This is the final installment
in a four-part series by past
Roundtable President John Fazio reviewing the current scholarship on
the question of whether John Wilkes Booth and his band of
conspirators, in their attempt to behead the Union government,
acted independently or under the direction of the Confederate
Secret Service and the top levels of the Confederate government,
up to and including Jefferson Davis.
Part 1 of this series reviewed
the nature of covert operations as generally practiced by nations
and as specifically practiced by the Confederate Secret Service.
Part 2 suggested the motives the Confederate government had for
pursuing political assassination as a war tactic and argued that
the Lincoln plot was actually part of a larger, official terror
campaign waged by the Confederacy against the Union. Part 3
profiled Booth and traced his activities leading up to the
assassination. Part 4 of this series wraps up the analysis of
Confederate complicity in the death of Abraham Lincoln and
addresses why all of it still matters 145 years later.
IX Relevance
So what? Many will no doubt ask
that question. All this happened 145 years ago. All of the players
are dead. Indeed, even their children and grandchildren are dead. So
why bother dredging it all up, fixing guilt where it had not
previously resided and perhaps provoking the ire of those who are
still not fully reconciled to the events of 1860 through 1865,
inflaming heretofore only smoldering embers?
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Secretary
of War, Edwin Stanton, quickly took control of both the pursuit
of the conspirators and the investigation of the crime.
The wanted poster above was widely circulated in the
government's attempt to track down Booth, Surratt and Herold.
Booth was finally cornered
and killed on April 26th, twelve days after the
assassination.
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First of all, and quite simply,
because it is interesting, which, after all is said and done, is
probably the first reason that so many of us read and study history,
all history, not just a particular slice of it. It is interesting,
entertaining and stimulating to learn what others have done with
this brief passage through eternity, this peek through a window that
we get. But there are other, more substantial reasons, such as
instruction and an application of lessons learned so as to avoid the
condemnation of reliving some of it. So often, this is a fitful
enterprise, which is to say that we sometimes learn from the
mistakes of others, and act accordingly, and sometimes do not, and
thus repeat their mistakes. And then there is that elusive
commodity, that will o’ the wisp known as truth. As Lincoln himself
said: “History is not history unless it is the truth.”
Pilate asked Jesus what may be the
most famous question in history: 'What is truth?' She is an alluring
beauty. Like beauty itself, we cannot define her. Like Odysseus’s
sirens, we cannot resist her. Like trying to cross a room by halves,
we can never reach her. But we are committed to her because an
historian is not an historian if he or she does not pursue truth; he
or she is just a storyteller. As Prof. Thomas J. Dimsdale writes in
his book The Vigilantes of Montana, “…as the anatomist must not shrink
from the corpse, which taints the air as he investigates the
symptoms and examines the results of disease, so the historian must
either tell the truth for the instruction of mankind, or sink to the
level of a mercenary pander, who writes, not to inform the people,
but to enrich himself.” (p. 44)
Further, there is truly no such
thing as dead history; it is a seamless web. Whatever happens today
happens because of what happened yesterday and before then, and so
on back to the beginning of the human experience. We are, all of us,
influenced hundreds of times in hundreds of ways every day by events
that occurred and decisions that were made thousands of years ago
and more recently. The use of Roman numerals in this essay is the
tiniest example of that.
As for the Civil War, it is surely
the most defining event in our history as a nation. It made us one
nation, rather than a loose association of semi-sovereign states. It was
a crossroads, and as Shelby Foote famously said: “It was a helluva
crossroads.” Because it played such a major role in our history, and
because its effects are still being felt, we should make every
effort to get it straight, knowing all the while that it is
impossible to get all of it completely straight (we humans aren’t
built that way), but pursuing the elusive commodity anyway because
of our love for it and because we hope that the truth, as Jesus
said, will set us free.
Are the effects of the war still
being felt? Without question. The regions are still not fully
reconciled. Southerners still call northerners “Yankees,” always in
a pejorative sense, and “snowbirds,” which is somewhat less
pejorative. Northerners still call southerners “rednecks” and
“crackers,” which are also pejoratives. Literature and the Internet
are filled with sentimental paeans to dead heroes and lost causes,
as well as hateful screeds, from those who still identify more with
their states and their region than with their country, who still
have not fully accepted the results of the war and who would still
opt for secession and independence if given the chance. Worse,
battlefield monuments intended to memorialize mighty men and mighty
deeds are still desecrated from time to time, here and there. Will
the truth, or at least the continued pursuit of it, facilitate
reconciliation? I think so. It is often said that the first step
toward the solution of a problem is recognition that one has one.
