Smugglers' Gold (3 page)

APRIL 15, 1865

The U.S. Treasury Building at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue had opened for business in August 1839, while only partially complete. Designed by architect Robert Mills—whose monument to George Washington had been stalled, uncompleted, since 1854—the Treasury Building was a classic example of high Greek Revival architecture, boasting thirty columns carved from single blocks of granite, each thirty-six feet tall, across its east front colonnade. Completed in 1842, the building's 150 rooms had proved too small for its ever-growing staff by March 1855, when Congress approved the addition of a south wing, completed in 1861. Still, Treasury kept going, with a west wing begun in 1862, finished in 1864. Now, there was talk of a new north wing, but construction had not started yet.

Treasury would normally be closed to visitors on weekends, but this was no normal Saturday, and Ryder's errand was no normal visit. He didn't know exactly where to look for William Patrick Wood, whose Secret Service agency would not officially exist for three more months, but Treasury seemed the logical starting point. If Wood had not reported on this day of days, Ryder would find a guard, a clerk, a janitor—someone—who could direct him to Wood's office or his residence.

And Ryder wasn't going home until they'd spoken one more time.

From Pennsylvania Avenue, he climbed a flight of steps and passed beneath his destination's massive portico. Four soldiers armed with Burnside carbines barred his entry to the building, one of them—a corporal, with new stripes on his sleeves—demanding Ryder's name and business. They had no list of persons authorized to enter, but it hardly mattered, since they'd never heard of William Wood or anything related to the Secret Service. Ryder finally persuaded them to let him pass by mentioning Ward Lamon's name, after they frisked him thoroughly for weapons.

Treasury was cold and cavernous inside. His footsteps echoed through the lobby, with its vaulted ceiling, marble underfoot. He'd been expecting someone else to challenge him, direct him,
something
, but the place appeared to be deserted. Ryder had a fleeting, childish thought of running willy-nilly through the empty halls until he found the cash repository to stuff every pocket that he had with greenback currency. It passed, and he embarked on a concerted search to locate someone, anyone, who knew his way around the place.

Ten minutes later, Ryder found him. Entering the south wing, he was met by a young man of twenty years or so, with curly auburn hair, a pair of pince-nez spectacles clamped to his nose. His style of dress, together with the batch of papers in his arms, identified him as some kind of clerk or secretary. He was clearly startled at the sight of Ryder, frowning as he clutched his paper bundle tightly to his chest.

As if from force of habit, be inquired, “How may I help you, sir?”

“I'm looking for the Secret Service office,” Ryder said. A gamble.

“Secret Service?”

“Mr. William Patrick Wood?”

“Hmm. Mr. Wood is . . . well, of course, I don't know
where
he is. But you can find his office in the west wing, back that way.” A nod, in lieu of pointing, since his hands were full.

Another yawning corridor, with floors stacked overhead.

“How will I know it when I see it?” Ryder asked, growing impatient.

“Hmm. There ought to be a name plate on the door. If I am not mistaken, you should try the second floor.”

“And if he isn't in?”

“Then I suppose he would be out, sir. Hmm?”

Ryder proceeded to the west wing, climbed a curving marble staircase, and resumed his search. Five minutes later, he was standing at a door that bore Wood's name, head bent and listening for any sign of movement from beyond it. Nothing, but he took a chance and knocked, regardless.

“Enter!” came the order from within.

Ryder turned the brass doorknob and stepped into an office that was smaller than he had expected, barely furnished with a desk and single chair. The man he'd come to see was standing at the only window, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. When Wood swiveled to face him, recognition sparking in his eyes, it seemed to Ryder that he'd aged a decade overnight.

“I'd say good morning, Mr. Ryder, but I hate to start a conversation with a lie.”

“It's why I'm here, sir,” Ryder said.

“And why is that, exactly?”

“Rebel bastards killed the president and tried for Secretary Seward. Let me help you hunt them down.”

