Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, the most wanted men in the United States of America, have successfully fled into the Maryland countryside. They met up at the rendezvous spot in the dead of night. With no sign that Atzerodt or Powell managed to escape Washington, Booth and Herold pushed on with their flight, galloping their horses south, toward Virgina. However, Booth’s leg injury is so severe, and their horses so tired, that they were forced to find a place to rest. They are now hiding in the house of the eminent physician and Confederate sympathizer Dr. Samuel Mudd.

Somewhere in Washington, George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell are still on the loose.

The authorities don’t know any of that yet—no numbers, no identities, and no motives. But even before Lincoln breathed his last, they began the intricate process of unraveling the mystery of his death.

Investigators stumble upon Atzerodt’s trail first. After failing to carry out the assassination of Vice President Johnson, the carriage painter spent the night wandering aimlessly about Washington, getting thoroughly drunk in a number of bars and making sure to dispose of the knife he was supposed to use to kill the vice president. Other than plotting against the president of the United States, he has committed no crime. Atzerodt has a reputation for being dim, but he is canny enough to know that once he threw his knife into a gutter, the only obvious piece of evidence connecting him with the conspiracy was being seen publicly on Booth’s horse. It might take days for authorities to make that connection. If he maintains a low profile and keeps his wits about him, there is every chance that he can get out of Washington and get on with a normal life.

Atzerodt is all too aware that returning to his room at Kirkwood House would be a very stupid idea. So just before three A.M. he checks into the Pennsylvania House hotel, where he is assigned a double room. His roommate, at a time when Atzerodt needs to be as far away from the long arm of the law as possible, is a police lieutenant named W. R. Keim. The two men know each other from Atzerodt’s previous stays at the Pennsylvania House. They lie on their backs in the darkness and have a short conversation before falling asleep. Keim is stunned by the slaying of Lincoln. As drunk as he is, Atzerodt does an artful job of feigning sadness, saying that the whole Lincoln assassination is a terrible tragedy.

Lieutenant Keim never suspects a thing.

But events are already conspiring against Atzerodt. Even as he sleeps off his long, hard night of drinking and walking, detectives sent to protect Andrew Johnson are combing through Atzerodt’s belongings at Kirkwood House. A desk clerk remembers seeing a “villainous-looking” individual registered in room 126. Atzerodt took the only room key with him when he fled, so detectives have to break down the door to investigate. Quickly canvassing the empty room, they come up with the first solid leads about Lincoln’s murder. In the breast pocket of a dark coat hanging on a wall peg, they discover a ledger book from the Ontario Bank in Montreal. The name written inside the cover is that of John Wilkes Booth, whom scores of eyewitnesses have already identified as Lincoln’s killer. The book confirms the connection between Atzerodt and Booth.

A quick rifling of the bed produces a loaded revolver under the pillow and a Bowie knife hidden beneath the covers. And that is just the beginning. Room 126 soon becomes a treasure trove of evidence: a map of southern states, pistol rounds, a handkerchief embroidered with the name of Booth’s mother, and much more.

Investigators now have two suspects: Booth and Atzerodt. Warrants are issued for their arrests.

At the same time, an anonymous tip leads investigators to raid Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse on H Street in the dead of night. Nothing is found, but Surratt’s behavior is suspicious enough that detectives decide to keep an eye on her and the house. A similar anonymous tip leads police to room 228 at the National Hotel—Booth’s room—which is quickly ripped apart. Booth has left behind an abundance of clues—among them a business card bearing the name “J. Harrison Surratt” and a letter from former conspirator Samuel Arnold that implicates Michael O’Laughlen. More and more, it is becoming obvious that John Wilkes Booth did not act alone.

A few blocks away, detectives question Secretary of State Seward’s household staff, which adds two more nameless individuals to the list: the man who attacked Seward and his accomplice, who was seen waiting outside. This brings the number of conspirators to six: Booth, Atzerodt, O’Laughlen, Arnold, and Seward’s two unknown attackers. John Surratt becomes a suspect because police are watching his mother.

The detectives, thrilled at their brisk progress, are sure they will arrest each and every member of the conspiracy within a matter of days.

Meanwhile, Washington is in a state of shock. Flags are flown at half-mast. Vice President Andrew Johnson is sworn in as the seventeenth president of the United States. Secretary of State Seward is not dead, as is widely rumored. But he is very badly injured.

He will be in a coma through Saturday but will awaken on Easter Sunday. Gazing out the window, he will see the War Department’s flags at half-mast and immediately know what has happened. “The president is dead,” Seward will sigh.

When his nurse insists that this is not the case, Seward will hold his ground. “If he had been alive he would be the first to call on me,” he will say, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at half-mast.” Then he will turn his head from the window, tears streaming down his cheeks, their salt mingling with the blood of his still-fresh wounds.

But now it is still Saturday morning. Black crepe replaces the red, white, and blue bunting on government buildings. Liquor outlets are shut down so that angry Washingtonians don’t find yet another excuse to begin drinking and perhaps, in their drunken anger, start looting. Multiracial crowds gather in front of the Petersen house, grateful to merely be in the presence of the hallowed ground where Lincoln died. Just across the street, Ford’s Theatre has instantly gone from a Washington cultural hub to a pariah; the good fortune of having Lincoln attend Our American Cousin will soon put the theater out of business. The government will decree that the building may never again be used as a place of public amusement.

The cast of Our American Cousin is so afraid of being attacked by angry mobs that the actors and actresses lock themselves inside the theater after the shooting. One of their own, Harry Hawk, has already been taken into police custody for sharing the same stage as Booth.

Throughout the nation, as the news spreads, Abraham Lincoln’s worst fears are being realized. Outraged northerners mourn his loss and openly rant about revenge, while southerners rejoice in the death of the tyrannical man who wouldn’t give them the freedom to form their own nation. The Civil War, so close to being finally over, now seems on the verge of erupting once again.

Believing that catching Lincoln’s killer will help quell the unrest, Secretary of War Stanton spends Saturday expanding the search, making the hunt for Lincoln’s killers the biggest criminal dragnet in American history. Soldiers, cavalry, and every imaginable form of law enforcement throughout the northern states are called off every other task and ordered to devote all their energies to finding John Wilkes Booth and his band of killers. In the same manner that Grant attempted to besiege Petersburg by throwing a noose around the city, Stanton hopes to throw a giant rope around the Northeast, then slowly cinch the knot tighter until he squeezes out the killers. He also sends a telegram to New York City, recalling Lafayette Baker, his former spymaster and chief of security. The strange connection between Stanton and Baker now becomes even stronger.

