Manhunt (4 page)

The sight of the Grants must have disappointed Booth. Their carriage, loaded with baggage, was heading toward the train station. They were leaving town. They must have canceled their engagement at Ford's Theatre. If General Grant was not attending
Our American Cousin
tonight, did that mean the Lincolns had canceled, too? Curtain call, approximately 8:30 P.M., was in less than five hours, and John Wilkes Booth did not know whether the Lincolns still planned to attend the play or who might be in the box with them.

Booth rode over to the Kirkwood House, where he accomplished his strangest errand of the day. The Kirkwood was the residence
of the new vice president, 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. But he did not want to see the vice president. He just wanted to leave him a note. Booth approached the front desk and requested a small, blank calling card. He wrote a brief note and handed it to the desk clerk, who placed it in Johnson's mail slot. The mysterious message, which soon became the object of intense speculation, read: “Don't wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.”

He visited a boardinghouse at 541 H Street, a few blocks from Ford's Theatre, to pay what looked like an innocent social call on the proprietor, Mary E. Surratt, a forty-two-year-old Maryland widow and the mother of his friend John Harrison Surratt Jr., a Confederate courier. Over the last several months, Booth had become a frequent caller at Mrs. Surratt's town house. Her son John wasn't home—he was out of the city on rebel business—and would not be back tonight. Mary told Booth that she was riding out that afternoon to her country tavern in Surrattsville, Maryland, several miles south of Washington, and Booth asked if she would mind delivering a small package wrapped in newspaper to her destination. Conveniently, Booth had the package with him.

There was one more thing. Booth informed Mary that he would be riding out of Washington this evening. Sometime that night, he said, he would stop at her tavern to pick up not only this package, but also the guns, ammunition, and other supplies that her son John had secreted there for him. Booth asked Mary to tell the tavern keeper John Lloyd—a heavy-drinking former Washington policeman to whom she had rented her country place—to get everything ready for the actor's visit this evening. She agreed, and soon she and one of her boarders, Louis Weichmann, an old school chum of John Surratt's, drove down to Surrattsville by carriage.

Booth returned to Ford's Theatre around 5:00 or 6:00 P.M., where Edman “Ned” Spangler, a scene shifter and stagehand—“stage carpenter,” he called himself—saw the actor come up behind the theatre through Baptist Alley, named for the church that once occupied the site. Spangler had known Booth and his family for about a dozen years and had done odd jobs for them, most recently helping the actor outfit a small, private stable in the alley behind Ford's, about fifty yards from the back door. Spangler had seen Booth use a variety of horses: tonight he rode what Ned described as “a little bay mare.” Booth and Spangler walked to the stable, where the actor removed the saddle and the yellow-trimmed saddlecloth. He didn't like the look of the cloth, he told Ned, and said he might use his shawl instead. Booth asked Ned not to remove the mare's bridle. “She is a bad little bitch,” Booth said, and she should remain bridled. Booth locked the stable door, took the key, and went for a drink.

At some point, most likely by late afternoon or early evening, Booth must have secluded himself, probably in room 228 at the National, and made his final preparations. There were two elements, practical and psychological. First, the weapons. Booth chose as his primary weapon a .44-caliber, single-shot, muzzle-loading percussion cap pistol manufactured by Henry Deringer of Philadelphia. It was a small, short-barreled, pocket-size handgun designed for stealth and concealment, not combat, and favored by gamblers and other unsavory types. Unlike military pistols such as the .44-caliber Colt or Remington Army revolvers, or the lighter-weight .36-caliber Colt Navy revolver, all of which could fire up to six rounds before reloading, the Deringer could be fired just once. Reloading was a laborious process that called for two hands and twenty to forty seconds. Booth knew that his first shot would be his last. If he missed, he wouldn't have time to reload. Because the Deringer fired a round ball and not a rifled conical bullet, it was most effective at short range. Its big .44-caliber ball, weighing in at nearly an ounce, was a solid, deadly round.

