defaced with sentiments of the moment.
In that case, wondered Wells, how was Mudd able to provide such an accurate description of the stranger? The doctor’s report was remarkably well observed: “He had a pretty full forehead and his skin was fair. He was very pale when I saw him, and appeared as if accustomed to in-door rather than outdoor life.” Moreover, the man had a moustache and a “long, heavy beard”; it was even longer than Colonel Wells’s own substantial one, Mudd asserted. But unfortunately, Mudd apologized, he could not determine whether it was a natural or artificial beard. Finally, Mudd confirmed, the man did shave off the moustache after he was given the razor. The doctor even described the qualities of the stranger’s hair. And he saw the eyes. All very interesting details about a face Mudd claimed he never saw.
Yes, Mudd admitted, he had met Booth before, but he swore that the injured man was not Lincoln’s assassin. And, he added, not only did the man in the photo not look like the stranger, he did not even look like John Wilkes Booth! “A photograph of Booth was … shown me by a detective, but I did not observe any resemblance between the two men, though I must say that I have very often been shown likenesses of intimate friends, and failed to recognize them by their pictures.”
One of the detectives interrupted the interrogation to give Wells a piece of evidence no one had told him about—John Wilkes Booth’s boot, fresh from Mudd’s farmhouse. Wells stared at the boot and, frustrated, feigning concern for the doctor’s well-being, issued a warning: “I said it seemed to me that he was concealing the facts, and that I did not know whether he understood that that was the strongest evidence of his guilt that could be produced at that time, and that might endanger his safety.”
It was now midafternoon. Wells had been at Mudd for three hours straight and still could not break him. “He did not seem unwilling to answer a direct question that I asked; but I discovered almost immediately, that, unless I did ask the direct question, important facts were omitted.” Wells pressed on relentlessly. His strategy was not to threaten the doctor overtly, but to keep him talking for several hours until he wore him down. The doctor offered gossipy, trivial details of no value to the manhunters: “They paid me $25.00 for my services, which they rather pressed me to accept. I told them a small fee would answer.” Although the men stayed at his place for fifteen hours, Mudd claimed that he hardly spoke to them at all: “I had very little conversation with these men during the day.”
Wells wondered if Mudd had noticed Booth’s prominent tattoo, the initials “JWB” inked boldly between the thumb and forefinger of the actor’s left hand. Cleverly, the doctor denied seeing the hand at all: “My examination was quite short … I did not observe his hand to see whether it was small or large.” Or, implicitly, whether it was tattooed. Mudd repeated his tale about sending Booth and Herold off in the direction of Piney Chapel: “Before they left they inquired the way to Rev. Mr. Wil-mer’s … he is regarded by neighbors as a Union man.” In any event Mudd did not see which way they went: “I did not see the parties when they left in the afternoon … I did not go out.” And, by the way, “I have always called myself a Union man, though I have never voted with the administration party.”
Mudd cautioned Wells that the pale stranger was well armed, but said nothing about Davey’s Spencer carbine: “The injured man had a belt with two revolvers in it concealed under his clothing, which I discovered when he got into bed after having his wound dressed.” It was late in the afternoon. Wells had questioned Dr. Mudd—and the doctor had parried him—for close to six hours. The colonel produced another carte-de-visite photograph of Lincoln’s assassin and told Mudd to look at it carefully. Do you or do you not recognize him as the stranger? Wells demanded. No, that was not the man. On second thought, Mudd admitted it. He said that he realized it just now. Yes, the stranger was John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln’s assassin had taken refuge at his farm. And, either intentionally or unwittingly, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd had helped him escape.
As Colonel Wells brought the interview to a close around 6:00 P.M. on Friday, April 21, he mentioned a little formality that he would take care of. To avoid confusion, and to make things clear, he would write out a statement of Mudd’s testimony. The doctor was free to go. But would he please return to Bryantown on Saturday to sign it? As Mudd departed, Colonel Henry Wells spoke ominously: “One of the strongest circumstances against you is, that you have failed to give early information, as you might have done, in this matter.”
Mudd, exhausted by the morning’s questioning by Lieutenant Lovett, followed by six more hours with Colonel Wells, rode home. He had accomplished his mission. Tonight, in a few hours, Booth and Herold would land safely in Virginia, far from the reach of Colonel Wells, Lieutenant Lovett and his detectives, and Lieutenant Dana and the Thirteenth New York Cavalry. They had lost the assassin’s scent and would never pick it up again. Unless other manhunters picked up Booth’s trail soon and continued the chase, he would escape. Soon, unless somebody stopped him, John Wilkes Booth would vanish into the Deep South. Once that happened, Union forces would never find him. Mudd had played a large role in helping Booth escape Maryland. Soon, however, he would pay a terrible price for his lies.
ONCE JOHN WILKES BOOTH ATTEMPTED TO CROSS THE POtomac on Thursday the twentieth, and finally reached Virginia early on Sunday the twenty-third, the sanctuary of Thomas Jones’s Huckleberry did not survive long undisturbed. Union detectives suspected that a man of Jones’s reputation must know something about Booth’s escape and they arrested him. But they had no evidence, and, true to his character, he volunteered nothing. The troops confined Jones at the Bryantown Tavern, locking him up in a second-floor, back bedroom. Like the Surratt’s tavern, the Bryantown establishment served as a way station for mysterious, wartime Confederate intrigues.
The detectives didn’t know it, but they had, in a sense, conveyed Thomas Jones to a scene of the crime. At this very tavern, in a first-floor parlor below the bedroom that served as the river ghost’s ersatz jail, John Wilkes Booth met with Samuel Mudd and rebel agent Thomas Harbin when the actor plotted his madcap scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. The detectives also ensnared Captain Cox in their dragnet. Oswell Swann, who guided the fugitives to Rich Hill early on Easter morning, Sunday, April 16, gave information against the captain. Cox insisted that when the two strangers came to his door, he dismissed them and ordered them on their way. But Swann disputed him and swore that Cox invited the criminals into his home, where they spent several hours. The detectives locked up Cox with Jones and posted two guards outside their door. Before they went to sleep on the floor, their heads resting on their saddles, Cox turned to his good friend and experienced secret agent for advice. “What shall I do, Tom?” he whispered in the dark. “Stick to what you have said,” counseled Jones, “and admit nothing else.”
The detectives, frustrated at their lack of progress, tried to trick Jones into confessing by loitering in the yard below his bedroom window and talking loudly about his forthcoming and imminent hanging. Still Jones would not talk. Even when transferred to the dreaded Old Capitol prison, site of his former, devastating incarceration, and current home to John T. Ford, Junius Brutus Booth, John Sleeper Clarke, and many others ensnared by the manhunt, he refused to provide any information about John Wilkes Booth. During the wagon ride from Bryantown to Washington, an unsubtle government agent had tried, once again, to loosen his captive’s tongue with alcohol. Detective Franklin genially offered a bottle of whiskey, which Jones pretended to drink. When the officer saw that his prisoner refused to get drunk, he cursed him all the way to the capital.
The detectives failed to realize it, but when they arrested Jones, they also captured an eyewitness who possessed intimate knowledge of how he helped Booth and Herold. But they could never make her talk. Jones was forced to leave her behind in Bryantown, but he laughed at the detectives’ ignorance about their valuable prize—his horse: “This mare was the same one Booth had ridden from the pines to the river that memorable …
night. She was a flea-bitten gray, named Kit. Had her complicity been known, what an object of interest she would have been.” Instead, Kit lived out the rest of her days in quiet anonymity.
Jones knew he possessed the trump card that he could play to outbluff the detectives: not a single eyewitness could place him in the company of Booth and Herold. Whenever he had traveled to and from the pine thicket, he always rode alone. When he had guided the assassins to the boat at Dent’s Meadow, he did it alone, and no one saw him coming or going. As long as Samuel Cox and the captain’s son kept faith and did not implicate him, the detectives could not make a case against him. Booth and Herold were the only ones who could betray Jones. But Booth had vowed to die before being taken alive. Eventually, Jones reasoned, the government would have to release him.
And that is exactly what happened. Freed in the aftermath of the manhunt, Thomas A. Jones passed from memory and, eventually, from history as a forgotten footnote, merely one of the hundreds of men and women arrested, never charged, and soon released during the great manhunt of April 1865. Captain Cox, too, won his liberty. Oswell Swann was the only witness against him. Cox’s loyal servant girl, Mary, denounced Oswell as a liar and swore that Booth never entered the house. Jones guessed correctly that the two conflicting black witnesses canceled out each other: “Mary’s positive and persistent declaration that Booth had not entered the house—unshaken by threats or offered bribes—saved Cox’s life when it hung in the balance.” When the ever-observant Jones, peering out from a window of the Old Capitol, spotted Swann leaving the prison, heading for the Navy Yard Bridge and Maryland beyond, he knew that Cox was safe. Jones informed his relieved friend, “You have nothing more to fear. The only witness against you has been dismissed and is going home.”