Why does Stanton call for Baker, of all people?

As all this is going on, George Atzerodt wakes up at dawn on Saturday morning, still drunk after just two hours of sleep. He is somehow oblivious to the fact that people might be looking for him. Nor does he have any idea that the man who assaulted Secretary Seward, Lewis Powell, is also still stuck in Washington, hiding out in a cemetery after being thrown from his horse. Atzerodt knows he must get out of Washington, but first he needs money to fund his escape. He has no plan, and he is under no delusion that he will find a way to meet up with John Wilkes Booth; nor does he want to.

Atzerodt leaves the Pennsylvania House and walks across the city to nearby Georgetown, where he makes the unusual gesture of calling on an old girlfriend. He tells her he is going away for a while, as if she might somehow want to come along. And then as mysteriously as he appeared, Atzerodt leaves the home of Lucinda Metz and pawns his revolver for ten dollars at a nearby store. He uses the money to buy a stagecoach ticket into Maryland, taking public transportation at a time when all common sense cries out for a more inconspicuous means of escape.

But now fate is smiling upon George Atzerodt. Nobody stops the stagecoach as it rolls out of Washington and into Maryland. Even when the stage is halted and searched by Union soldiers miles outside the capital, nobody suspects that the simple-witted Atzerodt is capable of being resourceful enough to take part in the conspiracy. In fact, Atzerodt is so unassuming that the sergeant in charge of the soldiers actually shares a few glasses of cider with the conspirator.

In this way, George Atzerodt stumbles deeper and deeper into the countryside, on his way, he believes, to safety and freedom.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

John Wilkes Booth is miserable. Flat on his back on a bed in the country home of Confederate sympathizer Samuel Mudd, Booth screams in pain as the thirty-one-year-old doctor cuts off his boot and gently presses his fingers into the grossly swollen ankle. As if shattering his fibula while leaping to the stage wasn’t bad enough, Booth’s horse threw him during his thirty-mile midnight ride through Maryland, hurling his body into a rock. Booth is sore, hungover, exhausted, and experiencing a new and nagging anxiety: that of the hunted.

After the assassination, Booth and David Herold rode hard all night, stopping only at a small tavern owned by Mary Surratt to pick up some Spencer rifles she’d hidden for them. Herold was glib, boasting to the Confederate proprietor that they’d killed the president. But he also had his wits about him, buying a bottle of whiskey so Booth could enjoy a nip or two to dull the pain. Then they rode on, ten more hard miles on tree-lined country roads, for Booth every mile more painful than the last. It was the actor’s leg that made them detour to Mudd’s house. Otherwise they would have reached the Potomac River by sunrise. With any luck, they might have stolen a boat and made the crossing into Virginia immediately.

Still, they’re close. Very close. By choosing to take shelter at Mudd’s rather than stay on the main road south to the Potomac, they have veered off the fastest possible route. But Mudd’s five-hundred-acre estate is just north of Bryantown, south and east of Washington, and fully two-thirds of the way to the Potomac River.

Booth’s pants and jacket are now spattered with mud. His handsome face, so beloved by women everywhere, is unshaven and sallow. But more than anything else, John Wilkes Booth is helpless. Almost overnight he has become a shell of himself, as if assassinating Lincoln has robbed him of the fire in his belly, and the pain of his shattered leg has transformed him from daredevil to coward. He is now completely dependent upon David Herold to lead their escape into the South. At a time when Booth needs all his wiles and resources to complete the second half of the perfect assassination, he is too distraught and in too much agony to think straight.

Dr. Mudd says he’s going to splint the leg. Booth lies back and lets him, despite the knowledge that this means he will no longer be able to slip his foot into a stirrup. Now he must ride one-legged, half on and half off his horse—if he can ride at all.

Mudd finishes splinting the leg, then leaves Booth alone to get some rest. The actor is in an upstairs room, so if anyone comes looking, he won’t be found right away. He wraps a shawl around his neck and face to conceal his identity, and he has plans to shave his mustache. But otherwise, he does absolutely nothing to facilitate his escape. The pain is too great. It will take a miracle for Booth to travel even one mile farther.

He rolls over and closes his eyes, then falls into a deep sleep, sure that he is being hunted but completely unaware that more than a thousand men on horseback are within a few miles of his location—and that Lafayette Baker is now on the case.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Lafayette Baker is in his room at New York’s Astor House hotel when he hears that Lincoln has been shot. The disgraced spy, who was sent away from Washington for tapping Secretary Stanton’s telegraph lines, is not surprised. His first thought, as always, is of finding a way to spin this tragedy for his own personal gain. Baker loves glory and money. He understands in an instant that the man who finds Lincoln’s killer will know unparalleled wealth and fame. Baker longs to be that man.

It’s noon on Saturday when a telegram arrives from Stanton, summoning him to “come here immediately and find the murderer of our president.”

If Baker were an ordinary man and not prone to weaving elaborate myths about himself, that telegram would be a very straightforward call to battle. But Baker is so fond of half-truths and deception that it’s impossible to know if he is traveling to Washington as a sort of supersleuth, handpicked by Stanton to find Lincoln’s killers, or if he is traveling to Washington to find and kill Booth before the actor can detail Secretary Stanton’s role in the conspiracy. Whatever the case, at a time when Baker could have been anywhere in the world, Stanton knew exactly where to find the fired spy so that he could be summoned to the capital.

Lafayette Baker takes the overnight train to Washington, arriving at dawn. The city is in chaos, and he will later describe the looks on people’s faces as “inexpressible, bewildering horror and grief.” Baker travels immediately to the War Department, where he meets with Stanton. “They have killed the president. You must go to work. My whole dependence is upon you,” the secretary tells him. The entire detective forces of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston have traveled to Washington and are devoting their considerable professional talents to finding the killers. But Stanton has just given Baker carte blanche to move in and take over the entire investigation.

One of Baker’s specialties is playing the part of the double agent. Even though there is evidence that Baker and Booth are somehow connected to each other through the 1781/2 Water Street, New York, address, Baker claims that he knows nothing about the case or about the suspects. His first act is to post a reward for $30,000 leading to the arrest and conviction of Lincoln’s killers. He also has photographs of John Surratt, David Herold, and John Wilkes Booth plastered all around town.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

David Herold needs a buggy. It’s the most obvious solution to John Wilkes Booth’s plight. With a buggy they can travel quickly and in relative comfort. He asks Dr. Mudd to loan them his, but the doctor is reluctant; secretly harboring fugitives is one thing, but allowing the two most wanted men in America to ride through southern Maryland in his personal carriage would surely implicate Mudd and his wife in the conspiracy. Their hanging—for that is surely the fate awaiting any Lincoln conspirator—would leave their four young children orphans.

