Manhunt by James L. Swanson

Author:James L. Swanson [Swanson, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780060518509
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-10-08T07:00:00+00:00

ONCE JOHN WILKES BOOTH ATTEMPTED TO CROSS THE POtomac on Thursday the twentieth, and finally reached Virginia early on Sunday the twenty-third, the sanctuary of Thomas Jones’s Huckleberry did not survive long undisturbed. Union detectives suspected that a man of Jones’s reputation must know something about Booth’s escape and they arrested him. But they had no evidence, and, true to his character, he volunteered nothing. The troops confined Jones at the Bryantown Tavern, locking him up in a second-floor, back bedroom. Like the Surratt’s tavern, the Bryantown establishment served as a way station for mysterious, wartime Confederate intrigues.

The detectives didn’t know it, but they had, in a sense, conveyed Thomas Jones to a scene of the crime. At this very tavern, in a first-floor parlor below the bedroom that served as the river ghost’s ersatz jail, John Wilkes Booth met with Samuel Mudd and rebel agent Thomas Harbin when the actor plotted his madcap scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln. The detectives also ensnared Captain Cox in their dragnet. Oswell Swann, who guided the fugitives to Rich Hill early on Easter morning, Sunday, April 16, gave information against the captain. Cox insisted that when the two strangers came to his door, he dismissed them and ordered them on their way. But Swann disputed him and swore that Cox invited the criminals into his home, where they spent several hours. The detectives locked up Cox with Jones and posted two guards outside their door. Before they went to sleep on the floor, their heads resting on their saddles, Cox turned to his good friend and experienced secret agent for advice. “What shall I do, Tom?” he whispered in the dark. “Stick to what you have said,” counseled Jones, “and admit nothing else.”

The detectives, frustrated at their lack of progress, tried to trick Jones into confessing by loitering in the yard below his bedroom window and talking loudly about his forthcoming and imminent hanging. Still Jones would not talk. Even when transferred to the dreaded Old Capitol prison, site of his former, devastating incarceration, and current home to John T. Ford, Junius Brutus Booth, John Sleeper Clarke, and many others ensnared by the manhunt, he refused to provide any information about John Wilkes Booth. During the wagon ride from Bryantown to Washington, an unsubtle government agent had tried, once again, to loosen his captive’s tongue with alcohol. Detective Franklin genially offered a bottle of whiskey, which Jones pretended to drink. When the officer saw that his prisoner refused to get drunk, he cursed him all the way to the capital.

The detectives failed to realize it, but when they arrested Jones, they also captured an eyewitness who possessed intimate knowledge of how he helped Booth and Herold. But they could never make her talk. Jones was forced to leave her behind in Bryantown, but he laughed at the detectives’ ignorance about their valuable prize—his horse: “This mare was the same one Booth had ridden from the pines to the river that memorable … night. She was a flea-bitten gray, named Kit.

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