The Reward and the Informants

In 1865, after the executions, the diary remained in War Department files, its red leather binding gradually stiffening as the months passed. Clerks in the Judge Advocate General’s office handled it as they would any other evidence from concluded proceedings, filing it among the trial records that would eventually travel to the National Archives. The book’s fate was settled, or so it seemed. But the money remained in motion.

Edwin Stanton had authorized $100, 000 in rewards on April 20, 1865, while Booth was still at large and the War Department’s telegraph wires hummed with false sightings from Canada to Texas. The Secretary of War understood the arithmetic of manhunts: information flowed toward cash. He had divided the sum into tiers—$50, 000 for Booth, $25, 000 for John Surratt, $25, 000 for David Herold—each figure calibrated to the target’s perceived value and the difficulty of capture. The proclamation went out over military channels and into newspapers, printed alongside the photographic portraits that Stanton’s detectives had begun distributing to provost marshals and railway conductors. The reward served as an instrument of pursuit and a statement of institutional will: a sum large enough to make betrayal tempting and silence expensive.

Within hours of Booth’s death at the Garrett farm, that instrument became a problem of adjudication. The men who had surrounded the tobacco barn on the night of April 26 began composing their claims before the body cooled. Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty, commanding the 16th New York Cavalry detachment, understood that military rank conferred no automatic precedence in reward distribution. Colonel Lafayette Baker, the War Department’s chief detective, had dispatched his cousin Luther Baker and the civilian agent Everton Conger to join Doherty’s patrol precisely to ensure that professional investigators shared in any capture. This arrangement, conceived as coordination, now promised conflict.

The cavalrymen had done the riding. Doherty’s twenty-five troopers had pursued Booth through Southern Maryland for more than a week, guided by fragmentary intelligence and the occasional reliable informant. They had crossed the Potomac into Virginia, doubled back on false leads, and finally located the Garrett farm through the interrogation of William S. Jett, a Confederate signal courier who revealed that two strangers matching Booth and Herold’s description had sought shelter there. Doherty’s men had formed the cordon around the barn, set the structure alight when Booth refused to surrender, and witnessed the shooting that followed. Yet the detectives had supplied the directional intelligence, the professional network that extracted Jett’s confession, and the tactical plan for the encirclement. Both parties had legitimate claims. Neither intended to yield.

Luther Baker and Everton Conger filed their petition first, reaching Stanton’s desk while Doherty was still completing his official report. Their submission emphasized the detective function: the hours of interrogation, the cultivation of informants, the deduction that had led them to Jett and thus to the Garrett farm. They framed the cavalry detachment as transportation and muscle, necessary but subordinate to investigative expertise. The language was careful, lawyerly, aware that reward adjudication operated without fixed precedent. Baker and Conger asked for the largest practicable share, implicitly defining the capture as the product of detective work rather than military operations.

Doherty’s counter-petition, drafted with assistance from his regiment’s adjutant, inverted this hierarchy. The lieutenant acknowledged Baker and Conger’s presence but stressed that they had accompanied his command under his authority, subject to his orders. The cavalrymen had ridden the miles, endured the weather, maintained the pursuit when intelligence failed. The barn fire, the confrontation, the death of the assassin—all had occurred under military command. Doherty’s claim asserted that detectives without troops would have remained in Washington, while troops without detectives might eventually have located their quarry through persistence alone. The argument concerned money and also which institution, which methodology, which version of the manhunt would enter the historical record as decisive.

Stanton received both petitions by May 3, 1865, while the conspiracy trial was still assembling its evidence and its defendants. The Secretary of War had created this problem himself, deploying competing agencies without clear hierarchy, offering rewards without established rules of distribution. Now he faced the consequences. The War Department’s administrative machinery, so efficient at transmitting telegrams and mobilizing troops, possessed no standard procedure for dividing spoils among claimants. Stanton’s solution revealed both his pragmatism and his political instincts. He referred the matter to a three-member commission: the commander of the Department of Washington; Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, already preparing the conspiracy prosecution; and an assistant secretary with journalistic background who served as Stanton’s preferred handler of public relations. The commission would hear testimony, evaluate evidence, and recommend distribution. Its composition guaranteed that military, legal, and political perspectives would all receive representation.

The hearings began on May 10, 1865, in a room at the War Department building. Doherty appeared in dress uniform, accompanied by several of his troopers prepared to testify to their exertions. Baker and Conger came as civilians, though Luther Baker carried a letter from his cousin Lafayette asserting the detectives’ indispensable contribution. The commission’s first task was to establish a factual sequence of the capture, a narrative foundation upon which claims could be measured. This proved more difficult than anticipated.

