April 23, 1865---Booth flees South

APRIL 23, 1865:  

“Panic has seized the country” --- Jefferson Davis

I

The body of President Lincoln remained on view in Philadelphia. 

II

Captain Silas Soule of the First Colorado Cavalry, who testified against Colonel John Chivington at the Sand Creek Massacre Hearings, is murdered on the street in Denver, Colorado.

Stoneman’s Raid reaches Hendersonville, North Carolina, and has a major skirmish --- almost big enough to qualify as a “Last Battle of the Civil War” --- with local militia before despoiling the town.

A large “action” --- again, just not quite big enough to qualify as a “Last Battle of the Civil War” --- occurs at Munford’s Station, Alabama, between Confederate and Federal troops.

The Confederate “Florida Blues” enter into an armistice with Federal troops at St. Augustine. Armed resistance in north central Florida comes to an end. The “Blues” were a force made up of Minorcans, Spaniards, Sicilians, Italians, and Greeks, many the descendants of Sephardic Jews. Formed in 1860, even before Florida’s secession, units of the “Blues” fought at  Atlanta, Jonesboro and Bentonville, under General Joseph E. Johnston C.S.A..

III

John Wilkes Booth and David Herold managed to cross the Potomac River this day. 

Once on “friendly” Virginia soil they both expected greater aid and comfort. However, after Herold slogged an hour across swampy land to reach the property of the Confederate underground agent Mrs. Elizabeth Quisenberry (whose “safe house” had been recommended by Thomas Jones) Mrs. Quisenberry refused to aid the two fugitives. She refused their offer of Jones’ boat in trade, refused payment for a horse, refused to shelter them, and sent Herold on his way back to Booth (who, with his broken leg had stayed near their landfall at Gambo Creek). At the last minute, perhaps looking with a motherly eye at the woebegone boyish Herold, she did provide them food.

She also contacted one Thomas Harbin. Harbin was another Confederate agent who happened to be an acquaintance of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Harbin and Booth had met before, in late 1864.  

Harbin was willing to help the President’s assassin. Harbin hired a horse, wagon and driver to take Booth and Herold to “Cleydahl,” the estate home of Dr. Richard Stuart. 

 

 

Doubtless, Booth expected some medical attention from Stuart, but other than feeding Booth and Herold, Stuart ordered them gone. There is no direct evidence that he knew who they were, but the doctor undoubtedly had read the papers and knew there was a Federal manhunt underway for a “lame man.”

Booth and Herold went off, at his direction, to the cabin of the Lucas family, free blacks.

Evicting William Lucas and his family from their own home at knifepoint and gunpoint, the two exhausted conspirators holed up for the remainder of that day and overnight. The Lucases, fearing that Booth would kill them as he’d threatened (unsurprisingly, he hated blacks, and hated the fact that he was in a black home), did not report the two men to passing Federal authorities.