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Participants stand outside the Maryland Home of Dr. Samuel L. Mudd, who treated John Wilkes Booth's broken leg. |
ON April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth crept into the unguarded balcony box at Ford's Theatre, unloaded his single-shot derringer into Abraham Lincoln's skull and fled through the backstage door.
That much nearly any student of American history knows.
The details of the 10-day manhunt that followed--until authorities caught up with Booth at a Bowling Green barn--are more of a mystery.
Saturday, guide Michael Kauffman took a busload of history buffs on a trip back in time to unravel the 1865 saga. Kauffman is a member of the Surratt Society, a group named after a convicted Booth co-conspirator and devoted to studying the assassination.
The 10-hour tour, sponsored by the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation Inc., wound through two states and Washington, D.C., crossed two rivers, and followed every twist and turn of Booth's escape route. The group stopped at the places where Booth sought treatment, refuge and supplies.
The small theater in Washington where the actor from Maryland fired the fatal shot seemed strangely suspended in time during last weekend's tour.
Winding steps led to a view of the rocking chair in the balcony box where the 16th U.S. president sat with his wife and guests.
Flags still drape the railing as they did that night--although souvenir hunters stole the original items long ago.
The gun used to commit the first assassination of an American president is sealed in glass in the basement.
Tour participant Reed Smith of Stafford County joked that he hoped to find the boots that belonged to an ancestor of his who was in the audience that night. He had slipped off the boots to relax during the show and left them behind in the commotion after the murder.
"That's the story that has been handed down," Smith said.
Detailed insurance records have helped historians maintain the Civil War look of the Surratt Tavern in Clinton, Md., where Booth stopped to pick up supplies.
An interpreter wearing a hoop skirt stood in front of a shelf full of wine jugs and passed around a plug of pressed tobacco. She doled out tidbits about the life and business of Mary Surratt, who was found guilty of conspiring to kill the president and hanged.
At the nearby novelty shop, posters promised big money for Booth's capture.
"I just knew it would be interesting," said Jackie Stanley of Beaverdam, who started reading about the route as soon as she signed up for the tour.
The couch where Dr. Samuel L. Mudd treated Booth's injured leg still graces the living room of the Mudd home in Maryland.
"I love this escape route," Kauffman said. "Not only are the places all still there, but they also have this rich history of their own."
Visitors snaked up a set of creaking wood stairs to glimpse the physician's medical books and supplies, family photographs and other Mudd memorabilia.
Mudd maintained he didn't recognize Booth when the injured fugitive showed up at his door wearing false whiskers and theatrical makeup. Still, Mudd also was found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to prison.
The 10-day manhunt ended at the Garrett farm in Bowling Green, where troops discovered the criminal holed up in a tobacco barn.
The barn was set on fire, and Booth was shot in the neck. The bullet passed through his spinal cord and paralyzed him.
Last weekend's tour ended on the same ground where John Wilkes Booth died just after dawn on April 26, 1865.
Nearly 10 hours after the tour started at Ford's Theatre, Kauffman stood in the woodsy median of U.S. 301 in Caroline County. As cars sped by on the busy highway, he pointed out what was once the Garrett farm.
Kauffman, who gives several tours each year, has spent three decades sifting through trial records, national archives and databases about the Lincoln assassination.
He published the first complete version of conspiracy trial transcripts from 11,000 pages of government files.
He calls the Booth saga his "lifelong specialty," and he leaves no detail to chance.
"I've noticed how people like to pick. They really try to pick you apart," Kauffman said. "I'm almost terrified of making mistakes."
So he tests his theories firsthand.
He once leaped from the balcony at Ford's Theatre onto the stage to see if Booth could have broken his leg that way. He hired a cavalry unit to burn down a tobacco barn at 2 o'clock in the morning. And he tried to paddle across the Potomac in a row boat.
But even Kauffman can't re-create Booth's experiences exactly.
By bus, his tour travels from Washington to Bowling Green in a fraction of the time it took Booth to make the trip on horseback. Tourists cross modern bridges, travel paved highways and pass gas stations; Booth paddled across the water, fled along dirt roads and trekked through open fields.
Landmarks have been turned into restaurants and sold out of families.
"It just makes me sick to think about it," Kauffman said.
He's seen amazing changes in the tour over the past quarter of a century.
"The thing that keeps you going," Kauffman said, "is that you learn something new every day."