Instead, Mudd suggests that they ride into Bryantown to pick up some supplies and check on the latest news. With Booth still passed out upstairs, Herold agrees to the journey. But as they draw closer and closer to the small town, something in Herold’s gut tells him not to take the risk. A stranger like him will be too easily remembered by such a tight-knit community. He is riding Booth’s bay now, because it’s too spirited for the actor to control with his broken leg. Herold lets Mudd go on without him, then wheels the mare back to the doctor’s home.

Good thing. The United States cavalry now has Bryantown surrounded. They’re not only questioning all its citizens, they’re not letting anyone leave, either.

This is the sort of savvy, intuitive thinking that separates David Herold from the other members of Booth’s conspiracy. Atzerodt is dim. Powell is a thug. And Booth is emotional. But the twenty-two-year-old Herold, recruited to the conspiracy for his knowledge of Washington’s backstreets, is intelligent and resourceful. He was educated at Georgetown College, the finest such institution in the city. He is also an avid hunter, which gives him a full complement of the outdoor skills that Booth now requires to escape, the additional ability to improvise in dangerous situations, and an instinctive sixth sense about tracking—or, in this case, being tracked.

But now Herold is just as exhausted as Booth. He didn’t endure the same extreme adrenaline spike last night, if only because he didn’t kill anyone. But he experienced a definite and sustained rush as he galloped over the Navy Yard Bridge, then along the dangerous darkened roads of Maryland. He’s had time to think and to plan, and he knows that constant forward movement is the key to their survival. Otherwise, Herold has no doubt that the cavalry will be on their trail in no time.

Clearly, they cannot stay at Dr. Mudd’s any longer. Just before dusk, Herold rouses Booth and helps him down the stairs and up into the saddle. Herold guides them south through the countryside, aiming for the Zekiah Swamp, with its quicksand bogs and dense stands of oldgrowth hardwoods. The few trails that exist are almost impossible to see in the dark, and the pair are soon lost and frustrated. They turn back toward Mudd’s farm but remain out of sight, plotting their next move.

The next twelve hours bring an enduring awareness that they are neither safe nor welcome anywhere.

Easter Sunday dawns hard and bleak. Herold and Booth are camped in a stand of pines a quarter mile off the main road. A cold front is racing across Maryland, and they shiver in the damp swampy air, just a few short miles from the final obstacle to their escape into Virginia, the Potomac River. Booth isn’t wearing a boot on his injured leg, and his foot and ankle are in pain and quite cold from walking on swampy ground in the thin shoes he took from Mudd. Yet Herold doesn’t dare make a fire. Beside him, Booth is curled up in the fetal position, head resting on one hand. Each man clutches his revolver as a stiff wind bends the towering pines. The last sympathizer they visited, the wealthy owner of forty slaves in this still-lawless region, promised to send a man to ferry them across to safety. The rescue signal will be a soft whistle, a pause, and then another soft whistle.

So now they wait. Hour after brutally cold hour, they wonder who will deliver them from this hell. Booth says little, except to cry out in pain or mutter something about not being taken alive. He still has some fight in him. Now and then they hear the jangle of bridles from the nearby road. And all the while, a gnawing little voice in Herold’s gut tells him that they have been betrayed—that the whistle, when it comes, will be their only warning before United States cavalry confirm their position and ride in with guns blazing.

Late Sunday afternoon they hear the first whistle. Then a second. Confederate sympathizer Thomas Jones calls out to them in a low voice, announcing that he is walking into their camp.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

There is nothing dashing or heroic about the man who has come to save the lives of Booth and Herold. Thomas Jones is a broken man, a forty-four-year-old smuggler who has done time in prison, outlived his wife, and lost his home. He now earns his living by transporting everyone from secret agents to diplomats across the Potomac River to the South. On average, he makes the crossing three times a night. He is so skilled that northern newspapers secretly enlisted his help to get their product into the South during the war. A favorite technique employed by the silver-haired and low-key Jones is to begin his first crossing just before dusk, when the angle of the sun makes it impossible for sentries on the opposite shore to see small craft on the water. It is a brazen and brilliant tactic. Clearly, if any man can get Booth and Herold to safety, it’s Thomas Jones.

On his first visit to the campsite he merely wanted to get a look at the men he would be helping, to see if they were mentally and physically capable of enduring what might be a very long wait until it is safe to cross.

His second visit comes one day later. It’s also the second day in the pine forest for Booth and Herold. They once again hear the whistle from the trees. Booth is even worse today, the pain in his leg so severe that he doesn’t do much more than whimper. Herold stands, carbine pointed toward the sound of approaching footsteps, until Jones finally appears in their thicket, his pockets overflowing with ham, butter, bread, and a flask of coffee. In his hands he holds the one thing Booth wants to see more than any other: newspapers.

Cavalry are combing the countryside, he cautions the killers, and he reminds them to be patient. It might take several days before things die down. No matter how cold it gets, no matter how extreme the conditions, they must be prepared to hunker down in the woods until the coast is clear. As soon as it is, he’ll let them know.

Booth argues that their lives are in danger and that they can’t stay here any longer. But the thunder of hoofbeats from the nearby road stops him short—it’s Union cavalry and far too close for comfort.

“You see, my friend,” Jones whispers. “You must wait.” He tells them to kill the horses, lest their whinnying give the killers away.

Prior to the assassination, Booth would have continued to argue and then done as he pleased. But now he quietly gives in. “I leave it all with you,” he says to Jones.

Jones departs quickly. His visits are uplifting to Booth and Herold, a welcome break from the monotony of sitting still for hours and hours out in the open. They don’t even dare build a shelter, for fear the noise will attract unwelcome attention. Jones doesn’t just bring food and newspapers; he also offers hope, his cool confidence suggesting that all will be well, just so long as they are patient.

With a sigh, Booth turns his attention to the newspapers. He reads about the extent of the search. But his melancholy soon turns to rage as he learns that his monumental actions are not being applauded. Far from it. He is being labeled a scoundrel and a coward for shooting Lincoln in the back. Washington newspapers assail him as the war’s ultimate villain and note that any “kindly feeling” toward the South or its sympathizers has disappeared, thanks to his actions. Booth’s achievement is described in the Richmond papers as “the most deplorable calamity, which has ever befallen the people of the United States.” And finally, the nation’s most staunchly anti-Lincoln paper, the National Intelligencer, is now crying out that Lincoln was a true American hero. The very newspaper that the actor had once hoped would print the letter explaining his actions is instead portraying him as an abomination.

