Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth

[Gene C]

This weeks chapter is "The Assassins Death

A fairly good accounting of the capture and death of Booth.
What I found interesting is there is no mention of what Booth was doing the several days in between his visit to Mudd's house and Port Royal.
At the time this was written, hardly anyone new.

It is mentioned that Booth had a diary.
Another interesting thing, at the time almost everyone believed Baker had dumped Booth's body in the Potomac.

Townsend eloquently wrote "
In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever,
impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damna-
tion, - annihilation. The river-bottom may ooze about it laden with
great shot and drowning manacles. The earth may have opened to give it
that silence and forgiveness which man will never give its memory. The
fishes may swim around it, or the daisies grow white above it; but wo
shall never know. Mysterious, incomprehensible, unattainable, like the
dim times through which we live and think upon as if we only dreamed
them in perturbed fever, the assassin of a nation's head rests somewhere
in the elements, and that is all ; but if the indignant seas or the profaned
turf shall ever vomit his corpse from their recesses, and it receive humane
or Christian burial from some who do not recognize it, let the last words
those decaying lips ever uttered be carved above them with a dagger, to
tell the history of a young and once promising life -- useless ! useless !