They arrived at Stuart’s after dark around 8:00 p.m., just as the doctor and his family were finishing supper. When the doctor went to the door, he found two men he knew, William Bryant and a man named Crisman, in the company of two strangers. David Herold was on foot and the rest were on horseback, Booth and Bryant riding a sorrel and a gray. Keeping close to his front door, Stuart spoke to the haggard pair:
“Who are you?”
“We are Marylanders in want of accommodations for the night,” Herold replied.
Stuart wasn’t interested: “It is impossible; I have no accommodations for anybody.”
Davey pleaded their case: his brother had broken his leg, and someone recommended they see Stuart for medical treatment and help on their journey.
Unmoved, Stuart’s answer was the same—no.
Well, wasn’t he a doctor? Herold demanded.
Stuart possessed a quick riposte for any question. “I am no surgeon. I am only a physician,” he begged off, implying that he knew nothing about broken bones, setting fractures, or making splints.
But the recommendation came from Dr. Mudd, Herold boasted.
Unimpressed, Stuart claimed he had never heard of him: “I don’t know Dr. Mudd—never saw him. I don’t know that I had ever heard of Dr. Mudd.” And anyway, “Nobody was authorized to recommend anybody to me.”
Booth did not speak, relying on Herold to press the matter: “If you listen to the circumstances of the case, you will be able to do it.”
Alarmed by the stranger’s persistence, Stuart rebuffed him: “I don’t want to know anything about you.”
Stuart agreed to give them some food, but that was all. He did not like their appearance or manner and was suspicious of their story: “I did not really believe he had a broken leg; I thought that it was all put on.” Their tale did not make sense. Herold claimed that they were Confederate soldiers eager to continue the war after Lee’s surrender: “We are Marylanders going to Mosby.” But Stuart knew that Mosby’s war was over: “Mosby has surrendered, I understand, you will have to get your paroles.” Obviously the strangers were lying.
Reluctantly, Stuart told them to come in the house for their meal.
The sooner they ate, the quicker he could get rid of them. Herold walked in, and Booth followed on his crutches. Stuart’s three adult daughters and his son-in-law were seated at the table. The fugitives joined them and began their meal. Booth and Herold were an odd spectacle at Stuart’s fine table. How out of place these haggard travelers seemed. Or did they? Yes, Herold was obviously a callow, verbose youth of the common class. But Booth’s filthy clothes, unshaven face, and malodorous body could not camouflage who he really was. His cultivated manners, educated voice, and physical poise marked him as a gentleman. The dichotomy between Booth’s appearance and his status must have puzzled his well-born tablemates.
It also puzzled Dr. Stuart. While the strangers dined, the doctor remained outside, chatting with William Bryant: “It is very strange,” mused Stuart. “I know nothing about these men; I cannot accommodate them; you will have to take them somewhere else.” Bryant professed that he did not know their names, either, that they emerged from the marshes near his house and asked to be taken to Dr. Stuart’s. The doctor entered the house to check on his unwanted guests. When he stepped back outside, Bryant and the horses were gone! He exploited Stuart’s brief disappearance into the house to skedaddle and abandon the problem to the doctor. Bryant had done what the strangers asked; his job here was done.
Stuart panicked. His eyes darted up the road and spotted Bryant two or three hundred yards away. Stuart started running and overtook Bryant: “You must take these men away,” he pleaded. “I can’t accommodate them.” Stuart dashed back into the house to roust his guests. They had been inside a quarter of an hour. They had enjoyed their promised meal. They must leave—now: “The old man is waiting for you; he is anxious to be off; it is cold; he is not well, and wants to go home.” Obeying, Booth and Herold rose from the table immediately and left the house without protest.
Once outside, they again asked Stuart for help: “It was after they got outside that they were so importunate that I should try to accommodate them.” If Stuart wouldn’t treat Booth’s injury or let them spend the night, wouldn’t he at least get them to Fredericksburg? Stuart rebuffed them again, offering only the possibility of help: “I told them that I had a neighbor near there, a colored man who sometimes hired his wagon, and probably he would do it if he was not very busy, and it would be no harm to try.”
