Manhunt (51 page)

At first, Lafayette Baker's intrigues paid off handsomely—$17,500, an impressive sum considering that the salary of the president of the United States was $25,000. Colonel Conger got the same as Baker; Luther Baker got $5,000; and Lieutenant Doherty, commander of the Sixteenth New York Garrett's farm patrol, got only $2,500. Together, the Baker cousins outmaneuvered their rivals and monopolized $22,500, nearly one-quarter of the entire $100,000 reward. Loud, indignant complaints forced Congress to investigate the matter. Claims were reevaluated, reports were published by the Government Printing Office, and all the while, the manhunters lobbied greedily for their money. Booth would have likely enjoyed the grotesque spectacle of this bickering for blood money over the bodies of a dead president and his assassin.

Congress adjusted the figures and finally, more than one year after the manhunt, the U.S. Treasury issued warrants to disburse the reward.
Congress cut Conger's share from $17,500 to $15,000 and raised Doherty to a more generous $5,250. But the Bakers suffered badly. Lafayette Baker, who was not present at Garrett's farm, saw his share reduced from $17,500 to $3,750, while Luther Byron Baker's share was cut from $5,000 to $3,000. God may have guided Boston Corbett's hand at Garrett's farm, but the Almighty did not intervene to line the eccentric sergeant's pocket. He received the same payout as every enlisted man and noncommissioned officer there—$1,653.84.

Conger, Doherty, the Bakers, and the twenty-six men—two sergeants, seven corporals, and seventeen privates—from the Sixteenth New York Cavalry were not the only ones to enjoy a payday for Booth's capture and Herold's arrest. James O'Beirne, H. H. Wells, George Cot-tingham, and Alexander Lovett were awarded $1,000 each for their roles in the manhunt.

And then there were the other rewards. Nine men received bounties for the capture of George Atzerodt. Sergeant Zachariah Gemmill got the most—$3,598.54—and seven others won subordinate rewards of $2,878.78 each. James W. Purdum, the citizen whose tip contributed to the German's arrest, was paid the same. Major E. R. Artman, 213th Pennsylvania Volunteers, received $1,250.

Ten claimants split the reward money set aside for the arrest of Lewis Powell. Compared with what some other manhunters received for less hazardous work, the bounty for capturing the dangerous Seward assassin was not generous. Major H. W. Smith got the most, $1,000, and the other participants—Detective Richard Morgan, Eli Devore, Charles H. Rosch, Thomas Sampson, and William Wermerskirch—were paid $500 each. Citizens John H. Kimball and P. W. Clark also received $500 each, and two women, Mary Ann Griffin and Susan Jackson—“colored”—received the smallest rewards paid to anyone who shared in the bounty, just $250 each.

The reward payments totaled $104,999.60, and the Treasury Department issued warrants “in satisfaction of all claims,” to the dissatisfaction of the many claimants—officers, soldiers, detectives, government
officials, citizens, and crackpots—who dreamed of cashing in on Stanton's April 20 proclamation, but who got nothing.

Richard Garrett also made a claim against the government, not for helping capture Booth and Herold, but for the damage that the MANHUNTERS did to his property. His inventory was extensive. Two thousand dollars for one “tobacco house … framed on heavy cedar posts, plank floor throughout … furnished with all the fixtures for curing tobacco, including prize-press and sticks for hanging tobacco.” Then there were the contents, for which Garrett demanded $2,670: “One wheat-threshing machine (150); two stoves (25); one set large dining room tables (mahogany or walnut) (50); ten walnut chairs, cushioned seats (40); one feather bed (15); one shovel (1); two axes (3); five bushels sugar-corn seed (7.50); five hundred pounds hay (10).”

In addition, Garrett wanted $21.00 for the fifteen bushels of corn and 300 pounds of hay consumed by the horses of the Sixteenth New York. The government actually considered his claim, issued an official report, and refused to pay him a cent, reasoning that he had, after all, been disloyal to the Union.

Boston Corbett did enjoy additional compensation—fame. The public celebrated him as “Lincoln's Avenger.” Citizens deluged him with fan mail, and he faithfully answered their letters, sometimes offering biographical tidbits, religious counsel, or occasionally a coveted, firsthand account of the events at Garrett's farm. To the delight of autograph seekers, Corbett made a point of signing these letters with his full name, rank, and unit. The following letters are typical.

Incredibly, Corbett also corresponded with the assassin's family. Corbett's letter, long lost, its contents unknown, exists only as a shadow in Asia Booth Clarke's memoir of her brother: “We regard Boston Corbett as our deliverer, for by his shot he saved our brother from an ignominious death…. I returned Boston Corbett's letter to him; he did not request it exactly, but I thought it honorable to do so and safer at the time not to retain it…. He is still living, but I know he is not happy…. May he have no regret.”

