Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

by James L. Swanson

EDWIN M. STANTON

  One by one those who were there at the end quietly filed out of the little back bedroom. Reverend Dr. Gurley and Robert Lincoln told Mary. She would not go to the death chamber; she could not bear it. She never saw her husband’s face again. Around 9:00 A.M. she left the Petersen house. As she descended the stairs, coachman Francis Burke, who had waited all night to take the president home, readied to carry the widowed first lady there. Before she got in the carriage, she glared at Ford’s Theatre across the street: “That dreadful house … that dreadful house,” she moaned.

  The room was empty of all visitors now, save one. Edwin Stanton and the president were alone. The morning light streaming through the back windows raked across Lincoln’s still face. Stanton closed the blinds and approached the president’s body. He took from his pocket a small knife or pair of scissors and bent over Lincoln’s head. Gently he cut a generous lock of hair—more than one hundred strands—and sealed it in a plain, white envelope. Stanton signed his name in ink on the upper right corner, and then addressed the envelope: “To Mrs. Welles.” The lock was not for him, but a gift for Mary Jane Welles, wife of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and one of Mary Lincoln’s few friends in Washington. In 1862, Mrs. Welles had helped nurse Willie Lincoln, ill with typhoid fever, until his death on February 20. Then, in the aftermath, Mary Jane did double duty, continuing to nurse Tad, also ill, while also caring for Mary Lincoln, helpless in her grief. Nine months later, in November 1863, the Welleses’ three-year-old son died of diphtheria. With that loss, Mary Jane Welles and Mary Lincoln shared a sadness that brought them even closer. Within an hour of the assassination, Mary Lincoln had dispatched messengers to summon Mary Jane to her side. Stanton knew that if any woman in Washington deserved a sacred lock of the martyr’s hair it was Mary Jane Welles. Later, Mrs. Welles framed the cherished relic with dried flowers that had adorned the president’s coffin at the White House funeral. Lost in reverie, Lincoln’s god of war gazed down at his fallen chief and wept. Abraham Lincoln was gone. “To the angels.”

  It was time to take him home. Stanton ordered soldiers to go quickly and bring what was necessary to transport the body of the slain president. He ordered another soldier to guard the door to the death room and to allow no one to enter and disturb the president’s body. When the soldiers returned from their errand and turned down Tenth Street, the crowd began to wail. The men carried a plain, pine box, the final refutation of their hopes. They knew already, of course, that the president was dead. They had seen the cabinet secretaries leave the house, and then Mary Lincoln. But the sight of the crude, improvised coffin made it too real. It was finished. The box looked like a shipping crate, not a proper coffin for a head of state. Lincoln would not have minded. He was always a man of simple tastes. This was the plain, roughly hewn coffin of a rail-splitter.

  The men carried the box up the curving stairs and down the narrow hallway. Stanton supervised them as they rested the box on the floor. They unfurled an American flag and approached the president’s naked body. They wrapped him in the cotton bunting, and, if they followed custom, were careful to position the canton’s thirty-six, five-pointed stars over his face. These were the national colors of the Union. During the war Lincoln insisted that the flag retain its full complement of stars, refusing to acknowledge that the seceded states had actually left the Union. They lifted the president from the bed, placed him in the box, and screwed down the lid. The only sound in the room was the squeaking of the screws being tightened in their holes.

  Stanton nodded in assent. In unison, the men bent down and inched their fingers under the bottom edges of the box; it had no pallbearers’ handles. They eased it up from the floor and began shuffling their feet down the narrow hallway to the front door. They carried the president into the street and loaded him onto the back of a simple, horse-drawn wagon. The driver snapped the reins and the modest procession, escorted by a small contingent of bareheaded officers on foot, took Abraham Lincoln home to the White House. There were no bands, drums, or trumpets, just the cadence of horses’ hooves and the footsteps of the officers. Lincoln would have liked the simplicity.

