The City of Oil Lamps…m the protection of surrender, or to disappear into the general population, or to attempt one final operation that might redeem the defeat. John Wilkes Booth moved through this city as a familiar figure. At twenty-six, he was among the most celebrated actors in America, his performances as Richar…
The Scream Before the Shot…ce that no single observer had seen whole. The result is not a narrative but a palimpsest: layers of testimony, each honest, none complete. John Wilkes Booth, an American stage actor who assassinated United States president Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, had prepared his exi…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…ld not learn what he had permitted until morning, when the telegraph brought word of the assassination and the description of the murderer: John Wilkes Booth, actor, five feet eight inches, black hair, mustache, well-dressed, riding a bay mare with a white star on her forehead. The bridge Cobb gu…
The Scream Before the Shot…psest: layers of testimony, each honest, none complete. John Wilkes Booth, an American stage actor who assassinated United States president Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, had prepared his exit as he prepared his entrance. The hole in the door to the presidential box—bored…
The Confederate's Oath After Appomattox…a river, to reach the Virginia shore, to disappear into a countryside that might still harbor men willing to hide him. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln had come to this: a broken leg, a borrowed boat, a night crossing planned by a fifty-one-year-old tobacco farmer who was risking his life f…
The Refuge at the Garrett Farm…as H. “Boston” Corbett was an American soldier and milliner who, on April 26, 1865, would kill John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. Known for his devout religious beliefs and eccentric behavior, Corbett had been a milliner in New York before the war, had castrated himse…
The City of Oil Lamps…This plan had absorbed Booth’s energies and money, had drawn into its orbit a shifting group of conspirators—John Surratt, George Atzerodt, David Herold, Lewis Powell, Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlen. The capture of Richmond and Lee’s surrender had rendered kidnapping obsolete. Booth adapt…
The Scream Before the Shot…eward, his son Frederick, his daughter Fanny, a male nurse, and a State Department messenger—yet killed none. Then, like Booth, he had run. David Herold, the twenty-two-year-old pharmacist’s assistant who had guided Powell to the Seward house, had been waiting outside with their horses. When…
The Shadow on the Surratt Portrait…the first prepared cache waited. John Wilkes Booth rode with his broken leg thrust forward, the splinted bone jarring with every hoof-fall. David Herold, a pharmacist’s assistant turned guide through country he knew from duck-hunting expeditions, kept to the saddle behind him. They did not s…
The City of Oil Lamps…in the flight through Maryland. Herold knew the country south of the city, had hunted there, could navigate the roads that ran through Dr. Samuel Mudd’s neighborhood toward the Potomac crossing. The plan was to shoot Lincoln in his theater box, to leap to the stage (a drop of some twelve f…
The Scream Before the Shot…snapping at the fibula, or perhaps the tibia fracturing under the strain. Later he would write that he had broken his leg. Later still, Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland physician and tobacco farmer, would set it. But in this moment Booth did not fall. He caught himself, straightened, and stood f…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…y have reflected the paralysis of a man suddenly comprehending the magnitude of his commitment. Herold would accompany Booth to the home of Samuel Mudd, would share the pine thicket days, would surrender finally at the Garrett farm when the tobacco barn burned around them. His presence on t…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…Cobb’s error had created would narrow progressively, until it closed at the Garrett farm with the smoke of burning tobacco and the crack of Boston Corbett’s pistol. But that condensation lay in the future. At 10: 30 p. m. On April 14, 1865, two riders moved eastward through darkness that seeme…
The Refuge at the Garrett Farm…ed cavalry, armed and provisioned for extended operation, carrying warrants that authorized them to arrest or kill. Among them was Sergeant Boston Corbett, a figure whose presence in the record would acquire retrospective significance. Thomas H. “Boston” Corbett was an American soldier and mil…
The Burning Barn…plied. It was long enough for deliberation, for alternative courses of action to be considered and rejected, for the peculiar psychology of Boston Corbett to assert itself against the military discipline that had, until this moment, contained it. The immediate aftermath of the shot revealed th…
