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WAS JOHN WILKES BOOTH A ‘LONE GUNMAN’ OR PART OF A PLOT?
B ased on his analysis of recent books on the assassination of
President Abraham Lincoln, Prof. Donald E. Wilkes, Jr. in the
first part of this article in the April 20 issue Flagpole, intro
duced the possibility of a Confederate plot In this concluding sec
tion, he further examines the evidence, continuing with the six con
clusions he says can be drawn.
Fourth, in late March and earfy April 1865, the Confederate secret
services, having abandoned abduction plans, plotted to kill Lincoln
(and hopefully his entire Cabinet) by exploding a mine near the White
House. This plot to assassinate Lincoln had been personally
approved by Jefferson Davis and other top Confederate leaders. The
plan failed because the explosives expert from a secret service, the
Confederate War Department's Torpedo Bureau (at that time mines
were called torpedoes), who had been detailed to detonate the
mine, was, while being escorted to Washington, DC, by Confederate
cavalry, unexpectedly captured by Union cavalry on April 10, a mere
15 miles from the District
In fairness to Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders, it
must be noted that the Confederacy's plots to abduct or kill Lincoln
originated only after an incident in March 1864 in which
Confederate soldiers found concealed papers on the body of a Union
cavalry officer, CoL Ulric Dahlgren, who had been killed in combat
while leading an unsuccessful raid on Richmond. Those papers
strongly suggested that the Union raiders had intended to kill Davis
and the members of his cabinet, and to bum down Richmond. The
Confederate government publislied the papers and they were widely
distributed in America and Europe.
In the resulting uproar, Southern newspapers blasted Lincoln
and Union leaders as depraved murderers and ferocious criminals
and demanded that they be held personally accountable; the
Richmond Examiner, for example, 'insist(ed) upon the most scrupu
lous carrying out of retaliation for murders, robberies, and other
outrages, with the most punctual exactitude.' There were indignant
howls of execration about this 'diabolical plot* that had been
devised by 'a oevitish foe,' and editorials openly advocated
Lincoln's assassination.
Jefferson Davis and his top officials were convinced, not without
reason, that the Dahlgren papers proved that Lincoln had personally
approved the murder of the Confederate leadership and the destruc
tion of the Confederate capital and within weeks of the discovery
of the Dahlgren papers, the Confederate plot to abduct Lincoln was
afoot; and when that plot failed the scheme to blow up Lincoln
came into existence. The contents of the Dahlgren papers make it
perfectly understandable why Davis and Confederate leaders were
now willing to sign on to covert actions against Lincoln. *If Davis...
believed Lincoln had contemplated Davis' capture or death,' William
Hanchett has cogently asked, 'why should Davis not have contem
plated Lincoln's?' The old view that assassination by either the
North or the South was unthinkable because assassinations contra
vened binding moral standards for the gentlemen of the times
stands thoroughly disproved.
Fifth, John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate secret services opera
tive. That Booth was probably a Confederate spy has long been
strongly suspected. His sister Asia Booth Clarke in her memoir The
Unlocked Book, written before 1875, but not published until 1938,
mentioned some of John Wilkes Booth's clandestine activities for
the Confederacy and even described him as 'a spy, a blockade-
runner, a rebel!' It has also been long known that on various occa
sions during the Civil War, Booth had numerous suspicious secret
meetings with Confederate secret services operatives in hotels in
the North and in Canada, and that Booth emerged from these meet
ings with sums of money. There is now such a wealth of information
confirming Booth's status as an operative for Confederate secret ser
vices that we may with complete confidence accept the assertion,
made by two respectable scholars in 1998, that 'Booth was defi
nitely an agent... working with confirmed intelligence agents.'
Sixth, on his escape route through Maryland and Virginia, Jti..
Wilkes Booth traveled along the path of an underground Confederate
spy network which was used to secretly transport persons and goods
to and from the Confederacy, and as he moved along this route.
Booth received assistance from members of the clandestine organisa
tion operating the network. If it had not been for key members of
the Confederate underground,' Edward Steers, Jr., writes, 'Booth
would never have made his way as far as he did for as long as he
did.' Previously, it had been thought that Booth's escape route had
been randomly chosen, and that the persons who helped Booth
along that route were unrelated individuals whose assistance was
coincidental
GUILT BY ASSOCIATION
Everyone agrees that a conspiracy lay behind the Lincoln assassi
nation. The question is the scope of the conspiracy. The old view—
that the conspiracy consisted (in the words of Edward Steers, Jr.) of
only 'Booth... and a gang of semi-intelligent miscreants'—is
fading. The trend of thought now is in the direction of the
Confederate Grand Conspiracy theory, but nonetheless there is no
proof that Jefferson Davis or the Confederate government were
involved in the shooting at Ford's Theatre; and there are many rea
sons for believing they were not so involved. However, the man who
shot Lincoln was a Confederate spy who only a month previously
had masterminded a scheme to abduct Lincoln, a scheme which
obviously might lead to death or serious injury for Lincoln if he
resisted or tried to escape. At least three of Booth's sidekicks, Lewis
Powell Samuel Mudd and John Surratt, were engaged in Confederate
clandestine operations. After the assassination, Confederate clan
destine operators assisted Booth as he tried to escape.
120 L Clayton
. / 353*9800
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12 FLAGP0LE.COM • APRIL 27, 2005