Booth, overcome with despair, sets the papers aside. As is his new habit, he regales Herold with a monologue on the killings—regrets, desires, and misunderstandings. Then he takes out his diary and begins keeping a journal of their time in the wilderness. In it, he writes his reflections on killing Lincoln, just to make sure that his point of view is properly recorded for posterity. “I struck boldly and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on,” Booth writes. “I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made men the instrument of his punishment.”

Booth writes and rants and writes some more. Then he sleeps. Then he awakens and writes some more. There’s nothing else to do with his time. So it is with the world’s two most wanted men, bored to tears in a Maryland swamp.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Mary Surratt has been a suspect since the night Lincoln was shot. An anonymous tipster alerted Washington police that the boardinghouse on H Street was the hub of the conspiracy. Detectives questioned her at two o’clock that morning, even as Lincoln lay dying. The widow was forthcoming about the fact that John Wilkes Booth had paid her a visit just twelve hours earlier and that her son John had last been in Washington two weeks earlier. When a thorough search of the house turned up nothing, the police left. No arrest was made.

Now they are back. One of her boarders, Louis Weichmann, has volunteered volumes of information to the authorities about the comings and goings of Booth and the conspirators at Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse. This eyewitness information has confirmed not only that Booth is at the heart of the plan but that Mary Surratt is complicit.

It is well past midnight when police surround the house. She answers a knock at the door, thinking it is a friend. “Is this Mrs. Surratt’s house?” asks a detective.

“Yes.”

“Are you Mrs. Surratt?”

“I am the widow of John H. Surratt.”

“And the mother of John H. Surratt Jr.?”

“Yes.”

“Madam, I have come to arrest you.”

Three policemen step inside. Mary’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Anna, is also taken into custody. Just before they are led outside, Mary asks permission to kneel in prayer. She is a devout Catholic and prays “the blessing of God upon me, as I do in all my actions.”

The house is quiet. Her words echo through the half-lighted rooms as the detectives awkwardly wait for Mary to finish praying and rise to her feet.

Then there’s another knock on the door.

When the detectives open it, they are shocked by the sight of a sixfoot-two man with a pickax slung over his shoulder, wearing a shirtsleeve on his head like a stocking cap. His boots are coated with mud and he is unshaven. As he steps inside, they see that there appears to be blood on his sleeves. The detectives quickly close the door behind him.

Lewis Powell, starved and famished after three days of sleeping in the woods, instantly realizes he has made a grave error. “I guess I am mistaken,” he quickly tells the detectives, turning to leave.

The police send Mary and Anna Surratt out the door, where carriages wait to take them to jail. Then they focus their attention on the tall stranger with the pickax.

Powell gives his name as Lewis Payne and fabricates an elaborate story, saying that he has come to Mary Surratt’s at her behest, in order to dig a ditch for her in the morning. The police press him, asking about Powell’s address and place of employment. When he can’t answer in a satisfactory manner, they arrest him. At the police station he is stripsearched, and an unlikely collection of items, including cash, a compass, a pocketknife, and a newspaper clipping of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, are found in his pockets.

So far, all evidence points to “Payne’s” involvement in the assassination. His height and rugged build clearly match the description of Secretary Seward’s attacker. The police summon the young black servant who had given the description to the station. William Bell has been interrogated a number of times since the attacks, so as he is called back to the station once again his attitude is weary. The late hour does not help.

However, when a lineup of potential suspects is paraded into the room before him, Bell becomes instantly euphoric. He marches right up to Powell and presses his finger against the lips of the man who mocked him, insulted him with a racial slur, and very nearly killed his employer and several members of the family and staff. “He is the man,” Bell proclaims.

This is the last moment in Lewis Powell’s life when he is able to move his arms freely and walk without hearing the clank of chains. Manacles are placed on his wrists. A ball and chain will be attached to each ankle in the days to come, the unyielding iron cutting deeply into his flesh every time he takes a step. A canvas hood will soon be placed over his head, with only a small hole through which he can draw breath and eat.

And yet there is much worse to come for Lewis Powell.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The military sweep through southern Maryland is ongoing and intense. Searches of towns and homes have turned up nothing, and it is clear that the time has come to scour more daunting terrain for Booth and Herold. A combined force of seven hundred Illinois cavalry, six hundred members of the Twenty-second Colored Troops, and one hundred men from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry Regiment now enter the wilderness of Maryland’s vast swamps.

“No human being inhabits this malarious extent” is how one journalist describes this region. “Even a hunted murderer would shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only living denizens … . Here the soldiers prepared to seek for the President’s assassins, and no search of the kind has ever been so thorough and patient.”

The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen’s Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall’s Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers.

“The soldiers were only a few paces apart,” the journalist reports, “and in steady order they took to the ground as it came, now plunging to their armpits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by legions of wood ticks, now attempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poisonous stagnation. The tree boughs rent their uniforms. They came out upon dry land, many of them without a rag of garment, scratched and gnashed, and spent, repugnant to themselves, and disgusting to those who saw them.”

The soldiers detain anyone with anti-Union leanings. For many of the arrested, their only crime is either looking or behaving suspiciously. Taking them into custody is the best possible way to ensure that no suspect is overlooked.

Hundreds of these suspects soon fill Washington’s jails.

But not a single trace of Booth or Herold can be found anywhere.

Back in Washington, Lafayette Baker follows their progress. Since arriving in the capital two days earlier, Baker has distanced himself from the other investigators, “taking the usual detective measures, till then neglected,” of offering the reward, circulating photos of the suspects, and sending out a small army of handpicked detectives to scour the countryside. But he is hampered by the lack of railroads and telegraph lines through the rough and lawless countryside. There is, however, a telegraph line at Point Lookout, a former Union prisoner of war camp at the mouth of the Potomac River. To keep himself informed of all activities in the area, he dispatches a telegraph operator by steamship to that location and orders him to tap into the existing line.

