‘Manhunt’ sticks to known facts of Lincoln assassination
We’re watching “Manhunt,” the Apple TV historical drama based on James L. Swanson’s 2006 book “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.”
It’s a very useful series. While there is some compression of time and fact, and it turns (a clean-shaven) Edwin Stanton (played with serious intent by the always good Tobias Menzies) into a kind of action hero detective pursuing the assassin and interviewing witnesses, it pretty much sticks to the known facts of the investigation.
While people who get their history from popular entertainment generally get the history they deserve, if all you know about the hunt for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin is what you learn on “Manhunt,” you’ll have a good handle on the accepted version of what happened.
After shooting the president on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth escaped out the back door of Ford’s Theatre, jumped onto a rented horse he had left there (not before pistol-whipping the kid tasked with holding the horse) and rode frantically south out of Washington. He made his way into Maryland, where he met up with David Herold, then on to the house of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booth’s broken leg. With a $100,000 reward on his head, Booth evaded capture for 12 days before being cornered in a tobacco barn on Richard Garrett’s farm.
Stanton wasn’t Batman. And he had magnificent whiskers, which a writer for the National Archives once hinted inspired ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill to grow their own. Ironically, drummer Frank Beard has apparently never gone more than a few days without shaving. (He’s been photographed with stubble, but nothing even vaguely 19th-century hirsute.)
Speculation about his facial hair aside, Stanton was an undeniably interesting guy, the first American defense attorney to successfully use a plea of temporary insanity to defend his client Gen. Daniel Sickles, who shot and killed Philip Barton Key II, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia and the son of Francis Scott Key, in Lafayette Square across from the White House after he discovered Key was having an affair with his wife.
And, he famously tried to humiliate his future boss Lincoln by calling him a “damned long-armed ape” and refusing to seat him at the defense table when Lincoln was hired to help Stanton defend a farm equipment company against several lawsuits. Stanton, along with others, also probably kept James Buchanan from recognizing the Confederate States of America in the weeks between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration.
I remember reading Swanson’s book when it came out, written almost like a screenplay. It’s a quick read, a page turner that isn’t as detailed as some others, such as Michael W. Kauffman’s definitive 2004 biography “American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies” or Nora Titone’s 2010 book about the Booth family,
“Though My Thoughts Be Bloody.” I had the feeling that it would be the basis for a rip-roaring movie. Given the large cast of characters and all its fascinating sidebars, it probably makes for a better miniseries.
SOME SUGGESTIONS
After I finished the book, I offered it to former Little Rock zookeeper Randal Berry, an amateur historian who has done extensive research on the Lincoln assassination. He declined, having read the Swanson book in manuscript and given the author, with whom he’s friendly, some suggestions.
“There were some things in there I disagreed with and personally told James that,” Berry wrote in an instant message to me. Berry disagreed with Swanson’s contention that Booth was wearing all black when he shot Lincoln; he says that witnesses in the Lincolns’ box that night — whom we’ll get to in a moment — remembered him wearing a long-sleeved white shirt under a black suit.
In the Apple TV+ series, Booth is wearing a black suit, black tie and white shirt when he kills the president.
Berry also believes Swanson’s contention that after Lincoln took his last breath, Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the angels,” is not supported by the facts. Most historians believe that what Stanton uttered was “belongs to the ages.” This was what Dr. Robert Stone, who was at Lincoln’s bedside when he died, recorded in his diary, and how Lincoln’s son Robert (another bedside witness) told the story.
Berry says he doesn’t know where Swanson got “angels,” and says he may have made the change simply to generate controversy and stir up interest in the book.
In any case, the series has Stanton saying “angels”; while it felt a little like a glitch in the matrix, it doesn’t seem all that revisionist.
‘ANGELS’ FOR ‘AGES’
One of the reasons the clean-shaven Stanton and the substitution of “angels” for “ages” is mildly unsettling is because the Lincoln assassination is one of those historical events that we think we know about. We all know about Ford’s Theatre and Booth leaping to the stage after shooting Lincoln in the back of the head during a particularly raucous moment in “Our American Cousin,” breaking his leg in the process and screaming, “Sic temper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”) from the stage, before limping away in the confusion.
In actuality, Booth did not quite get away clean; after he shot Lincoln he was accosted by Army Maj. Henry Rathbone, who was seated in the president’s box along with his fiancée (and stepsister) Clara Harris. Booth tried to stab Rathbone in the heart with a dagger he was carrying, but Rathbone raised his left arm and Booth slashed it from the shoulder to the elbow. Rathbone never recovered; wracked with guilt over failing, he resigned from the military in 1870 and had trouble finding suitable employment. He became convinced that Clara — now his wife — was unfaithful to him and reportedly threatened her repeatedly.
