“I was two days ago one of the happiest men alive,” he wrote. “Now what am I? Oh, how little did I dream my boy when on Friday I was, as Sir Edward Mortimer, exclaiming, ‘where is my honor now?’ ‘Mountains of shame are piled upon me’ that I was not acting but uttering the fearful truth. I have a great deal to tell you of myself and the beautiful plans I had for the future, all blasted now but must wait until my mind is more settled. I am half crazy now.” He was especially concerned about his mother, Mary Ann, saying, “I go to New York today expecting to find her either dead or dying.”
Though Edwin wrote from the depths of despair, his glum outlook was not unrealistic; his fiancée, Blanche Hanel, would soon change her mind about marrying into the Booth family. But Mary Ann was not so frail as he imagined. She had taken a train to Philadelphia, and was with Asia by Sunday afternoon. In conversation, Asia mentioned the papers her brother had left with her. She said nothing about having looked at them already, but suggested they go through them now. So she, Mary Ann, and Sleeper Clarke went down to the safe and spent the rest of the afternoon poring over the items John Wilkes had left.
They found some bonds in the amount of $3,000; some city bonds for another $1,000; and a deed to Booth’s oil property, signed over to Junius. They also found two letters, one of which was addressed to Mary Ann:
Dearest beloved Mother
Heaven knows how dearly I love you. And may our kind Father in Heaven (if only for the sake of my love) watch over, comfort & protect you, in my absence. May he soften the blow of my departure, granting you peace and happiness for many, many years to come. God ever bless you.
I have always endeavored to be a good and dutiful son, and even now would wish to die sooner than give you pain. But dearest Mother, though I owe you all, there is another duty, a noble duty for the sake of liberty and humanity due to my country—For four years I have lived (I may say) a slave in the north (a favored slave its [sic] true, but no less hateful to me on that account.) Not daring to express my thoughts or sentiments, even in my own home, constantly hearing every principle, dear to my heart, denounced as treasonable, and knowing the vile and savage acts committed on my countrymen their wives & helpless children, that I have cursed my wilful idleness, and begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence. For four years I have borne it mostly for your dear sake, and for you alone, have I also struggled to fight off this desire to be gone, but it seems that uncontrollable fate, moving me for its ends, takes me from you, dear Mother, to do what work I can for a poor oppressed downtrodden people. May that same fate cause me to do that work well. I care not for the censure of the north, so I have your forgiveness, and I feel I may hope it, even though you differ with me in opinion. I may by the grace of God, live through this war dear Mother, if so, the rest of my life shall be more devoted to you, than has been my former. For I know it will take a long lifetime of tenderness and care, to atone for the pang this parting will give you. But I cannot longer resist the inclination to go and share the sufferings of my brave countrymen, holding an unequal strife (for every right human & divine) against the most ruthless enemy, the world has ever known. You can answer for me dearest Mother (although none of you think with me) that I have not a single selfish motive to spur me on to this, nothing save the sacred duty, I feel I owe the cause I love, the cause of the South. The cause of liberty & justice. So should I meet the worst, dear Mother, in struggling for such holy rights. I can say “Gods’ [sic] will be done” and bless him in my heart for not permitting me to outlive our dear bought freedom. And for keeping me from being longer a hidden lie among my country’s foes. Darling Mother I can not write you, you will understand the deep regret, the forsaking your dear side, will make me suffer, for you have been the best, the noblest, an example for all mothers. God bless you, as I shall ever pray him to do. And should the last bolt strike your son, dear Mother, bear it patiently and think at the best life is but short, and not at all times happy. My Brothers & Sisters (Heaven protect them) will add my love and duty to their own, and watch you with care and kindness, till we meet again. And if that happiness does not come to us on earth, then may, O may it be with God. So then dearest, dearest Mother, forgive and pray for me. I feel that I am right in the justness of my cause, and that we shall, ere long, meet again. Heaven grant it. Bless you, bless you. Your loving son will never cease to hope and pray for such a joy. Come weal or woe, with never ending love and devotion you will find me ever your affectionate son
John.
