Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killer, by James L. Swanson
This is an altogether excellent book about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent 12-day manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices.
The book is a very gripping read. Given the subject matter, it almost has to be. The President of the United States, at the height of his success, assassinated by an actor, who then manages to avoid the authorities for twelve days? Preposterous – except it actually happened. History is indeed much stranger, much more ludicrous, than anything a writer can dream up.
Swanson goes in depth on Booth and his gang, of course, but also provides vivid portraits of some of the other participants in the assassination drama. There’s Boston Corbett, the man who killed Booth at Garrett’s Farm – a devout Christian who, finding himself prone to temptations of the flesh, castrated himself with a pair of scissors, and then he calmly had dinner and went to church before going to see a doctor. (Though given the state of Civil War-era medicine, this may not have been an entirely unjustified decision.)
The most impressive person Booth encountered during his escape, I think, has to be Thomas Jones, a widowed Confederate secret agent who ferried messages and other agents across the Potomac River. When Booth turned up on his doorstep acting for help, Jones calmly hid him under the noses of the Federal cavalry for five days, and got him undetected to his boat’s hiding place. Jones was later arrested, but had carefully arranged things so that no one ever saw him with Booth, so the government had to let him go without charges – Jones got away with it, and got off scot free. In fact, no one would know how Booth had crossed the Potomac to this day, had a reporter not tracked down Jones twenty years later and convinced the old man to share his story before he died.
The portrait of Booth that emerges in the book is not at all flattering; based on Booth’s own writings, he seems to have been a grandiose, lecherous egomaniac, convinced that he would be hailed as a hero for striking down the tyrant, and shocked when all of the North and most of the South blasted him as a bloody-handed murderer. Booth killed Lincoln to avenge the South and prevent black suffrage – and he failed on both counts.
Useless, useless, indeed.
I definitely recommend “Manhunt”, both for the casual reader and for those interested in Civil War history.
-JM