On April 26th
1865, Union soldiers caught up with John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett Farm, and
killed him.
Union
Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger learned through interrogation that John
Wilkes Booth and David E Herold were at the Richard Garrett Farm near Port
Royal, Virginia. In the early morning
hours of April 26th 1865 Conger accompanied 25 Union soldiers from
the 16th New York Cavalry commanded by Lieutenant Edward P Doherty.
They surrounded the tobacco barn that Booth and Herold were hiding in, and
demanded their surrender. Herold gave
himself up, but Booth refused, so the soldiers set the barn on fire.
Booth could
be seen moving around inside the burning barn.
Union Sergeant Boston Corbett, claimed to have seen Booth raise a gun to
shot, and so he fired at Booth. The shot struck Booth in the neck. He was dragged from the barn and placed on
the porch of the Garrett farmhouse. The
bullet had gone through several vertebrae and partially severed his spinal
cord. As he got close to dying, Booth
said, "Tell my mother I died for my country." He then asked that his hands be held up where
he could see them and said his last words, "Useless, useless." It took him three hours to die.
In Booth’s
pockets were the pictures of five different women, a candle, a compass, and his
diary. In the diary Booth had written of
President Abraham Lincoln, "Our country owed all her troubles to him, and
God simply made me the instrument of his punishment."
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