faces. For the most part they stood and looked about. Cobb had learned one lesson that every soldier in every war must know and know well. He knew how to wait.
Shortly before 11:00 p.m. Cob
b heard a commotion coming down Eleventh Street. It was Booth, riding rapidly. As the actor came up, the sergeant halted him.
“Who are you, Sir?” Cobb asked.2
“My name is Booth.” It was best to tell the truth. The newly minted assassin had papers on his person that, if examined, would put a lie to any other name. Anyway, he was ahead of the news. With luck he would stay that way.
“Where are you going?” asked Cobb.
“I am going home.” Booth’s horse, ridden hard, was restive and stirred uneasily before the sergeant. By contrast its rider seemed calm and self-possessed. He addressed Cobb as friend, and Cobb returned the civility. Uncharacteristically light and high-pitched, Booth’s voice betrayed anxiety but would have done so only to those who knew him well. “I live close to Beantown, but do not live in the town,” he continued.
Cobb said that he didn’t know a place named Beantown.
“Good God!” replied Booth good-naturedly. “Then you never was down there.”
The questioning continued. Where had Booth come from? Where had he been? Why had he been out so late? Didn’t he know the rules about crossing at night? Four agonizing minutes of this blather continued.
Cobb had served nearly two years in a second-line unit without having been on a battlefield or fired a shot in anger. Unsuspecting, he was finally face-to-face with danger. Booth told Arnold that he would shoot his way across the bridge if anyone delayed him. This boast proved as idle as most. It was useless to shoot Cobb or bolt past him for the simple reason that the bridge was guarded at both ends. Across the river at Uniontown a heavy gate, barring all traffic, had been closed earlier in the evening. The gate abutted a blockhouse with its own squad of soldiers. Only words would get him across.
“Didn’t you know, my friend, that it [is] against the laws to cross here after nine?”
“No. It is news to me,” answered Booth.
“What is your object to be in town after nine o’clock when you have so long a road to travel?”
“It is a dark road, and I thought if I waited a spell I would have the moon.” The answer made sense. The moon had risen only thirty minutes earlier. Four days past full, it was quite bright under a sky with thin, light, curling clouds. The evening was pleasant, with temperatures in the midfifties and a light wind.3 It was a fine night for travel.
The sergeant studied the horseman anew by the lamplight at the guardhouse door. “Booth seemed to be gentlemanly in his address and style and appearance,” Cobb later explained. “What I thought was that he was some rich man’s son who lived down there. I thought he was a proper person.”
“I will pass you,” Cobb finally said, “but I don’t know as I ought to.”
“Hell! I guess there’ll be no trouble about that,” laughed Booth, and he turned his horse onto the planks.
The Navy Yard Bridge, one-quarter mile in length, was a haphazard affair, very unevenly floored and in poor condition. The rule was for riders to walk their horses across the span.4 Booth complied while in Cobb’s sight, but once over the draw he upped the pace. Private George Drake, who was on post at the Uniontown end, cried out, “Walk that horse!” Booth ignored the order, and Drake yelled, “Damn you, walk that horse!!” Booth quickly checked her speed.
Private Frederick A. Demond, also on the night shift, lazed out of the blockhouse. He looked at Booth, then helped Drake push open the gate. “We had no orders to stop any one coming from Washington as the guard on that end of the bridge was supposed to know who they passed,” lamented Demond. “Oh, if only I knew. I would have shot [Booth] as quick as I would a mad dog.” As it was, Demond watched Booth put spurs to the mare and ride off.5
Booth made the long haul up Good Hope Hill at a frantic pace. He rode as if he were being chased, thought Polk Gardner, a youngster heading in the opposite direction. Seeing Gardner, Booth reined in his horse and asked the youth if he had passed another traveler riding rapidly. Booth was looking for Herold, who was to have met him at the bridge. Gardner said no, and Booth rode on.6 Looming ahead were Forts Baker and Wagoner, two jewels in the defensive crown of the city. They flanked the road to left and right. The forts were connected by telegraph to 22nd Army Corps headquarters in Washington, but such was the confusion in the capital that it would be another hour before they received the frightful news.7 Booth passed between them without incident. At the hill’s summit the lights of the city seemed almost at his feet, the Capitol dome silvered by moonlight. An open road south lay before him.
“he is a damn pretty fellow,” Herold complained. “He promised to meet me here.”
“What is going on tonight?” Drake wondered aloud as once more he swung open the gate to Uniontown. Herold rode through past Drake, past Demond, past a convoy of army wagons, past teamsters idling at the curb, past Gardner and up the hill. He was five or ten minutes behind Booth, and his steady roan was closing the distance. Booth’s mare had great speed, but, according to her owner James W. Pumphrey, from whose stable the horse was being stolen, she had limited endurance. At ten or so miles, if pushed hard, she would break down.8
Herold found Booth at the foot of Soper’s Hill beyond the District line in Maryland. Never was star happier to see best supporting actor.
“Dave,” cried Booth in relief as Herold rode up. “Dave, I’ve done it! I’ve killed the tyrant!”9
Herold later told his family that he never dreamed Booth wished to harm the president. Shocked beyond measure at what he heard, “I begged Booth to let me leave.” Booth responded by threatening to kill him if he did.10 If anyone besides his family believed such a claim, that person has yet to be found. In for a penny, Herold was in for a pound. In fact, he had news of his own. He had remained near Seward’s house long enough to know that Powell was doing bloody work inside. For their escape Herold had shown Powell the bridge neighborhood that afternoon, but in the aftermath of the attack on the secretary of state, Powell, a relative stranger to Washington, had gotten lost in the maze of city streets.11 He would not be joining them.
Before they rode on, the pair swapped horses. Booth had boasted earlier in the day that his little mare was so lively she could almost kick him in the back.12 That was no advantage to a man who could not put the foot of his broken left leg into the stirrup.13 With great difficulty Booth was mounted on the roan, and Herold took the bay. Herold’s horse, Charley, was a gentle creature customarily rented to ladies. It was “a large single-foot racking horse—the easiest horse to ride,” explained Allison Nailor, from whose stable Herold took his mount. “It has a very easy gait—the motion being like that of a cradle.”14 Charley offered less bounce at the trot and little side-to-side sway, and was capable of being ridden comfortably for hours under normal conditions. Racing was not normal, however, and it was taking a toll. Examined the next morning, the roan was found to have a badly swollen shoulder, and the bay was lame in her left foreleg, from which a chunk of skin was missing.15
It was about three miles to the Surratt Tavern, and midnight found Herold pounding violently on its door. John Lloyd let him in and hurried to retrieve two carbines hidden at the house, as well as a pair of field glasses Mrs. Surratt had brought out earlier in the day. Herold quaffed some whiskey and took the bottle out to Booth, who remained mounted. Booth took a few slugs of his own. Between the two of them they put quite a dent in the contents, giving the stout and sulky landlord one dollar for the damages.
Herold took a carbine, but Booth refused one, taking only the field glasses. “Booth said he could not carry his carbine,” Lloyd stated. “It was as much as he could do to carry himself.”16
“I have broken my leg,” he explained.17
Lloyd had been drinking all day, drank more that night, vomited, and was passed out when aroused by Herold. Friends described the Virginia native as “a drinking, swearing, talkative Southern sympathizer with a bad memory—when sober—of what he said when drunk.”18 Something was about to occur, however, that was not the sort of thing one forgets.
&nbs
p; “I will tell you some news,” called out Booth as he and Herold turned to leave. “We have assassinated the President and Secretary Seward.”
As drunk as he was, Lloyd heard this. The words hit him like a slap in the face. He was a former District of Columbia policeman, and he instantly took in the gravity of Booth’s statement and his own culpability in the affair.
“God damn you!” the astonished innkeeper exclaimed to the horsemen. “Get away from here a thousand miles as fast as you can go!”19
As they galloped away from the tavern, the pain in Booth’s leg was becoming unbearable. He described feeling as if the bones of his leg tore the flesh at every bound of the horse. It was imperative to find medical help. Booth asked Lloyd about a physician, but the only one whom he knew no longer practiced. The assassin posed the same question to two locals tending a broken wagon near Surrattsville. They were equally unhelpful but later told authorities that they thought that the horsemen inquired for Samuel A. Mudd.20
Mudd’s house was seventeen miles farther on and a challenge for any nightrider to find. “The road becomes very lonely, and the country wears a desolate and deserted look,” wrote a journalist who retraced their steps.21 Groves of pine stood on one side, marsh on the other. Stumps of trees dotted the occasional field. Here was a darkened church, there a cemetery. The way was winding, narrow, and washed by rain. On a sunny summer day Booth could not have found Mudd’s on his own. Happily, Herold knew the roads “better than he knew the Lord’s Prayer.” He also knew that the route was well out of the way. Given their circumstances, Herold strongly opposed taking any such detour. Booth replied that he must see a doctor.22 At the injured man’s insistence, Herold dutifully led them down Beantown Road, then turned east.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 36
