The First American Wanted Poster With Photographs Went Out in 1865, and One of the Three Faces May Be the Wrong Brother

The War Department's April 20, 1865 reward broadside carries three photographs a little over three inches tall, pasted by hand into printed frames at the top of a sheet nearly two feet long. Somebody sat with a pot of paste and a stack of prints and mounted them one sheet at a time. No two copies of the most famous wanted poster in American history are quite the same object.

What the Sheet Actually Carried

The copy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art measures 23 13/16 by 12 5/16 inches, and each of the three portraits on it is 3 3/8 by 2 1/8 inches: albumen silver prints from glass negatives, mounted on letterpress. The museum files the object under collages, which is the honest classification. It is a printed sheet with three little photographs glued to it. The Met's catalog entry calls it the first such broadside in America illustrated with photographs tipped onto the sheet, and that "tipped onto" is the operative phrase, because halftone reproduction was still decades away. In 1865, a photograph reached a poster by being glued to it.

Under those photographs, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton offered $50,000 for John Wilkes Booth and $25,000 each for two accomplices, with a note that state and other authorities had put up almost another hundred thousand, "making an aggregate of about TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS." Anyone harboring the fugitives would face a military commission and, in the sheet's own capitals, "the punishment of DEATH." Above Stanton's signature sits a line that reads like a sermon: "Let the stain of innocent blood be removed from the land by the arrest and punishment of the murderers."

Neither accomplice's name is spelled correctly. The captions above the photographs read SURRAT, BOOTH, and HAROLD, and the body text asks for the apprehension of "JOHN H. SURRAT" and "David C. Harold." John H. Surratt and David E. Herold went out to the country misspelled, and the error survived into the later printings.

What the photographs could not do, the type had to. Booth is "Five Feet 7 or 8 inches high, slender build, high forehead, black hair, black eyes, and wore a heavy black moustache, which there is some reason to believe has been shaved off." Surratt has ears "projecting at the top," parts his hair on the right, and, the sheet notes, "His lips are firmly set." Herold is "round bodied, naturally quick and active, slightly closes his eyes when looking at a person." A portrait cannot carry a squint that only appears when a man looks at you, or a gait, or the fact that the face in the frame may have shaved since the shutter opened. The prose is doing the identification work. The photographs are doing something else, which is proving that the man exists and that the government has him fixed.

Where the Three Faces Came From

None of the three portraits was made for this purpose. According to the Met's account of its copy, Colonel Lafayette Baker had photographs of Booth and two accomplices within 24 hours of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Booth's came out of a police search of his room at the National Hotel. Surratt's was obtained from his mother, Mary, who would be indicted, tried, and hanged before the year was out. Herold's was pulled from a search of his mother's carte-de-visite album. All three were then carried to Alexander Gardner's Washington studio and copied so they could be printed in quantity, and the Met credits Gardner alongside the Boston firm Silsbee, Case & Company, whose studio portraits of Booth circulated during his acting career.

Two of those three pictures came out of a mother's own keeping, one of them from a carte-de-visite album. A carte de visite was a social object in 1865, traded between relatives and pasted into books that sat in parlors, and the technology that made it cheap enough to trade is the same technology that put a usable likeness within reach of a detective searching a bedroom. The pattern set here has never broken: the school portrait on a milk carton in the 1980s, the vacation snapshot in an Amber Alert, the graduation photo that runs on the news. Someone's mother took it, or paid for it, and then it was conscripted.

The photograph brought something a woodcut could only borrow, which is the claim of having been there. An engraver can work from a written description. A lens has to work from a face. What the lens certifies is that some face sat in front of it, which is a narrower guarantee than it looks, and these three prints were themselves copies of earlier sittings.

There Is No Single Wanted Poster

The popular version has one poster: Stanton writes it, the presses run, the picture of Booth goes up on every wall between Washington and the Rappahannock. Reproductions sold in museum shops reinforce it, because they all reproduce the same well-photographed sheet.

The record is messier. At least three printings circulated, and the first one had no photographs at all and no frames to hold them. In her research on the copy held in George Washington University's Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, graduate student Isabella Quartiere describes that earliest version as probably set straight from Stanton's draft in a hurry, with fewer than five examples believed to survive. The second group is the one you recognize, printed with three frames at the top waiting to be filled, and it exists in at least two states: an earlier one describing Booth's heavy black mustache, and a later one adding that he may have shaved it off. Little documentation survives about the exact order, so the sequence is reconstructed from the sheets themselves.

The last issue is stranger. Quartiere's account holds that the final version, carrying the updated description, was never actually distributed, which means any example of it wearing photographs is wearing pictures that somebody added later. RR Auction sold a fourth-printing example for $131,250 with three photographs affixed at the top and a description noting they were added later, likely in the early 20th century. A copy that came through Sotheby's in 2021 had gelatin silver prints in its frames, probably made by the collector Frederick Hill Meserve, decades after the manhunt.

