"Manhunt:The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James L. Swanson

This is a detailed and surprisingly suspenseful account of John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln, his twelve-day flight, and the Federal government's pursuit of him. Like many, I'd encountered the basic outline of this story before, much in Swanson's account surprised me. What shocked me was how lacking the security around Lincoln was considering the vehemence of feelings at the time. Petitioners could visit the President without going through any kind of security check. This was a far from peaceful world; There were certainly of guns and armed men in the neighborhood of The White House. Swanson mentions "numerous" assassination attempts on Lincoln prior to Booth's successful one. There was also no dearth of available weapons; Booth used a single-shot pistol to assassinate Lincoln, despite the fact that in wartime Washington "thousands of guns, including small, lightweight pocket-sized revolvers, were for sale"(21).

Booth is difficult to figure. All who encountered him noted his good looks, especially his piercing eyes. He was an accomplished actor and widely recognized. He was well-off and popular with women. And yet, he was "crushed by the fall of Richmond, and by the fire that consumed much of the rebel capital" and when the South surrendered, "Booth wandered the streets in despair,"(5) seeking the quickest means to "'drive away the blues'"(5). His loving sister, Asia Booth Clarke, slanted the picture a bit but captures the mystery of the man when she elegized "'granting that he died in vain, yet 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 athelte, health and great wealth, for his cause'"(368-369).

Swanson doesn't deviate from the tight focus of his book to detail the reasons why Booth was so strongly attached to the Southern cause. He simply relates the effects of that attachment. Booth had organized a failed attempt to kidnap the president in the fall of 1864 which was a failure. On the morning of April fifteenth, hungover, he heard the news that the president was going to attend a play at Ford's Theater that night. He decided then and there to not only assassinate the president at the theater, but quickly organized his accomplices and set them on missions to simultaneously assassinate Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson.

Swanson provides accounts of all three assassination attempts. The central one, Booth's, succeeded in part thanks in part to the usual dumb luck. It was concocted on the spur of the moment. Booth only heard of Lincoln's visit the morning of and put the event in works over the course of an afternoon. It succeeded despite the fact that Booth was poorly armed. For reasons unexplained, Booth insisted on using an unreliable single-shot pistol rather than a revolver. Half-prepared, he had a hard time finding someone to watch his horse outside the back door of Ford's while he went inside to do the deed. Also, and it's hard to know how anyone knows this, but apparently, just as Booth fired, Lincoln "jerked his head away from Booth"(43). But, not far enough away.

The Seward assassination was a desperate and ugly bungled job undertaken by the 21-year old "loyal, obedient, and hard-fighting" confederate veteran Lewis Powell. Gaining entry surreptitiously as a pharmacy delivery boy, once inside Seward's home, Powell ended up wildly flailing about with a knife as he engaged Seward's army nurse, Seward's two sons, and Seward himself in a vicious, hand-to-hand combat.

Booth threatened to expose the third assassin, a carriage painter named George Atzerodt, when he initially expressed an unwillingness to participate by assassinating Johnson. The coerced Atzerodt never did finished his assigned task, backing off at the last minute. Most likely, he could have easily assassinated Johnson, who occupied a room directly above Atzerodt's at the

Late in the book, Swanson notes the tendency in later times to romanticize Booth: "...his image morphed from evil murderer of a president into fascinating antihero- the brooding, misguided, romantic, and tragic assassin." Observing the use of Booth's image in banners around present day Ford's theater, he rightly observes "the display of Lee Harvey Oswald banners in Dallas, or James Earl Ray banners in Memphis, would be obscene"(383).

Is this romanticizing, this de-fanging, simply a matter or time? Or do writers like Swanson play a part by continuing to paint him as a tragic, romantic anti-hero? Describing Booth's escape from Washington, Swanson goes for Biblical rhetoric: "Like Lot's wife, who paused, turned, and dared look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Booth could see the sleeping city from which he fled, and he knew it would awaken soon and hear of the destruction he had wrought. He had done it. And he had escaped"(68).

None of this proves true. Booth did receive some of the fame he sought. Years afterward, all sorts of "Booth is alive and living in..." stories emerged, such "survival myths...evok[ing] the traditional fate of the damned, of a cursed spirit who can find no rest"(385). Also, Booth wrought considerable destruction. However, he failed to reverse the verdict of the war as he most likely hoped: the war was over and Lincoln's assassination failed to reignite it. Indeed, Lincoln's assassination served to make Lincoln a folk-hero, cementing his image as Father Abraham, deliverer of the nation. And, ultimately Booth did not escape.

It did take 12 days to capture him. The twists and turns of the hunt as rendered by Swanson's telling provide suspense, but this isn't a pursuit and capture that reflects particularly well on the strength, bravery and ingenuity of either the hunter or the hunted. A good portion of Booth's days on "the run" were spent starving, in pain, and holed up in a pine woods. With the aid of the Confederate agent who had arranged the pine woods hidey-hole, Booth eventually secured a boat to take him across the Potomac to Virginia and what he hoped would be a sympathetic and sheltering South. Unfortunately, he and his side-kick, the sycophantic, immature David Herold, got lost on the river and ended up pretty much where they started back in Maryland, albeit a little further North. For reasons unknown, at this point, they stayed an extra day in yet another hiding spot in a swampy woods. Ultimately, they ended up again staying one day too long at their final stop, the Garrett farm house in Virginia. On April 25th, a cavalry patrol surrounded the barn in which the Garret's had locked Booth and Herold after they tricked them into entering.

