Infamous America - BOOTH Ep. 4 | "Manhunt"

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Booth and Herold navigate a swamp with the help of a stranger and then lay low while Army patrols scour the countryside. In Washington, Secretary Stanton's forces finally arrest one of the attackers. In the rest of the country, churchgoers experience the darkest Easter Sunday they've ever known as they mourn the passing of the President. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Wilkes Booth and David Harold had been sitting in the pine thicket for hours. They'd been told to wait for a man who could help them get out of Maryland and into Virginia. They didn't know when the man would arrive, but he would signal them with a particular whistle. They spent those hours waiting in a state of high anxiety. The densely wooded area was a good place to hide, but every rustle of a leaf made them jump. Every snap of a twig, every call of a creature made them get. grab their guns. It would be almost impossible to spot them from a distance. If manhunters were in the area, they would have to miraculously ride right into the fugitive to find them. But Booth and

Harold were still nervous, with obvious good reason. They were the most wanted men in America. And that was actually a light description. They were the most wanted men in the history of America. Finally, after hours of waiting, they heard two whistles from the edge of the thicket. There was a pause and then a third whistle. That was the signal. David Harold moved forward and aimed his gun at the man who whistled. The man was 44 years old, but looked like he could be 60. He knew more about Southern Maryland than any man in the area.

He'd ferried hundreds of Confederate spies across the Potomac River over the years. He would do the same for them. but not yet. An unprecedented manhunt was underway, and military units scoured the roads and hills and swamps of Maryland. Booth and Harold would have to wait a few days before they could cross the river into Virginia. During that time, the reality of the new world

would shatter Booth's dreams of glory. He envisioned himself entering the south as a conquering hero, but he soon faced the fact that he was just a murderer stuck in the trees of a Maryland swamp. Welcome to Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. This is a seven-part series about one of the largest man-hunts in American history, the search for John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

This is Chapter 4, Manhunt. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm a mind. I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN. So you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps

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On the evening of Saturday, April 15th, 1865, Booth and Harold rode away from Dr. Mudd's farm. Mud had given them the names of two men who would help them, William Bertels and Samuel Cox. The men were staunch Confederate supporters. Mud told the assassin and his accomplice which roads to take, but in the darkness, Booth and Harold got lost. It had been about 21 hours since Booth shot President Lincoln,

and Booth and Harold were still stuck in Southern Maryland. They were desperate to cross the Potomac River to Virginia, but to do that, they needed to find Bertels or Cox, and to do that, they needed to rely on the help of a stranger. Booth and Harold rode for two hours before they stumbled on to the log cabin of a free black man named Oswell Swan. Booth asked Swan if he knew the two men they were searching for. Swan knew them both. Swan gave the two travelers a little food and a little whiskey,

and then Booth offered two dollars to take them to the home of William Bertels. Then Booth changed his mind. He wanted to go to the home of Samuel Cox instead. Swan agreed to take them to Cox, but the trip would be more difficult. Bertels lived just two miles away, but Cox lived on the other side of Zikaa Swamp. The two strangers would need an experienced guide to get them through the snakes and the mud and the tangled foliage. Booth added more money to his offer, and Swan agreed to take them to Samuel Cox. They continued their journey almost immediately, and Swan was as good as his word.

He led them through the swamp and right up to the doorstep of Samuel Cox. It had taken roughly three hours of hard travel through the swamp, and they arrived somewhere between midnight and 1 a.m. Cox lived on a vast estate, and his farmhouse was impressive. David Harold knocked on the door while Booth waited on his horse. At the sound of the knock, Samuel Cox poked his head out of a second surrogue. story window and asked who was there. Harold refused to give their names. He said only they were travelers in need of help.

Cox came down, but he was hesitant to assist the two men. He was about to turn them away when Booth struggled down from his horse and hobbled to the door. After some discussion, Cox agreed to help them. They went inside, and Booth and Harold ate some food while their guide, Oswell Swan, waited outside. A couple hours later, Booth and Harold emerged from the house. Harold paid Oswell's Swan $12 for his services and warned him not to say anything about their adventure that night. Then Harold and Booth mounted up and began to follow a man who worked for Cox. It was still dark and they were back on the move. Their new guide led them to a pine

thicket in the area. The two exhausted travelers tied off their horses and moved deeper into the trees. They unrolled their blankets and laid down to catch a couple hours of sleep before dawn. Samuel Cox said they'd be safe in these woods. Sometime the next day, a man would find them and he would announce himself with a particular whistle. The man would smuggle them across the river as he had done for so many other Confederate agents. For now, all they could do was wait. When dawn broke on Sunday, April 16th, churchgoers across the nation, prepared for Easter services they could never have imagined 36 hours earlier. In the Christian tradition, President Lincoln had been shot on a holiday called Good Friday. He had died on Holy

