The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

52 Th Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Boos.
ning across the Potomac. It was commanded by Lieutenant Laverty, and
garrisoned by sixty-five men. On Tuesday night, Major O'Bierne's party
reached this place, and soon afterwards, a telegraph station was established
here by an invaluable man to the expedition, Captain Beckwitn, General
Grant's chief cypher operator, who tapped the Point Lookout wire, and
placed the War Department within a moment's reach of the theater of
events.
Major O'Bierne's party started at once over the worst road in the world
for Port Tobacco.
If any place in the world is utterly given over to depravity, it is Port
Tobacco. From this town, by a sinuous creek, there is flat boat navigation
to the Potomac, and across that river to Mattox's creek. Before the war
Port Tobacco was the seat of a tobacco aristocracy and a haunt of negro
traders. It passed very naturally into a rebel post for blockade-runners
and a rebel post-office general. Gambling, corner fighting, and shooting
matches were its lyceum education. Violence and ignorance had every saffrage in the town. Its people were smugglers, to all intents, and there was
neither Bible nor geography to the whole region adjacent. Assassination
was never very unpopular at Port Tobacco, and when its victim was a north.
ern president it became quite heroic. A month before the murder a provost-marshal near by was slain in his bed-chamber. For such a town and
district the detective police were the only effective missionaries. The hotel
here is called the Brawner House; it has a bar in the nethermost cellar,
and its patrons, carousing in that imperfect light, look like the denizens of
some burglar's crib, talking robbery between their cups; its dining-room
is dark and tumible-down, and the cuisine bears traces of Caffir origin; a
barbecue is nothing to a dinner there. The Court House of Port Tobacco
is the most superflous house in the place, except the church. It stands in
the center of the town in a square, and the dwellings lie about it closely,
au if to throttle justice. Five hundred people exist in Port Tobacco; life
there reminds me, in connection with the slimy river and the adjacent
swamps, of the great reptile period of the world, when iguanadons and
pterodactyls and plcosauri ate each other.
'Into this abstract of Gomorrah the few detectives went like angels who
visited Lot. They pretended to be enquiring for friends, or to have busi
ness designs, and the first people they heard of were Harold and Atzerott.
The latter had visited Port Tobacco three weeks before- the murder, and intimated at that time his design of fleeing~ the country. But everybody
denied having seen him subsequent to the crime.
Atzerotthad been in town just prior to the crime. He had been living-with
a widow woman named Mrs.Wheeler, by whom he had several children, and
she was immediately called upon by Major O'Bierne. He did not tell her
what Atzerott had done, but vaguely hinted that he had committed some
terrible crime, and that since he had done her wrong, she could vindicate
both herself and justice by telling" his whereabouts. The woman admitted
that Atzerott had been her bane, but she loved him, and refused to betray
him.
His trunk was found in her garret, and in it the key to his paint shop in
Port Tobicco. The latter was.fruitlessly searched, but the probable whereabouts of Atzerott in Mongomery county obtained, and Major O'Bierne telegraphing there immediately, the desperate fellow was found and locked up.
A man named Crangle who had succeeded Atzerott in Mrs. Wheeler's pliable affections, was arrested at once and put in jail. A number of disloyal
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