The Immediate Aftermath of the Shooting

The manhunt was over. What remained was a corpse cooling on a Virginia porch and a question that would travel with it back to Washington: whether the state could prove what it had killed.

At sunrise on April 26, 1865, John Wilkes Booth lay paralyzed on the rough wooden planks of Richard Garrett’s farmhouse, his breathing shallow and labored. The bullet from Boston Corbett’s pistol had entered the left side of his neck, traveled through three vertebrae, and partially severed the spinal cord. The soldiers who had burned the tobacco barn stood in the morning light, watching a man they had pursued for twelve days slip toward death. No surgeon was present. No one attempted to remove the bullet. Booth was twenty-six years old. He would not see noon. In his dying moments, he reportedly whispered, “Tell my mother I died for my country.”

Three hours later, he was dead. The body remained on the porch while the officers present began their work of examination and collection. Lieutenant Edward Doherty, who had commanded the detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry, assumed formal custody. With him were Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger of the War Department and Luther Baker, cousin of Lafayette Baker, the War Department’s chief of detectives. These three men would determine what evidence accompanied the corpse back to the capital.

Conger approached the body first. He searched the clothing and found what would become the most consequential piece of evidence in the government’s possession: a small pocket diary, its pages filled with entries Booth had made during his flight. The book was bound in dark leather, small enough to fit in an inside coat pocket. Conger flipped through the pages, noting dates, place names, fragments of self-justification. The entries began on April 14, the night of the assassination, and continued through the twelve days of pursuit. Here was Booth’s own account of his movements, his rationales, his shifting sense of purpose. Conger closed the book and placed it with his own papers. The diary would not be made public for months, and then only in fragments. For now it was state property, its contents known only to the men who held it.

Baker conducted his own examination. The body was still warm. He noted the clothing: a black coat, a pair of boots, a cravat. There was cash in the pockets—several hundred dollars in greenbacks and gold, the remnant of the funds Booth had carried from Washington. There were also letters, fragments of correspondence that would later be traced to sympathizers in Canada and Maryland. Baker gathered these items methodically, establishing a record that would be crucial when the government brought its case against the surviving conspirators. Every object that left the Garrett farm that morning would be entered into evidence, tagged, and preserved for the military commission that would sit in judgment.

The body itself presented a different problem. Transporting a corpse across seventy miles of Virginia countryside, then down the Potomac River to Washington, required measures that no military manual prescribed. The soldiers found a worn farm wagon and borrowed a horse from the Garretts. Booth’s body was wrapped in a blanket (accounts differ on whether it was blue or gray) and secured to the wagon’s side with rope to prevent it from shifting during the rough journey ahead. The posture was undignified, almost absurd: the most wanted man in America, lashed like cordwood to a farmer’s cart.

The procession left the Garrett farm in mid-morning. Doherty rode at the head of his detachment, with Conger and Baker flanking the wagon. The cavalrymen who had burned the barn and witnessed the shooting followed behind, their horses kicking dust on the road to Port Royal. The route was the same one Booth had traveled in reverse twelve days earlier, when Thomas Jones had guided him across the Rappahannock to the relative safety of Virginia’s interior. Now that safety was illusion. The countryside was crawling with federal troops, the Confederate infrastructure collapsed, the networks of Confederate sympathizers that had sustained Booth’s flight either arrested or in hiding.

At Port Royal, the party reached the steamboat John S. Ide, which carried them down the Rappahannock to the Potomac and thence to Belle Plain on the Virginia shore. The journey took most of the day. The April heat was rising, and the blanket-wrapped corpse began to show the first signs of decomposition. There was no ice available, no embalming fluid, no means of preservation beyond the haste with which the party traveled. The soldiers who had pursued Booth with such determination now found themselves guarding a body that was becoming unreadable even as evidence; identification would depend on witnesses who had known him in life and on such physical marks as had survived both shooting and journey. Among those marks were a tattoo on his left hand bearing his initials “J.W.B.” and a distinct scar on the back of his neck.

