The young man was a godsend. Booth would not have seen another sunset without him.
“i took a knife and split the leg of his boot down to the instep, slipped it off and the sock with it,” recounted Mudd. Herold, between whispers to Booth, urged the doctor to be quick, and Mudd did the best he could after being startled awake at 4:00 a.m. “I felt carefully with both hands down along his leg. At first I could discover nothing. After a second investigation I found on the outside near the ankle, something that felt like indurated flesh, and then for the first time I concluded it was a direct and clear fracture of the bone.” The fibula had broken the way a stick of candy might break, snapped in half and forming two smooth surfaces. The grating of these ends was distinctly observable when Booth moved.
The break was located about two inches above the ankle. Fortunately, it was not compound, nor was the adjoining tibia fractured. Having no proper splints, Mudd cut up an old hatbox for that purpose. The box, with its absurdly incongruous decorative pattern, was fashioned into a pasteboard expedient extending from the arch of the foot to a point just below the knee. Forming a sort of boot firm enough to keep the lower leg rigidly straight, it was serviceable for the present, but the injury required redressing after several days of rest—if Booth remained at rest. If moving, he took great risks from striking the leg or falling on it.23
Although Mudd later told detectives that he did not regard the break as particularly dangerous or painful, his patient’s condition was alarming. Booth was shaking, moaning, nearly prostrate. Gulping air as if exhausted, he complained of severe back pain. “Booth’s eyes had a most unnatural expression, either from excessive drinking or excessive mental excitement. His hair was in disorder, his clothes covered with mud, and he appeared unable to stand,” recalled Mudd’s wife, Sarah, who tore cloth strips for bandages.24 Booth had a black mark down one side of his face—like Cain.
Herold and Mudd helped Booth to an upstairs bed. As he was lowered into it, the doctor noticed that the injured man had two revolvers concealed in his clothes.
Booth spent the dawning day attempting to sleep. It was the only thing that brought relief. He refused both breakfast and lunch brought to his room by a servant. Concerned when the second meal was returned untouched, Mrs. Mudd prepared a tray with cake, oranges, and wine and carried it up herself. “I guess you think I have very little hospitality,” she said brightly. “You have been sick all day and I have not been up to see you.” She asked how he was feeling. “My back hurts me dreadfully,” he replied.25
Throughout the day Mudd called several times to check on his patient. He brought Booth a razor, soap, and water, following Herold’s suggestion that a shave might raise the invalid’s spirits. (Unsaid was its added benefit of removing Booth’s trademark mustache.) He also whittled two arm pieces for a rough pair of crutches. Hearing the injured man say that he did not think he could travel on horseback, he agreed to help Herold find a buggy.
In the early afternoon Mudd, mounted on his favorite gray, and Herold, on the mettlesome bay, rode to the nearby home of Mudd’s father in search of a carriage. Having no luck there, the two headed for Bryantown. Herold was anxious and charged ahead, but as they drew within sight of the village, he stopped and turned back. He seemed deeply engaged in thought when Mudd met him. “I believe I will get my friend to go on horseback,” he announced. A vanguard of the 13th New York Cavalry had just arrived in Bryantown.26 Herold might have seen them, or he could have stopped upon realizing the irrationality, in their circumstances, of running for his life in a coach-and-four. There were no easy roads in their future. It was trail and swamp and thicket for them.
Mudd continued on to Bryantown to purchase a few household items for his wife. Surprised to find a federal swarm in the village, he asked a picket what had happened and was informed that Lincoln had been shot by a man named Booth. Mudd was horrified. Booth had told him that he was returning from a trip to Virginia when injured. “Dr. Sam Mudd was a rather intense man, not very broad-minded and not cool,” the Confederate agent Thomas A. Jones believed.27 At this critical moment, his heart and head in a mad race, the doctor managed an outward calm. He commenced a deliberately slow retreat home, chatting with neighbors about the news as he collected his thoughts. His impulse was to turn Booth in. But Mudd, who knew little enough about the assassin, knew one thing for certain—“Booth would never be taken alive.”28 The heavily armed fugitive was in his home with Mudd’s wife and four young children. Mudd simply could not risk a shootout in the family parlor. He would return, run Booth and Herold off, and pray for the best.
