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

On this episode of Our American Stories, our storyteller is James Swanson, the NYT Bestseller of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 man Hunt, the Twelve Day Chase for
Lincoln's Killer, and we're telling this story because on this

(00:32):
day in eighteen o nine, Abraham Lincoln was born. I
really came to this story by chance. I was born
in Chicago on Lincoln's birthday, February twelfth, and when I
was a small boy, my parents began giving me Lincoln
comic books, those old classics, illustrated and crayon books about
Lincoln in the Civil War, and trinkets from the Lincoln sites.

(00:56):
And when I got little, older books that I could
actually read, my real interest. 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 now long gone, gave me a framed engraving, which

(01:19):
you might think is an unusual gift for a child.
It was an engraving of John Wilkes booth darringer 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 fifteenth, eighteen
sixty five, the morning that Lincoln died. He was shot
good Friday the night before, and lingered on until the morning.

(01:41):
And I remember reading that vividly. And 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 would begin with the breaking news
the president shot, and as each edition came out later
in the day, a more headlines would be added, The

(02:01):
president's shot is dying, not expected to live. Secretary of
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 a scissors and clipped it just when
I was reading the line, and ran out the back door,

(02:23):
and I must have read that clipping one 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 fifteen thousand

(02:44):
books about Abraham Lincoln, probably even more. No one has
ever done the complete bibliography, and of those fifteen thousand
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 one hundred books
like this or ten, but there wasn't one. So that
really gave me incentive to do it. So I'd ask

(03:08):
this question, who was Abraham Lincoln on the morning of
April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five, 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 third. Lee surrendered

(03:29):
on April ninth. Lincoln gave his last speech from the
White House grounds the evening of April eleventh, and on
April thirteenth, 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 kind, bonfires. One of the papers said

(03:53):
that the capital dome was so beautiful that it looked
like a second moon had descended upon the earth, as
a sign of God's favor for union and 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

(04:15):
that strange dream again last night. And Gideon well As,
a 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

(04:38):
of major significance is about to happen. The meeting broke
up and Lincoln took his wife Mariann 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 eighteen
sixty two, six hundred thousand dead Union and Confederate. It

(05:00):
was a crushing burden on Lincoln, and the Lincoln's 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 the second term ended in eighteen sixty nine,
he wanted to go to the Pacific Ocean. He told
her he wanted to go to California, but he reminded

(05:21):
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
play our American cousin to seek release from the exhilaration
of victory. So that's who Lincoln was on that day.

(05:43):
It was his week in 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

(06:05):
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

(06:26):
best thing that ever happened to the black man. He
was standing below the White House window in April eleventh
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.

(06:46):
Any one of us could have gone to the Lincoln
White House, walked in the front door, approached the office,
suites and tell 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 hours. You would be admitted to
the presence of the sitting president without being searched, without

(07:08):
being identified. There were no methods of identifying people then.
There were no driver's license, 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.

(07:31):
Booth could have gained easy access to the White House
and slottered 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

(07:52):
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 in a scape,
because the theater audience 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 fifteen hundred people in the
theater even stood up to pursue Booth. So it was

(08:14):
counterintuitively smart to kill him in the theater and 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 had. More
one hundred death threats were found in Lincoln's desk after
he was assassinated. He was almost assassinated in Baltimore on

(08:35):
its way to Washington on the inaugural journey in eighteen
sixty one. It's almost as though, even 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

(08:57):
fifty feet of the president, looking down on him while
he read that Different 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. And you've
been listening to James Swanson, author of man Hunt, the

(09:17):
Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, And my goodness, what
insight here thinking about that day in Lincoln's life on
April fifteenth, and that day in John Wilkes Booth's life,
and on a stage. I've 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

(09:40):
to do it in the theater. That's a great actor
would he wanted to stage his final performance when we
come back more of this remarkable story, the story of
Abraham Lincoln born on this day in eighteen o nine.
Here on our American stories, and we returned to our

(10:10):
American stories and to James Swanson, author of man Hunt,
The Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, Let's pick up
where we last left off. Booth needed a catalyst, though,
and that came when he visited Ford's Theater midday to
pick up his mail, and someone said Lincoln is coming tonight.

