Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapter 10-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2 Summary: “I Have Done It”

John Wilkes Booth observed President Lincoln and his party arriving at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, Good Friday. Around nine o’clock, he enters the theater to determine how much time was left in the play. He then leaves and goes to the stables, where he had left his horse earlier in the day. He saddles her up and tries to get stagehand Ned Spangler to hold her reins. Spangler refuses, because he is working, and they convince another employee, John “Peanut” Burroughs, to do so instead. Then, Booth goes through an underground passageway under the stage to walk out of the front of the theater. He goes to the Star Saloon and has a drink.

Around 10 o’clock, he returns to Ford’s Theatre. Booth goes to the door of the vestibule that leads to the president’s box. There, he shows a document to the president’s valet, Charles Forbes, who lets him enter. Earlier in the day, Booth had hidden a wooden music stand in the vestibule that he now uses to block the vestibule door from being opened from the outside. Then, he walks into the president’s box during Act 3, Scene 2, of the play.

Booth knows the play well and waits for a moment of laughter to fire the gun. Everyone in the box is focused on the play and no one notices Booth. After the laugh line, Booth fires the gun into Lincoln’s head from a very close distance. At first, the audience is unsure what had happened. However, Major Rathbone knows immediately it was a gunshot. He turns and sees Booth. He attempts to stop him, but Booth slashes at him with his knife and then jumps from the balcony onto the stage. There, he says “Sic semper tyrannis […] The South is avenged” (48). The only actor onstage, Harry Hawk, attempts to stop Booth but flees when he sees the knife. Booth runs off stage right.

Secretary of State William Seward is meanwhile in bed in his home known as “the Clubhouse” recovering from a bad carriage accident. Booth’s co-conspirators Lewis Powell and David Herold are outside watching the house. They decide that Powell will carry a small package and pretend to be delivering medicine for the secretary from his doctor, Dr. Verdi. Shortly after 10 o’clock, Powell walks up to the house with the package. He tells the house servant, William Bell, that he needs to deliver the medicine to the secretary himself. Bell protests and follows Powell up the stairs. There, the secretary’s son Frederick argues that Powell should just give him the medicine. When she hears the noise outside Seward’s room, Franny, the secretary’s daughter, opens the door and says her father is almost asleep. Frederick quickly closes the door. Powell pretends to leave, but then rushes Frederick and pistol whips him. He goes into Seward’s room where he stabs the secretary, fights with a Sergeant Robinson and Gus, another one of the secretary’s sons, and then retreats, stabbing a State Department messenger in the back as he leaves. He gets on his horse and rides away.

Franny thinks her father is dead, but he is alive, though badly injured, on the floor of the bedroom.

Chapter 3 Summary: “His Sacred Blood”

At Ford’s Theatre, an army major and lawyer in the audience named Joseph B. Stewart leaps up on stage and pursues the fleeing John Wilkes Booth. Booth runs out of the theater into the alley and gets his horse from John “Peanut” Burroughs. He leaps on the horse’s back, hits John Burroughs in the head and kicks him away. Stewart attempts to grab the reins, but Booth evades him and gallops away. He heads to the Navy Yard Bridge to flee the city. At the bridge, Sergeant Silas T. Cobb is standing watch. Cobb is not supposed to let anyone cross after nine o’clock, but Booth talks Cobb into letting him cross over into Anacostia, Maryland.

At Secretary Seward’s house, family members and doctors work to save his life. His son, Frederick, has a bad head injury as well from being hit in the head with the pistol. Secretary Seward and his son both live. Sergeant Robinson, who fought off Powell and saved the Secretary’s life, is gifted Powell’s knife as a memento and given a congressional award for his bravery.

In the president’s box in Ford’s Theatre, President Lincoln is unresponsive. Major Rathbone is badly injured from Booth’s stabbing and is bleeding profusely. The audience is beginning to panic. Doctor Charles Leale and others are trying to get into the box, but the door is blocked with the music stand. Rathbone pulls the stand out and Leale enters. He examines the president and finds the head wound. Leale administers CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, temporarily restoring him, but he knows the president does not have long to live.

