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

by James L. Swanson

  For the defendants, that news was bad enough, but the rest was equally shocking. By order of President Andrew Johnson, they would be hanged the next day, on July 7. Hartranft left the stunned prisoners, who had less than a day to live, to contemplate their fates. He had work to do. Did anyone at the fort know how to build a scaffold? Or how to tie a noose?

  The rapid conviction, sentencing, and execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators ended a trial that had meandered through May and June. The archfiend Booth was dead, but eight members of his supporting cast took center stage in his absence.

  Johnson, under pressure by Edwin Stanton, had ordered that eight members of Booth’s supporting cast be tried by a military tribunal, a controversial move that provoked objections from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Lincoln’s first attorney general, Edward Bates. The trial proceeded anyway and became the great focus for that spring and summer. By the time it was over, the commission had been in session for seven weeks, had taken the testimony of 366 witnesses and had produced a transcript of 4,900 pages.

  On June 29, the commission went into secret session. After such a long and complicated trial, observers thought that it might take weeks to reach verdicts. But the end came more quickly. After deliberating just a few days, the tribunal presented the verdicts and sentences to Johnson on July 5. He approved them at once, and the next day Hancock carried the execution orders to the prison.

  The residents of Washington did not know until the Evening Star came off the press on the afternoon of July 6 that four conspirators would hang the next day. Indeed, it was from the newspapers that Surratt’s attorneys learned their client would die. Newsboys rushed onto Pennsylvania Avenue, hawking the issue to eager readers: “Extra. Mrs. Surratt, Payne, Herold and Atzerodt to be Hung!! The Sentences to be Executed Tomorrow!! Mudd, Arnold, and O’Laughlin to be Imprisoned for Life! Spangler to be Imprisoned for Six Years!”

  As evening passed and night fell, the news caused a flurry of activity throughout Washington. Reporters converged on the Old Arsenal, but Hartranft barred them from interviewing the condemned. Frustrated but refusing to be outwitted, the gentlemen of the press spied on the prisoners through cell windows, and recorded in their notebooks the last visits of family members and how the condemned behaved. In the courtyard, soldiers labored through the night building a scaffold while the hangman prepared four nooses from thirty-one-strand, two-thirds-inch Boston hemp, supplied by the Navy Yard.

  Mrs. Surratt’s supporters, including her daughter, rushed to the Executive Mansion to beg Johnson for mercy. He would not see them or be swayed. In a daring, last-minute legal maneuver, the Surratt attorneys got a civil court judge to issue a writ of habeas corpus ordering the army to release her into civilian custody. Johnson ended her last hope by suspending the writ the next morning.

  Elsewhere in Washington that night, others reveled at the news of the impending hangings. A pass to the execution—fewer than two hundred were printed—was the hottest ticket in town. Crowds besieged Hancock in the streets and at his hotel, the Metropolitan. According to the Evening Star, “his letterbox was filled with letters and cards that projected like a fan, and for a time the entrances to the hotel were completely blockaded.” Curiosity seekers needed no pass to surround Surratt’s boardinghouse on H Street. The house where the conspirators held their meetings became, in the words of one reporter, “the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes.”

  By order of President Johnson, the execution was scheduled to take place between 10:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M., July 7. At exactly 1:02 P.M., the prisoners, with Surratt at their head, were paraded single file into the courtyard, past four pine boxes and four freshly dug graves, and up the scaffold steps. Terrified, and wearing a black alpaca dress and black veil that completely concealed her face, Mary Surratt could barely walk and needed soldiers and her priests to support her.

  Lewis Powell strutted jauntily without fear, “like a king about to be crowned,” according to a reporter. David Herold and George Atzerodt shuffled along fretfully. It was a bright, blazing hot Washington summer day. Courteous officers shielded Surratt with parasols and placed a white handkerchief atop Atzerodt’s head to protect him from the sun.

  The condemned were bound with strips of linen, had nooses looped around their necks and white hoods drawn over their heads. The hangman, who had come to admire Powell’s stoicism, whispered into his ear as he tightened the noose: “I want you to die quick.”

  The giant who had nearly stabbed the secretary of state to death replied, “You know best.”