  After Lincoln’s body was removed, Stanton and the other members of the cabinet—save Seward—met in the back parlor of the Petersen house. Andrew Johnson was not present when Lincoln died, so the cabinet sent to him an official, written notification of the president’s death and of his succession to the presidency. They urged that the new president be sworn in immediately, and Johnson sent back word that he would be pleased to take the oath of office at 11:00 A.M. in his room at the Kirkwood. In the late morning of April 15, Chief Justice Chase and the officials in attendance found a changed man. Six weeks ago, an intoxicated Johnson had embarrassed himself by giving a foolish, rambling speech on Inauguration Day. Lincoln forgave him and said no more about it. The morning of Lincoln’s death found Johnson sober, grave, dignified, and deeply moved. Given the tragic and unprecedented circumstances of his elevation to the presidency, it was decided collectively that it would not be appropriate for him to deliver a formal, public inaugural address.

  Between the time Lincoln died and his body was removed from the Petersen house, the first newspaper account of the assassination hit the streets of Washington. The Daily Morning Chronicle announced the terrible news with a series of headlines: “MURDER OF President Lincoln. / ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE SECRETARY OF STATE. / MANNER OF ASSASSINATION / Safety of Other Members of the Cabinet. / Description of the Assassin / THE POLICE INVESTIGATION / THE SURGEONs’ LATEST REPORTS.”

  Suspecting that the president’s entire cabinet had been marked for death, and hearing that a would-be assassin had been scared off from Stanton’s home, Chronicle reporters had rushed to all of their homes to discover whether they had been attacked, too:

  It, therefore, is evident, that the aim of the plotters was to paralyze the country by at once striking down the head, the heart, and the arm of the country.

  We went in search of the Vice-President, and found he was safe in his apartments at the Kirkwood. We called at Chief Justice Chase’s and learned there, that he too was safe. Secretaries Stanton, Welles, and Usher, and … the other members of the Cabinet, were with the President … and we are gratified to be able to announce that all the members of the Cabinet, save Mr. Seward, are unharmed.

  This man Booth has played more than once at Ford’s theatre, and is, of course, acquainted with its exits and entrances, and the facility with which he escaped behind the scenes is well understood…. [Booth] has long been a man of intemperate habits and subject to temporary fits of great excitement. His capture is certain, but if he is true to his nature he will commit suicide, and thus appropriately end his career.

  Over the next few days, newspapers in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago published reams of unsubstantiated gossip. They tantalized readers by claiming that particular arrests were only days—even hours—away; readers assumed that high-level leaders of the Confederacy, including President Jefferson Davis, who was still at large, would be named as conspirators. One Washington paper boasted that more than one hundred criminals would face trial, and another wrote that certainly twenty-one and perhaps even twenty-three would hang. The public devoured every word and clamored for more.

  The news reached Elmira, New York, on the morning of April 15. John Cass, proprietor of a clothing store on the corner of Walter and Baldwin streets, took his morning paper, the Elmira Advertiser, at home, and by 7:30 A.M. he had read that the president had been assassinated but was still alive. He walked to the telegraph office opposite his store but there was no additional news. Then it came, a little after 9:00 A.M.; the president was dead. Cass crossed the street, and told his clerks to close for the day. Then he noticed a man crossing the street, making a beeline for Cass’s store. The man, dressed in a fashionable jacket that bespoke foreign tailoring, stepped inside. Cass thought he looked Canadian. The stranger asked for white shirts of a particular style and manufactu
rer. Cass, having none in stock, tried to interest the customer in other shirts. The man demurred, Cass recalled: “He examined them, but said he would rather have those of the make which he had been accustomed to wearing.”

  Cass said he had just received some “very bad news.”

  “What?” the customer asked.

  “Of the death of Abraham Lincoln,” Cass said.

  With that, John Surratt walked out of the store.

