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John Wilkes Booth

The exact circumstances of the capture and death of John Wilkes Booth in the early morning hours of April 26, 1865, after his flight from Washington, D.C., into Virginia have been obscured by a haze of conflicting reports and lost evidence.

Secretary of State William H. Seward wrote in 1862, “Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.” But on the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth slipped into President Abraham Lincoln’s box at the Ford Theater and shot him in the back of the head, while across town a second assassin slashed at Seward’s face, severely wounding him before being chased out of the house.

Booth, who craved fame as much as he hated the idea of the South’s defeat, planned the assassination for maximum drama. He used a single-shot Derringer, a daring choice, since it gave him only one chance at the President. After firing at Lincoln he leapt onto the stage and cried, “Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged!” While Booth was involved in his theatrics, an ex-Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, on Booth’s orders, snuck into Seward’s home and stabbed at the secretary of state while wrestling off panicked family members. Powell eventually fled the scene having sliced Seward’s cheek nearly off but without inflicting a mortal wound. A third accomplice in the plot, George Azerodt, was drinking at a hotel bar, having failed to muster the courage to attack Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Powell and Azerodt were quickly apprehended. Booth on the other hand rushed offstage while the audience sat dumbfounded. Somehow he was able—despite his highly recognizable face and a broken ankle courtesy of his dramatic leap—to elude hundreds of searchers for 12 days.

Although he performed his great crime magnificently, he failed to plan properly for the next act, the denouement of a successful, untroubled escape. Despite his poor planning, Booth managed to stay incognito with the help of a handful of Southern sympathizers and a healthy dose of luck. His constant companion was David Herold, who idolized him. Herold was supposed to be Powell’s lookout and getaway accomplice, but he panicked and left Powell at the Seward house. Over the nearly two weeks he spent as a fugitive, Herold dutifully risked life and limb to get Booth into Virginia.

From the hotel where his President lay dying, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton mobilized detectives and troops to find the killers. Booth, meanwhile, huddled in the home of the Maryland doctor Samuel Mudd, who set his leg, gave him food and a bed, and connected him with Thomas A. Jones, a former Confederate spy. Jones concealed Booth and Herold in a dense pine thicket for nearly a week, where they idled while the nation wrestled with hysteria, grief, and vigilantism. Jones was waiting for the right opportunity to secrete the men in a skiff to cross the Potomac.

During that time the reward for Booth’s capture ballooned to a sum nearly four times Lincoln’s annual salary. According to Swanson, “With his simple plan, Jones confounded the whole manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. A lone Confederate agent, without resources and nearly penniless, had just checkmated the frantic pursuit by thousands of men being orchestrated from Washington.” And afterward Jones kept the story of his involvement secret for 20 years, while detectives puzzled over Booth’s “lost week.”

Under the cloak of night, Jones led the men to a boat and left them. Booth and Herold crossed the Potomac, got lost, set out again, and eventually made their way to the farm of Richard Garrett, with the help of a host of knowing and unknowing accomplices. They claimed they were ex-Rebels on the run from Union troops because they wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath. Booth stayed in Garrett’s house until their host’s sons became suspicious and made the two men sleep in the tobacco barn. Worried they might steal horses, the boys locked the two fugitives in for the night.

Meanwhile, Detective Luther Baker had a break in the case when he questioned a fisherman at Port Royal who had seen a man with a broken leg board the Port Conway ferry the day before. Baker followed the trail to the Garrett farm and surrounded the barn on the night of April 26. True to form, Herold quickly surrendered. Even trapped in a barn alone, Booth held a certain power over his captors. He managed to stall the detective, even offering to fight the cavalry that surrounded him. This was better than Shakespeare. Lincoln’s assassin had just challenged twenty-six men to a duel. Or was it, in Booth’s mind, a knightly trial by combat, with victory the reward to the just?

Baker set the barn on fire to smoke him out. A sergeant peering through the chinks in the barn wall watched Booth fumble around inside for his guns. The sergeant, in a strange mirror of Lincoln’s assassination, felled Booth with one shot to the back of the head. Lincoln’s assassin was dragged out and lay dying on the Garretts’ porch as the cavalry watched. The manhunt finally was over.

John Wilkes Booth was driven not only by his patriotism but by his insatiable appetite for fame. He got his fame, but at the price of his life. But he lived long enough to recognize his failures, and endure the public condemnation of his act. When he leaped to the stage and shouted ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis,’ he must have thought that his immortality as a Southern patriot was sealed. But his last words serve as his true epitaph: ‘Useless, useless.’

A court of inquiry was held in the Petersen house across the street from Ford’s Theatre. There, in a room next to the one in which the mortally wounded President lay dying, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Judge David K. Cartter of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia were busy taking testimony from those who had seen the shooting in the theater or who had anything pertinent to report.

Early in the morning of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth showed up at the Maryland home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, a casual acquaintance. Dr. Mudd tended Booth’s leg and put him up for a few hours, after which the assassin disappeared (later to be tracked down and killed by federal troops).

A few days later, Dr. Mudd was arrested, taken to Washington, and incarcerated; on May 11, he was put on trial before a military tribunal, where it was charged that he did”… advise, encourage, receive, entertain, harbor and conceal, aid and assist… John Wilkes Booth, David E. Herold, Lewis Paine, John H. Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, George A. Atzerodt, Mary E. Surratt, and Samuel Arnold, and their confederates, with knowledge of the murderous and traitorous conspiracy… and with the intent to aid, abet, and assist them in the execution thereof, and in escaping from justice after the murder of said Abraham Lincoln.…”

By June nearly all the people suspected of having had any connection with the assassination had been let go. The military commission made its verdicts public and ordered them to be carried out on July 7. On that blazing hot day, in the courtyard of the Arsenal Penitentiary, three men, Paine, Atzerodt, and Herold, and one woman, Mrs. Surratt, were hanged. The other four conspirators were sent to Fort Jefferson on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas to be imprisoned there at hard labor.

Mudd’s lawyer argued that of the accused conspirators Mudd had known only Booth, Atzerodt, and the Surratts, and these just barely; that he had taken no part in any assassination plans; that Booth had disguised himself and used a false name when he arrived at Mudd’s house with the broken leg; and finally that he did not even learn that Lincoln had been shot until Booth had gone.

To no avail: on June 30, Mudd was sentenced “to be imprisoned at hard labor for life…” and in mid-July was sent to serve his time. In August and September, 1867, Mudd performed gallant service in treating fellow prisoners during an epidemic of yellow fever, and for his actions President Andrew Johnson gave him a full and unconditional pardon in February, 1869. Released, Mudd returned to his home, where he died in 1883.

Elizabeth D. Hoover. America’s Most Wanted: The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth. . Wednesday, February 8, 2006.

John Wilkes Booth Long before he changed the course of history with a single bullet, John Wilkes Booth made a name for himself in 19th century America as a famous actor. This video looks at the life of this one-time star to find out who the man behind the derringer really was. From the pastoral landscape of his childhood to his meteoric rise to fame, from his Southern loyalties to his fateful decision to pull the trigger, this is the riveting tale of the actor who went down in history as an assassin.

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