If Abraham Lincoln had leaned back in his rocking chair that night at Ford’s Theatre and turned around—hearing a footfall or a rustle, or glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a stage light glinting off the mouth of the derringer—he would have recognized his murderer. Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,” he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”—“pause us till these rebels now afoot / Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth perform at Ford’s. “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” little knowing that he was engraving his own Shakespearean epitaph.
John Wilkes Booth wasn’t the best actor in the Booth family: he was outshone by his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and by his brother Edwin. But John Wilkes was the most beautiful of the Booths, the handsomest man in all America, it was said: lithe and feline, with dark Fauntleroy curls and a leading-man mustache. “All you have is rage or self-pity,” Edwin tells John Wilkes, deriding his little brother’s hammy acting, in the lush and tense “Manhunt,” the new seven-episode series from Apple TV+. Booth, played by the smolderingly beautiful sleepy-eyed Irish actor Anthony Boyle, is dastardly and desperate. “Tomorrow, I’m gonna be more famous than anyone in my family,” he announces on the night of the assassination. “I’m gonna be the most famous man in the whole world.” In his diary, Booth wrote down his reason for killing the President: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” Boyle doesn’t utter that line, but he embodies it, lunatic and frantic, believing himself Brutus.
Billed as an adaptation of James L. Swanson’s best-selling 2006 book, “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” the series involves a great many men riding horses, wielding guns, and gritting teeth: costume drama meets police procedural. After shooting Lincoln in the back of the head on the night of April 14, 1865, Booth leaps from the Presidential Box onto the stage, breaking a leg. He flees the theatre and mounts a horse, escaping to Maryland, and then the chase begins, led by Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies), the stalwart Secretary of War. “Come here immediately and see if you can find the murderers of the President,” the real Stanton wrote in a telegram to L. C. Baker, the head of the National Detective Police, on April 15th. In “Manhunt,” Baker is played by a miscast Patton Oswalt, who is saddled with some truly dreadful lines—“If you hear something, say something”—and seems more amused than shocked by an assassination that sent the nation into a cascade of mourning. Oswalt’s Baker also doesn’t have that much to do, given that in the show it’s Stanton who not only coördinates the manhunt from the telegraph room at the War Department but also, on the spot, reënacts the crime, collects evidence, inspects footprints, follows clues, cracks codes, interrogates witnesses, and even, implausibly, joins the chase on horseback.
Edwin Stanton suffered from asthma and would soon die of it. In a harrowing portrayal, Menzies’s clenched-jaw Stanton grimaces and winces and leans on a cane for support. He is seized by bouts of coughing and wheezing. More than once, he simply collapses, as if, before the curtain falls, he, too, will have to be carried off the stage, another American slain.
“John Wilkes Booth’s escape and disappearance unfolded as though scripted not by a master criminal but by a master dramatist,” Swanson wrote in “Manhunt.” Swanson is the author of several other books about manhunts, including one about the hunt for Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy; one about the pursuit of Lee Harvey Oswald; and, most recently, a Y.A. book called “Chasing King’s Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Assassin.” If you like manhunts, he’s your man. But the public appetite for a well-told tale about the pursuit of Booth began even as it was happening. The essentials of the drama can be traced not to any of Swanson’s books but to “The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth, with a Full Sketch of the Conspiracy of Which He Was the Leader, and the Pursuit, Trial and Execution of His Accomplices,” a seventy-nine-page thriller that was first sold in 1865, for twenty-five cents. Its author was the talented investigative reporter George Alfred Townsend, who covered the case from Washington for the New York World. The book is a compilation of the reports he filed in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, “fresh from the mouths of the actors,” and his own reconstruction of the events he reported, complete with floor plans and maps. Townsend, not Swanson, is the master dramatist of Booth’s crime and escape. Here’s Townsend writing of the moment Booth fired the shot: “A keen quick report and a puff of white smoke,—a close smell of powder and the rush of a dark, imperfectly outlined figure,—and the President’s head dropped upon his shoulders: the ball was in his brain.” And of the moment Booth rode away: “His horse’s hoofs might almost have been heard amid the silence that for a few seconds dwelt in the interior of the theater. Then Mrs. Lincoln screamed.”
