Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

Speaker 1: This is Our American Stories, and we’ve told the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We’re now going to look at the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. Our storyteller is James Swanson, the author of Manhunt, The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Swanson begins by sharing with us how he came to write his New York Times bestseller.

Speaker 2: I really came to this story by chance. I was born in Chicago on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12th, and when I was a small boy, my parents began giving me Lincoln comic books—those old classics, illustrated, and crayon books about Lincoln and the Civil War, and trinkets from the Lincoln sites. And when I got a little older books that I could actually read, my real interest in—and I guess I’d say—my obsession with this story began when I was ten years old. And that’s when my grandmother, Elizabeth, who was a veteran of the old Chicago tabloid newspaper scene—sadly, now long, long gone—gave me a framed engraving, which you might think is an unusual gift for a child. It was an engraving of John Wilkes Booth’s derringer pistol, the one he had used to kill Abraham Lincoln. And framed with that engraving was part of a clipping from the Chicago Tribune from the morning of April 15th, 1865, the morning that Lincoln died. He was shot Good Friday the night before, and lingered on until the morning. And I remember reading that vividly. In those days, the headlines were not the broad, horizontal headline across the page, but rather the left column was devoted to headlines, and then there was a series of descending headlines in that left column. And so it would begin with the breaking news: “The President Shot.” As each edition came out later in the day, more headlines would be added: “The President Shot,” “Is Dying, Not Expected to Live,” “Secretary Seward Stabbed to Death in His Bed.” Of course, that was wrong. It was an early false report that Seward had died, that his sons had been murdered along with him. And I got to a midpoint in the story, and someone had taken scissors and clipped it just when I was reading the line, “and ran out the back door.” And I must have read that clipping a hundred times when I was a boy, and I remember saying to myself, “I want to read the rest of the story.” And that’s how it began. I really wrote the book that I always wanted to read but no one else had written, which might sound odd, because there were over 15,000 books about Abraham Lincoln, probably even more. No one has ever done the complete bibliography, and of those 15,000 or so books, at least a thousand are related somehow to his end of days. One would think with all the Lincoln studies out there, there’d be a hundred books like this, but there wasn’t one. So that really gave me incentive to do it. So I’d ask this question: Who was Abraham Lincoln on the morning of April 14th, 1865, and who was John Wilkes Booth? It was probably the happiest day of Lincoln’s life. It was certainly the happiest week. He had won the war. Lee had surrendered. Richmond fell on April 3rd. Lee surrendered on April 9th. Lincoln gave his last speech from the White House grounds the evening of April 11th, and on April 13th, Washington celebrated with the Grand Illumination of the City, probably the most beautiful night in the history of Washington. Fireworks, flares, lamps, illuminations of all kinds, bonfires. One of the papers said that the Capitol Dome was so beautiful that it looked like a second moon had descended upon the Earth, as a sign of God’s favor for the Union, for the victory. Lincoln met with his son that morning, back from the war. He had been on Lee’s staff. Then he met with his cabinet, and General Grant was a rare visitor for that meeting, and Lincoln told his assembled cabinet, “I had that strange dream again last night.” And Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, said, “Well, what was that?” And Lincoln said that he was at the head of a mysterious vessel moving towards a distant shore, and he was alone. And Lincoln said, “Whenever I’ve had that dream, and I’ve had it many times during this war, something of the utmost importance has happened. I’m convinced that something of major significance is about to happen.” The meeting broke up, and Lincoln took his wife, Mary, on a carriage ride through the streets of Washington. He wanted to be alone with her and talk. During that ride, he had told her they had been very unhappy ever since the death of their son Willie in the White House in 1862. Six hundred thousand dead Union and Confederate was a crushing burden on Lincoln, and the Lincolns had grown apart during the war for many reasons, and he told Mary, “We must be happy again.” He told her that they might go back to Illinois and he could practice law. When his second term ended in 1869, he wanted to go to the Pacific Ocean. He told her he wanted to go to California, but he reminded her again, “We must be happy again.” She wrote shortly after this ride that “I’ve never seen him so happy.” In fact, I told him, “You alarm me because you’ve not been this happy since just before the death of our son Willie.” That night, they decided to go to the play Our American Cousin to seek release from the exhilaration of victory. So that’s who Lincoln was on that day. It was his week and his day of triumph. He had a rough start in office, but he learned how to command generals, how to build armies, how to articulate his goals to the American people. And he had done what he promised he would do. He won that war, and he destroyed slavery. So, who was Booth that morning? Twenty-six years old. One of the most popular actors in America. Exceedingly handsome, athletic. Women and men would stop in the street to watch him as he passed. Generous, vain, funny, egomaniacal, politically motivated to be a lover of the South, of Secession, a supporter of slavery. He once said, “Slavery is the best thing that ever happened to the Black man.” He was standing below the White House window on April 11th when Lincoln gave his last speech, and when Lincoln talked about giving Blacks the right to vote, Booth turned to a Confederate and said, “That’s the last speech he’ll ever give. Now, I’ll put him through.” He didn’t even need fame to gain access to Lincoln’s office in the White House. Any one of us could have gone to the Lincoln White House, walked in the front door, approached the office suites, and told one of his two or three male secretaries, “I want to see the President.” Often you’d be told, “Well, he’s busy. Now sit on that bench over there.” It might take a couple of hours. You would be admitted to the presence of the sitting President without being searched, without being identified. There were no methods of identifying people then. There were no driver’s licenses, no photo IDs, and Lincoln would regularly place himself in the presence of strangers unknown to him. Booth could have walked in. Lincoln had seen Booth perform. Lincoln would have been happy to receive Booth. Lincoln loved reading Shakespeare to friends. He corresponded with other actors. Booth could have gained easy access to the White House and slaughtered Lincoln at his desk. We’ll never know why. Certainly, Booth was building himself up to a climax to strike against Lincoln. He was fantasizing about it. He began drinking more heavily. Maybe he wasn’t ready psychologically to kill until later. I don’t know why Booth didn’t do it. Part of it, perhaps, maybe he wanted to kill Lincoln before an audience and really stage that performance. The theater was actually a great way to do it and escape, because the theater audio was trapped in front of the orchestra; and when Booth got on stage, he was closer to the back escape route than the audience was. And in fact, only one man out of 1,500 people in the theater even stood up to pursue Booth. So it was counterintuitively smart to kill him in the theater and have his horse waiting in the back. We’ll never know why, but it was a shocking lack of security. Lincoln eschewed security. The Secretary of War tried to have him have. More than one hundred death threats were found in Lincoln’s desk after he was assassinated. He was almost assassinated in Baltimore on his way to Washington on the inaugural journey in 1861. It’s almost as though in a Civil War that killed six hundred thousand people, it was unimaginable that the President could be assassinated. No sitting President had ever before been attacked, and it was just beyond—strangely beyond—people’s imagination. I think at the time he had even stalked Lincoln at the Second Inaugural. He was within fifty feet of the President looking down on him while he read that magnificent “With Malice Toward None, With Charity for All” speech, and getting drunk at a bar shortly after that, he pounded his fist on the table and said to a friend, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President on Inauguration Day? He was almost as close to me as you are now.”

Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to James Swanson, author of Manhunt, The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. And my goodness, what insight here thinking about that day in Lincoln’s life on April 15th, and that day in John Wilkes Booth’s life.

Speaker 3: And on a stage.

Speaker 1: I have no doubt after having read this book, and I love this book. By the way, go to Amazon and pick it up. It is well worth reading. You won’t put it down. Actually, he wanted to do it in the theater. That’s a great actor. What he wanted: to stage his final performance. When we come back, more of this remarkable story—the story of Lincoln’s assassination and its aftermath—here on Our American Stories.

Speaker 3: And.

Speaker 1: We return to Our American Stories and to James Swanson, author of Manhunt, The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Speaker 2: Booth needed a catalyst, though, and that came when he visited Ford’s Theatre midday to pick up his mail, and someone said, “Lincoln is coming tonight,” and that’s the trigger that set off the imaginary clock counting down in Booth’s mind. He knew he would have eight or nine hours to reassemble his conspirators. He had gathered them earlier, several months before, to kidnap Abraham Lincoln during the war and hold him hostage as a master stroke to urund the war, but that plan didn’t work out. Booth wanted to do this because he hated Lincoln. Lincoln was really an American Caesar to John Low. He wanted to punish Lincoln, the tyrant. He hoped to change history, and of course, he wanted eternal fame. He had it in his lifetime, but he wanted to be immortalized as a Southern and ultimately American patriot. So he had just enough time to assemble his co-conspirators, get his guns, his supplies, his horses, send certain messages to people whose help he needed, and just as the Lincolns were riding to Ford’s Theatre in their carriage with their theater guests. John Wilkes Booth called the final meeting of his conspirators at 8:00 p.m. at a hotel two blocks from Ford’s Theatre. And that’s the first moment he told them, “We strike tonight. I shall kill Lincoln alone.” He turned to another conspirator, Lewis Powell, an ex-Confederate soldier, said, “You will go to the home of the Secretary of State, guided by David Herold, one of our other conspirators, and you’ll murder him in his bed. He’s been in a terrible carriage accident. He’s helpless; he can’t move. Go in and kill him.” He told George Atzerodt, a German immigrant, “You will go to the hotel of the Vice President. He is unguarded. You will knock on his door, and you will kill him when he answers the door with a knife attack or pistol fire.” They broke up the meeting, and that was the last time the group of conspirators ever met together again in full. You all know the rest of the story of what Melville called that bloody, awful night. And I won’t rehearse the facts of the assassination, except to say Booth performed it to the hilt. He really created a new kind of art form, which I’ve called in the book “performance assassination.” He wanted to escape. It wasn’t a suicide mission, but he wanted to be seen and celebrated. When he crept to the President’s box and shot Lincoln and jumped to the stage of Ford’s Theatre, he wasn’t wearing a disguise; he hadn’t shaved his mustache. He did nothing to conceal himself. He turned to the audience and faced them and cried out the state motto of Virginia, “Sic semper tyrannis!” Tyrants. Then he cried out, “The South is avenged!” Then, just as he left the stage, he really exalted to himself. Only a few people heard it, but just before he vanished from sight, he said, “I have done it!” And he went out the back and got on his horse. The next twelve days are really a wonderful story of mischances, of luck, and of irony. Booth was riding ahead of the news. He made his way out of Washington, and he was able to survive because he had planned the route in advance. He knew many of the people he would visit along the way, including the notorious Dr. Samuel Mudd, who certainly should have been executed for his involvement with the Booth plotters. He encountered Confederate women’s secret agents and their teenage daughters, young nineteen- and twenty-year-old Confederate soldiers who swore they would help him, former slave owners, even some ex-slaves who helped him and guided him. A wonderful man named Thomas