Killing Lincoln: Part Four

They are now hiding in the house of the eminent physician and Confederate sympathizer Dr. Samuel Mudd.

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.

As drunk as he is, Atzerodt does an artful job of feigning sadness, saying that the whole Lincoln assassination is a terrible tragedy.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, Atzerodt is so unassuming that the sergeant in charge of the soldiers actually shares a few glasses of cider with the conspirator.

Herold was glib, boasting to the Confederate proprietor that they’d killed the president.

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.

But Stanton has just given Baker carte blanche to move in and take over the entire investigation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Booth’s achievement is described in the Richmond papers as “the most deplorable calamity, which has ever befallen the people of the United States.”

As is his new habit, he regales Herold with a monologue on the killings—regrets, desires, and misunderstandings.

In it, he writes his reflections on killing Lincoln, just to make sure that his point of view is properly recorded for posterity.

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.

This eyewitness information has confirmed not only that Booth is at the heart of the plan but that Mary Surratt is complicit.

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.

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.

Even a hunted murderer would shrink from hiding there. Serpents and slimy lizards are the only living denizens.

The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous.

Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers.

...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.

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

His nervousness is compounded as Lovett questions him again, probing Mudd’s story for discrepancies, half-truths, and outright lies.

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.

“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.

The actor clings precariously to the horse’s mane, desperate not to fall off.

Rather, he helped the two men out of compassion for men in trouble and a last-ditch bout of loyalty to the Confederacy.

He is the telegraph operator specially detailed by Baker to keep the detective apprised of all actions in the Booth dragnet.

Booth and Herold refused, though not in a belligerent manner.

Boston Corbett, in his own way, is as much a zealot as Booth. Only his passion is religion.

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.

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.

Underneath the hoods the heat was intense, and the air stifling.

All the sweating and the bloating of the skin from the heavy hoods conspired to make each conspirator look more and more swollen and rabid with each passing day. Over time they resembled not so much men, but crazed apparitions.

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.