Boston Corbett

• 1. Introduction

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  Boston Corbett vanished from Kansas on the 26th of May 1888. No one ever saw him again. He had just escaped from the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, riding off on horseback. He made his way to the town of Neodesha, where he stayed briefly with an old prisoner-of-war comrade named Richard Thatcher. Before leaving, he told Thatcher he was heading for Mexico. Then he disappeared completely.

  Two decades earlier, this same man had been cheered through the streets of Washington, D.C. He was the soldier credited with shooting John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who had killed President Abraham Lincoln. Before the war, he had been an obscure immigrant tradesman in New England. He was a man so devoted to his faith that it alarmed those around him. He had survived a Confederate prison camp. He had even mutilated his own body in the name of his religion.

  What turned a struggling hat-maker into the man who ended the hunt for Lincoln's killer? And what turned a national hero into a fugitive from his own government's care?

• 2. A Hatter's Faith

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  Thomas H. Corbett was born in London on the 29th of January 1832. His family immigrated to the United States in 1840, when he was seven or eight. The Corbetts moved often before finally settling in Troy, New York. As a teenager, Corbett apprenticed as a milliner, a trade he returned to on and off for the rest of his life. The work exposed him constantly to mercury(II) nitrate fumes, used at the time to turn fur into felt for hats. Heavy exposure to that compound can cause hallucinations, psychosis, and a condition called erethism. Historians have since pointed to this exposure to explain much of Corbett's instability, both before and after the war.

  After working in Troy, Corbett returned to New York City, where in the early 1850s he met and married Susan Rebecca, a woman thirteen years his senior. He became a US citizen on the 9th of June 1855, taking his oath at a courthouse in Troy. The couple then moved to Richmond, Virginia. His outspoken opposition to slavery made it hard for him to keep steady work there. When they tried to sail back to New York, Susan fell ill and died at sea on the 18th of August 1856. Grief-stricken, Corbett moved to Boston, began drinking heavily, lost his job, and became homeless.

  By 1857, Corbett was working at a hat shop on Washington Street in Boston. He had reached this point after a spell of heavy drinking, when a street preacher stopped him and persuaded him to join the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was a proficient milliner, but known for stopping work to pray over coworkers who cursed. He also preached on the street and handed out religious tracts in North Square, earning a local reputation as an eccentric and a fanatic. On the 16th of July 1858, wrestling with sexual temptation, he turned to two verses in the Gospel of Matthew. A friend later recalled that Corbett said the Lord had directed him, in a vision, to castrate himself. He did it with a pair of scissors, then ate a meal and attended a prayer meeting before anyone sought medical help for him. He was released from care on the 15th of August. A friend recorded that Corbett was 'very much gratified with the result as his passion was not trouble any more.'

  Baptized on the 29th of August, Corbett changed his first name from Thomas to Boston, after the city of his conversion. At meetings on Fulton and Bromfield Streets, his enthusiastic outbursts earned him the nickname 'The Glory to God man.' Trying to imitate Jesus, he grew his hair long. The Union Army made him cut it when he enlisted a few years later. His old milliner boss summed him up this way: Corbett was 'a good man, for all of his faults were of the head, and not of the heart.' That same conviction would soon carry him into a war that tested him in ways no hat shop ever had.

• 3. A Soldier's Ordeal

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  On the 19th of April 1861, Corbett enlisted as a private in Company I of the Union Army's 12th New York State Militia. He carried a Bible everywhere and read passages aloud to anyone nearby. He held unauthorized prayer meetings and argued openly with his superior officers. He once reprimanded Colonel Daniel Butterfield for cursing and taking the Lord's name in vain. Butterfield had him sent to the guardhouse for several days, but Corbett refused to apologize. The Army eventually court-martialed him for his continued defiance and sentenced him to be shot. The sentence was later reduced, and he was discharged in August 1863.

  Corbett re-enlisted that same month in Company L of the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment. On the 26th of February 1864, he was demoted to private for an incident that was never recorded. Despite his eccentricities, he was reportedly a good soldier. On the 24th of June 1864, Confederate troops under John S. Mosby captured many of Corbett's comrades near Culpeper, Virginia. Corbett kept firing from behind a persimmon tree and a ditch with a seven-shooter repeating rifle. It took the Confederates three attempts to finally capture him, only after he ran out of ammunition. One junior officer, enraged by his resistance, knocked the rifle from his hand and aimed a pistol at his head. A Captain Chapman intervened, saying, 'Don't shoot that man! He has a right to defend himself to the last!'