To John Sleeper Clarke’s way of thinking, the fact that Booth could not express himself at home was clear evidence that the family did not agree with him and would not have condoned or encouraged the assassination. He thought that in justice to the family, that letter ought to be published. Certainly, it would be more helpful than the second letter, which seemed to be addressed to Clarke himself. It was part manifesto, part explanation for Booth’s plan to “make a prisoner of this man to whom the world owes so much misery.” It rehashed the political arguments of the past, restated Booth’s love for the Union as it once was, and expressed his certainty that Abraham Lincoln was wrong in making war against the South. “In a foreign war,” Booth wrote, “I too could say ‘country right or wrong,’ But in a struggle such as ours (where the brother tries to pierce the brothers [sic] heart) for God’s sake choose the right.” Booth had always sought guidance from the past, and he was confident that his drastic action would help the United States avoid the failures of bygone civilizations.14
GEORGE C. COTTINGHAM AND JOSHUA LLOYD had spent most of Friday night standing guard outside Andrew Johnson’s hotel room. Both were detectives on the force of Major James O’Beirne, and naturally both were eager to join the manhunt. They finally got their chance late on Saturday, when Lloyd realized that both David Herold and John Surratt, whose names had emerged in the investigation, were acquaintances of his. They reported this fact to O’Beirne, and the major reassigned them to find those men. At five A.M. on Sunday, the detectives saddled up and headed for Surrattsville.
By then, Booth and Herold were camping in a stand of pine trees forty miles south of Washington. Though Booth had brought an extra pistol in his saddlebags, he could hardly rest easy. He knew he was the most hunted man in American history, and pursuers might come at him from any direction. Though the fugitives were unaware of it, hundreds had already flooded into Charles County. Many of those who landed at Chapel Point were passing nearby on their way inland. So for hours they sat quiet and motionless, continuously scanning the woods for signs of danger. A subtle noise, and their eyes widened; a sudden move, and they gripped their revolvers. After hours of anxious waiting, they finally heard two whistles, a pause, then another whistle. It was the signal Captain Cox had told them to expect.
The man Cox had sent to them was slow-moving, dour, and gray-haired. Thomas A. Jones was forty-four, but could pass for sixty. The years had worn heavily on him. His imprisonment and the death of his wife had made him determined to do all he could in service to the Cause—or more to the point, against the administration. Jones had ferried countless people across the river near his old home, a few miles south of here. That place stood on an eighty-foot bluff, with dormer windows that had given him a clear view of the Potomac for seven miles to the north and nine to the south. But Jones had lost that home, and he now lived in a smaller house a few miles to the north. His new place was much farther from the Potomac, with nothing but dense woods and rough terrain between them. At its nearest point, the river was turbulent and far more dangerous to cross.15
ALL DAY SATURDAY, Secretary Stanton seemed to think that the manhunt would be over at any time, and that he could run the investigation using only the people at his immediate disposal. But by Sunday, Booth had still not been captured, and the flood of data had become unmanageable. It was clear that more brainpower would be needed to solve the case. So Stanton contacted local, state, and federal officials all over the country and asked them to send their best detecti
ves to Washington. He freed up some of his own department’s investigators, and he reassigned several provost marshals to concentrate on the case. In days he had assembled the largest investigative body in the nation’s history.16
To make sense of the information they gathered, Stanton put three special commissioners in charge of the case. Lt. Col. John A. Foster, Col. Henry H. Wells, and Col. Henry Steel Olcott would run the investigation from their offices in General Augur’s headquarters. Each was an experienced investigator with a distinct perspective. Foster, of New York City, was a thirty-two-year-old prodigy who had begun practicing law when he was barely out of his teens. Wells, forty-one, was a native New Yorker and a tough-minded prosecutor. He had once commanded the 26th Michigan Infantry, but served lately as the provost marshal of Washington’s defenses south of the Potomac. Olcott, thirty-two, was an author, educator, and pioneer in scientific agriculture. When the department hired him as a detective, he was already famous as a debunker of psychic phenomena. Though Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles sized him up as “rash, reckless, at times regardless of the rights of others,” Olcott would be the most conscientious member of the investigative team.17
