American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [10]
Some, however, think Booth shot himself, and there was even a story that aired on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries that he’d actually gotten away! Here’s how that one got started: Booth had been quietly buried under a dirt floor in an old penitentiary, and the secretive nature of his burial raised questions almost from the get-go. One of the Union soldiers who claimed to have been at the Garrett farm said it was somebody else’s body.17 Then in 1907, a Tennessee lawyer named Finian Bates wrote a book claiming that Booth safely made his way south, changed his name, and ended up in Oklahoma. The book sold an amazing 75,000 copies, and the lawyer had “Booth’s body” mummified and took it on the road to exhibit to thousands!18 As late as 1994, some historians tried to have the “original” Booth exhumed for DNA tests, but that got rejected. The fact is, of nineteen people who viewed the body afterwards, all but one were in agreement it was Booth. You couldn’t fake the letters “J.W.B.” that had been scrawled in India ink on the back of his hand since he was a boy. Besides that, there was a telltale scar, a plugged tooth, and that broken left leg with the old shoe.19
Which doesn’t solve whether Booth was intentionally silenced before he could stand trial—and possibly implicate some higher-ups beyond the Confederate fanatics. Back in 1937, an amateur historian named Otto Eisenschiml published Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, maintaining that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was involved in Lincoln’s death. In more recent years, The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) put forth a similar scenario.
For sure, Stanton hadn’t started off as a big fan of Lincoln’s. A year after the election, he’d spoken of “the painful imbecility” of the president. It’s contended by a majority of historians that his contempt had eventually given way to respect and that Stanton became staunchly loyal and was always urging Lincoln to accept bodyguards. So, while a lot of the charges against Stanton don’t seem to have a legitimate basis, from my reading it seems that some of them are worth considering.
First of all, to me, the planning of an assassination isn’t going to be carried out by common everyday citizens who are unhappy with the rule of their country and take it upon themselves to change it. When you look at who killed Caesar, it was the Roman senators. If there is a conspiracy involved, it’s going to include the highest levels. You always need to ask the question, who profits the most? I wouldn’t rule out the Confederates, because you could understand the motive of revenge. Certainly the list of whom they’d most like to see die would be the people who directly led to their losing the war. But I tend to think there would also be some kind of help from the Union side. They can have ulterior motives, because politics is the name of the game. When you look at the two political parties today, they can be very cutthroat within their own ranks. Why would you expect anything different back then?
During the Civil War, Stanton was the second most important official in Washington—but somehow he wasn’t included on Booth’s target list. After the assassination, he not only made himself acting president but took charge of the investigation right away. “While others sat sobbing, he ordered a furious dragnet in which civil liberties were ignored and dozens of people were falsely arrested—none of whom had in any way aided the assassin.”20 In the wake of what had happened, that’s not too surprising. What does raise my eyebrows is that, only a few hours after the assassination, seven names on Stanton’s to-capture list were part of the earlier kidnap plots. Which leads you to conclude that the War Department must have