  Surratt pleaded to those near her, “Please don’t let me fall.” When she complained that her wrists had been bound too tightly, a soldier retorted, “Well, it won’t hurt long.”

  Moments before the drop, Atzerodt cried out, “God help me now! Oh! Oh! Oh!” His last word was still on his lips when, at 1:26 P.M., he and the others dropped to their deaths, a moment preserved forever by photographer Alexander Gardner, whose execution series remains the most shocking set of American historical photos ever made.

  That night, a mob celebrated the execution by attacking Surratt’s boardinghouse to strip it of souvenirs, until the police drove them off. John Surratt, still hiding in Canada, read about his mother’s execution in the newspapers. He had fled the United States, arriving in Montreal on April 17. From there he traveled about thirty miles east to St. Liboire. A parish priest, Father Charles Boucher, gave sanctuary to the former Catholic seminarian, and Surratt remained there in hiding from mid-April through the trial, conviction, sentencing, and hanging of his mother. He followed the trial by reading the papers, and through secret correspondence with friends in Washington. In all that time, from the end of April to the first week of July, Surratt made no effort to save his mother from the gallows. Later, he blamed his friends for failing to inform him about the true peril that Mary Surratt faced.

  Just hours after the hanging, as the bodies of the conspirators rested in the pine ammunition crates that served as coffins, the editors of the Evening Star pronounced their satisfaction with the day’s work: “The last act of the tragedy of the 19th century is ended, and the curtain dropped forever upon the lives of its actors. Payne, Herold, Atzerodt and Mrs. Surratt have paid the penalty of their awful crime…. In the bright sunlight of this summer day … the wretched criminals have been hurried into eternity; and tonight, will be hidden in despised graves, loaded with the execrations of mankind.”

  Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Azterodt, reunited in the grave with John Wilkes Booth, together again, just as they were that terrible Good Friday evening of April 1865, the night that the chase for Abraham Lincoln’s killer began.

  BUT LINCOLN’S ASSASSIN HAD NOT REACHED HIS FINAL RESTing place. There remained one, final manhunt for him. February 1869 was the last month of Andrew Johnson’s troubled presidency. On March 4, the great hero of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant, would take the oath of office. Soon Johnson’s name would be eclipsed, an ephemeral interlude between the old administration of the martyred Lincoln and the new one of the hero Grant. Whatever his reputation, Johnson still possessed the full executive authority of the presidency—including the pardon power—until his final day in office.

  It had been almost four years since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the great conspiracy trial. The raw wounds of April 1865 had, at least in part, healed. Indeed, when John Surratt Jr., who had fled America after Lincoln’s murder, was captured in Europe in 1866 and brought back to the United States for trial in 1867, he was tried, not by the military tribunal that condemned his mother, but by a civil court. And, after a proceeding that produced a voluminous, two-volume transcript of 1,383 printed pages, he was freed. The passions of 1865 had subsided, and President Johnson’s thoughts turned to three of the convicted conspirators who had escaped hanging in July 1865—Dr. Samuel Mudd, Samuel Arnold, and Edman Spangler. The fourth, Michael O’Laughlen, had died in prison. Mudd and Arnold, serving life sentences, and Spangler, s
entenced to six years, all languished in the American Devil’s Island, the faraway military prison at Dry Tortugas, Florida.

  On February 8, 1869, President Johnson pardoned Mudd, and soon thereafter Arnold and Spangler. They had survived the manhunt, and now they were free. And, freed from the grave by an order of the president transmitted the same day, was the body of Mary Surratt. Her daughter, Anna, had her remains disinterred from the Old Arsenal and buried the next day at Washington’s Mount Olivet Cemetery.

  In New York City, one man followed the news with keen interest. He had waited patiently for this day, for he, too, sought to redeem a loved one. He sat at his desk and began writing a letter to the president.

  N.Y. Febry 10th, 1869

  PRIVATE.

  Dear Sir—

  May I not now ask your kind consideration of my poor Mother’s request in relation to her son’s remains?

  The bearer of this (Mr. John Weaver) is sexton of CHRIST CHURCH, Baltimore, who will observe the strictest secrecy in this matter—and you may rest assured that none in my family desire its publicity.

