Manhunt

I wrote about Parable of the Talents, which forced me to contemplate a dystopian future where everyone disregards the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments—two of the three passed in the wake of the Civil War. While I was in the middle of the book, I watched the miniseries Manhunt, about the massive and intense search for John Wilkes Booth after his assassination of Lincoln, shortly after the end of that war.

In this era of prestige TV, I have been wondering when we would get a treatment of Reconstruction, the great missed opportunity of U.S. history. The more you understand about contemporary America, the more you lament the fact that we were unable to hold the gains of the Civil War. Black people in the South were nominally free afterwards, but they were terrorized for decades by the heirs of Davis and Lee. Surely the last century would have played out very differently if freed slaves had been given the vote and the property they were promised. How much grief would we have been spared if the north had successfully broken the back of the landed class of the south, as it had intended, and given some of that wealth back to the people whose labor created it?

I did not expect Manhunt to fill this niche in the cultural landscape, since its focus seemed relatively narrow. The action opens on the night of the assassination—April 14, 1865—and sticks closely to the pursuit of Booth, so I thought it would be limited in its aspirations. However, through flashback, through the perspective of witnesses, and through tracing the dimensions of the conspiracy, it tells a much larger story.

The Reconstruction series of my dreams would have Black characters at its center, like an updated Roots. Manhunt, by contrast, has a white man at its center: Lincoln’s war secretary, Edwin Stanton, played by Tobias Menzies. Yet it feels fully justified for this particular story to revolve around Stanton, because it seems undeniable that this one person held the country together after the assassination, through sheer force of will.

Lincoln was not the only member of the government targeted on that night in April. The first victim of the plot was the Secretary of State, William Seward, who was stabbed by a fellow conspirator of Booth’s, Lewis Powell. Powell entered Seward’s home and attacked Seward’s servants and sons before reaching the man himself. Another conspirator was picked up at the hotel where the vice president, Andrew Johnson, was staying, having been assigned to kill him. Seward survived the stabbing, and Johnson was saved because his would-be assassin lost his nerve, but both were targeted along with Lincoln, and if the conspirators had succeeded in killing all three, the government would have staggered around headless without any immediate constitutional remedy. Stanton, grasping the desperate situation, took control. After he left Seward and went to the house where Lincoln lay dying, he sat at a desk in a back room and started giving orders.

Lincoln was assassinated within a week of Lee’s surrender. Although the war was officially over, there were still thousands of Confederate soldiers at large who could have seized Washington. Stanton could not know how far the conspiracy really went, or if the city was in danger. One of his first tasks was to lock down the area, putting Union soldiers on alert and getting General Grant back in town to take charge of them. Even during this period of uncertainty and menace—where he couldn’t be sure there wasn’t an assassin coming for him—he began the investigation into the conspiracy.

It was evident from the beginning that Booth was responsible, since the crowd at the theater recognized the famous actor. It was soon clear that he had crossed a bridge to Maryland, and tried to make his way to Virginia from there. Stanton had the War Department offer a $100,000 reward for information leading to Booth’s arrest. As Stanton looked into Booth’s activities prior to the assassination, he found that he had spent time in Montreal amid known Confederate spies. This linked the conspiracy to the highest levels of the Confederate government, although Stanton and his allies could never quite pin it on them. In widening the focus of the investigation, the story expands to take in much of Stanton’s role and accomplishments in the war, in particular his advocacy for the participation of Black troops in the fight and the care for former slaves through the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The story also gives us the perspective of Mary Simms, the servant and former slave of the doctor, Samuel Mudd, who treated Booth’s broken leg while he is on the run. In reality, Simms’ testified to Mudd’s character and his work as an agent of the Confederacy, but left his employ before the events of 1865. In the story, she is present as a witness of Booth’s arrival, and testifies at trial to this effect. Since the series is interested in her past work for Mudd, the character of Simms functions as a wider lens on the issue of slavery and both the promise and disappointment of Reconstruction.

In the end, the series mostly functions as a tight hour by hour account of the search for Booth. It never loses that sense of immediacy, even as it spins out to encompass more of the action and outcome of the Civil War. It successfully zooms outward from Booth to the larger conspiracy, without sacrificing its sense of pacing. Most of the import of the story, though, is in the hints at the failure of Reconstruction. Stanton does his best, under incredibly difficult circumstances, to keep Lincoln’s postwar plans intact. But he can only do so much when the power of the presidency has shifted to the fickle, racist Andrew Johnson. The makers of the series do their best to tie this broader theme to the action of the manhunt, but it feels a bit uneven in execution.

Personally, I appreciated the attempt to grasp at the larger problem of Reconstruction, even as it created a challenge for drama. I understood the balancing act between maintaining pace or interest and offering a glimpse of the real history. Maybe Manhunt works best as an introduction to the subject of Reconstruction, rather than any kind of in-depth inquiry. And that’s all right. It’s more than most.