Saturday, and now people mourned his passing on Easter Sunday, the day Christian celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Around the country, ministers prepared sermons about the nation's fallen leader. Celebratory colors were replaced with black, and the Christian Crowds at places of worship and other gathering spots were unprecedented. Churches from the east coast to the west coast overflowed with attendees. Every inch of floor space was taken up. Extra chairs and benches were brought in, and they still weren't enough. People stood along the edges of rooms and crowded into the yards outside while they strained to hear the sermons.

In Union Army camps, the grief was profound. Officers and enlisted men gathered to hear chapter. or anyone who wanted to preach. In African-American churches, the sense of loss was deep, and the fear of uncertainty was strong. President Lincoln had been called the Great Emancipator. He was viewed by many as a kind of protector, and now he was gone.

A person wrote in a journal, The horror and sorrow are intense. Tears are in all eyes. Sobs in every voice, old men and children, rich and poor, black and white. While many of the nation's citizens packed themselves into churches, the search for John Wilkes Booth rolled on, and so did the speculation about his location.

On this Easter Sunday, now known as Black Sunday, there were no good answers. If anything, the confidence of the Manhunters had been shaken. The search for Booth and his conspirators had begun on Friday night. It was now Sunday, and no one of consequence had been arrested. Many, many people had been questioned, and much information had been learned, but the attackers were still out there somewhere, and that somewhere could be as big as half the country. Sergeant Silas Cobb, who was guarding the Navy Yard Bridge on the night of the attacks, reported that he allowed two men to pass that night.

One of those men had called himself Booth. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and his force of soldiers and detectives knew Booth had attacked President Lincoln, and they were pretty sure George Azzarot had been sent to kill Vice President Johnson. But they still didn't know the identity or identities of the person or persons who were involved in the attack on Secretary of State Seward. And they didn't know where any of these attackers were. If the man calling himself Booth at the Navy Yard Bridge had actually been Booth, then the assassin had escaped the city Friday night. He had enough of a head start that he could be hundreds of miles from Washington by now.

Little did Stanton know that Booth and his accomplice, David Harold, were just 40 miles away, pulled up in a pine thicket near a swamp in southern Maryland. Booth and Harold had slept on their bed rolls for some portion of the dark hours before the dawn of Easter Sunday. While people in Washington went to church and Stanton's detectives searched for clues, Booth and Harold waited for their savior. After hours of anxious waiting, they heard two distinctive whistles emanate from the edge of the thicket. There was a pause, and then a third whistle.

Harold grabbed his gun and jumped up. He moved toward the edge of the thicket and spotted the man who had whistled, Thomas Jones. Harold led Jones deeper into the trees. After tramping through the thicket, Thomas Jones met John Wilkes Booth, the man whose name was on everyone's lips and splashed across every newspaper. Booth was lying on his blanket with the rifle from John Lloyd's tavern near him, along with pistols and a knife. Jones had been reticent to help. He'd only come out here because he'd given his word to his old friend Samuel Cox that he would meet the two fugitives.

But once he saw Booth's condition, dirty, pained, and exhausted, he resolved to help the assassin, regardless of his crime. Jones' plan was simple. Booth and Harold needed to hunker down in the pine thicket until the first big wave of the manhunt had passed. Jones would make sure they were safe and had food and water. They needed to be patient. He was willing to help, but he wasn't suicidal. He would find the right time to cross the Potomac River, but it might take several days. They just had to trust him.

Thomas Jones had given up virtually everything for the Confederate cause. He'd lost almost all his money. He'd spent six months in a union prison early in the war. He'd helped scores of Confederate spies move north and south, and he'd received no payment for his services. He'd tried to get paid, but the attempt had been a casualty of the conflict. He'd gone to Richmond late in the war to collect payment for years of service, but he'd waited too long.

Richmond, the Confederate Capitol, was being evacuated as Union forces closed in on the city. But Jones wasn't in it for the money. He was a true believer in the Southern cause, and he felt it was now his duty to help this actor turned assassin. Booth was initially skeptical of the do-nothing plan. He didn't like sitting and waiting. He wanted to get as far away as possible. And he wanted to find a place to heal indoors. But Booth changed his mind on the second day in the thicket.

On Monday, April 17th, Jones returned to the thicket with food and coffee and the other thing Booth craved. newspapers. Booth desperately needed to know how his actions had been received, especially in the South, but he would have to wait to consume the papers. Not long after Jones arrived, the three men heard a sound that terrified them, the pounding of hoofbeats of a cavalry troop. A unit of Union cavalry thundered down a road on the edge of the woods. If they turned into the pines, they could ride incredibly close to the conspirators, and maybe even right into them. The three men held their breath, and the cavalry unit continued down the road past the thicket. The men exhaled, and Booth agreed that it was better to wait.

He was in no condition to make a hard run for it, and worse than that, neither were their horses. The animals were stable horses that were used for easy rides around the city. They were not accustomed to hard riding and hard living in the wilderness. They were in bad shape, and they were a security risk. If the cavalry hadn't been galloping down the road, they could have heard the fugitive's horses and discovered their hideout. Thomas Jones ordered David Harold to take the horses to a pit of quicksand about a mile away. Harold shot the horses and then sank their bodies into the quicksand.

He and Booth were now truly vulnerable. With Booth's broken leg and no horses, they had not. no way to escape if necessary. If Jones didn't get them across the river, they would never survive. On the same day, Booth and Harold received their first major scare, Edwin Stanton's forces made their first big arrests. That Monday morning, they arrested Sam Arnold, the author of the all-important Sam letter. It was the letter that seemed to insinuate a conspiracy that involved the highest levels of

the Confederate government. Sam was advised by his father to tell the arresting officer, officers whatever they wanted to know. At the moment, they wanted to know two things, the details of Booth's plans and the names of Booth's conspirators. Sam didn't know many details of the assassination plot. It had come together too quickly, but he knew plenty of names. At the end of the interrogation, the detective sent a wire that advised the arrest of four men, one of whom they already knew, John Wilkes Booth. The other three were Michael O'Loughlin, George Atzeron, and John Serat.

O'Loughlin turned himself in when he found out he was wanted for arrest. He was placed in double irons in Baltimore and sent to Washington under heavy guard. He was the only one of the three who was caught immediately, but he was far from the only one arrested on Monday the 17th, and one of more than a hundred who had been arrested up to that point. Booth's brother Junius was arrested. A Portuguese sea captain was arrested for some reason. Dozens of Confederate sympathizers and agents were arrested.

The stage hand at Ford's Theater who had briefly helped Booth was arrested. Twice. Those were just a few of the many. But unfortunately for War Secretary Edwin Stanton, the main conspirators were still at large. Booth and Harold were hiding in a pine thicket in southern Maryland. George Atserrat was now hiding at his cousin's house in Germantown, Maryland north of the city. And John Serrat was a ghost. Detectives had been to his mother Mary's boarding house at 2 a.m. on the night of the attack,

but the visit had been short. The Washington police had learned Booth had a friend named John Sarat, but they hadn't known much more than that. Neither Booth nor John was at the house, so detectives had left. Now John had been named by a man who was deeper in the conspiracy, and quite frankly, the detectives were desperate. It was time to go back to Mary Sarat's house and press her. for answers. This time, the detectives got very lucky. They arrived at the Sarat boarding house at about 11 p.m. They intended to arrest everyone and search the place. They moved everyone into the

parlor to wait for transportation to a general's headquarters for interrogation. One of the military detectives said later that there was something odd about the procedure. Mary Sarat did not protest her arrest. She didn't even ask why she was being arrested. But that wasn't the strangest part of the evening. The strangest part happened 30 minutes later. A little after 11.30, the bell rang at the front door of the boarding house. A detective and a military captain answered. A big, powerfully built man holding a pickaxe stood on the doorstep.

He looked to be in his early 20s. His clothes were dirty, but they were of fine quality. When the door opened, the young man stepped inside, but then quickly second-guessed his decision. He said he'd made a mistake. The captain and the detective asked him who he was there to see. He said Mary Sarat, and they said he was in the right place. They peppered him with questions, and he gave them vague answers.

