Hunting Lincoln’s Killer

The bodies and blood were everywhere, blanketing the Virginia hills and the banks of the Bull Run River on that beautiful summer day in 1861. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s Union forces were being massacred.

“We waded in great confusion,” recalled a twenty-three-year-old soldier named Edward P. Doherty. “We were immediately ordered to fall back and lie down, as the discharge from the enemy’s battery was severe.”

The Battle of Bull Run — the first major battle of the American Civil War — unfolded on July 21, 1861, just forty kilometres southwest of Washington, D.C. Confidence of victory was so high among Union supporters that a large crowd of spectators, including several members of the U.S. Congress, gathered nearby, carrying picnic baskets and opera glasses.

It turned into a rout. “Legs, arms and bodies are crushed and broken as if smitten by thunder-bolts; the ground is crimson with blood,” recalled one of Doherty’s fellow soldiers. A desperate Doherty dragged some of his wounded comrades to a nearby church that was serving as a field hospital, then he dashed across the battlefield to rejoin what he supposed was his regiment. He was badly mistaken: They were enemy Confederates. “The cavalry galloped up and arrested me,” he wrote in a gripping account published in the New York Times.

Doherty was just one of thirteen hundred missing or captured Union soldiers that day; another fifteen hundred perished. What made him different was that he was Canadian. This was not his country, but, like many other Canadians, he made it his war.

For four years the American Civil War raged between the Northern Union and the Southern Confederate armies, claiming more than six hundred thousand lives. On that summer morning in 1861, Edward Doherty could never have imagined what his final and fateful mission in that war would be.

Little is recorded about Doherty’s early life except a handwritten entry in a church registry that shows he was born into a family of Irish immigrants in 1838 in Wickham, a small town in what was then called Canada East, not far from Montreal. Doherty moved to that city to go to school, graduated from college, and studied law with a local firm.

By 1861, Doherty found himself working in New York City. On April 20, a week after the Civil War broke out, he ran into some companions who had just enlisted. “I met a number of my friends who were members of the 71st regiment — who, after some parley, induced me to become a member of their corps,” he recounted in a remarkably detailed series of letters printed in the Montreal Gazette under the title “Letter from the Seat of the War. From a Montrealer in the U.S. Army.”

Just like that, he was a private in Company A of the Seventy-First New York Volunteers. Doherty never elaborated on his reasons for enlisting so quickly, though his military diaries revealed a young man’s thrill at the prospect of stirring battles and “gallant soldiers.”

Doherty and the rest of his regiment were quickly dispatched to Washington, where the Northern troops were gathering. The president himself came by to visit the new recruits soon after: “On Sunday, we were honored by a visit and a how do you do shake hands,” Doherty reported in the Montreal Gazette.

Soon after, the men of the Seventy-First Regiment found themselves plunged into the nightmare that was Bull Run. After the brief but bloody battle, the victorious Confederates confined Doherty and other prisoners in the nearby church that had been turned into a field hospital. It became a sort of tomb for the dying and a dungeon for the living. “During the confusion, I managed to conceal myself under a blanket which was saturated with blood,” he recounted in the New York Times. “They left me, supposing I was wounded.” All through the night, Doherty tried to ease the suffering of those around him, but by the next morning thirty-two of his fallen comrades had died.

The healthier prisoners were being marched away to Richmond, Virginia. Doherty had no intention of being forced deeper into enemy territory, much less of being left behind to die. He and two other captured soldiers made a break for it. They snuck past the guard, ran all night and for seven days more across railroad tracks, fields, and forests, before they finally made it back to a Union camp.

After a warm supper and a good night’s sleep, Doherty insisted on riding back to Bull Run to see where so many of his comrades had fallen. “I visited the field of battle on horseback,” Doherty recalled. “I saw there numbers of our comrades, unburied.” As he looked over the hills littered with rotting bodies, it was not only the blood or the disfigured faces and torn limbs that struck him. “The smell was offensive,” he remembered.

Doherty’s bravery helped him to move up the ranks. His military record was full of praise from his superior officers. “His reputation for gallantry in the field as admired by his brother officers is second to no one in the service,” said one commander. Even his foes had strikingly similar praise for the Canadian. One unnamed Confederate in Doherty’s military files described him as “that gallant officer.”

By September 1863, the war had dragged on for two years with no sign of victory for either side. Doherty arrived in Washington, joining the Sixteenth New York Cavalry as a first lieutenant. His new regiment was handed the important assignment of “covering the Defences of Washington, D.C., and operating against guerrillas,” according to his military records. Their job was to protect the city, though not the president.

Two more years of heavy fighting finally gave Abraham Lincoln his victory against the Confederacy, though not the unity of the “house divided” he had warned about in a famous speech three years prior to the Civil War’s outbreak. Hatred ran deep in the South for the president who — through his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and through the ultimate victory of his Union Army — had freed America’s slaves. Few were more enraged than John Wilkes Booth — one of the country’s most famous actors and most ferocious Southern sympathizers. In a letter justifying his stance, he had proudly proclaimed that “this country was formed for the white, not for the black man.”

