Manhunt

by James L. Swanson

  The night before, the authorities had done little to pursue Booth during the first hour after the assassination. At Ford’s Theatre the immediate concern was the condition of the president, not the whereabouts of Booth. But by early morning, Stanton had summoned the iron will for which he was renowned and planned the manhunt. The government—Vice President Johnson and the cabinet—had survived the night; no more assassinations had occurred; and no invading army stormed the capital. Stanton coordinated—or at least tried to—the efforts of the local police force, detectives, and the army.

  From New York City came another offer of help, twelve hours after Stanton had asked its chief of police to send his finest detectives to Washington. On April 15, at 1:40 p.m., Stanton received a telegram from Detective H. S. Olcott, proposing to join the manhunt: “If Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan or I or any of my employees can serve you and the country in any way, no matter what, or anywhere, we are ready.” John Wilkes Booth was still at large. He had escaped the first, frantic night of the manhunt. Now it might not be so easy to capture him quickly. Stan-ton reached for Olcott’s helping hand, telegraphing a prompt reply: “I desire your services. Come to Washington at once, and bring your force of detectives with you.” Olcott hurried to move that night: “I leave at midnight with such of my men as live in town. The rest will follow forthwith.”

  That afternoon Stanton also summoned Lieutenant Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, head of the self-styled “National Detective Police,” and one of his favorites.

  WAR DEPARTMENT

  Washington City, April 15, 1865—3:20 p.m.

  Col. L. C. BAKER, New York:

  Come here immediately and see if you can find the murderers of the President.

  EDWIN M. STANTON, Secretary of War.

  Stanton vowed to apprehend Booth and all those who conspired with him to commit what became known as “the great crime.” Southern leaders feared that Stanton might accuse them of complicity in the murder. One of them, Governor F. H. Pierpont of Virginia, sent a message to the War Department pleading that his state was blameless, and condemning Booth for shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” at Ford’s Theatre: “Loyal Virginia sends her tribute of mourning for the fall of the Nation’s President by the hands of a dastardly agent of treason, who dared to repeat the motto of our State at the moment of the perpetration of his accursed crime.”

  Soldiers, policemen, and private detectives fanned out over Washington, Maryland, and Virginia in pursuit of the actor and his accomplices. On assassination night John H. Surratt was named as one of Booth’s possible accomplices and was the first suspect in the Seward knife attack. But when soldiers had searched for him at his mother’s boardinghouse a few hours after Lincoln was shot, he was not there. Stanton declared the search and capture of John Wilkes Booth to be the nation’s top priority. Booth and his conspirators had to be caught before they disappeared into the Deep South, where they would find succor in the heart of the stricken Confederacy. On the morning of April 15, the nation held its collective breath and with one voice asked, “Will Booth be taken?”

  It was a dangerous time to be a friend of John Wilkes Booth. On the night of the fourteenth, when the actors huddled backstage at Ford’s Theatre a few minutes after Lincoln was shot, John Matthews feared the worst. “There were shouts of ‘burn’ and ‘hang’ and ‘lynch’” coming from the audience, he recalled, and then Matthews made a discovery that put him in fear for his life.

  When taking off my coat the letter which Booth had given me dropped out of the pocket. I had forgotten about it. I said “Great God! There is the letter that John gave me in the afternoon.” It was in an envelope, sealed and stamped for the post office. I opened it, and glanced hastily over the letter. I saw it was a statement of what he was going to do. I read it very hurriedly. It was written in a sort of patriotic strain, and was to this effect; That he had for a long time devoted his money, his time, and his energies to the accomplishment of an end; that a short time ago he had been worth so much money—twenty or thirty thousand dollars, I think—all of which he had spent furthering this enterprise; but that he had been baffled. It then went on: “The moment has come at last when my plans must be changed. The world may censure me for what I am about to do; but I am sure posterity will justify me.” Signed. “Men who love their country more than gold or life: J. W. Booth, Payne, Atzerodt, and Herold.”