Now, safe in the knowledge that he has established the broadest possible dragnet, Baker waits for that telegraph line to sing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

The moment Dr. Samuel Mudd has been dreading for two days comes while he is in the fields, working his crops. The cavalry unit galloping up his driveway is not there by accident. There are at least two dozen riders, not including his cousin George. It was George to whom Mudd confided that two strangers had spent the night of Lincoln’s assassination in his home. They spoke after Easter services, even as Booth and Herold were still very much in the vicinity. Mudd took pains to state that his life was in danger, should these two men ever come back. The story was a cover, intended to make it look as if he had no knowledge of the strangers’ identities. It was Mudd’s hope that George would act as an intermediary, alerting the police to the fact that his Good Samaritan cousin might just have “accidentally” aided the men who killed Lincoln.

George, however, is a devoted Union sympathizer. Instead of the police, George has brought the cavalry, with their rifles, sabers, and no-nonsense military bearing. The riders dismount. Lieutenant Alexander Lovett is in charge and quickly begins a line of questioning to determine exactly who and what Samuel Mudd saw that night.

Mudd is not a brave man and is quickly rattled. His lips turn blue, even as his face turns chalk white. The story he fabricated and rehearsed in his head so many times suddenly eludes him. Rather than present himself as eager for the “entire strangers” to be captured, Mudd is vague and contrary. He mentions that one stranger had a broken leg and that he had done the neighborly thing by splinting it before sending the men on their way. When Lovett asks him to repeat parts of the story, Mudd frequently contradicts his own version of events.

Lieutenant Lovett is positive that Samuel Mudd is lying. But he does not arrest him—not now, at least. He is determined to find evidence that will link Mudd to the two strangers. He bawls the order to mount up, and the cavalry trots back out to the main road.

Mudd, his heart beating in relief, can only wonder when they will return.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

George Atzerodt has chosen to escape via a northeast route, rather than push south like Booth and Herold. This takes him into a much more pro-Union territory, where the Lincoln assassination has people demanding vengeance on the perpetrators. On the surface, Atzerodt’s plan is an act of genius, allowing one of the most wanted men in America to literally hide in plain sight.

But the increasingly unbalanced George Atzerodt is not a genius. His escape is not a premeditated act of egress but a random wandering from home to home, accepting sanctuary and comfort wherever he can find it. He dawdles when he should be making continuous progress. After four days on the run he makes a critical mistake, boldly supporting Lincoln’s assassination while eating dinner with strangers. His statements quickly make their way to U.S. marshals.

Now, as Atzerodt takes refuge at a cousin’s house in the small community of Germantown, Maryland, twenty miles outside of Washington, a cavalry detachment knocks at the door. Entering the house, they find Atzerodt sharing a bed with two other men. “Get up and dress yourself,” a sergeant commands.

There is no fight, no attempt to pretend he shouldn’t be arrested. George Atzerodt goes meekly into custody, where he is soon fitted with wrist shackles, a ball and chain on his ankle, and a hood over his head, just like Lewis Powell.

Less than three months later, George Atzerodt—the twenty-nine-year-old drifter who stumbled into the conspiracy and stumbled right back out without harming a soul—hangs by the neck until dead.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

One week after the assassination, even as John Wilkes Booth is still alive and hiding in a Maryland swamp, the body of Abraham Lincoln is loaded aboard a special train for his return home to Illinois. General Ulysses S. Grant supervises the occasion. The body of Lincoln’s late son Willie rides along in a nearby casket. Abraham Lincoln once confided to Mary that he longed to be buried someplace quiet, and so it is that the president and his dear son are destined for Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery.

But even after the burial, Lincoln’s body will never quite be at rest. In the next 150 years, Lincoln’s casket will be opened six times and moved from one crypt to another seventeen times. His body was so thoroughly embalmed that he was effectively mummified.

The funeral, which is quite different from the actual burial, of course, was held on Wednesday, April 19. Six hundred mourners were ushered into the East Room of the White House. Its walls were decorated in black, the mirrors all covered, and the room lit by candles. General Ulysses S. Grant sat alone nearest his dear departed friend, next to a cross of lilies. He wept.

Mary Lincoln is still so distraught that she will spend the next five weeks sobbing alone in her bedroom; she was notably absent from the list of recorded attendees. The sound of hammers pounding nails all night long on Tuesday, creating the seating risers for the funeral guests, sounded like the horrible ring of gunfire to her. Out of respect for her mourning and instability, President Andrew Johnson will not have the platforms torn down until after she moves out, on May 22.

Immediately after the funeral, Lincoln’s body was escorted by a military guard through the streets of Washington. One hundred thousand mourners lined the route to the Capitol, where the body was once again put on view for the public to pay their last respects.

And now, two days later, there is the matter of the train. In a trip that will re-create his journey to the White House five years earlier—though in the opposite direction—Lincoln’s special train will stop along the way in twelve cities and pass through 444 communities. In what will be called “the greatest funeral in the history of the United States,” thirty million people will take time from their busy lives to see this very special train before its great steel wheels finally slow to a halt in his beloved Springfield.

The unfortunate mementos of his assassination remain behind in Washington: the Deringer bullet and the Nélaton’s probe that pinpointed its location in his brain will soon be on display in a museum, as will the red horsehair rocker in which he was shot. He also leaves behind the messy unfinished business of healing the nation. And while Abraham Lincoln has gone home to finally get the rest he has so long deserved, that unfinished business will have to wait until his murderer is found.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Samuel Mudd is not home when Lieutenant Lovett and the cavalry return. Lovett sends farmhand Thomas Davis to find him.

Mudd is having lunch nearby and quickly returns to his farm to face Lovett.

The terror of their previous encounter returns. He knows that Lovett has spent the previous three days searching the area around his property for evidence. Mudd’s face once again turns a ghostly white. His nervousness is compounded as Lovett questions him again, probing Mudd’s story for discrepancies, half-truths, and outright lies.

This time Lovett does not ride away. Nor is he content to search the pastures and outer edges of the farm. No, this time he wants to go inside Mudd’s home and see precisely where these strangers slept. Lovett gives the order to search the house.

Mudd frantically gestures to his wife, Sarah, who walks quickly to him. He whispers in her ear, and she races into the house. The soldiers can hear her footsteps as she climbs the stairs to the second floor, then returns within just a moment. In her hands are two items: a razor and a boot. “I found these while dusting up three days ago,” she says as she hands them to Lovett.

Mudd explains that one of the strangers used the razor to shave off his mustache. The boot had come from the stranger with the broken leg.

Lovett presses Mudd on this point, asking him if he knew the man’s identity.

Mudd insists that he didn’t.

Lovett cradles the long riding boot in his hands. It has been slit down one side by Mudd, in order that he might pull it from Booth’s swollen leg to examine the wound.

Lovett asks if this is, indeed, the boot the stranger wore.

Mudd agrees.