By now Stuart knew exactly who his visitors were. Obviously, they were not Confederate soldiers. That feeble ruse collapsed under superficial examination. The lame man was a well-spoken gentleman, his garrulous boy companion of humbler origins. Judging by their appearance, they had been living outdoors, without shelter, for a week or two. They had traveled south from Maryland into Virginia. They were desperate. And one had a broken leg. They fit the profiles of two men known to the whole country by now. Who could these men be but John Wilkes Booth and David Herold? Stuart dared not speak their names, but his eagerness to eject them from his land shows that he knew how dangerous they could be to him and his family: “I was suspicious of them. I did not know but they might be some of the characters who had been connected with the vile acts of assassination . . . which I had heard of a few days before.”
Again Booth suffered “the cold hand they extend to me.” Bryant and his charges departed Cleydael and rode on to the home of Stuart’s “colored man,” William Lucas.
Bryant, Booth, and Herold approached the humble Lucas cabin—a world removed from Dr. Stuart’s opulent Cleydael estate—around midnight. It was quiet and dark inside. William, his wife, and his son were asleep. Davey leaned in close to the crude, barred plank door. “Lucas!” he called sharply. Herold’s summons woke the dogs sleeping nearby, raising a chorus of barks. The hounds woke William Lucas, who, when he heard one of Bryant’s horses neighing in the yard, suspected that thieves were after his team. Then again he heard a strange voice: “Lucas.” He did not recognize the speaker and refused to unlock the door. “People had been shot that way,” he reasoned.
Lucas demanded that the voice identify itself. Instead, the speaker, unwilling to disclose his identity, and communicating as through a secret code, uttered the names of three men and asked if Lucas knew them, implying through attitude of voice that he should. He didn’t and became frightened. The strange voice must belong to a robber or a horse thief. There was no way that he would open his door to the mysterious, threatening stranger standing on the other side, inches away. The stranger called out a fourth name, William Bryant. Lucas knew this one, but what difference did that make? The stranger could have picked up the name anywhere. Then a second voice called out: Lucas. It is me, William Bryant. You know me. Relieved, Lucas unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped outside. Bryant and two strangers stepped forward.
“We want to stay here tonight,” the youngest member of the trio declared bluntly, omitting the courtesy of an introduction.
Bewildered by the unexpected request, and put off by Herold’s rudeness, Lucas resisted: “You cannot do it. I am a colored man and have no right to take care of white people; I have only one room in the house and my wife is sick.”
Herold became belligerent: “We are Confederate soldiers, we have been in service three years; we have been knocking about all night, and don’t intend to any longer . . . we are going to stay.”
Before Lucas could object again, Booth hobbled around him on his crutches, forced his way into the cabin, and claimed a chair.
Pursuing the lame man into his home, Lucas chastised them for their rudeness: “Gentlemen, you have treated me very badly.”
Booth, seething from Dr. Stuart’s rebuff, was in no mood for etiquette lessons from an impudent, free black man who did not know his place. How dare Dr. Stuart, lapsed gentleman, cast him into the night? Stuart had not heard the last from John Wilkes Booth. And how dare Stuart, addi
ng insult to the injury, banish him to some Negro shack, degrading the great tragedian like a man of the lowest class and order, like some filthy beggar or runaway slave. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” Booth had declared in his secret political manifesto of 1864; “Nigger citizenship,” he spewed venomously in response to Lincoln’s April 11, 1865, speech. And now, here he sat, begging a black man for accommodations, and suffering insults in reply: Never!
