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Stanton sent more patrols into Maryland and Virginia to track down everyone who he knew, or suspected, had seen or helped Booth during his twelve days on the run. Thomas Jones, Captain Cox, the Garrett sons, and many more were seized and taken to the Old Capitol prison.
He decided to put only eight defendants on trial—Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen, Edman Spangler, and Samuel Mudd.
Boston Corbett did enjoy additional compensation—fame. The public celebrated him as “Lincoln’s Avenger.”
Boston Corbett was never punished for shooting Booth. He had violated no orders, and no one could prove that his true motive was anything other than protecting his men.
Indeed, it was from the newspapers that Surratt’s attorneys learned their client would die.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BOSTON CORBETT’S LIFE UNFOLDED AS ODDLY AS ONE MIGHT have guessed.
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.”
Edwin Stan-ton was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, not far from the stone chapel where Abraham Lincoln held a small funeral service for his son Willie. Few people visit his grave. If you drive down R Street, you can see it from your car: the weathered, white obelisk just a few yards behind the formidable, spike-topped iron fence, standing sentinel over his rest.
a CENTURY LATER, AT ANOTHER CEMETERY, MISGUIDED ANTIquarians buried Lewis Powell’s remains with honors.
In 1993, somebody discovered his head, still neatly labeled, at the national museum. Powell sympathizers gained possession of the skull, transported it to his native Florida, sealed it in a miniature, hatbox-size coffin, and buried it on November 11—Veterans Day—1994.
After the assassination, Ford’s Theatre survived arson, abandonment, and disaster. Stanton vowed that the site of Lincoln’s murder must never again serve as a house of laughter and public entertainment.
It was too much for Stanton. He seized Ford’s Theatre again in the name of public safety. The government sentenced the building to death as a playhouse, and paid a contractor $28,500 to gut the interior. All evidence of its appearance on the night of April 14, 1865—the gaslights, the decorations, the furniture, the stage, and the president’s box—vanished, either destroyed or carted away.
Then, over time, something changed. Booth became part of American folklore and his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero—the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin.
To Asia, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth were paired, tragic figures destined to die and bring about a transcendent healing between North and South.
In 1937, a woman wrote a preposterous book claiming that Booth had survived the night at Garrett’s farm, lived a secret life, and fathered a child. The proof? Why, the author was the assassin’s granddaughter, of course.
John Wilkes Booth did not get what he wanted. Yes, he did enjoy a singular success: he killed Abraham Lincoln. But in every other way, Booth was a failure. He did not prolong the Civil War, inspire the South to fight on, or overturn the verdict of the battlefield, or of free elections. Nor did he confound emancipation, resuscitate slavery, or save the dying antebellum civilization of the Old South.
