Slaveholders in the region, meanwhile, never knew that "Minty", the petite, , disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was responsible for so many slave escapes in their community. By the late 1850s, they began to suspect a northern white abolitionist was secretly enticing their slaves away. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure. In 1868, in an effort to entice support for Tubman's claim for a Civil War military pension, a former abolitionist named Salley Holley wrote an article claiming $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". Such a high reward would have garnered national attention, especially at a time when a small farm could be purchased for a mere and the federal government offered $25,000 for the capture of each of John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators in President Lincoln's assassination in 1865. A reward offering of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure. Catherine Clinton suggests that the $40,000 figure may have been a combined total of the various bounties offered around the region.