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
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
