Before
resuming where we left off, I need to tack on some info here that
should have been included in earlier installments. First off, there
were, as it turns out, at least three additional suspicious deaths that
followed closely on the heels of the Lincoln assassination, so let’s
take a quick look at those. And as I’m sure it will be recalled, these
deaths are in addition to all the other curious deaths and confinements
that have previously been discussed.
First up for
review is Colonel Levi C. Turner, who was appointed Assistant Judge
Advocate for the Army on August 5, 1862, which positioned him to be
second-in-command to Judge Advocate Holt during the farcical ‘trial of
the conspirators.’ The colonel also worked closely with notorious NDP
chief Lafayette Baker during and after the Civil War to investigate
suspected subversive activities. Turner died of unstated causes on March
13, 1867, less than two years after Lincoln was slain and about sixteen
months before Baker himself turned up dead.
Also
up for review is our old friend Silas Cobb, the guy who was in charge of
guarding the Navy Yard Bridge and enforcing the curfew on the night of
the assassination. Cobb was the accommodating gent who allegedly allowed
both Booth and Herold to escape from Washington and then failed to
offer any reasonable explanation for his actions, and of course suffered
no repercussions for those actions. Cobb turned up dead in November
1867, two-and-a-half years after Lincoln was shot. According to reports,
he was the victim of a drowning accident.
Finally
we have Henri Beaumont de Sainte-Marie, the chap who was credited with
tipping off authorities to the whereabouts of John Surratt, ultimately
leading to Surratt’s arrest, extradition, and failed prosecution. De
Sainte-Marie died at the relatively young age of forty-one while still
awaiting a claims court decision on the hefty reward promised for
information leading to Surratt’s capture.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I
also discussed in a previous post the fact that former British First
Lady Cherie Blair is a descendant of the Booth clan, thereby
demonstrating that the Booth family has continued to wield political
power into the modern era. What I didn’t know at the time was that
another member of the Booth dynasty wielded considerable power on this side of the Atlantic right up until her death at the infamous Watergate Apartments on October 9, 1987.
She
was hiding right in plain sight, disguised only by the “e” that her
branch of the family had added to the Booth name to mask the
association. That wielder of power was none other than Clare Boothe
Luce, who, along with her husband Henry Luce – a Skull and Bonesman who
became a publishing magnate, launching such influential magazines as Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated – was a longtime asset of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Boothe
was born on March 10, 1903 to unmarried parents who lived a shadowy
life and moved around a lot. Her mother was known to use at least three
aliases and her father used at least two. Clare briefly flirted with
being an actress before embarking on a career as a journalist, war
correspondent, politician and diplomat. Curiously, another woman born in
1903 and also known as Claire Luce also became an actress, creating a
good deal of confusion after Clare Boothe became Clare Luce.
Clare Boothe Luce
Clare
Boothe Luce had the distinction of being the first American woman named
to a key diplomatic post, serving as the US Ambassador to Italy from
1953 to 1956. In 1959, she very briefly served as the US Ambassador to
Brazil before resigning. From 1943 to 1947, she had served in the House
of Representatives, representing Connecticut. During that time, she
served on the House Military Affairs Committee, because she naturally
knew a lot about military affairs.
During the
1960s, her and her husband busied themselves with sponsoring anti-Castro
groups seeking to return Cuba to its former status as a US
puppet-state. In 1973, she was appointed to the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, because she obviously also knew a lot about
foreign intelligence. In 1983, she was awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. Boothe Luce was also a Dame of Malta.
It
is a strange world indeed when well over a century after the first
acknowledged assassination of a sitting US president (historians don’t
generally have much to say about the untimely deaths of William
Harrison, who served for just one month, or Zachary Taylor, who served
for some sixteen months), members of the alleged assassin’s family were
still wielding considerable political power on both sides of the
Atlantic. Last time I checked, there weren’t any members of the Guiteau,
Czolgosz, Oswald or Sirhan families occupying such positions of power.
And now, we return to our regularly scheduled programming ….
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
While
Booth and Herold were supposedly taking their time getting from
Washington to Garrett’s farm (traveling a distance of less than 100
miles in a week-and-a-half), the largest manhunt in the young nation’s
history was underway, coordinated by our old friend, Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton. From the outset, Stanton’s goal seemed to be to avoid
actually apprehending John Wilkes Booth and some of the other alleged
conspirators.
Stanton had considerable manpower at
his disposal, including idle US military forces in Washington, the
Metropolitan Police, Lafayette Baker’s detective force, US Cavalry
forces, and provost marshals. Working closely with Stanton were Metro
Police Superintendent A.C. Richards, Washington Provost Marshall Major
James O’Beirne, and General Christopher Columbus Augur, commander of US
military forces in Washington. To say that Stanton misappropriated the
available manpower would be a rather charitable assessment.