A War Department handbill headed “Appeal to the Colored People” announced, “The pistol from which he met his death, though held by Booth, was fired by the hands of treason and slavery.” Lincoln’s assassination, as Townsend reported, was part of a wider plot to decapitate and incapacitate the federal government. The night Lincoln was shot, another assassin tried to kill his Secretary of State, William Seward (he survived), and a third assassin had been directed to kill the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson (only to lose his nerve at the last minute). Stanton heard first of the attack on Seward and went to his house. He then raced to the boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, to which Lincoln had been carried, and found the President dying. Townsend wrote, “Secretary Stanton, just arrived from the bedside of Mr. Seward, asked . . . what was Mr. Lincoln’s condition. ‘I fear, Mr. Stanton, that there is no hope.’ ‘O, no, general; no, no;’ and the man, of all others, apparently strange to tears, sank down beside the bed, the hot, bitter evidences of an awful sorrow trickling through his fingers to the floor.”
Booth had earlier plotted to kidnap Lincoln and hold him hostage. He considered Lincoln a tyrant who had imposed emancipation on a martyred South. As he explained in a manifesto that he wrote in November, 1864, “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man.” On April 11, 1865, two days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Booth was in the crowd when Lincoln gave a speech in which he expressed gratitude for Black men’s service in the Union Army and said that under the policy that would reconstruct the nation they would be rewarded for that service. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth muttered. He appears to have only then decided to kill Lincoln, seemingly in the hope of reversing that policy. One tragedy of the assassination is that in some measure Booth was successful.
The Apple series follows much of Townsend’s account, but with the storytelling jumbled. It conveys both Booth’s plotting and Stanton’s relationship with Lincoln, in flashbacks as relentless as strobe lights. Only the chase moves forward in time, a neat narrative solution to the problem of the inevitability of the story’s outcome: Booth would not live to stand trial. Stanton’s investigation involved tracking not only Booth but also a half-dozen conspirators who had originally signed on to Booth’s plan, and who aided his escape. “What if the Confederacy is behind the assassination?” an associate asks Stanton. He replies, “I’d have to start another war.” Many in Lincoln’s Administration in fact suspected that Jefferson Davis had conceived of and ordered the assassination, and believed that the only way to truly end the war would be to capture and convict him. This did not come to pass. In the show, a colleague of Stanton’s tells him, “The connection between John Wilkes Booth and Jefferson Davis—you don’t have it!”
Swanson’s book displays little interest in slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. This is not true of the Apple adaptation. In a sped-up time line, “Manhunt” hints at how, with Lincoln dead, Johnson fought the policy of Reconstruction proposed by Radical Republicans and endorsed by Stanton. The show’s engagement with the origin and the course of Reconstruction is serious and informed, and—from a historical and political perspective—the most interesting and distinctive aspect of the project. Surprisingly, the series gives real play, too, to the theory that Johnson, not Davis, was behind the plot. “Don’t wish to disturb you,” Booth wrote to Johnson on April 14th. “Are you at home?” Was this to figure out where the assigned assassin would find Johnson that night? Or was Johnson involved in or even the head of the conspiracy? Very likely he was not; nor was Davis. But, in “Manhunt,” Johnson (Glenn Morshower), seen here unravelling every effort at securing equal rights for freed Blacks, is wonderfully despicable—it’s easy to believe the worst of him.
If much of the storytelling in “Manhunt” dates to 1865, later generations of Americans were told very different versions of what happened. On the early morning of April 15th, Booth and his guide, David Herold, made their way in the direction of Bryantown, in Charles County, Maryland, and to the home of a doctor named Samuel Mudd, who cut off Booth’s boot, set his broken leg, and applied a splint. Stanton pursued him as a conspirator. The Mudds were part of one of the largest slaveowning families in the county, and Samuel Mudd was, in fact, a Confederate agent. Mudd insisted he did not know that his patient was Booth, and did not know that Lincoln had been killed. Mudd’s suffering is the subject of John Ford’s 1936 film “The Prisoner of Shark Island,” enthusiastically received by one of his daughters for offering “complete vindication” of her father. This Mudd, played by Warner Baxter, is a simple country doctor—“one of the most unselfish and courageous men in American history,” according to a title card at the beginning of the film—who merely helps a man in need. When he and the other suspected conspirators are put on trial, the courthouse is surrounded by a Union mob screaming, “Burn the traitors! Burn them!” Mudd’s former slaves—he calls them “my hands”—include Aunt Rosabelle, a mother of twelve and a source of comic relief, who is played by Etta McDaniel, the sister of Hattie McDaniel, who three years later would become the first Black woman to win an Oscar, for her portrayal of Mammy in “Gone with the Wind.” During the Civil War, the sisters’ father had fought in the Union Army: he was one of the men to whom Lincoln promised citizenship in the speech that so riled up Booth. (The father was denied a pension, and the family lived in poverty; Hattie and Etta’s mother worked in white homes as a domestic, as did the McDaniel sisters, even after their débuts in show business.)
