Maryland Historic Site After assassinating President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth led a wild chase through the lower Potomac countryside, through the Zekiah Swamp and across the river twice before being tracked down in Caroline County, Virginia.

Booth greeted his friend with an excited handshake, Mathews later recalled that Booth squeezed his hand so tightly that his nails left marks in his flesh. He gave Mathews the letter and asked him to deliver it to the National Intelligencer the next day.

$100,000 Reward! This printed broadside, issued five days after Lincoln’s death, announced a $100,000 reward for the apprehension of John Wilkes Booth and two of his known accomplices, “John H. Surrat” and “David C. Harold,” in connection with the assassination of President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865.

Then, in the last seconds before David Herold left the barn, Booth whispered the last words exchanged between them: “When you go out, don’t tell them the arms I have.” With that, Herold passed from fugitive to captive.

The Conspirator is an entertaining film which includes more accurate historical detail than most Hollywood productions, but it misses some of the larger historical truths and issues which must be examined to understand America in the 1860s and the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.

Anna and her family finally dropped out of the news, and Anna eventually had two more children. She was bedridden in her later years and died of kidney disease on October 24, 1904, at age 61. She was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, in an unmarked grave next to her mother.

John Surratt and Booth enlisted six men to help them. Most notable was David Herold, who could help with escape routes; George Atzerodt, who could manage the inevitable crossing of the Potomac River, and Lewis Powell, who went by the name Lewis Paine, was a Confederate Army veteran with a taste for violence.

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MT Olivet Cemetery, Washington, D.C., United States