The family moved to Germany, and just after midnight on Christmas Eve 1883, Rathbone attacked his children. When Clara intervened, he shot and stabbed her to death. Then he stabbed himself five times in the chest. The suicide attempt failed; after his wounds healed he was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane in Hildesheim, where he died on Aug. 14, 1911.
NO CLEAR CONSENSUS
There’s no clear consensus as to what Booth might have yelled. Rathbone said he thought he heard Booth scream “Freedom” immediately after he shot Lincoln; various eyewitnesses had conflicting reports as to what he may have yelled either from the box or the stage. Some thought they heard “sic temper tyrannis!” but Booth himself said he’d only uttered “sic semper.”
Booth planned it as a theatrical production, befitting his status as one of the country’s best-known actors.
But Booth (played in “Manhunt” by Northern Irish actor Anthony Boyle) was famous as much for being the younger brother of Edwin Booth, arguably the most famous actor in the world, as he was for his own work. In modern terms, John Wilkes might have been to Edwin as Casey Affleck (Best Actor Oscar notwithstanding) is to his more famous brother, Ben.
For a time, Booth acted under the pseudonym “J.B. Wilkes” to escape the shadow of his famous family, which included his father, British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, who abandoned his wife and eight children in 1821, running off to Maryland with the flower girl, Mary Ann Holmes, who would bear him four more children.
INTO THE THEATER
The boys — Junius Jr. (born 1821), Edwin (1833), and John (1838) — all followed their father into the theater. Daughter Asia (1836) was a poet who married an actor; she was the closest to John and is remembered today primarily for her slim memoir of him in which she told a story about Booth, as a young boy in a Quaker boarding school, being approached by an “old Gipsey” woman who told him, “Ah, you’ve had a bad hand. … It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble,” and that he had been “born under an unlucky star” with a “thundering crowd of enemies” and would “make a bad end” and “die young.”
She remembered her brother as a lover of butterflies and flowers, who thought of fireflies as “bearers of sacred torches.” He was a good listener, insecure about his stage presence, worried he might fail as an actor. He played the flute. He preferred sad songs. He loved to recite poetry. He preferred sunrises to sunsets, which were “too melancholy.”
He was just coming into his own as a leading man when the Civil War began. Walt Whitman would famously write of him, “He would have flashes, passages, I thought, of real genius.” But he was very much the little brother in the mind of the public.
John and Edwin were estranged before the assassination; they rarely saw each other in those last months. Edwin was a Unionist, John burned for the South.
“That he was insane on that one point [secession], no one who knew him well can doubt,” Edwin wrote in a letter to a man seeking his autograph in 1881. “When I told him that I had voted for Lincoln’s re-election he expressed deep regret, and declared his belief that Lincoln would be made king of America; and this, I believe, drove him beyond the limits of reason. … All his theatrical friends speak of him as a poor crazy boy and such his family think him.”
The day after the assassination, Edwin vowed never to appear on stage again. (He returned to acting in January 1866.)
WRETCHED PATIENCE
Assassination does not require high conspiracy. All it takes is wretched patience and a will, a fistful of cash, and a cheap pistol. Sooner or later the parade will pass.
But Abraham Lincoln was the victim of a conspiracy, a hastily arranged one. The original plan was to kidnap the president and exchange him for Confederate prisoners, but after Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, John Wilkes Booth’s plans curdled into murderousness.
Booth was a hothead, a Southern sympathizer living in Maryland, a state that had remained loyal to the Union despite having a great number of Southern sympathizers. Booth had not joined the Confederate army because he’d promised his mother he’d stay out of the war — a promise he ultimately couldn’t keep.
He probably did not even believe the war ended with the surrender of Lee at Appomattox; the Army of Tennessee did not surrender until April 26. “Manhunt” has him fever dreaming while on the lam of being inaugurated as the second president of the CSA.
Our first presidential assassination was, in a way, our most parsable and best planned, an action taken by forces subversive to the U.S. government for political ends. Stanton worried about Booth becoming a martyr for the Cause; he took pains to make sure there was no tomb around which true believers might rally. (Edwin had to beg for his brother’s bones; he only got them after promising to leave the grave unmarked.)
The plot to kill Lincoln was real, and maybe not yet completely unraveled. TV shows are for entertainment, not education, but “Manhunt” is a skillfully made entertainment that takes liberties with, but doesn’t warp, the truth.