Manhunt

by James L. Swanson

  On the morning of April 20, as Stanton was putting the finishing touches on his proclamation, before sending it to the printer to produce as large broadsides for public posting, and to publish in the newspapers, word reached the War Department that the manhunters had captured George Atzerodt, the vice president’s would-be assassin. The foolish German’s laundry list of carelessness—abandoning incriminating evidence at the Kirkwood, negligently disposing of his knife, pawning his pistol, and speaking knowingly about the assassination—created a road map of guilt that led Sergeant Gemmill to the slumbering Atzerodt. How characteristic that he was Booth’s only conspirator captured unawares in his bed. Newspaper woodcuts gleefully depicted the humiliating circumstances.

  The April 20 proclamation offered a $25,000 reward for Atzerodt. Just before it went to press, Edwin Stanton revised it, deleting the just-captured Atzerodt and substituting the name of John Surratt, Mary’s missing son. Soon his proclamation hit the streets, offering an unprecedented reward of $100,000 for Lincoln’s killers, and threatening with death anyone who gave them aid or comfort. The earlier reward offers of $10,000 on April 15 and $30,000 on April 16 had failed to turn up Booth. Stanton hoped that his new, stupendous offer would motivate Booth’s hunters—and his helpers.

  War Department, Washington, April 20, 1865

  $100,000 REWARD!

  THE MURDERER

  Our late beloved President, Abraham Lincoln,

  IS STILL AT LARGE.

  $50,000 REWARD

  Will be paid by this Department for his apprehension, in addition to any reward offered by Municipal Authorities or State Executives.

  $25,000 REWARD

  Will be paid for the apprehension of JOHN H. SURRATT, one of Booth’s accomplices.

  $25,000 REWARD

  Will be paid for the apprehension of David C. Harold, another of Booth’s accomplices.

  LIBERAL REWARDS will be paid for any information that shall conduce to the arrest of either of the above-named criminals, or their accomplices.

  All persons harboring or secreting the said persons, or either of them, or aiding or assisting their concealment or escape, will be treated as accomplices in the murder of the President and the attempted assassination of the Secretary of State, and shall be subject to trial before a Military Commission and the punishment of DEATH.

  Let the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land by the arrest and punishment of the murderers.

  All good citizens are exhorted to aid public justice on this occasion. Every man should consider his own conscience charged with this solemn duty, and rest neither night nor day until it be accomplished.

  EDWIN M. STANTON, Secretary of War.

  “Hunted Like a Dog”

  John Wilkes Booth and David Herold had languished in the pine thicket for five days and four nights. In the late afternoon of Thursday, April 20, several hours after his daily morning rendezvous with the fugitives, Thomas Jones rode over to Allen’s Fresh, a little village about three miles west of Huckleberry, where the Zekiah swamp ends and the Wicomico River begins. He ensconced himself at Colton’s store and employed his favorite intelligence-gathering technique—sit, watch, listen, and do not speak. He didn’t have to wait long. A Union cavalry patrol, identifiable by its signature sound of brass-hilted, steel-bladed sabers clanking in their polished, silver-bright iron scabbards, and guided by a local Maryland scout named John R. Walton, trotted into town. Some of the troopers walked into Colton’s and ordered drinks. Jones listened keenly to every word they spoke. Then Walton burst into the room: “We have just got news that those fellows have been seen down in Mary’s County.” The announcement roused the cavalrymen as quick as the traditional bugle call of “boots and saddles.” They ran outside, mounted their horses, and galloped away.

  Jones suppressed all outward signs of excitement. This was it! This was the opening he had waited patiently for all week. Several hundred detectives and soldiers had scoured Charles County, Maryland, for days, but they had failed to pick up Booth’s trail. It was time for them to continue the search elsewhere. Indeed, there were some reports that Booth had already crossed the Potomac and was in Virginia now. Yes, some manhunters would remain in the region just in case, but it appeared to Jones that the intensity of the search in the immediate area was diminishing. The Union cavalry was riding out of the area, away from the pine thicket. Confident that no other federal troops lurked in the immediate vicinity, Jones resolved “now or never, this is my chance.” He wanted to bolt out of Colton’s and whip his horse in a wild dash to Booth’s hiding place. But he knew better. To avoid suspicion he tarried in the store as though he didn’t have a care in the world. Eventually he strolled outside, mounted his horse in a leisurely way, and left Allen’s Fresh as slowly as possible. As soon as he reached a safe distance from the village, he laid the whip on hard and galloped frantically for the pines.

  It was dusk now, and Jones thought he had perfect weather for a clandestine mission. “It had been cloudy and misty all day,” he wrote, “and as night came darkly on, the clouds seemed to grow denser and the dampness more intense. A gray fog, rising from the marsh below the village and floating up the swamp, wrapped in shrouds the trees whose motionless forms were growing dim in the gathering gloom.” Darkness fell before Jones reached the thicket. He dismounted and walked deeper into the pines, exercising special caution. He had never been there at night, and Booth and Herold did not expect him. Jones knew that they were impatient and nervous, and he did not want to scare them so much that they cut him down with gunfire on the verge of completing his mission. At a safe distance, he pursed his lips and emitted the secret, three-note whistle code. As before, Herold answered, then emerged from behind the camouflage of black pine trunks and brush and led Jones deeper into the woods, to Booth’s earthen sickbed. The assassin and his chamberlain all but salivated with anticipation. This unexpected nighttime call could mean only one thing: Thomas Jones had important news. Was this the night?

