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

by James L. Swanson

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  Seymour, Mark Wilson, ed. The Pursuit of John H. Surratt: Despatches from the Official Record of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Austin, Texas: Civil War Library, 2000.

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  Smith, Jean Edward. Grant. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

  Smoot, Richard Mitchell. The Unwritten History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Clinton, Massachusetts: Press of W. J. Coulter, 1908.

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  ———. Lincoln’s Last Day. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1922.

  ———. New Light on Lincoln’s Last Day. Privately printed, 1926.

  Steers, Edward, Jr. Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

  ———. The Escape & Capture of John Wilkes Booth. Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1992.

  ———. His Name Is Still Mudd: The Case Against Doctor Samuel Alexander Mudd. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Thomas Publications, 1997.

  ———, ed. The Trial: The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.

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  ———. Trial of John H. Surratt in the Criminal Court for the District Of Columbia. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867. 2 volumes.

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  ———. Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

  Valentine, David T. Obsequies of Abraham Lincoln, in the City of New York. New York: Edmund Jones & Co., 1866.

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  The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 volumes. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

  Wearmouth, John M., and Roberta J. Wearmouth. Thomas A. Jones: Chief Agent of the Confederate Secret Service in Maryland. Port Tobacco, Maryland: Stones Throw Publishing, 2000.

  Welles, Gideon. Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. 3 volumes.

  West, Richard S. Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Navy Department. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.

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  ———. Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

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  ———. Joseph Jefferson: Reminiscences of a Fellow Player. New York: Scribner’s, 1906.

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  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  The best account of Inauguration Day, 1865, is Ronald C. White Jr.’s Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). Highly descriptive accounts of the day’s events appeared in the Washington newspapers, including those I consider the best “papers of record”—the Evening Star, Daily Morning Chronicle, and National Intelligencer. The four best Lincoln biographies also cover the event briefl y. See David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pages 565–568; Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pages 410–412; Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Knopf, 1952), pages 503–504; and Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1939), volume 4, pages 85–99. Some critics might question the inclusion of Sandburg’s six-volume Lincoln magnum opus, The Prairie Years (in two volumes) and The War Years (in four volumes) on any list of the “best” biographies. Indeed, Gore Vidal once wrote that Sandburg’s biography was the worst thing to happen to Lincoln since his assassination. Sandburg has also come into disfavor among professional historians. Despite certain faults of interpreta
tion, and some inevitable errors, no book about Lincoln has ever been better written, or is more evocative of the spirit of Lincoln’s age. Sandburg’s treatment on pages 246 through 413 in volume four of The War Years, covering Lincoln’s last days, the assassination, the tumultuous response, and the funeral is still worth reading.

  William Smith’s photograph was lost for almost a century until the discovery in 1962 of a single print, on its original mounting, bearing a letterpress identification of the artist and event. Smith took the photograph for Alexander Gardner who, working closer to the East Front with another camera, could not be in two places at once. This specimen was believed to be a unique survival until the discovery of a second example in the late 1990s. A full-page reproduction of Smith’s magnificent image can be found in Lloyd Osten-dorf’s Lincoln’s Photographs: A Complete Album (Dayton, Ohio: Rockywood Press, 1998), at page 206.

  Gardner’s photographs appear in Ostendorf on pages 208–212.

  Noah Brooks’s description of the bursting sun appears in his memoir Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time (New York: The Century Company, 1895). I used the best edition, the 1971 Georgia University Press reprint, edited by the insightful journalist and Civil War historian Herbert Mitgang. The sunburst appears at page 213, and Brooks’s vision of the shadow of death at 215.

  The complete text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural can be read in a number of books, including Lincoln’s Greatest Speech by White, at pages 17–19 (White also illustrates Lincoln’s rarely seen handwritten draft); This Fiery Trial: The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pages 220–221, edited by William E. Gienapp; and The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, volume 8, pages 332–333 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1952), edited by Roy P. Basler.

  The observations of Elizabeth Keckley, dressmaker and confidante to Mary Lincoln, appear on pages 176–177 of her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1868). For more on this fascinating and tumultuous relationship, see Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly (New York: Broadway Books, 2003). Fleischner explains the variant spellings of Elizabeth’s last name.

  Samuel Knapp Chester’s account of the House of Lords episode appears in Ben Perley Poore, The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President (Boston: J. E. Tilton and Company, 1865), 3 volumes, volume 1, page 49; and in Benn Pitman’s The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1865), at page 45.

  Arthur F. Loux has chronicled Booth’s lifetime schedule, as far as it can be ascertained, in John Wilkes Booth: Day by Day (privately printed, 1989).

  Booth’s lament about “the blues” was taken from Henry B. Phillips at the Petersen house on the night of the assassination. See Maxwell Whiteman,

  While Lincoln Lay Dying: A Facsimile Reproduction of the First Testimony Taken in Connection with the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln as Recorded by Corporal James Tanner (Philadelphia: Union League of Philadelphia, 1968), in “Statement of Mr. Henry B. Philips.” The book is unpaginated.

  Lincoln’s April 10, 1865, remarks to the citizen-serenaders are published in Basler, Collected Works, volume 8, pages 393–394.

  Brooks’s description of April 11 and the circumstances of Lincoln’s last speech appear on pages 225–227 of Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time. Keckley’s account—including the Tad Lincoln quotation—appears on pages 176 and 177 of Behind the Scenes.

