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

by James L. Swanson

  Booth’s second letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” was his political manifesto that described his love for the Confederacy, his hatred of Lincoln, and his scorn for the black man. In the aftermath of the assassination, the text was incriminating, sensational, and even explosive:

  Right or wrong, God judge me, not man. For be my motive good or bad, of one thing I am sure, the lasting condemnation of the North.

  I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression. For four years I have waited, hoped and prayed, for the dark clouds to break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine. To wait longer would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead… God’s will be done. I go to see, and share the bitter end.

  I have ever held the South were right. The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln four years ago, spoke plainly, war—war upon Southern rights and institutions. His election proved it …

  People of the North, to hate tyranny, to love liberty, and justice, to strike at wrong and oppression, was the teaching of our fathers…

  This country was formed for the white, not for the black man …

  My love… is for the South alone. Nor do I deem it a dishonor, in attempting to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much misery.

  A Confederate, doing duty upon his own responsibility.

  J Wilkes Booth

  Improvidently, John Sleeper Clarke brought the documents to John Millward, the U.S. marshal in Philadelphia, and then showed them to an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. Clarke, with little concern for the welfare of his pregnant wife or the rest of the Booth family, tried to protect himself by publicizing the manuscripts. Millward forbade publication of the letter to Booth’s mother, fearing it might elicit sympathy for the assassin. But he allowed the Inquirer to publish the manifesto, which it did on April 19, under a series of excited headlines: “Letter of John Wilkes Booth”; “Proof that he Meditated His Crime Months Ago”; “Confesses That He was Engaged in a Plot to Capture and Carry Off the President”; “A Secession Rhapsody.”

  Clarke’s foolish act provoked the opposite of its intended effect. Like a fire bell in the night, the document summoned swarms of detectives to his door. Asia was furious: “Mr. J. S. Clarke thoughtlessly gave that enclosed letter alluding to a kidnapping scheme to Mr. Stockton, his personal friend and the reporter of a daily paper, and, as every shred of news was voraciously accepted, the letter was published, and arrests followed in quick succession.” It was only Clarke’s first betrayal. He was ashamed of the Booth name now. Soon he would tell Asia that they must divorce to save his reputation and acting career. John Wilkes Booth had never liked his brother-in-law. Indeed, when Clarke proposed to Asia, Booth warned her that Clarke was an opportunist who sought to exploit their name to further his own stage career. “Always bear in mind that you are a professional stepping-stone,” Booth warned her. “Our father’s name is a power … in the land. It is dower enough for a struggling actor.”

  John Sleeper Clarke did not deflect suspicion—he excited it. What else, government detectives wondered, might the bowels of that Philadelphia mansion give up in addition to the assassin’s stunning declaration? Asia described the frenzied manhunters: “It was like the days of the Bastille in France. Arrests were made suddenly and in dead of night…. Detectives, women and men, decoys, and all that vile rabble of human bloodhounds infested the city.” John Sleeper Clarke was seized, taken to Washington, and imprisoned in the Old Capitol for a month.

  Asia described how detectives swarmed her home: “This unfortunate publication, so useless now when the scheme had failed—and it led to no fresh discoveries—brought a host of miseries, for it not only served for food to newsmongers and enemies, but it directed a free band of male and female detectives to our house…. My house, which was an extensive (MYSTERIOUSLY BUILT, it was now called) old mansion, was searched; then, without warning, surprised by a full body of police, surrounded, and searched again. We were under hourly surveillance from outside … our letters were few, but they were opened, and no trouble taken to conceal that they had been read first.”

  Edwin Booth wrote frequently to his sister during the manhunt. “Think no more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as soon he must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”

  The authorities ransacked the house and confiscated anything connected to John Wilkes Booth, including family books, photographs, and documents that had nothing to do with the assassination. Asia catalogued the violations. “All information contained in his criticisms, letters, playbills and theatrical records, has been lost in the general destruction of papers and effects belonging to Wilkes Booth. All written or printed material found in our possession, everything that bore his name was given up, even the little picture of himself, hung over my babies’ beds in the nursery. He had placed it there himself saying, ‘Remember me, babies, in your prayers.’ Not a vestige remains of aught that belonged to him; his books of music were stolen, seized, or savagely destroyed.”

