Manhunt (53 page)

B
OSTON
C
ORBETT'S LIFE UNFOLDED AS ODDLY AS ONE MIGHT
have guessed. His fame lasted a season, climaxing with his appearance in a front-page woodcut in
Frank Leslie's
, and his May 17 appearance as a witness at the conspiracy trial. Soon the fan letters dwindled to a trickle, then ceased. Photographers no longer begged to take his picture. On September 9, 1865, he wrote to Edward Doherty about his share of the reward, seeking advice on how best to pursue his claim: should he hire Doherty's lawyer or find one of his own. On August 9, 1866, the U.S. Treasury issued him a warrant in the amount of $1,653.84. Corbett left the army, moved west, and got a job as assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives. That sinecure ended on the day in 1887 when he drew a revolver and held the legislature hostage at gunpoint. Confined to the Topeka asylum, he escaped in 1888, and then vanished from history. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him. Perhaps he ended his days still preaching warnings against “the snares of the evil one.”

T
HOMAS
A. J
ONES KEPT THE SECRET OF THE PINE THICKET
and Booth's river crossing for eighteen years, until, in 1883, he divulged the tale to George Alfred Townsend. Later, Jones wrote a book about his adventures:
“J. Wilkes Booth. An Account of His Sojourn in Southern Maryland after the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his Passage Across the Potomac, and his death in Virginia. By Thomas A. Jones. The only living man who can tell the story.”
In 1893, he traveled north to Chicago to have his manuscript published there by a local printer, and he set up a stand to sell books at the World's Columbian Exposition. According to legend, outraged Union veterans attacked the display and destroyed his stock of books. Today the slim volume, now a rare book, remains a priceless, firsthand account from the manhunt.

In an odd twist, Jones became an amateur dealer in Lincoln assassination memorabilia, scouting Washington and its environs for coveted objects he supplied to collectors. Twenty-five years after the assassination,
he advised a customer that reward posters were impossible to find, and that an original April 14 Ford's Theatre playbill for
Our American Cousin
could not be had for less than one hundred dollars. Jones trafficked in photos of the Petersen House and of Mary Surratt's boardinghouse, and he offered to locate photos of Boston Corbett. “I have had a good deal of work to do to get said pictures,” Jones advised one of his collectors. “You might have looked Washington over for six months and I doubt whether you could have found the pictures you will get through me.” Jones even tried to track down his battered old skiff, the one that carried Booth and Herold across the Potomac. That relic would make a sensational collector's prize. The search turned up more rare photos. “When I had been looking around the City to see if I could find out any thing about the Boat that Booth went across the River in,” Jones explained, he found a soldier who told him that if he went to a “certain house” at the old arsenal, he would make an interesting discovery—four of Gardner's photos of the hanging. “The house that the President died in is just the same as when the President died,” Jones informed a customer, except for Oldroyd's sign out front. Thomas Jones died in March 1895. He was seventy-four years old.

O
THER SURVIVORS OF THE MANHUNT TRADED ON THEIR MEM
ories, too. In 1867, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker published a now forgotten and shabby book,
History of the United States Secret Service
, that was anything but a true history. Baker exaggerated not only his importance in the chase for Booth, but in the entire Civil War. He died in 1868.

His cousin Luther Byron Baker survived him and, by the late 1880s, went on the lecture circuit and became the most successful of the postassassination entrepreneurs. Armed with a professional manager, a variety of posters, and a four-page promotional brochure crammed with testimonials from satisfied customers, Baker delivered dozens of paid lectures over the next eight years until his death in May 1896, at age sixty-six.

At his lectures Baker sold a substantial souvenir: a large-format, seven-and-five-eighths-by-nine-inch, cardboard-backed, so-called combination picture that depicted Baker riding his horse “Buckskin,” the duo surrounded by images of Booth, Corbett, and Lincoln. A descriptive label pasted on the reverse, and written in the purported voice of Buckskin, described the horse's participation in the manhunt. A concluding note, autographed by Baker, verified the animal's story. It was one of the most fetching Lincoln assassination trinkets ever concocted. Death did not end Buckskin's role as Baker's lecture companion. A taxidermy student at the Michigan State Agricultural College stuffed him, and the venerable manhunter stood proudly—albeit mutely—onstage with Baker as an unforgettable prop.

J
OHN
H. S
URRATT
J
R. ENJOYED LESS SUCCESS AS A LECTURER
. “In 1870, five years after the assassination—and his mother's hanging—and just three years after his own trial, Surratt tried to exploit his story on the lecture circuit.

He certainly had an amazing story to tell. After his mother's hanging, John Surratt decided that fleeing to Europe offered him the best chance of survival. In September he traveled from St. Liboire to Montreal, moved on to Quebec, sailed to Liverpool, and continued to Rome, where, under the name “John Watson,” he joined the Papal Zouaves, the colorfully uniformed army of the Papal States. Surratt blended in with this Catholic milieu, and he felt safely beyond the reach of the MANHUNTERS. But in April 1866, around the first anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, a fellow Zouave who recognized Surratt informed on him. Booth's coconspirator was arrested at Verdi on November 7. He escaped from Velletri prison the next day. While walking under guard near the edge of an overlook, Surratt glanced over the precipice. He saw jagged rocks twenty or thirty feet below, and, beyond them, a steep drop down a cliff. Before his guards could restrain him, Surratt, in an escape worthy of John Wilkes Booth, grabbed the balustrade, leaped over it, and
tumbled to the rocks. Fortunately for Surratt, he landed uninjured. The rocks where he fell were the prison's waste dump, and a voluminous, filthy pile of human excrement and garbage cushioned his fall.

