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

by James L. Swanson

  In the meantime, Booth and David Herold got into a heated argument. Davey had no more fight left in him. “I am sick and tired of this way of living,” he had complained to his idol on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, less than twelve hours ago. Herold had convinced himself, naively, that once he talked his way out of trouble the soldiers would send him home. After all, in his mind, he wasn’t guilty of anything. Booth killed Lincoln, and Powell stabbed Seward. Davey just came along for the ride. Booth could roast alive in the tobacco barn if he chose, but not him. “You don’t choose to give yourself up, let me go out and give myself up,” Herold proposed.

  “No, you shall not do it,” Booth growled in a low voice, so that the soldiers hovering on the other side of the boards could not hear him.

  Herold implored Booth to release him from the assassin’s service, speaking so loudly that some of the soldiers heard his begging.

  Herold started for the door, but Booth menaced him: “[H]e threatened to shoot me and blow his brains out,” Herold complained. Furious, the actor denounced his hitherto faithful companion: “You damned coward! Will you leave me now? Go, go! I would not have you stay with me.”

  Baker, counting down the minutes on his pocket watch, shouted to Booth that he was running out of time. Only five minutes more, and he would torch the barn.

  aGAIN, BOOTH ASKED: “WHO ARE YOU? AND WHAT DO YOU want?”

  Before Baker could reply, Conger took him aside, out of earshot, and suggested how to continue the negotiations: “Do not by any remark made to him allow him to know who we are: you need not tell him who we are. If he thinks we are rebels, or thinks we are his friends, we will take advantage of it. We will not lie to him about it; but we need not answer any question that has any reference to that subject, but simply insist on his coming out, if he will.”

  Baker agreed with Conger, telling Booth: “It doesn’t make any difference who we are: we know who you are, and we want you. We want to take you prisoners.”

  Booth corrected him. There was no more than one prisoner available for the taking: “I am alone, there is no one with me.”

  Baker rebuked the assassin: “We know that two men were in there and two must come out.” Conger worked his way around the barn’s perimeter to select the best place to light the fire.

  “This is a hard case,” Booth confided to Baker, “it may be I am to be taken by my friends.” That assassin held the forlorn hope that soldiers surrounding the barn were Confederate, not Union.

  “I am going,” insisted Davey. “I don’t intend to be burned alive.”

  Booth relented. Forcing Davey to share his fate would serve no purpose. And it would be wrong. Herold had had several chances to abandon Booth during the manhunt—in Washington on assassination night, in the pine thicket, or during the night the assassin slept alone at Garrett’s farm. But on every occasion, the loyal Herold returned to share Booth’s fate. Almost certainly, Booth must have concluded that it would be ungrateful, even ungallant, to deny his young follower the chance to live. When others had betrayed Booth, Herold had stuck by him. It was harsh to call him “coward” now. This was the last act. It was time to claim center stage alone. The actor called out to Baker: “Oh Captain—there is a man here who wants to surrender awful bad.”

  Too excited to remain silent, Lieutenant Doherty blurted out: “Hand out your arms.” Yes, chimed Baker almost simultaneously, “Let him hand out his arms.”

  Their demands perplexed Herold. Would they refuse his surrender until he first handed over Booth’s firearms? His master might let him go, but Davey knew that Booth would never give up his guns. “I have none,” Herold pleaded.

  Doherty did not believe him: “Hand out your arms, and you can come out.”

  “I have no arms,” Herold whimpered, “let me out.”

  Luther Baker scoffed at Herold’s stubborn denials: “We know exactly what you have got.” The Garretts, helpfully, had provided Baker and the other officers with a complete inventory of the fugitives’ arms and equipment: two revolvers, one Spencer repeating carbine, one Bowie knife, a pistol belt, a couple of blankets, and the clothes on their backs. “You carried a carbine,” Baker insisted, “and you must hand it out.”

  This back-and-forth bickering over the arms devolved into comedy, with one officer and two detectives proving themselves too incompetent to consummate the peaceful, willing surrender of Lincoln’s assassin and his guide. Booth spoke up to end the impasse: “The arms are mine; and I have got them.”