“As I've explained to you, I'll have no agency or personal authority until July. If you return then—”

“I believe you're doing something now, sir.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're not entirely wrong,” Wood granted. “In conjunction with the U.S. Marshals Service, I'm coordinating efforts to locate the individuals responsible for these attacks.”

“The Marshals Service has no use for me,” Ryder reminded him.

“Their loss may be my gain,” Wood said. “You would answer directly to me, not to Mr. Lamon.”

“Sounds better.”

“So, you'll join us, after all?”

“It's why I'm here, sir.”

“I'm referring to the service, Mr. Ryder, not the manhunt. I need men to go the distance.”

Ryder spent a long ten seconds thinking through it, then said, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then I can tell you what we know so far. The president's assassin, as you've no doubt heard, was John Wilkes Booth.”

“The actor, right.”

“The actor
and
Confederate partisan. He hails from Maryland, you know. In 1859, after Harpers Ferry, he joined the Richmond Grays militia, to guard against abolitionists trying to rescue John Brown from the gallows. I dare say that he was disappointed when they didn't show. After the war broke out, he never missed a chance to criticize the Union or the president. St. Louis coppers held him for a while, in '63, for saying—and I quote—he ‘wished the president and the whole damned government would go to hell.' They let him go, of course.”

“Too bad.”

“Freedom of speech. Today, we know that he's been close to Confederate agents, here and in Canada. He met with members of the Rebel secret service last October, on a trip to Montreal.”

“And wasn't jailed when he returned?” asked Ryder.

“Understand, we're learning most of this through hindsight, from informants. At the time . . .” Wood spread his empty hands. “It's one more reason why we need the service you'll be joining, come July.”

“There's more,” said Ryder, confident that Wood had not shown all his cards.

“There is. We're fairly sure that Booth has fled back home, to Maryland. We believe his object is to hide out somewhere in the South, or else—more likely, I suspect—to flee the country altogether. If he ships for Europe, or to South America, consider him as good as gone.”

“Send me to Maryland,” said Ryder.

“First things first. We also have a clue of sorts to Secretary Seward's would-be killer. Near the scene of the attack, his bloody knife has been recovered from a gutter. Nothing points us to him yet, but I suspect that he, at least, is still somewhere in Washington or its immediate vicinity.”

“You have a good description of him?”

“Here,” Wood answered, passing him a printed sheet of paper from a stack atop his desk.

There'd been no time to have a portrait of the traitor done, but his description as compiled from witnesses to the attack was clear enough. Twenty to twenty-five years old, dark hair under a slouch hat, with a Deep South accent. He had posed as a messenger delivering medicine to Secretary Seward, then run amok when denied entrance to Seward's bedchamber. Six witnesses stood ready to identify him, once he was in custody.

“You have a weapon, I assume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We've no credentials yet, you understand, but this should serve for now.” As Wood spoke, he removed a business card from his vest pocket, took a dip pen from the inkwell on his desk, wrote something on the backside of the card, and blotted it. Over Wood's neat signature, the message read:

Agent of the U.S. Secret Service

“I'll have something better for you in July, if you're still with us.”

“Yes, sir,” Ryder said and pocketed the card.

He left Wood's office thinking,
One job at a time.

C
HARLES
C
OUNTY,
M
ARYLAND

APRIL 26, 1865

I
hate these damned mosquitoes!” Jimmy Lucas muttered, slapping at his neck. “They've got more of my blood inside 'em than I have in my own veins.”

“Forget about the bugs,” said Ryder, huddled on the skiff's front seat with Lucas poling. “Let's just get this done.”

Zekiah Swamp lay at the headwaters of the Wicomico River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's eastern shore. It sprawled over 450 acres, and every square foot of it lived up to the original Algonquin name of
Sacaya
, translated to English as “dense thicket.” Aside from mosquitoes and leeches, the marsh—Maryland's largest, running clear across Charles County—also swarmed with snakes and snapping turtles, skunks, beavers, and black bears. Ryder hadn't seen an alligator yet, but kept his lever-action Henry rifle ready, just in case.

