During his decade as a professional actor, 26-year-old John Wilkes Booth has performed in some of America’s most prestigious theaters. But Abraham Lincoln’s assassin delivered his final, and perhaps most memorable, performance in a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia.
For some observers, however, it was nothing less than an act of disappearance.
The drama played out sometime after 2 a.m. on April 26, 1865, when a detachment of the 16e The New York Cavalry Regiment and a pair of detectives cornered Booth and a compatriot, David Herold, in the barn. By this time, Booth and Herold had been on the run for 12 days.
Luther Baker, one of the detectives, told the two fugitives they had five minutes to get out, otherwise the men would set the barn on fire.
Booth asked for “some time to think about it.”
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At this point, Booth and Herold weren’t even sure who their potential captors were, seemingly giving rise to hope that they might be sympathetic southerners. Booth asked them twice to identify themselves, but they were only told, “It doesn’t make any difference who we are. We know who you are and we want you. We want to take you prisoner.
Booth refused to come out, but tried to negotiate, citing the recent leg injury he suffered: “I’m crippled. I only have one leg. If you withdraw your men in line 100 yards from the gate, I will come out and fight you.
Saying that the men around him hadn’t come to fight but simply to stop him, Booth tried again, this time asking for only 50 yards. Again, his request was denied.
“Well, my brave boys, prepare me a stretcher!” Booth responded, in what Second Detective Everton Conger recalled as a “singularly theatrical voice.”
Publicity award for the capture of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, illustrated with photographic prints by John H. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth and David E. Herold.
Universal History Archive / UIG / Getty images
By now, Booth’s accomplice had decided to give up. After some quarrels with Booth, who denounced him as a “hell of a coward,” Herold appeared at the barn door and surrendered.
But Booth stayed behind, hiding in the shadows, heavily armed with a pair of pistols, a large Bowie knife and a rifle, or a short-barreled shotgun.
During this time, according to Conger’s account, the detective had snuck into a corner of the barn, twisted a piece of rope into a fuse, and ignited part of the hay that covered the barn floor.
The fire spread quickly and Conger, looking through a crack between the slats of the barn, saw Booth’s facial expressions that he realized would be impossible to put out. Booth, said Conger, “relaxed his muscles and turned and walked for the door.”
The next thing Conger heard was a gunshot.
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John Wilkes Booth is dragged from the barn on Garrett’s farm by Union cavalry sent to capture him after his assassination of President Lincoln.
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His longest death scene
When Conger reached the barn door, he found Detective Baker with Booth, who had suffered a serious neck injury. Conger initially assumed that Booth had committed suicide, but Baker told him no.
The two men took Booth from the burning barn and set him down on the nearby grass. [9]
“I put my ear to his mouth,” Conger recalls, “and I finally understood that he was saying, ‘Tell my mother, I’m dying for my country’.
As fitting as they could have been, these won’t be Booth’s last words. His final death scene would last for several hours.
The soldiers moved Booth to the porch of the farm owned by the Garrett family, whose tobacco barn they had just set on fire. There, Booth struggled to sip water but managed to speak in a low voice. In relentless pain, he repeatedly pleaded with his captors: “Kill me! Kill me! “A local medic, summoned to the scene, declared Booth’s state of despair. He died around 7 a.m.
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US soldier Boston Corbett, who shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States.
Hulton Archives / Getty Images
The assassin of the assassin
As Detective Baker suspected, the fatal bullet was not from Booth’s pistol, but from one of the Union soldiers, an Army sergeant by the name of Boston Corbett.
Corbett later said he observed Booth through a crack in the burning barn. “I could see him, but he couldn’t see me,” he said. “It wasn’t at all out of fear that I shot him, but because I felt it was time for the man to be shot, because I thought he would harm our men. … ”
Corbett’s thoughtless decision made it impossible to capture Booth and question him about the scale of the assassination plot, as many in Washington had hoped. Corbett went on to collect a reward of $ 1,653.85 for his efforts.
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But was he really dead?
John Wilkes Booth’s body was taken aboard the Navy battleship USS Montauk for examination by Army medics. Based on evidence such as a scar from previous surgery and the initials JWB on his left hand, they concluded that the body was “indisputable” of Booth, notes Michael W. Kauffman in his 2004 Booth biography, American Brutus.
But with the nation still in an uproar over Lincoln’s murder, not everyone was happy.
Conspiracy theorists have argued that Booth, a professional actor and master of disguise, actually escaped his captors before the tobacco barn standoff and an unfortunate dupe took the fatal blow to the neck.
WATCH: The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth on HISTORY Vault
Before long, newspaper articles had Booth in Mexico, India, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Turkey, China, and the Pelew Islands, to name a few. According to one account, he had started mining in South America. In another, he had become the main actor in Australia under the name Senor Enos. In yet another, he was in the service of a sultan in Egypt and owned more than 100 camels. Still other accounts claimed that he had not left the United States at all, but had become a bishopric in Atlanta – or a carpenter in Tennessee. In 1907, a popular book claimed that a man who confessed to being Booth had died four years earlier in Enid, Oklahoma; the mummified corpse of man visited the country as a carnival attraction.
As it turned out, several of the rumors came from a patient in an Ohio lunatic asylum. But other seemingly credible citizens have claimed to have seen Booth or received letters from him long after his supposed death. A US Senator, Garrett Davis of Kentucky, even speculated that Booth might still be alive in an 1866 Senate debate.
“I can’t conceive, if he was in the barn, why he wasn’t taken alive and brought alive in this town,” Davis said. “… There is a most inexplicable mystery and mystery in my mind about this whole matter.