Lafayette Baker appointed two of his own detectives to accompany Doherty: his cousin Luther Baker and a former cavalry officer named Everton Conger. No one disputed that it was Doherty who was in charge of the military regiment. But jealousy and rivalry quickly set in between the civilian detectives and Doherty. Later, they would each claim that they had played the major role in the events that would follow.

But inside the barn the famous actor was not through performing. “I own all the arms, and intend to use them on you gentlemen,” the assassin declared. The search party carried out its threat and began to light a fire around the building. Booth stayed put as the fire spread. A single gunshot added to the confusion as the flames crackled in the burning barn.

Doherty, thinking at first that Booth had shot himself, raced into the burning building with the others to grab Booth. “He was dazed for a moment and his eyes bore that piteous expression characteristic of a hunted deer,” Doherty later recalled in an interview with the Brooklyn Citizen. “He bent forward as if to make a spring and, raising his right hand, ran his finger through his heavy hair as if collecting his thoughts.” Then Booth slumped down and collapsed onto the floor of the barn.

Doherty had hunted down the president’s killer across two states. Now he had a corpse to get back to Washington. He did so with surprising tenderness and care, according to his account in Century. “I took a saddle blanket off my horse, and, borrowing a darning needle from Miss Garrett, sewed his body in it.”

For Edward Doherty, that was the end of the hunt for Lincoln’s murderer. But it was just the beginning of his fight to secure a reward and, even more importantly, his reputation.

A nasty battle was brewing over the reward of more than $100,000 that had been offered for the capture of Booth and his accomplices. In early May 1865, Doherty wrote to the army’s chief of staff, submitting the names of the soldiers who had served under him with a simple message: “My command and myself claim the honor of having effected the capture of the assassins and we respectfully ask that the reward offered be properly distributed where it belongs.” He sent the army’s top brass affidavits from no fewer than thirteen of his men. One after the other, they confirmed the leadership role Doherty had played in the hunt.

But Lafayette Baker and his underlings, Conger and Luther Baker, did not want Doherty and his men to get the glory or the cash. In late December 1865, they lobbied Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in an account filled with exaggerations, omissions, and outright lies — even claiming at one point that Doherty had hidden under a shed, a fabrication unsupported by the testimony of any of the eyewitnesses. In their version of events, Lafayette Baker had masterminded the entire hunt from his office in Washington. Never one to be modest, Lafayette Baker concluded — despite the facts that he had stayed in Washington, uncovered no clues, and was nowhere near the chase — that he was in effect the one who “apprehended both Booth and Harrold [sic] … and is entitled to the reward primarily.”

Stanton appointed a special judicial committee to sort through the deluge of claims, and its report in April 1866 made clear Doherty’s central role in the capture of Lincoln’s assassin: “The expedition was imminently of a military character. Its special duty was to scout through a considerable region of country lately within the enemy’s lines, and inhabited by a class hostile to the government, who would readily aid in the escape or concealment of the fugitives, and who could be overawed and compelled to surrender them, or give information in regard to their route, by military force alone. The military element of the expedition is, therefore, believed to have been that which was essential to its success. … Lieutenant Doherty is shown to have acted and been recognized as the commander of the expedition.” As such, he was worthy of the largest share of the reward — $7,500 (worth about $137,000 today) — about twice as much as Baker and each of his detectives was allotted. Enraged, Doherty’s rivals used their political connections in Congress to engineer a hearing into the “fairness and propriety” of the reward payments.

Giles Waldo Hotchkiss, a New York congressman, opened the proceedings with a full-frontal attack. “I believe Lieutenant Doherty was a downright coward in the expedition,” he said, repeating the slanderous stories spread by Lafayette Baker. “Doherty stayed under a shed, and no power could drive him out of it,” Hotchkiss contended, while his frightened men were “lying around under the apple trees and elsewhere.” The committee voted to give Lafayette Baker the biggest share of the reward and slashed Doherty’s payment.

Fortunately, some justice was restored when the report was put to a vote in the full House of Representatives. Lafayette Baker — whose machinations and lies had also earned him plenty of political enemies — saw his bounty massively slashed. Doherty had his reward pushed back up to $5,250. It was a messy end to an ugly affair.

Worse than any squabble over money, Doherty had been slandered in Congress, the most public forum in the country. Doherty voiced his outrage in a letter to the New York Times. “I cannot remain quiet under such a charge, affecting my character as a soldier and my conduct as an officer,” he declared.

“Chance has connected my name with a great historical event,” wrote the Canadian who took up the Union cause, “and I simply desire that the army with whom I served, and the people for whom I fought, should know that in the performance of my duty, I was not a laggard and a coward.”

