Yesterday was April 26 — the 161st anniversary of John Wilkes Booth's death. I was looking up the details for the site, and I figured the story would be pretty straightforward. Booth shot Lincoln, ran for it, hid in a barn, got cornered, and that was it. What I did not expect was to fall down a rabbit hole about the soldier who actually shot Booth — a guy named Boston Corbett, whose story is somehow even stranger than Booth's.
I'd never heard of him. I'm guessing most people haven't.
The barn
First the part most people kind of know. After Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, he escaped Washington with a co-conspirator named David Herold. They spent 12 days running through Maryland and Virginia, hiding in swamps and at sympathetic farmhouses. Eventually a tip led Union soldiers to a tobacco barn at the Garrett family farm in Virginia.
It was the early morning of April 26. The soldiers surrounded the barn. Herold surrendered. Booth refused. So the soldiers set the barn on fire to flush him out.
What I always assumed — what I think most people assume — is that Booth either died in the fire or shot himself. He didn't. A Union sergeant shot him through a crack in the barn wall, against direct orders to take Booth alive.
That sergeant was Boston Corbett. And that's where the story gets weird.
The hatmaker
Boston Corbett was born in England in 1832 and came to America as a kid. He worked as a hatter — basically the guy who makes felt hats — in New York and Boston. This matters because in the 1800s, hatters used mercury to treat the felt. Mercury is poisonous. Long-term exposure causes tremors, paranoia, and mental instability. That's where the phrase "mad as a hatter" actually comes from.
So Corbett spent years breathing in mercury fumes for a living. By his late twenties he was already showing signs of religious mania, which was probably made worse by the chemical exposure.
Then, in 1858, something happened that's so disturbing I almost don't want to write about it. Corbett was walking home in Boston when two prostitutes approached him on the street. He went home, opened his Bible to the verses in Matthew about being a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven," and decided to take it literally. He used a pair of scissors. Then he ate dinner, went to a prayer meeting, and afterward checked himself into Massachusetts General Hospital.
He survived. He was 26.
The army
When the Civil War broke out, Corbett enlisted in the Union Army. By all accounts he was a strange but committed soldier. He held prayer meetings in camp. He once got court-martialed for arguing with an officer about cursing. He was captured at one point and spent five months in Andersonville prison, which killed about 13,000 Union prisoners — and somehow he survived that too.
By April 1865 he was a sergeant in the 16th New York Cavalry. And his unit was the one sent after Booth.
The shot
The orders were clear: take Booth alive. The government wanted a trial. They wanted to know if there was a wider conspiracy, if the Confederate government had been involved, who else might have helped him.
When the barn caught fire, Corbett was watching through a gap in the wall. He later said he saw Booth raise a rifle and figured he was about to shoot one of the other soldiers. So Corbett fired first.
He hit Booth in the neck — almost the exact same spot where Booth had hit Lincoln. Booth was paralyzed instantly. He was dragged out of the barn and laid on the porch of the Garrett house. He died about three hours later, at age 26.
His last words were reportedly, "Useless, useless," as he looked at his own hands.
The hero
Corbett became famous overnight. The man who killed Lincoln's killer. He gave speeches. People wanted his autograph. The War Department initially wanted to court-martial him for disobeying orders, but the public reaction was so positive that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton dropped the charges. Corbett got a share of the $100,000 reward (which was a lot of money in 1865).
He should have been set for life. He wasn't.
The asylum
Within a few years Corbett was broke. He kept giving away his money. He moved around — Connecticut, Massachusetts, eventually Kansas, where he lived in a literal hole he dug into the side of a hill. He took odd jobs. He preached on the streets.
In 1887, he became an assistant doorkeeper at the Kansas state legislature in Topeka. The job lasted about a month. One day he heard people in the legislature laughing and decided they were mocking him. He pulled out two pistols and started chasing legislators around the building. Nobody was hurt, but he was arrested and committed to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane.
He escaped in May 1888 by stealing a horse and riding off. He was 56 years old.
The disappearance
Here's where it gets interesting. After the escape, Boston Corbett vanished from the historical record. There are theories about what happened to him. The most common one is that he ended up in a cabin in northern Minnesota and died in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894 — a wildfire that killed over 400 people. There's a man named "Thomas Corbett" listed among the dead, and the timing fits.
But nobody really knows. The man who fired the most famous shot of the Lincoln assassination just walked off into America and was never seen again.
Why I think this is wild
Booth's story makes sense to me. He was an actor, a Confederate sympathizer, an egomaniac who thought he could change history. You can imagine why he did what he did, even if it was evil.
Corbett doesn't make any sense. He's a hatter who got mercury poisoning and became a religious extremist. He castrated himself with scissors. He survived Andersonville. He shot Booth without permission. He became a celebrity and gave it all away. He chased state senators around a building with two guns. He escaped from an insane asylum at 56 and disappeared.
And he's the guy who closed the loop on Lincoln's assassination. That weirdo. The history books just kind of skip over him because there's no clean ending. He's not famous like Booth and he's not respected like the soldiers who tracked Booth down. He's the random in the middle of the most important moment in 19th-century American history, and his life reads like a fever dream.
Sometimes the story behind the story is wilder than the story.