If Booth missed, or failed to inflict a fatal wound with the pistol, he
would turn to his secondary, backup weapon, a “Rio Grande Camp Knife,” a handsome and extremely sharp type of Bowie knife. Booth left behind no explanation for why he chose the Deringer over a revolver. Pistols misfire occasionally. Either the copper percussion cap might fail to spark, or the black powder in the barrel might be spoiled from dampness and fail to ignite. Three decades earlier, on January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence, a crazed, unemployed British house painter who fancied himself of royal blood, failed to assassinate Andrew Jackson on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol when not one, but both, of his single-shot, black powder, percussion cap pistols misfired. And even if Booth's pistol worked, how certain was he that he could kill Lincoln with one shot? Plenty of veteran combat soldiers who had survived multiple gunshot wounds were getting drunk in the saloons of Washington that night. Booth couldn't have chosen the Deringer because he could not obtain a revolver. He had already purchased at least four, and if he did not have any in his hotel room within easy reach, he could have gone out and bought another one. In the war capital of the Union, thousands of guns, including small, lightweight pocket-sized revolvers, were for sale in the shops of Washington.

Booth was a thrill seeker, and perhaps he wanted to enhance his excitement by risking the use of a single-shot pistol. Or did he believe it more heroic, honorable—even gentlemanly—to take his prey with a single bullet? Perhaps he preferred a stylish coup de grâce to blazing away at Lincoln with a six-shooter.

Given Washington's damp spring air and Booth's knowledge that he would have just one shot, he probably did not arm the pistol with a fresh copper cap and black powder charge until late in the afternoon. Better to be sure than rely on a stale load that might have been languishing in the barrel for weeks. Before wrapping the bullet with a small swatch of cloth wadding and ramming the round down the barrel, did he roll the ball between his fingertips, scrutinizing it for flaws in the casting and perhaps contemplating how this little round, dull gray one-ounce piece of metal would soon change history?

Before leaving the National, Booth slid the knife and pistol into his pockets and gathered the rest of his belongings. He planned to travel light tonight, without baggage. In addition to the weapons and his garments—a black felt slouch hat, black wool frock coat, black pants, big, knee-high black leather riding boots with spurs—he took only a velvet-cased compass, keys, a whistle, a datebook, a pencil, some money, a bank draft or bill of exchange, a small switchblade, and a few other small items including carte-de-visite photographs of five of his favorite girlfriends. His valise and big traveling trunk would have to stay behind; he would not be coming back. About 7:00 P.M., room clerk George Bunker saw Booth leave the National for the last time that day:

“He spoke to me and went off.”

W
HEN
M
ARY
S
URRATT AND
L
OUIS
W
EICHMANN ARRIVED IN
Surrattsville, John Lloyd wasn't there. He had gone to pick up some foodstuffs. Mary waited for him. She could not leave without delivering Booth's message. When Lloyd returned he parked his wagon near the wood yard, climbed down, and began unloading his cargo of fish and oysters. Mary walked over to him.

“Talk about the devil, and his imps will appear,” she teased her tenant.

“I was not aware that I was a devil before.”

“Well, Mr. Lloyd,” Mary went on once she was sure that she was out of Weichmann's earshot, “I want you to have those shooting-irons ready; there will be parties here to-night who will call for them.”

She handed him the package wrapped in newspaper. The evening callers will want this too, she explained. And, she added, give them a couple bottles of whiskey. Her mission accomplished, Mary prepared to drive back to Washington. But the front spring bolts of her buggy had broken, and the spring had become detached from the axle. Lloyd tied them tightly with cord—the best he could do without proper spare parts. After Mrs. Surratt departed, Lloyd followed her instructions. He
carried the package upstairs, unwrapped it, and discovered Booth's field glasses. Then he went to the unfinished room where, several weeks ago, John Surratt had shown him how to conceal two Spencer carbines under the joists. Lloyd retrieved them and placed them in his bedchamber. He had been drinking, and he was tired. Indeed, he confessed, “I was right smart in liquer that afternoon, and after night I got more so. I went to bed between 8 and 9 o'clock, and slept very soundly until 12 o'clock.”

