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

by James L. Swanson

  Killing the horses was the third time since the assassination that David Herold gave up the chance to abandon John Wilkes Booth. On the night of April 14, he kept their rendezvous at Soper’s Hill when he could have fled and gone into hiding. On the fifteenth, when he rode from Dr. Mudd’s to the vicinity of Bryantown, he could have left Booth behind at the farm and kept riding. Now, in the pine thicket, all he had to do was kill one of the horses, mount the other, and gallop away. Without the lame actor—who, after all, was the main prey of the manhunters—Herold had a better chance of melting into the countryside.

  Davey returned to the thicket and sat on the ground beside his master. Never during their escape were they more alone and vulnerable. If Union cavalry descended upon them now, they would not be able to make a run for it. Even two healthy, well-rested men, which Booth and Herold were not, could never outrun a mounted pursuit. And if Thomas Jones decided to abandon them, how would they find a boat to cross the river? They kept low to the ground and waited for nightfall.

  Marooned in this desolate place, did Booth reminisce about happier days, when he and his beloved sister, Asia, played as carefree teenagers in the forests of Bel Air, Maryland? Once upon a time, before he became a famous actor and a denizen of America’s great cities, Booth loved to commune with nature. Asia’s bittersweet memories of their frolics haunted her in the days following the assassination: “In the woods he would throw himself face downward and nestle his nose close into the earth, taking long sniffs of ‘the earth’s healthy breath’ … [h]e declared this process of inhaling wholesome odors and rich scents was delightful … [h]e called it ‘burrowing,’ and he loved to nibble at sweet roots and twigs, so that I called him rabbit.”

  As darkness fell for the second night over Booth’s lonely, pine thicket encampment, did he remember another night among the pines of another time and place, a magical Halloween eve with Asia that was eerily like this one? “It was a cold, dark night,” she reminisced, “with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth—which may be the odor of good men’s bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying—the aroma of the pines, and the rapturous sense of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing ‘Te Deum Laudamus.’”

  There would be no joyous song tonight. Instead, Booth and Herold murmured quietly, most likely talking of their crimes and speculating on their fate. What would they do? What would tomorrow bring? When would they cross over the river and find rest on the other side? When Booth smelled the forested scent of the thicket, did its sweet, piney odor take him back to a time of youthful innocence and allow him, briefly, to forget murders and manhunts? In the black safety of the night, Booth and Herold rolled out their coarse, woolen blankets and slumbered, close to the earth.

  IN WASHINGTON THAT NIGHT, THE INHABITANTS OF MARY Surratt’s boardinghouse prepared for bed, too. The manhunters had been here before. When detectives came to 541 H Street on April 14, just a few hours after the assassination, they left empty-handed. Their quarry, John H. Surratt, was not at home, and John Wilkes Booth was not found hiding there. But tonight the authorities came back, in the evening again, at a time when Mary and Anna Surratt and their boarders were likely to be home. The manhunters were desperate. Three days after the assassination, John Wilkes Booth was still on the run. They had uncovered plenty of clues to prove that he was the assassin, was the head of a conspiracy, and had probably fled south to Maryland, but they had no fresh clues about his present whereabouts. And Seward’s assassin remained a mystery man—Stanton did not even know his name. The War Department suspected John Surratt of the Seward attack but had no proof. Someone at that boardinghouse must know something about the assassination, Stanton and his subordinates reasoned. Booth had been a regular caller and was John Surratt’s friend. It was time to go back and squeeze harder. It was about 11:00 P.M. on April 17.

  Colonel H. H. Wells sent Major H. W. Smith to the boardinghouse to arrest the residents and search the premises. When Smith arrived, he posted a few men outside and told the rest to follow him up the stairs to the front door. He rang the bell, and Mary Surratt came to an open window and asked, “Is that you, Mr. Kirby?” She thought it was a neighbor. Smith said it wasn’t Kirby and told her to open the door. When she did, Smith stepped into the hall.

  “Are you Mrs. Surratt?”

  “I am the widow of John H. Surratt.”

  And, Smith continued, “the mother of John H. Surratt, Jr.?”

  “I am.”

  “I come to arrest you and all in your house, and take you, for examination, to General Augur’s headquarters.”

  It was odd, Smith recalled later, that Mrs. Surratt “did not ask even for what she was arrested,” and that she “expressed no surprise or feeling at all.”

  While Smith and his men questioned the residents and prepared to transport them by carriage to General Augur’s headquarters, another official arrived at about 11:30 P.M. It was R. C. Morgan, under War Department orders from Colonel Olcott to, as Morgan put it, “superintend the seizing of papers and the arrest of the inmates of the house.” By the time Morgan got there Smith and his team had already made the arrests, and the boarders were gathered in the parlor, ready to leave.

  Morgan called for a carriage to transport the women, went back into the house, and closed the front door. Soon a man walking down H Street stopped at number 541, looked the house over, and walked up the front steps. He didn’t notice the men standing nearby in the street. He got to the front door and knocked, then rang the bell. Morgan and Captain Wermerskirch opened the door. Before them stood a large, powerful-looking man, toting a pickax. The man was dressed in a gray coat, black pantaloons, and a fine pair of boots, and he wore atop his head an odd little makeshift hat cut from a shirtsleeve. As soon as the man stepped into the hall Morgan shut the door behind him.

  The man sensed that something was wrong.

  “I guess I am mistaken.”

  “Whom do you want to see?”

  “Mrs. Surratt.”

  “You are right: walk in.”

  Morgan peppered the late-night caller with questions:

  “I asked him what he came there at this time of night for. He said he came to dig a gutter: Mrs. Surratt had sent for him. I asked him when.

  “In the morning,” the man replied. Morgan asked where he last worked. “Sometimes on I Street.”

  Morgan asked where he boarded. “He said he had no boarding house; he was a poor man, who got his living with the pick.”

  “How much do you make a day?” Morgan asked. “Sometimes nothing at all, sometimes a dollar, sometimes a dollar and a half.”

  “Have you any money?” “Not a cent”

  Morgan asked the man why he came at this time of night to work, and he replied that he called just to find out what time he should start work in the morning. The man claimed that he had no previous connection to Mrs. Surratt; she had seen him working in the neighborhood, knew he was a poor man, and offered him work. Morgan asked how old he was.

  “About twenty.”

  Where was he from?

  “Fauquier County, Virginia.”

  The man pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. It was an oath of allegiance to the Union, the type signed by former Confederate soldiers. Powell had signed it “L. Paine.” He had just stumbled into the War Department’s raid in progress. But Smith, Morgan, Wermerskirch, and the others didn’t realize it yet.

  The officers noticed that his clothes, while soiled, were much too fine to belong to a day laborer. Their suspicions grew as the man stammered more excuses. William Seward’s assassin was a big, young, strong man, too.

  Major Smith stepped to the doorway to the front parlor where Mary was sitting and asked her to come into the hall: “Mrs. Surratt, will you step here for a minute?” When she came out, Lewis Powell was standing no more than three paces from her, near a gaslight fixture, and, as Smith remembered, “the gas was turned o
n at full head.”

  “Do you know this man? And did you hire him to come and dig a gutter for you?”

  It was the man she knew as Reverend Wood! Mary must have shuddered at the sight of him. No, not him, she likely cried silently. Her eyes locked upon the stranger’s in recognition. Powell’s remarkable face was unforgettable, and he had been to her home at least twice before.

  Mary raised her right hand as if swearing an oath. “Before God, sir, I do not know this man; and I have never seen him, and did not hire him to dig a gutter for me.”

  Powell looked at Mary and said nothing.

