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

by James L. Swanson

Abraham Lincoln had ordered that work on the dome continue during the war as a sign that the Union would go on.

“I see that you have a band of music with you…. I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday we fairly captured it. I presented this question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”

“Yes, anything to drive away the blues.” Lee’s surrender, Booth says, “was enough to give anyone the blues.”

Andrew Johnson, former military governor of Tennessee. Johnson did not own a house in Washington, and the job did not include official quarters, so he lodged at a hotel. Johnson’s room was unguarded, and, if Booth had wanted to, he could have walked upstairs and knocked on the door.

The vice president—alone and unguarded—had retired for the night. All Atzerodt had to do was knock on his door and, the moment Johnson opened it, plunge the knife into his chest or shoot him

William Clark returned to the Petersen house and found his room in shambles. That night he climbed into Lincoln’s deathbed and fell asleep under the same coverlet that warmed the body of the dying president.

John Wilkes Booth

Stanton wanted to see the box, too, and so, like one of his detectives prowling for clues, he too retraced Booth’s steps to visualize each scene in the assassin’s script. He also wanted to see the play. Perhaps a reenactment of Our American Cousin would provide a vital, hitherto neglected clue. Stanton rounded up what cast members could be found, commandeered Ford’s, and ordered a surreal, private performance in the empty theatre.

Jones was an indispensable, mysterious, and laconic secret agent fighting the shadow war along the watery borders between Union and rebel territory. The Union army had never caught him in action—he was a river ghost to the boys in blue.

Then, to hedge their bets, they published an absurd and contradictory headline: “The Assassin Arrested, or Still at Large.”

The theatre building itself was “arrested” by the government—it was ordered closed and was eventually confiscated from the Fords.

These were not the only arrests. The dragnet rounded up more than one hundred suspects: Junius Booth, one of the assassin’s brothers; a strange Portuguese sea captain named Celestino; various Confederate sympathizers and agents; and others who expressed disloyal sentiments.

Even worse, Booth witnessed the first draft of history transform Abraham Lincoln from a controversial and often unpopular war leader into America’s secular saint.

Booth drew from his pocket a small datebook for the previous year, 1864. Although obsolete, the book, bound in worn, black covers, contained a number of unused pages. Booth thumbed through it until he reached a blank page, which he annotated “Ti Amo/April 13–14 Friday the Ides.” Then, in a cramped, hurried hand, unlike his usual expansive style, he began his manifesto. “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. 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 Intelligencer, in which I fully set forth our reasons for our proceedings. He or the Govmt …”

But while Jones slept more quietly and peacefully than he had in weeks, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold were rowing in the wrong direction!

It had taken Booth ten days to travel from downtown Washington to the Port Conway ferry. It would take the Sixteenth New York, alerted by telegraph and transported by steamboat, just one day to close the gap between Washington and Port Conway. The same superior technology that the Union had used to defeat the Confederacy was now employed against Booth.

Finally, at the climax of a twelve-day manhunt that had gripped the nation, a heavily armed patrol of Sixteenth New York Cavalry had actually cornered Lincoln’s assassin. The situation demanded decisive action, but, at the critical moment, Conger and the others hesitated. Instead of ordering their men to rush the barn and take Booth, they decided to talk him out, and then they delegated the job to a solitary, unarmed man, a civilian—and an ex-rebel soldier, no less—to negotiate Booth’s surrender. It was a clear abdication of command responsibility. Twenty-six cavalrymen, each armed with a six-shot revolver, not counting other weapons, could pour a fusillade of 156 conical lead pistol bullets into the barn before having to reload. In response, Booth could fire a mere 12 rounds from the revolvers and 7 from the Spencer carbine.

In the dark, and in the few seconds before they seized him, Booth could not pick off more than a few of them before he was subdued. Stanton wanted Booth alive for questioning.

“We want you,” Baker replied, “and we know who you are. Give up your arms and come out!” Booth stalled to preserve his options: “Let us have a little time to consider it.” Surprisingly, Baker agreed to the delay: “Very well.”

A quirky English immigrant who adopted the name “Boston” to honor the city in which he found Christ, thirty-two-year-old Thomas Corbett proved to be a hard fighter and a reliable noncommissioned officer. A hatter before the Civil War, he had performed a bizarre, horrific act of self-mutilation when tempted by fallen women. The records of Massachusetts General Hospital chronicled the gruesome event: “[Corbett] is a Methodist, and having perused the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of Matthew, he took a pair of scissors and made an opening one inch long in the lower part of the scrotum. He then drew the testes down and cut them off. He then went to a prayer meeting, walked about some, and ate a hearty dinner. There was not much external hemorrhage, but a clot had filled the opening so that the blood was confined to the scrotum, which was swelled enormously and was black. He called on Dr. Hodges … who laid it open and removed the blood; he tied the cord and sent him here.”

This was better than Shakespeare. Lincoln’s assassin had just challenged twenty-six men, a lieutenant, and two detectives to a duel.

By the time they entered, the two detectives and several soldiers were hovering over Booth in the middle of a burning barn, and carrying on an animated argument about the origin of the wound. There were better places to continue the debate, suggested Conger: “Let us carry him out of here: this place will soon be burning.”

Booth whispered for water and Conger and Baker gave it to him. He asked them to roll him over and turn him facedown. Booth was in agony and wanted to shift positions but was helpless to move himself. Conger thought it a bad idea to roll him over: “You cannot lie on your face.”

Corbett claimed that he had not shot Booth for vengeance, but because he believed the assassin was about to open fire on the soldiers. He did it to protect the lives of his fellow troopers, he insisted. And, Corbett continued, he did not intend to kill Booth. He only wanted to inflict a disabling wound to render the assassin helpless, for capture. And he did not violate any orders from his superiors. The men of the Sixteenth New York had not been ordered to hold their fire. Indeed, Conger, Baker, and Doherty had failed to give them any orders at all on the subject. Corbett exercised his own discretion as a noncommissioned officer and shot Booth: “It was not through fear at all that I shot him, but because it was my impression that it was time the man was shot; for I thought he would do harm to our men in trying to fight his way out of that den if I did not.”

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.

Booth is not celebrated for the murder, but he has in some way been forgiven for it. What else can explain the presence of large street banners, decorated with the assassin’s photo, hanging from lampposts along his F Street escape route, directing tourists to Ford’s Theatre? In comparison, the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene.

A lawyer named Finis Bates claimed that the assassin was his client, and in 1903 he published a wildly popular book titled The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. When this false Booth died, allegedly by his own hand, his mummy was exhibited for years at traveling carnivals. It survives to this day, hidden in a private collection.

When he leaped to the stage and shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” he must have thought that his immortality as a Southern patriot was sealed. But his last words survive as his true epitaph: “Useless, useless.”