In June 1860, a military commission appointed by President Andrew Johnson concluded its trial of eight alleged conspirators of John Wilkes Booth. The commission concluded that the eight suspects had conspired with Booth to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
Although no one doubts that Booth was part of a conspiracy to kill Lincoln, there is considerable doubt about the military commission's guilty verdicts against the eight suspects. Booth definitely had accomplices, but it is highly doubtful that the military commission correctly identified them. Consider the following facts:
* The military commission relied heavily on fabricated evidence and false testimony, much of it coerced. Some of the “evidence” that the commission allowed would have been comical if the matter had not been so serious, and some of this evidence was mocked in the press at the time.
One of these items of phony evidence was a letter that implicated Confederate leaders in the Lincoln assassination. This letter supposedly floated in a harbor for days but emerged easily readable and with barely any signs of water contact.
Another item of dubious evidence was a scrap of paper that seemed to implicate Dr. Samuel Mudd. The scrap was supposedly found in a fireplace in a saloon weeks after the fact, having miraculously survived several fires in the fireplace.
More items of dubious evidence were two letters that a Mrs. Hudspeth claimed were left behind on a horse car by two mysterious strangers who were whispering to each other! One of the letters mentioned that “Abe must die.”
* One of the military commission’s chief witnesses was later proven to be an imposter and was convicted of perjury.
* The military commission suppressed all evidence that indicated that Booth did not seriously contemplate murdering Lincoln until the day of the assassination.
* According to a 1977 FBI analysis, 86 pages were removed from Booth’s diary after the War Department took possession of it.
* In the part of Booth’s diary that survived, Booth, among other things, denied being behind the attack on Secretary of State William Seward.
* The identification of Lewis Powell as William Seward’s attacker is usually portrayed as being ironclad and airtight, when in fact there are enormous discrepancies in the accounts of the witnesses who identified Powell as the attacker. For example, State Department messenger Emerick Hansell initially said that the man who attacked Seward was Seward’s mentally disturbed son Augustus. Seward’s wife initially said that she could not identify Lewis Powell as the man who attacked her husband. Another witness, George Robinson, initially said that the attacker was heavy-set with light hair and a mustache and beard (“whiskers”), whereas Powell was tall, thin, clean-shaven, and had dark hair.
* The War Department chose to ignore evidence that pointed to other suspects in the assassination conspiracy. In some cases, they had some of these suspects in custody, but they turned them loose with no explanation, even though they had more evidence against them than they did against some of the eight alleged conspirators who were tried and convicted.
* The military commission’s case against Edmun (Ned) Spangler was bogus and would have been rejected in a civilian trial, but the commission found him guilty of aiding Booth and sentenced him to six years in prison. The chief witness against Spangler was a fellow Ford’s Theater worker named Jacob Ritterspaugh. Lafayette Baker, a notorious thug assigned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to help with the conspiracy investigation, was overhead threatening Ritterspaugh with prolonged imprisonment if he did not lie about what Spangler said to him during the first few minutes after the shooting. The witnesses who saw a suspicious man in the back alley said the man had a mustache, but Spangler was never known to have a mustache. A number of witnesses testified that Spangler never left the stage area after the play started and that he remained there during the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Several witnesses cast serious doubt on Ritterspaugh’s story.
* Secretary of War Stanton failed to warn President Lincoln about a foreign assassination plot against Secretary of State Seward.
* When Lincoln asked Stanton on the night of the assassination if he could have Major Thomas Eckert as a guard, Stanton falsely told him that Eckert had to perform important duties that night and could not be spared. We know about this thanks to David Homer Bates, who was the manager of the War Department’s telegraph office from 1861-1866. Bates’ information is especially revealing because Bates admired Stanton and had no idea that Stanton was lying when he said that Eckert could not be spared that night. Bates merely stated that Lincoln asked Stanton to let him take Eckert as his guard that night, and that Stanton said that Eckert had important duties that night and could not leave. Bates took Stanton at his word and had no clue that he was lying.