  Lewis Powell had been caught in a lie. Soon, George Alfred Townsend would make fun of his transparent cover story: “That night he dug a trench deep and broad enough for them to lie in forever.” Now Powell was trapped in the house. The soldiers had closed the front door behind him; in moments they would try to seize and arrest him. But unless they all moved at once—took him by surprise, tackled him in unison—they might lose their advantage. Technically, Powell was unarmed. He had abandoned his broken revolver on Seward’s floor and his knife, which he had dropped on the street in front of the secretary’s house, was in the hands of the government. He carried no more than a workman’s tool. But his prodigious strength could turn that tool into a deadly weapon. The pickax’s oak butt was a stout club, and its twin, spear-tipped iron points deadly, stabbing prongs. In Powell’s hands this humble tool was the equivalent of a primitive, close-combat pole arm from the Middle Ages.

  The odds seemed against him; five men against one, confined in a compact foyer. But the tight space favored Powell. The soldiers began to press closer, and the closer they got, the more harm he could do. They were all within his killing range now.

  If Powell chose to fight, the clock would start ticking at the first blow If he was quick, he could administer a second, skull-smashing strike by the time their hands reached for their holster flaps, and perhaps manage even a third swing of the pick before the survivors could draw, cock, and raise their revolvers. If Powell were lucky, he might deliver a fourth blow before a soldier could jerk the trigger and get off the first panicked, hurried shot. If the bullet went wild, or hit him but failed to kill him instantly, Powell could respond with a fifth, mighty swing of the ax.

  He could do all of this in less than ten seconds and when it was over, he could, just as he had at Seward’s, step past the broken bodies of men with crushed skulls and gaping wounds and walk out Mrs. Surratt’s front door into the night. Powell glared at the soldiers. He could swing that ax quicker than they could draw their pistols. It was his move.

  Then the mighty Lewis Powell did something extraordinary. Inexplicably, meekly, without protest, he surrendered without a fight.

  The soldiers arrested Powell, Mary Surratt, her daughter Anna, Louis Weichmann, a friend of John Surratt’s, and the rest of the boarders, including the terrified little Miss Appolonia Dean, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl who lived alone without her parents at Mary Surratt’s.

  The soldiers searched the house and uncovered, or so they believed, additional incriminating evidence: photographs of Confederate generals—one of President Jefferson Davis, some stray small-arms ammunition, a bullet mold. And the coup de grâce—a picture of John Wilkes Booth, hidden behind a picture frame.

  Powell and Mary Surratt were taken to General Augur’s headquarters for questioning. Before leaving the boardinghouse, Mary Surratt begged Colonel Wells to allow her to say a prayer. She fell to her knees and prayed silently.

  If Lewis Powell had not blundered into the government’s hands this night, he might have escaped Washington and vanished from history. Instead, the government celebrated his capture as the first major break in the manhunt. The capture of Seward’s assassin on the third night since Good Friday was a triumph, secondary in importance only to finding the archfiend, John Wilkes Booth. Rival Washington photographers salivated at the prospect of taking the first photos of Lewis Powell and selling copies to a public desperate for news and images of the great crime. But Stanton wasn’t quite ready to grant permission. With Booth, Herold, Atzerodt, and John Surratt still at large, forcing Powell to pose for souvenir photos while the manhunt was still under way might come across as an act of premature celebration. There would be time later for photos—of all of them.

  Wells tried to question Powell but the laconic assassin refused to cooperate. The colonel noticed bloodstains on his shirt cuffs.

  “What do you think of that?” Wells taunted him.

  “That’s not blood,” Powell weakly claimed.

  Within hours of Powell’s arrest, William Bell, Seward’s servant, identified Powell as the knife-wielding maniac. And when Gus Seward came to see him, he was instructed to grab hold of Powell just as he had during the attack. Then Wells ordered Powell to say two words to Gus: “I’m mad.” Yes, Seward, affirmed, this was the man.

