Monday morning was cold, Tuesday afternoon windy, but in a piece of good luck the weather was generally mild during Booth’s residence in the thicket. Nights dipped into the forties, however, and were dark, cheerless, and uncomfortable. Booth had a touch of pleurisy, for which sleeping on the ground was no prescription, and Herold’s health was reduced, too, by hunting trips during which he lay out on winter nights in duck blinds, putting a lingering chill in his bones and affecting his eyes.52 But the men do not appear to have pieced together a makeshift shelter from the elements, as later reported.53 Jones, who would know, gave no such impression. The agent believed that the assassin, whose pain was more or less unabated, did not move from one spot at any time during his stay there.
Herold was a sight. His light-colored trousers were filthy, his fancy necktie askew, and his feet hurt. While Booth displayed his tattoo with pride, Herold busied himself attempting to rub away his initials, tattooed on his left arm.54 The only boy in a family with seven sisters, the smooth-faced young man with the helmet of hair may have been a trifle spoiled, but at least he was companionable and compliant. Aggression and cruelty were alien to him. He could curse with the best, of course, but a friendly manner and an ability to talk his way out of trouble were his true weapons. So was a cleverness that few saw behind his dark blue eyes. He was also unflinchingly steadfast. With numerous opportunities to desert Booth, he never did. Whatever Herold’s shortcomings, no one could have been more loyal.
Booth wrote in his pocket notebook that Herold prayed often. Well he might! A manhunt of unprecedented scope was under way, and it was meeting with great success. Powell, Atzerodt, Arnold, O’Laughlen, Spangler, Mrs. Surratt, and Lloyd were arrested while Booth was in the coppice, and Mudd soon followed.55 The pursuit, ranging initially as far afield as New York, Pennsylvania, and even Missouri, focused increasingly on southern Maryland. Ships guarded the river, and troops combed the swamp. “The whole country is full of wild cavalrymen shooting at everything they see,” complained one detective. “The lunatics are flying around with sabers, the air full of bullets.”56 Soldiers searched Rich Hill. “So help me Gawd,” Cox told them, “I know nothing about it.” Unable to find Booth there, they emptied Cox’s smokehouse as consolation.57 Once they came close enough for Herold to hear a soldier with a message for Captain Stephen D. Franklin of the 20th Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment shout out the captain’s name as he called to Franklin on the road.
“take care how you approach them, Tom,” cautioned Cox. “They might shoot you through mistake.” Jones had never visited Booth at night, and he weighed Cox’s words as he approached the fugitives. Thursday, April 20—a dreary, drizzly day—had finally closed. With the darkness the clouds grew denser, the dampness more intense, and a fog floated up from the swamp to shroud the area. All was intently dark. One could scarcely see ten feet ahead. It was no night for the fainthearted, but Jones had to come. The nearest search party, responding to an erroneous sighting of Booth, had thundered south to St. Mary’s County. Now or never, thought Jones.
“Friends, this is your only chance,” Jones told the fugitives. “The night is pitch dark, and my boat is close by. I will get you some supper at my house and send you off if I can.” Jones and Herold put Booth onto his horse, an old mare named Kit. Every movement wrung a groan from the assassin, in spite of what Jones termed Booth’s stoic attitude.
The distance from the thicket to the river was about three and a half miles. It took them down a cart path to the public road and then along that road to Huckleberry, Jones’s farm, where his fields could be crossed and the river accessed. Jones walked slowly ahead of the fugitives. When all seemed safe, he halted and whistled. Herold then led Kit forward to where he waited. Jones advanced again to scout farther and repeat the pattern. The pace was unnervingly slow, leaving their imaginations prey to every whirr of a whippoorwill’s wings, and it left them exposed to travelers who might approach from behind, but there was no other way to do it.
Two houses close to the highway posed hazards. One usually had a large number of children milling about. The other had dogs. Both places were passed uneventfully, however. Perhaps because of the weather, the men saw no one. Sometime after nine the travelers made it safely to Jones’s place, where the farmer had them tie up to a pear tree near his stable and wait.
