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

by James L. Swanson

  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 date book 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.”

  In other words, Booth was saying that a feast seems grudgingly and mercenarily given unless it is repeatedly graced with assurances of welcome. Plain eating is best done in one’s own domestic setting; on more social occasions, the spice to a feast is ceremony; gatherings are too unadorned without it.

  Booth’s two drafts differed little. The chief differences were in the sums of money Booth offered and the closing salutations. First Booth wrote “$5.00.” On second thought he cut the sum in half. And perhaps he intended the smaller amount to augment the greater insult. Booth closed the first draft with “Most respectfully, your obedient servant.” The actor judged that salutation too respectful to the unworthy doctor and substituted the less florid “Yours respectfully.”

  How strange, too, that in Booth’s last writings—his journal entries and his final letter—he quoted from his victim’s favorite texts. The cadences of the King James Bible resonated in many of Abraham Lincoln’s finest writings, and his love of Shakespeare knew no bounds. During private, social evenings at the White House, the president often sat by the fire and read his aloud to his small, intimate circle of friends. In a letter to the celebrated actor James Henry Hackett, Lincoln expounded on his favorites: “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”

  It was Macbeth that Lincoln chose to read aloud to his guests on a Potomac cruise aboard the River Queen on Sunday five days before the as
sassination. One of the president’s companions described that memorable performance:

  On Sunday, April 9th, we were steaming up the Potomac. That whole day the conversation dwelt upon literary subjects. Mr. Lincoln read to us for several hours passages taken from Shakespeare. Most of these were from “Macbeth,” and, in particular, the verses which follow Duncan’s assassination. I cannot recall this reading without being awed at the remembrance, when Macbeth becomes king after the murder of Duncan, he falls prey to the most horrible torments of mind. Either because he was struck by the weird beauty of these verses, or from a vague presentiment coming over him, Mr. Lincoln paused here while reading, and began to explain to us how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim; and he read over again the same scene.

  Gleeful at the prospect of taking symbolic revenge against Stuart, Booth folded two and a half dollars into a small, tight square and then wrapped his letter around the money. He called Charlie Lucas over and handed him the insulting ensemble. If only he could see Stuart’s face when the old doctor read his rebuke, Booth gloated.

  Charlie Lucas braked the wagon to a stop in front of the home of William Rollins, a former Port Conway store owner who made his living by fishing and farming. Booth and Herold did not know him. Rollins was in his backyard preparing his fishing nets and did not see the wagon’s approach. When he walked around his house, he recognized William Lucas’s horses. Then he saw the two strangers, David Herold standing at the gate, and another man sitting in the wagon. Herold asked an old man sitting nearby for some water, and the fellow filled a tin dipper to the rim and passed it to Herold. As Davey began walking to the wagon, the cup spilled over: “It is too full,” he called out to Booth. “I’ll drink some of it.”

  Thirsty, Booth yelled back, “Bring it down here.”

  Still holding the dipper, Herold turned to Rollins and asked if he knew anybody who could take them to Orange Court House. When Rollins said no, Herold asked if he would take them at least part of the way. Rollins offered to drive them to Bowling Green, about fifteen miles distant, for a fee. Intrigued, Herold invited Rollins to come over to the wagon and meet his friend. “This man says he has a wagon and will take us to Bowling Green for ten dollars,” Herold reported, as he climbed aboard Lucas’s wagon and surrendered the refreshing cup. Booth asked Rollins to confirm the distance, and the fisherman added, tantalizingly, that the Fredericksburg and Richmond railroad was just two and a half miles from there.

  Then, improvidently, Herold asked if there was a hotel nearby where Booth could lay up his injured leg for a couple of days. He should have known there was no time for that. Perpetuating their masquerade as Confederate soldiers, Herold volunteered the familiar story: his companion had been wounded near Petersburg. Rollins told them about a hotel at Bowling Green. Then Booth switched subjects, inquiring whether Rollins would take him and Davey across the Rappahannock, only two or three hundred yards wide at this point, and land them on the other side at Port Royal. Rollins offered to do it for the same price that the ferry operating between Port Conway and Port Royal charged—ten cents one way. He would be happy to transport them in his boat after he went down to the river and put out his fishing nets. The tide was about to rise, and that meant prime fishing time.

  Booth wanted to cross at once. As soon as the nets are set, Rollins reiterated. Frustrated, Booth tried to entice him with more money: “I don’t want to be lying over here. We’ll pay you more than the ferriage.” The actor could not persuade him. The tide was rising now, and the fisherman wasn’t going to miss out on a good catch. At that moment three mounted figures appeared on the hill just above Port Conway, about fifty yards from the river, and surveyed the town. They were soldiers. And a wagon down by the wharf, parked in front of William Rol-lins’s house, caught their eye.

  The men spurred their horses and descended slowly to Port Conway. When they got within twenty yards of the wagon, Herold jumped out and thrust his hand inside the breast of his coat. One of the men noticed Davey’s clumsy, obvious move immediately. He had seen men draw pistols before. Another member of the trio took note of the wagon, which was drawn, he thought, “by two very wretched looking horses.” Then they looked over to the man sitting in the wagon: “[He] was dressed in a dark suit that looked seamed and ravelly, as if from rough contact with thorny undergrowth. On his head was a seedy looking black slouch hat, which he kept well pulled down over his forehead … his beard, of a coal-black hue, was of about two weeks’ growth and gave his face an unclean appearance.”

  ON MONDAY, APRIL 24, DR. SAMUEL A. MUDD SAW SOLDIERS, too. There would be no more questions today, no additional searches of the house and outbuildings, no marathon, cat-and-mouse interrogations at Bryantown. The soldiers came to his farm to arrest him and take him away to Washington. There he would languish, locked up in the fearsome Old Capitol prison, across the street from the great dome, shining symbol of the Union that he, John Wilkes Booth, and all the others, had tried to topple. Confined incommunicado, Samuel A. Mudd waited to learn what terrible price the government would seek to exact from him.

  BOOTH AND HEROLD HAD BEEN DREADING THIS MOMENT, IF not at Port Conway, then somewhere along their escape route. It was only a matter of time. Their first encounter with soldiers was inevitable. Fate chose Port Conway. Booth and Herold tensed for action. As the riders approached, Herold walked toward them, creating distance between them and Booth, and all the while scrutinizing their uniforms and equipment. Their jackets did not look blue. Davey, adopting his usual, disarming manner of the friendly sidekick, called out to the men: “Gentlemen, whose command do you belong to?”

  One of them, an officer, responded: “To Mosby’s command.”

  Herold was relieved. They were Confederates!

  These men weren’t just everyday soldiers. Even though two of them were eighteen years old and one was nineteen years old, First Lieutenant Mortimer B. Ruggles, Private Absalom R. Bainbridge, and Private William S. Jett were veterans of one of the Confederacy’s most elite, renowned cavalry units, commanded by the legendary John Singleton Mosby. Herold was elated: “If I am not inquisitive,” he asked Ruggles, “can I ask you where you are going?”

  William Jett jumped in: “That is a secret. Nobody knows where we are going because I never tell anybody.” And who was asking? They decided to turn the tables on the stranger and asked him to what command did he belong?

  Davey performed well: “We belong to A. P. Hill’s Corps; I have my wounded brother a Marylander who was wounded in the fight below Petersburg.”

  Where is this wound? queried Jett.

  “In the leg.” Jett pursued the interrogation and requested their names.

  “Our name is Boyd; his name is James William Boyd and mine is David E. Boyd.” Herold assumed the guise of an enthusiastic Confederate, a militant bitter-ender, zealous to continue the fight, wherever it was. “Come gentlemen I suppose you are all going to the Southern Army,” Herold ventured confidentially, adding that “we are also anxious to get over there ourselves and wish you to take us along with you.”

  Booth struggled out of the wagon, propped himself up on his crutches, and began walking toward them.

  Mosby’s men thought Herold was odd and overeager and did not reply to him or dismount their horses. Guessing that this was the opportune moment for some social lubrication, Davey played host: “Come gentlemen, get down; we have got something to drink here; we will go and take a drink.”

  Jett declined curtly: “Thank you Sir, I never drink anything.” Jett rode about twenty yards away from Herold, dismounted, and tied his horse to a gate. Ruggles and Bainbridge dismounted and sat on Rollins’s steps.

  As soon as Jett rejoined the group, Herold tapped him on the shoulder and asked if they could speak privately. They walked to the wharf, and Herold proposed a plan: “I take it for granted that you are raising a command to go south to Mexico and I want you to let us g
o with you.”

  Real soldiers did not talk this way, Jett knew: “I was thrown aback that such an idea should have entered any man’s head.” The verbose “David E. Boyd,” if that was his true name, was holding something back. “I cannot go with any man that I do not know anything about,” Jett explained. He stared Herold down and asked a simple question: “Who are you?”

  “We are,” Herold spouted excitedly in a trembling voice, “the assassinators of the president.” Herold pointed to where Booth stood some yards off. “Yonder is the assassinator! Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed the president.”

  Dumbstruck, Private William Jett did not say a word. Interpreting Jett’s silence as a sign of disbelief, Herold asked him if he had noticed Booth’s indelible proof of identity—the initials “JWB” tattoed on his left hand. Ruggles walked up to Herold and Jett, but Jett found that all he could do was mumble to his friend “here is a strange thing.” Then they told Ruggles the stunning news. Booth was just a few feet away, swinging forward on the crutches. Within seconds they were face-to-face with Lincoln’s assassin, his marked hand hidden discreetly by a shawl.

  “I suppose you have been told who I am?” Booth asked.