Manhunt (46 page)

Then, like a ghostly apparition, John Wilkes Booth's pale, haunting visage emerged from the void, like a luminous portrait floating on a black canvas. Then he exploded: “Damn you! You have betrayed me! If you don't get out of here I will shoot you! Get out of this barn at once!” Garrett glimpsed Booth's right hand in motion. The assassin, while cursing Garrett, slowly reached behind his back for one of his revolvers.

Like Harry Hawk had done on the stage of Ford's Theatre after Booth jumped from the president's box, a terrified John Garrett turned and ran, escaped the barn, and nearly leapt into Conger's arms. Booth was going to kill him, Garrett pleaded.

Conger was skeptical: “How do you know he was going to shoot you?”

Because, Garrett claimed in a tremulous voice, “he reached down to the hay behind him to get his revolver.” He had come out of the barn just in time, he insisted.

Finally, at the climax of a twelve-day manhunt that had gripped the nation, a heavily armed patrol of Sixteenth New York Cavalry had actually cornered Lincoln's assassin. The situation demanded decisive action, but, at the critical moment, Conger and the others hesitated. Instead of ordering their men to rush the barn and take Booth, they decided to talk him out, and then they delegated the job to a solitary, unarmed man, a civilian—and an ex-rebel soldier, no less—to negotiate Booth's surrender. It was a clear abdication of command responsibility. Twenty-six cavalrymen, each armed with a six-shot revolver, not counting other weapons, could pour a fusillade of 156 conical lead pistol bullets into the barn before having to reload. In response, Booth could fire a mere 12 rounds from the revolvers and 7 from the Spencer carbine. He wouldn't have time to reload. Or the troops could, without
warning, before they fired a shot, charge the barn and try to take Booth by surprise. In the dark, and in the few seconds before they seized him, Booth could not pick off more than a few of them before he was subdued. Stanton wanted Booth alive for questioning.

Why did they hesitate? If brave Union men could charge Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and suffer several thousand casualties, and if the valiant regiments of the Army of Northern Virginia could make the disastrous, suicidal Pickett's charge on the third day at Gettysburg, why couldn't twenty-six soldiers, under the cloak of darkness, charge two civilians hiding in a barn? Surely the honor of capturing Lincoln's assassin was worth the risk of a few casualties.

Even after John Garrett's ill-advised, failed mission, Doherty, Conger, and Baker dithered, pursuing a strategy of talk, not action. The trio deputized Baker as their spokesman. Baker shouted an ultimatum to the occupants: “I want you to surrender. If you don't, I will burn this barn down in fifteen minutes.” If the fugitives refused to come out voluntarily, he resolved, then the flames would drive them out. Baker, Conger, and Doherty awaited an answer. It was 2:30 A.M., Wednesday, April 26. From the time the Sixteenth New York arrived at Garrett's farm until this moment, the fugitives had not spoken one word to their pursuers. Then came the first contact.

A voice speaking from inside the barn bellowed three pointed questions: “Who are you?” “What do you want?” “Whom do you want?”

It was John Wilkes Booth. The assassin stepped to the front of the tobacco barn and peered through a space between two boards, eyeballing his counterpart, whom he took, mistakenly, as an army captain.

“We want you,” Baker replied, “and we know who you are. Give up your arms and come out!”

Booth stalled to preserve his options: “Let us have a little time to consider it.”

Surprisingly, Baker agreed to the delay: “Very well.”

Ten or fifteen minutes elapsed without communication between the
parties. But the manhunters maintained a keen vigil on all four of the barn walls to ensure that their prey did not slip out unnoticed through a crevice between the boards.

In the meantime, Booth and David Herold got into a heated argument. Davey had no more fight left in him. “I am sick and tired of this way of living,” he had complained to his idol on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, less than twelve hours ago. Herold had convinced himself, naively, that once he talked his way out of trouble the soldiers would send him home. After all, in his mind, he wasn't guilty of anything. Booth killed Lincoln, and Powell stabbed Seward. Davey just came along for the ride. Booth could roast alive in the tobacco barn if he chose, but not him. “You don't choose to give yourself up, let me go out and give myself up,” Herold proposed.

“No, you shall not do it,” Booth growled in a low voice, so that the soldiers hovering on the other side of the boards could not hear him.