Surratt fled the Papal States and crossed into the Kingdom of Italy. Proceeding to Naples, and impersonating a Canadian citizen, he tricked the British consul into gaining him passage on a steamer headed for Alexandria, Egypt. But when Surratt disembarked on November 23, 1866, American officials were waiting for him. He was seized and shipped back to America on a U.S. Navy warship. John Surratt landed at the Washington Navy Yard on February 19, 1867, and was imprisoned immediately. His trial before a civil court, and not the military tribunal that condemned his mother, lasted from June through August 1867. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and he was released. He was charged again in June 1868, but in November the charges were dismissed. John Surratt was a free man. His mother was dead, he had been exposed as a leader in a plot to kidnap President Lincoln, and he had earned the reputation of a coward who had abandoned his mother to die. But at least he was alive. If he had been captured in 1865 and tried by military tribunal, he certainly would have been convicted, and would likely have been executed.

Surratt got up a talk, went to Rockville, Maryland, and on December 6, 1870, made his first public appearance trading on his friendship with John Wilkes Booth and his involvement in the kidnapping plot. Surratt had the audacity to lecture in New York City at The Cooper Union, the site of Abraham Lincoln's triumphant February 1860 address that propelled him to the presidency. Emboldened, he decided to return to the scene of the crime, Washington. He had large, attractively designed posters printed to advertise his appearance at the Odd Fellows Hall on Seventh Street, above D, on December 30, 1870. His mother's boardinghouse and Ford's Theatre were just a few blocks away. But it was too soon. Citizens complained and, despite Surratt's boast in his poster that, “all reports to the contrary notwithstanding,” he would “most positively” deliver his lecture, the event was canceled. A
reporter found him hiding in a hotel room. John Surratt never lectured again. The last survivor of Booth's conspirators, he died in April 1916.

The aftermath of Powell's knife.

s
ECRETARY OF
S
TATE
W
ILLIAM
S
EWARD AND HIS
sons survived their wounds. For the rest of his life, until his death in 1872, William Seward preferred to turn the scarred half of his face away from the camera and pose in profile. A rare frontal portrait reveals how he carried Lewis Powell's terrible, disfiguring mark. Frederick recovered his senses after his grievous head wound, and he lived another fifty years. But, in a family tragedy, death soon claimed the Seward women. In June 1865, Frances died at age fifty-nine. Her weak constitution had succumbed to the stressful assassination attempt. But at least William Seward had been prepared for the possibility of his wife's death. The next year he endured a staggering loss. His brave daughter, Fanny, who had fearlessly challenged Lewis Powell that awful, bloody night, left the world on October 29, 1866. Seward called her death his “great unspeakable sorrow.” Her passing, he wrote, left his dreams for the future “broken and destroyed forever.” Fanny was twenty-one years old. She would have been a wonderful writer.

s
AMUEL
A
RNOLD LIVED LONG ENOUGH TO WRITE HIS MEM
oirs, and the
Baltimore American
newspaper serialized the manuscript in 1902. By then he was the sole surviving defendant from the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial of 1865, and the only one who had ever written a full account of Booth's kidnapping plot. He was also the only one who lived long enough to see the new century. He died on September 1, 1906. Arnold joined John Wilkes Booth and Michael O'Laughlen at Green Mount Cemetery.

D
R
M
UDD RETURNED TO HIS FARM IN 1869, HAPPY TO BE FREE
of the black prison guards he despised. Soon Ned Spangler journeyed there, and Mudd took him in until Ned's death on February 7, 1875. Samuel Mudd passed on in 1883. Before he died, he confessed privately to Samuel Cox Jr. the truth about the night of April 14, 1865: Mudd admitted that he had known all along that the injured stranger at his door was John Wilkes Booth. After the doctor's death, one of his lawyers confirmed it. In 1906, Samuel Mudd's daughter published a collection of his letters, and in 1936, a Hollywood motion picture,
The Prisoner of Shark Island
, portrayed Mudd as an innocent country doctor obeying his Hippocratic oath, deceived by Lincoln's assassin. That false image took hold in the popular mind, and, to this day, many Americans still believe the myth that Dr. Mudd and his descendants have toiled assiduously for more than a century to perpetuate.

E
DWIN
M. S
TANTON DIED IN 1869, THE SAME YEAR THAT
J
OHN
Wilkes Booth escaped the secret grave to which Lincoln's secretary of war had condemned him. After the manhunt and conspiracy trial, Stan-ton's career went into eclipse under the controversial, impeachment-tainted Johnson presidency. When Johnson tried to fire him, Stanton
refused to surrender his War Department office. General Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, and in December he nominated Stanton to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Lincoln's right hand died later that month before he could join the court.

Stanton lived long enough to see much of the work of the manhunt undone. Public sympathy for Mary Surratt bloomed; he was accused of suppressing and tampering with Booth's diary, and Congress investigated; he saw Booth, Surratt, Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and O'Laughlen emerge from their graves; saw the three survivors Mudd, Arnold, and Spangler pardoned; and saw the fugitive John Surratt Jr., who had escaped him in April of 1865, captured, tried, and freed. Perhaps it was best that Stanton did not live to see Surratt dare to boast of his role in the great crime and attempt to profit from the murder of Stanton's commander in chief—and friend.