  Unable to visit Washington I have deputed Mr. Weaver—in whom I Have the fullest Confidence, and I beg that you will not delay in ordering the body to be given to his care.

  He will retain it (placing it in his vault) until such time as we can remove other members of our family to the BALTIMORE CEMETERY, and thus prevent any special notice of it.

  There is also (I am told) a trunk of his at the National Hotel—which I once applied for but was refused—it being under the seal of the War Dept., it may contain relics of the poor misguided boy—which would be dear to his sorrowing mother, and of no use to anyone. Your Excellency would greatly lessen the crushing weight of grief that is hurrying my Mother to the grave by giving immediate orders for the safe delivery of the remains of John Wilkes Booth to Mr. Weaver.

  Edwin Booth

  Five days later, Andrew Johnson ordered the War Department, no longer the domain of the once all-powerful Edwin Stanton, to surrender the body of Lincoln’s assassin to his family. A Washington, D.C., undertaker, Harvey and Marr, picked up the body in a wagon and drove into town, and down a familiar alley to a shed behind the funeral establishment. The sturdy wood crate was unloaded and brought inside. John Wilkes Booth would have recognized the little shed. Once it was a stable, fitted out for him by a man named Ned Spangler. Booth had returned to Baptist Alley, behind Ford’s Theatre, where the manhunt began.

  The Washington Evening Star remarked on the delicious irony: “It is a strange coincidence that the remains of J. Wilkes Booth should yesterday have been temporarily deposited in the stable, in the rear of Ford’s Theatre, in which he kept his horse, and fronting on the alley through which he made his escape on the night he assassinated President Lincoln. The remains were deposited in the stable by the undertakers … in order to baffle the crowd who had besieged their establishment, on F Street, to satisfy their curiosity by a sight of the body.”

  From there, Edwin Booth had his brother whisked away to Baltimore, where the remains rested for the next four months in a vault at Green Mount Cemetery. On June 26, 1869, John Wilkes Booth was buried quietly in the family plot at Green Mount. No headstone marks his grave. He lies there still, his epitaph carved not on cold stone or marble, but in his sister’s forgiving heart. Asia Booth’s loving memoir to her brother closes with a graveside elegy:

  “But, granting that he died in vain, yet he gave his all on earth, youth, beauty, manhood, a great human love, the certainty of excellence in his profession, a powerful brain, the strength of an athlete, health and great wealth, for ‘his cause’ This man was noble in life, he periled his immortal soul, and he was brave in death. Already his hidden remains are given Christian burial, and strangers have piled his grave with flowers.

  “‘So runs the world away.’”

  Epilogue

  ASIA BOOTH GAVE BIRTH TO TWINS IN AUGUST 1865. ONE WAS a boy, but she dared not name him John. When he grew older, many remarked that he resembled his notorious uncle. Asia stayed married to John Sleeper Clarke, who prospered in England as a celebrated comedian, but who denied her a happy life. “He lives in mystery and silence as far as I am concerned,” Asia complained. “He lives a free going bachelor life and does what he likes.” In 1879 she wrote to her brother Edwin, “I am so tired of his dukelike haughtiness—his icy indifference, and so disgusted with the many false things he tells me.” She remembered her brother John’s prophetic warning before her marriage—she would only be Clarke’s stepping-stone. Now Clarke was famous in his own right, and Asia and her blackened name were no longer of any use to him. “It is marvelous how he hates me—the mother of nine babies—but I am a Booth—that is sufficient.”

  Asia could keep a secret, too. Unbeknownst to John Sleeper Clarke, in 1874 she began writing a memoir to honor her dead brother. Fearing that her husband would burn the manuscript if he ever found it, she entrusted it to confidantes. It was not published until 1938, fifty years after her death, and sixty-four years after she wrote it. Her brother John had assassinated Abraham Lincoln seventy-four years ago. Asia Booth Clarke died in England on May 16, 1888, at the age of fifty-two. She had wanted to come home and rejoin her family in America. On June 1, she was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. She rests in the Booth family plot, near her brother John.