“The Prisoner of Shark Island” is not interested in the testimony of Mudd’s former slaves at his military trial, but Mudd’s defenders sought to destroy their credibility to establish that Mudd had always been a kindly master and had nothing to do with the Confederacy. Such was the fiction of the Lost Cause. “Manhunt” crafts a different fiction: call it the Found Cause.
In “Manhunt,” Mudd, played by Matt Walsh (best known for his role in “Veep,” as the beleaguered Mike McLintock), is a sadistic Confederate agent who lives with his young housekeeper and former slave, Mary Simms, played by Lovie Simone, in an arresting performance that captures the struggle between terror and resolve. “I’m going to be part of a community,” Simone’s Simms tells Mudd, defying him. “I’m going to be somebody.” Mary Simms is not mentioned in Swanson’s book. Nor are any of the other people formerly owned by Mudd who testified at his military trial, including Simms’s brothers, one of whom Mudd had shot in the leg. (Five of the prosecution’s eleven witnesses were former slaves of Mudd’s.) Simms’s testimony was particularly important in establishing that he carried Confederate mail.
But about Booth she could say very little, because, notwithstanding the story told in “Manhunt,” she was not at Mudd’s house when Booth rode up with a broken leg early on April 15, 1865. The brother of hers who had been shot in the leg had run away in 1863, and Simms herself had fled in 1864, after Maryland abolished slavery.
In the series, Simms and her brother choose, inexplicably, to return to Mudd’s house in 1865 and Simms is in the house when Booth arrives; she hides his boot and later directs Stanton to its hiding place. Her testimony, elicited by Stanton, is crucial not so much to Mudd’s conviction as to the series’ interest in both racial justice and a happy ending. We’re also led to believe that Simms—having met with Elizabeth Keckley, a Black writer and seamstress who served as a dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, and having opened a school for Black children—has a grand future ahead of her. In the series’ epilogue, we see her wearing a precisely fitted new calico dress, carrying a stack of books, and chatting with other Black students as she arrives at the library of the newly founded Howard University: a door of learning opened.
The facts are less comforting. Mudd, having narrowly avoided hanging, was sentenced to hard labor for life in a prison on an island off the coast of Florida, but in February, 1869, in a ceremony at the White House attended by Mudd’s wife, Andrew Johnson signed his pardon. (This coda is not mentioned in “Manhunt.”) Mudd went home, resumed his practice, and ran for office. He had nine children and thirty-three grandchildren. His house is now a museum. Mary Simms appears in the 1900 U.S. census as a widowed, sixty-year-old mother of two, living in Bryantown, in another family’s house, and working as a cook, and is listed as unable to either read or write. Pray that she was happy, and part of a community, and somebody, surely somebody, to everyone who loved her. But she did not attend Howard University.
You get, onscreen, the civil war you’re living. “What if Booth weakened our democracy?” a reporter asks Stanton in the first episode of “Manhunt” (filmed in 2022). Lest you miss any of the clues pointing to the crime of our time, the insurrection at hand, we see a nefarious villain—famous and cosseted, one of the richest men in New York—boasting, as he points a gun at Stanton, “I could fire this on Wall Street in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me.” Stanton, however determined to capture Booth, is as hobbled as his prey. In “Manhunt,” the War Between the States is a war between two crippled, broken men. “Manhunt” is “The Prisoner of Shark Island” upside down: the Confederates have become the villains. Much else remains the same. The killer is a man with a gun. The law is a man on a horse. They stagger after each other, armed to the teeth: the least frail man wins.
You also get whatever civil war, or whatever history, that Hollywood is willing to pay for, which, as a rule, involves men, horses, and guns. George Saunders’s luminous novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” about the President’s grief at the death of his young son Willie, in 1862, became an eerie, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree New York Times virtual-reality short in 2017, and feature-film rights were soon sold, but there’s still no movie (although an opera is in the works). Nor has there been a film of Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 Civil War novel, “March,” an exquisitely unsettling upending of “Little Women.” And there doesn’t appear to be any upcoming adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2022 novel, “Booth,” long-listed for the Booker Prize, a book that is to Swanson’s “Manhunt” what “Little Dorrit” is to an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
Fowler’s searching family saga begins with Richard Booth, “skinny as a stork,” a former lawyer and an admirer of the English radical John Wilkes. While living on his family’s halfhearted farm in Maryland (“the people who live there call it the farm, though it’s half trees”), crafting a new translation of the Aeneid which he will never finish, and helping fugitive slaves escape to Philadelphia, he is given the honor of naming the baby who will become his most famous grandson. Richard Booth’s son, Junius, has left his wife and son in England and fled to America with a woman named Mary Ann Holmes. She is left on the farm to raise the children for nine months of the year while her husband tours the country, performing onstage, between bouts of insanity that the family calls his “mad freaks,” though they also involve suicide attempts, first by hanging, then by drowning. As for Mary, Fowler writes that, by 1838, the year John Wilkes is born, for “seventeen years, almost without break, she’s been either expecting a baby or nursing one. It will be twenty continuous years before she’s done.”
