John Wilkes Booth Trail

JOHN WILKES

John Wilkes Booth’s plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 began as a conspiracy to kidnap him. Whether the Confederate high command in Richmond, Virginia, sanctioned the plan or Booth retaliated on his own for what he perceived as Lincoln’s harsh wartime policies is unclear. In the fall of 1864, Booth, the popular actor, arrived in Southern Maryland, a haven for Confederate sympathizers, with letters of introduction from exiled Confederates in Canada. He also brought his scheme to kidnap the President. Booth gathered recruits to assist him. By April 1865, He abandoned the kidnapping plot in favor of assassination. On April 14, shortly after 10 p.m., Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head, while the president watched a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Booth fled over the Navy Yard Bridge into Southern Maryland. With fellow conspirator David Herold, he stopped around midnight at widow Mary E. Surratt’s tavern in the village of Surrattsville. She was then operating a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., but a tenant at the tavern testified that Booth retrieved rifles, field glasses, and other supplies hidden there as part of the earlier kidnapping scheme. The tenant also said that Surratt had been at the tavern as recently as the afternoon of April 14, and had left instructions to have the equipment ready. His testimony was fatal to Surratt, marking the first time that the federal government had executed and hung a woman.

Booth and Herold did not linger at the tavern, but headed south to the village of T.B. and then into Charles County. Their exact route is uncertain, but their destination was Dr. Samuel A. Mudd’s home about three miles north of Bryantown. The doctor and Booth had met previously, and Mudd had introduced the actor to a leading Confederate agent, Thomas Harbin, as well as John Surratt, Jr., a Confederate courier and son of Mary Surratt. The fugitives arrived at the Mudd farm early in the morning of April 15, seeking help for the broken leg that Booth had sustained in his escape. After setting the leg, Mudd allowed the pair to rest in an upstairs bedroom. That afternoon, the doctor went into Bryantown, learned that it was occupied by Federal troops, and that the search was on for Lincoln’s assassin. Mudd returned home and sent Booth and Herold on their way. The last time he saw them, they were headed in the direction of Zekiah Swamp. Mudd was later sentenced to prison for assisting Booth.

However, the pair did not seek refuge in the swamp. They made a wide arc around Bryantown and were guided to the home of Samuel Cox (near the present-day town of Bel Alton) shortly after midnight on April 16. Cox sent them to a dense pine thicket where they hid for several days, receiving food and newspapers from Thomas Jones, a Confederate signal agent, and Franklin Robey, Cox’s overseer. On the night of April 20, Jones led the fugitives to the Potomac River where he had hidden a rowboat. He directed them to Mathias Point on the Virginia shore, but for some reason the pair rowed to Nanjemoy Creek in Maryland, where they rested before trying again the next night.

With the Chesapeake Bay on one side and the Potomac River on the other, Point Lookout was an ideal location for the Federal government to construct a state-ofthe-art hospital and the North’s largest prisoner-of-war camp, because it was remote, and yet easily accessible by boat. Once a fine bathing beach, the pleasant retreat scene changed dramatically in 1861.

Sketch of entrance to the prison camp at Point Lookout. Courtesy Maryland Department of Natural Resources

To keep Maryland from seceding when the Civil War began in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln ordered Federal troops to occupy the state. He also suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and jailed suspected Confederate sympathizers, including public officials, newspaper editors, and private citizens. Had Maryland seceded, Confederate territory would have surrounded Washington, D.C.

Though many Maryland men served in the U.S. Army, thousands of others enlisted in Confederate service. Southern partisans who stayed home conducted signal corps operations, ran the federal blockade to deliver vital supplies, and engaged in espionage. Southern Maryland was a hotbed of “secesh” intrigue, and many famous Confederate spies had ties to this region.

Perhaps the most famous Confederate spy, Maria Rosetta O’Neale Greenhow, known as “Rebel Rose,” was born in Southern Maryland about 1814. An antebellum social leader in Washington, D.C., Greenhow used her connections to elicit critical information from federal officials and military figures. In July 1861, aided by another Marylander, Betty Duvall, Greenhow delivered a coded message detailing Union plans for the First Battle of Manassas to Confederate Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard. Confederate President Jefferson Davis credited Greenhow with the ensuing victory.

In August, federal officials placed her under house arrest, but she continued to spy. That autumn, she was confined in the Old Capitol Prison, on the present site of the U.S. Supreme Court, and then sent to Richmond. She spent time in Europe and wrote her memoirs, My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington. Greenhow sailed in a blockade runner for North Carolina in 1864, but the ship sank off Cape Fear and she drowned. She is buried in Wilmington, N.C.

Another Maryland spy, Olivia Floyd, conducted her espionage activities from Rose Hill, her home in Port Tobacco, using her charm to extract information from Union officers. After the war, she was the guest of honor at a Confederate veterans’ reunion in Kentucky.

When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, followed in May 1863 by establishing the United States Colored Troops (USCT), he sealed the fate of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Although Maryland would not emancipate its 87,000 slaves for almost two more years, the enslaved liberated themselves by the thousands to join free African Americans in the United States Army and Navy.

Masters jailed slaves to prevent escape or recruitment

John Wilkes Booth’s flight from justice ended at the Richard Garrett farm south of Port Royal on April 26, 1865. The 16th New York Cavalry, acting on a tip, found Booth and accomplice David Herold hidden in a tobacco barn there. Herold surrendered but Booth refused, even after the troopers set the barn afire to flush him out. Sgt. Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett claimed he shot Booth through a crack in the wall as he was about to fire his weapon. Booth was dragged out and died on the farmhouse porch. Corbett was arrested for violating orders to take Booth alive, but the charge was dropped and he became a national hero. The Garrett Farm buildings are long gone, and the site, part of Fort A.P. Hill, is not accessible to the public