Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

As conventional history tells it, the conspirators who plotted the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln met justice at gun-point and on the business end of a hangman's noose. John Wilkes Booth, the actor who fired a derringer ball into Lincoln's brain at point-blank range, was shot dead by federal troops near Bowling Green, Virginia, two weeks after his grand exit from the scene of the crime at Ford's Theater. Later, four of Booth's coconsspirators went to the gallows.

Yet from the moment of the president's murder on that drizzly Good Friday, suspicions about the actual nature of the conspiracy began to fester. Did the government have fore-knowledge of Booth's plot? Was Booth a pawn of high-ranking officials? Inevitably, 125 years after the crime of the nineteenth century, fact and lore are more than a little tangled. Still, given the abundance of odd "coincidences" and curious admissions of the players, in many ways America's first presidential assassination remains a genuine mystery.

The Booth plot, which included the attempted butchering of Secretary of State William H. Seward (he lived) and the planned assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson (never executed, thanks to a coconspirator with cold feet), involved nine ne'er-do-well Northerners (including Booth) who harbored Southern sympathies. But the bitter Civil War had only tentatively concluded, so it fell upon the Northern government to blame the plot on the South, not sparing Confederate president Jefferson Davis from indictment. Of course, the North didn't let a minor obstacle like lack of evidence hinder its case; at the trial of Booth's peon cohorts, the government suborned testimony to implicate "the dirty Rebs."

Trumped-up evidence not withstanding, Booth did in fact have provocative links to Southern brass. A rabid advocate of the Confederacy (yet unwilling to don a uniform and fight), the egocentric actor used his celebrity as a cover for smuggling medicine to the South. Consequently, some historians have claimed that Booth as a Confederate secret agent.

During an October 1864 trip to Montreal, Canada, Booth conferred with Jacob Thompson, chief of the Confederate secret service. At about the same time, Booth had been recruiting for his grand plot to kidnap Lincoln, hoping to trade his eminent hostage for Confederate POWs. "Did Booth propose his kidnap scheme to Jacob Thompson?" asked historian Theodore Roscoe. "Probably. Did he suggest Lincoln's assassination…?" Roscoe thought that possible as well.

Another item often cited as evidence of a Southern role in the Booth plot is a note found in Booth's steamer trunk and signed by a "Sam." The note referred to seeing how Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, would feel about some unspecified affair.

During the nineteenth century, a steady stream of pamphlets linked Booth to the Copperheads - Northern Democrats seen as Southern-symps - and their secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Jack Ruby of the Lincoln affair, Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot Booth in a burning barn, purportedly was a religious nut who had castrated himself to achieve spiritual purity. Though later locked away in a mental institution, he managed to escape and vanish without a trace. The altar on which the long-haired Corbett supposedly offered his eternal chastity? The Russian Skoptsi sect, a pagan goddess cult whose priests wore women's clothing. A pagan cult? Ah, cue the Illuminati: For conspiratologists who like to posit that all-powerful eighteenth-century Bavarian secret society at the center of history's nastiest moments wonder if the Illumined Ones had a hand in the Lincoln murder. If so, can we be sure that Brother (or is it Sister?) Corbett really killed Booth?

The more enduring - and earthbound - theories assert that Booth was working for traitors among Lincoln's own cabinet, that he escaped with their assistance, and that the rakish actor lived to a ripe old age on a handsome government pension.

"There was one man who profited greatly by Lincoln's assassination," historian Otto Eisenschiml announced in 1937. "This man was his secretary of war, Edward M. Stanton." A member of the Radical Republican faction that bitterly opposed Lincoln's lenient reconstruction plan for the South, Stanton stood to consolidate his own power if the North imposed a hard-line military occupation instead.

As Eisenschiml and other revisionist historians saw it, Stanton's behavior immediately preceding the assassination, and also after, was highly suspicious.Stanton refused a request by Lincoln to allow the secretary of war's assistant, Major Thomas Eckert, to accompany the president to the fateful performance at Ford's Theater. The implication, according to Eisenschiml, is that Stanton knew something Lincoln didn't.

Despite the profusion of death threats against Lincoln - and an earlier kidnap attempt by Booth in which the actor shot the famous stovepipe hat clean off Abe's head - only one bodyguard accompanied the president to Ford's Theater. And he was hardly a stellar specimen at that, abandoning the president in his hour of need to indulge in a snort at the corner pub. Apparently the bodyguard was never reprimanded for his gross negligence.

The night of the assassination, commercial telegraph lines in Washington - controlled by the government during wartime - apparently went dead, delaying the news of Booth's escape. Some see this mysterious event as evidence that government insiders abetted the assassin in his flight.