  In the crowded dressing rooms, surrounded by excited actors running amok, Matthews read Booth’s letter. No one paid attention to the piece of paper he clutched in his hands. He read it a second time and then asked himself, “What shall I do with this letter?” The audience in the theatre had not stopped shouting. Matthews considered handing the letter over to the authorities. The roar of the mob persuaded him otherwise. “If this paper is found on me,” Matthews reasoned, “I will be compromised—no doubt lynched on the spot.” Even if he survived the night, he knew that the letter’s brush would tar him forever: “I will be associated with the letter, and suspicions will grow out of it that can never be explained away, and I will be ruined.” He knew what he had to do to protect himself: “I burned it up.”

  Matthews was not alone. On the night of April 14, others in Washington attempted to obliterate evidence of their connection to Lincoln’s assassin. And the next morning, as news of Lincoln’s death spread across the nation, many other letters written in Booth’s hand certainly perished in flames. Indeed, fewer than one hundred of Booth’s letters and manuscripts survived the tumultuous days that followed the assassination. One of his paramours even sought to destroy herself. Ella Turner, a petite, sensual, redheaded prostitute, placed Booth’s photo under her pillow, saturated a piece of cloth with chloroform, pressed the poisonous anesthetic to her delicate face, and tried to fill her lungs with a fatal dose. At 11:00 a.m. on April 15, residents of her house found her in her room, collapsed on her bed, unconscious but alive. Several doctors were summoned. The press got hold of the story, and the Washington Evening Star published the lurid details of her rescue: “Proper remedies were immediately applied, when she soon aroused and asked for Booth’s picture, which she had concealed under the pillow of her bed, at the same time remarking to the physicians that she ‘did not thank them for saving her life.’” Soon she came to her senses and chose to survive her lover’s crime.

  Booth’s female correspondents had more to worry about than the letters he had sent to them. They could dispose of those documents easily enough. But what about the love notes that they had mailed to him, and that were in his possession? Many women—single, engaged, and married—had written incriminating letters to their idol offering to surrender whatever pleasures he chose to take from them. George Alfred Townsend penned an unforgettable vignette of a typical case:

  The beauty of this man and his easy confidentiality, not familiar, but marked by a mild and even dignity, made women impassioned of him. He was licentious as men, and particularly as actors go, but not a seducer, as far as I can learn. I have traced one case in Philadelphia where a young girl who had seen him on stage became enamored of him.

  She sent him bouquets, notes, photographs and all the accessories of an intrigue. Booth, to whom such things were common, yielded to the girl’s importunities at last and gave her an interview. He was surprised to find that so bold a correspondent was so young, so fresh, and so beautiful. He told her therefore, in pity, the consequences of pursuing him; that he entertained no affection for her, though a sufficient desire, and that he was a man of the world to whom all women grew fulsome in their turn.

  “Go home,” he said, “and beware of actors. They are to be seen, not to be known.”

  The girl, yet more infatuated, persisted. Booth, who had no real virtue except by scintillations, became what he had promised, and one more soul went to the isles of Cypress.

  On April 14, and for weeks to come, more than one woman prayed that Booth had destroyed her letters before he killed the president. Fortune spared the reputations of the assassin’s admirers—not
one of their love letters was discovered and published during the manhunt. But when news of the assassination reached Boston, a singular young girl decided to cherish, and not obliterate, her intimate bond to Lincoln’s killer.

  They had met in Boston the previous year, during Booth’s successful, month long theatrical engagement at the Boston Museum. It was an astonishing run—between April 25 and May 28, 1864, Booth, onstage almost every night, performed the greatest roles in the Shakespearean canon—Richard III, Hamlet, Romeo, Othello, Shylock, and Macbeth. He met her sometime during that month in Boston. Her name was Isabel Sumner. The daughter of a respectable merchant family, she possessed an intelligent face, a slender frame, and ravishing beauty. She was sixteen years old, and Booth proposed that they become lovers. He was smitten immediately, and pursued Isabel with an ardor uncommon for a man who was used to having women throw themselves at him. “God bless this sweet face before me,” he cooed in a letter written as he gazed at the photograph she had given him. “It would move me to do anything.”

