The Cavalry’s Return to Washington

Seen from above, the Potomac carved a winding path through the greening landscape, its surface rippling under the passage of a lone steamer pushing north. The farmstead along the shore dwindled into the distance, a faint plume of smoke marking where the barn had stood. On board, below decks, lay a body removed from that farm, now bound upriver toward the capital.

The journey upriver would take most of the day. The John S. Ide was a government transport, wooden-hulled and paddle-wheeled, capable of perhaps eight knots against the current with a favorable wind. Her master knew the river well enough to avoid the sandbars that shifted with each spring flood, but he could not avoid the crowds. Word had traveled fast along the telegraph lines that Stanton’s men had run south from Washington—Booth was dead, the assassin taken, the cavalry returning with prisoners. At every landing, small boats put out with passengers who had no business on a military vessel but every desire to see the body. The War Department had not prepared for this. No protocol existed for the public exhibition of a presidential assassin’s corpse, and the officers on deck found themselves improvising between security and spectacle.

Lieutenant Doherty stood at the rail as the steamer passed Aquia Creek. He was twenty-six years old, a Canadian by birth who had earned his commission through battlefield service rather than political connection.

Following the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, he had been dispatched from Washington at 2 p.m. on April 24 with a detachment of 26 Union soldiers from the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment, accompanied by intelligence officers Everton Conger and Luther Baker. The soldiers pursued Booth through Southern Maryland and across the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers to Richard Garrett’s farm, a pursuit that had ended in fire and gunshot.

Now, in the aftermath, Doherty was already composing the report that would define his career. The facts were simple enough: he had received orders from Colonel Lafayette Baker, had crossed the Potomac that night, had located Booth at the Garrett farm through the interrogation of Confederate sympathizers like Willie Jett, and had placed his men in position to prevent escape. What remained contested, and would remain contested for decades, was the precise sequence of who had given which order, and who deserved the credit that would translate into dollars and promotion.

Below deck, David Herold sat in improvised confinement, his hands bound, his manner shifting between theatrical bravado and visible fear. The pharmacist’s assistant had surrendered without resistance when the barn was set alight, emerging with his hands raised.

David Edgar Herold (June 16, 1842 – July 7, 1865) was an American pharmacist’s assistant and accomplice of John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. After the shooting, Herold accompanied Booth to the home of Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s injured leg. He had remained with Booth until the authorities cornered them in the Garrett barn.

The soldiers had not believed his protests of coercion, or had not cared. Herold was twenty-two years old, the son of a prosperous Washington family, and his knowledge of the conspiracy’s full scope—his presence at the Surratt tavern, his introduction of Booth to Dr. Samuel Mudd, his role in guiding the wounded assassin through the pine thicket—made him valuable beyond his own culpability. Stanton’s men would want to question him before any formal charges were filed, and the journey upriver offered a final interval of uncertainty before the machinery of military justice began to turn.

The Garretts posed a different problem. Father and son had been taken into custody as material witnesses, their farm declared federal property, their loyalty suspect. Richard Garrett, the elder, had protested that he had not known his guest’s true identity, that he had offered hospitality to a wounded Confederate soldier in a region where such hospitality was commonplace, that his family had been threatened with violence if they revealed the presence of the fugitives. His son, Richard junior, had said less, watching the soldiers with the flat expression of a man calculating what testimony would best serve his interests. Neither had been present when Boston Corbett fired the shot that paralyzed Booth, but their barn had been the stage, and their tobacco the kindling, and the War Department would need to determine whether they had been accomplices or merely the unlucky hosts of history.

Detective Everton Conger kept his own counsel in the forward cabin. A former Union officer with a medical education and a reputation for ruthless efficiency, Conger had been assigned to the pursuit by Lafayette Baker’s National Detective Police. He had interrogated the Confederate agent William S. Scott at Port Royal, had traced Booth’s crossing to the Northern Neck, had directed the final approach to the Garrett farm with the confidence of a man who understood that information was the true currency of war. Now, as the steamer carried him toward Washington, he was already drafting his own account of the capture, one that emphasized his role in locating the fugitive and minimized the contributions of others. The reward money—$75, 000 offered by the War Department, with additional sums from state governments and private subscriptions—would be distributed according to claims that were already being prepared in competing versions.

Luther Baker, Lafayette Baker’s cousin and fellow detective, moved among the soldiers with a different calculation. Baker had been recalled to Washington after the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. His relationship to the chief of the National Detective Police gave him institutional weight that Doherty lacked and Conger resented, but it also made him vulnerable to accusations of nepotism. He had been present at the barn, had witnessed Corbett’s shot, had helped drag the wounded Booth to the farmhouse porch where he died. His testimony would be crucial in determining whether Corbett had acted within orders or violated them, and he knew that Stanton’s inquiry would probe every detail of the final confrontation. The Secretary of War had wanted Booth alive for interrogation. The shot through the neck had foreclosed that possibility, and someone would need to answer for it.