Photographer Mathew Brady scored a coup over his rival Alexander Gardner. Although Gardner had won the right to photograph the conspirators in irons on the navy ironclads, and also Booth's autopsy, Brady secured an exclusive sitting with the man of the hour. Always alert to the commercial possibilities of his art, Brady arranged Corbett in a variety of poses: seated and standing, reading a book and looking at the camera, armed and unarmed. Brady even persuaded Lieutenant Doherty to join the session for a standing, double portrait with Corbett, each man decked out in full cavalry regalia. The greater the number of poses Brady could induce Corbett to assume, the more cartes-de-visite he could sell to a besotted public. Some lucky fans even got Corbett to autograph his photo for their albums. When he appeared in public, reported one newspaper, “he has been greatly lionized, and on the streets was repeatedly surrounded by citizens, who occasionally manifested their appreciation by loud cheers.”

A few dissenting voices, including the editors of the
Chicago Tribune
,
wondered why the men of the Sixteenth New York had to kill the assassin: “The general regret is that Booth was not taken alive, and the general disposition to complain that he might have been if a combined rush of twenty-eight men surrounding them had been made.”

The man of the hour, Booth's killer, Boston Corbett (top). Blood money—Corbett's share of the $100,000 reward (bottom).

Beyond the reward money, Corbett profited little from his fame. Relic hunters offered fantastic sums for his Colt revolver, up to $1,000, but he refused to part with it. It wasn't his to sell: the weapon had been purchased by the War Department and issued to the sergeant along with his uniform, saber, and other equipment. Then, not long after he shot Booth, somebody stole it from him, and it hasn't been seen since.

Boston Corbett was never punished for shooting Booth. He had violated no orders, and no one could prove that his true motive was anything other than protecting his men. He had the reputation of a good
soldier. Luther Baker remembered that “he attended to his duties as a soldier very strictly, and seemed to have a good deal of dignity among the men.” But Baker also recalled something else about the eccentric, self-castrating, hard-fighting sergeant: “I noticed from the first that he had an odd expression.”

T
WO AND A HALF MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH OF
J
OHN
W
ILKES
Booth at Garrett's farm, at around 11:00 A.M. on July 6, 1865, the clock began ticking down on one of the most dramatic events in the history of Washington, the epilogue of the manhunt for Lincoln's killers. It began when Major General Winfield Scott Hancock rode to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, now Fort Leslie McNair, carrying four sealed envelopes from the War Department. They were addressed neatly in a clerk's hand to four prisoners who had languished in solitary confinement at the arsenal.

Hancock handed the envelopes to Major General John F. Hartranft, commandant of the prison. Hartranft accepted the mail grimly. He suspected, without even breaking the seals, what the envelopes contained, and the unpleasant duty that awaited him. Together, Hartranft and Hancock marched to the prison building and, walking down a long corridor from cell to cell, delivered the envelopes to their recipients—Lewis Powell, Mary Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt.

Torn open in fearful haste, the envelopes contained death warrants. Having been found guilty by a military commission of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William Seward, the letters informed Powell, Surratt, Herold, and Atzerodt that they were to be put to death by hanging.

For the defendants, that news was bad enough, but the rest was equally shocking. By order of President Andrew Johnson, they would be hanged the next day, on July 7. Hartranft left the stunned prisoners, who had less than a day to live, to contemplate their fates. He had work
to do. Did anyone at the fort know how to build a scaffold? Or how to tie a noose?

The rapid conviction, sentencing, and execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators ended a trial that had meandered through May and June. The archfiend Booth was dead, but eight members of his supporting cast took center stage in his absence.

Johnson, under pressure by Edwin Stanton, had ordered that eight members of Booth's supporting cast be tried by a military tribunal, a controversial move that provoked objections from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Lincoln's first attorney general, Edward Bates. The trial proceeded anyway and became the great focus for that spring and summer. By the time it was over, the commission had been in session for seven weeks, had taken the testimony of 366 witnesses and had produced a transcript of 4,900 pages.

On June 29, the commission went into secret session. After such a long and complicated trial, observers thought that it might take weeks to reach verdicts. But the end came more quickly. After deliberating just a few days, the tribunal presented the verdicts and sentences to Johnson on July 5. He approved them at once, and the next day Hancock carried the execution orders to the prison.

The residents of Washington did not know until the
Evening Star
came off the press on the afternoon of July 6 that four conspirators would hang the next day. Indeed, it was from the newspapers that Surratt's attorneys learned their client would die. Newsboys rushed onto Pennsylvania Avenue, hawking the issue to eager readers: “Extra. Mrs. Surratt, Payne, Herold and Atzerodt to be Hung!! The Sentences to be Executed Tomorrow!! Mudd, Arnold, and O'Laughlin to be Imprisoned for Life! Spangler to be Imprisoned for Six Years!”

As evening passed and night fell, the news caused a flurry of activity throughout Washington. Reporters converged on the Old Arsenal, but Hartranft barred them from interviewing the condemned. Frustrated but refusing to be outwitted, the gentlemen of the press spied on the prisoners through cell windows, and recorded in their notebooks the
last visits of family members and how the condemned behaved. In the courtyard, soldiers labored through the night building a scaffold while the hangman prepared four nooses from thirty-one-strand, two-thirds-inch Boston hemp, supplied by the Navy Yard.