* Not a single person along the manhunt trail from Washington to Garrett’s farm—including the guard at the Navy Yard Bridge, Dr. Mudd, and Samuel Cox—positively identified David Herold as the person who rode with Booth.
* The Garretts said they saw the man named Boyd writing in a small black book. Traditionalists have claimed that this is further evidence that Boyd was really Booth and that the Garretts saw Booth writing in his diary. However, Booth’s diary was red, and his last entry was two days before the Garretts said they saw Boyd writing in his black book.
* The War Department claimed that Detective John Lee found evidence in George Atzerodt’s hotel room that linked him to Booth and David Herold. This evidence consisted of a knife, a revolver, a map of Virginia, and a coat belonging to David Herold that had Booth’s bankbook in it. But the hotel clerk who accompanied Lee to the room said he only saw Lee find a revolver.
It boggles the mind to think that Booth would have trusted a person like Herold with his bankbook. It is also hard to imagine that even Herold would have left his coat in plain view if he knew it contained Booth’s bankbook. Why would Herold have bothered to hide the gun and knife but leave in plain view his coat that supposedly contained such damning evidence?
* Nearly all books on the Lincoln case repeat the claim that the initials JWB were seen on the body that was examined and autopsied on the USS Montauk. But when one looks at the evidence behind this claim, one sees that it is highly suspect and problematic. Of all the people on the Montauk who gave statements that day about what they had seen, only one, National Hotel clerk Charles Dawson, claimed to have seen the initials. The autopsy doctors did not mention seeing them, nor did Dr. May, nor did any of the other witnesses who gave statements that day.
* Out of all the witnesses who saw the body on the Montauk that day, not one of them mentioned seeing any of the scars that Booth was known to have.
* The body on the Montauk bore so little resemblance to Booth that Major Eckert did not want any photos taken of the body.
* Dr. May and Lawrence Gardner said that the corpse’s face was heavily freckled (“very much freckled”), but Booth had no freckles. There is no known case in the history of forensic science of livor mortis causing freckles to appear on a person’s face after death.
* The body examined at Weaver’s funeral home in 1869 only had one filled tooth, but Booth was known to have had two fillings. Also, the hair on the body’s head was 10-12 inches longer than Booth’s hair, which proves it could not have been Booth's body, since hair only grows a fraction of an inch, if at all, after death.
* Forensic science tells us that the bullet that struck the neck of the man autopsied on the Montauk—the man who was shot in Garrett’s barn—must have been a rifle bullet, not a pistol bullet as the War Department claimed. This means that Sergeant Boston Corbett could not have been the one who shot the man in Garrett’s barn. When Dr. Barnes first specified what kind of bullet struck the neck, he said it was a rifle bullet.
* The military commission’s chief witness against the eight accused Booth conspirators, Louis Weichmann, was discredited at the John Surratt trial in 1867. Several witnesses stated that they heard Weichmann being threatened if he did not say what the authorities wanted him to say or that Weichmann told them this was the case. Many of Weichmann’s claims were proven to be problematic, and some of them were proven to be impossible.
* The military commission claimed that John Surratt was in Washington on the day of the assassination, but Surratt’s attorneys at his 1867 trial presented powerful evidence that he was in New York that day. Even some traditionalist scholars now concede that Surratt was in New York that day.
Some of the books that document these facts are Theodore Roscoe’s book The Web of Conspiracy, Dr. Robert Arnold’s book The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Leonard Guttridge and Ray Neff’s book Dark Union, Dan Thomas’s books The Reason Lincoln Had to Die and The Reason Booth Had to Die, Thomas Bogar’s book Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, and David Dewitt’s book The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation.
One of the biggest ignored facts at the trial, and in most history books on the case, is that the Radical Republicans hated Lincoln and bitterly opposed Lincoln’s lenient, forgiving approach to Reconstruction. Many Radicals actually cheered Lincoln's death. The military commission was dominated by Radical Republicans.