By nearly unanimous consent,
Abraham Lincoln is regarded by American historians as our greatest
President. I know there are those who quarrel with that, but they
have an ax to grind. By any objective standard, they are wrong. That
he was felled, ultimately, by order of one of his countryman, who
happened, at the time, to be the Chief Executive of another
political entity, whether that political entity is deemed legitimate
or not, is something that needs to be established with some degree
of certainty and, once so established, needs to be
accepted by those who love truth and mean well.
When it is so accepted, the
corollary will also be accepted, i.e. that that Chief Executive
(Davis) was human like the rest of us, capable of both good and
evil, and that far from being a persecuted martyr, he actually got
off pretty easily at the hands of a government that was more
interested in moving on than in retribution. If some care to temper
that conclusion by holding that Davis was acting in response to a
belief, genuinely held, even if not accurate, that his victim had
ordered the same fate for him, I have no problem with that. The
evidence suggests that he did so believe. The recognition of the fact
that Davis ordered Lincoln’s death, whether or not he did so
believing that he was retaliating in kind, will take us a step
closer to complete and final reconciliation of our regions and our
people.
X. Summary
Rogue operations are almost unknown
in national intelligence gathering and covert actions. That John Wilkes Booth and his
band of misfits were an exception to the rule is the myth that
Confederate operatives successfully promoted after the Civil War, a
myth that has survived into our own time. Recently, however,
scholars, building upon old and newly discovered evidence, have
shattered that myth. In its place they have made a carefully
documented and very persuasive case that in fact Booth was a
middle-level agent of the Confederate Secret Service, that his band
of misfits were lowest-level grunts and that all of them were
separated from the highest levels of the Confederate government by
layers of insulation designed to give those highest levels plausible
deniability for acts committed pursuant to their orders.
Intelligence services throughout the world have operated and
continue to operate in the same way.
Confederate sympathizers, and later
the Confederate Secret Service, had Lincoln in their sights from the
moment he was elected (all the gifts of food sent to him in
Springfield upon his election were found to be poisoned), but their
activities grew more intense when it became clear that the South
would almost certainly lose the war. Moreover, in the last two years
of the war (1864 and 1865), other upper-echelon officers of the
Federal government were also marked for assassination.
There were numerous motives for
destroying Northern leadership, in addition to creating chaos in the
Federal Government and in the Union army, including retribution for
ending slavery; retribution for the Isaac Wistar and the
Dahlgren-Kilpatrick raids against Richmond and, in the latter raid,
an alleged written order from Lincoln to kill the Confederate
President and his cabinet; retribution for Lincoln’s refusal to
negotiate a peaceful settlement of the conflict on anything but his
terms, i.e. union and emancipation; retribution for the hanging of
John Yates Beall; personal animosity against Lincoln because of his
background and style; and the perceived need to preserve hope for
Southern independence by elimination of a father figure bent on a
magnanimous reconciliation of the regions.
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Despite
evidence of a much wider conspiracy, only Booth's immediate
accomplices were put on trial. Mary
Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold and George Atzerodt were
sentenced to death and hanged on July 7, 1865 (above). Samuel
Arnold, Dr. Samuel Mudd and Michael O'Laughlen were sentenced
to "hard labor for life" at Fort Jefferson in the Dry
Tortugas, Florida. Edman Spangler received a six-year
sentence in the same facility. O'Laughlen died of yellow fever in 1867
while at Fort Jefferson and the remaining three imprisoned
conspirators were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in
1869 and released. Following his capture in Egypt in
1866, John Surratt was tried by a civil court in 1867, but
was released because of a hung jury and a statute of
limitations that prohibited further prosecution for treason.
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The assassination was part of a
terror campaign that preceded and followed the assassination. This
included wrecking the Northern economy by shipping gold out of the
country; blowing up boats and ships with coal and log bombs; blowing
up ammunition dumps with time bombs; attempted spreading of disease
in the North by distribution of infected clothing; setting fire to
hotels and public buildings in Northern cities; attempting to draw
the United Stated into war with Canada (British America) and Great
Britain by making cross-border raids on American cities from Canada;
and the systematic murder of prisoners of war by deprivation and
disease.
Abduction and assassination plots
were constantly being hatched by the Confederate Secret Service
after the war began, but with greater intensity and purpose as it
progressed, reaching their apogee in the last full year of the war
and in the early months of 1865. The Confederate government set up
cells of operatives in many Northern cities and in Montreal and
Toronto. Acting on instructions given to them in Richmond or
couriered to them from Richmond, these operatives did their best to
undermine the Northern war effort in ways deemed effective not so
much by them as by their superiors in Richmond. It is likely that
assassination of at least Lincoln was ordered after the
Dahlgren-Kilpatrick raid because of the alleged order previously
referred to. This order, despite the fact that its authenticity is
highly questionable, because Lincoln would never have issued such an
order and because such an order would almost certainly not have been
committed to writing regardless of who issued it, inflamed the
Southern people and gave rise to calls for retribution in kind.
