American Brutus

by Michael W. Kauffman

  So far, nobody in Augur’s office had spoken to Powell. The detectives simply escorted him and a number of other men into a room full of people, then closed the door. William H. Bell, the servant of Secretary Seward, had been waiting to identify him, and detectives watched Bell closely as he looked at the men who had just walked in. Bell scanned the crowd slowly, looking back and forth, studying faces, returning glances. And then he froze. His eyes widened, his shoulders drew back, and he fixed his gaze on the tall, muscular, dark-haired man in the room. Powell stared back as Bell moved in close, never breaking eye contact, not saying a word. Then, standing face-to-face, he dramatically raised his hand and pointed a finger right at the face of that fearsome giant. Lewis Powell broke into a broad grin.

  THE SEARCH of Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse went on for hours, and it turned up some interesting evidence. Detectives found more than a hundred letters, a pair of spurs, a composite photograph of Confederate leaders, and a bullet mold. There were many carte de visite photographs scattered around, but one in particular caught their attention. It bore a patriotic shield and Confederate flags, along with the inscriptions, “Thus will it ever be with Tyrants,” “Virginia the Mighty,” and “ Sic Semper Tyrannis! ”40

  FOURTEEN

  “LET THE STAIN OF INNOCENT BLOOD BE REMOVED FROM THE LAND”

  AS SOON AS LEWIS POWELL WAS IDENTIFIED AS THE SEWARDS’ assailant, he was placed in shackles and transported to the ironclad Saugus at the navy yard. His capture, only three days after the assassination, capped a remarkably successful day for government investigators. Of the eight people put on trial that spring, five were arrested on April 17. Now only four of the prime suspects remained at large: Booth, Surratt, Herold, and Atzerodt.

  After Powell’s awkward entrance at Seward’s, the revolver’s malfunction, his panicked response, the unexpected resistance, and the uncooperative horse, he was lucky to have gotten away alive. He had intended to take his own route out of Washington, separate from Booth’s. That “skedaddle” was something he had learned from Mosby. He had planned to take a right turn onto H Street at the top of Lafayette Park. That would have taken him across town to Benning Road, northeast of the Capitol, and to a bridge over the Eastern Branch. On the other side of the bridge, a fork in the road offered two options: turn right, and end up on Booth’s escape route; turn left, and go to Baltimore.1

  In his excitement, Powell forgot that the army had recently built a gate across the Benning Bridge and no one could cross it after nine P.M. Powell may actually have reached the bridge, but then been forced to turn around. It was an easy route heading out of the city, but coming the other way was more complicated. Inbound, Benning Road ended at an intersection where five streets converged like spokes on a wheel. Four of them looked about the same, and evidently Powell chose a wrong one. H Street would have led him back to familiar territory. But instead he took Boundary Street, then turned onto one of the roads that led north from there. He was lost.

  Somewhere near Glenwood Cemetery, he found an abandoned coat and exchanged his own for it. After hiding in the cemetery for two days, he emerged cold and starving, carrying a pickaxe taken from a gravedigger’s shed. Since he had lost his hat at Seward’s, he improvised a substitute by cutting a sleeve off his undershirt and wearing it as a skullcap.

  John Wilkes Booth had been better prepared. He had spent a great deal of time thinking through the assassination and planning for every contingency. He knew that his own hat would probably fall off when he hit the stage, and indeed it did. Yet when he reached the Navy Yard Bridge, he was allowed to cross in part because there was nothing suspicious about him. He was wearing a new hat, which he had evidently packed in his saddlebags before the shooting. 2

  NOONE WAS ABLE to find or identify the man who ran into the woods near the Surratt Tavern. So on Tuesday morning, April 18, Lt. Alexander Lovett gave up trying and joined Detectives Cottingham and Lloyd on a search for the tavern keeper, John M. Lloyd. Along with a cavalry detachment, they headed south, toward Charles County, and ran into Lloyd on his way back to the tavern. They told him he was under arrest.

  Lloyd was an emotional wreck. For the past three days, he had denied all knowledge of Booth’s escape, but he knew that sooner or later he would be found out. As he saw it, his choice was between a government hanging and a neighborhood lynching. He was convinced that betraying Booth would cost him his life, and he was determined not to say a thing until absolutely necessary.

  Detectives Simon Gavacan and William Williams escorted Lloyd to a makeshift guardhouse at Robey’s post office and left him there. Then they joined Joshua Lloyd, Lieutenant Lovett, and three men from the 16th New York Cavalry on a foray back into Charles County. They reached Bryantown at midday, and found Lieutenant Dana at a tavern. Though Dana had been there since Saturday, he had turned up little on Booth’s movements. A local doctor had reported that two strangers stopped at the home of his cousin on Saturday morning, but Dana took no action. He was more interested in the fact that some of Mosby’s Rangers had been spotted Saturday night near the government farm on the Patuxent, and had reportedly engaged Union troops in a skirmish. The way Dana saw it, Booth was almost surely with those men; his earlier movements were of little concern.3

  Unlike David Dana, Lovett and the detectives thought that the sighting of the two strangers was worth investigating. They headed at once to the home of Dr. George D. Mudd, who had made the report, and questioned him at length about what he knew. Mudd said that he was attending church near Beantown on Sunday when his cousin, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, told him about two strangers who had come to his house before sunrise the day before. One was suffering a great deal from a broken leg, and his companion said he had sustained the injury in a riding accident. He was treated, and spent most of the day recuperating in bed. His friend was a talkative little man who seemed to know his way around the area but was a stranger to Mudd. They left his farm Saturday afternoon, and Samuel Mudd had not seen them since.