Although no one doubts that Booth was part of a conspiracy to kill Lincoln, there is considerable doubt about the military commission's guilty verdicts against the eight suspects. Booth definitely had accomplices, but it is highly doubtful that the military commission correctly identified them. Consider the following facts:
* The military commission relied heavily on fabricated evidence and false testimony, much of it coerced. Some of the “evidence” that the commission allowed would have been comical if the matter had not been so serious, and some of this evidence was mocked in the press at the time.
One of these items of phony evidence was a letter that implicated Confederate leaders in the Lincoln assassination. This letter supposedly floated in a harbor for days but emerged easily readable and with barely any signs of water contact.
Another item of dubious evidence was a scrap of paper that seemed to implicate Dr. Samuel Mudd. The scrap was supposedly found in a fireplace in a saloon weeks after the fact, having miraculously survived several fires in the fireplace.
More items of dubious evidence were two letters that a Mrs. Hudspeth claimed were left behind on a horse car by two mysterious strangers who were whispering to each other! One of the letters mentioned that “Abe must die.”
* One of the military commission’s chief witnesses was later proven to be an imposter and was convicted of perjury.
* The military commission suppressed all evidence that indicated that Booth did not seriously contemplate murdering Lincoln until the day of the assassination.
* According to a 1977 FBI analysis, 86 pages were removed from Booth’s diary after the War Department took possession of it.
* In the part of Booth’s diary that survived, Booth, among other things, denied being behind the attack on Secretary of State William Seward.
* The identification of Lewis Powell as William Seward’s attacker is usually portrayed as being ironclad and airtight, when in fact there are enormous discrepancies in the accounts of the witnesses who identified Powell as the attacker. For example, State Department messenger Emerick Hansell initially said that the man who attacked Seward was Seward’s mentally disturbed son Augustus. Seward’s wife initially said that she could not identify Lewis Powell as the man who attacked her husband. Another witness, George Robinson, initially said that the attacker was heavy-set with light hair and a mustache and beard (“whiskers”), whereas Powell was tall, thin, clean-shaven, and had dark hair.
* The War Department chose to ignore evidence that pointed to other suspects in the assassination conspiracy. In some cases, they had some of these suspects in custody, but they turned them loose with no explanation, even though they had more evidence against them than they did against some of the eight alleged conspirators who were tried and convicted.
* The military commission’s case against Edmun (Ned) Spangler was bogus and would have been rejected in a civilian trial, but the commission found him guilty of aiding Booth and sentenced him to six years in prison. The chief witness against Spangler was a fellow Ford’s Theater worker named Jacob Ritterspaugh. Lafayette Baker, a notorious thug assigned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to help with the conspiracy investigation, was overhead threatening Ritterspaugh with prolonged imprisonment if he did not lie about what Spangler said to him during the first few minutes after the shooting. The witnesses who saw a suspicious man in the back alley said the man had a mustache, but Spangler was never known to have a mustache. A number of witnesses testified that Spangler never left the stage area after the play started and that he remained there during the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Several witnesses cast serious doubt on Ritterspaugh’s story.
* Secretary of War Stanton failed to warn President Lincoln about a foreign assassination plot against Secretary of State Seward.
* When Lincoln asked Stanton on the night of the assassination if he could have Major Thomas Eckert as a guard, Stanton falsely told him that Eckert had to perform important duties that night and could not be spared. We know about this thanks to David Homer Bates, who was the manager of the War Department’s telegraph office from 1861-1866. Bates’ information is especially revealing because Bates admired Stanton and had no idea that Stanton was lying when he said that Eckert could not be spared that night. Bates merely stated that Lincoln asked Stanton to let him take Eckert as his guard that night, and that Stanton said that Eckert had important duties that night and could not leave. Bates took Stanton at his word and had no clue that he was lying.
