American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [7]
So let’s begin with the hour of America’s first great crisis, the Civil War, and what we need to remember about the assassination of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.
CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST NOT-ALONE-NUT: JOHN WILKES BOOTH
THE INCIDENT: The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, on April 14, 1865.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: The president was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, by a prominent actor named John Wilkes Booth, who escaped on horseback and was later killed by a soldier while hiding in a barn. Eight coconspirators were also caught and found guilty by a military court.
MY TAKE: The plot is likely to have gone well beyond those who were rounded up, but except for Booth we don’t hear much about any others in our history books. Besides leaders of the Confederacy, the conspiracy to kill Lincoln probably included people within his own cabinet.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
—Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
I had the occasion very recently to be sitting with my nephews, who are of later junior high or first-year high school age. They’re here in Minnesota, part of the same public school system that I was. I wanted to get a sense of whether they’re still learning the same things in the history books today. So I asked them what they knew about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was funny because one nephew immediately said, “Oh, we just got done with that,” so it was fresh in his mind.
He basically related the same story I’d studied back in the 1950s. This actor named John Wilkes Booth came up behind President Lincoln in the theater, shot him in the back of the head, yelled something as he leapt down onto the stage, fell, and broke his leg. He then snuck away and they tracked him down later and set the barn on fire where he was hiding, then shot and killed him. That was the extent of it.
Well, after doing the research for this book, I knew differently. It’s not even a theory. There were eight people tried and convicted by a jury and punished. Four of them were hung, and the other four sent to prison. All coconspirators of John Wilkes Booth. Why did my nephews not know a thing about that? Why is that eliminated from what’s being taught, along with the fact that the plotters had also targeted the vice president and secretary of state on the same night that Lincoln was killed. Here was a classic case of a conspiracy going through the court system, yet my nephews today—just as I was earlier—are led to believe that Booth was a lone assassin who had no cohorts. It was just the action of a lone nut.
Our history textbooks and our schools are averse to telling the whole story. In the back of my mind, this raises the issue: is the Lincoln assassination a setup to where that becomes the norm for our way of thinking? That the only people who ever gun down our leaders are upset over a particular issue that compels them to kill? In this case, of course, Booth was a Southern sympathizer, angered about losing the Civil War. Later, Lee Harvey Oswald would be a die-hard Communist, James Earl Ray a jailbird racist, and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan a fanatic Palestinian. This becomes the pattern. I see the simplification as part of the dumbing-down of our people.
So what follows in this chapter is what my nephews ought to have been informed about. First, how far-reaching the Lincoln conspiracy really was remains unknown to this day. For sure, some of the evidence links the plotters to the Confederate leadership. But it also looks like Booth had advance information about Lincoln’s movements from someone inside the president’s cabinet. And Dr. Samuel Mudd, at whose house Booth took refuge afterwards, wasn’t some kindly country doctor carrying out his Hippocratic