You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [73]
The plot behind the assassination is also far stranger than your textbooks might have let on. They probably told you Booth was just a murderous lunatic with unknown motivations, rather than part of a far-reaching plan to overthrow the entire U.S. government that came terrifyingly close to succeeding.
Back then, the government was a much less stable system. If modern politics is a game of Jenga in which careful maneuvering is needed to alter even the smallest piece of legislation, then old-timey politics was also like a game of Jenga, except that it wasn’t against the rules to just uppercut the whole damn stack off the table and declare yourself winner for life.
Unhappy with the outcome of the Civil War, Booth hatched a simple plot: He and his coconspirators would murder the president, vice president, general-in-chief, and secretary of state simultaneously, toppling the U.S. government so the South could rise again. And if they’d pulled it off, no safeguards were yet in place to protect the sanctity of the administration. Historian Jay Winik is of the opinion that even a simultaneous assassination of the president and vice president would have done the trick. Luckily for the United States, murderers aren’t that reliable: most of the assassins chickened out, except Booth and Lewis Powell, who went to Secretary of State William Seward’s home and overdosed on stab crazy, perforating Seward, the Union general guarding him, his nurse, his children, a messenger, and probably any pets that Seward had. However, the joke was ultimately on Powell: Seward survived despite dozens of stab wounds because, as Teddy Roosevelt would later prove, politicians were mostly carved from wood back then, and nothing short of a forest fire could put one down.
4. THE BURR CONSPIRACY
Aaron Burr is what is known in the political realm as a “total bastard.” In 1800, he narrowly lost the presidential race to Thomas Jefferson, which he blamed on his political rival Alexander Hamilton and not the aforementioned bastard issue. Due to the somewhat bizarre rules of the era’s politics—more Thunderdome than Primary Colors—coming in second made him the vice president, a position in which he served admirably right up until 1804, when he was informed that Jefferson was essentially firing him for his second term. Burr responded by running for governor of New York, losing, blaming Alexander Hamilton again, and then murdering him in public.
Some might consider going from being the nation’s third vice president to unemployed murderer a bad year. Instead, Burr decided to embrace the supervillain role he was so clearly born to play. After murdering Hamilton, he set his sights high and began a decade-long plot with the endgame of—ready?—becoming king of the western United States. He began buying up most of Texas from the Spanish government and hiring a modest army of well-armed “farmers” to work it for him. When America went to war with Spain over the western territories, he planned to use his army to seize territory for himself. If you’re thinking Burr was just a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, you should know that he had the commander in chief of the region’s army and a young Andrew “Craps Thunder and Pisses Murder” Jackson on his side. If the Spanish had gotten off their lazy asses to start the Spanish-American War thirty years earlier, Texas very well could have ended up as a monarchy with Burr its first king.
He was eventually arrested for conspiracy, but, despite the best efforts of Thomas Jefferson, he was never convicted. That’s not altogether surprising since he also got off for Hamilton’s murder despite having shot him in a public duel witnessed by some of Hamilton’s best friends. We weren’t kidding around about the bastard thing.
3. MR. BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION
If you think the power-crazed Burr was the highest a conspiracy ever got in the U.S. government, we’d like to introduce you to President Buchanan, who took office with one noble and lofty goal in mind: to deal with the slavery problem once and for all. It’s just