Lovett presses Mudd again, verifying that the doctor had no knowledge of the stranger’s identity.

Mudd swears this to be truth.

And then Lovett shows Mudd the inside of the riding boot, which would have been clearly visible when Mudd was removing it from the stranger’s leg.

Mudd’s world collapses. His story is shattered in an instant.

For marked inside the boot, plain for all to see, is the name

“J. Wilkes.”

Dr. Samuel Mudd is under arrest.

And while Lieutenant Lovett has just made a key breakthrough in the race to find John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, the truth is that nobody in authority knows where they are.

Lafayette Baker, however, has a pretty good idea.

Baker keeps a host of coastal survey maps in his office at the War Department. With “that quick detective intuition amounting almost to inspiration,” in his own words, he knows that Booth’s escape options are limited. When news of the discovery of the abandoned riding boot makes its way back to Washington, Baker concludes that Booth cannot be traveling on horseback. And though traveling by water is more preferable, once Booth is flushed from the swamps—for that is surely where he is hiding—he won’t follow the Maryland coastline. There are too many deep rivers to cross, and he would be easily spotted. Lafayette Baker also deduces that Booth won’t head toward Richmond if he gets across the Potomac because that would lead him straight into Union lines.

Lafayette Baker is already convinced that John Wilkes Booth must aim for the mountains of Kentucky. “Being aware that nearly every rod of ground in Lower Maryland must have been repeatedly passed over by the great number of persons engaged in the search,” he will later write, “I finally decided, in my own mind, that Booth and Herold had crossed over the river into Virginia. The only possible way left open to escape was to take a southwestern course, in order to reach the mountains of Tennessee or Kentucky, where such aid could be secured as would insure their ultimate escape from the country.”

It’s as if he already knows Booth’s plan.

To get to Kentucky, Booth must cross the great breadth of Virginia, following almost the exact same path General Lee took in his escape from Petersburg. But he has no horse, which means traveling by water or on the main roads in a buggy, and he must cross treacherous territory to get south of Richmond.

Baker studies his maps, searching for the precise spot where Booth might cross the Potomac. His eyes zoom in on Port Tobacco. “If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port Tobacco,” he will quote a journalist as saying in his memoirs. “Five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco. Life there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the adjacent swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when iguanodons and pterodactyls, and plesiosauri ate each other.”

Lafayette Baker is wrong—but not by much.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Six days. Six long, cold miserable days. That’s how long Booth and Herold have now been in the swamp, scratching at wood ticks, shivering under thin, damp wool blankets, and eating just the one meal a day provided by Thomas Jones. The silence has been almost complete, save for the times when Union warships on the Potomac fire their big guns to salute their fallen president.

The newspapers delivered daily by Jones continue to be a source of information and misery, as it becomes more and more clear that Booth’s actions have condemned him. Booth would rant about that injustice if he had the energy. The fact is, he and Herold long ago tired of speaking in a whisper. And even if they hadn’t, they have nothing to talk about.

The sizzle of happiness that accompanied killing Lincoln is long gone. Booth is a man accustomed to the finest things in life, and his miserable existence in the swamp has him longing for the tender flesh of Lucy Hale, a bottle of whiskey, a plate of oysters, and a warm bed.

Booth is just settling in for another night in the swamp when he hears the first whistle. Herold hears it, too, and is on his feet in an instant. Grabbing his rifle, Herold warily approaches the sound and returns with Jones. “The coast seems to be clear,” Jones tells them, his voice betraying the sense of urgency. “Let us make the attempt.”

Their camp is three miles from the river. Getting to the Potomac undetected means traveling down well-used public roads. Despite the darkness, they might run into a cavalry detail at any moment, but it is a chance they have to take.

Booth can’t walk, so Jones loans him his horse. Herold and Jones help Booth into the saddle. The actor clings precariously to the horse’s mane, desperate not to fall off.

Jones tells them to wait, then walks ahead to make sure the coast is clear. Only when he whistles that all is well do they follow. This is how they travel to the river, the ever vigilant Jones utilizing the smuggling skills he honed so well during the war to lead them to safety. Their pace is frustratingly slow to Booth, who wants to canter the horse as quickly as he can manage to the river, but Jones is taking no chances.

When they approach Jones’s house, Booth begs to be allowed inside for a moment of warmth. He badly wants to get to the river, but he is also addicted to creature comforts. After six days out in the cold, something as simple as standing before a roaring fireplace feels like a version of heaven. Jones won’t hear of it, reminding them that his servants are home and could possibly give them away. Instead, Jones walks inside and returns with hot food, reminding the two fugitives that this might be the last meal they eat for a while.

They press on to the river. Jones has hidden a twelve-foot-long boat at the water’s edge, tied to a large oak tree. The bank is steep, and Booth must be carried down the slope. But soon he sits in the stern, grasping an oar. Herold perches in the bow. The night is still dark, for the moon has not risen. A cold mist hovers on the surface of the wide and treacherous Potomac. Safety is just across the river in Virginia, where the citizens are solidly pro-Confederacy. It’s so close they can see it. But getting there means navigating unseen currents and tides that can force them far downriver—or even backward. The river is two miles wide at this point and constantly patrolled by Union warships. Some are merely heading into Washington’s Navy Yard after time at sea, while others are specifically hunting for two men in a small boat. It is common naval practice for ships to douse their running lights at night, all the better to thwart smugglers. Booth and Herold might actually run headlong into a ship without even seeing it in the total darkness.

“Keep to that,” Jones instructs Booth, lighting a small candle to illuminate Booth’s compass and pointing to the southwesterly heading. The actor has carried the compass since the assassination, just for a moment such as this. “It will bring you into Machodoc Creek. Mrs. Quesenberry lives near the mouth of this creek. If you tell her you come from me, I think she will take care of you.”

“God bless you, my dear friend,” says Booth. “Good-bye.”

They shove off. Jones turns his back and returns home, his work complete. No other man has risked as much, nor shown as much compassion for Booth and Herold, as Jones. He did not do it because he applauded the assassination—in fact, Jones is disgusted by Booth’s action. Rather, he helped the two men out of compassion for men in trouble and a last-ditch bout of loyalty to the Confederacy. His deeds will go unpunished. When his part in the conspiracy will be revealed later on, the testimony will come from a non-white resident of southern Maryland and thus will be ignored.

Booth and Herold, meanwhile, paddle hard for the opposite shore. That is: Herold paddles hard. Booth sits in the back and dangles his oar in the water under the pretense of steering.