Herold implored Booth to release him from the assassin's service, speaking so loudly that some of the soldiers heard his begging.

Herold started for the door, but Booth menaced him: “[H]e threatened to shoot me and blow his brains out,” Herold complained. Furious, the actor denounced his hitherto faithful companion: “You damned coward! Will you leave me now? Go, go! I would not have you stay with me.”

Baker, counting down the minutes on his pocket watch, shouted to Booth that he was running out of time. Only five minutes more, and he would torch the barn.

a
GAIN
, B
OOTH ASKED
: “W
HO ARE YOU
? A
ND WHAT DO YOU
want?”

Before Baker could reply, Conger took him aside, out of earshot, and suggested how to continue the negotiations: “Do not by any remark made to him allow him to know who we are: you need not tell him who we are. If he thinks we are rebels, or thinks we are his friends, we will
take advantage of it. We will not lie to him about it; but we need not answer any question that has any reference to that subject, but simply insist on his coming out, if he will.”

Baker agreed with Conger, telling Booth: “It doesn't make any difference who we are: we know who you are, and we want you. We want to take you prisoners.”

Booth corrected him. There was no more than one prisoner available for the taking: “I am alone, there is no one with me.”

Baker rebuked the assassin: “We know that two men were in there and two must come out.” Conger worked his way around the barn's perimeter to select the best place to light the fire.

“This is a hard case,” Booth confided to Baker, “it may be I am to be taken by my friends.” That assassin held the forlorn hope that soldiers surrounding the barn were Confederate, not Union.

“I am going,” insisted Davey. “I don't intend to be burned alive.”

Booth relented. Forcing Davey to share his fate would serve no purpose. And it would be wrong. Herold had had several chances to abandon Booth during the manhunt—in Washington on assassination night, in the pine thicket, or during the night the assassin slept alone at Garrett's farm. But on every occasion, the loyal Herold returned to share Booth's fate. Almost certainly, Booth must have concluded that it would be ungrateful, even ungallant, to deny his young follower the chance to live. When others had betrayed Booth, Herold had stuck by him. It was harsh to call him “coward” now. This was the last act. It was time to claim center stage alone. The actor called out to Baker: “Oh Captain—there is a man here who wants to surrender awful bad.”

Too excited to remain silent, Lieutenant Doherty blurted out: “Hand out your arms.” Yes, chimed Baker almost simultaneously, “Let him hand out his arms.”

Their demands perplexed Herold. Would they refuse his surrender until he first handed over Booth's firearms? His master might let him go, but Davey knew that Booth would never give up his guns. “I have none,” Herold pleaded.

Doherty did not believe him: “Hand out your arms, and you can come out.”

“I have no arms,” Herold whimpered, “let me out.”

Luther Baker scoffed at Herold's stubborn denials: “We know exactly what you have got.” The Garretts, helpfully, had provided Baker and the other officers with a complete inventory of the fugitives' arms and equipment: two revolvers, one Spencer repeating carbine, one Bowie knife, a pistol belt, a couple of blankets, and the clothes on their backs. “You carried a carbine,” Baker insisted, “and you must hand it out.”

This back-and-forth bickering over the arms devolved into comedy, with one officer and two detectives proving themselves too incompetent to consummate the peaceful, willing surrender of Lincoln's assassin and his guide. Booth spoke up to end the impasse: “The arms are mine; and I have got them.”

Baker disputed the assassin: “This man carried a carbine, and he must hand it out.”

Booth argued back: “Upon the word and honor of a gentleman, he has no arms: the arms are mine, and I have got them.” And he would not give them up. “I own all the arms and intend to use them on you gentlemen.” As this wore on, Booth reminded the nitpicking officers that “There is a man in here who wants to come out.”

Yes, Herold affirmed: “Let me out, quick; I do not know anything about this man, he is a desperate character, and he is going to shoot me.”

Booth supported Herold's charade: “Let him out; that young man is innocent.”

Enough, reasoned Lieutenant Doherty. If they can persuade one of the fugitives to come out of the barn without a fight, why not forget the arms, wait no more, and take the man? The lieutenant turned to Baker:

“We had better let him out.”

“No,” the detective countered, “wait until Mr. Conger comes here.”