“Please let me go to the house and get some of your hot coffee,” Booth said.
Jones looked up at the assassin. For nearly a week Booth had lived without the shelter of a roof, the comfort of a fire, or the taste of hot food. The crippled man, whom the world seemed ready to roast on a spit, wanted the cheer of a home, if only for a moment. Jones experienced a rush of pity for him. “My friend, it wouldn’t do,” Jones responded with a lump in his throat. “It would not be safe. I have negroes at the house and if they see you, you are lost and so am I. This is your last chance to get away.”
“So be it,” the assassin sighed dispiritedly.
Jones left Booth and Herold to the damp night and went inside. After supper with his children, he gathered food for the fugitives and rejoined them.
Three abreast, the men picked their way down a steep cliffside path leading to the Potomac. Jones and Herold were compelled to carry Booth along the narrow track, which ran through a heavy laurel undergrowth. Footing was difficult in the darkness as they struggled along, but soon the lapping of the river’s waves could be heard. Jones thought the noise sounded particularly mournful and unwelcoming.
Marsh grass near the river concealed a lead-colored skiff. Jones got the boat into the river, then helped Herold get Booth on board. The assassin would navigate and steer from the stern while first mate Herold would row from amidships. It would be tough going, as the closest point on the Virginia shore was imperceptible. Indeed, the men could scarcely see each other. Jones lit a candle. Shielding it with a coat from any possible onlooker, he pointed out on Booth’s small boxed compass a heading that would carry them to a creek on the Virginia side, and he gave them the name of a party there who might assist them.
“Goodbye,” Jones said. He was beginning to shove them off when Booth cried, “Wait a minute, old fellow.” The fugitive wished to pay him something for his trouble. Jones said no. This had never been about money. He could take only eighteen dollars, the cost of his boat, which he would not see again.
Booth’s voice choked with emotion as he replied, “God bless you, my dear friend, for all you have done for me.”
“The night was ink black,” recalled Jones. “I could see nothing, and the only sound was the swish of the waves. I pushed the boat off. There was a moment’s sound of oars on the water—and it glided out of sight.”
Then, from the darkness, Jones heard a voice. “Goodbye, old fellow,” the assassin called out.
herold rowed steadily forward into the current. Booth, dripping candle wax on the compass face, headed him right and left. Their objective, the mouth of Machodoc Creek in Virginia, was a distant six miles. It was an almost straight shot south by west down the Potomac, but the tide had set in against the travelers, and the river swirled with dangers. In the thick, moonless soup the men could see little, certainly not Virginia’s shoreline. The experience was akin to swimming with one’s eyes closed. Given their circumstances, the two landlubbers, equipped only with one paddle and one broken oar, made the best of their situation and plowed ahead. When water lapped into the boat, Herold stopped rowing and bailed it out with his hat.58
Suddenly a light cut the darkness. A Union patrol ship was in front of them. It was the USS Juniper, a military steamer. Eighty feet in length, it was a formidable vessel with a complement of twenty-six men and a heavy gun with a one-mile range. The voices of those on board were alarmingly distinct. Booth thought that with his oar he could have reached out and tapped the ship’s hull.59
The chase was on—or was it? There is no evidence the ship noticed the little skiff in the fog. The Juniper was actually at anchor, the imagined searchlights only bow-lamps for t
he anchor. Booth feared the worst, however, and turned upriver. By first light, time and tide had carried him back to Maryland. Herold recognized their whereabouts as Nanjemoy Creek. They were near Indiantown Farm, the residence of John J. Hughes, where Herold had hunted.
