Manhunt (38 page)

Lucas demanded that the voice identify itself. Instead, the speaker, unwilling to disclose his identity, and communicating as through a secret code, uttered the names of three men and asked if Lucas knew them, implying through attitude of voice that he should. He didn't and became frightened. The strange voice must belong to a robber or a horse thief. There was no way that he would open his door to the mysterious, threatening stranger standing on the other side, inches away. The stranger called out a fourth name, William Bryant. Lucas knew this one, but what difference did that make? The stranger could have picked up the name anywhere. Then a second voice called out: Lucas. It is me, William Bryant. You know me. Relieved, Lucas unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped outside. Bryant and two strangers stepped forward.

“We want to stay here tonight,” the youngest member of the trio declared bluntly, omitting the courtesy of an introduction.

Bewildered by the unexpected request, and put off by Herold's rudeness, Lucas resisted: “You cannot do it. I am a colored man and have no right to take care of white people; I have only one room in the house and my wife is sick.”

Herold became belligerent: “We are Confederate soldiers, we have been in service three years; we have been knocking about all night, and don't intend to any longer … we are going to stay.”

Before Lucas could object again, Booth hobbled around him on his crutches, forced his way into the cabin, and claimed a chair.

Pursuing the lame man into his home, Lucas chastised them for their rudeness: “Gentlemen, you have treated me very badly.”

Booth, seething from Dr. Stuart's rebuff, was in no mood for etiquette lessons from an impudent, free black man who did not know his place. How dare Dr. Stuart, lapsed gentleman, cast him into the night? Stuart had not heard the last from John Wilkes Booth. And how dare Stuart, adding insult to the injury, banish him to some Negro shack,
degrading the great tragedian like a man of the lowest class and order, like some filthy beggar or runaway slave. “This country was formed for the
white
, not for the black man,” Booth had declared in his secret political manifesto of 1864; “Nigger citizenship,” he spewed venomously in response to Lincoln's April 11, 1865, speech. And now, here he sat, begging a black man for accommodations, and suffering insults in reply: Never!

Booth's simmering blood boiled over in a way it had not since the assassination night. Still seated, the actor froze William Lucas with a hateful stare while dropping his hand to his waist, his fingers feeling for the handle of his knife. He had not unsheathed it in anger since he baptized its razor-sharp blade with Major Rathbone's blood, now dried and still caked on the knife, partly obscuring its acid-etched, defiantly patriotic mottos. Booth could easily have cleansed the knife in Dr. Mudd's washbasin, or in the freshwater spring at the pine thicket, but chose not to. Instead, he cherished its stained, mirrored surface like a relic of a martyred saint, a vivid, tangible memento of the assassination. He had lost the ultrasouvenir—his Deringer—when he grappled with Rathbone in the president's box. But he still possessed the knife as a personal reminder that blood had been spilt, and there was no turning back: “I have done the deed,” in the words of Macbeth. The bloody keepsake resonated like a symbolic stigmata of wounds not suffered, but inflicted, by the assassin's hand.

Booth's hand rose from his waistband until the quickly moving blade caught William Lucas's eye. “Old man, how do you like that?” Booth growled, waving the knife in the air.

“I do not like it at all!” pleaded Lucas, who was always terrified of knives.

Booth was one provocation away from unwinding another powerful, arcing swing of the blade, but he calmed himself. Murdering a black family in their cabin was sure to attract unwanted attention. And Booth considered himself in a class above the common cutthroat. As he argued in his datebook, his motives were purer than those of Brutus or
William Tell. Booth still burned at a world turned upside down, but reason dictated that he use, and not kill, William Lucas.

The actor sheathed the knife and assumed a less threatening guise. The point had been made, and Booth did not need to brandish the pistols and carbine. In the cabin's dim light, Lucas saw them clearly enough. Booth informed Lucas what they really wanted: “We were sent here, old man; we understand you have good teams.” So it
was
the horses, Lucas thought, just as he feared when he heard the strange voice outside his door. Lucas pleaded with Booth to leave his horses alone, explaining that he had hired hands coming Monday to plant corn. Convinced that the strangers would try to steal the horses, Lucas spoke evasively and claimed that the animals were far away, in the pasture. It would be hard searching for them in the dark. Booth turned to Herold and closed the matter: “Well, Dave, we will not go on any further, but stay here and make this old man get us this horse in the morning.” William Bryant, his task done, rode away, abandoning Lucas and his family to the strangers he had brought into their cabin.

Lucas was terrified to be alone with them and, fearing Booth's knife slitting his throat while he slept, he surrendered his cabin: “I was afraid to go to sleep and my wife and I went out on the step and stayed there the rest of the night.”

In the morning, a little after 6:00, Booth and Herold ordered Lucas to get the horses. They hitched them to his wagon and climbed aboard. For the last time, Lucas beseeched them: were they really going to take his horses and not pay him? Feeling generous, Booth asked what price he charged for a ride to Port Conway, a small town on the Rappahannock River about ten miles away. Ten dollars in gold coins or $20 in greenbacks, quoted Lucas. But Booth and Herold were obviously taking a one-way trip; how would he get his horses and wagon back? He asked them to take his twenty-one-year-old son Charles along for the ride so the boy could bring the team home. Booth said no, but Herold, in rare dissent from his master, yielded: “Yes, he can go, as you have a large family and a crop on hand and you can have your team back again.”