George Atzerodt has a drink with a stableman, John Fletcher, and picks up a horse. Then, he goes to the Kirkwood, where Vice President Johnson is staying. Atzerodt, however, cannot work up the courage to kill the vice president and rides away.

David Herold, having abandoned Powell, meanwhile heads to Navy Yard Bridge to escape the city and meet up with Booth. While fleeing, he comes across Fletcher, who wants his horse back. Fletcher pursues Herold to the bridge, but Sergeant Cobb has already let him cross, so Fletcher gives up and goes home.

After fleeing Secretary Seward’s house, Powell gets lost without his guide, Herold, and spends two nights sleeping in a tree.

Back at Ford’s Theatre, the star actress Laura Keene rushes into the box. She puts the president’s head in her lap. Stained with the president’s blood, the dress she was wearing would later become a popular relic of the momentous day.

In Maryland, Herold meets up with Booth and rides to the safe house. George Atzerodt runs into a friend on the tram to Navy Yard and asks if he can stay with him. The friend refuses. Atzerodt heads back to downtown Washington but not back to his hotel room at the Kirkwood. The next day, the police search his hotel room and find weapons and John Wilkes Booth’s bankbook.

Dr. Leale decides to move President Lincoln’s body so he can die somewhere more dignified. With help of other men, he takes it out of the theater and into the street. It is too far to go to the White House, but a man at 454 10th Street calls out that they can “Bring him in here!” (94)

Chapters 2-3 Analysis

In Chapter 2, Swanson describes in great detail the assassination of President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William Seward. This dual focus highlights the brutality of both attacks while highlighting how Booth’s plan was not just focused on the president but on his administration more generally. The language Swanson uses to describe the attacks is vivid and intense, evocative of crime thrillers. For example, when Rathbone attempts to halt Booth’s retreat from the theater box, Swanson writes, “the assassin’s blade sliced through his coat sleeve and into his upper arm. Blood gushed from the long, deep wound” (46). Swanson uses similar language to describe Powell’s attack on Secretary Seward, his sons, and a servant. This level of detail gives the description of the scene sensory verisimilitude.

The actions of George Atzerodt and Fanny Seward demonstrate The Role of Coincidence and Individual Agency in Historical Events in these two chapters. George Atzerodt is tasked with assassinating Vice President Andrew Johnson. Swanson notes that “Compared with the tasks that faced Booth and Powell, Atzerodt had the easiest job of all.” Even so, he “couldn’t do it” (79). Atzerodt’s decision not to assassinate Vice President Johnson is critical to the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. If he had also been killed, there would not necessarily have been a clear transfer of power, and the United States could have been thrown into a constitutional crisis (the Presidential Succession Act was not passed until 1947). His decision not to act changed history forever. In contrast, when Fanny Seward acknowledged to Powell that her father was in the bedroom behind her, she inadvertently endangered his life and that of her brothers. She acted without knowledge and set off a chain of events beyond her power.

Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the theme of The Evolving Popular Reception of the Assassination. The first example of this happens shortly after the attack when the star actress, Laura Keene, takes advantage of the situation to literally put herself in the frame: “Keene imagined a fantastic tableaux [sic] with her as its central figure” (84). She takes the president’s head into her lap and the dress he bleeds on is transformed into a totemic point of popular fascination: “[I]t became the object of morbid curiosity” (85). The myth of Lincoln’s assassination and its mediatization has begun. A similar impulse for capturing the infamous moment to further one’s own career can be seen in the description of painter Carl Bersch who, seeing the scene of Lincoln’s body being carried out into the street surrounded by a crowd, thinks “what a fine subject this scene would make for an oil painting” (93). While not mentioned in the text itself, Bersch’s painting of the scene “Lincoln Borne By Loving Hands” (1865) did indeed become a key depiction of the tragic moment and it currently hangs at Ford’s Theatre (“Lincoln Borne By Loving Hands.” Google Arts & Culture).