So the sheet you are looking at in a museum case may be an 1865 broadside carrying 1865 photographs, or an 1865 broadside carrying photographs a collector cut and pasted in around 1915 to complete it. Hand-mounted images made every copy a slightly different document at birth, and they made every copy repairable, upgradeable, and forgeable afterward. Ask what the poster looked like, and the honest answer is that it depends on which one, and on what has happened to it since.

The Face That May Be the Wrong Brother

The face captioned SURRAT, at the left of the row, may not be John Surratt at all.

The argument that it is not has been made by people who spent careers with this material. Laurie Verge, who ran the Surratt House Museum for decades, wrote on the researcher Dave Taylor's site, LincolnConspirators.com, that she and Joan Chaconas found the disputed photograph in the Library of Congress around 1978, "and it was clearly identified as being of Isaac Douglas Surratt, son of the condemned Mary Surratt." Isaac was John's older brother, and in 1865 he was serving with Confederate forces in Texas. Verge put the motive plainly: "If I had been Mary, I would have surrendered a picture of my son, Isaac, that I knew was a thousand miles away from D.C. – not one of John." Roger Norton raised the same question publicly in 2012, naming the author Roy Chamlee as the one writer he could find who agreed.

The evidence on the other side is thin in a different way. There is essentially nothing to compare against: by Verge's account, the only other known photograph of Isaac ran in Baltimore newspapers when he died in 1907, at 66. Louis Weichmann, who boarded with the Surratts and testified for the government, described going back to Mary Surratt's house on the afternoon of April 15 to get a photograph of her son, and wrote that the picture was obtained from her "but with little persuasion." If a mother handed over the wrong son on purpose, Weichmann never said so, and he had boarded with the family and known John for years. He was in the party rather than at Mary's elbow: at the conspiracy trial he testified that "Mr. Holohan, who was in our company, went and procured a photograph of Surratt." Norton, who asked the question in the first place, looked at the images side by side and changed his own mind in the same thread.

Nobody has resolved it. In 1865 there was no forensic way to settle it from the print alone. Identification ran on provenance, comparison against other likenesses, and people who said they knew the face, and in this case all three are thin: the photograph came from the one person with a motive to mislead, there is almost nothing to compare it against, and the chain later runs through a catalog label at the Library of Congress that the researchers arguing about the picture do not agree on.

What the Photograph Could Not Certify

Booth and Herold were cornered on April 26, six days after the broadside went out, in a tobacco barn on the Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia, by a detachment of the 16th New York Cavalry under Lieutenant Edward Doherty. The Met's entry says the descriptions combined with the photographic portraits proved invaluable to the militia. The cavalry got to that barn by following a trail of people, and the photographs were part of that trail. The U.S. Army's history of the manhunt records that when Doherty's detachment reached Port Conway on April 25, the soldiers showed William Rollins and his wife Bettie photographs of the fugitives, confirmed from them that Booth and Herold had come through, and learned that Willie Jett might be staying at a hotel in Bowling Green. Bettie Rollins knew Jett was courting a girl there. The troopers found him asleep in the Star Hotel, and he gave up the Garrett farm. The recognition at the barn itself still happened at conversational distance, in the dark, from men who had already been told exactly who was inside.

The disputed face is the one that outlasted everybody. Surratt reached Canada, then England, then Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves under an assumed name. He was found because Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie, an old acquaintance serving in the same force, recognized him and told Rufus King, the American minister in Rome. That story is preserved in a Supreme Court record, because Sainte-Marie sued for the money. The findings in Shuey v. United States, 92 U.S. 73 (1875), lay out the sequence: the arrest ordered on November 6, 1866, the escape from the guard at Veroli, the flight to Egypt, the re-arrest at Alexandria later that month, and the awkward fact that the president had revoked the reward for Surratt on November 24, 1865, almost a year before any of it happened. Sainte-Marie was paid $10,000 under an 1868 act of Congress, sued for the remaining $15,000 of the advertised $25,000, and lost, because giving the information that led to an arrest is not the same as making the arrest. He died while the case was still moving, and his executor carried it to the Court and lost there too.

Surratt himself went to trial in a civilian court in 1867 and got a hung jury, eight for acquittal and four for conviction, and the charges against him were dropped the following year. He lived until 1916, which is long enough that he could have been photographed with a Kodak.

The broadside's own hedge is the honest part of it, sitting right there in the description of Booth: a mustache that there is some reason to believe has been shaved off. A photograph fixes a face at one instant under one studio's lighting, which is a real and useful thing and is not the same as certifying who is standing in front of you. Look closely at one of the surviving sheets, and the paste is what holds your attention, three small rectangles lifted slightly at the corners, some of them carrying faces printed half a century after the men in them were shot, hanged, or let go.

Lead image by the U.S. War Department, public domain. Source.