A.C. Richards
According to Bill O’Reilly’s error-filled bestseller, Killing Lincoln,
there were three routes leading out of Washington into Virginia – the
Georgetown Aqueduct, Long Bridge, and Benning’s Bridge – and just one,
the Navy Yard Bridge, leading into Maryland. The Confederacy-friendly
path into Maryland was by far the most likely route for an assassin to
take, so it naturally was completely ignored.
The
first troops to find themselves accidentally on the correct route were
led by a David Dana. Dana just happened to be the brother of Assistant
Secretary of War Charles Dana, who served directly under Stanton and who
decided that the patrol’s presence on the trail of the alleged
assassins was pointless and instead sent his brother’s troops on a wild
goose chase. Major O’Beirne also found himself accidentally on the right
trail, so he of course was recalled to Washington.
As
previously mentioned, Stanton’s first dispatch after the shooting of
Lincoln was not written until 1:30 AM and was not sent until 2:15 AM,
about four hours after the shot was fired. That dispatch made no mention
of John Wilkes Booth, despite the fact that numerous witnesses
supposedly (but not actually) immediately identified Booth as the
assailant. Booth’s name didn’t appear in a telegram until 4:15 AM,
conveniently too late to make the morning papers. A telegram sent to the
police chiefs of northern cities contained no mention of the name
Booth.
Initial press reports, based on information
leaked by Stanton himself, identified John Surratt as the perpetrator of
the fictional attack on the Seward family. When it later became known
that Surratt was nowhere near Washington at the time of the attack,
Lewis Powell/Paine, who bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to John
Surratt, was substituted in as the perpetrator of the alleged
assassination attempt.
Christopher Columbus Augur
James O’Beirne
The
first telegram dispatched by the War Department was a curiously worded
message to General Grant, which read: “The President was assassinated
tonight at Ford’s Theatre at 10:30 tonight & cannot live. The wound
is a pistol shot through the head. Secretary Seward & his son
Frederick, were also assassinated at their residence & are in a
dangerous condition.” One would think that it would go without saying
that someone who had been “assassinated” would be in “a dangerous
condition.” Luckily though, neither of the Sewards were actually
assassinated, although news of their ‘deaths’ quickly circulated around
Washington.
One of the earliest actions taken by
investigators was raiding the room at the Kirkwood Hotel allegedly
rented by George Atzerodt for the purpose of assassinating Andrew
Johnson. According to Guttridge and Neff, writing in Dark Union,
“The room was registered as Atzerodt’s but had not been slept in. The
Kirkwood’s day clerk, who had entered Room 126 earlier that morning,
found nothing and said so. His testimony was ignored.” When detectives
entered that very same empty and unused room, they allegedly uncovered a
wealth of evidence.
Supposedly recovered from the
room were a bankbook issued to John Wilkes Booth, a loaded revolver,
three boxes of pistol cartridges, a map of the southern states, a Bowie
knife, and a handkerchief with Booth’s mother’s name embroidered on it.
Booth’s room at the National Hotel, Room 228, was similarly raided with
additional evidence supposedly recovered, including a business card
containing John Surratt’s name and a letter from Samuel Arnold
conveniently implicating both he and McLaughlin, despite the fact that
Arnold and McLaughlin, like Surratt, were nowhere near Washington at the
time of the assassination.
“Wanted” posters issued
by the War Department were wildly, and probably deliberately,
inaccurate. John Surratt’s and David Herold’s names were both spelled
incorrectly, the photo of Herold was of him as a schoolboy, which
clearly wasn’t an accurate representation of how he looked circa 1865,
and the photo of Surratt wasn’t John Surratt at all. In a blatant act of
historical revisionism, corrected posters were issued much later. One
widely circulated poster that was issued after Lewis Paine was
already in custody inexplicably offered a reward for Paine and contained
a richly detailed 160-word description of the already incarcerated
suspect, along with a mere 42-word description of the guy who was still
at large, John Wilkes Booth.
Original “Wanted” poster
Revised “Wanted” posters
The
first alleged conspirator to be arrested was the hapless Ned Spangler,
who was taken into custody at Ford’s Theatre on the night of the
assassination. Samuel Arnold and Michael McLaughlin, implicated through
what appears to have been planted evidence, were arrested on April 17,
1865, the former at Fort Monroe and the latter in Baltimore. Later that
night, Mary Surratt and Lewis Powell were both arrested at Surratt’s
boardinghouse. George Adzerodt was taken into custody in the early
morning hours of April 20 in Maryland, following – by one account – a
tip from his police detective brother. Dr. Mudd was arrested on April
24, four days after Captain William Wood, a close associate of Stanton
and the warden of the Old Capitol Prison, had begun watching his home.
