2nd look at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln was asked by Teddy Roosevelt why he was burning some of his father’s letters.  Lincoln replied, “It would serve no purpose to make them public.  They deal with a man who played a part in my father’s death, a member of father’s cabinet.”  Lincoln issued greenbacks in an attempt to create a viable currency from the US treasury, rather than through a national bank like the Federal Reserve.

Five persons were killed in connection with Lincoln’s assassination plot.  The public cried for vengeance on the perpetrators.  Four persons were hanged as co-conspirators after a trial that had a callous disregard for evidence that did not fit the preconceived sentence.  John Wilkes Booth was shot by a religious fanatic named Boston Corbett, though Corbett’s claim is subject to question.

With Booth dead before he could make any public statements and the execution of the four co-conspirators from Booth’s boarding house, any higher-ups involved were safe from exposure.

On the night of the murder, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton hurried to the house with the dying President and took charge of the investigation.  For five hours he refused to identify Booth as the killer.  Meanwhile Booth was able to escape and led investigators on a two week manhunt. 

Booth was surrounded in a barn by a contingent of troops under the command of Lieutenant Luther Baker, who was assigned to the task by his uncle, Lafayette Baker, a shady character who headed the Secret Service.  The Secret Service was under the command of Secretary Stanton.  Lafayette Baker was an intimate friend of Stanton’s, yet detested by President Lincoln.

Sergeant Corbett, who claimed he shot Booth to death, was thirty feet from Booth when the assassin was paid off.  Only Lieutenant Baker was in the barn with Booth.  Corbett was armed with a rifle, yet Booth was killed by a pistol bullet in the back of the neck, which was fired from such short range that Booth had powder burns.

According to his own testimony, when Lafayette Baker told Stanton that Booth had been found, Stanton dropped into his chair and covered his face with his hands.  When Baker finally added that Booth was dead, Baker said that Stanton dropped his hands and smiled for the first time in days.

At the trial, Stanton first testified that he did not have Booth’s diary.  Later, he changed his testimony and produced the diary, with twenty-four pages missing covering the period before Lincoln’s murder.  Baker testified that the diary had been complete before he had turned it over to Stanton.  Because of Stanton’s position, the court did not require him to explain his contradictory testimony.

The damning testimony which sent Mary Suratt and her three companions to the gallows came from a trio of dissolute characters whose veracity was the least of their virtues.

Loius Weichmann was an employee of Mr. Stanton’s War Department, and roomed at Mary Suratt’s, where the crime was plotted.  Weichmann talked about the plot openly for months before the murder.  As long as Stanton was in office, Weichmann loafed on government jobs.  After Stanton was ousted, Weichmann was discharged.

The tavern keeper John Lloyd claimed that Suratt used him as a supply depot.  In his testimony he quoted her at length, word for word, yet at the time of their actual talk he admitted to being falling down drunk.

John Parker, a man with a previous police record, was hired by Mrs. Lincoln as the President’s White House guard in April of 1863.  It was he who left his post in Ford’s theater and walked to a nearby bar where Booth was waiting, indicating that the President was unguarded.