a
T THE
H
ERNDON
H
OUSE AT THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF
Ninth and F streets, around the corner from Ford's, at around 8:00 P.M. Booth presided over a conclave of some of the coconspirators he had assembled over the previous months to strike against President Lincoln. He must have hoped that this would be their last meeting before a great success. They had failed at least once before and then dispersed amid suspicion and fear. Tonight they needed to get ready for action in less than two hours. It was not the first time they had assembled to move against the president. Beginning in 1864, the last full year of the Civil War, the young stage star had marshaled his cash, celebrity, and connections in service of a bold plan. He hatched a harebrained scheme to kidnap President Lincoln, spirit him to Richmond, hold him as a hostage for the Confederacy, and turn the tide of the war. The origins of the plot remain murky. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, there arose several conspiracies to kidnap or murder him. Secessionist hotheads began posting numerous death threats to Springfield before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, and some even sent him jars of poisoned fruit. In the notorious Baltimore plot of 1861, local rebels schemed to assassinate the president-elect when his railroad train passed through the city en route to Washington for his inauguration. But Detective Allan Pinkerton thwarted the scheme by persuading Lincoln to pass through Baltimore incognito hours ahead of schedule. Other Lincoln haters threatened to assassinate him on the East Front of the Capitol the
moment he commenced reading his inaugural address. During the war, several Southern military officers, as well as a handful of officials in the Confederate Secret Service, considered various actions against Lincoln. At some point, John Wilkes Booth came into contact with these circles and operatives, in Canada, New York City, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.

In late 1864 and early 1865 Booth organized his own little band of conspirators, loyal to him and not Richmond, to plot against the president. He recruited a gang who, after he clothed and fed them, plied them with drink, and allowed them to bask in his fame and favor, would, he hoped, follow him anywhere—even into a plot to kidnap the president of the United States. But big talk was cheap in wartime Washington and as late as January 1865, with the Confederacy in danger of imminent collapse, not one of the several overlapping conspiracies had ever attempted decisive action against Abraham Lincoln.

Booth and his gang of acolytes—Lewis Powell, David Herold, John H. Surratt Jr., Samuel Arnold, Michael O'Laughlen, and George Atzerodt, plus others lost to history who drifted in and out of his orbit—would change that by kidnapping the president.

O'Laughlen, born in 1834, had known Booth since 1845, when their families lived across the street from each other in Baltimore. In 1861, the first year of the war, Michael enlisted in the First Maryland Infantry, but soon illness ended his military service. Restless, and looking for excitement, he signed on to the plot. Samuel Arnold, who was thirty-one, met Booth in 1848 when they were students at St. Timothy's Hall, a boys' school near Baltimore. He joined the First Maryland too in April 1861, but after the first battle of Bull Run in July 1861 he was, like O'Laughlen, discharged. Arnold's family operated a prominent Baltimore bakery at the corner of Fayette and Liberty streets. In August 1864, Booth wrote to Sam, suggesting they meet. They hadn't seen each other since 1852, thirteen years ago. Arnold visited Booth's room at Barnum's Hotel in Baltimore, where the actor offered him cigars and wine, and introduced him to O'Laughlen. Arnold joined the conspiracy. But
Booth needed to recruit more men than these two boyhood chums, who possessed scant military experience. An introduction to John Harrison Surratt Jr., a wily, twenty-year-old courier for the Confederate Secret Service who lived in Washington at his mother's boardinghouse, gave Booth the men he needed. Surratt had traveled the rebel underground's secret routes to the South, essential knowledge if they were going to transport Lincoln across Union lines. Surratt brought George Atzerodt into the plot. George, a hard-drinking, twenty-nine-year-old Prussian immigrant who worked as a carriage painter in Port Tobacco, Maryland, knew boats and the waters of Charles County. David Herold, a twenty-two-year-old pharmacist's assistant who lived with his mother near the Washington Navy Yard, joined the conspiracy. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman who knew the country through which they would have to carry the president. Lewis Powell, twenty-one-year-old son of a Baptist minister, enlisted in May 1861 as a private in the Second Florida Infantry. An attractive, well-muscled six-footer, Powell exemplified the best that the Confederate army could muster. A loyal, obedient, and hard-fighting soldier, he saw plenty of action until he was wounded and taken prisoner at Gettysburg in July 1863. Paroled, he made his way to Baltimore and fell into the orbit of Surratt and Booth. Powell had the size and strength necessary to physically subdue Abraham Lincoln.