He said he was a poor man, and Mary Sarat had offered him a chance to make money by digging a gutter for her house. He had stopped by, at 11.30 that night, to find out when he should begin work in the morning. The soldiers and detectives studied him. carefully. He matched the general description of the man who had attacked Seward. He had an oath of allegiance to the union in his pocket that was signed by L. Payne. The detectives called Mary Sarat into the front room. They asked her if she knew the young man. She said no, she'd never hired him to dig a gutter. The man had been caught in a lie. The detectives could not yet confirm

that he was the man who had attacked Secretary Seward, but they certainly had a number suspicion to arrest him. Booth was probably stunned. He probably read the pages over and over. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. Newspapers in the South had railed against President Lincoln for years. They'd called him a tyrant who had no regard for the law or personal liberty. Now, many of them changed their tune. And the words of one paper were especially painful. The Daily National Intelligence or in Richmond had been firmly against Lincoln. but in the days after the assassination, it praised his purity. It said the people of the nation trusted him with the most serious matters of life and death,

and he did not have a single enemy. John Wilkes Booth vehemently disagreed. He sat in the pine thickets surrounded by newspapers. To Booth, they were as essential to life as the food and drink that Thomas Jones delivered every day. Jones had delivered the papers, and Booth had almost certainly scanned the words with expectant glee. It was his first news from the outside world. It was his first chance to read the glowing reviews that he craved,

that he was certain would be forthcoming. He was shocked to discover that the entire nation, North and South, condemned him as a murdering scoundrel. Well, the newspapers did anyway. There were almost certainly some who cheered him, but just as certainly they did so privately. In public, in print, the newspapers savaged him. They called him a coward for creeping up behind an unarmed man and shooting him in the head.

Booth needed to set the record straight. He pulled out a pocket diary and began to write. Here are some of the exact words of John Wilkes Booth. I passed all his pickets, rode 60 miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. Booth's personality shone clearly in just a few lines.

He didn't ride 60 miles that first night. He rode 30, and the bone of his leg wasn't exactly tearing the flesh at every jump. He said that his country, meaning the Confederacy, owed all its troubles to Abraham Lincoln. And Booth had simply done God's will when he cut down Lincoln. Whether Booth really thought he was acting according to God's wishes, or whether he just thought it would look noble in print, we'll never know. But it brought up an interesting coincidence that Booth never knew about. President Lincoln wrote about that very idea.

In the wake of the assassination, some of Lincoln's personal notes were discovered. In the fall of 1862, as the size and scale and brutality of the war became evident, he wrote, In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. And Booth seemed to be dismayed by another problem with the National Intelligence or newspaper. In his diary, he referred to a letter he'd written that he thought was going to be delivered to the paper and published the day after the assassination.

But it wasn't there. Many years later, an actor from Grover's Theater came forward and claimed he'd received the letter from Booth on the day of the assassination. That night, the actor opened it and read it and said it was a confession of the crime. And the actor said Booth signed it with the names of all the attackers. The actor was terrified, and he threw it in the fire. Now, in an isolated pine thicket, Booth tried to remake history in his diary. He wrote about the failed kidnapping plot and then gave his own account of the assassination. Until today, nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country's wrongs.

For six months we had worked to capture. But our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart. I struck boldly and not as the papers say, I walked with a firm step through. a thousand of his friends, was stopped but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted six semper before I fired. In jumping, broke my leg. Booth wasn't the only conspirator pouring over the newspapers on Monday, April 17th. More than 300 miles north in Elmira, New York, John Surrott read about the assassination and the vicious attack on Secretary Seward.

He didn't know that his mother had been arrested at their house in Washington, but he could easily have guessed, because he saw his own name in the papers. Right there in print, he was identified as the man who had attacked Seward. The allegation was wrong, of course, but War Secretary Edwin Stanton's men were definitely hunting for him. John Sarat fled north to Canada and was the only conspirator to escape justice. Next time on Infamous America, Stanton's forces arrest more conspirators and learn more about Booth's escape from Washington. The reward for Booth, Harold, and Surrott becomes the largest in American history. And it's time for Booth and Harold to make their move.

In the dead of night, they attempt a dangerous crossing of the Potomac River. That's next week on Infamous America. Research for this season was provided by Joey McAdams. editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your writer and host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening.

Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details and join us on social media. We're BlackBarrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks again. We'll see you next week.