The John S. Ide reached the Washington Navy Yard at approximately six o’clock in the evening of April 27, 1865. The wharves were crowded despite the hour, a mass of soldiers, officials, and civilians who had gathered in response to telegraphed announcements of the cavalry’s return. Secretary Stanton had arranged a reception that balanced military protocol with political theater. The prisoners would be transferred to the direct custody of the War Department, the body would be conveyed to a secure location for examination and identification, and the officers would report immediately to headquarters for debriefing. What Stanton could not control, and what would complicate every subsequent investigation, was the multiplicity of accounts that had already begun to diverge.

The transfer of custody occurred on the dock, witnessed by clerks who recorded the serial numbers of manacles and the signatures of receiving officers. Herold was marched between a double file of cavalrymen, his face turned toward the crowd in what some observers interpreted as bravado and others as simple confusion. The Garretts followed, their status ambiguous—they were not formally arrested, not formally released, held in a procedural limbo that would persist for weeks.

Booth’s body required more elaborate handling. The corpse had been wrapped in a blanket and placed in a pine box for transport, but decomposition had advanced rapidly in the Virginia heat, and the smell was noticeable even at a distance. Soldiers who had seen death on battlefields turned away. Civilians who had come expecting a monster found only a body, and the disjunction between the assassin’s theatrical reputation and his physical remains would feed rumors that persisted for generations.

Lieutenant Doherty presented himself at the War Department at eight o’clock, still in field uniform, his report written in a hand that showed the fatigue of forty hours without sleep. Colonel Baker received him with a mixture of congratulation and calculation, aware that the success of the pursuit would reflect well on his own administration of the detective service but also that the competition for credit might expose the rivalries within his organization. Stanton himself appeared briefly, his face drawn with the exhaustion of twelve days of crisis management, his questions precise and limited: Had Booth been armed? Had he attempted to fire? Who had given the order to burn the barn? The Secretary’s interest in these details was not merely procedural. A congressional inquiry was already forming, and the administration needed a single, defensible narrative of the capture.

The debriefings continued through the night and into the following morning, each principal offering a version that emphasized his own contribution. Doherty stressed the discipline of his cavalry detachment, the speed of their march, the tactical disposition that had prevented Booth’s escape. Conger emphasized his intelligence work, his interrogation techniques, his direction of the final approach.

Luther Baker claimed credit for the decision to fire the barn, then—when Stanton’s displeasure became apparent—revised his account to suggest that the fire had been spontaneous, or that Corbett had acted without orders. Boston Corbett himself was already isolated, his religious fervor and his disputed sanity making him an uncomfortable witness for any faction. According to later testimony, Corbett maintained that he believed Booth had intended to shoot his way out of the barn and that he acted in self-defense, telling Stanton, “… Booth would have killed me if I had not shot first. I think I did right.”

He had disappeared from the Garrett farm immediately after the shooting, retrieved his horse, and made his own way to Washington, arriving with a statement that he had acted in direct response to divine instruction.

The body of John Wilkes Booth was conveyed to the monitor USS Montauk, anchored in the Anacostia River near the Navy Yard. The ironclad’s hold offered security and isolation, a temporary morgue where surgeons could examine the corpse without public observation. The identification posed immediate difficulties. Booth’s features were distorted by the wound and by decomposition, his famous mustache shaved during his flight, his body stripped of the theatrical costume that had made him recognizable. Surgeon General Joseph Barnes led a team of medical officers in a systematic examination, noting the gunshot wound to the neck, the fracture of the cervical vertebrae, the tattoo on his hand that matched descriptions in wanted posters. The body was photographed, though the images would prove too disturbing for public distribution, and a death mask was attempted with uncertain success.

The rival claims over credit began to harden into public antagonism within days of the return. Doherty submitted his official report on April 28, a document that named Conger and Baker as subordinates who had acted under his command. Conger responded with a private memorandum to Stanton, asserting that he had directed all significant decisions and that Doherty had merely provided military escort. Luther Baker, writing through his cousin’s office, claimed that the detectives had located Booth independently and that the cavalry had arrived only for the final confrontation. The reward distribution, when it came in June, would reflect these competing claims in a compromise that satisfied no one: Doherty received $5, 250, Conger $17, 500, the Baker cousins $17, 500 each, Corbett $1, 653.84, with the remainder distributed among the enlisted men according to a formula that recognized rank rather than individual contribution.

The prisoners faced a different calculus. Herold was transferred to the Washington Arsenal, held in solitary confinement while investigators prepared the case against him. His interrogations were conducted without legal counsel, his statements recorded and compared against the testimony of other witnesses, his knowledge of the conspiracy’s full scope extracted through methods that would later be challenged at trial. The Garretts were released after preliminary questioning, their farm placed under federal seal as a crime scene, their lives disrupted by a notoriety that would persist for generations. Richard Garrett senior would die within the year, his health broken by the experience; his son would spend decades attempting to reclaim property that the government had appropriated and never fully compensated.