Jones, who was a Confederate river agent who had ferried hundreds of people across the Potomac River and helped Booth and David Herold cross after hiding them in a pine thicket for several days. Booth went the wrong way on the river. He lost two days of time; he injured his leg when he jumped from Ford’s Theatre, and he had a wasted day at Dr. Mudd’s. The pursuers, and there were several thousand of them, didn’t know where Booth was, and they could only travel on horseback or by steamboat. So it’s really an incredible story of essentially one man on a horse or in a wagon or in a rowboat with one companion trying to outrun several thousand pursuers who had access to trains, steamboats, horses, and the telegraph. I do point out that if Booth had not been injured and had a few pieces of bad luck, I think he could have escaped. He could have made it into the Deep South, where some counties had never seen a Union soldier. He could have made it into Mexico, which was his plan, and an escape to Europe. Ultimately, I think he would have been caught there, like John Surratt, one of his conspirators who did flee to Canada, fled to Italy, joined the Pope’s Army, but was recognized two years later and brought back to America for trial. One thing that I enjoyed most about doing the book was meeting a number of incredible characters that I knew very little about at the beginning. And I’ll just name a few of them and then tell you how I think Booth did get away with this. There’s Fanny Seward, the wonderful daughter of Secretary of State Seward, who valiantly helped battle against the powerful assassin Lewis Powell, who stabbed her brothers, who stabbed the U.S. Army nurse who almost stabbed her to death, and her firsthand recollections, which she recorded in her diary, are a vivid, wonderful, moving, horrifying, shocking account of the Seward attack. Sadly, she died shortly after the assassination. She would have been a wonderful writer. Another character, Laura Keene, the actress who was on stage and ran up to the box and cradled Lincoln’s head in her lap, and his blood stained her dress. I have quite a different take on Laura Keene. She’s portrayed quite heroically in all the other books on the Lincoln assassination, but I reveal some interesting things about her, and I invite you to reconsider her actions and what she did and said. And one of my other favorite characters who added great insights into Booth’s psychology—his state of mind, his early years—is his sister, Asia Booth. She wrote a secret book about her brother, which was not published until two years later, but she began writing it in the 1870s. And she did something which I’m going to read a brief passage from now that leads really to my final point about how Booth got away with this. She saw that her brother was going to become famous, and she tried to influence it in the way we remember him. And to her, Lincoln and her brother were paired tragic figures, brought together mysteriously by history. And this is what she said, and I’m quoting now: “saved his country from a king, but he created for her a martyr. He set the stamp of greatness on an epoch of history, and gave all he had to build this enduring monument to his foe. The South avenged the wrongs inflicted by the North. A life inexpressibly dear was sacrificed wildly for what its possessor deemed best. The life best beloved by the North was dashed madly out when most triumphant. Let the blood of both cement the indissoluble union of our country.” Do you see what she’s done? She’s almost saying her brother is like a historically necessary figure, like Judas. There can be no Good Friday without Judas’s betrayal. Somehow, there can be no reunion of the country without the murder committed by her brother. Booth’s body was returned to the family four years later. It had been buried secretly, and parts removed as souvenirs. But Vice President Johnson succeeded to the Presidency, and he pardoned the surviving conspirators, and he released from the grave of those that had been executed.

Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to James Swanson, the author of Manhunt, The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, and I would urge you to go to Amazon and pick up the book. I promise you, you will not put it down. It’s a heck of a story. And in this man’s eyes, in John Wilkes Booth’s eyes, he’s the hero, and he thinks in the end that he…