Booth’s simmering blood boiled over in a way it had not since the assassination night. Still seated, the actor froze William Lucas with a hateful stare while dropping his hand to his waist, his fingers feeling for the handle of his knife. He had not unsheathed it in anger since he baptized its razor-sharp blade with Major Rathbone’s blood, now dried and still caked on the knife, partly obscuring its acid-etched, defiantly patriotic mottos. Booth could easily have cleansed the knife in Dr. Mudd’s washbasin, or in the freshwater spring at the pine thicket, but chose not to. Instead, he cherished its stained, mirrored surface like a relic of a martyred saint, a vivid, tangible memento of the assassination. He had lost the ultrasouvenir—his Deringer—when he grappled with Rathbone in the president’s box. But he still possessed the knife as a personal reminder that blood had been spilt, and there was no turning back: “I have done the deed,” in the words of Macbeth. The bloody keepsake resonated like a symbolic stigmata of wounds not suffered, but inflicted, by the assassin’s hand.
Booth’s hand rose from his waistband until the quickly moving blade caught William Lucas’s eye. “Old man, how do you like that?” Booth growled, waving the knife in the air.
“I do not like it at all!” pleaded Lucas, who was always terrified of knives.
Booth was one provocation away from unwinding another powerful, arcing swing of the blade, but he calmed himself. Murdering a black family in their cabin was sure to attract unwanted attention. And Booth considered himself in a class above the common cutthroat. As he argued in his datebook, his motives were purer than those of Brutus or William Tell. Booth still burned at a world turned upside down, but reason dictated that he use, and not kill, William Lucas.
The actor sheathed the knife and assumed a less threatening guise. The point had been made, and Booth did not need to brandish the pistols and carbine. In the cabin’s dim light, Lucas saw them clearly enough. Booth informed Lucas what they really wanted: “We were sent here, old man; we understand you have good teams.” So it was the horses, Lucas thought, just as he feared when he heard the strange voice outside his door. Lucas pleaded with Booth to leave his horses alone, explaining that he had hired hands coming Monday to plant corn. Convinced that the strangers would try to steal the horses, Lucas spoke evasively and claimed that the animals were far away, in the pasture. It would be hard searching for them in the dark. Booth turned to Herold and closed the matter: “Well, Dave, we will not go on any further, but stay here and make this old man get us this horse in the morning.” William Bryant, his task done, rode away, abandoning Lucas and his family to the strangers he had brought into their cabin.
Lucas was terrified to be alone with them and, fearing Booth’s knife slitting his throat while he slept, he surrendered his cabin: “I was afraid to go to sleep and my wife and I went out on the step and stayed there the rest of the night.”
In the morning, a little after 6:00, Booth and Herold ordered Lucas to get the horses. They hitched them to his wagon and climbed aboard. For the last time, Lucas beseeched them: were they really going to take his horses and not pay him? Feeling generous, Booth asked what price he charged for a ride to Port Conway, a small town on the Rappahannock River about ten miles away. Ten dollars in gold coins or $20 in greenbacks, quoted Lucas. But Booth and Herold were obviously taking a one-way trip; how would he get his horses and wagon back? He asked them to take his twenty-one-year-old son Charles along for the ride so the boy could bring the team home. Booth said no, but Herold, in rare dissent from his master, yielded: “Yes, he can go, as you have a large family and a crop on hand and you can have your team back again.”
It was settled. Within minutes William Lucas would be free of Lincoln’s assassins, patiently awaiting, with an extra $20 in his pocket, Charlie’s return with the horses in a few hours. Then Lucas, still smarting from the indignity of his midnight eviction, made a mistake. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He taunted the strangers about the Confederacy’s defeat: “I thought you would be done pressing horses in the Northern Neck,” he added, “since the fall of Richmond.” Lucas’s insolence enraged Booth, causing an eruption of his volcanic temper. Richmond? Did this damned black rascal dare mention Richmond? Asia Booth Clarke knew her brother’s sensitivity on that subject. She described how their brother Junius, walking with Wilkes “one night . . . in the streets of Washington . . . beheld the tears run from his eyes as he turned his face towards Richmond, saying brokenly, ‘Virginia—Virginia.’ It was like the wail of a Roman father over his slaughtered child. This idealized city of his love had deeper hold upon his heart than any feminine beauty.”