There was a hole in the middle of the Booth family, something like the phantom limb that lingers after an amputation. “Frederick was the first to die,” just one year old, Fowler writes. Then Mary Ann, and baby Elizabeth, and Henry Byron. The sorrow found no bottom. “Let me die,” their mother prayed. Their father put stones in his shoes and walked mile after mile after mile, in penance for whatever sins had led to such losses. This was no civil war. Fowler writes, “This grief was a war against the world.”
John Wilkes Booth was born into this war and never escaped it. But none of this family drama finds a place in “Manhunt,” whose domestic concerns lie chiefly with the First Family. Lili Taylor gives a riveting performance as Mary Todd Lincoln, herself driven all but mad by the deaths of Willie and another son, Eddie, in 1850, at age three. “All mothers are my sisters,” she tells her husband, in a kind of Victorian-style version of America Ferrera’s monologue in “Barbie.” She’s there to speak for every mother who has lost a child, but only because there are few other women or children in the show’s world. (Even Mudd’s wife and children have been erased.) Hamish Linklater, as Lincoln, is oddly tremulous, and everything about his life as a father is better rendered in Fowler’s novel: “Nighttime finds Tad sleeping, curled up like a cat, beneath his father’s desk, his head on his father’s shoes.”
In period drama after period drama, Hollywood producers appear to pride themselves on the exact reproduction of everything from candlesticks to carriages, but they do not seem capable of imagining the lives of women and girls before birth control, safe childbirth, and ready abortion. In Hollywood’s version of American history, as in the imagination of the current Supreme Court majority, every man owns a gun and no woman is ever pregnant. Most nineteenth-century American women, whatever their race or wealth or state of servitude, were pregnant or nursing for decades. You hardly ever see them onscreen: no swollen bellies, no leaking breasts, no babies in arms, no toddlers clinging to legs, no lullabies, no “little stone lozenges” like the gravestones that mark the burials of Pip’s five infant brothers in “Great Expectations.” “Manhunt” tries hard to get Reconstruction right; it gets the warp and woof of daily life quite wrong.
“I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes,” Fowler has said. “This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it.” She decided to write “Booth” during yet another series of mass shootings in the United States. She wanted to write about the rest of the Booths, the family that nursed the assassin, the family left behind: his brothers Edwin and Junius and his sisters Rosalie and Asia—Asia, who loved John Wilkes the most.
Asia Booth Clarke, three years older than John Wilkes, married an actor and gave birth to nine children, seven in ten years—her “little trotters,” she called them. After her brother murdered the President, she moved to England; all three children she bore there died. “It is dreadful to have no babies,” she once wrote. On April 15, 1865, she learned of the assassination when, in bed, pregnant with twins, she read about it in the morning newspaper. Eleven days later, when Booth was killed in Virginia, a theatre manager came to tell her the news.
The twins were born that summer. One, a girl, died the next year. Fowler writes, “They do not name the boy for John.”
This is act vee one eye. Long before Lincoln became President, “Macbeth” had been his favorite play. As a young lawyer, he carried a copy of it in his pocket. John Wilkes Booth had often played the title role. “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,” Lincoln had said, days before his death, reading a speech from the play. “After being hunted like a dog . . . I am here in despair,” Booth wrote in his last diary entry. “And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for.” Booth, the overactor who knew only rage and self-pity, was best known for his performance as Richard III, scheming, enraged, crippled, doomed. A horse! A horse! He performed it, as was standard on the nineteenth-century stage, using a loose seventeenth-century adaptation that cribbed from other Shakespeare plays. “All quiet—after Richard twice tries to rise and cannot,” he once scrawled on a blank page in his prompt book, across from Richard’s dying lines (borrowed from “Henry IV”): “Now let the world no longer be a stage / To feed contention in a lingering act . . . On bloody actions, the rude scene may end, / And darkness be the burier of the dead!” Long after Lincoln’s death, as one tale has it, Edwin Booth opened his brother’s trunk and found inside theatrical costumes that had belonged to John Wilkes and their father, many stitched by his mother. He tugged them out and burned them: Iago’s ruffed tunic, Mark Antony’s flowing toga, Richard’s long cloak, each by each, in the dead dark of an American night. ♦