“Treachery!” exclaimed Mudd, ripping into his guest. Booth “had come with a lie on his tongue which would be certain to have him in serious trouble.” Outraged, Mudd said he had a mind to throw the assassin and his Man Friday to the wolves.
Booth had no fight left in him at this point, and he wilted before the doctor’s assault. Speaking confidentially to a friend years later, Mudd said “Booth appealed to him in the name of his mother, whom he professed to love so devotedly,” not to do that. Booth pleaded and “acted and spoke so tragically” that Mudd finally relented on the condition that the men leave his place at once. Booth thanked him and gave him twenty-five dollars for his services.29
Darkness and the threat of rain had gathered as Booth worked his way on his new pine crutches to the horses. “His face presented a picture of agony,” recalled Sarah Mudd, and she cautioned Herold about his condition.
“If he suffers much, we won’t go far,” promised the young man.
oswald swan, a black tobacco farmer, had been hailed from the darkness outside his home by two white men on horseback. One he described as a little squirt, the other a larger man with a broken leg. It was Herold and Booth, and the pair, hungry and lost, wanted bread and whiskey and Swan’s services as guide through Zekiah Swamp to Rich Hill, the estate of Samuel Cox. It was a three-hour trip in the gloom, but, circling below the dangers in Bryantown, Swan got them safely to Cox’s about one in the morning. He received twelve dollars for his trouble and a piece of advice. “Don’t you say anything,” warned Herold. “If you tell that you saw anybody, you will not live long.”30
Herold slammed the large brass knocker on Cox’s front door, and the sound rang out in the quiet of the night like a cannon shot. The household was instantly aroused, and the formidable Samuel Cox in his slippers answered. “How do you do?” he asked as he fought to protect his flickering lamplight from the chilly night wind.31
Tall, large-voiced, and imperious, Cox was the local squire. The fugitives sought him out as an individual whose rebel bona fides were so pronounced he was under suspicion throughout the war. A brief conversation ensued, after which Cox blew out his light and brought the men inside for food and drink. Looking through the dining room windows from the yard, Swan fancied, improbably enough, that he saw oysters and champagne on the table.
Cox had learned of the assassination the previous day. Booth now confirmed the fact and acknowledged that he had done it. Since Booth did not know Cox personally, the assassin established his identity by showing the planter his tattoo. Cox had seen the elder Booth perform and thus knew the Booth name, but this was no time to reminisce. Though Cox was practically deaf in his left ear, his right ear was registering much. As the night wore on, so did the realization that it would not do for Booth and Herold to remain at Rich Hill. Cox could hide them in the woods, feed them, and try to get them across the Potomac, but the pair had to leave his house before sunrise announced them to the neighborhood.
The cocks were crowing as Booth and Herold were shown the door. Mary Swann, a servant, wrapped some food in a red handkerchief for Booth to take along. What pretty black eyes this man has, she thought.32 Oswald Swan, waiting patiently outside, put his hand under the armrest of the injured man’s crutch and helped get the assassin atop his horse. Booth was grumbling all the while about Cox’s lack of hospitality. “I thought Cox was a man of Southern feeling,” he said indignantl
y.
Dismissing Swan, Booth and Herold exited the gate of the Cox estate. Fences, framed by flower beds in the first blush of spring, guided them down a lane to the road. As they passed the stables, Samuel Cox Jr. watched them carefully from his bedroom window. He was suspicious that the travelers might attempt to steal fresh mounts. The two had nothing on their minds except their eviction and exile to the brush, however. Mary recalled, “They went away cussin’ and swearing.”
Franklin Robey, Cox’s overseer, joined the fugitives and led them west about one and a half miles into a thick stand of pines.33 Shrewdly, Cox put them on a neighbor’s property. This thicket was uncomfortably close to the road, but it was so dense it looked as impenetrable as a briar patch. Inside it one could see no farther than thirty or forty feet, about the length of the front porch at Tudor Hall. Robey told Booth and Herold to wait there. Someone would be sent to them as soon as possible. For the present they had food and blankets. A nearby spring would furnish water. They were to stay perfectly quiet and listen for a particular whistle, which their visitor would make as he approached them.
Booth selected a spot and made himself as comfortable as he could on a mat of pine needles. The ground was cold and wet. After putting down his pistols, knife, crutch, and hat, he drew a blanket over himself and settled back. It was a bright and pleasant Easter Sunday morning.
Well before noon Herold heard a noise. Taking the carbine, he left to investigate and returned with a lean and plain-looking stranger. The man’s face was glum, suggesting that its owner would rather be anywhere else than in these pines. But here he was because Cox asked it, and Cox, his foster brother, was both family and best friend. The two had turned to each other since childhood, and now Cox had called again, this time for an enormous favor from Thomas A. Jones.34
At first glance Booth might have been disappointed with his new guardian angel. The homespun Mr. Jones appeared dull-witted and indolent. He impressed one as a plebeian with limited awareness, much less sagacity, about events that swirled around him. Nothing could have been more misleading. Jones was a crafty rebel agent and a veteran river-crosser so successful that he had been caught only once in the war. While he was in prison, Union soldiers moved into his house. Jones’s wife, Jane, the sister of Thomas Harbin, was driven with her children into a small back room while the troops took what they wanted and acted as they wished. Jones returned home to discover that Jane, ill and overworked, had died in childbirth. “My wife was the best woman I could ever have,” the widower lamented, and her death turned a foe into an inveterate enemy. “He sincerely hated the Yankees,” recalled a friend.35 The years had been so hard on Jones that, although middle-aged, he looked old to the assassin.
“Booth seemed to be suffering intense pain from his broken leg,” wrote Jones in an 1893 memoir, and he did not attempt to rise. Introducing himself, he acknowledged proudly what he had done, asked what the public thought of it, and expressed an urgent desire to cross the Potomac. Booth returned repeatedly to the point that if he could only get across the river, he could receive proper medical care. In Virginia all would be well. “His voice was pleasant, and his manner was courteous and polite,” recalled Jones. “A determined man, not boasting.”
Jones replied that the death of Lincoln was good news. For his part he would bring Booth food and newspapers. Since the country was filling up with soldiers and detectives, nothing could be done about crossing the river for the present. It was too dangerous to attempt it. Be patient, counseled Jones, and be assured that he would do all he could to help.
“He held out his hand and thanked me,” said Jones. A grimace accompanied movements even so slight, and Jones was touched by the helpless man’s plight. “I did not know Booth, but how could I give up the life of that poor devil?” he explained. “I determined to die before I would betray him.”36
True to his word, Jones returned the following morning. He brought ham, fish, bread, coffee, whiskey, and other things his kitchen furnished. Robey visited, and so did the Coxes père et fils. The amount of provisions hauled from Rich Hill into the thicket led employees at Cox’s mill to speculate that someone important was hiding there.37 “They fixed him up the best they could,” recalled one of Cox’s former slaves.
