The Burden of the Diary

What remained was to determine how much of that story the public would be allowed to know, and how much would follow the assassin into an unmarked grave.

In the pine thicket on the Zekiah Swamp, where woven branches held the damp of late April against any sun, John Wilkes Booth wrote by a guttering candle.

The pocket diary he had purchased in Washington before the assassination lay open on his knee, its pages absorbing his pen’s movement with the urgency of a man who believed posterity required his account. His left leg, the fibula snapped clean when he jumped from Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater, throbbed beneath the splint Dr. Samuel Mudd had applied two nights before.

Pain and fever had settled into him like a second presence. Yet the prose he committed framed his suffering as heroic sacrifice, the necessary cost of striking down a tyrant. He wrote of liberating the South, of an act history would vindicate once passions cooled. The diary was his jury, his confessor, his collaborator in self-justification.

He did not know that Thomas Jones, the Confederate agent who brought him food and news, had begun calculating the risks of continued association. He did not know that the network of sympathizers he counted upon for passage across the Potomac had begun to dissolve, its members arrested or frightened into silence by the rewards Stanton had plastered across the countryside. He knew only that the candle burned low and that he must set down his version before the chance was lost.

Lieutenant Luther Baker found the same book eleven inches from the dead man’s hand.

The contrast between these moments—Booth writing in conviction of future vindication, Baker retrieving the diary as physical evidence of crime—measures the distance the document would travel in the hours after Booth’s death. The transformation began immediately.

Baker, a civilian detective attached to the War Department’s manhunt, had ridden with Lieutenant Edward Doherty’s detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry from Washington to the Garrett farm in King George County, Virginia. He had watched the tobacco barn burn, had heard Sergeant Boston Corbett’s single shot, had seen Booth dragged to the porch of Richard Garrett’s farmhouse where he died over three hours, paralyzed from the neck down.

Now, in the first moments of official custody, Baker inventoried the body. The diary was in the inside breast pocket of Booth’s coat, its leather scuffed, its pages swollen with humidity.

Baker examined it briefly, noted its existence, and passed it to his superior. The chain of custody had begun.

The diary’s physical journey to that porch had been Booth’s own. He had begun it on the night of April 14, 1865, in the hours after the assassination, when he and David Herold reached Surratt’s Tavern on the Brandywine Pike, nine miles from Washington. There they collected weapons and supplies cached for the kidnapping plot Booth had originally conceived—rifles, field glasses, ammunition—and Booth wrote the first entries by lamplight while Herold tended the horses.

The tavern, operated by Mary Surratt’s tenant John M. Lloyd, would become a fixed point in the geography of conspiracy once investigators traced Booth’s movements.

But in the early morning hours of April 15, it was simply a waystation where a wounded man could gather himself before pressing south. Booth wrote of his deed in grandiose terms: he had struck for liberty, for the Confederacy, for a cause that would yet prevail. The diary absorbed his conviction and preserved it against the contradictions of experience.

From Surratt’s Tavern the diary traveled to Dr. Samuel Mudd’s house, twelve miles distant in Charles County, Maryland.

Mudd was a physician and tobacco farmer whose Confederate sympathies were known; his wife would later testify that she recognized Booth from his theatrical appearances in Washington. The doctor set the broken leg, provided a splint and crutches, and allowed the fugitives to rest through April 15.

Booth updated his diary there, recording his injury and his determination to continue. The Mudd farm offered a model of the Confederate underground Booth had expected: secret sympathizers, medical care, knowledge of safe routes. Yet even as he wrote, the structure failed.

Mudd, alarmed by news of the assassination reaching him through neighbors, would claim later that he did not learn of Lincoln’s death until after Booth departed. The claim would be tested at trial. What is certain is that Booth left the Mudd farm on April 16 with his leg insufficiently healed, his hope of reaching Virginia still alive, and his diary growing heavier with each entry.

The next five days brought progressive collapse of his expectations. Booth and Herold moved through the pine barrens of southern Maryland, guided first by Confederate agent Samuel Cox, then after April 20 by Thomas Jones, who knew the country intimately and had preserved a small boat against just such necessity.

Jones brought newspapers that told Booth what he could not yet believe: that the assassination was universally condemned, that the South he meant to serve regarded his act as catastrophe, that the great manhunt had made his capture inevitable. The historian Philip Kunhardt would later observe that instead of becoming a great Southern hero, Booth found his deed considered the worst possible tragedy that could have befallen both South and North. Booth recorded this reception not as error but as temporary misunderstanding, a failure of perspective that time would correct.

The entries grew longer, more defensive, more elaborate in self-exoneration. He cast himself as Brutus. He claimed kinship with William Tell. He was a liberator misunderstood by the very people he had tried to free. The diary became his primary companion, the one witness he could trust to record his true motives.