  George Mudd suggested that the detectives talk directly with his cousin, and he led their party out to the farm, four miles north of town. Dr. Samuel Mudd was out in a field when they arrived, and he came back in at once. They asked him about his Saturday morning visitors, and were particularly interested in learning where they went after they left his farm. Mudd said that the small man had asked how to get to the home of Rev. Lemuel Wilmer, who lived on the opposite (west) side of Zekiah Swamp. He had given them directions, and they appeared to be heading that way when they left. Armed with that information, the team headed for the home of Parson Wilmer. Dr. George Mudd led the way.4

  In the meantime, hundreds of soldiers trudged over the countryside, searching every home for fugitives and, sometimes, for plunder. Even the hospital staff of Point Lookout was pressed into service. Fifty of them were sent out to search, and at least one of them enjoyed this temporary duty. As he wrote home: “A gay time we had of it. . . . Of course we met with all sorts of faces long, short, scared, indignant, and angry countenances, but little attention was paid to all remonstrations, and objections but particular attention was lavished on the many good things, with which the Pantry was, or happened to be stocked. . . . Objections were made on several occasions by some of the many southern sympathizer’s [sic], with which this country is stocked, but they were soon convinced of the necessity of said proceedings just by showing and explaining to them the use for which handcuffs are intended.”5

  Many of these pursuers were closer to Booth than they imagined, and some passed within yards of his hiding place in the pines. He lay there quietly under the cover of the trees, aching to be on the move once more. Paranoid and impatient, he could hardly stand this forced inaction. He was eager to know what the world thought of his deed, and his first inkling came when Jones brought him some newspapers. The reactions were not good. “History,” said the Washington Evening Star, “has on its record no suicidal act so terrible as that committed by the conquered South yesterday through its represen
tative, the assassin of President Lincoln.” They reported that in Baltimore, “all kindly feeling towards rebels and rebel sympathizers has, as it were, been obliterated, and one intense feeling of detestation and abhorrence for all connected with the rebellion takes its place.” The Richmond Whig called Lincoln’s assassination “the most appalling, the most deplorable calamity which has ever befallen the people of the United States.”6

  Booth was stunned. For years, the papers had assailed Lincoln as a tyrant who had no regard for laws or the rights of citizens. But now these same papers railed against him for his act of tyrannicide. Worse, the assassination changed Lincoln into something entirely unreal. The Daily National Intelligencer, once an anti-Lincoln paper, now said of him that “none has ever lived in all the tide of time who evinced more purity, and who was more trusted by a great nation in the issues of its life and death. He did not have, he could not have among those worthy of consideration, a single enemy.” Booth was particularly offended by the suggestion, printed in several papers, that stepping up behind an unarmed middle-aged man and shooting him in the back of the head was somehow an act of cowardice. That was a charge he could not leave unanswered.

  He still carried a pocket diary for tracking his professional engagements. He had it from the year before, and because he had not toured since May, most of the book remained unmarked. So he cut out the used pages and carefully composed a message he hoped would set the world straight:

  Ti Amo

  April 13–14 Friday the Ides7

  Until today nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive & great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart.

  To Booth, the important point was that he, the assassin, did strike with a heart—and with courage. As he put it:

  I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A Col. was at his side. I shouted Sic semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill; Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it was. This forced union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to out-live my country. This night (before the deed), I wrote a long article and left it for one of the Editors of the National Inteligencer, in which I fully set forth our reasons for our proceedings. He or the Govmt8

  Undoubtedly, Booth was going to suggest that either the editor or the government had suppressed his letter, and perhaps he intended to repeat the gist of it here. But something cut him short.

  In tone and substance, the writing in that diary was quintessential Booth: posturing, defensive, and grossly inflated. Though he had certainly walked among a thousand of Lincoln’s friends, it was hardly a dangerous move, since none suspected his motives at the time. Rathbone was a major, not a colonel, and even though he was sitting near the president, he was unarmed and unaware that Booth was in the box. Having fired the shot, Booth rode thirty miles that night, not sixty, and subsequent information proved that his broken leg was a simple fracture that could not have been “tearing the flesh at every jump.” These were all exaggerations, and all designed to show that Booth was not a coward but a hero who acted “boldly and not as the papers say.”

  Of all the points Booth tried to make, only one has endured, and that may have been unintentional on his part. When he wrote “In jumping broke my leg,” he left posterity with the image of himself breaking his leg on stage after being caught in the folds of the national flag. “The revenge of Old Glory” is one of history’s most dramatic twists, but it may not be true. Assessment of the evidence actually substantiates the version that Booth himself later told. In the course of his escape into the countryside, he said, he broke his leg when his horse tripped and rolled over on him.