  Corbett became a prisoner of war at Andersonville Prison. A fellow prisoner named William Collins later described an incident on the way there, at a stop in Macon. Guards had kept roughly two thousand thirsty prisoners away from a nearby stream. When one man crossed the line to fill his canteen, he was shot in the arm and left suffering under a tree. Collins recalled that Corbett stepped out of the ranks and crossed the deadline himself. He filled a canteen and gave the wounded man water, ignoring the guards' threats of death. He returned unharmed, and Collins called it 'the bravest deed that I had seen during the war.'

  Fellow prisoner Richard Thatcher remembered Corbett reading Scripture to him and offering advice with 'the courage of his convictions.' Corbett led prayer meetings and patriotic rallies to keep morale up among the prisoners, according to John McElroy's 1879 memoir, Andersonville. Five months later, in November 1864, Corbett was released in a prisoner exchange. He was admitted to a military hospital in Annapolis, Maryland, and treated for scurvy, malnutrition, and exposure. When he rejoined his company, he was promoted to sergeant. He later testified for the prosecution at the trial of Andersonville's commandant, Captain Henry Wirz. Within months, Corbett's regiment would be pulled into a manhunt that made him famous.

• 4. The Barn at Garrett Farm

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  On the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln. The president died the next day. Corbett's regiment was camped near the Potomac in Vienna, Virginia, on the night of the shooting. The following morning, they learned that Booth was the gunman. Corbett and his fellow cavalrymen later joined the procession for Lincoln's funeral, walking behind a hearse drawn by six white horses draped in black cloth. On the 24th of April, his regiment was ordered out to hunt for Booth, and Corbett was among the first to volunteer.

  On the 26th of April, the regiment surrounded a tobacco barn on Richard Garrett's farm in Virginia. Inside were Booth and an accomplice, David Herold. Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty told Corbett to help deploy the men around the building to block any escape. Herold surrendered, but Booth refused, shouting, 'I will not be taken alive!' Soldiers set the barn on fire to try to force him into the open, but he stayed inside. Corbett was posted near a large crack in the barn wall.

  Corbett asked Doherty for permission to enter the barn alone and subdue Booth by hand. He reasoned that if Booth shot him, the other soldiers could overpower Booth before he could reload. He had no idea Booth was armed with a carbine and several revolvers. Doherty refused the request. Lieutenant Colonel Everton Conger pushed burning hay through the cracks to smoke Booth out. Booth walked toward the flames to see if he could put them out. Corbett and others said Booth then raised his carbine as if to fight his way free. Corbett fired his Colt revolver through the crack, mortally wounding him.

  The bullet struck Booth behind the left ear and passed through his neck, severing part of his spinal cord and leaving him paralyzed. Soldiers noted that the wound sat in nearly the same spot where Booth had shot Lincoln. Writer Mary Clemmer Ames later described the coincidence. 'The balls entered the skull of each at nearly the same spot,' she wrote, 'but the trifling difference made an immeasurable difference.' Soldiers carried Booth out and laid him on the farmhouse porch. He asked for water, then to be turned, murmuring 'Kill me!' as he suffered. At sunrise, gasping and unable to move, he looked at his own hands and said his final words: 'Useless... useless.' He died of asphyxia two to three hours after being shot.

  Corbett later told his questioners he had only meant to wound Booth in the shoulder. He said his aim had slipped, or that Booth had moved as he fired. Some accounts have him crediting 'Providence' for his choice to fire. Biographer Scott Martelle notes that no one mentioned Providence in statements taken right after the shooting. Corbett received $1,653.85, and his fellow cavalrymen got $1,000 each. Officers Everton Conger, Edward Doherty, and Lafayette Baker split far larger sums: $15,000, $5,250, and $3,750. That single shot fired through a crack in a Virginia barn made Corbett instantly, unavoidably famous.

• 5. Praise and Doubt

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  Secretary of War Edwin Stanton reportedly heard Corbett explain himself. 'Booth would have killed me if I had not shot first. I think I did right,' Corbett said. Stanton is said to have replied, 'The rebel is dead. The patriot lives; he has spared the country expense, continued excitement and trouble. Discharge the patriot.' Biographer Scott Martelle is skeptical the meeting happened at all, noting that no other source records it. Whatever the truth, Corbett was met by cheering crowds. On his way to Mathew Brady's studio to sit for a portrait, people followed him asking for autographs.