Herold paddles for several hours against a daunting current, but they’re going the wrong way. Booth’s compass may be a prized possession, but it’s useless if not utilized properly.

Things go from bad to worse. The fugitives almost paddle headlong into the Juniper, a Federal gunboat. And yet if anyone on the deck of the eighty-footer sees them they don’t cry out.

Finally, they land, four miles upriver from where they departed, still in Maryland. Their escape is not going well. They are forced to hide themselves and their boat in the brush for yet another day.

And so, after one last, long twenty-four hours of hiding from the thousands of soldiers now combing the countryside looking for them, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold once again set out under cover of darkness rowing hard for Virginia. This time they make it.

Next stop: Kentucky.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Samuel H. Beckwith is in Port Tobacco, the “Gomorrah,” in Lafayette Baker’s words, of Maryland. He is the telegraph operator specially detailed by Baker to keep the detective apprised of all actions in the Booth dragnet. Now he telegraphs a coded message back to Washington, stating that investigators have questioned local smugglers and learned that Booth and Herold have gone across the Potomac River.

The evidence is, in fact, erroneous. It refers to a group of men smuggled into Virginia on Easter Sunday, not Booth and Herold. Lafayette Baker immediately reacts, however, sending twenty-five members of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry by the steamship John S. Ide from Washington downriver to Belle Plain, Virginia. All of the men have volunteered for the mission. The senior officers are Baker’s cousin Lieutenant Luther Baker and Colonel Everton Conger, a twenty-nine-year-old, highly regarded veteran of the Civil War.

Lafayette Baker sees them off. “I want you to go to Virginia and get Booth,” he says and then puts his cousin in charge, despite the lower rank.

The Ide pushes back at two P.M., for a four-hour voyage. It arrives at the simple wharf and warehouse along the shore just after dark. The men immediately spur their horses down the main road of Belle Plain, Virginia, and then into the countryside, knocking on farmhouse doors and questioning the occupants. They stop any and all riders and carriages they encounter, pressing hard for clues as to Booth’s whereabouts.

But nobody has seen Booth or Herold—or, if they have, they’re not talking. By morning the cavalry squad is in Port Conway, more than ten miles inland from the Potomac. Exhausted, their horses wrung out from the long night, the soldiers are starting to feel as if this is just another futile lead. Conger has promised them all an equal share of the more than $200,000 in reward money awaiting those who capture Booth. This spurred them to ride all night, but now the prize seems unattainable. They are growing fearful that the Ide will return to Washington without them, leaving them to wait days for another ship.

During their trip south, Lieutenant Luther Baker made the rather wise decision to give the command back to Conger. “You have been over the ground,” he told the veteran.

Then, just as they are about to give up and go home, on the shores of the Rappahannock River, at a ferry crossing known as Port Royal, two men positively identify photographs of Booth and Herold. They passed through the previous day and were traveling with a small group of Confederate veterans.

By this time, the twenty-five cavalry soldiers are exhausted, “so haggard and wasted with travel that had to be kicked into intelligence before they could climb to their saddles,” Lieutenant Baker will later recall.

But climb into their saddles they do, for hours and hours of more searching.

At two o’clock in the morning, at a handsome whitewashed farm three hundred yards off the main road, they finally come to a halt. The ground is soft clay, so their horses’ hooves make no sound. The soldiers draw their carbines from their scabbards as Lieutenant Baker dismounts and opens the property’s main gate. He has no certain knowledge of anything nefarious. It is just a hunch.

Fanning out, the riders make a circle around the house and barn.

In a very few minutes, Lieutenant Baker’s hunch will make history.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Until just a few hours ago, John Wilkes Booth was happier and more content than at any time since killing Lincoln. His broken leg notwithstanding, his three days in Virginia, with its pro-Confederate citizens and custom of hospitality, have made him think that escape is a likely possibility. He even disclosed his identity to a group of former southern soldiers he met along the road. To everyone else who’s asked, he’s a former soldier who was injured at Petersburg and is on his way home.

He’s spent the last day at the farmhouse of Richard Garrett, whose son John just returned home from the war. The Garretts do not know Booth’s true identity and believe his story about being a former soldier. He’s enjoyed hot meals and the chance to wash and sleep. But an hour before sunset came word that Federal cavalry were crossing the ferry over the Rappahannock River.

Booth reacted to the news with visible fear. The Garretts, seeing this, grew suspicious and insisted that both men leave. Booth and Herold refused, though not in a belligerent manner. Not knowing what to do and not wanting to create a problem with the two armed strangers, John Garrett sent them to sleep in the barn. Now Booth and Herold hide in a forty-eight-by-fifty-foot wooden structure, filled with hay and corn. Tobacco-curing equipment is stored inside, and thick cedar beams provide sturdy structural support. Worried that Booth and Herold plan to steal their horses and escape in the night, John and his brother William sleep outside the barn, armed with a pistol.

Booth doesn’t realize the Garrett brothers are outside guarding the barn; nor does he know that the cavalry is surrounding the house. All he is sure of is that at two A.M. the dogs begin barking. Then a terrified John Garrett steps into the barn and orders the men to give up their weapons. The building is surrounded, he tells them.

“Get out of here,” Booth cries, “or I will shoot you. You have betrayed me.”

Garrett flees, locking the barn door behind him. Booth and Herold are now trapped inside, with no idea how many men are out there. Then Herold says he wants out. He’s sick of this life and wants to go home. He’s done nothing wrong and wishes to proclaim his innocence.

“Captain,” Booth calls out, not knowing the proper rank to use. “There is a man here who very much wants to surrender.”

Then he turns to Herold in disgust: “Go away from me, damned coward.”

Herold exits through the main door, wrists first. He is immediately taken away and arrested by the soldiers.

Lieutenant Baker calls to Booth, telling him that the barn will be set on fire within moments unless Booth surrenders. “Well, Captain,” Booth cries out, his old sense of the dramatic now fully returned, “you may prepare a stretcher for me. Draw up your men. Throw open the door. Let’s have a fair fight.”

Then Booth hears the crackle of burning straw and smells the sickly sweet wood smoke of burning cedar. “One more stain on the old banner!” he yells, doing his best to sound fearless. No one quite knows what that statement means.

He looks across the barn and sees Lieutenant Baker opening the door. The actor hefts his loaded carbine, preparing to take aim.

Just as Abraham Lincoln felt a slight instant of pain and then nothing at all when Booth shot him, now Booth hears the crack of a rifle and feels a jolt in his neck, and then nothing. Sergeant Boston Corbett has fired a bullet and it slices through Booth’s spinal cord and paralyzes him from the neck down. John Wilkes Booth collapses to the floor of the barn, the flames now climbing higher and higher all around him.