The troopers recalled the pursuit differently than the detectives. Private James O’Beirne, who had participated in the interrogation of Willie Jett, remembered Conger asking the questions while cavalrymen stood guard. Conger, in his testimony, emphasized his own persistence with Jett, the gradual extraction of the Garrett farm’s location through psychological pressure. Doherty testified that he had directed the overall operation, made the decision to surround the barn, and ordered the fire set when Booth refused to surrender. Conger, in a deposition taken separately, claimed that he had urged the firing, that Doherty had hesitated, and that the decisive action was his own.

These discrepancies were not merely about credit. They affected the calculation of reward shares. If the capture resulted from detective intelligence, Baker and Conger deserved the largest portion. If it resulted from military execution, Doherty’s claim took precedence. If both contributions were essential, some equitable division became necessary—but equity, in this context, had no mathematical formula.

The commission’s questioning exposed deeper tensions. Baker and Conger had operated under authority from Lafayette Baker’s National Detective Police, a civilian agency created by Stanton during the war. Doherty commanded regular cavalry, subject to the military chain of command that ran through the departmental commander to Stanton himself. The manhunt had temporarily merged these structures, but the reward hearings forced them apart again, revealing how little the War Department had clarified their relative standing. Stanton himself had authorized both Doherty’s patrol and the detectives’ participation. His signature appeared on orders that assigned Conger to accompany the cavalry without specifying whether he served as advisor, equal, or superior. The commission was effectively asked to interpret Stanton’s intentions, to reconstruct from fragmentary documentation a command relationship that had never been fully articulated.

Other claimants complicated the proceedings further. Richard H. Garrett, the farmer whose barn had burned and whose son had been briefly detained as a suspected accomplice, submitted a petition for compensation. The reward proclamation had promised money for information leading to capture, not merely for capture itself. Garrett argued that his property, his sons’ actions, and his family’s inadvertent sheltering of the fugitives had created the conditions for Booth’s discovery. He did not claim to have informed deliberately—his initial statements to investigators emphasized his ignorance of his guests’ identities—but he noted that without the Garrett farm, there would have been no capture at all. The commission found this argument awkward. Rewarding Garrett seemed to reward negligence at best, complicity at worst. Yet dismissing his claim entirely raised questions about whether the government’s promises extended only to those who acted with full knowledge of their targets’ identities.

Thomas Jones, the Confederate signal agent who had hidden Booth and Herold in the Zekiah Swamp pine thicket for six days, made no claim. His prudence was well judged. Jones had assisted the fugitives knowingly, ferrying them across the Potomac on April 21 and 22, supplying them with food and a boat during the period when the federal dragnet was densest in Maryland. His actions, however motivated by Confederate loyalty or personal sympathy, constituted aid to a presidential assassin. The reward system offered no protection to accomplices, however minor. Jones remained in Southern Maryland; investigators knew his role but lacked sufficient grounds for arrest. His silence during the reward hearings was itself a form of discretion—an acknowledgment that some participants in the manhunt’s drama stood outside the categories of claimant and witness.

The commission’s deliberations extended through May and into early June. The three members met privately, reviewed testimony, and debated the principles that should govern their recommendation. Their final report, submitted to Stanton on June 6, 1865, attempted a division that satisfied no one entirely. Doherty and his cavalry detachment received $75, 000 of the $100, 000 total, with the lieutenant personally awarded $5, 000 and his men dividing the remainder according to rank and service. Baker and Conger received $17, 500, split between them. The remaining $7, 500 went to various minor claimants: informants who had provided verified intelligence, a few civilians who had assisted the pursuit in documented ways.

The detectives’ share represented a defeat. They had asked for half the total, arguing that their intelligence had made the capture possible. The commission’s award acknowledged their contribution while subordinating it to military execution. Baker and Conger protested, filing additional petitions that challenged the commission’s authority and its interpretation of the evidence. Stanton rejected these appeals on June 15, 1865. His decision was final, subject only to congressional appropriation of the funds.

The congressional dimension proved more contentious than anticipated. The reward money required legislative authorization, and the House of Representatives, convening in special session, discovered in the dispute an opportunity for political theater. Members questioned Stanton’s authority to promise such sums, the commission’s composition, and the equity of its distribution. Some argued that the entire $100, 000 should go to the cavalrymen, whose visible service and modest pay made them sympathetic recipients. Others, suspicious of military bureaucracy, suggested that civilian detectives deserved larger recognition. The debate consumed three days in mid-July 1865, coinciding with the conspiracy trial’s final phase.