It was settled. Within minutes William Lucas would be free of Lincoln's assassins, patiently awaiting, with an extra $20 in his pocket, Charlie's return with the horses in a few hours. Then Lucas, still smarting from the indignity of his midnight eviction, made a mistake. He couldn't keep his mouth shut. He taunted the strangers about the Confederacy's defeat: “I thought you would be done pressing horses in the Northern Neck,” he added, “since the fall of Richmond.” Lucas's insolence enraged Booth, causing an eruption of his volcanic temper. Richmond? Did this damned black rascal dare mention Richmond? Asia Booth Clarke knew her brother's sensitivity on that subject. She described how their brother Junius, walking with Wilkes “one night … in the streets of Washington … beheld the tears run from his eyes as he turned his face towards Richmond, saying brokenly, ‘Virginia—Virginia.' It was like the wail of a Roman father over his slaughtered child. This idealized city of his love had deeper hold upon his heart than any feminine beauty.”

Ignorant of Booth's passion, Lucas could not have uttered a more dangerous provocation. Asia, however, recognized that the city's fall the week prior to Lincoln's assassination helped spur her brother to commit his great crime: “[T]he fall of Richmond rang in with maddening, exasperating clang of joy, and that triumphant entry into the fallen city … breathed air afresh upon the fire which consumed him.” If Richmond's fall could provoke John Wilkes Booth to murder the president of the United States, how might Lucas's blasphemous slander provoke the assassin to punish
him
?

Booth's pitiless black eyes burned through Lucas like searing coals: “Repeat that again,” he dared Lucas. One more insult, and Booth was ready to draw one of his revolvers and shoot the old man on the spot. Lucas knew he had made a terrible mistake. He had pushed Booth too far, and the actor was ready to explode in violence. Wisely, the old man backed off: “I said no more to him.” Young Charlie Lucas climbed aboard the wagon and seized the reins, signaling his readiness to serve Booth and Herold by driving them to Port Conway or—at this tense moment—any
place they wanted to go. Wordlessly, Booth reached under his coat and pulled out, not a revolver, but a wad of cash. Peeling off $20 in paper currency, he bent low and handed the money to Mrs. Lucas.

As the wagon rolled away around 7:00 A.M., it came to Booth; he knew how to deal with Dr. Stuart.

They reached Port Conway around noon, and Charlie steered the wagon toward the ferry landing, near the home of William Rollins. Booth asked Charlie to wait a few minutes before driving his father's wagon home. The actor wanted to write a letter to Dr. Stuart, and he wanted Charlie to deliver it.

A letter? John Wilkes Booth was running for his life. He didn't know where the manhunters were. The newspapers he read did not reveal their unit designations, their strength of numbers, or their search assignments. In his ignorance, and to ensure his survival, Booth had to assume that he might encounter Union troops and detectives at any moment, anywhere along his route. They might be behind him or lying in wait ahead of him. He was always in danger. Conceivably every minute might count, and even a slight delay might make the difference between freedom and death. Incredibly, foolishly, with his life at stake, Booth took time to indulge his undisciplined, theatrical impulses. He insisted on having the last word and upbraiding Stuart for his appalling, shameful manners. He opened his 1864 date book to a blank page and began writing feverishly. After finishing the note, he read it over and, dissatisfied, ripped it out and tucked it out of sight inside one of the book's interior flaps. He started over, composed another note, and carefully removed the page.

Dated Monday, April 24, 1865, Booth's caustic rebuke assumed Shakespearean pretensions:

Booth judged Stuart guilty of committing the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society—inhospitality. It was the sort of accusation that, leveled at a more leisurely time, might trigger a duel. Indeed, had Booth more time, he might have tried to soliloquize the doctor in person. Booth's letter climaxed with an insulting rebuke of offering to pay a petty sum of
cash
in exchange for Stuart's grudging hospitality. Thespian to the end, Booth invoked Shakespeare to dramatize his point, drawing his letter's penultimate “ceremony” line from
Macbeth
, act 3, scene 4. There, Lady Macbeth, speaking at the haunted banquet that followed her husband's murder of Duncan in his sleep, opined on, of all things, proper hospitality: “The feast is sold / That is not often vouched, while ‘tis a-making, / ‘Tis given with welcome. To feed were best at home; / From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony. / Meeting were bare without it.” Booth quoted the obscure phrase from memory nearly perfectly, committing only the minor error of writing “in” instead of “to” “meat.”

In other words, Booth was saying that a feast seems grudgingly and mercenarily given unless it is repeatedly graced with assurances of welcome. Plain eating is best done in one's own domestic setting; on more social occasions, the spice to a feast is ceremony; gatherings are too unadorned without it.

Booth's two drafts differed little. The chief differences were in the sums of money Booth offered and the closing salutations. First Booth wrote “$5.00.” On second thought he cut the sum in half. And perhaps he intended the smaller amount to augment the greater insult. Booth closed the first draft with “Most respectfully, your obedient servant.” The actor judged that salutation too respectful to the unworthy doctor and substituted the less florid “Yours respectfully.”

How strange, too, that in Booth's last writings—his journal entries and his final letter—he quoted from his victim's favorite texts. The cadences of the King James Bible resonated in many of Abraham Lincoln's finest writings, and his love of Shakespeare knew no bounds. During private, social evenings at the White House, the president often sat by the fire and read his aloud to his small, intimate circle of friends. In a letter to the celebrated actor James Henry Hackett, Lincoln expounded on his favorites: “Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are
Lear
,
Richard Third
,
Henry Eighth
,
Hamlet
, and especially
Macbeth
. I think nothing equals
Macbeth
. It is wonderful.”

It was
Macbeth
that Lincoln chose to read aloud to his guests on a Potomac cruise aboard the
River Queen
on Sunday five days before the assassination. One of the president's companions described that memorable performance: