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 Manhunt, the Twelve Day Chase for Lincoln's killer.
Swanson begins by sharing with us how he came to

(00:32):
write his New York Times bestseller.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
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 and the Civil War, and trinkets from the
Lincoln sites. And when I got a little older books

(00:56):
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 long gone, gave me a
framed engraving, which you might think is an unusual gift

(01:19):
for a child. It was an engraving of John Wilkes
booth Darryner 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. And I remember reading that vividly.

(01:42):
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 it
would begin with the breaking news the President shot, and
as each edition came out later in the day, more
headlines would be added, the President shot, is dying, not

(02:02):
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. And I must have

(02:25):
read that clipping a 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 books about Abraham Lincoln,
probably even more. No one has ever done the complete bibliography,

(02:48):
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 a hundred books like this, but there wasn't one.
So that really gave me incentive to do it. So
I'd ask this question, who was Abraham Lincoln on the

(03:10):
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 on April ninth. Lincoln gave his last speech
from the White House grounds the evening of April eleventh,

(03:34):
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 that the capital Dome was
so beautiful that it looked like a second moon had

(03:55):
descended upon the earth, as a sign of God's favor
for the Union, 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 that strange dream
again last night. And Gideon Wells, the Secretary of the Navy, said, well,

(04:18):
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 of major significance is about to happen. The meeting

(04:41):
broke up and Lincoln took his wife Mary and 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 was a crushing burden on Lincoln, and the Lincoln's

(05:01):
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 his 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 her again, we must be happy again. She

(05:22):
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 the play Our American Cousin to seek release
from the exhilaration of victory. So that's who Lincoln was
on that day. It was his week in his day

(05:43):
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 morning? Twenty six years old? One of the most
popular actors in America. Exceedingly handsome, athletic, Women and men

(06:09):
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
best thing that ever happened to the black man. He
was standing below the White House window on April eleventh

(06:30):
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.
Any one of us could have gone to the Lincoln
White House, walked in the front door, approached the office suites,

(06:52):
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 of lots. You would be admitted
to the presence of the sitting president without being searched,
without being identified. There were no methods of identifying people then.
There were no driver's license, no photo IDs, and Lincoln

(07:15):
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.
Booth could have gained easy access to the White House
and slaughtered Lincoln at his desk. We'll never know why.
Certainly Booth was building himself up to a climax to

(07:38):
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
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 and escape

(07:58):
because the theater ought 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
counterintuitively smart to kill him in the theater and have
his horse waiting in the back. We'll never know why,

(08:19):
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
its way to Washington on the inaugural journey in eighteen
sixty one. It's almost as though in a civil war

(08:39):
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 fifty
feet of the President, looking down on him while he
read that Magnificent with Malice toward None, with Charity for

(09:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
And you've been listening to James Swanson, author of Manhunt,
The 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.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
On a stage.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
I have 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 to do it
in the theater. That's a great actor. What he wanted
to stage his final performance. When we come back more
of this remarkable story, the story of Lincoln's assassination and

(09:49):
it's aftermath. Here on our American stories, And we returned

(10:10):
to our American stories and to James Swanson, author of
manhunt the twelve day chase for Lincoln's killer. Let's pick
up where we last left off.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
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, 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

(10:44):
before to kidnap Abraham Lincoln during the war and hold
him hostage as a master stroke to amund the war,
but that plan didn't work out. Booth wanted to do
this because he hated Lincoln. Lincoln was really an American caesar.
To John Will Booth, he wanted to punish Lincoln the tyrant.
He hoped to change history, and of course he wanted

(11:06):
eternal fame. He had it in his lifetime, but he
wanted to be immortalized as a Southern and ultimillion American patriot.
So he had just enough time to assemble his co conspirators,
get his guns, 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 Willis Booth called the final meeting

(11:30):
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. I shall kill Lincoln alone.
He turned to another conspirator, Lewis powellan 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 will murder him in his bed. He's been

(11:51):
in a terrible carriage accident. He's helpless, he can't move.
Go in and kill him. He told George Atzerout, a
German immigrant. You will 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

(12:12):
of conspirators ever met together again. In full. You all
know the rest of the story of what Melville called
that bloody, awful night. 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,

(12:35):
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 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

(12:57):
the state motto of Virginia sixth semper turannas 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, 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,

(13:22):
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
route in advance. 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

(13:45):
their teenage daughters, young Confederate soldiers nineteen and twenty years
old who swore they would help him, former slave owners,
even some ex 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

(14:06):
hiding them in a pine thicket for several days, Booth
went the wrong way on the river. He lost two
days of time, he injured his leg when he jumped
from Ford's theater, and he had a wasted day at
doctor Mudd's. 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

(14:29):
story of essentially one man on a horse or in
a wagon or in a rowboat with one companion trying
to outrun several 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

(14:52):
have made it into the Deep South, where some counties
had never seen a Union soldier. He could have made
it into Mexico, which was his plan, and he even
escaped 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 first hand
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 Keen, the actress who was on stage

