Meet Boston Corbett, The Self-Castrated Hat Maker Who Killed Abraham Lincoln's Assassin, John Wilkes Booth
Boston Corbett, born Thomas P. Corbett, led a life marked by extreme religious fervour, personal tragedy, and an unyielding sense of divine mission that ultimately led him to assassinate John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed President Abraham Lincoln. Despite his early ordinary life as a hat maker, Corbett's story is a fascinating journey through personal loss, religious zeal, Civil War heroism, and a mysterious disappearance that leaves his final fate unknown.
Early Life and Personal Tragedy
Born in 1832 in London, Thomas Corbett emigrated to the United States with his family and settled in the Northeast. By his mid-20s, he had established himself in the hat trade, a respected profession at the time. Tragedy struck in 1858 when his wife and child died during childbirth. This loss deeply affected Corbett, leading him into a spiral of grief and alcoholism.
Conversion and Radical Transformation
Corbett's life took a dramatic turn one night in Boston when he encountered a street evangelist. The fervent preaching moved him, and he converted to Christianity, becoming a regular at street corner churches. His newfound faith was intense; he swore off alcohol, grew his hair and beard long to resemble Jesus, and adopted the name Boston Corbett after the city of his spiritual rebirth. He was baptised by a Methodist minister, marking his commitment to his faith.
The Act of Self-Castration
In 1858, in a shocking display of religious zeal, and while he was ministering in the summer of 1858, Corbett was propositioned by a pair of prostitutes, and the lower half of his body responded invitingly. He went home, took a pair of scissors, snipped an incision under his scrotum, and removed his testicles, then headed out to a prayer meeting.
In the Bible, Matthew 19:12 quotes Christ as saying “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Corbett made himself a eunuch and didn’t check himself into Massachusetts General Hospital until he’d finished his prayers, had a full dinner, and taken a light stroll through the city that evening.
Military Service and Capture
Corbett's religious fervour extended to his military service during the Civil War. Corbett had become a hardened combat soldier. He had reenlisted three times, surviving traumatic events that had felled other men. Back in June 1864, while hunting Mosby’s men, Corbett had found himself cornered by the so-called Gray Ghost’s troops near Centreville, Virginia. His fellow soldiers were “nearly all compelled to surrender,” according to Harper’s Weekly, but not Corbett. He “stood out manfully, and fired his revolver and 12 shots from his breech-loading rifle before surrendering. . . . Mosby, in admiration of the bravery displayed by Corbett, ordered his men not to shoot him.” Instead, Corbett was sent to Andersonville, the most notorious Civil War prison.
Andersonville, in south-central Georgia, was built for 10,000 captives but held some 32,000 at its peak—almost a third of the men who ended up in the disease-ridden prison never made it out. When he was paroled in November of 1864, Corbett and another Union fighter were the only POWs from their unit to survive the ordeal. And barely so. Corbett left with scurvy and intermittent fever, rheumatism, and “bloody flux,” otherwise known as dysentery, a wartime ailment deadlier than combat.
Corbett spent some time recuperating at a hospital in Annapolis, then rejoined his regiment.
The Pursuit of John Wilkes Booth
Ten days after Lincoln's assassination, the John Wilkes Booth was still nowhere to be found. To hunt the traitor, the government turned to the 16th New York Cavalry, the men who’d battled the infamous Confederate colonel John Mosby’s raiders. It was Boston Corbett’s unit.
Within a few months, the war was over. Lincoln was dead, his killer on the loose, and officials in Washington were apoplectic. During a church service several days into the dragnet, the head of the congregation asked Corbett to lead the flock in a blessing. “O Lord, lay not innocent blood to our charge,” the 33-year-old sergeant prayed, “but bring the guilty speedily to punishment.”
Not long afterward, volunteers from the 16th Cavalry regiment, led by Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty, prepared to go south into Virginia and hunt down John Wilkes Booth. Corbett was one of them.
The search party left Washington via steamer on April 24 and headed about 50 miles down the Potomac to a landing at Belle Plain, Virginia. After a day of fruitless searching, the volunteers received a tip from a fisherman and his wife that men fitting Booth’s and his accomplice David Herold’s descriptions had crossed the Rappahannock River and were headed toward Bowling Green in Virginia’s Caroline County. The same informants suggested that the men were aided by a soldier named Willie Jett, who happened to be sweet on the daughter of a certain innkeeper in Bowling Green.