  Lincoln’s last speech is published in Basler, Collected Works, volume 8, pages 399–405.

  Keckley preserved her fears of assassination in Behind the Scenes at page 178.

  Booth’s angry statement about black voting rights is discussed in Michael Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004), at page 209; John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, “Right or Wrong, God Judge Me”: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), at page 15; and William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), at page 37. Booth’s statement about the “last speech” was reported by Lewis Powell to Major Thomas Eckert of the War Department telegraph office. See Eckert’s testimony in House Report 40, at page 674.

  Booth’s letter to his mother appears in John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, “Right or Wrong,” at page 144.

  CHAPTER ONE

  April 1865 was a month like no other in our history. According to one account, “looking back on this rapid succession of events, it is clear that the American people had, in less than a month, lived through the most intensely dramatic series of events in the history of the United States.” See James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg, Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Arena Editions, 2001), pages 9–11. The best account of those weeks is Jay Winik’s April 1865: The Month That Saved America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), a splendid synthesis of matters civil, military, and political. James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) remains the essential one-volume history of the war, and offers valuable insights on its end. Ernest B. Furgurson’s Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004) evokes the capital city that Lincoln and Booth knew, as does Margaret Leech’s incomparable classic, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941). Any student of the Lincoln assassination should read Winik, McPherson, Furgurson, and Leech in order to understand the context of Booth’s crime. To see the streets and architecture of the wartime capital as Lincoln, Booth, the conspirators, and the MANHUNTERS saw them, there are no better time machines than two photographic histories, Richard M. Lee’s Mr. Lincoln’s City (McLean, Virginia: EPM Publications, 1981) and Stanley Kimmel’s Mr. Lincoln’s Washington (New York: Bramhall House, 1957).

  The description of Booth as Adonis is from the actor Sir Charles Wyndham, and appears in Swanson and Weinberg, Lincoln’s Assassins, page 147.

  My account of the events of April 14, 1865—and of most of the events in the book—is based largely on contemporary newspaper accounts; testimony from the conspiracy trial of 1865; testimony from the John H. Surratt trial of 1867; letters and memoirs of the participants; original photographs, broadsides, and relics; various government documents; and the best books published on the assassination between 1865 and 2005. Although I attribute direct quotations, I do not cite sources for each and every fact in the book. That approach would have resulted in an exceedingly voluminous section of notes that would overburden most readers. Manhunt is meant to be not an encyclopedia of the assassination, but a dramatic account of the events of April 14 through 26 that unfolds, as much as possible, in real time. Where Lincoln scholars are in general agreement about certain facts (for example, that Booth had been drinking heavily, or that he usually stayed at the National Hotel, or that women were attracted to him), I refer the reader to the standard references listed in the introduction to the bibliography. In the notes that follow I do call attention to obscure or unusual facts, and I also discuss controversial events when scholars have disagreed about the facts, or their interpretation.

  For a history of the play, and its script, see Welford Dunaway Taylor, Our American Cousin: The Play That Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Beacham Publishing, 1990).

  Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded Lincoln’s dream in his diary. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), volume 2, pages 282–283.

  For more on Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting, see Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), pages 731–732; Donald, Lincoln, at pages 590–592; and Oates, With Malice Toward None, at pages 427–428.

  Lincoln’s telegram of June 9, 1863, appears in Basler, Collected Works, volume 6, at page 256; and the April 1848 letter in Collected Works, volume 1, at pages 465–466.

&nbs
p; Henry Clay Ford’s suggestion to James Ferguson, and Ferguson’s response, appear in Poore, The Conspiracy Trial, volume 1, page 190. Also see Pitman, The Assassination of President Lincoln, at page 76.

  Henry Clay Ford witnessed Booth’s laughter at noon, April 14: “He sat on the steps while reading his letter, every now and then looking up and laughing.” Pitman, The Assassination of President Lincoln, at page 101.

  No one admitted to telling Booth that the president was coming to the theatre. Henry Clay Ford, testifying at the conspiracy trial, tried to blur the issue by saying he did not know, and that it could have been anyone: “It was while Booth was there I suppose he learned of the President’s visit to the Theatre that evening. There were several around Booth, talking to him.” Pitman, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, at page 100.

  All quotations attributed to Dr. Charles Leale come from one source, his firsthand account of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15, 1865, not published until many years after the assassination. See Charles A. Leale, Address Delivered Before the Commandery of the State of N.Y. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S., February, 1909.

  Ferguson’s account of how Booth boasted about his rented horse, and the presence of Maddox, comes from Poore, The Conspiracy Trial, volume 1, page 190. Also see Pitman, The Assassination of President Lincoln, page 76.

  Booth’s conversation with Henry Merrick at the National Hotel, published in the April 17, 1865, New York Tribune, is reproduced in Rhodehamel and Taper, “Right or Wrong” page 150.

  Booth’s comment about “splendid acting” is reprinted in Kauffman, American Brutus, page 222.

  John Matthews left behind at least two accounts of his conversation with Booth. See Rhodehamel and Taper, “Right or Wrong” pages 151–153.

  For an account of Julia Dent Grant’s sighting of Booth, see Steers, Blood on the Moon, page 112.