With Lucas and the third man in their skiff, Bob Elder, he was hunting John Wilkes Booth. Throughout the swamp surrounding them, a dozen other three-man teams were scouring the wetland for a glimpse of Lincoln's killer, each man hoping that he'd be the first to spot Booth or his partner, David Edgar Herold. In an inside pocket of his coat, Ryder carried a folded copy of the wanted poster Secretary Stanton had issued six days earlier. It offered fifty thousand dollars for capture of Booth, twenty-five thousand for Herold—his name misspelled in print as
Harold
—and for a third conspirator still at large, John Harrison Surratt.

The others—those who'd been identified, at least—were already in custody. Mary Surratt, John's mother, ran a boardinghouse in Washington that catered to Confederates. City police and members of the U.S. Army's Provost Marshal's detail knew son John as a Rebel courier and an associate of Booth. They'd visited Mary's place at two
A.M
. on April 15 and she'd put them off with lies, but two days later, one of Mary's servants told investigators of a meeting held beneath her roof the night Lincoln was shot, including Booth and others. On their second visit, April 17, the officers searched high and low, discovering photographs of Booth and Jefferson Davis, a pistol, percussion caps, and a bullet mold. While they were hauling Mary out, one Lewis Powell arrived, introducing himself as a workman on Mary's payroll. Confused, she denied knowing him, and he joined her in jail, soon identified as the man who had wreaked bloody havoc at Secretary Seward's home three nights earlier.

On April 20, another suspected conspirator, George Atzerodt, had been run to ground at a farm outside Germantown, Maryland, twenty-odd miles northwest of Washington. According to police, Booth had assigned Atzerodt to murder Vice President Johnson, and while Atzerodt had booked a room at Johnson's hotel, he then lost his nerve and fled, leaving a pistol and a Bowie knife beneath his pillow for police to find. Now, he was under lock and key with Powell and Mary Surratt, aboard the monitor USS
Saugus
, anchored at Washington's Navy Yard.

Booth, David Herold, and John Surratt, meanwhile, were all in the wind. But Ryder thought their lead was narrowing.

Today, authorities knew that Booth had crossed the Navy Yard Bridge into Maryland, on horseback, within thirty minutes of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Herold made the same crossing, about an hour later, and rendezvoused with Booth before proceeding to Surrattsville, in Prince George's County. There, they'd retrieved stockpiled weapons and other supplies, then ridden to Bryantown, stopping at the home of a local physician, Dr. Samuel Mudd. Mudd, in turn, had splinted Booth's right leg—broken sometime during his escape—and fashioned him a pair of crutches. Booth and Herold had spent another day with Mudd, then hired a local man as their guide to the Rich Hill home of another Confederate sympathizer, Col. Samuel Cox. Fearing arrest himself, Cox spilled the fact that he had shown the fugitives a place to hide.

In Zekiah Swamp.

Cox swore the conspirators had moved on by April 24, crossing the Potomac River into Virginia with aid from a new guide, one Thomas Jones, but Ryder had his orders: leave no stone—or mossy, rotten log—unturned. Some thought that Cox was brave enough to lie for Booth and Herold even now, diverting searchers while they fled deeper into the South by some alternate route. Ryder disagreed, but he was under orders. More important, he thought there was a possibility—however slight—that one or both conspirators might still be hiding somewhere in the swamp, and he was not about to be the man who let them slip away through negligence.

Even without assassins in the underbrush, the hunt was perilous. Aside from copperheads—the reptile kind—and timber rattlesnakes, black bears and rabid skunks, the manhunt had already cost multiple lives. A barge loaded with Union soldiers tracking Booth, the
Black Diamond,
had collided with the steamer
Massachusetts
on the Potomac, both sinking near Blackstone Island. Among the fifty dead were Union prisoners of war lately paroled in exchange for Confederate captives.

