Manhunt (68 page)

Courtesy of private collection
Michael O'Laughlin

Courtesy of private collection
John Surratt in the Zouave uniform of the Papal Guard, where he served before his capture and return to the United States. His service in Rome fueled rumors that the assassination of Lincoln was part of a Catholic conspiracy. Copies of this photograph were sold to the public during Surratt's 1867 trial.

Courtesy of private collection
Through the summer of 1865, during the trial of the conspirators, John Wilkes Booth, even in death, continued to dominate the popular imagery of the assassination. Dion Haco novelized the life of the man he dubbed “the assassinator” in
Booth: The Assassin
, here in its original and fragile paper wrappers, one of the rarest publications from the time.

M
ANHUNT
IS ABOUT
J
OHN
W
ILKES
B
OOTH
's twelve-day journey from the scene of his great crime to ambush, death, and infamy. But the chase for Lincoln's killer was not the only thrilling manhunt underway at the close of the Civil War in April 1865.

Another man was on the run that spring, desperate to save his country, his family, and his life. He was Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. His final journey began at church on Sunday morning, April 2, where he was handed the urgent telegram from Robert E. Lee: There is no more time—the Yankees are coming—flee the capital at once. Shortly before midnight Davis boarded a railroad train—soon he would be reduced to horses and wagons—and chugged south from Richmond, vowing to fight on. Accused of plotting Lincoln's assassination, Davis, like John Wilkes Booth, became the object of a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward and vigorous pursuit by Union cavalry. It ended a few weeks later near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis never enjoyed the South's first love—that honor belonged to Lee and Jackson—but his final journey into captivity, and the suffering he endured, transformed him into the martyr of the Lost Cause.

During the manhunts for Booth and Davis another man undertook his last journey, too. He was Abraham Lincoln, late sixteenth president of the United States. Lincoln's final sojourn began on April 19,
after the White House funeral. From there a solemn procession escorted him to the Capitol rotunda, where tens of thousands of mourners viewed him in death. It was just the beginning. On April 21, one week after he was shot, four hundred soldiers escorted him to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad depot and placed him aboard the special train that would carry him home on the nearly 1700-mile trip to Springfield. When it was over, Lincoln's corpse had been unloaded from the train ten times and placed on public view in all the great cities of the North between Washington and Springfield. More than one million Americans had looked upon their martyr's face, while several million had watched the funeral train roll by. It was the largest, most elaborate, and magnificent funeral pageant in American histor y, before or since, and it raised Lincoln to the pantheon of secular sainthood.

And so my next book is about final journeys, the manhunt for Jefferson Davis and the funeral of Abraham Lincoln, both martyrs to their cause.

I hope that you will receive it as kindly as you have
Manhunt
.

Author's Request

For my next book, and also for my research on other books soon to come, I ask for your help. As I learned while writing
Manhunt
, not all the important documents and relics with stories to tell repose in libraries and museums. Many items are still in private hands and remain hidden in attics, trunks,
and basements all across America. I am in search of a wide variety of material related to Abraham Lincoln's life and death, and items from the American Civil War, both Union and Confederate, including the following: ABRAHAM LINCOLN (letters, relics, photographs, campaign flags and banners, inaugural ball tickets and invitations, sculptures and busts, and oil paintings); BROADSIDES (reward posters and death announcements); JOHN WILKES BOOTH (his letters, personal possessions, and playbills announcing his performances); LINCOLN FUNERAL MATERIAL (prints, silk ribbons, mourning badges, railroad timetables, and photographs); COL. ELMER ELLSWORTH (photographs of the Marshall House where he was shot, painted ceramic pitchers depicting his death, autographs, and ephemera); NEWSPAPERS (complete runs or individual issues of Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore papers covering the fall of Richmond, surrender of Lee, assassination of Lincoln, death of Booth, trial and execution of the conspirators, and the trial of John H. Surratt Jr. I especially seek Washington, D.C., papers, including the
Daily Morning Chronicle, National Intelligencer
, and
Evening Star
, and also issues of the
National Police Gazette
and
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
); JEFFERSON DAVIS (all material related to his escape and capture including letters, prints, and photographs); CIVIL WAR MEDICINE
(surgical kits and relics, medical photographs of wounded soldiers, salesman's samples of coffins, identified uniforms, and personal effects); CIVIL WAR MUSIC (especially drums, bugles, and other items connected to the history of military bands); and CIVIL WAR RELICS (including swords, flags, and uniforms, especially those with documented histories connecting them to individual soldiers and units).

I will be grateful to hear from readers kind enough to assist me with my research for future book projects.

James L. Swanson
P.O. Box 76166
Washington, DC 20013
E-mail: [email protected]

 

O
N THE
M
ANHUNT
BOOK TOUR
, I had the pleasure of meeting several thousand readers at signings, parties, and lectures. I was asked many interesting questions, and at one event the leader of a book group suggested that I share some of these with a wider audience, to stimulate conversations at book groups that have been kind enough to choose
Manhunt
for discussion. Here are some of my favorite questions:

1. What if John Wilkes Booth had missed?
   

2. What if not only Booth, but also Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt, had accomplished their missions? Would the murders of the president, vice president, and secretary of state have plunged the Union into chaos and prolonged the Civil War?
   

3. How did the Lincoln assassination change American history?
   

4. What was Mary Surratt's level of culpability in the assassination? Was her execution an injustice?
   

5. What of Dr. Samuel Mudd? Was he guilty, and of what?
   

6. Who is the more admirable character, the actress Laura Keene or the assassin's sister, Asia Booth Clarke?
   

7. Is Thomas Jones, the rebel river ghost, to be admired for his code of honor or condemned for his aid to the assassin?
   

8. Is Ford's Theatre a monument to Abraham Lincoln, or his killer?
   

9. In what ways, if any, is John Wilkes Booth a sympathetic character?
   

10. Have we, nearly 150 years after the great crime, forgiven John Wilkes Booth?
    

11. Who is the hero of
    Manhunt
    ? Is there more than one?
    

 

It was the crime of the nineteenth century, and it led to the most notorious trial in American history. But the story of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination didn't end with his state funeral and the death of his killer, John Wilkes Booth. In the spring and summer of 1865, a military commission tried eight people as conspirators in Booth's plot to murder Lincoln and other high officials. In
Lincoln's Assassins
, James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg resurrect these events, presenting an unprecedented visual record—with nearly three hundred photographs—that brings to light this tragic event and the perpetrators behind it.

“[A] remarkable book… … Through an exquisite combination of vivid writing, stunning photographs, and contemporary pamphlets, letters, and documents, Swanson and Weinberg carry the reader across the boundaries of time and space, bringing the spring and summer of 1865 into brilliant focus.”

—Doris Kearns Goodwin

“An authoritative and visually compelling study of the trial and execution of the conspirators.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“[A] fascinating book… … Most notably,
Lincoln's Assassins
reproduces Alexander Gardner's striking photographs of the incarcerated defendants, which convey a sense of almost surreal immediacy”

—
New York Times Book Review