  “The coast seems to be clear,” Jones reported, in the understated, dispassionate manner that was his trademark, “and the darkness favors us. Let us make the attempt.” Booth and Herold could hardly believe their ears. Finally, freed from the prison of these damned woods, where the tall, rigid pines loomed over them like the bars of a jail cell, they could push on to Virginia. They gathered their meager belongings, including the precious field glasses, which Booth considered so important to his escape that, on the afternoon of the assassination, he sent Mary Surratt on a special mission to deliver them to her country tavern. But the instrument was useless in the thicket because visibility in the pines could be measured in yards, not miles; its purpose was to peer far into the distance and scout the safety of new ground. Booth grabbed the field glasses for the vistas he must have expected to see in the coming days.

  Jones cautioned them to stay alert and not let down their guard. To get to the Potomac, they had to complete a perilous trek of about three and a half miles down a series of hidden paths and public roads. With only one horse for three men, Jones proposed that Booth ride his mare and that Herold, on foot, lead it by the bridle. Jones, also on foot, would lead the way. Jones and Herold struggled to lift Booth from the ground and propped him in the saddle. The actor was in great pain. Indeed, Jones observed, “every movement, in spite of his stoicism, wrung a groan of anguish from his lips.” They handed the assassin the Spencer carbine and the two revolvers, rolled the blankets and tied them behind the saddle, and got under way, proceeding down the rough cart track that led to the public road. Jones insisted that no one speak or make a sound. As soon as they set foot on the public road, he warned them, they would be in great danger from travelers and from two houses built close to the road.

  Jones walked fifty or sixty yards ahead, like an infantry picket probing in advance of the main body, listening to every sound as he peered through the mist, searching for hostile riders. All was quiet. Jones stopped dead in his tracks, paused a few moments, and whis
tled for his companions to come up. Every few minutes Jones repeated the process

  until they reached the segment of their journey he dreaded most—the mile-long stretch of public road between the cart track and his farm. They were so vulnerable on the open road that even Thomas Jones, wily veteran of hundreds of dangerous, Confederate nighttime missions, was on edge: “When I paused to listen, the croaking of a frog, the distant barking of a dog, the whir of the wing of some night bird as it passed over my head, would cause my heart to beat quicker, and my breath to come faster.” Jones whistled for Booth and Herold to enter the public highway and follow him. When they caught up to Jones, he grabbed the bridle and jerked the horse a few yards off to the side of the road and told them to wait. Jones crept past the first house, occupied by Sam Thomas, a black man whose bothersome children were always underfoot. A lamplight, too weak to illuminate the road, glowed dimly through a window. Jones walked well past the house and whistled for his companions to continue. “When I gave the low whistle agreed upon as the signal that the road was clear, it sounded in my ears as loud as the blast of a trumpet, and though the ground was soft and yielding, the tramping of the slowly advancing horse . . . was like the approaching of a troop.” Booth and Herold passed the Thomas dwelling undetected.

  Jones feared the next house even more because its owner, John Ware, kept several dogs. Jones walked past Ware’s gate and listened. Not hearing a sound, he continued past the house and whistled, fearing that he might arouse a pack of barking dogs. Not one hound rose up at the signal. Finally, Jones reached the end of the public road and led Booth and Herold, their nerves seriously frayed, on to the safety of his farm. It was between nine and ten o’clock. By then, “the night had grown inky dark. No rain was falling, but the dampness clung to every thing and fell in drops upon us as we made our way among the trees.” Jones halted his party under two pear trees near his stable, about fifty yards from the house.

  Booth craved the shelter—even for just a few minutes—of a roof over his head and the warming glow of a fire in the hearth and assumed that Jones would usher them into his home before the last rush to the river. “Wait here,” Jones said, “while I go in and get you some supper, which you can eat here while I get something for myself.”

  Booth’s heart sank and he pleaded, “Oh, can’t I go in and get some of your hot coffee?”

  “My friend, it wouldn’t do,” answered Jones. “Indeed it would not be safe. There are servants in the house who would be sure to see you and then we would all be lost. Remember, this is your last chance to get away.”

  Booth knew Jones was right. Soon enough, on the Virginia side, shelter, a fire, and a bed awaited him. Jones, knowing how Booth suffered from his broken leg and from living outdoors, hated to turn him down: “It cut me to the heart when this poor creature, whose head had not been under a roof, who had not tasted warm food, felt the glow of a fire, or seen a cheerful light for nearly a week, there in the dark, wet night at my threshold, made this piteous request.”

  Jones slipped into his house through the kitchen, where Henry Woodland was at the table eating a late supper. Jones collected his wits and pretended that this was just another typical spring night at Huckleberry, and not the climactic hour of a day that saw him spying on Union troops, galloping to rescue Lincoln’s assassin and his companion, leading them on a perilous night ride, and posting them outside his farmhouse, not more than fifty yards from his kitchen table.