Why
authorities drug their feet for several days before arresting Mudd even
while rounding up some 2,000 other suspects who ultimately were not
charged is another of the many unanswered questions surrounding the
Lincoln assassination and its aftermath. In any event, that left just
two of the alleged conspirators at large, David Herold and John Wilkes
Booth. Finding them was going to require a specially assembled team – a
team that would uncannily know just where to go.
The
elite posse was assembled by NDP chief Lafayette Baker on April 24. The
group thereafter all but made a beeline to the area around Garrett’s
farm. How they knew to go there is a question not often addressed by
historians. For the record, Baker claimed that he was tipped off by “an
old Negro,” but said person was never identified and he or she never
stepped forward to collect the substantial reward offered. A House
Committee noted that, “upon what information Colonel Baker proceeded in
sending out the expedition … is in no manner disclosed or intimated in
his official report.”
An 1867 Minority Report of
the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives offered what
were, by today’s standards, shockingly frank assessments of Baker’s
character, such as, “Although examined on oath, time and again, and on
various occasions, it is doubtful whether he [Baker] has in any one
thing told the truth even by accident,” and “there can be no doubt that
of his many previous outrages, entitling him to unenviable immortality,
he has added that of willful and deliberate perjury; and we are glad to
know that no one member of the committee deems any statement made by him
as worthy of the slightest credit. What a blush of shame will tinge the
cheek of the American student in future ages, when he reads that this
miserable wretch for years held, as it were, in the hollow of his hand,
the liberties of the American people.”
The posse
assembled by Baker was led by his cousin, Lt. Luther Baker, and Lt. Col.
Everton Conger, who had served as an aide to Lafayette Baker. Both had
returned to civilian life and were recruited specifically to lead the
mission. They were joined by Lt. Edward Doherty and a detachment of
twenty-five soldiers. After completing the mission, all involved signed
quitclaims and collected a substantial amount of reward money. One of
the troopers, as fate would have it, had met Booth previously; some 33
years later, on April 20, 1898, he issued the following published
statement: “It was not Booth nor did it resemble him …” Many Americans
had reached that conclusion years earlier.
Edward Doherty
Everton Conger
At
the Garrett home, the guy later identified as John Wilkes Booth
introduced himself as John W. Boyd. Herold was introduced as his cousin,
David Boyd. During the standoff in the barn with the pair’s would-be
captors, the name “Booth” was never spoken. When Herold surrendered and
exited the barn, leaving his companion behind, he insisted that he did
not know the other man, who he claimed was named Boyd. Boyd/Booth was
wearing a Rebel uniform and did not have on a ring that Booth reportedly
always wore.
It was not until he had been shot and
lay dying that the suspected assassin was addressed by Luther Baker as
“Booth.” According to Baker’s account, the mortally wounded man “seemed
surprised, opened his eyes wide, and looked about,” as if he too was
looking for the elusive John Wilkes Booth. At 7:15 AM on the morning of
April 26, 1865, Booth/Boyd drew his last breath, some two-and-a-half
hours after being shot, allegedly by Boston Corbett.
Mainstream
authors and historians have labored long and hard to convince readers
that Booth’s body was positively identified, leaving no doubt in the
public mind that justice had been served. James Swanson, for example,
has written in Manhunt that, “On the Montauk, several men
who knew Booth in life, including his doctor and dentist, were summoned
aboard the ironclad to witness him in death. It was all very official.
The War Department even issued an elaborate receipt to the notary who
witnessed the testimony. During a careful autopsy …” The same James
Swanson has also written, in Lincoln’s Assassins, that, “When the
assassin’s body was brought back to Washington, the government took
rigorous steps to confirm the identity of the man killed at Garrett’s
farm … Witnesses who knew Booth in life were summoned to identify him in
death.” William Hanchett, in The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (his
contemptible attempt to ‘debunk’ so-called ‘conspiracy theories’), has
claimed that “Booth’s body was identified beyond any possibility of a
mix-up at a coroner’s inquest on April 27, 1865.”
All
such proclamations are rather brazen and unconscionable acts of
historical revisionism. The reality is that the body was not autopsied
and it was processed in-and-out of Washington in record time. A mere
forty hours passed between the death of the man at Garrett’s farm and
the secret, late night disposal of his body, and that included the time
needed to transport the corpse back to Washington. To this day, that
initial burial site remains a mystery and several different versions of
the disposal of the body have been published.