  Baker disputed the assassin: “This man carried a carbine, and he must hand it out.”

  Booth argued back: “Upon the word and honor of a gentleman, he has no arms: the arms are mine, and I have got them.” And he would not give them up. “I own all the arms and intend to use them on you gentlemen.” As this wore on, Booth reminded the nitpicking officers that “There is a man in here who wants to come out.”

  Yes, Herold affirmed: “Let me out, quick; I do not know anything about this man, he is a desperate character, and he is going to shoot me.”

  Booth supported Herold’s charade: “Let him out; that young man is innocent.”

  Enough, reasoned Lieutenant Doherty. If they can persuade one of the fugitives to come out of the barn without a fight, why not forget the arms, wait no more, and take the man? The lieutenant turned to Baker:

  “We had better let him out.”

  “No,” the detective countered, “wait until Mr. Conger comes here.”

  Well, where is he? Doherty demanded. Out of sight, at the back of the barn, preparing to set it on fire. Then they wouldn’t wait, Doherty decided.

  But Baker resisted his logic: “I ought not to let this man out without consulting him.”

  “No: Open that door!” Doherty commanded one of his troopers. “I will take that man out myself.”

  The lieutenant positioned himself to the side, not in front of, the door. If he stayed out of the line of fire, Booth could not see—or shoot—him when he opened the door for Herold’s exit. Inches apart, separated only by the width of the barn wall, Doherty and Herold could hear each other’s breathing. They caught glimpses of each other through the spaces that divided the boards.

  Then, in the last seconds before David Herold left the barn, Booth whispered the last words exchanged between them: “When you go out, don’t tell them the arms I have.”

  “Whoever you are, come out with your hands up,” a voice outside the barn shouted.

  Davey turned away from Booth and faced the door, now ajar and ready for his passage from fugitive to captive. Doherty ordered Herold not to walk through the door just yet. First he wanted to see his hands to confirm that he was unarmed. The lieutenant told Davey to thrust only one hand through the doorframe. The frightened youth complied, and in a moment Doherty saw a spot of open-palmed, white flesh protruding through the entryway. The lieutenant signaled Davey to send through the other hand. It, too, was empty.

  Doherty sprung to the door, seized Herold by the wrists, and yanked hard, pulling him forward through the doorway, and throwing him off balance. Davey’s captor tucked his revolver under his armpit, ran both his hands down Herold’s body to see if he had any hidden arms, and found none. Then he asked Herold, “Have you got any weapons at all about you?”

  “Nothing at all but this,” swore Davey, pulling out a piece of paper, a torn fragment of a map, which Doherty put in his pocket. The lieutenant grabbed Herold by the collar and, like a schoolmaster taking an errant pupil by the scruff, marched him away from the barn.

  So far the operation at Garrett’s farm was no model of a small unit action. One army officer and two military detectives vying for the command of twenty-six enlisted men had barely accomplished the surrender of the assassin’s harmless cat’s-paw. Herold had managed to surrender in spite of the disagreements and competition for authority among the hunters. Now Doherty, Baker, and Conger faced a bigger problem. John Wilkes Booth remained in that barn, heavily armed and waiting for their next move. Ye
s, they possessed certain advantages. The assassin was at bay, surrounded, and outnumbered twenty-six to one. Escape from the tobacco barn seemed impossible. But then, so did escape from an audience of more than one thousand people at Ford’s Theatre. Like Macbeth, Booth could not fly away from Garrett’s farm but, like the doomed, baited bear, he remained lethal.

  Booth had died onstage dozens of times in Richard III, Hamlet, and Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, but tonight he was not playacting. He wanted to go down fighting, not hang like a petty thief. “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal,” he wrote in his diary a few nights before. “Oh may he, may he spare me that and let me die bravely.” For Booth, this was his final and greatest performance, not just for the small audience of soldiers at the improvised theatre of Garrett’s farm, but also for history.

  He had already perpetrated the most flamboyant public murder in American history. Indeed, Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house. At Ford’s Theatre, Booth broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art—performance assassination. Tonight he would script his own end with a performance that equaled his triumph at Ford’s Theatre.

