Boston Corbett: The Madman Who Killed John Wilkes Booth and Vanished Into Oblivion
Image credit: Joe Daly 2025
History is a merciless butcher, carving up the past with callous disregard for the drifters, lunatics, and accidental players who find themselves at the crossroads of destiny. It makes heroes of cowards and villains of prophets, and the ones who slip through its greasy fingers are left to rot in the margins, their exploits overshadowed by more convenient myths. But every so often, one of these ghosts bellows from history’s abyss and demands a reckoning. Boston Corbett was one of those ghosts—a wild-eyed, Bible-thumping lunatic with a gun and a destiny, a man who, in the chaos following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, managed to wedge himself between the pages of history with the kind of reckless conviction that only the truly insane can muster.
Born in 1832 in London, Corbett arrived in America as a child and found his way into the bowels of the working class, toiling as a hatter in the suffocating fumes of mercury-laced chemicals that, more often than not, melted a man’s sanity like wax in a furnace. By the time the Civil War came knocking, he had already drifted deep into the abyss of religious fanaticism, renaming himself “Boston” after a spiritual rebirth on the streets of that city and self-castrating with a pair of scissors to ward off the temptations of the flesh. A madman by any reasonable metric, he somehow found his way into the Union Army, where he proved to be an uncommonly brave and impassioned soldier. The last man standing in a face-off with Confederate troops, Corbett fought until he ran out of ammo, after which he was captured by the Confederates, endured the horrors of Andersonville Prison, and was eventually released in a prisoner swap in 1864. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he emerged even more unhinged than before.
But it wasn’t until April 26, 1865, that fate finally came calling. John Wilkes Booth—the actor-turned-murderer whose pistol shot had turned a nation’s joy to mourning—was cornered in a tobacco barn in Virginia, surrounded by federal troops and staring down the barrel of oblivion. With him was David Herold, a Confederate hanger-on with no stomach for death, who wisely surrendered when the soldiers demanded it. But Booth, ever the tragedian, refused. “Well, my brave boys, prepare a stretcher for me!” he crowed after Lt. Edward Doherty, commander of the Union troops ,was unable to coax him into a peaceful surrender. It was paramount to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War for the United States, that Booth be taken alive, as he was sure that the assassination plot ran straight from Booth, to the highest echelons of the Confederacy.
As the night wore on, Boston Corbett, then a sergeant in the 16th New York Cavalry, seethed with righteous fury. While his superiors debated strategy, he made his own suggestions—first, that he be allowed to storm the barn single-handedly and drag Booth out by sheer force. When that was denied, he offered to go in unarmed and engage Booth in hand-to-hand combat, as though God Himself would shield him from the assassin’s fury. The officers, perhaps recognizing that their erratic little cavalryman was one misstep away from chewing through his own reins, rejected the idea.
Instead, they set the barn on fire. Flames crawled up the dry wooden beams, crackling like rifle shots in the night. Inside, Booth coughed and staggered, silhouetted in the inferno, his pistol useless, his life reduced to minutes. And then, in a moment of fevered impulse, Boston Corbett peered through a gap in the barn wall, raised his Colt revolver, and pulled the trigger. The bullet punched through Booth’s neck, severing his spinal cord and dropping him like a sack of wet bones.
They dragged him out into the cold dirt, a tattered, gasping wreck of the man who had once basked in the footlights of Ford’s Theatre. Bloodied, gaunt and caked in filth, his days on the run had taken him through a gauntlet of snake-infested swamps, dense, rugged wilderness and late night river crossings. It would have pushed the healthiest of men to physical and emotional devastation but Booth had negotiated it all on a broken ankle.
Splayed on the ground, Booth tried to speak, but the words came out garbled, thick with blood. He lasted three agonizing hours, during which he seemed to die several times before regaining consciousness with each jaw-dropping interlude. Finally, as his time clearly drew to a close, Booth requested that his hands be raised so that he could look at them.. With the final sputtering breath of a ruined dreamer, Booth forced out a single word, which he then repeated: "Useless." Then he was gone.
Boston Corbett had fired the shot that killed the most wanted man in America, and for a brief, shining moment, he was a hero. But history, as always, is a cruel mistress. The government had offered a massive reward for Booth’s capture—$100,000, a king’s ransom in blood money—but Corbett only received a fraction of it, after the rest of the reward was parceled out among the various tipsters and volunteers who had aided in Booth’s takedown. Corbett took his cut, spent it with the fervor of a man who knew he’d never hold onto it, and watched as the world moved on without him.
As the years passed, his madness deepened. He ranted about divine missions, grew increasingly erratic, and eventually fled to Kansas, where he disappeared into the wind, swallowed whole by the same obscurity from which he had briefly emerged. Some say he died in a fire; others claim he simply wandered off into the wilderness, another lunatic lost in the vast, uncaring machinery of time.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain: Boston Corbett was never meant to last. He was a footnote in a fever dream, a bullet in the dark, a ghost who—whether by destiny or delirium—had found his way into the heart of history, if only for an instant.