At Belle Plain, soldiers transferred their cargo to the ironclad USS Montauk, anchored in the Potomac as part of the naval blockade that had strangled Confederate commerce for four years. A monitor-class vessel low in the water and armored against shot and shell is no funeral bier; its deck is steel plates and gun turrets rather than any space meant for mourning or display.

The scene that followed was staged with deliberate theatricality. Edwin Stanton had arranged for a panel of witnesses who could confirm that this body belonged to John Wilkes Booth; as Secretary of War he had directed every stage of this manhunt from Washington itself.

The witnesses assembled on the Montauk included men who had known Booth in various capacities. There were former theatrical colleagues who could identify his physical features: a prominent jaw, a distinctive scar on the neck, a particular arrangement of teeth. There were government clerks who had seen him in Washington during the months before the assassination. There were physicians who could examine the body for identifying marks and determine the cause of death. Each witness was led to the corpse in turn, asked to state his name and connection to Booth, and invited to examine the body at close range. The body was identified there as Booth by more than ten people who knew him.

The identification was not straightforward. The face was swollen and discolored from the trauma of death and the heat of the journey. The bullet wound in the neck was clearly visible, a dark entry point surrounded by congealed blood. But the features that had made Booth famous—the dark hair, the intense eyes, the mobile expression—were distorted beyond easy recognition. Witnesses who had known him well hesitated before confirming his identity. Those who knew him only by reputation could offer no certain judgment.

It was the dental examination that provided the most reliable identification. Booth had received dental treatment in Washington in the months before the assassination, and his dentist had kept records of the work performed. The dentist was summoned to the Montauk and asked to examine the corpse’s mouth. He found the fillings he had placed, the particular configuration of gold and amalgam that matched his notes. This was not conclusive proof—dental records were not then the forensic standard they would later become—but it was sufficient to satisfy the government panel that the body before them was, beyond reasonable doubt, that of John Wilkes Booth.

The autopsy was conducted on the evening of April 27 by Surgeon General Joseph Barnes and a team of naval medical officers. The body was stripped and examined systematically, each organ described and weighed, each wound measured and recorded. The fatal bullet was not found; it had lodged in the cervical vertebrae and would remain there, a permanent part of the skeletal record. The surgeons noted the paralysis that had preceded death, the partial severance of the spinal cord, the rapid onset of respiratory failure. Their report would be entered into the official record, a document of bureaucratic precision that contrasted sharply with the violence of Booth’s end.

The body was then prepared for burial—or rather, for temporary interment, since Stanton had determined that no permanent resting place would be announced. The corpse was placed in a simple wooden coffin, which was in turn loaded with iron ballast to ensure it would sink in deep water. The location of burial was kept secret, known only to a handful of officials. Stanton’s reasoning was explicit: he wished to prevent the grave from becoming a site of Confederate pilgrimage, a shrine to the man who had struck down the Union’s president. The body of John Wilkes Booth would disappear from public view as completely as if it had never been found.

Yet the physical disappearance of the corpse did not end the contest over its meaning. Even as the Montauk rode at anchor in the Potomac, rumors continued to spread. In taverns and newspaper offices across the North, men argued about whether the right man had been killed. The New York Herald, which had built its circulation on sensational crime reporting, gave voice to doubts that would persist for decades. Booth had been seen in Texas, in Mexico, in the Indian Territory. The body buried at sea—or in the Arsenal grounds, or in a nameless Potter’s Field—was not his. The government had perpetrated a fraud to cover its own incompetence, or to protect hidden conspirators, or to satisfy some darker purpose that could only be guessed at.

These rumors had consequences that extended far beyond the immediate question of identification. They shaped the government’s approach to the surviving conspirators, who were already in military custody and awaiting trial. If there was any doubt about Booth’s fate, then the case against his accomplices rested on shaky ground. Stanton understood this, and he moved aggressively to suppress speculation. The witnesses who had identified the body were asked to sign sworn statements. The autopsy report was filed with the War Department’s most confidential papers. The diary that Conger had retrieved from Booth’s pockets was sequestered, its contents known only to a select few.