(10:32):
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 round the war, but that plan didn't work out.

(10:54):
Booth wanted to do this because he hated Lincoln. Lincoln
was really an American caesar. To John will Spooth, 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 an American patriot. So he had
just enough time to assemble his co conspirators, get his guns,

(11:17):
his supplies, his horses, send certain messages to people, whose
help he needed. And just as the Lincoln's were riding
to Ford's Theater in their carriage with their theater guests,
John Wilkes Booth called the final meeting of his conspirators
at eight PM at a hotel two blocks from Ford's Theater.
And that's the first moment he told them, we strike tonight.

(11:37):
I shall kill Lincoln alone. He turned to another conspirator,
Lewis Powell, and ex Confederate soldier, said you will go
to the home of the Secretary of State, guided by
David Harold, 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 atzer Out, a German immigrant. You will

(11:58):
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.

(12:25):
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

(12:47):
shot Lincoln and jumped to the stage of Ford's Theater,
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 sixth temperate Terrannis. Stuff's always tyrants. Then he
cried out the South as 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,

(13:10):
he said, I have done it, and he went out
the back and got on his horse. The next twelve
days is 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 root in advance.

(13:32):
He knew many of the people he would visit along
the way, including the notorious doctor 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 Confederate soldiers nineteen and twenty years old who swore
they would help him, former slave owners, even some ex

(13:53):
slaves who helped him and guide 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 Harold 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,

(14:14):
he injured his leg when he jumped from Ford's theater,
and he had a wasted day at doctor MUDs. 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

(14:37):
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 a diver
Sina Union soldier. He could have made it into Mexico,

(14:58):
which was his plan, and he might have even an
escape to Europe. Ultimately, I think he would have been
caught there, like John Sarat, 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

(15:18):
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 us.
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 US Army nurse

(15:40):
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

(16:03):
and ran up to the box and created 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

(16:26):
added great insights into booth 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
in two years later, but she began writing it in
the eighteen seventies. And she did something which I'm going
to read brief passage from now that leads really to

(16:47):
my final point about how Booth got away with us.
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

(17:10):
is what she said. Her brother, 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 avenge
the wrongs inflicted by the North. A life inexpressibly dear
was sacrificed wildly for what its possessor deemed best. The

(17:33):
life best beloved by the North was dashed madly out
when most triumphant, let the blood of both cement the
indissolable 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,

(17:55):
there can become no reunion of the country without the
murder committed by her brother. Boost body was returned to
the family four years later, I have 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.

(18:18):
And you've been listening to James Swanson, the author of
man Hunt, 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 books Boot's eyes, he's the
hero and he thinks in the end that he did

(18:38):
something great and good and virtuous. And that's what's so
interesting about this story. And that's what's so interesting about
the nature of man, the nature of sin, And this
is why the book is so compelling. When we come back,
we're going to continue with this remarkable story. And again,
the man who watched Lincoln's assassination is something we did too.

(18:59):
Go to our America Stories dot com. You'll get Lincoln's
assassination through the eyes of the superintendent of DC's police
department at the time. The story of Abraham Lincoln born
on this day in eighteen o nine. More with James Swanson,
the author of Manhunt, here on our American Stories. And

(19:38):
we continue here with our American Stories and with the
author James Swanson, the book man Hunt, the twelve day
Chase for Lincoln's killer. And we're telling this story because
on this day in eighteen o nine, Abraham Lincoln was born.
And now we returned to James Swanson and the story
of John Wilkes Booth and to day the biggest man

(20:01):
hunt in American history. One of the most remarkable things
I found in researching this book was what Asia Booth
said about his grave and had really made me aware
of the memory of Booth and how we need to
challenge it. I think this is what she said, that
no epitaph marks his grave and there's no stone. He's

(20:22):
buried in the Booth family plot, and her book closes
with this grave side elegy, but granting that he died
in vain. He gave his all on earth, youth, beauty, manhood,
a great human love, the certainty of excellence in his profession,
a powerful brain, the strength of an athlete, health, and

(20:43):
great wealth for his cause. This man was noble in life,
he periled his immortal soul, and he was brave in death.
Already his hidden remains are given Christian burial, and strangers
have piled his grave with flowers. So runs the world away.

