The Man Who Shot John Wilkes Booth Got $1,653.85. The Detective Got $15,000.

The Man Who Shot John Wilkes Booth Got $1,653.85. The Detective Got $15,000. Before dawn on 26 April 1865 soldiers of the 16th New York Cavalry set fire to a tobacco barn in Virginia to drive out John Wilkes Booth. Sergeant Boston Corbett fired one shot through the boards and hit him in the neck. The officers had wanted Booth alive; the country called Corbett a hero. When Congress divided the reward, Corbett received the same $1,653.85 as every enlisted man in the troop. The detective Everton Conger received $15,000. Twenty-three years later Corbett rode out of a Kansas asylum and was never seen again. This film follows the documents: Ford's Theatre, the flight with David Herold, Booth's diary, the War Department's $100,000 proclamation, Lafayette Baker's detectives, the Garrett farm, Conger's report of a shot "without order, pretext or excuse", the Montauk identification, the missing diary pages, the 1866 reward committee, Corbett's Kansas years and the David George mummy. A note on accuracy: no written order to take Booth alive has been found. The War Department's first reward plan and the final award differ, and both are given. CHAPTERS 0:00 The hook 0:57 The Booths 1:25 The cause 2:10 Ford's Theatre 3:23 The fugitives 4:09 Thomas Corbett 4:34 Boston 5:10 The soldier 5:54 The reward 6:26 Lafayette Baker 7:03 Virginia 7:26 Jett 7:39 The tobacco barn 8:13 The fire 8:33 The shot 8:57 Useless 9:22 The orders 10:01 Stanton 10:38 The body 11:13 The trial 11:31 Doctor Mudd 11:57 The diary 12:53 The claims 13:25 The committee 14:18 What it bought 14:37 Lafayette Baker 14:55 The lectures 15:16 Concordia 15:35 The legislature 16:02 The escape 16:25 The impostors 16:52 John St. Helen 17:29 Green Mount 17:55 Close Fifty-second film in a series on the archive behind the famous stories. Same method as the rest: the official version, then the documents. SOURCES War Department reward proclamation, 20 April 1865. Everton Conger, testimony, trial of John Surratt (1867). House Committee of Claims, report on the distribution of rewards, July 1866. John Wilkes Booth's diary (Ford's Theatre National Historic Site). Kansas House journal, February 1887. Finis L. Bates, The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth (1907). IMAGE CREDITS Library of Congress (Brady-Handy collection); National Archives (US); Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (1865); Metropolitan Museum of Art; Wikimedia Commons contributors. All public domain or freely licensed, via Wikimedia Commons. #Lincoln #JohnWilkesBooth #BostonCorbett #CivilWar #History