There is also the curious matter of Booth's diary, which disappeared into a Stanton safe after the assassination. It wasn't until several years after the conspiracy trial that the journal was made public, a revelation that caused a political tempest. Curiously, there were at least eighteen pages missing. Lafayette C. Baker, the scheming chief of the National Detective Police (NDF), forerunner of the modern Secret Service, testified that when his men turned the diary over to Stanton, all the pages had been intact.
Others have explained Booth's vanishing diary in terms of a less sinister conspiracy. Thomas Reed Turner suggests that the government suppressed the diary, which detailed the failed kidnap plots, to avoid raising embarrassing questions about its own inaction in the wake of Booth's less-than-subtle abduction attempts. According to Turner, "There was more than just a suspicion that the government was aware of Booth's plot….The fact that the government was able so rapidly to get on the track of the main conspirators indicates that this was a group it had under surveillance." Still, if this is true, the question remains: Why didn't the government put Booth and company out of business before all hell broke loose?

In a strange cipher message written by NDF chief baker (himself the object of many a suspicion) three years after the assassination, the corrupt top cop issued what some believe to be a rhyming confession: "In New Rome there walked three men, a Judas, a Brutus, and a spy. Each planned that he should be the kink[sic] when Abraham should die… As the fallen many lay dying, Judas came and paid respects to one he hated, and when at last he saw him die, he said 'Now the ages have him and the nation now have I.'"
"Judas" obviously refers to Stanton, who rushed to the scene of the crime and uttered his famous "Now he belongs to the ages" quote. Brutus may refer to Booth's father, the famous actor Junius Brutus Booth; to Booth himself; or to Lincoln's close friend, Ward H. Lamon, the U.S. marshal for Washington, who had often warned Lincoln about assassination plots, but was out of town on that fatal evening. Et tu¸ Lamon? Whatever its real meaning, Baker's doggerel declaration concludes thus: "But lest one is left to wonder what has happened to the spy, I can safely tell you this, it was I. Lafayette C. Baker 2-5-68." Even anticonspiracist historians like Thomas Reed Turner concede that the text and signature seem to be authentic.
Baker died several months after penning that cryptogram, "at the robust age of forty-four." His wife believe he had been poisoned by government operatives.
Dead men tell no tales, of course.

It fell upon Schick Sunn Classic Productions, producers of searching documentary films on Bigfoot and Noah's Ark, to rejuvenate such arcana. The Lincoln Conspiracy, a 1977 book and feature film, is less the catalog of verities it professes to be and more of an imaginative compendium of assassination possibilities. Drawing on controversial "never before published documents," authors David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier proposed a superconspiracy in which four separate (and not necessarily congenial) groups sponsored Booth's kidnap and assassination plots: Stanton and his Radical Republican confreres, who planned to seize the government with the aid of Baker; Jacob Thompson, the Confederate spy master, and his Graycoat superiors in Richmond; Northern bankers and cotton speculators, who made a mint on wartime contraband and hated to see the good times end; and Maryland planters whose malevolence toward the Negro-coddling Lincoln knew no bounds.

But Balsiger and Sellier managed to top even that ambitious theory by rallying the enduring legend of Booth's survival and escape from the massive federal dragnet. The Lincoln Conspiracy claimed that the man killed in the Farrett barn was not Booth, but a second Rebel-agent-cum-fugitive who had nothing to do with Booth's plot. His name was Captain James William Boyd, a man who, unfortunately for him, "bore a striking resemblance to Booth."

Lucky for Booth this amazing body double (who stood a full six inches taller than Booth) bore a number of other convenient similarities, including the initials J. W. B., which even more conveniently were tattooed on his arm. According to Balsiger and Sellier, both J. W. B.'s were hobbled by seriously injured legs. (Booth snapped his when he leapt from the president's box to the stage at Rod's Theater; Boyd's old war wound had flared up.) And as luck would have it, both men were accompanied by fugitive sidekicks, who themselves shared an uncanny resemblance. Not only that, but in his flight the hapless Boyd managed to team up with a bona fide Booth coconspirator.

When NDF chief Baker informed Stanton that his men had killed Boyd, and not Booth, the coverup began. This theory, like other tales of Booth's survival, draws on genuinely peculiar details surrounding the identification and disposal of the body, which were conducted in ironclad secrecy. Few saw the body; an official photograph of the corpse was consigned to oblivion; and Booth's own doctor had trouble identifying his former patient, who had never sported reddish hair before. (The folks at Sunn Classic tell us the Boyd had…reddish hair!)

Balsiger and Sellier's claims about body doubles and synchronized limping are a bit hard to swallow, as are their "newly discovered" documents, which include transcripts (yet not the originals) purporting to be the missing pages of Booth's diary.

However improbable, though, the legend of Booth's survival is incontestably deathless. During the 1920s, the mummified remains of a derelict painter, John St. Hellen, billed as the once-worldy Booth, enjoyed a mildly successful postmortem career as a carnival sideshow. Before that, the latter half of the nineteenth century had been rife with accounts of a gracefully aging Booth, lately back from Europe, India, or points more mysterious, dropping in on relatives, or spouting deathbed "confessions" in unglamorous places like Enid, Oklahoma.

To loosely paraphrase Booth's often-alleged overboss, the redoubtable Secretary of War Stanton: Now the Lincoln conspiracies belong to the ages.

Take a look at some Coincidences about the Lincoln Assassination.