All that, without a shot fired, yet.

Ryder had given up on bagging Booth himself, a fantasy he'd briefly nurtured in the early hours of the manhunt. Now, it seemed that someone else would have the honor, if the actor didn't slip away entirely. Thinking of him safe and sound in Dixie Land infuriated Ryder, much less the idea of him sailing off to foreign shores. No other country had officially allied itself with the Confederacy, but France had sympathized with the Rebels—and its troops had invaded Mexico in December 1861, capturing Mexico City in June 1863. Maximilian I—an Austrian archduke installed as emperor of Mexico by France's Napoleon III in April 1864—might well shelter Booth south of the Rio Grande, if he even knew where the assassin had concealed himself.

And could a lone, determined man then track Booth down and treat him to a taste of justice?

Possibly. Something to think about, at least.

A gunshot from the west snapped Ryder's head around and made him raise his Henry rifle. Seconds later, he picked out another skiff with searchers in it, heading his way. In the bow, a man he recognized as Emil Crowe was waving, calling out, “It's done!”

“
What's
done?” Ryder yelled back at him.

“They got the sumbitch, in Virginia. Shot him dead as dirt.”

“Where in Virginia?” Ryder asked.

“On a tobacco farm, outside Port Royal.”

“You're sure about this, Emil?”

“Positive. Had his initials tattooed on his hand, 'long with a scar somebody recognized, back of his neck.”

“And Herold?”

“He's surrendered. No sign of Surratt, though. Thought is, now, he mighta run for Canada.”

The news was mostly good, so why did Ryder feel a sudden letdown, hearing it? He couldn't answer that and wondered what it said about him. Would he rather still be hunting Booth than have him measured for a casket?

No. And yet . . .

He turned to Jimmy Lucas, on the pole, and said, “All right, let's head for home.”

O
LD
A
RSENAL
P
ENITENTIARY,
W
ASHINGTON,
DC

JULY 7, 1865

It was a gray day for a hanging. Clouds were scudding over Greenleaf Point, the peninsula marking the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers. Ryder stood with fifteen hundred spectators inside the prison courtyard, most dressed in their Sunday finery, although this was a Friday morning. Thirty-odd soldiers in uniform, all armed with muskets, stood along the wall behind the scaffold. On the gallows platform, fifteen attendants fumbled at binding and hooding the condemned, while four held black umbrellas up to shield their heads from spitting rain.

Ryder had no umbrella, just his flat-brimmed hat and overcoat to keep him dry. Beneath his coat, pinned to his vest, he wore the Secret Service badge he had received from William Wood on Wednesday, after Wood himself was sworn in by Secretary McCulloch at the Treasury Building. That badge, in turn, legitimized the pistol he was wearing, a Colt Army Model 1860 revolver holstered on the left, butt-forward, for a cross-hand draw.

He wouldn't be needing the pistol today.

Director Wood had passed on witnessing the execution of the four Lincoln conspirators condemned to hang, but Ryder felt he ought to see it through. He was the only Secret Service agent in attendance and would file a full report when it was finished, so he focused on the smallest details as the ritual proceeded.

Several hundred persons had been held for questioning after the president's assassination, all but eight released without charges. Nine alleged conspirators had been identified, with one of them—John Surratt—still at large. President Johnson had created a military commission on May 1 to try the remaining eight, and it convened for the first time eight days later. The trial lasted through June, concluding on the last day of that month with guilty verdicts for all eight of the accused. Four of the plotters—George Atzerodt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and Mary Surratt—had been condemned to hang. Dr. Samuel Mudd's life was spared by a single vote, resulting in a term of life imprisonment. Also sentenced to life, Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen, both convicted of plotting with Booth to kidnap Lincoln a month before he was murdered.

