The Greatest Manhunt in American History

For 12 days after his brazen assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was at large, and in Manhunt, historian James L. Swanson tells the vivid, fully documented tale of his escape and the wild, massive pursuit. Get a taste of the daily drama from this timeline of the desperate search.

April 14, 1865 Around noon, Booth learns that Lincoln is coming to Ford's Theatre that night. He has eight hours to prepare his plan. 10:15 pm: Booth shoots the president, leaps to the stage, and escapes on a waiting horse. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton orders the manhunt to begin. April 15 About 4:00 am: Booth seeks treatment for a broken leg at Dr. Samuel Mudd's farm near Beantown, Maryland. Cavalry patrol heads south toward Mudd farm. Confederate operative Thomas Jones hides Booth in a remote pine thicket for five days, frustrating the manhunters. April 19 Tens of thousands watch the procession to the U.S. Capitol, where President Lincoln lies in state. Wild rumors and stories of false sightings of Booth spread.
April 20 Stanton offers a $100,000 reward for the assassins, and threatens death to any citizen who helps them. After hiding Booth in Maryland, Jones puts him in a rowboat on the Potomac River, bound for Virginia. More than a thousand manhunters are still searching in Maryland. In the dark, Booth rows the wrong way and first ends up back in Maryland. April 20-24 Booth lands in the northern neck of Virginia, and Confederate agents and sympathizers guide him to Port Conway, Virginia. April 24 Booth befriends three Confederate soldiers who help him cross the Rappahannock River to Port Royal and then guide him further southwest to the Garrett farm. Union troops in Washington receive a report of a Booth sighting. They board a U.S. Navy tug and steam south, right past Booth's hideout at the Garrett farm. April 25 The 16th New York Calvary, realizing their error, turns around and surrounds the Garrett farm after midnight that night.
April 26 When Booth refuses to surrender, troops set the barn on fire, and Boston Corbett shoots the assassin. Booth dies a few hours later, at sunrise. April 26-27 Booth's body is brought back to Washington, where it is autopsied, photographed, and buried in a secret grave.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In the early days of April 1865, with the bloody war to preserve the union finished, Swanson tells us, Abraham Lincoln was "jubilant." Elsewhere in Washington, the other player in the coming drama of the president's assassination was miserable. Hearing Lincoln's April 10 victory speech, famed actor and Confederate die-hard John Wilkes Booth turned to a friend and remarked with seething hatred, "That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through." On April 14, Booth did just that. With great power, passion and at a thrilling, breakneck pace, Swanson (Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution) conjures up an exhausted yet jubilant nation ruptured by grief, stunned by tragedy and hell-bent on revenge. For 12 days, assisted by family and some women smitten by his legendary physical beauty, Booth relied on smarts, stealth and luck to elude the best detectives, military officers and local police the federal government could muster. Taking the reader into the action, the story is shot through with breathless, vivid, even gory detail. With a deft, probing style and no small amount of swagger, Swanson, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, has crafted pure narrative pleasure, sure to satisfy the casual reader and Civil War aficionado alike. 11 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 7)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Despite the novel's success, Lee, as is widely known, never published another book; instead, she retreated to her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where she has given few interviews since 1964. In the eyes of the public, she has long become nearly as invisible as her indelible shut-in, Boo Radley, though she recently gave an interview to the New York Times and wrote a short essay for O magazine.

Now we have Charles J. Shields's Mockingbird, the first book-length treatment of her life. An unauthorized biography, it relies largely on interviews and "other sorts of communication" with Lee's acquaintances to trace her life from childhood through the publication of the novel and the years following, during which Lee struggled to write a second book. Mockingbird is less a biography than, as its subtitle claims, "a portrait," and like all portraits, it is highly subjective. More dogged than shrewd, it is hardly the definitive treatment Lee merits, nor is it a particularly perceptive argument about the place of To Kill a Mockingbird in American literature. (Shields has also written biographies for young adults.) However, it usefully and often entertainingly compiles and organizes information about Lee's life and offers a plausible answer to the question that preoccupies so many readers: Why did Lee never write another book -- and why did she retreat from the public?

For Shields, the answer lies in Lee's birthplace and in her paradoxical personality. Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, a small town in which everyone knew each other's business. She was a saucy yet shy child. Her father, like Atticus Finch, was a lawyer with a civic-minded bent that he instilled in his three daughters and one son -- though, as Shields points out, Lee's father was long a supporter of segregation. Her mother was an invalid, who, it seems, suffered either from manic depression or an undiagnosed mental illness; she did very little mothering of Nelle, who was largely left to a maid's ministrations (much as Scout is in To Kill a Mockingbird).

In what proved to be a crucial event, the shy but saucy Lee met Truman Capote one summer when the 5-year-old boy was living with his aunts next door. Bonded by what Capote called their "apartness," the children began to write stories on an Underwood typewriter Lee's father gave them.

The portrait that emerges from Shields's research in Mockingbird is of a tomboyish young woman with little tolerance for pretension; she was remembered by one classmate as a "deflater of phoniness." In 1949, after giving up on getting a law degree at the University of Alabama (where she made few friends but sharpened her wit writing a column for the university newspaper titled "Caustic Comment"), Lee moved to New York to follow in Capote's footsteps. Capote had already published a novel and -- always the more outgoing of the two -- he introduced her around town, but many of his friends found her dull. "Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book and that was that," one recalled. Lee struggled to make a living until, with the financial assistance of Joy and Michael Brown, two artists whom she met through Capote, she sat down to write the novel that became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Shields deftly shows that Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, was instrumental not only in getting the novel published but in shaping it into the book it is today. As Hohoff put it, "The editorial call to duty was plain." Lee needed "professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure."

Mockingbird is best where it deflates rumor and hearsay and fills in a more accurate picture of the woman. Shields makes a convincing case that Lee, a standoffish, stubborn woman invested in precision, became too "overwhelmed" by the success of her first novel to finish any of her subsequent efforts. (Her sister told a reporter that Lee's second book, about hunting deer, was stolen shortly before completion, but the story rings false.) For Lee, he observes, writing was always about capturing the everyday nuances of Southern small-town life she knew so well -- and, in her own way, loved; when she became famous, her relationship to that world was permanently altered.

Shields persuasively demonstrates that, despite widespread rumors, it's highly unlikely that Capote had anything to do with To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather, Shields shows that Lee actually contributed more to Capote's In Cold Blood than is commonly thought, writing several hundred pages of notes on which Capote heavily relied.

Even so, Mockingbird fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields follows his research down many a cul de sac and pads out trivial details (a whole page is dedicated to the movies that were nominated for various Oscars in 1962) while giving short shrift to complicated questions: Is To Kill a Mockingbird a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement?

Readers who love To Kill a Mockingbird will want to read this book for its tidbits of engaging info. But in the end, this is less a rigorous biography than a pleasant evocation of how one fiercely private woman was perceived by those around her. As such, it reminds us that a biography is, always, a fiction in its own right.

Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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