Manhunt (47 page)

Frustrated, Doherty wanted to wait until morning, but Baker and Conger argued forcefully against that. As soon as the sun rose, they reasoned, Booth could see the whole troop and open fire. Sunrise would transform this pastoral setting into a killing field. One of Doherty's sergeants, Boston Corbett, volunteered for a suicide mission: he would slip into the barn alone and fight Booth man-to-man: “I offered to Mr. Conger, the detective officer, and to Lieut. Doherty, separately, to go into the barn and take him or fight him—saying if he killed me his weapons would then be empty, and they could easily take him alive.” Three times Corbett volunteered to charge in alone; and each time Doherty vetoed that harebrained scheme and ordered Corbett back to his position. Corbett was, no doubt, the most eccentric character under Doherty's command.

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.”

Conger and Baker wanted to burn the barn. The searing flames and choking smoke would do the job for them, at no risk to the men. Indeed, the only danger would be to the men who had to get close enough to the barn to lay the kindling against the timbers. Booth might be able to shove his pistol into the four inches of space between each board and shoot them through the head at point-blank range. They thought about the risk involved and concluded that it didn't have to fall to their own men.

Conger sent for the Garrett sons. He had one more job for them, he explained: collect a few armfuls of straw and pile them against the side of the barn. John Garrett roamed the grounds but could not find any fresh straw. It was all in the tobacco barn with Booth, he told Conger. Then find something else that will burn, the detective ordered. John Garrett gathered pine twigs and set them next to the barn. He returned with a second armful and bent low to arrange the pile. The rustling sound alerted Booth, who rushed to the site of the noise. Garrett jumped when he heard that familiar, menacing voice address him from the other side, just a foot or two away: “Young man, I advise you for your own good not to come here again.” It was Booth's second warning to him that night. There would not be a third, the assassin promised: “If you do not leave at once I will shoot you.” Quickly, John Garrett dropped the pine kindling and retreated out of pistol range.

If they were gathering kindling, Booth realized, the manhunters
did not plan on waiting until sunrise. They were going to burn the barn, and soon, probably. Booth decided to retake the initiative and stall the fire. He challenged his pursuers to honorable combat on open ground.

“Captain,” he called out to Baker, “I know you to be a brave man, and I believe you to be honorable: I am a cripple.” Booth's tantalizing admission thrilled every man who heard it. They had suspected, but were not absolutely sure, that the man in the barn was John Wilkes Booth. They had received reports that Lincoln's assassin was lame, and the Garretts told them that Mr. Boyd had a broken leg. Now the man in the barn confirmed it. “I have got but one leg,” Booth continued. “If you will withdraw your men in ‘line' one hundred yards from the door, I will come out and fight you.”

As a sign of good faith Booth revealed that he had chosen, at least up to now, to spare Baker's life: “Captain, I consider you to be a brave and honorable man; I have had half a dozen opportunities to shoot you, but I did not.”

Baker's eyes darted to the burning candle he held improvidently in his hand. The assassin told the truth! Conger suggested that Baker relieve himself of the inviting target immediately: “When Conger said it was presumptuous in me to hold the candle, as Booth might shoot me, I set the candle down about twenty feet from the door.”

This was
better
than Shakespeare. Lincoln's assassin had just challenged twenty-six men, a lieutenant, and two detectives to a duel. Or was it, in Booth's mind, a knightly trial by combat, with victory the reward to the just? Baker declined the glove: “We did not come here to fight you, we simply came to make you a prisoner. We do not want any fight with you.” Neither did Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who, back in Washington, awaited news from the manhunters. He wanted the assassin alive to interrogate him and expose fully the secrets of his grand conspiracy. Stanton, convinced that officials at the highest levels of the government of the Confederate States of America had participated in the assassination, wanted Booth to name his coplotters. If Booth was
dead, that would satisfy the nation's lust for vengeance, but not Stanton's curiosity. It was far better, the secretary of war believed, to take Booth alive. There would be plenty of time to hang him later, after the trial.

Booth repeated his challenge but reduced the distance to offer more generous odds to his opponents: “If you'll take your men fifty yards from the door, I'll come out and fight you. Give me a chance for my life.”

Again Baker declined.

“Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!” Booth jauntily replied.

Conger made up his mind and turned to Baker: “We will fire the barn.”

“Yes,” his fellow detective agreed, “the quicker the better.”

Conger bent over and lit the kindling. The pine twigs and needles, mixed with a little hay and highly combustible, burst into flames that licked the dry, weathered boards. Soon the barn's boards and timbers caught fire, and within minutes an entire corner of the barn blazed brightly. The fire illuminated the yard with a yellow-orange glow that flickered eerily across the faces of the men of the Sixteenth. Booth could see them clearly now, but held his fire.