  In Maryland, in the early-morning hours of April 20, two separate teams of manhunters were planning another raid and were closing in on George Atzerodt. He had spent the last four nights at Hartman Rich-ter’s place, heedless of the great peril he faced. He didn’t know that Booth had signed the conspirators’ names to an assassins’ declaration—luckily for him John Matthews had destroyed it—but he should have suspected by now that detectives would have searched his room at the Kirkwood and discovered his connection to Booth, and thus the others. He should have fled but instead, foolishly, he tarried at his cousin’s. Hartman Richter remembered George’s casual behavior. “He remained at my house from Sunday till Thursday morning, and occupied himself with walking about, working in the garden a little, and going among the neighbors. He did not attempt to get away, or hide himself.”

  Nor did he attempt to be discreet. His Easter dinner conversation about the assassination, especially his strange comment about a man following Grant onto the train, seemed too knowing to one of Hezekiah Metz’s guests, Nathan Page. Three days later, on Wednesday, April 19, Page mentioned the suspicious story to a local Union informant, James Purdum. Purdum passed the tip to Union forces at Monocacy Junction, and when Captain Solomon Townsend of the First Delaware Cavalry heard it, he took action. Townsend ordered Sergeant Zachariah W. Gemmill to pick up Purdum as a guide, go to the Richters’, and arrest Atzerodt.

  A second group of manhunters also targeted the Richter place on the morning of April 20. James L. McPhail, the highly effective U.S. Army provost marshal of Maryland, was also in pursuit. McPhail had been active in the manhunt since the night of Lincoln’s assassination, when Stanton suspected that Booth might be headed to Baltimore. McPhail had already contributed to the arrests of Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlen on April 17. And unfortunately for George Atzerodt, his brother John, and his brother-in-law, John L. Smith, both served on McPhail’s staff. John Atzerodt was a patriot and felt duty bound to help McPhail capture his fugitive brother. He reported that George was known to visit their cousin Hartman Richter in Montgomery County. Perhaps, John suggested, McPhail might find him there. The provost marshal ordered detectives to raid Richter’s place.

  But Sergeant Gemmill and six cavalrymen under his command got there first, at about 4:00 A.M. Gemmill knocked on the door, and, before Richter would open it, he asked twice who it was. Gemmill was impatient: “I told him to come and see.” When Richter came to the door, Gemmill asked him if a man named Atwood—the alias that Atzerodt used at Metz’s place—was there. The man had been there, Richter said, but he had left for Frederick, Maryland. When Gemmill said that he would search the house anyway, Richter admitted that Atzerodt was upstairs in bed. Richter’s wife chimed in that there were three men up there. Gemmill, holding a candle or lamp, went upstairs with two cavalrymen. They found the hapless Atzerodt in bed. He surrendered meekly, not even asking why he was being taken.
r />   Soon, under questioning by Provost Marshal McPhail, Atzerodt confessed. McPhail didn’t even have to squeeze him. Atzerodt had asked for the meeting. George told him about the room at the Kirkwood House and the coat, the pistol, and the knife. They all belonged to David Herold, Atzerodt claimed. He described how he threw his knife away in the streets of Washington the morning Lincoln died and how he had pawned his pistol in Georgetown. He revealed the kidnapping plot and how it progressed into murder. He described the conspirators’ final meeting at the Herndon House. And he implicated Mary Surratt and Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. Atzerodt’s capture was a coup. Now the War Department, in addition to seizing Mary Surratt, Samuel Arnold, and Michael O’Laughlen, had in its clutches two of the four men—Powell and Atzerodt—who were actually present at the Herndon House assassination conference.

  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

  of 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.

  Chapter Seven

  “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 man hunters 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 ri
de 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 whistled 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.