Well, where is he? Doherty demanded. Out of sight, at the back of
the barn, preparing to set it on fire. Then they wouldn't wait, Doherty decided.

But Baker resisted his logic: “I ought not to let this man out without consulting him.”

“No: Open that door!” Doherty commanded one of his troopers. “I will take that man out myself.”

The lieutenant positioned himself to the side, not in front of, the door. If he stayed out of the line of fire, Booth could not see—or shoot—him when he opened the door for Herold's exit. Inches apart, separated only by the width of the barn wall, Doherty and Herold could hear each other's breathing. They caught glimpses of each other through the spaces that divided the boards.

Then, in the last seconds before David Herold left the barn, Booth whispered the last words exchanged between them: “When you go out, don't tell them the arms I have.”

“Whoever you are, come out with your hands up,” a voice outside the barn shouted.

Davey turned away from Booth and faced the door, now ajar and ready for his passage from fugitive to captive. Doherty ordered Herold not to walk through the door just yet. First he wanted to see his hands to confirm that he was unarmed. The lieutenant told Davey to thrust only one hand through the doorframe. The frightened youth complied, and in a moment Doherty saw a spot of open-palmed, white flesh protruding through the entryway. The lieutenant signaled Davey to send through the other hand. It, too, was empty.

Doherty sprung to the door, seized Herold by the wrists, and yanked hard, pulling him forward through the doorway, and throwing him off balance. Davey's captor tucked his revolver under his armpit, ran both his hands down Herold's body to see if he had any hidden arms, and found none. Then he asked Herold, “Have you got any weapons at all about you?”

“Nothing at all but this,” swore Davey, pulling out a piece of paper, a torn fragment of a map, which Doherty put in his pocket. The lieutenant
grabbed Herold by the collar and, like a schoolmaster taking an errant pupil by the scruff, marched him away from the barn.

So far the operation at Garrett's farm was no model of a small unit action. One army officer and two military detectives vying for the command of twenty-six enlisted men had barely accomplished the surrender of the assassin's harmless cat's-paw. Herold had managed to surrender in spite of the disagreements and competition for authority among the hunters. Now Doherty, Baker, and Conger faced a bigger problem. John Wilkes Booth remained in that barn, heavily armed and waiting for their next move. Yes, they possessed certain advantages. The assassin was at bay, surrounded, and outnumbered twenty-six to one. Escape from the tobacco barn seemed impossible. But then, so did escape from an audience of more than one thousand people at Ford's Theatre. Like Macbeth, Booth could not fly away from Garrett's farm but, like the doomed, baited bear, he remained lethal.

Booth had died onstage dozens of times in
Richard III
,
Hamlet
, and Shakespeare's other great tragedies, but tonight he was not playacting. He wanted to go down fighting, not hang like a petty thief. “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal,” he wrote in his diary a few nights before. “Oh may he, may he spare me that and let me die bravely.” For Booth, this was his final and greatest performance, not just for the small audience of soldiers at the improvised theatre of Garrett's farm, but also for history.

He had already perpetrated the most flamboyant public murder in American history. Indeed, Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house. At Ford's Theatre, Booth broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art—performance assassination. Tonight he would script his own end with a performance that equaled his triumph at Ford's Theatre.

Their negotiations with the assassin had not gone well. They demanded Booth's immediate surrender, but he persuaded them to give him more time. They demanded that Herold turn over at least one of
the weapons, but Booth claimed property rights over the arms and released Davey to them empty-handed. Now he had all the guns, and, in addition, like Jim Bowie at the Alamo twenty-nine years before, a deadly knife for the close combat of last resort. Booth—not Doherty, Baker, or Conger—was setting the agenda at Garrett's farm.

In certain respects, Booth enjoyed three significant tactical advantages over the Sixteenth New York Cavalry: he occupied a fortified position, but they had to come in and get him; they were deployed in the open around the barn and could not see him, but he remained hidden and could see them; they wanted Booth alive and did not want to be killed by him, but he was ready to die, and to take some of them with him. Moreover, the ticking clock favored the assassin. In a few hours, morning's first light would illuminate the manhunters and render them perfect targets. At this close range, the Spencer carbine was an outstanding sniper's weapon. Booth could hardly miss.