Swanson's portrays Booth as an actor who was always on stage and casts Booth's assassination as a self-concious performance by which Booth hoped to cement his reputation as a hero for the ages. Swanson argues, "Booth had not only committed murder, he had performed it, fully staged before a packed house...[he] broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art-performance assassination"(327). However, at times he comes across as a bit of a diva. While in the piney woods, he insists on getting the papers to read his reviews. When a confederate sympathizer turns him away from his door with just a parcel of food, Booth is incensed by what he views a a breach of hospitality. With time pressing, Booth takes a moment to pen the sympathizer a nasty letter calling him on "the ultimate sin in genteel Virginia society-inhospitality"(268). He not only writes a note, he writes it twice, not satisfied with his first version.

How Booth hoped to escape capture remains a mystery. Booth was a public figure, a member of the well-known Booth theatrical family. According to Swanson, "handsome and charismatic, [Booth] was instantly recognizable to thousands of fans in both the North and the South"(10). Although outside the purview of a book like this, celebrity and public exposure in the early days of photography, prior to the advent of film, warrants a book. Of course, his pursuers were not all Sherlock Holmes. The cavalry troop that eventually captured him only launched their investigation into Virginia on the strenght of an incorrect tip. Once they had Booth and Herold cornered in Garret's tobacco barn, they dithered and negotiated for almost half-a-day rather than take the initiative.

Swanson delivers his tale in melodramatic prose that echoes the style of the 19th century's penny presses. He's fond of perils-of-Pauline reverses and surprises and, at crucial moments in his story, he slows and nearly stops time for dramatic effects. Swanson sometimes lays it on thick: of Lincoln's deathbed, he writes "Death hovered near, impatient to claim the president and escort him on the voyage to that dark and distant shore that had beckoned Lincoln so often in his dreams"(77).

For all his attempts to capture the melodramatic prose style of the period, his quoting from actual period prose make his pale in comparison. Thomas T. Jones was a confederate agent who aided Booth and his side-kick David Herold. For five days, he offered them sustenance while they hid out in a pine grove near his home. He provided them with the boat by which they crossed the Potomac. At one point, while hiding Booth, he became aware of a $100,000 reward for Booth's capture, but, despite the fact that he was not financially well off, he didn't turn in Booth. He rationalizes:

Had I, for MONEY, betrayed the man whose hand I had taken, whose confidence I had won, and to whom I promised succor, I would have been, of all traitors, the most abject and despicable. Money won by such vile means would have been accursed and the pale face of the man whose life I had sold, whold have haunted me to my grave. True, the hopes of the Confederacy WERE like autumn leaves when the blast has swept by. True, the little I had accumulated through twenty years of unremitting toil WAS irrevocably lost. But, thank God, there was something I still possessed-something I could still call my own, and its name was Honor." (210)

Or, Asia Booth's description of a night in the woods with her brother: "It was a cold, dark night...with large fiery stars set far up in the black clouds. A perfect starry floor was the heaven that night, and the smell of the earth-which may be the odor of good men's bones rotting, it is so pleasurable and sanctifying-the aroma of pines, and the rapturous snese of a solemn silence, made us feel happy enough to sing 'Te Deum Laudamus'"(188). Whew!

Sometimes, his point-of-view gets kind of confusing. For instance, Swanson lauds Jones as "a man of true Southern feeling who could not be bought"(210). A confederate soldier, William Jett, informed on Booth after briefly abetting his escape. Swanson describes him repeatedly as "a Judas"(312). At times, he comes across as rooting for Booth. Booth was eventually arrested at Garret's farm on where he seemed to dawdle, enjoying socializing, speaking about Lincoln's assassin in the third person. Swanson loses his distance at one point and erupts "Booth shouldn't be there at all. The manhunters could appear at any moment without warning. He should leave at once; he dare not remain there any longer than one more night"(295). This might not be intended as a work of scholarship, but still, a little more distance seems fitting?

Although I'm not a Lincoln buff and have little interest in true-crime, I read this fast and to the end. In his acknowledgements, Swanson thanks his sister whose "animated spirit and taste for bizarre historical tales encouraged me from the start"(396). Swanson has a good eye for the bizarre and strange and Booth's tale is full of these elements. Whenever my interest started to fail, Swanson would produce a fact or incident that caught my attention. Such as, the man who actually ended up shooting Booth, cavalryman Boston Corbett, was a religious fanatic who castrated himself to avoid sin. Such as, assassin Lewis Powell's head was somehow separated from his body and given a ceremonial burial by sympathizers back in the nineties. Not the 1890's but the 1990's. I checked that again. It's true! Swanson finishes this story: "so Seward's violent assassin rests, if not in peace, then in pieces"(380). This is truly a fun but strange book.