  “How many shad did you catch?” Jones queried Henry.

  The fishing was good, he replied: “I caught about seventy, master.”

  Then Jones zeroed in with the critical question that would decide everything that night: “Did you bring the boat to Dent’s Meadow, and leave it there, Henry?”

  The lives of John Wilkes Booth and David Herold depended on the answer. “Yes, master.”

  Concealing his delight, Jones carried on innocently: “We had better get out another net tomorrow. The fish are running well.”

  Jones proceeded to his dining room, where his supper waited on the table. In front of several family members, and without exchanging a word with any of them, he scooped up enough food for two men and carried it out of the house: “They knew better than to question me about anything in those days,” Jones recalled. On his way out, Jones snatched a candle and slipped it into one of his coat pockets.

  After Booth and Herold wolfed down their supper, the first time they had enjoyed more than one meal a day since their confinement in the pine thicket, Herold and Jones got Booth back into the saddle and headed to the river, about one mile distant. Jones walked ahead of them, whistling for them to come up through the open fields. Three hundred yards from the river they came to a wood fence too high for the horse to step over and too well built to dismantle easily. From here the crippled actor would have to struggle to the river on foot. Herold and Jones helped Booth dismount, and he winced in pain as they lifted him over the fence. Leaving the horse behind, Jones and Herold, along with the makeshift crutches provided by Dr. Mudd, supported Booth’s weight between them as they stepped carefully down the steep and narrow path that led to the boat. What if it was gone? Jones worried. Unless Union troops had stumbled upon it within the last several hours, it should be just a few yards ahead where Henry Woodland left it. As they inched toward Dent’s Meadow, Booth’s senses must have come alive—he could hear the river’s current lapping its banks. Jones heard it, too: “As we approached we could hear its sullen roar . . . a mournful sound coming through the darkness.”

  The trio pressed forward, until they began to see the outline of a dull gray shape emerge from the darkness. At last! Booth’s spirits soared at the sight of the humble craft. His broken leg, the scourging newspaper accounts, and the monotony of the pine thicket had worn down his optimism. Seeing the skiff must have aroused an excitement in him that he had not experienced since his triumphant ride across the Navy Yard Bridge, the first key milestone in his escape after fleeing Ford’s Theatre. Crossing the Potomac from Maryland to Virginia would be the second. Jones waded into the shallows and brought in the boat.

  He and Herold helped Booth struggle into the craft, seating him at the stern. They laid the weapons and crutches on the wood hull planks with a dull thud. They handed him a single oar to steer. Herold climbed aboard, settled into the bow seat to row, and seized the other two oars, locking them into place. Jones hunkered down, produced the candle from his coat, and told Booth to bring out his pocket compass. The actor snapped open the square, velvet-lined case while Jones, concealing the candle under an oilcloth coat, ignited a match and lit the wick. Their faces inches apart, Jones, clenching the dripping candle over the protective glass cover that shielded the magnetized, dancing needle, showed Booth the true course to steer. “Keep to that,” he promised, “and it will bring you into the Machodoc Creek.” Jones handed Booth the candle, cautioning him to hide its faint glow during the crossing, and then gave Booth his final gift, the name of a contact on the other side: “Mrs. Quesenberry lives near the mouth of this creek. If you tell her you come from me I think she will take care of you.”

  Jones grabbed the stern firmly and began pushing Booth and Her-old gently into the Potomac. Booth turned suddenly and spoke: “Wait a minute, old fellow.” The grateful assassin thrust a fistful of Union greenbacks at Jones. Jones rebuffed the gesture, protesting that he had not helped him for money. He agreed to accept just eighteen dollars, the price he paid for the boat a year ago in Baltimore.

  Choked with emotion, Booth understood that he would never see Jones again: “God bless you, my dear friend, for all you have done for me. Good-bye, old fellow.”

  Jones shoved them off, and Herold gripped the oars and stroked toward the Virginia shore, two miles distant. The river was dark as India ink and the boat soon vanished against the black, glass-smooth surface of the powerful current moving under a moonless night. Who can tell, wondered Jones, what thoughts possessed Booth as he entrusted himself “to the mercies of the dar
k water.”

  More certain is the significance of the pine-thicket days—John Wilkes Booth’s “lost week”—in the twelve-day chase for Lincoln’s killer. Booth and Herold spent more than one-third of the entire manhunt in the pine thicket. It was in the pines where Booth confronted the nation’s reaction to him and his crime, where news of Powell’s mad attack shocked his conscience, where he learned his manifesto would not be published and his voice would be silenced, where he realized that, although he performed the great crime magnificently, he failed to plan properly for the next act, the denouement of a successful, untroubled escape, and where he learned that he had made Abraham Lincoln a martyred hero greater than the living president had ever been in life. The assassin’s mysterious disappearance also affected the nation. In vanishing, he drove the manhunters to distraction, shook the people’s confidence in their government, attained the reputation of a devious, master criminal, and fueled rumors of a massive conspiracy. How else could one man, the most wanted man in American history, escape justice?