As the war neared its end, Thomas
F. Harney, an explosives expert from the Confederate Torpedo Bureau,
was sent to Washington for the purpose of decapitating Northern
leadership by blowing up a wing of the White House after as many of
such leaders as possible were lured into that wing. En route, he was
joined by a force of about 150 men detached from Mosby’s Rangers. He
and some of the men under his command were captured and the mission
was aborted on April 10, 1865. It appears likely that the acts
carried out by Booth and the men and woman under his command and
control four days later were a contingency plan for accomplishing
the decapitation in the event of the failure of the Harney mission.
Booth was a very famous and
accomplished actor. He was a strong supporter of the Southern cause
and was an agent of the Confederate Secret Service. He was actively
engaged in clandestine activities for the South for years, including
spying, blockade-running and smuggling. He traveled extensively to
many Northern cities, especially New York, and to Canada, to meet
with Confederate operatives. He also traveled to southern Maryland
and Virginia to meet with other members of the Secret Service and to
arrange for their help with his escape from Washington to Richmond.
Events moved rapidly in March and
April, 1865:
- On March 4 Booth attended
Lincoln’s Second Inauguration and, he later said, missed an
opportunity to kill the President then. It appears that he
attempted to do so, but was thwarted by the President’s guards.
- On March 17 his plan to abduct
the President at Campbell Hospital failed. From March 21 through
24 Booth was in New York conferring with Confederate Secret
Service agents.
- On April 3, Richmond fell.
- On April 4, Lincoln toured the
city as a conquering hero, at least to the freed blacks, which
infuriated Booth.
- On April 9, Lee surrendered.
- On April 10, Harney was
captured, thereby activating Booth’s mission.
- On April 11, Booth listened to
Lincoln speak from the balcony of the Executive Mansion and
announced to Powell and perhaps Arnold and/or Herold, who may also
have been with him, that he was going to assassinate the President
and soon.
- On the evening of April 14,
armed only with a single-shot Derringer and a dagger, the
preponderance of the evidence is that he calmly walked up to
Charles Forbes, Lincoln’s footman and messenger, who was guarding
the President’s box in Ford’s Theater and who was probably
unarmed, handed him a card, was allowed to pass into the
President’s box and then used the Derringer to murder the
President and the dagger to facilitate his escape.
Booth escaped on a horse that was being held for
him in the alley behind the theater. He made his way to a crossing
of the Potomac River where a sentry allowed him to cross without a
pass upon his giving his real name. Shortly after, the sentry also
allowed David Herold to cross without a pass upon his giving a false
name. The President’s police guard, John F. Parker, had
left his post and was either elsewhere in the theater watching the
play or in a bar adjacent to the theater. Forbes and Parker,
especially Parker, and the sentry who allowed Booth and Herold to
cross the Potomac after the assassination, must be suspected of
treachery. It must be regarded as nearly certain, too, that Booth
had help – co-conspirators who gave him information relative to the
schedules of Federal office-holders and/or who arranged elements of
the plots to capture or assassinate such officers.
At the trial of the conspirators
before a military commission in May and June, 1865, very persuasive
and conclusive evidence of the guilt of the conspirators was
presented, but those witnesses who linked Davis to the conspiracy
were discredited by allegations and evidence of perjury. One
(Dunham) was later tried and convicted of perjury and was
imprisoned. This created a great deal of confusion and uncertainty
with respect to Davis, which induced Federal prosecutors not to
pursue a case against him, though there were other reasons as well,
political reasons, for not trying him. He was released on bail in
May, 1867, and pardoned by President Johnson in December,1868.
Strangely, many others whose complicity in the crimes of April 14
was all but certain were never tried, either because proof was
lacking, as Federal prosecutors claimed, or because of undue
influence in high places or simply because of plausible deniability
guaranteed by human buffering.
The whole truth of the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln is not and probably never will be
known. That fact, however, should not deter us from
pursuing the truth. The Civil War, the effects of which are with us
every day, is the most defining event in American history. The
assassination of Abraham Lincoln is the most defining moment of that
event. Accordingly, we should continue to make every effort to get
it straight, and we will, and damn the torpedoes.
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Sources: (Roll-over any book title to bring up more information on that
book; click the book title to purchase from Amazon.com. Part
of the proceeds from any book purchased from Amazon through the
CCWRT website is returned to the CCWRT to support its education and
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An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government , Harcourt,
Inc., 2001
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