* Not a single person along the manhunt trail from Washington to Garrett’s farm—including the guard at the Navy Yard Bridge, Dr. Mudd, and Samuel Cox—positively identified David Herold as the person who rode with Booth.
* The Garretts said they saw the man named Boyd writing in a small black book. Traditionalists have claimed that this is further evidence that Boyd was really Booth and that the Garretts saw Booth writing in his diary. However, Booth’s diary was red, and his last entry was two days before the Garretts said they saw Boyd writing in his black book.
* The War Department claimed that Detective John Lee found evidence in George Atzerodt’s hotel room that linked him to Booth and David Herold. This evidence consisted of a knife, a revolver, a map of Virginia, and a coat belonging to David Herold that had Booth’s bankbook in it. But the hotel clerk who accompanied Lee to the room said he only saw Lee find a revolver.
It boggles the mind to think that Booth would have trusted a person like Herold with his bankbook. It is also hard to imagine that even Herold would have left his coat in plain view if he knew it contained Booth’s bankbook. Why would Herold have bothered to hide the gun and knife but leave in plain view his coat that supposedly contained such damning evidence?
* Nearly all books on the Lincoln case repeat the claim that the initials JWB were seen on the body that was examined and autopsied on the USS Montauk. But when one looks at the evidence behind this claim, one sees that it is highly suspect and problematic. Of all the people on the Montauk who gave statements that day about what they had seen, only one, National Hotel clerk Charles Dawson, claimed to have seen the initials. The autopsy doctors did not mention seeing them, nor did Dr. May, nor did any of the other witnesses who gave statements that day.
* Out of all the witnesses who saw the body on the Montauk that day, not one of them mentioned seeing any of the scars that Booth was known to have.
* The body on the Montauk bore so little resemblance to Booth that Major Eckert did not want any photos taken of the body.
* Dr. May and Lawrence Gardner said that the corpse’s face was heavily freckled (“very much freckled”), but Booth had no freckles. There is no known case in the history of forensic science of livor mortis causing freckles to appear on a person’s face after death.
* The body examined at Weaver’s funeral home in 1869 only had one filled tooth, but Booth was known to have had two fillings. Also, the hair on the body’s head was 10-12 inches longer than Booth’s hair, which proves it could not have been Booth's body, since hair only grows a fraction of an inch, if at all, after death.
* Forensic science tells us that the bullet that struck the neck of the man autopsied on the Montauk—the man who was shot in Garrett’s barn—must have been a rifle bullet, not a pistol bullet as the War Department claimed. This means that Sergeant Boston Corbett could not have been the one who shot the man in Garrett’s barn. When Dr. Barnes first specified what kind of bullet struck the neck, he said it was a rifle bullet.
* The military commission’s chief witness against the eight accused Booth conspirators, Louis Weichmann, was discredited at the John Surratt trial in 1867. Several witnesses stated that they heard Weichmann being threatened if he did not say what the authorities wanted him to say or that Weichmann told them this was the case. Many of Weichmann’s claims were proven to be problematic, and some of them were proven to be impossible.
* The military commission claimed that John Surratt was in Washington on the day of the assassination, but Surratt’s attorneys at his 1867 trial presented powerful evidence that he was in New York that day. Even some traditionalist scholars now concede that Surratt was in New York that day.
Some of the books that document these facts are Theodore Roscoe’s book The Web of Conspiracy, Dr. Robert Arnold’s book The Conspiracy Between John Wilkes Booth and the Union Army to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Leonard Guttridge and Ray Neff’s book Dark Union, Dan Thomas’s books The Reason Lincoln Had to Die and The Reason Booth Had to Die, Thomas Bogar’s book Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, and David Dewitt’s book The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation.
One of the biggest ignored facts at the trial, and in most history books on the case, is that the Radical Republicans hated Lincoln and bitterly opposed Lincoln’s lenient, forgiving approach to Reconstruction. Many Radicals actually cheered Lincoln's death. The military commission was dominated by Radical Republicans.
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