THOMAS JONES RETURNED TO HUCKLEBERRY AND KEPT JOHN Wilkes Booth’s secret for nearly twenty years. Because of his silence, the saga of Booth’s missing “lost week” remained a puzzle, indeed, the chief unsolved mystery of the twelve-day chase for Lincoln’s killer. Then, in 1883, George Alfred Townsend vowed to solve the mystery. Townsend, friend of Mark Twain, and a leading journalist of the nineteenth century, and one of the best writers who covered the Civil War, reported the Lincoln assassination for a newspaper and also wrote a vivid, luridly entertaining book about John Wilkes Booth. Possessed by the assassination and the manhunt, Townsend could not let go. Beginning in April 1865 and continuing on and off for the next two decades, he haunted the scenes of the crime, tracked down many of the Southerners who helped Booth during the chase, and interviewed a number of the MANHUNTERS. Townsend collected obscure names and facts that would have been lost to history without his detective work.
In 1883, during his third attempt to retrace Booth’s escape route, Townsend coaxed Judge Frederick Stone, in 1865 a defense counsel at the trial of several of Booth’s conspirators, and now a U.S. congressman, to talk about Booth’s notorious lost week. Stone confessed that there was a man who hid Booth and Herold and helped them cross the Potomac. This man was still alive. Perhaps, after all these years, he would talk to Townsend. The tip elated the journalist, whose scoop-seeking sensibilities alerted him to the value of breaking the story on the great mystery of the manhunt. But Stone refused to name Booth’s savior. In Port Tobacco, the very place where Thomas Jones had refused to betray the assassin for $100,000, Townsend persuaded several young locals, including members of Captain Cox’s family, to divulge the elusive name. Townsend wrote a letter to Jones: “I am a writer for the press and, sometimes, of books. It might be of mutual advantage for us to meet.”
He courted Jones with letters until, finally, the aging but still quickwitted veteran agreed to meet in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 11, 1883, to reveal his story. There, in room 52 of the Barnum Hotel, Jones broke his lifelong silence and told the story that, eighteen years ago, he refused to confess under threat of death or sell for a reward of $100,000. The times were different now, thought Jones. He could not harm John Wilkes Booth now. And he was an old man. If he did not preserve his memories soon, the story of his great adventure would follow him to the grave. Too many stories of the War of the Rebellion had already died with their tellers. Townsend sat spellbound as Jones regaled him until almost midnight with the thrilling, hitherto-lost tale of the pine thicket and the Potomac crossing. Jones so mesmerized Townsend that the writer beseeched him to meet again the next day to continue the story. Jones agreed. For the interview, and for the coveted, once-priceless knowledge that could have brought Thomas Jones sudden death—or instant riches—George Alfred Townsend paid him the grand sum of sixty dollars.
Later, several years after Townsend wrote about Jones, another journalist staged a dramatic reunion of the river ghost and Captain Williams. Modestly, Jones wondered if the captain would even remember him. Williams recognized him instantly: “Of course I remember you. I can never forget that come-to-the-Lord-and-be-saved expression you wear now and then. But if I had known then what I do now, how different things would have been! Why, you ought to be shot! If you had told me where Booth was you would have been the biggest man in America, and would have had money by the flour barrel full.”
Jones demurred, just as he did that day long ago at Brawner’s Tavern: “Yes, and a conscience full of purgatory, and the everlasting hatred of the people I loved. No, Captain, I never the first time thought of betraying Booth. After he was placed in my hands I determined to die before I would betray him … how could I give up the life of that poor devil over there in the pine thicket hovering between life and death.”
The captain said that Jones didn’t fool him then: “Myself and the other officers believed that you knew more than you would tell, but that sanctimonious look of yours saved you.” Williams elaborated: “I remember when I made the offer … in the saloon he was standing next to me at the bar and I could not detect the least movement or change of face. There was something which told me he knew where Booth was, or could give us which could lead to his capture, but he couldn’t be worked. No amount of money or glory would have tempted him. No human being can read his face and tell what is passing in his mind. It is like a stone.”
In April 1894, the twenty-ninth anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, an old man ambled up Tenth Street in Washington, D.C., until he stopped in front of house number 453. The rectangular wood, painted signboard attached to the famous brick house read: “THIS HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN DIED CONTAINS THE OLDROYD LINCOLN MEMORIAL COLLECTION OF OVER 3,000. ARTICLES RELATING TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN. OPEN ALL HOURS DAY & EVENING. ADMISSION 25 ¢.” Osborn H. Oldroyd, Washington eccentric, had become, like George Alfred Townsend, obsessed with the assassination. He occupied the Petersen House and turned it into a tourist attraction nearly three-quarters of a century before Ford’s Theatre, a gutted ruin, became the museum it is today. In Petersen’s basement, Oldroyd installed his personal museum, a late-nineteenth-century cabinet of curiosities where preposterous relics of dubious provenance lay side by side with priceless historical treasures, all preserved under thick display glass in oak jeweler’s floor cases, illuminated unevenly by yellow, incandescent, electric bulbs. Over the years Oldroyd amassed an impressive but indiscriminate hoard of trash and treasure, and for the bargain price of a quarter tourists could ogle his collection and view Abraham Lincoln’s death room. Soon Oldroyd, like Townsend, would retrace Booth’s escape route and write about his adventures. But today history showed up at his door.
The old man, now seventy-four, gripped the cast-iron railing and ascended the same stairs where, a generation earlier, Dr. Leale and the others carried the dying president up to the little, second-floor back bedroom. He stood silently in the death chamber. The room was quiet now, not like the night twenty-nine years earlier when frantic doctors stripped Lincoln of his clothes, searching his body for wounds, while Mary Lincoln’s wailing, unsettling cries echoed through the halls. The old man visualized the bloody scene that unfolded here and recalled his memories of the assassin who scripted that mournfu
l night. Satisfied, he sought out the proprietor of this haunting memorial to sadness and death. “My name is Thomas A. Jones,” he informed Oldroyd, “and I am the man who cared for and fed Booth and Herold while they were in hiding, after committing the awful deed.”
Within the year, in March 1895, Thomas Jones joined Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth in death. His estate was valued at a meager $271.70, prior to claims that reduced the balance to $181.60. Obituaries in the Southern papers remarked on his “zeal,” “fidelity,” “courage,” and, of course, above all the other antebellum virtues, his “honor.” One newspaper published this benediction: “There is no one who does not believe that Thomas A. Jones acted the part of a hero.” His grave at Saint Mary’s Church in Newport, Maryland, was marked by a fragrant cedar stob that rotted away a long time ago.
DAVID HEROLD DIPPED THE BLADES DEEP AND PULLED HARD, and the skiff, unburdened of its usual heavy cargo of fish and waterlogged nets, responded to his experienced touch at the oars. He and Booth could see Thomas Jones standing motionless at the river’s edge, watching them glide away. Soon their guardian angel, like the river ghost he was, vanished from sight, followed by all signs of the shoreline, blanketed by the cloaking mist. The gentle, rhythmic rocking of the boat upon the water exhilarated Booth. After the detour to Dr. Mudd’s and the interminable delay at the pine thicket, it felt good to be on the move again. Miraculously, these delays, although exposing them to great danger, had not proven fatal to their escape. Now Booth and Herold could say good riddance to Maryland and all their troubles there, leaving behind the stymied detectives and federal troops who pursued them. With each stroke, Herold propelled them a few yards closer to Virginia.
Booth bent down low, huddled over his compass, and checked their bearings. He dared not light the candle again—its reflection on the water could magnify its tiny flame into a shining beacon that would reveal their position to the Union gunboats that patrolled the river. But he had no choice: he couldn’t read the dial in the dark. Puzzled, he stared at the needle dancing on its spindle as melting wax dripped over its glass and wood housing. They were supposed to be rowing from Maryland west across the Potomac to Virginia and then south until they reached Machodoc Creek. But the needle indicated that they were heading northwest, in the opposite direction. Was the compass broken? Booth shook and rotated the case, but the needle always returned to the proper position, still tugging north. No, the compass was true.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Page 25