The official narrative was thus constructed through a combination of documentation and concealment. The government possessed the body, the diary, the physical evidence of Booth’s flight. It controlled access to these materials, releasing only such information as served its purposes. The military commission that would try Mary Surratt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, and George Atzerodt would hear testimony about Booth’s movements, his associates, his intentions. But it would not hear everything. The full contents of the diary remained secret, cited only in fragments that supported the prosecution’s theory of a broad Confederate conspiracy.

This pattern—evidence revealed and evidence withheld—would characterize the entire proceeding. The government had won the manhunt, capturing or killing all those directly involved in Lincoln’s assassination. But the victory was incomplete. Booth’s twelve-day flight had demonstrated the persistence of Confederate networks that the federal bureaucracy had failed to penetrate. His capture had depended on chance and informants rather than systematic intelligence. And his death, however convenient for the government’s purposes, had deprived the prosecution of its most valuable witness. The surviving conspirators could be tried, convicted, and executed. But the full story of the assassination—its planning, its financing, its connections to Confederate officialdom—would remain partially obscure, a matter of inference and dispute.

On the deck of the Montauk, as the identification witnesses dispersed and the surgeons packed their instruments, Luther Baker made a final inventory of the personal effects recovered from Booth’s body. The cash was counted and receipted. The letters were sealed in envelopes and marked with the date and circumstances of recovery. The small pocket diary, its leather cover still warm from the Virginia sun, was placed in a locked box for transport to the War Department. Baker signed the receipt, noting that he had taken custody of these items from Lieutenant Doherty at 9:00 p.m. On April 27, 1865.

The box containing the diary was carried ashore the following morning, through streets still draped in mourning for the president whose death it documented. Stanton received it in his office in the War Department, a cavernous room where telegraph keys clicked constantly with reports from occupied Southern territory. He did not open it immediately. The Secretary of War had other business to attend to: the disposition of Confederate armies still in the field, the reconstruction of state governments, the protection of freedmen from reprisal. The diary could wait. It was evidence now, state property, a tool to be deployed when the time was right.

The time would come soon enough. The military commission was already being empaneled, its members selected from officers loyal to the administration and the Union cause. The prisoners were held in the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, a grim fortress on the Washington waterfront, isolated from civilian contact and from each other. The trial would begin in early May, less than two weeks after Booth’s death, and would conclude with four hangings on July 7. Through it all, the diary would remain a presence, cited and contested, its full contents never disclosed to the public that read newspaper accounts of the proceedings.

What Stanton knew, and what he chose not to reveal, would shape the historical record for generations. The official narrative of Lincoln’s assassination—the story of a lone actor, a deranged Confederate sympathizer acting without substantial support—served the immediate needs of Reconstruction politics. It allowed the federal government to punish conspicuous conspirators without pursuing the more difficult question of Confederate official complicity. It provided closure without full disclosure. And it left Booth himself as a figure of romantic speculation, his motives and connections forever subject to revision and myth.

The body, meanwhile, had completed its journey. From the Garrett farmhouse porch to the deck of the Montauk, from the rough blanket of a farm wagon to the iron ballast of a secret grave, John Wilkes Booth had been transformed from a fugitive into an artifact. The state had asserted its power over his physical remains, just as it would assert its power over his historical reputation.

On the evening of April 27, as the Montauk rode at anchor and the last witnesses were rowed ashore, Luther Baker secured the locked box containing Booth’s diary in the vessel’s strong room. The corpse lay in its ballasted coffin on the ironclad’s deck, guarded by a detail of marines. Both would travel to Washington under cover of darkness, transferred to a naval tug for the final passage upriver.

The manhunt that had consumed the War Department for twelve days was finished. The evidence was now in hand: a body identified by dental work, a diary whose full contents remained secret, a chain of custody established by signed receipts. The federal government had captured the story of Lincoln’s assassination as surely as it had captured the man who committed it. What remained was to determine how much of that story the public would be allowed to know, and how much would be buried with the assassin in his unmarked grave.