The crossing of the Potomac on the night of April 21-22, guided by Jones’s compass and knowledge of the river’s channels, should have carried Booth to Virginia and Confederate lines he still believed held somewhere in the interior. Instead, navigational error—perhaps Jones’s miscalculation, perhaps Booth’s impatience—brought them upriver to a bend in the Potomac where Maryland shore met Maryland shore. They spent a day hiding in the mouth of a creek, then crossed successfully on the night of April 22-23, reaching the Northern Neck of Virginia at last.

But the Virginia they found was not the sanctuary Booth had imagined. The Confederate army had dissolved; Lee had surrendered; the apparatus of resistance had scattered to farms and hiding places.

Booth’s diary entries from these days record dawning recognition that his act had outlived its political moment. He wrote still of tyrannicide, of liberty, of history’s judgment. But the prose carried a new note, something between defiance and desperation.

The diary’s physical presence imposed its own burden. Booth carried it in his coat through swamps and river crossings, consulted it in moments of discouragement, added to it in stolen hours when Herold slept or foraged. The book was small enough to escape notice, distinctive enough to identify its keeper. It contained names—Mudd, Jones, Surratt—that would become coordinates in the prosecution’s map of conspiracy. It contained Booth’s own account of his movements, his meetings, his expectations. The man who wrote it believed he was creating evidence for his vindication. The man who would read it would find evidence of his guilt.

At the Garrett farm, where Booth and Herold arrived on April 24, the diary accompanied its keeper into the tobacco barn where they slept on the night of April 25. Richard Garrett, the farmer who had reluctantly given them shelter, did not know their identities; his son John grew suspicious and locked them in the barn on the morning of April 26, while he rode to alert the cavalry. Booth had the diary with him when Lieutenant Doherty’s detachment surrounded the building, when negotiations for surrender began, when Herold emerged with hands raised and Booth refused to follow. He may have had it still when Corbett’s bullet struck him through the neck. The diary survived the fire that consumed the barn, the dragging of Booth’s body to the porch, the three hours of paralysis and pain that preceded his death at approximately seven o’clock on the morning of April 26.

Baker’s retrieval was the first act in the diary’s transformation from personal apologia to public evidence. Within hours, it was in the custody of Colonel Everton Conger, the civilian detective who had accompanied the cavalry detachment and who would carry it, with Booth’s body, back to Washington. Conger delivered it to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had directed the manhunt from the War Department’s telegraph office with a ferocity that made his name synonymous with the pursuit. Stanton received the diary on April 27, along with other effects found on Booth’s body: a knife, a pistol, a compass, a pipe, some Confederate currency, a photograph of five women. The diary was the prize. It offered, in Booth’s own hand, a narrative of the conspiracy that could be shaped to government purposes.

What happened next remains disputed. The diary eventually produced at the conspiracy trial in May and June 1865 contained fifty-one pages of entries, covering November 1864 through April 1865. But the book itself, when examined by defense attorneys, showed clear evidence of excision.

Eighteen pages had been removed—cut or torn from the binding—with enough care to suggest official deliberation rather than hasty concealment. The missing pages covered the period immediately following the assassination, the days of Booth’s flight through Maryland when he had been in contact with Confederate agents and sympathizers.

Their removal served the prosecution’s interest in limiting the conspiracy to defendants then in custody: Booth, Herold, Mudd, Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Samuel Arnold. The broader network of Confederate support that had sustained Booth’s escape—the Joneses and Coxes and Lloyds who had fed him, guided him, hidden him—would not be brought into the courtroom. The diary, edited, would tell a narrower story.

Stanton’s responsibility for this excision has never been definitively established. The Secretary of War controlled the evidence; his aides handled the documents; his prosecutors would use the diary in court. But whether Stanton personally ordered the removal, or whether subordinates acted in anticipation of his wishes, or whether the pages were removed for some other purpose entirely, remains unknown. The missing pages were never recovered. Their absence shaped the trial that followed, limiting the defense’s ability to demonstrate that Booth had operated within a larger Confederate apparatus, constraining the argument that the assassination was an act of war rather than individual criminality. The diary, once Booth’s instrument of self-exoneration, had become the government’s instrument of selective accusation.

The transformation was complete. The book that had accompanied Booth through twelve days of flight, that had absorbed his fevered justifications and his growing despair, was now Exhibit A in the prosecution of his alleged co-conspirators. Its entries were read aloud in court, parsed for incriminating references, offered as proof of defendants’ knowledge and intent. The passages that remained—Booth’s grandiose claims of tyrannicide, his complaints of suffering, his self-comparison to historical assassins—served to confirm the prosecution’s portrait of a murderer motivated by personal ambition and political delusion. The passages that had been removed, the names and meetings and arrangements that might have complicated this portrait, were available only to inference and speculation.

