Manhunt (31 page)

On the morning of April 19, the most solemn day in the history of the nation began with the president's funeral in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. Workmen labored through the previous night to construct wood risers to accommodate the six hundred invited guests. Disabled by grief, Mary Lincoln was not among them. She remained secluded in the family quarters, sending her sons, Robert and Tad, downstairs as her representatives. The Reverend Dr. Gurley, who prayed over Lincoln's corpse at the Petersen house, presided this day.

On Pennsylvania Avenue tens of thousands of people jostled for position on both sides of the street to view the funeral catafalque when six magnificent white horses drawing Abraham Lincoln's body made the turn from Fifteenth Street onto the avenue. Nimble children scooted up trees for the best view, and at the hotels, restaurants, stores, and offices
lining the avenue every building wept with black crepe, and it seemed that mourners had flung open every single window, poking their heads through to watch the procession below.

The procession rolled slowly forward, the beat of the march measured by muffled bass and tenor drums swathed in crepe. Lincoln's funeral procession was the saddest, most profoundly moving spectacle ever staged in the history of the Republic. There was more. At the U.S. Capitol, in the rotunda beneath the Great Dome, a catafalque waited to receive Lincoln's coffin. Thousands of citizens had already waited hours in line to view Father Abraham. The newspapers said that it would be an open casket. Lincoln had been shot through the head, but the bullet did not disfigure his face, aside from the plum-colored bruising in the vicinity of his right eye socket. The undertaker's artistry had taken care of that. When the funeral was over, the procession done, and the viewing concluded, the president's body would be placed aboard a special train that would carry him home to Springfield.

Only one thing detracted from the sacredness of this day. The murderer, John Wilkes Booth, was still at large. Throughout the solemnities of April 19, no minister or government official mentioned the assassin's name in public. To speak it would desecrate the memory of the honored dead. But the specter of Booth festered, if not on the tongue, then in the mind. It had been five days since Good Friday. Easter had come and gone. And still, Lincoln's killer was free, mocking the manhunters. Something had to be done. Tomorrow, after the president's body left Washington, Edwin Stanton would take an unprecedented step. He planned to issue a dramatic proclamation to the American people that combined an incredible reward with a terrifying threat. But Stanton could not take a break from the hunt. On the morning of the funeral, before the noon service in the East Room, he sent a message to General Hancock at Winchester retracting his flirtation three days ago about enlisting Confederate General Mosby in the manhunt: “There is evidence that Mosby knew of Booth's plan, and was here in this city with him; also that some of the gang are endeavoring to escape by crossing
the upper Potomac to get with Mosby or the secesh there. Atzerodt, or Port Tobacco as he is called, is known to have gone to Rockville Saturday to escape in that direction.”

In New Orleans, the famous detective Allan Pinkerton did not hear about the assassination until the morning of Lincoln's funeral. News had failed to reach the city until five days after the shooting. Pinkerton loathed being away from the action, and he sent a grandiose and ill-timed telegram to Stanton angling for a starring role in the manhunt:

Pinkerton's self-promotion and obsequious flattery fell flat. And New Orleans was a long way from Washington. Booth had already been on the run for five days, and it would take Pinkerton several days to travel to Washington. Stanton already had a few thousand manhunters in the field. He did not need Pinkerton or his vaunted, all-seeing eye. The detective whose motto was “we never sleep” had managed to sleep five nights before informing himself of the most important news of the war.

W
HILE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MOURNERS VIEWED
L
INCOLN'S
remains in Washington on April 19, manhunters prepared to raid the Philadelphia home of the assassin's sister, Asia Booth Clarke. It was all
the fault of her husband, John Sleeper Clarke. On Sunday the sixteenth, Asia remembered that some time ago John Wilkes had entrusted her with some personal papers to safeguard in her vault. When she unlocked the vault and opened her brother's envelopes, she discovered a number of documents, including two amazing letters. One was a tender, intimate letter to their mother that prepared her for his sacrifice to the cause:

Booth's second letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” was his political manifesto that described his love for the Confederacy, his hatred of Lincoln, and his scorn for the black man. In the aftermath of the assassination, the text was incriminating, sensational, and even explosive:

Improvidently, John Sleeper Clarke brought the documents to John Millward, the U.S. marshal in Philadelphia, and then showed them to an editor at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
newspaper. Clarke, with little concern for the welfare of his pregnant wife or the rest of the Booth family, tried to protect himself by publicizing the manuscripts. Millward forbade publication of the letter to Booth's mother, fearing it might elicit sympathy for the assassin. But he allowed the
Inquirer
to publish the manifesto, which it did on April 19, under a series of excited headlines: “Letter of John Wilkes Booth”; “Proof that he Meditated His Crime Months Ago”; “Confesses That He was Engaged in a Plot to Capture and Carry Off the President”; “A Secession Rhapsody.”