On Sunday afternoon, Detectives George Cottingham and Joshua Lloyd set up their headquarters in the tavern at Surrattsville. They had been looking for John M. Lloyd as a possible informant, but Lloyd (who was not related to Joshua) had gone to Allen’s Fresh, where he had sent his wife a few days before. The detectives talked about going after him, but before they could leave, something strange happened. A riderless horse, with a saddle and bridle, came trotting out of the woods just beyond the fence. A short distance from it was a man on foot. He noticed the detectives, and dashed back into the woods. A sergeant gave chase. He fired a couple of shots in his direction, but the man got away and apparently the horse fled as well. No trace of the stranger or the animal was found. Not knowing who else might be out there, Cottingham sent a messenger back to Washington for reinforcements. In the meantime, he and his partner would stay where they were and wait to see if the man reappeared.18
Meanwhile, Provost Marshal James L. McPhail continued looking for Booth’s associates in Baltimore. Two of his men, Voltaire Randall and Eaton G. Horner, had already learned that Booth had been close to Sam Arnold and Mike O’Laughlen. They could not find either man in Baltimore, so they telegraphed their names and descriptions to authorities in Washington. Their search took on a new urgency when an item appeared in the papers about a letter Booth had received from someone named “Sam” in Hookstown. This had to be Arnold.
Hookstown was a small settlement about five miles northwest of the city. It was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else and secrets were hard to keep. The Arnold family owned a 118-acre farm there, and it was left in the care of Mrs. Arnold’s brother, William J. Bland. Sam Arnold had moved in with his uncle after leaving the plot in March, but his stay was short-lived. By the beginning of April, he had already gone away, and as McPhail’s men learned, he had given the postmistress a forwarding address at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Armed with that information, detectives took the 7:00 P.M. steamship to Old Point Comfort, next to the fort at the mouth of the Chesapeake.19
AT HIS HOME IN CAMDEN, New Jersey, Matthew Canning was taken into custody by Captain John H. Jack, 186th Pennsylvania. For Canning, his arrest was less of a surprise than the identity of the officer who made it. John Jack, a former actor himself, was an intimate friend of both Canning and the Booths. He trusted his prisoner, and spared him a traumatic ride to Washington in wrist irons. They traveled as companions.20
Harry A. Langdon was not so fortunate. As an actor, Langdon was also well acquainted with the Booths. He also bore a resemblance to them; for that reason, he was thrown in jail. He was just one of many look-alikes detained in the wake of the assassination. One such person, hustled off a train at Wilmington, was subsequently identified as Congressman Andrew Jackson Rogers of New Jersey. Others were less well known. By Monday, the jails were filling up with so many attractive dark-haired men that the Philadelphia Inquirer noted it was no longer safe to be good-looking. Authorities mistook one man for Booth and tried to seize him on a train in southeastern Pennsylvania. Unaware they were after him, the man traveled from Pottsville through Reading and into the Poconos with soldiers hot on his heels. They finally caught up to him after a sixty-mile chase, near Tamaqua. Records give no indication of his fate.21
Photographs of Booth would have spared these handsome men the agony, but not everyone had access to them. The War Department ordered plenty of copies, but the Surgeon General’s office, which was printing them, could not keep up with the demand. Booth had been photographed more than forty times, and detectives were using at least two different images in their questioning of witnesses. One was selected for mass distribution. It showed Booth seated, with his left hand on his hip, cradling a small riding crop in his right hand. Apparently, it was not the best choice. Brooke Stabler and Sergeant Cobb both had trouble recognizing him from it, and Mary Ann Van Tyne noted how little resemblance it actually bore to Booth. “I think him a better looking man than that is,” she said, “but I should think it is the man I saw. But it is a poor likeness of him.” O’Laughlen’s friend Dan Loughran agreed. Loughran had been shown a standing pose of Booth, and he said it looked a lot more like him than did the other one. The poor choice of photographs complicated matters for some suspects. Anyone who failed to identify Booth from the seated photograph was judged to be evasive, and all the more suspicious. 22