David Herold, who had surrendered at the Garrett farm and who had never kept a diary of his own, faced the edited book in the courtroom as primary documentary evidence of his guilt. The entries that mentioned him were few and oblique—Booth had not trusted paper with the full record of their collaboration—but sufficient to establish his presence at the assassination and his accompaniment of the fugitive’s flight. Samuel Mudd faced the diary’s references to his medical treatment, its description of his farm as a waystation, its implication that he had known more than he admitted. Mary Surratt faced the entries from Surratt’s Tavern, the weapons cached on her property, the network of Confederate sympathy that her boardinghouse had sustained. The diary did not name her directly; it did not need to. The prosecution would construct the connections, using Booth’s words as foundation.

The physical book itself became a contested object. Defense attorneys demanded to examine the original; the prosecution produced it with the pages of excision visible to the eye. The judge advocate general, Joseph Holt, who directed the prosecution, acknowledged the removal of pages but offered no explanation. The defense objected; the objection was overruled; the trial proceeded with the evidence as presented. The diary’s material condition—its swollen pages, its broken binding, the knife-marks of its mutilation—testified to the violence that had surrounded its creation and use. It had been written in hiding, carried through swamps, recovered from a burning barn, edited by the government that now deployed it. Its scars matched its keeper’s.

Booth had intended the diary for history. He had imagined future readers who would understand his motives, vindicate his act, place him among the liberators of mankind. The history he received was different: a military tribunal that would convict his accomplices on the evidence of his own words, a legal process that would hang four of them including Mary Surratt, a public memory that would remember him as assassin rather than hero. The diary made this outcome possible. Without it, the prosecution would have lacked the documentary anchor for its narrative of conspiracy; without it, the defense might have found more room to maneuver; without it, the government’s control of the evidentiary record would have been less complete. The book that Booth had written to save his reputation became the instrument of his collaborators’ destruction.

The irony was not lost on contemporary observers. The New York Herald, reporting on the trial, noted the diary’s strange fate in being turned against its author’s friends. The World, more critical of the prosecution, suggested that the missing pages might have contained matters which the government did not wish made public—a speculation that has persisted in historical accounts. What the missing pages contained, whether they named names that would have embarrassed the prosecution or complicated its theory of the case, remains unknown. Their absence is itself a fact, a silence in the record that speaks to the pressures of political necessity.

The diary’s afterlife extended beyond the trial. It was preserved in the War Department’s files, transferred to the National Archives, exhibited occasionally as a relic of the assassination. Scholars would debate its reliability, its omissions, its psychological revelations. Handwriting analysis would confirm its authenticity; content analysis would reveal its author’s progressive isolation and self-deception. But its primary historical function had been served in the summer of 1865, when it helped to convict the defendants and to establish the official narrative of the Lincoln assassination as the work of a small conspiracy rather than a larger rebellion.

The burden of the diary was thus double. For Booth, it had been the burden of self-justification in the face of failure, the attempt to write himself into a history that was slipping away. For the government, it became the burden of selective disclosure, the editing of evidence to fit a prosecutorial theory. The two burdens met in the courtroom, where Booth’s words were read by his enemies to condemn his friends. The diary that he had carried as a secret companion through twelve days of flight became, after his death, a public weapon in the war over memory and responsibility.

This transformation was not unique in the history of political violence. Assassins have often left documents meant to explain themselves; governments have often seized and shaped those documents to their own purposes. The particular case of Booth’s diary matters because of the scale of the manhunt, the intensity of public feeling, the speed with which personal record became institutional evidence. Twelve days separated the first entry at Surratt’s Tavern from the final retrieval at the Garrett farm. Three months separated that retrieval from the execution of four conspirators on the gallows at the Washington Arsenal. The diary moved through this compressed history as both witness and instrument, its pages carrying the weight of lives and deaths beyond its keeper’s own.

What remained, after the trial and the executions, was the book itself: damaged, incomplete, preserved in the archive as material trace of an event that had reshaped the nation. Its physical survival was itself a kind of accident. The fire that consumed the Garrett barn might have destroyed it; the waters of the Potomac might have swallowed it; the government that edited it might have suppressed it entirely. Instead it endured, a compromised document whose compromises were themselves historical facts. The missing pages testified to the pressures of prosecution; the remaining pages testified to the self-deception of the assassin. Together they composed a record that was neither true nor false in any simple sense, but rather a palimpsest of intentions and uses, written and rewritten in the heat of pursuit.

The diary, now a government exhibit, provided the official language of motive.