vengeance on the perpetrators. On the surface, Atzerodt’s plan is an act of genius, allowing one of the most wanted men in America to literally hide in plain sight.
But the increasingly unbalanced George Atzerodt is not a genius. His escape is not a premeditated act of egress but a random wandering from home to home, accepting sanctuary and comfort wherever he can find it. He dawdles when he should be making continuous progress. After four days on the run he makes a critical mistake, boldly supporting Lincoln’s assassination while eating dinner with strangers. His statements quickly make their way to U.S. marshals.
Now, as Atzerodt takes refuge at a cousin’s house in the small community of Germantown, Maryland, twenty miles outside of Washington, a cavalry detachment knocks at the door. Entering the house, they find Atzerodt sharing a bed with two other men. “Get up and dress yourself,” a sergeant commands.
There is no fight, no attempt to pretend he shouldn’t be arrested. George Atzerodt goes meekly into custody, where he is soon fitted with wrist shackles, a ball and chain on his ankle, and a hood over his head, just like Lewis Powell.
Less than three months later, George Atzerodt—the twenty-nine-year-old drifter who stumbled into the conspiracy and stumbled right back out without harming a soul—hangs by the neck until dead.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
One week after the assassination, even as John Wilkes Booth is still alive and hiding in a Maryland swamp, the body of Abraham Lincoln is loaded aboard a special train for his return home to Illinois. General Ulysses S. Grant supervises the occasion. The body of Lincoln’s late son Willie rides along in a nearby casket. Abraham Lincoln once confided to Mary that he longed to be buried someplace quiet, and so it is that the president and his dear son are destined for Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery.
But even after the burial, Lincoln’s body will never quite be at rest. In the next 150 years, Lincoln’s casket will be opened six times and moved from one crypt to another seventeen times. His body was so thoroughly embalmed that he was effectively mummified.
The funeral, which is quite different from the actual burial, of course, was held on Wednesday, April 19. Six hundred mourners were ushered into the East Room of the White House. Its walls were decorated in black, the mirrors all covered, and the room lit by candles. General Ulysses S. Grant sat alone nearest his dear departed friend, next to a cross of lilies. He wept.
Mary Lincoln is still so distraught that she will spend the next five weeks sobbing alone in her bedroom; she was notably absent from the list of recorded attendees. The sound of hammers pounding nails all night long on Tuesday, creating the seating risers for the funeral guests, sounded like the horrible ring of gunfire to her. Out of respect for her mourning and instability, President Andrew Johnson will not have the platforms torn down until after she moves out, on May 22.
Immediately after the funeral, Lincoln’s body was escorted by a military guard through the streets of Washington. One hundred thousand mourners lined the route to the Capitol, where the body was once again put on view for the public to pay their last respects.
And now, two days later, there is the matter of the train. In a trip that will re-create his journey to the White House five years earlier—though in the opposite direction—Lincoln’s special train will stop along the way in twelve cities and pass through 444 communities. In what will be called “the greatest funeral in the history of the United States,” thirty million people will take time from their busy lives to see this very special train before its great steel wheels finally slow to a halt in his beloved Springfield.
The unfortunate mementos of his assassination remain behind in Washington: the Deringer bullet and the Nelaton’s probe that pinpointed its location in his brain will soon be on display in a museum, as will the red horsehair rocker in which he was shot. He also leaves behind the messy unfinished business of healing the nation. And while Abraham Lincoln has gone home to finally get the rest he has so long deserved, that unfinished business will have to wait until his murderer is found.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Samuel Mudd is not home when Lieutenant Lovett and the cavalry return. Lovett sends farmhand Thomas Davis to find him.
Mudd is having lunch nearby and quickly returns to his farm to face Lovett.
The terror of their previous encounter returns. He knows that Lovett has spent the previous three days searching the area around his property for evidence. Mudd’s face once again turns a ghostly white. His nervousness is compounded as Lovett questions him again, probing Mudd’s story for discrepancies, half-truths, and outright lies.
This time Lovett does not ride away. Nor is he content to search the pastures and outer edges of the farm. No, this time he wants to go inside Mudd’s home and see precisely where these strangers slept. Lovett gives the order to search the house.
Mudd frantically gestures to his wife, Sarah, who walks quickly to him. He whispers in her ear, and she races into the house. The soldiers can hear her footsteps as she climbs the stairs to the second floor, then returns within just a moment. In her hands are two items: a razor and a boot. “I found these while dusting up three days ago,” she says as she hands them to Lovett.
Mudd explains that one of the strangers used the razor to shave off his mustache. The boot had come from the stranger with the broken leg.
Lovett presses Mudd on this point, asking him if he knew the man’s identity.
Mudd insists that he didn’t.
Lovett cradles the long riding boot in his hands. It has been slit down one side by Mudd, in order that he might pull it from Booth’s swollen leg to examine the wound.
Lovett asks if this is, indeed, the boot the stranger wore.
Mudd agrees.
Lovett presses Mudd again, verifying that the doctor had no knowledge of the stranger’s identity.
Mudd swears this to be truth.
And then Lovett shows Mudd the inside of the riding boot, which would have been clearly visible when Mudd was removing it from the stranger’s leg.
Mudd’s world collapses. His story is shattered in an instant.
For marked inside the boot, plain for all to see, is the name
“J. Wilkes.”
Dr. Samuel Mudd is under arrest.
And while Lieutenant Lovett has just made a key breakthrough in the race to find John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, the truth is that nobody in authority knows where they are.
Lafayette Baker, however, has a pretty good idea.
Baker keeps a host of coastal survey maps in his office at the War Department. With “that quick detective intuition amounting almost to inspiration,” in his own words, he knows that Booth’s escape options are limited.
