On the night of the fifteenth (Saturday) a locked room in the Kirkwood House, where Vice President Johnson was stopping, which had been engaged by George A. Atzerodt on the morning of the fourteenth, was broken open, and in the bed were found a bowie-knife and a revolver, and on the wall a coat (subsequently identified as Herold’s), in which was found, among other articles, a bank book of Booth’s. The room had not been otherwise occupied—Atzerodt, after taking possession of it, having mysteriously disappeared.
On the morning of the seventeenth (Monday), at Baltimore, Michael O’Laughlin was arrested as a friend of Booth’s, and it was soon thought that he “resembled extremely” a certain suspicious stranger who, it was remembered, had been seen prowling about Secretary Stanton’s residence on the night of the 13th, when the serenade took place, and there doing such an unusual act as inquiring for, and looking at, General Grant.
On the same day at Fort Monroe, Samuel Arnold was arrested, whose letter signed “Sam” had been found on Saturday night among the effects of Booth.
On the night of the seventeenth, also, the house of Mrs. Surratt with all its contents was taken possession of by the soldiers, and Mrs. Surratt, her daughter, and all the other inmates were taken into custody. While the ladies were making preparations for their departure to prison, a man disguised as a laborer, with a sleeve of his knit undershirt drawn over his head, a pick-axe on his shoulder, and covered with mud, came to the door with the story that he was to dig a drain for Mrs. Surratt in the morning; and that lady asseverating that she had never seen the man before, he was swept with the rest to headquarters, and there, to the astonishment of everybody, turned out to be the desperate assailant of the Sewards.
During these few days Washington was like a city of the dead. The streets were hung with crape. The obsequies, which started on its march across the continent the colossal funeral procession in which the whole people were mourners, were being celebrated with the most solemn pomp. No business was done except at Military Headquarters. Men hardly dared talk of the calamity of the nation. Everywhere soldiers and police were on the alert to seize any supposed or denounced sympathizer with the South. Mysterious and prophetic papers turned up at the White House and the War Department. Women whispered terrible stories of what they knew about the “Great Crime.” To be able to give evidence was to be envied as a hero.
And still the arch-devil of the plot could not be found!
The lower parts of Maryland seethed like a boiling pot, and the prisons of Washington were choking with the “suspect” from that quarter. Lloyd—the drunken landlord of the tavern at Surrattsville, ten miles from Washington, at which Booth and Herold had stopped at midnight of the fatal Friday for carbines and whisky—after two days of stubborn denial was at last frightened into confession; and Doctor Mudd, who had set Booth’s leg Saturday morning thirty miles from Washington, was in close confinement. All the intimate friends of the actor in Washington, in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in New York and even in Montreal were in the clutches of the government. Surratt himself—the pursuit of whom, guided by Weichman, his former college-chum, his room-mate, and the favorite guest of his mother, had been instant and thorough—it was ascertained, had left Canada on the 12th of April and was back again on the 18th.
But where was Booth? where Herold? where Atzerodt?
On the 20th, the Secretary of War applied the proper stimulus by issuing a proclamation to the following effect:
“$50,000 reward will be paid by this department for the apprehension of the murderer of our late beloved President.