It was now midnight on April 26. After knocking on several doors there, Doherty’s men found Jett at a hotel and rousted him from bed. Jett wasn’t about to give up Booth and Herold, but Doherty informed him that he “should suffer” if he didn’t do so. Jett agreed to lead them 12 miles to land near Port Royal owned by a farmer named Richard Garrett, where Jett had left the men two days earlier.
“Arriving at Garrett’s Farm,” Corbett later wrote, “the lieutenant said to me, ‘Mr. Booth is in that house, ride through the command, and see that every man’s pistol is in readiness for use.’ ”
When Doherty asked after the fugitives, Garrett claimed they were in the woods. Doherty didn’t buy it. So, as he later told the Washington brass, he “seized this man by the collar, and pulled him out of the door and down the steps, put my revolver to his head and told him to tell me at once where the two assassins were; [Garrett] replied, ‘in the barn.’ ”
It was after 2 AM by now. Doherty’s men descended on the tobacco barn and formed a ring around it, Corbett included. From inside, Booth was trying to talk himself out of the jam. “Captain, draw off your men fifty yards!” Booth shouted, according to a soldier in the 16th Cavalry. “A cripple as I am with only one leg and cannot walk without a crutch. I would like a chance for my life.” Doherty refused.
It was dark, but there were cracks in the barn walls, and from his position, Corbett claimed to have eyes on their shifty target—he wanted to charge the barn himself. But when he asked for permission to try flushing the assassin out into the open, he was denied.
Meanwhile, the back-and-forth between Booth and Doherty continued for an hour, until Booth yelled that there was “a man here who wants to surrender awful bad.” Out came Herold, the accomplice. And Booth started talking again.
Concluding that their target was never coming out, a federal investigator named Everton Conger took a clutch of dry hay, lit it on fire, and stuck it through a crack in the barn. As the flames climbed toward the night sky, Corbett made his move toward the barn for a better look and pulled the trigger.
“What on earth did you shoot him for?” yelled Lafayette Baker, another government detective, as he rushed to yank Booth out of the burning barn.
The orders from Washington were not to take the fugitive dead or alive—the War Department wanted Booth in the flesh. His motives for killing Lincoln were still a mystery, and officials knew they had a conspiracy to root out—possibly even one orchestrated by Confederate president Jefferson Davis. They needed their target to talk.
Booth was carried to the front porch of the Garrett house and placed on a makeshift mattress. “Kill me,” he whispered later. He asked to see his hands, so one of the soldiers lifted his paralyzed limbs. “Useless, useless,” Booth muttered. He died around 7 am.
The government detectives immediately cast aspersions on Corbett, the trigger-happy sergeant who had just deprived the nation of a trial for the President’s murderer. All because, he said, “God Almighty directed me to.” Instead of the assassin, it was Corbett who was sent back to Washington to be questioned.
Controversy and Later Years
Corbett's actions sparked controversy. While some viewed him as a hero, others believed he had deprived the nation of the opportunity to learn more about the conspiracy behind Lincoln's assassination. Corbett claimed divine inspiration for his actions, avoiding a court-martial and instead receiving praise from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Despite his brief moment of fame, Corbett's life post-war was marked by instability and paranoia. He struggled to maintain employment, worked as a preacher, and believed he was being pursued by enemies seeking revenge for Booth's death.
Disappearance and Legacy
In 1886, Corbett was institutionalised after a mental breakdown but escaped in 1888. He vanished, with rumours suggesting he may have perished in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894 or fled to Mexico.
Other rumours suggested Corbett drowned in the Kansas River. One theory had him targeted by ruffians still bitter over the Bloody Kansas battles. Another had him moving to Hinckley, Minnesota, and later perishing in the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1, 1894. The best evidence of that hypothesis came from a survivor named Frank Haney, who in 1954 wrote an account of the conflagration and recalled an older Boston man named Tom Corbett, who was good with a rifle and was hired to hunt game for the crew at Gus Sexton’s Minnesota logging camp in 1890. In this version of his demise, the real Corbett wasn’t able to keep up with the younger men who escaped the flames by foot.
In the early 1900s, the federal pension bureau heard about a Boston Corbett who claimed he was alive and well and wanted his pension checks. But an investigation shed some doubt on the claim. The weathered old fellow, who went by the nickname Old Trapper, gave only vague details about Booth’s killing, professing he couldn’t think straight. It was also noted that the new Corbett stood six feet tall—a full eight inches taller than the original. The imposter, a onetime patent-medicine salesman named John Corbett, was jailed.
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