WITH DETECTIVES SWARMING IN from many jurisdictions, some friction was bound to develop. The presence of Lafayette C. Baker, chief of the National Detective Police, would guarantee it. When Baker arrived in Washington on Sunday, his first order of business was to offer a $30,000 reward—from funds he didn’t have—to anyone who could find the conspirators. He copied Britten Hill’s description of the Seward assailant onto the handbills he sent out. Then he happened upon two detectives from the police department and told them (falsely) that Stanton had put him in overall command of the investigation. The men shared some leads with Baker, and in exchange he offered the information that he already had Booth’s horse in his possession. That, too, was a lie. In a matter of hours, Lafayette Baker had managed to alienate some of the best detectives around. And he was just getting started.23
PRIVATE THOMAS PRICE, 6th New York Heavy Artillery, was one of many soldiers assigned to look for Booth in Washington. At about three P.M., he was searching in a rural area near Glenwood Cemetery when he noticed an old path, now overgrown, leading into the woods between two forts. Lying next to it, in a gully, was a long gray coat with bloodstains on the right sleeve and breast. Price thought the garment might have something to do with the assassination, and excitedly he made note of the clues associated with it: a snail on the coat, the dampness of the fabric, and the nearby tracks of a large horse.
At about the same time, Justice Abram B. Olin accompanied Clara Harris, who had been the Lincolns’ guest in their box, to the scene of the crime. Clara’s father, Senator Ira Harris, was with them, as were Jim Ferguson and Chief Justice Cartter of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. On entering the box, Clara suddenly remembered a white-handled penknife she had seen lying open on the balustrade that Friday night. At the time, she had been distracted by the play, and forgot all about it. The knife had disappeared since then, but other important evidence remained. Justice Olin was particularly interested in the doors to the box. Olin had heard a rumor that Booth fired the shot through the closed door behind the president’s rocker, and he wanted to resolve that issue. He asked Clara Harris to arrange the furniture just as she remembered it. Then, by the light of a candle, he and the others inspected the hole in the door. It did indeed line up with the back of the president’s head, but it was smaller than a bullet, and had no powder burns around it. There were, however, fresh and distinct marks from a gimlet. Since there were no wood shavings on the carpet, it appeared that whoever had
bored the hole had cleaned up after himself.24
AT THE LITTLE VILLAGE OF NEWPORT, in southern Charles County, Thomas Harbin and a Confederate boatman named Joseph N. Baden, Jr., left a local hotel and headed south toward a place on the Potomac called the Banks O’Dee. Harbin, who had enlisted in the plot when Booth spoke to him in Bryantown the previous winter, had not been seen with any of the conspirators in months, and may well have thought the abduction plan had been abandoned. Most likely, he and Baden had come over with Mosby’s people in their quest for forage, but since Booth had drawn so much attention to the area, they no longer considered it prudent to remain. In light of subsequent events, it appears that someone in Maryland told them to recross the river, then wait on the other side, where a couple of men would join them later.
Meanwhile, Booth’s mare had broken her bridle, and their slow-moving guide, Thomas Jones, found her grazing near the pine thicket. The fugitives could ill afford to have her running loose. Hundreds of people had been given a description of this horse, and if she were discovered, soldiers would intensify their search of the area. Jones advised the fugitives to get rid of her, and Herold’s horse as well. Franklin Robey, Cox’s overseer, and Herold led the animals down to the swamp. Pulling them into deep water, they shot both horses and watched their carcasses sink beneath the surface. Now even the vultures wouldn’t find them.25
BY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, George Atzerodt had made his way to Germantown and the home of Hezekiah Metz, an old family friend whose daughter Elizabeth had caught his eye. Atzerodt—or Atwood, as his hosts knew him—was one of several guests who had joined the Metzes for supper, and around the table all anyone could talk about was the assassination. The news had come out in bits and pieces, and James Leamon was skeptical of what he had been hearing. He asked if it was true that General Grant had been murdered. Atzerodt said he did not think so, but added, “If it is so, someone must have got on the same train of cars that he did.”26
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