  The stage star courted the teenage beauty in a series of emotionally uninhibited letters that made him sound like a teenager: “I LOVE YOU . . . in the fountain of my heart a seal is set to keep its waters, pure and bright for thee alone.” Booth gave Isabel a signed photograph of himself, a lock of his hair, and a ring. Why did the debauched, worldly actor so crave this innocent, young girl? Booth answered the question himself in a letter: “I will . . . never, never cease to think of you as something pure and sacred, A bright and happy dream, from which I have been awoke to Sadness.”

  When Isabel learned that Lincoln’s assassin was her lover, she could not bring herself to destroy John’s letters and gifts. Instead, she hid them for the next sixty-two years, until her death in 1927. As best as anyone could remember, she never spoke the name John Wilkes Booth again. Fortunately for Isabel Sumner, Booth did not carry her photo in his wallet the night he left the National Hotel to murder Abraham Lincoln. Neither Stanton’s detectives nor the newspapers discovered her, and her connection to Booth stayed a secret for the next one hundred and thirty years.

  Frances Mudd rose at 6:00 a.m. and called for her servants to get breakfast ready. At 7:00 a.m., Mrs. Mudd woke her husband. David Herold, after only two hours of rest, shambled downstairs. John Wilkes Booth, his mind and body still spent from his great day, stayed in bed. He had ridden too far from Washington to hear the ringing bells of the city’s churches and firehouses tolling in mourning. Dr. Mudd invited Herold to join his family for breakfast. Frances prepared a plate of food for Booth and told a servant to carry it upstairs and set it on his bedside table.

  Herold questioned Mudd about his local contacts, especially those who lived close to the river. Davey’s evident knowledge of the area prompted Frances Mudd to inquire if he lived in their county.

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, “but I have been frolicking around for five or six months.”

  Amused by his boyish demeanor, Frances teased him: “All play and no work makes Jack a bad boy. Your father ought to make you go to work.”

  “My father is dead,” Herold responded, “and,” he added jauntily, “I am ahead of the old lady.”

  As he bantered at the breakfast table, the good-natured Davey Her-old appeared oblivious to the grave peril he faced. He was running for his life, but Frances Mudd observed that “he seemed not to have a care in the world.” Before Mudd left the house, Herold asked him for two favors. “After breakfast, when I was about to leave for my farm-work, this young man asked me if I had a razor about the house, that his friend desired to take a shave, as perhaps he would feel better.” The doctor provided a straight razor, soap, and water. And, wondered Davey, could Mudd make a pair of crutches for Booth, nothing fancy, just something simple for him “to hobble along with”? The physician, handy with wood and tools, complied: “I got two arm pieces and whittled them out as best I could.” Then Mudd took the pieces to one of his hired men, an old Englishman named John Best, and, using a saw and an auger, “he and I made a rude pair of crutches out of a piece of plank” and sent them to Booth.

  When breakfast was finished, Herold went back to bed. Lieutenant Dana and the Thirteenth New York Cavalry patrol left Piscataway and pressed on toward Bryantown. Frances Mudd did not hear a sound from Herold or Booth for the next four hours until around noon, when Davey came down to devour his second meal of the day. While Herold dined, the Thirteenth New York reached Bryantown around noon. David Dana’s men were just a few miles from Dr. Mudd’s. This was the closest the manhunters had gotten to Booth since the assassination. As before, Booth stayed in bed. The servant who brought him dinner found Saturday morning’s breakfast tray, its food untouched, still sitting on the bedside table. Improvidently, Booth skipped the midday meal, too. He must have been famished, and who knew when his next meal might come?

  By 8:00 a.m. George Atzerodt had made it to Georgetown. He showed up at Matthews & Co.’s store at 49 High Street and paid a call on an acquaintance, John Caldwell. Atzerodt said that he was going to the country and asked Caldwell if he wanted to buy his watch. “I told him that I had a watch of my own, and did not want another.” Then Atzerodt asked for a loan of $10. Caldwell refused. “I told him that I did not have any money to spare.” Atzerodt unbelted his revolver and offered it to Caldwell. “Lend me $10.00, and take this as security, and I will bring the money or send it to you next week.” The storekeeper looked the weapon over. “I thought the revolver was good security for the money, and I let him have the money, expecting him to pay it back.. . . I did not inquire of him why it was loaded and capped.” Atzerodt left the store and continued on his journey. He had decided to leave Washington. He knew a place where he thought he would be safe.