  Corbett told the crowd he had aimed for Booth's body, not his head, and that Booth seemed to stoop just as he fired. He recalled thinking, when he saw the wound near Booth's ear matched Lincoln's, 'God avenged Abraham Lincoln.' He testified at the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators on the 17th of May 1865. One newspaper editor predicted Corbett would 'live as one of the World's great avengers.' His reward money dwarfed his sergeant's annual salary of $204. He turned down offers to buy his revolver. 'That is not mine, it belongs to the Government, and I would not sell it for any price,' he said. He also declined a chance to keep one of Booth's own pistols.

  Richard Garrett, who owned the farm where Booth died, and his twelve-year-old son Robert later disputed a key detail. They said Booth had never reached for a weapon at all. Historian Edward Steers challenged their account, noting it contradicted statements taken at the time. Newspaper reports had already begun to turn on Corbett too, arguing he had acted willfully since no order specified whether Booth should be taken alive. The doubts never erased Corbett's fame, but they followed him. Southern sympathizers soon began sending him letters threatening his life.

• 6. Paranoia and Flight

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  Discharged from the Army in August 1865, Corbett returned to milliner work in Boston and attended the Bromfield Street Church. When Boston's hat trade slowed, he moved to Danbury, Connecticut, and preached in the surrounding countryside. By 1870, he had relocated again, to Camden, New Jersey, where he worked as a milliner and was known locally as a Methodist lay preacher.

  In Danbury and then Camden, Corbett kept losing jobs for stopping work to pray over swearing co-workers. To earn money he leaned on his reputation as 'Lincoln's Avenger,' giving lantern-slide lectures on the shooting at Sunday schools and tent meetings. His talks grew so erratic that he was never invited back. A friend named R. B. Hoover recalled Corbett believing that powerful men in Washington were hounding him. Corbett thought they were angry that he had denied them the chance to prosecute and execute Booth themselves.

  Hate mail convinced Corbett that groups calling themselves 'Booth's Avengers' or the 'Secret Order' were plotting revenge against him. He took to carrying a pistol everywhere and grew quick to draw it on anyone he found suspicious. In 1875, at a Soldiers' Reunion in Caldwell, Ohio, he pulled his gun on men who questioned whether Booth had really been killed. He was removed before he could fire. In 1878, he moved to Concordia, Kansas, homesteaded a plot of land, and built himself a dugout home, still preaching and attending revivals.

  In January 1887, Corbett's fame won him an appointment as assistant doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives in Topeka. On the 15th of February, convinced the House's officers were discriminating against him, he pulled a revolver and chased them through the building. No one was hurt, but he was arrested. The following day, a judge declared him insane and committed him to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane. Speculation later arose that Corbett had settled in a cabin near Hinckley, in Pine County, Minnesota. It held that he died there in the Great Hinckley Fire on the 1st of September 1894. The theory rested on one name, 'Thomas Corbett,' found on a list of the dead. A secondhand claim held that the victim had said he was Boston Corbett. Martelle called the connection 'too tenuous to credit.'

  A patent medicine salesman in Enid, Oklahoma, filed for pension benefits under Corbett's name a few years after the real man disappeared. Investigators proved he was lying, and he was imprisoned. In September 1905, a man arrested in Dallas made the same claim. He too was exposed as a fraud. He was sent to prison for perjury, then committed to the Government Hospital for the Insane. Only a Boy Scout troop and a handful of later writers and filmmakers would try to fix his memory in place.

• 7. Afterlives

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  In 2015, writer Scott Martelle published a biography of Corbett. Its title was The Madman and the Assassin: The Strange Life of Boston Corbett, the Man Who Killed John Wilkes Booth. Martelle described Corbett as 'the closest to an average, everyday person, a regular, run-of-the-mill American, albeit a strange one, who did his job as a hatter, and then as a soldier.'

  In 1958, Boy Scout Troop 31 of Concordia, Kansas, built a roadside monument to Corbett on Key Road. A small sign nearby marks the dugout where he once lived on his homestead.

  A fictionalized version of Corbett appears in the 1955 novel Andersonville. Actor Dabbs Greer played a fictitious version of him in a 1962 Lawman episode called 'The Unmasked.' In it, the character lives under the name Joe Brockway, though he introduces himself as Bill Corbett. Two vengeful former Confederate soldiers hunt him through the episode. In the 2024 series Manhunt, actor William Mark McCullough took on the role. More than a century later, storytellers are still the ones supplying the ending his own life never got.