As the fire gathered momentum, it also lit the inside of the barn so that now, for the first time, the soldiers could see their quarry in the gaps between the slats. Booth made a halfhearted attempt to suppress the flames by overturning a table upon them, but that only fueled the rapidly advancing inferno. The assassin was trapped. He had three choices: stay in the barn and burn alive; raise a pistol barrel—probably the .44 caliber with its heavier round to do the job right—to his head and blow out his brains; or script his own blaze of glory by hobbling out the front door and doing battle with the manhunters, welcoming death but risking capture. When Booth was a boy, he prophesied to his sister, Asia, the manner of his death: “I am not to drown, hang, or burn.” He had been right so far. He had crossed the Potomac River safely. He
would not stay in the barn and die by fire. Nor would he allow himself to be taken and strangle from the rope. Suicide? Never that shameful end, Booth vowed to himself. Richard III did not commit suicide, Macbeth did not die by his own hand, not Brutus, nor Tell. Neither would he. No, no, he must fight the course. And if he must perish, he would die in full struggle against his enemies.

Booth had decided it was better to die than be taken back to Washington to face justice. He had seen a man hanged before. In 1859, he caught the train to Charlestown, Virginia, to witness the execution of abolitionist John Brown, condemned for his ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. He had seen Brown driven to the scaffold in a horse-drawn cart, like a piece of meat carried off to market. He watched as Brown ascended the stairs to the platform, was bound, and had the sack pulled over his head. He saw the hangman loop the noose around Brown's neck, and then leave the old man standing in suspense for several minutes until the drop fell. Brown twitched a little, and then it was over. When they cut him down his face was purple.

No, Booth vowed, the prophecy was true. He must not be captured and hanged. The spectacle of a trial would put him on public display for the amusement of the gentlemen of the press and the idle curiosity seekers sure to flock to the proceedings. But he would not command the courtroom as his stage. He would be allowed no press interviews; no dramatic courtroom declarations about his beloved South, Lincoln the tyrant, his dreams, or his motives; and, under prevailing legal customs of the time, no opportunity to speak at all. In the theatre of Booth's trial, the main character would be mute. Lincoln's assassin would be a silent star, seen, but never heard. It would be hard for the voluble, loquacious thespian to bear.

Nor did Booth wish to endure the rituals of the scaffold: the indignity of being bound and trussed, of walking past his own coffin and the open grave, of being stripped of his shoes so that they did not rocket off his feet when his body jerked at the end of the rope. The bodily humiliations were even worse: the swollen tongue, burst blood vessels in the
eyeballs, unloosed kidneys and bowels, and a blackened, blood-bruised, rope-burned neck. This shameful death of a common criminal was not for him.

“I have too great a soul to die like a criminal.” Garrett's Farm, April 26, 1865.

And he would have to share the scaffold-stage with his supporting cast of coconspirators. It was far better, Booth decided, to perish here—if he must die tonight. He was dictating the action, and his pursuers responding to his improvised performance.

Booth moved to the center of the barn, where he stood awkwardly balancing the carbine in one hand, a pistol in the other, and a crutch under one arm. He swiveled his head in every direction, measuring how quickly the flames were engulfing him and hoping for a miracle. He glanced toward the door and hopped forward, a crutch under his left arm and in his right hand the Spencer carbine, the butt plate balanced against his hip. “One more stain on the old banner,” Booth cried out, conjuring up the Stars and Bars Confederate battle flag, perhaps imagining his own patriotic blood mingling with the vast ocean spilled by the South's quarter million dead.

Unseen by Booth, Sergeant Boston Corbett watched the assassin's every move inside the barn: “Immediately when the fire was lit … I could see him, but he could not see me.” Corbett had, by stealth, without Booth seeing him, walked up to one side of the barn and peeked between one of the four-inch gaps that separated each of the barn wall's vertical boards. As the flames grew brighter, Corbett could see Booth clearly: the assassin “turn[ed] towards the fire, either to put the fire out, or else to shoot the one who started it, I do not know which; but he was then coming right towards me … a little to my right,—a full breast view.” Now Booth was within easy range of Corbett's pistol. But the sergeant held his fire: “I could have shot him … but as long as he was there, making no demonstration to hurt any one, I did not shoot him, but kept my eye upon him steadily.” He saw Booth reach the middle of the barn and face the door.

Outside the barn, Conger, Baker, and Doherty, and the cavalrymen posted near the door tensed for action. No man could endure those hot flames and choking smoke for long, and they expected the door to swing open at any moment and see Booth emerge, either with his hands up or his pistols blazing.

Corbett's eyes followed their prey as Booth got closer to the door. By now the sergeant had drawn his pistol. Booth moved again and leveled the carbine against his hip, as though he was preparing to bring it into firing position. Corbett poked the barrel of his revolver through the slit in the wall and aimed it at Booth. The sergeant described what happened next:

“Finding the fire gaining upon him, he turned to the other side of the barn and got towards where the door was; and, as he got there, I saw him make a movement towards the floor. I supposed he was going to fight his way out. One of the men who was watching told me that [Booth] aimed his carbine at him. He was taking aim with the carbine, but at whom I could not say. My mind was upon him attentively to see that he did no harm; and, when I became impressed that it was time, I
shot him. I took steady aim on my arm, and shot him through a large crack in the barn.”

The soldiers surrounding the barn heard one shot. Instantly Booth dropped the carbine and crumpled to his knees. His brain commanded movement but his body disobeyed. He could not rise. He could not lift his arms. He could not move at all.

Like sprinters cued by a starting gun, Baker rushed into the barn with Conger at his heels. Baker caught Booth before he toppled over and Conger seized the assassin's pistol, which the actor grasped so tightly that the detective had to twist it to pry it out of his hand.