More than a century later a grandson of Hughes claimed that the farmer received the fugitives with kindness and fed them. Herold painted a different picture of Nanjemoy hospitality: “We went to a man’s house [probably Hughes] and wanted to buy some bread. He said he hadn’t baked and would not bake any. He said he had nothing to eat either. I said we were wet and would like to have something to drink. I had a bottle and asked if he would sell me some whiskey. He said he would not do it.” Then how about a glass of water? Herold asked sarcastically. A child finally sold Booth a quarter’s worth of milk. Questioned by his wife, Victorine, about what was going on, Hughes snapped, “You take care of the house, and I will take care of the outside.”60
Spurned by people he thought would embrace him, Booth hit a new low. “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gun boats till I was forced to return [to Maryland], wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair,” he wrote. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a hero. And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat. Behold the cold hand they extend to me. I think I have done well, though I am abandoned with the curse of Cain upon me, when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness.”
Rejection had done something to Booth that no amount of argument could have accomplished. It put into his hot head the suspicion that he might have made a mistake. The evidence is nuanced but clear. “I do not repent the blow I struck. I may before my God, but not to man. I bless the entire world. Have never hated or wronged anyone. This last [act of mine] was not a wrong unless God deems it so, and it’s with Him to damn or bless me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. I am sure there is no pardon in Heaven for me since man condemns me so.”
At this point Booth was less worried about Lincoln’s life than about his own. “Tonight I try to escape these bloodhounds once more. Who, who can read his fate? I have too great a soul to die like a criminal. Oh, may He, may He spare me that and let me die bravely. I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but ‘I must fight the course,’ ” concluded Booth, echoing Macbeth. “Tis all that’s left me.”61
At sundown on Saturday, April 22, the two men attempted the river once more. Herold rowed out of the Nanjemoy, passed an unmanned lightship, and headed for Virginia. The weather was breezy and afforded better conditions than two nights earlier, but there was the damnable Juniper again. The gunboat, having spent most of the day hauling detectives about, was back off Mathias Point on the Virginia shore at the spot where the Potomac turns south toward Booth’s destination. This cape had to be turned. Happily it was cloudy and the moon had set, so the fugitives decided to run the gauntlet. They passed unnoticed within three hundred yards of the vessel.62 Whether exhausted, confused, or spooked, the pair put in at their first port of opportunity, a tidal estuary named Gambo Creek.
Herold helped Booth ashore, then set off to reconnoiter. In a clearing in the pines he discovered the small farm of William Bryant, an older man, coarse and common, who occupied the bottom of the local social ladder.63 Although it was Sunday morning, Bryant was at work in his field when Herold came up. Bryant was not interested in selling his horses, he quickly told the visitor. Food was another matter. Booth was got to the spot by some means and deposited under an oak tree inside a wormwood fence that enclosed what passed for Bryant’s front yard. He was exhausted and agonizingly sore under his arms from the crutches. A pillow was fetched for him and his leg set at rest.64
A pallet of grass seemed a better choice than Bryant’s shack. That ramshackle structure was little more than a plank hut, the inside of which looked dirty and uninviting. A black woman named Susan McGee lived here with Bryant. She was his housekeeper and, if rumor be true, his concubine as well. McGee busied herself preparing food. Booth was not hungry, even for the special things she whipped up to tempt his palate. He appreciated her solicitude, however, and, as he was wont to do, left behind as a keepsake one of his handkerchiefs.65
Meanwhile Herold set off to find Cottage Farm, the home of Elizabeth Quesenberry. Jones had directed the fugitives to call there because his brother-in-law Thomas Harbin, an early member of Booth’s abduction team, ran his operations from a small schoolhouse on the lawn of Mrs. Quesenberry’s home.
Walking up through the fields, Herold asked for the lady of the house. “Herold was covered with dirt, filth, and grime, unwashed, uncombed, the picture of a vacant-minded tramp,” recalled one of those present. In a few minutes Mrs. Quesenberry rode up on horseback. As the stranger introduced himself and asked to buy horses or at the least to secure a conveyance in which to travel upcountry, she frowned. Her impulse was to order him off.66 But the vagabond claimed to be an escaped soldier tending a brother with a broken leg, and Mrs. Quesenberry had a good heart, so she sent her governess to fetch Harbin, who was down by the river.
Harbin learned of the assassination several days earlier and knew who did it. When he saw the visitor, whom he knew on sight, his heart sank. With this man came a world of trouble.