(21:03):
That was one of the most shocking things I'd read
in the tens of thousands of pages that I read
researching this book. And in a way, she's right. And
here's how I think both has gotten away with it.
In American memory, we don't think of John Wilkes Booth
the way we think of our other assassins, Lee Harvey Oswald,
James Earl, Ray Cipher, men of no account accomplishment that

(21:27):
we revile for what they've done. Booth has his own monument.
It's called Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. All his artifacts
are in the basement museum there. His diary, as if
awaiting a final entry, is open for us to see
the pistol he used to kill Lincoln, which children over
a million of them visit a year, and marvel at

(21:47):
the photos of his girlfriends in his pockets. Near Ford's Theater,
there are street banners with his photograph blown up to
massive size, directing tourists to Ford's Theater. I would pose
this question, would you go to Dallas, Texas to find
Lee Harvey Oswald Banners near the book depository. Would you
go to Memphis and find James Earl Ray Banners. Somehow

(22:12):
Booth has been drained by modern culture of his dangerousness,
of his evil nature, the fact that he was a killer,
a racist. He murdered our greatest president, and yet we
think of him in an almost antiquarian way. We think
of him as the tragic young actor who threw away
his life and his talent for a cause that was wrong.

(22:34):
And I don't think we condemn him the way most
Americans did in eighteen sixty five. I think this is
partly because Booth performed this so well, and he's almost
tricked us into believing this isn't quite real. It's a play.
He performed the assassination, he performed his escape, He performed
wonderfully an impromptu play. On the twelfth night, in the

(22:55):
middle of the night when the soldiers surrounded him of
the garret barn and engaged him a dialogue and repartetion
set the barn on fire. Those were the footlights of
the stage, and he knew that was his last performance
for the American Theater. A couple other examples of how
I think has gotten away with us. If you go
to the new Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, the theater

(23:15):
is dressed to appear just as it did on the
night of April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five. The State Box
is festooned with flags, and the framed engraving of George
Washington that hangs from the front of the box is
the actual one that witnessed Booths leap to the stage.
You can follow booth steps up the curving staircase, retrace
his path to the box, enter the vestibule, and recreate

(23:36):
his view of Lincoln's rocking chair. You can sit in
the audience, and while listening to a National Park Service
historian lecture on the assassination, you can stare up at
the box and imagine Booths suspended momentarily in midair at
the apex of his leap. John Wilkes Booth would have
loved it. An entire museum, one of the most popular

(23:57):
in America, devoted to his crime. I must have fame,
he once exhorted himself. Fame in the main rotunda, figures
of the great Frederick Douglas of Grant and Sherman of
tableau of the entire Lincoln family, and who is looking
at them with hate filled eyes? A life size wax
figure of John Wilkes Booth in the gift shop I

(24:20):
found for sale to children toy Derringer pistols. It was unbelievable,
and I would say again, would you find wax figures
of Oswald at the Kennedy Library in Boston, at wax
figures of James Earl Ray at the King Center in Atlanta,
or standing outside the Lorraine Motel, or replicas of Oswald's

(24:40):
Manliker Coconnor rifle for sale to our children? I think not.
Booth was so avid that before he killed Lincoln the
night of the fourteenth, he wrote his own op ed
to be published in the papers the next day, so
that the American people could read why he killed Lincoln
if he worked hard on he sealed in an envelope.

