(02-13-2021 08:13 PM)Steve Wrote:  The notion that Jonathan Ladd (or somebody named Ladd) was present at Lincoln's deathbed comes from a typewritten copy of an 1892 speech to the Ohio Society of New York given by Brig. Gen. Henry Lawrence Burnett which is held by the Goshen (NY) Historical Society and Library. I'll quote the relevant passages below:

After finishing this case, I was kept on court-martial duty at Cincinnati, Lexington and Louisville for some time and, finally at the request of Governor Morton in September 1864, I was ordered to Indiana to act as Judge Advocate of the court detailed to try the members of the "Knights of the Golden Circle" or "Sons of Liberty." These trials were finished sometime in December of that year, and I entered almost immediately upon the trial of the Chicago conspirators -- St. Leger, Grenfel, and others, who had come over from Canada to engage in the enterprise of releasing the rebel prisoners then in Camp Douglas near Chicago.

While making the closing argument in this case, on the 17th of April, 1865, I received a dispatch from the Secretary of War, directing me to report in person immediately to the War Department to aid in the examinations respecting the murder of the President. I started for Washington the same evening, reached there on the morning of the 19th, and was "specially assigned by the Secretary of War for duty on the investigation of the murder of President Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Mr. Seward", and a room was assigned to me in the War Department.

I quote the above passage just to show that Burnett wasn't in Washington at the time and takes his description of the deathbed from newspaper and magazine accounts of the scene. Now here is the transcription from the relevant section of the typewritten copy of Burnett's account about Lincon's deathbed. I've bolded a couple of parts for emphasis:

The scene at the bedside of the dying President has been described in the Press, and as the news swept around the earth, all the children of men, in all the civilized world, wept with those about his couch. That death-bed scene will never be forgotten. It was surrounded by his Cabinet ministers, all of whom were bathed in tears, not excepting Mr. Stanton, the War Secretary, with iron will and nerve, who when informed by Surgeon-General Barnes that the President could not live until morning exclaimed: 'Oh, no, General! no, no', and immediately sat down at his bedside and wept like a little child.

"Senator Sumner was seated on the right of the President's couch near the head, holding the right hand of the President in his own. He was sobbing like a tender woman with his head bowed down almost to the pillow of the bed on which the President was lying."

At twenty-two minutes past seven, the President passed away and Mr. Stanton exclaimed, "Now he belongs to the ages." Besides the persons named, there were about the deathbed his wife and son, Vice-President Johnson, all the other members of the Cabinet with the exception of Mr. Seward, Generals Halleck, Meigs, Farnsworth, Augur, and Ladd, Rev. Dr. Gurley, Schuyler Colfax, Governor Farwell, Judges Cartter and Otto, Surgeon-General Barnes, Drs. Stone, Crane and Leals, Major John Hay, and Maunsell B. Field.


There was no Gen. Ladd on the Union side during the entire civil war. "Gen. Ladd" is the copyist's mistake in transcribing, it's presumably supposed to be "Todd" as in Brig. Gen. John Blair Smith Todd who was by then actually the Congressional delegate from Dakota territory. Gen. Farnsworth was also a Congressman at this time as well. Todd was a relative of Mary. Newspaper accounts from the time confirm Todd was there but make no mention of of a "Ladd". The person typing up the account presumably mistook a cursive "To" for an "La". They also mistyped Dr. Leale's name as "Leals", mistaking the "e" for an "s".

Also one (or some) of Maj. Ladd's grandchildren paid for this account of his life in a 1920 History of Lowell, Mass:

https://archive.org/details/historyoflowelli05cobu/page/340/mode/2up

It makes no mention of Maj. Ladd travelling to Washington from Elmira and somehow ending up at Lincoln's bedside. Since Ladd's paid the publisher to include a biography of Ladd and his son to be included in the book, it makes little sense to leave out a mention of Ladd being at Lincoln's bedside when he died in their hagiographic account of his life if his family knew about it.