  Their negotiations with the assassin had not gone well. They demanded Booth’s immediate surrender, but he persuaded them to give him more time. They demanded that Herold turn over at least one of the weapons, but Booth claimed property rights over the arms and released Davey to them empty-handed. Now he had all the guns, and, in addition, like Jim Bowie at the Alamo twenty-nine years before, a deadly knife for the close combat of last resort. Booth—not Doherty, Baker, or Conger—was setting the agenda at Garrett’s farm.

  In certain respects, Booth enjoyed three significant tactical advantages over the Sixteenth New York Cavalry: he occupied a fortified position, but they had to come in and get him; they were deployed in the open around the barn and could not see him, but he remained hidden and could see them; they wanted Booth alive and did not want to be killed by him, but he was ready to die, and to take some of them with him. Moreover, the ticking clock favored the assassin. In a few hours, morning’s first light would illuminate the manhunters and render them perfect targets. At this close range, the Spencer carbine was an outstanding sniper’s weapon. Booth could hardly miss.

  Frustrated, Doherty wanted to wait until morning, but Baker and Conger argued forcefully against that. As soon as the sun rose, they reasoned, Booth could see the whole troop and open fire. Sunrise would transform this pastoral setting into a killing field. One of Doherty’s sergeants, Boston Corbett, volunteered for a suicide mission: he would slip into the barn alone and fight Booth man-to-man: “I offered to Mr. Conger, the detective officer, and to Lieut. Doherty, separately, to go into the barn and take him or fight him—saying if he killed me his weapons would then be empty, and they could easily take him alive.” Three times Corbett volunteered to charge in alone; and each time Doherty vetoed that harebrained scheme and ordered Corbett back to his position. Corbett was, no doubt, the most eccentric character under Doherty’s command.

  A quirky English immigrant who adopted the name “Boston” to honor the city in which he found Christ, thirty-two-year-old Thomas Corbett proved to be a hard fighter and a reliable noncommissioned officer. A hatter before the Civil War, he had performed a bizarre, horrific act of self-mutilation when tempted by fallen women. The records of Massachusetts General Hospital chronicled the gruesome event: “[Corbett] is a Methodist, and having perused the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of Matthew, he took a pair of scissors and made an opening one inch long in the lower part of the scrotum. He then drew the testes down and cut them off. He then went to a prayer meeting, walked about some, and ate a hearty dinner. There was not much external hemorrhage, but a clot had filled the opening so that the blood was confined to the scrotum, which was swelled enormously and was black. He called on Dr. Hodges … who laid it open and removed the blood; he tied the cord and sent him here.”

  Conger and Baker wanted to burn the barn. The searing flames and choking smoke would do the job for them, at no risk to the men. Indeed, the only danger would be to the men who had to get close enough to the barn to lay the kindling against the timbers. Booth might be able to shove his pistol into the four inches of space between each board and shoot them through the head at point-blank range. They thought about the risk involved and concluded that it didn’t have to fall to their own men.

  Conger sent for the Garrett sons. He had one more job for them, he explained: collect a few armfuls of straw and pile them against the side of the barn. John Garrett roamed the grounds but could not find any fresh straw. It was all in the tobacco barn with Booth, he told Conger. Then find something else that will burn, the detective ordered. John Garrett gathered pine twigs and set them next to the barn. He returned with a second armful and bent low to arrange the pile. The rustling sound alerted Booth, who rushed to the site of the noise. Garrett jumped when he heard that familiar, menacing voice address him from the other side, just a foot or two away: “Young man, I advise you for your own good not to come here again.” It was Booth’s second warning to him that night. There would not be a third, the assassin promised: “If you do not leave at once I will shoot you.” Quickly, John Garrett dropped the pine kindling and retreated out of pistol range.

  If they were gathering kindling, Booth realized, the manhunters did not plan on waiting until sunrise. They were going to burn the barn, and soon, probably. Booth decided to retake the initiative and stall the fire. He challenged his pursuers to honorable combat on open ground.