Boston Corbett, in his own way, is as much a zealot as Booth. Only his passion is religion. Incredibly, years before, Corbett cut off his own testicles with a pair of scissors after experiencing a moment of lust. Booth has now been shot by a man very much like himself: a rebellious fanatic. Corbett actually disobeyed orders when taking aim at the actor. Baker and Conger pull John Wilkes Booth from the barn moments before it is completely engulfed in flames. The actor is still alive.

As with Lincoln, the decision is made not to transport him, for any movement will surely kill the actor. But he is dead by morning anyway. His limp body is hurled into the back of a garbage wagon.

The flight—and life—of John Wilkes Booth has come to an end. He is just twenty-six years old.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Two and a half months later, the rounding up of Lincoln’s killers has become a national pastime. Secretary of War Stanton has personally taken charge of identifying the larger conspiracy that has grown out of Booth’s single gunshot, pushing Lafayette Baker from the limelight. While some in the Confederate South now call Booth a martyr and hang pictures of him in their homes as they would for any family member, northerners are even more determined to see every last one of his co-conspirators found—and killed. The jails are full of men and women who have been trapped in the spider’s web of the Stanton investigation. Some have absolutely nothing to do with Lincoln’s death, like James Pumphrey, the Confederate-sympathizing owner of a stable, who spent a month behind bars. No one is immune from suspicion. Federal agents scour their list of suspects, making sure no one is overlooked. One missing suspect is twenty-one-year-old John Surratt, whose mother, Mary, provided Booth and his conspirators with weapons and lodging.

Mary herself sits inside the old Arsenal Penitentiary awaiting her fate. She’s been locked up since her arrest on April 17. The trial of all the co-conspirators, including Mary, began on May 10, and some 366 witnesses were called before it was over, seven weeks later. From the beginning, the public viewed all the conspirators as clearly criminals. Certainly the drunken George Atzerodt and the brutish thug who attacked the Sewards, Lewis Powell, look the part. But Mary Surratt is different. Standing five foot six, with a buxom figure and a pretty smile that captivates some of the journalists in attendance, Mary has initially engendered some sympathy, and many Americans wonder if her life should be spared.

But Mary’s physical appearance, like that of her co-conspirators, began to change as the trial stretched into its sixth and seventh weeks. Stanton was responsible for this disfiguring transformation. When not on trial, he insisted, all the conspirators had to wear a thick padded hood over their heads. Extra cotton padding was placed over the eyelids, pressing hard against the eyeballs. There was just one slit, at the mouth, for eating. The purpose was to prevent them from seeing or hearing one another as they remained chained in the bowels of the Montauk, the warship President Lincoln visited on the last day of his life.

Underneath the hoods the heat was intense and the air stifling. The sweating and the bloating of the skin from the heavy hoods made each conspirator appear more and more swollen and rabid with each passing day.

Mary Surratt endured an even greater private hell. In addition to the claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood, she suffered from severe cramping, excessive menstruating, and constant urinating from a disease known as endometriosis. She was barely tended to by her captors or given the freedom to properly care for herself. One eyewitness called her cell aboard the Montauk “barely habitable.” Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.

After deliberating for three days, the nine-member jury finds Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold guilty. They will be hanged. As for Dr. Samuel Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, Ned Spangler, and Samuel Arnold, their punishment will be the remote penitentiary of Fort Jefferson in the Gulf of Mexico.

There is no one willing to speak up for the men who will hang. But Mary Surratt’s priest comes to her defense. So does her daughter, Anna—though not her missing son, John. Mary Surratt’s attorney frantically works to get an audience with President Andrew Johnson so that he might personally intervene on her behalf. Her supporters say she was just a lone woman trying to make ends meet by providing weapons for Booth and his conspiracy and point out that she didn’t pull the trigger and was nowhere near Ford’s Theatre.

There is hope. Not much, but a little. The other three sentenced to hang are all part of Booth’s inner circle. Not so with Mary Surratt. Although Johnson will not speak to him, her attorney continues to argue to the fringe of President Johnson’s outer circle, those who actively prevent him from speaking with the president, that her life should be spared.

Mary Surratt spends the night of July 6 in prayer, asking God to spare her life.

In the morning, she refuses breakfast, and even at ten A.M., when her visitors are told to leave so that her body can be prepared, Mary is still hoping. She wears a black dress and veil. Her ankles and wrists are manacled. And then she is marched out into a blazing summer sun. She looks up at the ten-foot-high gallows, newly built for the execution of her and the other conspirators. She sees the freshly dug graves beneath the gallows—the spot where her body will rest for all eternity.

Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and David Herold climb the gallows staircase. They are seated in chairs on the platform at the top. Their hands and arms are tied to their bodies—the men’s with ropes, Mary’s with white cloth. Their legs are tied together at the ankles and knees so that they won’t kick wildly after the hangman springs the door.

“Mrs. Surratt is innocent!” Powell cries out, just before a white cotton hood is placed over his head.

Outside the prison, Mary’s supporters gather. Time is short. But there is still hope. Soldiers stand atop the penitentiary walls, just in case a last-minute rider approaches with a pardon. Inside the penitentiary, one hundred civilians have won the right to watch Lincoln’s killers die. The muggy air is thick with anticipation.

All it takes is one word from President Johnson. Mary Surratt continues to pray.

“Please don’t let me fall,” she says to an executioner, getting vertigo as she looks down on the crowd from atop the tall, unstable gallows. He puts the white hood over her head, and then she stands alone, terrified that she might topple forward over the edge of the gallows before the pardon can arrive.

The death sentences are read in alphabetical order by General Winfield Scott Hancock, another old friend of Generals Grant and Lee from their days in Mexico.

Each trapdoor is held in place by a single post. At the bottom of the scaffold stand four hand-selected members of the armed forces. It is their job to kick away the posts on the signal from the hangman. Suddenly, that signal is given.

The trapdoors swing open. Mary Surratt, like the others, drops six feet in an instant. But unlike the others’, her neck does not break, and she does not die right away. The forty-two-year-old mother and widow, whose son would not come to her rescue out of fear for his own life, swings for five long minutes before her larynx is crushed and her body stops fighting for air.

Stanton lets the bodies dangle in the wind for twenty more minutes before pronouncing that he is satisfied. The corpses are buried in the hard prison yard.

Mary Surratt becomes the first and only woman ever hanged by the United States government.