Clarke's foolish act provoked the opposite of its intended effect. Like a fire bell in the night, the document summoned swarms of detectives to his door. Asia was furious: “Mr. J. S. Clarke thoughtlessly gave that
enclosed letter alluding to a kidnapping scheme to Mr. Stockton, his personal friend and the reporter of a daily paper, and, as every shred of news was voraciously accepted, the letter was published, and arrests followed in quick succession.” It was only Clarke's first betrayal. He was ashamed of the Booth name now. Soon he would tell Asia that they must divorce to save his reputation and acting career. John Wilkes Booth had never liked his brother-in-law. Indeed, when Clarke proposed to Asia, Booth warned her that Clarke was an opportunist who sought to exploit their name to further his own stage career. “Always bear in mind that you are a professional stepping-stone,” Booth warned her. “Our father's name is a power … in the land. It is dower enough for a struggling actor.”

John Sleeper Clarke did not deflect suspicion—he excited it. What else, government detectives wondered, might the bowels of that Philadelphia mansion give up in addition to the assassin's stunning declaration? Asia described the frenzied manhunters: “It was like the days of the Bastille in France. Arrests were made suddenly and in dead of night…. Detectives, women and men, decoys, and all that vile rabble of human bloodhounds infested the city.” John Sleeper Clarke was seized, taken to Washington, and imprisoned in the Old Capitol for a month.

Asia described how detectives swarmed her home: “This unfortunate publication, so useless now when the scheme had failed—and it led to no fresh discoveries—brought a host of miseries, for it not only served for food to newsmongers and enemies, but it directed a free band of male and female detectives to our house…. My house, which was an extensive (MYSTERIOUSLY BUILT, it was now called) old mansion, was searched; then, without warning, surprised by a full body of police, surrounded, and searched again. We were under hourly surveillance from outside … our letters were few, but they were opened, and no trouble taken to conceal that they had been read first.”

Edwin Booth wrote frequently to his sister during the manhunt. “Think no more of him as your brother; he is dead to us now, as soon he
must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit, in another world.”

The authorities ransacked the house and confiscated anything connected to John Wilkes Booth, including family books, photographs, and documents that had nothing to do with the assassination. Asia catalogued the violations. “All information contained in his criticisms, letters, playbills and theatrical records, has been lost in the general destruction of papers and effects belonging to Wilkes Booth. All written or printed material found in our possession, everything that bore his name was given up, even the little picture of himself, hung over my babies' beds in the nursery. He had placed it there himself saying, ‘Remember me, babies, in your prayers.' Not a vestige remains of aught that belonged to him; his books of music were stolen, seized, or savagely destroyed.”

In Maryland, in the early-morning hours of April 20, two separate teams of manhunters were planning another raid and were closing in on George Atzerodt. He had spent the last four nights at Hartman Rich-ter's place, heedless of the great peril he faced. He didn't know that Booth had signed the conspirators' names to an assassins' declaration—luckily for him John Matthews had destroyed it—but he should have suspected by now that detectives would have searched his room at the Kirkwood and discovered his connection to Booth, and thus the others. He should have fled but instead, foolishly, he tarried at his cousin's. Hartman Richter remembered George's casual behavior. “He remained at my house from Sunday till Thursday morning, and occupied himself with walking about, working in the garden a little, and going among the neighbors. He did not attempt to get away, or hide himself.”

Nor did he attempt to be discreet. His Easter dinner conversation about the assassination, especially his strange comment about a man following Grant onto the train, seemed too knowing to one of Hezekiah Metz's guests, Nathan Page. Three days later, on Wednesday, April 19, Page mentioned the suspicious story to a local Union informant, James Purdum. Purdum passed the tip to Union forces at Monocacy Junction,
and when Captain Solomon Townsend of the First Delaware Cavalry heard it, he took action. Townsend ordered Sergeant Zachariah W. Gemmill to pick up Purdum as a guide, go to the Richters', and arrest Atzerodt.

A second group of manhunters also targeted the Richter place on the morning of April 20. James L. McPhail, the highly effective U.S. Army provost marshal of Maryland, was also in pursuit. McPhail had been active in the manhunt since the night of Lincoln's assassination, when Stanton suspected that Booth might be headed to Baltimore. McPhail had already contributed to the arrests of Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen on April 17. And unfortunately for George Atzerodt, his brother John, and his brother-in-law, John L. Smith, both served on McPhail's staff. John Atzerodt was a patriot and felt duty bound to help McPhail capture his fugitive brother. He reported that George was known to visit their cousin Hartman Richter in Montgomery County. Perhaps, John suggested, McPhail might find him there. The provost marshal ordered detectives to raid Richter's place.

But Sergeant Gemmill and six cavalrymen under his command got there first, at about 4:00 A.M. Gemmill knocked on the door, and, before Richter would open it, he asked twice who it was. Gemmill was impatient: “I told him to come and see.” When Richter came to the door, Gemmill asked him if a man named Atwood—the alias that Atzerodt used at Metz's place—was there. The man had been there, Richter said, but he had left for Frederick, Maryland. When Gemmill said that he would search the house anyway, Richter admitted that Atzerodt was upstairs in bed. Richter's wife chimed in that there were three men up there. Gemmill, holding a candle or lamp, went upstairs with two cavalrymen. They found the hapless Atzerodt in bed. He surrendered meekly, not even asking why he was being taken.