  “Captain,” he called out to Baker, “I know you to be a brave man, and I believe you to be honorable: I am a cripple.” Booth’s tantalizing admission thrilled every man who heard it. They had suspected, but were not absolutely sure, that the man in the barn was John Wilkes Booth. They had received reports that Lincoln’s assassin was lame, and the Garretts told them that Mr. Boyd had a broken leg. Now the man in the barn confirmed it. “I have got but one leg,” Booth continued. “If you will withdraw your men in ‘line’ one hundred yards from the door, I will come out and fight you.”

  As a sign of good faith Booth revealed that he had chosen, at least up to now, to spare Baker’s life: “Captain, I consider you to be a brave and honorable man; I have had half a dozen opportunities to shoot you, but I did not.”

  Baker’s eyes darted to the burning candle he held improvidently in his hand. The assassin told the truth! Conger suggested that Baker relieve himself of the inviting target immediately: “When Conger said it was presumptuous in me to hold the candle, as Booth might shoot me, I set the candle down about twenty feet from the door.”

  This was better than Shakespeare. Lincoln’s assassin had just challenged twenty-six men, a lieutenant, and two detectives to a duel. Or was it, in Booth’s mind, a knightly trial by combat, with victory the reward to the just? Baker declined the glove: “We did not come here to fight you, we simply came to make you a prisoner. We do not want any fight with you.” Neither did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who, back in Washington, awaited news from the manhunters. He wanted the assassin alive to interrogate him and expose fully the secrets of his grand conspiracy. Stanton, convinced that officials at the highest levels of the government of the Confederate States of America had participated in the assassination, wanted Booth to name his coplotters. If Booth was dead, that would satisfy the nation’s lust for vengeance, but not Stanton’s curiosity. It was far better, the secretary of war believed, to take Booth alive. There would be plenty of time to hang him later, after the trial.

  Booth repeated his challenge but reduced the distance to offer more generous odds to his opponents: “If you’ll take your men fifty yards from the door, I’ll come out and fight you. Give me a chance for my life.”

  Again Baker declined.

  “Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!” Booth jauntily replied.

  Conger made up his mind and turned to Baker:
“We will fire the barn.”

  “Yes,” his fellow detective agreed, “the quicker the better.”

  Conger bent over and lit the kindling. The pine twigs and needles, mixed with a little hay and highly combustible, burst into flames that licked the dry, weathered boards. Soon the barn’s boards and timbers caught fire, and within minutes an entire corner of the barn blazed brightly. The fire illuminated the yard with a yellow-orange glow that flickered eerily across the faces of the men of the Sixteenth. Booth could see them clearly now, but held his fire.

  As the fire gathered momentum, it also lit the inside of the barn so that now, for the first time, the soldiers could see their quarry in the gaps between the slats. Booth made a halfhearted attempt to suppress the flames by overturning a table upon them, but that only fueled the rapidly advancing inferno. The assassin was trapped. He had three choices: stay in the barn and burn alive; raise a pistol barrel—probably the .44 caliber with its heavier round to do the job right—to his head and blow out his brains; or script his own blaze of glory by hobbling out the front door and doing battle with the manhunters, welcoming death but risking capture. When Booth was a boy, he prophesied to his sister, Asia, the manner of his death: “I am not to drown, hang, or burn.” He had been right so far. He had crossed the Potomac River safely. He would not stay in the barn and die by fire. Nor would he allow himself to be taken and strangle from the rope. Suicide? Never that shameful end, Booth vowed to himself. Richard III did not commit suicide, Macbeth did not die by his own hand, not Brutus, nor Tell. Neither would he. No, no, he must fight the course. And if he must perish, he would die in full struggle against his enemies.

  Booth had decided it was better to die than be taken back to Washington to face justice. He had seen a man hanged before. In 1859, he caught the train to Charlestown, Virginia, to witness the execution of abolitionist John Brown, condemned for his ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry. He had seen Brown driven to the scaffold in a horse-drawn cart, like a piece of meat carried off to market. He watched as Brown ascended the stairs to the platform, was bound, and had the sack pulled over his head. He saw the hangman loop the noose around Brown’s neck, and then leave the old man standing in suspense for several minutes until the drop fell. Brown twitched a little, and then it was over. When they cut him down his face was purple.