Stanton’s control of the narrative extended to the physical evidence. Booth’s possessions—the weapons, the diary, the banknotes, the photographs—were catalogued in a War Department vault, accessible only to authorized investigators. The body itself remained on the Montauk for two days, examined by surgeons, photographed, and finally prepared for burial in a storage room at the Arsenal Penitentiary in 1865. The Secretary had determined that no public funeral should dignify the assassin, no monument should mark his resting place, no pilgrimage should be possible for Confederate sympathizers who might transform Booth’s death into martyrdom. The secrecy of the burial, and the subsequent relocation of the remains to a warehouse at the Washington Arsenal in 1867 and then to the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore in 1869, would fuel conspiracy theories that persisted into the twentieth century.

The cavalry detachment was demobilized with dispatch. The 16th New York Cavalry returned to its garrison duties, the special assignment concluded, the men who had ridden through Maryland and Virginia returned to the routine of occupation duty. Doherty received a brevet promotion to captain, the conventional recognition for exceptional service, but no further command that would allow him to consolidate his reputation. His subsequent career would be marked by disputes over the reward distribution and by a slow estrangement from the military establishment that had briefly celebrated him. The detectives returned to their intelligence networks, Conger to his interrogation rooms, the Bakers to their cousin’s expanding bureaucratic empire, each man aware that the capture of Booth had been a peak from which their influence could only decline.

The atmosphere aboard the John S. Ide shifted palpably as the steamer rounded the bend below Alexandria. What had begun as a clandestine extraction from hostile territory transformed, mile by mile, into something resembling a triumphal procession. The vessel’s master found himself navigating not merely the river’s currents but the competing demands of officers who suddenly understood that their private quarrels would soon become public currency. Doherty emerged from below decks to pace the forward cabin, reviewing his report with the anxious attention of a man who sensed that every sentence might be scrutinized by congressional investigators or dissected in newspaper columns. Conger, meanwhile, positioned himself where arriving officials would first encounter him, understanding that the psychology of first impressions would shape whose version of events gained institutional traction.

The transformation from pursuit to spectacle imposed its own strains on the exhausted detachment. Soldiers who had slept in saddles and fought through marshland now found themselves objects of curiosity, their uniforms—still bearing the dust of Virginia roads—treated as relics of a completed drama. At Quantico Creek, a delegation of newspaper correspondents had gathered, having traveled down from Washington on a faster vessel; they pressed for statements, for descriptions of Booth’s final moments, for confirmation of rumors that the assassin had been captured alive and subsequently murdered. The officers offered carefully calibrated responses, each man aware that premature disclosure might compromise the advantage he sought in the coming competition for recognition. The enlisted men, for their part, responded to the attention with the rough humor of veterans who had learned to distrust any celebration that preceded mustering-out pay.

The Navy Yard reception that Stanton orchestrated reflected his understanding of political theater’s double function: to commemorate success and to contain its interpretation. The Secretary had arranged for the arrival to coincide with evening, when gaslight would lend formal dignity to the proceedings and when the crowds, though substantial, would be manageable. He had excluded the general public from the dock itself, restricting access to military personnel, government clerks, and a select group of correspondents whose dispatches he could anticipate and, if necessary, influence. This controlled environment allowed him to observe the arriving principals before they could coordinate their stories, to read in their bearing and their interactions with one another the outlines of disputes that would require his mediation.

The physical transfer of Booth’s body from steamer to shore became, inevitably, a moment of contested symbolism. Doherty had expected to command this operation as he had commanded the detachment, but found himself displaced by arrangements made through Colonel Baker’s office. Navy Yard workers, rather than cavalrymen, carried the pine box up the gangplank, their movements deliberate and slow, as if the weight they bore exceeded its physical measure. The substitution of civilian labor for military honor guard subtly diminished the cavalry’s claim to primary agency in the capture, a diminishment that Doherty noted and resented. Conger, observing this, understood that institutional protocols could be as decisive as battlefield actions in determining how history would distribute its rewards.

The immediate aftermath of arrival revealed the fault lines that would deepen in subsequent weeks. Stanton’s interrogation of each principal separately—Doherty at eight o’clock, Conger at nine, Luther Baker at ten—prevented the formation of a unified account but also generated the very discrepancies that would plague official investigations.

The Montauk’s hold received its final cargo on the evening of April 28. The pine box containing Booth’s body was lowered through a hatch, placed in a compartment that could be secured against unauthorized access, and guarded by a marine detachment whose orders came directly from the Secretary of War. The ironclad’s engines maintained steam, ready to move the vessel if security required relocation, but for two days the ship remained at anchor, a floating morgue that concentrated in its hold the unresolved tensions of the pursuit. Surgeons had completed their examination, photographers had recorded what they could, clerks had inventoried the physical evidence. What remained was the construction of an official story, a narrative that would be tested in the conspiracy trial that Stanton was already preparing, and that would be challenged by the rival claimants whose competing versions had been set in motion during the return from Belle Plain.

The rival claims over credit are entrenched as Booth’s body is secured on the Montauk, handing off the pressure of a fractured victory to the next investigative node: the Surratt boardinghouse, where detectives would now seek the evidence to bind the conspirators into a single, prosecutable narrative.