  CLARA HARRIS AND HENRY RATHBONE MARRIED IN 1867, HAD three children, and moved to Hanover, Germany. No one ever blamed Rathbone for the night at Ford’s Theatre. He was a social guest, not Lincoln’s bodyguard. He wasn’t assigned the duty of protecting the president. And he didn’t see Booth until after the actor fired his pistol. Still, he was an army officer. And he was in the box. Fortunately for Rathbone, it did not become widely known that he had asked Dr. Leale to treat his wound before treating Lincoln’s. Nor did anyone suggest that he didn’t seem to fight quite as hard as Sergeant Robinson or the Seward boys. George Robinson had submitted himself repeatedly to the punishment of Powell’s knife, and the sergeant would not have abandoned his patient until Powell stabbed him to death. Rathbone, in contrast, had flinched upon first contact with Booth’s avenging blade. Perhaps he should have made Booth cut him again.

  Clara would have been better off if John Wilkes Booth had stabbed her fiancé again and slain him at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. If Booth had served her that night, then she would have survived the night eighteen years later when, on December 23, 1883, Henry, after behaving oddly and menacing the children, murdered Clara in their home. In a bizarre, chilling reminder of Booth’s crime, Henry selected the assassin’s weapons of choice—the pistol and the knife. Rathbone shot his wife and then stabbed her to death. Then he tried to commit suicide with the same blade. It was a brutal, bloody crime that harkened back to the horrific scene in the president’s box. But this time Clara’s dress was drenched not with Henry’s blood, but her own. Henry never returned to America and lived out his remaining days in a German asylum.

  BOSTON CORBETT’S LIFE UNFOLDED AS ODDLY AS ONE MIGHT have guessed. His fame lasted a season, climaxing with his appearance in a front-page woodcut in Frank Leslie’s, and his May 17 appearance as a witness at the conspiracy trial. Soon the fan letters dwindled to a trickle, then ceased. Photographers no longer begged to take his picture. On September 9, 1865, he wrote to Edward Doherty about his share of the reward, seeking advice on how best to pursue his claim: should he hire Doherty’s lawyer or find one of his own. On August 9, 1866, the U.S. Treasury issued him a warrant in the amount of $1,653.84. Corbett left the army, moved west, and got a job as assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives. That sinecure ended on the day in 1887 when he drew a revolver and held the legislature hostage at gunpoint. Confined to the Topeka asylum, he escaped in 1888, and then vanished from history. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him. Perhaps he ended his days still preaching warnings against “the snares of the evil one.”

  THOMAS A. JONES KEPT THE SECRET OF THE PINE THICKET and
Booth’s river crossing for eighteen years, until, in 1883, he divulged the tale to George Alfred Townsend. Later, Jones wrote a book about his adventures: “J. Wilkes Booth. An Account of His Sojourn in Southern Maryland after the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his Passage Across the Potomac, and his death in Virginia. By Thomas A. Jones. The only living man who can tell the story.” In 1893, he traveled north to Chicago to have his manuscript published there by a local printer, and he set up a stand to sell books at the World’s Columbian Exposition. According to legend, outraged Union veterans attacked the display and destroyed his stock of books. Today the slim volume, now a rare book, remains a priceless, firsthand account from the manhunt.

  In an odd twist, Jones became an amateur dealer in Lincoln assassination memorabilia, scouting Washington and its environs for coveted objects he supplied to collectors. Twenty-five years after the assassination, he advised a customer that reward posters were impossible to find, and that an original April 14 Ford’s Theatre playbill for Our American Cousin could not be had for less than one hundred dollars. Jones trafficked in photos of the Petersen House and of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse, and he offered to locate photos of Boston Corbett. “I have had a good deal of work to do to get said pictures,” Jones advised one of his collectors. “You might have looked Washington over for six months and I doubt whether you could have found the pictures you will get through me.” Jones even tried to track down his battered old skiff, the one that carried Booth and Herold across the Potomac. That relic would make a sensational collector’s prize. The search turned up more rare photos. “When I had been looking around the City to see if I could find out any thing about the Boat that Booth went across the River in,” Jones explained, he found a soldier who told him that if he went to a “certain house” at the old arsenal, he would make an interesting discovery—four of Gardner’s photos of the hanging. “The house that the President died in is just the same as when the President died,” Jones informed a customer, except for Oldroyd’s sign out front. Thomas Jones died in March 1895. He was seventy-four years old.