The odd man out, Edman Spangler, had been employed at Ford's Theatre, preparing the president's box on April 14. A coworker recalled him saying, “Damn the president!” while he was working on the box, and other witnesses reported seeing him converse with Booth when the actor entered through the theater's back door. One claimed that Spangler held Booth's horse while he was busy murdering the president, while others disagreed. The panel voted to convict him, but he got off with a relatively lenient six-year prison term.

Now it was time for the condemned to pay, in spite of protests that Mary Surratt should be spared on account of her sex. Lewis Powell, belatedly, insisted that Surratt was innocent of any part in the conspiracy, but no one trusted him. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt had presented President Johnson with a clemency petition for Mary on July 5, but Johnson had refused to sign it, declaring that she had “kept the nest that hatched the egg” of treason.

By then, the details of Booth's death were known and had been published widely. Sgt. Boston Corbett was the triggerman who'd dropped him, after soldiers torched the barn where Booth was hiding out on Richard Garrett's farm. According to Corbett, Booth brandished a pistol as he hobbled from the barn, forcing Garrett to fire in self-defense. Lt. Col. Everton Conger, commanding that phase of the manhunt, disputed that story, reporting to Secretary Stanton that Corbett had fired “without order, pretext, or excuse.” He arrested Corbett for disobeying an order to take Booth alive, but Stanton had dismissed the charge, granting Corbett $1,653 from the $50,000 price placed on Booth's head.

It hardly mattered to the actor-turned-assassin. Booth had survived for two hours, his spinal cord severed, whispering to one bystander, “Tell my mother I died for my country.” His last recorded words—“Useless, useless”—fairly summarized his wasted life, in Ryder's mind.

Atop the scaffold, preparations for the execution were complete. Each of the four condemned was hooded with a white sack like a pillow case. White strips of cloth, as if from shredded sheets, secured their arms behind their backs, and wrapped around their thighs, to keep their legs from thrashing when they dropped. Mary Surratt, off to the left, was dressed for her own funeral in a black long-sleeved, ankle-length dress. The others—Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt from left to right—were also dressed in black, except for light gray trousers worn by Herold.

The chosen hangman, Col. Christian Rath from Michigan, remained with the condemned as various assistants left the scaffold. Ministers appointed to provide whatever solace they could manage—two priests for Mary Surratt on her own—were gathered off to one side of the gallows, muttering the prayers dictated by their creeds. Mary Surratt, like Booth and Dr. Mudd, happened to be a Roman Catholic, a circumstance that had produced wild rumors of a Papist plot to kill the president. Ryder had heard the stories, but he couldn't figure out how Pope Pius IX in Rome would benefit from Lincoln's death. It smacked of the Know-Nothing bile that had sparked riots in the streets of Baltimore and Louisville, before the war, together with the burning of a church in Maine.

Ridiculous.

As far as Ryder was concerned, the president had died at Rebel hands. It would have pleased Ryder to see old Jeff Davis on the scaffold with the other four, but he was under lock and key at Fort Monroe, off the Virginia coast, awaiting trial for treason. If and when he was condemned, Ryder thought he might make time to attend that hanging, too.

A silence fell over the crowd, as Colonel Rath took his position by the lever that would drop all four conspirators at once. Off to the left, somewhere, a drum roll issued from the shadows near the prison wall, where Gen. Winfield Scott stood supervising the proceedings. At a nod from him, Rath yanked the lever and propelled four bodies into space.

A jolt brought them up short, Ryder imagining that he could hear their necks snap, more or less in unison. Death from a proper hanging was supposed to be immediate, but all four of the hooded bodies twitched and wriggled at their ropes' end, like blind tadpoles swimming helplessly against a tide too strong for them. At last, after a minute, maybe more, the trembling ceased and they hung still.

Some of the spectators were cheering and applauding now, but most of them were solemn, silent, as they watched the corpses swing. By twos and threes, then larger groups, they started filing toward the exit from the prison yard, anxious to leave now that they'd seen the spectacle. Worried, perhaps, that they had been contaminated through their close proximity to sudden death.