Ignorant of Booth’s passion, Lucas could not have uttered a more dangerous provocation. Asia, however, recognized that the city’s fall the week prior to Lincoln’s assassination helped spur her brother to commit his great crime: “[T]he fall of Richmond rang in with maddening, exasperating clang of joy, and that triumphant entry into the fallen city . . . breathed air afresh upon the fire which consumed him.” If Richmond’s fall could provoke John Wilkes Booth to murder the president of the United States, how might Lucas’s blasphemous slander provoke the assassin to punish him?
Booth’s pitiless black eyes burned through Lucas like searing coals: “Repeat that again,” he dared Lucas. One more insult, and Booth was ready to draw one of his revolvers and shoot the old man on the spot. Lucas knew he had made a terrible mistake. He had pushed Booth too far, and the actor was ready to explode in violence. Wisely, the old man backed off: “I said no more to him.” Young Charlie Lucas climbed aboard the wagon and seized the reins, signaling his readiness to serve Booth and Herold by driving them to Port Conway or—at this tense moment—any place they wanted to go. Wordlessly, Booth reached under his coat and pulled out, not a revolver, but a wad of cash. Peeling off $20 in paper currency, he bent low and handed the money to Mrs. Lucas.
As the wagon rolled away around 7:00 a.m., it came to Booth; he knew how to deal with Dr. Stuart.
They reached Port Conway around noon, and Charlie steered the wagon toward the ferry landing, near the home of William Rollins. Booth asked Charlie to wait a few minutes before driving his father’s wagon home. The actor wanted to write a letter to Dr. Stuart, and he wanted Charlie to deliver it.
A letter? John Wilkes Booth was running for his life. He didn’t know where the manhunters were. The newspapers he read did not reveal their unit designations, their strength of numbers, or their search assignments. In his ignorance, and to ensure his survival, Booth had to assume that he might encounter Union troops and detectives at any moment, anywhere along his route. They might be behind him or lying in wait ahead of him. He was always in danger. Conceivably every minute might count, and even a slight delay might make the difference between freedom and death. Incredibly, foolishly, with his life at stake, Booth took time to indulge his undisciplined, theatrical impulses. He insisted on having the last word and upbraiding Stuart for his appalling, shameful manners. He opened his 1864 datebook to a blank page and began writing feverishly. After finishing the note, he read it over and, dissatisfied, ripped it out and tucked it out of sight inside one of the book’s interior flaps. He started over, composed another note, and carefully removed the page.
Dated Monday, April 24, 1865, Booth’s caustic rebuke assumed Shakespearean pretensions:
Dear Sir:
Forgive me, but I have some little pride. I hate to blame you for your want of hospitality: you know your own affairs. I was sick and tired, with a broken leg, in need of medical advice. I would not have turned a dog from my
door in such a condition. However, you were kind enough to give me something to eat, for which I not only thank you, but on account of the reluctant manner in which it was bestowed, feel bound to pay for it. It is not the substance, but the manner in which a kindness is extended, that makes one happy for the acceptance thereof. The sauce in meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it. Be kind enough to accept the enclosed two dollars and a half (though hard to spare) for what we have received.
Yours respectfully, STRANGER.
Booth judged Stuart guilty of committing the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society—inhospitality It was the sort of accusation that, leveled at a more leisurely time, might trigger a duel. Indeed, had Booth more time, he might have tried to soliloquize the doctor in person. Booth’s letter climaxed with an insulting rebuke of offering to pay a petty sum of cash in exchange for Stuart’s grudging hospitality. Thespian to the end, Booth invoked Shakespeare to dramatize his point, drawing his letter’s penultimate “ceremony” line from Macbeth, act 3, scene 4. There, Lady Macbeth, speaking at the haunted banquet that followed her husband’s murder of Duncan in his sleep, opined on, of all things, proper hospitality: “The feast is sold / That is not often vouched, while ’tis a-making, / ’Tis given with welcome. To feed were best at home; / From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony. / Meeting were bare without it.” Booth quoted the obscure phrase from memory nearly perfectly, committing only the minor error of writing “in” instead of “to” “meat.”
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