“Herold, where’s Booth?” the agent asked.
“He’s over at the next farm, and you must go and see him.” Seemingly on the point of collapse, Herold blurted out the story of his adventures. Everyone within hearing, including the servants, got an earful.
Harbin had a tender regard for Mrs. Quesenberry, a widow with four young children, and he was determined to protect her if he could. Drawing her aside, he said, “You must not sell this man a horse. There are circumstances connected with him which make it my duty to tell you to give him nothing more than something to eat.”
“Herold was a mass of dirt,” recalled Harbin, so while Mrs. Quesenberry started on their meals, Harbin and his associate Joe Baden walked Herold down to the schoolhouse for a scrub and brush. Mission accomplished, Herold was fed, and food for Booth was stuffed into a carpet sack.
At two o’clock in the afternoon of a beautiful breezy day, the young man commenced retracing his steps across the extensive fields behind the Quesenberry house. Watching him go, Harbin had to acknowledge that Herold, “of whom he expected so little, should show so much pluck. Herold’s apparent courage was first rate.” As the young man disappeared into the woods toward Bryant’s place, something occurred to Harbin. There was no frost on the ground. In the odd way people notice an insignificant detail in a moment of crisis, Harbin realized that spring was truly here.
Harbin arrived at Bryant’s about four and found Booth under the oak where Herold had left him. The assassin’s appearance was striking. He was dirty and gaunt in appearance. His black suit was streaked and spotty. A pair of roughly built crutches was nearby, and an open shoe with leather laces, which Dr. Mudd supplied to replace his boot, revealed a swollen lower leg. There was no doubt who he was.
“John,” Harbin called out pleasantly. Booth returned the greeting and said simply that, despite appearances, he thought the worst of his trip was over “and that while his journey thus far had been attended with much danger, he anticipated little difficulty over the remainder of the course as he soon expected to be among friends.” After all, he was in Virginia. Booth displayed no signs of nervousness or apprehension, although his mouth occasionally twitched in pain as he spoke.
Harbin was eager to talk to Booth but unable to do so due to Bryant. The inquisitive farmer, who had a mercenary look, hung near them, unsure what to make of his guests but determined to advance his own interests when he did.
With Harbin’s help, arrangements were speedily made. Bryant agreed to carry the fugitives on horseback to their next stop on two conditions. First, he would be paid in greenbacks. He had always sai
d, he informed the Southerners, that Confederate money would not be worth a damn. Second, he would be paid in advance. He wanted ten dollars for the eight miles.67 “Fagin!” thought another visitor who dealt with him. “Physically and intellectually a good personation of Fagin. Money is his god.”68 Short of options, Booth agreed.
The assassin hobbled to a step in the fence, got himself on it, and pulled himself with a grimace onto a horse. He wore no spurs and left his broken leg out of the stirrup. Herold saddled up with Bryant. Harbin mounted his own animal. About twilight the quartet got moving. Their route was along a little-traveled series of gated lanes, down into deeply gouged streams, and up hills. The country was heavily wooded and had a gloomy look.
The ride was befittingly solemn, but as Herold and Bryant pulled ahead, Booth and Harbin got their chance to talk, and Booth spoke freely. “He had no regret. He was not remorseful,” recalled Harbin, “rather took a rude joy in his act.” The failure of the larger plot was not his, Booth claimed. It belonged to his associates, and he upbraided them. Surratt ran for his mother the moment assassination was mentioned, and those who stayed behind were not workmen at their tasks. “He only failed through the miserable agents he had been compelled to rely on.” Booth said nothing about needing money or a doctor or anything else. His sole focus was on getting farther south. He hoped to reach the Confederate army in North Carolina, which was still in the field, and from there make his way to Mexico. “He was steady and hopeful and self-reliant. He possessed all of his courage.”
“John, you will not be able to get very far,” Harbin warned. “The Government is hunting you on all sides. They will capture you or shoot you.”
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth Page 38