  At the Executive Mansion the soldiers carried the president’s temporary coffin to the second-floor guest bedroom for the autopsy. Cutting open Abraham Lincoln’s brain and body served little purpose. The surgeons knew what killed him—a single bullet through the brain. They were hiding their voyeurism behind the camouflage of scientific inquiry. Their chosen surgeon reached for his saws and knives while his brother physicians watched. And they wanted the bullet. The nation could hardly bury its martyred Father Abraham with a lead ball lodged in his brain. They cut it out, marked it as evidence, and preserved it for history. When they were finished Mary Lincoln sent a request: Please cut a lock of his hair for her. His blood, according to a newspaper report, was drained from his corpse by the embalmer—the same mortuary artist who preserved the little body of Willie Lincoln in 1862—transferred to glass jars, and “sacredly preserved.”

  Gideon Welles, at the White House to check on his wife, Mary Jane, while she cared for Mrs. Lincoln, descended the staircase, accompanied by Attorney General James Speed. At the foot of the stairs, they found Tad Lincoln staring out of a window. Welles never forgot the sight of the grieving boy:“ ‘Tad’ . . . seeing us, cried aloud his tears, ‘O, Mr. Welles, who killed my father?’” It was more than the navy secretary could bear. All through the previous night, and while he had watched the president die that morning, Welles had suppressed his emotions. Now, standing beside little Tad, he lost all composure and poured forth his tears.

  At Dr. Mudd’s kitchen table, Davey asked him where he could get his hands on a buggy or carriage to transport Booth. Mudd suggested that Davey ride with him to his father’s place and try there first. Thomas Davis, the hired hand in charge of Mudd’s horses, saddled their mounts.

  Frances Mudd was concerned that Booth had not eaten all day, and just as her husband and David Herold were leaving, she asked if she could visit him. “Yes, certainly you can,” Dr. Mudd replied. She arrayed a tray with savory fare—“some cake, a couple of oranges, and some wine”—and carried it upstairs. Placing the tray on the table, she asked Booth how he was feeling.

  “My back hurts me dreadfully,” he complained. “I must have hurt it when the horse fell and broke my leg.”

  Booth declined the cake and wine and pleaded for
brandy instead. Frances regretted that they had none but offered as a substitute “some good whiskey”—his spirit of choice at the Star Saloon and Surratt’s tavern. Strangely, he declined the whiskey, too.

  Mrs. Mudd apologized: “I guess you think I have very little hospitality; you have been sick all day and I have not been up to see you.” Once more she asked Booth if she could do anything for him. He spoke no more, and she left the room.

  When Samuel Mudd and David Herold arrived at Oak Hill, his father’s farm a few miles to the east, Dr. George Mudd was not at home. Sam’s younger brother, Henry Lowe Mudd Jr., advised them that all the carriages but one were broken down and in need of repair. He could not let them have the good carriage without their father’s permission because tomorrow was Easter Sunday, and the elder Mudd might need it. Herold suggested that they ride on to Bryantown and try their luck there. Samuel Mudd agreed, and they spurred their horses on at an unhurried pace. When they got within sight of the edge of town, Davey yanked back hard on the reins and brought his horse to a dead stop. He could not believe what he saw, several hundred yards ahead. Mounted men, wearing dark blue shell jackets trimmed with yellow piping. Yankee cavalry. Manhunters.

  Herold had just spotted the vanguard of the Thirteenth New York Cavalry. Ordered to pursue John Wilkes Booth from Washington, Dana had led his troops into Bryantown, a well-known locale of Confederate intrigue, commandeered the tavern, and occupied the town. Dana intended to establish a command center there, and from Bryantown launch cavalry patrols through the surrounding countryside, in pursuit of the Lincoln and Seward assassins.