  Henry Wells wanted to interrogate Mary shortly after her arrest so she would have little time to reflect, and to craft well-rehearsed answers to his questions. Perhaps the experienced lawyer and officer was expecting an easily intimidated woman whom he could browbeat into revealing all she knew about her son, about John Wilkes Booth, and about the other conspirators. If so, Wells was wrong. Mary Surratt proved his match, behaved coolly, and divulged no clues to help the manhunters track Booth. At the outset, she admitted freely facts that she was sure Wells already knew from other sources, especially her connection to Booth: “[Booth] has been coming to our house about two months; sometimes he called twice a day; we found him very much a gentleman. I think my son invited him home…. My son is a country-bred young gentleman. I was not surprised that he should make the acquaintance of such a man as Mr. Booth because I consider him capable of forming acquaintances in the best society.” Wells began the interrogation:

  “What was it that brought your son and J. Wilkes Booth together?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has not the question occurred to you since the murder?”

  “Yes, Sir; but I could not account for it, and I think no one could be more surprised than we were that he should be guilty of such an act.”

  Wells questioned her about John Surratt’s connection to Booth’s other conspirators.

  “Don’t you know of his making the acquaintance of a Mr. Atzerodt?”

  “He was a German, I think. The name he gave me was ‘Port Tobacco.’ He remained only part of a week, when I found some liquor in his room; no gentleman can board with me who keeps liquor in his rooms.”

  Wells shifted the interrogation to the subject of Lewis Powell. The colonel suspected that he had visited the boardinghouse recently posing as a minister named “Wood.”

  “What was the name of the other young man?”

  “I think his name was Wood.”

  Wells showed her a photograph of David Herold and she denied knowing him. That much was true. Neither Booth nor John Surratt had ever brought Herold to the boardinghouse. Wells continued to play cat and mouse with Mary, inviting her to name other visitors to her home and implying that she might as well tell him because he already knew the answers. “I assure you on the honor of a lady that I would not tell you an untruth.” Unimpressed, Wells countered, “I assure you, on the honor of a gentleman, I shall get this information from you.” But Wells wasn’t getting anywhere. He took a break. “Reflect a moment, and I will send for a glass of water for you,” he told Mary. After an aide served her, Wells asked a number of apparently innocuous questions about horses before shifting suddenly to the real subject of his interest—Lewis Powell.

  “Did you meet the young man arrested this evening within two or three days and make an arrangement with him to come to your house this evening.”

  “No, Sir; the ruffian that was in my door when I came away? He was a tremendous hard fellow with a skull cap on, and my daughter commenced crying, and said these gentlemen [Major Smith’s raiding party] came to save our lives. I hope they arrested him.”

  “
He tells me now that he met you in the street and you engaged him to come to your house.”

  “Oh! Oh! It is not so, Sir; for I believe he would have murdered everyone, I assure you.”

  “When did you see him first?”

  “Just as the carriage drew up, he rang the door bell, and my daughter said, ‘Oh! There is a murderer.’”

  Perhaps Wells appreciated the ironic truth of Mary Surratt’s statement. Indeed, she was correct. Powell was a killer, but one who posed no threat to Mary Surratt, her daughter, or the occupants of H Street. During her interview with Colonel Wells, Mary stonewalled the experienced investigator and served Booth well. Yes, she had admitted the Atzerodt connection, but the manhunters had known about that for three days. On the night of the assassination, John Fletcher had identified Atzerodt’s bridle and recognized the one-eyed horse, and detectives had also connected him to Booth from their search of the German’s room at the Kirkwood House. But Mary Surratt did not tell Henry Wells about Booth’s April 14 visit to her, the field glasses, her carriage ride to Surrattsville, the “shooting irons”—or that she had seen Lewis Powell before.

  The interrogation over—for now—Wells refused to allow Mary to return home. He told her that she was still under arrest, and that he was sending her to the Old Capitol prison, where she would join the many other suspects and witnesses arrested after the president’s murder. Although she did not suspect it this night, Mary Surratt would never see her boardinghouse again.