Samuel Mudd at His Farmhouse…Sunday, April 16, elements of the 16th New York Cavalry were operating in Charles County, following the telegraphic instructions of Colonel Lafayette Baker and the War Department’s expanding dragnet. They found Mudd at his farm. They found the burned boot, or what remained of it. They found tha…
The Confederate's Oath After Appomattox…ight description, the right pattern of movement. The cavalry detachments under Doherty and Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger, the detective Lafayette Baker’s agents, the river patrols—all were converging on the stretch of Maryland shore where Booth and Herold lay hidden. Booth read of this conv…
The Price on the President’s Head…edirected toward specific named targets. The military occupation of the southern states, already organized for control, adapted to pursuit. Lafayette Baker embodied this adaptation. His methods combined systematic intelligence gathering with improvised brutality. Agents were dispatched to south…
Samuel Mudd at His Farmhouse…o every military station in southern Maryland. It reached the cavalry detachments under Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty and Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger. It reached the naval vessels patrolling the river. It reached the civilian population in the form of reward notices that would eventually,…
The Confederate's Oath After Appomattox…und the right geography, the right description, the right pattern of movement. The cavalry detachments under Doherty and Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger, the detective Lafayette Baker’s agents, the river patrols—all were converging on the stretch of Maryland shore where Booth and Herold lay…
The Refuge at the Garrett Farm…er, the detective who had built a network of informants throughout the occupied South, and Baker’s chosen instrument was Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger. Following the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, Conger was ordered to accompany a detachment of 25 Union soldiers from…
The Scream Before the Shot…alone toward their rendezvous. Powell, abandoned, made his own way out of the city. He would wander for three days before being captured at Mary Surratt’s boarding house, still carrying the weapons of his failed assassination. His capture, and the evidence found on him, would help seal Mary…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…thizers might offer shelter or at least silence. This knowledge had been acquired through months of preparation, through the cultivation of Mary Surratt and her son John, through reconnaissance disguised as theatrical touring and social visiting. The conspiracy had existed as intention long…
The Shadow on the Surratt Portrait…t 541 H Street, the boarding house sat in the stillness of Good Friday evening, its parlor lamp turned low against the approaching Sabbath. Mary Surratt climbed the front steps shortly before eleven o’clock, the jangle of her keys the only sound on the deserted street. She had spent the afte…
The City of Oil Lamps…uth, by messenger, by the telegraph wires that connected Washington to the nation. The War Department would receive first notice; Secretary Edwin Stanton would begin the process of mobilization that would occupy the next twelve days. But in the immediate aftermath, Ford’s Theater was simply a…
The Scream Before the Shot…the shot. The captain sent a messenger to headquarters, but the message traveled no faster than a man on horseback. At the War Department, Edwin Stanton was working late, as was his habit. The first report reached him not through official channels but through his own household. His twelve-ye…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…movement of planned flight. By 10: 30 p. m., when Cobb examined the riders at the bridge, no organized pursuit had begun. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, at his home on K Street, had not yet received confirmation of the attack. The military telegraph, which would coordinate the manhunt, rema…
The Sergeant at the Navy Yard Bridge…his commitment. Herold would accompany Booth to the home of Samuel Mudd, would share the pine thicket days, would surrender finally at the Garrett farm when the tobacco barn burned around them. His presence on the bridge marked him as committed beyond recall, a fellow traveler in a flight t…
After Days of Hiding…of concealment. Each movement was shorter, more tentative, more obviously driven by immediate necessity rather than strategic purpose. The Garrett farm, when they reached it on April 24, represented not a destination but a terminus, the last point before capture or death. The chapter of the…
The Refuge at the Garrett Farm…urratt and for the man still unknown who had attacked Secretary Seward. The notices reached Port Royal, the nearest town of any size to the Garrett farm, and they reached the Confederate veterans who drifted through the region in the war’s final dissolution. Yet the notices did not reach Ric…