  THE BACK BEDROOM OF THE PETERSEN HOUSE WAS EMPTY FOR the first time in twelve hours. Stanton left the room unguarded. Unlike Ford’s Theatre, the house where Lincoln died was not a crime scene. No one collected the bloody sheets, pillowcases, pillows, and towels as evidence of the great crime. Soon one of the boarders, a photographer named Julius Ulke, set up his camera in the corner of the room, facing the bed. The bloodied linens, bathed in morning light, were still wet. Ulke’s haunting photograph of the death chamber, lost for nearly a century, preserved a scene that words cannot adequately describe.

  William Clark returned to the Petersen house and found his room in shambles. That night he climbed into Lincoln’s deathbed and fell asleep under the same coverlet that warmed the body of the dying president. Four days later, the day of Lincoln’s funeral, he wrote a letter to his sister, Ida F. Clark, in Boston:

  Morning, April 15, 1865. Lincoln’s deathbed shortly after his body was taken home to the White House.

  Since the death of our President hundreds daily call at the house to gain admission to my room.

  I was engaged nearly all of Sunday with one of Frank Leslie’s Special Artists aiding him viz making a correct drawing of the last moments of Mr. Lincoln, as I knew the position of every one present he succeeded in executing a fine sketch, which will appear in their paper the last of this week. He intends, from this same drawing to have some fine large steel engravings executed. He also took a sketch of nearly every article in my room which will appear in their paper. He wished to mention the names of all in particularly of yourself, Clara and Nannie, but I told him he must not do that, as they were members of my family and I did not want them to be made so public. He also urged me to give him my picture or at least allow him to take my sketch, but I could not see that either.

  Everybody has a great desire to obtain some memento from my room so that whoever comes in has to be closely watched for fear they will steal something.

  I have a lock of his hair which I have had neatly framed, also a piece of linen with a portion of his brain, the pillow case upon which he lay when he died and nearly all his wearing apparel but the latter I intend to send to Robt Lincoln as soon as the funeral is over, as I consider him the one most justly entitled to them

  The same matrass is on my bed, and the same coverlit covers me nightly that covered him while dying.

  Enclosed you will find a piece of lace that Mrs. Lincoln wore on her head during the evening and was dropped by her while entering my room to see her dying husband. It is worth keeping for its historical value.

  William Petersen, the previous night merely the anonymous owner of one of several hundred equally anonymous boardinghouses scattered throughout the nation’s capital, had become, by early morning, proprietor of the famous “house where Lincoln died.” That unwelcome honor—and the rabid attention of newspaper reporters and curiosity seekers—displeased him. In particular Petersen resented the implication that the president had died dishonorably, not at the Executive Mansion, but in a shabby boardinghouse. Lincoln would not have complained. Eighteen years ago he began his Washington career in another boardinghouse not much different from the one where it ended. Elected to Congress in 1846, Lincoln came to Washington for the first time in 1847 and moved into Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse across the street from the Capitol not far from First and East Capitol streets. There was no shame in it then. Lincoln would have felt no shame in dying in one now.

  LITTLE MORE THAN AN HOUR BEFORE LINCOLN DIED, GEORGE Atzerodt arose from his humble quarters at the Pennsylvania House and left the hotel. A servant just back from fetching a carriage to take a woman to the 6:15 A.M. train ran into him outside:

  “What brings you out so early this morning?”

  “Well,” Atzerodt replied, “I have got business.”

  When Atzerodt walked past Creaser’s house on F Street, between Eighth and Ninth streets, opposite the Patent Office, and along Booth’s escape route just two blocks from Ford’s Theatre, he tossed his knife under a wood carriage step, into the gutter. A few minutes later, an eagle-eyed woman looking out a third-story window in the building next to Creaser’s shoe store saw it there and sent a black woman to get it. But the woman did not want the knife in her house so a passerby, William Clendenin, volunteered to take the clue, still in its sheath, to Almarin C. Richards, the chief of police.

  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. Stanton 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.

  EDWINM. 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 act
ors 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.”