At least within the army, Doherty’s courage was not questioned. He was transferred to the Fifth U.S. Cavalry and sent to Kansas and Colorado to help the U.S. Army drive the Cheyenne out of their lands in a series of raids and massacres known as the Republican River Expedition. During one particularly bloody battle, at least fifty Cheyenne fighters were surrounded and slaughtered. It was a tragic twist of fate that the Canadian who had fought in Lincoln’s army in a war that ended slavery would end up helping that army in its ugly war of extermination of Indigenous peoples.

In any event, Doherty’s military days were coming to an end. Trouble inside the ranks began brewing for him by 1868, according to author James Carson, who carefully chronicled the history of Doherty’s cavalry regiment. It started with complaints that Doherty had meted out improper punishments to enlisted men under his command. An army investigation found no fault and accepted Doherty’s defence that he was harsh but fair. But then Doherty was accused of going to the house of a “common, public prostitute” in uniform; there were reports of unpaid debts and a serious drinking problem.

A special military board convened in Washington and investigated Doherty’s case for a month. He escaped a court martial, but the army brass ruled that he was “unfit for the service by reason of lack of good moral character.” Doherty complained that he never got an adequate chance of “explaining or disproving these malicious false charges,” but he was mustered out of the service on December 27, 1870.

Doherty recovered from that setback, building a successful civilian life in the years that followed. He married, raised a son, found various government jobs, and by 1886 he had landed a well-paying if unexciting sinecure as general inspector of paving in New York City’s public works department. Doherty probably would have been content to live the rest of his life in relative obscurity.

But more than two decades after the war Doherty was again thrust into the spotlight. The Brooklyn Citizen, a New York newspaper, ran a major feature on the local hero, with the headline all in capital letters: “HE CAPTURED BOOTH.” “He has remained silent,” the newspaper reported, “allowing the honor to go to others.”

Doherty got more publicity when in 1890 Century magazine published an expanded version of the detailed military report he had filed soon after Booth’s capture and death. That same year, Doherty’s legacy was secured when the definitive tenvolume biography of Lincoln written by his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, and the future secretary of state, John Hay, was published, crediting the Booth manhunt to “a party under Lieutenant E.P. Doherty.”

In 1895 the New York Times added its prestige to the scales of history with a lengthy story about the city’s paving inspector who “commanded the company of cavalry which tracked Booth to his hiding place.” Much more than he had in the battle for the reward money, Doherty, it seemed, had emerged victorious.

Doherty also reconnected with his fellow army veterans. He became a commander of a local branch of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union Army veterans group, and served twice as grand marshal for New York’s Memorial Day celebrations.

Doherty died of heart disease at his New York home on April 3, 1897. He would have been pleased with the headline of the obituary that ran the next day in the New York Times, which was simple and to the point: “He Commanded the Men who Hunted down the Assassin of Abraham Lincoln.”

Edward P. Doherty was buried in the American military’s hallowed grounds at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. His tombstone reads: “Commanded detachment of 16th N.Y. Cavalry which captured President Lincoln’s assassin April 26, 1865.”

The man from small-town Quebec had won his battle with history.

The Altar of Freedom

Canada and America’s Civil War

Over the course of America’s bloody four-year Civil War from 1861 to 1865, around thirty thousand to fifty thousand Canadians enlisted to fight — and they did so valiantly. At least twenty-nine earned Medals of Honour; five of them became Union generals. Many paid the ultimate price for valour: an estimated five thousand to seven thousand died.

The American Civil War pitted twenty-three Northern states, which remained in the American Union, against eleven Southern “Confederate” states, which claimed the right to secede from the Union. The schism was primarily caused by the Southern states’ desire to retain and expand the institution of slavery as American settlement moved westward, and the Northern states’ desire to limit, or even abolish, slavery.

Canadians signed up overwhelmingly on the Northern side. For those looking for adventure or in need of a small but steady salary, it was certainly geographically easier to join U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s Union Army. Tens of thousands of citizens from what was then British North America — especially French Canadians — had already settled in the northeastern states, looking for work. As many as five to ten per cent of some regiments in Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan were francophones.

Many also joined out of conviction. An estimated 2,500 Black Canadians signed up, according to historian Richard M. Reid, who has chronicled their contributions. In a battle made famous by the Oscar-winning 1989 movie Glory, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry — the first Black regiment in the North — stormed Fort Wagner in South Carolina on July 18, 1863. Half the men, including four Black Canadians, perished that day in the brave, but failed, assault.

The sympathies of many members of Canada’s political and financial elite lay with the Confederacy. Like their wealthy counterparts in England, they had business ties with the cotton-producing South. They also felt more attuned to the conservative aristocracy of the South than to what they saw as Lincoln’s dangerous democratic populism.

The major newspapers they owned were decidedly pro-South. The Globe, published by fervent abolitionist George Brown, was an exception. More typical was the Niagara Review, which denounced Lincoln as a “mad, blood-stained despot at Washington.”