For
reasons never explained in the historical record, the body was not
transported back to Washington by the military detachment, but was
instead escorted by only three men: Luther Baker, prisoner Willie Jett,
and one unnamed soldier. Before reaching Washington, Jett somehow
managed to, uhmm, ‘escape.’ The body was carried by steamer up the
Potomac River, then transported by tugboat to the Washington Navy Yard
and placed aboard the ironclad Montauk in the dead of night, at
1:45 AM on April 27, 1865, bypassing normal procedures. Before the day
was done, the body would be covertly disposed of. The captain of the Montauk would
later say that he “was not present at either time (arrival or disposal)
or I should have put a stop to it.” The commandant of the Navy Yard
would add that, “The removal of the body was entirely without my
knowledge, an unusual transaction.”
Prosecutor John Bingham (left) and Judge Advocate Joseph Holt (center)
Dispatched to the Montauk to
oversee the identification of the body were such disreputable
characters as Surgeon General Barnes, Judge Advocate Joseph Holt,
prosecutor/persecutor John Bingham, Stanton underlings Thomas Eckert and
Lafayette Baker, and two of Baker’s most trusted men, Luther Baker and
Everton Conger. Edwin Stanton had ordered Lafayette Baker and Thomas
Eckert to personally intercept the boat carrying the body and
clandestinely get it aboard the Montauk.
During
the alleged inquest, none of Booth’s peers in the theater community,
many of whom were present in Washington at the time, were brought
onboard to ID the body. No members of the Booth family were enlisted to
view the body. None of Booth’s alleged co-conspirators, many of whom
were being held on the very same ship, were allowed to ID the body. According to Dark Union,
“thirteen people were permitted to view the body. All but the war
photographer Alexander Gardner, his assistant, and a hotel clerk were
connected with the War Department.” If we’re being honest here, that
should read, “all but possibly the hotel clerk were connected with the
War Department.”
Even within the government’s
handpicked and limited cast of witnesses, there was disagreement as to
whether the body was that of Booth. Dr. John Frederick May, who had
previously seen Booth as a patient, noted that “there is no resemblance
in that corpse to Booth, nor can I believe it to be him.” May added that
the corpse “looks to me much older, and in appearance much more
freckled than he was. I do not recollect that he was at all freckled.”
Dr. May would later write that the corpse’s “right limb was greatly
contused, and perfectly black from a fracture of one of the long bones.”
Surgeon General Barnes’ report to Stanton, however, held that it was
“the left leg and foot” that were injured and “encased in an appliance
of splints and bandages,” thus clouding the waters even on such
straightforward issues as which of the corpse’s legs was injured.
Dr. John Frederick May
After
the hasty identification charade, and without anyone who was actually
close to Booth in life having seen the body, and without any public
display of the body, and without any photographs of the body that would
ever see the light of day, the corpse was quickly disposed of by either
Lafayette Baker and Thomas Eckert, or Lafayette and Luther Baker,
depending upon who is telling the tale. Following the announcement that
the body had been disappeared, shouts of “hoax!” rocked Washington, with
many convinced that Booth hadn’t been captured or killed and was still
free.
On July 28, 1866, Senator Garrett Davis of
Kentucky voiced his doubts about the identification of Booth: “I have
never seen any satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed.” Senator
Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who had played a role in the mock trial,
came back with: “I submit to my friend from Kentucky that there are some
things that we must take judicial notice of, just as well as that
Julius Caesar is dead.”
Davis though remained
decidedly unconvinced: “I would rather have better testimony of the
fact. I want it proved that Booth was in that barn. I cannot conceive,
if he was in the barn, why he was not taken alive. I have never seen
anybody, or the evidence of anybody, that identified Booth after he is
said to have been killed. Why so much secrecy about it? … There is a
mystery and a most inexplicable mystery to my mind about the whole
affair … [Booth] could have been captured just as well alive as dead. It
would have been much more satisfactory to have brought him up here
alive and to have inquired of him to reveal the whole transaction … [or]
bring his body up here … let all who had seen him playing, all who
associated with him on the stage or in the green room or at the taverns
and other public places, have had access to his body to have identified
it.”
Senator Reverdy Johnson
Senator Garrett Davis
There
was no way the powers-that-be were going to allow that to happen, of
course, since the body clearly wasn’t that of John Wilkes Booth. Had it
been, the government surely would have taken the actions necessary to
convince a skeptical public. But such actions weren’t really necessary
in 1865, just as they aren’t today. The omnipotent ones can tell us, for
example, that Osama bin Laden was killed and his body promptly disposed
of – and the majority of us will accept it as the gospel truth.
And
those malcontents who choose not to accept a proclamation that lacks
any objective proof? Well, they don’t really matter. Just as the voices
of reason didn’t really matter 150 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment