Manhunt (49 page)

His breathing turned sporadic and labored, and he gasped for breath every few minutes. “His heart would almost die out; and then it would commence, and, by a few rapid beats, would make a slight motion again,” Baker observed.

Booth's lips turned purple and his throat swelled.

He gasped.

The rising sun nudged above the horizon and colored the eastern sky. In Albany, New York, mourners who had waited in line all night filed past Abraham Lincoln's remains, displayed magnificently in the state Capitol's Assembly Chamber. “During the still hours of the morning,” said one who witnessed the scene, “a sad procession moved through our streets to and from the Capitol. Aside from the slow tread of this procession, not a sound was to be heard.” That afternoon the funeral train would pull out of the station, heading west to the prairies. Lincoln would be home soon.

Booth gasped again.

His vision blurred.

He could not breathe. He gasped a third time.

The sun broke free from the horizon and flooded Garrett's farm with light, which shone on Booth's face. The soldiers tried to shield his eyes by draping clothes over the back of a chair that they set up on the porch between Booth and the sun.

No, do not hide him from the light, Booth might have said, if he could still speak. When he was a boy, his bedroom at Bel Air faced the
east and he told his dearest sister, Asia: “No setting sun view for me, it is too melancholy for me; let me see him rise.”

The stage grew dark. His body shuddered. Then, no more. John Wilkes Booth was dead. The twelve-day chase for Abraham Lincoln's assassin was over.

L
UCINDA
H
OLLOWAY, CARESSING
B
OOTH'S HAIR, HAD WATCHED
him die: “[G]asping three times and crossing his hands upon his breasts, he died just as the day was breaking.” She twisted a curl of his hair between her fingers and caught Dr. Urquhart's eye. She did not need to ask. The doctor looked up, watching for his chance when Doherty, Baker, and Conger, distracted, glanced momentarily away from the assassin's corpse. Quicker than their eyes could detect, Urquhart's hand, grasping a pair of razor-sharp surgical scissors, reached down for Booth's head. In an instant he snipped a lock of the rich, black hair and pressed it into Lucinda Holloway's palm. As quickly, she clenched her fingers around the black curl into a tight fist to conceal the precious memento. She was not a craven relic hunter who lusted morbidly, like so many others, for bloody souvenirs of the great crime. No, to her the lock was a private, romantic keepsake of the luminous, dying star. If the soldiers saw what she had done, they would have overpowered her, prying open her balled fist and confiscating her treasure.

Later, when the soldiers were gone, Lucinda entered the house and walked straight to the bookcase that held another prized relic—Booth's field glasses. When no one was looking, she scratched her initials on the buckle of the shoulder strap, and then took the glasses to her mother's house, a safe distance of several miles from Garrett's farm.

T
HE
G
ARRETT MEN STOOD BY AS MUTE WITNESSES TO THE
drama they had helped author. By locking Booth and Herold in their barn, they made it impossible for the assassin to make a run for it when the Sixteenth New York arrived. Had they captured a notorious murderer or betrayed an injured, helpless man? Even more, a man who had come under their hospitality. Did they deserve honor or opprobrium? The Garretts feared judgment under the old Southern code. Soon, they tried to rewrite the events of this night to cast their actions in a positive light. Ignoring the fact that they evicted Booth from their home on the night of April 25, the Garretts claimed that he had declined the bed on his last night, and that it was Booth who insisted on sleeping under the porch with the sharp-toothed dogs, or in the barn on the hard, wood planks. Conveniently, they overlooked the part of the story about just who locked Booth inside that barn.

In the years ahead, they even invoked Edwin Booth's name in defense of their family's reputation. Edwin, a loyal Unionist, hated John's deeds, but could not bring himself to hate his brother. Touched that the Garrett family took John in, and under the mistaken impression that they offered his misguided brother nothing but kindness and hospitality during the last two days of his life, Edwin wrote the Garretts a grateful letter: "Your family will always have our warmest thanks for your kindness to him whose madness wrought so much ill to us." If Edwin Booth had known the truth, that the Garretts had locked his brother in a barn like an animal, and helped prepare the funeral pyre, then Edwin, rather than lauding their kindness, might instead have wanted to come down to Port Royal and burn the rest of their farm down to the ground.

Edwin Booth might not have been the only one. The newspapers and the public demonized the Garrett farmhouse and gave it human characteristics, just as they had done to Ford's Theatre. George Alfred Townsend's lurid characterization spoke for many: “In the pale moonlight … a plain old farmhouse looked grayly through its environing locusts.
It was worn and whitewashed, and two-storied, and its half-human windows glowered down upon the silent cavalrymen like watching owls which stood as sentries over some horrible secret asleep within … in this house, so peaceful by moonlight, murder had washed its spotted hands, and ministered to its satiated appetite.”

Journalist George Alfred Townsend's
thrilling account of the manhunt.

Conger, Baker, and Doherty wanted to be absolutely certain, before they took the body back to Washington, that they had gotten their man, so they fished from their pockets carte-de-visite photos of Booth. Young Richard Garrett, mesmerized, watched the proceedings:

“I saw it done … our whole family saw it done. [H]e was a strikingly handsome man with a face one could scarcely forget. The detectives had a printed description of him which they proceeded to verify after his death. It agreed in every particular, height, color of hair, eyes, size of hand … I saw the initials J.W.B. just where they were said to be. I saw the detectives place … the photograph of John Wilkes Booth … beside the face of the dead man we had known for two days, and [nothing] in the world could not persuade me that God ever made two men so exactly alike.”

Lieutenant Doherty unrolled his scratchy, wool, regulation army
blanket and ordered his men to lay Booth's body upon it. He told the Garrett girls to go inside and bring him a thick sewing needle. Then he stitched the blanket around the assassin's corpse, leaving one end open, like a sleeping bag, from which Booth's feet protruded. They needed a wagon. Doherty's men rustled up a local man and hired him to drive the corpse to Port Royal. The man brought the wagon to the Garretts' front porch, where several soldiers heaved Booth in like a sack of corn. David Herold, whimpering, crying, pleading excuses that no one cared to hear, took it all in.

George Alfred Townsend offered his readers an unforgettable picture of Booth's ersatz hearse:

Booth's funeral procession retraced the very route that he, David Herold, and their three young Confederate companions had followed
from Port Royal to Garrett's farm two days ago. No sobbing mourners watched this parade. The soldiers forced Herold to walk, but he complained mightily that his feet were killing him. They put him on a horse, tying his feet into the stirrups and his hands to the saddle. On the ride one of the soldiers chatted up Herold and scored a superb souvenir—he persuaded Booth's companion to trade vests with him.

The jostling wagon disturbed Booth's clotted wound, noted Townsend. “When the wagon started, Booth's wound till now scarcely dribbling, began to run anew. It fell through the crack of the wagon, dripping upon the axle, and spotting the road with terrible wafers.” It was an eerie re-creation of the street scene in front of Ford's Theatre the night of April 14, when drops of Abraham Lincoln's blood and brains drizzled onto the mud underfoot. Townsend relished the phenomenon of Booth's flowing blood as the stigmata of a cursed corpse: “It stained the planks and soaked the blankets; and the old negro, at a stoppage, dabbled his hand in it by mistake, he drew back instantly, with a shudder and stifled expletive, ‘Gor-r-r, dat'll never come off in de world; it's murderer's blood.' He wrung his hands, and looked imploringly at the officers, and shuddered again: ‘Gor-r-r, I wouldn't have dat on me fur thousand, thousand dollars.'”

After Luther Baker and Ned Freeman crossed the Rappahannock, they drove Booth's body from Port Conway toward Belle Plaine. Three miles north of that location, Baker haled the
John S
.
Ide
, which had transported the Sixteenth New York Cavalry to Belle Plaine on the twenty-fourth. There was no wharf above Belle Plaine, so Baker unloaded Booth's corpse from Freeman's wagon, put it in a small boat, and rowed to the
Ide
.

T
HOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WERE EXACTLY
what Conger, Baker, Doherty, and the men of the Sixteenth New York had in mind. Indeed, as news of the assassin's death spread, manhunters
across Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia fantasized about the same thing: That War Department broadside dated April 20, 1865, and its astounding proclamation—“$100,000.00 REWARD! The murderer of our late, beloved President Is Still At Large.” Booth was dead. Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, Sam Arnold, Michael O'Laughlen, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, Ned Spangler, and David Herold had all been arrested. It was only a matter of time before the U.S. government began writing checks—to someone.

Conger's plan worked. He had arrived in Washington before Booth's body, and now he could claim the credit of being the first to tell Edwin Stanton the news. He rushed from the wharf to Colonel Baker's office, where he broke the news. “He came into the back office,” Baker stated, “and said to me that he had got Booth.” Conger told the story of Garrett's farm, unfolded his handkerchief, and showed Baker what he had—the effects taken from Booth's body. The two detectives jumped in a buggy and, about 5:00 P.M., drove to the War Department to tell Stanton the news. But the secretary had left his office for the day. They drove on to Stanton's home, leaped out of the buggy, and ran to the front door. They found Stanton in the parlor reclining on a lounge resting, but not asleep. “We have got Booth,” Baker told him. Stanton covered his eyes with his hands, paused, and stood up. Conger and Baker laid out Booth's effects on a table. Stanton picked up the diary and, Baker recalled, “after looking at it for some time, he handed it back to me.” “Then,” continued Baker, Stanton picked up the “little pocket compass.” In the quiet of his parlor, Stanton had received the news—Booth had been taken, he was dead, and the manhunt for Lincoln's assassin was over. The secretary of war wasn't ready to celebrate yet. He wanted to be sure that the body being brought to Washington was really John Wilkes Booth. Conger unrolled the handkerchief containing the treasures he had stripped from Booth's still living body and shared his booty with Stanton. Persuasive evidence, Stanton must have concurred, but he had to be absolutely certain. He decided to convene an inquest
aboard the
Montauk
as soon as Booth's body arrived in Washington. Witnesses would give notarized statements. An autopsy would be performed. Then Stanton could be sure.