  Booth’s flight from the president’s box to Baptist Alley had not been one fluid motion. Almost all eyewitnesses at Ford’s reported seeing Booth crouch or stagger, and momentarily lose his footing when he landed. But they noticed no sign of pain, in movement or expression. What they saw was dizziness, such as one gets from a quick rush of adrenaline; that was to be expected under the circumstances.

  If Booth had broken his leg in the theater, as history tells us, we should expect to find eyewitness accounts that describe him as limping across the stage. Yet within hours or days of the shooting, dozens of statements were taken, and every one of them described Booth’s flight as a rush or a dead run. Many remarked on how quickly he made it into the wings. As one man said, “He ran with lightning speed across the Stage & disappeared beyond the scenes. . . .The whole occurrence, the shot, the leap, the escape— was done while you could count eight.” An army lieutenant said that Booth “shot off like an arrow” in plain sight of armed soldiers like himself, who had had no time to react. Indeed, the way he “strode across the stage, in a real theatrical manner” was the key to his success. 9

  Flying through the door to Baptist Alley, Booth thrust his left foot into a stirrup and almost leaped into the saddle. His movement startled the mare, and she pulled out from under him, leaving him twisting with the full weight of his body on that (supposedly broken) left leg. Peanuts Borrows and Major Joseph Stewart both saw Booth’s struggle to throw himself onto the horse, and neither reported anything that suggests he was in pain. Nor did Sergeant Cobb notice any discomfort when Booth approached him to cross the Navy Yard Bridge. Not until Booth reached the tavern in Surrattsville was he clearly suffering from a painful injury. He told John Lloyd that his horse had fallen on him, and he boasted of killing the president.10

  Booth and Herold had switched horses by then. Sergeant Cobb and others were positive that Booth had ridden away on a bright bay mare, and everyone agreed that Herold was on a roan. But outside the city, everyone who encountered them remembered it the other way around. In light of Booth’s broken leg, the switch made perfect sense. An injured man would certainly have preferred the gentle, steady gait of a horse like the one Herold had rented. From Lloyd’s to Mudd’s, Booth stayed on that horse, and Herold rode the mare, who was now noticeably lame, with a bad cut on her left front leg. Clearly, she had been involved in an accident.11

  For days on end, the fugitives lay in the pine thicket, pouring out their thoughts and their regrets over what had happened. Booth still clung to his lofty defense of tyrannicide, but the realities of the case had put everything in a different light. According to Herold, Booth was horrified by that bloodbath at Seward’s, and he said that he was “very sorry for the sons,” though he “wished to God that Seward was killed.” He was especially pained to hear that he had caused so much trouble for Ford’s employee Ned Spangler.

  Booth could not understand how his own recollection of the shooting could differ so much from what the papers described. As Herold later described it, Booth’s version was almost surrealistic:

  “There was a soldier or officer trying to prevent him from going into the box, and the thought struck him to draw a letter from his pocket and show it to the man, which he did. The man let him pass. He was so agitated at the time, that he fastened the door, he thinks. He advanced toward the President, with the letter in one hand and the pistol in the other. He put the pistol to the back of the president’s head, shoved it, and hollered ‘Sic Semper tyrannis.’ He says it was the President’s secretary that caught him by the throat.”

  Booth was surprised to hear that Major Rathbone was wounded in the arm, since he had lunged straight at him, hitting him “in the stomach or belly.”12

  WHILE THE FUGITIVES HID in the pine woods, hundreds of troops crisscrossed Charles County looking for them. From Port Tobacco to Benedict, Chapel Point to Leonardtown, and all along the Potomac shore, soldiers cov
ered every crossroads and settlement that Booth might have passed. The mission was unusually demanding, and some of the troops had been on constant duty from Friday night until Tuesday. A sleep rotation had been established, but only for those remaining in the city; those on patrol had to catch some rest when the opportunity arose. Their only compensation was an extra ration of coffee, sugar, and bread.

  Weeks after the fact, George Alfred Townsend would describe the manhunt as a well-organized operation carried on with military precision. In fact, each unit had its own way of doing things. Some focused on the black residents, assuming they would incriminate their former masters. Secretary Stanton believed as much, and made a point of putting the 22nd U.S. Colored Troops into the search. But others, such as William P. Wood, banked on the goodwill of the white population. Wood treated them kindly and cultivated their trust. Officers and detectives employed all kinds of tricks and ruses to get people to talk. As for the actual search, there is no reason to believe that a systematic approach (such as a grid search) was ever even considered.13

  Though the lead conspirator remained at large, the dragnet was productive nonetheless. Hundreds of people were detained, including Atzerodt’s friend Walter M. Barnes, who was described as “one of the conspirators”; Adeline Adams, who had allegedly entertained Booth at her hotel in Newport; and Thomas Nelson Conrad, a “minister” who could not account for his presence in Charles County. Some of these people were seen as potential witnesses, but the large majority were just suspicious characters— blockade-runners, people who had threatened Union men, or those who had exulted in the president’s death. Their numbers grew so large that on several occasions Edwin Stanton ordered a general purge to make room for legitimate suspects.