(16:03):
and ran up to the box and cradle Lincoln's head
in her lap and his blood stained her dress. I
have quite a different take on Laura Keen. 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's 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 a brief passage from now that leads really

(16:47):
to 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. Booth's body was returned to
the family four years later. It had 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

(18:17):
been executed.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
And you've been listening to James Swanson, the author of
Manhunt the Twelve Day Chase for a 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 Almeric stories dot Com. You'll get Lincoln's assassination
through the eyes of the superintendent of DC's police department
at the time, played by one of the great reenactors
in all of America. The Ford Theatres reenactor. He did
that for us, especially here on our American stories. When
we come back more with James Swanson, the author of Manhunt.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Here on our American Stories.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
And we continue here with our American stories and with
the author James Swanson the book Manhunt, the twelve day
Chase for Lincoln's Killer. And now we return to James
Swanson and the story of John Wilke Spooth and today
the biggest manhunt in American history.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
One of the most remarkable things I found in researching
this book, Bok was what Asia Booth said about his grave,
and it 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 epithaph marks his
grave and there's no stone he's buried in the Booth
family plot, and her book closes with this graveside elergy,

(20:23):
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 great wealth for
his cause. This man was noble in life. He periled
his immortal soul, and he was brave in death. Already

(20:46):
his hidden remains are given Christian burial, and strangers have
piled his grave with flowers. So runs the world away.
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

(21:06):
here's how I think Booth 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 ciphermen of no account accomplishment that we
revile for what they've done. Booth has his own monument.
It's called Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. All his artifacts

(21:30):
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 in marvel at
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

(21:53):
this question. Would you go to Dallas, Texas to find
Lee Harvey Oswall banners near the book Depository. Would you
go to Memphis and find James Earl Ray banners. Somehow
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

(22:16):
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.
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.

(22:40):
He performed the assassination, he performed his escape, He performed
wonderfully an impromptu play. On the twelfth night, in the
middle of the night when the soldiers surrounded him of
the Garrett Barn and engaged him a dialogue and reprote
and set the barn on fire, those were the footlights
of the stage, and he knew that was his last
performance for the American Theater. Other examples of how I

(23:01):
think Ruth has gotten away with us. If you go
to the new Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, the theater
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 Booth's leap to the stage.

(23:22):
You can follow booth steps up the curving staircase, retrace
his path to the box, enter the vestibule, and recreate
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 Booth suspended momentarily in mid air
at the apex of his sleep. John Wilkes Booth would

(23:45):
have loved it. An entire museum, one of the most
popular in America, devoted to his crime. I must have fame,
he once exhorted himself. Fame in the main rotunda figure
of the great Frederick Douglas of Grant and Sherman of
tableau of the entire Lincoln family and who was looking

(24:06):
at them with hatefield eyes. A life size wax figure
of John Wilkes Booth in the gift shop I 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

(24:27):
figures of James Earl Ray at the King Center in Atlanta,
or standing outside the Lorraine Motel, or replicas of Oswald's
Manikar Coconna 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

(24:48):
that the American people could read why he killed Lincoln
if he worked hard on it, he sealed in an envelope.
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

(25:12):
he had possession of that letter, that he destroyed it
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

(25:35):
the assassination. So I think this actor John Matthews made
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 his co conspirator's names. Matthews was adamant

(25:57):
that the others signed it, but we don't know what
the kind was. But based on other 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 cared for by Thomas Jones, the Confederate agent

(26:17):
who brought him food, Booth also implored him bring me
the newspapers. We're not certain what all 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 Losome Act,

(26:39):
and he was crushed to read his reviews. It really
took the wind out of his sales. While 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

(27:02):
own article had not been published, and when he read
the newspaper editorials condemning him. With respect 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

(27:25):
have found Lincoln too lenient. After all, he just wanted
them to go home to their farms. 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

(27:47):
did that as a symbol that it's our song. Now.
It's not the Southern song, it's not the rebel song,
It's an American song. Maybe we would have done to
him what the people of England did to the man.
I'm convinced save them from Nazi invasion. When Churchill was
no longer needed, out of course, Lincoln would have retained office.

(28:08):
He couldn't have been ousted from the presidency. I'm convinced that, somehow,
and maybe this is 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.

(28:31):
So in the end of the book, I want to
make sure that you don't sympathize with John Wilkes Booth.
There's a 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

(28:55):
of my book, certainly not the hero of the book.
And my hero 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,

(29:15):
when I finished with Booth, you'll agree with me that
he's not a folk hero. He's not an Antiicourian curiosity.
He was a racist, a murderer, and he killed one
of the greatest of all Americans.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
And you've been listening to James Swanson, and what a
story he tells. By all means pick up Manhunt, the
twelve day chase for Lincoln's killer.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
There's so much more there.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
He just skims the surface here in this piece of storytelling,
great job is always by Greg Hangler, finding the story,
bringing it to the year, editing up the piece. A
great story, a tragic story, James Swanson manhunt, the story
of the chase for Lincoln's killer.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
Here on our American Stories

Speaker 2 (30:16):
MHM.