The nourishment Booth most craved came bundled in a small roll. Booth was eager to know the consequences of his actions, so Jones brought him newspapers, unidentified by title but doubtless from Baltimore or Washington. From them Booth learned that Lincoln died early Saturday morning at an hour when the assassin rested at the Mudd house. Powell knifed Seward, injuring him seriously but not fatally. Atzerodt made no attempt on the life of Johnson. Upon Lincoln’s death the nation did not flounder or fall into revolution. Order prevailed, and a constitutional transition of power occurred. The country was shaken to its depth by the murder, but, as Brevet Colonel Henry L. Burnett of Ohio, a judge advocate, said, “We stand guard, and the government shall not die.”38
Such were the cold facts of Booth’s act, but the emotions his deed produced leapt shrieking from the page. Monster crime! Demon deed! Appalling! Iniquitous! Barbaric! Chicago: “The crime of the ages has been committed. It is hard to conceive of any event which would occasion sorrow so profound and apprehension and foreboding so painful.” Boston: “The nation is bowed in anguish. The oppression would beggar human power to properly describe.” Philadelphia: “The most intense horror has spread over this city. All kindly feeling toward the Rebels has been obliterated.” Cincinnati: “The universal feeling is one of terrible wrath.” New York: “People appear perfectly horrified, and the utmost rage is felt toward all known secessionists and rebel sympathizers.”39 Baltimore: “Great woe! Every place was in mourning, all business suspended, a death-like stillness pervaded the community.” Washington: “The feeling of the populace has been one of the deepest and most intense indignation against the perpetrators.”40
The folly of Booth’s act almost matched its infamy. “There was not, in all of Mr. Lincoln’s constitution, the smallest element either of the usurper or the tyrant,” wrote a Western editor. “Never was there a man in any high place to whom such a phrase [as ‘Sic semper tyrannis’] was less appropriate.”41 The assassin was a devil, added the publisher Coyle in a stinging personal rebuke in the Intelligencer. “Booth was no cavalier, no romantic knight seized with monomania. On the contrary he was a cold, cautious, cowardly planning knave who knew well the good and gentle character of his victim. The monster wretch, compared with whose foul deed the records of all other assassins pale, committed a deed without a single manly motive, engendered of cowardice, cruelty and loathsome egotism.”42
Butcher! Wretch! Sanguinary fiend! Dastard murderer! The assassin’s personal and political friends turned on him in fury. Frank Queen in the New York Clipper proclaimed Booth a bloody-handed cutthroat.43 John T. Ford and John Sleeper Clarke denounced him, as did nationwide meetings of Booth’s fellow actors, who joined the condemnation with their professional passion. The recently loyalized Richmond Whig characterized the assassination as “an atrocity which will shock and appall every honorable man and woman in the land.”44 “A hellish crime,” declared Confederate General J. R. Jones.45 Robert Ould, the South’s agent for the exchange of prisoners, thought that in its harm to the rebel states “it is the worst—Lee’s surrender was nothing to it.”46 A leading Copperhead journalist wrote, “It seems marvelous that there should live one human being so warped in judgment, so steeped in wickedness, so hardened in devilish fanaticism as to be capable of this deed.”47
Booth carried a pocket memorandum book purchased in St. Louis in 1864. He used its pages to jot down names, addresses, business notes, and the like. To pass the time in the thicket he fashioned a daily calendar, commencing on April 17 and extending optimistically through mid-June.
Shaken to the core by the charges of wickedness and cowardice, Booth turned to a blank page in the volume, took out his stub of a pencil, and defended himself. “I struck boldly and not as the
papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on,” he wrote. “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. I can never regret it.”48 Blaming others for the broader plot’s failure and praising his own courage in escaping with a broken leg, he bemoaned the failure of the National Intelligencer to publish the letter he left with Mathews, not knowing that Mathews had read the document in secret after the assassination and burned it.49
The sentiments of Brutus were cheered at the Winter Garden five months earlier—he heard it—but apparently the world was not a stage after all. Booth wrote despairingly of his future. He was ready to die with the rebellion, he told Jones. The fisherman attempted to lift his spirits, as best a man who apparently did not know how to smile could do, but he also raised an unpleasant issue that Booth must face.
The horses could not be cared for in the present circumstances, and they might disclose the hiding place by reacting to his pursuers’ mounts, whose pounding and neighing along the road were unmistakably audible. The troublesome bay, whose name is not recorded, had broken loose several times. She sealed her fate and that of Charley. Booth must kill them.50
The assassin liked horses more than he did most people, but he knew the truth of Jones’s advice. “If we can hear those horses, they can certainly hear ours, uneasy from want of food and stabling,” he explained to Herold, and he gave a pained consent. Cox told Herold where to take them, then watched the young man and Robey ride them off at night toward the swamp. Taking the horses through a cutting tangle of undergrowth, the two rode them into a bog. Robey shot each horse once in the head, and the animals sank into the muck, saddles and all. The overseer pocketed as a souvenir of this dismal business a martingale ring from one horse’s tack, broken off as it fought for life in the mire.51 Cox, anxious the thing be done properly, later searched the area carefully. He discovered no trace of what happened there.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 37