The legislative outcome confirmed Stanton’s arrangement with minor adjustments. Congress appropriated the full $100, 000 but added a requirement that Doherty’s distribution to his men be supervised by the War Department’s paymaster, ensuring documentation and preventing the lieutenant from favoring particular troopers. This provision, apparently technical, reflected congressional skepticism about military self-regulation. The detectives’ award remained unchanged, as did the minor claimants’ shares. The Garrett family’s petition was formally denied, though Richard Garrett received a separate, smaller compensation for property damage through a private bill introduced by his congressman.

The payments were disbursed in August and September 1865, as Washington’s summer heat yielded to the cooler weather of early autumn. Doherty’s troopers received their portions at the War Department building, signing receipts that were filed with the Judge Advocate General’s records. The amounts varied: privates received several hundred dollars each, sergeants somewhat more, officers proportionally larger sums. For men whose army pay had been thirteen dollars monthly, these were substantial windfalls. Some sent money home immediately; others, discharged from service as the army demobilized, used the funds to establish themselves in civilian life. The reward transformed temporary military service into lasting financial advantage.

Baker and Conger’s experience differed. Their $17, 500, divided equally, represented professional income rather than windfall. Both men continued in detective work, Conger returning to his law practice in Illinois while maintaining connections to the War Department’s intelligence apparatus. Luther Baker remained with his cousin’s agency, participating in the ongoing pursuit of John Surratt, whose $25, 000 reward remained unclaimed. The detectives’ reduced share became a grievance they carried forward, surfacing in later accounts of the capture that emphasized their contribution and diminished Doherty’s role. The reward adjudication had not merely distributed money. It had created incentives for competing narratives that would persist for decades.

The Garrett family received nothing from the reward fund, but their encounter with federal power continued. Richard Garrett’s compensation for the burned barn, eventually authorized at $400, arrived in 1866, long after the family had absorbed the loss. The amount did not cover replacement, and the congressional process required Garrett to document his loyalty, obtain local certification, and wait through administrative delays that consumed months. His experience illustrated the asymmetry of the reward system: those who assisted the manhunt inadvertently, without intention or information, found themselves outside its protections while bearing its costs.

Thomas Jones, the signal agent who had hidden Booth, was arrested in November 1865, after witnesses from the Maryland shore identified him as the boatman who had ferried the fugitives across the Potomac. He was held for several months, interrogated repeatedly, and eventually released without trial. The government lacked sufficient evidence to prove conspiracy, and Jones’s assistance to Booth, though documented, fell into a category of wartime conduct that the postwar administration hesitated to prosecute. He received no reward, of course, but also no punishment beyond imprisonment and the destruction of his Confederate networks. His case demonstrated the system’s limits: it could identify, compensate, and punish, but it could not address every participant in the manhunt’s complex human geometry.

The reward process left other debts unsettled. Willie Jett, the Confederate courier whose revelation had led directly to the Garrett farm, received no payment from the federal government. He had been interrogated, detained briefly, and released to resume his life in Virginia. His information had been extracted under pressure, not offered voluntarily, and the commission determined that this distinction mattered for reward purposes. Jett’s experience—cooperation without compensation, knowledge that brought no benefit—repeated a pattern visible throughout the manhunt. The federal dragnet had depended upon countless local informants, Confederate deserters, and accidental witnesses whose contributions were never formally recognized.

Stanton’s reward system had achieved its immediate purpose. Booth was dead, his accomplices captured or identified, the conspiracy exposed and prosecuted. But the adjudication process revealed how poorly the War Department’s administrative machinery matched the complexity of its intelligence operations. The Secretary of War had created parallel authorities without clear hierarchy, offered incentives without established rules, and delegated final judgment to a commission that could not escape the political implications of its decisions. The result was not failure, exactly. The money was distributed, the capture credited, the public satisfied. But the process exposed fault lines that would widen as the immediate crisis receded.

The finalized reward payments, deposited in autumn 1865, left some men enriched and others embittered. Doherty’s cavalrymen returned to civilian life with savings that distinguished them from ordinary veterans. Baker and Conger carried their reduced award as professional disappointment and personal grievance. The Garrett family rebuilt their barn without federal assistance. Thomas Jones survived imprisonment to resume an obscure life. And the War Department, having concluded its most extensive manhunt, filed the receipts and testimony among records that would eventually gather dust, their controversies settled only by the passage of time and the deaths of participants.