(25:01):
He handed it to an actor friend and said, I
may have to leave town rather quickly, and I might
not be coming back. And if I don't come back,
will you deliver this to the National Intelligence or new
editor the next day? That man was so terrified that
he had possession of that letter, that he destroyed it

(25:23):
and it was never published. Later, he purported to reconstruct
the letter, but I note in my book that I
don't believe his reconstruction of the letter because his attempt
to reconstruct the letter is based on a memo that
Booth wrote that was discovered in his sister's safe after
the assassination. So I think this actor John Matthews made

(25:47):
up the letter and didn't really remember it. He just
sort of paraphrased a known Booth document. The one thing
he did, the only thing he remembered about that letter,
which I do believe it was signed by Booth, and
then he signed and his co conspirator's names Matthew, and
Matthews was adamant that the others signed it. But we
don't know what the content was. But based on other

(26:08):
Booth documents, we can guess he was crushed, and he
records this in his memo book. During the escape, he
was crushed that that op ed was not published. Then
when he was hiding in that pine thicket for five
days and four nights being carried for by Thomas Jones,
the Confederate agent who brought him food. Booth also implored
him bring me the newspapers. We're not certain what all

(26:30):
the issues were, but based on the distribution of Confederate mail,
we know that the Confederates had access to certain Northern
papers pretty quickly, and if Booth had read any of them,
he would have read how he had been damned for
this loathsome act, and he was crushed to read his reviews.
It really took the wind out of his sales. While

(26:51):
he was hiding in this pine thicket, he couldn't move.
At one point, Union cavalry came within two hundred yards
of his hiding place, and he just had to sit
there and wait and read what the North thought of him.
It was his lowest point in the escape when he
saw that his own article had not been published, and
when he read the newspaper editorials condemning him. With respect

(27:14):
to what would have happened if Lincoln survived, it's the
great unanswered question of the Lincoln assassination. Who knows. Maybe
Lincoln's death made it easier for the Republicans to pass
the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments. I don't know. Maybe
radical Republicans would have found Lincoln too lenient. After all,
he just wanted them to go home to their farms.

(27:36):
Lincoln didn't want to put any of the Confederate leadership
on trial, not even Jefferson Davis himself. He didn't want
to try any of the generals for treason. He wanted
to have an easy piece for the South and bring
the country together. That's why he asked the band at
the White House to play Dixie a few days before
he died. He did that as a symbol that it's
our song. Now, it's not the Southern song, it's not

(27:58):
the rebel song, it's an Americans. So maybe we would
have done to him what the people of England did
to the man. I'm convinced saved them from Nazi invasion
when Churchill was no longer needed. Out of course, Lincoln
would have retained office. He couldn't have been ousted from
the presidency. I'm convinced that somehow, and maybe this is

(28:21):
just a hope of mine, that Lincoln's generosity, his magnificent
insights into human nature and human psychology, his wonderful ability
to speak and write and communicate, would have somehow made
post war life better for the freed slaves. So in
the end of the book, I want to make sure
that you don't sympathize with John Wilkes Booth. There's a

(28:43):
temptation to do it, because he had a side that
was charismatic, that was mesmerizing, and you spend twelve days
with him in my book. Really, I put you in
the saddle with him, side by side, so that you
meet everyone he met along the way and experience everything
he did. But Booth is not the hero of my book,
certainly not the hero of the book. And my hero

(29:06):
is Abraham Lincoln. And even though Lincoln leaves the scene
in the first quarter of the book, I hope that
you'll find that you find his memory in his presence
and legacy to linger throughout the book, and that by
the time you get to the end, when I finished
with Booth, you'll agree with me that he's not a
folk hero, he's not an anti Chourian curiosity. He was

(29:29):
a racist, a murderer, and he killed one of the
greatest of all Americans. And you've been listening to James
Swantson and what a story he tells. By all means,
pick up man Hunt, the twelve day chase for Lincoln's
killer there's so much more there. He just skims the
surface here in this piece of storytelling. Great job as

(29:49):
always by Greg Hangler, finding the story, bringing it to
the year, editing up the piece. A great story, a
tragic story. James swantson Manhunt, the story of the chase
for Lincoln's killer, the story of Abraham Lincoln, born on
this day in eighteen o nine. Here on our American story.